fell short of their
possession. She thought that she set bounds to the girl's originality
because she recognized them. Margaret understood this better than
her aunt, and knew that she had consulted her about going to see
the Dryfooses out of deference, and with no expectation of luminous
instruction. She was used to being a law to herself, but she knew what
she might and might not do, so that she was rather a by-law. She was the
kind of girl that might have fancies for artists and poets, but might
end by marrying a prosperous broker, and leavening a vast lump
of moneyed and fashionable life with her culture, generosity, and
good-will. The intellectual interests were first with her, but she might
be equal to sacrificing them; she had the best heart, but she might know
how to harden it; if she was eccentric, her social orbit was defined;
comets themselves traverse space on fixed lines. She was like every one
else, a congeries of contradictions and inconsistencies, but obedient to
the general expectation of what a girl of her position must and must not
finally be. Provisionally, she was very much what she liked to be.

VII

Margaret Vance tried to give herself some reason for going to call upon
the Dryfooses, but she could find none better than the wish to do a kind
thing. This seemed queerer and less and less sufficient as she examined
it, and she even admitted a little curiosity as a harmless element in
her motive, without being very well satisfied with it. She tried to add
a slight sense of social duty, and then she decided to have no motive
at all, but simply to pay her visit as she would to any other eligible
strangers she saw fit to call upon. She perceived that she must be very
careful not to let them see that any other impulse had governed her; she
determined, if possible, to let them patronize her; to be very modest
and sincere and diffident, and, above all, not to play a part. This was
easy, compared with the choice of a manner that should convey to them
the fact that she was not playing a part. When the hesitating Irish
serving-man had acknowledged that the ladies were at home, and had taken
her card to them, she sat waiting for them in the drawing-room. Her
study of its appointments, with their impersonal costliness, gave her no
suggestion how to proceed; the two sisters were upon her before she had
really decided, and she rose to meet them with the conviction that she
was going to play a part for want