Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/224

210 other sex whom she appeared to feel at liberty to see at home, and when the child risked an inquiry about the ladies who one by one, during her own previous period, had been made quite loudly welcome, Mrs. Beale hastened to inform her that one by one they had, the fiends, been found out after all to be awful. If she wished to know more about them she was recommended to approach her father.

Maisie had, however, at the very moment of this injunction much livelier curiosities, for the dream of lectures at an institution had at last become a reality, thanks to Sir Claude's now unbounded energy in discovering what could be done. It appeared in this connection that when you came to look into things in a spirit of earnestness an immense deal could be done for very little more than your fare in the Underground. The institution—there was a splendid one in a part of the town but little known to the child—became in the glow of such a spirit a thrilling place, and the walk to it from the station through Glower Street—a pronunciation for which Mrs. Beale once laughed at her little friend—a pathway literally strewn with "subjects." Maisie seemed to herself to