“Do? I don’t know,” said Lady Yalding a little guiltily. “She’s a good, quiet little thing—literary tastes, reads Browning, and all that sort of rot. She’s all right.”
“Why don’t you give her a show? She’d take the shine out of some of the girls here if you had her dressed.”
“My dear Jim,” Lady Yalding said, “she’s all right as she is. What’s the good of turning the child’s head and giving her notions out of her proper station?”
“If I were that child I’d like to have a little bit of a fling just for once. The poor little rat looks starved, as though it hadn’t laughed for a year. Then it’s Christmas—peace and goodwill, and all that, don’t you know. If I were you I’d ask her down a bit——”
Lady Yalding thought—a thing she rarely did.
“Well,” she said, “it is pretty slow for her, I suppose. I’ll send her home to her people.”
“On Christmas Eve? Fog and frost, and the trains all anyhow? Fanny, Fanny!”
“Oh, very well. We’ll have her down, and go the whole hog. Only don’t make a fool of the child, Jim; she’s a good little thing.”
And that was how the dream-dressed Lady Yalding came to sweep into the old lady’s sitting-room—it was as full of mahogany, by the way, as Maisie’s home in Lewisham—and spoke so kindly of Maisie’s loneliness, that the girl could have fallen down and worshipped at her Paris shoes.
When Maisie, in the figured lavender satin that had been her mother’s, swept across the great hall on the arm of the Honourable James, she felt that this indeed was life. Here was the great world with its infinite possibilities.