a danger. Hadn’t she lived with her eyes
on it from her third year? It was the condition
most frequently discussed at the Faranges’, where
the word was always in the air and where at the age
of five, amid rounds of applause, she could gabble
it off. She knew as well in short that a person
could be compromised as that a person could be slapped
with a hair-brush or left alone in the dark, and it
was equally familiar to her that each of these ordeals
was in general held to have too little effect.
But the first thing was to make absolutely sure of
Mrs. Beale. This was done by saying to her thoughtfully:
“Well, if you don’t mind—and
you really don’t, do you?”
Mrs. Beale, with a dawn of amusement, considered.
“Mixing you up? Not a bit. For what
does it mean?”
“Whatever it means I don’t in the least
mind being mixed. Therefore if you don’t
and I don’t,” Maisie concluded, “don’t
you think that when I see him this evening I had better
just tell him we don’t and ask him why in the
world he should?”
The child, however, was not destined to enjoy much
of Sir Claude at the “thingumbob,” which
took for them a very different turn indeed. On
the spot Mrs. Beale, with hilarity, had urged her
to the course proposed; but later, at the Exhibition,
she withdrew this allowance, mentioning as a result
of second thoughts that when a man was so sensitive
anything at all frisky usually made him worse.
It would have been hard indeed for Sir Claude to be
“worse,” Maisie felt, as, in the gardens
and the crowd, when the first dazzle had dropped,
she looked for him in vain up and down. They
had all their time, the couple, for frugal wistful
wandering: they had partaken together at home
of the light vague meal—Maisie’s
name for it was a “jam-supper”—to
which they were reduced when Mr. Farange sought his
pleasure abroad. It was abroad now entirely that
Mr. Farange pursued this ideal, and it was the actual
impression of his daughter, derived from his wife,
that he had three days before joined a friend’s
yacht at Cowes.
The place was full of side-shows, to which Mrs. Beale
could introduce the little girl only, alas, by revealing
to her so attractive, so enthralling a name:
the side-shows, each time, were sixpence apiece, and
the fond allegiance enjoyed by the elder of our pair
had been established from the earliest time in spite
of a paucity of sixpences. Small coin dropped
from her as half-heartedly as answers from bad children
to lessons that had not been looked at. Maisie
passed more slowly the great painted posters, pressing
with a linked arm closer to her friend’s pocket,
where she hoped for the audible chink of a shilling.
But the upshot of this was but to deepen her yearning:
if Sir Claude would only at last come the shillings
would begin to ring. The companions paused, for
want of one, before the Flowers of the Forest, a large
