’s own were simply the most charming and interesting 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 connexions, 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 judgements, 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 accumulations of the unanswered. They were there, these accumulations; they were like a roomful of confused objects, never as yet ‘sorted’, which for some time now she had been passing and re-passing, along the corridor of her life. She passed it when she could without opening the door; then, on occasion, she turned the key to throw in a fresh contribution. So it was that she had been getting things out of the way. They rejoined the rest of the confusion; it was as if they found their place, by some instinct of affinity, in the heap. They knew in short where to go, and when she at present by a mental act once more pushed the door open she had practically a sense of method and experience. What she should never know about Charlotte’s thought – she tossed that in. It would find itself in company, and she might at last have been standing there long enough to see it fall into its corner. The sight moreover would doubtless have made her stare, had her attention been more free – the sight of the mass of vain things, congruous, incongruous, that awaited every addition. It made her in fact, with a vague gasp, turn away, and what had further determined this was the final sharp extinction of the inward scene by the outward. The quite different door had opened and her husband was there.
It had been as strange as she could consent afterwards to think it; it had been essentially what had made the abrupt bend in her life: he had come back, had followed her from the other house, visibly uncertain – this was written in the face he for the first minute showed her. It had been written only for those seconds, and it had appeared to go, quickly, after they began to talk; but while it lasted it had been written large, and though she didn’t quite know what she had expected of him she felt she hadn’t expected the least shade of embarrassment. What had made the embarrassment – she called it embarrassment so as to be able to assure herself she put it at the very worst – what had made the particular look was his thus distinguishably wishing to see how he should find her. Why first? – that had later on kept coming to her; the question dangled there as if it were the key to everything. With the sense of it,