Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/46

32 the straighteners; every one knew the diadem and the button, the scallops and satin bands; everyone, though Maisie had never betrayed her, knew even Clara Matilda.

It was on account of these things that mamma got her for so little money, really for nothing. So much, one day when Mrs. Wix had accompanied her into the drawing-room and left her, the child heard one of the ladies she found there—a lady with eyebrows arched like skipping-ropes and thick black stitching, like ruled "lines," on beautiful white gloves—announce to another. She knew governesses were poor; Miss Overmore was unmentionably and Mrs. Wix familiarly so. Neither this, however, nor the old brown frock, nor the diadem, nor the button, made a difference for Maisie in the charm put forth through everything, the charm of Mrs. Wix's conveying that somehow, in her ugliness and her poverty, she was peculiarly and soothingly safe, safer than any one in the world—than papa, than mamma, than the lady with the arched eyebrows, safer even, though much less beautiful, than Miss Overmore, on whose loveliness, as she supposed it, the little girl was faintly conscious that one could n't rest