What Maisie Knew | Page 2

system,
relieve at least one of the parents. This would make every time, for
Maisie, after her inevitable six months with Beale, much more of a
change.
"More of a change?" Ida cried. "Won't it be enough of a change for her
to come from that low brute to the person in the world who detests him
most?"

"No, because you detest him so much that you'll always talk to her
about him. You'll keep him before her by perpetually abusing him."
Mrs. Farange stared. "Pray, then, am I to do nothing to counteract his
villainous abuse of ME?"
The good lady, for a moment, made no reply: her silence was a grim
judgement of the whole point of view. "Poor little monkey!" she at last
exclaimed; and the words were an epitaph for the tomb of Maisie's
childhood. She was abandoned to her fate. What was clear to any
spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was this
lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little
porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. They had wanted
her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could,
with her unconscious aid, do each other. She should serve their anger
and seal their revenge, for husband and wife had been alike crippled by
the heavy hand of justice, which in the last resort met on neither side
their indignant claim to get, as they called it, everything. If each was
only to get half this seemed to concede that neither was so base as the
other pretended, or, to put it differently, offered them both as bad
indeed, since they were only as good as each other. The mother had
wished to prevent the father from, as she said, "so much as looking" at
the child; the father's plea was that the mother's lightest touch was
"simply contamination." These were the opposed principles in which
Maisie was to be educated--she was to fit them together as she might.
Nothing could have been more touching at first than her failure to
suspect the ordeal that awaited her little unspotted soul. There were
persons horrified to think what those in charge of it would combine to
try to make of it: no one could conceive in advance that they would be
able to make nothing ill. This was a society in which for the most part
people were occupied only with chatter, but the disunited couple had at
last grounds for expecting a time of high activity. They girded their
loins, they felt as if the quarrel had only begun. They felt indeed more
married than ever, inasmuch as what marriage had mainly suggested to
them was the unbroken opportunity to quarrel. There had been "sides"
before, and there were sides as much as ever; for the sider too the
prospect opened out, taking the pleasant form of a superabundance of

matter for desultory conversation. The many friends of the Faranges
drew together to differ about them; contradiction grew young again
over teacups and cigars. Everybody was always assuring everybody of
something very shocking, and nobody would have been jolly if nobody
had been outrageous. The pair appeared to have a social attraction
which failed merely as regards each other: it was indeed a great deal to
be able to say for Ida that no one but Beale desired her blood, and for
Beale that if he should ever have his eyes scratched out it would be
only by his wife. It was generally felt, to begin with, that they were
awfully good-looking--they had really not been analysed to a deeper
residuum. They made up together for instance some twelve feet three of
stature, and nothing was more discussed than the apportionment of this
quantity. The sole flaw in Ida's beauty was a length and reach of arm
conducive perhaps to her having so often beaten her ex-husband at
billiards, a game in which she showed a superiority largely accountable,
as she maintained, for the resentment finding expression in his physical
violence. Billiards was her great accomplishment and the distinction
her name always first produced the mention of. Notwithstanding some
very long lines everything about her that might have been large and that
in many women profited by the licence was, with a single exception,
admired and cited for its smallness. The exception was her eyes, which
might have been of mere regulation size, but which overstepped the
modesty of nature; her mouth, on the other hand, was barely perceptible,
and odds were freely taken as to the measurement of her waist. She was
a person who, when she was out and she was always out--produced
everywhere a sense of having been seen often, the sense indeed of a