“Edward, I hate you,” said Maisie, and she thought she did.
But when all the beautiful new clothes were packed and her cab was at the door, some sense of what she was leaving did come to the girl, and she flung her arms round her mother in an embrace such as she had never given in her life.
“I don’t want to go,” she cried. “Mummy darling, I’ve been a little beast about it. I won’t go if you say you’d rather not. Shall I send the cab away? I will if you say so, my own dear old Mummy!”
Maisie’s mother was not a very wise woman, but she was not fool enough to trust this new softness.
“No, no, dearest,” she said; “go and try your own way. God bless you, my darling! You’ll miss the train if you stay. God bless you, my darling!”
And Maisie went away crying hard through the new veil with the black velvet spots on it; as for the mother—but she was elderly, and plain, and foolishly fond, and her emotions can have but little interest for the readers of romances.
And now Maisie, for the first time, knew the meaning of home. And before she had been at Yalding a week she had learned to analyse home and to give names to its constituents: love, interest, sympathy, liberty—these were some.
At Yalding Towers Maisie was nothing to any one. No one knew or cared one single little bit of a straw whether she was unhappy or no. Her time was filled, and overfilled, by the attentions exacted by an old, eccentric, and very disagreeable lady. When she put on, for the first evening, the least pretty of the pretty dresses she had brought with her, the old lady looked at her with a disapproval almost rising to repulsion, and said: “I expect you to wear black; and a linen collar and cuffs.”
So another black dress had to be ordered from home, and all the pretty, dainty things lay creasing themselves with disuse in the ample drawers and cupboards of her vast, dreary bedroom.
Her employer was exacting and irritable. When on the third day Maisie broke into tears under the constant flood of nagging, the old lady told her to go away and not to come back till she could control her temper.