Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/313

Rh and ignorance and antagonism, that gave the liveliest rebound to her immediate perceptions and adoptions. The place and the people were all a picture together, a picture that, when they went down to the wide sands, shimmered, in a thousand tints, with the pretty organization of the plage, with the gayety of spectators and bathers, with that of the language and the weather, and above all with that of our young lady's unprecedented situation. For it appeared to her that no one, since the beginning of time, could have had such an adventure or, in an hour, so much experience; as a sequel to which she only needed, in order to feel with conscious wonder how the past was changed, to hear Susan, inscrutably aggravated, express a preference for the Edgware Road. The past was so changed and the circle it had formed already so overstepped that on that very afternoon, in the course of another walk, she found herself inquiring of Sir Claude—and without a single scruple—if he were prepared as yet to name the moment at which they should start for Paris. His answer, it must be said, gave her the least little chill.

"Oh, Paris, my dear child—I don't quite know about Paris!"