Charity in Full Dress
THE culmination of Maggies career as an admired member of society in St Oggs was certainly the day of the Bazaar, when her simple noble beauty, clad in a white muslin of some soft-floating kind, which I suspect must have e from the stores of aunt Pullets wardrobe, appeared with marked distinong the more adorned and ventional women around her. We perhaps never deteuch 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 tohat belong to pretentious vulgarity; but their stall beio the one where Maggie sat, it seemed newly obvious today that Miss Guest held her too high, and that Miss Laura spoke and moved tinually with a view to effect. All well-drest St Oggs and its neighbourhood were there, and it would have been worth while to e even from a distao 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 beh - a very quaint place with broad faded stripes painted on the walls and here and there a show of heraldiimals of a bristly, long-snouted character, the cherished emblems of a noble family ohe 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 - a very agreeable resort fentlemen disposed to loiter ao exge the occasional crush down below for a more odious point of view. In fact, the perfect fitness of this a building for an admirable modern purpose that made charity truly elegant, ahrough vanity up to the supply of a deficit, was so striking that hardly a persoered the room without exging the remark more than onear the great arch over the orchestra was the stone oriel with painted glass which was one of the venerable insistencies of the old Hall; and it was close by this that Lucy had her stall for the venience 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 to have the sale of these articles rather than of bead mats and other elaborate products of which she had but a dim uanding. But it soon appeared that the gentlemens dressing-gowns, which were among her odities, were objects of such general attention and inquiry aed so troublesome a curiosity as to their lining and parative merits together with a determination to test them by trying on, as to make her post a very spicuous ohe ladies who had odities of their own to sell, and did not want dressing-gowns, saw at ohe frivolity and bad taste of this mase preference foods whiy tailor could furnish; and it is possible that the emphatiotice of various kinds which was drawn towards Miss Tulliver on this public occasion threw a very strong and unmistakable light on her subsequent du many minds the. Not that anger on at of spurned beauty dwell in the celestial breasts of charitable ladies, but rather, that the errors of persons who have once been much admired necessarily take a deeper tinge from the mere force of trast, and also, that today Maggies spicuous position for the first time made evideain characteristics which were subsequently felt to have an explanatory bearing. There was something rather bold in Miss Tullivers direc