Book 6 - Chapter 9

Charity in Full-Dress

The culmination of Maggie's career as an admired member of society in
St. Ogg's was certainly the day of the bazaar, when her simple noble
beauty, clad in a white muslin of some soft-floating kind, which I
suspect must have come from the stores of aunt Pullet's wardrobe,
appeared with marked distinction among the more adorned and
conventional women around her. We perhaps never detect how much of our
social demeanor is made up of artificial airs until we see a person
who is at once beautiful and simple; without the beauty, we are apt to
call simplicity awkwardness. The Miss Guests were much too well-bred
to have any of the grimaces and affected tones that belong to
pretentious vulgarity; but their stall being next to the one where
Maggie sat, it seemed newly obvious to-day that Miss Guest held her
chin too high, and that Miss Laura spoke and moved continually with a
view to effect.

All well-dressed St. Ogg's and its neighborhood were there; and it
would have been worth while to come even from a distance, to see the
fine old hall, with its open roof and carved oaken rafters, and great
oaken folding-doors, and light shed down from a height on the
many-colored show beneath; a very quaint place, with broad faded
stripes painted on the walls, and here and there a show of heraldic
animals of a bristly, long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of
a noble family once the seigniors of this now civic hall. A grand
arch, cut in the upper wall at one end, surmounted an oaken orchestra,
with an open room behind it, where hothouse plants and stalls for
refreshments were disposed; an agreeable resort for gentlemen disposed
to loiter, and yet to exchange the occasional crush down below for a
more commodious point of view. In fact, the perfect fitness of this
ancient building for an admirable modern purpose, that made charity
truly elegant, and led through vanity up to the supply of a deficit,
was so striking that hardly a person entered the room without
exchanging the remark more than once. Near the great arch over the
orchestra was the stone oriel with painted glass, which was one of the
venerable inconsistencies of the old hall; and it was close by this
that Lucy had her stall, for the convenience of certain large plain
articles which she had taken charge of for Mrs. Kenn. Maggie had
begged to sit at the open end of the stall, and to have the sale of
these articles rather than of bead-mats and other elaborate products
of which she had but a dim understanding. But it soon appeared that
the gentlemen's dressing-gowns, which were among her commodities, were
objects of such general attention and inquiry, and excited so
troublesome a curiosity as to their lining and comparative merits,