But his wife, a full-blooded, impetuous woman, feels that she is being denied her rights through this absorbing passion of the father for his son. Her nature hungers for more than child love. She loves her husband fiercely and fails to understand his coolness. Then what Ibsen calls a Rat-Wife appears. The Rat-Wife is only a woman with a dog that goes about catching and killing rats. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, she plays upon a little pipe and the rats follow her to the water and are drowned. "Just because they want not to--because they're so deadly afraid of the water--that's why they've got to plunge into it," says this horrid old bel-dame of the naughty perverse rodents. She has lured other game--human game--in her early days, and Little Eyolf is transfixed by her glittering eye, as Coleridge hath it. He follows her music as far as the water and is drowned. The act is vital and searching in its analysis of character. With a few powerful strokes we get Rita, Asta, Alfred, the Rat-Wife; and the poor lame chap, with his hankering after a soldier's life, is very sad. The contention between Alfred and Rita, husband and wife, in the next act, goes to the very springs of their souls. We learn that Rita is jealous of her little boy--the dead, drowned boy, whose open, upturned, and staring eyes haunt her. Alfred upbraids her for her neglect of the child, and declares that he would be alive if it were not for her carelessness. Being lame he was not taught to swim like other lads, and the lameness was caused by a fall from a table. Rita had left him asleep on the table, safe as she thought, and then the accident occurred. The husband protests in a low voice that he too forgot, "You, you, you, lured me to you--I forgot the child--in your arms." The two lay bare their very thoughts. Alfred has really never loved Rita. Her gold and green forests and her beauty led him to marry her. His craze for the boy further removed him from his wife, and his intellectual life was not conducive to perfect sympathy. He wished his lad to be a prodigy. He meant him to do in the world all the father had not. The scene is a poignant one. The mother, very human woman of considerable temperament, is almost broken-hearted at the double loss. The child's death was a blow, but her husband's dislike drives her frantic. The child, young as he was, had repelled her. She felt barred from the wealth of love that flourished between father and child. She resented it. She resented the child's love for Asta, for Asta proves to be a very formidable factor in the play. She is jealous of everybody.