Cesario then grows bold and tells Orsino that perhaps there is "some lady" who has "as great a pang of heart" for him as he has for Olivia. Orsino refuses to acknowledge that women can love with the passion that men can:
. . . no woman's sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman's heart
So big, to hold so much.
(92-95)
True love, he says, using a typically Elizabethan analogy, lies in one's liver, and a woman's love lies only on the tip of her tongue. Women may talk sweetly, but women cannot "suffer surfeit, cloyment and revolt," pains of the liver which are reserved for only men. He wants to make it perfectly clear to Cesario that there is "no compare / Between that love a woman can bear me / And that I owe Olivia."
Cesario now becomes bolder still and says that women can indeed love with as much passion as men can. He knows it to be so, for his father had a daughter who loved a man with as much passion as Cesario himself could love Orsino — that is, if Cesario were a woman. Then Cesario realizes that perhaps he has said enough on the subject, but when Orsino inquires further concerning the history of this "sister," Cesario's imagination is rekindled. He returns to the theme of the unrequited lover and conjures up a sad tale about his "sister" who loved so purely and so passionately and so privately that love became "like a worm in the bud" of her youth and fed "on her damask cheek." Turning to Orsino, he says, "We men may say more, swear more," but talk is often empty. His sister died, Cesario sighs, and now he is "all the daughters of my father's house, / And all the brothers too." With this cryptic statement in mind, the duke gives Cesario a jewel. He is to present it to Olivia, and he is to "bide no denay" — that is, he is not to take No for an answer. Orsino is determined to have Olivia's love.
