e won yet?

_Herm_. He'll stay, my lord.

_Leon_. At my request he would not.
Hermione, my dear'st, thou never spok'st
To better purpose.

_Herm_. Never?

_Leon_. Never, but once.

_Herm_. What! have I twice said well? when was't before?
I pr'ythee tell me.

_Leon_. Why, that was when
Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death,
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand,
And clap thyself my love: then didst thou utter,
_I'm yours forever_."

There is, I think, a relish of suppressed bitterness in this last
speech, as if her long reluctance had planted in him a germ of doubt
whether, after all, her heart was really in her words of consent. For
the Queen is a much deeper character than her husband. It is true,
these notices, and various others, drop along so quiet and
unpronounced, as hardly to arrest the reader's attention. Shakespeare,
above all other men, delights in just such subtile insinuations of
purpose; they belong indeed to his usual method of preparing for a
given issue, yet doing it so slyly as not to preclude surprise when
the issue comes.

So that in his seeming abruptness Leontes, after all, does but
exemplify the strange transformations which sometimes occur in men
upon sudden and unforeseen emergencies. And it is observable that the
very slightness of the Queen's indiscretion, the fact that she goes
but a little, a very little too far, only works against her, causing
the King to suspect her of great effort and care to avoid suspicion.
And on the same principle, because he has never suspected her before,
therefore he suspects her all the more vehemently now: that his
confidence has hitherto stood unshaken, he attributes to extreme
artfulness on her part; for even so, to an ill-disposed mind perfect
innocence is apt to give an impression of consummate art. A passion
thus groundless and self-generated might well be full-grown as soon as
born. The more greedy and craving, too, that it has nothing real to
eat; it therefore proceeds at once to "make the meat it feeds on,"
causing him to magnify whatever he sees, and to imagine many things
that are not. That jealousy, however, is not the habit of his mind,
appears in that it finds him unprepared, and takes him by surprise;
insomuch that he forthwith loses all self-control, and runs right
athwart the rules of common decency and decorum, so that