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.