Chapter 18

The child, however, was not destined to enjoy much of Sir Claude at the
"thingumbob," which took for them a very different turn indeed. On the
spot Mrs. Beale, with hilarity, had urged her to the course proposed;
but later, at the Exhibition, she withdrew this allowance, mentioning as
a result of second thoughts that when a man was so sensitive anything at
all frisky usually made him worse. It would have been hard indeed for
Sir Claude to be "worse," Maisie felt, as, in the gardens and the crowd,
when the first dazzle had dropped, she looked for him in vain up and
down. They had all their time, the couple, for frugal wistful wandering:
they had partaken together at home of the light vague meal--Maisie's
name for it was a "jam-supper"--to which they were reduced when Mr.
Farange sought his pleasure abroad. It was abroad now entirely that Mr.
Farange pursued this ideal, and it was the actual impression of his
daughter, derived from his wife, that he had three days before joined a
friend's yacht at Cowes.

The place was full of side-shows, to which Mrs. Beale could introduce
the little girl only, alas, by revealing to her so attractive, so
enthralling a name: the side-shows, each time, were sixpence apiece,
and the fond allegiance enjoyed by the elder of our pair had been
established from the earliest time in spite of a paucity of sixpences.
Small coin dropped from her as half-heartedly as answers from bad
children to lessons that had not been looked at. Maisie passed more
slowly the great painted posters, pressing with a linked arm closer
to her friend's pocket, where she hoped for the audible chink of a
shilling. But the upshot of this was but to deepen her yearning: if Sir
Claude would only at last come the shillings would begin to ring. The
companions paused, for want of one, before the Flowers of the Forest, a
large presentment of bright brown ladies--they were brown all over--in
a medium suggestive of tropical luxuriance, and there Maisie dolorously
expressed her belief that he would never come at all. Mrs. Beale
hereupon, though discernibly disappointed, reminded her that he had not
been promised as a certainty--a remark that caused the child to gaze at
the Flowers through a blur in which they became more magnificent, yet
oddly more confused, and by which moreover confusion was imparted to the
aspect of a gentleman who at that moment, in the company of a lady, came
out of the brilliant booth. The lady was so brown that Maisie at first
took her for one of the Flowers; but during the few seconds that this
required--a few seconds in which she had also desolately given up Sir
Claude--she heard Mrs. Beale's voice, behind her, gather both wonder and
pain into a single sharp little