prompt:
Chapter: Mrs Beale fairly swooped upon her and the effect of the whole hour was
to show the child how much, how quite formidably indeed, after all, she
was loved. This was the more the case as her stepmother, so changed--in
the very manner of her mother--that she really struck her as a new
acquaintance, somehow recalled more familiarity than Maisie could feel.
A rich strong expressive affection in short pounced upon her in the
shape of a handsomer, ampler, older Mrs. Beale. It was like making a
fine friend, and they hadn't been a minute together before she felt
elated at the way she had met the choice imposed on her in the cab.
There was a whole future in the combination of Mrs. Beale's beauty and
Mrs. Beale's hug. She seemed to Maisie charming to behold, and also to
have no connexion at all with anybody who had once mended underclothing
and had meals in the nursery. The child knew one of her father's wives
was a woman of fashion, but she had always dimly made a distinction, not
applying that epithet without reserve to the other. Mrs. Beale had since
their separation acquired a conspicuous right to it, and Maisie's first
flush of response to her present delight coloured all her splendour with
meanings that this time were sweet. She had told Sir Claude she was
afraid of the lady in the Regent's Park; but she had confidence enough
to break on the spot, into the frankest appreciation. "Why, aren't you
beautiful? Isn't she beautiful, Sir Claude, ISN'T she?"

"The handsomest woman in London, simply," Sir Claude gallantly replied.
"Just as sure as you're the best little girl!"

Well, the handsomest woman in London gave herself up, with tender
lustrous looks and every demonstration of fondness, to a happiness at
last clutched again. There was almost as vivid a bloom in her maturity
as in mamma's, and it took her but a short time to give her little
friend an impression of positive power--an impression that seemed to
begin like a long bright day. This was a perception on Maisie's part
that neither mamma, nor Sir Claude, nor Mrs. Wix, with their immense and
so varied respective attractions, had exactly kindled, and that made an
immediate difference when the talk, as it promptly did, began to turn to
her father. Oh yes, Mr. Farange was a complication, but she saw now that
he wouldn't be one for his daughter. For Mrs. Beale certainly he was an
immense one--she speedily made known as much; but Mrs. Beale from this
moment presented herself to Maisie as a person to whom a great gift had
come. The great gift was just for handling complications. Maisie felt
how little she made of them when, after she had dropped to Sir Claude
some recall of a previous meeting, he made answer, with a sound of
consternation and yet an air of relief, that he had denied to their
companion their having, since the day he came for her, seen each other
till that moment.

Mrs. Beale could but vaguely pity it. "Why did you do anything so
silly?"

"To protect your reputation."

"From Maisie?" Mrs. Beale was much amused. "My reputation with Maisie is
too good to suffer."

"But you believed me, you rascal, didn't you?" Sir Claude asked of the
child.

She looked at him; she smiled. "Her reputation did suffer. I discovered
you had been here."

He was not too chagrined to laugh. "The way, my dear, you talk of that
sort of thing!"

"How should she talk," Mrs. Beale wanted to know, "after all this
wretched time with her mother?"

"It was not mamma who told me," Maisie explained. "It was only Mrs.
Wix." She was hesitating whether to bring out before Sir Claude the
source of Mrs. Wix's information; but Mrs. Beale, addressing the young
man, showed the vanity of scruples.

"Do you know that preposterous person came to see me a day or two
ago?--when I told her I had seen you repeatedly."

Sir Claude, for once in a way, was disconcerted. "The old cat! She never
told me. Then you thought I had lied?" he demanded of Maisie.

She was flurried by the term with which he had qualified her gentle
friend, but she took the occasion for one to which she must in every
manner lend herself. "Oh I didn't mind! But Mrs. Wix did," she added
with an intention benevolent to her governess.

Her intention was not very effective as regards Mrs. Beale. "Mrs. Wix is
too idiotic!" that lady declared.

"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.
Beale continued: "That's not all she came to do, if you please. But
you'll never guess the rest."

"Shall _I_ guess it?" Maisie quavered.

Mrs. Beale was again amused. "Why you're just the person! It must be
quite the sort of thing you've heard at your awful mother's. Have you
never seen women there crying to her to 'spare' the men they love?"

Maisie, wondering, tried to remember; but Sir Claude was freshly
diverted. "Oh they don't trouble about Ida! Mrs. Wix cried to you to
spare ME?"

"She regularly went down on her knees to me."

"The darling old dear!" the young man exclaimed.

These words were a joy to Maisie--they made up for his previous
description of Mrs. Wix. "And WILL you spare him?" she asked of Mrs.
Beale.

Her stepmother, seizing her and kissing her again, seemed charmed with
the tone of her question. "Not an inch of him! I'll pick him to the
bone!"

"You mean that he'll really come often?" Maisie pressed.

Mrs. Beale turned lovely eyes to Sir Claude. "That's not for me to
say--its for him."

He said nothing at once, however; with his hands in his pockets
and vaguely humming a tune--even Maisie could see he was a little
nervous--he only walked to the window and looked out at the Regent's
Park. "Well, he has promised," Maisie said. "But how will papa like it?"

"His being in and out? Ah that's a question that, to be frank with you,
my dear, hardly matters. In point of fact, however, Beale greatly enjoys
the idea that Sir Claude too, poor man, has been forced to quarrel with
your mother."

Sir Claude turned round and spoke gravely and kindly. "Don't be afraid,
Maisie; you won't lose sight of me."

"Thank you so much!" Maisie was radiant. "But what I meant--don't you
know?--was what papa would say to ME."

"Oh I've been having that out with him," said Mrs. Beale. "He'll behave
well enough. You see the great difficulty is that, though he changes
every three days about everything else in the world, he has never
changed about your mother. It's a caution, the way he hates her."

Sir Claude gave a short laugh. "It certainly can't beat the way she
still hates HIM!"

"Well," Mrs. Beale went on obligingly, "nothing can take the place of
that feeling with either of them, and the best way they can think of to
show it is for each to leave you as long as possible on the hands of the
other. There's nothing, as you've seen for yourself, that makes either
so furious. It isn't, asking so little as you do, that you're much of
an expense or a trouble; it's only that you make each feel so well how
nasty the other wants to be. Therefore Beale goes on loathing your
mother too much to have any great fury left for any one else. Besides,
you know, I've squared him."

"Oh Lord!" Sir Claude cried with a louder laugh and turning again to the
window.

"_I_ know how!" Maisie was prompt to proclaim. "By letting him do what
he wants on condition that he lets you also do it."

"You're too delicious, my own pet!"--she was involved in another hug.
"How in the world have I got on so long without you? I've not been
happy, love," said Mrs. Beale with her cheek to the child's.

"Be happy now!"--she throbbed with shy tenderness.

"I think I shall be. You'll save me."

"As I'm saving Sir Claude?" the little girl asked eagerly.

Mrs. Beale, a trifle at a loss, appealed to her visitor, "Is she
really?"

He showed high amusement at Maisie's question. "It's dear Mrs. Wix's
idea. There may be something in it."

"He makes me his duty--he makes me his life," Maisie set forth to her
stepmother.

"Why that's what _I_ want to do!"--Mrs. Beale, so anticipated, turned
pink with astonishment.

"Well, you can do it together. Then he'll HAVE to come!"

Mrs. Beale by this time had her young friend fairly in her lap and she
smiled up at Sir Claude. "Shall we do it together?"

His laughter had dropped, and for a moment he turned his handsome
serious face not to his hostess, but to his stepdaughter. "Well, it's
rather more decent than some things. Upon my soul, the way things are
going, it seems to me the only decency!" He had the air of arguing it
out to Maisie, of presenting it, through an impulse of conscience, as a
connexion in which they could honourably see her participate; though his
plea of mere "decency" might well have appeared to fall below her rosy
little vision. "If we're not good for YOU" he exclaimed, "I'll be hanged
if I know who we shall be good for!"

Mrs. Beale showed the child an intenser light. "I dare say you WILL save
us--from one thing and another."

"Oh I know what she'll save ME from!" Sir Claude roundly asserted.
"There'll be rows of course," he went on.

Mrs. Beale quickly took him up. "Yes, but they'll be nothing--for you
at least--to the rows your wife makes as it is. I can bear what _I_
suffer--I can't bear what you go through."

"We're doing a good deal for you, you know, young woman," Sir Claude
went on to Maisie with the same gravity.

She coloured with a sense of obligation and the eagerness of her desire
it should be remarked how little was lost on her. "Oh I know!"

"Then you must keep us all right!" This time he laughed.

"How you talk to her!" cried Mrs. Beale.

"No worse than you!" he gaily answered.

"Handsome is that handsome does!" she returned in the same spirit. "You
can take off your things," she went on, releasing Maisie.

The child, on her feet, was all emotion. "Then I'm just to stop--this
way?"

"It will do as well as any other. Sir Claude, to-morrow, will have your
things brought."

"I'll bring them myself. Upon my word I'll see them packed!" Sir Claude
promised. "Come here and unbutton."

He had beckoned his young companion to where he sat, and he helped
to disengage her from her coverings while Mrs. Beale, from a little
distance, smiled at the hand he displayed. "There's a stepfather for
you! I'm bound to say, you know, that he makes up for the want of other
people."

"He makes up for the want of a nurse!" Sir Claude laughed. "Don't you
remember I told you so the very first time?"

"Remember? It was exactly what made me think so well of you!"

