Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/376

362 tense cord, twitched by a nervous hand, on which the counted pearls of intelligence were to be neatly strung.

In the evening, upstairs, they had another strange session, as to which Maisie could not afterwards have told you whether it was bang in the middle or quite at the beginning that her companion sounded with fresh emphasis the note of the moral sense. What mattered was merely that she did exclaim, and again, as at first appeared, most disconnectedly: "God help me, it does seem to peep out!" Oh, the queer confusions that had wooed it at last to such peeping!—none so queer, however, as the words of woe, and it might verily be said of rage, in which the poor lady bewailed the tragic end of her own rich ignorance. There was a point at which she seized the child and hugged her as close as in the old days of partings and returns; at which she was visibly at a loss how to make up to such a victim for such contaminations; appealing, as to what she had done and was doing, in bewilderment, in explanation, in supplication, for reassurance, for pardon and even, outright, for pity.

"I don't know what I 've said to you, my own; I don't know what I 'm saying or what