Thereupon Lady Macbeth enters: she has had time to see what color Duncan's blood imparts to water, in the little act of washing the hands which became memorable to her, and seared into the brain as if with a brand heated in nether fires. No constraint of alarm caused her to enter, but she is driven in by the terrible affinity of her feeling: she belongs to the scene,--a part of it which cannot be left out. She must hear what is said, observe what occurs, keep her appointment with the death which she solicited. This fascination of spilt blood, this woman's instinct to see her husband through the first surprise, this dread of some defect in his behavior, this solicitude to repair it by some spirit of her own, takes her into a scene which deals one stroke too much upon her emotion. For the morn broke rapidly, as if to resent the criminal advantage which the midnight took. She has had no chance to calculate what effect this murder will have upon human sensibilities when they are taken by it unawares. She sees the awfulness of it suddenly reflected from the faces and gestures of Macduff, Banquo, and the rest. It beats at the gate, across which she has braced a woman's arm, and breaks it in; and a mob of reproaches rush over her. What have those delicate hands been doing? What is this hideous issue of her slender body, just born, stark naked, in the horror of these men? Nature, in making her, was so little in the male mood, so intently following the woman's model, that it left out the element which carries Macbeth through this scene. To hear her husband describe his simulated rage in butchering the grooms, and draw that painting of Duncan in his blood,-- "And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature For ruin's wasteful entrance,"-- it is too much, and 'tis plain she is not needed. "Help me hence, ho!" her sex cries. It is the revulsion of nature in a feminine soul. Love has exhaled all its hardihood into the deed which is just now discovered. She, too, has only now really discovered it. The nerves part at the overstrain of seeing what the deed is like, and drop her helpless into a swoon. She recovers, but her mind wakes to the necessity of playing a part, to the harassing assumption of royal demeanor to hide a slavish dread, to the cruel demands of courtesy, to the effort to sustain her husband's state, to the counterfeit composure of the banquet:-- "Better be with the dead, Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace, Than on the torture of the mind to lie In restless ecstasy." She does not say this; but Macbeth avows it for her, since they are partners "In the affliction of these terrible dreams That shake us nightly."