More--or less--than dog-like is such love, for dogs are unaware of "mere ignoble earth," dogs do not judge and analyse and patronise, and resolve to "make the low nature better for their throes." Never has the mistaken idea, the inept conduct, of passion been so subtly shown us, with so much at once of pity and of irony. James Lee's wife is a plain woman. "Why, fade you might to a thing like me, And your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair, Your skin, this bark of a gnarled tree" . . . So she cries in the painful concluding poem. Faded, coarse-haired, coarse-skinned . . . is all said? But he had married her. In what, do we find the word of that enigma? In the beauties of her heart and mind--the passionate, devoted heart, the subtle, brooding mind. These had done the first work; and alas! they have done the second also. The heart was passionate and devoted, but it analysed too closely, and then clung too closely; the mind was subtle and intense, but it could not rest, it could not "take for granted"--male synonym for married bliss! And of course we shall not dare deny James Lee his trustiest, sturdiest weapon: _she had no sense of humour!_ . . . If he was incomplete, so too was she; and her incompleteness was of the kind that, in this relation, never fails to fail--his, of the kind that more often than not succeeds. Thus she sums him: "With much in you waste, with many a weed, And plenty of passions run to seed, But a little good grain too." This man, who may be reckoned in his thousands, as the corresponding type in woman may, needs--not tyrannically, because unconsciously--a mate who far excels him in all that makes nobility; and, nine times out of ten, obtains her. "Mrs. James Lee" (how quaintly difficult it is to realise that sequence!) is, on the contrary, of the type that one might almost say inevitably fails to find the "true" mate. Perhaps she _has_ none. Perhaps, to be long loved, to be even long endured, this type must alter itself by modification or suppression, like the wife in the _Last Word_--who was not of it! For here is the very heart of the problem: can or cannot character be altered? James Lee's wife is of the morbid, the unbalanced, the unlovely: these, if they are to "survive," must learn the lore of self-suppression. Not for them exactingness, caprice, the gay or grave analysis of love and lover: such moods charm alone in lovely women, and even in _them_ bring risks along. The Mrs. Lees must curb them wholly. As the whims of unwedded love, they may perchance amuse or interest; marriage, for such, comports them not at all. Let us trace, compassionately if ironically, the mistakes of this sad woman. I.--SHE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW