"Without you? Oh yes—now."
"On account, as you just intimated, of Mrs. Beale's changed manner?"
Maisie, with her sense of responsibility, weighed both Mrs. Beale's changed manner and Mrs. Wix's human weakness. "I think she talked her round."
Sir Claude thought a moment. "Ah poor dear!"
"Do you mean Mrs. Beale?"
"Oh no—Mrs. Wix."
"She likes being talked round—treated like any one else. Oh she likes great politeness," Maisie expatiated. "It affects her very much."
Sir Claude, to her surprise, demurred a little to this. "Very much—up to a certain point."
"Oh up to any point!" Maisie returned with emphasis.
"Well, haven't I been polite to her?"
"Lovely—and she perfectly worships you."
"Then, my dear child, why can't she let me alone?"—this time Sir Claude unmistakeably blushed. Before Maisie, however, could answer his question, which would indeed have taken her long, he went on in another tone: "Mrs. Beale thinks she has probably quite broken her down. But she hasn't."
Though he spoke as if he were sure, Maisie was strong in the impression she had just uttered and that she now again produced. "She has talked her round."
"Ah yes; round to herself, but not round to me."
Oh she couldn't bear to hear him say that! "To you? Don't you really believe how she loves you?"
Sir Claude examined his belief. "Of course I know she's wonderful."
"She's just every bit as fond of you as I am," said Maisie. "She told me so yesterday."
"Ah then," he promptly exclaimed, "she has tried to affect you! I don't love her, don't you see? I do her perfect justice," he pursued, "but I mean I don't love her as I do you, and I'm sure you wouldn't seriously expect it. She's not my daughter—come, old chap! She's not even my mother, though I dare say it would have been better for me if she had been. I'll do for her what I'd do for my mother, but I won't do more." His real excitement broke out in a need to explain and justify himself, though he kept trying to correct and conceal it with laughs and mouthfuls and other vain familiarities. Suddenly he broke off, wiping his moustache with sharp pulls and coming back to Mrs. Beale. "Did she try to talk you over?"
"No—to me she said very little. Very little indeed," Maisie continued.
Sir Claude seemed struck with this. "She was only sweet to Mrs. Wix?"
"As sweet as sugar!" cried Maisie.
He looked amused at her comparison, but he didn't contest it; he uttered on the contrary, in an assenting way, a little inarticulate sound. "I know what she can be. But much good may it have done her! Mrs. Wix won't come 'round.' That's what makes it so fearfully awkward."
Maisie knew it was fearfully awkward; she had known this now, she felt, for some time, and there was something else it more pressingly concerned her to learn. "What is it you meant you came over to ask me?"
"Well," said Sir Claude, "I was just going to say. Let me tell you it will surprise you." She had finished breakfast now and she sat back in her chair again: she waited in silence to hear. He had pushed the things before him a little way and had his elbows on the table. This time, she was convinced, she knew what was coming, and once more, for the crash, as with Mrs. Wix lately in her room, she held her breath and drew together her eyelids. He was going to say she must give him up. He looked hard at her again; then he made his effort. "Should you see your way to let her go?"
She was bewildered. "To let who—?"
"Mrs. Wix simply. I put it at the worst. Should you see your way to sacrifice her? Of course I know what I'm asking."
Maisie's eyes opened wide again; this was so different from what she had expected. "And stay with you alone?"
He gave another push to his coffee-cup. "With me and Mrs. Beale. Of course it would be rather rum; but everything in our whole story is rather rum, you know. What's more unusual than for any one to be given up, like you, by her parents?"
"Oh nothing is more unusual than that!" Maisie concurred, relieved at the contact of a proposition as to which concurrence could have lucidity.
"Of course it would be quite unconventional," Sir Claude went on—"I mean the little household we three should make together; but things have got beyond that, don't you see? They got beyond that long ago. We shall stay abroad at any rate—it's ever so much easier and it's our affair and nobody else's: it's no one's business but ours on all the blessed earth. I don't say that for Mrs. Wix, poor dear—I do her absolute justice. I respect her; I see what she means; she has done me a lot of good. But there are the facts. There they are, simply. And here am I, and here are you. And she won't come round. She's right from her point of view. I'm talking to you in the most extraordinary way—I'm always talking to you in the most extraordinary way, ain't I? One would think you were about sixty and that I—I don't know what any one would think I am. Unless a beastly cad!" he suggested. "I've been awfully worried, and this's what it has come to. You've done us the most
