Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/259

Rh that she may pile up her wrongs and things. She 'll be as free as she likes then—as free, you see, as your mother's ass of a husband. They won't have anything more to consider, and they 'll just put you into the street. Do I understand," Beale inquired, "that, in the face of what I press upon you, you still prefer to take the risk of that?" It was the most wonderful appeal any gentleman had ever addressed to his daughter, and it had placed Maisie in the middle of the room again, while her father moved slowly about her with his hands in his pockets and something in his step that seemed, more than anything else he had done, to show the habit of the place. She turned her fevered little eyes over his friend's brightnesses, as if, on her own side, to press for some help in a quandary unexampled. As if, also, the pressure reached him, he after an instant stopped short, completing the prodigy of his attitude and the grace of his loyalty by a supreme formulation of the general inducement. "You have an eye, love! Yes—there 's money. No end of money."

This affected her for a moment like some great flashing dazzle in one of the pantomimes to which Sir Claude had taken her: