" She gave out a long puff
of pain. "It was time!" Then as if still more to point the moral: "I
said just now I understood your wife. I said just now I admired her. I
stand to it: I did both of those things when I saw how even SHE, poor
thing, saw. If you want the dots on the i's you shall have them. What
she came to me for, in spite of everything, was that I'm just"--she
quavered it out--"well, just clean! What she saw for her daughter was
that there must at last be a DECENT person!"
Maisie was quick enough to jump a little at the sound of this
implication that such a person was what Sir Claude was not; the
next instant, however, she more profoundly guessed against whom the
discrimination was made. She was therefore left the more surprised at
the complete candour with which he embraced the worst. "If she's bent on
decent persons why has she given her to ME? You don't call me a decent
person, and I'll do Ida the justice that SHE never did. I think I'm as
indecent as any one and that there's nothing in my behaviour that makes
my wife's surrender a bit less ignoble!"
"Don't speak of your behaviour!" Mrs. Wix cried. "Don't say such
horrible things; they're false and they're wicked and I forbid you! It's
to KEEP you decent that I'm here and that I've done everything I have
done. It's to save you--I won't say from yourself, because in yourself
you're beautiful and good! It's to save you from the worst person of
all. I haven't, after all, come over to be afraid to speak of her!
That's the person in whose place her ladyship wants such a person as
even me; and if she thought herself, as she as good as told me, not fit
for Maisie's company, it's not, as you may well suppose, that she may
make room for Mrs.
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