Chapter 5

The second parting from Miss Overmore had been bad enough, but this
first parting from Mrs. Wix was much worse. The child had lately been to
the dentist's and had a term of comparison for the screwed-up intensity
of the scene. It was dreadfully silent, as it had been when her tooth
was taken out; Mrs. Wix had on that occasion grabbed her hand and they
had clung to each other with the frenzy of their determination not to
scream. Maisie, at the dentist's, had been heroically still, but just
when she felt most anguish had become aware of an audible shriek on the
part of her companion, a spasm of stifled sympathy. This was reproduced
by the only sound that broke their supreme embrace when, a month later,
the "arrangement," as her periodical uprootings were called, played the
part of the horrible forceps. Embedded in Mrs. Wix's nature as her tooth
had been socketed in her gum, the operation of extracting her would
really have been a case for chloroform. It was a hug that fortunately
left nothing to say, for the poor woman's want of words at such an
hour seemed to fall in with her want of everything. Maisie's alternate
parent, in the outermost vestibule--he liked the impertinence of
crossing as much as that of his late wife's threshold--stood over them
with his open watch and his still more open grin, while from the only
corner of an eye on which something of Mrs. Wix's didn't impinge the
child saw at the door a brougham in which Miss Overmore also waited.
She remembered the difference when, six months before, she had been
torn from the breast of that more spirited protectress. Miss Overmore,
then also in the vestibule, but of course in the other one, had been
thoroughly audible and voluble; her protest had rung out bravely and she
had declared that something--her pupil didn't know exactly what--was
a regular wicked shame. That had at the time dimly recalled to Maisie
the far-away moment of Moddle's great outbreak: there seemed always to
be "shames" connected in one way or another with her migrations. At
present, while Mrs. Wix's arms tightened and the smell of her hair was
strong, she further remembered how, in pacifying Miss Overmore, papa had
made use of the words "you dear old duck!"--an expression which, by its
oddity, had stuck fast in her young mind, having moreover a place well
prepared for it there by what she knew of the governess whom she now
always mentally characterised as the pretty one. She wondered whether
this affection would be as great as before: that would at all events be
the case with the prettiness Maisie could see in the face which showed
brightly at the window of the brougham.

The brougham was a token of harmony, of the fine conditions papa would
this time offer: