Deceit is the game of petty spirits, and that is by nature a woman’s quality.

The line frames deceit as a mark of “petty” or small-minded character and then, in a misogynistic turn typical of some early modern polemics, treats that pettiness as inherently feminine. Read in context (likely a dramatic or satirical voice rather than a neutral authorial maxim), it would function to shame a character’s duplicity by associating it with social stereotypes about women and moral weakness. For modern readers, the quote is significant less as ethical counsel than as evidence of how gendered assumptions were used rhetorically to police behavior and to naturalize prejudice as “nature.”