She had not had governesses for nothing: what
in the world had she ever done but learn and learn and learn? She looked
at the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she soon should have
learnt All. They lingered in the flushed air till at last it turned
to grey and she seemed fairly to receive new information from every
brush of the breeze. By the time they moved homeward it was as if this
inevitability had become for Mrs. Wix a long, tense cord, twitched by
a nervous hand, on which the valued pearls of intelligence were to be
neatly strung.
In the evening upstairs they had another strange sensation, as to which
Maisie couldn't afterwards have told you whether it was bang in the
middle or quite at the beginning that her companion sounded with fresh
emphasis the note of the moral sense. What mattered was merely that she
did exclaim, and again, as at first appeared, most disconnectedly: "God
help me, it does seem to peep out!" Oh the queer confusions that had
wooed it at last to such peeping! None so queer, however, as the words
of woe, and it might verily be said of rage, in which the poor lady
bewailed the tragic end of her own rich ignorance. There was a point at
which she seized the child and hugged her as close as in the old days of
partings and returns; at which she was visibly at a loss how to make up
to such a victim for such contaminations: appealing, as to what she had
done and was doing, in bewilderment, in explanation, in supplication,
for reassurance, for pardon and even outright for pity.
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