Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/19

Rh good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve their anger and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been alike crippled by the heavy hand of justice, which, in the last resort, met on neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything. If each was only to get half, this seemed to concede that neither was so base as the other pretended; or, to put it differently, offered them as both bad indeed, since they were only as good as each other. The mother had wished to prevent the father from, as she said, "so much as looking" at the child; the father's plea was that the mother's lightest touch was "simply contamination." These were the opposed principles in which Maisie was to be educated; she was to fit them together as she might. Nothing could have been more touching at first than her failure to suspect the ordeal that awaited her little unspotted soul. There were persons horrified to think what those who had charge of it would combine to try to make of it; no one could conceive in advance that they would be able to make nothing ill.

This was a society in which, for the most