Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/472

458 hand, passed under her nose. Then it left her, and, as if she were sinking with a slip from a foothold, her arms made a short jerk. What this jerk represented was the spasm within her of something still deeper than a moral sense. She looked at her examiner; she looked at the visitors; she felt the rising of the tears she had kept down at the station. The only thing was the old flat, shameful schoolroom plea. "I don't know—I don't know."

"Then you 've lost it." Mrs. Wix seemed to close the book as she fixed the straighteners on Sir Claude. "You 've nipped it in the bud. You 've killed it when it had begun to live."

She was a newer Mrs. Wix than ever, a Mrs. Wix high and great; but Sir Claude was not after all to be treated as a little boy with a missed lesson. "I 've not killed anything," he said; "on the contrary, I think I 've produced life. I don't know what to call it—I have n't even known how decently to deal with it to approach it; but whatever it is it 's the most beautiful thing I 've ever met—it 's exquisite, it 's sacred." He had his hands in his pockets, and though a trace of the sickness he had just shown still