Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/384

370 from the dark portent of the absent letter, the real pitch of their morning was reached by the note, not of mutual scrutiny, but of unprecedented frankness. There were broodings indeed and silences, and Maisie sank deeper into the vision that for her friend she was, at the most, superficial, and that also, positively, she was the more so the more she tried to appear complete. Was the sum of all knowledge only to know how little, in this presence, one would ever reach it? The answer to that question luckily lost itself in the brightness suffusing the scene as soon as Maisie had thrown out, in regard to Mrs. Beale, such a remark as she had never dreamed she should live to make. "If I thought she was unkind to him—I don't know what I should do!"

Mrs. Wix dropped one of her squints; she even confirmed it by a wild grunt. "I know what I should!"

Maisie, at this, felt that she lagged. "Well, I can think of one thing."

Mrs. Wix more directly challenged her. "What is it, then?"

Maisie met her expression as if it were a game with forfeits for winking. "I'd kill her!" That, at least, she hoped as she