prompt:
Chapter: It continued to rain so hard that our young lady's private dream of
explaining the Continent to their visitor had to contain a provision for
some adequate treatment of the weather. At the _table d'hote_ that evening
she threw out a variety of lights: this was the second ceremony of the
sort she had sat through, and she would have neglected her privilege
and dishonoured her vocabulary--which indeed consisted mainly of the
names of dishes--if she had not been proportionately ready to dazzle
with interpretations. Preoccupied and overawed, Mrs. Wix was apparently
dim: she accepted her pupil's version of the mysteries of the menu in a
manner that might have struck the child as the depression of a credulity
conscious not so much of its needs as of its dimensions. Maisie was soon
enough--though it scarce happened before bedtime--confronted again with
the different sort of programme for which she reserved her criticism.
They remounted together to their sitting-room while Sir Claude, who said
he would join them later, remained below to smoke and to converse with
the old acquaintances that he met wherever he turned. He had proposed
his companions, for coffee, the enjoyment of the _salon de lecture_,
but Mrs. Wix had replied promptly and with something of an air that it
struck her their own apartments offered them every convenience. They
offered the good lady herself, Maisie could immediately observe, not
only that of this rather grand reference, which, already emulous, so
far as it went, of her pupil, she made as if she had spent her life in
salons; but that of a stiff French sofa where she could sit and stare at
the faint French lamp, in default of the French clock that had stopped,
as for some account of the time Sir Claude would so markedly interpose.
Her demeanour accused him so directly of hovering beyond her reach that
Maisie sought to divert her by a report of Susan's quaint attitude on
the matter of their conversation after lunch. Maisie had mentioned to
the young woman for sympathy's sake the plan for her relief, but her
disapproval of alien ways appeared, strange to say, only to prompt her
to hug her gloom; so that between Mrs. Wix's effect of displacing her
and the visible stiffening of her back the child had the sense of a
double office and enlarged play for pacific powers.

These powers played to no great purpose, it was true, in keeping before
Mrs. Wix the vision of Sir Claude's perversity, which hung there in the
pauses of talk and which he himself, after unmistakeable delays, finally
made quite lurid by bursting in--it was near ten o'clock--with an object
held up in his hand. She knew before he spoke what it was; she knew at
least from the underlying sense of all that, since the hour spent after
the Exhibition with her father, had not sprung up to reinstate Mr.
Farange--she knew it meant a triumph for Mrs. Beale. The mere present
sight of Sir Claude's face caused her on the spot to drop straight
through her last impression of Mr. Farange a plummet that reached still
deeper down than the security of these days of flight. She had wrapped
that impression in silence--a silence that had parted with half its veil
to cover also, from the hour of Sir Claude's advent, the image of Mr.
Farange's wife. But if the object in Sir Claude's hand revealed itself
as a letter which he held up very high, so there was something in his
mere motion that laid Mrs. Beale again bare. "Here we are!" he cried
almost from the door, shaking his trophy at them and looking from one to
the other. Then he came straight to Mrs. Wix; he had pulled two papers
out of the envelope and glanced at them again to see which was which. He
thrust one out open to Mrs. Wix. "Read that." She looked at him hard,
as if in fear: it was impossible not to see he was excited. Then she
took the letter, but it was not her face that Maisie watched while she
read. Neither, for that matter, was it this countenance that Sir Claude
scanned: he stood before the fire and, more calmly, now that he had
acted, communed in silence with his stepdaughter.

The silence was in truth quickly broken; Mrs. Wix rose to her feet with
the violence of the sound she emitted. The letter had dropped from her
and lay upon the floor; it had made her turn ghastly white and she was
speechless with the effect of it. "It's too abominable--it's too
unspeakable!" she then cried.

"Isn't it a charming thing?" Sir Claude asked. "It has just arrived,
enclosed in a word of her own. She sends it on to me with the remark
that comment's superfluous. I really think it is. That's all you can
say."

"She oughtn't to pass such a horror about," said Mrs. Wix. "She ought
to put it straight in the fire."

"My dear woman, she's not such a fool! It's much too precious." He had
picked the letter up and he gave it again a glance of complacency which
produced a light in his face. "Such a document"--he considered, then
concluded with a slight drop--"such a document is, in fine, a basis!"

"A basis for what?"

"Well--for proceedings."

"Hers?" Mrs. Wix's voice had become outright the voice of derision. "How
can SHE proceed?"

Sir Claude turned it over. "How can she get rid of him? Well--she IS rid
of him."

"Not legally." Mrs. Wix had never looked to her pupil so much as if she
knew what she was talking about.

"I dare say," Sir Claude laughed; "but she's not a bit less deprived
than I!"

"Of the power to get a divorce? It's just your want of the power that
makes the scandal of your connexion with her. Therefore it's just her
want of it that makes that of hers with you. That's all I contend!" Mrs.
Wix concluded with an unparalleled neigh of battle. Oh she did know what
she was talking about!

Maisie had meanwhile appealed mutely to Sir Claude, who judged it easier
to meet what she didn't say than to meet what Mrs. Wix did.

"It's a letter to Mrs. Beale from your father, my dear, written from
Spa and making the rupture between them perfectly irrevocable. It lets
her know, and not in pretty language, that, as we technically say, he
deserts her. It puts an end for ever to their relations." He ran his
eyes over it again, then appeared to make up his mind. "In fact it
concerns you, Maisie, so nearly and refers to you so particularly that
I really think you ought to see the terms in which this new situation
is created for you." And he held out the letter.

Mrs. Wix, at this, pounced upon it; she had grabbed it too soon even
for Maisie to become aware of being rather afraid of it. Thrusting it
instantly behind her she positively glared at Sir Claude. "See it,
wretched man?--the innocent child SEE such a thing? I think you must be
mad, and she shall not have a glimpse of it while I'm here to prevent!"

The breadth of her action had made Sir Claude turn red--he even looked a
little foolish. "You think it's too bad, eh? But it's precisely because
it's bad that it seemed to me it would have a lesson and a virtue for
her."

Maisie could do a quick enough justice to his motive to be able clearly
to interpose. She fairly smiled at him. "I assure you I can quite
believe how bad it is!" She thought of something, kept it back a moment,
and then spoke. "I know what's in it!"

He of course burst out laughing and, while Mrs. Wix groaned an "Oh
heavens!" replied: "You wouldn't say that, old boy, if you did! The
point I make is," he continued to Mrs. Wix with a blandness now
re-established--"the point I make is simply that it sets Mrs. Beale
free."

She hung fire but an instant. "Free to live with YOU?"

"Free not to live, not to pretend to live, with her husband."

"Ah they're mighty different things!"--a truth as to which her
earnestness could now with a fine inconsequent look invite the
participation of the child.

Before Maisie could commit herself, however, the ground was occupied by
Sir Claude, who, as he stood before their visitor with an expression
half rueful, half persuasive, rubbed his hand sharply up and down the
back of his head. "Then why the deuce do you grant so--do you, I may
even say, rejoice so--that by the desertion of my own precious partner
I'm free?"

Mrs. Wix met this challenge first with silence, then with a
demonstration the most extraordinary, the most unexpected. Maisie could
scarcely believe her eyes as she saw the good lady, with whom she had
associated no faintest shade of any art of provocation, actually, after
an upward grimace, give Sir Claude a great giggling insinuating naughty
slap. "You wretch--you KNOW why!" And she turned away. The face that
with this movement she left him to present to Maisie was to abide with
his stepdaughter as the very image of stupefaction; but the pair lacked
time to communicate either amusement or alarm before their admonisher
was upon them again. She had begun in fact to show infinite variety and
she flashed about with a still quicker change of tone. "Have you brought
me that thing as a pretext for your going over?"

Sir Claude braced himself. "I can't, after such news, in common decency
not go over. I mean, don't you know, in common courtesy and humanity.
My dear lady, you can't chuck a woman that way, especially taking the
moment when she has been most insulted and wronged. A fellow must behave
like a gentleman, damn it, dear good Mrs. Wix. We didn't come away, we
two, to hang right on, you know: it was only to try our paces and just
put in a few days that might prove to every one concerned that we're in
earnest. It's exactly because we're in earnest that, dash it, we needn't
be so awfully particular. I mean, don't you know, we needn't be so
awfully afraid." He showed a vivacity, an intensity of argument, and if
Maisie counted his words she was all the more ready to swallow after a
single swift gasp those that, the next thing, she became conscious he
paused for a reply to. "We didn't come, old girl, did we," he pleaded
straight, "to stop right away for ever and put it all in NOW?"

Maisie had never doubted she could be heroic for him. "Oh no!" It was as
if she had been shocked at the bare thought. "We're just taking it as
we find it." She had a sudden inspiration, which she backed up with a
smile. "We're just seeing what we can afford." She had never yet in her
life made any claim for herself, but she hoped that this time, frankly,
what she was doing would somehow be counted to her. Indeed she felt Sir
Claude WAS counting it, though she was afraid to look at him--afraid she
should show him tears. She looked at Mrs. Wix; she reached her maximum.
"I don't think I ought to be bad to Mrs. Beale."

She heard, on this, a deep sound, something inarticulate and sweet,
from Sir Claude; but tears were what Mrs. Wix didn't scruple to show.
"Do you think you ought to be bad to ME?" The question was the more
disconcerting that Mrs. Wix's emotion didn't deprive her of the
advantage of her effect. "If you see that woman again you're lost!" she
declared to their companion.

Sir Claude looked at the moony globe of the lamp; he seemed to see
for an instant what seeing Mrs. Beale would consist of. It was also
apparently from this vision that he drew strength to return: "Her
situation, by what has happened, is completely changed; and it's no
use your trying to prove to me that I needn't take any account of
that."

"If you see that woman you're lost!" Mrs. Wix with greater force
repeated.

