Chapter 26 - Page 2

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 fresh support for her challenge. "Have you absolutely none at
all?"

She had no need now, as to the question itself at least, to be specific;
that on the other hand was the eventual result of their quiet conjoined
apprehension of the thing that--well, yes, since they must face
it--Maisie absolutely and appallingly had so little of. This marked more
particularly the moment of the child's perceiving that her friend had
risen to a level which might--till superseded at all events--pass almost
for sublime. Nothing more remarkable had taken place in the first heat
of her own departure, no act of perception less to be overtraced by our
rough method, than her vision, the rest of that Boulogne day, of the
manner in which she figured. I so despair of courting her noiseless
mental footsteps here that I must crudely give you my word for its being
from this time forward a picture literally present to her. Mrs. Wix
saw her as a little person knowing so extraordinarily much that, for
the account to be taken of it, what she still didn't know would be
ridiculous if it hadn't been embarrassing. Mrs. Wix was in truth more
than ever qualified to meet embarrassment; I am not sure that Maisie had
not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made
her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was
concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development; nothing could
have been more marked for instance than her success in promoting Mrs.
Beale's. She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs. Wix, had been
the successive stages of her knowledge, so the very