"Nothing would induce me," the young man said to Maisie, "to tell you
what made me think so well of HER." Having divested the child he kissed
her gently and gave her a little pat to make her stand off. The pat was
accompanied with a vague sigh in which his gravity of a moment before
came back. "All the same, if you hadn't had the fatal gift of beauty--"

"Well, what?" Maisie asked, wondering why he paused. It was the first
time she had heard of her beauty.

"Why, we shouldn't all be thinking so well of each other!"

"He isn't speaking of personal loveliness--you've not THAT vulgar
beauty, my dear, at all," Mrs. Beale explained. "He's just talking of
plain dull charm of character."

"Her character's the most extraordinary thing in all the world," Sir
Claude stated to Mrs. Beale.

"Oh I know all about that sort of thing!"--she fairly bridled with the
knowledge.

It gave Maisie somehow a sudden sense of responsibility from which she
sought refuge. "Well, you've got it too, 'that sort of thing'--you've
got the fatal gift: you both really have!" she broke out.

"Beauty of character? My dear boy, we haven't a pennyworth!" Sir Claude
protested.

"Speak for yourself, sir!" she leaped lightly from Mrs. Beale. "I'm good
and I'm clever. What more do you want? For you, I'll spare your blushes
and not be personal--I'll simply say that you're as handsome as you can
stick together."

"You're both very lovely; you can't get out of it!"--Maisie felt the
need of carrying her point. "And it's beautiful to see you side by
side."

Sir Claude had taken his hat and stick; he stood looking at her a
moment. "You're a comfort in trouble! But I must go home and pack you."

"And when will you come back?--to-morrow, to-morrow?"

"You see what we're in for!" he said to Mrs. Beale.

"Well, I can bear it if you can."

Their companion gazed from one of them to the other, thinking that
though she had been happy indeed between Sir Claude and Mrs. Wix she
should evidently be happier still between Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale. But
it was like being perched on a prancing horse, and she made a movement
to hold on to something. "Then, you know, shan't I bid goodbye to Mrs.
Wix?"

"Oh I'll make it all right with her," said Sir Claude.

Maisie considered. "And with mamma?"

"Ah mamma!" he sadly laughed.

Even for the child this was scarcely ambiguous; but Mrs. Beale
endeavoured to contribute to its clearness. "Your mother will crow,
she'll crow--"

"Like the early bird!" said Sir Claude as she looked about for a
comparison.

"She'll need no consolation," Mrs. Beale went on, "for having made your
father grandly blaspheme."

Maisie stared. "Will he grandly blaspheme?" It was impressive, it might
have been out of the Bible, and her question produced a fresh play of
caresses, in which Sir Claude also engaged. She wondered meanwhile who,
if Mrs. Wix was disposed of, would represent in her life the element of
geography and anecdote; and she presently surmounted the delicacy she
felt about asking. "Won't there be any one to give me lessons?"

Mrs. Beale was prepared with a reply that struck her as absolutely
magnificent. "You shall have such lessons as you've never had in all
your life. You shall go to courses."

"Courses?" Maisie had never heard of such things.

"At institutions--on subjects."

Maisie continued to stare. "Subjects?"

Mrs. Beale was really splendid. "All the most important ones. French
literature--and sacred history. You'll take part in classes--with
awfully smart children."

"I'm going to look thoroughly into the whole thing, you know." And Sir
Claude, with characteristic kindness, gave her a nod of assurance
accompanied by a friendly wink.

But Mrs. Beale went much further. "My dear child, you shall attend
lectures."

The horizon was suddenly vast and Maisie felt herself the smaller for
it. "All alone?"

"Oh no; I'll attend them with you," said Sir Claude. "They'll teach me
a lot I don't know."

"So they will me," Mrs. Beale gravely admitted. "We'll go with her
together--it will be charming. It's ages," she confessed to Maisie,
"since I've had any time for study. That's another sweet way in which
you'll be a motive to us. Oh won't the good she'll do us be immense?"
she broke out uncontrollably to Sir Claude.

He weighed it; then he replied: "That's certainly our idea."

Of this idea Maisie naturally had less of a grasp, but it inspired her
with almost equal enthusiasm. If in so bright a prospect there would be
nothing to long for it followed that she wouldn't long for Mrs. Wix;
but her consciousness of her assent to the absence of that fond figure
caused a pair of words that had often sounded in her ears to ring in
them again. It showed her in short what her father had always meant by
calling her mother a "low sneak" and her mother by calling her father
one. She wondered if she herself shouldn't be a low sneak in learning to
be so happy without Mrs. Wix. What would Mrs. Wix do?--where would Mrs.
Wix go? Before Maisie knew it, and at the door, as Sir Claude was off,
these anxieties, on her lips, grew articulate and her stepfather had
stopped long enough to answer them. "Oh I'll square her!" he cried; and
with this he departed.

Face to face with Mrs. Beale, Maisie, giving a sigh of relief, looked
round at what seemed to her the dawn of a higher order. "Then EVERY
ONE will be squared!" she peacefully said. On which her stepmother
affectionately bent over her again.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Mrs. Beale lets it slip that she and Sir Claude have been seeing each other, and Maisie reveals that she has already heard this from Mrs. Wix. Sir Claude says that Mrs. Wix has been hoping that Mrs. Beale will "spare" him--meaning go without him for Maisie's sake . Mrs. Beale says no way. Maisie reveals a remarkable--and somewhat alarming--ability to understand the ins and outs of adult intrigue and odd marital arrangements. She still doesn't see, though, what the big deal is about Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale. But, by this time, it's clear to the reader that the two are having an affair. Remember, this was even more scandalous in James's day than it is now. Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude praise Maisie's character, and she praises theirs back. Mrs. Beale then promises to start taking Maisie to classes where she'll learn art and French literature and all kinds of other things. Though thrilled at the prospect of finally getting to go to school and do some real learning, Maisie still worries about Mrs. Wix, but Sir Claude promises to take care of her.


prompt:
Chapter: It was Susan Ash who came to her with the news: "He's downstairs, miss,
and he do look beautiful."

In the schoolroom at her father's, which had pretty blue curtains, she
had been making out at the piano a lovely little thing, as Mrs. Beale
called it, a "Moonlight Berceuse" sent her through the post by Sir
Claude, who considered that her musical education had been deplorably
neglected and who, the last months at her mother's, had been on the
point of making arrangements for regular lessons. She knew from him
familiarly that the real thing, as he said, was shockingly dear and that
anything else was a waste of money, and she therefore rejoiced the more
at the sacrifice represented by this composition, of which the price,
five shillings, was marked on the cover and which was evidently the real
thing. She was already on her feet. "Mrs. Beale has sent up for me?"

"Oh no--it's not that," said Susan Ash. "Mrs. Beale has been out this
hour."

"Then papa!"

"Dear no--not papa. You'll do, miss, all but them wandering 'airs,"
Susan went on. "Your papa never came 'ome at all," she added.

"Home from where?" Maisie responded a little absently and very
excitedly. She gave a wild manual brush to her locks.

"Oh that, miss, I should be very sorry to tell you! I'd rather tuck away
that white thing behind--though I'm blest if it's my work."

"Do then, please. I know where papa was," Maisie impatiently continued.

"Well, in your place I wouldn't tell."

"He was at the club--the Chrysanthemum. So!"

"All night long? Why the flowers shut up at night, you know!" cried
Susan Ash.

"Well, I don't care"--he child was at the door. "Sir Claude asked for me
ALONE?"

"The same as if you was a duchess."

Maisie was aware on her way downstairs that she was now quite as happy
as one, and also, a moment later, as she hung round his neck, that
even such a personage would scarce commit herself more grandly. There
was moreover a hint of the duchess in the infinite point with which,
as she felt, she exclaimed: "And this is what you call coming OFTEN?"

Sir Claude met her delightfully and in the same fine spirit. "My dear
old man, don't make me a scene--I assure you it's what every woman I
look at does. Let us have some fun--it's a lovely day: clap on something
smart and come out with me; then we'll talk it over quietly."

They were on their way five minutes later to Hyde Park, and nothing that
even in the good days at her mother's they had ever talked over had more
of the sweetness of tranquillity than his present prompt explanations.
He was at his best in such an office and with the exception of Mrs. Wix
the only person she had met in her life who ever explained. With him,
however, the act had an authority transcending the wisdom of woman. It
all came back--the plans that always failed, all the rewards and bribes
that she was perpetually paying for in advance and perpetually out of
pocket by afterwards--the whole great stress to be dealt with introduced
her on each occasion afresh to the question of money. Even she herself
almost knew how it would have expressed the strength of his empire to
say that to shuffle away her sense of being duped he had only, from
under his lovely moustache, to breathe upon it. It was somehow in the
nature of plans to be expensive and in the nature of the expensive to be
impossible. To be "involved" was of the essence of everybody's affairs,
and also at every particular moment to be more involved than usual.
This had been the case with Sir Claude's, with papa's, with mamma's,
with Mrs. Beale's and with Maisie's own at the particular moment, a
moment of several weeks, that had elapsed since our young lady had been
re-established at her father's. There wasn't "two-and-tuppence" for
anything or for any one, and that was why there had been no sequel to
the classes in French literature with all the smart little girls. It
was devilish awkward, didn't she see? to try, without even the limited
capital mentioned, to mix her up with a remote array that glittered
before her after this as the children of the rich. She was to feel
henceforth as if she were flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane
of the sweet-shop of knowledge. If the classes, however, that were
select, and accordingly the only ones, were impossibly dear, the
lectures at the institutions--at least at some of them--were directly
addressed to the intelligent poor, and it therefore had to be easier
still to produce on the spot the reason why she had been taken to none.
This reason, Sir Claude said, was that she happened to be just going to
be, though they had nothing to do with that in now directing their steps
to the banks of the Serpentine. Maisie's own park, in the north, had
been nearer at hand, but they rolled westward in a hansom because at the
end of the sweet June days this was the direction taken by every one
that any one looked at. They cultivated for an hour, on the Row and
by the Drive, this opportunity for each observer to amuse and for one
of them indeed, not a little hilariously, to mystify the other, and
before the hour was over Maisie had elicited, in reply to her sharpest
challenge, a further account of her friend's long absence.

