d, at best, fruit as a regular diet is hardly preferable to
starvation. And while she scrimped and saved, and made her own gowns,
and patched up the children's kilts as best she might, Socrates stood
around the streets talking about the immortality of the soul and the
vanity of human life!

Many times Xanthippe pined for the amusements and seductive gayeties of
social life, but she got none. The only society she knew was the prosy
men-folk whom Socrates used to fetch home with him occasionally.
Xanthippe grew to hate them, and we don't blame her. Just imagine that
dirty old Diogenes lolling around on the furniture, and expressing his
preference for a tub; picking his teeth with his jack-knife, and
smoking his wretched cob-pipe in the parlor!

"Socrates, dear," Xanthippe would say at times, "please take me to the
theatre to-night; I do so want to see that new tragedy by Euclydides."

But Socrates would swear by Hercules, or by the dog, or by some other
classic object, that he had an engagement with the rhetoricians, or
with the sophists, or with Alcibiades, or with Crito, or with some of
the rest of the boys--he called them philosophers, but we know what he
meant by that.

So it was toil and disappointment, disappointment and toil, from one
month's end to another's; and so the years went by.

Sometimes Xanthippe rebelled; but, with all her wit, how could she
reason with Socrates, the most gifted and the wisest of all
philosophers? He had a provoking way of practising upon her the
exasperating methods of Socratic debate,--a system he had invented, and
for which he still is revered. Never excited or angry himself, he
would ply her with questions until she found herself entangled in a
network of contradictions; and then she would be driven, willy-nilly,
to that last argument of woman--"because." Then Socrates--the
brute!--would laugh at her, and would go out and sit on the front
door-steps, and look henpecked. This is positively the meanest thing a
man _can_ do!

"Look at that poor man," said the wife of Edippus the cobbler. "I _do_
believe his wife is cruel to him: see how sad and lonesome he is."

"Don't play with those Socrates children," said another matron. "Their
mother must be a dreadful shiftless creature to let her young ones run
the streets in such patched-up clothes."

So up and down the street the neighbors gossiped--oh! it was very
humiliating to Xanthippe.

Meanwhile Helen lived in peace wi