the unspoken
was, unspeakably, the completeness of the sacrifice of Mrs. Beale. There
were times when every minute that Sir Claude stayed away was like a nail
in Mrs. Beale's coffin. That brought back to Maisie--it was a roundabout
way--the beauty and antiquity of her connexion with the flower of the
Overmores as well as that lady's own grace and charm, her peculiar
prettiness and cleverness and even her peculiar tribulations. A hundred
things hummed at the back of her head, but two of these were simple
enough. Mrs. Beale was by the way, after all, just her stepmother
and her relative. She was just--and partly for that very reason--Sir
Claude's greatest intimate ("lady-intimate" was Maisie's term) so that
what together they were on Mrs. Wix's prescription to give up and break
short off with was for one of them his particular favourite and for the
other her father's wife. Strangely, indescribably her perception of
reasons kept pace with her sense of trouble; but there was something in
her that, without a supreme effort not to be shabby, couldn't take the
reasons for granted. What it comes to perhaps for ourselves is that,
disinherited and denuded as we have seen her, there still lingered in
her life an echo of parental influence--she was still reminiscent of
one of the sacred lessons of home. It was the only one she retained,
but luckily she retained it with force. She enjoyed in a word an
ineffaceable view of the fact that there were things papa called mamma
and mamma called papa a low sneak for doing or for not doing. Now this
rich memory gave her a name that she dreaded to invite to the lips of
Mrs. Beale: she should personally wince so just to hear it. The very
sweetness of the foreign life she was steeped in added with each hour
of Sir Claude's absence to the possibility of such pangs. She watched
beside Mrs. Wix the great golden Madonna, and one of the ear-ringed old
women who had been sitting at the end of their bench got up and pottered
away. "Adieu mesdames!" said the old woman in a little cracked civil
voice--a demonstration by which our friends were so affected that they
bobbed up and almost curtseyed to her. They subsided again, and it was
shortly after, in a summer hum of French insects and a phase of almost
somnolent reverie, that Maisie most had the vision of what it was to
shut out from such a perspective so appealing a participant. It had not
yet appeared so vast as at that moment, this prospect of statues