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 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 table-cloth 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