prompt:
Chapter: She became aware in time that this phase wouldn't have shone by
lessons, the care of her education being now only one of the many
duties devolving on Miss Overmore; a devolution as to which she was
present at various passages between that lady and her father--passages
significant, on either side, of dissent and even of displeasure. It was
gathered by the child on these occasions that there was something in the
situation for which her mother might "come down" on them all, though
indeed the remark, always dropped by her father, was greeted on his
companion's part with direct contradiction. Such scenes were usually
brought to a climax by Miss Overmore's demanding, with more asperity
than she applied to any other subject, in what position under the sun
such a person as Mrs. Farange would find herself for coming down. As the
months went on the little girl's interpretations thickened, and the more
effectually that this stretch was the longest she had known without a
break. She got used to the idea that her mother, for some reason, was
in no hurry to reinstate her: that idea was forcibly expressed by her
father whenever Miss Overmore, differing and decided, took him up on the
question, which he was always putting forward, of the urgency of sending
her to school. For a governess Miss Overmore differed surprisingly; far
more for instance than would have entered into the bowed head of Mrs.
Wix. She observed to Maisie many times that she was quite conscious of
not doing her justice, and that Mr. Farange equally measured and equally
lamented this deficiency. The reason of it was that she had mysterious
responsibilities that interfered--responsibilities, Miss Overmore
intimated, to Mr. Farange himself and to the friendly noisy little house
and those who came there. Mr. Farange's remedy for every inconvenience
was that the child should be put at school--there were such lots of
splendid schools, as everybody knew, at Brighton and all over the place.
That, however, Maisie learned, was just what would bring her mother
down: from the moment he should delegate to others the housing of his
little charge he hadn't a leg to stand on before the law. Didn't he keep
her away from her mother precisely because Mrs. Farange was one of these
others?

There was also the solution of a second governess, a young person to
come in by the day and really do the work; but to this Miss Overmore
wouldn't for a moment listen, arguing against it with great public
relish and wanting to know from all comers--she put it even to Maisie
herself--they didn't see how frightfully it would give her away. "What
am I supposed to be at all, don't you see, if I'm not here to look
after her?" She was in a false position and so freely and loudly called
attention to it that it seemed to become almost a source of glory. The
way out of it of course was just to do her plain duty; but that was
unfortunately what, with his excessive, his exorbitant demands on her,
which every one indeed appeared quite to understand, he practically, he
selfishly prevented. Beale Farange, for Miss Overmore, was now never
anything but "he," and the house was as full as ever of lively gentlemen
with whom, under that designation, she chaffingly talked about him.
Maisie meanwhile, as a subject of familiar gossip on what was to be done
with her, was left so much to herself that she had hours of wistful
thought of the large loose discipline of Mrs. Wix; yet she none the less
held it under her father's roof a point of superiority that none of his
visitors were ladies. It added to this odd security that she had once
heard a gentleman say to him as if it were a great joke and in obvious
reference to Miss Overmore: "Hanged if she'll let another woman come
near you--hanged if she ever will. She'd let fly a stick at her as they
do at a strange cat!" Maisie greatly preferred gentlemen as inmates
in spite of their also having their way--louder but sooner over--of
laughing out at her. They pulled and pinched, they teased and tickled
her; some of them even, as they termed it, shied things at her, and all
of them thought it funny to call her by names having no resemblance to
her own. The ladies on the other hand addressed her as "You poor pet"
and scarcely touched her even to kiss her. But it was of the ladies she
was most afraid.

She was now old enough to understand how disproportionate a stay she had
already made with her father; and also old enough to enter a little into
the ambiguity attending this excess, which oppressed her particularly
whenever the question had been touched upon in talk with her governess.
"Oh you needn't worry: she doesn't care!" Miss Overmore had often
said to her in reference to any fear that her mother might resent her
prolonged detention. "She has other people than poor little YOU to
think about, and has gone abroad with them; so you needn't be in the
least afraid she'll stickle this time for her rights." Maisie knew Mrs.
Farange had gone abroad, for she had had weeks and weeks before a letter
from her beginning "My precious pet" and taking leave of her for an
indeterminate time; but she had not seen in it a renunciation of hatred
or of the writer's policy of asserting herself, for the sharpest of all
her impressions had been that there was nothing her mother would ever
care so much about as to torment Mr. Farange. What at last, however, was
in this connexion bewildering and a little frightening was the dawn of a
suspicion that a better way had been found to torment Mr. Farange than
to deprive him of his periodical burden. This was the question that
worried our young lady and that Miss Overmore's confidences and the
frequent observations of her employer only rendered more mystifying. It
was a contradiction that if Ida had now a fancy for waiving the rights
she had originally been so hot about her late husband shouldn't jump at
the monopoly for which he had also in the first instance so fiercely
fought; but when Maisie, with a subtlety beyond her years, sounded this
new ground her main success was in hearing her mother more freshly
abused. Miss Overmore had up to now rarely deviated from a decent
reserve, but the day came when she expressed herself with a vividness
not inferior to Beale's own on the subject of the lady who had fled to
the Continent to wriggle out of her job. It would serve this lady right,
Maisie gathered, if that contract, in the shape of an overgrown and
underdressed daughter, should be shipped straight out to her and landed
at her feet in the midst of scandalous excesses.

The picture of these pursuits was what Miss Overmore took refuge in when
the child tried timidly to ascertain if her father were disposed to feel
he had too much of her. She evaded the point and only kicked up all
round it the dust of Ida's heartlessness and folly, of which the supreme
proof, it appeared, was the fact that she was accompanied on her journey
by a gentleman whom, to be painfully plain on it, she had--well, "picked
up." The terms on which, unless they were married, ladies and gentlemen
might, as Miss Overmore expressed it, knock about together, were the
terms on which she and Mr. Farange had exposed themselves to possible
misconception. She had indeed, as has been noted, often explained this
before, often said to Maisie: "I don't know what in the world, darling,
your father and I should do without you, for you just make the
difference, as I've told you, of keeping us perfectly proper." The child
took in the office it was so endearingly presented to her that she
performed a comfort that helped her to a sense of security even in the
event of her mother's giving her up. Familiar as she had grown with the
fact of the great alternative to the proper, she felt in her governess
and her father a strong reason for not emulating that detachment. At the
same time she had heard somehow of little girls--of exalted rank, it was
true--whose education was carried on by instructors of the other sex,
and she knew that if she were at school at Brighton it would be thought
an advantage to her to be more or less in the hands of masters. She
turned these things over and remarked to Miss Overmore that if she
should go to her mother perhaps the gentleman might become her tutor.

"The gentleman?" The proposition was complicated enough to make Miss
Overmore stare.

"The one who's with mamma. Mightn't that make it right--as right as your
being my governess makes it for you to be with papa?"

Miss Overmore considered; she coloured a little; then she embraced her
ingenious friend. "You're too sweet! I'm a REAL governess."

"And couldn't he be a real tutor?"

"Of course not. He's ignorant and bad."

"Bad--?" Maisie echoed with wonder.

Her companion gave a queer little laugh at her tone. "He's ever so much
younger--" But that was all.

"Younger than you?"

Miss Overmore laughed again; it was the first time Maisie had seen her
approach so nearly to a giggle.

"Younger than--no matter whom. I don't know anything about him and don't
want to," she rather inconsequently added. "He's not my sort, and I'm
sure, my own darling, he's not yours." And she repeated the free caress
into which her colloquies with Maisie almost always broke and which made
the child feel that HER affection at least was a gage of safety. Parents
had come to seem vague, but governesses were evidently to be trusted.
Maisie's faith in Mrs. Wix for instance had suffered no lapse from the
fact that all communication with her had temporarily dropped. During the
first weeks of their separation Clara Matilda's mamma had repeatedly and
dolefully written to her, and Maisie had answered with an enthusiasm
controlled only by orthographical doubts; but the correspondence had
been duly submitted to Miss Overmore, with the final effect of its not
suiting her. It was this lady's view that Mr. Farange wouldn't care for
it at all, and she ended by confessing--since her pupil pushed her--that
she didn't care for it herself. She was furiously jealous, she said; and
that weakness was but a new proof of her disinterested affection. She
pronounced Mrs. Wix's effusions moreover illiterate and unprofitable;
she made no scruple of declaring it monstrous that a woman in her
senses should have placed the formation of her daughter's mind in such
ridiculous hands. Maisie was well aware that the proprietress of the old
brown dress and the old odd headgear was lower in the scale of "form"
than Miss Overmore; but it was now brought home to her with pain that
she was educationally quite out of the question. She was buried for the
time beneath a conclusive remark of her critic's: "She's really beyond a
joke!" This remark was made as that charming woman held in her hand the
last letter that Maisie was to receive from Mrs. Wix; it was fortified
by a decree proscribing the preposterous tie. "Must I then write and
tell her?" the child bewilderedly asked: she grew pale at the dreadful
things it appeared involved for her to say. "Don't dream of it, my
dear--I'll write: you may trust me!" cried Miss Overmore; who indeed
wrote to such purpose that a hush in which you could have heard a pin
drop descended upon poor Mrs. Wix. She gave for weeks and weeks no sign
whatever of life: it was as if she had been as effectually disposed of
by Miss Overmore's communication as her little girl, in the Harrow Road,
had been disposed of by the terrible hansom. Her very silence became
after this one of the largest elements of Maisie's consciousness; it
proved a warm and habitable air, into which the child penetrated further
than she dared ever to mention to her companions. Somewhere in the
depths of it the dim straighteners were fixed upon her; somewhere out of
the troubled little current Mrs. Wix intensely waited.

