prompt:
Chapter: The money was far too much even for a fee in a fairy-tale, and in the
absence of Mrs. Beale, who, though the hour was now late, had not yet
returned to the Regent's Park, Susan Ash, in the hall, as loud as Maisie
was low and as bold as she was bland, produced, on the exhibition
offered under the dim vigil of the lamp that made the place a
contrast to the child's recent scene of light, the half-crown that an
unsophisticated cabman could pronounce to be the least he would take. It
was apparently long before Mrs. Beale would arrive, and in the interval
Maisie had been induced by the prompt Susan not only to go to bed like
a darling dear, but, in still richer expression of that character, to
devote to the repayment of obligations general as well as particular
one of the sovereigns in the ordered array that, on the dressing-table
upstairs, was naturally not less dazzling to a lone orphan of a
housemaid than to the subject of the manoeuvres of a quartette. This
subject went to sleep with her property gathered into a knotted
handkerchief, the largest that could be produced and lodged under her
pillow; but the explanations that on the morrow were inevitably more
complete with Mrs. Beale than they had been with her humble friend
found their climax in a surrender also more becomingly free. There were
explanations indeed that Mrs. Beale had to give as well as to ask, and
the most striking of these was to the effect that it was dreadful for
a little girl to take money from a woman who was simply the vilest of
their sex. The sovereigns were examined with some attention, the result
of which, however, was to make the author of that statement desire to
know what, if one really went into the matter, they could be called
but the wages of sin. Her companion went into it merely so far as the
question of what then they were to do with them; on which Mrs. Beale,
who had by this time put them into her pocket, replied with dignity
and with her hand on the place: "We're to send them back on the spot!"
Susan, the child soon afterwards learnt, had been invited to contribute
to this act of restitution her one appropriated coin; but a closer
clutch of the treasure showed in her private assurance to Maisie that
there was a limit to the way she could be "done." Maisie had been open
with Mrs. Beale about the whole of last night's transaction; but she
now found herself on the part of their indignant inferior a recipient
of remarks that were so many ringing tokens of that lady's own
suppressions. One of these bore upon the extraordinary hour--it was
three in the morning if she really wanted to know--at which Mrs. Beale
had re-entered the house; another, in accents as to which Maisie's
criticism was still intensely tacit, characterised her appeal as such
a "gime," such a "shime," as one had never had to put up with; a
third treated with some vigour the question of the enormous sums due
belowstairs, in every department, for gratuitous labour and wasted zeal.
Our young lady's consciousness was indeed mainly filled for several
days with the apprehension created by the too slow subsidence of her
attendant's sense of wrong. These days would become terrific like the
Revolutions she had learnt by heart in Histories if an outbreak in the
kitchen should crown them; and to promote that prospect she had through
Susan's eyes more than one glimpse of the way in which Revolutions are
prepared. To listen to Susan was to gather that the spark applied to
the inflammables and already causing them to crackle would prove to
have been the circumstance of one's being called a horrid low thief for
refusing to part with one's own. The redeeming point of this tension
was, on the fifth day, that it actually appeared to have had to do with
a breathless perception in our heroine's breast that scarcely more as
the centre of Sir Claude's than as that of Susan's energies she had soon
after breakfast been conveyed from London to Folkestone and established
at a lovely hotel. These agents, before her wondering eyes, had combined
to carry through the adventure and to give it the air of having owed
its success to the fact that Mrs. Beale had, as Susan said, but just
stepped out. When Sir Claude, watch in hand, had met this fact with the
exclamation "Then pack Miss Farange and come off with us!" there had
ensued on the stairs a series of gymnastics of a nature to bring Miss
Farange's heart into Miss Farange's mouth. She sat with Sir Claude in
a four-wheeler while he still held his watch; held it longer than any
doctor who had ever felt her pulse; long enough to give her a vision
of something like the ecstasy of neglecting such an opportunity to
show impatience. The ecstasy had begun in the schoolroom and over the
Berceuse, quite in the manner of the same foretaste on the day, a little
while back, when Susan had panted up and she herself, after the hint
about the duchess, had sailed down; for what harm then had there been in
drops and disappointments if she could still have, even only a moment,
the sensation of such a name "brought up"? It had remained with her that
her father had foretold her she would some day be in the street, but it
clearly wouldn't be this day, and she felt justified of the preference
betrayed to that parent as soon as her visitor had set Susan in motion
and laid his hand, while she waited with him, kindly on her own. This
was what the Captain, in Kensington Gardens, had done; her present
situation reminded her a little of that one and renewed the dim wonder
of the fashion after which, from the first, such pats and pulls had
struck her as the steps and signs of other people's business and even a
little as the wriggle or the overflow of their difficulties. What had
failed her and what had frightened her on the night of the Exhibition
lost themselves at present alike in the impression that any "surprise"
now about to burst from Sir Claude would be too big to burst all at
once. Any awe that might have sprung from his air of leaving out her
stepmother was corrected by the force of a general rule, the odd truth
that if Mrs. Beale now never came nor went without making her think of
him, it was never, to balance that, the main mark of his own renewed
reality to appear to be a reference to Mrs. Beale. To be with Sir Claude
was to think of Sir Claude, and that law governed Maisie's mind until,
through a sudden lurch of the cab, which had at last taken in Susan and
ever so many bundles and almost reached Charing Cross, it popped again
somehow into her dizzy head the long-lost image of Mrs. Wix.

It was singular, but from this time she understood and she followed,
followed with the sense of an ample filling-out of any void created by
symptoms of avoidance and of flight. Her ecstasy was a thing that had
yet more of a face than of a back to turn, a pair of eyes still directed
to Mrs. Wix even after the slight surprise of their not finding her, as
the journey expanded, either at the London station or at the Folkestone
hotel. It took few hours to make the child feel that if she was in
neither of these places she was at least everywhere else. Maisie had
known all along a great deal, but never so much as she was to know from
this moment on and as she learned in particular during the couple of
days that she was to hang in the air, as it were, over the sea which
represented in breezy blueness and with a summer charm a crossing of
more spaces than the Channel. It was granted her at this time to arrive
at divinations so ample that I shall have no room for the goal if I
attempt to trace the stages; as to which therefore I must be content to
say that the fullest expression we may give to Sir Claude's conduct is
a poor and pale copy of the picture it presented to his young friend.
Abruptly, that morning, he had yielded to the action of the idea pumped
into him for weeks by Mrs. Wix on lines of approach that she had been
capable of the extraordinary art of preserving from entanglement in
the fine network of his relations with Mrs. Beale. The breath of her
sincerity, blowing without a break, had puffed him up to the flight
by which, in the degree I have indicated, Maisie too was carried off
her feet. This consisted neither in more nor in less than the brave
stroke of his getting off from Mrs. Beale as well as from his wife--of
making with the child straight for some such foreign land as would
give a support to Mrs. Wix's dream that she might still see his
errors renounced and his delinquencies redeemed. It would all be a
sacrifice--under eyes that would miss no faintest shade--to what even
the strange frequenters of her ladyship's earlier period used to call
the real good of the little unfortunate. Maisie's head held a suspicion
of much that, during the last long interval, had confusedly, but quite
candidly, come and gone in his own; a glimpse, almost awe-stricken in
its gratitude, of the miracle her old governess had wrought. That
functionary could not in this connexion have been more impressive, even
at second-hand, if she had been a prophetess with an open scroll or some
ardent abbess speaking with the lips of the Church. She had clung day
by day to their plastic associate, plying him with her deep, narrow
passion, doing her simple utmost to convert him, and so working on him
that he had at last really embraced his fine chance. That the chance was
not delusive was sufficiently guaranteed by the completeness with which
he could finally figure it out that, in case of his taking action,
neither Ida nor Beale, whose book, on each side, it would only too well
suit, would make any sort of row.

