prompt:
Chapter: Her sleep was drawn out, she instantly recognised lateness in the way
her eyes opened to Mrs. Wix, erect, completely dressed, more dressed
than ever, and gazing at her from the centre of the room. The next thing
she was sitting straight up, wide awake with the fear of the hours of
"abroad" that she might have lost. Mrs. Wix looked as if the day had
already made itself felt, and the process of catching up with it began
for Maisie in hearing her distinctly say: "My poor dear, he has come!"

"Sir Claude?" Maisie, clearing the little bed-rug with the width of her
spring, felt the polished floor under her bare feet.

"He crossed in the night; he got in early." Mrs. Wix's head jerked
stiffly backward. "He's there."

"And you've seen him?"

"No. He's there--he's there," Mrs. Wix repeated. Her voice came out with
a queer extinction that was not a voluntary drop, and she trembled so
that it added to their common emotion. Visibly pale, they gazed at each
other.

"Isn't it too BEAUTIFUL?" Maisie panted back at her; a challenge with an
answer to which, however, she was not ready at once. The term Maisie had
used was a flash of diplomacy--to prevent at any rate Mrs. Wix's using
another. To that degree it was successful; there was only an appeal,
strange and mute, in the white old face, which produced the effect of
a want of decision greater than could by any stretch of optimism have
been associated with her attitude toward what had happened. For Maisie
herself indeed what had happened was oddly, as she could feel, less of a
simple rapture than any arrival or return of the same supreme friend had
ever been before. What had become overnight, what had become while she
slept, of the comfortable faculty of gladness? She tried to wake it up a
little wider by talking, by rejoicing, by plunging into water and into
clothes, and she made out that it was ten o'clock, but also that Mrs.
Wix had not yet breakfasted. The day before, at nine, they had had
together a _cafe complet_ in their sitting-room. Mrs. Wix on her side
had evidently also a refuge to seek. She sought it in checking the
precipitation of some of her pupil's present steps, in recalling to her
with an approach to sternness that of such preliminaries those embodied
in a thorough use of soap should be the most thorough, and in throwing
even a certain reprobation on the idea of hurrying into clothes for
the sake of a mere stepfather. She took her in hand with a silent
insistence; she reduced the process to sequences more definite than any
it had known since the days of Moddle. Whatever it might be that had
now, with a difference, begun to belong to Sir Claude's presence was
still after all compatible, for our young lady, with the instinct of
dressing to see him with almost untidy haste. Mrs. Wix meanwhile luckily
was not wholly directed to repression. "He's there--he's there!" she
had said over several times. It was her answer to every invitation
to mention how long she had been up and her motive for respecting so
rigidly the slumber of her companion. It formed for some minutes her
only account of the whereabouts of the others and her reason for not
having yet seen them, as well as of the possibility of their presently
being found in the salon.

"He's there--he's there!" she declared once more as she made, on the
child, with an almost invidious tug, a strained undergarment "meet."

"Do you mean he's in the salon?" Maisie asked again.

"He's WITH her," Mrs. Wix desolately said. "He's with her," she
reiterated.

"Do you mean in her own room?" Maisie continued.

She waited an instant. "God knows!"

Maisie wondered a little why, or how, God should know; this, however,
delayed but an instant her bringing out: "Well, won't she go back?"

"Go back? Never!"

"She'll stay all the same?"

"All the more."

"Then won't Sir Claude go?" Maisie asked.

"Go back--if SHE doesn't?" Mrs. Wix appeared to give this question the
benefit of a minute's thought. "Why should he have come--only to go
back?"

Maisie produced an ingenious solution. "To MAKE her go. To take her."

Mrs. Wix met it without a concession. "If he can make her go so easily,
why should he have let her come?"

Maisie considered. "Oh just to see ME. She has a right."

"Yes--she has a right."

"She's my mother!" Maisie tentatively tittered.

"Yes--she's your mother."

"Besides," Maisie went on, "he didn't let her come. He doesn't like her
coming, and if he doesn't like it--"

Mrs. Wix took her up. "He must lump it--that's what he must do! Your
mother was right about him--I mean your real one. He has no strength.
No--none at all." She seemed more profoundly to muse. "He might have
had some even with HER--I mean with her ladyship. He's just a poor sunk
slave," she asserted with sudden energy.

Maisie wondered again. "A slave?"

"To his passions."

She continued to wonder and even to be impressed; after which she went
on: "But how do you know he'll stay?"

"Because he likes us!"--and Mrs. Wix, with her emphasis of the word,
whirled her charge round again to deal with posterior hooks. She had
positively never shaken her so.

It was as if she quite shook something out of her. "But how will that
help him if we--in spite of his liking!--don't stay?"

"Do you mean if we go off and leave him with her?--" Mrs. Wix put the
question to the back of her pupil's head. "It WON'T help him. It will be
his ruin. He'll have got nothing. He'll have lost everything. It will be
his utter destruction, for he's certain after a while to loathe her."

"Then when he loathes her"--it was astonishing how she caught the
idea--"he'll just come right after us!" Maisie announced.

"Never."

"Never?"

"She'll keep him. She'll hold him for ever."

Maisie doubted. "When he 'loathes' her?"

"That won't matter. She won't loathe HIM. People don't!" Mrs. Wix
brought up.

"Some do. Mamma does," Maisie contended.

"Mamma does NOT!" It was startling--her friend contradicted her flat.
"She loves him--she adores him. A woman knows." Mrs. Wix spoke not only
as if Maisie were not a woman, but as if she would never be one. "_I_
know!" she cried.

"Then why on earth has she left him?"

Mrs. Wix hesitated. "He hates HER. Don't stoop so--lift up your hair.
You know how I'm affected toward him," she added with dignity; "but
you must also know that I see clear."

Maisie all this time was trying hard to do likewise. "Then if she has
left him for that why shouldn't Mrs. Beale leave him?"

"Because she's not such a fool!"

"Not such a fool as mamma?"

"Precisely--if you WILL have it. Does it look like her leaving him?"
Mrs. Wix enquired. She brooded again; then she went on with more
intensity: "Do you want to know really and truly why? So that she may
be his wretchedness and his punishment."

"His punishment?"--this was more than as yet Maisie could quite accept.
"For what?"

"For everything. That's what will happen: he'll be tied to her for ever.
She won't mind in the least his hating her, and she won't hate him back.
She'll only hate US."

"Us?" the child faintly echoed.

"She'll hate YOU."

"Me? Why, I brought them together!" Maisie resentfully cried.

"You brought them together." There was a completeness in Mrs. Wix's
assent. "Yes; it was a pretty job. Sit down." She began to brush her
pupil's hair and, as she took up the mass of it with some force of
hand, went on with a sharp recall: "Your mother adored him at first--it
might have lasted. But he began too soon with Mrs. Beale. As you say,"
she pursued with a brisk application of the brush, "you brought them
together."

"I brought them together"--Maisie was ready to reaffirm it. She felt
none the less for a moment at the bottom of a hole; then she seemed to
see a way out. "But I didn't bring mamma together--" She just faltered.

"With all those gentlemen?"--Mrs. Wix pulled her up. "No; it isn't quite
so bad as that."

"I only said to the Captain"--Maisie had the quick memory of it--"that
I hoped he at least (he was awfully nice!) would love her and keep her."

"And even that wasn't much harm," threw in Mrs. Wix.

"It wasn't much good," Maisie was obliged to recognise. "She can't bear
him--not even a mite. She told me at Folkestone."

Mrs. Wix suppressed a gasp; then after a bridling instant during
which she might have appeared to deflect with difficulty from her odd
consideration of Ida's wrongs: "He was a nice sort of person for her to
talk to you about!"

"Oh I LIKE him!" Maisie promptly rejoined; and at this, with an
inarticulate sound and an inconsequence still more marked, her companion
bent over and dealt her on the cheek a rapid peck which had the apparent
intention of a kiss.

"Well, if her ladyship doesn't agree with you, what does it only prove?"
Mrs. Wix demanded in conclusion. "It proves that she's fond of Sir
Claude!"

Maisie, in the light of some of the evidence, reflected on that till her
hair was finished, but when she at last started up she gave a sign of no
very close embrace of it. She grasped at this moment Mrs. Wix's arm. "He
must have got his divorce!"

"Since day before yesterday? Don't talk trash."

This was spoken with an impatience which left the child nothing to
reply; whereupon she sought her defence in a completely different
relation to the fact. "Well, I knew he would come!"

"So did I; but not in twenty-four hours. I gave him a few days!" Mrs.
Wix wailed.

Maisie, whom she had now released, looked at her with interest. "How
many did SHE give him?"

Mrs. Wix faced her a moment; then as if with a bewildered sniff: "You
had better ask her!" But she had no sooner uttered the words than she
caught herself up. "Lord o' mercy, how we talk!"

Maisie felt that however they talked she must see him, but she said
nothing more for a time, a time during which she conscientiously
finished dressing and Mrs. Wix also kept silence. It was as if they each
had almost too much to think of, and even as if the child had the sense
that her friend was watching her and seeing if she herself were watched.
At last Mrs. Wix turned to the window and stood--sightlessly, as Maisie
could guess--looking away. Then our young lady, before the glass, gave
the supreme shake. "Well, I'm ready. And now to SEE him!"

Mrs. Wix turned round, but as if without having heard her. "It's
tremendously grave." There were slow still tears behind the
straighteners.

"It is--it is." Maisie spoke as if she were now dressed quite up to the
occasion; as if indeed with the last touch she had put on the
judgement-cap. "I must see him immediately."

"How can you see him if he doesn't send for you?"

"Why can't I go and find him?"

"Because you don't know where he is."

"Can't I just look in the salon?" That still seemed simple to Maisie.

Mrs. Wix, however, instantly cut it off. "I wouldn't have you look in
the salon for all the world!" Then she explained a little: "The salon
isn't ours now."

"Ours?"

"Yours and mine. It's theirs."

"Theirs?" Maisie, with her stare, continued to echo. "You mean they want
to keep us out?"

Mrs. Wix faltered; she sank into a chair and, as Maisie had often enough
seen her do before, covered her face with her hands. "They ought to, at
least. The situation's too monstrous!"

Maisie stood there a moment--she looked about the room. "I'll go to
him--I'll find him."

