Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/48

34 that they never got to at all; she only used to say "We'll take that in its proper order." Her order was a circle as vast as the untravelled globe. She had not the spirit of adventure, and the child could perfectly see how many subjects she was afraid of. She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which, indeed, there flowed the blue river of truth. She knew swarms of stories, mostly those of the novels she had read, relating them with a memory that never faltered and a wealth of detail that was Maisie's delight. They were all about love and beauty and countesses and wickedness. Her conversation was practically an endless narrative, a great garden of romance, with sudden vistas into her own life and gushing fountains of fact. These were the parts where they most lingered. She made the child take with her again every step of her long, lame course and think it a journey in an enchanted land. Her pupil acquired a vivid vision of every one who had ever, in her phrase, knocked against her—some of them oh so hard!—every one literally but Mr. Wix, her husband, as to whom nothing was mentioned save that he had been dead for ages. He had been rather remarkably