Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/361

Rh her relative. She was just, and partly for that very reason, Sir Claude's greatest intimate ("lady-intimate" was Maisie's term): so that what together they were, on Mrs. Wix's programme, to give up and break short off with was for one of them his particular favorite and for the other her father's wife. Strangely, indescribably, her perception of reasons kept pace with her sense of trouble; but there was something in her that without a supreme effort not to be shabby could not take the reasons for granted. What it comes to perhaps for ourselves is that, disinherited and denuded as we have seen her, there still lingered in her life an echo of parental influence—she was still reminiscent of one of the sacred lessons of home. It was the only one she retained, but luckily she retained it with force. She enjoyed, in a word, an ineffaceable view of the fact that there were things papa called mamma and mamma called papa a low sneak for doing or for not doing. Now this rich memory gave her a name that she dreaded to invite to the lips of Mrs. Beale; she would personally wince so just to hear it. The very sweetness of the foreign life she was steeped in added with each hour of