interests in America and yet more the first flush
of that superiority to Mrs. Beale and to mamma which
had been expressed in Sevres sets and silver boxes.
These were still there, but perhaps there were no
great interests in America. Mamma had known an
American who was not a bit like this one. She
was not, however, of noble rank; her name was only
Mrs. Tucker. Maisie’s detachment would
none the less have been more complete if she had not
suddenly had to exclaim: “Oh dear, I haven’t
any money!”
Her father’s teeth, at this, were such a picture
of appetite without action as to be a match for any
plea of poverty. “Make your stepmother
pay.”
“Stepmothers don’t pay!” cried
the Countess. “No stepmother ever paid
in her life!” The next moment they were in the
street together, and the next the child was in the
cab, with the Countess, on the pavement, but close
to her, quickly taking money from a purse whisked out
of a pocket. Her father had vanished and there
was even yet nothing in that to reawaken the pang
of loss. “Here’s money,” said
the brown lady: “go!” The sound was
commanding: the cab rattled off. Maisie sat
there with her hand full of coin. All that for
a cab? As they passed a street-lamp she bent
to see how much. What she saw was a cluster of
sovereigns. There must then have been great
interests in America. It was still at any rate
the Arabian Nights.
The money was far too much even for a fee in a fairy-tale,
and in the absence of Mrs. Beale, who, though the
hour was now late, had not yet returned to the Regent’s
Park, Susan Ash, in the hall, as loud as Maisie was
low and as bold as she was bland, produced, on the
exhibition offered under the dim vigil of the lamp
that made the place a contrast to the child’s
recent scene of light, the half-crown that an unsophisticated
cabman could pronounce to be the least he would take.
It was apparently long before Mrs. Beale would arrive,
and in the interval Maisie had been induced by the
prompt Susan not only to go to bed like a darling
dear, but, in still richer expression of that character,
to devote to the repayment of obligations general
as well as particular one of the sovereigns in the
ordered array that, on the dressing-table upstairs,
was naturally not less dazzling to a lone orphan of
a housemaid than to the subject of the manoeuvres
of a quartette. This subject went to sleep with
her property gathered into a knotted handkerchief,
the largest that could be produced and lodged under
her pillow; but the explanations that on the morrow
were inevitably more complete with Mrs. Beale than
they had been with her humble friend found their climax
in a surrender also more becomingly free. There
were explanations indeed that Mrs. Beale had to give
as well as to ask, and the most striking of these
was to the effect that it was dreadful for a little
girl to take money from a woman who was simply the
