the sentiment inspired by himself. She
had not, to his knowledge, invited the object of it to their wedding,
had not thought of proposing to her, for a matter of a couple of hours,
an arduous and expensive journey. But she had kept her connected and
informed, from week to week, in spite of preparations and absorptions.
"Oh, I've been writing to Charlotte--I wish you knew her better:" he
could still hear, from recent weeks, this record of the fact, just as he
could still be conscious, not otherwise than queerly, of the gratuitous
element in Maggie's wish, which he had failed as yet to indicate to her.
Older and perhaps more intelligent, at any rate, why shouldn't Charlotte
respond--and be quite FREE to respond--to such fidelities with something
more than mere formal good manners? The relations of women with each
other were of the strangest, it was true, and he probably wouldn't
have trusted here a young person of his own race. He was proceeding
throughout on the ground of the immense difference--difficult indeed as
it might have been to disembroil in this young person HER race-quality.
Nothing in her definitely placed her; she was a rare, a special product.
Her singleness, her solitude, her want of means, that is her want of
ramifications and other advantages, contributed to enrich her somehow
with an odd, precious neutrality, to constitute for her, so detached
yet so aware, a sort of small social capital. It was the only one she
had--it was the only one a lonely, gregarious girl COULD have, since
few, surely, had in anything like the same degree arrived at it, and
since this one indeed had compassed it but through the play of some gift
of nature to which you could scarce give a definite name.

It wasn't a question of her strange sense for tongues, with which she
juggled as a conjuror at a show juggled with balls or hoops or lighted
brands--it wasn't at least entirely that, for he had known people
almost as polyglot whom their accomplishment had quite failed to make
interesting. He was polyglot himself, for that matter--as was the case
too with so many of his friends and relations; for none of whom, more
than for himself, was it anything but a common convenience. The point
was that in this young woman it was a beauty in itself, and almost a
mystery: so, certainly, he had more than once felt in noting, on her
lips, that rarest, among the Barbarians, of all civil graces, a perfect
felicity in the use of Italian. He had know