woman's character suffers more from this than the man's, even though
Tresham, in the last scene, is half turned into a woman. Sex seems to
disappear in that scene.

A different person is Colombe, the Duchess in _Colombe's Birthday_. That
play, as I have said, gets on, but it gets on because Colombe moves
every one in the play by her own motion. From beginning to end of the
action she is the fire and the soul of it. Innocent, frank and brave,
simple and constant among a group of false and worldly courtiers, among
whom she moves like the white Truth, untouched as yet by love or by the
fates of her position, she is suddenly thrown into a whirlpool of
affairs and of love; and her simplicity, clearness of intelligence,
unconscious rightness of momentary feeling, which comes of her not
thinking about her feelings--that rare and precious element in
character--above all, her belief in love as the one worthy thing in the
world, bring her out of the whirlpool, unshipwrecked, unstained by a
single wave of ill-feeling or mean thinking, into a quiet harbour of
affection and of power. For she will influence Berthold all his life
long.

She is herself lovely. Valence loves her at sight. Her love for Valence
is born before she knows it, and the touch of jealousy, which half
reveals it to her, is happily wrought by Browning. When she finds out
that Valence did for love of her what she thought was done for loyalty
alone to her, she is a little revolted; her single-heartedness is
disappointed. She puts aside her growing love, which she does not know
as yet is love, and says she will find out if Berthold wishes to marry
her because he loves her, or for policy. Berthold is as honest as she
is, and tells her love has nothing to do with the matter. The thought of
an untrue life with Berthold then sends her heart with a rush back to
Valence, and she chooses love and obscurity with Valence. It is the
portrait of incarnate truth, in vivid contrast to Constance, who is a
liar in grain.

Constance is the heroine of the fragment of a drama called _In a
Balcony_. Norbert, a young diplomat, has served the Queen, who is fifty
years old, for a year, all for the love of Constance, a cousin and
dependent of the Queen. He tells Constance he will now, as his reward,
ask the Queen for her hand. Constance says, "No; that will ruin us both;
temporise; tell the Queen, who is hungry for love, that you love her;
and that, as she cannot marry a subject, you