It had been armed with the wings of young imagination, young generosity; it had been, he believed--always counting out her intense devotion to her father--the liveliest emotion she had known before the dawn of 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.