quite stiff and grand; even perhaps a little too stiff and too
grand for a familiar and domestic frock, yet marked none the
less, this time, she ventured to hope, by incontestable intrinsic
merit. She had glanced repeatedly at the clock, but she had
refused herself the weak indulgence of walking up and down,
though the act of doing so, she knew, would make her feel, on the
polished floor, with the rustle and the "hang," still more
beautifully bedecked. The difficulty was that it would also make
her 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