Chapter 28 - Page 2

given out that
she had quitted him with the snap of a tension, left him, dropped him
in London, after some struggle as a sequel to which her own advent
represented that she had practically sacrificed him? Maisie assisted in
fancy at the probable episode in the Regent's Park, finding elements
almost of terror in the suggestion that Sir Claude had not had fair
play. They drew something, as she sat there, even from the pride of an
association with such beauty as Mrs. Beale's; and the child quite forgot
that, though the sacrifice of Mrs. Beale herself was a solution she had
not invented, she would probably have seen Sir Claude embark upon it
without a direct remonstrance.

What her stepmother had clearly now promised herself to wring from Mrs.
Wix was an assent to the great modification, the change, as smart as a
juggler's trick, in the interest of which nothing so much mattered as
the new convenience of Mrs. Beale. Maisie could positively seize the
moral that her elbow seemed to point in ribs thinly defended--the moral
of its not mattering a straw which of the step-parents was the guardian.
The essence of the question was that a girl wasn't a boy: if Maisie had
been a mere rough trousered thing, destined at the best probably to grow
up a scamp, Sir Claude would have been welcome. As the case stood he had
simply tumbled out of it, and Mrs. Wix would henceforth find herself in
the employ of the right person. These arguments had really fallen into
their place, for our young friend, at the very touch of that tone in
which she had heard her new title declared. She was still, as a result
of so many parents, a daughter to somebody even after papa and mamma
were to all intents dead. If her father's wife and her mother's husband,
by the operation of a natural or, for all she knew, a legal rule, were
in the shoes of their defunct partners, then Mrs. Beale's partner was
exactly as defunct as Sir Claude's and her shoes the very pair to which,
in "Farange _v._ Farange and Others," the divorce court had given
priority. The subject of that celebrated settlement saw the rest of
her day really filled out with the pomp of all that Mrs. Beale assumed.
The assumption rounded itself there between this lady's entertainers,
flourished in a way that left them, in their bottomless element, scarce
a free pair of eyes to exchange signals. It struck Maisie even a little
that there was a rope or two Mrs. Wix might have thrown out if she
would, a rocket or two she might have sent up. They had at any rate
never been so long together without communion or telegraphy, and their
companion kept them apart by simply keeping them with her. From this
situation they saw the grandeur of their intenser relation to her pass
and pass like an