 the seat you like best - a
little above or a little below the one on which your goddess sits (it is the
same thing to the metaphysical mind, and that is the reason why women are at
once worshipped and looked down upon), with a satisfactory confidence that there
will be no lady-callers.
    »Stephen will come earlier this morning, I know,« said Lucy: »he always does
when it's rainy.«
    Maggie made no answer. She was angry with Stephen: she began to think she
should dislike him; and if it had not been for the rain, she would have gone to
her aunt Glegg's this morning, and so have avoided him altogether. As it was,
she must find some reason for remaining out of the room with her mother.
    But Stephen did not come earlier, and there was another visitor - a nearer
neighbour - who preceded him. When Philip entered the room, he was going merely
to bow to Maggie, feeling that their acquaintance was a secret which he was
bound not to betray; but when she advanced towards him and put out her hand, he
guessed at once that Lucy had been taken into her confidence. It was a moment of
some agitation to both, though Philip had spent many hours in preparing for it;
but like all persons who have passed through life with little expectation of
sympathy, he seldom lost his self-control, and shrank with the most sensitive
pride from any noticeable betrayal of emotion. A little extra paleness, a little
tension of the nostril when he spoke, and the voice pitched in rather a higher
key, that to strangers would seem expressive of cold indifference, were all the
signs Philip usually gave of an inward drama that was not without its
fierceness. But Maggie, who had little more power of concealing the impressions
made upon her than if she had been constructed of musical strings, felt her eyes
getting larger with tears as they took each other's hands in silence. They were
not painful tears: they had rather something of the same origin as the tears
women and children shed when they have found some protection to cling to, and
look back on the threatened danger. For Philip, who a little while ago was
associated continually in Maggie's mind with the sense that Tom might reproach
her with some justice, had now, in this short space, become a sort of outward
conscience to her, that she might fly to for rescue and strength. Her tranquil,
tender affection for Philip, with its root deep down in her childhood, and its
memories
