“Pooh, pooh! you’ll be having a wife to
care about one of these days, if you get on at this
pace in the world. But as to this Mill, we mustn’t
reckon on our chickens too early. However, I promise
you to bear it in mind, and when you come back we’ll
talk of it again. I am going to dinner now.
Come and breakfast with us to-morrow morning, and
say good-bye to your mother and sister before you start.”
Illustrating the Laws of Attraction
It is evident to you now that Maggie had arrived at
a moment in her life which must be considered by all
prudent persons as a great opportunity for a young
woman. Launched into the higher society of St.
Ogg’s, with a striking person, which had the
advantage of being quite unfamiliar to the majority
of beholders, and with such moderate assistance of
costume as you have seen foreshadowed in Lucy’s
anxious colloquy with aunt Pullet, Maggie was certainly
at a new starting-point in life. At Lucy’s
first evening party, young Torry fatigued his facial
muscles more than usual in order that “the dark-eyed
girl there in the corner” might see him in all
the additional style conferred by his eyeglass; and
several young ladies went home intending to have short
sleeves with black lace, and to plait their hair in
a broad coronet at the back of their head,—“That
cousin of Miss Deane’s looked so very well.”
In fact, poor Maggie, with all her inward consciousness
of a painful past and her presentiment of a troublous
future, was on the way to become an object of some
envy,—a topic of discussion in the newly
established billiard-room, and between fair friends
who had no secrets from each other on the subject
of trimmings. The Miss Guests, who associated
chiefly on terms of condescension with the families
of St. Ogg’s, and were the glass of fashion
there, took some exception to Maggie’s manners.
She had a way of not assenting at once to the observations
current in good society, and of saying that she didn’t
know whether those observations were true or not,
which gave her an air of gaucherie, and impeded
the even flow of conversation; but it is a fact capable
of an amiable interpretation that ladies are not the
worst disposed toward a new acquaintance of their own
sex because she has points of inferiority. And
Maggie was so entirely without those pretty airs of
coquetry which have the traditional reputation of
driving gentlemen to despair that she won some feminine
pity for being so ineffective in spite of her beauty.
She had not had many advantages, poor thing! and it
must be admitted there was no pretension about her;
her abruptness and unevenness of manner were plainly
the result of her secluded and lowly circumstances.
It was only a wonder that there was no tinge of vulgarity
about her, considering what the rest of poor Lucy’s
relations were—an allusion which always
made the Miss Guests shudder a little. It was
not agreeable to think of any connection by marriage
