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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Captain looked vague. "Lord Eric?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Mrs. Wix?"

"My old governess."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then will you come back to her?"

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

"Yes she will. She wants you."

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

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

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

"Oh yes she will if _I_ ask her!"

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

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

"Then you don't mean now?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Doesn't care for what?"

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

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

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

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

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

"He'll have left her of course."

"Does he really intend to do that?"

"You've every opportunity to ask him."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A little?"

"Like all the others."

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

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

"Oh I'm in for it!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, not very much."

"He didn't speak of your mother?"

"Oh yes, a little!"

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

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

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

completion: Instead of being scared or shy, Maisie takes to the Captain immediately. They share their shock over Sir Claude having called Ida "a damned old brute" , and the Captain tells Maisie that he thinks Ida is "an angel". The Captain tells Maisie that her mother talks about her a lot, and Maisie is so flustered by his charming nature that she starts to ramble about all the other men her mother has been romantically involved with. The Captain again says that Ida is very fond of Maisie, and he goes on to say that she has suffered greatly in her sacrifices for her daughter. Maisie asks the Captain whether he loves Ida, and when he says that he does, Maisie sobs, begging him to say it again, perhaps because she has never met someone who seems to be truly in love with her mother. The Captain suggests that she come back to live with her mother, saying she won't be living with Sir Claude anymore and that he will be there "some day". Maisie sees that Sir Claude and her mother have stopped fighting, and Sir Claude is approaching Maisie and the Captain while casually lighting a cigarette. Maisie tells the Captain that Sir Claude won't care about her mother's affairs, but Ida sends the Captain off because she doesn't want the two men to interact. Before the Captain leaves, Maisie passionately tells him to not love her mother "only for just a little. like all the others. Do it always. The Captain leaves and Sir Claude reaches Maisie. He looks stranger than she has ever seen him, seeming disgusted and cold. He asks who the Captain is and what they have been doing, and Maisie chooses to play dumb, a tactic she has usually used on her biological parents but not Sir Claude. This angers him so much that he calls her "the perfection of a dunce" , and he puts her in a cab to go home by herself. She feels joyful for successfully hiding her knowledge, as she used to when hiding things her father said from her mother


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

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

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

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

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

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

"What kind of idea?"

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

"Delicate?"--that was ambiguous.

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

Maisie wondered. "You and me?"

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

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

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

"Mixed up with what?"

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

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

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

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

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

completion: Sir Claude again doesn't visit Maisie's father's house for a while, but Mrs. Beale admits to Maisie when asked that she does continue to see Sir Claude alone. Maisie still does not seem to understand the nature of their relationship as an extramarital affair, but she is pleased that Mrs. Beale is able to bring her notes from Sir Claude every day or two when she sees him. A new phase of Maisie's life begins in which she starts to attend lessons more frequently and forgets almost entirely about Mrs. Wix. Sir Claude does not attend the lessons along with Maisie and Mrs. Beale as promised, though Mrs. Beale says that he will some day, causing Maisie to always hope he will be there. One day, Mrs. Beale announces out of the blue that she and Maisie are going to go to an event at Earl's Court in the evening. She says that there is a chance Sir Claude will be there, and both of them seem to have their hopes up. Mrs. Beale admits to Maisie that she and Sir Claude haven't been spending time together with Maisie because Sir Claude doesn't want to get her "mixed up" , though she refuses to elaborate further on what this means. This causes Maisie some confusion, but she settles on telling Mrs. Beale that they should assure Sir Claude that neither of them minds her being mixed up


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

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

"Of all the wickedness--BEALE!"

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

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

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

"He never went--the hound!"

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

"Who IS she?" she asked again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It must be Mrs. Cuddon!"

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

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

"Is she very rich?" He had begun to strike her as almost embarrassed, so
shy that he might have found himself with a young lady with whom he had
little in common. She was literally moved by this apprehension to offer
him some tactful relief.

