Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/395

Rh still honorably subordinate, if not too explicitly menial—an absolute coercion, an interested clutch, of the old woman's respectability. There was response, for Maisie's mind, I may say at once, in the jump of that respectability to its feet; it was itself capable of one of the leaps, one of the bounds just mentioned, and it carried its charge, with this momentum and while Mrs. Beale popped into Sir Claude's chamber, straight away to where, at the end of the passage, pupil and governess were quartered. The greatest stride of all, for that matter, was that within a few seconds the pupil had, in another relation, been converted into a daughter. Maisie's eyes were still following it when, after the rush, with the door almost slammed and no thought of soap and towels, the pair stood face to face. Mrs. Wix, in this position, was the first to gasp a sound. "Can it ever be that she has one?"

Maisie felt still more bewildered. "One what?"

"Why, moral sense."

They spoke as if you might have two, but Mrs. Wix looked as if it were not altogether a happy thought, and Maisie didn't see how even an affirmative from her own lips would