"If that were true," she returned, "I wouldn't appeal to you. I do, Sir
Claude, in the name of all that's good in you--and oh so earnestly! We
can help each other. What you'll do for our young friend here I needn't
say. That isn't even what I want to speak of now. What I want to speak
of is what you'll GET--don't you see?--from such an opportunity to take
hold. Take hold of US--take hold of HER. Make her your duty--make her
your life: she'll repay you a thousand-fold!"

It was to Mrs. Wix, during this appeal, that Maisie's contemplation
transferred itself: partly because, though her heart was in her throat
for trepidation, her delicacy deterred her from appearing herself to
press the question; partly from the coercion of seeing Mrs. Wix come out
as Mrs. Wix had never come before--not even on the day of her call at
Mrs. Beale's with the news of mamma's marriage. On that day Mrs. Beale
had surpassed her in dignity, but nobody could have surpassed her now.
There was in fact at this moment a fascination for her pupil in the hint
she seemed to give that she had still more of that surprise behind. So
the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's main support, the
long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding
in the fury of it--she had had a glimpse of the game of football--a sort
of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity. It gave her often
an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a manner as if
she could only get at experience by flattening her nose against a pane
of glass. Such she felt to be the application of her nose while she
waited for the effect of Mrs. Wix's eloquence. Sir Claude, however,
didn't keep her long in a position so ungraceful: he sat down and opened
his arms to her as he had done the day he came for her at her father's,
and while he held her there, looking at her kindly, but as if their
companion had brought the blood a good deal to his face, he said: