Chapter 3

She was therefore all the more startled when her mother said to her in
connexion with something to be done before her next migration: "You
understand of course that she's not going with you."

Maisie turned quite faint. "Oh I thought she was."

"It doesn't in the least matter, you know, what you think," Mrs. Farange
loudly replied; "and you had better indeed for the future, miss, learn
to keep your thoughts to yourself." This was exactly what Maisie had
already learned, and the accomplishment was just the source of her
mother's irritation. It was of a horrid little critical system, a
tendency, in her silence, to judge her elders, that this lady suspected
her, liking as she did, for her own part, a child to be simple and
confiding. She liked also to hear the report of the whacks she
administered to Mr. Farange's character, to his pretensions to peace
of mind: the satisfaction of dealing them diminished when nothing came
back. The day was at hand, and she saw it, when she should feel more
delight in hurling Maisie at him than in snatching her away; so much so
that her conscience winced under the acuteness of a candid friend who
had remarked that the real end of all their tugging would be that each
parent would try to make the little girl a burden to the other--a sort
of game in which a fond mother clearly wouldn't show to advantage. The
prospect of not showing to advantage, a distinction in which she held
she had never failed, begot in Ida Farange an ill humour of which
several persons felt the effect. She determined that Beale at any rate
should feel it; she reflected afresh that in the study of how to be
odious to him she must never give way. Nothing could incommode him more
than not to get the good, for the child, of a nice female appendage who
had clearly taken a fancy to her. One of the things Ida said to the
appendage was that Beale's was a house in which no decent woman could
consent to be seen. It was Miss Overmore herself who explained to
Maisie that she had had a hope of being allowed to accompany her to her
father's, and that this hope had been dashed by the way her mother took
it. "She says that if I ever do such a thing as enter his service I must
never expect to show my face in this house again. So I've promised not
to attempt to go with you. If I wait patiently till you come back here
we shall certainly be together once more."

Waiting patiently, and above all waiting till she should come back
there, seemed to Maisie a long way round--it reminded her of all the
things she had been told, first and last, that she should have if she'd
be good and that in spite of her goodness she had never had at all.
"Then who'll take care of me at