What Maisie Knew eBook

had hurried past him and left him in perpetual Piccadilly.  Every one knew what he had—­only twenty-five hundred.  Poor Ida, who had run through everything, had now nothing but her carriage and her paralysed uncle.  This old brute, as he was called, was supposed to have a lot put away.  The child was provided for, thanks to a crafty godmother, a defunct aunt of Beale’s, who had left her something in such a manner that the parents could appropriate only the income.

I

The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was inevitably confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware that something had happened which must matter a good deal and looking anxiously out for the effects of so great a cause.  It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before.  Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or a story could have been so in the thick of the fight.  She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic-lantern.  Her little world was phantasmagoric—­strange shadows dancing on a sheet.  It was as if the whole performance had been given for her—­a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre.  She was in short introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness of others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the sacrifice but the modesty of her youth.

Her first term was with her father, who spared her only in not letting her have the wild letters addressed to her by her mother:  he confined himself to holding them up at her and shaking them, while he showed his teeth, and then amusing her by the way he chucked them, across the room, bang into the fire.  Even at that moment, however, she had a scared anticipation of fatigue, a guilty sense of not rising to the occasion, feeling the charm of the violence with which the stiff unopened envelopes, whose big monograms—­Ida bristled with monograms—­she would have liked to see, were made to whizz, like dangerous missiles, through the air.  The greatest effect of the great cause was her own greater importance, chiefly revealed to her in the larger freedom with which she was handled, pulled hither and thither and kissed, and the proportionately greater niceness she was obliged to show.  Her features had somehow become prominent; they were so perpetually nipped by the gentlemen who came to see her father and the smoke of whose cigarettes went into her face.  Some of these gentlemen made her strike matches and light their cigarettes; others, holding her on knees violently jolted, pinched the calves of her legs till she shrieked—­her shriek was much admired—­and reproached them with being toothpicks.  The word stuck in her mind and contributed to her feeling from this time