"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't" (page 62)
It had not been easy, growing up under overbearing father Polonius or with rash brother Laertes. A thousand times controlled, ten thousand times reprimanded, Sister Augusta had found Hamlet prince of Denmarke to be worth forty thousand brothers and a hundred thousand fathers. As to mother, she had died young, and Sister Augusta remembered her only as a figure, as a fragment, as an anecdote.
She felt that mother-shaped hole in her young life, and for consolation she had fussy Polonius and bullying Laertes. Until she imagined a new life with Hamlet, the prince.
Hamlet was neither particularly tall nor personally beautiful. But he had wit and self-aggrandizement. Having been subject to the self-glorifying tales of Polonius and Laertes at the dinner table, Sister Augusta did not find Hamlet’s self-obsession alarming. It was how a man was, in her limited experience. He was her sunlight and her moon, her midnight and high noon.
So she could understand the little meer-maid.
The current prince of Denmarke wasn’t a bad sort. Unlike Hamlet, he wasn’t mad, bad, or dangerous to know.
But like Lord Byron, “What could I do? – a foolish girl – in spite of all I could say or do – would come after me – or rather went before me – for I found her here.... I could not exactly play the Stoic with a woman – who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophize me."
Lord Byron had plenty to say on this subject, all of which all of the princes of Denmarke could have agreed with: “a man is a man – & if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night – there is but one way”.