Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/218

just what Maisie was not to know—an exclusion moreover that she never questioned in the light of a participation large enough to make him, in hours of solitude with Mrs. Beale, present like a picture on the wall. As far as her father was concerned such hours had no interruption; and then it was clear between them that they were each thinking of the absent and each thinking that the other thought; so that he was an object of conscious reference in everything they said or did. The wretched truth, Mrs. Beale had to confess, was that she had hoped against hope and that in the Regent's Park it was impossible Sir Claude should really be in and out. Had n't they at last to look the fact in the face?—it was too disgustingly evident that no one after all had been squared. Well, if no one had been squared it was because every one had been vile. No one and every one were of course Beale and Ida, the extent of whose power to be nasty was a thing that, to a little girl, Mrs. Beale simply could n't communicate. Therefore it was that to keep going at all, as she said, that lady had to make, as she also said, another arrangement—the arrangement in which Maisie was included only to the point of