"Why I've broken my word to you so dreadfully--promising so solemnly and
then never coming? Well, my dear, that's a question that, not seeing me
day after day, you must very often have put to Mrs. Beale."

"Oh yes," the child replied; "again and again."

"And what has she told you?"

"That you're as bad as you're beautiful."

"Is that what she says?"

"Those very words."

"Ah the dear old soul!" Sir Claude was much diverted, and his loud,
clear laugh was all his explanation. Those were just the words Maisie
had last heard him use about Mrs. Wix. She clung to his hand, which was
encased in a pearl-grey glove ornamented with the thick black lines
that, at her mother's, always used to strike her as connected with the
way the bestitched fists of the long ladies carried, with the elbows
well out, their umbrellas upside down. The mere sense of his grasp in
her own covered the ground of loss just as much as the ground of gain.
His presence was like an object brought so close to her face that she
couldn't see round its edges. He himself, however, remained showman of
the spectacle even after they had passed out of the Park and begun,
under the charm of the spot and the season, to stroll in Kensington
Gardens. What they had left behind them was, as he said, only a pretty
bad circus, and, through prepossessing gates and over a bridge, they
had come in a quarter of an hour, as he also remarked, a hundred miles
from London. A great green glade was before them, and high old trees,
and under the shade of these, in the fresh turf, the crooked course
of a rural footpath. "It's the Forest of Arden," Sir Claude had just
delightfully observed, "and I'm the banished duke, and you're--what was
the young woman called?--the artless country wench. And there," he went
on, "is the other girl--what's her name, Rosalind?--and (don't you
know?) the fellow who was making up to her. Upon my word he IS making
up to her!"

His allusion was to a couple who, side by side, at the end of the glade,
were moving in the same direction as themselves. These distant figures,
in their slow stroll (which kept them so close together that their
heads, drooping a little forward, almost touched), presented the back of
a lady who looked tall, who was evidently a very fine woman, and that
of a gentleman whose left hand appeared to be passed well into her arm
while his right, behind him, made jerky motions with the stick that it
grasped. Maisie's fancy responded for an instant to her friend's idea
that the sight was idyllic; then, stopping short, she brought out with
all her clearness: "Why mercy--if it isn't mamma!"

Sir Claude paused with a stare. "Mamma? But mamma's at Brussels."

Maisie, with her eyes on the lady, wondered. "At Brussels?"

"She's gone to play a match."

"At billiards? You didn't tell me."

"Of course I didn't!" Sir Claude ejaculated. "There's plenty I don't
tell you. She went on Wednesday."

The couple had added to their distance, but Maisie's eyes more than kept
pace with them. "Then she has come back."

Sir Claude watched the lady. "It's much more likely she never went!"

"It's mamma!" the child said with decision.

They had stood still, but Sir Claude had made the most of his
opportunity, and it happened that just at this moment, at the end of the
vista, the others halted and, still showing only their backs, seemed to
stay talking. "Right you are, my duck!" he exclaimed at last. "It's my
own sweet wife!"

He had spoken with a laugh, but he had changed colour, and Maisie
quickly looked away from him. "Then who is it with her?"

"Blest if I know!" said Sir Claude.

"Is it Mr. Perriam?"

"Oh dear no--Perriam's smashed."

"Smashed?"

"Exposed--in the City. But there are quantities of others!" Sir Claude
smiled.

Maisie appeared to count them; she studied the gentleman's back. "Then
is this Lord Eric?"

For a moment her companion made no answer, and when she turned her eyes
again to him he was looking at her, she thought, rather queerly. "What
do you know about Lord Eric?"

She tried innocently to be odd in return. "Oh I know more than you
think! Is it Lord Eric?" she repeated.

"It maybe. Blest if I care!"

Their friends had slightly separated and now, as Sir Claude spoke,
suddenly faced round, showing all the splendour of her ladyship and all
the mystery of her comrade. Maisie held her breath. "They're coming!"

"Let them come." And Sir Claude, pulling out his cigarettes, began to
strike a light.

"We shall meet them!"

"No. They'll meet US."

Maisie stood her ground. "They see us. Just look."

Sir Claude threw away his match. "Come straight on." The others, in the
return, evidently startled, had half-paused again, keeping well apart.
"She's horribly surprised and wants to slope," he continued. "But it's
too late."

Maisie advanced beside him, making out even across the interval that her
ladyship was ill at ease. "Then what will she do?"

Sir Claude puffed his cigarette. "She's quickly thinking." He appeared
to enjoy it.

Ida had wavered but an instant; her companion clearly gave her moral
support. Maisie thought he somehow looked brave, and he had no likeness
whatever to Mr. Perriam. His face, thin and rather sharp, was smooth,
and it was not till they came nearer that she saw he had a remarkably
fair little moustache. She could already see that his eyes were of the
lightest blue. He was far nicer than Mr. Perriam. Mamma looked terrible
from afar, but even under her guns the child's curiosity flickered and
she appealed again to Sir Claude. "Is it--IS it Lord Eric?"

Sir Claude smoked composedly enough. "I think it's the Count."

This was a happy solution--it fitted her idea of a count. But what idea,
as she now came grandly on, did mamma fit?--unless that of an actress,
in some tremendous situation, sweeping down to the footlights as if she
would jump them. Maisie felt really so frightened that before she knew
it she had passed her hand into Sir Claude's arm. Her pressure caused
him to stop, and at the sight of this the other couple came equally to
a stand and, beyond the diminished space, remained a moment more in
talk. This, however, was the matter of an instant; leaving the Count
apparently to come round more circuitously--an outflanking movement, if
Maisie had but known--her ladyship resumed the onset. "What WILL she do
now?" her daughter asked.

Sir Claude was at present in a position to say: "Try to pretend it's
me."

"You?"

"Why that I'm up to something."

In another minute poor Ida had justified this prediction, erect there
before them like a figure of justice in full dress. There were parts of
her face that grew whiter while Maisie looked, and other parts in which
this change seemed to make other colours reign with more intensity.
"What are you doing with my daughter?" she demanded of her husband; in
spite of the indignant tone of which Maisie had a greater sense than
ever in her life before of not being personally noticed. It seemed to
her Sir Claude also grew pale as an effect of the loud defiance with
which Ida twice repeated this question. He put her, instead of answering
it, an enquiry of his own: "Who the devil have you got hold of NOW?"
and at this her ladyship turned tremendously to the child, glaring at
her as at an equal plotter of sin. Maisie received in petrifaction the
full force of her mother's huge painted eyes--they were like Japanese
lanterns swung under festal arches. But life came back to her from a
tone suddenly and strangely softened. "Go straight to that gentleman, my
dear; I've asked him to take you a few minutes. He's charming--go. I've
something to say to THIS creature."

Maisie felt Sir Claude immediately clutch her. "No, no--thank you: that
won't do. She's mine."

"Yours?" It was confounding to Maisie to hear her speak quite as if she
had never heard of Sir Claude before.

"Mine. You've given her up. You've not another word to say about her. I
have her from her father," said Sir Claude--a statement that startled
his companion, who could also measure its lively action on her mother.

There was visibly, however, an influence that made Ida consider; she
glanced at the gentleman she had left, who, having strolled with his
hands in his pockets to some distance, stood there with unembarrassed
vagueness. She directed to him the face that was like an illuminated
garden, turnstile and all, for the frequentation of which he had his
season-ticket; then she looked again at Sir Claude. "I've given her
up to her father to KEEP--not to get rid of by sending about the town
either with you or with any one else. If she's not to mind me let HIM
come and tell me so. I decline to take it from another person, and I
like your pretending that with your humbug of 'interest' you've a leg to
stand on. I know your game and have something now to say to you about
it."

Sir Claude gave a squeeze of the child's arm. "Didn't I tell you she'd
have, Miss Farange?"

"You're uncommonly afraid to hear it," Ida went on; "but if you think
she'll protect you from it you're mightily mistaken." She gave him a
moment. "I'll give her the benefit as soon as look at you. Should you
like her to know, my dear?" Maisie had a sense of her launching the
question with effect; yet our young lady was also conscious of hoping
that Sir Claude would declare that preference. We have already learned
that she had come to like people's liking her to "know." Before he
could reply at all, none the less, her mother opened a pair of arms of
extraordinary elegance, and then she felt the loosening of his grasp.
"My own child," Ida murmured in a voice--a voice of sudden confused
tenderness--that it seemed to her she heard for the first time. She
wavered but an instant, thrilled with the first direct appeal, as
distinguished from the mere maternal pull, she had ever had from lips
that, even in the old vociferous years, had always been sharp. The next
moment she was on her mother's breast, where, amid a wilderness of
trinkets, she felt as if she had suddenly been thrust, with a smash of
glass, into a jeweller's shop-front, but only to be as suddenly ejected
with a push and the brisk injunction: "Now go to the Captain!"

