uare, and she privately repeated it
again and again--there had appeared beforehand no reason why she should
have seen the mantle of history flung, by a single sharp sweep, over so
commonplace a deed. That, all the same, was what had happened; it had
been bitten into her mind, all in an hour, that nothing she had ever
done would hereafter, in some way yet to be determined, so count for
her--perhaps not even what she had done in accepting, in their old
golden Rome, Amerigo's proposal of marriage. And yet, by her little
crouching posture there, that of a timid tigress, she had meant nothing
recklessly ultimate, nothing clumsily fundamental; so that she called it
names, the invidious, the grotesque attitude, holding it up to her own
ridicule, reducing so far as she could the portee of what had followed
it. She had but wanted to get nearer--nearer to something indeed that
she couldn't, that she wouldn't, even to herself, describe; and
the degree of this achieved nearness was what had been in advance
incalculable. Her actual multiplication of distractions and
suppressions, whatever it did for her, failed to prevent her living
over again any chosen minute--for she could choose them, she could fix
them--of the freshness of relation produced by her having administered
to her husband the first surprise to which she had ever treated him.
It had been a poor thing, but it had been all her own, and the whole
passage was backwardly there, a great picture hung on the wall of her
daily life, for her to make what she would of.

It fell, for retrospect, into a succession of moments that were
WATCHABLE still; almost in the manner of the different things done
during a scene on the stage, some scene so acted as to have left a great
impression on the tenant of one of the stalls. Several of these moments
stood out beyond the others, and those she could feel again most, count
again like the firm pearls on a string, had belonged more particularly
to the lapse of time before dinner--dinner which had been so late, quite
at nine o'clock, that evening, thanks to the final lateness of Amerigo's
own advent. These were parts of the experience--though in fact there had
been a good many of them--between which her impression could continue
sharply to discriminate. Before the subsequent passages, much later on,
it was to be said, the flame of memory turned to an equalising glow,
that of a lamp in some side-chapel in which incense was thick. The
great momen