prompt:
Chapter: In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a child's
mind the past, on each occasion, became for her as indistinct as
the future: she surrendered herself to the actual with a good faith
that might have been touching to either parent. Crudely as they had
calculated they were at first justified by the event: she was the little
feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them. The
evil they had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other
they poured into her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless
receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the best conscience in the
world as to the duty of teaching her the stern truth that should be her
safeguard against the other. She was at the age for which all stories
are true and all conceptions are stories. The actual was the absolute,
the present alone was vivid. The objurgation for instance launched
in the carriage by her mother after she had at her father's bidding
punctually performed was a missive that dropped into her memory with the
dry rattle of a letter falling into a pillar-box. Like the letter it
was, as part of the contents of a well-stuffed post-bag, delivered in
due course at the right address. In the presence of these overflowings,
after they had continued for a couple of years, the associates of either
party sometimes felt that something should be done for what they called
"the real good, don't you know?" of the child. The only thing done,
however, in general, took place when it was sighingly remarked that she
fortunately wasn't all the year round where she happened to be at the
awkward moment, and that, furthermore, either from extreme cunning or
from extreme stupidity, she appeared not to take things in.

The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents,
corresponded with a great date in her small still life: the complete
vision, private but final, of the strange office she filled. It was
literally a moral revolution and accomplished in the depths of her
nature. The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms
and legs; old forms and phrases began to have a sense that frightened
her. She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy
rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of
concealment. She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious
spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult,
and that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so.
Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed
no longer. She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and
when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she
began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure new and keen.
When therefore, as she grew older, her parents in turn announced before
her that she had grown shockingly dull, it was not from any real
contraction of her little stream of life. She spoiled their fun, but she
practically added to her own. She saw more and more; she saw too much.
It was Miss Overmore, her first governess, who on a momentous occasion
had sown the seeds of secrecy; sown them not by anything she said, but
by a mere roll of those fine eyes which Maisie already admired. Moddle
had become at this time, after alternations of residence of which the
child had no clear record, an image faintly embalmed in the remembrance
of hungry disappearances from the nursery and distressful lapses in the
alphabet, sad embarrassments, in particular, when invited to recognise
something her nurse described as "the important letter haitch." Miss
Overmore, however hungry, never disappeared: this marked her somehow as
of higher rank, and the character was confirmed by a prettiness that
Maisie supposed to be extraordinary. Mrs. Farange had described her as
almost too pretty, and some one had asked what that mattered so long as
Beale wasn't there. "Beale or no Beale," Maisie had heard her mother
reply, "I take her because she's a lady and yet awfully poor. Rather
nice people, but there are seven sisters at home. What do people mean?"

Maisie didn't know what people meant, but she knew very soon all the
names of all the sisters; she could say them off better than she could
say the multiplication-table. She privately wondered moreover, though
she never asked, about the awful poverty, of which her companion also
never spoke. Food at any rate came up by mysterious laws; Miss Overmore
never, like Moddle, had on an apron, and when she ate she held her fork
with her little finger curled out. The child, who watched her at many
moments, watched her particularly at that one. "I think you're lovely,"
she often said to her; even mamma, who was lovely too, had not such a
pretty way with the fork. Maisie associated this showier presence with
her now being "big," knowing of course that nursery-governesses were
only for little girls who were not, as she said, "really" little. She
vaguely knew, further, somehow, that the future was still bigger than
she, and that a part of what made it so was the number of governesses
lurking in it and ready to dart out. Everything that had happened
when she was really little was dormant, everything but the positive
certitude, bequeathed from afar by Moddle, that the natural way for a
child to have her parents was separate and successive, like her mutton
and her pudding or her bath and her nap.

"DOES he know he lies?"--that was what she had vivaciously asked Miss
Overmore on the occasion which was so suddenly to lead to a change in
her life.

"Does he know--" Miss Overmore stared; she had a stocking pulled over
her hand and was pricking at it with a needle which she poised in the
act. Her task was homely, but her movement, like all her movements,
graceful.

"Why papa."

"That he 'lies'?"

"That's what mamma says I'm to tell him--'that he lies and he knows he
lies.'" Miss Overmore turned very red, though she laughed out till her
head fell back; then she pricked again at her muffled hand so hard
that Maisie wondered how she could bear it. "AM I to tell him?" the
child went on. It was then that her companion addressed her in the
unmistakeable language of a pair of eyes of deep dark grey. "I can't say
No," they replied as distinctly as possible; "I can't say No, because
I'm afraid of your mamma, don't you see? Yet how can I say Yes after
your papa has been so kind to me, talking to me so long the other day,
smiling and flashing his beautiful teeth at me the time we met him in
the Park, the time when, rejoicing at the sight of us, he left the
gentlemen he was with and turned and walked with us, stayed with us for
half an hour?" Somehow in the light of Miss Overmore's lovely eyes that
incident came back to Maisie with a charm it hadn't had at the time, and
this in spite of the fact that after it was over her governess had never
but once alluded to it. On their way home, when papa had quitted them,
she had expressed the hope that the child wouldn't mention it to mamma.
Maisie liked her so, and had so the charmed sense of being liked by her,
that she accepted this remark as settling the matter and wonderingly
conformed to it. The wonder now lived again, lived in the recollection
of what papa had said to Miss Overmore: "I've only to look at you to see
you're a person I can appeal to for help to save my daughter." Maisie's
ignorance of what she was to be saved from didn't diminish the pleasure
of the thought that Miss Overmore was saving her. It seemed to make them
cling together as in some wild game of "going round."

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

completion: Maisie pretends to be stupid to keep from having to hurl insults and then learns to keep secrets to protect herself. Still, Maisie feels guilty--like she is the one who has made "everything" in her world "bad" . Aww, poor kiddo. We meet Maisie's "first governess," Miss Overmore, who is pretty and refined . Maisie and Miss Overmore develop an understanding, learning to communicate without words. Maisie starts to show precocity by speaking in ways that startle adults like Miss Overmore.


prompt:
Chapter: She was therefore all the more startled when her mother said to her in
connexion with something to be done before her next migration: "You
understand of course that she's not going with you."

Maisie turned quite faint. "Oh I thought she was."

"It doesn't in the least matter, you know, what you think," Mrs. Farange
loudly replied; "and you had better indeed for the future, miss, learn
to keep your thoughts to yourself." This was exactly what Maisie had
already learned, and the accomplishment was just the source of her
mother's irritation. It was of a horrid little critical system, a
tendency, in her silence, to judge her elders, that this lady suspected
her, liking as she did, for her own part, a child to be simple and
confiding. She liked also to hear the report of the whacks she
administered to Mr. Farange's character, to his pretensions to peace
of mind: the satisfaction of dealing them diminished when nothing came
back. The day was at hand, and she saw it, when she should feel more
delight in hurling Maisie at him than in snatching her away; so much so
that her conscience winced under the acuteness of a candid friend who
had remarked that the real end of all their tugging would be that each
parent would try to make the little girl a burden to the other--a sort
of game in which a fond mother clearly wouldn't show to advantage. The
prospect of not showing to advantage, a distinction in which she held
she had never failed, begot in Ida Farange an ill humour of which
several persons felt the effect. She determined that Beale at any rate
should feel it; she reflected afresh that in the study of how to be
odious to him she must never give way. Nothing could incommode him more
than not to get the good, for the child, of a nice female appendage who
had clearly taken a fancy to her. One of the things Ida said to the
appendage was that Beale's was a house in which no decent woman could
consent to be seen. It was Miss Overmore herself who explained to
Maisie that she had had a hope of being allowed to accompany her to her
father's, and that this hope had been dashed by the way her mother took
it. "She says that if I ever do such a thing as enter his service I must
never expect to show my face in this house again. So I've promised not
to attempt to go with you. If I wait patiently till you come back here
we shall certainly be together once more."

Waiting patiently, and above all waiting till she should come back
there, seemed to Maisie a long way round--it reminded her of all the
things she had been told, first and last, that she should have if she'd
be good and that in spite of her goodness she had never had at all.
"Then who'll take care of me at papa's?"

