Chapter 21 - Page 2

betray that she quite did think her wretched offspring
better placed with Sir Claude than in her own soiled hands. There was at
any rate nothing scant either in her admissions or her perversions, the
mixture of her fear of what Maisie might undiscoverably think and of the
support she at the same time gathered from a necessity of selfishness
and a habit of brutality. This habit flushed through the merit she now
made, in terms explicit, of not having come to Folkestone to kick up a
vulgar row. She had not come to box any ears or to bang any doors or
even to use any language: she had come at the worst to lose the thread
of her argument in an occasional dumb disgusted twitch of the toggery in
which Mrs. Beale's low domestic had had the impudence to serve up Miss
Farange. She checked all criticism, not committing herself even so far
as for those missing comforts of the schoolroom on which Mrs. Wix had
presumed.

"I AM good--I'm crazily, I'm criminally good. But it won't do for YOU
any more, and if I've ceased to contend with him, and with you too, who
have made most of the trouble between us, it's for reasons that you'll
understand one of these days but too well--one of these days when I
hope you'll know what it is to have lost a mother. I'm awfully ill, but
you mustn't ask me anything about it. If I don't get off somewhere my
doctor won't answer for the consequences. He's stupefied at what I've
borne--he says it has been put on me because I was formed to suffer. I'm
thinking of South Africa, but that's none of your business. You must
take your choice--you can't ask me questions if you're so ready to
give me up. No, I won't tell you; you can find out for yourself. South
Africa's wonderful, they say, and if I do go it must be to give it a
fair trial. It must be either one thing or the other; if he takes you,
you know, he takes you. I've struck my last blow for you; I can follow
you no longer from pillar to post. I must live for myself at last, while
there's still a handful left of me. I'm very, very ill; I'm very, very
tired; I'm very, very determined. There you have it. Make the most of
it. Your frock's too filthy; but I came to sacrifice myself." Maisie
looked at the peccant places; there were moments when it was a relief to
her to drop her eyes even on anything so sordid. All her interviews, all
her ordeals with her mother had, as she had grown older, seemed to have,
before any other, the hard quality of duration; but longer than any,
strangely, were these minutes offered to her as so pacific and so
agreeably winding up the connexion. It was her anxiety that made them
long, her fear of some hitch, some check of the current, one of her
ladyship's famous quick jumps. She held her breath; she only wanted,