"Do you think she'll not let me come back to you? My dear lady, I leave
you here, you and Maisie, as a hostage to fortune, and I promise you by
all that's sacred that I shall be with you again at the very latest on
Saturday. I provide you with funds; I install you in these lovely rooms;
I arrange with the people here that you be treated with every attention
and supplied with every luxury. The weather, after this, will mend; it
will be sure to be exquisite. You'll both be as free as air and you can
roam all over the place and have tremendous larks. You shall have a
carriage to drive you; the whole house shall be at your call. You'll
have a magnificent position." He paused, he looked from one of his
companions to the other as to see the impression he had made. Whether or
no he judged it adequate he subjoined after a moment: "And you'll oblige
me above all by not making a fuss."

Maisie could only answer for the impression on herself, though indeed
from the heart even of Mrs. Wix's rigour there floated to her sense a
faint fragrance of depraved concession. Maisie had her dumb word for the
show such a speech could make, for the irresistible charm it could take
from his dazzling sincerity; and before she could do anything but blink
at excess of light she heard this very word sound on Mrs. Wix's lips,
just as if the poor lady had guessed it and wished, snatching it from
her, to blight it like a crumpled flower. "You're dreadful, you're
terrible, for you know but too well that it's not a small thing to me
that you should address me in terms that are princely!" Princely was
what he stood there and looked and sounded; that was what Maisie for the
occasion found herself reduced to simple worship of him for being. Yet
strange to say too, as Mrs. Wix went on, an echo rang within her that
matched the echo she had herself just produced. "How much you must WANT
to see her to say such things as that and to be ready to do so much for
the poor little likes of Maisie and me! She has a hold on you, and you
know it, and you want to feel it again and--God knows, or at least _I_
do, what's your motive and desire--enjoy it once more and give yourself
up to it! It doesn't matter if it's one day or three: enough is as good
as a feast and the lovely time you'll have with her is something you're
willing to pay for! I dare say you'd like me to believe that your pay is
to get her to give you up; but that's a matter on which I strongly urge
you not to put down your money in advance. Give HER up first. Then pay
her what you please!"

Sir Claude took this to the end, though there were things in it that
made him colour, called into his face more of the apprehension than
Maisie had ever perceived there of a particular sort of shock. She had
an odd sense that it was the first time she had seen any one but Mrs.
Wix really and truly scandalised, and this fed her inference, which grew
and grew from moment to moment, that Mrs. Wix was proving more of a
force to reckon with than either of them had allowed so much room for.
It was true that, long before, she had obtained a "hold" of him, as
she called it, different in kind from that obtained by Mrs. Beale and
originally by her ladyship. But Maisie could quite feel with him now
that he had really not expected this advantage to be driven so home. Oh
they hadn't at all got to where Mrs. Wix would stop, for the next minute
she was driving harder than ever. It was the result of his saying with a
certain dryness, though so kindly that what most affected Maisie in it
was his patience: "My dear friend, it's simply a matter in which I must
judge for myself. You've judged FOR me, I know, a good deal, of late, in
a way that I appreciate, I assure you, down to the ground. But you can't
do it always; no one can do that for another, don't you see, in every
case. There are exceptions, particular cases that turn up and that are
awfully delicate. It would be too easy if I could shift it all off on
you: it would be allowing you to incur an amount of responsibility that
I should simply become quite ashamed of. You'll find, I'm sure, that
you'll have quite as much as you'll enjoy if you'll be so good as to
accept the situation as circumstances happen to make it for you and to
stay here with our friend, till I rejoin you, on the footing of as much
pleasantness and as much comfort--and I think I have a right to add, to
both of you, of as much faith in ME--as possible."

Oh he was princely indeed: that came out more and more with every word
he said and with the particular way he said it, and Maisie could feel
his monitress stiffen almost with anguish against the increase of his
spell and then hurl herself as a desperate defence from it into the
quite confessed poorness of violence, of iteration. "You're afraid
of her--afraid, afraid, afraid! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!" Mrs. Wix
wailed it with a high quaver, then broke down into a long shudder of
helplessness and woe. The next minute she had flung herself again on
the lean sofa and had burst into a passion of tears.

Sir Claude stood and looked at her a moment; he shook his head slowly,
altogether tenderly. "I've already admitted it--I'm in mortal terror;
so we'll let that settle the question. I think you had best go to bed,"
he added; "you've had a tremendous day and you must both be tired to
death. I shall not expect you to concern yourselves in the morning
with my movements. There's an early boat on; I shall have cleared out
before you're up; and I shall moreover have dealt directly and most
effectively, I assure you, with the haughty but not quite hopeless Miss
Ash." He turned to his stepdaughter as if at once to take leave of her
and give her a sign of how, through all tension and friction, they were
still united in such a way that she at least needn't worry. "Maisie
boy!"--he opened his arms to her. With her culpable lightness she flew
into them and, while he kissed her, chose the soft method of silence to
satisfy him, the silence that after battles of talk was the best balm
she could offer his wounds. They held each other long enough to reaffirm
intensely their vows; after which they were almost forced apart by Mrs.
Wix's jumping to her feet.

Her jump, either with a quick return or with a final lapse of courage,
was also to supplication almost abject. "I beseech you not to take a
step so miserable and so fatal. I know her but too well, even if you
jeer at me for saying it; little as I've seen her I know her, I know
her. I know what she'll do--I see it as I stand here. Since you're
afraid of her it's the mercy of heaven. Don't, for God's sake, be afraid
to show it, to profit by it and to arrive at the very safety that it
gives you. I'M not afraid of her, I assure you; you must already have
seen for yourself that there's nothing I'm afraid of now. Let me go to
her--I'LL settle her and I'll take that woman back without a hair of
her touched. Let me put in the two or three days--let me wind up the
connexion. You stay here with Maisie, with the carriage and the larks
and the luxury; then I'll return to you and we'll go off together--we'll
live together without a cloud. Take me, take me," she went on and
on--the tide of her eloquence was high. "Here I am; I know what I am
and what I ain't; but I say boldly to the face of you both that I'll do
better for you, far, than ever she'll even try to. I say it to yours,
Sir Claude, even though I owe you the very dress on my back and the very
shoes on my feet. I owe you everything--that's just the reason; and to
pay it back, in profusion, what can that be but what I want? Here I am,
here I am!"--she spread herself into an exhibition that, combined with
her intensity and her decorations, appeared to suggest her for strange
offices and devotions, for ridiculous replacements and substitutions.
She manipulated her gown as she talked, she insisted on the items of
her debt. "I have nothing of my own, I know--no money, no clothes, no
appearance, no anything, nothing but my hold of this little one truth,
which is all in the world I can bribe you with: that the pair of you are
more to me than all besides, and that if you'll let me help you and save
you, make what you both want possible in the one way it CAN be, why,
I'll work myself to the bone in your service!"

Sir Claude wavered there without an answer to this magnificent appeal;
he plainly cast about for one, and in no small agitation and pain. He
addressed himself in his quest, however, only to vague quarters until he
met again, as he so frequently and actively met it, the more than filial
gaze of his intelligent little charge. That gave him--poor plastic and
dependent male--his issue. If she was still a child she was yet of
the sex that could help him out. He signified as much by a renewed
invitation to an embrace. She freshly sprang to him and again they
inaudibly conversed. "Be nice to her, be nice to her," he at last
distinctly articulated; "be nice to her as you've not even been to ME!"
On which, without another look at Mrs. Wix, he somehow got out of the
room, leaving Maisie under the slight oppression of these words as well
as of the idea that he had unmistakeably once more dodged.

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

completion: It continues to rain, keeping everyone cooped up in the hotel. Sir Claude meets with acquaintances, as he has multiple times over their days in France. Mrs. Wix is cold to Sir Claude, not wanting him to go back to England to see Mrs. Beale. Sir Claude shows Maisie and Mrs. Wix a letter he just received; the letter is sent from Mrs. Beale, but it contains another letter sent to her by Beale saying that he is leaving her. Mrs. Wix is horrified at the scandal, while Sir Claude is pleased. Maisie is silent through all of this, and when Sir Claude offers her the letter to look at, she is relieved that Mrs. Wix doesn't let her see it. Sir Claude calls Mrs. Beale "free" , but Mrs. Wix launches into a tirade about this. When Sir Claude implies that she is being hypocritical by supporting him leaving his wife but not Mrs. Beale in a very similar situation, Mrs. Wix slaps him. Sir Claude repeats that he has to go to see Mrs. Beale, especially after this news, calling it "common courtesy". They continue to argue for quite a while. Eventually, Sir Claude says that Mrs. Wix simply can't make the decision for him; he will set them up to enjoy France totally while he is gone, but he is going. Mrs. Wix begs for him to do what she has always planned: go off with her and Maisie alone somewhere. Sir Claude does not quite know how to answer this passionate plea, so he tells Mrs. Wix to be nice to Maisie, and then he leaves


prompt:
Chapter: Every single thing he had prophesied came so true that it was after all
no more than fair to expect quite as much for what he had as good as
promised. His pledges they could verify to the letter, down to his very
guarantee that a way would be found with Miss Ash. Roused in the summer
dawn and vehemently squeezed by that interesting exile, Maisie fell back
upon her couch with a renewed appreciation of his policy, a memento of
which, when she rose later on to dress, glittered at her from the carpet
in the shape of a sixpence that had overflowed from Susan's pride of
possession. Sixpences really, for the forty-eight hours that followed,
seemed to abound in her life; she fancifully computed the number of them
represented by such a period of "larks." The number was not kept down,
she presently noticed, by any scheme of revenge for Sir Claude's flight
which should take on Mrs. Wix's part the form of a refusal to avail
herself of the facilities he had so bravely ordered. It was in fact
impossible to escape them; it was in the good lady's own phrase
ridiculous to go on foot when you had a carriage prancing at the door.
Everything about them pranced: the very waiters even as they presented
the dishes to which, from a similar sense of the absurdity of
perversity, Mrs. Wix helped herself with a freedom that spoke to Maisie
quite as much of her depletion as of her logic. Her appetite was a sign
to her companion of a great many things and testified no less on the
whole to her general than to her particular condition. She had arrears
of dinner to make up, and it was touching that in a dinnerless state
her moral passion should have burned so clear. She partook largely as
a refuge from depression, and yet the opportunity to partake was just
a mark of the sinister symptoms that depressed her. The affair was
in short a combat, in which the baser element triumphed, between her
refusal to be bought off and her consent to be clothed and fed. It was
not at any rate to be gainsaid that there was comfort for her in the
developments of France; comfort so great as to leave Maisie free to take
with her all the security for granted and brush all the danger aside.
That was the way to carry out in detail Sir Claude's injunction to be
"nice"; that was the way, as well, to look, with her, in a survey of the
pleasures of life abroad, straight over the head of any doubt.

