. She had not, so to speak, fallen in; she had had no
accident and had not got wet; this at any rate was her pretension until
after she began a little to wonder if she mightn't, with or without
exposure, have taken cold. She could at all events remember no time at
which she had felt so excited, and certainly none--which was another
special point--that so brought with it as well the necessity for
concealing excitement. This birth of a new eagerness became a high
pastime, in her view, precisely by reason of the ingenuity required for
keeping the thing born out of sight. The ingenuity was thus a private
and absorbing exercise, in the light of which, might I so far multiply
my metaphors, I should compare her to the frightened but clinging young
mother of an unlawful child. The idea that had possession of her would
be, by our new analogy, the proof of her misadventure, but likewise,
all the while, only another sign of a relation that was more to her than
anything on earth. She had lived long enough to make out for herself
that any deep-seated passion has its pangs as well as its joys, and that
we are made by its aches and its anxieties most richly conscious of it.
She had never doubted of the force of the feeling that bound her to
her husband; but to become aware, almost suddenly, that it had begun to
vibrate with a violence that had some of the effect of a strain would,
rightly looked at, after all but show that she was, like thousands of
women, every day, acting up to the full privilege of passion. Why in the
world shouldn't she, with every right--if, on consideration, she saw no
good reason against it? The best reason against it would have been the
possibility of some consequence disagreeable or inconvenient to others--
especially to such others as had never incommoded her by the egotism of
THEIR passions; but if once that danger were duly guarded against the
fulness of one's measure amounted to no more than the equal use of
one's faculties or the proper playing of one's part. It had come to the
Princess, obscurely at first, but little by little more conceivably,
that her faculties had not for a good while been concomitantly used; the
case resembled in a manner that of her once-loved dancing, a matter of
remembered steps that had grown vague from her ceasing to go to balls.
She would go to balls again--that seemed, freely, even crudely, stated,
the remedy; she would take out of the deep receptacles in which she
had laid the