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 will be content with me, whom the Queen loves.”  Norbert objects, and no wonder, to this lying business, but he does it; and the Queen runs to Constance, crying, “I am loved, thank God!  I will throw everything aside and marry him.  I thought he loved you, but he loves me.”  Then Constance, wavering from truth again, says that the Queen is right.  Norbert does love her.  And this is supposed by some to be a noble self-sacrifice, done in pity for the Queen.  It is much more like jealousy.