Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/172

158 "The handsomest woman in London, simply," Sir Claude gallantly replied. "Just as you 're the best little girl!"

Well, the handsomest woman in London gave herself up with tender, lustrous looks and every demonstration of fondness to a happiness at last recovered. There was almost as vivid a bloom in her maturity as in mamma's, and it took her but a short time to give her little friend an impression of positive power—an impression that opened up there like a new source of confidence. This was a perception on Maisie's part that neither mamma, nor Sir Claude, nor Mrs. Wix, with their immense and so varied respective attractions, had exactly kindled and that made an immediate difference when the talk, as it promptly did, began to turn to her father. Oh yes, Mr. Farange was a complication, but she saw now that he would not be one for his daughter. For Mrs. Beale certainly he was an immense one; she speedily made known as much: but Mrs. Beale from this moment presented herself to Maisie as a person to whom a great gift had come. The great gift was just for handling complications. Maisie observed how little she made of them when,