Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/414

400 and mute, in the white old face, which produced the effect of a want of decision greater than could by any stretch of optimism have been associated with her attitude toward what had happened. For Maisie herself indeed what had happened was, oddly, as she could feel, less of a simple rapture than any arrival or return of the same supreme friend had ever been before. What had become overnight, what had become while she slept, of the comfortable faculty of gladness? She tried to wake it up a little wider by talking, by rejoicing, by plunging into water and into clothes, and she made out that it was ten o'clock, but also that Mrs. Wix had not yet breakfasted. The day before, at nine, they had had together a café complet in their sitting-room. Mrs. Wix, on her side, had evidently also a refuge to seek. She sought it in checking the precipitation of some of her pupil's present steps, in recalling to her, with an approach to sternness, that of all such preparations ablutions should be the most thorough, and in throwing even a certain reprobation on the idea of hurrying into clothes for the sake of a mere stepfather. She took her in fact, with a sort