Beale Farange stood and smiled at his young lady, his back to
the fanciful fireplace, his light overcoat--the very lightest in
London--wide open, and his wonderful lustrous beard completely
concealing the expanse of his shirt-front. It pleased her more than ever
to think that papa was handsome and, though as high aloft as mamma and
almost, in his specially florid evening-dress, as splendid, of a beauty
somehow less belligerent, less terrible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

completion: The Exhibition at Earl's Court is not as great as Mrs. Beale and Maisie had hoped. Because of their lack of money, they have to have only a small meal beforehand, and they can't actually see a lot of the sideshows because they cost money. They look around but see Sir Claude nowhere, causing them even more frustration. Suddenly, Mrs. Beale sees Beale, Maisie's father. Maisie immediately assumes that he lied to Mrs. Beale about where he would be, like her mother lied to Sir Claude the day they ran into her in the park. Beale is with a woman who Mrs. Beale says must be Mrs. Cuddon. Quickly, Beale approaches Mrs. Beale and Maisie and takes Maisie with him into a carriage, leaving Mrs. Beale and the other woman behind. He doesn't speak, but he trembles and hugs her to him. When the carriage stops, it is not at Beale's house but rather a fancy house with an electric light. They go inside, and Beale tells Maisie it is the house of an "American Countess. Maisie is very impressed by the Countess's riches, and she is happy when Beale says that the Countess should join them shortly. Beale speaks harshly about his wife, Mrs. Beale, when she is brought up, but Maisie is happy to be receiving such unusual attention from her father. Beale continues to show Maisie the lavish items in the Countess's living room and treats Maisie affectionately, even playing with her hair as she sits on his lap. Maisie insightfully thinks that her father does not actually know her but wants her to play along as if they are close


prompt:
Chapter: When he had lighted a cigarette and begun to smoke in her face it was as
if he had struck with the match the note of some queer clumsy ferment
of old professions, old scandals, old duties, a dim perception of what
he possessed in her and what, if everything had only--damn it!--been
totally different, she might still be able to give him. What she was
able to give him, however, as his blinking eyes seemed to make out
through the smoke, would be simply what he should be able to get from
her. To give something, to give here on the spot, was all her own
desire. Among the old things that came back was her little instinct of
keeping the peace; it made her wonder more sharply what particular thing
she could do or not do, what particular word she could speak or not
speak, what particular line she could take or not take, that might for
every one, even for the Countess, give a better turn to the crisis. She
was ready, in this interest, for an immense surrender, a surrender of
everything but Sir Claude, of everything but Mrs. Beale. The immensity
didn't include THEM; but if he had an idea at the back of his head
she had also one in a recess as deep, and for a time, while they sat
together, there was an extraordinary mute passage between her vision
of this vision of his, his vision of her vision, and her vision of his
vision of her vision. What there was no effective record of indeed
was the small strange pathos on the child's part of an innocence so
saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy. What, further,
Beale finally laid hold of while he masked again with his fine presence
half the flounces of the fireplace was: "Do you know, my dear, I shall
soon be off to America?" It struck his daughter both as a short cut and
as the way he wouldn't have said it to his wife. But his wife figured
with a bright superficial assurance in her response.

"Do you mean with Mrs. Beale?"

Her father looked at her hard. "Don't be a little ass!"

Her silence appeared to represent a concentrated effort not to be. "Then
with the Countess?"

"With her or without her, my dear; that concerns only your poor daddy.
She has big interests over there, and she wants me to take a look at
them."

Maisie threw herself into them. "Will that take very long?"

"Yes; they're in such a muddle--it may take months. Now what I want to
hear, you know, is whether you'd like to come along?"

Planted once more before him in the middle of the room she felt herself
turning white. "I?" she gasped, yet feeling as soon as she had spoken
that such a note of dismay was not altogether pretty. She felt it still
more while her father replied, with a shake of his legs, a toss of his
cigarette-ash and a fidgety look--he was for ever taking one--all the
length of his waistcoat and trousers, that she needn't be quite so
disgusted. It helped her in a few seconds to appear more as he would
like her that she saw, in the lovely light of the Countess's splendour,
exactly, however she appeared, the right answer to make. "Dear papa,
I'll go with you anywhere."