Maisie glanced at the gentleman submissively, but felt the want of more
introduction. "The Captain?"

Sir Claude broke into a laugh. "I told her it was the Count."

Ida stared; she rose so superior that she was colossal. "You're too
utterly loathsome," she then declared. "Be off!" she repeated to her
daughter.

Maisie started, moved backward and, looking at Sir Claude, "Only for a
moment," she signed to him in her bewilderment. But he was too angry
to heed her--too angry with his wife; as she turned away she heard his
anger break out. "You damned old b----"--she couldn't quite hear all.
It was enough, it was too much: she fled before it, rushing even to a
stranger for the shock of such a change of tone.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Sir Claude visits Maisie and takes her out for a stroll in Kensington Gardens, in London's Hyde Park. We learn that he has broken his promise and hasn't been to visit Maisie much. Even though Maisie's mother is supposed to be away playing pool in Brussels, she appears in the park with a man. The man she's with isn't one we've heard about before; it's neither Mr. Perriam nor Lord Eric, nor someone called the "Count." The man in question is the "Captain," and Maisie is told to go talk to him while Ida and Sir Claude have it out.


prompt:
Chapter: As she met the Captain's light blue eyes the greatest marvel occurred;
she felt a sudden relief at finding them reply with anxiety to the
horror in her face. "What in the world has he done?" He put it all on
Sir Claude.

"He has called her a damned old brute." She couldn't help bringing that
out.

The Captain, at the same elevation as her ladyship, gaped wide; then of
course, like every one else, he was convulsed. But he instantly caught
himself up, echoing her bad words. "A damned old brute--your mother?"

Maisie was already conscious of her second movement. "I think she tried
to make him angry."

The Captain's stupefaction was fine. "Angry--SHE? Why she's an angel!"

On the spot, as he said this, his face won her over; it was so bright
and kind, and his blue eyes had such a reflexion of some mysterious
grace that, for him at least, her mother had put forth. Her fund of
observation enabled her as she gazed up at him to place him: he was a
candid simple soldier; very grave--she came back to that--but not at
all terrible. At any rate he struck a note that was new to her and that
after a moment made her say: "Do you like her very much?"

He smiled down at her, hesitating, looking pleasanter and pleasanter.
"Let me tell you about your mother."

He put out a big military hand which she immediately took, and they
turned off together to where a couple of chairs had been placed under
one of the trees. "She told me to come to you," Maisie explained as they
went; and presently she was close to him in a chair, with the prettiest
of pictures--the sheen of the lake through other trees--before them, and
the sound of birds, the plash of boats, the play of children in the air.
The Captain, inclining his military person, sat sideways to be closer
and kinder, and as her hand was on the arm of her seat he put his own
down on it again to emphasise something he had to say that would be good
for her to hear. He had already told her how her mother, from the moment
of seeing her so unexpectedly with a person who was--well, not at all
the right person, had promptly asked him to take charge of her while she
herself tackled, as she said, the real culprit. He gave the child the
sense of doing for the time what he liked with her; ten minutes before
she had never seen him, but she could now sit there touching him,
touched and impressed by him and thinking it nice when a gentleman
was thin and brown--brown with a kind of clear depth that made his
straw-coloured moustache almost white and his eyes resemble little pale
flowers. The most extraordinary thing was the way she didn't appear just
then to mind Sir Claude's being tackled. The Captain wasn't a bit like
him, for it was an odd part of the pleasantness of mamma's friend that
it resided in a manner in this friend's having a face so informally put
together that the only kindness could be to call it funny. An odder part
still was that it finally made our young lady, to classify him further,
say to herself that, of all people in the world, he reminded her most
insidiously of Mrs. Wix. He had neither straighteners nor a diadem, nor,
at least in the same place as the other, a button; he was sun-burnt and
deep-voiced and smelt of cigars, yet he marvellously had more in common
with her old governess than with her young stepfather. What he had
to say to her that was good for her to hear was that her poor mother
(didn't she know?) was the best friend he had ever had in all his life.
And he added: "She has told me ever so much about you. I'm awfully glad
to know you."

She had never, she thought, been so addressed as a young lady, not even
by Sir Claude the day, so long ago, that she found him with Mrs. Beale.
It struck her as the way that at balls, by delightful partners, young
ladies must be spoken to in the intervals of dances; and she tried to
think of something that would meet it at the same high point. But this
effort flurried her, and all she could produce was: "At first, you know,
I thought you were Lord Eric."

The Captain looked vague. "Lord Eric?"

"And then Sir Claude thought you were the Count."

At this he laughed out. "Why he's only five foot high and as red as
a lobster!" Maisie laughed, with a certain elegance, in return--the
young lady at the ball certainly would--and was on the point, as
conscientiously, of pursuing the subject with an agreeable question. But
before she could speak her companion challenged her. "Who in the world's
Lord Eric?"

"Don't you know him?" She judged her young lady would say that with
light surprise.

"Do you mean a fat man with his mouth always open?" She had to
confess that their acquaintance was so limited that she could only
describe the bearer of the name as a friend of mamma's; but a light
suddenly came to the Captain, who quickly spoke as knowing her man.
"What-do-you-call-him's brother, the fellow that owned Bobolink?" Then,
with all his kindness, he contradicted her flat. "Oh dear no; your
mother never knew HIM."

"But Mrs. Wix said so," the child risked.

"Mrs. Wix?"

"My old governess."

This again seemed amusing to the Captain. "She mixed him up, your old
governess. He's an awful beast. Your mother never looked at him."

He was as positive as he was friendly, but he dropped for a minute after
this into a silence that gave Maisie, confused but ingenious, a chance
to redeem the mistake of pretending to know too much by the humility of
inviting further correction. "And doesn't she know the Count?"

"Oh I dare say! But he's another ass." After which abruptly, with a
different look, he put down again on the back of her own the hand he had
momentarily removed. Maisie even thought he coloured a little. "I want
tremendously to speak to you. You must never believe any harm of your
mother."

"Oh I assure you I DON'T!" cried the child, blushing, herself, up to her
eyes in a sudden surge of deprecation of such a thought.

The Captain, bending his head, raised her hand to his lips with a
benevolence that made her wish her glove had been nicer. "Of course you
don't when you know how fond she is of YOU."

"She's fond of me?" Maisie panted.

"Tremendously. But she thinks you don't like her. You MUST like her. She
has had too much to put up with."

"Oh yes--I know!" She rejoiced that she had never denied it.

"Of course I've no right to speak of her except as a particular friend,"
the Captain went on. "But she's a splendid woman. She has never had any
sort of justice."

"Hasn't she?"--his companion, to hear the words, felt a thrill
altogether new.

"Perhaps I oughtn't to say it to you, but she has had everything to
suffer."

"Oh yes--you can SAY it to me!" Maisie hastened to profess.

The Captain was glad. "Well, you needn't tell. It's all for YOU--do you
see?"

Serious and smiling she only wanted to take it from him. "It's between
you and me! Oh there are lots of things I've never told!"

"Well, keep this with the rest. I assure you she has had the most
infernal time, no matter what any one says to the contrary. She's the
cleverest woman I ever saw in all my life. She's too charming." She had
been touched already by his tone, and now she leaned back in her chair
and felt something tremble within her. "She's tremendous fun--she can
do all sorts of things better than I've ever seen any one. She has the
pluck of fifty--and I know; I assure you I do. She has the nerve for a
tiger-shoot--by Jove I'd TAKE her! And she is awfully open and generous,
don't you know? there are women that are such horrid sneaks. She'll
go through anything for any one she likes." He appeared to watch for
a moment the effect on his companion of this emphasis; then he gave a
small sigh that mourned the limits of the speakable. But it was almost
with the note of a fresh challenge that he wound up: "Look here, she's
TRUE!"

Maisie had so little desire to assert the contrary that she found
herself, in the intensity of her response, throbbing with a joy still
less utterable than the essence of the Captain's admiration. She was
fairly hushed with the sense that he spoke of her mother as she had
never heard any one speak. It came over her as she sat silent that,
after all, this admiration and this respect were quite new words, which
took a distinction from the fact that nothing in the least resembling
them in quality had on any occasion dropped from the lips of her father,
of Mrs. Beale, of Sir Claude or even of Mrs. Wix. What it appeared to
her to come to was that on the subject of her ladyship it was the first
real kindness she had heard, so that at the touch of it something
strange and deep and pitying surged up within her--a revelation that,
practically and so far as she knew, her mother, apart from this,
had only been disliked. Mrs. Wix's original account of Sir Claude's
affection seemed as empty now as the chorus in a children's game, and
the husband and wife, but a little way off at that moment, were face to
face in hatred and with the dreadful name he had called her still in the
air. What was it the Captain on the other hand had called her? Maisie
wanted to hear that again. The tears filled her eyes and rolled down
her cheeks, which burned under them with the rush of a consciousness
that for her too, five minutes before, the vivid towering beauty whose
assault she awaited had been, a moment long, an object of pure dread.
She became on the spot indifferent to her usual fear of showing what
in children was notoriously most offensive--presented to her companion,
soundlessly but hideously, her wet distorted face. She cried, with a
pang, straight AT him, cried as she had never cried at any one in all
her life. "Oh do you love her?" she brought out with a gulp that was
the effect of her trying not to make a noise.

