"Me and HIM, silly!" cried Mrs. Beale with, this time, a real giggle.
"But you don't do any harm--YOU don't," said Maisie, wondering afresh
and intending her emphasis as a decorous allusion to her parents.
"Of course we don't, you angel--that's just the ground _I_ take!" her
companion exultantly responded. "He says he doesn't want you mixed up."
"Mixed up with what?"
"That's exactly what _I_ want to know: mixed up with what, and how you
are any more mixed--?" Mrs. Beale paused without ending her question.
She ended after an instant in a different way. "All you can say is that
it's his fancy."
The tone of this, in spite of its expressing a resignation, the fruit of
weariness, that dismissed the subject, conveyed so vividly how much such
a fancy was not Mrs. Beale's own that our young lady was led by the mere
fact of contact to arrive at a dim apprehension of the unuttered and the
unknown. The relation between her step-parents had then a mysterious
residuum; this was the first time she really had reflected that except
as regards herself it was not a relationship. To each other it was only
what they might have happened to make it, and she gathered that this,
in the event, had been something that led Sir Claude to keep away from
her. Didn't he fear she would be compromised? The perception of such a
scruple endeared him the more, and it flashed over her that she might
simplify everything by showing him how little she made of such a danger.
Hadn't she lived with her eyes on it from her third year? It was the
condition most frequently discussed at the Faranges', where the word was
always in the air and where at the age of five, amid rounds of applause,
she could gabble it off. She knew as well in short that a person could
be compromised as that a person could be slapped with a hair-brush or
left alone in the dark, and it was equally familiar to her that each of
these ordeals was in general held to have too little effect. But the
first thing was to make absolutely sure of Mrs. Beale. This was done by
saying to her thoughtfully: "Well, if you don't mind--and you really
don't, do you?"
Mrs. Beale, with a dawn of amusement, considered. "Mixing you up? Not a
bit. For what does it mean?"
"Whatever it means I don't in the least mind BEING mixed. Therefore if
you don't and I don't," Maisie concluded, "don't you think that when I
see him this evening I had better just tell him we don't and ask him why
in the world HE should?"