Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/33

Rh of hungry disappearances from the nursery and distressful lapses in the alphabet, sad embarrassments, in particular, when invited to recognize something that her nurse called "the important letter haitch." Miss Overmore, however hungry, never disappeared; this marked her somehow as a being more exalted, and the character was confirmed by a prettiness that Maisie supposed to be extraordinary. Mrs. Farange had said that she was almost too pretty, and some one had asked what that mattered so long as Beale wasn't there. "Beale or no Beale," Maisie had heard her mother say in reply, "I take her because she's a lady and yet awfully poor. Rather nice people, but there are seven sisters at home. What do people mean?"

Maisie didn't know what people meant, but she knew very soon all the names of all the sisters. She could say them off better than she could say the multiplication-table. She privately wondered, moreover, though she never asked, about the awful poverty, of which her companion also never spoke. Food, at any rate, came up by mysterious laws. Miss Overmore never, like Moddle, had on an apron, and when she ate she held her fork with her little finger curled out.