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

completion: Maisie's stay at her father's house is different this time. She is left with him for longer than the usual 6-month interval; supposedly her mother has gone abroad and is trying to annoy her father by leaving Maisie at his house as long as possible. Miss Overmore's relationship with Beale Farange has also clearly changed, giving the young woman less time to spend caring for Maisie. The idea of sending Maisie to school or getting her another governess are debated, but neither come to pass. Miss Overmore again tells Maisie that it is important that she live with them because she keeps the situation of Miss Overmore staying at the house "perfectly proper". Maisie innocently asks if it would be proper for her to live with her mother and have the gentleman living with her mother be her tutor. Miss Overmore tells Maisie that he is "bad" and "ever so much younger". Mrs. Wix sends Maisie letters while she is at her father's house, but Miss Overmore will not let Maisie see them. She calls Mrs. Wix's writing "illiterate," "monstrous," and "beyond a joke". Maisie is distressed, thinking that she might have to write to Mrs. Wix saying these things, but Miss Overmore assures her that she'll take care of it. Mrs. Wix stops sending letters after this, but Maisie keeps her in her mind as a comforting presence


prompt:
Chapter: It quite fell in with this intensity that one day, on returning from
a walk with the housemaid, Maisie should have found her in the hall,
seated on the stool usually occupied by the telegraph-boys who haunted
Beale Farange's door and kicked their heels while, in his room, answers
to their missives took form with the aid of smoke-puffs and growls. It
had seemed to her on their parting that Mrs. Wix had reached the last
limits of the squeeze, but she now felt those limits to be transcended
and that the duration of her visitor's hug was a direct reply to Miss
Overmore's veto. She understood in a flash how the visit had come to be
possible--that Mrs. Wix, watching her chance, must have slipped in under
protection of the fact that papa, always tormented in spite of arguments
with the idea of a school, had, for a three days' excursion to Brighton,
absolutely insisted on the attendance of her adversary. It was true that
when Maisie explained their absence and their important motive Mrs. Wix
wore an expression so peculiar that it could only have had its origin in
surprise. This contradiction indeed peeped out only to vanish, for at
the very moment that, in the spirit of it, she threw herself afresh upon
her young friend a hansom crested with neat luggage rattled up to the
door and Miss Overmore bounded out. The shock of her encounter with Mrs.
Wix was less violent than Maisie had feared on seeing her and didn't
at all interfere with the sociable tone in which, under her rival's
eyes, she explained to her little charge that she had returned, for a
particular reason, a day sooner than she first intended. She had left
papa--in such nice lodgings--at Brighton; but he would come back to
his dear little home on the morrow. As for Mrs. Wix, papa's companion
supplied Maisie in later converse with the right word for the attitude
of this personage: Mrs. Wix "stood up" to her in a manner that the child
herself felt at the time to be astonishing. This occurred indeed after
Miss Overmore had so far raised her interdict as to make a move to the
dining-room, where, in the absence of any suggestion of sitting down,
it was scarcely more than natural that even poor Mrs. Wix should stand
up. Maisie at once enquired if at Brighton, this time, anything had
come of the possibility of a school; to which, much to her surprise,
Miss Overmore, who had always grandly repudiated it, replied after an
instant, but quite as if Mrs. Wix were not there:

"It may be, darling, that something WILL come. The objection, I must
tell you, has been quite removed."

At this it was still more startling to hear Mrs. Wix speak out with
great firmness. "I don't think, if you'll allow me to say so, that
there's any arrangement by which the objection CAN be 'removed.' What
has brought me here to-day is that I've a message for Maisie from dear
Mrs. Farange."

The child's heart gave a great thump. "Oh mamma's come back?"

"Not yet, sweet love, but she's coming," said Mrs. Wix, "and she
has--most thoughtfully, you know--sent me on to prepare you."

"To prepare her for what, pray?" asked Miss Overmore, whose first
smoothness began, with this news, to be ruffled.

Mrs. Wix quietly applied her straighteners to Miss Overmore's flushed
beauty. "Well, miss, for a very important communication."

"Can't dear Mrs. Farange, as you so oddly call her, make her
communications directly? Can't she take the trouble to write to her only
daughter?" the younger lady demanded. "Maisie herself will tell you that
it's months and months since she has had so much as a word from her."

"Oh but I've written to mamma!" cried the child as if this would do
quite as well.

"That makes her treatment of you all the greater scandal," the governess
in possession promptly declared.

"Mrs. Farange is too well aware," said Mrs. Wix with sustained spirit,
"of what becomes of her letters in this house."

Maisie's sense of fairness hereupon interposed for her visitor. "You
know, Miss Overmore, that papa doesn't like everything of mamma's."

"No one likes, my dear, to be made the subject of such language as your
mother's letters contain. They were not fit for the innocent child to
see," Miss Overmore observed to Mrs. Wix.

"Then I don't know what you complain of, and she's better without them.
It serves every purpose that I'm in Mrs. Farange's confidence."

Miss Overmore gave a scornful laugh. "Then you must be mixed up with
some extraordinary proceedings!"

"None so extraordinary," cried Mrs. Wix, turning very pale, "as to say
horrible things about the mother to the face of the helpless daughter!"

"Things not a bit more horrible, I think," Miss Overmore returned, "than
those you, madam, appear to have come here to say about the father!"

Mrs. Wix looked for a moment hard at Maisie, and then, turning again to
this witness, spoke with a trembling voice. "I came to say nothing about
him, and you must excuse Mrs. Farange and me if we're not so above all
reproach as the companion of his travels."

The young woman thus described stared at the apparent breadth of the
description--she needed a moment to take it in. Maisie, however, gazing
solemnly from one of the disputants to the other, noted that her answer,
when it came, perched upon smiling lips. "It will do quite as well,
no doubt, if you come up to the requirements of the companion of Mrs.
Farange's!"

Mrs. Wix broke into a queer laugh; it sounded to Maisie an unsuccessful
imitation of a neigh. "That's just what I'm here to make known--how
perfectly the poor lady comes up to them herself." She held up her head
at the child. "You must take your mamma's message, Maisie, and you must
feel that her wishing me to come to you with it this way is a great
proof of interest and affection. She sends you her particular love and
announces to you that she's engaged to be married to Sir Claude."

"Sir Claude?" Maisie wonderingly echoed. But while Mrs. Wix explained
that this gentleman was a dear friend of Mrs. Farange's, who had been
of great assistance to her in getting to Florence and in making herself
comfortable there for the winter, she was not too violently shaken to
perceive her old friend's enjoyment of the effect of this news on Miss
Overmore. That young lady opened her eyes very wide; she immediately
remarked that Mrs. Farange's marriage would of course put an end to any
further pretension to take her daughter back. Mrs. Wix enquired with
astonishment why it should do anything of the sort, and Miss Overmore
gave as an instant reason that it was clearly but another dodge in a
system of dodges. She wanted to get out of the bargain: why else had she
now left Maisie on her father's hands weeks and weeks beyond the time
about which she had originally made such a fuss? It was vain for Mrs.
Wix to represent--as she speciously proceeded to do--that all this time
would be made up as soon as Mrs. Farange returned: she, Miss Overmore,
knew nothing, thank heaven, about her confederate, but was very sure
any person capable of forming that sort of relation with the lady in
Florence would easily agree to object to the presence in his house
of the fruit of a union that his dignity must ignore. It was a game
like another, and Mrs. Wix's visit was clearly the first move in it.
Maisie found in this exchange of asperities a fresh incitement to the
unformulated fatalism in which her sense of her own career had long
since taken refuge; and it was the beginning for her of a deeper
prevision that, in spite of Miss Overmore's brilliancy and Mrs. Wix's
passion, she should live to see a change in the nature of the struggle
she appeared to have come into the world to produce. It would still be
essentially a struggle, but its object would now be NOT to receive her.