"_I_ won't! I won't go NEAR them!" cried Mrs. Wix.

"Then I'll see him alone." The child spied what she had been looking
for--she possessed herself of her hat. "Perhaps I'll take him out!" And
with decision she quitted the room.

When she entered the salon it was empty, but at the sound of the opened
door some one stirred on the balcony, and Sir Claude, stepping straight
in, stood before her. He was in light fresh clothes and wore a straw hat
with a bright ribbon; these things, besides striking her in themselves
as the very promise of the grandest of grand tours, gave him a certain
radiance and, as it were, a tropical ease; but such an effect only
marked rather more his having stopped short and, for a longer minute
than had ever at such a juncture elapsed, not opened his arms to her.
His pause made her pause and enabled her to reflect that he must have
been up some time, for there were no traces of breakfast; and that
though it was so late he had rather markedly not caused her to be called
to him. Had Mrs. Wix been right about their forfeiture of the salon? Was
it all his now, all his and Mrs. Beale's? Such an idea, at the rate her
small thoughts throbbed, could only remind her of the way in which what
had been hers hitherto was what was exactly most Mrs. Beale's and his.
It was strange to be standing there and greeting him across a gulf,
for he had by this time spoken, smiled and said: "My dear child, my
dear child!" but without coming any nearer. In a flash she saw he was
different--more so than he knew or designed. The next minute indeed it
was as if he caught an impression from her face: this made him hold out
his hand. Then they met, he kissed her, he laughed, she thought he even
blushed: something of his affection rang out as usual. "Here I am, you
see, again--as I promised you."

It was not as he had promised them--he had not promised them Mrs. Beale;
but Maisie said nothing about that. What she said was simply: "I knew
you had come. Mrs. Wix told me."

"Oh yes. And where is she?"

"In her room. She got me up--she dressed me."

Sir Claude looked at her up and down; a sweetness of mockery that she
particularly loved came out in his face whenever he did that, and it
was not wanting now. He raised his eyebrows and his arms to play at
admiration; he was evidently after all disposed to be gay. "Got you
up?--I should think so! She has dressed you most beautifully. Isn't she
coming?"

Maisie wondered if she had better tell. "She said not."

"Doesn't she want to see a poor devil?"

She looked about under the vibration of the way he described himself,
and her eyes rested on the door of the room he had previously occupied.
"Is Mrs. Beale in there?"

Sir Claude looked blankly at the same object. "I haven't the least
idea!"

"You haven't seen her?"

"Not the tip of her nose."

Maisie thought: there settled on her, in the light of his beautiful
smiling eyes, the faintest purest coldest conviction that he wasn't
telling the truth. "She hasn't welcomed you?"

"Not by a single sign."

"Then where is she?"

Sir Claude laughed; he seemed both amused and surprised at the point
she made of it. "I give it up!"

"Doesn't she know you've come?"

He laughed again. "Perhaps she doesn't care!"

Maisie, with an inspiration, pounced on his arm. "Has she GONE?"

He met her eyes and then she could see that his own were really much
graver than his manner. "Gone?" She had flown to the door, but before
she could raise her hand to knock he was beside her and had caught it.
"Let her be. I don't care about her. I want to see YOU."

"Then she HASN'T gone?"

Maisie fell back with him. He still looked as if it were a joke, but the
more she saw of him the more she could make out that he was troubled.
"It wouldn't be like her!"

She stood wondering at him. "Did you want her to come?"

"How can you suppose--?" He put it to her candidly. "We had an immense
row over it."

"Do you mean you've quarrelled?"

Sir Claude was at a loss. "What has she told you?"

"That I'm hers as much as yours. That she represents papa."

His gaze struck away through the open window and up to the sky; she
could hear him rattle in his trousers-pockets his money or his keys.
"Yes--that's what she keeps saying." It gave him for a moment an air
that was almost helpless.

"You say you don't care about her," Maisie went on. "DO you mean you've
quarrelled?"

"We do nothing in life but quarrel."

He rose before her, as he said this, so soft and fair, so rich, in spite
of what might worry him, in restored familiarities, that it gave a
bright blur to the meaning--to what would otherwise perhaps have been
the palpable promise--of the words.

"Oh YOUR quarrels!" she exclaimed with discouragement.

"I assure you hers are quite fearful!"

"I don't speak of hers. I speak of yours."

"Ah don't do it till I've had my coffee! You're growing up clever," he
added. Then he said: "I suppose you've breakfasted?"

"Oh no--I've had nothing."

"Nothing in your room?"--he was all compunction. "My dear old
man!--we'll breakfast then together." He had one of his happy thoughts.
"I say--we'll go out."

"That was just what I hoped. I've brought my hat."

"You ARE clever! We'll go to a cafe." Maisie was already at the door; he
glanced round the room. "A moment--my stick." But there appeared to be
no stick. "No matter; I left it--oh!" He remembered with an odd drop and
came out.

"You left it in London?" she asked as they went downstairs.

"Yes--in London: fancy!"

"You were in such a hurry to come," Maisie explained.

He had his arm round her. "That must have been the reason."

Halfway down he stopped short again, slapping his leg. "And poor Mrs.
Wix?"

Maisie's face just showed a shadow. "Do you want her to come?"

"Dear no--I want to see you alone."

"That's the way I want to see YOU!" she replied. "Like before."

"Like before!" he gaily echoed. "But I mean has she had her coffee?"

"No, nothing."

"Then I'll send it up to her. Madame!" He had already, at the foot of
the stair, called out to the stout _patronne_, a lady who turned to
him from the bustling, breezy hall a countenance covered with fresh
matutinal powder and a bosom as capacious as the velvet shelf of a
chimneypiece, over which her round white face, framed in its golden
frizzle, might have figured as a showy clock. He ordered, with
particular recommendations, Mrs. Wix's repast, and it was a charm to
hear his easy brilliant French: even his companion's ignorance could
measure the perfection of it. The _patronne_, rubbing her hands and
breaking in with high swift notes as into a florid duet, went with him
to the street, and while they talked a moment longer Maisie remembered
what Mrs. Wix had said about every one's liking him. It came out enough
through the morning powder, it came out enough in the heaving bosom, how
the landlady liked him. He had evidently ordered something lovely for
Mrs. Wix. _"Et bien soigne, n'est-ce-pas?"_

_"Soyez tranquille"_--the patronne beamed upon him. _"Et pour Madame?"_

_"Madame?"_ he echoed--it just pulled him up a little.

_"Rien encore?"_

"_Rien encore._ Come, Maisie." She hurried along with him, but on the way
to the cafe he said nothing.

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

completion: When Maisie wakes up the next morning, she realizes that she has been allowed to sleep in much later than usual. Mrs. Wix is sitting in the room, dressed and wide awake. She reports anxiously that Sir Claude has returned and is in his room with Mrs. Beale. Maisie thinks that Sir Claude may have let Mrs. Beale come to see Maisie but will send her home now so that he, Maisie, and Mrs. Wix can live together. Mrs. Wix and Maisie begin to fight again, especially about the positive or negative effects of Maisie bringing Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale together. Maisie says that she thinks Sir Claude must have gotten his divorce from Ida, but Mrs. Wix says that it couldn't have happened so fast. Maisie decides she is going to go into Sir Claude's room to see him. Mrs. Wix tries to dissuade her, but Maisie enters his room confidently. She finds Sir Claude, but not Mrs. Beale, there. Contrary to his usual greeting of holding his arms open to her immediately, this time he simply looks at Maisie for a moment. After this pause, he says to Maisie "Here I am, you see, again--as I promised you". Maisie thinks to herself, "It was not as he had promised them--he had not promised them Mrs. Beale" , but instead she simply says that Mrs. Wix had alerted her that he had arrived. Maisie asks whether Mrs. Beale is in the room attached to Sir Claude's bedroom, and he tells Maisie that he hasn't seen Mrs. Beale yet. He says that he doesn't care where she is, as all he wants is to spend time with Maisie. He tells Maisie that he and Mrs. Beale have had a fight, though he doesn't specify what it was about. He suggests that they go out to breakfast together. He asks about inviting Mrs. Wix along, but they both agree that they want to be alone. In the hallway, Sir Claude speaks French with a hotel employee, asking for them to send breakfast up to Mrs. Wix


prompt:
Chapter: After they were seated there it was different: the place was not below
the hotel, but further along the quay; with wide, clear windows and a
floor sprinkled with bran in a manner that gave it for Maisie something
of the added charm of a circus. They had pretty much to themselves the
painted spaces and the red plush benches; these were shared by a few
scattered gentlemen who picked teeth, with facial contortions, behind
little bare tables, and by an old personage in particular, a very old
personage with a red ribbon in his buttonhole, whose manner of soaking
buttered rolls in coffee and then disposing of them in the little that
was left of the interval between his nose and chin might at a less
anxious hour have cast upon Maisie an almost envious spell. They too
had their _cafe au lait_ and their buttered rolls, determined by Sir
Claude's asking her if she could with that light aid wait till the hour
of dejeuner. His allusion to this meal gave her, in the shaded sprinkled
coolness, the scene, as she vaguely felt, of a sort of ordered mirrored
licence, the haunt of those--the irregular, like herself--who went to
bed or who rose too late, something to think over while she watched
the white-aproned waiter perform as nimbly with plates and saucers as
a certain conjurer her friend had in London taken her to a music-hall
to see. Sir Claude had presently begun to talk again, to tell her how
London had looked and how long he had felt himself, on either side, to
have been absent; all about Susan Ash too and the amusement as well as
the difficulty he had had with her; then all about his return journey
and the Channel in the night and the crowd of people coming over and
the way there were always too many one knew. He spoke of other matters
beside, especially of what she must tell him of the occupations, while
he was away, of Mrs. Wix and her pupil. Hadn't they had the good time he
had promised?--had he exaggerated a bit the arrangements made for their
pleasure? Maisie had something--not all there was--to say of his success
and of their gratitude: she had a complication of thought that grew
every minute, grew with the consciousness that she had never seen him in
this particular state in which he had been given back.

