Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/82

and also that at the end of three months the staircase, for a little girl hanging over banisters, sent up the deepening rustle of more delicate advances, everything made the same impression as before. Mrs. Beale had very pretty frocks, but Miss Overmore's had been quite as good; and if papa was much fonder of his second wife than he had been of his first, Maisie had foreseen that fondness and followed its development almost as closely as the victim of it. There was little indeed in the relations of her companions that her precocious experience couldn't explain; for if they struck her as, after all, rather deficient in that air of the honeymoon of which she had so often heard—in much detail, for instance, from Mrs. Wix—it was natural to judge this circumstance in the light of papa's proved disposition to contest the empire of the matrimonial tie. His honeymoon, when he came back from Brighton—not on the morrow of Mrs. Wix's visit and not, oddly, till several days later—his honeymoon was perhaps perceptibly tinged with the dawn of a later stage of wedlock. There were things as to which, for Mrs. Beale, as the child had learnt, his dislike would n't matter now, and their number increased so that such a trifle