"That was what the Captain said to me that day, mamma. I think it would have given you pleasure to hear the way he spoke of you."
The pleasure, Maisie could now in consternation reflect, would have been a long time coming if it had come no faster than the response evoked by her allusion to it. Her mother gave her one of the looks that slammed the door in her face; never in a career of unsuccessful experiments had Maisie had to take such a stare. It reminded her of the way that once, at one of the lectures in Glower Street, something in a big jar that, amid an array of strange glasses and bad smells, had been promised as a beautiful yellow was produced as a beautiful black. She had been sorry on that occasion for the lecturer, but she was at this moment sorrier for herself. Oh nothing had ever made for twinges like mamma's manner of saying: "The Captain? What Captain?"
"Why when we met you in the Gardens--the one who took me to sit with him. That was exactly what HE said."
Ida let it come on so far as to appear for an instant to pick up a lost thread. "What on earth did he say?"
Maisie faltered supremely, but supremely she brought it out. "What you say, mamma--that you're so good."
"What 'I' say?" Ida slowly rose, keeping her eyes on her child, and the hand that had busied itself in her purse conformed at her side and amid the folds of her dress to a certain stiffening of the arm. "I say you're a precious idiot, and I won't have you put words into my mouth!" This was much more peremptory than a mere contradiction. Maisie could only feel on the spot that everything had broken short off and that their communication had abruptly ceased. That was presently proved. "What business have you to speak to me of him?"
Her daughter turned scarlet. "I thought you liked him."
"Him!--the biggest cad in London!" Her ladyship towered again, and in the gathering dusk the whites of her eyes were huge.
Maisie's own, however, could by this time pretty well match them; and she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had ever yet lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up quite as hard as any one could look down. "Well, he was kind about you then; he WAS, and it made me like him. He said things--they were beautiful, they were, they were!" She was almost capable of the violence of forcing this home, for even in the midst of her surge of passion--of which in fact it was a part--there rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious, of what it might mean for her mother's fate to have forfeited such a loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which Maisie fully saw--saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death. "I've thought of him often since, and I hoped it was with him--with him--" Here, in her emotion, it failed her, the breath of her filial hope.