Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/153

ladyship, the little girl took this act of resolution as a proof of what, in the spirit of the engagement sealed by all their tears, he was really prepared to do. Mrs. Wix spoke to her of the pecuniary sacrifice by which she herself purchased the scant security she enjoyed and which, if it was a defence against the hand of violence, was far from making her safe from private aggression. Didn't her ladyship find every hour of the day some insidious means to humiliate and trample upon her? There was a quarter's salary owing her—a great name, even Maisie could suspect, for a small matter: she should never see it as long as she lived, but keeping quiet about it put her ladyship, thank Heaven, a little in one's power. Now that he was doing so much else she could never have the grossness to apply for it to Sir Claude. He had sent home for schoolroom consumption a huge frosted cake, a wonderful delectable mountain with geological strata of jam, which might with economy see them through many days of their siege; but it was none the less known to Mrs. Wix that his affairs were more and more involved, and her fellow-partaker looked back tenderly, in the light of these involutions, at the expression of face