He turned his back to her and stood with his nose at the glass of the
chimneypiece while he brushed specks of ash out of his beard. Then he
abruptly said: "Do you know anything about your brute of a mother?"

It was just of her brute of a mother that the manner of the question in
a remarkable degree reminded her: it had the free flight of one of Ida's
fine bridgings of space. With the sense of this was kindled for Maisie
at the same time an inspiration. "Oh yes, I know everything!" and she
became so radiant that her father, seeing it in the mirror, turned back
to her and presently, on the sofa, had her at his knee again and was
again particularly affecting. Maisie's inspiration instructed her,
pressingly, that the more she should be able to say about mamma the
less she would be called upon to speak of her step-parents. She kept
hoping the Countess would come in before her power to protect them was
exhausted; and it was now, in closer quarters with her companion, that
the idea at the back of her head shifted its place to her lips. She told
him she had met her mother in the Park with a gentleman who, while Sir
Claude had strolled with her ladyship, had been kind and had sat and
talked to her; narrating the scene with a remembrance of her pledge of
secrecy to the Captain quite brushed away by the joy of seeing Beale
listen without profane interruption. It was almost an amazement, but it
was indeed all a joy, thus to be able to guess that papa was at last
quite tired of his anger--of his anger at any rate about mamma. He was
only bored with her now. That made it, however, the more imperative that
his spent displeasure shouldn't be blown out again. It charmed the child
to see how much she could interest him; and the charm remained even
when, after asking her a dozen questions, he observed musingly and a
little obscurely: "Yes, damned if she won't!" For in this too there was
a detachment, a wise weariness that made her feel safe. She had had
to mention Sir Claude, though she mentioned him as little as possible
and Beale only appeared to look quite over his head. It pieced itself
together for her that this was the mildness of general indifference, a
source of profit so great for herself personally that if the Countess
was the author of it she was prepared literally to hug the Countess. She
betrayed that eagerness by a restless question about her, to which her
father replied: "Oh she has a head on her shoulders. I'll back her to
get out of anything!" He looked at Maisie quite as if he could trace the
connexion between her enquiry and the impatience of her gratitude. "Do
you mean to say you'd really come with me?"

She felt as if he were now looking at her very hard indeed, and also as
if she had grown ever so much older. "I'll do anything in the world you
ask me, papa."

He gave again, with a laugh and with his legs apart, his proprietary
glance at his waistcoat and trousers. "That's a way, my dear, of saying
'No, thank you!' You know you don't want to go the least little mite.
You can't humbug ME!" Beale Farange laid down. "I don't want to bully
you--I never bullied you in my life; but I make you the offer, and it's
to take or to leave. Your mother will never again have any more to do
with you than if you were a kitchenmaid she had turned out for going
wrong. Therefore of course I'm your natural protector and you've a right
to get everything out of me you can. Now's your chance, you know--you
won't be half-clever if you don't. You can't say I don't put it before
you--you can't say I ain't kind to you or that I don't play fair. Mind
you never say that, you know--it WOULD bring me down on you. I know
what's proper. I'll take you again, just as I HAVE taken you again and
again. And I'm much obliged to you for making up such a face."

She was conscious enough that her face indeed couldn't please him if it
showed any sign--just as she hoped it didn't--of her sharp impression of
what he now really wanted to do. Wasn't he trying to turn the tables on
her, embarrass her somehow into admitting that what would really suit
her little book would be, after doing so much for good manners, to leave
her wholly at liberty to arrange for herself? She began to be nervous
again: it rolled over her that this was their parting, their parting
for ever, and that he had brought her there for so many caresses only
because it was important such an occasion should look better for him
than any other. For her to spoil it by the note of discord would
certainly give him ground for complaint; and the child was momentarily
bewildered between her alternatives of agreeing with him about her
wanting to get rid of him and displeasing him by pretending to stick
to him. So she found for the moment no solution but to murmur very
helplessly: "Oh papa--oh papa!"

