and a bright red frame for the
protection of his famous photograph. The games were, as he said, to
while away the evening hour; and the evening hour indeed often passed
in futile attempts on Mrs. Wix's part to master what "it said" on the
papers. When he asked the pair how they liked the games they always
replied "Oh immensely!" but they had earnest discussions as to whether
they hadn't better appeal to him frankly for aid to understand them.
This was a course their delicacy shrank from; they couldn't have told
exactly why, but it was a part of their tenderness for him not to let
him think they had trouble. What dazzled most was his kindness to Mrs.
Wix, not only the five-pound note and the "not forgetting" her, but
the perfect consideration, as she called it with an air to which her
sounding of the words gave the only grandeur Maisie was to have seen her
wear save on a certain occasion hereafter to be described, an occasion
when the poor lady was grander than all of them put together. He shook
hands with her, he recognised her, as she said, and above all, more than
once, he took her, with his stepdaughter, to the pantomime and, in the
crowd, coming out, publicly gave her his arm. When he met them in sunny
Piccadilly he made merry and turned and walked with them, heroically
suppressing his consciousness of the stamp of his company, a heroism
that--needless for Mrs. Wix to sound THOSE words--her ladyship, though
a blood-relation, was little enough the woman to be capable of. Even to
the hard heart of childhood there was something tragic in such elation
at such humanities: it brought home to Maisie the way her humble
companion had sidled and ducked through life. But it settled the
question of the degree to which Sir Claude was a gentleman: he was
more of one than anybody else in the world--"I don't care," Mrs. Wix
repeatedly remarked, "whom you may meet in grand society, nor even to
whom you may be contracted in marriage." There were questions that
Maisie never asked; so her governess was spared the embarrassment of
telling her if he were more of a gentleman than papa. This was not
moreover from the want of opportunity, for there were no moments between
them at which the topic could be irrelevant, no subject they were going
into, not even the principal dates or the auxiliary verbs, in which it
was further off than the turn of the page. The answer on the winter
nights to the puzzle of cards and counters and little bewilderi