"Heaven only knows, my own precious!" Miss Overmore replied, tenderly
embracing her. There was indeed no doubt that she was dear to this
beautiful friend. What could have proved it better than the fact that
before a week was out, in spite of their distressing separation and her
mother's prohibition and Miss Overmore's scruples and Miss Overmore's
promise, the beautiful friend had turned up at her father's? The little
lady already engaged there to come by the hour, a fat dark little lady
with a foreign name and dirty fingers, who wore, throughout, a bonnet
that had at first given her a deceptive air, too soon dispelled, of
not staying long, besides asking her pupil questions that had nothing
to do with lessons, questions that Beale Farange himself, when two or
three were repeated to him, admitted to be awfully low--this strange
apparition faded before the bright creature who had braved everything
for Maisie's sake. The bright creature told her little charge frankly
what had happened--that she had really been unable to hold out. She had
broken her vow to Mrs. Farange; she had struggled for three days and
then had come straight to Maisie's papa and told him the simple truth.
She adored his daughter; she couldn't give her up; she'd make for her
any sacrifice. On this basis it had been arranged that she should stay;
her courage had been rewarded; she left Maisie in no doubt as to the
amount of courage she had required. Some of the things she said made
a particular impression on the child--her declaration for instance
that when her pupil should get older she'd understand better just how
"dreadfully bold" a young lady, to do exactly what she had done, had
to be.

"Fortunately your papa appreciates it; he appreciates it IMMENSELY"--
that was one of the things Miss Overmore also said, with a striking
insistence on the adverb. Maisie herself was no less impressed with
what this martyr had gone through, especially after hearing of the
terrible letter that had come from Mrs. Farange. Mamma had been so
angry that, in Miss Overmore's own words, she had loaded her with
insult--proof enough indeed that they must never look forward to being
together again under mamma's roof. Mamma's roof, however, had its turn,
this time, for the child, of appearing but remotely contingent, so that,
to reassure her, there was scarce a need of her companion's secret,
solemnly confided--the probability there would be no going back to mamma
at all. It was Miss Overmore's private conviction, and a part of the
same communication, that if Mr. Farange's daughter would only show a
really marked preference she would be backed up by "public opinion" in
holding on to him. Poor Maisie could scarcely grasp that incentive, but
she could surrender herself to the day. She had conceived her first
passion, and the object of it was her governess. It hadn't been put to
her, and she couldn't, or at any rate she didn't, put it to herself,
that she liked Miss Overmore better than she liked papa; but it would
have sustained her under such an imputation to feel herself able
to reply that papa too liked Miss Overmore exactly as much. He had
particularly told her so. Besides she could easily see it.

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

completion: Maisie learns that Miss Overmore will not be coming with her when she returns to her father's place. Maisie and Miss Overmore separate, sadly. Miss Overmore defies Ida Farange's orders and comes to stay with Maisie at her father's house. We learn that Maisie has "conceived her first passion, and the object of it was her governess" . She's really into this Miss Overmore. Luckily, Maisie thinks, her father, Beale Farange, seems to like Miss Overmore just as much as she does. This is foreshadowing.


prompt:
Chapter: All this led her on, but it brought on her fate as well, the day when
her mother would be at the door in the carriage in which Maisie now rode
on no occasions but these. There was no question at present of Miss
Overmore's going back with her: it was universally recognised that her
quarrel with Mrs. Farange was much too acute. The child felt it from
the first; there was no hugging nor exclaiming as that lady drove her
away--there was only a frightening silence, unenlivened even by the
invidious enquiries of former years, which culminated, according to its
stern nature, in a still more frightening old woman, a figure awaiting
her on the very doorstep. "You're to be under this lady's care," said
her mother. "Take her, Mrs. Wix," she added, addressing the figure
impatiently and giving the child a push from which Maisie gathered that
she wished to set Mrs. Wix an example of energy. Mrs. Wix took her and,
Maisie felt the next day, would never let her go. She had struck her at
first, just after Miss Overmore, as terrible; but something in her voice
at the end of an hour touched the little girl in a spot that had never
even yet been reached. Maisie knew later what it was, though doubtless
she couldn't have made a statement of it: these were things that a few
days' talk with Mrs. Wix quite lighted up. The principal one was a
matter Mrs. Wix herself always immediately mentioned: she had had a
little girl quite of her own, and the little girl had been killed on
the spot. She had had absolutely nothing else in all the world, and her
affliction had broken her heart. It was comfortably established between
them that Mrs. Wix's heart was broken. What Maisie felt was that she had
been, with passion and anguish, a mother, and that this was something
Miss Overmore was not, something (strangely, confusingly) that mamma was
even less.

So it was that in the course of an extraordinarily short time she
found herself as deeply absorbed in the image of the little dead
Clara Matilda, who, on a crossing in the Harrow Road, had been knocked
down and crushed by the cruellest of hansoms, as she had ever found
herself in the family group made vivid by one of seven. "She's your
little dead sister," Mrs. Wix ended by saying, and Maisie, all in
a tremor of curiosity and compassion, addressed from that moment a
particular piety to the small accepted acquisition. Somehow she wasn't
a real sister, but that only made her the more romantic. It contributed
to this view of her that she was never to be spoken of in that character
to any one else--least of all to Mrs. Farange, who wouldn't care for
her nor recognise the relationship: it was to be just an unutterable and
inexhaustible little secret with Mrs. Wix. Maisie knew everything about
her that could be known, everything she had said or done in her little
mutilated life, exactly how lovely she was, exactly how her hair was
curled and her frocks were trimmed. Her hair came down far below her
waist--it was of the most wonderful golden brightness, just as Mrs.
Wix's own had been a long time before. Mrs. Wix's own was indeed very
remarkable still, and Maisie had felt at first that she should never get
on with it. It played a large part in the sad and strange appearance,
the appearance as of a kind of greasy greyness, which Mrs. Wix had
presented on the child's arrival. It had originally been yellow, but
time had turned that elegance to ashes, to a turbid sallow unvenerable
white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner of which
the poor lady appeared not yet to have recognised the supersession, with
a glossy braid, like a large diadem, on the top of the head, and behind,
at the nape of the neck, a dingy rosette like a large button. She wore
glasses which, in humble reference to a divergent obliquity of vision,
she called her straighteners, and a little ugly snuff-coloured dress
trimmed with satin bands in the form of scallops and glazed with
antiquity. The straighteners, she explained to Maisie, were put on for
the sake of others, whom, as she believed, they helped to recognise the
bearing, otherwise doubtful, of her regard; the rest of the melancholy
garb could only have been put on for herself. With the added suggestion
of her goggles it reminded her pupil of the polished shell or corslet
of a horrid beetle. At first she had looked cross and almost cruel; but
this impression passed away with the child's increased perception of
her being in the eyes of the world a figure mainly to laugh at. She
was as droll as a charade or an animal toward the end of the "natural
history"--a person whom people, to make talk lively, described to each
other and imitated. Every one knew the straighteners; every one knew the
diadem and the button, the scallops and satin bands; every one, though
Maisie had never betrayed her, knew even Clara Matilda.

It was on account of these things that mamma got her for such low pay,
really for nothing: so much, one day when Mrs. Wix had accompanied her
into the drawing-room and left her, the child heard one of the ladies
she found there--a lady with eyebrows arched like skipping-ropes and
thick black stitching, like ruled lines for musical notes on beautiful
white gloves--announce to another. She knew governesses were poor; Miss
Overmore was unmentionably and Mrs. Wix ever so publicly so. Neither
this, however, nor the old brown frock nor the diadem nor the button,
made a difference for Maisie in the charm put forth through everything,
the charm of Mrs. Wix's conveying that somehow, in her ugliness and her
poverty, she was peculiarly and soothingly safe; safer than any one
in the world, than papa, than mamma, than the lady with the arched
eyebrows; safer even, though so much less beautiful, than Miss Overmore,
on whose loveliness, as she supposed it, the little girl was faintly
conscious that one couldn't rest with quite the same tucked-in and
kissed-for-good-night feeling. Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda,
who was in heaven and yet, embarrassingly, also in Kensal Green, where
they had been together to see her little huddled grave. It was from
something in Mrs. Wix's tone, which in spite of caricature remained
indescribable and inimitable, that Maisie, before her term with her
mother was over, drew this sense of a support, like a breast-high
banister in a place of "drops," that would never give way. If she knew
her instructress was poor and queer she also knew she was not nearly so
"qualified" as Miss Overmore, who could say lots of dates straight off
(letting you hold the book yourself), state the position of Malabar, play
six pieces without notes and, in a sketch, put in beautifully the trees
and houses and difficult parts. Maisie herself could play more pieces
than Mrs. Wix, who was moreover visibly ashamed of her houses and trees
and could only, with the help of a smutty forefinger, of doubtful
legitimacy in the field of art, do the smoke coming out of the chimneys.
They dealt, the governess and her pupil, in "subjects," but there were
many the governess put off from week to week and that they never got to
at all: she only used to say "We'll take that in its proper order." Her
order was a circle as vast as the untravelled globe. She had not the
spirit of adventure--the child could perfectly see how many subjects she
was afraid of. She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through
which indeed there curled the blue river of truth. She knew swarms of
stories, mostly those of the novels she had read; relating them with
a memory that never faltered and a wealth of detail that was Maisie's
delight. They were all about love and beauty and countesses and
wickedness. Her conversation was practically an endless narrative,
a great garden of romance, with sudden vistas into her own life and
gushing fountains of homeliness. These were the parts where they most
lingered; she made the child take with her again every step of her long,
lame course and think it beyond magic or monsters. Her pupil acquired a
vivid vision of every one who had ever, in her phrase, knocked against
her--some of them oh so hard!--every one literally but Mr. Wix, her
husband, as to whom nothing was mentioned save that he had been dead for
ages. He had been rather remarkably absent from his wife's career, and
Maisie was never taken to see his grave.

