Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/239

short soft staircase, struck her as the most beautiful she had ever seen in her life. The next thing she perceived it to be was the drawing-room of a lady—oh, of a lady, she could see in a moment, and not of a gentleman not even of one like papa himself or even like Sir Claude—whose things were as much prettier than mamma's as it had always had to be confessed mamma's were prettier than Mrs. Beale's. In the middle of the small bright room and the presence of more curtains and cushions, more pictures and mirrors, more palm-trees drooping over brocaded and gilded nooks, more little silver boxes scattered over little crooked tables and little oval miniatures hooked upon velvet screens than Mrs. Beale and her ladyship together could in an unnatural alliance have dreamed of mustering, the child became aware, with a swift possibility of compassion, of something that was strangely like a relegation to obscurity of each of those women of taste. It was a stranger operation still that her father should on the spot be presented to her as quite advantageously and even grandly at home in the dazzling scene and himself by so much the more separated from scenes inferior to it. She spent with him in it, while