er feel herself still more sharply in a state; which was exactly what
she proposed not to do. The only drops of her anxiety had been when her
thought strayed complacently, with her eyes, to the front of her gown,
which was in a manner a refuge, a beguilement, especially when she was
able to fix it long enough to wonder if it would at last really satisfy
Charlotte. She had ever been, in respect to her clothes, rather timorous
and uncertain; for the last year, above all, she had lived in the
light of Charlotte's possible and rather inscrutable judgment of them.
Charlotte's own were simply the most charming and interesting that any
woman had ever put on; there was a kind of poetic justice in her being
at last able, in this particular, thanks to means, thanks quite to
omnipotence, freely to exercise her genius. But Maggie would have
described herself as, in these connections, constantly and intimately
"torn"; conscious on one side of the impossibility of copying her
companion and conscious on the other of the impossibility of sounding
her, independently, to the bottom. Yes, it was one of the things she
should go down to her grave without having known--how Charlotte, after
all had been said, really thought her stepdaughter looked under any
supposedly ingenious personal experiment. She had always been lovely
about the stepdaughter's material braveries--had done, for her, the
very best with them; but there had ever fitfully danced at the back of
Maggie's head the suspicion that these expressions were mercies, not
judgments, embodying no absolute, but only a relative, frankness. Hadn't
Charlotte, with so perfect a critical vision, if the truth were known,
given her up as hopeless--hopeless by a serious standard, and thereby
invented for her a different and inferior one, in which, as the only
thing to be done, she patiently and soothingly abetted her? Hadn't
she, in other words, assented in secret despair, perhaps even in secret
irritation, to her being ridiculous?--so that the best now possible
was to wonder, once in a great while, whether one mightn't give her the
surprise of something a little less out of the true note than usual.
Something of this kind was the question that Maggie, while the absentees
still delayed, asked of the appearance she was endeavouring to present;
but with the result, repeatedly again, that it only went and lost itself
in the thick air that had begun more and more to hang, for our young
woman, over her