k on values not hitherto so fully shown. It was the effect of her
quickened sensibility; she knew herself again in presence of a
problem, in need of a solution for which she must intensely work: that
consciousness, lately born in her, had been taught the evening before to
accept a temporary lapse, but had quickly enough again, with her getting
out of her own house and her walking across half the town--for she had
come from Portland Place on foot--found breath still in its lungs.

It exhaled this breath in a sigh, faint and unheard; her tribute, while
she stood there before speaking, to realities looming through the golden
mist that had already begun to be scattered. The conditions facing her
had yielded, for the time, to the golden mist--had considerably melted
away; but there they were again, definite, and it was for the next
quarter of an hour as if she could have counted them one by one on
her fingers. Sharp to her above all was the renewed attestation of her
father's comprehensive acceptances, which she had so long regarded as of
the same quality with her own, but which, so distinctly now, she should
have the complication of being obliged to deal with separately. They had
not yet struck her as absolutely extraordinary--which had made for her
lumping them with her own, since her view of her own had but so lately
begun to change; though it instantly stood out for her that there
was really no new judgment of them she should be able to show without
attracting in some degree his attention, without perhaps exciting his
surprise and making thereby, for the situation she shared with him, some
difference. She was reminded and warned by the concrete image; and for
a minute Charlotte's face, immediately presented to her, affected her
as searching her own to see the reminder tell. She had not less promptly
kissed her stepmother, and then had bent over her father, from behind,
and laid her cheek upon him; little amenities tantamount heretofore
to an easy change of guard--Charlotte's own frequent, though always
cheerful, term of comparison for this process of transfer. Maggie
figured thus as the relieving sentry, and so smoothly did use and
custom work for them that her mate might even, on this occasion, after
acceptance of the pass-word, have departed without irrelevant and,
in strictness, unsoldierly gossip. This was not, none the less, what
happened; inasmuch as if our young woman had been floated over her first
impulse to brea