The man looks utterly baffled by this question. "Well, I mean, they might not get raised properly, with a foreign father. Some taverns allow betting but mostly on the chariot races."

"Does Osirion's government prohibit betting on anything?"

" - well, yes, you're not allowed to run gambling parlors on games of chance."

"Never mind, actually."

"If you were going to change one thing about the Osirian government's present practices - say you had a lot of negotiating leverage with the government for some reason - what would you ask them to change?"

"I'd say a woman shouldn't be allowed to marry a foreign man if there are Osirian men who'll have her," he says. "And chewing tobacco should be banned."

"That seems like - sort of a frankly self-interested policy?  I mean, isn't that just saying outright that you want less mating-competition for women coming from mates outside your own personal reference class?"

Blink blink blink. "...yes?"

"Okay, maybe I phrased things poorly.  Suppose that you knew somebody else with negotiating leverage over the Osirian government, and you were trying to sell them on a policy that was supposedly good for the general public and not just you personally or your own faction - what would be your policy ask?"

" - well, I think it's good for all decent men, if women can't marry foreigners."

"Okay, but suppose I asked you for a policy intervention that would be a good idea, relative to status quo, for the average of the entire population including men and women.  Or does that question just - never come up, around here?"

"Well, it's also good for the women to be prevented from marrying foreign men, since they make bad husbands."

"You'd naturally expect that there'd be some good foreign husbands, and that women would already be choosing the apparently better husband if there were better nonforeign husbands than foreign husbands on offer to them?  Like, by default, you don't usually expect people to get better results when you reduce the options available to them, so there must be something nondefault going on there?  To be clear, I'm from pretty far away, and if there's some blatant flaw in my reasoning that any child would see, you should explain to me like I'm a younger child than that."

" - well, they're all seduced by the foreign men with their accents and their fancy ruffles and forget to think about whether a man will make a good husband."

"What do you predict a woman would say about this key political issue if I asked a woman?"

"Well, a nice respectable one or a frivolous girl who wants to marry the man with the laciest collar?"

"Both."  Keltham will actually just pass the guy a gold piece at this point, or around ten times the cost of the pastry; he's got no idea how much of a strain this conversation must be for an Intelligence 10 Person, but they're definitely reaching the point where Keltham feels like he should be paying for things.

He blinks, baffled, at the gold piece. "Thank you, sir."

It takes him a while of staring at the gold piece to remember there was an accompanying question. 

"I think a respectable woman would say that she doesn't like the foreign influence. And a woman who isn't respectable likes the foreign men because they're forward and seduce her, unless they leave her bereft, in which case she doesn't like that at all. And if it were banned for foreign men to marry her then she'd know for sure they're only leading her on."

"Can you expand on 'doesn't like the foreign influence'?"

"Well, she'd notice that having foreign men around...is bad...so she'd be against it."

"Because they deceive Osirian women into marrying them, using ruffles?  And chew... tobacco?"

"Yes, that's right."

"Suppose somebody proposed that a better version of this policy would let women marry foreign husbands if they wanted, if the woman showed Intelligence above 16 to Detect Thoughts or Wisdom above 14 to Detect Anxieties, in which case she's probably able to figure out for herself how to not be deceived by the ruffles.  Would you say that's a better or worse version of the policy?"

Blink blink blink blink blink. 

"Well, then all the best girls would marry foreigners and that'd be bad for the country! You don't sell all your best cattle!"

"Noted.  Would it be better or worse for the women, in your estimation?"