Mrs. Wix had once said--it was once or fifty times; once was enough for
Maisie, but more was not too much--that he was wonderfully various.
Well, he was certainly so, to the child's mind, on the present occasion:
he was much more various than he was anything else. Besides, the fact
that they were together in a shop, at a nice little intimate table as
they had so often been in London, only made greater the difference of
what they were together about. This difference was in his face, in his
voice, in every look he gave her and every movement he made. They were
not the looks and the movements he really wanted to show, and she could
feel as well that they were not those she herself wanted. She had
seen him nervous, she had seen every one she had come in contact with
nervous, but she had never seen him so nervous as this. Little by little
it gave her a settled terror, a terror that partook of the coldness she
had felt just before, at the hotel, to find herself, on his answer about
Mrs. Beale, disbelieve him. She seemed to see at present, to touch
across the table, as if by laying her hand on it, what he had meant when
he confessed on those several occasions to fear. Why was such a man so
often afraid? It must have begun to come to her now that there was one
thing just such a man above all could be afraid of. He could be afraid
of himself. His fear at all events was there; his fear was sweet to her,
beautiful and tender to her, was having coffee and buttered rolls and
talk and laughter that were no talk and laughter at all with her; his
fear was in his jesting postponing perverting voice; it was just in
this make-believe way he had brought her out to imitate the old London
playtimes, to imitate indeed a relation that had wholly changed, a
relation that she had with her very eyes seen in the act of change when,
the day before in the salon, Mrs. Beale rose suddenly before her. She
rose before her, for that matter, now, and even while their refreshment
delayed Maisie arrived at the straight question for which, on their
entrance, his first word had given opportunity. "Are we going to have
dejeuner with Mrs. Beale?"

His reply was anything but straight. "You and I?"

Maisie sat back in her chair. "Mrs. Wix and me."

Sir Claude also shifted. "That's an enquiry, my dear child, that Mrs.
Beale herself must answer." Yes, he had shifted; but abruptly, after a
moment during which something seemed to hang there between them and, as
it heavily swayed, just fan them with the air of its motion, she felt
that the whole thing was upon them. "Do you mind," he broke out, "my
asking you what Mrs. Wix has said to you?"

"Said to me?"

"This day or two--while I was away."

"Do you mean about you and Mrs. Beale?"

Sir Claude, resting on his elbows, fixed his eyes a moment on the white
marble beneath them. "No; I think we had a good deal of that--didn't
we?--before I left you. It seems to me we had it pretty well all out. I
mean about yourself, about your--don't you know?--associating with us,
as I might say, and staying on with us. While you were alone with our
friend what did she say?"

Maisie felt the weight of the question; it kept her silent for a space
during which she looked at Sir Claude, whose eyes remained bent.
"Nothing," she returned at last.

He showed incredulity. "Nothing?"

"Nothing," Maisie repeated; on which an interruption descended in the
form of a tray bearing the preparations for their breakfast. These
preparations were as amusing as everything else; the waiter poured their
coffee from a vessel like a watering-pot and then made it froth with the
curved stream of hot milk that dropped from the height of his raised
arm; but the two looked across at each other through the whole play of
French pleasantness with a gravity that had now ceased to dissemble.
Sir Claude sent the waiter off again for something and then took up her
answer. "Hasn't she tried to affect you?"

Face to face with him thus it seemed to Maisie that she had tried so
little as to be scarce worth mentioning; again therefore an instant she
shut herself up. Presently she found her middle course. "Mrs. Beale
likes her now; and there's one thing I've found out--a great thing.
Mrs. Wix enjoys her being so kind. She was tremendously kind all day
yesterday."

"I see. And what did she do?" Sir Claude asked.

Maisie was now busy with her breakfast, and her companion attacked his
own; so that it was all, in form at least, even more than their old
sociability. "Everything she could think of. She was as nice to her as
you are," the child said. "She talked to her all day."

"And what did she say to her?"

"Oh I don't know." Maisie was a little bewildered with his pressing her
so for knowledge; it didn't fit into the degree of intimacy with Mrs.
Beale that Mrs. Wix had so denounced and that, according to that lady,
had now brought him back in bondage. Wasn't he more aware than his
stepdaughter of what would be done by the person to whom he was bound?
In a moment, however, she added: "She made love to her."

Sir Claude looked at her harder, and it was clearly something in her
tone that made him quickly say: "You don't mind my asking you, do you?"

"Not at all; only I should think you'd know better than I."

"What Mrs. Beale did yesterday?"

She thought he coloured a trifle; but almost simultaneously with that
impression she found herself answering: "Yes--if you have seen her."

He broke into the loudest of laughs. "Why, my dear boy, I told you just
now I've absolutely not. I say, don't you believe me?"

There was something she was already so afraid of that it covered up
other fears. "Didn't you come back to see her?" she enquired in a
moment. "Didn't you come back because you always want to so much?"

He received her enquiry as he had received her doubt--with an
extraordinary absence of resentment. "I can imagine of course why you
think that. But it doesn't explain my doing what I have. It was, as I
said to you just now at the inn, really and truly you I wanted to see."

She felt an instant as she used to feel when, in the back garden at her
mother's, she took from him the highest push of a swing--high, high,
high--that he had had put there for her pleasure and that had finally
broken down under the weight and the extravagant patronage of the cook.
"Well, that's beautiful. But to see me, you mean, and go away again?"

"My going away again is just the point. I can't tell yet--it all
depends."

"On Mrs. Beale?" Maisie asked. "SHE won't go away." He finished emptying
his coffee-cup and then, when he had put it down, leaned back in his
chair, where she could see that he smiled on her. This only added to her
idea that he was in trouble, that he was turning somehow in his pain and
trying different things. He continued to smile and she went on: "Don't
you know that?"

"Yes, I may as well confess to you that as much as that I do know. SHE
won't go away. She'll stay."

"She'll stay. She'll stay," Maisie repeated.

"Just so. Won't you have some more coffee?"

"Yes, please."

"And another buttered roll?"

"Yes, please."

He signed to the hovering waiter, who arrived with the shining spout of
plenty in either hand and with the friendliest interest in mademoiselle.
_"Les tartines sont la."_ Their cups were replenished and, while he
watched almost musingly the bubbles in the fragrant mixture, "Just
so--just so," Sir Claude said again and again. "It's awfully awkward!"
he exclaimed when the waiter had gone.

"That she won't go?"

"Well--everything! Well, well, well!" But he pulled himself together;
he began again to eat. "I came back to ask you something. That's what
I came back for."

"I know what you want to ask me," Maisie said.

"Are you very sure?"

"I'm ALMOST very."

"Well then risk it. You mustn't make ME risk everything."

She was struck with the force of this. "You want to know if I should be
happy with THEM."

"With those two ladies only? No, no, old man: _vous n'y etes pas_. So
now--there!" Sir Claude laughed.

"Well then what is it?"

The next minute, instead of telling her what it was, he laid his hand
across the table on her own and held her as if under the prompting of a
thought. "Mrs. Wix would stay with HER?"

"Without you? Oh yes--now."

"On account, as you just intimated, of Mrs. Beale's changed manner?"

Maisie, with her sense of responsibility, weighed both Mrs. Beale's
changed manner and Mrs. Wix's human weakness. "I think she talked her
round."

Sir Claude thought a moment. "Ah poor dear!"

"Do you mean Mrs. Beale?"

"Oh no--Mrs. Wix."

"She likes being talked round--treated like any one else. Oh she likes
great politeness," Maisie expatiated. "It affects her very much."

Sir Claude, to her surprise, demurred a little to this. "Very much--up
to a certain point."

"Oh up to any point!" Maisie returned with emphasis.

"Well, haven't I been polite to her?"

"Lovely--and she perfectly worships you."

"Then, my dear child, why can't she let me alone?"--this time Sir
Claude unmistakeably blushed. Before Maisie, however, could answer his
question, which would indeed have taken her long, he went on in another
tone: "Mrs. Beale thinks she has probably quite broken her down. But she
hasn't."

Though he spoke as if he were sure, Maisie was strong in the impression
she had just uttered and that she now again produced. "She has talked
her round."

"Ah yes; round to herself, but not round to me."

Oh she couldn't bear to hear him say that! "To you? Don't you really
believe how she loves you?"

Sir Claude examined his belief. "Of course I know she's wonderful."

"She's just every bit as fond of you as _I_ am," said Maisie. "She told
me so yesterday."

"Ah then," he promptly exclaimed, "she HAS tried to affect you! I don't
love HER, don't you see? I do her perfect justice," he pursued, "but I
mean I don't love her as I do you, and I'm sure you wouldn't seriously
expect it. She's not my daughter--come, old chap! She's not even my
mother, though I dare say it would have been better for me if she had
been. I'll do for her what I'd do for my mother, but I won't do more."
His real excitement broke out in a need to explain and justify himself,
though he kept trying to correct and conceal it with laughs and
mouthfuls and other vain familiarities. Suddenly he broke off, wiping
his moustache with sharp pulls and coming back to Mrs. Beale. "Did she
try to talk YOU over?"

"No--to me she said very little. Very little indeed," Maisie continued.

Sir Claude seemed struck with this. "She was only sweet to Mrs. Wix?"

"As sweet as sugar!" cried Maisie.

He looked amused at her comparison, but he didn't contest it; he uttered
on the contrary, in an assenting way, a little inarticulate sound. "I
know what she CAN be. But much good may it have done her! Mrs. Wix won't
COME 'round.' That's what makes it so fearfully awkward."

Maisie knew it was fearfully awkward; she had known this now, she felt,
for some time, and there was something else it more pressingly concerned
her to learn. "What is it you meant you came over to ask me?"

"Well," said Sir Claude, "I was just going to say. Let me tell you it
will surprise you." She had finished breakfast now and she sat back in
her chair again: she waited in silence to hear. He had pushed the things
before him a little way and had his elbows on the table. This time, she
was convinced, she knew what was coming, and once more, for the crash,
as with Mrs. Wix lately in her room, she held her breath and drew
together her eyelids. He was going to say she must give him up. He
looked hard at her again; then he made his effort. "Should you see your
way to let her go?"

She was bewildered. "To let who--?"

"Mrs. Wix simply. I put it at the worst. Should you see your way to
sacrifice her? Of course I know what I'm asking."

Maisie's eyes opened wide again; this was so different from what she had
expected. "And stay with you alone?"

