"I should think you'd be too proud to ask!" Mrs. Wix interposed. Mrs. Wix was herself conspicuously too proud.
But at the child's words Mrs. Beale had fairly bounded. "Come away from me, Maisie?" It was a wail of dismay and reproach, in which her stepdaughter was astonished to read that she had had no hostile consciousness and that if she had been so actively grand it was not from suspicion, but from strange entanglements of modesty.
Sir Claude presented to Mrs. Beale an expression positively sick. "Don't put it to her that way!" There had indeed been something in Mrs. Beale's tone, and for a moment our young lady was reminded of the old days in which so many of her friends had been "compromised."
This friend blushed; she was before Mrs. Wix, and though she bridled she took the hint. "No—it isn't the way." Then she showed she knew the way. "Don't be a still bigger fool, dear, but go straight to your room and wait there till I can come to you."
Maisie made no motion to obey, but Mrs. Wix raised a hand that forestalled every evasion. "Don't move till you've heard me. I'm going, but I must first understand. Have you lost it again?"
Maisie surveyed—for the idea of a describable loss—the immensity of space. Then she replied lamely enough: "I feel as if I had lost everything."
Mrs. Wix looked dark. "Do you mean to say you have lost what we found together with so much difficulty two days ago?" As her pupil failed of response she continued: "Do you mean to say you've already forgotten what we found together?"
Maisie dimly remembered. "My moral sense?"
"Your moral sense. Haven't I, after all, brought it out?" She spoke as she had never spoken even in the schoolroom and with the book in her hand.
It brought back to the child's recollection how she sometimes couldn't repeat on Friday the sentence that had been glib on Wednesday, and she dealt all feebly and ruefully with the present tough passage. Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale stood there like visitors at an "exam." She had indeed an instant a whiff of the faint flower that Mrs. Wix pretended to have plucked and now with such a peremptory hand thrust at her nose. Then it left her, and, as if she were sinking with a slip from a foothold, her arms made a short jerk. What this jerk represented was the spasm within her of something still deeper than a moral sense. She looked at her examiner; she looked at the visitors; she felt the rising of the tears she had kept down at the station. They had nothing—no, distinctly nothing—to do with her moral sense. The only thing was the old flat shameful schoolroom plea. "I don't know—I don't know."