Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/27

been dreadfully put about." If the skin on Moddle's face had, to Maisie, the air of being unduly, almost painfully stretched, it never presented that appearance so much as when she uttered, as she often had occasion to utter, such words. The child wondered if they didn't make it hurt more than usual; but it was only after some time that she was able to attach to the picture of her father's sufferings, and more particularly to her nurse's manner about them, the meaning for which these things had waited. By the time she had grown sharper, as the gentlemen who criticised her calves used to say, she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable—images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she was not yet big enough to play. The great strain meanwhile was that of carrying, by the right end, the things her father said about her mother—things mostly, indeed, that Moddle, on a glimpse of them, as if they had been complicated toys or difficult books, took out of her hands and put away in the closet. It was a wonderful assortment of objects of this kind that she discovered there later, all tumbled