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

completion: Maisie heads back to her mother's. Enter Mrs. Wix, the governess who's now to be responsible for Maisie when she is with her mother. Mrs. Wix is off-putting to Maisie at first but soon wins her over. We learn that Mrs. Wix had a young daughter, Clara Matilda, who died, and Maisie can tell by Mrs. Wix's voice that she "had been ... a mother, and that this was something Miss Overmore was not, something, strangely, confusingly that mamma was even less" . So Maisie has her first experience of mother love from Mrs. Wix--more foreshadowing. Mrs. Wix is described as both poor and ugly but "peculiarly and soothingly safe," which in James-speak means super-protective of Maisie . Maisie and Mrs. Wix visit Clara Matilda's grave. It turns out that Mrs. Wix is less accomplished than Miss Overmore as well as less elegant. Instead of learning school subjects from Mrs. Wix, Maisie listens to stories--lots and lots of them. The only thing that Mrs. Wix reveals about her late husband is that he has been dead for a long time. She and Maisie never go to visit his grave.


prompt:
Chapter: The second parting from Miss Overmore had been bad enough, but this
first parting from Mrs. Wix was much worse. The child had lately been to
the dentist's and had a term of comparison for the screwed-up intensity
of the scene. It was dreadfully silent, as it had been when her tooth
was taken out; Mrs. Wix had on that occasion grabbed her hand and they
had clung to each other with the frenzy of their determination not to
scream. Maisie, at the dentist's, had been heroically still, but just
when she felt most anguish had become aware of an audible shriek on the
part of her companion, a spasm of stifled sympathy. This was reproduced
by the only sound that broke their supreme embrace when, a month later,
the "arrangement," as her periodical uprootings were called, played the
part of the horrible forceps. Embedded in Mrs. Wix's nature as her tooth
had been socketed in her gum, the operation of extracting her would
really have been a case for chloroform. It was a hug that fortunately
left nothing to say, for the poor woman's want of words at such an
hour seemed to fall in with her want of everything. Maisie's alternate
parent, in the outermost vestibule--he liked the impertinence of
crossing as much as that of his late wife's threshold--stood over them
with his open watch and his still more open grin, while from the only
corner of an eye on which something of Mrs. Wix's didn't impinge the
child saw at the door a brougham in which Miss Overmore also waited.
She remembered the difference when, six months before, she had been
torn from the breast of that more spirited protectress. Miss Overmore,
then also in the vestibule, but of course in the other one, had been
thoroughly audible and voluble; her protest had rung out bravely and she
had declared that something--her pupil didn't know exactly what--was
a regular wicked shame. That had at the time dimly recalled to Maisie
the far-away moment of Moddle's great outbreak: there seemed always to
be "shames" connected in one way or another with her migrations. At
present, while Mrs. Wix's arms tightened and the smell of her hair was
strong, she further remembered how, in pacifying Miss Overmore, papa had
made use of the words "you dear old duck!"--an expression which, by its
oddity, had stuck fast in her young mind, having moreover a place well
prepared for it there by what she knew of the governess whom she now
always mentally characterised as the pretty one. She wondered whether
this affection would be as great as before: that would at all events be
the case with the prettiness Maisie could see in the face which showed
brightly at the window of the brougham.

The brougham was a token of harmony, of the fine conditions papa would
this time offer: he had usually come for her in a hansom, with a
four-wheeler behind for the boxes. The four-wheeler with the boxes on it
was actually there, but mamma was the only lady with whom she had ever
been in a conveyance of the kind always of old spoken of by Moddle as a
private carriage. Papa's carriage was, now that he had one, still more
private, somehow, than mamma's; and when at last she found herself quite
on top, as she felt, of its inmates and gloriously rolling away, she
put to Miss Overmore, after another immense and talkative squeeze, a
question of which the motive was a desire for information as to the
continuity of a certain sentiment. "Did papa like you just the same
while I was gone?" she enquired--full of the sense of how markedly his
favour had been established in her presence. She had bethought herself
that this favour might, like her presence and as if depending on it, be
only intermittent and for the season. Papa, on whose knee she sat, burst
into one of those loud laughs of his that, however prepared she was,
seemed always, like some trick in a frightening game, to leap forth and
make her jump. Before Miss Overmore could speak he replied: "Why, you
little donkey, when you're away what have I left to do but just to love
her?" Miss Overmore hereupon immediately took her from him, and they had
a merry little scrimmage over her of which Maisie caught the surprised
perception in the white stare of an old lady who passed in a victoria.
Then her beautiful friend remarked to her very gravely: "I shall make
him understand that if he ever again says anything as horrid as that
to you I shall carry you straight off and we'll go and live somewhere
together and be good quiet little girls." The child couldn't quite make
out why her father's speech had been horrid, since it only expressed
that appreciation which their companion herself had of old described as
"immense." To enter more into the truth of the matter she appealed to
him again directly, asked if in all those months Miss Overmore hadn't
been with him just as she had been before and just as she would be now.
"Of course she has, old girl--where else could the poor dear be?" cried
Beale Farange, to the still greater scandal of their companion, who
protested that unless he straightway "took back" his nasty wicked fib
it would be, this time, not only him she would leave, but his child too
and his house and his tiresome trouble--all the impossible things he
had succeeded in putting on her. Beale, under this frolic menace, took
nothing back at all; he was indeed apparently on the point of repeating
his extravagance, but Miss Overmore instructed her little charge that
she was not to listen to his bad jokes: she was to understand that a
lady couldn't stay with a gentleman that way without some awfully proper
reason.

Maisie looked from one of her companions to the other; this was the
freshest gayest start she had yet enjoyed, but she had a shy fear of not
exactly believing them. "Well, what reason IS proper?" she thoughtfully
demanded.

"Oh a long-legged stick of a tomboy: there's none so good as that." Her
father enjoyed both her drollery and his own and tried again to get
possession of her--an effort deprecated by their comrade and leading
again to something of a public scuffle. Miss Overmore declared to the
child that she had been all the while with good friends; on which Beale
Farange went on: "She means good friends of mine, you know--tremendous
friends of mine. There has been no end of THEM about--that I WILL say
for her!" Maisie felt bewildered and was afterwards for some time
conscious of a vagueness, just slightly embarrassing, as to the subject
of so much amusement and as to where her governess had really been.
She didn't feel at all as if she had been seriously told, and no such
feeling was supplied by anything that occurred later. Her embarrassment,
of a precocious instinctive order, attached itself to the idea that
this was another of the matters it was not for her, as her mother used
to say, to go into. Therefore, under her father's roof during the time
that followed, she made no attempt to clear up her ambiguity by an
ingratiating way with housemaids; and it was an odd truth that the
ambiguity itself took nothing from the fresh pleasure promised her by
renewed contact with Miss Overmore. The confidence looked for by that
young lady was of the fine sort that explanation can't improve, and she
herself at any rate was a person superior to any confusion. For Maisie
moreover concealment had never necessarily seemed deception; she had
grown up among things as to which her foremost knowledge was that
she was never to ask about them. It was far from new to her that the
questions of the small are the peculiar diversion of the great: except
the affairs of her doll Lisette there had scarcely ever been anything at
her mother's that was explicable with a grave face. Nothing was so easy
to her as to send the ladies who gathered there off into shrieks, and
she might have practised upon them largely if she had been of a more
calculating turn. Everything had something behind it: life was like a
long, long corridor with rows of closed doors. She had learned that at
these doors it was wise not to knock--this seemed to produce from within
such sounds of derision. Little by little, however, she understood more,
for it befell that she was enlightened by Lisette's questions, which
reproduced the effect of her own upon those for whom she sat in the very
darkness of Lisette. Was she not herself convulsed by such innocence? In
the presence of it she often imitated the shrieking ladies. There were
at any rate things she really couldn't tell even a French doll. She
could only pass on her lessons and study to produce on Lisette the
impression of having mysteries in her life, wondering the while whether
she succeeded in the air of shading off, like her mother, into the
unknowable. When the reign of Miss Overmore followed that of Mrs. Wix
she took a fresh cue, emulating her governess and bridging over the
interval with the simple expectation of trust. Yes, there were matters
one couldn't "go into" with a pupil. There were for instance days when,
after prolonged absence, Lisette, watching her take off her things,
tried hard to discover where she had been. Well, she discovered a
little, but never discovered all. There was an occasion when, on her
being particularly indiscreet, Maisie replied to her--and precisely
about the motive of a disappearance--as she, Maisie, had once been
replied to by Mrs. Farange: "Find out for yourself!" She mimicked her
mother's sharpness, but she was rather ashamed afterwards, though as
to whether of the sharpness or of the mimicry was not quite clear.