It sounds, no doubt, too penetrating, but it was not all as an effect of
Sir Claude's betrayals that Maisie was able to piece together the beauty
of the special influence through which, for such stretches of time,
he had refined upon propriety by keeping, so far as possible, his
sentimental interests distinct. She had ever of course in her mind fewer
names than conceptions, but it was only with this drawback that she now
made out her companion's absences to have had for their ground that he
was the lover of her stepmother and that the lover of her stepmother
could scarce logically pretend to a superior right to look after her.
Maisie had by this time embraced the implication of a kind of natural
divergence between lovers and little girls. It was just this indeed
that could throw light on the probable contents of the pencilled note
deposited on the hall-table in the Regent's Park and which would greet
Mrs. Beale on her return. Maisie freely figured it as provisionally
jocular in tone, even though to herself on this occasion Sir Claude
turned a graver face than he had shown in any crisis but that of putting
her into the cab when she had been horrid to him after her parting with
the Captain. He might really be embarrassed, but he would be sure, to
her view, to have muffled in some bravado of pleasantry the disturbance
produced at her father's by the removal of a valued servant. Not that
there wasn't a great deal too that wouldn't be in the note--a great deal
for which a more comfortable place was Maisie's light little brain,
where it hummed away hour after hour and caused the first outlook at
Folkestone to swim in a softness of colour and sound. It became clear in
this medium that her stepfather had really now only to take into account
his entanglement with Mrs. Beale. Wasn't he at last disentangled from
every one and every thing else? The obstacle to the rupture pressed upon
him by Mrs. Wix in the interest of his virtue would be simply that he
was in love, or rather, to put it more precisely, that Mrs. Beale had
left him no doubt of the degree in which SHE was. She was so much so as
to have succeeded in making him accept for a time her infatuated grasp
of him and even to some extent the idea of what they yet might do
together with a little diplomacy and a good deal of patience. I may not
even answer for it that Maisie was not aware of how, in this, Mrs. Beale
failed to share his all but insurmountable distaste for their allowing
their little charge to breathe the air of their gross irregularity--his
contention, in a word, that they should either cease to be irregular
or cease to be parental. Their little charge, for herself, had long
ago adopted the view that even Mrs. Wix had at one time not thought
prohibitively coarse--the view that she was after all, AS a little
charge, morally at home in atmospheres it would be appalling to analyse.
If Mrs. Wix, however, ultimately appalled, had now set her heart on
strong measures, Maisie, as I have intimated, could also work round both
to the reasons for them and to the quite other reasons for that lady's
not, as yet at least, appearing in them at first-hand.

Oh decidedly I shall never get you to believe the number of things she
saw and the number of secrets she discovered! Why in the world, for
instance, couldn't Sir Claude have kept it from her--except on the
hypothesis of his not caring to--that, when you came to look at it and
so far as it was a question of vested interests, he had quite as much
right in her as her stepmother, not to say a right that Mrs. Beale
was in no position to dispute? He failed at all events of any such
successful ambiguity as could keep her, when once they began to look
across at France, from regarding even what was least explained as most
in the spirit of their old happy times, their rambles and expeditions in
the easier better days of their first acquaintance. Never before had she
had so the sense of giving him a lead for the sort of treatment of what
was between them that would best carry it off, or of his being grateful
to her for meeting him so much in the right place. She met him literally
at the very point where Mrs. Beale was most to be reckoned with, the
point of the jealousy that was sharp in that lady and of the need of
their keeping it as long as possible obscure to her that poor Mrs. Wix
had still a hand. Yes, she met him too in the truth of the matter that,
as her stepmother had had no one else to be jealous of, she had made
up for so gross a privation by directing the sentiment to a moral
influence. Sir Claude appeared absolutely to convey in a wink that
a moral influence capable of pulling a string was after all a moral
influence exposed to the scratching out of its eyes; and that, this
being the case, there was somebody they couldn't afford to leave
unprotected before they should see a little better what Mrs. Beale was
likely to do. Maisie, true enough, had not to put it into words to
rejoin, in the coffee-room, at luncheon: "What CAN she do but come to
you if papa does take a step that will amount to legal desertion?"
Neither had he then, in answer, to articulate anything but the jollity
of their having found a table at a window from which, as they partook of
cold beef and apollinaris--for he hinted they would have to save lots
of money--they could let their eyes hover tenderly on the far-off white
cliffs that so often had signalled to the embarrassed English a promise
of safety. Maisie stared at them as if she might really make out after a
little a queer dear figure perched on them--a figure as to which she had
already the subtle sense that, wherever perched, it would be the very
oddest yet seen in France. But it was at least as exciting to feel where
Mrs. Wix wasn't as it would have been to know where she was, and if she
wasn't yet at Boulogne this only thickened the plot.

If she was not to be seen that day, however, the evening was marked by
an apparition before which, none the less, overstrained suspense folded
on the spot its wings. Adjusting her respirations and attaching, under
dropped lashes, all her thoughts to a smartness of frock and frill for
which she could reflect that she had not appealed in vain to a loyalty
in Susan Ash triumphant over the nice things their feverish flight had
left behind, Maisie spent on a bench in the garden of the hotel the
half-hour before dinner, that mysterious ceremony of the _table d'hote_
for which she had prepared with a punctuality of flutter. Sir Claude,
beside her, was occupied with a cigarette and the afternoon papers; and
though the hotel was full the garden shewed the particular void that
ensues upon the sound of the dressing-bell. She had almost had time to
weary of the human scene; her own humanity at any rate, in the shape of
a smutch on her scanty skirt, had held her so long that as soon as she
raised her eyes they rested on a high fair drapery by which smutches
were put to shame and which had glided toward her over the grass without
her noting its rustle. She followed up its stiff sheen--up and up from
the ground, where it had stopped--till at the end of a considerable
journey her impression felt the shock of the fixed face which,
surmounting it, seemed to offer the climax of the dressed condition.
"Why mamma!" she cried the next instant--cried in a tone that, as
she sprang to her feet, brought Sir Claude to his own beside her and
gave her ladyship, a few yards off, the advantage of their momentary
confusion. Poor Maisie's was immense; her mother's drop had the effect
of one of the iron shutters that, in evening walks with Susan Ash, she
had seen suddenly, at the touch of a spring, rattle down over shining
shop-fronts. The light of foreign travel was darkened at a stroke; she
had a horrible sense that they were caught; and for the first time of
her life in Ida's presence she so far translated an impulse into an
invidious act as to clutch straight at the hand of her responsible
confederate. It didn't help her that he appeared at first equally hushed
with horror; a minute during which, in the empty garden, with its long
shadows on the lawn, its blue sea over the hedge and its startled peace
in the air, both her elders remained as stiff as tall tumblers filled to
the brim and held straight for fear of a spill.

At last, in a tone that enriched the whole surprise by its unexpected
softness, her mother said to Sir Claude: "Do you mind at all my speaking
to her?"

"Oh no; DO you?" His reply was so long in coming that Maisie was the
first to find the right note.

He laughed as he seemed to take it from her, and she felt a sufficient
concession in his manner of addressing their visitor. "How in the world
did you know we were here?"

His wife, at this, came the rest of the way and sat down on the bench
with a hand laid on her daughter, whom she gracefully drew to her and in
whom, at her touch, the fear just kindled gave a second jump, but now in
quite another direction. Sir Claude, on the further side, resumed his
seat and his newspapers, so that the three grouped themselves like a
family party; his connexion, in the oddest way in the world, almost
cynically and in a flash acknowledged, and the mother patting the child
into conformities unspeakable. Maisie could already feel how little it
was Sir Claude and she who were caught. She had the positive sense of
their catching their relative, catching her in the act of getting rid of
her burden with a finality that showed her as unprecedentedly relaxed.
Oh yes, the fear had dropped, and she had never been so irrevocably
parted with as in the pressure of possession now supremely exerted
by Ida's long-gloved and much-bangled arm. "I went to the Regent's
Park"--this was presently her ladyship's answer to Sir Claude.

"Do you mean to-day?"

"This morning, just after your own call there. That's how I found you
out; that's what has brought me."

Sir Claude considered and Maisie waited. "Whom then did you see?"

Ida gave a sound of indulgent mockery. "I like your scare. I know your
game. I didn't see the person I risked seeing, but I had been ready
to take my chance of her." She addressed herself to Maisie; she had
encircled her more closely. "I asked for YOU, my dear, but I saw no one
but a dirty parlourmaid. She was red in the face with the great things
that, as she told me, had just happened in the absence of her mistress;
and she luckily had the sense to have made out the place to which Sir
Claude had come to take you. If he hadn't given a false scent I should
find you here: that was the supposition on which I've proceeded." Ida
had never been so explicit about proceeding or supposing, and Maisie,
drinking this in, noted too how Sir Claude shared her fine impression of
it. "I wanted to see you," his wife continued, "and now you can judge of
the trouble I've taken. I had everything to do in town to-day, but I
managed to get off."

Maisie and her companion, for a moment, did justice to this achievement;
but Maisie was the first to express it. "I'm glad you wanted to see me,
mamma." Then after a concentration more deep and with a plunge more
brave: "A little more and you'd have been too late." It stuck in her
throat, but she brought it out: "We're going to France."

Ida was magnificent; Ida kissed her on the forehead. "That's just what I
thought likely; it made me decide to run down. I fancied that in spite
of your scramble you'd wait to cross, and it added to the reason I have
for seeing you."

Maisie wondered intensely what the reason could be, but she knew ever so
much better than to ask. She was slightly surprised indeed to perceive
that Sir Claude didn't, and to hear him immediately enquire: "What in
the name of goodness can you have to say to her?"

His tone was not exactly rude, but it was impatient enough to make his
wife's response a fresh specimen of the new softness. "That, my dear
man, is all my own business."

"Do you mean," Sir Claude asked, "that you wish me to leave you with
her?"

