And when they were settled at last by the fire again, and had shared a bowl of soup and a glass of wine, and read a few pages of Swann’s Way, just to resume the phrase of music, to feel themselves back in the intimate world, Christina went to the pots of cyclamen—two white and one scarlet one—that she had placed in the window of the library where Cornelius could see the sun shine through their petals, and drank them in with her eyes. It was a moment of pure joy. The dread had gone. And she was thinking that in this unexpected phase of their life together, meeting illness and facing death, many forgotten things—lost things—had slowly to be found again and used in a new way. It was years since she had bothered with house plants. Now, already, her mind was moving toward seedlings in the spring, perhaps a little greenhouse, the centering of life here and the enriching of it in every possible way.

“Deep as a well,” she murmured.

“What?”

“I was thinking, darling, that whatever we have lost in breadth, we have gained, and are gaining, in depth. Don’t you agree?”

“It’s so odd,” Cornelius said. “I mean, it’s as if all kinds of things I felt I could not live without—even the bank, even the club—have just vanished out of my consciousness. They feel so unimportant. Other things have come to the surface. We are in a great adventure, Christina.” She saw that he was looking intently at the palms of his hands. “It is all written here, I expect—how we go on making ourselves to the end. I am a better man than I was a year ago, a richer man, a—” he glanced up at his wife as if to find the word in her face “—happier man. How strange!”

Next morning it smelled like snow. A dark pewter sky and a harsh wind. Christina felt unaccountably tired, and her knee ached. She lay in a hot bath for a half hour before getting Cornelius up, thinking. Perhaps, after all, she could ask Ellen to come a few mornings a week and help out. And she had better go down this morning if another storm was brewing. This thought got her out of the bath and helped her through the morning chores. Cornelius fell asleep in his chair in the library after breakfast. They were both recovering from the expenditures of the Boston trip.

Hannah phoned to ask how things had gone in Boston, at Jane’s request. Jane, she told Christina, was about the same.

“She tires,” Hannah said. “Just like a baby, she needs a lot of sleep.”

“We are all hibernating animals this winter,” Christina answered.