the allegory. If
women will set up "the pert pretence to match the male achievement,"
they must consent to take the world as men are forced to take it. There
must be no unfairness, no claim on the chivalry which has sought to
shield them: in the homely phrase, they must "take the rough with the
smooth"--not the stainless result alone, with a revolted shudder for the
marrings which have made it possible.

But having flung these truths at her, observe that the man rues them. He
accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as I read this passage) to what
is _true_ in the idea of woman's purity. The insufferable creature of
the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a
she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. If man
could but return, unstained! He must go forth, must explore the rays--of
all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; but if he could
explore, and not return "absurd as frightful." . . . He cannot.
Experience is not whole without "some wonder linked with fear"--the
colours! The shafts ray from her "midmost home"; she "dwells there,
hearted." True, but this is not _experience_, and she shall not conceit
herself into believing it to be. She shall not set up the "pert pretence
to match the male achievement": she shall learn that men make women
"easy victors," when their rough effaces itself to smooth for woman's
sake. One or the other she must choose: knowledge and the right to
judge, or ignorance and the duty to refrain from judgment. . . . And
yet--he goes again; he obeys the silver smile! For the "crimson-quest
may deepen to a sunrise"; he _may_ come back and find her waiting,
"sunlight and salvation," because she understands at last; and both
shall look for stains from those long shafts, and see none there. . . .
Maybe, maybe: he goes--will come again one day; and _that_ at last may
prove itself the day when "men are pure, and women brave."

+ + + + +

We pass from the unearthly atmosphere of _Numpholeptos_--well-nigh the
most abstract of all Browning's poems--to the vivid, astonishing realism
of _Too Late_.

Edith is dead, and the man who loved her and failed to win her, is
musing upon the transmutation of all values in his picture of life which
has been made by the tidings. Not till now had he fully realised his
absorption in the thought of her: "the woman I loved so well, who
married the other." He had been wont to "sit and loo