Mrs. Wix, after Miss Overmore's last demonstration, addressed herself
wholly to the little girl, and, drawing from the pocket of her dingy old
pelisse a small flat parcel, removed its envelope and wished to know
if THAT looked like a gentleman who wouldn't be nice to everybody--let
alone to a person he would be so sure to find so nice. Mrs. Farange, in
the candour of new-found happiness, had enclosed a "cabinet" photograph
of Sir Claude, and Maisie lost herself in admiration of the fair smooth
face, the regular features, the kind eyes, the amiable air, the general
glossiness and smartness of her prospective stepfather--only vaguely
puzzled to suppose herself now with two fathers at once. Her researches
had hitherto indicated that to incur a second parent of the same sex you
had usually to lose the first. "ISN'T he sympathetic?" asked Mrs. Wix,
who had clearly, on the strength of his charming portrait, made up her
mind that Sir Claude promised her a future. "You can see, I hope," she
added with much expression, "that HE'S a perfect gentleman!" Maisie had
never before heard the word "sympathetic" applied to anybody's face; she
heard it with pleasure and from that moment it agreeably remained with
her. She testified moreover to the force of her own perception in a
small soft sigh of response to the pleasant eyes that seemed to seek
her acquaintance, to speak to her directly. "He's quite lovely!" she
declared to Mrs. Wix. Then eagerly, irrepressibly, as she still held the
photograph and Sir Claude continued to fraternise, "Oh can't I keep it?"
she broke out. No sooner had she done so than she looked up from it at
Miss Overmore: this was with the sudden instinct of appealing to the
authority that had long ago impressed on her that she mustn't ask for
things. Miss Overmore, to her surprise, looked distant and rather odd,
hesitating and giving her time to turn again to Mrs. Wix. Then Maisie
saw that lady's long face lengthen; it was stricken and almost scared,
as if her young friend really expected more of her than she had to give.
The photograph was a possession that, direly denuded, she clung to,
and there was a momentary struggle between her fond clutch of it and
her capability of every sacrifice for her precarious pupil. With the
acuteness of her years, however, Maisie saw that her own avidity would
triumph, and she held out the picture to Miss Overmore as if she were
quite proud of her mother. "Isn't he just lovely?" she demanded while
poor Mrs. Wix hungrily wavered, her straighteners largely covering it
and her pelisse gathered about her with an intensity that strained its
ancient seams.

"It was to ME, darling," the visitor said, "that your mamma so
generously sent it; but of course if it would give you particular
pleasure--" she faltered, only gasping her surrender.

Miss Overmore continued extremely remote. "If the photograph's your
property, my dear, I shall be happy to oblige you by looking at it on
some future occasion. But you must excuse me if I decline to touch an
object belonging to Mrs. Wix."

That lady had by this time grown very red. "You might as well see him
this way, miss," she retorted, "as you certainly never will, I believe,
in any other! Keep the pretty picture, by all means, my precious," she
went on: "Sir Claude will be happy himself, I dare say, to give me one
with a kind inscription." The pathetic quaver of this brave boast was
not lost on Maisie, who threw herself so gratefully on the speaker's
neck that, when they had concluded their embrace, the public tenderness
of which, she felt, made up for the sacrifice she imposed, their
companion had had time to lay a quick hand on Sir Claude and, with a
glance at him or not, whisk him effectually out of sight. Released from
the child's arms Mrs. Wix looked about for the picture; then she fixed
Miss Overmore with a hard dumb stare; and finally, with her eyes on
the little girl again, achieved the grimmest of smiles. "Well, nothing
matters, Maisie, because there's another thing your mamma wrote about.
She has made sure of me." Even after her loyal hug Maisie felt a bit of
a sneak as she glanced at Miss Overmore for permission to understand
this. But Mrs. Wix left them in no doubt of what it meant. "She has
definitely engaged me--for her return and for yours. Then you'll see
for yourself." Maisie, on the spot, quite believed she should; but
the prospect was suddenly thrown into confusion by an extraordinary
demonstration from Miss Overmore.

"Mrs. Wix," said that young lady, "has some undiscoverable reason for
regarding your mother's hold on you as strengthened by the fact that
she's about to marry. I wonder then--on that system--what our visitor
will say to your father's."

Miss Overmore's words were directed to her pupil, but her face, lighted
with an irony that made it prettier even than ever before, was presented
to the dingy figure that had stiffened itself for departure. The
child's discipline had been bewildering--had ranged freely between the
prescription that she was to answer when spoken to and the experience of
lively penalties on obeying that prescription. This time, nevertheless,
she felt emboldened for risks; above all as something portentous seemed
to have leaped into her sense of the relations of things. She looked at
Miss Overmore much as she had a way of looking at persons who treated
her to "grown up" jokes. "Do you mean papa's hold on me--do you mean
HE'S about to marry?"

"Papa's not about to marry--papa IS married, my dear. Papa was married
the day before yesterday at Brighton." Miss Overmore glittered more
gaily; meanwhile it came over Maisie, and quite dazzlingly, that her
"smart" governess was a bride. "He's my husband, if you please, and I'm
his little wife. So NOW we'll see who's your little mother!" She caught
her pupil to her bosom in a manner that was not to be outdone by the
emissary of her predecessor, and a few moments later, when things had
lurched back into their places, that poor lady, quite defeated of the
last word, had soundlessly taken flight.

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

completion: One day while Maisie is still living at her father's house, Mrs. Wix visits out of the blue. Maisie believes Mrs. Wix came on this day because both her father and Miss Overmore are away, supposedly investigating a school for Maisie to attend, but Miss Overmore returns a day early and so catches Mrs. Wix. Mrs. Wix announces that she has come because she has a message from Ida for Maisie, saying she had to come to deliver the message because letters sent for Maisie obviously do not get to her. The important message for Maisie is that her mother is engaged to be married to a man named Sir Claude. Miss Overmore seems shocked by this revelation and says that it "would of course put an end to any further pretension to take her daughter back". Mrs. Wix argues against this and then pulls out a photograph of Sir Claude to show Maisie. Maisie admires the photo of Sir Claude greatly and begs to keep it. Mrs. Wix clearly wants to keep the photo for herself, but quickly surrenders it to Maisie. Miss Overmore insults Mrs. Wix by saying she will not touch the photograph because it is "an object belonging to Mrs. Wix" , and Mrs. Wix retaliates by informing Maisie that she will definitely be returning to her mother's house soon. Miss Overmore tops this by implying that Maisie's father is married, then explaining exactly how: "Papa's not about to marry--papa is married, my dear. Papa was married the day before yesterday at Brighton. He's my husband, if you please, and I'm his little wife. So now we'll see who's your little mother


prompt:
Chapter: After Mrs. Wix's retreat Miss Overmore appeared to recognise that she
was not exactly in a position to denounce Ida Farange's second union;
but she drew from a table-drawer the photograph of Sir Claude and,
standing there before Maisie, studied it at some length.

"Isn't he beautiful?" the child ingenuously asked.

Her companion hesitated. "No--he's horrid," she, to Maisie's surprise,
sharply returned. But she debated another minute, after which she handed
back the picture. It appeared to Maisie herself to exhibit a fresh
attraction, and she was troubled, having never before had occasion to
differ from her lovely friend. So she only could ask what, such being
the case, she should do with it: should she put it quite away--where
it wouldn't be there to offend? On this Miss Overmore again cast
about; after which she said unexpectedly: "Put it on the schoolroom
mantelpiece."

Maisie felt a fear. "Won't papa dislike to see it there?"

"Very much indeed; but that won't matter NOW." Miss Overmore spoke with
peculiar significance and to her pupil's mystification.

"On account of the marriage?" Maisie risked.

Miss Overmore laughed, and Maisie could see that in spite of the
irritation produced by Mrs. Wix she was in high spirits. "Which marriage
do you mean?"

With the question put to her it suddenly struck the child she didn't
know, so that she felt she looked foolish. So she took refuge in saying:
"Shall YOU be different--" This was a full implication that the bride of
Sir Claude would be.

