his air of leaving out her
stepmother was corrected by the force of a general rule, the odd truth
that if Mrs. Beale now never came nor went without making her think of
him, it was never, to balance that, the main mark of his own renewed
reality to appear to be a reference to Mrs. Beale. To be with Sir Claude
was to think of Sir Claude, and that law governed Maisie's mind until,
through a sudden lurch of the cab, which had at last taken in Susan and
ever so many bundles and almost reached Charing Cross, it popped again
somehow into her dizzy head the long-lost image of Mrs. Wix.

It was singular, but from this time she understood and she followed,
followed with the sense of an ample filling-out of any void created by
symptoms of avoidance and of flight. Her ecstasy was a thing that had
yet more of a face than of a back to turn, a pair of eyes still directed
to Mrs. Wix even after the slight surprise of their not finding her, as
the journey expanded, either at the London station or at the Folkestone
hotel. It took few hours to make the child feel that if she was in
neither of these places she was at least everywhere else. Maisie had
known all along a great deal, but never so much as she was to know from
this moment on and as she learned in particular during the couple of
days that she was to hang in the air, as it were, over the sea which
represented in breezy blueness and with a summer charm a crossing of
more spaces than the Channel. It was granted her at this time to arrive
at divinations so ample that I shall have no room for the goal if I
attempt to trace the stages; as to which therefore I must be content to
say that the fullest expression we may give to Sir Claude's conduct is
a poor and pale copy of the picture it presented to his young friend.
Abruptly, that morning, he had yielded to the action of the idea pumped
into him for weeks by Mrs. Wix on lines of approach that she had been
capable of the extraordinary art of preserving from entanglement in
the fine network of his relations with Mrs. Beale. The breath of her
sincerity, blowing without a break, had puffed him up to the flight
by which, in the degree I have indicated, Maisie too was carried off
her feet. This consisted neither in more nor in less than the brave
stroke of his getting off from Mrs. Beale as well as from his wife--of
making with the child straight for some such foreign land as would
give a support to Mrs. Wix's dream that she might still see