Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/55

Rh Therefore, under her father's roof, during the time that followed, she made no attempt to clear up her ambiguity by a sociable interrogation of housemaids; and it was an odd truth that the ambiguity itself took nothing from the fresh pleasure promised her by renewed contact with Miss Overmore. The confidence looked for by that young lady was of the fine sort that explanation cannot improve, and she herself, at any rate, was a person superior to all confusion. For Maisie, moreover, concealment had never necessarily seemed deception, and she had grown up among things as to which her former knowledge was that she was not to ask about them. It was far from new to her that the questions of the small are the peculiar diversion of the great. Except the affairs of her doll Lisette, there had scarcely ever been anything at her mother's that was explicable with a grave face. Nothing was so easy to her as to send the ladies who gathered there off into shrieks, and she might have practised upon them largely if she had been of a more calculating turn. Everything had something behind it. Life was like a long, long corridor with rows of closed doors. She had learned that at these