It continued to rain so hard that our young lady’s
private dream of explaining the Continent to their
visitor had to contain a provision for some adequate
treatment of the weather. At the table d’hote
that evening she threw out a variety of lights:
this was the second ceremony of the sort she had sat
through, and she would have neglected her privilege
and dishonoured her vocabulary—which indeed
consisted mainly of the names of dishes—if
she had not been proportionately ready to dazzle with
interpretations. Preoccupied and overawed, Mrs.
Wix was apparently dim: she accepted her pupil’s
version of the mysteries of the menu in a manner that
might have struck the child as the depression of a
credulity conscious not so much of its needs as of
its dimensions. Maisie was soon enough—though
it scarce happened before bedtime—confronted
again with the different sort of programme for which
she reserved her criticism. They remounted together
to their sitting-room while Sir Claude, who said he
would join them later, remained below to smoke and
to converse with the old acquaintances that he met
wherever he turned. He had proposed his companions,
for coffee, the enjoyment of the salon de lecture,
but Mrs. Wix had replied promptly and with something
of an air that it struck her their own apartments
offered them every convenience. They offered
the good lady herself, Maisie could immediately observe,
not only that of this rather grand reference, which,
already emulous, so far as it went, of her pupil,
she made as if she had spent her life in salons; but
that of a stiff French sofa where she could sit and
stare at the faint French lamp, in default of the
French clock that had stopped, as for some account
of the time Sir Claude would so markedly interpose.
Her demeanour accused him so directly of hovering beyond
her reach that Maisie sought to divert her by a report
of Susan’s quaint attitude on the matter of
their conversation after lunch. Maisie had mentioned
to the young woman for sympathy’s sake the plan
for her relief, but her disapproval of alien ways
appeared, strange to say, only to prompt her to hug
her gloom; so that between Mrs.
Wix’s effect
of displacing her and the visible stiffening of her
back the child had the sense of a double office and
enlarged play for pacific powers.
These powers played to no great purpose, it was true,
in keeping before Mrs. Wix the vision of Sir Claude’s
perversity, which hung there in the pauses of talk
and which he himself, after unmistakeable delays, finally
made quite lurid by bursting in—it was near
ten o’clock—with an object held up
in his hand. She knew before he spoke what it
was; she knew at least from the underlying sense of
all that, since the hour spent after the Exhibition
with her father, had not sprung up to reinstate Mr.
Farange—she knew it meant a triumph for
Mrs. Beale. The mere present sight of Sir Claude’s
Copyrights
What Maisie Knew from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
