The Lady and the Tiger

The ending is ambiguous. Whether the princess decides to kill her lover or lose him to another woman depends on the woman. I think the author of this story intends for her to tell him to open the door with the tiger because he writes about how the woman is having a crisis of heart and all that and the darkness of the human soul and so on. So if she picked the lady it wouldn’t talk about all that because she would have a good and noble soul and could bear losing her lover and care about making him happy. But he keeps referring to her being ‘semi-barbaric’ and all that so I think he intends for her to tell him to open the door with the tiger. But since whoever wrote this can’t write and is nuts and not subtle at all, it could secretly be the other way around. Personally, I think the ending should go like this:

’Without the slightest hesitation, he went to the door on the right, and opened it.’

Immediately there sprung out of the door on the right a tiger of a most ferocious sort. There was a crazed gleam in its eyes and its mouth opened and closed, foam making its way down its jaws. The semi-barbaric princess sat forward on her semi-barbaric parapet and allowed a semi-barbaric smile on her semi-barbaric face. Her bland and genial and truly semi-barbaric father, the king, let forth a furious cry from his parapet in his beloved arena.

The tiger, though most ferocious, was quite small. In fact, its appearance seemed to be that of a cub, not more than a week old at most. Its teeth had been pulled and its claws had been clipped. (and who but a semi-barbaric princess could bear to bribe someone to do such a thing to such an animal?)

The lover, following the instructions the princess had sent him whilst he languished in his damp holding cell, procured a muzzle from within his garments and proceeded to end his peril. However much the small and ferocious tiger leapt at him, he bore no more than a few unimportant bruises at this assault.

But the semi-barbaric king was forced to abide by the terms of his law, as the tiger was ferocious, and the lover had survived, and thus everyone lived happily ever after and ate pheasant.