Some days later I again saw the seven wives in a rose-garden, but not the same one as before. It was a magnificent rose-garden, the like of which I had never seen before. It was circular, and the roses were arranged to make a kind of rainbow. The outermost ring was made of roses with purple flowers, the next inner ring of flowers of a golden yellow, the one within this of blue, the inmost of light or shining green. Inside this rainbow of roses was a small pool of limpid water. The seven wives, who had earlier been called the spring-maidens, were sitting there when they spied me at the window, and called me to visit them again. When I arrived they said, 'Have you ever seen anything more beautiful on earth?' 'Never,' I said. 'Such things,' they told me, 'are created by the Lord in a moment, and they represent something new on earth, since everything created by the Lord represents something. But see if you can guess what this represents. Our guess is that it is the delights of conjugial love.'

[2] On hearing this I said, 'Do you mean the delights of conjugial love about which you had so much to say before, with such wisdom and also eloquence? After I left you, I reported what you had said to some wives who live in our district. 'Now I have been taught,' I told them, 'I know that you have delights in your hearts arising from your conjugial love, and you are able to share these with your husbands in proportion to their wisdom. Consequently you gaze at your husbands continually from morning to evening with the eyes of your spirits, trying to deflect and guide their minds towards being wise, so that you can snap up these delights. I also related what you mean by wisdom, spiritual rational and spiritual moral wisdom. I said your view of marriage was that it was restricted to loving one's wife only and putting away all lust after other women. But the wives of our district responded to this by laughing. "What is this you say?" they said, "this is all nonsense. We do not know what conjugial love is. Even if our husbands have some, we certainly don't have any. So how could we enjoy its delights? In fact, we sometimes violently refuse what you call the ultimate delights, for we find them displeasing, hardly different from suffering rape. In fact, if you look closely, you will not see any sign of such a love in our faces. So you must be talking nonsense or joking, if you told those seven wives that we think about our husbands from morning to evening, continually paying attention to their whims and pleasures, in order to gain such delights from them." I remember this from what they said, so that I could report it to you, seeing that they find repugnant and in fact totally contradict what you told me by the spring, which I so eagerly drank it in and believed it.'

[3] The wives sitting in the rose-garden replied to this, 'Friend, you are unaware of the wisdom and prudence wives possess, because they keep it completely hidden from men; and they do so for no other purpose but to be loved. For each man, who is not spiritually but only naturally rational and moral, is cold to his wife, a feeling hidden at his innermost level. A wise and prudent wife has a keen and exact perception of this, and so to this extent she conceals and retracts into her heart her conjugial love, keeping it so deeply hidden as not to show the slightest trace of it in her face, her tone of voice or her gestures. The reason is that the more she shows this, the more her husband's coldness to marriage floods out from where it is lodged in the inmost levels of his mind into the outermost levels, inducing a total chill in the body, and so an impulse to seek a separate bed and bedroom.'

[4] Then I asked, 'Where does the coldness that you call coldness to marriage come from?' 'It comes,' they replied, 'from their folly about spiritual matters. Everyone who is foolish about spiritual matters feels at the inmost level coldness towards his wife, and warmth towards prostitutes. Since conjugial love and scortatory love are opposites, it follows that, when scortatory love is hot, conjugial love is cold. When a man has coldness dominant in him, he cannot put up with any feeling of love, not even a breath of it, coming from his wife. So his wife wisely and prudently conceals it, and to the extent that she conceals it by her denials and refusals, to that extent her husband is warmed and restored by the sphere of prostitution influencing him. That is why the wife of such a man has no delights in his heart, as we have, but only pleasures. These are called the pleasures of folly as applied to the man, since they are the pleasures of scortatory love.

[5] 'Every chaste wife loves her husband, even if he is unchaste. But since wisdom is the only means by which her love can be received, she devotes all her energies to turning his folly into wisdom, that is, preventing him lusting after other women. She has a thousand ways of doing this, but she takes the greatest care to see that none of them are tracked down by her husband. For she is well aware that love can never be forced, but slips in where there is freedom. Women therefore have been given the ability to recognise by sight, hearing and touch any state of mind their husbands have. Men, on the other hand, are not given the ability to recognise any state of mind their wives have.

[6] 'A chaste wife can look sternly at her husband, speak harshly to him, get angry and quarrel with him, while still in her heart she cherishes a mild and tender love for him. These fits of anger and pretence are aimed at making the husband wise and receptive of her love, as is obvious from the fact that they can be instantly reconciled. Moreover, wives have these methods of concealing their love implanted in their heart and marrow, in order to prevent an explosion of coldness to marriage in the husband. It is also to prevent this coldness quenching the fire of his scortatory warmth, thus turning him from green wood into a dry stick.'

[7] After this and many similar lectures from the seven wives, their husbands came with bunches of grapes in their hands, some of which had a delightful taste, but others a sharp one. 'Why,' said the wives, 'have you brought us nasty or uncultivated grapes?' 'Because,' the husbands replied, 'we could tell in our souls, which are united with yours, that you have been talking to that man about truly conjugial love, saying its delights are those of wisdom, and about scortatory love, saying its delights are the pleasures of folly. These last are the grapes with the nasty taste, the former ones are the ones that taste delightful.'

They confirmed what their wives had said, adding that the pleasures of folly look on the outside like the delights of wisdom, but not on the inside. 'They are,' they said, 'just like the good and the nasty grapes we brought. Both the chaste and the unchaste have outwardly the same kind of wisdom, but inwardly it is quite different.'

[8] After this the little boy came back again with a parchment in his hand; he held it out to me and said, 'Read it.' This is what I read: 'You must know that the delights of conjugial love rise to the highest heaven, being joined on the way and there by the delights of all the heavenly loves. So they enter upon their happiness which lasts for ever. This is because the delights of that love are the delights of wisdom. You must also know that the pleasures of scortatory love sink down to the lowest hell, being joined on the way and there by the pleasures of all hellish loves, and thus they enter upon unhappiness, which consists in distress affecting all the heart's joys. This is because the pleasures of that love are also the pleasures of folly.'

After this the husbands went away with their wives, escorting the little boy until his path took him up to heaven. They were able to recognise the community which had sent him as being one of the new heaven, with which the new church on earth will be linked.