"Yes, if you'll be so good; that's the extraordinary request I take the
liberty of making." Her ladyship had dropped to a mildness of irony by
which, for a moment, poor Maisie was mystified and charmed, puzzled
with a glimpse of something that in all the years had at intervals
peeped out. Ida smiled at Sir Claude with the strange air she had on
such occasions of defying an interlocutor to keep it up as long; her
huge eyes, her red lips, the intense marks in her face formed an
_eclairage_ as distinct and public as a lamp set in a window. The
child seemed quite to see in it the very beacon that had lighted her
path; she suddenly found herself reflecting that it was no wonder the
gentlemen were guided. This must have been the way mamma had first
looked at Sir Claude; it brought back the lustre of the time they had
outlived. It must have been the way she looked also at Mr. Perriam and
Lord Eric; above all it contributed in Maisie's mind to a completer
view of that satisfied state of the Captain. Our young lady grasped
this idea with a quick lifting of the heart; there was a stillness
during which her mother flooded her with a wealth of support to the
Captain's striking tribute. This stillness remained long enough
unbroken to represent that Sir Claude too might but be gasping again
under the spell originally strong for him; so that Maisie quite hoped
he would at least say something to show a recognition of how charming
she could be.

What he presently said was: "Are you putting up for the night?"

His wife cast grandly about. "Not here--I've come from Dover."

Over Maisie's head, at this, they still faced each other. "You spend the
night there?"

"Yes, I brought some things. I went to the hotel and hastily arranged;
then I caught the train that whisked me on here. You see what a day I've
had of it."

The statement may surprise, but these were really as obliging if not as
lucid words as, into her daughter's ears at least, Ida's lips had ever
dropped; and there was a quick desire in the daughter that for the hour
at any rate they should duly be welcomed as a ground of intercourse.
Certainly mamma had a charm which, when turned on, became a large
explanation; and the only danger now in an impulse to applaud it would
be that of appearing to signalise its rarity. Maisie, however, risked
the peril in the geniality of an admission that Ida had indeed had a
rush; and she invited Sir Claude to expose himself by agreeing with her
that the rush had been even worse than theirs. He appeared to meet this
appeal by saying with detachment enough: "You go back there to-night?"

"Oh yes--there are plenty of trains." Again Sir Claude hesitated; it
would have been hard to say if the child, between them, more connected
or divided them. Then he brought out quietly: "It will be late for you
to knock about. I'll see you over."

"You needn't trouble, thank you. I think you won't deny that I can help
myself and that it isn't the first time in my dreadful life that I've
somehow managed it." Save for this allusion to her dreadful life they
talked there, Maisie noted, as if they were only rather superficial
friends; a special effect that she had often wondered at before in the
midst of what she supposed to be intimacies. This effect was augmented
by the almost casual manner in which her ladyship went on: "I dare say
I shall go abroad."

"From Dover do you mean, straight?"

"How straight I can't say. I'm excessively ill."

This for a minute struck Maisie as but a part of the conversation;
at the end of which time she became aware that it ought to strike
her--though it apparently didn't strike Sir Claude--as a part of
something graver. It helped her to twist nearer. "Ill, mamma--really
ill?"

She regretted her "really" as soon as she had spoken it; but there
couldn't be a better proof of her mother's present polish than that Ida
showed no gleam of a temper to take it up. She had taken up at other
times much tinier things. She only pressed Maisie's head against her
bosom and said: "Shockingly, my dear. I must go to that new place."

"What new place?" Sir Claude enquired.

Ida thought, but couldn't recall it. "Oh 'Chose,' don't you know?
--where every one goes. I want some proper treatment. It's all I've ever
asked for on earth. But that's not what I came to say."

Sir Claude, in silence, folded one by one his newspapers; then he rose
and stood whacking the palm of his hand with the bundle. "You'll stop
and dine with us?"

"Dear no--I can't dine at this sort of hour. I ordered dinner at Dover."

Her ladyship's tone in this one instance showed a certain superiority to
those conditions in which her daughter had artlessly found Folkestone a
paradise. It was yet not so crushing as to nip in the bud the eagerness
with which the latter broke out: "But won't you at least have a cup of
tea?"

Ida kissed her again on the brow. "Thanks, love. I had tea before
coming." She raised her eyes to Sir Claude. "She IS sweet!" He made no
more answer than if he didn't agree; but Maisie was at ease about that
and was still taken up with the joy of this happier pitch of their talk,
which put more and more of a meaning into the Captain's version of her
ladyship and literally kindled a conjecture that such an admirer might,
over there at the other place, be waiting for her to dine. Was the same
conjecture in Sir Claude's mind? He partly puzzled her, if it had risen
there, by the slight perversity with which he returned to a question
that his wife evidently thought she had disposed of.

He whacked his hand again with his paper. "I had really much better take
you."

"And leave Maisie here alone?"

Mamma so clearly didn't want it that Maisie leaped at the vision of a
Captain who had seen her on from Dover and who, while he waited to take
her back, would be hovering just at the same distance at which, in
Kensington Gardens, the companion of his walk had herself hovered. Of
course, however, instead of breathing any such guess she let Sir Claude
reply; all the more that his reply could contribute so much to her own
present grandeur. "She won't be alone when she has a maid in
attendance."

Maisie had never before had so much of a retinue, and she waited also to
enjoy the action of it on her ladyship. "You mean the woman you brought
from town?" Ida considered. "The person at the house spoke of her in a
way that scarcely made her out company for my child." Her tone was that
her child had never wanted, in her hands, for prodigious company. But
she as distinctly continued to decline Sir Claude's. "Don't be an old
goose," she said charmingly. "Let us alone."

In front of them on the grass he looked graver than Maisie at all now
thought the occasion warranted. "I don't see why you can't say it before
me."

His wife smoothed one of her daughter's curls. "Say what, dear?"

"Why what you came to say."

At this Maisie at last interposed: she appealed to Sir Claude. "Do let
her say it to me."

He looked hard for a moment at his little friend. "How do you know what
she may say?"

"She must risk it," Ida remarked.

"I only want to protect you," he continued to the child.

"You want to protect yourself--that's what you mean," his wife replied.
"Don't be afraid. I won't touch you."

"She won't touch you--she WON'T!" Maisie declared. She felt by this time
that she could really answer for it, and something of the emotion with
which she had listened to the Captain came back to her. It made her
so happy and so secure that she could positively patronise mamma. She
did so in the Captain's very language. "She's good, she's good!" she
proclaimed.

"Oh Lord!"--Sir Claude, at this, let himself go. He appeared to have
emitted some sound of derision that was smothered, to Maisie's ears, by
her being again embraced by his wife. Ida released her and held her off
a little, looking at her with a very queer face. Then the child became
aware that their companion had left them and that from the face in
question a confirmatory remark had proceeded.

"I AM good, love," said her ladyship.

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

completion: When Maisie gets to her mother's house, it is clear that the Countess gave her too much money for the cab fare. Susan Ash takes one coin, and Maisie goes to sleep with the rest of the money tied in a handkerchief under her pillow. The next day, Mrs. Beale takes the money from Maisie, calling the coins "wages of sin" and saying they must be sent back to the Countess. A few days pass, and Sir Claude suddenly announces to Maisie that he is taking her and Susan Ash to Folkestone, a port town in south-east England. Maisie thinks that "He had yielded to the action of the idea pumped into him for weeks by Mrs. Wix" , namely of removing Maisie from the care of either of her parents and raising her himself, presumably along with Mrs. Wix. In Folkestone, Maisie thinks a lot about relationships and wonders whether they will go to France and be joined by Mrs. Beale. Suddenly, Ida shows up while Maisie and Sir Claude are in the garden of the hotel where they are staying. Ida reveals that she found the letter Sir Claude had left for her in London and quickly changed her plans to follow them. She asks to speak to Maisie alone, which Sir Claude hesitates to allow. Ida, like Maisie's father at the Countess's house, plays the loving parent, cuddling and praising Maisie. Ida does not seem to want to change their plans, saying that she is planning to go abroad after leaving them because she is sick. Ida presses Sir Claude again to leave them alone, and Maisie supports her, thinking of the Captain and chanting, "She's good, she's good. In a huff, Sir Claude leaves the garden


