Her "first" made the Captain laugh out again. "Oh he'll be sure to be
nasty! But I've said too much to you."
"Well, you know, I'll never tell," said Maisie.
"No, it's all for yourself. Good-bye."
"Good-bye." Maisie kept his hand long enough to add: "I like you too."
And then supremely: "You DO love her?"
"My dear child--!" The Captain wanted words.
"Then don't do it only for just a little."
"A little?"
"Like all the others."
"All the others?"--he stood staring.
She pulled away her hand. "Do it always!" She bounded to meet Sir
Claude, and as she left the Captain she heard him ring out with apparent
gaiety:
"Oh I'm in for it!"
As she joined Sir Claude she noted her mother in the distance move
slowly off, and, glancing again at the Captain, saw him, swinging his
stick, retreat in the same direction.
She had never seen Sir Claude look as he looked just then; flushed yet
not excited--settled rather in an immoveable disgust and at once very
sick and very hard. His conversation with her mother had clearly drawn
blood, and the child's old horror came back to her, begetting the
instant moral contraction of the days when her parents had looked to
her to feed their love of battle. Her greatest fear for the moment,
however, was that her friend would see she had been crying. The next
she became aware that he had glanced at her, and it presently occurred
to her that he didn't even wish to be looked at. At this she quickly
removed her gaze, while he said rather curtly: "Well, who in the world
IS the fellow?"
She felt herself flooded with prudence. "Oh _I_ haven't found out!" This
sounded as if she meant he ought to have done so himself; but she could
only face doggedly the ugliness of seeming disagreeable, as she used to
face it in the hours when her father, for her blankness, called her a
dirty little donkey, and her mother, for her falsity, pushed her out of
the room.
"Then what have you been doing all this time?"
"Oh I don't know!" It was of the essence of her method not to be silly
by halves.
"Then didn't the beast say anything?" They had got down by the lake and
were walking fast.
"Well, not very much."
"He didn't speak of your mother?"
"Oh yes, a little!"
"Then what I ask you, please, is HOW?" She kept silence--so long that
he presently went on: "I say, you know--don't you hear me?" At this she
produced: "Well, I'm afraid I didn't attend to him very much."
Sir Claude, smoking rather hard, made no immediate rejoinder; but
finally he exclaimed: "Then my dear--with such a chance--you were the
perfection of a dunce!" He was so irritated--or she took him to be--that
for the rest of the time they were in the Gardens he spoke no other
word; and she meanwhile subtly abstained from any attempt to pacify him.
That would only lead to more questions. At the gate of the Gardens he
hailed a four-wheeled cab and, in silence, without meeting her eyes, put
her into it, only saying "Give him THAT" as he tossed half a crown upon
the seat. Even when from outside he had closed the door and told the man
where to go he never took her departing look. Nothing of this kind had
ever yet happened to them, but it had no power to make her love him
less; so she could not only bear it, she felt as she drove away--she
could rejoice in it. It brought again the sweet sense of success that,
ages before, she had had at a crisis when, on the stairs, returning from
her father's, she had met a fierce question of her mother's with an
imbecility as deep and had in consequence been dashed by Mrs. Farange
almost to the bottom.