No: her hour is past. He is ruled now by that voice from heaven. Terribly he turns upon her-- "Go, get your clothes on--dress those shoulders! . . . Wipe off that paint! I hate you"-- and as she flashes back her "Miserable!" his hideous repulse sinks to a yet more hideous contemplation of her-- "My God, and she is emptied of it now! Outright now!--how miraculously gone All of the grace--had she not strange grace once? Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes, No purpose holds the features up together, Only the cloven brow and puckered chin Stay in their places: and the very hair That seemed to have a sort of life in it, Drops, a dead web!" Poignant in its authenticity is her sole, piteous answer-- ". . . Speak to me--not of me!" But he relentlessly pursues the dread analysis of baffled passion's aspect-- "That round great full-orbed face, where not an angle Broke the delicious indolence--all broken!" Once more that cry breaks from her-- "To me--not of me!" but soon the natural anger against his insolence possesses her; she whelms him with a torrent of recrimination. Coward and ingrate he is, beggar, her slave-- ". . . a fawning, cringing lie, A lie that walks and eats and drinks!" --while he, as in some horrible trance, continues his cold dissection-- ". . . My God! Those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades-- I should have known there was no blood beneath!" For though the heaven-song have pierced him, not yet is Sebald reborn, not yet can aught of generosity involve him. Still he speaks "of her, not to her," deaf in the old selfishness and baseness. He can cry, amid his vivid recognition of another's guilt, that "the little peasant's voice has righted all again"--can be sure that _he_ knows "which is better, vice or virtue, purity or lust, nature or trick," and in the high nobility of such repentance as flings the worst of blame upon the other one, will grant himself lost, it is true, but "proud to feel such torments," to "pay the price of his deed" (ready with phrases now, he also!), as, poor weakling, he stabs himself, leaving his final word to her who had been for him all that she as yet knew how to be, in-- "I hate, hate--curse you! God's in his heaven!" * * * * * Now, at this crisis, we are fully shown what, in despite of other commentators,[49:1] I am convinced that Browning meant us to perceive from the first--that Ottima's is the nobler spirit of the two. Her lover has stabbed himself, but she, not yet realising it, flings herself upon him, wrests the dagger--