Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/74

60 proceeded to do—that all this time would be made up as soon as Mrs. Farange returned. She, Miss Overmore, knew nothing, thank heaven, about her confederate; but she was very sure that any person capable of forming that sort of relation with the lady in Florence was a person who could easily be put forward as objecting to the presence in his house of the fruit of a union that his dignity must ignore. It was a game like another, and Mrs. Wix's visit was clearly the first move in it. Maisie found in this exchange of asperities a fresh incitement to the unformulated fatalism in which her observation of her own career had long since taken refuge; and it was the beginning, for her, of a deeper prevision that, in spite of Miss Overmore's brilliancy and Mrs. Wix's passion, she should live to see a change in the nature of the struggle she appeared to have come into the world to produce. It would still be essentially a struggle, but its object would now be not to receive her.

Mrs. Wix, after Miss Overmore's last demonstration, addressed herself wholly to the little girl, and, drawing from the pocket of her dingy old pelisse a small flat parcel, removed its envelope and wished to know if