Her days at first held any number of these new sensations or rather recognitions of sensations that used in her girlhood to be a matter of course, but now were seen to be extraordinarily precious. She spilt over like a brimming chalice of gratefulness for the great common things of life--sleep, hunger, power to move about, freedom from fear, freedom from pain. Her returning health ran through her veins like some exquisite delicate wine. She was now thirty, and had never felt so young. Wonderful to wake up in the morning to another day of being well. Wonderful being allowed to be alive in a world so utterly beautiful, so full of opportunity. She had all the thankfulness, the tender giving of herself up confidently to joy of the convalescent. She was happy just to sit on fine mornings on the doorstep in the sun drinking things in. Robertlet and Ditti had never been so much kissed; Rosa and the cook had never been asked so often after their ailing mothers; Kökensee had never been so near having a series of entertainments arranged for it. The very cat was stroked with a fresh sense of fellowship, the very watchdog, at one time suspected of surliness, was loved anew; and when she passed through the yard she did not fail to pause and gaze with a sunny determined kindness at the pig. But though she passionately wanted to make everybody and everything happy in return for Robert's goodness to her, in return for the kind way she thought he was accepting her decision and not once after that first outbreak reproaching her, she had been anchored too long to one definite behaviour not to feel a little unsteady when first let loose. She hovered uncertainly round the edges of life, fingering them, trying to feel the point where she could best catch hold and climb into its fulness again. It was oddly difficult. Was it that she had been out of things for so many years? Had she then become a specialist? As the weeks passed and the first sheer delight in just being well was blunted by repetition, she began to be puzzled. Everything began to puzzle her--herself, Robert, the children, the servants. Robert puzzled her extremely. Whenever before she had been happy, a cheerful singing thing, he had loved her. She knew he had. She had only to be in a gay mood, in the mood that recklessly didn't mind whether he liked it or not but sat on his knee and insisted on his listening while she talked, half in earnest and half amused, about the bigger, vaguer, windier aspects of life, for him to come up out of the depths of his meditations and laugh and pet her. Now nothing fetched him up. He was quite unresponsive. He seemed beyond her reach, in some strange retreat where she could not get at him. She had never felt so far away from him. He was not angry evidently; he was quite kind. She could not guess that this steady unenthusiastic kindness was the natural expression of a fraternal regard.