Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/281

punctuality of flutter. Sir Claude, beside her, was occupied with a cigarette and the afternoon papers; and though the hotel was full the garden showed the particular void that ensues upon the sound of the dressing-bell. She had almost had time to weary of the human scene; her own humanity, at any rate, in the shape of a smutch on her scanty skirt, had held her so long that as soon as she raised her eyes they rested on a high, fair drapery by which smutches were put to shame and which had glided toward her over the grass without her perceiving its rustle. She followed up its stiff sheen—up and up from the ground, where it had stopped—till, at the end of a considerable journey, her impression felt the shock of the fixed face which, surmounting it, seemed to offer the climax of the dressed condition. "Why, mamma!" she cried the next instant—cried in a tone that, as she sprang to her feet, brought Sir Claude to his own beside her and gave her ladyship, a few yards off, the advantage of their momentary confusion. Poor Maisie's was immense; her mother's drop had the effect of one of the iron shutters that, in evening walks with Susan Ash, she had seen suddenly, at the touch of a