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

completion: Maisie has to go back to her father and Miss Overmore . This means that she has to say goodbye to Mrs. Wix for the first time, and this is super, super sad! Maisie asks her father if he liked Miss Overmore "just the same" while she was at her mother's . This embarrasses Miss Overmore, even though Beale Farange makes no secret of having been with Miss Overmore the whole time. This is just above Maisie's head. She, too, feels embarrassed and wonders why Miss Overmore has been awkward. She also tries to figure out the nature of her father's relationship to Miss Overmore. Maisie takes to treating her doll, Lisette, the way she herself is treated by her mother and Miss Overmore. She keeps secrets from her doll and even reprimands her for asking indiscreet questions.


prompt:
Chapter: She became aware in time that this phase wouldn't have shone by
lessons, the care of her education being now only one of the many
duties devolving on Miss Overmore; a devolution as to which she was
present at various passages between that lady and her father--passages
significant, on either side, of dissent and even of displeasure. It was
gathered by the child on these occasions that there was something in the
situation for which her mother might "come down" on them all, though
indeed the remark, always dropped by her father, was greeted on his
companion's part with direct contradiction. Such scenes were usually
brought to a climax by Miss Overmore's demanding, with more asperity
than she applied to any other subject, in what position under the sun
such a person as Mrs. Farange would find herself for coming down. As the
months went on the little girl's interpretations thickened, and the more
effectually that this stretch was the longest she had known without a
break. She got used to the idea that her mother, for some reason, was
in no hurry to reinstate her: that idea was forcibly expressed by her
father whenever Miss Overmore, differing and decided, took him up on the
question, which he was always putting forward, of the urgency of sending
her to school. For a governess Miss Overmore differed surprisingly; far
more for instance than would have entered into the bowed head of Mrs.
Wix. She observed to Maisie many times that she was quite conscious of
not doing her justice, and that Mr. Farange equally measured and equally
lamented this deficiency. The reason of it was that she had mysterious
responsibilities that interfered--responsibilities, Miss Overmore
intimated, to Mr. Farange himself and to the friendly noisy little house
and those who came there. Mr. Farange's remedy for every inconvenience
was that the child should be put at school--there were such lots of
splendid schools, as everybody knew, at Brighton and all over the place.
That, however, Maisie learned, was just what would bring her mother
down: from the moment he should delegate to others the housing of his
little charge he hadn't a leg to stand on before the law. Didn't he keep
her away from her mother precisely because Mrs. Farange was one of these
others?

There was also the solution of a second governess, a young person to
come in by the day and really do the work; but to this Miss Overmore
wouldn't for a moment listen, arguing against it with great public
relish and wanting to know from all comers--she put it even to Maisie
herself--they didn't see how frightfully it would give her away. "What
am I supposed to be at all, don't you see, if I'm not here to look
after her?" She was in a false position and so freely and loudly called
attention to it that it seemed to become almost a source of glory. The
way out of it of course was just to do her plain duty; but that was
unfortunately what, with his excessive, his exorbitant demands on her,
which every one indeed appeared quite to understand, he practically, he
selfishly prevented. Beale Farange, for Miss Overmore, was now never
anything but "he," and the house was as full as ever of lively gentlemen
with whom, under that designation, she chaffingly talked about him.
Maisie meanwhile, as a subject of familiar gossip on what was to be done
with her, was left so much to herself that she had hours of wistful
thought of the large loose discipline of Mrs. Wix; yet she none the less
held it under her father's roof a point of superiority that none of his
visitors were ladies. It added to this odd security that she had once
heard a gentleman say to him as if it were a great joke and in obvious
reference to Miss Overmore: "Hanged if she'll let another woman come
near you--hanged if she ever will. She'd let fly a stick at her as they
do at a strange cat!" Maisie greatly preferred gentlemen as inmates
in spite of their also having their way--louder but sooner over--of
laughing out at her. They pulled and pinched, they teased and tickled
her; some of them even, as they termed it, shied things at her, and all
of them thought it funny to call her by names having no resemblance to
her own. The ladies on the other hand addressed her as "You poor pet"
and scarcely touched her even to kiss her. But it was of the ladies she
was most afraid.

She was now old enough to understand how disproportionate a stay she had
already made with her father; and also old enough to enter a little into
the ambiguity attending this excess, which oppressed her particularly
whenever the question had been touched upon in talk with her governess.
"Oh you needn't worry: she doesn't care!" Miss Overmore had often
said to her in reference to any fear that her mother might resent her
prolonged detention. "She has other people than poor little YOU to
think about, and has gone abroad with them; so you needn't be in the
least afraid she'll stickle this time for her rights." Maisie knew Mrs.
Farange had gone abroad, for she had had weeks and weeks before a letter
from her beginning "My precious pet" and taking leave of her for an
indeterminate time; but she had not seen in it a renunciation of hatred
or of the writer's policy of asserting herself, for the sharpest of all
her impressions had been that there was nothing her mother would ever
care so much about as to torment Mr. Farange. What at last, however, was
in this connexion bewildering and a little frightening was the dawn of a
suspicion that a better way had been found to torment Mr. Farange than
to deprive him of his periodical burden. This was the question that
worried our young lady and that Miss Overmore's confidences and the
frequent observations of her employer only rendered more mystifying. It
was a contradiction that if Ida had now a fancy for waiving the rights
she had originally been so hot about her late husband shouldn't jump at
the monopoly for which he had also in the first instance so fiercely
fought; but when Maisie, with a subtlety beyond her years, sounded this
new ground her main success was in hearing her mother more freshly
abused. Miss Overmore had up to now rarely deviated from a decent
reserve, but the day came when she expressed herself with a vividness
not inferior to Beale's own on the subject of the lady who had fled to
the Continent to wriggle out of her job. It would serve this lady right,
Maisie gathered, if that contract, in the shape of an overgrown and
underdressed daughter, should be shipped straight out to her and landed
at her feet in the midst of scandalous excesses.

The picture of these pursuits was what Miss Overmore took refuge in when
the child tried timidly to ascertain if her father were disposed to feel
he had too much of her. She evaded the point and only kicked up all
round it the dust of Ida's heartlessness and folly, of which the supreme
proof, it appeared, was the fact that she was accompanied on her journey
by a gentleman whom, to be painfully plain on it, she had--well, "picked
up." The terms on which, unless they were married, ladies and gentlemen
might, as Miss Overmore expressed it, knock about together, were the
terms on which she and Mr. Farange had exposed themselves to possible
misconception. She had indeed, as has been noted, often explained this
before, often said to Maisie: "I don't know what in the world, darling,
your father and I should do without you, for you just make the
difference, as I've told you, of keeping us perfectly proper." The child
took in the office it was so endearingly presented to her that she
performed a comfort that helped her to a sense of security even in the
event of her mother's giving her up. Familiar as she had grown with the
fact of the great alternative to the proper, she felt in her governess
and her father a strong reason for not emulating that detachment. At the
same time she had heard somehow of little girls--of exalted rank, it was
true--whose education was carried on by instructors of the other sex,
and she knew that if she were at school at Brighton it would be thought
an advantage to her to be more or less in the hands of masters. She
turned these things over and remarked to Miss Overmore that if she
should go to her mother perhaps the gentleman might become her tutor.

"The gentleman?" The proposition was complicated enough to make Miss
Overmore stare.