It was doubtless another consequence of the thick mist through which she
saw him that in reply to her question the Captain gave her such a queer
blurred look. He stammered, yet in his voice there was also the ring of
a great awkward insistence. "Of course I'm tremendously fond of her--I
like her better than any woman I ever saw. I don't mind in the least
telling you that," he went on, "and I should think myself a great beast
if I did." Then to show that his position was superlatively clear he
made her, with a kindness that even Sir Claude had never surpassed,
tremble again as she had trembled at his first outbreak. He called her
by her name, and her name drove it home. "My dear Maisie, your mother's
an angel!"

It was an almost unbelievable balm--it soothed so her impression of
danger and pain. She sank back in her chair, she covered her face
with her hands. "Oh mother, mother, mother!" she sobbed. She had an
impression that the Captain, beside her, if more and more friendly, was
by no means unembarrassed; in a minute, however, when her eyes were
clearer, he was erect in front of her, very red and nervously looking
about him and whacking his leg with his stick. "Say you love her, Mr.
Captain; say it, say it!" she implored.

Mr. Captain's blue eyes fixed themselves very hard. "Of course I love
her, damn it, you know!"

At this she also jumped up; she had fished out somehow her
pocket-handkerchief. "So do I then. I do, I do, I do!" she passionately
asseverated.

"Then will you come back to her?"

Maisie, staring, stopped the tight little plug of her handkerchief on
the way to her eyes. "She won't have me."

"Yes she will. She wants you."

"Back at the house--with Sir Claude?"

Again he hung fire. "No, not with him. In another place."

They stood looking at each other with an intensity unusual as between a
Captain and a little girl. "She won't have me in any place."

"Oh yes she will if _I_ ask her!"

Maisie's intensity continued. "Shall you be there?"

The Captain's, on the whole, did the same. "Oh yes--some day."

"Then you don't mean now?"

He broke into a quick smile. "Will you come now?--go with us for an
hour?"

Maisie considered. "She wouldn't have me even now." She could see that
he had his idea, but that her tone impressed him. That disappointed her
a little, though in an instant he rang out again.

"She will if I ask her," he repeated. "I'll ask her this minute."

Maisie, turning at this, looked away to where her mother and her
stepfather had stopped. At first, among the trees, nobody was visible;
but the next moment she exclaimed with expression: "It's over--here he
comes!"

The Captain watched the approach of her ladyship's husband, who lounged
composedly over the grass, making to Maisie with his closed fingers a
little movement in the air. "I've no desire to avoid him."

"Well, you mustn't see him," said Maisie.

"Oh he's in no hurry himself!" Sir Claude had stopped to light another
cigarette.

She was vague as to the way it was proper he should feel; but she had a
sense that the Captain's remark was rather a free reflexion on it. "Oh
he doesn't care!" she replied.

"Doesn't care for what?"

"Doesn't care who you are. He told me so. Go and ask mamma," she added.

"If you can come with us? Very good. You really want me not to wait for
him?"

"PLEASE don't." But Sir Claude was not yet near, and the Captain had
with his left hand taken hold of her right, which he familiarly,
sociably swung a little. "Only first," she continued, "tell me this. Are
you going to LIVE with mamma?"

The immemorial note of mirth broke out at her seriousness. "One of these
days."

She wondered, wholly unperturbed by his laughter. "Then where will Sir
Claude be?"

"He'll have left her of course."

"Does he really intend to do that?"

"You've every opportunity to ask him."

Maisie shook her head with decision. "He won't do it. Not first."

Her "first" made the Captain laugh out again. "Oh he'll be sure to be
nasty! But I've said too much to you."

"Well, you know, I'll never tell," said Maisie.

"No, it's all for yourself. Good-bye."

"Good-bye." Maisie kept his hand long enough to add: "I like you too."
And then supremely: "You DO love her?"

"My dear child--!" The Captain wanted words.

"Then don't do it only for just a little."

"A little?"

"Like all the others."

"All the others?"--he stood staring.

She pulled away her hand. "Do it always!" She bounded to meet Sir
Claude, and as she left the Captain she heard him ring out with apparent
gaiety:

"Oh I'm in for it!"

As she joined Sir Claude she noted her mother in the distance move
slowly off, and, glancing again at the Captain, saw him, swinging his
stick, retreat in the same direction.

She had never seen Sir Claude look as he looked just then; flushed yet
not excited--settled rather in an immoveable disgust and at once very
sick and very hard. His conversation with her mother had clearly drawn
blood, and the child's old horror came back to her, begetting the
instant moral contraction of the days when her parents had looked to
her to feed their love of battle. Her greatest fear for the moment,
however, was that her friend would see she had been crying. The next
she became aware that he had glanced at her, and it presently occurred
to her that he didn't even wish to be looked at. At this she quickly
removed her gaze, while he said rather curtly: "Well, who in the world
IS the fellow?"

She felt herself flooded with prudence. "Oh _I_ haven't found out!" This
sounded as if she meant he ought to have done so himself; but she could
only face doggedly the ugliness of seeming disagreeable, as she used to
face it in the hours when her father, for her blankness, called her a
dirty little donkey, and her mother, for her falsity, pushed her out of
the room.

"Then what have you been doing all this time?"

"Oh I don't know!" It was of the essence of her method not to be silly
by halves.

"Then didn't the beast say anything?" They had got down by the lake and
were walking fast.

"Well, not very much."

"He didn't speak of your mother?"

"Oh yes, a little!"

"Then what I ask you, please, is HOW?" She kept silence--so long that
he presently went on: "I say, you know--don't you hear me?" At this she
produced: "Well, I'm afraid I didn't attend to him very much."

Sir Claude, smoking rather hard, made no immediate rejoinder; but
finally he exclaimed: "Then my dear--with such a chance--you were the
perfection of a dunce!" He was so irritated--or she took him to be--that
for the rest of the time they were in the Gardens he spoke no other
word; and she meanwhile subtly abstained from any attempt to pacify him.
That would only lead to more questions. At the gate of the Gardens he
hailed a four-wheeled cab and, in silence, without meeting her eyes, put
her into it, only saying "Give him THAT" as he tossed half a crown upon
the seat. Even when from outside he had closed the door and told the man
where to go he never took her departing look. Nothing of this kind had
ever yet happened to them, but it had no power to make her love him
less; so she could not only bear it, she felt as she drove away--she
could rejoice in it. It brought again the sweet sense of success that,
ages before, she had had at a crisis when, on the stairs, returning from
her father's, she had met a fierce question of her mother's with an
imbecility as deep and had in consequence been dashed by Mrs. Farange
almost to the bottom.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The Captain surprises Maisie by telling her that he has heard a lot about her and that her mother is "an angel" . According to the Captain, Ida Farange is just misunderstood but really wild about her daughter. Even though Maisie long ago realized that her mother isn't wild about her--and really doesn't care about her at all--this announcement from the Captain moves her. The Captain emphasizes what a hard time Ida has had, and Maisie is moved to pity when she realizes that this is the first time she's heard anyone say anything nice about her mother at all. Maisie asks the Captain if he loves her mother, and now it's his turn to be startled. But, he says he does love her. Maisie says she does, too, and then tells the Captain that if he loves her mother, he shouldn't be "like the others" but should love Ida "always" . The Captain says that Maisie should live with her mother and that he'll join them eventually. Sir Claude returns and asks Maisie what the Captain has said and who he is. Maisie feigns ignorance as she has learned to do; she pretends not to have paid attention to the Captain and not to have found out who he is. Sir Claude responds angrily, calling Maisie an idiot, putting her into a cab, and sending her away, alone.


prompt:
Chapter: If for reasons of her own she could bear the sense of Sir Claude's
displeasure her young endurance might have been put to a serious test.
The days went by without his knocking at her father's door, and the
time would have turned sadly to waste if something hadn't conspicuously
happened to give it a new difference. What took place was a marked
change in the attitude of Mrs. Beale--a change that somehow, even
in his absence, seemed to bring Sir Claude again into the house. It
began practically with a conversation that occurred between them the
day Maisie, came home alone in the cab. Mrs. Beale had by that time
returned, and she was more successful than their friend in extracting
from our young lady an account of the extraordinary passage with the
Captain. She came back to it repeatedly, and on the very next day it
grew distinct to the child that she was already in full possession of
what at the same moment had been enacted between her ladyship and Sir
Claude. This was the real origin of her final perception that though he
didn't come to the house her stepmother had some rare secret for not
being quite without him. This led to some rare passages with Mrs. Beale,
the promptest of which had been--not on Maisie's part--a wonderful
outbreak of tears. Mrs. Beale was not, as she herself said, a crying
creature: she hadn't cried, to Maisie's knowledge, since the lowly
governess days, the grey dawn of their connexion. But she wept now with
passion, professing loudly that it did her good and saying remarkable
things to her charge, for whom the occasion was an equal benefit, an
addition to all the fine precautionary wisdom stored away. It somehow
hadn't violated that wisdom, Maisie felt, for her to have told Mrs.
Beale what she had not told Sir Claude, inasmuch as the greatest strain,
to her sense, was between Sir Claude and Sir Claude's wife, and his wife
was just what Mrs. Beale was unfortunately not. He sent his stepdaughter
three days after the incident in Kensington Gardens a message as frank
as it was tender, and that was how Mrs. Beale had had to bring out in
a manner that seemed half an appeal, half a defiance: "Well yes, hang
it--I DO see him!"

