husbands and wives,
luxuriant complications, made the air too tropical. In the boat they
were father and daughter, and poor Dotty and Kitty supplied abundantly,
for their situation, the oars or the sail. Why, into the bargain, for
that matter--this came to Maggie--couldn't they always live, so far as
they lived together, in a boat? She felt in her face, with the question,
the breath of a possibility that soothed her; they needed only KNOW each
other, henceforth, in the unmarried relation. That other sweet evening,
in the same place, he had been as unmarried as possible--which had kept
down, so to speak, the quantity of change in their state. Well then,
that other sweet evening was what the present sweet evening would
resemble; with the quite calculable effect of an exquisite inward
refreshment. They HAD, after all, whatever happened, always and ever
each other; each other--that was the hidden treasure and the saving
truth--to do exactly what they would with: a provision full of
possibilities. Who could tell, as yet, what, thanks to it, they wouldn't
have done before the end?

They had meanwhile been tracing together, in the golden air that, toward
six o'clock of a July afternoon, hung about the massed Kentish woods,
several features of the social evolution of her old playmates, still
beckoned on, it would seem, by unattainable ideals, still falling
back, beyond the sea, to their native seats, for renewals of the moral,
financial, conversational--one scarce knew what to call it--outfit, and
again and for ever reappearing like a tribe of Wandering Jewesses. Our
couple had finally exhausted, however, the study of these annals, and
Maggie was to take up, after a drop, a different matter, or one at least
with which the immediate connection was not at first apparent. "Were you
amused at me just now--when I wondered what other people could wish to
struggle for? Did you think me," she asked with some earnestness--"well,
fatuous?"

"'Fatuous'?"--he seemed at a loss.

"I mean sublime in OUR happiness--as if looking down from a height. Or,
rather, sublime in our general position--that's what I mean." She spoke
as from the habit of her anxious conscience something that disposed her
frequently to assure herself, for her human commerce, of the state of
the "books" of the spirit. "Because I don't at all want," she explained,
"to be blinded, or made 'sniffy,' by any sense of a social situation."
Her father listened to this declarat