"Well, you can do it together. Then he'll HAVE to come!"

Mrs. Beale by this time had her young friend fairly in her lap and she
smiled up at Sir Claude. "Shall we do it together?"

His laughter had dropped, and for a moment he turned his handsome
serious face not to his hostess, but to his stepdaughter. "Well, it's
rather more decent than some things. Upon my soul, the way things are
going, it seems to me the only decency!" He had the air of arguing it
out to Maisie, of presenting it, through an impulse of conscience, as a
connexion in which they could honourably see her participate; though his
plea of mere "decency" might well have appeared to fall below her rosy
little vision. "If we're not good for YOU" he exclaimed, "I'll be hanged
if I know who we shall be good for!"

Mrs. Beale showed the child an intenser light. "I dare say you WILL save
us--from one thing and another."

"Oh I know what she'll save ME from!" Sir Claude roundly asserted.
"There'll be rows of course," he went on.

Mrs. Beale quickly took him up. "Yes, but they'll be nothing--for you
at least--to the rows your wife makes as it is. I can bear what _I_
suffer--I can't bear what you go through."

"We're doing a good deal for you, you know, young woman," Sir Claude
went on to Maisie with the same gravity.

She coloured with a sense of obligation and the eagerness of her desire
it should be remarked how little was lost on her. "Oh I know!"