At this she bounded in her place. “Oh you
incredible little waif!” She brought it out
with a wail of violence; after which, with another
convulsion, she marched straight away.
Maisie dropped back on the bench and burst into sobs.
Nothing so dreadful of course could be final or even
for many minutes prolonged: they rushed together
again too soon for either to feel that either had
kept it up, and though they went home in silence it
was with a vivid perception for Maisie that her companion’s
hand had closed upon her. That hand had shown
altogether, these twenty-four hours, a new capacity
for closing, and one of the truths the child could
least resist was that a certain greatness had now
come to Mrs. Wix. The case was indeed that the
quality of her motive surpassed the sharpness of her
angles; both the combination and the singularity of
which things, when in the afternoon they used the
carriage, Maisie could borrow from the contemplative
hush of their grandeur the freedom to feel to the utmost.
She still bore the mark of the tone in which her friend
had thrown out that threat of never losing sight of
her. This friend had been converted in short
from feebleness to force; and it was the light of her
new authority that showed from how far she had come.
The threat in question, sharply exultant, might have
produced defiance; but before anything so ugly could
happen another process had insidiously forestalled
it. The moment at which this process had begun
to mature was that of Mrs. Wix’s breaking out
with a dignity attuned to their own apartments and
with an advantage now measurably gained. They
had ordered coffee after luncheon, in the spirit of
Sir Claude’s provision, and it was served to
them while they awaited their equipage in the white
and gold saloon. It was flanked moreover with
a couple of liqueurs, and Maisie felt that Sir Claude
could scarce have been taken more at his word had it
been followed by anecdotes and cigarettes. The
influence of these luxuries was at any rate in the
air. It seemed to her while she tiptoed at the
chimney-glass, pulling on her gloves and with a motion
of her head shaking a feather into place, to have
had something to do with Mrs. Wix’s suddenly
saying: “Haven’t you really and truly
any moral sense?”
Maisie was aware that her answer, though it brought
her down to her heels, was vague even to imbecility,
and that this was the first time she had appeared
to practise with Mrs. Wix an intellectual inaptitude
to meet her—the infirmity to which she
had owed so much success with papa and mamma.
The appearance did her injustice, for it was not less
through her candour than through her playfellow’s
pressure that after this the idea of a moral sense
mainly coloured their intercourse. She began,
the poor child, with scarcely knowing what it was;
but it proved something that, with scarce an outward
sign save her surrender to the swing of the carriage,
