What Maisie Knew

of course, in his terrible position, knew what might happen from hour to hour; but he hoped to be free and he had given Mrs. Beale the tip. "Bring her there on the quiet and I'll try to turn up"—this was clear enough on what so many weeks of privation had made of his desire to see the child: it even appeared to represent on his part a yearning as constant as her own. That in turn was just puzzling enough to make Maisie express a bewilderment. She couldn't see, if they were so intensely of the same mind, why the theory on which she had come back to Mrs. Beale, the general reunion, the delightful trio, should have broken down so in fact. Mrs. Beale furthermore only gave her more to think about in saying that their disappointment was the result of his having got into his head a kind of idea.

"What kind of idea?"

"Oh goodness knows!" She spoke with an approach to asperity. "He's so awfully delicate."

"Delicate?"—that was ambiguous.

"About what he does, don't you know?" said Mrs. Beale. She fumbled. "Well, about what we do."

Maisie wondered. "You and me?"

"Me and him, silly!" cried Mrs. Beale with, this time, a real giggle.

"But you don't do any harm—you don't," said Maisie, wondering afresh and intending her emphasis as a decorous allusion to her parents.

"Of course we don't, you angel—that's just the ground I take!" her companion exultantly responded. "He says he doesn't want you mixed up."

"Mixed up with what?"

"That's exactly what I want to know: mixed up with what, and how you are any more mixed—?" Mrs. Beale paused without ending her question. She ended after an instant in a different way. "All you can say is that it's his fancy."

The tone of this, in spite of its expressing a resignation, the fruit of weariness, that dismissed the subject, conveyed so vividly how much such a fancy was not Mrs. Beale's own that our young lady was led by the mere fact of contact to arrive at a dim apprehension of the unuttered and the unknown. The relation between her step-parents had then a mysterious residuum; this was the first time she really had reflected that except as regards herself it was not a relationship. To each other it was only what they might have happened to make it, and she gathered that this, in the event, had been something that led Sir Claude to keep away from her. Didn't he fear she would be compromised? The perception of such a scruple endeared him the more, and it flashed over her that she might simplify everything by showing him how little she made of such a danger. Hadn't she lived with her eyes on it from her third year? It was the condition most frequently discussed at the Faranges', where the word was always in the air and where at the age of five, amid rounds of applause, she could gabble it off. She knew as well in short that a person could be compromised as that a person could be slapped with a hair-brush or left alone in the dark, and it was equally familiar to her that each of these ordeals was in general held to have too little effect. But the first thing was to make absolutely sure of Mrs. Beale. This was done by saying to her thoughtfully: "Well, if you don't mind—and you really don't, do you?"

Mrs. Beale, with a dawn of amusement, considered. "Mixing you up? Not a bit. For what does it mean?"

"Whatever it means I don't in the least mind being mixed. Therefore if you don't and I don't," Maisie concluded, "don't you think that when I see him this evening I had better just tell him we don't and ask him why in the world he should?"

XVIII

The child, however, was not destined to enjoy much of Sir Claude at the "thingumbob," which took for them a very different turn indeed. On the spot Mrs. Beale, with hilarity, had urged her to the course proposed; but later, at the Exhibition, she withdrew this allowance, mentioning as a result of second thoughts that when a man was so sensitive anything at all frisky usually made him worse. It would have been hard indeed for Sir Claude to be "worse," Maisie felt, as, in the gardens and the crowd, when the first dazzle had dropped, she looked for him in vain up and down. They had all their time, the couple, for frugal wistful wandering: they had partaken together at home of the light vague meal—Maisie's name for it was a "jam-supper"—to which they were reduced when Mr. Farange sought his pleasure abroad. It was abroad now entirely that Mr. Farange pursued this ideal, and it was the actual impression of his daughter, derived from his wife, that he had three days before joined a friend's yacht at Cowes.

The place was full of side-shows, to which Mrs. Beale could introduce the little girl only, alas, by revealing to her so attractive, so enthralling a name: the side-shows, each time, were sixpence apiece, and the fond allegiance enjoyed by the elder of our pair had been established from the earliest time in spite of a paucity of sixpences. Small coin dropped from her as half-heartedly as answers from bad children to lessons that had not been looked at. Maisie passed more slowly the great painted posters, pressing with a linked arm closer to her friend's pocket, where she hoped for the audible chink of a shilling. But the upshot of this was but to deepen her yearning: if Sir Claude would only at last come the shillings would begin to ring. The companions paused,