Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/357

friendly benches where brown old women, in such white frilled caps and such long gold earrings, sat and knitted or snoozed; its little yellow-faced houses that looked like the homes of misers or of priests, and its dark Château where small soldiers lounged on the bridge that stretched across an empty moat and military washing hung from the windows of towers. This was a part of the place that could lead Maisie to inquire if it did n't just meet one's idea of the Middle Ages; and since it was rather a satisfaction than a shock to perceive, and not for the first time, the limits, in Mrs. Wix's mind, of the historic imagination, that only added one more to the variety of kinds of insight that she felt it her own present mission to show. They sat together on the gray old bastion; they looked down on the little new town which seemed to them quite as old, and across at the great dome and the high gilt Virgin of the church that, as they gathered, was famous and that pleased them by its unlikeness to any place in which they had worshipped. They wandered in this temple afterwards, and Mrs. Wix confessed that for herself she had probably early in life made in not being a Catholic a fatal mistake. Her confession