It has the casuistical subtlety which the over-developed conscience of the Christian Church encouraged.

It is intellectual, too, rather than real, metaphysical more than moral, Browning rather than Sophocles.

Nor do I believe that a Rhodian girl, even with all Athens at the back of her brain, would have conceived it at all.

Then Balaustion makes another comment on the situation, in which there is more of Browning than of herself.

"Admetos," she says, "has been kept back by the noisy quarrel from seeing into the truth of his own conduct, as he was on the point of doing, for 'with the low strife comes the little mind.'" But when his father is gone, and Alkestis is borne away, then, in the silence of the house and the awful stillness in his own heart, he sees the truth.