Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/220

206 that she had been in a way to think ill, and Maisie was glad to hear of the corrective at the same time that she heard of the ailment.

She presently found herself supposing and in spite of her envy even hoping that whenever Mrs. Beale was out of the house Sir Claude had in some manner the satisfaction of it. This was now of more frequent occurrence than ever before—so much so that she would have thought of her stepmother as almost extravagantly absent had it not been that in the first place her father was a superior specimen of that habit: it was the frequent remark of his present wife, as it had been before the tribunals of their country a conspicuous plea of her predecessor, that he scarce came home even to sleep. In the second place Mrs. Beale, when she was on the spot, had now a beautiful air of longing to make up for everything. The only shadow in such bright intervals was that, as Maisie put it to herself, she could get nothing by questions. It was in the nature of things to be none of a small child's business even when a small child had from the first been deluded into a fear that she might be only too much initiated. Things then were in Maisie's experience so true to their nature