She followed up its stiff sheen--up and up from
the ground, where it had stopped--till at the end of a considerable
journey her impression felt the shock of the fixed face which,
surmounting it, seemed to offer the climax of the dressed condition.
"Why mamma!" she cried the next instant--cried in a tone that, as
she sprang to her feet, brought Sir Claude to his own beside her and
gave her ladyship, a few yards off, the advantage of their momentary
confusion. Poor Maisie's was immense; her mother's drop had the effect
of one of the iron shutters that, in evening walks with Susan Ash, she
had seen suddenly, at the touch of a spring, rattle down over shining
shop-fronts. The light of foreign travel was darkened at a stroke; she
had a horrible sense that they were caught; and for the first time of
her life in Ida's presence she so far translated an impulse into an
invidious act as to clutch straight at the hand of her responsible
confederate. It didn't help her that he appeared at first equally hushed
with horror; a minute during which, in the empty garden, with its long
shadows on the lawn, its blue sea over the hedge and its startled peace
in the air, both her elders remained as stiff as tall tumblers filled to
the brim and held straight for fear of a spill.
At last, in a tone that enriched the whole surprise by its unexpected
softness, her mother said to Sir Claude: "Do you mind at all my speaking
to her?"
"Oh no; DO you?" His reply was so long in coming that Maisie was the
first to find the right note.
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