ply affecting . . . is to say that there is
no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. . . . I know
nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever
read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so young--I had
no mother.'"

Such ardour well might stir us to agreement, were it not that Dickens
chose for its warmest expression the very centre of our disbelief:
Mildred's _recurrence_ to that cry. . . . The cry itself--I cannot be
alone in thinking--rings false, and the recurrence, therefore, but heaps
error upon error. When I imagine an ardent girl in such a situation,
almost anything she could have been made to say would to me seem more
authentic than this. The first utterance, moreover, occurs before she
knows that Tresham has learnt the truth--it occurs, in soliloquy,
immediately after an interview with her lover.

"I was so young, I loved him so, I had
No mother, God forgot me, and I fell."

_I fell_ . . . No woman, in any extremity, says that; that is what is
said by others of her. And _God forgot me_--is this the thought of one
who "loves him so"? . . . The truth is that we have here the very
commonplace of the theatre: the wish to have it both ways, to show, yet
not to reveal--the "dramatic situation," in short, set out because it
_is_ dramatic, not because it is true. We cannot suppose that Browning
meant Earl Mertoun for a mere seducer, ravishing from a maiden that
which she did not desire to give--yet the words he here puts in
Mildred's mouth bear no other interpretation. Either she is capable of
passion, or she is not. If she _is_, sorrow for the sorrow that her
recklessness may cause to others will indeed put pain and terror in her
soul, but she will not, can not, say that "God forgot her": those words
are alien to the passionate. If she is _not_, if Mertoun is the mere
seducer . . . but the suggestion is absurd. We know that he is like
herself, as herself should have been shown us, young love incarnate,
rushing to its end mistakenly--wrong, high, and pure. These errors are
the errors of quick souls, of souls that, too late realising all, yet
feel themselves unstained, and know that not God forgot them, but they
this world in which we dwell.

In her interview with Tresham after the servant's revelation, I find the
same untruth. He delivers a long rhapsody on brothers' love, saying that
it exceeds all other in its unselfishness. Her sole rejoinder--and here
she