Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/85

child's days with a sense of intermission to which even French Lisette gave no accent—with finished games and unanswered questions and dreaded tests; with the habit, above all, in her watch for a change, of hanging over banisters when the door-bell sounded. This was the great refuge of her impatience, but what she heard at such times was a clatter of gayety downstairs; the impression of which, from her earliest childhood, had built up in her the belief that the grown-up time was the time of real amusement and, above all, of real intimacy. Even Lisette, even Mrs. Wix had never, she felt, in spite of hugs and tears, been so intimate with her as so many persons at present were with Mrs. Beale and as so many others of old had been with Mrs. Farange. The note of hilarity brought people together still more than the note of melancholy, which was the one exclusively sounded, for instance, by poor Mrs. Wix. Maisie, in these days, preferred none the less that domestic revels should be wafted to her from a distance; she felt sadly unsupported for facing the interrogatory of the drawing-room. That was a reason the more for making the most of Susan Ash, who, in her quality of under-