What Maisie Knew eBook

V

The second parting from Miss Overmore had been bad enough, but this first parting from Mrs. Wix was much worse.  The child had lately been to the dentist’s and had a term of comparison for the screwed-up intensity of the scene.  It was dreadfully silent, as it had been when her tooth was taken out; Mrs.

Wix had on that occasion grabbed her hand and they had clung to each other with the frenzy of their determination not to scream.  Maisie, at the dentist’s, had been heroically still, but just when she felt most anguish had become aware of an audible shriek on the part of her companion, a spasm of stifled sympathy.  This was reproduced by the only sound that broke their supreme embrace when, a month later, the “arrangement,” as her periodical uprootings were called, played the part of the horrible forceps.  Embedded in Mrs. Wix’s nature as her tooth had been socketed in her gum, the operation of extracting her would really have been a case for chloroform.  It was a hug that fortunately left nothing to say, for the poor woman’s want of words at such an hour seemed to fall in with her want of everything.  Maisie’s alternate parent, in the outermost vestibule—­he liked the impertinence of crossing as much as that of his late wife’s threshold—­stood over them with his open watch and his still more open grin, while from the only corner of an eye on which something of Mrs. Wix’s didn’t impinge the child saw at the door a brougham in which Miss Overmore also waited.  She remembered the difference when, six months before, she had been torn from the breast of that more spirited protectress.  Miss Overmore, then also in the vestibule, but of course in the other one, had been thoroughly audible and voluble; her protest had rung out bravely and she had declared that something—­her pupil didn’t know exactly what—­was a regular wicked shame.  That had at the time dimly recalled to Maisie the far-away moment of Moddle’s great outbreak:  there seemed always to be “shames” connected in one way or another with her migrations.  At present, while Mrs. Wix’s arms tightened and the smell of her hair was strong, she further remembered how, in pacifying Miss Overmore, papa had made use of the words “you dear old duck!”—­an expression which, by its oddity, had stuck fast in her young mind, having moreover a place well prepared for it there by what she knew of the governess whom she now always mentally characterised as the pretty one.  She wondered whether this affection would be as great as before:  that would at all events be the case with the prettiness Maisie could see in the face which showed brightly at the window of the brougham.