m away the various ornaments congruous with the greater
occasions, and of which her store, she liked to think, was none of
the smallest. She would have been easily to be figured for us at this
occupation; dipping, at off moments and quiet hours, in snatched visits
and by draughty candle-light, into her rich collections and seeing her
jewels again a little shyly, but all unmistakably, glow. That in fact
may pass as the very picture of her semi-smothered agitation, of the
diversion she to some extent successfully found in referring her crisis,
so far as was possible, to the mere working of her own needs.

It must be added, however, that she would have been at a loss to
determine--and certainly at first--to which order, that of self-control
or that of large expression, the step she had taken the afternoon of her
husband's return from Matcham with his companion properly belonged. For
it had been a step, distinctly, on Maggie's part, her deciding to do
something, just then and there, which would strike Amerigo as unusual,
and this even though her departure from custom had merely consisted
in her so arranging that he wouldn't find her, as he would definitely
expect to do, in Eaton Square. He would have, strangely enough, as might
seem to him, to come back home for it, and there get the impression of
her rather pointedly, or at least all impatiently and independently,
awaiting him. These were small variations and mild manoeuvres, but
they went accompanied on Maggie's part, as we have mentioned, with
an infinite sense of intention. Her watching by his fireside for her
husband's return from an absence might superficially have presented
itself as the most natural act in the world, and the only one, into the
bargain, on which he would positively have reckoned. It fell by this
circumstance into the order of plain matters, and yet the very aspect
by which it was, in the event, handed over to her brooding fancy was
the fact that she had done with it all she had designed. She had put her
thought to the proof, and the proof had shown its edge; this was what
was before her, that she was no longer playing with blunt and idle
tools, with weapons that didn't cut. There passed across her vision ten
times a day the gleam of a bare blade, and at this it was that she most
shut her eyes, most knew the impulse to cheat herself with motion and
sound. She had merely driven, on a certain Wednesday, to Portland Place,
instead of remaining in Eaton Sq