"I say, you know--don't you hear me?" At this she
produced: "Well, I'm afraid I didn't attend to him very much."

Sir Claude, smoking rather hard, made no immediate rejoinder; but
finally he exclaimed: "Then my dear--with such a chance--you were the
perfection of a dunce!" He was so irritated--or she took him to be--that
for the rest of the time they were in the Gardens he spoke no other
word; and she meanwhile subtly abstained from any attempt to pacify him.
That would only lead to more questions. At the gate of the Gardens he
hailed a four-wheeled cab and, in silence, without meeting her eyes, put
her into it, only saying "Give him THAT" as he tossed half a crown upon
the seat. Even when from outside he had closed the door and told the man
where to go he never took her departing look. Nothing of this kind had
ever yet happened to them, but it had no power to make her love him
less; so she could not only bear it, she felt as she drove away--she
could rejoice in it. It brought again the sweet sense of success that,
ages before, she had had at a crisis when, on the stairs, returning from
her father's, she had met a fierce question of her mother's with an
imbecility as deep and had in consequence been dashed by Mrs. Farange
almost to the bottom.

XVII

If for reasons of her own she could bear the sense of Sir Claude's
displeasure her young endurance might have been put to a serious test.
The days went by without his knocking at her father's door, and the
time would have turned sadly to waste if something hadn't conspicuously
happened to give it a new difference. What took place was a marked
change in the attitude of Mrs. Beale--a change that somehow, even
in his absence, seemed to bring Sir Claude again into the house. It
began practically with a conversation that occurred between them the
day Maisie, came home alone in the cab. Mrs. Beale had by that time
returned, and she was more successful than their friend in extracting
from our young lady an account of the extraordinary passage with the
Captain. She came back to it repeatedly, and on the very next day it
grew distinct to the child that she was already in full possession of
what at the same moment had been enacted between her ladyship and Sir
Claude. This was the real origin of her final perception that though he
didn't come to the house her stepmother had some rare secret for not
being quite without him. This led to some rare passages with Mrs. Beale,
the