more in his way than not, since people could really,
almost always, hurry better without help than with it. Still, she could
actually hardly have made him take more time than he struck her taking,
though it must indeed be added that there was now in this much-thinking
little person's state of mind no mere crudity of impatience. Something
had happened, rapidly, with the beautiful sight of him and with the
drop of her fear of having annoyed him by making him go to and fro.
Subsidence of the fearsome, for Maggie's spirit, was always, at first,
positive emergence of the sweet, and it was long since anything had been
so sweet to her as the particular quality suddenly given by her present
emotion to the sense of possession.

XXVI

Amerigo was away from her again, as she sat there, as she walked there
without him--for she had, with the difference of his presence in the
house, ceased to keep herself from moving about; but the hour was filled
nevertheless with the effect of his nearness, and above all with the
effect, strange in an intimacy so established, of an almost renewed
vision of the facts of his aspect. She had seen him last but five days
since, yet he had stood there before her as if restored from some far
country, some long voyage, some combination of dangers or fatigues. This
unquenchable variety in his appeal to her interest, what did it mean
but that--reduced to the flatness of mere statement--she was married,
by good fortune, to an altogether dazzling person? That was an old,
old story, but the truth of it shone out to her like the beauty of some
family picture, some mellow portrait of an ancestor, that she might
have been looking at, almost in surprise, after a long intermission. The
dazzling person was upstairs and she was down, and there were moreover
the other facts of the selection and decision that this demonstration
of her own had required, and of the constant care that the equilibrium
involved; but she had, all the same, never felt so absorbingly married,
so abjectly conscious of a master of her fate. He could do what he would
with her; in fact what was actually happening was that he was actually
doing it. "What he would," what he REALLY would--only that quantity
itself escaped perhaps, in the brightness of the high harmony, familiar
naming and discussing. It was enough of a recognition for her that,
whatever the thing he might desire, he would always absolutely bring
it off