They HAD, after all, whatever happened, always and ever each other; each other--that was the hidden treasure and the saving truth--to do exactly what they would with: a provision full of possibilities.

Who could tell, as yet, what, thanks to it, they wouldn't have done before the end?
They had meanwhile been tracing together, in the golden air that, toward six o'clock of a July afternoon, hung about the massed Kentish woods, several features of the social evolution of her old playmates, still beckoned on, it would seem, by unattainable ideals, still falling back, beyond the sea, to their native seats, for renewals of the moral, financial, conversational--one scarce knew what to call it--outfit, and again and for ever reappearing like a tribe of Wandering Jewesses.

Our couple had finally exhausted, however, the study of these annals, and Maggie was to take up, after a drop, a different matter, or one at least with which the immediate connection was not at first apparent.

"Were you amused at me just now--when I wondered what other people could wish to struggle for?
Did you think me," she asked with some earnestness--"well, fatuous ?" "'Fatuous' ?"--he seemed at a loss.
"I mean sublime in OUR happiness--as if looking down from a height.

Or, rather, sublime in our general position--that's what I mean." She spoke as from the habit of her anxious conscience something that disposed her frequently to assure herself, for her human commerce, of the state of the "books" of the spirit.