sought and found in renewed circulation, as I have called it, a
measure of relief from the idea of having perhaps to answer for
what she had done. The pagoda in her blooming garden figured the
arrangement--how otherwise was it to be named?--by which, so
strikingly, she had been able to marry without breaking, as she
liked to put it, with the past. She had surrendered herself to
her husband without the shadow of a reserve or a condition, and
yet she had not, all the while, given up her father--the least
little inch. She had compassed the high city of seeing the two
men beautifully take to each other, and nothing in her marriage
had marked it as more happy than this fact of its having
practically given the elder, the lonelier, a new friend. What had
moreover all the while enriched the whole aspect of success was
that the latter's marriage had been no more meassurably paid for
than her own. His having taken the same great step in the same
free way had not in the least involved the relegation of his
daughter. That it was remarkable they should have been able at
once so to separate and so to keep together had never for a
moment, from however far back, been equivocal to her; that it was
remarkable had in fact quite counted, at first and always, and
for each of them equally, as part of their inspiration and their
support. There were plenty of singular things they were NOT
enamoured of--flights of brilliancy, of audacity, of originality,
that, speaking at least for the dear man and herself, were not at
all in their line; but they liked to think they had given their
life this unusual extension and this liberal form, which many
families, many couples, and still more many pairs of couples,
would not have found workable. That last truth had been
distinctly brought home to them by the bright testimony, the
quite explicit envy, of most of their friends, who had remarked