Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/383

Rh were scarce in the air before Maisie had jumped at them. She held them well, she looked at them hard; at last she brought out with an assurance which there was no one, alas, but herself to admire: "Well, yes—since you ask me." She hesitated, then continued: "Lots of times!"

Mrs. Wix glared an instant askance; such approval as her look expressed was not wholly unqualified. It expressed, at any rate, something that presumably had to do with her saying once more: "Yes, he 's afraid of her."

Maisie heard, and it had afresh its effect on her, even through the blur of the attention now required by the possibility of that idea of jealousy—a possibility created only by her feeling that she had thus found the way to show she was not simple. It stuck out of Mrs. Wix that this lady still believed her moral sense to be interested and feigned; so what could be such a gage of her sincerity as a peep of the most restless of the passions? Such a revelation would baffle discouragement, and discouragement was in fact so baffled that, helped in some degree by the mere intensity of their need to hope, which also, according to its nature, sprang