prompt:
Chapter: A good deal of the rest of Ida's visit was devoted to explaining, as it
were, so extraordinary a statement. This explanation was more copious
than any she had yet indulged in, and as the summer twilight gathered
and she kept her child in the garden she was conciliatory to a degree
that let her need to arrange things a little perceptibly peep out. It
was not merely that she explained; she almost conversed; all that was
wanting was that she should have positively chattered a little less. It
was really the occasion of Maisie's life on which her mother was to have
most to say to her. That alone was an implication of generosity and
virtue, and no great stretch was required to make our young lady feel
that she should best meet her and soonest have it over by simply seeming
struck with the propriety of her contention. They sat together while
the parent's gloved hand sometimes rested sociably on the child's and
sometimes gave a corrective pull to a ribbon too meagre or a tress too
thick; and Maisie was conscious of the effort to keep out of her eyes
the wonder with which they were occasionally moved to blink. Oh there
would have been things to blink at if one had let one's self go; and
it was lucky they were alone together, without Sir Claude or Mrs. Wix
or even Mrs. Beale to catch an imprudent glance. Though profuse and
prolonged her ladyship was not exhaustively lucid, and her account of
her situation, so far as it could be called descriptive, was a muddle
of inconsequent things, bruised fruit of an occasion she had rather too
lightly affronted. None of them were really thought out and some were
even not wholly insincere. It was as if she had asked outright what
better proof could have been wanted of her goodness and her greatness
than just this marvellous consent to give up what she had so cherished.
It was as if she had said in so many words: "There have been things
between us--between Sir Claude and me--which I needn't go into, you
little nuisance, because you wouldn't understand them." It suited her
to convey that Maisie had been kept, so far as SHE was concerned or
could imagine, in a holy ignorance and that she must take for granted a
supreme simplicity. She turned this way and that in the predicament she
had sought and from which she could neither retreat with grace nor
emerge with credit: she draped herself in the tatters of her impudence,
postured to her utmost before the last little triangle of cracked glass
to which so many fractures had reduced the polished plate of filial
superstition. If neither Sir Claude nor Mrs. Wix was there this was
perhaps all the more a pity: the scene had a style of its own that would
have qualified it for presentation, especially at such a moment as that
of her letting it betray that she quite did think her wretched offspring
better placed with Sir Claude than in her own soiled hands. There was at
any rate nothing scant either in her admissions or her perversions, the
mixture of her fear of what Maisie might undiscoverably think and of the
support she at the same time gathered from a necessity of selfishness
and a habit of brutality. This habit flushed through the merit she now
made, in terms explicit, of not having come to Folkestone to kick up a
vulgar row. She had not come to box any ears or to bang any doors or
even to use any language: she had come at the worst to lose the thread
of her argument in an occasional dumb disgusted twitch of the toggery in
which Mrs. Beale's low domestic had had the impudence to serve up Miss
Farange. She checked all criticism, not committing herself even so far
as for those missing comforts of the schoolroom on which Mrs. Wix had
presumed.

"I AM good--I'm crazily, I'm criminally good. But it won't do for YOU
any more, and if I've ceased to contend with him, and with you too, who
have made most of the trouble between us, it's for reasons that you'll
understand one of these days but too well--one of these days when I
hope you'll know what it is to have lost a mother. I'm awfully ill, but
you mustn't ask me anything about it. If I don't get off somewhere my
doctor won't answer for the consequences. He's stupefied at what I've
borne--he says it has been put on me because I was formed to suffer. I'm
thinking of South Africa, but that's none of your business. You must
take your choice--you can't ask me questions if you're so ready to
give me up. No, I won't tell you; you can find out for yourself. South
Africa's wonderful, they say, and if I do go it must be to give it a
fair trial. It must be either one thing or the other; if he takes you,
you know, he takes you. I've struck my last blow for you; I can follow
you no longer from pillar to post. I must live for myself at last, while
there's still a handful left of me. I'm very, very ill; I'm very, very
tired; I'm very, very determined. There you have it. Make the most of
it. Your frock's too filthy; but I came to sacrifice myself." Maisie
looked at the peccant places; there were moments when it was a relief to
her to drop her eyes even on anything so sordid. All her interviews, all
her ordeals with her mother had, as she had grown older, seemed to have,
before any other, the hard quality of duration; but longer than any,
strangely, were these minutes offered to her as so pacific and so
agreeably winding up the connexion. It was her anxiety that made them
long, her fear of some hitch, some check of the current, one of her
ladyship's famous quick jumps. She held her breath; she only wanted,
by playing into her visitor's hands, to see the thing through. But her
impatience itself made at instants the whole situation swim; there were
things Ida said that she perhaps didn't hear, and there were things
she heard that Ida perhaps didn't say. "You're all I have, and yet I'm
capable of this. Your father wishes you were dead--that, my dear, is
what your father wishes. You'll have to get used to it as I've done--I
mean to his wishing that I'M dead. At all events you see for yourself
how wonderful I am to Sir Claude. He wishes me dead quite as much; and
I'm sure that if making me scenes about YOU could have killed me--!" It
was the mark of Ida's eloquence that she started more hares than she
followed, and she gave but a glance in the direction of this one; going
on to say that the very proof of her treating her husband like an angel
was that he had just stolen off not to be fairly shamed. She spoke as
if he had retired on tiptoe, as he might have withdrawn from a place
of worship in which he was not fit to be present. "You'll never know
what I've been through about you--never, never, never. I spare you
everything, as I always have; though I dare say you know things that,
if I did (I mean if I knew them) would make me--well, no matter! You're
old enough at any rate to know there are a lot of things I don't say
that I easily might; though it would do me good, I assure you, to have
spoken my mind for once in my life. I don't speak of your father's
infamous wife: that may give you a notion of the way I'm letting you
off. When I say 'you' I mean your precious friends and backers. If you
don't do justice to my forbearing, out of delicacy, to mention, just as
a last word, about your stepfather, a little fact or two of a kind that
really I should only HAVE to mention to shine myself in comparison, and
after every calumny, like pure gold: if you don't do me THAT justice
you'll never do me justice at all!"

Maisie's desire to show what justice she did her had by this time become
so intense as to have brought with it an inspiration. The great effect
of their encounter had been to confirm her sense of being launched with
Sir Claude, to make it rich and full beyond anything she had dreamed,
and everything now conspired to suggest that a single soft touch of her
small hand would complete the good work and set her ladyship so promptly
and majestically afloat as to leave the great seaway clear for the
morrow. This was the more the case as her hand had for some moments been
rendered free by a marked manoeuvre of both of her mother's. One of
these capricious members had fumbled with visible impatience in some
backward depth of drapery and had presently reappeared with a small
article in its grasp. The act had a significance for a little person
trained, in that relation, from an early age, to keep an eye on manual
motions, and its possible bearing was not darkened by the memory of the
handful of gold that Susan Ash would never, never believe Mrs. Beale had
sent back--"not she; she's too false and too greedy!"--to the munificent
Countess. To have guessed, none the less, that her ladyship's purse
might be the real figure of the object extracted from the rustling
covert at her rear--this suspicion gave on the spot to the child's eyes
a direction carefully distant. It added moreover to the optimism that
for an hour could ruffle the surface of her deep diplomacy, ruffle it
to the point of making her forget that she had never been safe unless
she had also been stupid. She in short forgot her habitual caution in
her impulse to adopt her ladyship's practical interests and show her
ladyship how perfectly she understood them. She saw without looking
that her mother pressed a little clasp; heard, without wanting to,
the sharp click that marked the closing portemonnaie from which
something had been taken. What this was she just didn't see; it was not
too substantial to be locked with ease in the fold of her ladyship's
fingers. Nothing was less new to Maisie than the art of not thinking
singly, so that at this instant she could both bring out what was on
her tongue's end and weigh, as to the object in her mother's palm, the
question of its being a sovereign against the question of its being a
shilling. No sooner had she begun to speak than she saw that within a
few seconds this question would have been settled: she had foolishly
checked the rising words of the little speech of presentation to which,
under the circumstances, even such a high pride as Ida's had had to give
some thought. She had checked it completely--that was the next thing she
felt: the note she sounded brought into her companion's eyes a look that
quickly enough seemed at variance with presentations.

"That was what the Captain said to me that day, mamma. I think it would
have given you pleasure to hear the way he spoke of you."

The pleasure, Maisie could now in consternation reflect, would have been
a long time coming if it had come no faster than the response evoked by
her allusion to it. Her mother gave her one of the looks that slammed
the door in her face; never in a career of unsuccessful experiments had
Maisie had to take such a stare. It reminded her of the way that once,
at one of the lectures in Glower Street, something in a big jar that,
amid an array of strange glasses and bad smells, had been promised as a
beautiful yellow was produced as a beautiful black. She had been sorry
on that occasion for the lecturer, but she was at this moment sorrier
for herself. Oh nothing had ever made for twinges like mamma's manner of
saying: "The Captain? What Captain?"

"Why when we met you in the Gardens--the one who took me to sit with
him. That was exactly what HE said."

Ida let it come on so far as to appear for an instant to pick up a lost
thread. "What on earth did he say?"

Maisie faltered supremely, but supremely she brought it out. "What you
say, mamma--that you're so good."

"What 'I' say?" Ida slowly rose, keeping her eyes on her child, and the
hand that had busied itself in her purse conformed at her side and amid
the folds of her dress to a certain stiffening of the arm. "I say you're
a precious idiot, and I won't have you put words into my mouth!" This
was much more peremptory than a mere contradiction. Maisie could only
feel on the spot that everything had broken short off and that their
communication had abruptly ceased. That was presently proved. "What
business have you to speak to me of him?"

Her daughter turned scarlet. "I thought you liked him."

"Him!--the biggest cad in London!" Her ladyship towered again, and in
the gathering dusk the whites of her eyes were huge.

Maisie's own, however, could by this time pretty well match them; and
she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had ever yet
lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up quite as hard as any
one could look down. "Well, he was kind about you then; he WAS, and it
made me like him. He said things--they were beautiful, they were, they
were!" She was almost capable of the violence of forcing this home, for
even in the midst of her surge of passion--of which in fact it was a
part--there rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious,
of what it might mean for her mother's fate to have forfeited such a
loyalty as that. There was literally an instant in which Maisie fully
saw--saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death. "I've
thought of him often since, and I hoped it was with him--with him--"
Here, in her emotion, it failed her, the breath of her filial hope.

