If she herself had now avoided any such sacrifice, and had made herself, during the time at her disposal, quite inordinately fresh and quite positively smart, this had probably added, while she waited and waited, to that very tension of spirit in which she was afterwards to find the image of her having crouched.  She did her best, quite intensely, by herself, to banish any such appearance; she couldn’t help it if she couldn’t read her pale novel—­ah, that, par exemple, was beyond her! but she could at least sit by the lamp with the book, sit there with her newest frock, worn for the first time, sticking out, all round her, quite stiff and grand; even perhaps a little too stiff and too grand for a familiar and domestic frock, yet marked none the less, this time, she ventured to hope, by incontestable intrinsic merit.  She had glanced repeatedly at the clock, but she had refused herself the weak indulgence of walking up and down, though the act of doing so, she knew, would make her feel, on the polished floor, with the rustle and the “hang,” still more beautifully bedecked.  The difficulty was that it would also make her feel herself still more sharply in a state; which was exactly what she proposed not to do.  The only drops of her anxiety had been when her thought strayed complacently, with her eyes, to the front of her gown, which was in a manner a refuge, a beguilement, especially when she was able to fix it long enough to wonder if it would at last really satisfy Charlotte.  She had ever been, in respect to her clothes, rather timorous and uncertain; for the last year, above all, she had lived in the light of Charlotte’s possible and rather inscrutable judgment of them.  Charlotte’s own were simply the most charming and interesting that any woman had ever put on; there was a kind of poetic justice in her being at last able, in this particular, thanks to means, thanks quite to omnipotence, freely to exercise her genius.  But Maggie would have described herself as, in these connections, constantly and intimately “torn”; conscious on one side of the impossibility of copying her companion and conscious on the other of the impossibility of sounding her, independently, to the bottom.  Yes, it was one of the things she should go down to her grave without having known—­how Charlotte, after all had been said, really thought her stepdaughter looked under any supposedly ingenious personal experiment.  She had always been lovely about the stepdaughter’s material braveries—­had done, for her, the very best with them; but there had ever fitfully danced at the back of Maggie’s head the suspicion that these expressions were mercies, not judgments, embodying no absolute, but only a relative, frankness.  Hadn’t Charlotte, with so perfect a critical vision, if the truth were known, given her up as hopeless—­hopeless by a serious standard, and thereby invented for her a different and inferior one, in which, as the only thing to be done, she patiently and soothingly abetted