"The one who's with mamma. Mightn't that make it right--as right as your
being my governess makes it for you to be with papa?"

Miss Overmore considered; she coloured a little; then she embraced her
ingenious friend. "You're too sweet! I'm a REAL governess."

"And couldn't he be a real tutor?"

"Of course not. He's ignorant and bad."

"Bad--?" Maisie echoed with wonder.

Her companion gave a queer little laugh at her tone. "He's ever so much
younger--" But that was all.

"Younger than you?"

Miss Overmore laughed again; it was the first time Maisie had seen her
approach so nearly to a giggle.

"Younger than--no matter whom. I don't know anything about him and don't
want to," she rather inconsequently added. "He's not my sort, and I'm
sure, my own darling, he's not yours." And she repeated the free caress
into which her colloquies with Maisie almost always broke and which made
the child feel that HER affection at least was a gage of safety. Parents
had come to seem vague, but governesses were evidently to be trusted.
Maisie's faith in Mrs. Wix for instance had suffered no lapse from the
fact that all communication with her had temporarily dropped. During the
first weeks of their separation Clara Matilda's mamma had repeatedly and
dolefully written to her, and Maisie had answered with an enthusiasm
controlled only by orthographical doubts; but the correspondence had
been duly submitted to Miss Overmore, with the final effect of its not
suiting her. It was this lady's view that Mr. Farange wouldn't care for
it at all, and she ended by confessing--since her pupil pushed her--that
she didn't care for it herself. She was furiously jealous, she said; and
that weakness was but a new proof of her disinterested affection. She
pronounced Mrs. Wix's effusions moreover illiterate and unprofitable;
she made no scruple of declaring it monstrous that a woman in her
senses should have placed the formation of her daughter's mind in such
ridiculous hands. Maisie was well aware that the proprietress of the old
brown dress and the old odd headgear was lower in the scale of "form"
than Miss Overmore; but it was now brought home to her with pain that
she was educationally quite out of the question. She was buried for the
time beneath a conclusive remark of her critic's: "She's really beyond a
joke!" This remark was made as that charming woman held in her hand the
last letter that Maisie was to receive from Mrs. Wix; it was fortified
by a decree proscribing the preposterous tie. "Must I then write and
tell her?" the child bewilderedly asked: she grew pale at the dreadful
things it appeared involved for her to say. "Don't dream of it, my
dear--I'll write: you may trust me!" cried Miss Overmore; who indeed
wrote to such purpose that a hush in which you could have heard a pin
drop descended upon poor Mrs. Wix. She gave for weeks and weeks no sign
whatever of life: it was as if she had been as effectually disposed of
by Miss Overmore's communication as her little girl, in the Harrow Road,
had been disposed of by the terrible hansom. Her very silence became
after this one of the largest elements of Maisie's consciousness; it
proved a warm and habitable air, into which the child penetrated further
than she dared ever to mention to her companions. Somewhere in the
depths of it the dim straighteners were fixed upon her; somewhere out of
the troubled little current Mrs. Wix intensely waited.

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

completion: Miss Overmore starts neglecting Maisie's lessons because she is now busy looking after Mr. Farange and his many guests. Miss Overmore and Mr. Farange toy with the idea of sending Maisie to a school or getting her a second governess, but nothing comes of either idea. Maisie starts spending a lot of time by herself. Maisie also realizes that her stay with her father has lasted longer than it was supposed to; Miss Overmore tells her that this is because her mom doesn't care about her. We hear through Miss Overmore that Mrs. Farange, while traveling, has "picked up" a younger male companion . Miss Overmore tells the girl that Maisie is providing a cover for her relationship with Mr. Farange; without Maisie as an excuse for Miss Overmore's presence in the house, they would cause a scandal. Miss Overmore forbids Maisie to write to Mrs. Wix and then bad-mouths her some more to Maisie.


prompt:
Chapter: It quite fell in with this intensity that one day, on returning from
a walk with the housemaid, Maisie should have found her in the hall,
seated on the stool usually occupied by the telegraph-boys who haunted
Beale Farange's door and kicked their heels while, in his room, answers
to their missives took form with the aid of smoke-puffs and growls. It
had seemed to her on their parting that Mrs. Wix had reached the last
limits of the squeeze, but she now felt those limits to be transcended
and that the duration of her visitor's hug was a direct reply to Miss
Overmore's veto. She understood in a flash how the visit had come to be
possible--that Mrs. Wix, watching her chance, must have slipped in under
protection of the fact that papa, always tormented in spite of arguments
with the idea of a school, had, for a three days' excursion to Brighton,
absolutely insisted on the attendance of her adversary. It was true that
when Maisie explained their absence and their important motive Mrs. Wix
wore an expression so peculiar that it could only have had its origin in
surprise. This contradiction indeed peeped out only to vanish, for at
the very moment that, in the spirit of it, she threw herself afresh upon
her young friend a hansom crested with neat luggage rattled up to the
door and Miss Overmore bounded out. The shock of her encounter with Mrs.
Wix was less violent than Maisie had feared on seeing her and didn't
at all interfere with the sociable tone in which, under her rival's
eyes, she explained to her little charge that she had returned, for a
particular reason, a day sooner than she first intended. She had left
papa--in such nice lodgings--at Brighton; but he would come back to
his dear little home on the morrow. As for Mrs. Wix, papa's companion
supplied Maisie in later converse with the right word for the attitude
of this personage: Mrs. Wix "stood up" to her in a manner that the child
herself felt at the time to be astonishing. This occurred indeed after
Miss Overmore had so far raised her interdict as to make a move to the
dining-room, where, in the absence of any suggestion of sitting down,
it was scarcely more than natural that even poor Mrs. Wix should stand
up. Maisie at once enquired if at Brighton, this time, anything had
come of the possibility of a school; to which, much to her surprise,
Miss Overmore, who had always grandly repudiated it, replied after an
instant, but quite as if Mrs. Wix were not there:

"It may be, darling, that something WILL come. The objection, I must
tell you, has been quite removed."

At this it was still more startling to hear Mrs. Wix speak out with
great firmness. "I don't think, if you'll allow me to say so, that
there's any arrangement by which the objection CAN be 'removed.' What
has brought me here to-day is that I've a message for Maisie from dear
Mrs. Farange."

The child's heart gave a great thump. "Oh mamma's come back?"

"Not yet, sweet love, but she's coming," said Mrs. Wix, "and she
has--most thoughtfully, you know--sent me on to prepare you."

"To prepare her for what, pray?" asked Miss Overmore, whose first
smoothness began, with this news, to be ruffled.

Mrs. Wix quietly applied her straighteners to Miss Overmore's flushed
beauty. "Well, miss, for a very important communication."

"Can't dear Mrs. Farange, as you so oddly call her, make her
communications directly? Can't she take the trouble to write to her only
daughter?" the younger lady demanded. "Maisie herself will tell you that
it's months and months since she has had so much as a word from her."

"Oh but I've written to mamma!" cried the child as if this would do
quite as well.

"That makes her treatment of you all the greater scandal," the governess
in possession promptly declared.

"Mrs. Farange is too well aware," said Mrs. Wix with sustained spirit,
"of what becomes of her letters in this house."

Maisie's sense of fairness hereupon interposed for her visitor. "You
know, Miss Overmore, that papa doesn't like everything of mamma's."

"No one likes, my dear, to be made the subject of such language as your
mother's letters contain. They were not fit for the innocent child to
see," Miss Overmore observed to Mrs. Wix.

"Then I don't know what you complain of, and she's better without them.
It serves every purpose that I'm in Mrs. Farange's confidence."

Miss Overmore gave a scornful laugh. "Then you must be mixed up with
some extraordinary proceedings!"

"None so extraordinary," cried Mrs. Wix, turning very pale, "as to say
horrible things about the mother to the face of the helpless daughter!"

"Things not a bit more horrible, I think," Miss Overmore returned, "than
those you, madam, appear to have come here to say about the father!"

Mrs. Wix looked for a moment hard at Maisie, and then, turning again to
this witness, spoke with a trembling voice. "I came to say nothing about
him, and you must excuse Mrs. Farange and me if we're not so above all
reproach as the companion of his travels."

The young woman thus described stared at the apparent breadth of the
description--she needed a moment to take it in. Maisie, however, gazing
solemnly from one of the disputants to the other, noted that her answer,
when it came, perched upon smiling lips. "It will do quite as well,
no doubt, if you come up to the requirements of the companion of Mrs.
Farange's!"

