Did Macbeth commit an error in killing the two Grooms? And does his Lady think so? TALBOYS. A gross error, and his Lady thinks so. BULLER. Why was it a gross error--and why did his lady think so? TALBOYS. Because--why--I really can't tell. BULLER. Nor I. The question leads to formidable difficulties--either way. But answer me this. Is her swooning at the close of her husband's most graphic picture of the position of the corpses--real or pretended? SEWARD. Real. TALBOYS. Pretended. BULLER. Sir? NORTH. I reserve my opinion. TALBOYS. Not a faint--but a _feint_. She cannot undo that which is done; nor hinder that which he will do next. She must mind her own business. Now distinctly her own business is--to faint. A high-bred, sensitive, innocent Lady, startled from her sleep to find her guest and King murdered, and the room full of aghast nobles, cannot possibly do anything else but faint. Lady Macbeth, who "all particulars of duty knows," faints accordingly. NORTH. Seward, we are ready to hear you. SEWARD. She has been about a business that must have somewhat shook her nerves--granting them to be of iron. She would herself have murdered Duncan had he not resembled her Father as he slept; and on sudden discernment of that dreadful resemblance, her soul must have shuddered, if her body served her to stagger away from parricide. On the deed being done, she is terrified after a different manner from the doer of the deed; but her terror is as great; and though she says-- "The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures--'tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted Devil--" believe me that her face was like ashes, as she returned to the chamber to gild the faces of the grooms with the dead man's blood. That knocking, too, alarmed the Lady--believe me--as much as her husband; and to keep cool and collected before him, so as to be able to support him at that moment with her advice, must have tried the utmost strength of her nature. Call her Fiend--she was Woman. Down stairs she comes--and stands among them all, at first like one alarmed only--astounded by what she hears--and striving to simulate the ignorance of the innocent--"What, in our house?" "Too cruel anywhere!" What she must have suffered then, Shakspeare lets us conceive for ourselves; and what on her husband's elaborate description of his inconsiderate additional murders. "The whole is too much for her"--she "is perplexed in the extreme"--and the sinner swoons. NORTH.