Chapter 24

It continued to rain so hard that our young lady's private dream of
explaining the Continent to their visitor had to contain a provision for
some adequate treatment of the weather. At the _table d'hôte_ that evening
she threw out a variety of lights: this was the second ceremony of the
sort she had sat through, and she would have neglected her privilege
and dishonoured her vocabulary--which indeed consisted mainly of the
names of dishes--if she had not been proportionately ready to dazzle
with interpretations. Preoccupied and overawed, Mrs. Wix was apparently
dim: she accepted her pupil's version of the mysteries of the menu in a
manner that might have struck the child as the depression of a credulity
conscious not so much of its needs as of its dimensions. Maisie was soon
enough--though it scarce happened before bedtime--confronted again with
the different sort of programme for which she reserved her criticism.
They remounted together to their sitting-room while Sir Claude, who said
he would join them later, remained below to smoke and to converse with
the old acquaintances that he met wherever he turned. He had proposed
his companions, for coffee, the enjoyment of the _salon de lecture_,
but Mrs. Wix had replied promptly and with something of an air that it
struck her their own apartments offered them every convenience. They
offered the good lady herself, Maisie could immediately observe, not
only that of this rather grand reference, which, already emulous, so
far as it went, of her pupil, she made as if she had spent her life in
salons; but that of a stiff French sofa where she could sit and stare at
the faint French lamp, in default of the French clock that had stopped,
as for some account of the time Sir Claude would so markedly interpose.
Her demeanour accused him so directly of hovering beyond her reach that
Maisie sought to divert her by a report of Susan's quaint attitude on
the matter of their conversation after lunch. Maisie had mentioned to
the young woman for sympathy's sake the plan for her relief, but her
disapproval of alien ways appeared, strange to say, only to prompt her
to hug her gloom; so that between Mrs. Wix's effect of displacing her
and the visible stiffening of her back the child had the sense of a
double office and enlarged play for pacific powers.

These powers played to no great purpose, it was true, in keeping before
Mrs. Wix the vision of Sir Claude's perversity, which hung there in the
pauses of talk and which he himself, after unmistakeable delays, finally
made quite lurid by bursting in--it was near ten o'clock--with an object
held up in his hand. She knew before he spoke what it was; she knew at
least from the underlying sense of all that, since the hour spent after
the