Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/403

guardian. The essence of the question was that a girl was n't a boy: if Maisie had been a trousered thing Sir Claude would have been welcome. As the case stood he had simply dropped out, and Mrs. Wix would henceforth find herself in the employ of the right person. These arguments had really fallen, for our young lady, into their place at the very touch of that tone in which she had heard her new title declared. She was still, as a result of so many parents, a daughter to somebody, even after papa and mamma were to all intents dead. If her father's wife and her mother's husband, by the operation of a natural, or, for all she knew, a legal rule, were in the shoes of their defunct partners, then Mrs. Beale's was exactly as defunct as Sir Claude's and her shoes the very pair to which, in "Farange v. Farange & Others," the divorce-court had given priority. The subject of that celebrated settlement saw the rest of the day really filled out with the pomp of all that Mrs. Beale assumed. The assumption rounded itself there between her entertainers, flourished in a way that left them, in their bottomless element, scarce a free pair of eyes to exchange signals. It struck Maisie even a