Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/156

142 he would recognize it as an obligation of plain decency to protect his wife against the outrage of that person's barefaced attempt to swindle her. The swindle was that Mr. Farange put upon her the whole intolerable burden; "and even when I pay for you myself," Sir Claude averred to his young friend, "she accuses me the more of truckling and grovelling." It was Mrs. Wix's conviction, they both knew, arrived at on independent grounds, that Ida's weekly excursions were feelers for a more considerable absence. If she came back later each week the week would be sure to arrive when she would n't come back at all. This appearance had of course much to do with Mrs. Wix's actual valor. Could they but hold out long enough the snug little home with Sir Claude would find itself informally constituted.

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might moreover have been taken to be the sense of a remark made by her stepfather as—one rainy day when the streets were all splash and two umbrellas unsociable and the wanderers had sought shelter in the