Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/101

Rh all about Sir Claude; and yet she never really mentioned to Mrs. Wix that she was prepared, under his inspiring injunction, to be vainly tortured. This lady, however, had formulated the position of things with an acuteness that showed how little she needed to be coached. Her explanations of everything that seemed not quite pleasant—and if her own footing was perilous it met that danger as well—was that her ladyship was passionately in love. Maisie accepted this hint with infinite awe and pressed upon it much when she was at last summoned into the presence of her mother.

There she encountered matters in which it seemed really to help to give her a clew—an almost terrifying strangeness, full, none the less, after a little, of reverberations of Ida's old fierce, demonstrative recoveries of possession. They had been some time in the house together, and this demonstration came late; preoccupied, however, as Maisie was with the idea of the sentiment Sir Claude had inspired, and familiar, in addition, by Mrs. Wix's anecdotes, with the ravages that, in general, such a sentiment could produce, she was able to make allowances for her ladyship's remarkable