They shrank at last, all doubts, as the weather cleared up: it had an
immense effect on them and became quite as lovely as Sir Claude had
engaged. This seemed to have put him so into the secret of things, and
the joy of the world so waylaid the steps of his friends, that little by
little the spirit of hope filled the air and finally took possession of
the scene. To drive on the long cliff was splendid, but it was perhaps
better still to creep in the shade--for the sun was strong--along the
many-coloured and many-odoured port and through the streets in which, to
English eyes, everything that was the same was a mystery and everything
that was different a joke. Best of all was to continue the creep up the
long Grand' Rue to the gate of the _haute ville_ and, passing beneath
it, mount to the quaint and crooked rampart, with its rows of trees,
its quiet corners and friendly benches where brown old women in such
white-frilled caps and such long gold earrings sat and knitted or
snoozed, its little yellow-faced houses that looked like the homes of
misers or of priests and its dark chateau where small soldiers lounged
on the bridge that stretched across an empty moat and military washing
hung from the windows of towers. This was a part of the place that could
lead Maisie to enquire if it didn't just meet one's idea of the middle
ages; and since it was rather a satisfaction than a shock to perceive,
and not for the first time, the limits in Mrs. Wix's mind of the
historic imagination, that only added one more to the variety of kinds
of insight that she felt it her own present mission to show. They sat
together on the old grey bastion; they looked down on the little new
town which seemed to them quite as old, and across at the great dome and
the high gilt Virgin of the church that, as they gathered, was famous
and that pleased them by its unlikeness to any place in which they
had worshipped. They wandered in this temple afterwards and Mrs. Wix
confessed that for herself she had probably made a fatal mistake early
in life in not being a Catholic. Her confession in its turn caused
Maisie to wonder rather interestedly what degree of lateness it was
that shut the door against an escape from such an error. They went back
to the rampart on the second morning--the spot on which they appeared
to have come furthest in the journey that was to separate them from
everything objectionable in the past: it gave them afresh the impression
that had most to do with their having worked round to a confidence that
on Maisie's part was determined and that she could see to be on her
companion's desperate. She had had for many hours the sense of showing
Mrs. Wix so much that she was comparatively slow to become conscious
of being at the same time the subject of a like aim. The business went
the faster, however, from the moment she got her glimpse of it; it then
fell into its place in her general, her habitual view of the particular
phenomenon that, had she felt the need of words for it, she might have
called her personal relation to her knowledge. This relation had never
been so lively as during the time she waited with her old governess for
Sir Claude's reappearance, and what made it so was exactly that Mrs. Wix
struck her as having a new suspicion of it. Mrs. Wix had never yet had a
suspicion--this was certain--so calculated to throw her pupil, in spite
of the closer union of such adventurous hours, upon the deep defensive.
Her pupil made out indeed as many marvels as she had made out on the
rush to Folkestone; and if in Sir Claude's company on that occasion Mrs.
Wix was the constant implication, so in Mrs. Wix's, during these hours,
Sir Claude was--and most of all through long pauses--the perpetual, the
insurmountable theme. It all took them back to the first flush of his
marriage and to the place he held in the schoolroom at that crisis of
love and pain; only he had himself blown to a much bigger balloon the
large consciousness he then filled out.

They went through it all again, and indeed while the interval dragged
by the very weight of its charm they went, in spite of defences and
suspicions, through everything. Their intensified clutch of the future
throbbed like a clock ticking seconds; but this was a timepiece that
inevitably, as well, at the best, rang occasionally a portentous hour.
Oh there were several of these, and two or three of the worst on the old
city-wall where everything else so made for peace. There was nothing
in the world Maisie more wanted than to be as nice to Mrs. Wix as Sir
Claude had desired; but it was exactly because this fell in with her
inveterate instinct of keeping the peace that the instinct itself
was quickened. From the moment it was quickened, however, it found
other work, and that was how, to begin with, she produced the very
complication she most sought to avert. What she had essentially done,
these days, had been to read the unspoken into the spoken; so that thus,
with accumulations, it had become more definite to her that the unspoken
was, unspeakably, the completeness of the sacrifice of Mrs. Beale. There
were times when every minute that Sir Claude stayed away was like a nail
in Mrs. Beale's coffin. That brought back to Maisie--it was a roundabout
way--the beauty and antiquity of her connexion with the flower of the
Overmores as well as that lady's own grace and charm, her peculiar
prettiness and cleverness and even her peculiar tribulations. A hundred
things hummed at the back of her head, but two of these were simple
enough. Mrs. Beale was by the way, after all, just her stepmother
and her relative. She was just--and partly for that very reason--Sir
Claude's greatest intimate ("lady-intimate" was Maisie's term) so that
what together they were on Mrs. Wix's prescription to give up and break
short off with was for one of them his particular favourite and for the
other her father's wife. Strangely, indescribably her perception of
reasons kept pace with her sense of trouble; but there was something in
her that, without a supreme effort not to be shabby, couldn't take the
reasons for granted. What it comes to perhaps for ourselves is that,
disinherited and denuded as we have seen her, there still lingered in
her life an echo of parental influence--she was still reminiscent of
one of the sacred lessons of home. It was the only one she retained,
but luckily she retained it with force. She enjoyed in a word an
ineffaceable view of the fact that there were things papa called mamma
and mamma called papa a low sneak for doing or for not doing. Now this
rich memory gave her a name that she dreaded to invite to the lips of
Mrs. Beale: she should personally wince so just to hear it. The very
sweetness of the foreign life she was steeped in added with each hour
of Sir Claude's absence to the possibility of such pangs. She watched
beside Mrs. Wix the great golden Madonna, and one of the ear-ringed old
women who had been sitting at the end of their bench got up and pottered
away. "Adieu mesdames!" said the old woman in a little cracked civil
voice--a demonstration by which our friends were so affected that they
bobbed up and almost curtseyed to her. They subsided again, and it was
shortly after, in a summer hum of French insects and a phase of almost
somnolent reverie, that Maisie most had the vision of what it was to
shut out from such a perspective so appealing a participant. It had not
yet appeared so vast as at that moment, this prospect of statues shining
in the blue and of courtesy in romantic forms.

"Why after all should we have to choose between you? Why shouldn't we
be four?" she finally demanded.

Mrs. Wix gave the jerk of a sleeper awakened or the start even of one
who hears a bullet whiz at the flag of truce. Her stupefaction at
such a breach of the peace delayed for a moment her answer. "Four
improprieties, do you mean? Because two of us happen to be decent
people! Do I gather you to wish that I should stay on with you even
if that woman IS capable--?"

Maisie took her up before she could further phrase Mrs. Beale's
capability. "Stay on as MY companion--yes. Stay on as just what you
were at mamma's. Mrs. Beale WOULD let you!" the child said.

Mrs. Wix had by this time fairly sprung to her arms. "And who, I'd like
to know, would let Mrs. Beale? Do you mean, little unfortunate, that YOU
would?"

"Why not, if now she's free?"

"Free? Are you imitating HIM? Well, if Sir Claude's old enough to know
better, upon my word I think it's right to treat you as if you also
were. You'll have to, at any rate--to know better--if that's the line
you're proposing to take." Mrs. Wix had never been so harsh; but on the
other hand Maisie could guess that she herself had never appeared so
wanton. What was underlying, however, rather overawed than angered her;
she felt she could still insist--not for contradiction, but for ultimate
calm. Her wantonness meanwhile continued to work upon her friend, who
caught again, on the rebound, the sound of deepest provocation. "Free,
free, free? If she's as free as YOU are, my dear, she's free enough, to
be sure!"

"As I am?"--Maisie, after reflexion and despite whatever of portentous
this seemed to convey, risked a critical echo.

"Well," said Mrs. Wix, "nobody, you know, is free to commit a crime."

"A crime!" The word had come out in a way that made the child sound it
again.

"You'd commit as great a one as their own--and so should I--if we were
to condone their immorality by our presence."

Maisie waited a little; this seemed so fiercely conclusive. "Why is it
immorality?" she nevertheless presently enquired.

Her companion now turned upon her with a reproach softer because it was
somehow deeper. "You're too unspeakable! Do you know what we're talking
about?"

In the interest of ultimate calm Maisie felt that she must be above all
clear. "Certainly; about their taking advantage of their freedom."

"Well, to do what?"

"Why, to live with us."

Mrs. Wix's laugh, at this, was literally wild. "'Us?' Thank you!"

"Then to live with ME."

The words made her friend jump. "You give me up? You break with me for
ever? You turn me into the street?"

Maisie, though gasping a little, bore up under the rain of challenges.
"Those, it seems to me, are the things you do to ME."

Mrs. Wix made little of her valour. "I can promise you that, whatever
I do, I shall never let you out of my sight! You ask me why it's
immorality when you've seen with your own eyes that Sir Claude has felt
it to be so to that dire extent that, rather than make you face the
shame of it, he has for months kept away from you altogether? Is it any
more difficult to see that the first time he tries to do his duty he
washes his hands of HER--takes you straight away from her?"

Maisie turned this over, but more for apparent consideration than from
any impulse to yield too easily. "Yes, I see what you mean. But at
that time they weren't free." She felt Mrs. Wix rear up again at the
offensive word, but she succeeded in touching her with a remonstrant
hand. "I don't think you know how free they've become."

"I know, I believe, at least as much as you do!"

Maisie felt a delicacy but overcame it. "About the Countess?"

"Your father's--temptress?" Mrs. Wix gave her a sidelong squint.
"Perfectly. She pays him!"

