Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/59

Rh every inconvenience was that the child should be put to school—there were such lots of splendid schools, as everybody knew, at Brighton and all over the place. That, however, Maisie learned, was just what would bring her mother down; from the moment he should delegate to others the housing of his little charge he had n't a leg to stand on before the law. Did n't he keep her away from her mother precisely because Mrs. Farange was one of those others?

There was also the solution of a second governess, a young person to come in by the day and really do the work; but to this Miss Overmore would n't for a moment listen, arguing against it with great public relish and wanting to know from all comers—she put it to Maisie herself—if they didn't see how frightfully it would give her away. "What am I supposed to be at all, don't you see, if I'm not here to look after her?" She was in a false position, and so freely and loudly called attention to it that it seemed to become almost a source of glory. The way out of it, of course, was just to do her plain duty; but that was unfortunately what, with his excessive, his exorbitant demands on her, which every one