He gave another push to his coffee-cup. "With me and Mrs. Beale. Of
course it would be rather rum; but everything in our whole story is
rather rum, you know. What's more unusual than for any one to be given
up, like you, by her parents?"

"Oh nothing is more unusual than THAT!" Maisie concurred, relieved at
the contact of a proposition as to which concurrence could have
lucidity.

"Of course it would be quite unconventional," Sir Claude went on--"I
mean the little household we three should make together; but things have
got beyond that, don't you see? They got beyond that long ago. We shall
stay abroad at any rate--it's ever so much easier and it's our affair
and nobody else's: it's no one's business but ours on all the blessed
earth. I don't say that for Mrs. Wix, poor dear--I do her absolute
justice. I respect her; I see what she means; she has done me a lot of
good. But there are the facts. There they are, simply. And here am I,
and here are you. And she won't come round. She's right from her point
of view. I'm talking to you in the most extraordinary way--I'm always
talking to you in the most extraordinary way, ain't I? One would think
you were about sixty and that I--I don't know what any one would think
_I_ am. Unless a beastly cad!" he suggested. "I've been awfully worried,
and this's what it has come to. You've done us the most tremendous good,
and you'll do it still and always, don't you see? We can't let you
go--you're everything. There are the facts as I say. She IS your mother
now, Mrs. Beale, by what has happened, and I, in the same way, I'm your
father. No one can contradict that, and we can't get out of it. My idea
would be a nice little place--somewhere in the South--where she and you
would be together and as good as any one else. And I should be as good
too, don't you see? for I shouldn't live with you, but I should be close
to you--just round the corner, and it would be just the same. My idea
would be that it should all be perfectly open and frank. _Honi soit qui
mal y pense_, don't you know? You're the best thing--you and what we can
do for you--that either of us has ever known," he came back to that.
"When I say to her 'Give her up, come,' she lets me have it bang in the
face: 'Give her up yourself!' It's the same old vicious circle--and when
I say vicious I don't mean a pun, a what-d'-ye-call-'em. Mrs. Wix is the
obstacle; I mean, you know, if she has affected you. She has affected
ME, and yet here I am. I never was in such a tight place: please believe
it's only that that makes me put it to you as I do. My dear child, isn't
that--to put it so--just the way out of it? That came to me yesterday,
in London, after Mrs. Beale had gone: I had the most infernal atrocious
day. 'Go straight over and put it to her: let her choose, freely, her
own self.' So I do, old girl--I put it to you. CAN you choose freely?"

This long address, slowly and brokenly uttered, with fidgets and
falterings, with lapses and recoveries, with a mottled face and
embarrassed but supplicating eyes, reached the child from a quarter
so close that after the shock of the first sharpness she could see
intensely its direction and follow it from point to point; all the more
that it came back to the point at which it had started. There was a word
that had hummed all through it. "Do you call it a 'sacrifice'?"

"Of Mrs. Wix? I'll call it whatever YOU call it. I won't funk it--I
haven't, have I? I'll face it in all its baseness. Does it strike you it
IS base for me to get you well away from her, to smuggle you off here
into a corner and bribe you with sophistries and buttered rolls to
betray her?"

"To betray her?"

"Well--to part with her."

Maisie let the question wait; the concrete image it presented was the
most vivid side of it. "If I part with her where will she go?"

"Back to London."

"But I mean what will she do?"

"Oh as for that I won't pretend I know. I don't. We all have our
difficulties."

That, to Maisie, was at this moment more striking than it had ever been.
"Then who'll teach me?"

Sir Claude laughed out. "What Mrs. Wix teaches?"

She smiled dimly; she saw what he meant. "It isn't so very very much."

"It's so very very little," he returned, "that that's a thing we've
positively to consider. We probably shouldn't give you another
governess. To begin with we shouldn't be able to get one--not of the
only kind that would do. It wouldn't do--the kind that WOULD do," he
queerly enough explained. "I mean they wouldn't stay--heigh-ho! We'd
do you ourselves. Particularly me. You see I CAN now; I haven't got to
mind--what I used to. I won't fight shy as I did--she can show out WITH
me. Our relation, all round, is more regular."

It seemed wonderfully regular, the way he put it; yet none the less,
while she looked at it as judiciously as she could, the picture it made
persisted somehow in being a combination quite distinct--an old woman
and a little girl seated in deep silence on a battered old bench by the
rampart of the _haute ville_. It was just at that hour yesterday; they
were hand in hand; they had melted together. "I don't think you yet
understand how she clings to you," Maisie said at last.

"I do--I do. But for all that--" And he gave, turning in his conscious
exposure, an oppressed impatient sigh; the sigh, even his companion
could recognise, of the man naturally accustomed to that argument, the
man who wanted thoroughly to be reasonable, but who, if really he had to
mind so many things, would be always impossibly hampered. What it came
to indeed was that he understood quite perfectly. If Mrs. Wix clung it
was all the more reason for shaking Mrs. Wix off.

This vision of what she had brought him to occupied our young lady
while, to ask what he owed, he called the waiter and put down a gold
piece that the man carried off for change. Sir Claude looked after him,
then went on: "How could a woman have less to reproach a fellow with? I
mean as regards herself."

Maisie entertained the question. "Yes. How COULD she have less? So why
are you so sure she'll go?"

"Surely you heard why--you heard her come out three nights ago? How can
she do anything but go--after what she then said? I've done what she
warned me of--she was absolutely right. So here we are. Her liking Mrs.
Beale, as you call it now, is a motive sufficient, with other things,
to make her, for your sake, stay on without me; it's not a motive
sufficient to make her, even for yours, stay on WITH me--swallow, don't
you see? what she can't swallow. And when you say she's as fond of me as
you are I think I can, if that's the case, challenge you a little on it.
Would YOU, only with those two, stay on without me?"

The waiter came back with the change, and that gave her, under this
appeal, a moment's respite. But when he had retreated again with the
"tip" gathered in with graceful thanks on a subtle hint from Sir
Claude's forefinger, the latter, while pocketing the money, followed
the appeal up. "Would you let her make you live with Mrs. Beale?"

"Without you? Never," Maisie then answered. "Never," she said again.

It made him quite triumph, and she was indeed herself shaken by the mere
sound of it. "So you see you're not, like her," he exclaimed, "so ready
to give me away!" Then he came back to his original question. "CAN you
choose? I mean can you settle it by a word yourself? Will you stay on
with us without her?" Now in truth she felt the coldness of her terror,
and it seemed to her that suddenly she knew, as she knew it about Sir
Claude, what she was afraid of. She was afraid of herself. She looked at
him in such a way that it brought, she could see, wonder into his face,
a wonder held in check, however, by his frank pretension to play fair
with her, not to use advantages, not to hurry nor hustle her--only to
put her chance clearly and kindly before her. "May I think?" she finally
asked.

"Certainly, certainly. But how long?"

"Oh only a little while," she said meekly.

He had for a moment the air of wishing to look at it as if it were the
most cheerful prospect in the world. "But what shall we do while you're
thinking?" He spoke as if thought were compatible with almost any
distraction.

There was but one thing Maisie wished to do, and after an instant she
expressed it. "Have we got to go back to the hotel?"

"Do you want to?"

"Oh no."

"There's not the least necessity for it." He bent his eyes on his watch;
his face was now very grave. "We can do anything else in the world." He
looked at her again almost as if he were on the point of saying that
they might for instance start off for Paris. But even while she wondered
if that were not coming he had a sudden drop. "We can take a walk."

She was all ready, but he sat there as if he had still something more to
say. This too, however, didn't come; so she herself spoke. "I think I
should like to see Mrs. Wix first."

"Before you decide? All right--all right." He had put on his hat, but
he had still to light a cigarette. He smoked a minute, with his head
thrown back, looking at the ceiling; then he said: "There's one thing
to remember--I've a right to impress it on you: we stand absolutely in
the place of your parents. It's their defection, their extraordinary
baseness, that has made our responsibility. Never was a young person
more directly committed and confided." He appeared to say this over, at
the ceiling, through his smoke, a little for his own illumination. It
carried him after a pause somewhat further. "Though I admit it was to
each of us separately."

He gave her so at that moment and in that attitude the sense of wanting,
as it were, to be on her side--on the side of what would be in every way
most right and wise and charming for her--that she felt a sudden desire
to prove herself not less delicate and magnanimous, not less solicitous
for his own interests. What were these but that of the "regularity"
he had just before spoken of? "It WAS to each of you separately," she
accordingly with much earnestness remarked. "But don't you remember? I
brought you together."

He jumped up with a delighted laugh. "Remember? Rather! You brought us
together, you brought us together. Come!"

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

completion: Maisie and Sir Claude sit together in a cafe, drinking coffee and eating rolls. Sir Claude tells Maisie about being in London, and Maisie notices that Sir Claude seems more nervous than she's ever seen him. They discuss whether they will all--Sir Claude, Mrs. Beale, Mrs. Wix, and Maisie--be eating together later in the day. When Sir Claude asks what Mrs. Wix has told Maisie about him and Mrs. Beale, Maisie plays dumb and simply says "Nothing". After a pause, Sir Claude changes his question, asking if Mrs. Wix has tried to affect Maisie. Maisie again avoids the question, saying that Mrs. Wix has been enjoying how nice Mrs. Beale has been to her over the past few days. Maisie shows Sir Claude that she doesn't trust him by being skeptical that he hasn't seen Mrs. Beale yet since arriving in France. Sir Claude again says that he has come to see Maisie, not Mrs. Beale. They both agree that Mrs. Beale is not going to go back to London on her own accord. After getting more food and drink from a waiter, Sir Claude exclaims that he came back to ask Maisie something. Maisie thinks that he is going to ask whether she would be happy living with just Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix. He says that was not his question, but he gets fixated momentarily on the idea that Mrs. Wix now approves of Mrs. Beale raising Maisie so long as he is not involved. He accuses Mrs. Wix of having affected Maisie and says that he doesn't love Mrs. Wix, even though he knows that she loves him. Mustering up his willpower, he finally asks Maisie his question: "Should you see your way to let go. Should you see your way to sacrifice her. He suggests that Maisie should live with him and Mrs. Beale abroad. Maisie worries about what would happen to Mrs. Wix then, and Sir Claude callously says that everyone has their difficulties. They discuss Maisie's education, with Sir Claude insulting the education Mrs. Wix has been providing. They pay for the meal, and Sir Claude presses Maisie again on whether she would ever live without him. Maisie promises she wouldn't, so Sir Claude asks her to make the decision about living with him and Mrs. Beale. Maisie asks to have some time to think, and they decide that they won't go back to the hotel right away. Maisie also says that she'd like to see Mrs. Wix before deciding. The chapter ends with Maisie again bringing up how she brought Sir Claude in and Mrs. Wix together, which makes Sir Claude momentarily brighten from his nervous state


