Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/45

erable white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner of which the poor lady appeared not yet to have recognized the supersession, with a glossy braid, like a large diadem, on the top of her head, and behind, at the nape of the neck, a dingy rosette like a large button. She wore glasses which, in humble reference to a divergent obliquity of vision, she called her straighteners, and a little ugly snuff-colored dress, trimmed with satin bands in the form of scallops and glazed with antiquity. The straighteners, she explained to Maisie, were put on for the sake of others, whom, as she believed, they helped to recognize the direction, otherwise misleading, of her glance. The rest of the melancholy attire could only have been put on for herself. With the added suggestion of her goggles it reminded her pupil of the polished shell or corselet of a horrid beetle. At first she had looked cross and almost cruel; but this impression passed away with the child's increased perception of her being, in the eyes of the world, a figure mainly for laughter. She was passively comical—a person whom people, to make talk lively, described to each other and imitated. Every one knew