There was an essential requirement—that one must have a gentle heart, that is, a heart capable of love, not simply of lust. The woman would be testing to find whether the candidate for her love had a gentle heart, whether he was capable of love. We have to remember also that these ladies were all of the nobility, and the nobility in that time were pretty sophisticated and competent people, both in their brutality and in their tenderness. Today I don’t know what one would do to test the temperament to see if he had a gentle heart, or whether that would be an ideal that anyone would even want—a
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