But Ida got it out of her. "You hoped, you little horror--?"

"That it was he who's at Dover, that it was he who's to take you. I mean
to South Africa," Maisie said with another drop.

Ida's stupefaction, on this, kept her silent unnaturally long, so long
that her daughter could not only wonder what was coming, but perfectly
measure the decline of every symptom of her liberality. She loomed there
in her grandeur, merely dark and dumb; her wrath was clearly still, as
it had always been, a thing of resource and variety. What Maisie least
expected of it was by this law what now occurred. It melted, in the
summer twilight, gradually into pity, and the pity after a little found
a cadence to which the renewed click of her purse gave an accent.
She had put back what she had taken out. "You're a dreadful dismal
deplorable little thing," she murmured. And with this she turned back
and rustled away over the lawn.

After she had disappeared, Maisie dropped upon the bench again and for
some time, in the empty garden and the deeper dusk, sat and stared at
the image her flight had still left standing. It had ceased to be her
mother only, in the strangest way, that it might become her father, the
father of whose wish that she were dead the announcement still lingered
in the air. It was a presence with vague edges--it continued to front
her, to cover her. But what reality that she need reckon with did it
represent if Mr. Farange were, on his side, also going off--going off to
America with the Countess, or even only to Spa? That question had, from
the house, a sudden gay answer in the great roar of a gong, and at the
same moment she saw Sir Claude look out for her from the wide lighted
doorway. At this she went to him and he came forward and met her on the
lawn. For a minute she was with him there in silence as, just before, at
the last, she had been with her mother.

"She's gone?"

"She's gone."

Nothing more, for the instant, passed between them but to move together
to the house, where, in the hall, he indulged in one of those sudden
pleasantries with which, to the delight of his stepdaughter, his native
animation overflowed. "Will Miss Farange do me the honour to accept my
arm?"

There was nothing in all her days that Miss Farange had accepted with
such bliss, a bright rich element that floated them together to their
feast; before they reached which, however, she uttered, in the spirit
of a glad young lady taken in to her first dinner, a sociable word that
made him stop short. "She goes to South Africa."

"To South Africa?" His face, for a moment, seemed to swing for a jump;
the next it took its spring into the extreme of hilarity. "Is that what
she said?"

"Oh yes, I didn't MISTAKE!" Maisie took to herself THAT credit. "For the
climate."

Sir Claude was now looking at a young woman with black hair, a red frock
and a tiny terrier tucked under her elbow. She swept past them on her
way to the dining-room, leaving an impression of a strong scent which
mingled, amid the clatter of the place, with the hot aroma of food. He
had become a little graver; he still stopped to talk. "I see--I see."
Other people brushed by; he was not too grave to notice them. "Did she
say anything else?"

"Oh yes, a lot more."

On this he met her eyes again with some intensity, but only repeating:
"I see--I see."

Maisie had still her own vision, which she brought out. "I thought she
was going to give me something."

"What kind of a thing?"

"Some money that she took out of her purse and then put back."

Sir Claude's amusement reappeared. "She thought better of it. Dear
thrifty soul! How much did she make by that manoeuvre?"

Maisie considered. "I didn't see. It was very small."

Sir Claude threw back his head. "Do you mean very little? Sixpence?"

Maisie resented this almost as if, at dinner, she were already bandying
jokes with an agreeable neighbour. "It may have been a sovereign."

"Or even," Sir Claude suggested, "a ten-pound note." She flushed at this
sudden picture of what she perhaps had lost, and he made it more vivid
by adding: "Rolled up in a tight little ball, you know--her way of
treating banknotes as if they were curl-papers!" Maisie's flush deepened
both with the immense plausibility of this and with a fresh wave of the
consciousness that was always there to remind her of his cleverness--the
consciousness of how immeasurably more after all he knew about mamma
than she. She had lived with her so many times without discovering the
material of her curl-papers or assisting at any other of her dealings
with banknotes. The tight little ball had at any rate rolled away from
her for ever--quite like one of the other balls that Ida's cue used to
send flying. Sir Claude gave her his arm again, and by the time she was
seated at table she had perfectly made up her mind as to the amount of
the sum she had forfeited. Everything about her, however--the crowded
room, the bedizened banquet, the savour of dishes, the drama of
figures--ministered to the joy of life. After dinner she smoked with her
friend--for that was exactly what she felt she did--on a porch, a kind
of terrace, where the red tips of cigars and the light dresses of ladies
made, under the happy stars, a poetry that was almost intoxicating.
They talked but little, and she was slightly surprised at his asking
for no more news of what her mother had said; but she had no need of
talk--there were a sense and a sound in everything to which words had
nothing to add. They smoked and smoked, and there was a sweetness in her
stepfather's silence. At last he said: "Let us take another turn--but
you must go to bed soon. Oh you know, we're going to have a system!"
Their turn was back into the garden, along the dusky paths from which
they could see the black masts and the red lights of boats and hear the
calls and cries that evidently had to do with happy foreign travel; and
their system was once more to get on beautifully in this further lounge
without a definite exchange. Yet he finally spoke--he broke out as he
tossed away the match from which he had taken a fresh light: "I must go
for a stroll. I'm in a fidget--I must walk it off." She fell in with
this as she fell in with everything; on which he went on: "You go up to
Miss Ash"--it was the name they had started; "you must see she's not in
mischief. Can you find your way alone?"

"Oh yes; I've been up and down seven times." She positively enjoyed the
prospect of an eighth.

Still they didn't separate; they stood smoking together under the stars.
Then at last Sir Claude produced it. "I'm free--I'm free."

She looked up at him; it was the very spot on which a couple of hours
before she had looked up at her mother. "You're free--you're free."

"To-morrow we go to France." He spoke as if he hadn't heard her; but it
didn't prevent her again concurring.

"To-morrow we go to France."

Again he appeared not to have heard her; and after a moment--it was an
effect evidently of the depth of his reflexions and the agitation of
his soul--he also spoke as if he had not spoken before. "I'm free--I'm
free!"

She repeated her form of assent. "You're free--you're free."

This time he did hear her; he fixed her through the darkness with a
grave face. But he said nothing more; he simply stooped a little and
drew her to him--simply held her a little and kissed her goodnight;
after which, having given her a silent push upstairs to Miss Ash, he
turned round again to the black masts and the red lights. Maisie mounted
as if France were at the top.

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

completion: Maisie and Ida converse alone in the garden of the hotel in Folkestone. Ida starts off in a fairly sweet manner, telling Maisie that she can't understand all that has happened between her and Sir Claude and that she needs to go to South Africa because she is sick. She repeats as usual that Maisie's father wishes Maisie were dead, and she also says that both Beale and Sir Claude wishes she were dead. Maisie sees her mother moving her hands subtly and thinks that she is about to be given a coin; however, she cannot tell what amount of money it is. Ida's good temper turns suddenly when Maisie brings up the Captain and the way he had complimented Ida when Maisie spoke to him in the park. Ida closes herself off to Maisie, stands, and calls her daughter an idiot. Maisie tells her mother that she thought Ida liked the Captain, and she feels devastated at the idea of Ida giving up "such a loyalty as that". Ida sees this, and it enrages her further. When Maisie says that she had assumed the Captain would go with her mother to South Africa, Ida is stunned into a long silence. Finally, she insults Maisie a last time, turns, and walks away alone. When Ida has left the garden, Maisie sits down alone on the bench; she sits for a long while as it turns to night. When Sir Claude appears in the doorway, accompanied by the sound of a gong, she goes to meet him. She confirms what Sir Claude can plainly see: her mother is gone. Sir Claude tries to keep the tone light by offering his arm to escort her inside. As they walk, Maisie tells him about Ida going to South Africa and about how she seemed like she was going to give Maisie money. He suggests that Ida may not have been holding a coin but "a ten-pound note. rolled up in a tight little ball, you know - her way of treating banknotes". Maisie is upset at the thought of missing out on that much money, and also disquieted because Sir Claude's knowledge of this habit, which Maisie did not know about, reveals how much Maisie does not know about her parents and their relationships. They go on to dinner, then Maisie accompanies Sir Claude to smoke on a terrace. Sir Claude says they must get Maisie on a schedule of going to bed at a reasonable hour, but he doesn't force the issue and seems to want to stay up himself. Sir Claude says something that Maisie feels he had been waiting to say: "I'm free--I'm free". Maisie repeats this back to him. He tells her that they will go to France the next day, and then he again repeats the phrase, "I'm free--I'm free". He sends Maisie up to bed, and she goes willingly, excited at the prospect of going to France


