"No, be assured, you shall not find me, daughter, After the slander of most step-mothers, Evil-ey'd unto you." Then she grants the married pair a stolen interview, in order that she may whip out and bring the King in to discover them. She knows the King will be displeased; but she calculates that after his first anger is cooled he will load her with favors to atone for his impetuosity:-- "I never do him wrong, But he does buy my injuries to be friends; Pays dear for my offences." What a capable woman, with this new patent for depleting a husband's pocket by wringing his heart! What an extraordinary endowment of a husband's heart to connect its spasms with the purse-clasp! Imogen feels the manœuvre of the Queen when she leaves to hurry up the King; and she says to Posthumus,-- "O dissembling courtesy! How fine this tyrant Can tickle where she wounds!" Why, then, if Shakspeare endowed her with this penetration, does she not at a glance unmask Iachimo when he comes pretending that Posthumus has been false to her in exile, and proffering himself that she may take revenge in kind? Because she has such a heart of trust in her husband that both her ears cannot hastily abuse it. The conflict between Iachimo's counterfeit news and her loyal memory occupies the whole field of her being, and keeps out the base design. She listens to Iachimo with ears attuned by the high praises which her husband sends by letter to introduce a friend "of the noblest note." Iachimo is the creature of her husband's admiration, sent to be admired, suspicion disarmed in advance, not a sentry left on duty before her frankness. His hints of a dishonorable purpose cannot be taken by a mind that is unable to conceive dishonor. So her absolute spotlessness drives him to the plainest speech; for such an artless and unconscious woman never tasked his lips before. When the revelation comes, like a hideous scrawl of flame across her clear firmament in the very high noon of her confiding, the heaven of purity rains down at once, and there he is, swimming for life in the flood of her disdain. Then he saw womanhood in one "awe-inspiring gaze" that might have prompted Shelley to exclaim,-- "Her beams anatomize me, nerve by nerve, And lay me bare, and make me blush to see My hidden thoughts." What an angelic impossibility of hearing is Imogen's! She has nothing that ever dreamed to itself of the covert meaning of his words. Without a second's interval of parley, not even time enough for natural astonishment, one peremptory instant annihilates his hope.