Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/49

Rh absent from his wife's existence, and Maisie was never taken to see his grave.

 V

second parting from Miss Overmore had been bad enough, but this first parting from Mrs. Wix was much worse. The child had lately been to the dentist's; she had a term of comparison for the screwed-up intensity of the scene. It was dreadfully silent, as it had been when her tooth was taken out. Mrs. Wix had on that occasion grabbed her hand, and they had clung to each other with the frenzy of their determination not to scream. Maisie, at the dentist's, had been heroically still, but just when she felt most anguish had become aware, on the part of her companion, of an audible shriek, a spasm of stifled sympathy. This was reproduced by the only sound that broke their supreme embrace when, a month later, the "arrangement," as her periodical up-rootings were called, played the part of the horrible forceps. Embedded in Mrs. Wix's clasp as her tooth had been sunk in her gum, the operation of extracting her