Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/362

348 Sir Claude's absence to the possibility of such pangs. She watched beside Mrs. Wix the great golden Madonna, and one of the earringed old women who had been sitting at the end of their bench got up and pottered away. "Adieu, mesdames!" said the old woman in a little cracked, civil voice—a demonstration by which our friends were so affected that they bobbed up and almost courtesied to her. They subsided again, and it was shortly after, in a summer hum of French insects and a phase of almost somnolent reverie, that Maisie most had the vision of what it was to shut out from such a perspective so appealing a participant. It had not yet appeared so vast as at that moment, this prospect of statues shining in the blue and of courtesy in romantic forms.

"Why, after all, should we have to choose between you? Why should n't we be four?" she finally demanded.

Mrs. Wix gave the jerk of a sleeper awakened, or the start even of one who hears a bullet whiz at a flag of truce; her stupefaction at such a breach of the peace delayed for a moment her answer. "Four improprieties, do you mean? Because two of us happen to be decent people! Do I gather you