"As your father's wedded wife? Utterly!" Miss Overmore replied. And the
difference began of course in her being addressed, even by Maisie, from
that day and by her particular request, as Mrs. Beale. It was there
indeed principally that it ended, for except that the child could
reflect that she should presently have four parents in all, and also
that at the end of three months the staircase, for a little girl hanging
over banisters, sent up the deepening rustle of more elaborate advances,
everything made the same impression as before. Mrs. Beale had very
pretty frocks, but Miss Overmore's had been quite as good, and if papa
was much fonder of his second wife than he had been of his first Maisie
had foreseen that fondness, had followed its development almost as
closely as the person more directly involved. There was little indeed in
the commerce of her companions that her precocious experience couldn't
explain, for if they struck her as after all rather deficient in that
air of the honeymoon of which she had so often heard--in much detail,
for instance, from Mrs. Wix--it was natural to judge the circumstance
in the light of papa's proved disposition to contest the empire of the
matrimonial tie. His honeymoon, when he came back from Brighton--not
on the morrow of Mrs. Wix's visit, and not, oddly, till several days
later--his honeymoon was perhaps perceptibly tinged with the dawn of a
later stage of wedlock. There were things dislike of which, as the child
knew it, wouldn't matter to Mrs. Beale now, and their number increased
so that such a trifle as his hostility to the photograph of Sir Claude
quite dropped out of view. This pleasing object found a conspicuous
place in the schoolroom, which in truth Mr. Farange seldom entered and
in which silent admiration formed, during the time I speak of, almost
the sole scholastic exercise of Mrs. Beale's pupil.

Maisie was not long in seeing just what her stepmother had meant by the
difference she should show in her new character. If she was her father's
wife she was not her own governess, and if her presence had had formerly
to be made regular by the theory of a humble function she was now on a
footing that dispensed with all theories and was inconsistent with all
servitude. That was what she had meant by the drop of the objection to
a school; her small companion was no longer required at home as--it was
Mrs. Beale's own amusing word--a little duenna. The argument against
a successor to Miss Overmore remained: it was composed frankly of the
fact, of which Mrs. Beale granted the full absurdity, that she was too
awfully fond of her stepdaughter to bring herself to see her in vulgar
and mercenary hands. The note of this particular danger emboldened
Maisie to put in a word for Mrs. Wix, the modest measure of whose
avidity she had taken from the first; but Mrs. Beale disposed afresh and
effectually of a candidate who would be sure to act in some horrible
and insidious way for Ida's interest and who moreover was personally
loathsome and as ignorant as a fish. She made also no more of a secret
of the awkward fact that a good school would be hideously expensive, and
of the further circumstance, which seemed to put an end to everything,
that when it came to the point papa, in spite of his previous clamour,
was really most nasty about paying. "Would you believe," Mrs. Beale
confidentially asked of her little charge, "that he says I'm a worse
expense than ever, and that a daughter and a wife together are really
more than he can afford?" It was thus that the splendid school at
Brighton lost itself in the haze of larger questions, though the fear
that it would provoke Ida to leap into the breach subsided with her
prolonged, her quite shameless non-appearance. Her daughter and her
successor were therefore left to gaze in united but helpless blankness
at all Maisie was not learning.

This quantity was so great as to fill the child's days with a sense of
intermission to which even French Lisette gave no accent--with finished
games and unanswered questions and dreaded tests; with the habit, above
all, in her watch for a change, of hanging over banisters when the
door-bell sounded. This was the great refuge of her impatience, but
what she heard at such times was a clatter of gaiety downstairs; the
impression of which, from her earliest childhood, had built up in her
the belief that the grown-up time was the time of real amusement and
above all of real intimacy. Even Lisette, even Mrs. Wix had never, she
felt, in spite of hugs and tears, been so intimate with her as so many
persons at present were with Mrs. Beale and as so many others of old had
been with Mrs. Farange. The note of hilarity brought people together
still more than the note of melancholy, which was the one exclusively
sounded, for instance, by poor Mrs. Wix. Maisie in these days preferred
none the less that domestic revels should be wafted to her from a
distance: she felt sadly unsupported for facing the inquisition of the
drawing-room. That was a reason the more for making the most of Susan
Ash, who in her quality of under-housemaid moved at a very different
level and who, none the less, was much depended upon out of doors. She
was a guide to peregrinations that had little in common with those
intensely definite airings that had left with the child a vivid memory
of the regulated mind of Moddle. There had been under Moddle's system
no dawdles at shop-windows and no nudges, in Oxford Street, of "I SAY,
look at 'ER!" There had been an inexorable treatment of crossings and a
serene exemption from the fear that--especially at corners, of which she
was yet weakly fond--haunted the housemaid, the fear of being, as she
ominously said, "spoken to." The dangers of the town equally with its
diversions added to Maisie's sense of being untutored and unclaimed.

The situation however, had taken a twist when, on another of her
returns, at Susan's side, extremely tired, from the pursuit of exercise
qualified by much hovering, she encountered another emotion. She on this
occasion learnt at the door that her instant attendance was requested
in the drawing-room. Crossing the threshold in a cloud of shame she
discerned through the blur Mrs. Beale seated there with a gentleman who
immediately drew the pain from her predicament by rising before her as
the original of the photograph of Sir Claude. She felt the moment she
looked at him that he was by far the most shining presence that had ever
made her gape, and her pleasure in seeing him, in knowing that he took
hold of her and kissed her, as quickly throbbed into a strange shy pride
in him, a perception of his making up for her fallen state, for Susan's
public nudges, which quite bruised her, and for all the lessons that, in
the dead schoolroom, where at times she was almost afraid to stay alone,
she was bored with not having. It was as if he had told her on the spot
that he belonged to her, so that she could already show him off and see
the effect he produced. No, nothing else that was most beautiful ever
belonging to her could kindle that particular joy--not Mrs. Beale at
that very moment, not papa when he was gay, nor mamma when she was
dressed, nor Lisette when she was new. The joy almost overflowed
in tears when he laid his hand on her and drew her to him, telling
her, with a smile of which the promise was as bright as that of a
Christmas-tree, that he knew her ever so well by her mother, but had
come to see her now so that he might know her for himself. She could
see that his view of this kind of knowledge was to make her come away
with him, and, further, that it was just what he was there for and had
already been some time: arranging it with Mrs. Beale and getting on with
that lady in a manner evidently not at all affected by her having on the
arrival of his portrait thought of him so ill. They had grown almost
intimate--or had the air of it--over their discussion; and it was still
further conveyed to Maisie that Mrs. Beale had made no secret, and would
make yet less of one, of all that it cost to let her go. "You seem so
tremendously eager," she said to the child, "that I hope you're at least
clear about Sir Claude's relation to you. It doesn't appear to occur to
him to give you the necessary reassurance."

Maisie, a trifle mystified, turned quickly to her new friend. "Why it's
of course that you're MARRIED to her, isn't it?"

Her anxious emphasis started them off, as she had learned to call it;
this was the echo she infallibly and now quite resignedly produced;
moreover Sir Claude's laughter was an indistinguishable part of the
sweetness of his being there. "We've been married, my dear child, three
months, and my interest in you is a consequence, don't you know? of my
great affection for your mother. In coming here it's of course for your
mother I'm acting."

"Oh I know," Maisie said with all the candour of her competence. "She
can't come herself--except just to the door." Then as she thought
afresh: "Can't she come even to the door now?"

"There you are!" Mrs. Beale exclaimed to Sir Claude. She spoke as if his
dilemma were ludicrous.

His kind face, in a hesitation, seemed to recognise it; but he answered
the child with a frank smile. "No--not very well."

"Because she has married you?"

He promptly accepted this reason. "Well, that has a good deal to do with
it."

He was so delightful to talk to that Maisie pursued the subject. "But
papa--HE has married Miss Overmore."

"Ah you'll see that he won't come for you at your mother's," that lady
interposed.

"Yes, but that won't be for a long time," Maisie hastened to respond.

"We won't talk about it now--you've months and months to put in first."
And Sir Claude drew her closer.

"Oh that's what makes it so hard to give her up!" Mrs. Beale made this
point with her arms out to her stepdaughter. Maisie, quitting Sir
Claude, went over to them and, clasped in a still tenderer embrace, felt
entrancingly the extension of the field of happiness. "I'LL come for
you," said her stepmother, "if Sir Claude keeps you too long: we must
make him quite understand that! Don't talk to me about her ladyship!"
she went on to their visitor so familiarly that it was almost as if they
must have met before. "I know her ladyship as if I had made her. They're
a pretty pair of parents!" cried Mrs. Beale.

Maisie had so often heard them called so that the remark diverted her
but an instant from the agreeable wonder of this grand new form of
allusion to her mother; and that, in its turn, presently left her free
to catch at the pleasant possibility, in connexion with herself, of
a relation much happier as between Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude than as
between mamma and papa. Still the next thing that happened was that her
interest in such a relation brought to her lips a fresh question.

"Have you seen papa?" she asked of Sir Claude.

It was the signal for their going off again, as her small stoicism had
perfectly taken for granted that it would be. All that Mrs. Beale had
nevertheless to add was the vague apparent sarcasm: "Oh papa!"

"I'm assured he's not at home," Sir Claude replied to the child; "but if
he had been I should have hoped for the pleasure of seeing him."

"Won't he mind your coming?" Maisie asked as with need of the knowledge.

"Oh you bad little girl!" Mrs. Beale humorously protested.

