Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/278

264 would be appalling to analyze. If Mrs. Wix, however, ultimately appalled, had now set her heart on strong measures, Maisie, as I have intimated, could also work round both to the reasons for them and to the quite other reasons for that lady's not, as yet at least, appearing in them at first hand.

Oh, decidedly, I shall never get you to believe the number of things she saw and the number of secrets she discovered! Why in the world, for instance, could n't Sir Claude have kept it from her—except on the hypothesis of his not caring to—that, when you came to look at it and so far as it was a question of vested interests, he had quite as much right in her as her stepmother, and a right that Mrs. Beale was in no position to dispute? He failed, at all events, of any such successful ambiguity as could keep her, when once they began to look across at France, from regarding even what was least explained as most in the spirit of their old happy times, their rambles and expeditions in the easier, better days of their first acquaintance. Never before had she had so the sense of giving him a lead for the sort of treatment of what was between them that would best carry it off, or of his being