to break out into questions as to what had passed at the other house
between that horrible woman and Sir Claude; but it was also just here
that the little girl was able to recall the effect with which in earlier
days she had practised the pacific art of stupidity. This art again came
to her aid: her mother, in getting rid of her after an interview in
which she had achieved a hollowness beyond her years, allowed her fully
to understand she had not grown a bit more amusing.

She could bear that; she could bear anything that helped her to feel she
had done something for Sir Claude. If she hadn't told Mrs. Wix how Mrs.
Beale seemed to like him she certainly couldn't tell her ladyship. In
the way the past revived for her there was a queer confusion. It was
because mamma hated papa that she used to want to know bad things of
him; but if at present she wanted to know the same of Sir Claude it was
quite from the opposite motive. She was awestruck at the manner in which
a lady might be affected through the passion mentioned by Mrs. Wix; she
held her breath with the sense of picking her steps among the tremendous
things of life. What she did, however, now, after the interview with
her mother, impart to Mrs. Wix was that, in spite of her having had her
"good" effect, as she called it--the effect she studied, the effect of
harmless vacancy--her ladyship's last words had been that her ladyship's
duty by her would be thoroughly done. Over this announcement governess
and pupil looked at each other in silent profundity; but as the weeks
went by it had no consequences that interfered gravely with the breezy
gallop of making up. Her ladyship's duty took at times the form of not
seeing her child for days together, and Maisie led her life in great
prosperity between Mrs. Wix and kind Sir Claude. Mrs. Wix had a new
dress and, as she was the first to proclaim, a better position; so it
all struck Maisie as a crowded brilliant life, with, for the time, Mrs.
Beale and Susan Ash simply "left out" like children not invited to a