, now amounted.

"I've been wanting--and longer than you'd perhaps believe--to put a
question to you for which no opportunity has seemed to me yet quite so
good as this. It would have been easier perhaps if you had struck me as
in the least disposed ever to give me one. I have to take it now, you
see, as I find it." They stood in the centre of the immense room, and
Maggie could feel that the scene of life her imagination had made of it
twenty minutes before was by this time sufficiently peopled. These few
straight words filled it to its uttermost reaches, and nothing was now
absent from her consciousness, either, of the part she was called upon
to play in it. Charlotte had marched straight in, dragging her rich
train; she rose there beautiful and free, with her whole aspect and
action attuned to the firmness of her speech. Maggie had kept the shawl
she had taken out with her, and, clutching it tight in her nervousness,
drew it round her as if huddling in it for shelter, covering herself
with it for humility. She looked out as from under an improvised
hood--the sole headgear of some poor woman at somebody's proud door;
she waited even like the poor woman; she met her friend's eyes
with recognitions she couldn't suppress. She might sound it as she
could--"What question then?"--everything in her, from head to foot,
crowded it upon Charlotte that she knew. She knew too well--that she was
showing; so that successful vagueness, to save some scrap of her dignity
from the imminence of her defeat, was already a lost cause, and the
one thing left was if possible, at any cost, even that of stupid
inconsequence, to try to look as if she weren't afraid. If she could but
appear at all not afraid she might appear a little not ashamed--that
is not ashamed to be afraid, which was the kind of shame that could
be fastened on her, it being fear all the while that moved her. Her
challenge, at any rate, her wonder, her terror--the blank, blurred
surface, whatever it was that she presented became a mixture that ceased
to signify; for to the accumulated advantage by which Charlotte was at
present sustained her next words themselves had little to add.

"Have you any ground of complaint of me? Is there any wrong you consider
I've done you? I feel at last that I've a right to ask you."

Their eyes had to meet on it, and to meet long; Maggie's avoided at
least the disgrace of looking away. "What makes you want to ask it?"

"My natural desire to