Hunt was trying to make his picture a true portrait--and also make it a symbol of many things which still were only taking shape in his own mind: of beauty rising from the gutter to overcome beauty of more favored birth, and to reign above it; also of a lower stratum surging up and breaking through the upper stratum, becoming a part of it, or assimilating it, or conquering it.
Leading families replaced by other families, classes replaced by other classes, nations replaced by other nations--such was the inevitable social process--so read the records of the fifty or sixty centuries since history began to be written.

Oh, he was trying to say a lot in this portrait of a girl of ordinary birth--even less than ordinary--in her cheap shirt-waist and skirt! And it pleased the sardonic element in Hunt's unmoral nature that this Maggie, through whom he was trying to symbolize so much, he knew to be a petty larcenist: shoplifting and matters of similar consequence.

She had been cynically frank about this to him; casual, almost boastful.

Her possessing a bent toward such activities was hardly to be wondered at, with her having Old Jimmie as her father, and the Duchess as a landlady, and having for acquaintances such gentlemen as Barney Palmer and this returning prison-bird, Larry Brainard.
But petty crime, thought Hunt, would not be Maggie's forte if she developed her possibilities.

With her looks, her boldness, her cleverness, she had the makings of a magnificent adventuress.