A young teacher was telling her pupils the story of the emotional lady
who, to put her lover to the test, bade him pick up the glove which
she had thrown down into the arena between the tiger and the lion.
The lover does her bidding in order to vindicate his character as a
brave knight. One boy after hearing the story at once states his
contempt for the knight's acquiescence, which he declares to be
unworthy.

"But," says the teacher, "you see he really did it to show the lady
how foolish she was." The answer of the boy sums up what I have been
trying to show: "There was no sense in _his_ being sillier than
_she_ was, to show her _she_ was silly."

If the boy had stopped there, we might have concluded that he was
lacking in imagination or romance, but his next remark proves what a
balanced and discriminating person he was, for he added: "Now, if
_she_ had fallen in, and he had leapt after her to rescue her, that
would have been splendid and of some use." Given the character of the
lady, we might, as adults, question the last part of the boy's
statement, but this is pure cynicism and fortunately does not enter
into the child's calculations.

In my own personal experience, and I have told this story often in the
German ballad form to girls of ten and twelve in the high schools in
England, I have never found one girl who sympathized with the lady or
who failed to appreciate the poetic justice meted out to her in the
end by the dignified renunciation of the knight.

Chesterton defines sentimentality as "a tame, cold, or small and