Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/108

94 It must also be admitted that he took them far—further perhaps than was always warranted by the old-fashioned conscience, the dingy decencies of Maisie's simple instructress. There were hours when Mrs. Wix sighingly testified to the scruples she surmounted—seemed to ask what other line one could take with a young person whose experience had been, as it were, so peculiar. "It is n't as if you did n't already know everything, is it, love?" and "I can't make you any worse than you are, can I, darling?"—these were the terms in which the good lady justified to herself and her pupil her pleasant conversational ease. What the pupil already knew was indeed rather taken for granted than expressed, but it performed the useful function of transcending all textbooks, and supplanting all studies. If the child could n't be worse it was a comfort even to herself that she was bad—a comfort offering a broad, firm support to the fundamental fact of the present crisis, the fact that mamma was fearfully jealous. This was another side of the circumstance of mamma's passion, and the deep couple in the schoolroom were not long in working round to it. It brought them face to face