Page:What Maisie Knew (Chicago & New York, Herbert S. Stone & Co., 1897).djvu/406

Geneva. Maisie, in the old days, had been regaled with anecdotes of these adventures, but they had become phantasmal, and the heroine's quite showy exemption from bewilderment at Boulogne, her acuteness on some of the very subjects on which Maisie had been acute to Mrs. Wix, were a high note of the mastery, of the advantage with which she had arrived. It was all a part of the wind in her sails and of the weight with which her daughter was now to feel her hand. The effect of it on Maisie was to add already the burden of time to her separation from Sir Claude. It might have lasted for days; it was as if, with their main agitation transferred thus to France and with neither mamma, now, nor Mrs. Beale, nor Mrs. Wix, nor herself at his side, he must be fearfully alone in England. Hour after hour she felt as if she were waiting; yet she could n't have said exactly for what. There were moments when Mrs. Beale' s flow of talk might have bubbled on the very edge of it; at others this talk was a mere rattle to smother a knock. At no part of the crisis had the rattle so public a purpose as when, instead of letting Maisie go with Mrs. Wix to prepare for dinner, she pushed her—with a