Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/86

72, moved at a very different level and who, none the less, was much depended upon out of doors. She was a guide to peregrinations that had little in common with those intensely definite airings that had left with the child a vivid memory of the regulated mind of Moddle. There were under Moddle' s system no dawdles at shopwindows and no nudges, in Oxford Street, of "I say, look at 'er!" There was an inexorable treatment of crossings and a serene exemption from the fear that—especially at corners, of which she was yet weakly fond—haunted the housemaid, the fear of being, as she ominously said, "spoken to." The dangers of the town, equally with its diversions, added to Maisie's sense of being untutored and unclaimed.

The situation, however, had taken a twist when, on another of her returns, at Susan's side, extremely tired, from the pursuit of exercise qualified by much hovering, she encountered another emotion. She on this occasion learnt at the door that her instant attendance was requested in the drawing-room. Crossing the threshold in a cloud of shame she discerned through the blur Mrs. Beale seated there with a gentleman who