Beale once laughed at her little
friend) a pathway literally strewn with "subjects." Maisie imagined
herself to pluck them as she went, though they thickened in the great
grey rooms where the fountain of knowledge, in the form usually of a
high voice that she took at first to be angry, plashed in the stillness
of rows of faces thrust out like empty jugs. "It MUST do us good--it's
all so hideous," Mrs. Beale had immediately declared; manifesting a
purity of resolution that made these occasions quite the most harmonious
of all the many on which the pair had pulled together. Maisie certainly
had never, in such an association, felt so uplifted, and never above
all been so carried off her feet, as at the moments of Mrs. Beale's
breathlessly re-entering the house and fairly shrieking upstairs to
know if they should still be in time for a lecture. Her stepdaughter,
all ready from the earliest hours, almost leaped over the banister to
respond, and they dashed out together in quest of learning as hard as
they often dashed back to release Mrs. Beale for other preoccupations.
There had been in short no bustle like these particular spasms, once
they had broken out, since that last brief flurry when Mrs. Wix, blowing
as if she were grooming her, "made up" for everything previously lost at
her father's.
These weeks as well were too few, but they were flooded with a new
emotion, part of which indeed came from the possibility that, through
the long telescope of Glower Street, or perhaps between the pillars of
the institution--which impressive objects were what Maisie thought most
made it one--they should some day spy Sir Claude.
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