I never was in such a tight place: please believe
it's only that that makes me put it to you as I do. My dear child, isn't
that--to put it so--just the way out of it? That came to me yesterday,
in London, after Mrs. Beale had gone: I had the most infernal atrocious
day. 'Go straight over and put it to her: let her choose, freely, her
own self.' So I do, old girl--I put it to you. CAN you choose freely?"
This long address, slowly and brokenly uttered, with fidgets and
falterings, with lapses and recoveries, with a mottled face and
embarrassed but supplicating eyes, reached the child from a quarter
so close that after the shock of the first sharpness she could see
intensely its direction and follow it from point to point; all the more
that it came back to the point at which it had started. There was a word
that had hummed all through it. "Do you call it a 'sacrifice'?"
"Of Mrs. Wix? I'll call it whatever YOU call it. I won't funk it--I
haven't, have I? I'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it
IS base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here
into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls to
betray her?"
"To betray her?"
"Well--to part with her."
Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the
most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"
"Back to London."
"But I mean what will she do?"
"Oh as for that I won't pretend I know. I don't.
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