Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/375

not sure that Maisie had not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development: nothing could have been more marked, for instance, than her success in promoting Mrs. Beale's. She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs. Wix, had been the successive stages of her knowledge, so the very climax of the concatenation would, in the same view, be the stage at which the knowledge should overflow. As she was condemned to know more and more, how could it logically stop before she should know Most? It came to her, in fact, as they sat there on the sands, that she was distinctly on the road to know Everything. She had not had governesses for nothing: what in the world had she ever done but learn and learn and learn? She looked at the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she soon would have learnt All. They lingered in the flushed air till at last it turned to gray and she seemed fairly to receive new information from every brush of the breeze. By the time they moved homeward it was as if, for Mrs. Wix, this inevitability had become a long,