and
light their cigarettes; others, holding her on knees violently jolted,
pinched the calves of her legs till she shrieked--her shriek was much
admired--and reproached them with being toothpicks. The word stuck in
her mind and contributed to her feeling from this time that she was
deficient in something that would meet the general desire. She found
out what it was: it was a congenital tendency to the production of a
substance to which Moddle, her nurse, gave a short ugly name, a name
painfully associated at dinner with the part of the joint that she
didn't like. She had left behind her the time when she had no desires
to meet, none at least save Moddle's, who, in Kensington Gardens, was
always on the bench when she came back to see if she had been playing
too far. Moddle's desire was merely that she shouldn't do that, and she
met it so easily that the only spots in that long brightness were the
moments of her wondering what would become of her if, on her rushing
back, there should be no Moddle on the bench. They still went to the
Gardens, but there was a difference even there; she was impelled
perpetually to look at the legs of other children and ask her nurse if
THEY were toothpicks. Moddle was terribly truthful; she always said: "Oh
my dear, you'll not find such another pair as your own." It seemed to
have to do with something else that Moddle often said: "You feel the
strain--that's where it is; and you'll feel it still worse, you know."

Thus from the first Maisie not only felt it, but knew she felt it. A
part of it was the consequence of her father's telling her he felt it
too, and telling Moddle, in her presence, that she must make a point of
driving that home. She was familiar, at the age of six, with the fact
that everything had been changed on her account, everything ordered to
enable him to give himself up to her. She was to remember always the
words in which Moddle impressed upon her that he did so give himself:
"Your papa wishes you never to forget, you know, that he has been
dreadfully put about." If the skin on Moddle's face had to Maisie the
air of being unduly, almost painfully, stretched, it never presented
that appearance so much as when she uttered, as she often had occasion
to utter, such words. The child wondered if they didn't make it hurt
more than usual; but it was only after some time that she was able to
attach to the picture of her father's sufferings, and more particularly
to her nurse's man