What Maisie Knew

'Of your mother first and foremost of course.'

'Dear, yes; more of mamma than of—than of—'

'Than of what?' Sir Claude asked as she hesitated for a comparison.

She thought over all objects of dread. 'Than of a wild elephant!' she at last declared. 'And you are too,' she reminded him as he laughed.

'Oh yes, I am too.'

Again she meditated. 'Why then did you marry her?'

'Just because I was afraid.'

'Even when she loved you?'

'That made her the more alarming.'

For Maisie herself, though her companion seemed to find it droll, this opened up depths of gravity. 'More alarming than she is now?'

'Well, in a different way. Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds.'

She took this in with complete intelligence. 'Then I think I've got them all.'

'You?' her friend cried. 'Nonsense! You're thoroughly 'game.''

'I'm awfully afraid of Mrs. Beale,' Maisie objected.

He raised his smooth brows. 'That charming woman?'

'Well,' she answered, 'you can't understand it because you're not in the same state.'

She had been going on with a luminous 'But' when, across the table, he laid his hand on her arm. 'I can understand it,' he confessed. 'I am in the same state.'

'Oh but she likes you so!' Maisie promptly pleaded.

Sir Claude literally coloured. 'That has something to do with it.'

Maisie wondered again. 'Being liked with being afraid?'

'Yes, when it amounts to adoration.'

'Then why aren't you afraid of me?'

'Because with you it amounts to that?' He had kept his hand on her arm. 'Well, what prevents is simply that you're the gentlest spirit on earth. Besides—' he pursued; but he came to a pause.

'Besides—?'

'I should be in fear if you were older—there! See—you already make me talk nonsense,' the young man added. 'The question's about your father. Is he likewise afraid of Mrs. Beale?'

'I think not. And yet he loves her,' Maisie mused.

'Oh no—he doesn't; not a bit!' After which, as his companion stared, Sir Claude apparently felt that he must make this oddity fit with her recollections. 'There's nothing of that sort now.'

But Maisie only stared the more. 'They've changed?'

'Like your mother and me.'

She wondered how he knew. 'Then you've seen Mrs. Beale again?'

He demurred. 'Oh no. She has written to me,' he presently subjoined. 'She's not afraid of your father either. No one at all is—really.' Then he went on while Maisie's little mind, with its filial spring too relaxed from of old for a pang at this want of parental majesty, speculated on the vague relation between Mrs. Beale's courage and the question, for Mrs. Wix and herself, of a neat lodging with their friend. 'She wouldn't care a bit if Mr. Farange should make a row.'

'Do you mean about you and me and Mrs. Wix? Why should she care? It wouldn't hurt her.'

Sir Claude, with his legs out and his hand diving into his trousers-pocket, threw back his head with a laugh just perceptibly tempered, as she thought, by a sigh. 'My dear stepchild, you're delightful! Look here, we must pay. You've had five buns?'

'How can you?' Maisie demanded, crimson under the eye of the young woman who had stepped to their board. 'I've had three.'

Shortly after this Mrs. Wix looked so ill that it was to be feared her ladyship had treated her to some unexampled passage. Maisie asked if anything worse than usual had occurred; whereupon the poor woman brought out with infinite gloom: 'He has been seeing Mrs. Beale.'

'Sir Claude?' The child remembered what he had said. 'Oh no—not seeing her!'

'I beg your pardon. I absolutely know it.' Mrs. Wix was as positive as she was dismal.

Maisie nevertheless ventured to challenge her. 'And how, please, do you know it?'

She faltered a moment. 'From herself. I've been to see her.'

Then on Maisie's visible surprise: 'I went yesterday while you were out with him. He has seen her repeatedly.'