The report of Portia’s wealth and wondrous beauty spread abroad, and many adventurers came in search of her. Portia liked none of them, and felt much aggrieved to be so curbed by her dead father’s will. Her waiting-maid Nerissa tried to console her by reminding her how wise and good her father had always been. Holy men, she said, had often at their deaths good inspirations, and it would very likely come to pass that the casket would never be rightly chosen except by someone who rightly loved.
Portia listened, but she was scarcely convinced. Among her suitors there was not one for whom she felt anything but ridicule or contempt. She was therefore delighted when Nerissa went on to tell her that the gentlemen were departing to their own homes, and intended to trouble her no further, unless she could be won by some other means than those imposed by her father.
“I am glad the parcel of wooers are so reasonable, for there is not one among them but I doat on his very absence!” said Portia gaily. “Heaven grant them a fair departure!”
“Do you not remember, lady, in your father’s time, a Venetian, a scholar and a soldier, that came here in company of the Marquis of Monferrat?” asked Nerissa.
“Yes, yes, it was Bassanio,” answered Portia quickly; then, more slowly, as if she would not have Nerissa notice her eagerness, “I think he was so called.”
“True, madam. He, of all the men that ever my foolish eyes looked upon, was the best deserving a fair lady.”
“I remember him well, and I remember him worthy of your praise,” said Portia.
At that moment a serving-man entered to say that four stranger lords desired to take their leave of the lady Portia, and that a forerunner had come from a fifth, the Prince of Morocco, who brought word that his master would be there that night.
“Come, Nerissa,” said Portia, with a little gesture of half-comic despair. “While we shut the gates upon one wooer, another knocks at the door.”