Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/32

18 inner self or, in other words, of concealment. She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult, and that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so. Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed no longer. She would forget everything; she would repeat nothing; and when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure altogether new. If, accordingly, as she grew older, her parents in turn, in her presence, announced that she had grown shockingly dull, it was not from any real contraction of her little stream of life. She spoiled their fun, but she practically added to her own. She saw more and more; she saw too much. It was Miss Overmore, her first governess, who, on a momentous occasion, had sown the seeds of secrecy, sown them not by anything she said, but by a mere roll of those fine eyes which Maisie already admired. Moddle had become, at this time, after alterations of residence of which the child had no clear record, an image faintly embalmed in the remembrance