arce
knew whether to suppose the depth of prostration or the flush of
triumph. The lady on his arm, still bent beneath her late ordeal, was
muffled in such draperies as had never before offered so much support
to so much woe. At the hotel, an hour later, this ambiguity dropped:
assisting Mrs. Wix in private to refresh and reinvest herself, Maisie
heard from her in detail how little she could have achieved if Sir
Claude hadn't put it in her power. It was a phrase that in her room she
repeated in connexions indescribable: he had put it in her power to have
"changes," as she said, of the most intimate order, adapted to climates
and occasions so various as to foreshadow in themselves the stages of
a vast itinerary. Cheap weeks would of course be in their place after
so much money spent on a governess; sums not grudged, however, by this
lady's pupil, even on her feeling her own appearance give rise, through
the straighteners, to an attention perceptibly mystified. Sir Claude in
truth had had less time to devote to it than to Mrs. Wix's; and moreover
she would rather be in her own shoes than in her friend's creaking new
ones in the event of an encounter with Mrs. Beale. Maisie was too lost
in the idea of Mrs. Beale's judgement of so much newness to pass any
judgement herself. Besides, after much luncheon and many endearments,
the question took quite another turn, to say nothing of the pleasure
of the child's quick view that there were other eyes than Susan Ash's
to open to what she could show. She couldn't show much, alas, till it
stopped raining, which it declined to do that day; but this had only the
effect of leaving more time for Mrs. Wix's own demonstration. It came
as they sat in the little white and gold salon which Maisie thought the
loveliest place she had ever seen except perhaps the apartment of the
Countess; it came while the hard summer storm lashed the windows and
blew in such a chill that Sir Claude, with his hands in his pockets and
cigarettes in his teeth, fidgeting, frowning, looking out and turning
back, ended by causing a smoky little fire to be made in the dressy
little chimney. It came in spite of something that could only be named
his air of wishing to put it off; an air that had served him--oh as all
his airs served him!--to the extent of his having for a couple of hours
confined the conversation to gratuitous jokes and generalities, kept it
on the level of the little empty coffee-cups and _petits verres