"Do you mean with Mrs. Beale?"
Her father looked at her hard. "Don't be a little ass!"
Her silence appeared to represent a concentrated effort not to be. "Then
with the Countess?"
"With her or without her, my dear; that concerns only your poor daddy.
She has big interests over there, and she wants me to take a look at
them."
Maisie threw herself into them. "Will that take very long?"
"Yes; they're in such a muddle--it may take months. Now what I want to
hear, you know, is whether you'd like to come along?"
Planted once more before him in the middle of the room she felt herself
turning white. "I?" she gasped, yet feeling as soon as she had spoken
that such a note of dismay was not altogether pretty. She felt it still
more while her father replied, with a shake of his legs, a toss of his
cigarette-ash and a fidgety look--he was for ever taking one--all the
length of his waistcoat and trousers, that she needn't be quite so
disgusted. It helped her in a few seconds to appear more as he would
like her that she saw, in the lovely light of the Countess's splendour,
exactly, however she appeared, the right answer to make. "Dear papa,
I'll go with you anywhere."
He turned his back to her and stood with his nose at the glass of the
chimneypiece while he brushed specks of ash out of his beard. Then he
abruptly said: "Do you know anything about your brute of a mother?"
It was just of her brute of a mother that the manner of the question in
a remarkable degree reminded her: it had the free flight of one of Ida's
fine bridgings of space.
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