Book 6 - Chapter 6

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 with such people as
the Gleggs and the Pullets; but it was of no use to contradict Stephen
when once he had set his mind on anything, and certainly there was no
possible objection to Lucy in herself,--no one could