"I know what you're up to--don't tell ME!" After which he came straight
over and, in the most inconsequent way in the world, clasped her in
his arms a moment and rubbed his beard against her cheek. Then she
understood as well as if he had spoken it that what he wanted, hang
it, was that she should let him off with all the honours--with all
the appearance of virtue and sacrifice on his side. It was exactly as
if he had broken out to her: "I say, you little booby, help me to be
irreproachable, to be noble, and yet to have none of the beastly bore of
it. There's only impropriety enough for one of us; so YOU must take it
all. REPUDIATE your dear old daddy--in the face, mind you, of his tender
supplications. He can't be rough with you--it isn't in his nature:
therefore you'll have successfully chucked him because he was too
generous to be as firm with you, poor man, as was, after all, his duty."
This was what he communicated in a series of tremendous pats on the
back; that portion of her person had never been so thumped since Moddle
thumped her when she choked. After a moment he gave her the further
impression of having become sure enough of her to be able very
gracefully to say out: "You know your mother loathes you, loathes you
simply. And I've been thinking over your precious man--the fellow you
told me about."

"Well," Maisie replied with competence, "I'm sure of HIM."

Her father was vague for an instant. "Do you mean sure of his liking
you?"

"Oh no; of his liking HER!"

Beale had a return of gaiety. "There's no accounting for tastes! It's
what they all say, you know."

"I don't care--I'm sure of him!" Maisie repeated.

"Sure, you mean, that she'll bolt?"

Maisie knew all about bolting, but, decidedly, she WAS older, and there
was something in her that could wince at the way her father made the
ugly word--ugly enough at best--sound flat and low. It prompted her to
amend his allusion, which she did by saying: "I don't know what she'll
do. But she'll be happy."

"Let us hope so," said Beale--almost as for edification. "The more happy
she is at any rate the less she'll want you about. That's why I press
you," he agreeably pursued, "to consider this handsome offer--I mean
seriously, you know--of your sole surviving parent." Their eyes, at
this, met again in a long and extraordinary communion which terminated
in his ejaculating: "Ah you little scoundrel!" She took it from him in
the manner it seemed to her he would like best and with a success that
encouraged him to go on: "You ARE a deep little devil!" Her silence,
ticking like a watch, acknowledged even this, in confirmation of which
he finally brought out: "You've settled it with the other pair!"

"Well, what if I have?" She sounded to herself most bold.

Her father, quite as in the old days, broke into a peal. "Why, don't you
know they're awful?"

She grew bolder still. "I don't care--not a bit!"

"But they're probably the worst people in the world and the very
greatest criminals," Beale pleasantly urged. "I'm not the man, my dear,
not to let you know it."

"Well, it doesn't prevent them from loving me. They love me
tremendously." Maisie turned crimson to hear herself.

Her companion fumbled; almost any one--let alone a daughter--would
have seen how conscientious he wanted to be. "I dare say. But do you
know why?" She braved his eyes and he added: "You're a jolly good
pretext."

"For what?" Maisie asked.

"Why, for their game. I needn't tell you what that is."

The child reflected. "Well then that's all the more reason."

"Reason for what, pray?"

"For their being kind to me."

"And for your keeping in with them?" Beale roared again; it was as if
his spirits rose and rose. "Do you realise, pray, that in saying that
you're a monster?"

She turned it over. "A monster?"

"They've MADE one of you. Upon my honour it's quite awful. It shows
the kind of people they are. Don't you understand," Beale pursued,
"that when they've made you as horrid as they can--as horrid as
themselves--they'll just simply chuck you?"

She had at this a flicker of passion. "They WON'T chuck me!"

