eparate and so to keep together had never for
a moment, from however far back, been equivocal to her; that it was
remarkable had in fact quite counted, at first and always, and for each
of them equally, as part of their inspiration and their support. There
were plenty of singular things they were NOT enamoured of--flights of
brilliancy, of audacity, of originality, that, speaking at least for the
dear man and herself, were not at all in their line; but they liked to
think they had given their life this unusual extension and this liberal
form, which many families, many couples, and still more many pairs
of couples, would not have found workable. That last truth had been
distinctly brought home to them by the bright testimony, the quite
explicit envy, of most of their friends, who had remarked to them again
and again that they must, on all the showing, to keep on such terms, be
people of the highest amiability--equally including in the praise, of
course, Amerigo and Charlotte. It had given them pleasure--as how should
it not?--to find themselves shed such a glamour; it had certainly,
that is, given pleasure to her father and herself, both of them
distinguishably of a nature so slow to presume that they would scarce
have been sure of their triumph without this pretty reflection of it.
So it was that their felicity had fructified; so it was that the ivory
tower, visible and admirable doubtless, from any point of the social
field, had risen stage by stage. Maggie's actual reluctance to ask
herself with proportionate sharpness why she had ceased to take comfort
in the sight of it represented accordingly a lapse from that ideal
consistency on which her moral comfort almost at any time depended. To
remain consistent she had always been capable of cutting down more or
less her prior term.

Moving for the first time in her life as in the darkening shadow of a
false position, she reflected that she should either not have ceased
to be right--that is, to be confident--or have recognised that she was
wrong; though she tried to deal with herself, for a space, only as a
silken-coated spaniel who has scrambled out of a pond and who rattles
the water from his ears. Her shake of her head, again and again, as she
went, was much of that order, and she had the resource, to which, save
for the rude equivalent of his generalising bark, the spaniel would have
been a stranger, of humming to herself hard as a sign that nothing had
happened to her