What Maisie Knew eBook

XXVIII

Mrs. Beale, at table between the pair, plainly attracted the attention Mrs. Wix had foretold.  No other lady present was nearly so handsome, nor did the beauty of any other accommodate itself with such art to the homage it produced.  She talked mainly to her other neighbour, and that left Maisie leisure both to note the manner in which eyes were riveted and nudges interchanged, and to lose herself in the meanings that, dimly as yet and disconnectedly, but with a vividness that fed apprehension, she could begin to read into her stepmother’s independent move.  Mrs. Wix had helped her by talking of a game; it was a connexion in which the move could put on a strategic air.  Her notions of diplomacy were thin, but it was a kind of cold diplomatic shoulder and an elbow of more than usual point that, temporarily at least, were presented to her by the averted inclination of Mrs. Beale’s head.  There was a phrase familiar to Maisie, so often was it used by this lady to express the idea of one’s getting what one wanted:  one got it—­Mrs.

Beale always said SHE at all events always got it or proposed to get it—­by “making love.”  She was at present making love, singular as it appeared, to Mrs. Wix, and her young friend’s mind had never moved in such freedom as on thus finding itself face to face with the question of what she wanted to get.  This period of the omelette aux rognons and the poulet saute, while her sole surviving parent, her fourth, fairly chattered to her governess, left Maisie rather wondering if her governess would hold out.  It was strange, but she became on the spot quite as interested in Mrs. Wix’s moral sense as Mrs. Wix could possibly be in hers:  it had risen before her so pressingly that this was something new for Mrs. Wix to resist.  Resisting Mrs. Beale herself promised at such a rate to become a very different business from resisting Sir Claude’s view of her.  More might come of what had happened—­whatever it was—­than Maisie felt she could have expected.  She put it together with a suspicion that, had she ever in her life had a sovereign changed, would have resembled an impression, baffled by the want of arithmetic, that her change was wrong:  she groped about in it that she was perhaps playing the passive part in a case of violent substitution.  A victim was what she should surely be if the issue between her step-parents had been settled by Mrs. Beale’s saying:  “Well, if she can live with but one of us alone, with which in the world should it be but me?” That answer was far from what, for days, she had nursed herself in, and the desolation of it was deepened by the absence of anything from Sir Claude to show he had not had to take it as triumphant.  Had not Mrs. Beale, upstairs, as good as given out that she had quitted him with the snap of a tension, left him, dropped him in London, after some struggle as a sequel to which her own advent represented that