"I beg your pardon," her father courteously insisted; "it's my duty to
put it before you. I shouldn't forgive myself if I didn't point out to
you that they'll cease to require you." He spoke as if with an appeal to
her intelligence that she must be ashamed not adequately to meet, and
this gave a real distinction to his superior delicacy.

It cleared the case as he had wished. "Cease to require me because they
won't care?" She paused with that sketch of her idea.

"OF COURSE Sir Claude won't care if his wife bolts. That's his game. It
will suit him down to the ground."

This was a proposition Maisie could perfectly embrace, but it still left
a loophole for triumph. She turned it well over. "You mean if mamma
doesn't come back ever at all?" The composure with which her face was
presented to that prospect would have shown a spectator the long road
she had travelled. "Well, but that won't put Mrs. Beale--"

"In the same comfortable position--?" Beale took her up with relish; he
had sprung to his feet again, shaking his legs and looking at his shoes.
"Right you are, darling! Something more will be wanted for Mrs. Beale."
He just paused, then he added: "But she may not have long to wait for
it."

Maisie also for a minute looked at his shoes, though they were not the
pair she most admired, the laced yellow "uppers" and patent-leather
complement. At last, with a question, she raised her eyes. "Aren't you
coming back?"

Once more he hung fire; after which he gave a small laugh that in the
oddest way in the world reminded her of the unique sounds she had
heard emitted by Mrs. Wix. "It may strike you as extraordinary that I
should make you such an admission; and in point of fact you're not to
understand that I do. But we'll put it that way to help your decision.
The point is that that's the way my wife will presently be sure to put
it. You'll hear her shrieking that she's deserted, so that she may just
pile up her wrongs. She'll be as free as she likes then--as free, you
see, as your mother's muff of a husband. They won't have anything more
to consider and they'll just put you into the street. Do I understand,"
Beale enquired, "that, in the face of what I press on you, you still
prefer to take the risk of that?" It was the most wonderful appeal any
gentleman had ever addressed to his daughter, and it had placed Maisie
in the middle of the room again while her father moved slowly about her
with his hands in his pockets and something in his step that seemed,
more than anything else he had done, to show the habit of the place.
She turned her fevered little eyes over his friend's brightnesses, as
if, on her own side, to press for some help in a quandary unexampled.
As if also the pressure reached him he after an instant stopped short,
completing the prodigy of his attitude and the pride of his loyalty by
a supreme formulation of the general inducement. "You've an eye, love!
Yes, there's money. No end of money."

This affected her at first in the manner of some great flashing dazzle
in one of the pantomimes to which Sir Claude had taken her: she saw
nothing in it but what it directly conveyed. "And shall I never, never
see you again--?"

"If I do go to America?" Beale brought it out like a man. "Never, never,
never!"

Hereupon, with the utmost absurdity, she broke down; everything gave
way, everything but the horror of hearing herself definitely utter such
an ugliness as the acceptance of that. So she only stiffened herself and
said: "Then I can't give you up."

She held him some seconds looking at her, showing her a strained
grimace, a perfect parade of all his teeth, in which it seemed to her
she could read the disgust he didn't quite like to express at this
departure from the pliability she had practically promised. But before
she could attenuate in any way the crudity of her collapse he gave an
impatient jerk which took him to the window. She heard a vehicle stop;
Beale looked out; then he freshly faced her. He still said nothing, but
she knew the Countess had come back. There was a silence again between
them, but with a different shade of embarrassment from that of their
united arrival; and it was still without speaking that, abruptly
repeating one of the embraces of which he had already been so prodigal,
he whisked her back to the lemon sofa just before the door of the room
was thrown open. It was thus in renewed and intimate union with him that
she was presented to a person whom she instantly recognised as the brown
lady.