Mrs. Wix broke into a queer laugh; it sounded to Maisie an unsuccessful
imitation of a neigh. "That's just what I'm here to make known--how
perfectly the poor lady comes up to them herself." She held up her head
at the child. "You must take your mamma's message, Maisie, and you must
feel that her wishing me to come to you with it this way is a great
proof of interest and affection. She sends you her particular love and
announces to you that she's engaged to be married to Sir Claude."

"Sir Claude?" Maisie wonderingly echoed. But while Mrs. Wix explained
that this gentleman was a dear friend of Mrs. Farange's, who had been
of great assistance to her in getting to Florence and in making herself
comfortable there for the winter, she was not too violently shaken to
perceive her old friend's enjoyment of the effect of this news on Miss
Overmore. That young lady opened her eyes very wide; she immediately
remarked that Mrs. Farange's marriage would of course put an end to any
further pretension to take her daughter back. Mrs. Wix enquired with
astonishment why it should do anything of the sort, and Miss Overmore
gave as an instant reason that it was clearly but another dodge in a
system of dodges. She wanted to get out of the bargain: why else had she
now left Maisie on her father's hands weeks and weeks beyond the time
about which she had originally made such a fuss? It was vain for Mrs.
Wix to represent--as she speciously proceeded to do--that all this time
would be made up as soon as Mrs. Farange returned: she, Miss Overmore,
knew nothing, thank heaven, about her confederate, but was very sure
any person capable of forming that sort of relation with the lady in
Florence would easily agree to object to the presence in his house
of the fruit of a union that his dignity must ignore. It was a game
like another, and Mrs. Wix's visit was clearly the first move in it.
Maisie found in this exchange of asperities a fresh incitement to the
unformulated fatalism in which her sense of her own career had long
since taken refuge; and it was the beginning for her of a deeper
prevision that, in spite of Miss Overmore's brilliancy and Mrs. Wix's
passion, she should live to see a change in the nature of the struggle
she appeared to have come into the world to produce. It would still be
essentially a struggle, but its object would now be NOT to receive her.

Mrs. Wix, after Miss Overmore's last demonstration, addressed herself
wholly to the little girl, and, drawing from the pocket of her dingy old
pelisse a small flat parcel, removed its envelope and wished to know
if THAT looked like a gentleman who wouldn't be nice to everybody--let
alone to a person he would be so sure to find so nice. Mrs. Farange, in
the candour of new-found happiness, had enclosed a "cabinet" photograph
of Sir Claude, and Maisie lost herself in admiration of the fair smooth
face, the regular features, the kind eyes, the amiable air, the general
glossiness and smartness of her prospective stepfather--only vaguely
puzzled to suppose herself now with two fathers at once. Her researches
had hitherto indicated that to incur a second parent of the same sex you
had usually to lose the first. "ISN'T he sympathetic?" asked Mrs. Wix,
who had clearly, on the strength of his charming portrait, made up her
mind that Sir Claude promised her a future. "You can see, I hope," she
added with much expression, "that HE'S a perfect gentleman!" Maisie had
never before heard the word "sympathetic" applied to anybody's face; she
heard it with pleasure and from that moment it agreeably remained with
her. She testified moreover to the force of her own perception in a
small soft sigh of response to the pleasant eyes that seemed to seek
her acquaintance, to speak to her directly. "He's quite lovely!" she
declared to Mrs. Wix. Then eagerly, irrepressibly, as she still held the
photograph and Sir Claude continued to fraternise, "Oh can't I keep it?"
she broke out. No sooner had she done so than she looked up from it at
Miss Overmore: this was with the sudden instinct of appealing to the
authority that had long ago impressed on her that she mustn't ask for
things. Miss Overmore, to her surprise, looked distant and rather odd,
hesitating and giving her time to turn again to Mrs. Wix. Then Maisie
saw that lady's long face lengthen; it was stricken and almost scared,
as if her young friend really expected more of her than she had to give.
The photograph was a possession that, direly denuded, she clung to,
and there was a momentary struggle between her fond clutch of it and
her capability of every sacrifice for her precarious pupil. With the
acuteness of her years, however, Maisie saw that her own avidity would
triumph, and she held out the picture to Miss Overmore as if she were
quite proud of her mother. "Isn't he just lovely?" she demanded while
poor Mrs. Wix hungrily wavered, her straighteners largely covering it
and her pelisse gathered about her with an intensity that strained its
ancient seams.

"It was to ME, darling," the visitor said, "that your mamma so
generously sent it; but of course if it would give you particular
pleasure--" she faltered, only gasping her surrender.

Miss Overmore continued extremely remote. "If the photograph's your
property, my dear, I shall be happy to oblige you by looking at it on
some future occasion. But you must excuse me if I decline to touch an
object belonging to Mrs. Wix."

That lady had by this time grown very red. "You might as well see him
this way, miss," she retorted, "as you certainly never will, I believe,
in any other! Keep the pretty picture, by all means, my precious," she
went on: "Sir Claude will be happy himself, I dare say, to give me one
with a kind inscription." The pathetic quaver of this brave boast was
not lost on Maisie, who threw herself so gratefully on the speaker's
neck that, when they had concluded their embrace, the public tenderness
of which, she felt, made up for the sacrifice she imposed, their
companion had had time to lay a quick hand on Sir Claude and, with a
glance at him or not, whisk him effectually out of sight. Released from
the child's arms Mrs. Wix looked about for the picture; then she fixed
Miss Overmore with a hard dumb stare; and finally, with her eyes on
the little girl again, achieved the grimmest of smiles. "Well, nothing
matters, Maisie, because there's another thing your mamma wrote about.
She has made sure of me." Even after her loyal hug Maisie felt a bit of
a sneak as she glanced at Miss Overmore for permission to understand
this. But Mrs. Wix left them in no doubt of what it meant. "She has
definitely engaged me--for her return and for yours. Then you'll see
for yourself." Maisie, on the spot, quite believed she should; but
the prospect was suddenly thrown into confusion by an extraordinary
demonstration from Miss Overmore.

"Mrs. Wix," said that young lady, "has some undiscoverable reason for
regarding your mother's hold on you as strengthened by the fact that
she's about to marry. I wonder then--on that system--what our visitor
will say to your father's."

Miss Overmore's words were directed to her pupil, but her face, lighted
with an irony that made it prettier even than ever before, was presented
to the dingy figure that had stiffened itself for departure. The
child's discipline had been bewildering--had ranged freely between the
prescription that she was to answer when spoken to and the experience of
lively penalties on obeying that prescription. This time, nevertheless,
she felt emboldened for risks; above all as something portentous seemed
to have leaped into her sense of the relations of things. She looked at
Miss Overmore much as she had a way of looking at persons who treated
her to "grown up" jokes. "Do you mean papa's hold on me--do you mean
HE'S about to marry?"

"Papa's not about to marry--papa IS married, my dear. Papa was married
the day before yesterday at Brighton." Miss Overmore glittered more
gaily; meanwhile it came over Maisie, and quite dazzlingly, that her
"smart" governess was a bride. "He's my husband, if you please, and I'm
his little wife. So NOW we'll see who's your little mother!" She caught
her pupil to her bosom in a manner that was not to be outdone by the
emissary of her predecessor, and a few moments later, when things had
lurched back into their places, that poor lady, quite defeated of the
last word, had soundlessly taken flight.

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

completion: Mrs. Wix appears at Beale Farange's. Miss Overmore can't even. She really hates Mrs. Wix and all that she stands for, including Mrs. Farange. But Mrs. Wix holds her own, fights back with some surprisingly sharp words, and manages to give Maisie the message she has come to give: that her mother will marry a man named Sir Claude. Mrs. Wix also shows Maisie a picture of the man in question, and little Maisie is very, very impressed by the looks of her soon-to-be stepfather. Maisie convinces Mrs. Wix to give her the picture, and Mrs. Wix parts with it reluctantly. Out of nowhere, Miss Overmore announces that she, too, has just gotten married: to Mr. Farange.


prompt:
Chapter: After Mrs. Wix's retreat Miss Overmore appeared to recognise that she
was not exactly in a position to denounce Ida Farange's second union;
but she drew from a table-drawer the photograph of Sir Claude and,
standing there before Maisie, studied it at some length.

"Isn't he beautiful?" the child ingenuously asked.

Her companion hesitated. "No--he's horrid," she, to Maisie's surprise,
sharply returned. But she debated another minute, after which she handed
back the picture. It appeared to Maisie herself to exhibit a fresh
attraction, and she was troubled, having never before had occasion to
differ from her lovely friend. So she only could ask what, such being
the case, she should do with it: should she put it quite away--where
it wouldn't be there to offend? On this Miss Overmore again cast
about; after which she said unexpectedly: "Put it on the schoolroom
mantelpiece."