prompt:
Chapter: She remained out with him for a time of which she could take no measure
save that it was too short for what she wished to make of it--an
interval, a barrier indefinite, insurmountable. They walked about, they
dawdled, they looked in shop-windows; they did all the old things
exactly as if to try to get back all the old safety, to get something
out of them that they had always got before. This had come before,
whatever it was, without their trying, and nothing came now but the
intenser consciousness of their quest and their subterfuge. The
strangest thing of all was what had really happened to the old safety.
What had really happened was that Sir Claude was "free" and that Mrs.
Beale was "free," and yet that the new medium was somehow still more
oppressive than the old. She could feel that Sir Claude concurred with
her in the sense that the oppression would be worst at the inn, where,
till something should be settled, they would feel the want of
something--of what could they call it but a footing? The question of the
settlement loomed larger to her now: it depended, she had learned, so
completely on herself. Her choice, as her friend had called it, was
there before her like an impossible sum on a slate, a sum that in spite
of her plea for consideration she simply got off from doing while she
walked about with him. She must see Mrs. Wix before she could do her
sum; therefore the longer before she saw her the more distant would be
the ordeal. She met at present no demand whatever of her obligation; she
simply plunged, to avoid it, deeper into the company of Sir Claude. She
saw nothing that she had seen hitherto--no touch in the foreign picture
that had at first been always before her. The only touch was that of Sir
Claude's hand, and to feel her own in it was her mute resistance to
time. She went about as sightlessly as if he had been leading her
blindfold. If they were afraid of themselves it was themselves they
would find at the inn. She was certain now that what awaited them there
would be to lunch with Mrs. Beale. All her instinct was to avoid that,
to draw out their walk, to find pretexts, to take him down upon the
beach, to take him to the end of the pier. He said no other word to her
about what they had talked of at breakfast, and she had a dim vision of
how his way of not letting her see him definitely wait for anything from
her would make any one who should know of it, would make Mrs. Wix for
instance, think him more than ever a gentleman. It was true that once or
twice, on the jetty, on the sands, he looked at her for a minute with
eyes that seemed to propose to her to come straight off with him to
Paris. That, however, was not to give her a nudge about her
responsibility. He evidently wanted to procrastinate quite as much as
she did; he was not a bit more in a hurry to get back to the others.
Maisie herself at this moment could be secretly merciless to Mrs. Wix--
to the extent at any rate of not caring if her continued disappearance
did make that lady begin to worry about what had become of her, even
begin to wonder perhaps if the truants hadn't found their remedy. Her
want of mercy to Mrs. Beale indeed was at least as great; for Mrs.
Beale's worry and wonder would be as much greater as the object at which
they were directed. When at last Sir Claude, at the far end of the
_plage_, which they had already, in the many-coloured crowd, once
traversed, suddenly, with a look at his watch, remarked that it was
time, not to get back to the _table d'hote_, but to get over to the
station and meet the Paris papers--when he did this she found herself
thinking quite with intensity what Mrs. Beale and Mrs. Wix WOULD say. On
the way over to the station she had even a mental picture of the
stepfather and the pupil established in a little place in the South
while the governess and the stepmother, in a little place in the North,
remained linked by a community of blankness and by the endless series of
remarks it would give birth to. The Paris papers had come in and her
companion, with a strange extravagance, purchased no fewer than eleven:
it took up time while they hovered at the bookstall on the restless
platform, where the little volumes in a row were all yellow and pink and
one of her favourite old women in one of her favourite old caps
absolutely wheedled him into the purchase of three. They had thus so
much to carry home that it would have seemed simpler, with such a
provision for a nice straight journey through France, just to "nip," as
she phrased it to herself, into the coupe of the train that, a little
further along, stood waiting to start. She asked Sir Claude where it was
going.

"To Paris. Fancy!"

She could fancy well enough. They stood there and smiled, he with all
the newspapers under his arm and she with the three books, one yellow
and two pink. He had told her the pink were for herself and the yellow
one for Mrs. Beale, implying in an interesting way that these were the
natural divisions in France of literature for the young and for the old.
She knew how prepared they looked to pass into the train, and she
presently brought out to her companion: "I wish we could go. Won't you
take me?"

He continued to smile. "Would you really come?"

"Oh yes, oh yes. Try."

"Do you want me to take our tickets?"

"Yes, take them."

"Without any luggage?"

She showed their two armfuls, smiling at him as he smiled at her, but so
conscious of being more frightened than she had ever been in her life
that she seemed to see her whiteness as in a glass. Then she knew that
what she saw was Sir Claude's whiteness: he was as frightened as
herself. "Haven't we got plenty of luggage?" she asked. "Take the
tickets--haven't you time? When does the train go?"

Sir Claude turned to a porter. "When does the train go?"

The man looked up at the station-clock. "In two minutes. _Monsieur est
place?_"

_"Pas encore."_

_"Et vos billets?--vous n'avez que le temps."_ Then after a look at
Maisie, _"Monsieur veut-il que je les prenne?"_ the man said.

Sir Claude turned back to her. _"Veux-tu lieu qu'il en prenne?"_

It was the most extraordinary thing in the world: in the intensity of
her excitement she not only by illumination understood all their French,
but fell into it with an active perfection. She addressed herself
straight to the porter. _"Prenny, prenny. Oh prenny!"_

_"Ah si mademoiselle le veut--!"_ He waited there for the money.

But Sir Claude only stared--stared at her with his white face. "You HAVE
chosen then? You'll let her go?"

Maisie carried her eyes wistfully to the train, where, amid cries of
_"En voiture, en voiture!"_ heads were at windows and doors banging
loud. The porter was pressing. _"Ah vous n'avez plus le temps!"_

"It's going--it's going!" cried Maisie.

They watched it move, they watched it start; then the man went his way
with a shrug. "It's gone!" Sir Claude said.

Maisie crept some distance up the platform; she stood there with her
back to her companion, following it with her eyes, keeping down tears,
nursing her pink and yellow books. She had had a real fright but had
fallen back to earth. The odd thing was that in her fall her fear too
had been dashed down and broken. It was gone. She looked round at last,
from where she had paused, at Sir Claude's, and then saw that his
wasn't. It sat there with him on the bench to which, against the wall of
the station, he had retreated, and where, leaning back and, as she
thought, rather queer, he still waited. She came down to him and he
continued to offer his ineffectual intention of pleasantry. "Yes, I've
chosen," she said to him. "I'll let her go if you--if you--"

She faltered; he quickly took her up. "If I, if I--"

"If you'll give up Mrs. Beale."

"Oh!" he exclaimed; on which she saw how much, how hopelessly he was
afraid. She had supposed at the cafe that it was of his rebellion, of
his gathering motive; but how could that be when his temptations--that
temptation for example of the train they had just lost--were after all
so slight? Mrs. Wix was right. He was afraid of his weakness--of his
weakness.

She couldn't have told you afterwards how they got back to the inn: she
could only have told you that even from this point they had not gone
straight, but once more had wandered and loitered and, in the course of
it, had found themselves on the edge of the quay where--still apparently
with half an hour to spare--the boat prepared for Folkestone was drawn
up. Here they hovered as they had done at the station; here they
exchanged silences again, but only exchanged silences. There were
punctual people on the deck, choosing places, taking the best; some of
them already contented, all established and shawled, facing to England
and attended by the steward, who, confined on such a day to the lighter
offices, tucked up the ladies' feet or opened bottles with a pop. They
looked down at these things without a word; they even picked out a good
place for two that was left in the lee of a lifeboat; and if they
lingered rather stupidly, neither deciding to go aboard nor deciding to
come away, it was Sir Claude quite as much as she who wouldn't move. It
was Sir Claude who cultivated the supreme stillness by which she knew
best what he meant. He simply meant that he knew all she herself meant.
But there was no pretence of pleasantry now: their faces were grave and
tired. When at last they lounged off it was as if his fear, his fear of
his weakness, leaned upon her heavily as they followed the harbour. In
the hall of the hotel as they passed in she saw a battered old box that
she recognised, an ancient receptacle with dangling labels that she knew
and a big painted W, lately done over and intensely personal, that
seemed to stare at her with a recognition and even with some suspicion
of its own. Sir Claude caught it too, and there was agitation for both
of them in the sight of this object on the move. Was Mrs. Wix going and
was the responsibility of giving her up lifted, at a touch, from her
pupil? Her pupil and her pupil's companion, transfixed a moment, held,
in the presence of the omen, communication more intense than in the
presence either of the Paris train or of the Channel steamer; then, and
still without a word, they went straight upstairs. There, however, on
the landing, out of sight of the people below, they collapsed so that
they had to sink down together for support: they simply seated
themselves on the uppermost step while Sir Claude grasped the hand of
his stepdaughter with a pressure that at another moment would probably
have made her squeal. Their books and papers were all scattered. "She
thinks you've given her up!"

"Then I must see her--I must see her," Maisie said.

"To bid her good-bye?"

"I must see her--I must see her," the child only repeated.

They sat a minute longer, Sir Claude, with his tight grip of her hand
and looking away from her, looking straight down the staircase to where,
round the turn, electric bells rattled and the pleasant sea-draught
blew. At last, loosening his grasp, he slowly got up while she did the
same. They went together along the lobby, but before they reached the
salon he stopped again. "If I give up Mrs. Beale--?"

"I'll go straight out with you again and not come back till she has
gone."

He seemed to wonder. "Till Mrs. Beale--?" He had made it sound like a
bad joke.

"I mean till Mrs. Wix leaves--in that boat."

Sir Claude looked almost foolish. "Is she going in that boat?"

"I suppose so. I won't even bid her good-bye," Maisie continued. "I'll
stay out till the boat has gone. I'll go up to the old rampart."

