THE PRINCESS
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
25
