The culmination¹ of Maggie’s career as an admired member of society in St. Ogg’s was certainly the day of the bazaar², 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 adorned³ and conventional women around her. We perhaps never detect how much of our social demeanor⁴ 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 simplicity⁵ awkwardness. The Miss Guests were much too well-bred to have any of the grimaces⁷ and affected⁸ tones that belong to pretentious⁹ 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 spoke¹⁰ 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 quaint¹¹ 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 emblems¹² of a noble family once the seigniors of this now

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