"Well—to part with her."
Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"
"Back to London."
"But I mean what will she do?"
"Oh as for that I won't pretend I know. I don't. We all have our difficulties."
That, to Maisie, was at this moment more striking than it had ever been. "Then who'll teach me?"
Sir Claude laughed out. "What Mrs. Wix teaches?"
She smiled dimly; she saw what he meant. "It isn't so very very much."
"It's so very very little," he returned, "that that's a thing we've positively to consider. We probably shouldn't give you another governess. To begin with we shouldn't be able to get one—not of the only kind that would do. It wouldn't do—the kind that would do," he queerly enough explained. "I mean they wouldn't stay—heigh-ho! We'd do you ourselves. Particularly me. You see I can now; I haven't got to mind—what I used to. I won't fight shy as I did—she can show out with me. Our relation, all round, is more regular."
It seemed wonderfully regular, the way he put it; yet none the less, while she looked at it as judiciously as she could, the picture it made persisted somehow in being a combination quite distinct—an old woman and a little girl seated in deep silence on a battered old bench by the rampart of the haute ville. It was just at that hour yesterday; they were hand in hand; they had melted together. "I don't think you yet understand how she clings to you," Maisie said at last.