This was the great refuge of her impatience, but
what she heard at such times was a clatter of gaiety downstairs; the
impression of which, from her earliest childhood, had built up in her
the belief that the grown-up time was the time of real amusement and
above all of real intimacy. Even Lisette, even Mrs. Wix had never, she
felt, in spite of hugs and tears, been so intimate with her as so many
persons at present were with Mrs. Beale and as so many others of old had
been with Mrs. Farange. The note of hilarity brought people together
still more than the note of melancholy, which was the one exclusively
sounded, for instance, by poor Mrs. Wix. Maisie in these days preferred
none the less that domestic revels should be wafted to her from a
distance: she felt sadly unsupported for facing the inquisition of the
drawing-room. That was a reason the more for making the most of Susan
Ash, who in her quality of under-housemaid moved at a very different
level and who, none the less, was much depended upon out of doors. She
was a guide to peregrinations that had little in common with those
intensely definite airings that had left with the child a vivid memory
of the regulated mind of Moddle. There had been under Moddle's system
no dawdles at shop-windows and no nudges, in Oxford Street, of "I SAY,
look at 'ER!" There had been an inexorable treatment of crossings and a
serene exemption from the fear that--especially at corners, of which she
was yet weakly fond--haunted the housemaid, the fear of being, as she
ominously said, "spoken to.
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