King Arthur, to protect Ophelia's womanly pride from the jeers of a
coarse court by openly declaring that he had loved her when he hadn't.
Not for any of Shakespeare's reasons for painting him a hero. But for
two much more reasonable reasons. One that he said, "I myself am
indifferent honest"--oh, the humanity of Hamlet!--and the other that,
when under the spell of her beauty and in the tentative, interested
stage when he cared for her all but enough to ask her to marry him, he
had the wit to discover that she was a fool. Imagine the calamity of
Hamlet married to Ophelia! That _would_ have been a tragedy. Think of
a man clever enough to discover that his idol was made of putty--that
his sweetheart was a Rosamond Vincy! Hamlet was a wise man. He
withdrew in time. Most men have to be married ten years to discover
that they have married an Ophelia or a Rosamond.

It is a trite saying that the whole world is behind a woman urging her
to marry. But I find much to interest me in trite sayings. I like to
get hold of them, and look them through, and turn them wrong side out,
and pull them to pieces to find how much life there is in them.
Psychological vivisection is not a subject for the humane society. A
trite saying has my sympathy. It generally is stupid and shop-worn,
and consequently is banished to polite society and hated by the
clever. And only because it possessed a soul of truth and a wonderful
vitality has it been kept from dying long ago of a broken heart.

Books could be written of the truth of this particular trite saying.
The urging, of course, among people whom we know, is neither vulgar
nor intentional. It takes the form of jests, of pseudo-humorous
questions if a man sends flowers two or three times. But it takes its
worst and most common form in the sudden melting away of the family if
the man calls and finds them all together. If a man has no specific