o spare him, a strangeness that had already,
fifty times, brushed her, in the depth of her trouble, as with the
wild wing of some bird of the air who might blindly have swooped for
an instant into the shaft of a well, darkening there by his momentary
flutter the far-off round of sky. It was extraordinary, this quality in
the taste of her wrong which made her completed sense of it seem rather
to soften than to harden and it was the more extraordinary the more she
had to recognise it; for what it came to was that seeing herself finally
sure, knowing everything, having the fact, in all its abomination, so
utterly before her that there was nothing else to add--what it came to
was that, merely by being WITH him there in silence, she felt, within
her, the sudden split between conviction and action. They had begun to
cease, on the spot, surprisingly, to be connected; conviction, that is,
budged no inch, only planting its feet the more firmly in the soil--but
action began to hover like some lighter and larger, but easier form,
excited by its very power to keep above ground. It would be free, it
would be independent, it would go in--wouldn't it?--for some prodigious
and superior adventure of its own. What would condemn it, so to speak,
to the responsibility of freedom--this glimmered on Maggie even now--was
the possibility, richer with every lapsing moment, that her husband
would have, on the whole question, a new need of her, a need which was
in fact being born between them in these very seconds. It struck her
truly as so new that he would have felt hitherto none to compare with
it at all; would indeed, absolutely, by this circumstance, be REALLY
needing her for the first one in their whole connection. No, he had used
her, had even exceedingly enjoyed her, before this; but there had been
no precedent for that character of a proved necessity to him which she
was rapidly taking on. The immense advantage of this particular clue,
moreover, was that she should have now to arrange, alter, to falsify
nothing; should have to be but consistently simple and straight. She
asked herself, with concentration, while her back was still presented,
what would be the very ideal of that method; after which, the next
instant, it had all come to her and she had turned round upon him for
the application. "Fanny Assingham broke it--knowing it had a crack and
that it would go if she used sufficient force. She thought, when I had
told her, that that would