She was now old enough to understand how disproportionate a stay she had
already made with her father; and also old enough to enter a little into
the ambiguity attending this excess, which oppressed her particularly
whenever the question had been touched upon in talk with her governess.
"Oh you needn't worry: she doesn't care!" Miss Overmore had often
said to her in reference to any fear that her mother might resent her
prolonged detention. "She has other people than poor little YOU to
think about, and has gone abroad with them; so you needn't be in the
least afraid she'll stickle this time for her rights." Maisie knew Mrs.
Farange had gone abroad, for she had had weeks and weeks before a letter
from her beginning "My precious pet" and taking leave of her for an
indeterminate time; but she had not seen in it a renunciation of hatred
or of the writer's policy of asserting herself, for the sharpest of all
her impressions had been that there was nothing her mother would ever
care so much about as to torment Mr. Farange. What at last, however, was
in this connexion bewildering and a little frightening was the dawn of a
suspicion that a better way had been found to torment Mr. Farange than
to deprive him of his periodical burden. This was the question that
worried our young lady and that Miss Overmore's confidences and the
frequent observations of her employer only rendered more mystifying. It
was a contradiction that if Ida had now a fancy for waiving the rights
she had originally been so hot about her late husband shouldn't jump at
the monopoly for which he had also in the first instance so fiercely
fought; but when Maisie, with a subtlety beyond her years, sounded this
new ground her main success was in hearing her mother more freshly
abused.
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