Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/297

my last blow for you; I can follow you no longer from pillar to post. I must live for myself at last—while there 's still a handful left of me. I 'm very very ill; I 'm very very tired; I 'm very very determined. There you have it: make the most of it. Your frock is too filthy—but I came to sacrifice myself." Maisie looked at the peccant places; there were moments when it was a relief to her to drop her eyes even on anything so sordid. All her interviews, all her ordeals with her mother had, as she had grown older, seemed to have, before any other, the hard quality of duration; but longer than any, strangely, were these minutes offered to her as so pacific and so agreeably winding up the connection. It was her anxiety that made them long, her fear of some hitch, some check of the current, one of her ladyship's famous quick jumps. She held her breath; she only wanted, by playing into her visitor's hands, to see the thing through. But her impatience itself made at instants the whole situation swim; there were things Ida said which she perhaps did n't hear, and there were things she heard that Ida perhaps did n't say. "You 're all I have, and yet I 'm capable of this. Your father wishes you were dead—that, my dear, is