sense of being liked by her, that she accepted this
remark as settling the matter and wonderingly conformed
to it. The wonder now lived again, lived in the
recollection of what papa had said to Miss Overmore:
“I’ve only to look at you to see you’re
a person I can appeal to for help to save my daughter.”
Maisie’s ignorance of what she was to be saved
from didn’t diminish the pleasure of the thought
that Miss Overmore was saving her. It seemed to
make them cling together as in some wild game of “going
round.”
She was therefore all the more startled when her mother
said to her in connexion with something to be done
before her next migration: “You understand
of course that she’s not going with you.”
Maisie turned quite faint. “Oh I thought
she was.”
“It doesn’t in the least matter, you know,
what you think,” Mrs. Farange loudly replied;
“and you had better indeed for the future, miss,
learn to keep your thoughts to yourself.”
This was exactly what Maisie had already learned,
and the accomplishment was just the source of her
mother’s irritation. It was of a horrid
little critical system, a tendency, in her silence,
to judge her elders, that this lady suspected her,
liking as she did, for her own part, a child to be
simple and confiding. She liked also to hear
the report of the whacks she administered to Mr. Farange’s
character, to his pretensions to peace of mind:
the satisfaction of dealing them diminished when nothing
came back. The day was at hand, and she saw it,
when she should feel more delight in hurling Maisie
at him than in snatching her away; so much so that
her conscience winced under the acuteness of a candid
friend who had remarked that the real end of all their
tugging would be that each parent would try to make
the little girl a burden to the other—a
sort of game in which a fond mother clearly wouldn’t
show to advantage. The prospect of not showing
to advantage, a distinction in which she held she
had never failed, begot in Ida Farange an ill humour
of which several persons felt the effect. She
determined that Beale at any rate should feel it;
she reflected afresh that in the study of how to be
odious to him she must never give way. Nothing
could incommode him more than not to get the good,
for the child, of a nice female appendage who had
clearly taken a fancy to her. One of the things
Ida said to the appendage was that Beale’s was
a house in which no decent woman could consent to
be seen. It was Miss Overmore herself who explained
to Maisie that she had had a hope of being allowed
to accompany her to her father’s, and that this
hope had been dashed by the way her mother took it.
“She says that if I ever do such a thing as enter
his service I must never expect to show my face in
this house again. So I’ve promised not
to attempt to go with you. If I wait patiently
till you come back here we shall certainly be together
once more.”
