What Maisie Knew | Page 3

kind of abuse of visibility, so that it would have been, in the usual
places rather vulgar to wonder at her. Strangers only did that; but they,
to the amusement of the familiar, did it very much: it was an inevitable
way of betraying an alien habit. Like her husband she carried clothes,
carried them as a train carries passengers: people had been known to
compare their taste and dispute about the accommodation they gave
these articles, though inclining on the whole to the commendation of
Ida as less overcrowded, especially with jewellery and flowers. Beale
Farange had natural decorations, a kind of costume in his vast fair
beard, burnished like a gold breastplate, and in the eternal glitter of the
teeth that his long moustache had been trained not to hide and that gave

him, in every possible situation, the look of the joy of life. He had been
destined in his youth for diplomacy and momentarily attached, without
a salary, to a legation which enabled him often to say "In MY time in
the East": but contemporary history had somehow had no use for him,
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 that she was deficient in something that would
meet the general desire. She found out what it was: it was a congenital
tendency to the production of a substance to which Moddle, her nurse,
gave a short ugly name, a name painfully associated at dinner with the
part of the joint that she didn't like. She had left behind her the time
when she had no desires to meet, none at least save Moddle's, who, in
Kensington Gardens, was always on the bench when she came back to
see if she had been playing too far. Moddle's desire was merely