If this image, however, may represent our young woman’s consciousness of a recent change in her life—­a change now but a few days old—­it must at the same time be observed that she both sought and found in renewed circulation, as I have called it, a measure of relief from the idea of having perhaps to answer for what she had done.  The pagoda in her blooming garden figured the arrangement—­how otherwise was it to be named?—­by which, so strikingly, she had been able to marry without breaking, as she liked to put it, with the past.  She had surrendered herself to her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition, and yet she had not, all the while, given up her father—­the least little inch.  She had compassed the high city of seeing the two men beautifully take to each other, and nothing in her marriage had marked it as more happy than this fact of its having practically given the elder, the lonelier, a new friend.  What had moreover all the while enriched the whole aspect of success was that the latter’s marriage had been no more meassurably paid for than her own.  His having taken the same great step in the same free way had not in the least involved the relegation of his daughter.  That it was remarkable they should have been able at once so to separate and so to keep together had never for a moment, from however far back, been equivocal to her; that it was remarkable had in fact quite counted, at first and always, and for each of them equally, as part of their inspiration and their support.  There were plenty of singular things they were not enamoured of—­flights of brilliancy, of audacity, of originality, that, speaking at least for the dear man and herself, were not at all in their line; but they liked to think they had given their life this unusual extension and this liberal form, which many families, many couples, and still more many pairs of couples, would not have found workable.  That last truth had been distinctly brought home to them by the bright testimony, the quite explicit envy, of most of their friends, who had remarked to them again and again that they must, on all the showing, to keep on such terms, be people of the highest amiability—­equally including in the praise, of course, Amerigo and Charlotte.  It had given them pleasure—­as how should it not?—­to find themselves shed such a glamour; it had certainly, that is, given pleasure to her father and herself, both of them distinguishably of a nature so slow to presume that they would scarce have been sure of their triumph without this pretty reflection of it.  So it was that their felicity had fructified; so it was that the ivory tower, visible and admirable doubtless, from any point of the social field, had risen stage by stage.  Maggie’s actual reluctance to ask herself with proportionate sharpness why she had ceased to take comfort in the sight of it represented accordingly a lapse from that ideal consistency on which her moral comfort almost at any time depended.  To remain consistent she had always been capable of cutting down more or less her prior term.