Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/264

250 have nothing to do with them. There followed between her companions a passage of which the sense was drowned for her in the deepening inward hum of her mere desire to get off; though she was able to guess later on that her father must have put it to his friend that it was no use talking, that she was an obstinate little pig and that, besides, she was really old enough to choose for herself. It glimmered back to her then as well that the Countess had cast derision on the question of America and had offered her alternatives to Spa in the shape of any place she should like to go in all the rest of the world. It glimmered back to her indeed that she must have failed quite dreadfully to seem responsive and polite, inasmuch as, before she knew it, she had visibly given the impression that if they did n't allow her to go home she should cry. Oh, if there had ever been a thing to cry about, it was being found in that punishable little attitude toward the handsomest offers one had ever received! The great pain of the thing was that she could see the Countess liked her enough to wish to be liked in return; and it was from the idea of a return she sought to flee—it was the idea of a return that, after a confusion of