They had
wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they
could, with her unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve
their anger and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been
alike crippled by the heavy hand of justice, which in the last resort
met on neither side their indignant claim to get, as they called it,
everything. If each was only to get half this seemed to concede that
neither was so base as the other pretended, or, to put it differently,
offered them both as bad indeed, since they were only as good as each
other. The mother had wished to prevent the father from, as she said,
"so much as looking" at the child; the father's plea was that the
mother's lightest touch was "simply contamination." These were the
opposed principles in which Maisie was to be educated--she was to fit
them together as she might. Nothing could have been more touching at
first than her failure to suspect the ordeal that awaited her little
unspotted soul. There were persons horrified to think what those in
charge of it would combine to try to make of it: no one could conceive
in advance that they would be able to make nothing ill.
This was a society in which for the most part people were occupied
only with chatter, but the disunited couple had at last grounds for
expecting a time of high activity. They girded their loins, they felt
as if the quarrel had only begun. They felt indeed more married than
ever, inasmuch as what marriage had mainly suggested to them was the
unbroken opportunity to quarrel.
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