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: Beale Farange, Maisie's father, says he'll soon be going to America with the Countess and, much to Maisie's surprise, invites her along. She initially accepts the invitation, and her father says it's hers to take or leave. While Maisie waits with Beale for the Countess to appear, she and her father discuss her mother and her future. Beale seems to have finally gotten tired of bad-mouthing his ex-wife. But, he has nothing but awful things to say about Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude. When Maisie says that she plans to live with the two of them, Beale says they have made her into "a monster" . When the Countess appears after a long wait, her ugliness horrifies Maisie, and she wants to run away, even though the Countess is perfectly nice. This confirms Maisie's sense that she can't possibly go with her father, even though this means she will never see him again. The Countess gives Maisie cab fare as she's leaving.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you mean to-day?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"From Dover do you mean, straight?"

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

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

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

"What new place?" Sir Claude enquired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And leave Maisie here alone?"

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

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

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

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

"Why what you came to say."

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

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

"She must risk it," Ida remarked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

completion: The cab fare that the Countess gave Maisie turns out to be way too generous. Back at Mrs. Beale's, a debate about what to do with the extra money ensues. Susan Ash, the maid who sometimes looks after Maisie, pockets some. Mrs. Beale insists on giving all of the extra money back. Sir Claude takes Maisie and Susan Ash to Folkestone, a city on England's southeast coast, on the English Channel. Here, Maisie is able to put a lot of the puzzle pieces together. She is getting smarter by the day. Sir Claude has taken her to Folkestone to go along with Mrs. Wix's plan, Maisie thinks. It seems like Mrs. Wix's urging of Sir Claude to do the right thing has finally made a difference. Maisie is sad that Mrs. Wix herself hasn't yet appeared, but she expects to see her again any day. All of a sudden, Maisie's mother, Ida, appears out of nowhere. Ida tells Sir Claude that she wants to talk to Maisie alone.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She's gone?"

"She's gone."

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh yes, a lot more."

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

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

"What kind of a thing?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"To-morrow we go to France."

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

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

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

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

completion: Ida and Maisie have a heart-to-heart. Ida is nicer than usual to Maisie, but still, her serious selfishness and unbelievable obnoxiousness shine through. Ida tells Maisie that she's through with Sir Claude and has to go away, doctor's orders. She's planning to leave for South Africa. Ida claims to have gone through lots and lots of trouble for Maisie-- unbelievable amounts of trouble, in fact. Maisie reports to Ida that the Captain has praised her, but Ida seems to have lost interest in him, too. Maisie's fondness for the Captain rubs Ida the wrong way, and she hurls awful insults at Maisie right before leaving her. Ida has taken some money out of her purse--Maisie can't tell how much--but the final turn in the conversation leads her to put it back, without giving any to Maisie. Maisie tells Sir Claude about the conversation and about the fact that Ida is leaving for South Africa. Sir Claude exclaims that he's "free" .


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then we shall live here?"

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

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

"Oh three or four days."

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

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

She turned upon him. "Mrs. Beale?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

completion: Maisie, Sir Claude, and Susan Ash cross the Channel together and arrive in Boulogne, France. Maisie asks Sir Claude whether they will be traveling on to Paris, but Sir Claude says not yet, explaining that Paris is too expensive. Maisie is disappointed at first, but then she realizes that she loves Boulogne because of all the new things there are to see and do. Sir Claude says that Mrs. Wix will soon be joining them. Poor Mrs. Wix arrives in the middle of a rainstorm, after a hard journey crossing the Channel.