"Oh DOES she?" At this the child's countenance fell: it seemed to give a
reason for papa's behaviour and place it in a more favourable light. She
wished to be just. "I don't say she's not generous. She was so to me."

"How, to you?"

"She gave me a lot of money."

Mrs. Wix stared. "And pray what did you do with a lot of money?"

"I gave it to Mrs. Beale."

"And what did Mrs. Beale do with it?"

"She sent it back."

"To the Countess? Gammon!" said Mrs. Wix. She disposed of that plea as
effectually as Susan Ash.

"Well, I don't care!" Maisie replied. "What I mean is that you don't
know about the rest."

"The rest? What rest?"

Maisie wondered how she could best put it. "Papa kept me there an hour."

"I do know--Sir Claude told me. Mrs. Beale had told him."

Maisie looked incredulity. "How could she--when I didn't speak of it?"

Mrs. Wix was mystified. "Speak of what?"

"Why, of her being so frightful."

"The Countess? Of course she's frightful!" Mrs. Wix returned. After a
moment she added: "That's why she pays him."

Maisie pondered. "It's the best thing about her then--if she gives him
as much as she gave ME!"

"Well, it's not the best thing about HIM! Or rather perhaps it IS too!"
Mrs. Wix subjoined.

"But she's awful--really and truly," Maisie went on.

Mrs. Wix arrested her. "You needn't go into details!" It was visibly at
variance with this injunction that she yet enquired: "How does that make
it any better?"

"Their living with me? Why for the Countess--and for her whiskers!--he
has put me off on them. I understood him," Maisie profoundly said.

"I hope then he understood you. It's more than I do!" Mrs. Wix admitted.

This was a real challenge to be plainer, and our young lady immediately
became so. "I mean it isn't a crime."

"Why then did Sir Claude steal you away?"

"He didn't steal--he only borrowed me. I knew it wasn't for long,"
Maisie audaciously professed.

"You must allow me to reply to that," cried Mrs. Wix, "that you knew
nothing of the sort, and that you rather basely failed to back me up
last night when you pretended so plump that you did! You hoped in fact,
exactly as much as I did and as in my senseless passion I even hope now,
that this may be the beginning of better things."

Oh yes, Mrs. Wix was indeed, for the first time, sharp; so that there
at last stirred in our heroine the sense not so much of being proved
disingenuous as of being precisely accused of the meanness that had
brought everything down on her through her very desire to shake herself
clear of it. She suddenly felt herself swell with a passion of protest.
"I never, NEVER hoped I wasn't going again to see Mrs. Beale! I didn't,
I didn't, I didn't!" she repeated. Mrs. Wix bounced about with a force
of rejoinder of which she also felt that she must anticipate the
concussion and which, though the good lady was evidently charged to the
brim, hung fire long enough to give time for an aggravation. "She's
beautiful and I love her! I love her and she's beautiful!"

"And I'm hideous and you hate ME?" Mrs. Wix fixed her a moment, then
caught herself up. "I won't embitter you by absolutely accusing you of
that; though, as for my being hideous, it's hardly the first time I've
been told so! I know it so well that even if I haven't whiskers--have
I?--I dare say there are other ways in which the Countess is a Venus to
me! My pretensions must therefore seem to you monstrous--which comes to
the same thing as your not liking me. But do you mean to go so far as to
tell me that you WANT to live with them in their sin?"

"You know what I want, you know what I want!"--Maisie spoke with the
shudder of rising tears.

"Yes, I do; you want me to be as bad as yourself! Well, I won't. There!
Mrs. Beale's as bad as your father!" Mrs. Wix went on.

"She's not!--she's not!" her pupil almost shrieked in retort.

"You mean because Sir Claude at least has beauty and wit and grace? But
he pays just as the Countess pays!" Mrs. Wix, who now rose as she spoke,
fairly revealed a latent cynicism.

It raised Maisie also to her feet; her companion had walked off a few
steps and paused. The two looked at each other as they had never looked,
and Mrs. Wix seemed to flaunt there in her finery. "Then doesn't he pay
YOU too?" her unhappy charge demanded.

At this she bounded in her place. "Oh you incredible little waif!"
She brought it out with a wail of violence; after which, with another
convulsion, she marched straight away.

Maisie dropped back on the bench and burst into sobs.

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

completion: After Sir Claude and Susan Ash leave, the weather gets better, so Mrs. Wix and Maisie spend Sir Claude's money enjoying France. They go for long walks, eat delicious meals, and have conversations as usual. Finally, after not bringing it up for a while, Maisie asks Mrs. Wix why they can't live with Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude. Mrs. Wix says this would be very inappropriate. They battle back and forth about what it means to be free and whether their relationship is immoral. Maisie still does not seem to fully understand the nature of Sir Claude's relationship with Mrs. Beale and the social stigma around adultery. Mrs. Wix and Maisie go so far as to accuse one another of giving the other one up. Maisie brings up the Countess and Mrs. Wix says that she pays Maisie's father. Maisie tells her about getting the cab fare from the Countess and having to send it back. While Mrs. Wix didn't know about this, she says that she did know about Maisie having stayed for an hour with her father at the Countess's house; she found this out from Sir Claude, who learned it from Mrs. Beale. They turn again to the topic of Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale, and now both Maisie and Mrs. Wix are yelling and on the brink of tears. Mrs. Wix says that Sir Claude pays Mrs. Beale just like the Countess pays Beale, and then she leaves Maisie. Maisie, alone again, sits down on a bench and sobs


prompt:
Chapter: Nothing so dreadful of course could be final or even for many minutes
prolonged: they rushed together again too soon for either to feel that
either had kept it up, and though they went home in silence it was with
a vivid perception for Maisie that her companion's hand had closed upon
her. That hand had shown altogether, these twenty-four hours, a new
capacity for closing, and one of the truths the child could least resist
was that a certain greatness had now come to Mrs. Wix. The case was
indeed that the quality of her motive surpassed the sharpness of her
angles; both the combination and the singularity of which things, when
in the afternoon they used the carriage, Maisie could borrow from the
contemplative hush of their grandeur the freedom to feel to the utmost.
She still bore the mark of the tone in which her friend had thrown out
that threat of never losing sight of her. This friend had been converted
in short from feebleness to force; and it was the light of her new
authority that showed from how far she had come. The threat in question,
sharply exultant, might have produced defiance; but before anything so
ugly could happen another process had insidiously forestalled it. The
moment at which this process had begun to mature was that of Mrs. Wix's
breaking out with a dignity attuned to their own apartments and with an
advantage now measurably gained. They had ordered coffee after luncheon,
in the spirit of Sir Claude's provision, and it was served to them while
they awaited their equipage in the white and gold saloon. It was flanked
moreover with a couple of liqueurs, and Maisie felt that Sir Claude
could scarce have been taken more at his word had it been followed
by anecdotes and cigarettes. The influence of these luxuries was
at any rate in the air. It seemed to her while she tiptoed at the
chimney-glass, pulling on her gloves and with a motion of her head
shaking a feather into place, to have had something to do with Mrs.
Wix's suddenly saying: "Haven't you really and truly ANY moral sense?"

Maisie was aware that her answer, though it brought her down to her
heels, was vague even to imbecility, and that this was the first time
she had appeared to practise with Mrs. Wix an intellectual inaptitude to
meet her--the infirmity to which she had owed so much success with papa
and mamma. The appearance did her injustice, for it was not less through
her candour than through her playfellow's pressure that after this the
idea of a moral sense mainly coloured their intercourse. She began, the
poor child, with scarcely knowing what it was; but it proved something
that, with scarce an outward sign save her surrender to the swing of the
carriage, she could, before they came back from their drive, strike up a
sort of acquaintance with. The beauty of the day only deepened, and the
splendour of the afternoon sea, and the haze of the far headlands, and
the taste of the sweet air. It was the coachman indeed who, smiling and
cracking his whip, turning in his place, pointing to invisible objects
and uttering unintelligible sounds--all, our tourists recognised, strict
features of a social order principally devoted to language: it was this
polite person, I say, who made their excursion fall so much short that
their return left them still a stretch of the long daylight and an hour
that, at his obliging suggestion, they spent on foot by the shining
sands. Maisie had seen the _plage_ the day before with Sir Claude, but
that was a reason the more for showing on the spot to Mrs. Wix that it
was, as she said, another of the places on her list and of the things of
which she knew the French name. The bathers, so late, were absent and
the tide was low; the sea-pools twinkled in the sunset and there were
dry places as well, where they could sit again and admire and expatiate:
a circumstance that, while they listened to the lap of the waves, gave
Mrs. Wix a fresh support for her challenge. "Have you absolutely none at
all?"

She had no need now, as to the question itself at least, to be specific;
that on the other hand was the eventual result of their quiet conjoined
apprehension of the thing that--well, yes, since they must face
it--Maisie absolutely and appallingly had so little of. This marked more
particularly the moment of the child's perceiving that her friend had
risen to a level which might--till superseded at all events--pass almost
for sublime. Nothing more remarkable had taken place in the first heat
of her own departure, no act of perception less to be overtraced by our
rough method, than her vision, the rest of that Boulogne day, of the
manner in which she figured. I so despair of courting her noiseless
mental footsteps here that I must crudely give you my word for its being
from this time forward a picture literally present to her. Mrs. Wix
saw her as a little person knowing so extraordinarily much that, for
the account to be taken of it, what she still didn't know would be
ridiculous if it hadn't been embarrassing. Mrs. Wix was in truth more
than ever qualified to meet embarrassment; I am not sure that Maisie had
not even a dim discernment of the queer law of her own life that made
her educate to that sort of proficiency those elders with whom she was
concerned. She promoted, as it were, their development; nothing could
have been more marked for instance than her success in promoting Mrs.
Beale's. She judged that if her whole history, for Mrs. Wix, had been
the successive stages of her knowledge, so the very climax of the
concatenation would, in the same view, be the stage at which the
knowledge should overflow. As she was condemned to know more and more,
how could it logically stop before she should know Most? It came to her
in fact as they sat there on the sands that she was distinctly on the
road to know Everything. She had not had governesses for nothing: what
in the world had she ever done but learn and learn and learn? She looked
at the pink sky with a placid foreboding that she soon should have
learnt All. They lingered in the flushed air till at last it turned
to grey and she seemed fairly to receive new information from every
brush of the breeze. By the time they moved homeward it was as if this
inevitability had become for Mrs. Wix a long, tense cord, twitched by
a nervous hand, on which the valued pearls of intelligence were to be
neatly strung.

