Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/225

Rh pluck them as she passed, though they thickened in the great gray rooms where the fountain of knowledge, in the form usually of a high voice that she took at first to be angry, plashed in the stillness of rows of faces thrust out like empty jugs. "It must do us good—it 's all so hideous," Mrs. Beale had immediately declared, manifesting a purity of resolution that made these occasions quite the most harmonious of all the many on which the pair had pulled together. Maisie certainly had never in such an association felt so uplifted and never above all been so carried off her feet as at the moments of Mrs. Beale's breathlessly re-entering the house and fairly shrieking upstairs to know if they would still be in time for a lecture. Her stepdaughter, all ready from the earliest hours, almost leaped over the banister to respond, and they dashed out together in quest of learning as hard as they often dashed back to release Mrs. Beale for other preoccupations. There had been in short no bustle like it since that last brief flurry when Mrs. Wix, blowing as if she were grooming her, "made up" for everything previously lost at her father's.

These weeks as well were too few, but