“handmaid” to her father’s will; she realizes all her hopes and fortunes “have reference to his liking;” and now she obeys, with the bitter thought in her heart that Fate, in denying her her will, has wronged Love itself (II, ii, 154); only when Charalois turns to her with a direct question, “Fair Beaumelle, can you love me?” does she utter a word—then from her lips a brief, desperate, “Yes, my lord”—and a moment later (II, ii, 315) she is weeping silently. (Her answer was honest in as far as she really did mean to give to the man chosen for her husband her duty with her hand.) Then the voice of the tempter whispers in her ear, she feels its tug at her heart, and with a cry, “Oh, servant!—Virtue strengthen me!” she hurries from the room. That is the situation at the end of the Second Act and first part of the play; an appreciation of its significance makes the connection with what follows less arbitrary and inorganic.

When Beaumelle next appears, in the Third Act, there has been a change. We may imagine that she has had time to ponder those cynical maxims of Bellapert on the natural course of romance. Her union has been unwilling; she does not care for her husband; Novall appeals to her as much as ever: with her eyes open, she deliberately chooses the path of sin—because the enforced marriage which shattered her hopes must needs appear to her the final demonstration of the correctness of her maid’s contention (towards which she was already inclining) that she has been foolishly impractical to dream of the satisfaction of her heart’s wish through wedlock, but that it is by secret amour that love must be, and is wont to be, enjoyed.

It may not be unreasonable to regard the resourcefulness and effrontery which characterize her throughout the Third Act as the result of a sort of mental intoxication, into which she has been lifted by her reckless resolve and the consciousness of danger; at any rate she now shows herself altogether too much for Romont; she finds a shrewdness and an eloquence that carry her triumphant to the consummation of her desire. When discovery ensues, her paramour is slain, and she herself is haled to die, she is overcome—abruptly and, one might say, strangely—with remorse and penitence. But it is not at all by one of those theatrically convenient but psychologically absurd changes of heart so frequent in the drama of that period; nothing, indeed, could be more true to life. Novall Junior, coward and fop that he was, has hitherto always borne himself in lordly fashion before her, even when they were surprised by Romont; but now at last she beholds him stripped to the shivering abjectness of his contemptible soul, that she may 

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