nderstand, don't you, that if she didn't do this there
would be no knowing what she might do?" This light Mrs. Assingham richly
launched while her younger friend, unresistingly moved, became uncertain
again, and then, not too much to show it--or, rather, positively to
conceal it, and to conceal something more as well--turned short round
to one of the windows and awkwardly, pointlessly waited. "The largest
of the three pieces has the rare peculiarity that the garlands, looped
round it, which, as you see, are the finest possible vieux Saxe, are not
of the same origin or period, or even, wonderful as they are, of a taste
quite so perfect. They have been put on at a later time, by a process of
which there are very few examples, and none so important as this, which
is really quite unique--so that, though the whole thing is a little
baroque, its value as a specimen is, I believe, almost inestimable."

So the high voice quavered, aiming truly at effects far over the heads
of gaping neighbours; so the speaker, piling it up, sticking at nothing,
as less interested judges might have said, seemed to justify the faith
with which she was honoured. Maggie meanwhile, at the window, knew the
strangest thing to be happening: she had turned suddenly to crying,
or was at least on the point of it--the lighted square before her all
blurred and dim. The high voice went on; its quaver was doubtless for
conscious ears only, but there were verily thirty seconds during which
it sounded, for our young woman, like the shriek of a soul in pain.
Kept up a minute longer it would break and collapse--so that Maggie felt
herself, the next thing, turn with a start to her father. "Can't she be
stopped? Hasn't she done it ENOUGH?"--some such question as that she
let herself ask him to suppose in her. Then it was that, across half
the gallery--for he had not moved from where she had first seen him--he
struck her as confessing, with strange tears in his own eyes, to sharp
identity of emotion. "Poor thing, poor thing"--it reached straight--
"ISN'T she, for one's credit, on the swagger?" After which, as, held
thus together they had still another strained minute, the shame, the
pity, the better knowledge, the smothered protest, the divined anguish
even, so overcame him that, blushing to his eyes, he turned short away.
The affair but of a few muffled moments, this snatched communion yet
lifted Maggie as on air--so much, for deep guesses on her own side
too, it ga