How and when and where, however, were just what Maisie was not to
know--an exclusion moreover that she never questioned in the light of
a participation large enough to make him, while she shared the ample
void of Mrs. Beale's rather blank independence, shine in her yearning
eye like the single, the sovereign window-square of a great dim
disproportioned room. As far as her father was concerned such hours
had no interruption; and then it was clear between them that each
was thinking of the absent and thinking the other thought, so that he
was an object of conscious reference in everything they said or did.
The wretched truth, Mrs. Beale had to confess, was that she had hoped
against hope and that in the Regent's Park it was impossible Sir Claude
should really be in and out. Hadn't they at last to look the fact in the
face?--it was too disgustingly evident that no one after all had been
squared. Well, if no one had been squared it was because every one had
been vile. No one and every one were of course Beale and Ida, the extent
of whose power to be nasty was a thing that, to a little girl, Mrs.
Beale simply couldn't give chapter and verse for. Therefore it was that
to keep going at all, as she said, that lady had to make, as she also
said, another arrangement--the arrangement in which Maisie was included
only to the point of knowing it existed and wondering wistfully what it
was. Conspicuously at any rate it had a side that was responsible for
Mrs. Beale's sudden emotion and sudden confidence--a demonstration
this, however, of which the tearfulness was far from deterrent to our
heroine's thought of how happy she should be if she could only make an
arrangement for herself. Mrs. Beale's own operated, it appeared, with
regularity and frequency; for it was almost every day or two that she
was able to bring Maisie a message and to take one back. It had been
over the vision of what, as she called it, he did for her that she
broke down; and this vision was kept in a manner before Maisie by a
subsequent increase not only of the gaiety, but literally--it seemed not
presumptuous to perceive--of the actual virtue of her friend. The friend
was herself the first to proclaim it: he had pulled her up immensely--he
had quite pulled her round. She had charming tormenting words about him:
he was her good fairy, her hidden spring--above all he was just her
"higher" conscience. That was what had particularly come out with her
startling tears: he had made her, dear man, think ever so much better of
herself. It had been thus rather surprisingly revealed that she had been
in a way to think ill, and Maisie was glad to hear of the corrective at
the same time that she heard of the ailment.

She presently found herself supposing, and in spite of her envy even
hoping, that whenever Mrs. Beale was out of the house Sir Claude had
in some manner the satisfaction of it. This was now of more frequent
occurrence than ever before--so much so that she would have thought of
her stepmother as almost extravagantly absent had it not been that, in
the first place, her father was a superior specimen of that habit: it
was the frequent remark of his present wife, as it had been, before the
tribunals of their country, a prominent plea of her predecessor, that
he scarce came home even to sleep. In the second place Mrs. Beale, when
she WAS on the spot, had now a beautiful air of longing to make up for
everything. The only shadow in such bright intervals was that, as Maisie
put it to herself, she could get nothing by questions. It was in the
nature of things to be none of a small child's business, even when a
small child had from the first been deluded into a fear that she might
be only too much initiated. Things then were in Maisie's experience so
true to their nature that questions were almost always improper; but
she learned on the other hand soon to recognise how at last, sometimes,
patient little silences and intelligent little looks could be rewarded
by delightful little glimpses. There had been years at Beale Farange's
when the monosyllable "he" meant always, meant almost violently, the
master; but all that was changed at a period at which Sir Claude's
merits were of themselves so much in the air that it scarce took even
two letters to name him. "He keeps me up splendidly--he does, my own
precious," Mrs. Beale would observe to her comrade; or else she would
say that the situation at the other establishment had reached a point
that could scarcely be believed--the point, monstrous as it sounded,
of his not having laid eyes upon her for twelve days. "She" of course
at Beale Farange's had never meant any one but Ida, and there was the
difference in this case that it now meant Ida with renewed intensity.
Mrs. Beale--it was striking--was in a position to animadvert more and
more upon her dreadfulness, the moral of all which appeared to be how
abominably yet blessedly little she had to do with her husband. This
flow of information came home to our two friends because, truly, Mrs.
Beale had not much more to do with her own; but that was one of the
reflexions that Maisie could make without allowing it to break the
spell of her present sympathy. How could such a spell be anything but
deep when Sir Claude's influence, operating from afar, at last really
determined the resumption of his stepdaughter's studies? Mrs. Beale
again took fire about them and was quite vivid for Maisie as to their
being the great matter to which the dear absent one kept her up.

This was the second source--I have just alluded to the first--of the
child's consciousness of something that, very hopefully, she described
to herself as a new phase; and it also presented in the brightest light
the fresh enthusiasm with which Mrs. Beale always reappeared and which
really gave Maisie a happier sense than she had yet had of being very
dear at least to two persons. That she had small remembrance at present
of a third illustrates, I am afraid, a temporary oblivion of Mrs. Wix,
an accident to be explained only by a state of unnatural excitement. For
what was the form taken by Mrs. Beale's enthusiasm and acquiring relief
in the domestic conditions still left to her but the delightful form of
"reading" with her little charge on lines directly prescribed and in
works profusely supplied by Sir Claude? He had got hold of an awfully
good list--"mostly essays, don't you know?" Mrs. Beale had said; a word
always august to Maisie, but henceforth to be softened by hazy, in fact
by quite languorous edges. There was at any rate a week in which no less
than nine volumes arrived, and the impression was to be gathered from
Mrs. Beale that the obscure intercourse she enjoyed with Sir Claude not
only involved an account and a criticism of studies, but was organised
almost for the very purpose of report and consultation. It was for
Maisie's education in short that, as she often repeated, she closed her
door--closed it to the gentlemen who used to flock there in such numbers
and whom her husband's practical desertion of her would have made it a
course of the highest indelicacy to receive. Maisie was familiar from of
old with the principle at least of the care that a woman, as Mrs. Beale
phrased it, attractive and exposed must take of her "character," and was
duly impressed with the rigour of her stepmother's scruples. There was
literally no one of the other sex whom she seemed to feel at liberty to
see at home, and when the child risked an enquiry about the ladies who,
one by one, during her own previous period, had been made quite loudly
welcome, Mrs. Beale hastened to inform her that, one by one, they had,
the fiends, been found out, after all, to be awful. If she wished to
know more about them she was recommended to approach her father.

Maisie had, however, at the very moment of this injunction much livelier
curiosities, for the dream of lectures at an institution had at last
become a reality, thanks to Sir Claude's now unbounded energy in
discovering what could be done. It stood out in this connexion that when
you came to look into things in a spirit of earnestness an immense deal
could be done for very little more than your fare in the Underground.
The institution--there was a splendid one in a part of the town but
little known to the child--became, in the glow of such a spirit, a
thrilling place, and the walk to it from the station through Glower
Street (a pronunciation for which Mrs. Beale once laughed at her little
friend) a pathway literally strewn with "subjects." Maisie imagined
herself to pluck them as she went, though they thickened in the great
grey rooms where the fountain of knowledge, in the form usually of a
high voice that she took at first to be angry, plashed in the stillness
of rows of faces thrust out like empty jugs. "It MUST do us good--it's
all so hideous," Mrs. Beale had immediately declared; manifesting a
purity of resolution that made these occasions quite the most harmonious
of all the many on which the pair had pulled together. Maisie certainly
had never, in such an association, felt so uplifted, and never above
all been so carried off her feet, as at the moments of Mrs. Beale's
breathlessly re-entering the house and fairly shrieking upstairs to
know if they should still be in time for a lecture. Her stepdaughter,
all ready from the earliest hours, almost leaped over the banister to
respond, and they dashed out together in quest of learning as hard as
they often dashed back to release Mrs. Beale for other preoccupations.
There had been in short no bustle like these particular spasms, once
they had broken out, since that last brief flurry when Mrs. Wix, blowing
as if she were grooming her, "made up" for everything previously lost at
her father's.

These weeks as well were too few, but they were flooded with a new
emotion, part of which indeed came from the possibility that, through
the long telescope of Glower Street, or perhaps between the pillars of
the institution--which impressive objects were what Maisie thought most
made it one--they should some day spy Sir Claude. That was what Mrs.
Beale, under pressure, had said--doubtless a little impatiently: "Oh
yes, oh yes, some day!" His joining them was clearly far less of a
matter of course than was to have been gathered from his original
profession of desire to improve in their company his own mind; and
this sharpened our young lady's guess that since that occasion either
something destructive had happened or something desirable hadn't. Mrs.
Beale had thrown but a partial light in telling her how it had turned
out that nobody had been squared. Maisie wished at any rate that
somebody WOULD be squared. However, though in every approach to the
temple of knowledge she watched in vain for Sir Claude, there was
no doubt about the action of his loved image as an incentive and a
recompense. When the institution was most on pillars--or, as Mrs. Beale
put it, on stilts--when the subject was deepest and the lecture longest
and the listeners ugliest, then it was they both felt their patron in
the background would be most pleased with them. One day, abruptly, with
a glance at this background, Mrs. Beale said to her companion: "We'll
go to-night to the thingumbob at Earl's Court"; an announcement putting
forth its full lustre when she had made known that she referred to
the great Exhibition just opened in that quarter, a collection of
extraordinary foreign things in tremendous gardens, with illuminations,
bands, elephants, switchbacks and side-shows, as well as crowds of
people among whom they might possibly see some one they knew. Maisie
flew in the same bound at the neck of her friend and at the name of Sir
Claude, on which Mrs. Beale confessed that--well, yes, there was just a
chance that he would be able to meet them. He never of course, in his
terrible position, knew what might happen from hour to hour; but he
hoped to be free and he had given Mrs. Beale the tip. "Bring her there
on the quiet and I'll try to turn up"--this was clear enough on what
so many weeks of privation had made of his desire to see the child: it
even appeared to represent on his part a yearning as constant as her
own. That in turn was just puzzling enough to make Maisie express a
bewilderment. She couldn't see, if they were so intensely of the same
mind, why the theory on which she had come back to Mrs. Beale, the
general reunion, the delightful trio, should have broken down so in
fact. Mrs. Beale furthermore only gave her more to think about in saying
that their disappointment was the result of his having got into his head
a kind of idea.

