Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/54

40 start she had yet enjoyed, but she had a shy fear of not exactly believing them. "Well, what reason is proper?" she thoughtfully demanded.

"Oh, a long-legged stick of a tomboy; there's none so good as that!" Her father enjoyed both her drollery and his own, and tried again to get possession of her—an effort resisted by the third person and leading again to something of a public scuffle. Miss Overmore declared to the child that she had been all the while with good friends, on which Beale Farange went on: "She means good friends of mine, you know—tremendous friends of mine. There has been no end of them about—that I will say for her!" The child felt bewildered and was afterwards for some time conscious of a vagueness, just slightly embarrassing, as to the subject of so much amusement and as to where her governess had really been. She did n't feel at all as if she had been seriously told, and no such feeling was supplied by anything that occurred later. Her embarrassment, of a precocious, instinctive order, attached itself to the idea that this was another of the matters that it was not for her, as her mother used to say, to go into.