Maisie felt a fear. "Won't papa dislike to see it there?"

"Very much indeed; but that won't matter NOW." Miss Overmore spoke with
peculiar significance and to her pupil's mystification.

"On account of the marriage?" Maisie risked.

Miss Overmore laughed, and Maisie could see that in spite of the
irritation produced by Mrs. Wix she was in high spirits. "Which marriage
do you mean?"

With the question put to her it suddenly struck the child she didn't
know, so that she felt she looked foolish. So she took refuge in saying:
"Shall YOU be different--" This was a full implication that the bride of
Sir Claude would be.

"As your father's wedded wife? Utterly!" Miss Overmore replied. And the
difference began of course in her being addressed, even by Maisie, from
that day and by her particular request, as Mrs. Beale. It was there
indeed principally that it ended, for except that the child could
reflect that she should presently have four parents in all, and also
that at the end of three months the staircase, for a little girl hanging
over banisters, sent up the deepening rustle of more elaborate advances,
everything made the same impression as before. Mrs. Beale had very
pretty frocks, but Miss Overmore's had been quite as good, and if papa
was much fonder of his second wife than he had been of his first Maisie
had foreseen that fondness, had followed its development almost as
closely as the person more directly involved. There was little indeed in
the commerce of her companions that her precocious experience couldn't
explain, for if they struck her as after all rather deficient in that
air of the honeymoon of which she had so often heard--in much detail,
for instance, from Mrs. Wix--it was natural to judge the circumstance
in the light of papa's proved disposition to contest the empire of the
matrimonial tie. His honeymoon, when he came back from Brighton--not
on the morrow of Mrs. Wix's visit, and not, oddly, till several days
later--his honeymoon was perhaps perceptibly tinged with the dawn of a
later stage of wedlock. There were things dislike of which, as the child
knew it, wouldn't matter to Mrs. Beale now, and their number increased
so that such a trifle as his hostility to the photograph of Sir Claude
quite dropped out of view. This pleasing object found a conspicuous
place in the schoolroom, which in truth Mr. Farange seldom entered and
in which silent admiration formed, during the time I speak of, almost
the sole scholastic exercise of Mrs. Beale's pupil.

Maisie was not long in seeing just what her stepmother had meant by the
difference she should show in her new character. If she was her father's
wife she was not her own governess, and if her presence had had formerly
to be made regular by the theory of a humble function she was now on a
footing that dispensed with all theories and was inconsistent with all
servitude. That was what she had meant by the drop of the objection to
a school; her small companion was no longer required at home as--it was
Mrs. Beale's own amusing word--a little duenna. The argument against
a successor to Miss Overmore remained: it was composed frankly of the
fact, of which Mrs. Beale granted the full absurdity, that she was too
awfully fond of her stepdaughter to bring herself to see her in vulgar
and mercenary hands. The note of this particular danger emboldened
Maisie to put in a word for Mrs. Wix, the modest measure of whose
avidity she had taken from the first; but Mrs. Beale disposed afresh and
effectually of a candidate who would be sure to act in some horrible
and insidious way for Ida's interest and who moreover was personally
loathsome and as ignorant as a fish. She made also no more of a secret
of the awkward fact that a good school would be hideously expensive, and
of the further circumstance, which seemed to put an end to everything,
that when it came to the point papa, in spite of his previous clamour,
was really most nasty about paying. "Would you believe," Mrs. Beale
confidentially asked of her little charge, "that he says I'm a worse
expense than ever, and that a daughter and a wife together are really
more than he can afford?" It was thus that the splendid school at
Brighton lost itself in the haze of larger questions, though the fear
that it would provoke Ida to leap into the breach subsided with her
prolonged, her quite shameless non-appearance. Her daughter and her
successor were therefore left to gaze in united but helpless blankness
at all Maisie was not learning.

This quantity was so great as to fill the child's days with a sense of
intermission to which even French Lisette gave no accent--with finished
games and unanswered questions and dreaded tests; with the habit, above
all, in her watch for a change, of hanging over banisters when the
door-bell sounded. This was the great refuge of her impatience, but
what she heard at such times was a clatter of gaiety downstairs; the
impression of which, from her earliest childhood, had built up in her
the belief that the grown-up time was the time of real amusement and
above all of real intimacy. Even Lisette, even Mrs. Wix had never, she
felt, in spite of hugs and tears, been so intimate with her as so many
persons at present were with Mrs. Beale and as so many others of old had
been with Mrs. Farange. The note of hilarity brought people together
still more than the note of melancholy, which was the one exclusively
sounded, for instance, by poor Mrs. Wix. Maisie in these days preferred
none the less that domestic revels should be wafted to her from a
distance: she felt sadly unsupported for facing the inquisition of the
drawing-room. That was a reason the more for making the most of Susan
Ash, who in her quality of under-housemaid moved at a very different
level and who, none the less, was much depended upon out of doors. She
was a guide to peregrinations that had little in common with those
intensely definite airings that had left with the child a vivid memory
of the regulated mind of Moddle. There had been under Moddle's system
no dawdles at shop-windows and no nudges, in Oxford Street, of "I SAY,
look at 'ER!" There had been an inexorable treatment of crossings and a
serene exemption from the fear that--especially at corners, of which she
was yet weakly fond--haunted the housemaid, the fear of being, as she
ominously said, "spoken to." The dangers of the town equally with its
diversions added to Maisie's sense of being untutored and unclaimed.

The situation however, had taken a twist when, on another of her
returns, at Susan's side, extremely tired, from the pursuit of exercise
qualified by much hovering, she encountered another emotion. She on this
occasion learnt at the door that her instant attendance was requested
in the drawing-room. Crossing the threshold in a cloud of shame she
discerned through the blur Mrs. Beale seated there with a gentleman who
immediately drew the pain from her predicament by rising before her as
the original of the photograph of Sir Claude. She felt the moment she
looked at him that he was by far the most shining presence that had ever
made her gape, and her pleasure in seeing him, in knowing that he took
hold of her and kissed her, as quickly throbbed into a strange shy pride
in him, a perception of his making up for her fallen state, for Susan's
public nudges, which quite bruised her, and for all the lessons that, in
the dead schoolroom, where at times she was almost afraid to stay alone,
she was bored with not having. It was as if he had told her on the spot
that he belonged to her, so that she could already show him off and see
the effect he produced. No, nothing else that was most beautiful ever
belonging to her could kindle that particular joy--not Mrs. Beale at
that very moment, not papa when he was gay, nor mamma when she was
dressed, nor Lisette when she was new. The joy almost overflowed
in tears when he laid his hand on her and drew her to him, telling
her, with a smile of which the promise was as bright as that of a
Christmas-tree, that he knew her ever so well by her mother, but had
come to see her now so that he might know her for himself. She could
see that his view of this kind of knowledge was to make her come away
with him, and, further, that it was just what he was there for and had
already been some time: arranging it with Mrs. Beale and getting on with
that lady in a manner evidently not at all affected by her having on the
arrival of his portrait thought of him so ill. They had grown almost
intimate--or had the air of it--over their discussion; and it was still
further conveyed to Maisie that Mrs. Beale had made no secret, and would
make yet less of one, of all that it cost to let her go. "You seem so
tremendously eager," she said to the child, "that I hope you're at least
clear about Sir Claude's relation to you. It doesn't appear to occur to
him to give you the necessary reassurance."

Maisie, a trifle mystified, turned quickly to her new friend. "Why it's
of course that you're MARRIED to her, isn't it?"

Her anxious emphasis started them off, as she had learned to call it;
this was the echo she infallibly and now quite resignedly produced;
moreover Sir Claude's laughter was an indistinguishable part of the
sweetness of his being there. "We've been married, my dear child, three
months, and my interest in you is a consequence, don't you know? of my
great affection for your mother. In coming here it's of course for your
mother I'm acting."

"Oh I know," Maisie said with all the candour of her competence. "She
can't come herself--except just to the door." Then as she thought
afresh: "Can't she come even to the door now?"

"There you are!" Mrs. Beale exclaimed to Sir Claude. She spoke as if his
dilemma were ludicrous.

His kind face, in a hesitation, seemed to recognise it; but he answered
the child with a frank smile. "No--not very well."

"Because she has married you?"

He promptly accepted this reason. "Well, that has a good deal to do with
it."