"The old rampart?"

"I'll sit on that old bench where you see the gold Virgin."

"The gold Virgin?" he vaguely echoed. But it brought his eyes back to
her as if after an instant he could see the place and the thing she
named--could see her sitting there alone. "While I break with Mrs.
Beale?"

"While you break with Mrs. Beale."

He gave a long deep smothered sigh. "I must see her first."

"You won't do as I do? Go out and wait?"

"Wait?"--once more he appeared at a loss.

"Till they both have gone," Maisie said.

"Giving US up?"

"Giving US up."

Oh with what a face for an instant he wondered if that could be! But his
wonder the next moment only made him go to the door and, with his hand
on the knob, stand as if listening for voices. Maisie listened, but she
heard none. All she heard presently was Sir Claude's saying with
speculation quite choked off, but so as not to be heard in the salon:
"Mrs. Beale will never go." On this he pushed open the door and she went
in with him. The salon was empty, but as an effect of their entrance the
lady he had just mentioned appeared at the door of the bedroom. "Is she
going?" he then demanded.

Mrs. Beale came forward, closing her door behind her. "I've had the most
extraordinary scene with her. She told me yesterday she'd stay."

"And my arrival has altered it?"

"Oh we took that into account!" Mrs. Beale was flushed, which was never
quite becoming to her, and her face visibly testified to the encounter
to which she alluded. Evidently, however, she had not been worsted, and
she held up her head and smiled and rubbed her hands as if in sudden
emulation of the _patronne_. "She promised she'd stay even if you should
come."

"Then why has she changed?"

"Because she's a hound. The reason she herself gives is that you've been
out too long."

Sir Claude stared. "What has that to do with it?"

"You've been out an age," Mrs. Beale continued; "I myself couldn't
imagine what had become of you. The whole morning," she exclaimed, "and
luncheon long since over!"

Sir Claude appeared indifferent to that. "Did Mrs. Wix go down with
you?" he only asked.

"Not she; she never budged!"--and Mrs. Beale's flush, to Maisie's
vision, deepened. "She moped there--she didn't so much as come out to
me; and when I sent to invite her she simply declined to appear. She
said she wanted nothing, and I went down alone. But when I came up,
fortunately a little primed"--and Mrs. Beale smiled a fine smile of
battle--"she WAS in the field!"

"And you had a big row?"

"We had a big row"--she assented with a frankness as large. "And while
you left me to that sort of thing I should like to know where you were!"
She paused for a reply, but Sir Claude merely looked at Maisie; a
movement that promptly quickened her challenge. "Where the mischief have
you been?"

"You seem to take it as hard as Mrs. Wix," Sir Claude returned.

"I take it as I choose to take it, and you don't answer my question."

He looked again at Maisie--as if for an aid to this effort; whereupon
she smiled at her stepmother and offered: "We've been everywhere."

Mrs. Beale, however, made her no response, thereby adding to a surprise
of which our young lady had already felt the light brush. She had
received neither a greeting nor a glance, but perhaps this was not more
remarkable than the omission, in respect to Sir Claude, parted with in
London two days before, of any sign of a sense of their reunion. Most
remarkable of all was Mrs. Beale's announcement of the pledge given by
Mrs. Wix and not hitherto revealed to her pupil. Instead of heeding this
witness she went on with acerbity: "It might surely have occurred to you
that something would come up."

Sir Claude looked at his watch. "I had no idea it was so late, nor that
we had been out so long. We weren't hungry. It passed like a flash. What
HAS come up?"

"Oh that she's disgusted," said Mrs. Beale.

"With whom then?"

"With Maisie." Even now she never looked at the child, who stood there
equally associated and disconnected. "For having no moral sense."

"How SHOULD she have?" Sir Claude tried again to shine a little at the
companion of his walk. "How at any rate is it proved by her going out
with me?"

"Don't ask ME; ask that woman. She drivels when she doesn't rage," Mrs.
Beale declared.

"And she leaves the child?"

"She leaves the child," said Mrs. Beale with great emphasis and looking
more than ever over Maisie's head.

In this position suddenly a change came into her face, caused, as the
others could the next thing see, by the reappearance of Mrs. Wix in the
doorway which, on coming in at Sir Claude's heels, Maisie had left
gaping. "I DON'T leave the child--I don't, I don't!" she thundered from
the threshold, advancing upon the opposed three but addressing herself
directly to Maisie. She was girded--positively harnessed--for departure,
arrayed as she had been arrayed on her advent and armed with a small fat
rusty reticule which, almost in the manner of a battle-axe, she
brandished in support of her words. She had clearly come straight from
her room, where Maisie in an instant guessed she had directed the
removal of her minor effects. "I don't leave you till I've given you
another chance. Will you come WITH me?"

Maisie turned to Sir Claude, who struck her as having been removed to a
distance of about a mile. To Mrs. Beale she turned no more than Mrs.
Beale had turned: she felt as if already their difference had been
disclosed. What had come out about that in the scene between the two
women? Enough came out now, at all events, as she put it practically to
her stepfather. "Will YOU come? Won't you?" she enquired as if she had
not already seen that she should have to give him up. It was the last
flare of her dream. By this time she was afraid of nothing.

"I should think you'd be too proud to ask!" Mrs. Wix interposed. Mrs.
Wix was herself conspicuously too proud.

But at the child's words Mrs. Beale had fairly bounded. "Come away from
ME, Maisie?" It was a wail of dismay and reproach, in which her
stepdaughter was astonished to read that she had had no hostile
consciousness and that if she had been so actively grand it was not from
suspicion, but from strange entanglements of modesty.

Sir Claude presented to Mrs. Beale an expression positively sick. "Don't
put it to her THAT way!" There had indeed been something in Mrs. Beale's
tone, and for a moment our young lady was reminded of the old days in
which so many of her friends had been "compromised."

This friend blushed; she was before Mrs. Wix, and though she bridled she
took the hint. "No--it isn't the way." Then she showed she knew the way.
"Don't be a still bigger fool, dear, but go straight to your room and
wait there till I can come to you."

Maisie made no motion to obey, but Mrs. Wix raised a hand that
forestalled every evasion. "Don't move till you've heard me. I'M going,
but I must first understand. Have you lost it again?"

Maisie surveyed--for the idea of a describable loss--the immensity of
space. Then she replied lamely enough: "I feel as if I had lost
everything."

Mrs. Wix looked dark. "Do you mean to say you HAVE lost what we found
together with so much difficulty two days ago?" As her pupil failed of
response she continued: "Do you mean to say you've already forgotten
what we found together?"

Maisie dimly remembered. "My moral sense?"

"Your moral sense. HAVEN'T I, after all, brought it out?" She spoke as
she had never spoken even in the schoolroom and with the book in her
hand.

It brought back to the child's recollection how she sometimes couldn't
repeat on Friday the sentence that had been glib on Wednesday, and she
dealt all feebly and ruefully with the present tough passage. Sir Claude
and Mrs. Beale stood there like visitors at an "exam." She had indeed an
instant a whiff of the faint flower that Mrs. Wix pretended to have
plucked and now with such a peremptory hand thrust at her nose. Then it
left her, and, as if she were sinking with a slip from a foothold, her
arms made a short jerk. What this jerk represented was the spasm within
her of something still deeper than a moral sense. She looked at her
examiner; she looked at the visitors; she felt the rising of the tears
she had kept down at the station. They had nothing--no, distinctly
nothing--to do with her moral sense. The only thing was the old flat
shameful schoolroom plea. "I don't know--I don't know."

"Then you've lost it." Mrs. Wix seemed to close the book as she fixed
the straighteners on Sir Claude. "You've nipped it in the bud. You've
killed it when it had begun to live."

She was a newer Mrs. Wix than ever, a Mrs. Wix high and great; but Sir
Claude was not after all to be treated as a little boy with a missed
lesson. "I've not killed anything," he said; "on the contrary I think
I've produced life. I don't know what to call it--I haven't even known
how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it's
the most beautiful thing I've ever met--it's exquisite, it's sacred." He
had his hands in his pockets and, though a trace of the sickness he had
just shown perhaps lingered there, his face bent itself with
extraordinary gentleness on both the friends he was about to lose. "Do
you know what I came back for?" he asked of the elder.

"I think I do!" cried Mrs. Wix, surprisingly un-mollified and with the
heat of her late engagement with Mrs. Beale still on her brow. That
lady, as if a little besprinkled by such turns of the tide, uttered a
loud inarticulate protest and, averting herself, stood a moment at the
window.

"I came back with a proposal," said Sir Claude.

"To me?" Mrs. Wix asked.

"To Maisie. That she should give you up."

"And does she?"

Sir Claude wavered. "Tell her!" he then exclaimed to the child, also
turning away as if to give her the chance. But Mrs. Wix and her pupil
stood confronted in silence, Maisie whiter than ever--more awkward,
more rigid and yet more dumb. They looked at each other hard, and as
nothing came from them Sir Claude faced about again. "You won't tell
her?--you can't?" Still she said nothing; whereupon, addressing Mrs.
Wix, he broke into a kind of ecstasy. "She refused--she refused!"

Maisie, at this, found her voice. "I didn't refuse. I didn't," she
repeated.

It brought Mrs. Beale straight back to her. "You accepted, angel--you
accepted!" She threw herself upon the child and, before Maisie could
resist, had sunk with her upon the sofa, possessed of her, encircling
her. "You've given her up already, you've given her up for ever, and
you're ours and ours only now, and the sooner she's off the better!"

Maisie had shut her eyes, but at a word of Sir Claude's they opened.
"Let her go!" he said to Mrs. Beale.

"Never, never, never!" cried Mrs. Beale. Maisie felt herself more
compressed.

"Let her go!" Sir Claude more intensely repeated. He was looking at Mrs.
Beale and there was something in his voice. Maisie knew from a loosening
of arms that she had become conscious of what it was; she slowly rose
from the sofa, and the child stood there again dropped and divided.
"You're free--you're free," Sir Claude went on; at which Maisie's back
became aware of a push that vented resentment and that placed her again
in the centre of the room, the cynosure of every eye and not knowing
which way to turn.

She turned with an effort to Mrs. Wix. "I didn't refuse to give you up.
I said I would if HE'D give up--"

"Give up Mrs. Beale?" burst from Mrs. Wix.

