She shows her natural goodness of heart by hurrying thither at once (though of course she has not the taste to leave her gorgeous retinue behind) and doing all she can to comfort and help her daughter. By this time she has all unconsciously “taken the wind out of the sails” of the avengers. But Electra can maintain her grimness and actually utter black hints of a wedding-bed in the grave![645] We turn next to her; what manner of woman can this be? Electra is one of Euripides’ most vivid and successful female characters. She has strong claims on our pity and sympathy, but fails to win them. Her mother is a ready victim of any emotion which breathes upon her; Electra has settled her position emotionally, intellectually, morally, years ago. Nothing can alter her; she is the victim and the apostle of an _idée fixe_. The crimes of love are no less frightful than the crimes of hate; in Electra affection for Agamemnon has become the basis of cold ferocity against Clytæmnestra. It is Orestes who shrinks when the deed is to be done, Electra who braces his resolution. She has borne no child. Instead of beginning a new life in her children, looking to the future, she has fed morbidly upon memories, stiffening natural grief and resentment into permanent inhuman morosity. Clytæmnestra has blandly outlived two murders in her own family, and remains neither unamiable nor uninteresting; but it is impossible to imagine what Electra will do, say, or think, after the events of to-day. This unnatural self-concentration, which means not only her mother’s death but her own spiritual suicide, is mainly the result of her childlessness. And it is on this that Euripides lays his finger. “Announce that I have given birth to a male child.... Then, when she has come, of course it is her death.”[646] This plot of Electra is possibly the most brilliantly skilful and most terrible stroke in all the poet’s work. It indicates the source of her heartlessness, it provides an excellent dramatic motive for the queen’s arrival, and it shows, as nothing else could show, the fiendishness of a woman who can use just this pretext to the very woman who gave her birth. She relies upon the sanctity of motherhood to aid her in trampling upon it. Her first words, as she slips forth to join her husband beneath the star-lit sky, show how the heavens themselves remind her that she has had no infant at her breast during the night-watches: “Black Night, thou _Nurse_ of golden stars”.[647] Moreover, not only does she feel her sorrows, she enjoys the sense of martyrdom. Her wrongs and present trials she is capable of exaggerating;[648] at every opportunity she exploits them for purposes of self-pity, as her husband hints more than once.[649]