"What kind of idea?"

"Oh goodness knows!" She spoke with an approach to asperity. "He's so
awfully delicate."

"Delicate?"--that was ambiguous.

"About what he does, don't you know?" said Mrs. Beale. She fumbled.
"Well, about what WE do."

Maisie wondered. "You and me?"

"Me and HIM, silly!" cried Mrs. Beale with, this time, a real giggle.

"But you don't do any harm--YOU don't," said Maisie, wondering afresh
and intending her emphasis as a decorous allusion to her parents.

"Of course we don't, you angel--that's just the ground _I_ take!" her
companion exultantly responded. "He says he doesn't want you mixed up."

"Mixed up with what?"

"That's exactly what _I_ want to know: mixed up with what, and how you
are any more mixed--?" Mrs. Beale paused without ending her question.
She ended after an instant in a different way. "All you can say is that
it's his fancy."

The tone of this, in spite of its expressing a resignation, the fruit of
weariness, that dismissed the subject, conveyed so vividly how much such
a fancy was not Mrs. Beale's own that our young lady was led by the mere
fact of contact to arrive at a dim apprehension of the unuttered and the
unknown. The relation between her step-parents had then a mysterious
residuum; this was the first time she really had reflected that except
as regards herself it was not a relationship. To each other it was only
what they might have happened to make it, and she gathered that this,
in the event, had been something that led Sir Claude to keep away from
her. Didn't he fear she would be compromised? The perception of such a
scruple endeared him the more, and it flashed over her that she might
simplify everything by showing him how little she made of such a danger.
Hadn't she lived with her eyes on it from her third year? It was the
condition most frequently discussed at the Faranges', where the word was
always in the air and where at the age of five, amid rounds of applause,
she could gabble it off. She knew as well in short that a person could
be compromised as that a person could be slapped with a hair-brush or
left alone in the dark, and it was equally familiar to her that each of
these ordeals was in general held to have too little effect. But the
first thing was to make absolutely sure of Mrs. Beale. This was done by
saying to her thoughtfully: "Well, if you don't mind--and you really
don't, do you?"

Mrs. Beale, with a dawn of amusement, considered. "Mixing you up? Not a
bit. For what does it mean?"

"Whatever it means I don't in the least mind BEING mixed. Therefore if
you don't and I don't," Maisie concluded, "don't you think that when I
see him this evening I had better just tell him we don't and ask him why
in the world HE should?"

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Mrs. Beale again tells Maisie that she sees Sir Claude even when he doesn't come to see Maisie. Mrs. Beale starts bringing Maisie messages from Sir Claude. Maisie feels that she is entering "a new phase"; she has temporarily forgotten about Mrs. Wix . Mrs. Beale finally starts to take Maisie's education seriously, if only for a short time. The two read together and sit in on lectures at an institution that Sir Claude has arranged for them to attend. Mrs. Beale arranges to take Maisie to a fair at Earl's Court, where Sir Claude has promised to meet them. Maisie reveals that she still doesn't understand what the big deal is about Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale--that they're committing adultery.


prompt:
Chapter: The child, however, was not destined to enjoy much of Sir Claude at the
"thingumbob," which took for them a very different turn indeed. On the
spot Mrs. Beale, with hilarity, had urged her to the course proposed;
but later, at the Exhibition, she withdrew this allowance, mentioning as
a result of second thoughts that when a man was so sensitive anything at
all frisky usually made him worse. It would have been hard indeed for
Sir Claude to be "worse," Maisie felt, as, in the gardens and the crowd,
when the first dazzle had dropped, she looked for him in vain up and
down. They had all their time, the couple, for frugal wistful wandering:
they had partaken together at home of the light vague meal--Maisie's
name for it was a "jam-supper"--to which they were reduced when Mr.
Farange sought his pleasure abroad. It was abroad now entirely that Mr.
Farange pursued this ideal, and it was the actual impression of his
daughter, derived from his wife, that he had three days before joined a
friend's yacht at Cowes.

The place was full of side-shows, to which Mrs. Beale could introduce
the little girl only, alas, by revealing to her so attractive, so
enthralling a name: the side-shows, each time, were sixpence apiece,
and the fond allegiance enjoyed by the elder of our pair had been
established from the earliest time in spite of a paucity of sixpences.
Small coin dropped from her as half-heartedly as answers from bad
children to lessons that had not been looked at. Maisie passed more
slowly the great painted posters, pressing with a linked arm closer
to her friend's pocket, where she hoped for the audible chink of a
shilling. But the upshot of this was but to deepen her yearning: if Sir
Claude would only at last come the shillings would begin to ring. The
companions paused, for want of one, before the Flowers of the Forest, a
large presentment of bright brown ladies--they were brown all over--in
a medium suggestive of tropical luxuriance, and there Maisie dolorously
expressed her belief that he would never come at all. Mrs. Beale
hereupon, though discernibly disappointed, reminded her that he had not
been promised as a certainty--a remark that caused the child to gaze at
the Flowers through a blur in which they became more magnificent, yet
oddly more confused, and by which moreover confusion was imparted to the
aspect of a gentleman who at that moment, in the company of a lady, came
out of the brilliant booth. The lady was so brown that Maisie at first
took her for one of the Flowers; but during the few seconds that this
required--a few seconds in which she had also desolately given up Sir
Claude--she heard Mrs. Beale's voice, behind her, gather both wonder and
pain into a single sharp little cry.

"Of all the wickedness--BEALE!"

He had already, without distinguishing them in the mass of strollers,
turned another way--it seemed at the brown lady's suggestion. Her course
was marked, over heads and shoulders, by an upright scarlet plume, as to
the ownership of which Maisie was instantly eager. "Who is she--who is
she?"

But Mrs. Beale for a moment only looked after them. "The liar--the
liar!"

Maisie considered. "Because he's not--where one thought?" That was also,
a month ago in Kensington Gardens, where her mother had not been.
"Perhaps he has come back," she was quick to contribute.

"He never went--the hound!"

That, according to Sir Claude, had been also what her mother had not
done, and Maisie could only have a sense of something that in a maturer
mind would be called the way history repeats itself.

"Who IS she?" she asked again.

Mrs. Beale, fixed to the spot, seemed lost in the vision of an
opportunity missed. "If he had only seen me!"--it came from between her
teeth. "She's a brand-new one. But he must have been with her since
Tuesday."

Maisie took it in. "She's almost black," she then reported.

"They're always hideous," said Mrs. Beale.

This was a remark on which the child had again to reflect. "Oh not his
WIVES!" she remonstrantly exclaimed. The words at another moment would
probably have set her friend "off," but Mrs. Beale was now, in her
instant vigilance, too immensely "on." "Did you ever in your life see
such a feather?" Maisie presently continued.

This decoration appeared to have paused at some distance, and in spite
of intervening groups they could both look at it. "Oh that's the way
they dress--the vulgarest of the vulgar!"

"They're coming back--they'll see us!" Maisie the next moment cried;
and while her companion answered that this was exactly what she wanted
and the child returned "Here they are--here they are!" the unconscious
subjects of so much attention, with a change of mind about their
direction, quickly retraced their steps and precipitated themselves upon
their critics. Their unconsciousness gave Mrs. Beale time to leap, under
her breath, to a recognition which Maisie caught.

"It must be Mrs. Cuddon!"

Maisie looked at Mrs. Cuddon hard--her lips even echoed the name. What
followed was extraordinarily rapid--a minute of livelier battle than had
ever yet, in so short a span at least, been waged round our heroine. The
muffled shock--lest people should notice--was violent, and it was only
for her later thought that the steps fell into their order, the steps
through which, in a bewilderment not so much of sound as of silence, she
had come to find herself, too soon for comprehension and too strangely
for fear, at the door of the Exhibition with her father. He thrust her
into a hansom and got in after her, and then it was--as she drove along
with him--that she recovered a little what had happened. Face to face
with them in the gardens he had seen them, and there had been a moment
of checked concussion during which, in a glare of black eyes and a
toss of red plumage, Mrs. Cuddon had recognised them, ejaculated and
vanished. There had been another moment at which she became aware of Sir
Claude, also poised there in surprise, but out of her father's view, as
if he had been warned off at the very moment of reaching them. It fell
into its place with all the rest that she had heard Mrs. Beale say to
her father, but whether low or loud was now lost to her, something
about his having this time a new one; on which he had growled something
indistinct but apparently in the tone and of the sort that the child,
from her earliest years, had associated with hearing somebody retort
to somebody that somebody was "another." "Oh I stick to the old!" Mrs.
Beale had then quite loudly pronounced; and her accent, even as the cab
got away, was still in the air, Maisie's effective companion having
spoken no other word from the moment of whisking her off--none at least
save the indistinguishable address which, over the top of the hansom and
poised on the step, he had given the driver. Reconstructing these things
later Maisie theorised that she at this point would have put a question
to him had not the silence into which he charmed her or scared her--she
could scarcely tell which--come from his suddenly making her feel his
arm about her, feel, as he drew her close, that he was agitated in a way
he had never yet shown her. It struck her he trembled, trembled too much
to speak, and this had the effect of making her, with an emotion which,
though it had begun to throb in an instant, was by no means all dread,
conform to his portentous hush. The act of possession that his pressure
in a manner advertised came back to her after the longest of the long
intermissions that had ever let anything come back. They drove and
drove, and he kept her close; she stared straight before her, holding
her breath, watching one dark street succeed another and strangely
conscious that what it all meant was somehow that papa was less to be
left out of everything than she had supposed. It took her but a minute
to surrender to this discovery, which, in the form of his present
embrace, suggested a purpose in him prodigiously reaffirmed and with
that a confused confidence. She neither knew exactly what he had done
nor what he was doing; she could only, altogether impressed and rather
proud, vibrate with the sense that he had jumped up to do something and
that she had as quickly become a part of it. It was a part of it too
that here they were at a house that seemed not large, but in the fresh
white front of which the street-lamp showed a smartness of flower-boxes.
The child had been in thousands of stories--all Mrs. Wix's and her own,
to say nothing of the richest romances of French Elise--but she had
never been in such a story as this. By the time he had helped her out
of the cab, which drove away, and she heard in the door of the house
the prompt little click of his key, the Arabian Nights had quite closed
round her.