prompt:
Chapter: The next day it seemed to her indeed at the bottom--down too far, in
shuddering plunges, even to leave her a sense, on the Channel boat, of
the height at which Sir Claude remained and which had never in every way
been so great as when, much in the wet, though in the angle of a screen
of canvas, he sociably sat with his stepdaughter's head in his lap and
that of Mrs. Beale's housemaid fairly pillowed on his breast. Maisie was
surprised to learn as they drew into port that they had had a lovely
passage; but this emotion, at Boulogne, was speedily quenched in others,
above all in the great ecstasy of a larger impression of life. She was
"abroad" and she gave herself up to it, responded to it, in the bright
air, before the pink houses, among the bare-legged fishwives and the
red-legged soldiers, with the instant certitude of a vocation. Her
vocation was to see the world and to thrill with enjoyment of the
picture; she had grown older in five minutes and had by the time they
reached the hotel recognised in the institutions and manners of France a
multitude of affinities and messages. Literally in the course of an hour
she found her initiation; a consciousness much quickened by the superior
part that, as soon as they had gobbled down a French breakfast--which
was indeed a high note in the concert--she observed herself to play to
Susan Ash. Sir Claude, who had already bumped against people he knew and
who, as he said, had business and letters, sent them out together for a
walk, a walk in which the child was avenged, so far as poetic justice
required, not only for the loud giggles that in their London trudges
used to break from her attendant, but for all the years of her tendency
to produce socially that impression of an excess of the queer something
which had seemed to waver so widely between innocence and guilt. On the
spot, at Boulogne, though there might have been excess there was at
least no wavering; she recognised, she understood, she adored and took
possession; feeling herself attuned to everything and laying her hand,
right and left, on what had simply been waiting for her. She explained
to Susan, she laughed at Susan, she towered over Susan; and it was
somehow Susan's stupidity, of which she had never yet been so sure,
and Susan's bewilderment and ignorance and antagonism, that gave the
liveliest rebound to her immediate perceptions and adoptions. The place
and the people were all a picture together, a picture that, when they
went down to the wide sands, shimmered, in a thousand tints, with the
pretty organisation of the _plage_, with the gaiety of spectators and
bathers, with that of the language and the weather, and above all with
that of our young lady's unprecedented situation. For it appeared to her
that no one since the beginning of time could have had such an adventure
or, in an hour, so much experience; as a sequel to which she only
needed, in order to feel with conscious wonder how the past was changed,
to hear Susan, inscrutably aggravated, express a preference for the
Edgware Road. The past was so changed and the circle it had formed
already so overstepped that on that very afternoon, in the course of
another walk, she found herself enquiring of Sir Claude--without a
single scruple--if he were prepared as yet to name the moment at which
they should start for Paris. His answer, it must be said, gave her the
least little chill.

"Oh Paris, my dear child--I don't quite know about Paris!"

This required to be met, but it was much less to challenge him than for
the rich joy of her first discussion of the details of a tour that,
after looking at him a minute, she replied: "Well, isn't that the REAL
thing, the thing that when one does come abroad--?"

He had turned grave again, and she merely threw that out: it was a way
of doing justice to the seriousness of their life. She couldn't moreover
be so much older since yesterday without reflecting that if by this time
she probed a little he would recognise that she had done enough for mere
patience. There was in fact something in his eyes that suddenly, to her
own, made her discretion shabby. Before she could remedy this he had
answered her last question, answered it in the way that, of all ways,
she had least expected. "The thing it doesn't do not to do? Certainly
Paris is charming. But, my dear fellow, Paris eats your head off. I mean
it's so beastly expensive."

That note gave her a pang--it suddenly let in a harder light. Were they
poor then, that is was HE poor, really poor beyond the pleasantry of
apollinaris and cold beef? They had walked to the end of the long jetty
that enclosed the harbour and were looking out at the dangers they had
escaped, the grey horizon that was England, the tumbled surface of the
sea and the brown smacks that bobbed upon it. Why had he chosen an
embarrassed time to make this foreign dash? unless indeed it was just
the dash economic, of which she had often heard and on which, after
another look at the grey horizon and the bobbing boats, she was ready
to turn round with elation. She replied to him quite in his own manner:
"I see, I see." She smiled up at him. "Our affairs are involved."

"That's it." He returned her smile. "Mine are not quite so bad as yours;
for yours are really, my dear man, in a state I can't see through at
all. But mine will do--for a mess."

She thought this over. "But isn't France cheaper than England?"

England, over there in the thickening gloom, looked just then remarkably
dear. "I dare say; some parts."

"Then can't we live in those parts?"

There was something that for an instant, in satisfaction of this, he had
the air of being about to say and yet not saying. What he presently said
was: "This very place is one of them."

"Then we shall live here?"

He didn't treat it quite so definitely as she liked. "Since we've come
to save money!"

This made her press him more. "How long shall we stay?"

"Oh three or four days."

It took her breath away. "You can save money in that time?"

He burst out laughing, starting to walk again and taking her under his
arm. He confessed to her on the way that she too had put a finger on
the weakest of all his weaknesses, the fact, of which he was perfectly
aware, that he probably might have lived within his means if he had
never done anything for thrift. "It's the happy thoughts that do it," he
said; "there's nothing so ruinous as putting in a cheap week." Maisie
heard afresh among the pleasant sounds of the closing day that steel
click of Ida's change of mind. She thought of the ten-pound note
it would have been delightful at this juncture to produce for her
companion's encouragement. But the idea was dissipated by his saying
irrelevantly, in presence of the next thing they stopped to admire: "We
shall stay till she arrives."

She turned upon him. "Mrs. Beale?"

"Mrs. Wix. I've had a wire," he went on. "She has seen your mother."

"Seen mamma?" Maisie stared. "Where in the world?"

"Apparently in London. They've been together."

For an instant this looked ominous--a fear came into her eyes. "Then
she hasn't gone?"

"Your mother?--to South Africa? I give it up, dear boy," Sir Claude
said; and she seemed literally to see him give it up as he stood
there and with a kind of absent gaze--absent, that is, from HER
affairs--followed the fine stride and shining limbs of a young fishwife
who had just waded out of the sea with her basketful of shrimps. His
thought came back to her sooner than his eyes. "But I dare say it's all
right. She wouldn't come if it wasn't, poor old thing: she knows rather
well what she's about."

This was so reassuring that Maisie, after turning it over, could make it
fit into her dream. "Well, what IS she about?"

He finally stopped looking at the fishwife--he met his companion's
enquiry. "Oh you know!" There was something in the way he said it that
made, between them, more of an equality than she had yet imagined; but
it had also more the effect of raising her up than of letting him down,
and what it did with her was shown by the sound of her assent.

"Yes--I know!" What she knew, what she COULD know is by this time no
secret to us: it grew and grew at any rate, the rest of that day, in the
air of what he took for granted. It was better he should do that than
attempt to test her knowledge; but there at the worst was the gist of
the matter: it was open between them at last that their great change,
as, speaking as if it had already lasted weeks, Maisie called it, was
somehow built up round Mrs. Wix. Before she went to bed that night she
knew further that Sir Claude, since, as HE called it, they had been on
the rush, had received more telegrams than one. But they separated again
without speaking of Mrs. Beale.

Oh what a crossing for the straighteners and the old brown dress--which
latter appurtenance the child saw thriftily revived for the possible
disasters of travel! The wind got up in the night and from her little
room at the inn Maisie could hear the noise of the sea. The next day it
was raining and everything different: this was the case even with Susan
Ash, who positively crowed over the bad weather, partly, it seemed, for
relish of the time their visitor would have in the boat, and partly to
point the moral of the folly of coming to such holes. In the wet, with
Sir Claude, Maisie went to the Folkestone packet, on the arrival of
which, with many signs of the fray, he made her wait under an umbrella
by the quay; whence almost ere the vessel touched, he was to be
descried, in quest of their friend, wriggling--that had been his
word--through the invalids massed upon the deck. It was long till
he reappeared--it was not indeed till every one had landed; when he
presented the object of his benevolence in a light that Maisie scarce
knew whether to suppose the depth of prostration or the flush of
triumph. The lady on his arm, still bent beneath her late ordeal, was
muffled in such draperies as had never before offered so much support
to so much woe. At the hotel, an hour later, this ambiguity dropped:
assisting Mrs. Wix in private to refresh and reinvest herself, Maisie
heard from her in detail how little she could have achieved if Sir
Claude hadn't put it in her power. It was a phrase that in her room she
repeated in connexions indescribable: he had put it in her power to have
"changes," as she said, of the most intimate order, adapted to climates
and occasions so various as to foreshadow in themselves the stages of
a vast itinerary. Cheap weeks would of course be in their place after
so much money spent on a governess; sums not grudged, however, by this
lady's pupil, even on her feeling her own appearance give rise, through
the straighteners, to an attention perceptibly mystified. Sir Claude in
truth had had less time to devote to it than to Mrs. Wix's; and moreover
she would rather be in her own shoes than in her friend's creaking new
ones in the event of an encounter with Mrs. Beale. Maisie was too lost
in the idea of Mrs. Beale's judgement of so much newness to pass any
judgement herself. Besides, after much luncheon and many endearments,
the question took quite another turn, to say nothing of the pleasure
of the child's quick view that there were other eyes than Susan Ash's
to open to what she could show. She couldn't show much, alas, till it
stopped raining, which it declined to do that day; but this had only the
effect of leaving more time for Mrs. Wix's own demonstration. It came
as they sat in the little white and gold salon which Maisie thought the
loveliest place she had ever seen except perhaps the apartment of the
Countess; it came while the hard summer storm lashed the windows and
blew in such a chill that Sir Claude, with his hands in his pockets and
cigarettes in his teeth, fidgeting, frowning, looking out and turning
back, ended by causing a smoky little fire to be made in the dressy
little chimney. It came in spite of something that could only be named
his air of wishing to put it off; an air that had served him--oh as all
his airs served him!--to the extent of his having for a couple of hours
confined the conversation to gratuitous jokes and generalities, kept it
on the level of the little empty coffee-cups and _petits verres_ (Mrs.
Wix had two of each!) that struck Maisie, through the fumes of the
French fire and the English tobacco, as a token more than ever that they
were launched. She felt now, in close quarters and as clearly as if Mrs.
Wix had told her, that what this lady had come over for was not merely
to be chaffed and to hear her pupil chaffed; not even to hear Sir
Claude, who knew French in perfection, imitate the strange sounds
emitted by the English folk at the hotel. It was perhaps half an effect
of her present renovations, as if her clothes had been somebody's else:
she had at any rate never produced such an impression of high colour,
of a redness associated in Maisie's mind at THAT pitch either with
measles or with "habits." Her heart was not at all in the gossip about
Boulogne; and if her complexion was partly the result of the dejeuner
and the _petits verres_ it was also the brave signal of what she was
there to say. Maisie knew when this did come how anxiously it had been
awaited by the youngest member of the party. "Her ladyship packed me
off--she almost put me into the cab!" That was what Mrs. Wix at last
brought out.

