Book 6 - Chapter 6 - Page 2

help liking her.
She would naturally desire that the Miss Guests should behave kindly
to this cousin of whom she was so fond, and Stephen would make a great
fuss if they were deficient in civility. Under these circumstances the
invitations to Park House were not wanting; and elsewhere, also, Miss
Deane was too popular and too distinguished a member of society in St.
Ogg's for any attention toward her to be neglected.

Thus Maggie was introduced for the first time to the young lady's
life, and knew what it was to get up in the morning without any
imperative reason for doing one thing more than another. This new
sense of leisure and unchecked enjoyment amidst the soft-breathing
airs and garden-scents of advancing spring--amidst the new abundance
of music, and lingering strolls in the sunshine, and the delicious
dreaminess of gliding on the river--could hardly be without some
intoxicating effect on her, after her years of privation; and even in
the first week Maggie began to be less haunted by her sad memories and
anticipations. Life was certainly very pleasant just now; it was
becoming very pleasant to dress in the evening, and to feel that she
was one of the beautiful things of this spring-time. And there were
admiring eyes always awaiting her now; she was no longer an unheeded
person, liable to be chid, from whom attention was continually
claimed, and on whom no one felt bound to confer any. It was pleasant,
too, when Stephen and Lucy were gone out riding, to sit down at the
piano alone, and find that the old fitness between her fingers and the
keys remained, and revived, like a sympathetic kinship not to be worn
out by separation; to get the tunes she had heard the evening before,
and repeat them again and again until she had found out a way of
producing them so as to make them a more pregnant, passionate language
to her. The mere concord of octaves was a delight to Maggie, and she
would often take up a book of studies rather than any melody, that she
might taste more keenly by abstraction the more primitive sensation of
intervals. Not that her enjoyment of music was of the kind that
indicates a great specific talent; it was rather that her sensibility
to the supreme excitement of music was only one form of that
passionate sensibility which belonged to her whole nature, and made
her faults and virtues all merge in each other; made her affections
sometimes an impatient demand, but also prevented her vanity from
taking the form of mere feminine coquetry and device, and gave it the
poetry of ambition. But you have known Maggie a long while, and need
to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is a thing
hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of
characteristics. For the