Oh, Love, Love, no, Love! Not so, indeed!
You were just weak earth, I knew":
—and then, pursuing, she sums him up as we saw at the beginning of our study.
Well for her, I say again, that this is but a fancied talk! And since it is, we can accord her a measure of wisdom. For she has been wise in one thing: she has not "wronged his weakness and called it worth"—that memorable phrase, so Browningesque!
She has "seen through" him, yet she loves him. Thus far, then, kind and wise in her great passion. . . . But she should forget that she has seen through him—she should keep that vision in the background, not hold it ever in her sight. And now herself begins to see that this is where she has not been wise. She took him for hers, just as he was—and did not he, thus accepted, find her his? Has she not watched all that was as yet developed in him, and waited patiently, wonderingly, for the more to come?
"Well, and if none of these good things came,
What did the failure prove?
The man was my whole world, all the same."
That is the fault in her:
"That I do love, watch too long,
And wait too well, and weary and wear;
And 'tis all an old story, and my despair
Fit subject for some new song."
She has shown him too much love and indulgence and hope implied in the indulgence: this was the wrong way. The "bond" has been felt—and such "light, light love" as his has wings to fly at the mere suspicion of a bond. He has grown weary of her "wisdom"; pleasure is his aim in life, and that is always ready to "turn up next in a laughing eye." . . . So the songs have said and will say for all time—the new songs for the old despair.
But though she knows all this (we seem to see), she will not be able to act upon it. Always she will watch too long, and wait too well. Hers is a nature as simple as it is intense. No sort of subterfuge is within her means—neither the gay deception nor the grave. What she knows that he resents, she still must do immutably—bound upon the wheel of her true self. For only one "self" she has, and that the wrong one.
She turns back, she walks homeward along the beach—"on the edge of the low rocks by the sea, for miles."