Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/246

232 something in him that seemed—and quite touchingly—to ask her to help him to pretend, pretend he knew enough about her life and her education, her means of subsistence and her view of himself, to give the questions he couldn't put her a natural domestic tone. She would have pretended with ecstasy if he could only have given her the cue. She waited for it while, between his big teeth, he breathed the sighs she did n't know to be stupid; and as if he had drawn—rather red with the confusion of it—the pledge of her preparation from her tears, he floundered about, wondering what the devil he could lay hold of.

 XIX

he had lighted a cigarette and begun to smoke in her face it was as if he had struck with the match the note of some queer, clumsy ferment of old professions, old scandals, old duties, a dim perception of what he possessed in her and what, if everything had only, damn it, been totally different, she might still be able to give him. What she was able to give him, however, as his 