Don Quixote rises trembling to answer the churchman who called him a numskull. The place, the company, and respect for the gown hold his indignation; a gownsman's weapon, he says, is the same as a woman's, the tongue, so he will fight with that. Public abuse is not pious reproof. The priest does not even know whether he has a wife or children to go home to. Knight he is and knight he will die, despising wealth but not honour, a chaste lover because the calling requires love. Sancho piles on proverbs about leaning against a good tree. On the spot the duke confers an island of no small importance. The ecclesiastic stands up without another morsel, almost calling the duke as great a fool as the sinners, and leaves the house. The duke laughs, then tells Don Quixote the speech was satisfaction enough, because women and churchmen can give no insult. Don Quixote unfolds the difference: an offence may come from any quarter, but insult must be maintained by someone able to stand their ground. He wishes the priest had stayed to hear that Amadis would not have borne such talk.
After dinner four damsels arrive with basin, jug, towels, and a ball of Naples soap. They wash the knight's beard until he stands blind with lather, neck stretched, eyes shut, while the inventors of the joke fetch more water and leave him the strangest figure in the room. The duke and duchess, not in on it, hover between laughter and anger. To keep Don Quixote from seeing through the trick, the duke orders himself soaped as well; the girls atone for their audacity by washing him too. Sancho watches and wishes squires' beards had the same luck. The duchess promises even a tub if needed, and sends him off with the seneschal.
Left at table, the duchess asks for a portrait of Dulcinea. Don Quixote cannot paint her as Parrhasius should, because enchanters have changed her from princess to peasant, from fragrant to foul. God knows, he says, whether there is any Dulcinea or not; he has not begotten her, yet he beholds her as she must be. Lineage is a problem the duke raises from the printed history; Don Quixote answers that virtue rectifies blood. The duchess then cites Sancho finding her sifting red wheat. That wheat, the knight insists, was grains of orient pearl, and the farm-wench Sancho saw was the same transformation that fooled his own eyes at El Toboso. He praises Sancho's mixed wit as future governor material who should take no bribe and surrender no right, even as he doubts whether to send him.
Hubbub cuts the counsel short. Sancho bursts in with a straining-cloth for a bib, kitchen-boys chasing him with a trough of dishwater. He will be washed, he shouts, but not with devil's lye while his master gets angels' water. Don Quixote and the duchess send the servants off shamefaced. Sancho kneels to so exalted a lady. The duke orders the house to treat Don Quixote in full chivalric style, and the duchess begs Sancho to spend the afternoon with her instead of his usual sleep.
