Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/106

92 the games they always replied "Oh, immensely!" but they had earnest discussions as to whether they hadn't better appeal to him frankly for aid to understand them. This was a course their delicacy shrank from; they couldn't have told exactly why, but it was a part of their tenderness for him not to let him think they had trouble. What dazzled most was his kindness to Mrs. Wix—not only the five-pound note and the "not forgetting her," but the perfect consideration, as she called it with an air to which her sounding of the words gave the only grandeur Maisie was to have seen her wear save on a certain occasion hereafter to be described—an occasion when the poor lady was grander than all of them put together. He shook hands with her, he recognized her, as she said, and, above all, more than once, he took her, with his stepdaughter, to the pantomime and, in the crowd, coming out, publicly gave her his arm. When he met them in sunny Piccadilly he made merry and turned and walked with them, heroically suppressing his consciousness of the stamp of his company; a gallantry that—needless for Mrs. Wix to sound those words—her ladyship, though