at 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. Beale!"

Maisie watched his face as it took this outbreak, and the most she saw
in it was that it turned a little white. That indeed made him look,
as Susan Ash would have said, queer; and it was perhaps a part of the
queerness that he intensely smiled. "You're too hard on Mrs. Beale. She
has great merits of her own."

Mrs. Wix, at this, instead of immediately replying, did what Sir Claude
had been doing before: she moved across to the window and stared a while
into the storm. There was for a minute, to Maisie's sense, a hush that
resounded with wind and rain. Sir Claude, in spite of these things,
glanced about for his hat; on which Maisie spied it first and, making
a dash for it, held it out to him. He took it with a gleam of a
"thank-you" in his face, and then something moved her still to hold the
other side of the brim; so that, united by their grasp of this object,
they stood some seconds looking many things at each other. By this time
Mrs. Wix had turned round. "Do you mean to tell me," she demanded, "that
you are going back?"

"To Mrs. Beale?" Maisie surrendered