h support for her challenge. "Have you absolutely none at
all?"

She had no need now, as to the question itself at least, to be specific;
that on the other hand was the eventual result of their quiet conjoined
apprehension of the thing that--well, yes, since they must face
it--Maisie absolutely and appallingly had so little of. This marked more
particularly the moment of the child's perceiving that her friend had
risen to a level which might--till superseded at all events--pass almost
for sublime. Nothing more remarkable had taken place in the first heat
of her own departure, no act of perception less to be overtraced by our
rough method, than her vision, the rest of that Boulogne day, of the
manner in which she figured. I so despair of courting her noiseless
mental footsteps here that I must crudely give you my word for its being
from this time forward a picture literally present to her. Mrs. Wix
saw her as a little person knowing so extraordinarily much that, for
the account to be taken of it, what she still didn't know would be
ridiculous if it hadn't been embarrassing. Mrs. Wix was in truth more
than ever qualified to meet embarrassment; I am not sure that Maisie had
not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made
her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was
concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development; nothing could
have been more marked for instance than her success in promoting Mrs.
Beale's. She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs. Wix, had been
the successive stages of her knowledge, so the very climax of the
concatenation would, in the same view, be the stage at which the
knowledge should overflow. As she was condemned to know more and more,
how could it logically stop before she should know Most? It came to her
in fact as they sat there on the sands that she was distinctly on the
road to know Everything. She had not had governesses for nothing: what
in the world had she ever done but learn and learn and learn? She looked
at the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she soon should have
learnt All. They lingered in the flushed air till at last it turned
to grey and she seemed fairly to receive new information from every
brush of the breeze. By the time they moved homeward it was as if this
inevitability had become for Mrs. Wix a long, tense cord, twitched by
a nervous hand, on which the valued pearls of intelligence were to be
neatly strung.

In