She had got out of her husband, she admitted, what she could, but husbands were never the persons who answered such questions ideally.

He had only made her more curious, and she had arrived early, this way, in order to miss as little as possible of Charlotte's story.
"Wives, papa," she said; "are always much better reporters--though I grant," she added for Charlotte, "that fathers are not much better than husbands.

He never," she smiled, "tells me more than a tenth of what you tell him; so I hope you haven't told him everything yet, since in that case I shall probably have lost the best part of it." Maggie went, she went--she felt herself going; she reminded herself of an actress who had been studying a part and rehearsing it, but who suddenly, on the stage, before the footlights, had begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the text.

It was this very sense of the stage and the footlights that kept her up, made her rise higher: just as it was the sense of action that logically involved some platform--action quite positively for the first time in her life, or, counting in the previous afternoon, for the second.

The platform remained for three or four days thus sensibly under her feet, and she had all the while, with it, the inspiration of quite remarkably, of quite heroically improvising.