The child could see that at this Sir Claude, though still moved to
mirth, coloured a little; but he spoke to her very kindly. "That's just
what I came to see, you know--whether your father WOULD mind. But Mrs.
Beale appears strongly of the opinion that he won't."

This lady promptly justified that view to her stepdaughter. "It will be
very interesting, my dear, you know, to find out what it is to-day that
your father does mind. I'm sure _I_ don't know!"--and she seemed to
repeat, though with perceptible resignation, her plaint of a moment
before. "Your father, darling, is a very odd person indeed." She turned
with this, smiling, to Sir Claude. "But perhaps it's hardly civil for me
to say that of his not objecting to have YOU in the house. If you knew
some of the people he does have!"

Maisie knew them all, and none indeed were to be compared to Sir Claude.
He laughed back at Mrs. Beale; he looked at such moments quite as Mrs.
Wix, in the long stories she told her pupil, always described the lovers
of her distressed beauties--"the perfect gentleman and strikingly
handsome." He got up, to the child's regret, as if he were going. "Oh I
dare say we should be all right!"

Mrs. Beale once more gathered in her little charge, holding her close
and looking thoughtfully over her head at their visitor. "It's so
charming--for a man of your type--to have wanted her so much!"

"What do you know about my type?" Sir Claude laughed. "Whatever it may
be I dare say it deceives you. The truth about me is simply that I'm the
most unappreciated of--what do you call the fellows?--'family-men.' Yes,
I'm a family-man; upon my honour I am!"

"Then why on earth," cried Mrs. Beale, "didn't you marry a
family-woman?"

Sir Claude looked at her hard. "YOU know who one marries, I think.
Besides, there ARE no family-women--hanged if there are! None of them
want any children--hanged if they do!"

His account of the matter was most interesting, and Maisie, as if it
were of bad omen for her, stared at the picture in some dismay. At the
same time she felt, through encircling arms, her protectress hesitate.
"You do come out with things! But you mean her ladyship doesn't want
any--really?"

"Won't hear of them--simply. But she can't help the one she HAS got."
And with this Sir Claude's eyes rested on the little girl in a way that
seemed to her to mask her mother's attitude with the consciousness of
his own. "She must make the best of her, don't you see? If only for the
look of the thing, don't you know? one wants one's wife to take the
proper line about her child."

"Oh I know what one wants!" Mrs. Beale cried with a competence that
evidently impressed her interlocutor.

"Well, if you keep HIM up--and I dare say you've had worry enough--why
shouldn't I keep Ida? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the
gander--or the other way round, don't you know? I mean to see the thing
through."

Mrs. Beale, for a minute, still with her eyes on him as he leaned upon
the chimneypiece, appeared to turn this over. "You're just a wonder of
kindness--that's what you are!" she said at last. "A lady's expected
to have natural feelings. But YOUR horrible sex--! Isn't it a horrible
sex, little love?" she demanded with her cheek upon her stepdaughter's.

"Oh I like gentlemen best," Maisie lucidly replied.

The words were taken up merrily. "That's a good one for YOU!" Sir Claude
exclaimed to Mrs. Beale.

"No," said that lady: "I've only to remember the women she sees at her
mother's."

"Ah they're very nice now," Sir Claude returned.

"What do you call 'nice'?"

"Well, they're all right."

"That doesn't answer me," said Mrs. Beale; "but I dare say you do take
care of them. That makes you more of an angel to want this job too." And
she playfully whacked her smaller companion.

"I'm not an angel--I'm an old grandmother," Sir Claude declared. "I like
babies--I always did. If we go to smash I shall look for a place as
responsible nurse."

Maisie, in her charmed mood, drank in an imputation on her years which
at another moment might have been bitter; but the charm was sensibly
interrupted by Mrs. Beale's screwing her round and gazing fondly into
her eyes, "You're willing to leave me, you wretch?"

The little girl deliberated; even this consecrated tie had become as a
cord she must suddenly snap. But she snapped it very gently. "Isn't it
my turn for mamma?"

"You're a horrible little hypocrite! The less, I think, now said about
'turns' the better," Mrs. Beale made answer. "_I_ know whose turn it is.
You've not such a passion for your mother!"

"I say, I say: DO look out!" Sir Claude quite amiably protested.

"There's nothing she hasn't heard. But it doesn't matter--it hasn't
spoiled her. If you knew what it costs me to part with you!" she pursued
to Maisie.

Sir Claude watched her as she charmingly clung to the child. "I'm so
glad you really care for her. That's so much to the good."

Mrs. Beale slowly got up, still with her hands on Maisie, but emitting a
soft exhalation. "Well, if you're glad, that may help us; for I assure
you that I shall never give up any rights in her that I may consider
I've acquired by my own sacrifices. I shall hold very fast to my
interest in her. What seems to have happened is that she has brought you
and me together."

"She has brought you and me together," said Sir Claude.

His cheerful echo prolonged the happy truth, and Maisie broke out almost
with enthusiasm: "I've brought you and her together!"

Her companions of course laughed anew and Mrs. Beale gave her an
affectionate shake. "You little monster--take care what you do! But
that's what she does do," she continued to Sir Claude. "She did it to me
and Beale."

"Well then," he said to Maisie, "you must try the trick at OUR place."
He held out his hand to her again. "Will you come now?"

"Now--just as I am?" She turned with an immense appeal to her
stepmother, taking a leap over the mountain of "mending," the abyss of
packing that had loomed and yawned before her. "Oh MAY I?"

Mrs. Beale addressed her assent to Sir Claude. "As well so as any other
way. I'll send on her things to-morrow." Then she gave a tug to the
child's coat, glancing at her up and down with some ruefulness.

"She's not turned out as I should like--her mother will pull her to
pieces. But what's one to do--with nothing to do it on? And she's better
than when she came--you can tell her mother that. I'm sorry to have to
say it to you--but the poor child was a sight."

"Oh I'll turn her out myself!" the visitor cordially said.

"I shall like to see how!"--Mrs. Beale appeared much amused. "You must
bring her to show me--we can manage that. Good-bye, little fright!" And
her last word to Sir Claude was that she would keep him up to the mark.

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

completion: After Mrs. Wix leaves, Miss Overmore realizes that she would be hypocritical to criticize Ida further for her marriage, so she silently gazes at Sir Claude's photo. Maisie is surprised when Miss Overmore pronounces Sir Claude "horrid" and is further confused when Miss Overmore suggests they put the photo on display in the schoolroom. Maisie asks Miss Overmore if she will be different now that she is married to Beale, and Miss Overmore responds that she will be completely different. She asks Maisie to call her Mrs. Beale from now on. From this point on, Mrs. Beale fully takes on the role of Beale's companion rather than Maisie's governess, and Maisie's care and studies are largely neglected. Her days are filled with listening to her father and step-mother entertain guests downstairs and being taken on walks by a poor, uncultured servant named Susan Ash. One day when Maisie comes home from a walk with Susan Ash, she finds Sir Claude waiting for her at her father's house. He is friendly and charming, and he announces that he has actually come to take Maisie to her mother's house. During this conversation, Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude seem to get along very well, making light jokes at the expense of their spouses; Maisie notes that Miss Overmore "went on to their visitor so familiarly that it was almost as if they must have met before". At the end of the conversation, everyone repeats that Maisie has brought Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude together. Then Sir Claude takes Maisie off to her mother's house, with Miss Beale promising to send Maisie's clothes and other items the next day


prompt:
Chapter: The idea of what she was to make up and the prodigious total it came
to were kept well before Maisie at her mother's. These things were the
constant occupation of Mrs. Wix, who arrived there by the back stairs,
but in tears of joy, the day after her own arrival. The process of
making up, as to which the good lady had an immense deal to say, took,
through its successive phases, so long that it heralded a term at least
equal to the child's last stretch with her father. This, however, was
a fuller and richer time: it bounded along to the tune of Mrs. Wix's
constant insistence on the energy they must both put forth. There was
a fine intensity in the way the child agreed with her that under Mrs.
Beale and Susan Ash she had learned nothing whatever; the wildness of
the rescued castaway was one of the forces that would henceforth make
for a career of conquest. The year therefore rounded itself as a
receptacle of retarded knowledge--a cup brimming over with the sense
that now at least she was learning. Mrs. Wix fed this sense from the
stores of her conversation and with the immense bustle of her reminder
that they must cull the fleeting hour. They were surrounded with
subjects they must take at a rush and perpetually getting into the
attitude of triumphant attack. They had certainly no idle hours, and the
child went to bed each night as tired as from a long day's play. This
had begun from the moment of their reunion, begun with all Mrs. Wix had
to tell her young friend of the reasons of her ladyship's extraordinary
behaviour at the very first.

