Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/401

while her sole surviving parent fairly chattered to her governess, left Maisie rather wondering if her governess would hold out. It was strange, but she became on the spot quite as interested in Mrs. Wix's moral sense as Mrs. Wix could possibly be in hers: it had risen before her so pressingly that there was something new for Mrs. Wix to resist. Resisting Mrs. Beale herself promised at this rate to become a very different business from resisting Sir Claude's view of her. More might come of what had happened—whatever it was—than Maisie felt she could have expected. She put it together with a suspicion that, had she ever in her life had a sovereign changed, would have resembled an impression, baffled by the want of arithmetic, that her change was wrong—she groped about in it that she had perhaps become the victim of a violent substitution. A victim was what she should surely be if the issue between her step-parents had been settled by Mrs. Beale' s saying: "Well, if she can live with but one of us alone, with which in the world should it be but me?" That answer was far from what, for days, she had nursed herself in, and the desolation of it was deepened by the absence of any-