She had a long pause before the fire during which she might have been fixing with intensity her projected vision, have been conscious even of its taking an absurd, a fantastic shape. She might have been watching the family coach pass and noting that somehow Amerigo and Charlotte were pulling it while she and her father were not so much as pushing. They were seated inside together, dandling the Principino and holding him up to the (24) windows to see and be seen, like an infant positively royal; so that the exertion was ALL with the others. Maggie found in this image a repeated challenge; again and yet again she paused before the fire: after which, each time, in the manner of one for whom a strong light has suddenly broken, she gave herself to livelier movement. She had seen herself at last, in the picture she was studying, suddenly jump from the coach; whereupon, frankly, with the wonder of the sight, her eyes opened wider and her heart stood still for a moment. She looked at the person so acting as if this person were somebody else, waiting with intensity to see what would follow. The person had taken a decision--which was evidently because an impulse long gathering had at last felt a sharpest pressure. Only how was the decision to be applied?--what in particular would the figure in the picture do? She looked about her, from the middle of the room, under the force of this question, as if THERE exactly were the field of action involved. Then as the door opened again she recognised, whatever the action, the form, at any rate, of a first opportunity. Her husband had reappeared--he stood before her refreshed, almost radiant, quite reassuring. Dressed, anointed, fragrant, ready above all for his dinner, he smiled at her over the end of their delay. It was as if her opportunity had depended on his look--and now she saw that it was good. There was still for the instant something in suspense, but it passed more quickly than on his previous entrance. He was already holding out his arms.
It was for hours and hours later on as if she had (25) somehow been lifted aloft, were floated and carried on some warm high tide beneath which stumbling-blocks had sunk out of sight. This came from her being again for the time in the enjoyment of confidence, from her knowing, as she believed, what to do. 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 promptly 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 (26) 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 judgement 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 enquiry. Maggie's enquiry was most sympathetic, moreover, for the whole happy thought of the cathedral-hunt, which she was so glad they had entertained and as to the pleasant results of which, down to the cold beef and bread-and-cheese, the queer old smell and the dirty tablecloth at the inn, Amerigo was good-humouredly responsive. He had looked at her across the table more than once, as if touched by the humility of this welcome offered to impressions at second-hand, the amusements, the large freedoms only of others--as if recognising in it something fairly exquisite; and at the end, while they were alone, before she had rung for a servant, he had renewed again his condonation of the little irregularity, such as it was, on which she (27) had ventured. They had risen together to come upstairs; he had been talking at the last about some of the people, at the very last of all about Lady Castledean and Mr.
