"So this is their little place, hey? Charming, charming, charming!"
he repeated as he vaguely looked round. The interrupted students clung
together as if they had been personally exposed; but Ida relieved their
embarrassment by a hunch of her high shoulders. This time the smile she
addressed to Mr. Perriam had a beauty of sudden sadness. "What on earth
is a poor woman to do?"
The visitor's grimace grew more marked as he continued to look, and
the conscious little schoolroom felt still more like a cage at a
menagerie. "Charming, charming, charming!" Mr. Perriam insisted; but
the parenthesis closed with a prompt click. "There you are!" said her
ladyship. "By-bye!" she sharply added. The next minute they were on the
stairs, and Mrs. Wix and her companion, at the open door and looking
mutely at each other, were reached by the sound of the large social
current that carried them back to their life.
It was singular perhaps after this that Maisie never put a question
about Mr. Perriam, and it was still more singular that by the end of a
week she knew all she didn't ask. What she most particularly knew--and
the information came to her, unsought, straight from Mrs. Wix--was that
Sir Claude wouldn't at all care for the visits of a millionaire who was
in and out of the upper rooms. How little he would care was proved by
the fact that under the sense of them Mrs. Wix's discretion broke down
altogether; she was capable of a transfer of allegiance, capable, at the
altar of propriety, of a desperate sacrifice of her ladyship.
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