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

completion: The next day, Maisie, Sir Claude, and Susan Ash travel to France. They arrive in a city called Boulogne, which is on the northern coast of France. They enjoy sightseeing, eating and exploring. Sir Claude explains to Maisie that they need to live there, rather than Paris or another fancier city in France, to save money. He implies that they might move away from their current location when Mrs. Wix arrives. He tells Maisie that this should be soon because she sent him a wire saying she had talked to Maisie's mother. Maisie thinks that he must be communicating with Mrs. Beale as well because she saw multiple telegrams, but she doesn't ask about it. The next day the weather turns to rain. Sir Claude and Maisie go to get Mrs. Wix, who has arrived in France after a rough trip due to the weather. They take Mrs. Wix back to the hotel, and Maisie is eager to show Mrs. Wix what she has learned about France once it stops raining. Still, they enjoy the food and beautiful rooms of the hotel. The chapter ends with Mrs. Wix announcing that Ida had sent her: "Her ladyship packed me off--she almost put me into the cab"


prompt:
Chapter: Sir Claude was stationed at the window; he didn't so much as turn round,
and it was left to the youngest of the three to take up the remark. "Do
you mean you went to see her yesterday?"

"She came to see ME. She knocked at my shabby door. She mounted my
squalid stair. She told me she had seen you at Folkestone."

Maisie wondered. "She went back that evening?"

"No; yesterday morning. She drove to me straight from the station. It
was most remarkable. If I had a job to get off she did nothing to make
it worse--she did a great deal to make it better." Mrs. Wix hung fire,
though the flame in her face burned brighter; then she became capable
of saying: "Her ladyship's kind! She did what I didn't expect."

Maisie, on this, looked straight at her stepfather's back; it might well
have been for her at that hour a monument of her ladyship's kindness. It
remained, as such, monumentally still, and for a time that permitted the
child to ask of their companion: "Did she really help you?"

"Most practically." Again Mrs. Wix paused; again she quite resounded.
"She gave me a ten-pound note."

At that, still looking out, Sir Claude, at the window, laughed loud. "So
you see, Maisie, we've not quite lost it!"

"Oh no," Maisie responded. "Isn't that too charming?" She smiled at Mrs.
Wix. "We know all about it." Then on her friend's showing such blankness
as was compatible with such a flush she pursued: "She does want me to
have you?"

Mrs. Wix showed a final hesitation, which, however, while Sir Claude
drummed on the window-pane, she presently surmounted. It came to Maisie
that in spite of his drumming and of his not turning round he was really
so much interested as to leave himself in a manner in her hands; which
somehow suddenly seemed to her a greater proof than he could have given
by interfering. "She wants me to have YOU!" Mrs. Wix declared.

Maisie answered this bang at Sir Claude. "Then that's nice for all of
us."

Of course it was, his continued silence sufficiently admitted while
Mrs. Wix rose from her chair and, as if to take more of a stand, placed
herself, not without majesty, before the fire. The incongruity of her
smartness, the circumference of her stiff frock, presented her as really
more ready for Paris than any of them. She also gazed hard at Sir
Claude's back. "Your wife was different from anything she had ever shown
me. She recognises certain proprieties."

"Which? Do you happen to remember?" Sir Claude asked.

Mrs. Wix's reply was prompt. "The importance for Maisie of a
gentlewoman, of some one who's not--well, so bad! She objects to a mere
maid, and I don't in the least mind telling you what she wants me to
do." One thing was clear--Mrs. Wix was now bold enough for anything.
"She wants me to persuade you to get rid of the person from Mrs.
Beale's."

Maisie waited for Sir Claude to pronounce on this; then she could only
understand that he on his side waited, and she felt particularly full of
common sense as she met her responsibility. "Oh I don't want Susan with
YOU!" she said to Mrs. Wix.

Sir Claude, always from the window, approved. "That's quite simple. I'll
take her back."

Mrs. Wix gave a positive jump; Maisie caught her look of alarm. "'Take'
her? You don't mean to go over on purpose?"

Sir Claude said nothing for a moment; after which, "Why shouldn't I
leave you here?" he enquired.

Maisie, at this, sprang up. "Oh do, oh do, oh do!" The next moment she
was interlaced with Mrs. Wix, and the two, on the hearth-rug, their eyes
in each other's eyes, considered the plan with intensity. Then Maisie
felt the difference of what they saw in it.

"She can surely go back alone: why should you put yourself out?" Mrs.
Wix demanded.

"Oh she's an idiot--she's incapable. If anything should happen to her
it would be awkward: it was I who brought her--without her asking. If I
turn her away I ought with my own hand to place her again exactly where
I found her."

Mrs. Wix's face appealed to Maisie on such folly, and her manner,
as directed to their companion, had, to her pupil's surprise, an
unprecedented firmness. "Dear Sir Claude, I think you're perverse. Pay
her fare and give her a sovereign. She has had an experience that she
never dreamed of and that will be an advantage to her through life.
If she goes wrong on the way it will be simply because she wants to,
and, with her expenses and her remuneration--make it even what you
like!--you'll have treated her as handsomely as you always treat every
one."

This was a new tone--as new as Mrs. Wix's cap; and it could strike a
young person with a sharpened sense for latent meanings as the upshot of
a relation that had taken on a new character. It brought out for Maisie
how much more even than she had guessed her friends were fighting side
by side. At the same time it needed so definite a justification that as
Sir Claude now at last did face them she at first supposed him merely
resentful of excessive familiarity. She was therefore yet more puzzled
to see him show his serene beauty untroubled, as well as an equal
interest in a matter quite distinct from any freedom but her ladyship's.
"Did my wife come alone?" He could ask even that good-humouredly.

"When she called on me?" Mrs. Wix WAS red now: his good humour wouldn't
keep down her colour, which for a minute glowed there like her ugly
honesty. "No--there was some one in the cab." The only attenuation she
could think of was after a minute to add: "But they didn't come up."

Sir Claude broke into a laugh--Maisie herself could guess what it was
at: while he now walked about, still laughing, and at the fireplace
gave a gay kick to a displaced log, she felt more vague about almost
everything than about the drollery of such a "they." She in fact could
scarce have told you if it was to deepen or to cover the joke that she
bethought herself to observe: "Perhaps it was her maid."

Mrs. Wix gave her a look that at any rate deprecated the wrong tone. "It
was not her maid."

"Do you mean there are this time two?" Sir Claude asked as if he hadn't
heard.

"Two maids?" Maisie went on as if she might assume he had.

The reproach of the straighteners darkened; but Sir Claude cut across it
with a sudden: "See here; what do you mean? And what do you suppose SHE
meant?"

Mrs. Wix let him for a moment, in silence, understand that the answer
to his question, if he didn't take care, might give him more than he
wanted. It was as if, with this scruple, she measured and adjusted all
she gave him in at last saying: "What she meant was to make me know that
you're definitely free. To have that straight from her was a joy I of
course hadn't hoped for: it made the assurance, and my delight at it, a
thing I could really proceed upon. You already know now certainly I'd
have started even if she hadn't pressed me; you already know what, so
long, we've been looking for and what, as soon as she told me of her
step taken at Folkestone, I recognised with rapture that we HAVE. It's
your freedom that makes me right"--she fairly bristled with her logic.
"But I don't mind telling you that it's her action that makes me happy!"