The brown lady looked almost as astonished, though not quite as alarmed,
as when, at the Exhibition, she had gasped in the face of Mrs. Beale.
Maisie in truth almost gasped in her own; this was with the fuller
perception that she was brown indeed. She literally struck the child
more as an animal than as a "real" lady; she might have been a clever
frizzled poodle in a frill or a dreadful human monkey in a spangled
petticoat. She had a nose that was far too big and eyes that were far
too small and a moustache that was, well, not so happy a feature as Sir
Claude's. Beale jumped up to her; while, to the child's astonishment,
though as if in a quick intensity of thought, the Countess advanced as
gaily as if, for many a day, nothing awkward had happened for any one.
Maisie, in spite of a large acquaintance with the phenomenon, had
never seen it so promptly established that nothing awkward was to be
mentioned. The next minute the Countess had kissed her and exclaimed to
Beale with bright tender reproach: "Why, you never told me HALF! My dear
child," she cried, "it was awfully nice of you to come!"

"But she hasn't come--she won't come!" Beale answered. "I've put it to
her how much you'd like it, but she declines to have anything to do with
us."

The Countess stood smiling, and after an instant that was mainly taken
up with the shock of her weird aspect Maisie felt herself reminded
of another smile, which was not ugly, though also interested--the
kind light thrown, that day in the Park, from the clean fair face of
the Captain. Papa's Captain--yes--was the Countess; but she wasn't
nearly so nice as the other: it all came back, doubtless, to Maisie's
minor appreciation of ladies. "Shouldn't you like me," said this one
endearingly, "to take you to Spa?"

"To Spa?" The child repeated the name to gain time, not to show how the
Countess brought back to her a dim remembrance of a strange woman with a
horrid face who once, years before, in an omnibus, bending to her from
an opposite seat, had suddenly produced an orange and murmured "Little
dearie, won't you have it?" She had felt then, for some reason, a small
silly terror, though afterwards conscious that her interlocutress,
unfortunately hideous, had particularly meant to be kind. This was also
what the Countess meant; yet the few words she had uttered and the smile
with which she had uttered them immediately cleared everything up. Oh
no, she wanted to go nowhere with HER, for her presence had already, in
a few seconds, dissipated the happy impression of the room and put an
end to the pleasure briefly taken in Beale's command of such elegance.
There was no command of elegance in his having exposed her to the
approach of the short fat wheedling whiskered person in whom she had now
to recognise the only figure wholly without attraction involved in any
of the intimate connexions her immediate circle had witnessed the growth
of. She was abashed meanwhile, however, at having appeared to weigh in
the balance the place to which she had been invited; and she added as
quickly as possible: "It isn't to America then?" The Countess, at this,
looked sharply at Beale, and Beale, airily enough, asked what the deuce
it mattered when she had already given him to understand she wanted to
have nothing to do with them. There followed between her companions a
passage of which the sense was drowned for her in the deepening inward
hum of her mere desire to get off; though she was able to guess later
on that her father must have put it to his friend that it was no use
talking, that she was an obstinate little pig and that, besides, she
was really old enough to choose for herself. It glimmered back to her
indeed that she must have failed quite dreadfully to seem ideally other
than rude, inasmuch as before she knew it she had visibly given the
impression that if they didn't allow her to go home she should cry. Oh
if there had ever been a thing to cry about it was being so consciously
and gawkily below the handsomest offers any one could ever have
received. The great pain of the thing was that she could see the
Countess liked her enough to wish to be liked in return, and it was from
the idea of a return she sought utterly to flee. It was the idea of a
return that after a confusion of loud words had broken out between the
others brought to her lips with the tremor preceding disaster: "Can't
I, please, be sent home in a cab?" Yes, the Countess wanted her and the
Countess was wounded and chilled, and she couldn't help it, and it was
all the more dreadful because it only made the Countess more coaxing and
more impossible. The only thing that sustained either of them perhaps
till the cab came--Maisie presently saw it would come--was its being
in the air somehow that Beale had done what he wanted. He went out to
look for a conveyance; the servants, he said, had gone to bed, but she
shouldn't be kept beyond her time. The Countess left the room with him,
and, alone in the possession of it, Maisie hoped she wouldn't come
back. It was all the effect of her face--the child simply couldn't look
at it and meet its expression halfway. All in a moment too that queer
expression had leaped into the lovely things--all in a moment she had
had to accept her father as liking some one whom she was sure neither
her mother, nor Mrs. Beale, nor Mrs. Wix, nor Sir Claude, nor the
Captain, nor even Mr. Perriam and Lord Eric could possibly have liked.
Three minutes later, downstairs, with the cab at the door, it was
perhaps as a final confession of not having much to boast of that, on
taking leave of her, he managed to press her to his bosom without her
seeing his face. For herself she was so eager to go that their parting
reminded her of nothing, not even of a single one of all the "nevers"
that above, as the penalty of not cleaving to him, he had attached to
the question of their meeting again. There was something in the Countess
that falsified everything, even the great interests in America and yet
more the first flush of that superiority to Mrs. Beale and to mamma
which had been expressed in Sevres sets and silver boxes. These were
still there, but perhaps there were no great interests in America.
Mamma had known an American who was not a bit like this one. She was
not, however, of noble rank; her name was only Mrs. Tucker. Maisie's
detachment would none the less have been more complete if she had not
suddenly had to exclaim: "Oh dear, I haven't any money!"

