What Maisie Knew | Page 6

could
say the multiplication-table. She privately wondered moreover, though
she never asked, about the awful poverty, of which her companion also
never spoke. Food at any rate came up by mysterious laws; Miss
Overmore never, like Moddle, had on an apron, and when she ate she
held her fork with her little finger curled out. The child, who watched
her at many moments, watched her particularly at that one. "I think
you're lovely," she often said to her; even mamma, who was lovely too,
had not such a pretty way with the fork. Maisie associated this showier
presence with her now being "big," knowing of course that nursery-
governesses were only for little girls who were not, as she said, "really"
little. She vaguely knew, further, somehow, that the future was still
bigger than she, and that a part of what made it so was the number of
governesses lurking in it and ready to dart out. Everything that had
happened when she was really little was dormant, everything but the
positive certitude, bequeathed from afar by Moddle, that the natural
way for a child to have her parents was separate and successive, like
her mutton and her pudding or her bath and her nap.
"DOES he know he lies?"--that was what she had vivaciously asked
Miss Overmore on the occasion which was so suddenly to lead to a
change in her life.
"Does he know--" Miss Overmore stared; she had a stocking pulled
over her hand and was pricking at it with a needle which she poised in

the act. Her task was homely, but her movement, like all her
movements, graceful.
"Why papa."
"That he 'lies'?"
"That's what mamma says I'm to tell him--'that he lies and he knows he
lies.'" Miss Overmore turned very red, though she laughed out till her
head fell back; then she pricked again at her muffled hand so hard that
Maisie wondered how she could bear it. "AM I to tell him?" the child
went on. It was then that her companion addressed her in the
unmistakeable language of a pair of eyes of deep dark grey. "I can't say
No," they replied as distinctly as possible; "I can't say No, because I'm
afraid of your mamma, don't you see? Yet how can I say Yes after your
papa has been so kind to me, talking to me so long the other day,
smiling and flashing his beautiful teeth at me the time we met him in
the Park, the time when, rejoicing at the sight of us, he left the
gentlemen he was with and turned and walked with us, stayed with us
for half an hour?" Somehow in the light of Miss Overmore's lovely
eyes that incident came back to Maisie with a charm it hadn't had at the
time, and this in spite of the fact that after it was over her governess
had never but once alluded to it. On their way home, when papa had
quitted them, she had expressed the hope that the child wouldn't
mention it to mamma. Maisie liked her so, and had so the charmed
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."

III

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