In the evening upstairs they had another strange sensation, as to which
Maisie couldn't afterwards have told you whether it was bang in the
middle or quite at the beginning that her companion sounded with fresh
emphasis the note of the moral sense. What mattered was merely that she
did exclaim, and again, as at first appeared, most disconnectedly: "God
help me, it does seem to peep out!" Oh the queer confusions that had
wooed it at last to such peeping! None so queer, however, as the words
of woe, and it might verily be said of rage, in which the poor lady
bewailed the tragic end of her own rich ignorance. There was a point at
which she seized the child and hugged her as close as in the old days of
partings and returns; at which she was visibly at a loss how to make up
to such a victim for such contaminations: appealing, as to what she had
done and was doing, in bewilderment, in explanation, in supplication,
for reassurance, for pardon and even outright for pity.

"I don't know what I've said to you, my own: I don't know what I'm
saying or what the turn you've given my life has rendered me, heaven
forgive me, capable of saying. Have I lost all delicacy, all decency,
all measure of how far and how bad? It seems to me mostly that I have,
though I'm the last of whom you would ever have thought it. I've just
done it for YOU, precious--not to lose you, which would have been worst
of all: so that I've had to pay with my own innocence, if you do laugh!
for clinging to you and keeping you. Don't let me pay for nothing; don't
let me have been thrust for nothing into such horrors and such shames. I
never knew anything about them and I never wanted to know! Now I know
too much, too much!" the poor woman lamented and groaned. "I know so
much that with hearing such talk I ask myself where I am; and with
uttering it too, which is worse, say to myself that I'm far, too far,
from where I started! I ask myself what I should have thought with my
lost one if I had heard myself cross the line. There are lines I've
crossed with YOU where I should have fancied I had come to a pretty
pass--" She gasped at the mere supposition. "I've gone from one thing to
another, and all for the real love of you; and now what would any one
say--I mean any one but THEM--if they were to hear the way I go on? I've
had to keep up with you, haven't I?--and therefore what could I do less
than look to you to keep up with ME? But it's not THEM that are the
worst--by which I mean to say it's not HIM: it's your dreadfully base
papa and the one person in the world whom he could have found, I do
believe--and she's not the Countess, duck--wickeder than himself. While
they were about it at any rate, since they WERE ruining you, they might
have done it so as to spare an honest woman. Then I shouldn't have had
to do whatever it is that's the worst: throw up at you the badness you
haven't taken in, or find my advantage in the vileness you HAVE! What I
did lose patience at this morning was at how it was that without your
seeming to condemn--for you didn't, you remember!--you yet did seem to
KNOW. Thank God, in his mercy, at last, IF you do!"

The night, this time, was warm, and one of the windows stood open to the
small balcony over the rail of which, on coming back from dinner, Maisie
had hung a long time in the enjoyment of the chatter, the lights, the
life of the quay made brilliant by the season and the hour. Mrs. Wix's
requirements had drawn her in from this pasture and Mrs. Wix's embrace
had detained her even though midway in the outpouring her confusion
and sympathy had permitted, or rather had positively helped, her to
disengage herself. But the casement was still wide, the spectacle, the
pleasure were still there, and from her place in the room, which, with
its polished floor and its panels of elegance, was lighted from without
more than from within, the child could still take account of them. She
appeared to watch and listen; after which she answered Mrs. Wix with a
question. "If I do know--?"

"If you do condemn." The correction was made with some austerity.

It had the effect of causing Maisie to heave a vague sigh of oppression
and then after an instant and as if under cover of this ambiguity pass
out again upon the balcony. She hung again over the rail; she felt the
summer night; she dropped down into the manners of France. There was
a cafe below the hotel, before which, with little chairs and tables,
people sat on a space enclosed by plants in tubs; and the impression was
enriched by the flash of the white aprons of waiters and the music of a
man and a woman who, from beyond the precinct, sent up the strum of a
guitar and the drawl of a song about "amour." Maisie knew what "amour"
meant too, and wondered if Mrs. Wix did: Mrs. Wix remained within, as
still as a mouse and perhaps not reached by the performance. After
a while, but not till the musicians had ceased and begun to circulate
with a little plate, her pupil came back to her. "IS it a crime?" Maisie
then asked.

Mrs. Wix was as prompt as if she had been crouching in a lair. "Branded
by the Bible."

"Well, he won't commit a crime."

Mrs. Wix looked at her gloomily. "He's committing one now."

"Now?"

"In being with her."

Maisie had it on her tongue's end to return once more: "But now he's
free." She remembered, however, in time that one of the things she had
known for the last entire hour was that this made no difference. After
that, and as if to turn the right way, she was on the point of a blind
dash, a weak reversion to the reminder that it might make a difference,
might diminish the crime for Mrs. Beale; till such a reflexion was in
its order also quashed by the visibility in Mrs. Wix's face of the
collapse produced by her inference from her pupil's manner that after
all her pains her pupil didn't even yet adequately understand. Never so
much as when confronted had Maisie wanted to understand, and all her
thought for a minute centred in the effort to come out with something
which should be a disproof of her simplicity. "Just TRUST me, dear;
that's all!"--she came out finally with that; and it was perhaps a good
sign of her action that with a long, impartial moan Mrs. Wix floated her
to bed.

There was no letter the next morning from Sir Claude--which Mrs. Wix let
out that she deemed the worst of omens; yet it was just for the quieter
communion they so got with him that, when after the coffee and rolls
which made them more foreign than ever, it came to going forth for fresh
drafts upon his credit they wandered again up the hill to the rampart
instead of plunging into distraction with the crowd on the sands or into
the sea with the semi-nude bathers. They gazed once more at their gilded
Virgin; they sank once more upon their battered bench; they felt once
more their distance from the Regent's Park. At last Mrs. Wix became
definite about their friend's silence. "He IS afraid of her! She has
forbidden him to write." The fact of his fear Maisie already knew; but
her companion's mention of it had at this moment two unexpected results.
The first was her wondering in dumb remonstrance how Mrs. Wix, with
a devotion not after all inferior to her own, could put into such an
allusion such a grimness of derision; the second was that she found
herself suddenly drop into a deeper view of it. She too had been afraid,
as we have seen, of the people of whom Sir Claude was afraid, and by
that law she had had her due measure of latest apprehension of Mrs.
Beale. What occurred at present, however, was that, whereas this
sympathy appeared vain as for him, the ground of it loomed dimly as a
reason for selfish alarm. That uneasiness had not carried her far before
Mrs. Wix spoke again and with an abruptness so great as almost to seem
irrelevant. "Has it never occurred to you to be jealous of her?"

It never had in the least; yet the words were scarce in the air before
Maisie had jumped at them. She held them well, she looked at them hard;
at last she brought out with an assurance which there was no one, alas,
but herself to admire: "Well, yes--since you ask me." She debated, then
continued: "Lots of times!"

Mrs. Wix glared askance an instant; such approval as her look expressed
was not wholly unqualified. It expressed at any rate something that
presumably had to do with her saying once more: "Yes. He's afraid of
her."

Maisie heard, and it had afresh its effect on her even through the
blur of the attention now required by the possibility of that idea of
jealousy--a possibility created only by her feeling she had thus found
the way to show she was not simple. It struck out of Mrs. Wix that
this lady still believed her moral sense to be interested and feigned;
so what could be such a gage of her sincerity as a peep of the most
restless of the passions? Such a revelation would baffle discouragement,
and discouragement was in fact so baffled that, helped in some degree
by the mere intensity of their need to hope, which also, according to
its nature, sprang from the dark portent of the absent letter, the real
pitch of their morning was reached by the note, not of mutual scrutiny,
but of unprecedented frankness. There were broodings indeed and
silences, and Maisie sank deeper into the vision that for her friend
she was, at the most, superficial, and that also, positively, she was
the more so the more she tried to appear complete. Was the sum of all
knowledge only to know how little in this presence one would ever reach
it? The answer to that question luckily lost itself in the brightness
suffusing the scene as soon as Maisie had thrown out in regard to Mrs.
Beale such a remark as she had never dreamed she should live to make.
"If I thought she was unkind to him--I don't know WHAT I should do!"

Mrs. Wix dropped one of her squints; she even confirmed it by a wild
grunt. "I know what _I_ should!"

Maisie at this felt that she lagged. "Well, I can think of ONE thing."

Mrs. Wix more directly challenged her. "What is it then?"

Maisie met her expression as if it were a game with forfeits for
winking. "I'd KILL her!" That at least, she hoped as she looked away,
would guarantee her moral sense. She looked away, but her companion said
nothing for so long that she at last turned her head again. Then she saw
the straighteners all blurred with tears which after a little seemed to
have sprung from her own eyes. There were tears in fact on both sides of
the spectacles, and they were even so thick that it was presently all
Maisie could do to make out through them that slowly, finally Mrs. Wix
put forth a hand. It was the material pressure that settled this and
even at the end of some minutes more things besides. It settled in its
own way one thing in particular, which, though often, between them,
heaven knew, hovered round and hung over, was yet to be established
without the shadow of an attenuating smile. Oh there was no gleam of
levity, as little of humour as of deprecation, in the long time they now
sat together or in the way in which at some unmeasured point of it Mrs.
Wix became distinct enough for her own dignity and yet not loud enough
for the snoozing old women.

"I adore him. I adore him."

Maisie took it well in; so well that in a moment more she would have
answered profoundly: "So do I." But before that moment passed something
took place that brought other words to her lips; nothing more, very
possibly, than the closer consciousness in her hand of the significance
of Mrs. Wix's. Their hands remained linked in unutterable sign of their
union, and what Maisie at last said was simply and serenely: "Oh I
know!"

