"Younger than--no matter whom. I don't know anything about him and don't
want to," she rather inconsequently added. "He's not my sort, and I'm
sure, my own darling, he's not yours." And she repeated the free caress
into which her colloquies with Maisie almost always broke and which made
the child feel that HER affection at least was a gage of safety. Parents
had come to seem vague, but governesses were evidently to be trusted.
Maisie's faith in Mrs. Wix for instance had suffered no lapse from the
fact that all communication with her had temporarily dropped. During the
first weeks of their separation Clara Matilda's mamma had repeatedly and
dolefully written to her, and Maisie had answered with an enthusiasm
controlled only by orthographical doubts; but the correspondence had
been duly submitted to Miss Overmore, with the final effect of its not
suiting her. It was this lady's view that Mr. Farange wouldn't care for
it at all, and she ended by confessing--since her pupil pushed her--that
she didn't care for it herself. She was furiously jealous, she said; and
that weakness was but a new proof of her disinterested affection. She
pronounced Mrs. Wix's effusions moreover illiterate and unprofitable;
she made no scruple of declaring it monstrous that a woman in her
senses should have placed the formation of her daughter's mind in such
ridiculous hands. Maisie was well aware that the proprietress of the old
brown dress and the old odd headgear was lower in the scale of "form"
than Miss Overmore; but it was now brought home to her with pain that
she was educationally quite out of the question. She was buried for the
time beneath a conclusive remark of her critic's: "She's really beyond a
joke!" This remark was made as that charming woman held in her hand the
last letter that Maisie was to receive from Mrs. Wix; it was fortified
by a decree proscribing the preposterous tie. "Must I then write and
tell her?" the child bewilderedly asked: she grew pale at the dreadful
things it appeared involved for her to say. "Don't dream of it, my