don't like her. You MUST like her. She
has had too much to put up with."

"Oh yes--I know!" She rejoiced that she had never denied it.

"Of course I've no right to speak of her except as a particular friend,"
the Captain went on. "But she's a splendid woman. She has never had any
sort of justice."

"Hasn't she?"--his companion, to hear the words, felt a thrill
altogether new.

"Perhaps I oughtn't to say it to you, but she has had everything to
suffer."

"Oh yes--you can SAY it to me!" Maisie hastened to profess.

The Captain was glad. "Well, you needn't tell. It's all for YOU--do you
see?"

Serious and smiling she only wanted to take it from him. "It's between
you and me! Oh there are lots of things I've never told!"

"Well, keep this with the rest. I assure you she has had the most
infernal time, no matter what any one says to the contrary. She's the
cleverest woman I ever saw in all my life. She's too charming." She had
been touched already by his tone, and now she leaned back in her chair
and felt something tremble within her. "She's tremendous fun--she can
do all sorts of things better than I've ever seen any one. She has the
pluck of fifty--and I know; I assure you I do. She has the nerve for a
tiger-shoot--by Jove I'd TAKE her! And she is awfully open and generous,
don't you know? there are women that are such horrid sneaks. She'll
go through anything for any one she likes." He appeared to watch for
a moment the effect on his companion of this emphasis; then he gave a
small sigh that mourned the limits of the speakable. But it was almost
with the note of a fresh challenge that he wound up: "Look here, she's
TRUE!"

Maisie had so little desire to assert the contrary that she found
herself, in the intensity of her response, throbbing with a joy still
less utterable than the essence of the Captain's admiration. She was
fairly hushed with the sense that he spoke of her mother as she had
never heard any one speak. It came over her as she sat silent that,
after all, this admiration and this respect were quite new words, which
took a distinction from the fact that nothing in the least resembling
them in quality had on any occasion dropped from the lips of her father,
of Mrs. Beale, of Sir Claude or even of Mrs. Wix. What it appeared to
her to come to was that on the subject of her ladyship it was the first
real kindness she had heard, so that at the touch of it something
strange and deep and pitying surged up