Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/272

258 visitor had set Susan in motion and laid his hand, while she waited with him, kindly on her own. That was what the Captain in Kensington Gardens had done; her present situation reminded her a little of that one, and renewed the dim wonder of the way in which, from the first, such pats and pulls had struck her as the steps and signs of other people's business and even a little as the wriggle or the overflow of their difficulties. What had failed her and what had frightened her on the night of the Exhibition lost themselves at present alike in the impression that what would come from Sir Claude was too big to come all at once. Any awe that might have sprung from his air of leaving out her stepmother was corrected by the force of a general rule, the odd truth that if Mrs. Beale now never came nor went without making her think of him, it was not, to balance that, the main character of his own contact to appear to be a reference to Mrs. Beale. To be with Sir Claude was to think of Sir Claude, and that law governed Maisie's mind until, through a sudden lurch of the cab, which had at last taken in Susan and ever so many bundles and almost reached Charing Cross, it popped again somehow