Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/338

324 her reach that Maisie sought to divert her by a report of Susan's quaint attitude toward what they had talked of after lunch. Maisie had mentioned to the young woman, for sympathy's sake, the plan for her relief; but her disapproval of alien ways appeared, strange to say, only to prompt her to hug her gloom; so that, between Mrs. Wix's effect of displacing her and the visible stiffening of her back, the child had the sense of a double office, an enlarged play for pacific powers.

These powers played to no great purpose, it was true, in keeping before Mrs. Wix the vision of Sir Claude's perversity, which hung there in the pauses of talk and which he himself, after unmistakable delays, finally made quite lurid by bursting in—it was near ten o'clock—with an object held up in his hand. She knew before he spoke what it was; she knew at least from the underlying sense of all that, since the hour spent after the Exhibition with her father, had not sprung up to reinstate Mr. Farange—she knew it meant a triumph for Mrs. Beale. The mere present sight of Sir Claude's face caused her, on the spot, to drop straight through her last impression of Mr. Farange a