All the next day, and all the next, she appeared to herself
to know it. She had a plan, and she rejoiced in her plan: this consisted
of the light that, suddenly breaking into her restless reverie, had
marked the climax of that vigil. It had come to her as a question--"What
if I've abandoned THEM, you know? What if I've accepted too passively
the funny form of our life?" There would be a process of her own by
which she might do differently in respect to Amerigo and Charlotte--a
process quite independent of any process of theirs. Such a solution had
but to rise before her to affect her, to charm her, with its simplicity,
an advantageous simplicity she had been stupid, for so long, not to
have been struck by; and the simplicity meanwhile seemed proved by the
success that had already begun to attend her. She had only had herself
to do something to see how immediately it answered. This consciousness
of its having answered with her husband was the uplifting, sustaining
wave. He had "met" her--she so put it to herself; met her with an effect
of generosity and of gaiety, in especial, on his coming back to her
ready for dinner, which she wore in her breast as the token of an escape
for them both from something not quite definite, but clearly, much less
good. Even at that moment, in fact, her plan had begun to work; she had
been, when he brightly reappeared, in the act of plucking it out of the
heart of her earnestness--plucking it, in the garden of thought, as if
it had been some full-blown flower that she could present to him on the
spot. Well, it was the flower of participation, and as that, then and
there, she held it out to him, putting straightway into execution the
idea, so needlessly, so absurdly obscured, of her SHARING with him,
whatever the enjoyment, the interest, the experience might be--and
sharing also, for that matter, with Charlotte.

She had thrown herself, at dinner, into every feature of the recent
adventure of the companions, letting him see, without reserve, that she
wished to hear everything about it, and making Charlotte in particular,
Charlotte's judgment of Matcham, Charlotte's aspect, her success
there, her effect traceably produced, her clothes inimitably worn,
her cleverness gracefully displayed, her social utility, in fine,
brilliantly exemplified, the subject of endless inquiry. Maggie's
inquiry was most empathetic, moreover, for the whole happy thought of
the cathedral-hunt, which she was so glad th