nces and intelligent little looks could be rewarded
by delightful little glimpses. There had been years at Beale Farange's
when the monosyllable "he" meant always, meant almost violently, the
master; but all that was changed at a period at which Sir Claude's
merits were of themselves so much in the air that it scarce took even
two letters to name him. "He keeps me up splendidly--he does, my own
precious," Mrs. Beale would observe to her comrade; or else she would
say that the situation at the other establishment had reached a point
that could scarcely be believed--the point, monstrous as it sounded,
of his not having laid eyes upon her for twelve days. "She" of course
at Beale Farange's had never meant any one but Ida, and there was the
difference in this case that it now meant Ida with renewed intensity.
Mrs. Beale--it was striking--was in a position to animadvert more and
more upon her dreadfulness, the moral of all which appeared to be how
abominably yet blessedly little she had to do with her husband. This
flow of information came home to our two friends because, truly, Mrs.
Beale had not much more to do with her own; but that was one of the
reflexions that Maisie could make without allowing it to break the
spell of her present sympathy. How could such a spell be anything but
deep when Sir Claude's influence, operating from afar, at last really
determined the resumption of his stepdaughter's studies? Mrs. Beale
again took fire about them and was quite vivid for Maisie as to their
being the great matter to which the dear absent one kept her up.

This was the second source--I have just alluded to the first--of the
child's consciousness of something that, very hopefully, she described
to herself as a new phase; and it also presented in the brightest light
the fresh enthusiasm with which Mrs. Beale always reappeared and which
really gave Maisie a happier sense than she had yet had of being very
dear at least to two persons. That she had small remembrance at present
of a third illustrates, I am afraid, a temporary oblivion of Mrs. Wix,
an accident to be explained only by a state of unnatural excitement. For
what was the form taken by Mrs. Beale's enthusiasm and acquiring relief
in the domestic conditions still left to her but the delightful form of
"reading" with her little charge on lines directly prescribed and in
works profusely supplied by Sir Claude? He had got hold of an awfully
good list--"mostly essays, don't you