 the voice. Such things could have had no perceptible
effect on a thoroughly well-educated young lady, with a perfectly balanced mind,
who had had all the advantages of fortune, training, and refined society. But if
Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about
her: her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been
written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
    In poor Maggie's highly-strung, hungry nature - just come away from a
third-rate schoolroom, with all its jarring sounds and petty round of tasks -
these apparently trivial causes had the effect of rousing and exalting her
imagination in a way that was mysterious to herself. It was not that she thought
distinctly of Mr. Stephen Guest, or dwelt on the indications that he looked at
her with admiration; it was rather that she felt the half-remote presence of a
world of love and beauty and delight, made up of vague, mingled images from all
the poetry and romance she had ever read, or had ever woven in her dreamy
reveries. Her mind glanced back once or twice to the time when she had courted
privation, when she had thought all longing, all impatience was subdued; but
that condition seemed irrecoverably gone, and she recoiled from the remembrance
of it. No prayer, no striving now, would bring back that negative peace: the
battle of her life, it seemed, was not to be decided in that short and easy way
- by perfect renunciation at the very threshold of her youth. The music was
vibrating in her still - Purcell's music, with its wild passion and fancy - and
she could not stay in the recollection of that bare, lonely past. She was in her
brighter aërial world again, when a little tap came at the door: of course it
was her cousin, who entered in ample white dressing-gown.
    »Why, Maggie, you naughty child, haven't you begun to undress?« said Lucy,
in astonishment. »I promised not to come and talk to you, because I thought you
must be tired. But here you are, looking as if you were ready to dress for a
ball. Come, come, get on your dressing-gown, and unplait your hair.«
    »Well, you are not very forward,« retorted Maggie, hastily reaching her own
pink cotton gown, and looking at Lucy's light-brown hair brushed back in curly
disorder.
    »O, I have not much to do
