living; when the coarse
(laborious) hand of a little peasant girl reminds her that life, whether
beautiful or not, is the artist's noblest study; and that, as the uses
of a hand are independent of its beauty and will survive it, life with
its obligations will survive love. "She has been a fool to think she
must be loved or die."

IX.

ON DECK.

She makes the final sacrifice to her husband's happiness, and leaves
him. But in so doing she pays a last tribute to the omnipotence of love.
She knows there is nothing in her that will claim a place in his
remembrance. She knows also that if he had loved her, it might be
otherwise. Love could have transformed her in his sight as it has
transfigured him in hers. Their positions might even have been
reversed. If one touch of such a love as hers could ever come to her in
a thought of his, he might turn into a being as ill-favoured as herself.
She would neither know nor care, since joy would have killed her.

We learn from the two last monologues, especially the last, that James
Lee's wife was a plain woman. This may throw some light on the
situation.

"THE WORST OF IT" is the cry of anguish of a man whose wife has been
false to him, and who sees in her transgression only the injury she has
inflicted on herself, and his own indirect part in its infliction. The
strain of suppressed personal suffering betrays itself in his very
endeavour to prove that he has not been wronged: that it was his fault,
not hers, if his love maddened her, and the vows by which he had bound
her were such as she could not keep. But the burden of his lament--"the
worst of it" all--is, that her purity was once his salvation, her past
kindness has for ever glorified his life; that she is dishonoured, and
through him, and that no gratitude of his, no power of his, can rescue
her from that dishonour. In his passionate tenderness he strives to
pacify her conscience, and again, as earnestly to arouse it. "Her
account is not with him who absolves her, but with the world which does
not; with her endangered womanhood, her jeopardized hope of Heaven." He
implores her for her own sake to return to virtue though not to him. For
himself he renounces her even in Paradise. He "will pass nor turn" his
"face" if they meet there.

The pathos of "TOO LATE" is all conveyed in its title. The loved woman
is dead. She was the wife of another man than he who mourns for her. But
so long as there was life there was hope.