This
was what the Captain, in Kensington Gardens, had done; her present
situation reminded her a little of that one and renewed the dim wonder
of the fashion after which, from the first, such pats and pulls had
struck her as the steps and signs of other people's business and even a
little as the wriggle or the overflow of their difficulties. What had
failed her and what had frightened her on the night of the Exhibition
lost themselves at present alike in the impression that any "surprise"
now about to burst from Sir Claude would be too big to burst all at
once. Any awe that might have sprung from his air of leaving out her
stepmother was corrected by the force of a general rule, the odd truth
that if Mrs. Beale now never came nor went without making her think of
him, it was never, to balance that, the main mark of his own renewed
reality to appear to be a reference to Mrs. Beale. To be with Sir Claude
was to think of Sir Claude, and that law governed Maisie's mind until,
through a sudden lurch of the cab, which had at last taken in Susan and
ever so many bundles and almost reached Charing Cross, it popped again
somehow into her dizzy head the long-lost image of Mrs. Wix.
It was singular, but from this time she understood and she followed,
followed with the sense of an ample filling-out of any void created by
symptoms of avoidance and of flight. Her ecstasy was a thing that had
yet more of a face than of a back to turn, a pair of eyes still directed
to Mrs.
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