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She was literally moved by this apprehension to offer him some tactful relief. Beale Farange stood and smiled at his young lady, his back to the fanciful fireplace, his light overcoat the very lightest in London wide open, and his wonderful lustrous beard completely concealing the expanse of his shirt-front.
Farange, in the candour of new-found happiness, had enclosed a "cabinet" photograph of Sir Claude, and Maisie lost herself in admiration of the fair smooth face, the regular features, the kind eyes, the amiable air, the general glossiness and smartness of her prospective stepfather only vaguely puzzled to suppose herself now with two fathers at once.
"But to you, of all people," Sir Claude asked, "what had she to say?" "Why that, like Mrs. Micawber whom she must, I think, rather resemble she will never, never, never desert Miss Farange." "Oh I'll make that all right!" Sir Claude cheerfully returned. "I'm sure I hope so, my dear man," said Mrs. Beale, while Maisie wondered just how he would proceed. Before she had time to ask Mrs.
Farange a plummet that reached still deeper down than the security of these days of flight. She had wrapped that impression in silence a silence that had parted with half its veil to cover also, from the hour of Sir Claude's advent, the image of Mr. Farange's wife.
The prospect of not showing to advantage, a distinction in which she held she had never failed, begot in Ida Farange an ill humour of which several persons felt the effect. She determined that Beale at any rate should feel it; she reflected afresh that in the study of how to be odious to him she must never give way.
"Fortunately your papa appreciates it; he appreciates it IMMENSELY" that was one of the things Miss Overmore also said, with a striking insistence on the adverb. Maisie herself was no less impressed with what this martyr had gone through, especially after hearing of the terrible letter that had come from Mrs. Farange.
You can't humbug ME!" Beale Farange laid down. "I don't want to bully you I never bullied you in my life; but I make you the offer, and it's to take or to leave. Your mother will never again have any more to do with you than if you were a kitchenmaid she had turned out for going wrong. Therefore of course I'm your natural protector and you've a right to get everything out of me you can.
She knew before he spoke what it was; she knew at least from the underlying sense of all that, since the hour spent after the Exhibition with her father, had not sprung up to reinstate Mr. Farange she knew it meant a triumph for Mrs. Beale. The mere present sight of Sir Claude's face caused her on the spot to drop straight through her last impression of Mr.
Maisie turned quite faint. "Oh I thought she was." "It doesn't in the least matter, you know, what you think," Mrs. Farange loudly replied; "and you had better indeed for the future, miss, learn to keep your thoughts to yourself." This was exactly what Maisie had already learned, and the accomplishment was just the source of her mother's irritation.
Farange put upon her the whole intolerable burden; "and even when I pay for you myself," Sir Claude averred to his young friend, "she accuses me the more of truckling and grovelling." It was Mrs. Wix's conviction, they both knew, arrived at on independent grounds, that Ida's weekly excursions were feelers for a more considerable absence.
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