Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/221

that questions were almost always improper; but she learned on the other hand soon to recognize that patient little silences and intelligent little looks could be rewarded from time to time by delightful little glimpses. There had been years at Beale Farange's when the monosyllable "he" meant always, meant almost violently the master; but all that was changed at a period at which Sir Claude's merits were of themselves so much in the air that it scarce took even two letters to name him. "He keeps me up splendidly—he does, my own precious," Mrs. Beale would observe to her companion; or else she would say that the situation at the other establishment had reached a point that could scarcely be believed—the point, monstrous as it sounded, of his not having laid eyes upon her for twelve days. "Her" of course at Beale Farange's had never meant any one but Ida, and there was the difference in this case that it now meant Ida with renewed intensity. Mrs. Beale was in a position strikingly to animadvert more and more upon her dreadfulness, the moral of all which appeared to be how abominably yet blessedly little she had to do with her husband. This flow of information came home to our two friends