“Dear Meg,” she said, caressingly, “you’re the noblest, and the sweetest, and the most beautiful girl at St. Benet’s! Why can’t you live up to your true self?”
“There are two selfs in me,” replied Maggie. “And if one even approaches the faintest semblance of angelhood, the other is black as pitch. There, it only wastes time to talk the thing over. I’m in for the sort of scrape I hate most. See, Nancy, I bought this at the auction.”
She opened her wardrobe, and taking out Polly Singleton’s magnificent eighty-guinea sealskin jacket, slipped it on.
“Don’t I look superb?” said Maggie. She shut the wardrobe-door, and surveyed herself in its long glass. Brown was Maggie Oliphant’s colour. It harmonised with the soft tints of her delicately rounded face, with the rich colour in her hair, with the light in her eyes. It added to all these charms, softening them, giving to them a more perfect lustre.
“Oh, Maggie!” said Nancy, clasping her hands, “you ought always to be dressed as you are now.”
Maggie dropped her arms suddenly to her sides. The jacket, a little too large for her, slid off her shoulders, and lay in a heap on the floor.
“What?” she said, suddenly. “Am I never to show my true and real self? Am I always to be disguised in sham beauty and sham goodness? Oh, Nancy, Nancy! if there is a creature I hate—I hate—her name is Maggie Oliphant!”
Nancy picked up the sealskin jacket, and put it back into the wardrobe.
“I am sorry you went to the auction, Maggie,” she repeated, “and I’m more sorry still to find you bought poor Polly Singleton’s sealskin. Well, it’s done now, and we have to consider how to get you out of this scrape. There’s no time for you to indulge in that morbid talk of yours to-day, Maggie, darling. Let us consider what’s best to be done.”
“Nothing,” retorted Maggie. “I shall simply go to Miss Heath and Miss Eccleston, and tell them the truth. There’s nothing else to be done. No hope whatever of getting out of the affair. I went to Polly Singleton’s auction because Rosalind Merton raised the demon in me. I tried to become the possessor of the sealskin jacket because her heart was set on it. I won an eighty-guinea jacket for ten guineas. You see how ignoble my motives were, also how unworthy the results. I did worse even than that—for I will out with the truth to you, Nancy—I revenged myself still further upon that spiteful little gnat, Rosalind, and raised the price of her coveted coral to such an extent that I know by her face she is pounds in debt for it. Now, my dear, what have you to say to me? Nothing good, I know that. Let me read Aristotle for the next hour just to calm my mind.”