But is she in truth so elusive? Are not women far simpler than they are accounted? "The First Reader in another language," I have elsewhere said of them; but doubtless a woman cannot be the judge. Let us see what Browning, subtle as few other men, thought of our lucidity. "Room after room, I hunt the house through We inhabit together. Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her-- Next time, herself!--not the trouble behind her Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume! As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew; Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather." So elusive, says this man, is the real Herself! But (I maintain) she does not know it. She goes her way, unconscious--or, if conscious, blind to its deepest implication. Caprice, mood, whim: these indeed she uses, _for fun_, as it were, but of "the trouble behind her" she knows nothing. Just to rise from a couch, pull a curtain, pass through a room! How should she dream that the cornice-wreath blossomed anew? And when she tossed her hat off, or carefully put it on before the mirror . . . if the glass did gleam, it was a trick of light; _she_ did not produce it! For, conscious of this magic, she would lose it; her very inapprehensiveness it is which "brings it off." Yet she loves to hear her lover tell of such imaginings, and the more he tells, the more there seem to be for him. "Yet the day wears, And door succeeds door; I try the fresh fortune-- Range the wide house from the wing to the centre. Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter. Spend my whole day in the quest, who cares? But 'tis twilight, you see--with such suites to explore, Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!" Listening, she begins to understand how deeply he means "herself." It is not only the spell that she leaves behind her in the mere, actual rooms: it is the mystery residing in her "house of flesh." What does _that_ house contain--where is _she_? He seems to hold her, yet she "goes out as he enters"; he seems to have found her, yet it is like hide-and-seek at twilight, and half-a-hundred hiders in a hundred rooms! She listens, puzzled; perhaps a little frightened to be so much of a secret. For she never meant to be--she cannot feel that she _is_; and thus, how shall she help him to "find" her? Perhaps she must always elude? She does not desire that: he must not let her escape him! And he quickly answers: "Escape me? Never-- Beloved! While I am I, and you are you, So long as the world contains us both, Me the loving and you the loth, While the one eludes, must the other pursue." But she is not "the loth"; that is all his fancy. She wants him to find her. And this, in its turn, scares _him_. "My life is a fault at last, I fear: It seems too much like a fate, indeed! Though I do my best, I shall scarce succeed."