WANT to live with them in their sin?"

"You know what I want, you know what I want!"--Maisie spoke with the
shudder of rising tears.

"Yes, I do; you want me to be as bad as yourself! Well, I won't. There!
Mrs. Beale's as bad as your father!" Mrs. Wix went on.

"She's not!--she's not!" her pupil almost shrieked in retort.

"You mean because Sir Claude at least has beauty and wit and grace? But
he pays just as the Countess pays!" Mrs. Wix, who now rose as she spoke,
fairly revealed a latent cynicism.

It raised Maisie also to her feet; her companion had walked off a few
steps and paused. The two looked at each other as they had never looked,
and Mrs. Wix seemed to flaunt there in her finery. "Then doesn't he pay
YOU too?" her unhappy charge demanded.

At this she bounded in her place. "Oh you incredible little waif!"
She brought it out with a wail of violence; after which, with another
convulsion, she marched straight away.

Maisie dropped back on the bench and burst into sobs.

XXVI

Nothing so dreadful of course could be final or even for many minutes
prolonged: they rushed together again too soon for either to feel that
either had kept it up, and though they went home in silence it was with
a vivid perception for Maisie that her companion's hand had closed upon
her. That hand had shown altogether, these twenty-four hours, a new
capacity for closing, and one of the truths the child could least resist
was that a certain greatness had now come to Mrs. Wix. The case was
indeed that the quality of her motive surpassed the sharpness of her
angles; both the combination and the singularity of which things, when
in the afternoon they used the carriage, Maisie could borrow from the
contemplative hush of their grandeur the freedom to feel to the utmost.
She still bore the mark of the tone in which her friend had thrown out
that threat of never losing sight of her. This friend had been converted
in short from feebleness to force; and it was the light of her new
authority that showed from how far she had come. The threat in question,
sharply exultant, might have produced defiance; but before anything so
ugly could happen another process had insidiously forestalled it. The
moment at which this process had begun to mature was that of Mrs. Wix's
breaking out with a dignity attuned to their own apartments and with an
advantage now measurably gained. They had ordered coffee after luncheon,
in the spirit of Sir Claude