"Give up Mrs. Beale. What do you call that but exquisite?" Sir Claude
demanded of all of them, the lady mentioned included; speaking with a
relish as intense now as if some lovely work of art or of nature had
suddenly been set down among them. He was rapidly recovering himself on
this basis of fine appreciation. "She made her condition--with such a
sense of what it should be! She made the only right one."

"The only right one?"--Mrs. Beale returned to the charge. She had taken
a moment before a snub from him, but she was not to be snubbed on this.
"How can you talk such rubbish and how can you back her up in such
impertinence? What in the world have you done to her to make her think
of such stuff?" She stood there in righteous wrath; she flashed her eyes
round the circle. Maisie took them full in her own, knowing that here at
last was the moment she had had most to reckon with. But as regards her
stepdaughter Mrs. Beale subdued herself to a question deeply mild. "HAVE
you made, my own love, any such condition as that?"

Somehow, now that it was there, the great moment was not so bad. What
helped the child was that she knew what she wanted. All her learning and
learning had made her at last learn that; so that if she waited an
instant to reply it was only from the desire to be nice. Bewilderment
had simply gone or at any rate was going fast. Finally she answered.
"Will you give HIM up? Will you?"

"Ah leave her alone--leave her, leave her!" Sir Claude in sudden
supplication murmured to Mrs. Beale.

Mrs. Wix at the same instant found another apostrophe. "Isn't it enough
for you, madam, to have brought her to discussing your relations?"

Mrs. Beale left Sir Claude unheeded, but Mrs. Wix could make her flame.
"My relations? What do you know, you hideous creature, about my
relations, and what business on earth have you to speak of them? Leave
the room this instant, you horrible old woman!"

"I think you had better go--you must really catch your boat," Sir Claude
said distressfully to Mrs. Wix. He was out of it now, or wanted to be;
he knew the worst and had accepted it: what now concerned him was to
prevent, to dissipate vulgarities. "Won't you go--won't you just get off
quickly?"

"With the child as quickly as you like. Not without her." Mrs. Wix was
adamant.

"Then why did you lie to me, you fiend?" Mrs. Beale almost yelled. "Why
did you tell me an hour ago that you had given her up?"

"Because I despaired of her--because I thought she had left me." Mrs.
Wix turned to Maisie. "You were WITH them--in their connexion. But now
your eyes are open, and I take you!"

"No you don't!" and Mrs. Beale made, with a great fierce jump, a wild
snatch at her stepdaughter. She caught her by the arm and, completing an
instinctive movement, whirled her round in a further leap to the door,
which had been closed by Sir Claude the instant their voices had risen.
She fell back against it and, even while denouncing and waving off Mrs.
Wix, kept it closed in an incoherence of passion. "You don't take her,
but you bundle yourself: she stays with her own people and she's rid of
you! I never heard anything so monstrous!" Sir Claude had rescued Maisie
and kept hold of her; he held her in front of him, resting his hands
very lightly on her shoulders and facing the loud adversaries. Mrs.
Beale's flush had dropped; she had turned pale with a splendid wrath.
She kept protesting and dismissing Mrs. Wix; she glued her back to the
door to prevent Maisie's flight; she drove out Mrs. Wix by the window or
the chimney. "You're a nice one--'discussing relations'--with your talk
of our 'connexion' and your insults! What in the world's our connexion
but the love of the child who's our duty and our life and who holds us
together as closely as she originally brought us?"

"I know, I know!" Maisie said with a burst of eagerness. "I did bring
you."

The strangest of laughs escaped from Sir Claude. "You did bring us--you
did!" His hands went up and down gently on her shoulders.

Mrs. Wix so dominated the situation that she had something sharp for
every one. "There you have it, you see!" she pregnantly remarked to her
pupil.

"WILL you give him up?" Maisie persisted to Mrs. Beale.

"To YOU, you abominable little horror?" that lady indignantly enquired,
"and to this raving old demon who has filled your dreadful little mind
with her wickedness? Have you been a hideous little hypocrite all these
years that I've slaved to make you love me and deludedly believed you
did?"

"I love Sir Claude--I love HIM," Maisie replied with an awkward sense
that she appeared to offer it as something that would do as well. Sir
Claude had continued to pat her, and it was really an answer to his
pats.

"She hates you--she hates you," he observed with the oddest quietness to
Mrs. Beale.

His quietness made her blaze. "And you back her up in it and give me up
to outrage?"

"No; I only insist that she's free--she's free."

Mrs. Beale stared--Mrs. Beale glared. "Free to starve with this pauper
lunatic?"

"I'll do more for her than YOU ever did!" Mrs. Wix retorted. "I'll work
my fingers to the bone."

Maisie, with Sir Claude's hands still on her shoulders, felt, just as
she felt the fine surrender in them, that over her head he looked in a
certain way at Mrs. Wix. "You needn't do that," she heard him say. "She
has means."

"Means?--Maisie?" Mrs. Beale shrieked. "Means that her vile father has
stolen!"

"I'll get them back--I'll get them back. I'll look into it." He smiled
and nodded at Mrs. Wix.

This had a fearful effect on his other friend. "Haven't I looked into
it, I should like to know, and haven't I found an abyss? It's too
inconceivable--your cruelty to me!" she wildly broke out. She had hot
tears in her eyes.

He spoke to her very kindly, almost coaxingly. "We'll look into it
again; we'll look into it together. It IS an abyss, but he CAN be
made--or Ida can. Think of the money they're getting now!" he laughed.
"It's all right, it's all right," he continued. "It wouldn't do--it
wouldn't do. We CAN'T work her in. It's perfectly true--she's unique.
We're not good enough--oh no!" and, quite exuberantly, he laughed again.

"Not good enough, and that beast IS?" Mrs. Beale shouted.

At this for a moment there was a hush in the room, and in the midst of
it Sir Claude replied to the question by moving with Maisie to Mrs. Wix.
The next thing the child knew she was at that lady's side with an arm
firmly grasped. Mrs. Beale still guarded the door. "Let them pass," said
Sir Claude at last.

She remained there, however; Maisie saw the pair look at each other.
Then she saw Mrs. Beale turn to her. "I'm your mother now, Maisie. And
he's your father."

"That's just where it is!" sighed Mrs. Wix with an effect of irony
positively detached and philosophic.

Mrs. Beale continued to address her young friend, and her effort to be
reasonable and tender was in its way remarkable. "We're representative,
you know, of Mr. Farange and his former wife. This person represents
mere illiterate presumption. We take our stand on the law."

"Oh the law, the law!" Mrs. Wix superbly jeered. "You had better indeed
let the law have a look at you!"

"Let them pass--let them pass!" Sir Claude pressed his friend hard--he
pleaded.

But she fastened herself still to Maisie. "DO you hate me, dearest?"

Maisie looked at her with new eyes, but answered as she had answered
before. "Will you give him up?"

Mrs. Beale's rejoinder hung fire, but when it came it was noble. "You
shouldn't talk to me of such things!" She was shocked, she was
scandalised to tears.

For Mrs. Wix, however, it was her discrimination that was indelicate.
"You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" she roundly cried.

Sir Claude made a supreme appeal. "Will you be so good as to allow these
horrors to terminate?"

Mrs. Beale fixed her eyes on him, and again Maisie watched them. "You
should do him justice," Mrs. Wix went on to Mrs. Beale. "We've always
been devoted to him, Maisie and I--and he has shown how much he likes
us. He would like to please her; he would like even, I think, to please
me. But he hasn't given you up."

They stood confronted, the step-parents, still under Maisie's
observation. That observation had never sunk so deep as at this
particular moment. "Yes, my dear, I haven't given you up," Sir Claude
said to Mrs. Beale at last, "and if you'd like me to treat our friends
here as solemn witnesses I don't mind giving you my word for it that I
never never will. There!" he dauntlessly exclaimed.

"He can't!" Mrs. Wix tragically commented.

Mrs. Beale, erect and alive in her defeat, jerked her handsome face
about. "He can't!" she literally mocked.

"He can't, he can't, he can't!"--Sir Claude's gay emphasis wonderfully
carried it off.

Mrs. Beale took it all in, yet she held her ground; on which Maisie
addressed Mrs. Wix. "Shan't we lose the boat?"

"Yes, we shall lose the boat," Mrs. Wix remarked to Sir Claude.

Mrs. Beale meanwhile faced full at Maisie. "I don't know what to make of
you!" she launched.

"Good-bye," said Maisie to Sir Claude.

"Good-bye, Maisie," Sir Claude answered.

Mrs. Beale came away from the door. "Goodbye!" she hurled at Maisie;
then passed straight across the room and disappeared in the adjoining
one.

Sir Claude had reached the other door and opened it. Mrs. Wix was
already out. On the threshold Maisie paused; she put out her hand to her
stepfather. He took it and held it a moment, and their eyes met as the
eyes of those who have done for each other what they can. "Good-bye," he
repeated.

"Good-bye." And Maisie followed Mrs. Wix.

They caught the steamer, which was just putting off, and, hustled across
the gulf, found themselves on the deck so breathless and so scared that
they gave up half the voyage to letting their emotion sink. It sank
slowly and imperfectly; but at last, in mid-channel, surrounded by the
quiet sea, Mrs. Wix had courage to revert. "I didn't look back, did
you?"

"Yes. He wasn't there," said Maisie.

"Not on the balcony?"

Maisie waited a moment; then "He wasn't there" she simply said again.

Mrs. Wix also was silent a while. "He went to HER," she finally
observed.

"Oh I know!" the child replied.

Mrs. Wix gave a sidelong look. She still had room for wonder at what
Maisie knew.

