's provision, and it was served to them while
they awaited their equipage in the white and gold saloon. It was flanked
moreover with a couple of liqueurs, and Maisie felt that Sir Claude
could scarce have been taken more at his word had it been followed
by anecdotes and cigarettes. The influence of these luxuries was
at any rate in the air. It seemed to her while she tiptoed at the
chimney-glass, pulling on her gloves and with a motion of her head
shaking a feather into place, to have had something to do with Mrs.
Wix's suddenly saying: "Haven't you really and truly ANY moral sense?"

Maisie was aware that her answer, though it brought her down to her
heels, was vague even to imbecility, and that this was the first time
she had appeared to practise with Mrs. Wix an intellectual inaptitude to
meet her--the infirmity to which she had owed so much success with papa
and mamma. The appearance did her injustice, for it was not less through
her candour than through her playfellow's pressure that after this the
idea of a moral sense mainly coloured their intercourse. She began, the
poor child, with scarcely knowing what it was; but it proved something
that, with scarce an outward sign save her surrender to the swing of the
carriage, she could, before they came back from their drive, strike up a
sort of acquaintance with. The beauty of the day only deepened, and the
splendour of the afternoon sea, and the haze of the far headlands, and
the taste of the sweet air. It was the coachman indeed who, smiling and
cracking his whip, turning in his place, pointing to invisible objects
and uttering unintelligible sounds--all, our tourists recognised, strict
features of a social order principally devoted to language: it was this
polite person, I say, who made their excursion fall so much short that
their return left them still a stretch of the long daylight and an hour
that, at his obliging suggestion, they spent on foot by the shining
sands. Maisie had seen the _plage_ the day before with Sir Claude, but
that was a reason the more for showing on the spot to Mrs. Wix that it
was, as she said, another of the places on her list and of the things of
which she knew the French name. The bathers, so late, were absent and
the tide was low; the sea-pools twinkled in the sunset and there were
dry places as well, where they could sit again and admire and expatiate:
a circumstance that, while they listened to the lap of the waves, gave
Mrs. Wix a fres