[SPOILER: Eurycleia comes up the stairs two at a time. Your husband is here. The suitors are dead. It’s over. Penelope does not move. Another beggar with stories, then. She comes down barefoot in her nightclothes and crosses the hall and sits on a stone bench far enough from the bloody man in the lamplight to see his face clearly. Telemachus cannot bear it. Mother. You turn from him? She does not look away from the stranger. I have learned to be careful with my hope. Twenty years she has held the kingdom by never letting anyone see what it cost her. Men have come with lies and disguises and claims that tomorrow everything will be restored. She has buried the hunger to believe. The hunger almost killed her. She is not going to feed it now on a man covered in blood and a nurse’s certainty. She has earned the right to not believe. The bed-test is the proof she requires, and she requires it because the cost of being wrong is worse than the cost of being slow.]
Penelope's Earned Skepticism
I have learned to be careful with my hope. Twenty years of men coming with stories taught her never to believe the first telling.