It took the form of her ladyship's refusal for three days to see her
little girl--three days during which Sir Claude made hasty merry dashes
into the schoolroom to smooth down the odd situation, to say "She'll
come round, you know; I assure you she'll come round," and a little
even to compensate Maisie for the indignity he had caused her to suffer.
There had never in the child's life been, in all ways, such a delightful
amount of reparation. It came out by his sociable admission that her
ladyship had not known of his visit to her late husband's house and
of his having made that person's daughter a pretext for striking up
an acquaintance with the dreadful creature installed there. Heaven
knew she wanted her child back and had made every plan of her own for
removing her; what she couldn't for the present at least forgive any
one concerned was such an officious underhand way of bringing about the
transfer. Maisie carried more of the weight of this resentment than even
Mrs. Wix's confidential ingenuity could lighten for her, especially as
Sir Claude himself was not at all ingenious, though indeed on the other
hand he was not at all crushed. He was amused and intermittent and at
moments most startling; he impressed on his young companion, with a
frankness that agitated her much more than he seemed to guess, that he
depended on her not letting her mother, when she should see her, get
anything out of her about anything Mrs. Beale might have said to him. He
came in and out; he professed, in joke, to take tremendous precautions;
he showed a positive disposition to romp. He chaffed Mrs. Wix till she
was purple with the pleasure of it, and reminded Maisie of the reticence
he expected of her till she set her teeth like an Indian captive. Her
lessons these first days and indeed for long after seemed to be all
about Sir Claude, and yet she never really mentioned to Mrs. Wix that
she was prepared, under his inspiring injunction, to be vainly tortured.
This lady, however, had formulated the position of things with an
acuteness that showed how little she needed to be coached. Her
explanation of everything that seemed not quite pleasant--and if her own
footing was perilous it met that danger as well--that her ladyship was
passionately in love. Maisie accepted this hint with infinite awe and
pressed upon it much when she was at last summoned into the presence of
her mother.

There she encountered matters amid which it seemed really to help to
give her a clue--an almost terrifying strangeness, full, none the less,
after a little, of reverberations of Ida's old fierce and demonstrative
recoveries of possession. They had been some time in the house together,
and this demonstration came late. Preoccupied, however, as Maisie was
with the idea of the sentiment Sir Claude had inspired, and familiar,
in addition, by Mrs. Wix's anecdotes, with the ravages that in general
such a sentiment could produce, she was able to make allowances for her
ladyship's remarkable appearance, her violent splendour, the wonderful
colour of her lips and even the hard stare, the stare of some gorgeous
idol described in a story-book, that had come into her eyes in
consequence of a curious thickening of their already rich circumference.
Her professions and explanations were mixed with eager challenges and
sudden drops, in the midst of which Maisie recognised as a memory
of other years the rattle of her trinkets and the scratch of her
endearments, the odour of her clothes and the jumps of her conversation.
She had all her old clever way--Mrs. Wix said it was "aristocratic"--of
changing the subject as she might have slammed the door in your face.
The principal thing that was different was the tint of her golden hair,
which had changed to a coppery red and, with the head it profusely
covered, struck the child as now lifted still further aloft. This
picturesque parent showed literally a grander stature and a nobler
presence, things which, with some others that might have been
bewildering, were handsomely accounted for by the romantic state of her
affections. It was her affections, Maisie could easily see, that led Ida
to break out into questions as to what had passed at the other house
between that horrible woman and Sir Claude; but it was also just here
that the little girl was able to recall the effect with which in earlier
days she had practised the pacific art of stupidity. This art again came
to her aid: her mother, in getting rid of her after an interview in
which she had achieved a hollowness beyond her years, allowed her fully
to understand she had not grown a bit more amusing.

She could bear that; she could bear anything that helped her to feel she
had done something for Sir Claude. If she hadn't told Mrs. Wix how Mrs.
Beale seemed to like him she certainly couldn't tell her ladyship. In
the way the past revived for her there was a queer confusion. It was
because mamma hated papa that she used to want to know bad things of
him; but if at present she wanted to know the same of Sir Claude it was
quite from the opposite motive. She was awestruck at the manner in which
a lady might be affected through the passion mentioned by Mrs. Wix; she
held her breath with the sense of picking her steps among the tremendous
things of life. What she did, however, now, after the interview with
her mother, impart to Mrs. Wix was that, in spite of her having had her
"good" effect, as she called it--the effect she studied, the effect of
harmless vacancy--her ladyship's last words had been that her ladyship's
duty by her would be thoroughly done. Over this announcement governess
and pupil looked at each other in silent profundity; but as the weeks
went by it had no consequences that interfered gravely with the breezy
gallop of making up. Her ladyship's duty took at times the form of not
seeing her child for days together, and Maisie led her life in great
prosperity between Mrs. Wix and kind Sir Claude. Mrs. Wix had a new
dress and, as she was the first to proclaim, a better position; so it
all struck Maisie as a crowded brilliant life, with, for the time, Mrs.
Beale and Susan Ash simply "left out" like children not invited to a
Christmas party. Mrs. Wix had a secret terror which, like most of her
secret feelings, she discussed with her little companion, in great
solemnity, by the hour: the possibility of her ladyship's coming down
on them, in her sudden highbred way, with a school. But she had also
a balm to this fear in a conviction of the strength of Sir Claude's
grasp of the situation. He was too pleased--didn't he constantly say
as much?--with the good impression made, in a wide circle, by Ida's
sacrifices; and he came into the schoolroom repeatedly to let them know
how beautifully he felt everything had gone off and everything would go
on.

He disappeared at times for days, when his patient friends understood
that her ladyship would naturally absorb him; but he always came back
with the drollest stories of where he had been, a wonderful picture of
society, and even with pretty presents that showed how in absence he
thought of his home. Besides giving Mrs. Wix by his conversation a sense
that they almost themselves "went out," he gave her a five-pound note
and the history of France and an umbrella with a malachite knob, and to
Maisie both chocolate-creams and story-books, besides a lovely greatcoat
(which he took her out all alone to buy) and ever so many games
in boxes, with printed directions, and a bright red frame for the
protection of his famous photograph. The games were, as he said, to
while away the evening hour; and the evening hour indeed often passed
in futile attempts on Mrs. Wix's part to master what "it said" on the
papers. When he asked the pair how they liked the games they always
replied "Oh immensely!" but they had earnest discussions as to whether
they hadn't better appeal to him frankly for aid to understand them.
This was a course their delicacy shrank from; they couldn't have told
exactly why, but it was a part of their tenderness for him not to let
him think they had trouble. What dazzled most was his kindness to Mrs.
Wix, not only the five-pound note and the "not forgetting" her, but
the perfect consideration, as she called it with an air to which her
sounding of the words gave the only grandeur Maisie was to have seen her
wear save on a certain occasion hereafter to be described, an occasion
when the poor lady was grander than all of them put together. He shook
hands with her, he recognised her, as she said, and above all, more than
once, he took her, with his stepdaughter, to the pantomime and, in the
crowd, coming out, publicly gave her his arm. When he met them in sunny
Piccadilly he made merry and turned and walked with them, heroically
suppressing his consciousness of the stamp of his company, a heroism
that--needless for Mrs. Wix to sound THOSE words--her ladyship, though
a blood-relation, was little enough the woman to be capable of. Even to
the hard heart of childhood there was something tragic in such elation
at such humanities: it brought home to Maisie the way her humble
companion had sidled and ducked through life. But it settled the
question of the degree to which Sir Claude was a gentleman: he was
more of one than anybody else in the world--"I don't care," Mrs. Wix
repeatedly remarked, "whom you may meet in grand society, nor even to
whom you may be contracted in marriage." There were questions that
Maisie never asked; so her governess was spared the embarrassment of
telling her if he were more of a gentleman than papa. This was not
moreover from the want of opportunity, for there were no moments between
them at which the topic could be irrelevant, no subject they were going
into, not even the principal dates or the auxiliary verbs, in which it
was further off than the turn of the page. The answer on the winter
nights to the puzzle of cards and counters and little bewildering
pamphlets was just to draw up to the fire and talk about him; and if the
truth must be told this edifying interchange constituted for the time
the little girl's chief education.