From this minute that pitch of the wondrous was in everything,
particularly in such an instant "Open Sesame" and in the departure of
the cab, a rattling void filled with relinquished step-parents; it was,
with the vividness, the almost blinding whiteness of the light that
sprang responsive to papa's quick touch of a little brass knob on the
wall, in a place that, at the top of a short soft staircase, struck her
as the most beautiful she had ever seen in her life. The next thing she
perceived it to be was the drawing-room of a lady--of a lady, she could
see in a moment, and not of a gentleman, not even of one like papa
himself or even like Sir Claude--whose things were as much prettier than
mamma's as it had always had to be confessed that mamma's were prettier
than Mrs. Beale's. In the middle of the small bright room and the
presence of more curtains and cushions, more pictures and mirrors, more
palm-trees drooping over brocaded and gilded nooks, more little silver
boxes scattered over little crooked tables and little oval miniatures
hooked upon velvet screens than Mrs. Beale and her ladyship together
could, in an unnatural alliance, have dreamed of mustering, the child
became aware, with a sharp foretaste of compassion, of something that
was strangely like a relegation to obscurity of each of those women of
taste. It was a stranger operation still that her father should on the
spot be presented to her as quite advantageously and even grandly at
home in the dazzling scene and himself by so much the more separated
from scenes inferior to it. She spent with him in it, while explanations
continued to hang back, twenty minutes that, in their sudden drop of
danger, affected her, though there were neither buns nor ginger-beer,
like an extemporised expensive treat.

"Is she very rich?" He had begun to strike her as almost embarrassed, so
shy that he might have found himself with a young lady with whom he had
little in common. 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. It pleased her more than ever
to think that papa was handsome and, though as high aloft as mamma and
almost, in his specially florid evening-dress, as splendid, of a beauty
somehow less belligerent, less terrible.

"The Countess? Why do you ask me that?"

Maisie's eyes opened wider. "Is she a Countess?"

He seemed to treat her wonder as a positive tribute. "Oh yes, my dear,
but it isn't an English title."

Her manner appreciated this. "Is it a French one?"

"No, nor French either. It's American."

She conversed agreeably. "Ah then of course she must be rich." She took
in such a combination of nationality and rank. "I never saw anything so
lovely."

"Did you have a sight of her?" Beale asked.

"At the Exhibition?" Maisie smiled. "She was gone too quick."

Her father laughed. "She did slope!" She had feared he would say
something about Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude, yet the way he spared them
made her rather uneasy too. All he risked was, the next minute, "She has
a horror of vulgar scenes."

This was something she needn't take up; she could still continue bland.
"But where do you suppose she went?"

"Oh I thought she'd have taken a cab and have been here by this time.
But she'll turn up all right."

"I'm sure I HOPE she will," Maisie said; she spoke with an earnestness
begotten of the impression of all the beauty about them, to which, in
person, the Countess might make further contribution. "We came awfully
fast," she added.

Her father again laughed loud. "Yes, my dear, I made you step out!" He
waited an instant, then pursued: "I want her to see you."

Maisie, at this, rejoiced in the attention that, for their evening out,
Mrs. Beale, even to the extent of personally "doing up" her old hat, had
given her appearance. Meanwhile her father went on: "You'll like her
awfully."

"Oh I'm sure I shall!" After which, either from the effect of having
said so much or from that of a sudden glimpse of the impossibility of
saying more, she felt an embarrassment and sought refuge in a minor
branch of the subject. "I thought she was Mrs. Cuddon."

Beale's gaiety rather increased than diminished. "You mean my wife
did? My dear child, my wife's a damned fool!" He had the oddest air of
speaking of his wife as of a person whom she might scarcely have known,
so that the refuge of her scruple didn't prove particularly happy. Beale
on the other hand appeared after an instant himself to feel a scruple.
"What I mean is, to speak seriously, that she doesn't really know
anything about anything." He paused, following the child's charmed eyes
and tentative step or two as they brought her nearer to the pretty
things on one of the tables. "She thinks she has good things, don't you
know!" He quite jeered at Mrs. Beale's delusion.

Maisie felt she must confess that it WAS one; everything she had missed
at the side-shows was made up to her by the Countess's luxuries. "Yes,"
she considered; "she does think that."

There was again a dryness in the way Beale replied that it didn't matter
what she thought; but there was an increasing sweetness for his daughter
in being with him so long without his doing anything worse. The whole
hour of course was to remain with her, for days and weeks, ineffaceably
illumined and confirmed; by the end of which she was able to read
into it a hundred things that had been at the moment mere miraculous
pleasantness. What they at the moment came to was simply that her
companion was still in a good deal of a flutter, yet wished not to show
it, and that just in proportion as he succeeded in this attempt he was
able to encourage her to regard him as kind. He moved about the room
after a little, showed her things, spoke to her as a person of taste,
told her the name, which she remembered, of the famous French lady
represented in one of the miniatures, and remarked, as if he had caught
her wistful over a trinket or a trailing stuff, that he made no doubt
the Countess, on coming in, would give her something jolly. He spied a
pink satin box with a looking-glass let into the cover, which he raised,
with a quick facetious flourish, to offer her the privilege of six rows
of chocolate bonbons, cutting out thereby Sir Claude, who had never
gone beyond four rows. "I can do what I like with these," he said, "for
I don't mind telling you I gave 'em to her myself." The Countess had
evidently appreciated the gift; there were numerous gaps, a ravage now
quite unchecked, in the array. Even while they waited together Maisie
had her sense, which was the mark of what their separation had become,
of her having grown for him, since the last time he had, as it were,
noticed her, and by increase of years and of inches if by nothing else,
much more of a little person to reckon with. Yes, this was a part of
the positive awkwardness that he carried off by being almost foolishly
tender. There was a passage during which, on a yellow silk sofa under
one of the palms, he had her on his knee, stroking her hair, playfully
holding her off while he showed his shining fangs and let her, with
a vague affectionate helpless pointless "Dear old girl, dear little
daughter," inhale the fragrance of his cherished beard. She must have
been sorry for him, she afterwards knew, so well could she privately
follow his difficulty in being specific to her about anything. She had
such possibilities of vibration, of response, that it needed nothing
more than this to make up to her in fact for omissions. The tears came
into her eyes again as they had done when in the Park that day the
Captain told her so "splendidly" that her mother was good. What was
this but splendid too--this still directer goodness of her father and
this unexampled shining solitude with him, out of which everything had
dropped but that he was papa and that he was magnificent? It didn't
spoil it that she finally felt he must have, as he became restless, some
purpose he didn't quite see his way to bring out, for in the freshness
of their recovered fellowship she would have lent herself gleefully to
his suggesting, or even to his pretending, that their relations were
easy and graceful. There was something in him that seemed, and quite
touchingly, to ask her to help him to pretend--pretend he knew enough
about her life and her education, her means of subsistence and her view
of himself, to give the questions he couldn't put her a natural domestic
tone. She would have pretended with ecstasy if he could only have given
her the cue. She waited for it while, between his big teeth, he breathed
the sighs she didn't know to be stupid. And as if, though he was so
stupid all through, he had let the friendly suffusion of her eyes yet
tell him she was ready for anything, he floundered about, wondering what
the devil he could lay hold of.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Mrs. Beale takes Maisie to the fair, called the "Exhibition," but they have no fun there since all of the attractions cost money. At the fair, Mrs. Beale is shocked when she and Maisie run into Beale Farange, Maisie's father. He is supposed to be abroad but turns out to be in town--in fact, never to have left. Just as Maisie and Sir Claude had unexpectedly encountered Ida and another man in the park, here Maisie and her stepmother see that Beale is with another woman. Mrs. Beale mistakes the woman for Mrs. Cuddon. Only later will it become clear that she is someone else, a new mistress of Beale's. All of a sudden, Maisie is in the hands of her father, who takes her away from Mrs. Beale and to his mistress's house. Here, Maisie and her father wait for the lady to return. The house is prettier and fancier than any Maisie has ever been in, and Maisie realizes that this means the lady is very rich. Mr. Farange explains that the lady, whom he calls the "Countess," is a wealthy American. He is unexpectedly affectionate with Maisie, to her surprise.