Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/419

 was unusual with her, to the weird influences of night and loneliness. It was unusual; for I think it to be no fancy, but a well-attested experience, that the blonde women are the least affected by the physical influences of darkness: they have a certain clarity to repel this infection that penetrates so many darker-looking people,—a certain nonchalance that is manifested even in girlhood's nursery, and prevents spooks from being rocked in the same cradle. Being free from the frailness which is latent in a tendency to project startled feelings into ghostly phenomena, they do, as a general rule, find it easy to translate the queer noises and conspiracies of the darkness into their plain prose. They keep the obscurest entry free from the litter which gathers from tales of superstition: from garret to cellar there's not a nook where creepiness can make a goblin-nest. Up and down lonesome staircases they can go without a light, prowl unperturbed into the uncanniest corners, hurry to investigate the cause of a low moan with a warm heart for a candle, enter the room of the dead without laying a reluctant hand upon the lock or pausing to summon fortitude.

One of these women was Lady Macbeth, who never before experienced, what her husband always had in liability, those paintings of his fear, those flaws and starts, that objectivity of over-wrought imagination. But now this scene, which treads upon the threshold of the murder, shudders with the proximity of something bodiless; on the corridors and stairs a spectral gleam is congealing into shapes not known to this world; the wild