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.