keeping quiet about it put her ladyship, thank heaven, a little in one's
power. Now that he was doing so much else she could never have the
grossness to apply for it to Sir Claude. He had sent home for schoolroom
consumption a huge frosted cake, a wonderful delectable mountain with
geological strata of jam, which might, with economy, see them through
many days of their siege; but it was none the less known to Mrs. Wix
that his affairs were more and more involved, and her fellow partaker
looked back tenderly, in the light of these involutions, at the
expression of face with which he had greeted the proposal that he should
set up another establishment. Maisie felt that if their maintenance
should hang by a thread they must still demean themselves with the
highest delicacy. What he was doing was simply acting without delay, so
far as his embarrassments permitted, on the inspiration of his elder
friend. There was at this season a wonderful month of May--as soft as a
drop of the wind in a gale that had kept one awake--when he took out his
stepdaughter with a fresh alacrity and they rambled the great town in
search, as Mrs. Wix called it, of combined amusement and instruction.

They rode on the top of 'buses; they visited outlying parks; they went
to cricket-matches where Maisie fell asleep; they tried a hundred places
for the best one to have tea. This was his direct way of rising to Mrs.
Wix's grand lesson--of making his little accepted charge his duty and
his life. They dropped, under incontrollable impulses, into shops that
they agreed were too big, to look at things that they agreed were too
small, and it was during these hours that Mrs. Wix, alone at home, but
a subject of regretful reference as they pulled off their gloves for
refreshment, subsequently described herself as least sheltered from the
blows her ladyship had achieved such ingenuity in dealing. She again
and again repeated that she wouldn't so much have minded having her
"attainments" held up to scorn and her knowledge of every subject