observe his baseness. She sees him cowed and beaten and slain, while Charalois (whom she never knew before their marriage nor has tried to understand in the brief period of their wedlock) with his outraged honor and irresistible prowess assumes to her eyes the proportions of a hero; and with her girl’s romanticism10 of nature, she bows down and worships him. It is somewhat the same note that is struck by Thackeray in the similar situation where Rawdon Crawley, returning home unexpectedly, finds his wife with Lord Steyne and knocks the man down.

CONTENTS

It was all done before Rebecca could interpose. She stood there trembling before him. She admired her husband, strong, brave, victorious.

So it was with Beaumelle. Except for one brief cry of “Undone for ever!” she utters no word from the moment of the surprise to the end of the Scene. She hangs back, shrinking, for a moment, when ordered into the coach with the dead body of her partner in guilt. “Come,” says Charalois, in terrible jest, “you have taught me to say, you must and shall.... You are but to keep him company you love—” and she obeys mutely.

Thus, all contriteness, Beaumelle goes to her fate. It should be observed how, even at the last, her tendency to romantic idealization vehemently asserts itself; she looks fondly back (IV, iv, 53)  to an imagined time, which never really existed, when she was “good” and “a part of” Charalois, made one with him through the virtuous harmony of their minds!—no voice is more unfaltering than her own to pronounce her doom as both righteous and necessary, and she conceives herself to climb, by her ecstatic welcoming of death, into the company of the ancient heroines and martyrs. In its realism of the commonplace and its slightly ironic conception, it is the outline drawing of a character that might have received elaborate portraiture at the hands of Flaubert.

Whether we are to regard this consistent “study in little” as a deliberate piece of work on the part of the authors, must remain a matter of opinion. There is no similar figure elsewhere in the dramatic output of Massinger, nor any quite so minutely conceived within the same number of speech-lines in that of Field, and one could scarce be blamed for believing that a number of hap-hazard, sketchy strokes with which the collaborators dashed off a character whom they deemed of no great importance, all so fell upon the canvas that, by a miracle of chance, they went to form the lineaments of a real woman. The discussion of the probability or possibility of such a hypothesis would carry us very 

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