Their hands were so linked and their union was so confirmed that it took
the far deep note of a bell, borne to them on the summer air, to call
them back to a sense of hours and proprieties. They had touched bottom
and melted together, but they gave a start at last: the bell was the
voice of the inn and the inn was the image of luncheon. They should be
late for it; they got up, and their quickened step on the return had
something of the swing of confidence. When they reached the hotel the
_table d'hote_ had begun; this was clear from the threshold, clear
from the absence in the hall and on the stairs of the "personnel,"
as Mrs. Wix said--she had picked THAT up--all collected in the
dining-room. They mounted to their apartments for a brush before the
glass, and it was Maisie who, in passing and from a vain impulse,
threw open the white and gold door. She was thus first to utter the
sound that brought Mrs. Wix almost on top of her, as by the other
accident it would have brought her on top of Mrs. Wix. It had at any
rate the effect of leaving them bunched together in a strained stare
at their new situation. This situation had put on in a flash the
bright form of Mrs. Beale: she stood there in her hat and her jacket,
amid bags and shawls, smiling and holding out her arms. If she had
just arrived it was a different figure from either of the two that for
THEIR benefit, wan and tottering and none too soon to save life, the
Channel had recently disgorged. She was as lovely as the day that had
brought her over, as fresh as the luck and the health that attended
her: it came to Maisie on the spot that she was more beautiful than
she had ever been. All this was too quick to count, but there was
still time in it to give the child the sense of what had kindled the
light. That leaped out of the open arms, the open eyes, the open
mouth; it leaped out with Mrs. Beale's loud cry at her: "I'm free,
I'm free!"

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

completion: Maisie and Mrs. Wix's fight continues the next day. They go out together to continue exploring France, and Mrs. Wix constantly criticizes Maisie's moral sense. Sometimes she does this explicitly, but she mostly does it through vague questions like when she asks out of the blue, "Have you absolutely none at all. Maisie does not fully understand Mrs. Wix's criticism, because she still does not understand why her role in Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale's relationship would be so taboo. Eventually, Mrs. Wix breaks down, admitting that she feels she has lost her own innocence by getting involved in the sordid matters of Maisie's four guardians. She also seems to feel guilty for how much Maisie has been exposed to. Maisie tries to clarify whether what Sir Claude is doing is actually a crime, and Mrs. Wix says that it is, even if he says he is "free". The next day, Sir Claude still does not return or send any word, which Mrs. Wix chalks up to Mrs. Beale having forbidden him to write. Mrs. Wix and Maisie go out again, and as they walk Mrs. Wix asks Maisie whether she is jealous of Mrs. Beale. Maisie hadn't thought of this before, but she reflects that she has often been jealous of her. Maisie remarks that she doesn't know what she would do if she found out Mrs. Beale was being unkind to Sir Claude, and Mrs. Wix says she knows what she would do: kill Mrs. Beale. Both of them cry, and when Mrs. Wix confesses her love of Sir Claude, instead of saying "So do I" Maisie says "Oh, I know". They return from their walk feeling united once again, and when they enter their hotel room they find Mrs. Beale standing there surrounded by bags. She opens her arms to Maisie and says "I'm free, I'm free


prompt:
Chapter: The greatest wonder of all was the way Mrs. Beale addressed her
announcement, so far as could be judged, equally to Mrs. Wix, who, as
if from sudden failure of strength, sank into a chair while Maisie
surrendered to the visitor's embrace. As soon as the child was liberated
she met with profundity Mrs. Wix's stupefaction and actually was able to
see that while in a manner sustaining the encounter her face yet seemed
with intensity to say: "Now, for God's sake, don't crow 'I told you
so!'" Maisie was somehow on the spot aware of an absence of disposition
to crow; it had taken her but an extra minute to arrive at such a quick
survey of the objects surrounding Mrs. Beale as showed that among them
was no appurtenance of Sir Claude's. She knew his dressing-bag now--oh
with the fondest knowledge!--and there was an instant during which its
not being there was a stroke of the worst news. She was yet to learn
what it could be to recognise in some lapse of a sequence the proof of
an extinction, and therefore remained unaware that this momentary pang
was a foretaste of the experience of death. It of course yielded in
a flash to Mrs. Beale's brightness, it gasped itself away in her own
instant appeal. "You've come alone?"

"Without Sir Claude?" Strangely, Mrs. Beale looked even brighter. "Yes;
in the eagerness to get at you. You abominable little villain!"--and her
stepmother, laughing clear, administered to her cheek a pat that was
partly a pinch. "What were you up to and what did you take me for? But
I'm glad to be abroad, and after all it's you who have shown me the way.
I mightn't, without you, have been able to come--to come, that is, so
soon. Well, here I am at any rate and in a moment more I should have
begun to worry about you. This will do very well"--she was good-natured
about the place and even presently added that it was charming. Then with
a rosier glow she made again her great point: "I'm free, I'm free!"
Maisie made on her side her own: she carried back her gaze to Mrs. Wix,
whom amazement continued to hold; she drew afresh her old friend's
attention to the superior way she didn't take that up. What she did take
up the next minute was the question of Sir Claude. "Where is he? Won't
he come?"

Mrs. Beale's consideration of this oscillated with a smile between the
two expectancies with which she was flanked: it was conspicuous, it
was extraordinary, her unblinking acceptance of Mrs. Wix, a miracle of
which Maisie had even now begun to read a reflexion in that lady's long
visage. "He'll come, but we must MAKE him!" she gaily brought forth.

"Make him?" Maisie echoed.

"We must give him time. We must play our cards."

"But he promised us awfully," Maisie replied.

"My dear child, he has promised ME awfully; I mean lots of things, and
not in every case kept his promise to the letter." Mrs. Beale's good
humour insisted on taking for granted Mrs. Wix's, to whom her attention
had suddenly grown prodigious. "I dare say he has done the same with
you, and not always come to time. But he makes it up in his own way--and
it isn't as if we didn't know exactly what he is. There's one thing he
is," she went on, "which makes everything else only a question, for us,
of tact." They scarce had time to wonder what this was before, as they
might have said, it flew straight into their face. "He's as free as I
am!"

"Yes, I know," said Maisie; as if, however, independently weighing the
value of that. She really weighed also the oddity of her stepmother's
treating it as news to HER, who had been the first person literally to
whom Sir Claude had mentioned it. For a few seconds, as if with the
sound of it in her ears, she stood with him again, in memory and in the
twilight, in the hotel garden at Folkestone.

Anything Mrs. Beale overlooked was, she indeed divined, but the effect
of an exaltation of high spirits, a tendency to soar that showed even
when she dropped--still quite impartially--almost to the confidential.
"Well, then--we've only to wait. He can't do without us long. I'm sure,
Mrs. Wix, he can't do without YOU! He's devoted to you; he has told me
so much about you. The extent I count on you, you know, count on you to
help me--" was an extent that even all her radiance couldn't express.
What it couldn't express quite as much as what it could made at any rate
every instant her presence and even her famous freedom loom larger; and
it was this mighty mass that once more led her companions, bewildered
and disjoined, to exchange with each other as through a thickening veil
confused and ineffectual signs. They clung together at least on the
common ground of unpreparedness, and Maisie watched without relief the
havoc of wonder in Mrs. Wix. It had reduced her to perfect impotence,
and, but that gloom was black upon her, she sat as if fascinated by Mrs.
Beale's high style. It had plunged her into a long deep hush; for what
had happened was the thing she had least allowed for and before which
the particular rigour she had worked up could only grow limp and sick.
Sir Claude was to have reappeared with his accomplice or without
her; never, never his accomplice without HIM. Mrs. Beale had gained
apparently by this time an advantage she could pursue: she looked at the
droll dumb figure with jesting reproach. "You really won't shake hands
with me? Never mind; you'll come round!" She put the matter to no test,
going on immediately and, instead of offering her hand, raising it, with
a pretty gesture that her bent head met, to a long black pin that played
a part in her back hair. "Are hats worn at luncheon? If you're as hungry
as I am we must go right down."

Mrs. Wix stuck fast, but she met the question in a voice her pupil
scarce recognised. "I wear mine."

Mrs. Beale, swallowing at one glance her brand-new bravery, which she
appeared at once to refer to its origin and to follow in its flights,
accepted this as conclusive. "Oh but I've not such a beauty!" Then she
turned rejoicingly to Maisie. "I've got a beauty for YOU my dear."

"A beauty?"

"A love of a hat--in my luggage. I remembered THAT"--she nodded at the
object on her stepdaughter's head--"and I've brought you one with a
peacock's breast. It's the most gorgeous blue!"

It was too strange, this talking with her there already not about
Sir Claude but about peacocks--too strange for the child to have the
presence of mind to thank her. But the felicity in which she had arrived
was so proof against everything that Maisie felt more and more the depth
of the purpose that must underlie it. She had a vague sense of its being
abysmal, the spirit with which Mrs. Beale carried off the awkwardness,
in the white and gold salon, of such a want of breath and of welcome.
Mrs. Wix was more breathless than ever; the embarrassment of Mrs.
Beale's isolation was as nothing to the embarrassment of her grace. The
perception of this dilemma was the germ on the child's part of a new
question altogether. What if WITH this indulgence--? But the idea lost
itself in something too frightened for hope and too conjectured for
fear; and while everything went by leaps and bounds one of the waiters
stood at the door to remind them that the _table d'hote_ was half over.

"Had you come up to wash hands?" Mrs. Beale hereupon asked them. "Go and
do it quickly and I'll be with you: they've put my boxes in that nice
room--it was Sir Claude's. Trust him," she laughed, "to have a nice
one!" The door of a neighbouring room stood open, and now from the
threshold, addressing herself again to Mrs. Wix, she launched a note
that gave the very key of what, as she would have said, she was up to.
"Dear lady, please attend to my daughter."

