Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/358

344 in its turn caused Maisie to wonder rather interestedly what degree of maturity it was that shut the door against an escape from such an error. They went back to the rampart on the second morning: the spot in which they appeared to have come furthest on the journey that was to separate them from everything that in the past had been objectionable; it gave them afresh the impression that had most to do with their having worked round to a confidence that on Maisie's part was determined and that she could see to be on her companion's desperate. She had had for many hours the sense of showing Mrs. Wix so much that she was comparatively slow to become conscious of being at the same time the subject of a similar process. The process went the faster, however, from the moment she got her glimpse of it; it then fell into its place in her general, her habitual view of the particular phenomenon that, had she felt the need of words for it, she might have called her personal relation to her knowledge. This relation had never been so lively as during the time she waited with her old governess for Sir Claude; and what made it so was exactly that Mrs. Wix struck her as having