Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/30

16 II

that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a child's mind, the past, on each occasion, became, for her, as indistinct as the future: she surrendered herself to the actual with a good faith that might have been touching to either parent. Crudely as they had calculated they were at first justified by the event; she was the little feathered shuttlecock that they fiercely kept flying between them. The evil they had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other they poured into her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle; and each of them had doubtless the best conscience in the world as to the duty of teaching her the stern truth that should be her safeguard against the other. She was at the age when all stories are true and all conceptions are stories. The actual was the absolute; the present alone was vivid. The objurgation, for instance, launched in the carriage by her mother after she had, at her father's bidding, punctually performed, was a missive that dropped into her memory with the dry rattle of a letter