"Her action?" Sir Claude echoed. "Why, my dear woman, her action is just
a hideous crime. It happens to satisfy our sympathies in a way that's
quite delicious; but that doesn't in the least alter the fact that it's
the most abominable thing ever done. She has chucked our friend here
overboard not a bit less than if she had shoved her shrieking and
pleading, out of that window and down two floors to the paving-stones."

Maisie surveyed serenely the parties to the discussion. "Oh your friend
here, dear Sir Claude, doesn't plead and shriek!"

He looked at her a moment. "Never. Never. That's one, only one, but
charming so far as it goes, of about a hundred things we love her for."
Then he pursued to Mrs. Wix: "What I can't for the life of me make out
is what Ida is REALLY up to, what game she was playing in turning to you
with that cursed cheek after the beastly way she has used you. Where--to
explain her at all--does she fancy she can presently, when we least
expect it, take it out of us?"

"She doesn't fancy anything, nor want anything out of any one. Her
cursed cheek, as you call it, is the best thing I've ever seen in her.
I don't care a fig for the beastly way she used me--I forgive it all a
thousand times over!" Mrs. Wix raised her voice as she had never raised
it; she quite triumphed in her lucidity. "I understand her, I almost
admire her!" she quavered. She spoke as if this might practically
suffice; yet in charity to fainter lights she threw out an explanation.
"As I've said, she was different; upon my word I wouldn't have known
her. She had a glimmering, she had an instinct; they brought her. It was
a kind of happy thought, and if you couldn't have supposed she would
ever have had such a thing, why of course I quite agree with you. But
she did have it! There!"

Maisie could feel again how a certain rude rightness in this plea might
have been found exasperating; but as she had often watched Sir Claude in
apprehension of displeasures that didn't come, so now, instead of saying
"Oh hell!" as her father used, she observed him only to take refuge in a
question that at the worst was abrupt.

"Who IS it this time, do you know?"

Mrs. Wix tried blind dignity. "Who is what, Sir Claude?"

"The man who stands the cabs. Who was in the one that waited at your
door?"

At this challenge she faltered so long that her young friend's pitying
conscience gave her a hand. "It wasn't the Captain."

This good intention, however, only converted the excellent woman's
scruple to a more ambiguous stare; besides of course making Sir Claude
go off. Mrs. Wix fairly appealed to him. "Must I really tell you?"

His amusement continued. "Did she make you promise not to?"

Mrs. Wix looked at him still harder. "I mean before Maisie."

Sir Claude laughed again. "Why SHE can't hurt him!"

Maisie felt herself, as it passed, brushed by the light humour of this.
"Yes, I can't hurt him."

The straighteners again roofed her over; after which they seemed to
crack with the explosion of their wearer's honesty. Amid the flying
splinters Mrs. Wix produced a name. "Mr. Tischbein."

There was for an instant a silence that, under Sir Claude's influence
and while he and Maisie looked at each other, suddenly pretended to be
that of gravity. "We don't know Mr. Tischbein, do we, dear?"

Maisie gave the point all needful thought. "No, I can't place Mr.
Tischbein."

It was a passage that worked visibly on their friend. "You must pardon
me, Sir Claude," she said with an austerity of which the note was real,
"if I thank God to your face that he has in his mercy--I mean his mercy
to our charge--allowed me to achieve this act." She gave out a long puff
of pain. "It was time!" Then as if still more to point the moral: "I
said just now I understood your wife. I said just now I admired her. I
stand to it: I did both of those things when I saw how even SHE, poor
thing, saw. If you want the dots on the i's you shall have them. What
she came to me for, in spite of everything, was that I'm just"--she
quavered it out--"well, just clean! What she saw for her daughter was
that there must at last be a DECENT person!"

Maisie was quick enough to jump a little at the sound of this
implication that such a person was what Sir Claude was not; the
next instant, however, she more profoundly guessed against whom the
discrimination was made. She was therefore left the more surprised at
the complete candour with which he embraced the worst. "If she's bent on
decent persons why has she given her to ME? You don't call me a decent
person, and I'll do Ida the justice that SHE never did. I think I'm as
indecent as any one and that there's nothing in my behaviour that makes
my wife's surrender a bit less ignoble!"

"Don't speak of your behaviour!" Mrs. Wix cried. "Don't say such
horrible things; they're false and they're wicked and I forbid you! It's
to KEEP you decent that I'm here and that I've done everything I have
done. It's to save you--I won't say from yourself, because in yourself
you're beautiful and good! It's to save you from the worst person of
all. I haven't, after all, come over to be afraid to speak of her!
That's the person in whose place her ladyship wants such a person as
even me; and if she thought herself, as she as good as told me, not fit
for Maisie's company, it's not, as you may well suppose, that she may
make room for Mrs. Beale!"

Maisie watched his face as it took this outbreak, and the most she saw
in it was that it turned a little white. That indeed made him look,
as Susan Ash would have said, queer; and it was perhaps a part of the
queerness that he intensely smiled. "You're too hard on Mrs. Beale. She
has great merits of her own."

Mrs. Wix, at this, instead of immediately replying, did what Sir Claude
had been doing before: she moved across to the window and stared a while
into the storm. There was for a minute, to Maisie's sense, a hush that
resounded with wind and rain. Sir Claude, in spite of these things,
glanced about for his hat; on which Maisie spied it first and, making
a dash for it, held it out to him. He took it with a gleam of a
"thank-you" in his face, and then something moved her still to hold the
other side of the brim; so that, united by their grasp of this object,
they stood some seconds looking many things at each other. By this time
Mrs. Wix had turned round. "Do you mean to tell me," she demanded, "that
you are going back?"

"To Mrs. Beale?" Maisie surrendered his hat, and there was something
that touched her in the embarrassed, almost humiliated way their
companion's challenge made him turn it round and round. She had seen
people do that who, she was sure, did nothing else that Sir Claude did.
"I can't just say, my dear thing. We'll see about I--we'll talk of it
to-morrow. Meantime I must get some air."

Mrs. Wix, with her back to the window, threw up her head to a height
that, still for a moment, had the effect of detaining him. "All the air
in France, Sir Claude, won't, I think, give you the courage to deny that
you're simply afraid of her!"

Oh this time he did look queer; Maisie had no need of Susan's vocabulary
to note it! It would have come to her of itself as, with his hand on
the door, he turned his eyes from his stepdaughter to her governess and
then back again. Resting on Maisie's, though for ever so short a time,
there was something they gave up to her and tried to explain. His lips,
however, explained nothing; they only surrendered to Mrs. Wix. "Yes. I'm
simply afraid of her!" He opened the door and passed out. It brought
back to Maisie his confession of fear of her mother; it made her
stepmother then the second lady about whom he failed of the particular
virtue that was supposed most to mark a gentleman. In fact there were
three of them, if she counted in Mrs. Wix, before whom he had undeniably
quailed. Well, his want of valour was but a deeper appeal to her
tenderness. To thrill with response to it she had only to remember all
the ladies she herself had, as they called it, funked.

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

completion: Mrs. Wix explains the situation further: Ida came to visit Mrs. Wix at her own lowly house and gave her a ten-pound note to go to France. Sir Claude hints to Maisie that this could have been the money Ida took out and then put away while talking with Maisie in the garden. Mrs. Wix says that she was sent so that Susan Ash can go back to England. Sir Claude suggests that he will take Susan Ash back, as he was the one who took her to France in the first place and she shouldn't have to venture back alone. Maisie and Mrs. Wix are both very against this plan. Sir Claude asks whether Ida was alone when she visited Mrs. Wix, and Mrs. Wix blushes as she replies that there was a man waiting in the cab. Mrs. Wix and Sir Claude talk about Ida further, agreeing that Sir Claude is free and that Ida seems to have completely given up responsibility for Maisie. Mrs. Wix says that she "almost admire" Ida for her recent decisions. Sir Claude steers the conversation back to who was in the cab; Mrs. Wix says that it wasn't the Captain but that she doesn't want to talk about it in front of Maisie. Sir Claude and Maisie say that it is just fine to do so, so Mrs. Wix says it is someone named Mr. Tischbein. Both Sir Claude and Maisie seem to take this lightly. Mrs. Wix slightly offends Maisie with what she says next; she tells them that she has been sent so that Maisie can be raised by "a decent person" , implying that Sir Claude is not decent enough to raise her properly. She elaborates that she is also intended to save Sir Claude from himself and keep him decent. Sir Claude tells Mrs. Wix that she is "too hard on Mrs. Beale". When Sir Claude distractedly looks for his hat, Maisie sees it first and runs to give it to him. They stare at each other, both holding the hat, until Mrs. Wix interrupts to ask whether he is really going back. Maisie adds the question of whether his going back would be to see Mrs. Beale. Sir Claude deflects the question, saying they'll talk about it tomorrow and that he needs to go outside for a while. Before he can leave, Mrs. Wix accuses him of being afraid of Mrs. Beale and he agrees with her. Sir Claude leaves and Maisie thinks about how he is also afraid of her mother, and perhaps of Mrs. Wix as well