 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 demeanour 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-drest St Ogg's and its neighbourhood 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-coloured 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
