She thinks of explaining more, explaining the smeared edges, but she looks in Laertes’s eyes and sees he doesn’t need it. (It’s harder for her, to read the messages in Hamlet’s or anyone’s eyes — but harder with Hamlet especially, when what she reads so clearly contradicts with what he says. She touched her lips as if fascinated, then mocked her for painting them at all, lumped it in with other girlish affectations she’d never been given to before. Perhaps she would be, if she’d been allowed them more, if she could be girlish and pretty without her father lecturing her for trying to tempt men. But for Hamlet it was only another deceit.)

“I thought our father would step in to defend me, if any man insulted my honor,” she says. It’s easier to explain the thinking than say the feeling. “He seemed to prize it so dearly.” More dearly (she doesn’t voice aloud) than he seemed to prize her. “Wouldst thou not for thy daughter? If in thy hearing, she were called false without proof, or if someone raised a hand to her.” She believed herself coddled before, between her overprotective father and more overprotective brother. The sort of creature who longs for freedom because she doesn’t appreciate the safety of the cage. Is this safety?