As against
Mrs. Beale, she more than once intimated, she had been willing to do
the best for her, but as against Sir Claude she could do nothing for
her at all. It was extraordinary the number of things that, still
without a question, Maisie knew by the time her stepfather came back
from Paris--came bringing her a splendid apparatus for painting in
water-colours and bringing Mrs. Wix, by a lapse of memory that would
have been droll if it had not been a trifle disconcerting, a second and
even a more elegant umbrella. He had forgotten all about the first,
with which, buried in as many wrappers as a mummy of the Pharaohs, she
wouldn't for the world have done anything so profane as use it. Maisie
knew above all that though she was now, by what she called an informal
understanding, on Sir Claude's "side," she had yet not uttered a word
to him about Mr. Perriam. That gentleman became therefore a kind of
flourishing public secret, out of the depths of which governess and
pupil looked at each other portentously from the time their friend was
restored to them. He was restored in great abundance, and it was marked
that, though he appeared to have felt the need to take a stand against
the risk of being too roughly saddled with the offspring of others, he
at this period exposed himself more than ever before to the presumption
of having created expectations.
If it had become now, for that matter, a question of sides, there was at
least a certain amount of evidence as to where they all were.
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