Her father's teeth, at this, were such a picture of appetite without
action as to be a match for any plea of poverty. "Make your stepmother
pay."

"Stepmothers DON'T pay!" cried the Countess. "No stepmother ever paid
in her life!" The next moment they were in the street together, and the
next the child was in the cab, with the Countess, on the pavement, but
close to her, quickly taking money from a purse whisked out of a pocket.
Her father had vanished and there was even yet nothing in that to
reawaken the pang of loss. "Here's money," said the brown lady: "go!"
The sound was commanding: the cab rattled off. Maisie sat there with her
hand full of coin. All that for a cab? As they passed a street-lamp she
bent to see how much. What she saw was a cluster of sovereigns. There
MUST then have been great interests in America. It was still at any rate
the Arabian Nights.

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

completion: As Maisie and her father wait for the Countess to arrive, he tells her that he and the Countess are planning on going to America. He invites Maisie to go with him, which surprises her greatly, and she replies, "Dear papa, I'll go with you anywhere". He does not seem to accept this answer, and moves on to talking about Maisie's mother. He threatens, as Maisie's mother has done, that her other parent does not care for her at all and will throw her out of the house. As he talks, Maisie realizes that her father is trying to get her to not come with him to America while still looking like a caring father--meaning this would be the last time she ever sees him. Beale moves on to criticizing Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude, saying that they're using Maisie as a "pretext" and turning the girl into "a monster". He threatens that they too will throw her out when she is no longer useful. Maisie brings the topic back to America, saying again that she wants to go if not going would mean never seeing her father again. Beale gives her a disgusted grimace, but suddenly leaps into action when he hears the Countess arrive at home. By the time the Countess comes in the front door, Beale and Maisie are a picture of familial bliss snuggled together on the couch. From the moment Maisie sees the Countess face to face, she begins referring to her almost exclusively as "the brown lady". It seems that Maisie is very disturbed by the Countess's race, and she is suddenly repulsed by her relationship to Beale and everything in the house that had once seemed lavish and lovely. The Countess attempts to be friendly to Maisie, complimenting her and offering her food. Maisie mentions going to America, and the Countess and Beale begin to argue; the Countess clearly did not think Beale would offer for his daughter to accompany them. Beale tells the Countess that Maisie has said she doesn't want to go, and throughout the argument Maisie has a growing desire to leave. She finally asks to be sent home, and a cab is called for her. As she gets in the cab, Maisie says that she doesn't have any money to pay. Beale tells her to get her stepmother to pay, but the Countess gives Maisie a handful of coins--more than she could possibly need for the cab ride home