It must also be admitted that he took them far, further perhaps than
was always warranted by the old-fashioned conscience, the dingy
decencies, of Maisie's simple instructress. There were hours when Mrs.
Wix sighingly testified to the scruples she surmounted, seemed to ask
what other line one COULD take with a young person whose experience
had been, as it were, so peculiar. "It isn't as if you didn't already
know everything, is it, love?" and "I can't make you any worse than
you ARE, can I, darling?"--these were the terms in which the good lady
justified to herself and her pupil her pleasant conversational ease.
What the pupil already knew was indeed rather taken for granted than
expressed, but it performed the useful function of transcending all
textbooks and supplanting all studies. If the child couldn't be worse
it was a comfort even to herself that she was bad--a comfort offering
a broad firm support to the fundamental fact of the present crisis:
the fact that mamma was fearfully jealous. This was another side
of the circumstance of mamma's passion, and the deep couple in the
schoolroom were not long in working round to it. It brought them face
to face with the idea of the inconvenience suffered by any lady who
marries a gentleman producing on other ladies the charming effect of
Sir Claude. That such ladies wouldn't be able to help falling in love
with him was a reflexion naturally irritating to his wife. One day
when some accident, some crash of a banged door or some scurry of
a scared maid, had rendered this truth particularly vivid, Maisie,
receptive and profound, suddenly said to her companion: "And you, my
dear, are you in love with him too?" Even her profundity had left
a margin for a laugh; so she was a trifle startled by the solemn
promptitude with which Mrs. Wix plumped out: "Over head and ears.
I've NEVER since you ask me, been so far gone."

This boldness had none the less no effect of deterrence for her when, a
few days later--it was because several had elapsed without a visit from
Sir Claude--her governess turned the tables. "May I ask you, miss, if
YOU are?" Mrs. Wix brought it out, she could see, with hesitation, but
clearly intending a joke. "Why RATHER!" the child made answer, as if in
surprise at not having long ago seemed sufficiently to commit herself;
on which her friend gave a sigh of apparent satisfaction. It might in
fact have expressed positive relief. Everything was as it should be.

Yet it was not with them, they were very sure, that her ladyship was
furious, nor because she had forbidden it that there befell at last a
period--six months brought it round--when for days together he scarcely
came near them. He was "off," and Ida was "off," and they were sometimes
off together and sometimes apart; there were seasons when the simple
students had the house to themselves, when the very servants seemed
also to be "off" and dinner became a reckless forage in pantries and
sideboards. Mrs. Wix reminded her disciple on such occasions--hungry
moments often, when all the support of the reminder was required--that
the "real life" of their companions, the brilliant society in which it
was inevitable they should move and the complicated pleasures in which
it was almost presumptuous of the mind to follow them, must offer
features literally not to be imagined without being seen. At one
of these times Maisie found her opening it out that, though the
difficulties were many, it was Mrs. Beale who had now become the chief.
Then somehow it was brought fully to the child's knowledge that her
stepmother had been making attempts to see her, that her mother had
deeply resented it, that her stepfather had backed her stepmother up,
that the latter had pretended to be acting as the representative of her
father, and that her mother took the whole thing, in plain terms, very
hard. The situation was, as Mrs. Wix declared, an extraordinary muddle
to be sure. Her account of it brought back to Maisie the happy vision of
the way Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale had made acquaintance--an incident to
which, with her stepfather, though she had had little to say about it
to Mrs. Wix, she had during the first weeks of her stay at her mother's
found more than one opportunity to revert. As to what had taken place
the day Sir Claude came for her, she had been vaguely grateful to Mrs.
Wix for not attempting, as her mother had attempted, to put her through.
That was what Sir Claude had called the process when he warned her of
it, and again afterwards when he told her she was an awfully good "chap"
for having foiled it. Then it was that, well aware Mrs. Beale hadn't
in the least really given her up, she had asked him if he remained
in communication with her and if for the time everything must really
be held to be at an end between her stepmother and herself. This
conversation had occurred in consequence of his one day popping into the
schoolroom and finding Maisie alone.

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

completion: Maisie is now back her mother's house being cared for and taught by Mrs. Wix. After such a long time not having any lessons, Maisie spends long, fulfilling days studying with Mrs. Wix. Maisie's mother won't see Maisie for three days once she has arrived at the house, but Sir Claude visits the schoolroom often. Sir Claude tells Maisie that Ida does not know about him visiting Beale's house, let alone getting to know Beale's new wife. When Maisie finally does get an audience with her mother, she plays dumb to keep Sir Claude's positive relationship with Mrs. Beale a secret. As the weeks go on, Ida often goes days at a time without seeing Maisie. Sir Claude also is away from the house for days at a time, but he always brings back presents for both Maisie and Mrs. Wix to show he's been thinking of them. Maisie's adoration for Sir Claude grows because of how well he treats Mrs. Wix. She thinks about how "He shook hands with her, he recognised her, as she said, and above all, more than once, he took her, with his stepdaughter, to the pantomime and, in the crowd, coming out, publicly gave her his arm". In other words, he treats Mrs. Wix not only as a person, but as if she is a respectable, beautiful lady. Mrs. Wix takes to talking about her love for Sir Claude to Maisie, figuring that Maisie can handle it because she is already aware of such matters from her parents' relationships. Maisie admits that she loves Sir Claude too. Ida and Sir Claude seem happily married for the most part--while they each sometimes go off for multiple days alone, they also go off together, likely to enjoy "brilliant society". While they are away, Maisie and Mrs. Wix are left alone to scrounge for dinner in the pantry, often ending up hungry. Maisie finds out that Mrs. Beale has been trying to visit her, but Ida will not allow it. Ida is especially adamant about this not happening because " stepfather had backed her stepmother up". Maisie asks Sir Claude if he is still in communication with Mrs. Beale but doesn't get an answer


prompt:
Chapter: He was smoking a cigarette and he stood before the fire and looked
at the meagre appointments of the room in a way that made her rather
ashamed of them. Then before (on the subject of Mrs. Beale) he let her
"draw" him--that was another of his words; it was astonishing how many
she gathered in--he remarked that really mamma kept them rather low on
the question of decorations. Mrs. Wix had put up a Japanese fan and two
rather grim texts; she had wished they were gayer, but they were all she
happened to have. Without Sir Claude's photograph, however, the place
would have been, as he said, as dull as a cold dinner. He had said
as well that there were all sorts of things they ought to have; yet
governess and pupil, it had to be admitted, were still divided between
discussing the places where any sort of thing would look best if any
sort of thing should ever come and acknowledging that mutability in the
child's career which was naturally unfavourable to accumulation. She
stayed long enough only to miss things, not half long enough to deserve
them. The way Sir Claude looked about the schoolroom had made her feel
with humility as if it were not very different from the shabby attic in
which she had visited Susan Ash. Then he had said in abrupt reference to
Mrs. Beale: "Do you think she really cares for you?"

"Oh awfully!" Maisie had replied.

"But, I mean, does she love you for yourself, as they call it, don't you
know? Is she as fond of you, now, as Mrs. Wix?"

The child turned it over. "Oh I'm not every bit Mrs. Beale has!"

Sir Claude seemed much amused at this. "No; you're not every bit she
has!"

He laughed for some moments, but that was an old story to Maisie, who
was not too much disconcerted to go on: "But she'll never give me up."

"Well, I won't either, old boy: so that's not so wonderful, and she's
not the only one. But if she's so fond of you, why doesn't she write to
you?"

"Oh on account of mamma." This was rudimentary, and she was almost
surprised at the simplicity of Sir Claude's question.

"I see--that's quite right," he answered. "She might get at you--there
are all sorts of ways. But of course there's Mrs. Wix."

"There's Mrs. Wix," Maisie lucidly concurred. "Mrs. Wix can't abide
her."

Sir Claude seemed interested. "Oh she can't abide her? Then what does
she say about her?"

"Nothing at all--because she knows I shouldn't like it. Isn't it sweet
of her?" the child asked.

"Certainly; rather nice. Mrs. Beale wouldn't hold her tongue for any
such thing as that, would she?"

Maisie remembered how little she had done so; but she desired to protect
Mrs. Beale too. The only protection she could think of, however, was the
plea: "Oh at papa's, you know, they don't mind!"

At this Sir Claude only smiled. "No, I dare say not. But here we mind,
don't we?--we take care what we say. I don't suppose it's a matter on
which I ought to prejudice you," he went on; "but I think we must on the
whole be rather nicer here than at your father's. However, I don't press
that; for it's the sort of question on which it's awfully awkward for
you to speak. Don't worry, at any rate: I assure you I'll back you up."
Then after a moment and while he smoked he reverted to Mrs. Beale and
the child's first enquiry. "I'm afraid we can't do much for her just
now. I haven't seen her since that day--upon my word I haven't seen
her." The next instant, with a laugh the least bit foolish, the young
man slightly coloured: he must have felt this profession of innocence to
be excessive as addressed to Maisie. It was inevitable to say to her,
however, that of course her mother loathed the lady of the other house.
He couldn't go there again with his wife's consent, and he wasn't the
man--he begged her to believe, falling once more, in spite of himself,
into the scruple of showing the child he didn't trip--to go there
without it. He was liable in talking with her to take the tone of her
being also a man of the world. He had gone to Mrs. Beale's to fetch
away Maisie, but that was altogether different. Now that she was in
her mother's house what pretext had he to give her mother for paying
calls on her father's wife? And of course Mrs. Beale couldn't come to
Ida's--Ida would tear her limb from limb. Maisie, with this talk of
pretexts, remembered how much Mrs. Beale had made of her being a good
one, and how, for such a function, it was her fate to be either much
depended on or much missed. Sir Claude moreover recognised on this
occasion that perhaps things would take a turn later on; and he wound
up by saying: "I'm sure she does sincerely care for you--how can she
possibly help it? She's very young and very pretty and very clever: I
think she's charming. But we must walk very straight. If you'll help me,
you know, I'll help YOU," he concluded in the pleasant fraternising,
equalising, not a bit patronising way which made the child ready to go
through anything for him and the beauty of which, as she dimly felt, was
that it was so much less a deceitful descent to her years than a real
indifference to them.