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

completion: Since neither Maisie nor Sir Claude want to go back and face Mrs. Wix and Mrs. Beale, they go on a long walk around Boulogne. They come upon a train going to Paris and Maisie suddenly asks to go. She tells Sir Claude to get tickets, and they try to do so in a hurry, knowing the train is leaving in just two minutes. The train leaves while they are still negotiating about the tickets, and they silently watch it pull away. When train has disappeared, Maisie lays out her deal: she can give up Mrs. Wix if Sir Claude can give up Mrs. Beale. Sir Claude seems very afraid, and he doesn't give an answer. They look for a long while at a boat going back to England, still not wanting to face the women at the hotel. Finally, Sir Claude and Maisie return to the hotel. Upon arriving, they see Mrs. Wix's bags packed in the hall as if she is leaving. Sir Claude says that Mrs. Wix must have thought Maisie had already given her up, causing Maisie to panic and repeat "I must see her". Maisie and Sir Claude again discuss the terms of their deal, but neither of them make any absolute promises about sacrificing Mrs. Wix or Mrs. Beale. Maisie suggests that they should both wait for the women to go on their own accord, but Sir Claude says that Mrs. Beale will never do so. Mrs. Beale finds them and announces that Mrs. Wix is leaving because Sir Claude and Maisie left for so long. She says that she and Mrs. Wix had a big fight, and she herself criticizes them for being out such a long time without sending any word. Mrs. Beale reports that Mrs. Wix is so upset with Maisie "for having no moral sense" that she is leaving her. Mrs. Wix enters the room and passionately denies this. She pleads with Maisie to come with her. Maisie turns to Sir Claude and pleads, "Will you come. Mrs. Beale tries to make Maisie feel guilty, then commands her to go to her room. Mrs. Wix commands Maisie not to go, and Maisie stays in place. Mrs. Wix asks whether Maisie has lost her moral sense, and Maisie feels confused, as if she has forgotten a lesson. Despairingly, Maisie repeats, "I don't know". Mrs. Wix accuses Sir Claude of killing Maisie's moral sense; he counters he hasn't killed something but rather "produced life". Sir Claude reveals his proposal to Maisie and tries to make Maisie admit that she is willing to give up Mrs. Wix. Mrs. Beale tries to hug Maisie, and Maisie closes her eyes as Sir Claude tries to get Mrs. Beale to release her. Maisie reveals her part of the deal: that Sir Claude would have to give up Mrs. Beale. Mrs. Beale calls it "rubbish" , and turns directly to Maisie to ask whether she really made such a proposal. Maisie begs Mrs. Beale directly to give up Sir Claude. Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale try to get Mrs. Wix to leave, saying she had already planned to do so, but Mrs. Wix is now adamant that she won't separate from Maisie. She tells Maisie that she will take her, causing Mrs. Beale to physically grab Maisie again. Mrs. Beale criticizes Mrs. Wix for having lied about leaving, but Maisie stays focused on Mrs. Beale, begging her again to leave Sir Claude. Mrs. Beale tells Maisie that she was the one who brought them together, and both Maisie and Sir Claude repeat this. Mrs. Beale says that she believed Maisie loved her; Maisie says that she loves Sir Claude and Sir Claude tells Mrs. Beale that Maisie hates her. The conversation suddenly turns to the financial concerns of raising Maisie. Mrs. Beale says that Mrs. Wix can't raise Maisie because she doesn't have the money, but Sir Claude says he can get money from Maisie's father. Mrs. Beale says she's already tried to no avail, and Sir Claude says that they'll try again together. Sir Claude says that they're not good enough to raise Maisie, and he moves toward where Maisie and Mrs. Wix are standing. Mrs. Beale blocks the door, but Sir Claude tells her to stand aside and let Mrs. Wix and Maisie through. Mrs. Beale makes a last attempt, saying that she is Maisie's mother and Sir Claude her father. Maisie again pleads for her to leave Sir Claude. Sir Claude turns to Mrs. Beale and says that he can't give her up. She mocks him for this, but he seems pleased with the pronouncement. Suddenly, the fight seems to be over. Maisie says goodbye to Sir Claude and he says goodbye to her. Mrs. Beale angrily says goodbye to Maisie and exits the room. Then Maisie follows Mrs. Wix out of the hotel and all the way to the boat. After they have ridden for a while, Mrs. Wix asks Maisie if Sir Claude watched them leave from the balcony. Maisie says he didn't


prompt:
Chapter: The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was inevitably
confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware that something had
happened which must matter a good deal and looking anxiously out for
the effects of so great a cause. It was to be the fate of this patient
little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even
at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient,
had perhaps ever understood before. Only a drummer-boy in a ballad or
a story could have been so in the thick of the fight. She was taken
into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she
might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a
magic-lantern. Her little world was phantasmagoric--strange shadows
dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given
for her--a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre. She was
in short introduced to life with a liberality in which the selfishness
of others found its account, and there was nothing to avert the
sacrifice but the modesty of her youth.

Her first term was with her father, who spared her only in not letting
her have the wild letters addressed to her by her mother: he confined
himself to holding them up at her and shaking them, while he showed his
teeth, and then amusing her by the way he chucked them, across the room,
bang into the fire. Even at that moment, however, she had a scared
anticipation of fatigue, a guilty sense of not rising to the occasion,
feeling the charm of the violence with which the stiff unopened
envelopes, whose big monograms--Ida bristled with monograms--she would
have liked to see, were made to whizz, like dangerous missiles, through
the air. The greatest effect of the great cause was her own greater
importance, chiefly revealed to her in the larger freedom with which
she was handled, pulled hither and thither and kissed, and the
proportionately greater niceness she was obliged to show. Her features
had somehow become prominent; they were so perpetually nipped by the
gentlemen who came to see her father and the smoke of whose cigarettes
went into her face. Some of these gentlemen made her strike matches and
light their cigarettes; others, holding her on knees violently jolted,
pinched the calves of her legs till she shrieked--her shriek was much
admired--and reproached them with being toothpicks. The word stuck in
her mind and contributed to her feeling from this time that she was
deficient in something that would meet the general desire. She found
out what it was: it was a congenital tendency to the production of a
substance to which Moddle, her nurse, gave a short ugly name, a name
painfully associated at dinner with the part of the joint that she
didn't like. She had left behind her the time when she had no desires
to meet, none at least save Moddle's, who, in Kensington Gardens, was
always on the bench when she came back to see if she had been playing
too far. Moddle's desire was merely that she shouldn't do that, and she
met it so easily that the only spots in that long brightness were the
moments of her wondering what would become of her if, on her rushing
back, there should be no Moddle on the bench. They still went to the
Gardens, but there was a difference even there; she was impelled
perpetually to look at the legs of other children and ask her nurse if
THEY were toothpicks. Moddle was terribly truthful; she always said: "Oh
my dear, you'll not find such another pair as your own." It seemed to
have to do with something else that Moddle often said: "You feel the
strain--that's where it is; and you'll feel it still worse, you know."

Thus from the first Maisie not only felt it, but knew she felt it. A
part of it was the consequence of her father's telling her he felt it
too, and telling Moddle, in her presence, that she must make a point of
driving that home. She was familiar, at the age of six, with the fact
that everything had been changed on her account, everything ordered to
enable him to give himself up to her. She was to remember always the
words in which Moddle impressed upon her that he did so give himself:
"Your papa wishes you never to forget, you know, that he has been
dreadfully put about." If the skin on Moddle's face had to Maisie the
air of being unduly, almost painfully, stretched, it never presented
that appearance so much as when she uttered, as she often had occasion
to utter, such words. The child wondered if they didn't make it hurt
more than usual; but it was only after some time that she was able to
attach to the picture of her father's sufferings, and more particularly
to her nurse's manner about them, the meaning for which these things
had waited. By the time she had grown sharper, as the gentlemen who had
criticised her calves used to say, she found in her mind a collection of
images and echoes to which meanings were attachable--images and echoes
kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers,
like games she wasn't yet big enough to play. The great strain meanwhile
was that of carrying by the right end the things her father said about
her mother--things mostly indeed that Moddle, on a glimpse of them, as
if they had been complicated toys or difficult books, took out of her
hands and put away in the closet. A wonderful assortment of objects of
this kind she was to discover there later, all tumbled up too with the
things, shuffled into the same receptacle, that her mother had said
about her father.

She had the knowledge that on a certain occasion which every day brought
nearer her mother would be at the door to take her away, and this would
have darkened all the days if the ingenious Moddle hadn't written on a
paper in very big easy words ever so many pleasures that she would enjoy
at the other house. These promises ranged from "a mother's fond love"
to "a nice poached egg to your tea," and took by the way the prospect
of sitting up ever so late to see the lady in question dressed, in
silks and velvets and diamonds and pearls, to go out: so that it was a
real support to Maisie, at the supreme hour, to feel how, by Moddle's
direction, the paper was thrust away in her pocket and there clenched in
her fist. The supreme hour was to furnish her with a vivid reminiscence,
that of a strange outbreak in the drawing-room on the part of Moddle,
who, in reply to something her father had just said, cried aloud: "You
ought to be perfectly ashamed of yourself--you ought to blush, sir, for
the way you go on!" The carriage, with her mother in it, was at the
door; a gentleman who was there, who was always there, laughed out very
loud; her father, who had her in his arms, said to Moddle: "My dear
woman, I'll settle you presently!"--after which he repeated, showing
his teeth more than ever at Maisie while he hugged her, the words for
which her nurse had taken him up. Maisie was not at the moment so fully
conscious of them as of the wonder of Moddle's sudden disrespect and
crimson face; but she was able to produce them in the course of five
minutes when, in the carriage, her mother, all kisses, ribbons, eyes,
arms, strange sounds and sweet smells, said to her: "And did your
beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving
mamma?" Then it was that she found the words spoken by her beastly papa
to be, after all, in her little bewildered ears, from which, at her
mother's appeal, they passed, in her clear shrill voice, straight to
her little innocent lips. "He said I was to tell you, from him," she
faithfully reported, "that you're a nasty horrid pig!"

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

completion: We meet Maisie, age six, and find out what her world is like while she's spending her "first term with her father" . After the impersonal preface, James's narrator shows us what it feels like to be Maisie, and the novel will remain close to her point of view throughout . In short, Maisie has got a tough life ahead of her. Beale Farange doesn't hide his anger for her benefit and bad-mouths Maisie's mother in front of his daughter on the regular. We also meet Maisie's babysitter, Moddle . Moddle is always telling Maisie what a bad pair her parents are . Moddle promises Maisie that things will be better when she goes to stay with her mother. But the chapter ends with Maisie repeating an insult per her father's request, one that's sure to get Ida Farange's goat: "'He said I was to tell you, from him,' she faithfully reported, 'that you're a nasty, horrid pig!'" . Ouch.