Griselda, in her sad suburban nook Watched his departures with a mute rebuke, Yet daring not to speak. The choice was hers To stay at home or run the theatres With her young lover in such company As her soul loathed. She had tried despairingly To be one, even as these, for his loved sake, And would have followed spite of her heart's ache, But that he hardly further cared to press, After one failure, stamped with "dowdiness:" That too had been his word, a bitter word, Biting and true, which smote her like a sword, Or rather a whip's sting to her proud cheek, Leaving her humbled, agonised and weak. Poor beautiful Griselda! What was now The value of thy beauty, chaste as snow In thy youth's morning, the unchallenged worth Of thy eyes' kindness, queenliest of the earth; The tradition of thy Fra-angelic face, Blessed as Mary's, and as full of grace; The fame which thou despisedst, yet which made A glory for thee meet for thy dear head? What, if in this last crisis of thy fate, When all a heaven and hell was in debate, And thy archangel, with the feet of clay, Stood mocking there in doubt to go or stay, The unstable fabric of thy woman's dower, Thy beauty, failed and left thee in _their_ power Whose only law of beauty was the sting Lent to man's lust by light bedizening? What use was in thy beauty, if, alas! Thou gavest them cause to mock--those tongues of brass-- At thy too crude and insular attire, Thy naïvetés of colour, the false fire Of thy first dallyings with the red and white, Thy sweet pictorial robes, Pre-Raphaelite, Quaint in their tones and _outrées_ in design, Thy lack of unity and shape and line, Thy English angularity--who knows, The less than perfect fitting of thy shoes? Griselda, in her flight, had left behind All but the dress she stood in, too refined, In her fair righteousness of thought and deed, To make provision for a future need, However dire. She was no Israelite To go forth from her Pharaoh in the night, With spoils of the Egyptians in her hands, And had thrown herself on Manton and on France With a full courage worth a nobler cause, Grandly oblivious of prudential laws. Her earliest trouble, marring even the bliss Of love's first ecstasy, had come of this, Her want of clothes--a worse and weightier care At the mere moment than her soul's despair For its deep fall from virtuous estate. How should she dress herself, she asked of Fate, With neither maid, nor money, nor a name? It was her first experiment in shame. Now, after all her poor economies, This was the ending read in his vexed eyes, And spoken by his lips: her utmost art Had failed to please that idle thing, his heart, Or even to avert his petulant scorn For one so little to love's manner born.