perhaps only for half-an-hour, simply daughter and father had glimmered out for them, and they had picked up the pretext that would make it easiest.  They were husband and wife—­oh, so immensely!—­as regards other persons; but after they had dropped again on their old bench, conscious that the party on the terrace, augmented, as in the past, by neighbours, would do beautifully without them, it was wonderfully like their having got together into some boat and paddled off from the shore where husbands and wives, luxuriant complications, made the air too tropical.  In the boat they were father and daughter, and poor Dotty and Kitty supplied abundantly, for their situation, the oars or the sail.  Why, into the bargain, for that matter—­this came to Maggie—­couldn’t they always live, so far as they lived together, in a boat?  She felt in her face, with the question, the breath of a possibility that soothed her; they needed only know each other, henceforth, in the unmarried relation.  That other sweet evening, in the same place, he had been as unmarried as possible—­which had kept down, so to speak, the quantity of change in their state.  Well then, that other sweet evening was what the present sweet evening would resemble; with the quite calculable effect of an exquisite inward refreshment.  They had, after all, whatever happened, always and ever each other; each other—­that was the hidden treasure and the saving truth—­to do exactly what they would with:  a provision full of possibilities.  Who could tell, as yet, what, thanks to it, they wouldn’t have done before the end?

They had meanwhile been tracing together, in the golden air that, toward six o’clock of a July afternoon, hung about the massed Kentish woods, several features of the social evolution of her old playmates, still beckoned on, it would seem, by unattainable ideals, still falling back, beyond the sea, to their native seats, for renewals of the moral, financial, conversational—­one scarce knew what to call it—­outfit, and again and for ever reappearing like a tribe of Wandering Jewesses.  Our couple had finally exhausted, however, the study of these annals, and Maggie was to take up, after a drop, a different matter, or one at least with which the immediate connection was not at first apparent.  “Were you amused at me just now—­when I wondered what other people could wish to struggle for?  Did you think me,” she asked with some earnestness—­“well, fatuous?”

“’Fatuous’?”—­he seemed at a loss.

“I mean sublime in our happiness—­as if looking down from a height.  Or, rather, sublime in our general position—­that’s what I mean.”  She spoke as from the habit of her anxious conscience something that disposed her frequently to assure herself, for her human commerce, of the state of the “books” of the spirit.  “Because I don’t at all want,” she explained, “to be blinded, or made ‘sniffy,’ by any sense of a social situation.”  Her father listened to this declaration as if the precautions