succeeds.
Thus she sums him:

"With much in you waste, with many a weed,
And plenty of passions run to seed,
But a little good grain too."

This man, who may be reckoned in his thousands, as the corresponding
type in woman may, needs--not tyrannically, because unconsciously--a
mate who far excels him in all that makes nobility; and, nine times out
of ten, obtains her. "Mrs. James Lee" (how quaintly difficult it is to
realise that sequence!) is, on the contrary, of the type that one might
almost say inevitably fails to find the "true" mate. Perhaps she _has_
none. Perhaps, to be long loved, to be even long endured, this type must
alter itself by modification or suppression, like the wife in the _Last
Word_--who was not of it! For here is the very heart of the problem: can
or cannot character be altered? James Lee's wife is of the morbid, the
unbalanced, the unlovely: these, if they are to "survive," must learn
the lore of self-suppression. Not for them exactingness, caprice, the
gay or grave analysis of love and lover: such moods charm alone in
lovely women, and even in _them_ bring risks along. The Mrs. Lees must
curb them wholly. As the whims of unwedded love, they may perchance
amuse or interest; marriage, for such, comports them not at all.

Let us trace, compassionately if ironically, the mistakes of this sad
woman.

I.--SHE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW

He is coming back to their seaside home at Sainte-Marie, near
Pornic--the Breton "wild little place" which Browning knew and loved so
well. "Close to the sea--a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly
lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.
I feel out of the earth sometimes as I sit here at the window."[254:1]

And at the window _she_ sits, watching for James Lee's return. Yesterday
it was summer, but the strange sudden "stop" has come, eerily, as it
always seems to come.

"Ah, Love, but a day
And the world has changed!
The sun's away,
And the bird estranged;
The wind has dropped,
And the sky's deranged:
Summer has stopped."

We can picture him as he arrives and listens to her: is there already a
faint annoyance? Need she so drearily depict the passing of summer? It
is bad enough that it _should_ pass--we need not talk about it! Such
annoyance we all have felt with the relentless chroniclers of change.
Enough, enough; since summer is gone and we cannot bring it back, let us