Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/98

84 IX

idea of what she was to make up and the prodigious total to come were kept well before Maisie at her mother's. These things were the constant occupation of Mrs. Wix, who arrived there by the back-stairs, but in tears of joy, the day after her own arrival. The process of making up, as to which the good lady had an immense deal to say, took, through its successive phases, so long that it promised to be a period at least equal to the child's last period with her father. But this was a fuller and richer time; it bounded along to the tune of Mrs. Wix's constant insistence on the energy they must both put forth. There was a fine intensity in the way the child agreed with her that under Mrs. Beale and Susan Ash she had learned nothing whatever—the wildness of the rescued castaway was one of the forces that would henceforth make for her a career of conquest. The year therefore rounded itself as a receptacle of retarded knowledge, a cup brimming over with the sense that now, at least, she was learning. Mrs. Wix fed this sense from the stores of her