But if her virtue, in the technical sense, remained intact, the Serpent had overfed her with _pommes de luxe_. On her return home--where the restoration of her child might have helped matters, but it doesn't know who she is and refuses to part from its foster-mother--we find her lethargic, off her feed, indifferent to the claims of menial toil, and clamorous (as I have shown) for her rights of the daily bath. In the first joy of conjugal reunion _Ezra_ consents to tolerate the discomfort of this change, but in the end he loses patience and hits her. She leaves for London the same afternoon. Six black months pass over the husband's bowed head, and then, on a very windy night (the wind was well done), she makes a re-entry, and confesses that, under stress of need, she has lapsed from virtue. This is bad news for _Ezra_, but he is prepared to forgive a fault in which he himself has had a fair share. Only there must be a sacrifice of something, if moral justice is to be appeased. So he chooses between his wife and his chapel and does execution on the latter. He goes out into the storm and sets the thing alight. His conscience is thus purified by fire, the gale being favourable to arson. It is a pity that so excellent an object as a brick chapel should be the evil genius of the play. Yet so it is. Built of the materials of Scandinavian drama, it is always just round the corner, heavy with doom. We never see it, but we hear more than enough about it, and in the end it becomes a bore which we are well rid of. The theme of the perils of foster-motherhood is not new, but Mrs. MERRICK has treated it freshly and with a very decent avoidance of its strictly sexual aspects. But her methods are too sedentary. She kept on with her atmosphere long after we knew the details of the cottage interior by heart; while a whole volume of active tragedy--_Mary's_ six months in London--was left to our fevered imagination. And the sense of reality which she was at such pains to create was spoiled by dialogue freely carried on in the immediate vicinity of persons who were not supposed to overhear it.