Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/43

Rh voice, at the end of an hour, touched the little girl in a spot that had never even been reached. Maisie knew later what it was, though doubtless she could n't have made a statement of it. These were things that a few days' conversation with Mrs. Wix lighted up. The principal one was a matter that Mrs. Wix herself always immediately mentioned; she had had a little girl quite of her own, and the little girl had been killed on the spot. She had had absolutely nothing else in all the world, and her affliction had broken her heart. It was comfortably established between them that Mrs. Wix's heart was broken. What Maisie felt was that she had been, with passion and anguish, a mother; and that this was something Miss Overmore was n't; something strangely, confusingly, that mamma was even less.

So it was that, in the course of an extraordinarily short time, she found herself more deeply absorbed in the image of the little dead Clara Matilda, who, on a crossing in the Harrow Road, had been knocked down and crushed by the cruellest of hansoms, than she had ever found herself in the family group made vivid by one of seven. "She's your little dead sister," Mrs. Wix ended by