"Come back with me to the first of all,
Let us lean and love it over again,
Let us now forget and now recall,
Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
And gather what we let fall!"

Too many tears would fall on that wife's rosary--the wife who had begun
so soon to know that Edens shall be lost by thinking Eves!

But let me not enforce a moral. The mood is one that women know, and
often wisely use. "Talking" _is_ to be hidden, "cheek on cheek," from
the hawk on the bough: but talking, as this wife will quickly see, is
not the sum of individuality's expression. She can teach him--learning
from him all the while--_not_ to "require it": she, this same sweet,
strong-souled woman, for to be able to speak as she speaks here is her
sure indenture of freedom.

"That shall be to-morrow,
Not to-night:
I must bury sorrow
Out of sight."

The "sorrow" is for him, not for herself: he has fallen below his
highest in the tyranny of to-night. Then be sure that she, so loving and
so seeing, shall lift him up to-morrow! _This_ tear shall be dried.

II

JAMES LEE'S WIFE

In this song-cycle of nine poems we are shown the death of a woman's
heart. James Lee's wife sums up in herself, as it were, all those
"troubles of love" which we have considered in the earlier monologues.
The man has failed her--as De Lorge failed his lady, as the poet the
"poor, pretty thoughtful thing"; love has left her--as it left the woman
of _The Laboratory_ and the girl of _In a Year_; she and her husband are
at variance in the great things of life--like the couple, in _A Woman's
last Word_. But even the complete surrender of individuality resolved
upon by the wife in that poem would not now avail, if indeed it ever
would have availed, the wife of James Lee. All is over, and, as she
gradually realises, over with such finality that there is only one thing
she can do, and that is to leave him--"set him free."

We learn the mournful story from the wife's lips only; the husband never
speaks, and is but once present. All we actually see are the moods of
nine separate days--spread over what precise period of time we are not
clearly shown, but it was certainly a year. These nine revealings show
us every stage from the first faint pang of apprehension to the accepted
woe; then the battle with _that_--the hope that love may yet prevail;
the clutch at some high stoicism drawn from the laws of nature, or fr