An ordinary woman might have enmeshed him in a cocoon of delicate coquetries: any woman dead in love, and a little less than strict to an oath, would have managed in some way to provoke that lead casket into twinkling a hint to him. But she is too honest for either. A woman with a soul as tender as it is firm, here she stands dismayed as Destiny is about to rattle its dice upon her heart: happiness, and a future worthy of her, all at stake. For though her mental resources might compete with any fate, she is all woman, made to be a wife, and without wifehood to feel herself at one essential point impaired,--all the more defrauded because so well endowed. How she clings for support to the few moments that yet stand before his choice! She wishes there were more of them to stay her. "I pray you tarry; ... ... for, in choosing wrong, I lose your company; therefore, forebear awhile." She has no courage now: love, when it stole her heart, found that trait too, and added it to the booty. "Lest you should not understand me well (And yet a maiden hath no tongue but thought), I would detain you here some month or two, Before you venture for me." The noble lady's plea fills us with admiring pity: we admire to see the strong, beautiful woman so downcast with this new emotion which Heaven has quartered upon her life; but we pity, because perhaps it will be doomed to dwell alone. And then the more spacious the lodging, the more dreary the echoes of these few sweet hours. Has she said too much? She has a chase after this frankness to make a struggle to detain it, but it overcomes and gets away:-- "Beshrew your eyes, They have o'erlooked me, and divided me: One half of me is yours, the other half yours,-- Mine own, I would say; but, if mine, then yours, And so all yours!" This freshet of disclosure does not carry away maidenly reserve, for that is transferred from her person and locked up in the coyness of the caskets: in them there lurks a threat, a possible disaster, which lends some pathos to her frankness, and prevents it from forfeiting our respect. Now Bassanio, who lives upon the rack, denies her plea for delay: "Let me to my fortune and the caskets." How profoundly she surmises that music might lull the watching Fate, so that he could pass to his Eurydice! She bids the music play:-- "As are those dulcet sounds in break of day, That creep into the dreaming bridegroom's ear, And summon him to marriage."