Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/311

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next day it seemed to her at the bottom—down too far in shuddering plunges even to leave her a sense, on the Channel boat, of the height at which Sir Claude remained and which had never, in every way, been so great as when, much in the wet, though in the angle of a screen of canvas, he sociably sat with his stepdaughter's head in his lap and that of Mrs. Beale's housemaid fairly pillowed on his breast. Maisie was surprised to learn, as they drew into port, that they had had a lovely passage, but this emotion at Boulogne was speedily quenched in others, above all in the great ecstasy of a larger impression of life. She was "abroad," and she gave herself up to it, responded to it in the bright air, before the pink houses, among the bare-legged fishwives and the redlegged soldiers, with the instant certitude of a vocation. Her vocation was to see the world and to thrill with relish of the picture; she had grown older in five minutes and had, by the time they reached the hotel, recognized in the institutions and manners of France a multitude of affinities and