She gave him a potential smile. Thar meant if he behaved himself he would get a real smile later in the day. Unfortunately he did not know how to behave himself after 30 years with her but surely one day the marriage will be consummated.

When the potential becomes actual

The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the “material mode” is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason,