Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/151

of her mamma's marriage. On that day Mrs. Beale had surpassed her in dignity; but nobody could have surpassed her now. There was, in fact at this moment a fascination for her pupil in the hint she seemed to give that she had still more of that surprise behind. So the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's main support—the long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion, and finding in the fury of it—she had had a glimpse of the game of football—a sort of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity. It gave her often an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a mode as if she could only get at experience by flattening her nose against a pane of glass. Such she felt to be the application of her nose while she waited for the effect of Mrs. Wix's eloquence. Sir Claude, however, did n't keep her long in a position so ungraceful: he sat down and opened his arms to her as he had done the day he came for her at her father's, and while he held her there, looking at her kindly, but as if their companion had brought the blood a good deal to his face, he said: "Dear Mrs. Wix is magnificent, but she's rather too grand about it. I mean the situation is n't