Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/336

322 failed of the particular virtue that was supposed most to mark a gentleman. In fact there were three of them if she counted in Mrs. Wix, before whom he had undeniably quailed. Well, his want of valor was but a deeper appeal to her tenderness. To thrill with response to it she had only to remember all the ladies she herself had, as they called it, funked.

 XXIV

continued to rain so hard that her fond private calculation of explaining the Continent to their visitor had to contain a proviso for some adequate treatment of the weather. At the table'd'hôte that evening she threw out a variety of lights: this was the second ceremony of the sort she had sat through, and she would have neglected her privilege and dishonored her vocabulary—which indeed consisted mainly of the names of dishes—if she had not been proportionately ready to dazzle with interpretations. Preoccupied and overawed, Mrs. Wix was comparatively dim: she accepted her pupil's version of the mysteries of the menu in a