It is evident to you now that Maggie had arrived at a moment in her life which must be considered by all prudent¹ 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 unfamiliar² to the majority of beholders, and with such moderate assistance of costume as you have seen foreshadowed in Lucy’s anxious colloquy³ with aunt Pullet, Maggie was certainly at a new starting-point in life. At Lucy’s first evening party, young Torry fatigued⁴ 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 presentiment⁵ 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 condescension⁶ 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 assenting⁷ 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 impeded⁸ the even flow of conversation; but it is a fact capable of an amiable

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