He was so delightful to talk to that Maisie pursued the subject. "But
papa--HE has married Miss Overmore."

"Ah you'll see that he won't come for you at your mother's," that lady
interposed.

"Yes, but that won't be for a long time," Maisie hastened to respond.

"We won't talk about it now--you've months and months to put in first."
And Sir Claude drew her closer.

"Oh that's what makes it so hard to give her up!" Mrs. Beale made this
point with her arms out to her stepdaughter. Maisie, quitting Sir
Claude, went over to them and, clasped in a still tenderer embrace, felt
entrancingly the extension of the field of happiness. "I'LL come for
you," said her stepmother, "if Sir Claude keeps you too long: we must
make him quite understand that! Don't talk to me about her ladyship!"
she went on to their visitor so familiarly that it was almost as if they
must have met before. "I know her ladyship as if I had made her. They're
a pretty pair of parents!" cried Mrs. Beale.

Maisie had so often heard them called so that the remark diverted her
but an instant from the agreeable wonder of this grand new form of
allusion to her mother; and that, in its turn, presently left her free
to catch at the pleasant possibility, in connexion with herself, of
a relation much happier as between Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude than as
between mamma and papa. Still the next thing that happened was that her
interest in such a relation brought to her lips a fresh question.

"Have you seen papa?" she asked of Sir Claude.

It was the signal for their going off again, as her small stoicism had
perfectly taken for granted that it would be. All that Mrs. Beale had
nevertheless to add was the vague apparent sarcasm: "Oh papa!"

"I'm assured he's not at home," Sir Claude replied to the child; "but if
he had been I should have hoped for the pleasure of seeing him."

"Won't he mind your coming?" Maisie asked as with need of the knowledge.

"Oh you bad little girl!" Mrs. Beale humorously protested.

The child could see that at this Sir Claude, though still moved to
mirth, coloured a little; but he spoke to her very kindly. "That's just
what I came to see, you know--whether your father WOULD mind. But Mrs.
Beale appears strongly of the opinion that he won't."

This lady promptly justified that view to her stepdaughter. "It will be
very interesting, my dear, you know, to find out what it is to-day that
your father does mind. I'm sure _I_ don't know!"--and she seemed to
repeat, though with perceptible resignation, her plaint of a moment
before. "Your father, darling, is a very odd person indeed." She turned
with this, smiling, to Sir Claude. "But perhaps it's hardly civil for me
to say that of his not objecting to have YOU in the house. If you knew
some of the people he does have!"

Maisie knew them all, and none indeed were to be compared to Sir Claude.
He laughed back at Mrs. Beale; he looked at such moments quite as Mrs.
Wix, in the long stories she told her pupil, always described the lovers
of her distressed beauties--"the perfect gentleman and strikingly
handsome." He got up, to the child's regret, as if he were going. "Oh I
dare say we should be all right!"

Mrs. Beale once more gathered in her little charge, holding her close
and looking thoughtfully over her head at their visitor. "It's so
charming--for a man of your type--to have wanted her so much!"

"What do you know about my type?" Sir Claude laughed. "Whatever it may
be I dare say it deceives you. The truth about me is simply that I'm the
most unappreciated of--what do you call the fellows?--'family-men.' Yes,
I'm a family-man; upon my honour I am!"

"Then why on earth," cried Mrs. Beale, "didn't you marry a
family-woman?"

Sir Claude looked at her hard. "YOU know who one marries, I think.
Besides, there ARE no family-women--hanged if there are! None of them
want any children--hanged if they do!"

His account of the matter was most interesting, and Maisie, as if it
were of bad omen for her, stared at the picture in some dismay. At the
same time she felt, through encircling arms, her protectress hesitate.
"You do come out with things! But you mean her ladyship doesn't want
any--really?"

"Won't hear of them--simply. But she can't help the one she HAS got."
And with this Sir Claude's eyes rested on the little girl in a way that
seemed to her to mask her mother's attitude with the consciousness of
his own. "She must make the best of her, don't you see? If only for the
look of the thing, don't you know? one wants one's wife to take the
proper line about her child."

"Oh I know what one wants!" Mrs. Beale cried with a competence that
evidently impressed her interlocutor.

"Well, if you keep HIM up--and I dare say you've had worry enough--why
shouldn't I keep Ida? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the
gander--or the other way round, don't you know? I mean to see the thing
through."

Mrs. Beale, for a minute, still with her eyes on him as he leaned upon
the chimneypiece, appeared to turn this over. "You're just a wonder of
kindness--that's what you are!" she said at last. "A lady's expected
to have natural feelings. But YOUR horrible sex--! Isn't it a horrible
sex, little love?" she demanded with her cheek upon her stepdaughter's.

"Oh I like gentlemen best," Maisie lucidly replied.

The words were taken up merrily. "That's a good one for YOU!" Sir Claude
exclaimed to Mrs. Beale.

"No," said that lady: "I've only to remember the women she sees at her
mother's."

"Ah they're very nice now," Sir Claude returned.

"What do you call 'nice'?"

"Well, they're all right."

"That doesn't answer me," said Mrs. Beale; "but I dare say you do take
care of them. That makes you more of an angel to want this job too." And
she playfully whacked her smaller companion.

"I'm not an angel--I'm an old grandmother," Sir Claude declared. "I like
babies--I always did. If we go to smash I shall look for a place as
responsible nurse."

Maisie, in her charmed mood, drank in an imputation on her years which
at another moment might have been bitter; but the charm was sensibly
interrupted by Mrs. Beale's screwing her round and gazing fondly into
her eyes, "You're willing to leave me, you wretch?"

The little girl deliberated; even this consecrated tie had become as a
cord she must suddenly snap. But she snapped it very gently. "Isn't it
my turn for mamma?"

"You're a horrible little hypocrite! The less, I think, now said about
'turns' the better," Mrs. Beale made answer. "_I_ know whose turn it is.
You've not such a passion for your mother!"

"I say, I say: DO look out!" Sir Claude quite amiably protested.

"There's nothing she hasn't heard. But it doesn't matter--it hasn't
spoiled her. If you knew what it costs me to part with you!" she pursued
to Maisie.

Sir Claude watched her as she charmingly clung to the child. "I'm so
glad you really care for her. That's so much to the good."

Mrs. Beale slowly got up, still with her hands on Maisie, but emitting a
soft exhalation. "Well, if you're glad, that may help us; for I assure
you that I shall never give up any rights in her that I may consider
I've acquired by my own sacrifices. I shall hold very fast to my
interest in her. What seems to have happened is that she has brought you
and me together."

"She has brought you and me together," said Sir Claude.

His cheerful echo prolonged the happy truth, and Maisie broke out almost
with enthusiasm: "I've brought you and her together!"

Her companions of course laughed anew and Mrs. Beale gave her an
affectionate shake. "You little monster--take care what you do! But
that's what she does do," she continued to Sir Claude. "She did it to me
and Beale."

"Well then," he said to Maisie, "you must try the trick at OUR place."
He held out his hand to her again. "Will you come now?"

"Now--just as I am?" She turned with an immense appeal to her
stepmother, taking a leap over the mountain of "mending," the abyss of
packing that had loomed and yawned before her. "Oh MAY I?"

Mrs. Beale addressed her assent to Sir Claude. "As well so as any other
way. I'll send on her things to-morrow." Then she gave a tug to the
child's coat, glancing at her up and down with some ruefulness.

"She's not turned out as I should like--her mother will pull her to
pieces. But what's one to do--with nothing to do it on? And she's better
than when she came--you can tell her mother that. I'm sorry to have to
say it to you--but the poor child was a sight."

"Oh I'll turn her out myself!" the visitor cordially said.

"I shall like to see how!"--Mrs. Beale appeared much amused. "You must
bring her to show me--we can manage that. Good-bye, little fright!" And
her last word to Sir Claude was that she would keep him up to the mark.

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

completion: Miss Overmore starts to go by Mrs. Beale . Maisie realizes that she now has four parents in total. Maisie's studies are neglected; "untutored and unclaimed," she spends most of her time at home, listening to grown-ups live it up downstairs . A maid named Susan Ash starts taking Maisie out for walks. Returning from one of these walks, Maisie finds Sir Claude waiting for her at her father's place. Maisie thinks, meeting Sir Claude, that he is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen. Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale get along swimmingly--which is odd, given that their spouses are bitter enemies. Mrs. Beale, Sir Claude, and Maisie all agree that Maisie has brought the two stepparents together. Here, James uses still more foreshadowing. Maisie goes home to her mother's with Sir Claude.