Chapter 15 - Page 2

tranquillity than his present prompt explanations.
He was at his best in such an office and with the exception of Mrs. Wix
the only person she had met in her life who ever explained. With him,
however, the act had an authority transcending the wisdom of woman. It
all came back--the plans that always failed, all the rewards and bribes
that she was perpetually paying for in advance and perpetually out of
pocket by afterwards--the whole great stress to be dealt with introduced
her on each occasion afresh to the question of money. Even she herself
almost knew how it would have expressed the strength of his empire to
say that to shuffle away her sense of being duped he had only, from
under his lovely moustache, to breathe upon it. It was somehow in the
nature of plans to be expensive and in the nature of the expensive to be
impossible. To be "involved" was of the essence of everybody's affairs,
and also at every particular moment to be more involved than usual.
This had been the case with Sir Claude's, with papa's, with mamma's,
with Mrs. Beale's and with Maisie's own at the particular moment, a
moment of several weeks, that had elapsed since our young lady had been
re-established at her father's. There wasn't "two-and-tuppence" for
anything or for any one, and that was why there had been no sequel to
the classes in French literature with all the smart little girls. It
was devilish awkward, didn't she see? to try, without even the limited
capital mentioned, to mix her up with a remote array that glittered
before her after this as the children of the rich. She was to feel
henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane
of the sweet-shop of knowledge. If the classes, however, that were
select, and accordingly the only ones, were impossibly dear, the
lectures at the institutions--at least at some of them--were directly
addressed to the intelligent poor, and it therefore had to be easier
still to produce on the spot the reason why she had been taken to none.
This reason, Sir Claude said, was that she happened to be just going to
be, though they had nothing to do with that in now directing their steps
to the banks of the Serpentine. Maisie's own park, in the north, had
been nearer at hand, but they rolled westward in a hansom because at the
end of the sweet June days this was the direction taken by every one
that any one looked at. They cultivated for an hour, on the Row and
by the Drive, this opportunity for each observer to amuse and for one
of them indeed, not a little hilariously, to mystify the other, and
before the hour was over Maisie had elicited, in reply to her sharpest
challenge, a further account of her friend's long absence.

"Why I've broken my word to you so