Henry James

What Maisie Knew Henry James

In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a child's mind the past, on eachoccasion, became for her as indistinct as the future: she surrendered herself to the actual with a goodfaith that might have been touching to either parent. Crudely as they had calculated they were at firstjustified by the event: she was the little feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying betweenthem. The evil they had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other they poured intoher little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the bestconscience in the world as to the duty of teaching her the stern truth that should be her safeguardagainst the other. She was at the age for which all stories are true and all conceptions are stories. Theactual was the absolute, the present alone was vivid. The objurgation for instance launched in thecarriage by her mother after she had at her father's bidding punctually performed was a missive thatdropped into her memory with the dry rattle of a letter falling into a pillar-box. Like the letter it was, as part of the contents of a well-stuffed post-bag, delivered in due course at the right address. In thepresence of these overflowings, after they had continued for a couple of years, the associates ofeither party sometimes felt that something should be done for what they called "the real good, don'tyou know?" of the child. The only thing done, however, in general, took place when it was sighinglyremarked that she fortunately wasn't all the year round where she happened to be at the awkwardmoment, and that, furthermore, either from extreme cunning or from extreme stupidity, sheappeared not to take things in