"I surrender," he said. "You would have been. Too fascinating!"
"That also depends on circumstances," said Lawrence. "She wouldn't be fascinatingly efficient in that back-to-nature garb if she were doing charity work at home or if she were taking a trip in an airplane."
"You carry your point," she agreed. "I shouldn't care to try."
"Which leads me," Lawrence went on, "to observe that our friend, Shakespeare, was, after all, right in bequeathing Hamlet to us. He might not look well in our own castle, but as a portrait viewed in our neighbor's house, or in a house unspecified, he is the high point of subjective tragedy."
Ortez did not answer for a moment, then he said, quietly: "I had rather lose my winter's work than lost Hamlet from my memory, yet when I think of what there is in life for a man, did he not have Hamlet's doubt to face, I think perhaps we would all be better off for no knowledge of that subjective war. Man has too much to do to lift himself out of the still clinging primordial slough to dally with subjectiveness. We should be acting, aggressive, strident in the strength of the war we wage toward freedom."
"Of course," agreed Lawrence, "but that requires only one thing, the master passion to do, because for us, doing is life. I cannot regret Hamlet's hesitating failure. It was his life. To every man there is but one way, his way, and whether it be failure or success does not depend upon an avenged wrong, a successful marriage, or even a great work done for humanity. The test is, is his life worth the price he pays to live it? I imagine Hamlet's was."
"Fallacies!" interrupted Claire. "Why, then, the tragedy?"
"Because Hamlet did not know that the governing laws to which he strove to hold himself were not laws, not true, not necessary."
"You mean," Ortez inquired, "that he was not bound to avenge his father and punish his mother?"
"I mean just that. Why should he? She was satisfied, his father was dead, and Hamlet gained nothing by his moral strutting and raving against his own hesitating hand."