to ask the King before a decision was made had been unobtrusively shuffled aside. Any such “cowardice” was now not to be thought of. The whole point of her action—the whole grandeur—would lie in taking it without the King’s knowledge, in leaving him utterly free to repudiate it, so that all the benefits should be his, and all the risks hers; and with the risk, of course, all the magnanimity, the pathos, the tragedy, and the originality. And also, the Tempter hinted, it would be no use asking the King, for he would certainly not approve the action: men were like that.
