Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/34

20 The child, who watched her at many moments, watched her particularly at that one. "I think you're lovely," she often said to her. Even mamma, who was lovely too, had not such a pretty way with the fork. Maisie associated this showier presence with her now being "big," knowing of course that nursery-governesses were only for little girls who were not, as she said, "really" little. She vaguely knew, further, somehow, that the future was still bigger than she, and that a part of what made it so was the number of governesses lurking in it and ready to dart out. Everything that had happened when she was really little was dormant, everything but the positive certitude, bequeathed from afar by Moddle, that the natural way for a child to have her parents was separate and successive, like her mutton and her pudding or her bath and her nap.

"Does he know that he lies?" that was what she had vivaciously asked Miss Overmore on the occasion which was so suddenly to lead to a change in her life.

"Does who know—?" Miss Overmore stared: she had a stocking pulled over her hand and was pricking at it with a needle which she poised in the act. Her task was