It gave her moments of secret rapture--moments of believing she might
help him indeed. The only mystification in this was the imposing time of
life that her elders spoke of as youth. For Sir Claude then Mrs. Beale
was "young," just as for Mrs. Wix Sir Claude was: that was one of the
merits for which Mrs. Wix most commended him. What therefore was Maisie
herself, and, in another relation to the matter, what therefore was
mamma? It took her some time to puzzle out with the aid of an experiment
or two that it wouldn't do to talk about mamma's youth. She even went
so far one day, in the presence of that lady's thick colour and marked
lines, as to wonder if it would occur to any one but herself to do so.
Yet if she wasn't young then she was old; and this threw an odd light on
her having a husband of a different generation. Mr. Farange was still
older--that Maisie perfectly knew; and it brought her in due course
to the perception of how much more, since Mrs. Beale was younger than
Sir Claude, papa must be older than Mrs. Beale. Such discoveries were
disconcerting and even a trifle confounding: these persons, it appeared,
were not of the age they ought to be. This was somehow particularly
the case with mamma, and the fact made her reflect with some relief on
her not having gone with Mrs. Wix into the question of Sir Claude's
attachment to his wife. She was conscious that in confining their
attention to the state of her ladyship's own affections they had been
controlled--Mrs. Wix perhaps in especial--by delicacy and even by
embarrassment. The end of her colloquy with her stepfather in the
schoolroom was her saying: "Then if we're not to see Mrs. Beale at all
it isn't what she seemed to think when you came for me."

He looked rather blank. "What did she seem to think?"

"Why that I've brought you together."

"She thought that?" Sir Claude asked.

Maisie was surprised at his already forgetting it. "Just as I had
brought papa and her. Don't you remember she said so?"

It came back to Sir Claude in a peal of laughter. "Oh yes--she said so!"

"And YOU said so," Maisie lucidly pursued.

He recovered, with increasing mirth, the whole occasion. "And YOU said
so!" he retorted as if they were playing a game.

"Then were we all mistaken?"

He considered a little. "No, on the whole not. I dare say it's just what
you HAVE done. We ARE together--it's really most odd. She's thinking of
us--of you and me--though we don't meet. And I've no doubt you'll find
it will be all right when you go back to her."

"Am I going back to her?" Maisie brought out with a little gasp which
was like a sudden clutch of the happy present.

It appeared to make Sir Claude grave a moment; it might have made him
feel the weight of the pledge his action had given. "Oh some day, I
suppose! We've plenty of time."

"I've such a tremendous lot to make up," Maisie said with a sense of
great boldness.

"Certainly, and you must make up every hour of it. Oh I'll SEE that you
do!"

This was encouraging; and to show cheerfully that she was reassured she
replied: "That's what Mrs. Wix sees too."

"Oh yes," said Sir Claude; "Mrs. Wix and I are shoulder to shoulder."

Maisie took in a little this strong image; after which she exclaimed:
"Then I've done it also to you and her--I've brought YOU together!"

"Blest if you haven't!" Sir Claude laughed. "And more, upon my word,
than any of the lot. Oh you've done for US! Now if you could--as I
suggested, you know, that day--only manage me and your mother!"

The child wondered. "Bring you and HER together?"

"You see we're not together--not a bit. But I oughtn't to tell you such
things; all the more that you won't really do it--not you. No, old
chap," the young man continued; "there you'll break down. But it won't
matter--we'll rub along. The great thing is that you and I are all
right."

"WE'RE all right!" Maisie echoed devoutly. But the next moment, in the
light of what he had just said, she asked: "How shall I ever leave you?"
It was as if she must somehow take care of him.

His smile did justice to her anxiety. "Oh well, you needn't! It won't
come to that."

"Do you mean that when I do go you'll go with me?"

Sir Claude cast about. "Not exactly 'with' you perhaps; but I shall
never be far off."

"But how do you know where mamma may take you?"

He laughed again. "I don't, I confess!" Then he had an idea, though
something too jocose. "That will be for you to see--that she shan't take
me too far."

"How can I help it?" Maisie enquired in surprise. "Mamma doesn't care
for me," she said very simply. "Not really." Child as she was, her
little long history was in the words; and it was as impossible to
contradict her as if she had been venerable.

Sir Claude's silence was an admission of this, and still more the tone
in which he presently replied: "That won't prevent her from--some time
or other--leaving me with you."

"Then we'll live together?" she eagerly demanded.

"I'm afraid," said Sir Claude, smiling, "that that will be Mrs. Beale's
real chance."

Her eagerness just slightly dropped at this; she remembered Mrs. Wix's
pronouncement that it was all an extraordinary muddle. "To take me
again? Well, can't you come to see me there?"

"Oh I dare say!"

Though there were parts of childhood Maisie had lost she had all
childhood's preference for the particular promise. "Then you WILL
come--you'll come often, won't you?" she insisted; while at the moment
she spoke the door opened for the return of Mrs. Wix. Sir Claude
hereupon, instead of replying, gave her a look which left her silent
and embarrassed.

When he again found privacy convenient, however--which happened to be
long in coming--he took up their conversation very much where it had
dropped. "You see, my dear, if I shall be able to go to you at your
father's it yet isn't at all the same thing for Mrs. Beale to come to
you here." Maisie gave a thoughtful assent to this proposition, though
conscious she could scarcely herself say just where the difference would
lie. She felt how much her stepfather saved her, as he said with his
habitual amusement, the trouble of that. "I shall probably be able to go
to Mrs. Beale's without your mother's knowing it."

Maisie stared with a certain thrill at the dramatic element in this.
"And she couldn't come here without mamma's--" She was unable to
articulate the word for what mamma would do.

"My dear child, Mrs. Wix would tell of it."

"But I thought," Maisie objected, "that Mrs. Wix and you--"

"Are such brothers-in-arms?"--Sir Claude caught her up. "Oh yes, about
everything but Mrs. Beale. And if you should suggest," he went on, "that
we might somehow or other hide her peeping in from Mrs. Wix--"

"Oh, I don't suggest THAT!" Maisie in turn cut him short.

Sir Claude looked as if he could indeed quite see why. "No; it would
really be impossible." There came to her from this glance at what they
might hide the first small glimpse of something in him that she wouldn't
have expected. There had been times when she had had to make the best
of the impression that she was herself deceitful; yet she had never
concealed anything bigger than a thought. Of course she now concealed
this thought of how strange it would be to see HIM hide; and while she
was so actively engaged he continued: "Besides, you know, I'm not afraid
of your father."

"And you are of my mother?"

"Rather, old man!" Sir Claude returned.

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

completion: This chapter consists entirely of a confusing conversation between Sir Claude and Maisie. They start by discussing Mrs. Beale; Maisie says that she knows Mrs. Beale won't give her up, even though Ida and Mrs. Wix won't let them be in contact. Sir Claude promises that he hasn't seen Mrs. Beale since the day he picked up Maisie to bring her to her mother's house. When Sir Claude brings up Mrs. Beale's youth, Maisie gets tangled up in the idea of which of her guardians are younger or older than one another. When Maisie comes out of this period of reflection, she and Sir Claude again discuss the idea of Maisie bringing Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale together. Sir Claude remarks, "We are together--it's really most odd. She's thinking of us--of you and me--though we don't meet". They move on to talking about whether Maisie will go back to her father's house, with Sir Claude saying she definitely will go back there. This brings Maisie to say that she has also brought Sir Claude and Mrs. Wix together, and Sir Claude responds that she has brought everyone together besides him and Maisie's mother, who are "not together--not a bit". Sir Claude says that he thinks Mrs. Beale will come to take Maisie back to her father's house at some point when Ida is away, and he promises that he'll find a way to visit her often when she's at her father's without her mother knowing. The chapter ends with Sir Claude saying he's not afraid of Maisie's father, but he is afraid of Maisie's mother