She was up to a change of deportment so complete that it represented--oh
for offices still honourably subordinate if not too explicitly
menial--an absolute coercion, an interested clutch of the old woman's
respectability. There was response, to Maisie's view, I may say at once,
in the jump of that respectability to its feet: it was itself capable of
one of the leaps, one of the bounds just mentioned, and it carried its
charge, with this momentum and while Mrs. Beale popped into Sir Claude's
chamber, straight away to where, at the end of the passage, pupil and
governess were quartered. The greatest stride of all, for that matter,
was that within a few seconds the pupil had, in another relation, been
converted into a daughter. Maisie's eyes were still following it when,
after the rush, with the door almost slammed and no thought of soap and
towels, the pair stood face to face. Mrs. Wix, in this position, was the
first to gasp a sound. "Can it ever be that SHE has one?"

Maisie felt still more bewildered. "One what?"

"Why moral sense."

They spoke as if you might have two, but Mrs. Wix looked as if it were
not altogether a happy thought, and Maisie didn't see how even an
affirmative from her own lips would clear up what had become most of a
mystery. It was to this larger puzzle she sprang pretty straight. "IS
she my mother now?"

It was a point as to which an horrific glimpse of the responsibility of
an opinion appeared to affect Mrs. Wix like a blow in the stomach. She
had evidently never thought of it; but she could think and rebound. "If
she is, he's equally your father."

Maisie, however, thought further. "Then my father and my mother--!"

But she had already faltered and Mrs. Wix had already glared back:
"Ought to live together? Don't begin it AGAIN!" She turned away with
a groan, to reach the washing-stand, and Maisie could by this time
recognise with a certain ease that that way verily madness did lie. Mrs.
Wix gave a great untidy splash, but the next instant had faced round.
"She has taken a new line."

"She was nice to you," Maisie concurred.

"What SHE thinks so--'go and dress the young lady!' But it's something!"
she panted. Then she thought out the rest. "If he won't have her, why
she'll have YOU. She'll be the one."

"The one to keep me abroad?"

"The one to give you a home." Mrs. Wix saw further; she mastered all the
portents. "Oh she's cruelly clever! It's not a moral sense." She reached
her climax: "It's a game!"

"A game?"

"Not to lose him. She has sacrificed him--to her duty."

"Then won't he come?" Maisie pleaded.

Mrs. Wix made no answer; her vision absorbed her. "He has fought. But
she has won."

"Then won't he come?" the child repeated.

Mrs. Wix made it out. "Yes, hang him!" She had never been so profane.

For all Maisie minded! "Soon--to-morrow?"

"Too soon--whenever. Indecently soon."

"But then we SHALL be together!" the child went on. It made Mrs. Wix
look at her as if in exasperation; but nothing had time to come before
she precipitated: "Together with YOU!" The air of criticism continued,
but took voice only in her companion's bidding her wash herself and come
down. The silence of quick ablutions fell upon them, presently broken,
however, by one of Maisie's sudden reversions. "Mercy, isn't she
handsome?"

Mrs. Wix had finished; she waited. "She'll attract attention." They
were rapid, and it would have been noticed that the shock the beauty
had given them acted, incongruously, as a positive spur to their
preparations for rejoining her. She had none the less, when they
returned to the sitting-room, already descended; the open door of her
room showed it empty and the chambermaid explained. Here again they were
delayed by another sharp thought of Mrs. Wix's. "But what will she live
on meanwhile?"

Maisie stopped short. "Till Sir Claude comes?"

It was nothing to the violence with which her friend had been arrested.
"Who'll pay the bills?"

Maisie thought. "Can't SHE?"

"She? She hasn't a penny."

The child wondered. "But didn't papa--?"

"Leave her a fortune?" Mrs. Wix would have appeared to speak of papa as
dead had she not immediately added: "Why he lives on other women!"

Oh yes, Maisie remembered. "Then can't he send--" She faltered again;
even to herself it sounded queer.

"Some of their money to his wife?" Mrs. Wix pave a laugh still stranger
than the weird suggestion. "I dare say she'd take it!"

They hurried on again; yet again, on the stairs, Maisie pulled up.
"Well, if she had stopped in England--!" she threw out.

Mrs. Wix considered. "And he had come over instead?"

"Yes, as we expected." Maisie launched her speculation. "What then would
she have lived on?"

Mrs. Wix hung fire but an instant. "On other men!" And she marched
downstairs.

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

completion: Maisie asks whether Mrs. Beale has come without Sir Claude, and Mrs. Beale says that she has come ahead of him because she was so eager to see Maisie. When Maisie asks whether Sir Claude is going to come soon, Mrs. Beale replies that they "must make him" and to "give him time". Mrs. Beale, contrary to her usual attitude, is friendly to Mrs. Wix, saying that Sir Claude can't do without her and seeming upset that Mrs. Wix wouldn't want to shake her hand. Mrs. Beale speaks lightly as if nothing is strange, saying that her belongings have been put in Sir Claude's room and inquiring about the dress code at meals at the hotel. As she exits to prepare for lunch, she tells Mrs. Wix, "Dear lady, please attend to my daughter". When Mrs. Wix and Maisie are left together, they discuss Mrs. Beale's moral sense and the game she is playing by being kind to Mrs. Wix and coming to France without Sir Claude in the first place. Mrs. Wix predicts that Sir Claude will return to them soon. Maisie asks in confusion about who has the money to pay for their hotel; Mrs. Wix says Mrs. Beale has no money because even Maisie's father, who was supposed to be supporting her, gets his money from other women. She concludes that Mrs. Beale's only recourse, having been left by Mr. Farange, is to live "on other men"


prompt:
Chapter: Mrs. Beale, at table between the pair, plainly attracted the attention
Mrs. Wix had foretold. No other lady present was nearly so handsome,
nor did the beauty of any other accommodate itself with such art to the
homage it produced. She talked mainly to her other neighbour, and that
left Maisie leisure both to note the manner in which eyes were riveted
and nudges interchanged, and to lose herself in the meanings that, dimly
as yet and disconnectedly, but with a vividness that fed apprehension,
she could begin to read into her stepmother's independent move. Mrs. Wix
had helped her by talking of a game; it was a connexion in which the
move could put on a strategic air. Her notions of diplomacy were thin,
but it was a kind of cold diplomatic shoulder and an elbow of more than
usual point that, temporarily at least, were presented to her by the
averted inclination of Mrs. Beale's head. There was a phrase familiar to
Maisie, so often was it used by this lady to express the idea of one's
getting what one wanted: one got it--Mrs. Beale always said SHE at all
events always got it or proposed to get it--by "making love." She was
at present making love, singular as it appeared, to Mrs. Wix, and her
young friend's mind had never moved in such freedom as on thus finding
itself face to face with the question of what she wanted to get. This
period of the _omelette aux rognons_ and the poulet saute, while her sole
surviving parent, her fourth, fairly chattered to her governess, left
Maisie rather wondering if her governess would hold out. It was strange,
but she became on the spot quite as interested in Mrs. Wix's moral
sense as Mrs. Wix could possibly be in hers: it had risen before her so
pressingly that this was something new for Mrs. Wix to resist. Resisting
Mrs. Beale herself promised at such a rate to become a very different
business from resisting Sir Claude's view of her. More might come of
what had happened--whatever it was--than Maisie felt she could have
expected. She put it together with a suspicion that, had she ever in
her life had a sovereign changed, would have resembled an impression,
baffled by the want of arithmetic, that her change was wrong: she groped
about in it that she was perhaps playing the passive part in a case of
violent substitution. A victim was what she should surely be if the
issue between her step-parents had been settled by Mrs. Beale's saying:
"Well, if she can live with but one of us alone, with which in the world
should it be but me?" That answer was far from what, for days, she had
nursed herself in, and the desolation of it was deepened by the absence
of anything from Sir Claude to show he had not had to take it as
triumphant. Had not Mrs. Beale, upstairs, as good as given out that
she had quitted him with the snap of a tension, left him, dropped him
in London, after some struggle as a sequel to which her own advent
represented that she had practically sacrificed him? Maisie assisted in
fancy at the probable episode in the Regent's Park, finding elements
almost of terror in the suggestion that Sir Claude had not had fair
play. They drew something, as she sat there, even from the pride of an
association with such beauty as Mrs. Beale's; and the child quite forgot
that, though the sacrifice of Mrs. Beale herself was a solution she had
not invented, she would probably have seen Sir Claude embark upon it
without a direct remonstrance.

What her stepmother had clearly now promised herself to wring from Mrs.
Wix was an assent to the great modification, the change, as smart as a
juggler's trick, in the interest of which nothing so much mattered as
the new convenience of Mrs. Beale. Maisie could positively seize the
moral that her elbow seemed to point in ribs thinly defended--the moral
of its not mattering a straw which of the step-parents was the guardian.
The essence of the question was that a girl wasn't a boy: if Maisie had
been a mere rough trousered thing, destined at the best probably to grow
up a scamp, Sir Claude would have been welcome. As the case stood he had
simply tumbled out of it, and Mrs. Wix would henceforth find herself in
the employ of the right person. These arguments had really fallen into
their place, for our young friend, at the very touch of that tone in
which she had heard her new title declared. She was still, as a result
of so many parents, a daughter to somebody even after papa and mamma
were to all intents dead. If her father's wife and her mother's husband,
by the operation of a natural or, for all she knew, a legal rule, were
in the shoes of their defunct partners, then Mrs. Beale's partner was
exactly as defunct as Sir Claude's and her shoes the very pair to which,
in "Farange _v._ Farange and Others," the divorce court had given
priority. The subject of that celebrated settlement saw the rest of
her day really filled out with the pomp of all that Mrs. Beale assumed.
The assumption rounded itself there between this lady's entertainers,
flourished in a way that left them, in their bottomless element, scarce
a free pair of eyes to exchange signals. It struck Maisie even a little
that there was a rope or two Mrs. Wix might have thrown out if she
would, a rocket or two she might have sent up. They had at any rate
never been so long together without communion or telegraphy, and their
companion kept them apart by simply keeping them with her. From this
situation they saw the grandeur of their intenser relation to her pass
and pass like an endless procession. It was a day of lively movement
and of talk on Mrs. Beale's part so brilliant and overflowing as to
represent music and banners. She took them out with her promptly to walk
and to drive, and even--towards night--sketched a plan for carrying them
to the Etablissement, where, for only a franc apiece, they should listen
to a concert of celebrities. It reminded Maisie, the plan, of the
side-shows at Earl's Court, and the franc sounded brighter than the
shillings which had at that time failed; yet this too, like the other,
was a frustrated hope: the francs failed like the shillings and the
side-shows had set an example to the concert. The Etablissement in short
melted away, and it was little wonder that a lady who from the moment of
her arrival had been so gallantly in the breach should confess herself
it last done up. Maisie could appreciate her fatigue; the day had not
passed without such an observer's discovering that she was excited and
even mentally comparing her state to that of the breakers after a gale.
It had blown hard in London, and she would take time to go down. It was
of the condition known to the child by report as that of talking against
time that her emphasis, her spirit, her humour, which had never dropped,
now gave the impression.

