Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/405

Rh confess herself at last done up. Maisie could appreciate her fatigue; the day had not passed without such an observer's discovering that she was excited and even mentally comparing her state to that of the breakers after a gale. It had blown hard in London, and she would take time to subside. It was of the condition known to the child by report as that of talking against time that her decision, her spirit, her humor, which had never dropped, now gave the impression.

She too was delighted with foreign manners; but her daughter's opportunities of explaining them to her were unexpectedly forestalled by her tone of large acquaintance with them. One of the things that nipped in the bud all response to her volubility was Maisie's surprised retreat before the fact that Continental life was what she had been almost brought up on. It was Mrs. Beale, disconcertingly, who began to explain it to her friends; it was she who, wherever they turned, was the interpreter, the historian and the guide. She was full of reference to her early travels at the age of eighteen: she had at that period made, with a distinguished Dutch family, a stay on the Lake of