Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/191

Rh "And what has she told you?"

"That you 're as bad as you 're beautiful."

"Is that what she says?"

"Those very words."

"Ah, the dear old soul!" Sir Claude was much diverted, and his loud, clear laugh was all his explanation. Those were just the words Maisie had last heard him use about Mrs. Wix. She clung to his hand, which was encased in a pearl-gray glove ornamented with the thick black lines that, at her mother's, always used to strike her as connected with the way the bestitched fists of the long ladies carried, with the elbows well out, their umbrellas upside down. The mere sense of it in her own covered the ground of loss just as much as the ground of gain. His presence was like an object brought so close to her face that she could n't see round its edges. He himself, however, remained showman of the spectacle even after they had passed out of the park and begun, under the charm of the spot and the season, to stroll in Kensington Gardens. What they had left behind them was, as he said, only a pretty bad circus, and, through engaging gates and over a bridge, they had come in a quarter of an hour, as he also remarked, a hundred