There has been no end of THEM about--that I WILL say
for her!" Maisie felt bewildered and was afterwards for some time
conscious of a vagueness, just slightly embarrassing, as to the subject
of so much amusement and as to where her governess had really been.
She didn't feel at all as if she had been seriously told, and no such
feeling was supplied by anything that occurred later. Her embarrassment,
of a precocious instinctive order, attached itself to the idea that
this was another of the matters it was not for her, as her mother used
to say, to go into. Therefore, under her father's roof during the time
that followed, she made no attempt to clear up her ambiguity by an
ingratiating way with housemaids; and it was an odd truth that the
ambiguity itself took nothing from the fresh pleasure promised her by
renewed contact with Miss Overmore. The confidence looked for by that
young lady was of the fine sort that explanation can't improve, and she
herself at any rate was a person superior to any confusion. For Maisie
moreover concealment had never necessarily seemed deception; she had
grown up among things as to which her foremost knowledge was that
she was never to ask about them. It was far from new to her that the
questions of the small are the peculiar diversion of the great: except
the affairs of her doll Lisette there had scarcely ever been anything at
her mother's that was explicable with a grave face. Nothing was so easy
to her as to send the ladies who gathered there off into shrieks, and
she might have practised upon them largely if she had been of a more
calculating turn.
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