Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/103

Rh at the other house, between that horrible woman and Sir Claude; but it was also just here that the little girl was able to recall the effect with which, in earlier days, she had practised the pacific art of stupidity. This art again came to her aid; her mother, in getting rid of her after an interview in which she had achieved a vacancy beyond her years, allowed her fully to understand that she had not grown a bit more amusing.

She could bear that—she could bear anything that helped her to feel that she had done something for Sir Claude. If she hadn't told Mrs. Wix how Mrs. Beale seemed to like him she certainly couldn't tell her ladyship. In the way the past revived for her there was a queer confusion: it was because mamma hated papa that she used to want to know bad things of him, and if at present she wanted to know the same of Sir Claude it was quite from the opposite motive. She was awestruck at the manner in which a lady might be affected through the passion mentioned by Mrs. Wix: she held her breath with the sense of picking her steps among the tremendous things of life. What she did, however, now, after the interview with her mother, impart to Mrs. Wix was that