We see the innocent girl, and ten years after what the world has made of her.

But the heart of the girl lies beneath the woman of the world.

And she recalls to the man the hour when they lingered near the church on the cliff; when he loved her, when he might have claimed her, and did not.
He feared they might repent of it; sacrificing to the present their chance of the eternities of love.

"Fool! who ruined four lives--mine and your opera-dancer's, your own and my husband's!" Whether her outburst now be quite true to her whole self or not Browning does not let us know; but it is true to that moment of her, and it is full of the poetry of the moment she recalls.

Moreover, these thirty short verses paint as no other man could have done the secret soul of a woman in society.