Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/154

140 with which he had greeted the proposal that he should set up another establishment. Maisie felt that if their maintenance should hang but by a thread they must still demean themselves with the highest delicacy. What he was doing was simply acting without delay, so far as his embarrassments permitted, on the inspiration of his elder friend. There was at this season a wonderful month of May—as soft as a drop of the wind in a gale that had kept one awake—when he took out his stepdaughter with a fresh alacrity and they rambled the great town in search, as Mrs. Wix called it, of combined amusement and instruction.

They rode on the top of 'busses; they visited outlying parks; they went to cricket-matches where Maisie fell asleep; they tried a hundred places for the best one to have tea: this was his direct way of rising to Mrs. Wix's admirable lesson of making his little accepted charge his duty and his life. They dropped, under incontrollable impulses, into shops that they agreed were too big, to look at things that they agreed were too small, and it was during these hours that Mrs. Wix, alone at home, but a subject of regretful reference as they pulled off their