Chapter 23

Sir Claude was stationed at the window; he didn't so much as turn round,
and it was left to the youngest of the three to take up the remark. "Do
you mean you went to see her yesterday?"

"She came to see ME. She knocked at my shabby door. She mounted my
squalid stair. She told me she had seen you at Folkestone."

Maisie wondered. "She went back that evening?"

"No; yesterday morning. She drove to me straight from the station. It
was most remarkable. If I had a job to get off she did nothing to make
it worse--she did a great deal to make it better." Mrs. Wix hung fire,
though the flame in her face burned brighter; then she became capable
of saying: "Her ladyship's kind! She did what I didn't expect."

Maisie, on this, looked straight at her stepfather's back; it might well
have been for her at that hour a monument of her ladyship's kindness. It
remained, as such, monumentally still, and for a time that permitted the
child to ask of their companion: "Did she really help you?"

"Most practically." Again Mrs. Wix paused; again she quite resounded.
"She gave me a ten-pound note."

At that, still looking out, Sir Claude, at the window, laughed loud. "So
you see, Maisie, we've not quite lost it!"

"Oh no," Maisie responded. "Isn't that too charming?" She smiled at Mrs.
Wix. "We know all about it." Then on her friend's showing such blankness
as was compatible with such a flush she pursued: "She does want me to
have you?"

Mrs. Wix showed a final hesitation, which, however, while Sir Claude
drummed on the window-pane, she presently surmounted. It came to Maisie
that in spite of his drumming and of his not turning round he was really
so much interested as to leave himself in a manner in her hands; which
somehow suddenly seemed to her a greater proof than he could have given
by interfering. "She wants me to have YOU!" Mrs. Wix declared.

Maisie answered this bang at Sir Claude. "Then that's nice for all of
us."

Of course it was, his continued silence sufficiently admitted while
Mrs. Wix rose from her chair and, as if to take more of a stand, placed
herself, not without majesty, before the fire. The incongruity of her
smartness, the circumference of her stiff frock, presented her as really
more ready for Paris than any of them. She also gazed hard at Sir
Claude's back. "Your wife was different from anything she had ever shown
me. She recognises certain proprieties."

"Which? Do you happen to remember?" Sir Claude asked.

Mrs. Wix's reply was prompt. "The importance for Maisie of a
gentlewoman, of some