Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/84

70 emboldened Maisie to put in a word for Mrs. Wix, the modest measure of whose avidity she had taken from the first; but Mrs. Beale disposed afresh and effectually of a candidate who would be sure to act in some horrible and insidious way in Ida's interest and who moreover was personally loathsome and as ignorant as a fish. She made also no less of a secret of the awkward fact that a good school would be hideously expensive, and of the further circumstance, which seemed to put an end to everything, that when it came to the point papa, in spite of his previous clamor, was really most nasty about paying. "Would you believe," Mrs. Beale confidentially asked of her little charge, "that he says I 'm a worse expense than ever and that a daughter and a wife together are really more than he can afford?" It was thus that the splendid school at Brighton lost itself in the haze of larger questions, though the fear that it would provoke Ida to leap into the breach subsided with her prolonged, her quite shameless non-appearance. Her daughter and her successor were therefore left to gaze in united but helpless blankness at all that Maisie was not learning.

This quantity was so great as to fill the