“Madam,” answered Ulysses, “who on the face of the whole earth can dare to chide with you?  Your fame reaches the firmament of heaven itself; you are like some blameless king, who upholds righteousness, as the monarch over a great and valiant nation:  the earth yields its wheat and barley, the trees are loaded with fruit, the ewes bring forth lambs, and the sea abounds with fish by reason of his virtues, and his people do good deeds under him.  Nevertheless, as I sit here in your house, ask me some other question and do not seek to know my race and family, or you will recall memories that will yet more increase my sorrow.  I am full of heaviness, but I ought not to sit weeping and wailing in another person’s house, nor is it well to be thus grieving continually.  I shall have one of the servants or even yourself complaining of me, and saying that my eyes swim with tears because I am heavy with wine.”

Then Penelope answered, “Stranger, heaven robbed me of all beauty, whether of face or figure, when the Argives set sail for Troy and my dear husband with them.  If he were to return and look after my affairs I should be both more respected and should show a better presence to the world.  As it is, I am oppressed with care, and with the afflictions which heaven has seen fit to heap upon me.  The chiefs from all our islands—­Dulichium, Same, and Zacynthus, as also from Ithaca itself, are wooing me against my will and are wasting my estate.  I can therefore show no attention to strangers, nor suppliants, nor to people who say that they are skilled artisans, but am all the time broken-hearted about Ulysses.  They want me to marry again at once, and I have to invent stratagems in order to deceive them.  In the first place heaven put it in my mind to set up a great tambour-frame in my room, and to begin working upon an enormous piece of fine needlework.  Then I said to them, ’Sweethearts, Ulysses is indeed dead, still, do not press me to marry again immediately; wait—­for I would not have my skill in needlework perish unrecorded—­till I have finished making a pall for the hero Laertes, to be ready against the time when death shall take him.  He is very rich, and the women of the place will talk if he is laid out without a pall.’  This was what I said, and they assented; whereon I used to keep working at my great web all day long, but at night I would unpick the stitches again by torch light.  I fooled them in this way for three years without their finding it out, but as time wore on and I was now in my fourth year, in the waning of moons, and many days had been accomplished, those good for nothing hussies my maids betrayed me to the suitors, who broke in upon me and caught me; they were very angry with me, so I was forced to finish my work whether I would or no.  And now I do not see how I can find any further shift for getting out of this marriage.  My parents are putting great pressure upon me, and my son chafes at the ravages the suitors are making upon his estate, for he is now old enough to understand all about it and is perfectly able to look after his own affairs, for heaven has blessed him with an excellent disposition.  Still, notwithstanding all this, tell me who you are and where you come from—­for you must have had father and mother of some sort; you cannot be the son of an oak or of a rock.”