She too was delighted with foreign manners; but her daughter's
opportunities of explaining them to her were unexpectedly forestalled
by her own tone of large acquaintance with them. One of the things that
nipped in the bud all response to her volubility was Maisie's surprised
retreat before the fact that Continental life was what she had been
almost brought up on. It was Mrs. Beale, disconcertingly, who began to
explain it to her friends; it was she who, wherever they turned, was the
interpreter, the historian and the guide. She was full of reference to
her early travels--at the age of eighteen: she had at that period made,
with a distinguished Dutch family, a stay on the Lake of Geneva. Maisie
had in the old days been regaled with anecdotes of these adventures,
but they had with time become phantasmal, and the heroine's quite showy
exemption from bewilderment at Boulogne, her acuteness on some of the
very subjects on which Maisie had been acute to Mrs. Wix, were a high
note of the majesty, of the variety of advantage, with which she had
alighted. It was all a part of the wind in her sails and of the weight
with which her daughter was now to feel her hand. The effect of it on
Maisie was to add already the burden of time to her separation from Sir
Claude. This might, to her sense, have lasted for days; it was as if,
with their main agitation transferred thus to France and with neither
mamma now nor Mrs. Beale nor Mrs. Wix nor herself at his side, he must
be fearfully alone in England. Hour after hour she felt as if she were
waiting; yet she couldn't have said exactly for what. There were moments
when Mrs. Beale's flow of talk was a mere rattle to smother a knock.
At no part of the crisis had the rattle so public a purpose as when,
instead of letting Maisie go with Mrs. Wix to prepare for dinner, she
pushed her--with a push at last incontestably maternal--straight into
the room inherited from Sir Claude. She titivated her little charge with
her own brisk hands; then she brought out: "I'm going to divorce your
father."

This was so different from anything Maisie had expected that it took
some time to reach her mind. She was aware meanwhile that she probably
looked rather wan. "To marry Sir Claude?"

Mrs. Beale rewarded her with a kiss. "It's sweet to hear you put it so."

This was a tribute, but it left Maisie balancing for an objection. "How
CAN you when he's married?"

"He isn't--practically. He's free, you know."

"Free to marry?"

"Free, first, to divorce his own fiend."

The benefit that, these last days, she had felt she owed a certain
person left Maisie a moment so ill-prepared for recognising this lurid
label that she hesitated long enough to risk: "Mamma?"

"She isn't your mamma any longer," Mrs. Beale returned. "Sir Claude has
paid her money to cease to be." Then as if remembering how little, to
the child, a pecuniary transaction must represent: "She lets him off
supporting her if he'll let her off supporting you."

Mrs. Beale appeared, however, to have done injustice to her daughter's
financial grasp. "And support me himself?" Maisie asked.

"Take the whole bother and burden of you and never let her hear of you
again. It's a regular signed contract."

"Why that's lovely of her!" Maisie cried.

"It's not so lovely, my dear, but that he'll get his divorce."

Maisie was briefly silent; after which, "No--he won't get it," she said.
Then she added still more boldly: "And you won't get yours."

Mrs. Beale, who was at the dressing-glass, turned round with amusement
and surprise. "How do you know that?"

"Oh I know!" cried Maisie.

"From Mrs. Wix?"

Maisie debated, then after an instant took her cue from Mrs. Beale's
absence of anger, which struck her the more as she had felt how much of
her courage she needed. "From Mrs. Wix," she admitted.

Mrs. Beale, at the glass again, made play with a powder-puff. "My own
sweet, she's mistaken!" was all she said.

There was a certain force in the very amenity of this, but our young
lady reflected long enough to remember that it was not the answer Sir
Claude himself had made. The recollection nevertheless failed to prevent
her saying: "Do you mean then that he won't come till he has got it?"

Mrs. Beale gave a last touch; she was ready; she stood there in all her
elegance. "I mean, my dear, that it's because he HASN'T got it that I
left him."

This opened a view that stretched further than Maisie could reach. She
turned away from it, but she spoke before they went out again. "Do you
like Mrs. Wix now?"

"Why, my chick, I was just going to ask you if you think she has come at
all to like poor bad me!"

Maisie thought, at this hint; but unsuccessfully. "I haven't the least
idea. But I'll find out."

"Do!" said Mrs. Beale, rustling out with her in a scented air and as if
it would be a very particular favour.

The child tried promptly at bed-time, relieved now of the fear that
their visitor would wish to separate her for the night from her
attendant. "Have you held out?" she began as soon as the two doors at
the end of the passage were again closed on them.

Mrs. Wix looked hard at the flame of the candle. "Held out--?"

"Why, she has been making love to you. Has she won you over?"

Mrs. Wix transferred her intensity to her pupil's face. "Over to what?"

"To HER keeping me instead."

"Instead of Sir Claude?" Mrs. Wix was distinctly gaining time.

"Yes; who else? since it's not instead of you."

Mrs. Wix coloured at this lucidity. "Yes, that IS what she means."

"Well, do you like it?" Maisie asked.

She actually had to wait, for oh her friend was embarrassed! "My
opposition to the connexion--theirs--would then naturally to some extent
fall. She has treated me to-day as if I weren't after all quite such a
worm; not that I don't know very well where she got the pattern of her
politeness. But of course," Mrs. Wix hastened to add, "I shouldn't like
her as THE one nearly so well as him."

"'Nearly so well!'" Maisie echoed. "I should hope indeed not." She spoke
with a firmness under which she was herself the first to quiver. "I
thought you 'adored' him."

"I do," Mrs. Wix sturdily allowed.

"Then have you suddenly begun to adore her too?"

Mrs. Wix, instead of directly answering, only blinked in support of her
sturdiness. "My dear, in what a tone you ask that! You're coming out."

"Why shouldn't I? YOU'VE come out. Mrs. Beale has come out. We each have
our turn!" And Maisie threw off the most extraordinary little laugh that
had ever passed her young lips.

There passed Mrs. Wix's indeed the next moment a sound that more than
matched it. "You're most remarkable!" she neighed.

Her pupil, though wholly without aspirations to pertness, barely
faltered. "I think you've done a great deal to make me so."

"Very true, I have." She dropped to humility, as if she recalled her so
recent self-arraignment.

"Would you accept her then? That's what I ask," said Maisie.

"As a substitute?" Mrs. Wix turned it over; she met again the child's
eyes. "She has literally almost fawned upon me."

"She hasn't fawned upon HIM. She hasn't even been kind to him."

Mrs. Wix looked as if she had now an advantage. "Then do you propose to
'kill' her?"

"You don't answer my question," Maisie persisted. "I want to know if you
accept her."

Mrs. Wix continued to hedge. "I want to know if YOU do!"

Everything in the child's person, at this, announced that it was easy to
know. "Not for a moment."

"Not the two now?" Mrs. Wix had caught on; she flushed with it. "Only
him alone?"

"Him alone or nobody."

"Not even ME?" cried Mrs. Wix.

Maisie looked at her a moment, then began to undress. "Oh you're
nobody!"

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

completion: At lunch, Mrs. Beale's beauty attracts attention from others at the hotel. Mrs. Beale continues to be overly sweet to Mrs. Wix. During lunch, she suggests that she is the most suited of Maisie's four potential guardians to raise the girl. The narrator implies that Maisie could do without a father figure, since she isn't a boy. After the meal they go out touring with Mrs. Beale; Maisie and Mrs. Wix are uncomfortable that they aren't able to communicate privately with the other woman constantly present. Since Mrs. Beale is more cultured, she is able to explain a lot of what they are seeing. All the while, Maisie worries about Sir Claude being alone in England. Mrs. Beale takes Maisie into Sir Claude's hotel room before dinner. Mrs. Beale announces that she is going to divorce Beale and marry Sir Claude. When Maisie asks about his marriage to her mother, Mrs. Beale says that she isn't her mother anymore: Sir Claude has made an agreement with Ida that he will stop supporting Ida financially and take full responsibility of Maisie. Maisie tells Mrs. Beale that she doesn't think Mrs. Beale or Sir Claude will get their divorces. When Mrs. Beale presses her, Maisie says that Mrs. Wix told her this. Mrs. Beale says that he will certainly get the divorce, and that she left him in England precisely because he hadn't gotten it yet. Maisie asks if Mrs. Beale actually likes Mrs. Wix, and Mrs. Beale asks that Maisie find out whether Mrs. Wix likes her. At bedtime, Maisie asks Mrs. Wix whether she likes Mrs. Beale. Maisie suggests that Mrs. Beale has been trying to win Mrs. Wix over to the idea of her taking care of Maisie, rather than Sir Claude. Mrs. Wix says that it wouldn't be as immoral as the two of them taking care of Maisie, but that she would still rather Sir Claude have sole guardianship. Mrs. Wix remarks that Maisie is talking in a very bold and mature way. Maisie seems pleased by this and continues to push the matter of whether Mrs. Wix would accept Mrs. Beale as Maisie's sole guardian. When Mrs. Wix asks Maisie if she would like that arrangement, Maisie says that she would not: she wants " alone or nobody". Mrs. Wix asks, "Not even me. and Maisie replies, "Oh, you're nobody