"
Maisie surveyed serenely the parties to the discussion. "Oh your friend
here, dear Sir Claude, doesn't plead and shriek!"
He looked at her a moment. "Never. Never. That's one, only one, but
charming so far as it goes, of about a hundred things we love her for."
Then he pursued to Mrs. Wix: "What I can't for the life of me make out
is what Ida is REALLY up to, what game she was playing in turning to you
with that cursed cheek after the beastly way she has used you. Where--to
explain her at all--does she fancy she can presently, when we least
expect it, take it out of us?"
"She doesn't fancy anything, nor want anything out of any one. Her
cursed cheek, as you call it, is the best thing I've ever seen in her.
I don't care a fig for the beastly way she used me--I forgive it all a
thousand times over!" Mrs. Wix raised her voice as she had never raised
it; she quite triumphed in her lucidity. "I understand her, I almost
admire her!" she quavered. She spoke as if this might practically
suffice; yet in charity to fainter lights she threw out an explanation.
"As I've said, she was different; upon my word I wouldn't have known
her. She had a glimmering, she had an instinct; they brought her. It was
a kind of happy thought, and if you couldn't have supposed she would
ever have had such a thing, why of course I quite agree with you. But
she did have it! There!"
Maisie could feel again how a certain rude rightness in this plea might
have been found exasperating; but as she had often watched Sir Claude in
apprehension of displeasures that didn't come, so now, instead of saying
"Oh hell!" as her father used, she observed him only to take refuge in a
question that at the worst was abrupt.
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