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 finds that she has a lot of schoolwork to make up, and Mrs. Wix, who's thrilled to have her back, sets to work to help her. Maisie's mother, Mrs. Farange , refuses to see Maisie for three days after her return. Mrs. Wix tries to make Maisie feel better by saying it's because her mother is in love, and, ever the romantic, she tells little Maisie stories about love's "ravages" . Maisie does not reveal to her mother, when she finally sees her, that Sir Claude and Mrs. Beale seemed to like each other very much. Time passes. Sir Claude leaves occasionally for a few days at a time. He seems to be out on the town--"in society," as they'd say in James's day--but he always comes back with gifts for both Maisie and Mrs. Wix. Sir Claude is clearly very fond of both of them. And they are, of course, very fond of him, too. Mrs. Wix takes to spending evenings chatting with Maisie about his charms. She feels a bit awkward doing so but figures Maisie has already seen and heard it all. During one of these talks, Mrs. Wix and Maisie both say they're in love with Sir Claude. But months go by, and they haven't seen Sir Claude much at all. Both he and his new wife are off partying. Maisie learns from Mrs. Wix that Mrs. Beale has been trying to see her, and that this has enraged Maisie's mother. Sir Claude sides with Mrs. Beale, which only makes Ida more upset.


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: Maisie and Sir Claude have a heart-to-heart. Sir Claude drops lots of vague hints. Maisie reminds him that she has brought him and Mrs. Beale together, and he hints at his marital difficulties. Sir Claude also tells Maisie that she won't be apart from him when she goes back to live with her father and Mrs. Beale, even though they won't all be living in the same place. This is almost as confusing for the reader as it is for Maisie; Sir Claude is being cagey, and none of what he's saying makes much sense. Sir Claude says that Mrs. Wix doesn't approve of Mrs. Beale, and Maisie starts to suspect that he's hiding something, although she can't yet say what it is.


prompt:
Chapter: It must not be supposed that her ladyship's intermissions were not
qualified by demonstrations of another order--triumphal entries and
breathless pauses during which she seemed to take of everything in the
room, from the state of the ceiling to that of her daughter's boot-toes,
a survey that was rich in intentions. Sometimes she sat down and
sometimes she surged about, but her attitude wore equally in either
case the grand air of the practical. She found so much to deplore that
she left a great deal to expect, and bristled so with calculation that
she seemed to scatter remedies and pledges. Her visits were as good as
an outfit; her manner, as Mrs. Wix once said, as good as a pair of
curtains; but she was a person addicted to extremes--sometimes barely
speaking to her child and sometimes pressing this tender shoot to a
bosom cut, as Mrs. Wix had also observed, remarkably low. She was always
in a fearful hurry, and the lower the bosom was cut the more it was to
be gathered she was wanted elsewhere. She usually broke in alone, but
sometimes Sir Claude was with her, and during all the earlier period
there was nothing on which these appearances had had so delightful a
bearing as on the way her ladyship was, as Mrs. Wix expressed it, under
the spell. "But ISN'T she under it!" Maisie used in thoughtful but
familiar reference to exclaim after Sir Claude had swept mamma away in
peals of natural laughter. Not even in the old days of the convulsed
ladies had she heard mamma laugh so freely as in these moments of
conjugal surrender, to the gaiety of which even a little girl could see
she had at last a right--a little girl whose thoughtfulness was now all
happy selfish meditation on good omens and future fun.

Unaccompanied, in subsequent hours, and with an effect of changing
to meet a change, Ida took a tone superficially disconcerting and
abrupt--the tone of having, at an immense cost, made over everything to
Sir Claude and wishing others to know that if everything wasn't right it
was because Sir Claude was so dreadfully vague. "He has made from the
first such a row about you," she said on one occasion to Maisie, "that
I've told him to do for you himself and try how he likes it--see?
I've washed my hands of you; I've made you over to him; and if you're
discontented it's on him, please, you'll come down. So don't haul poor
ME up--I assure you I've worries enough." One of these, visibly, was
that the spell rejoiced in by the schoolroom fire was already in danger
of breaking; another was that she was finally forced to make no secret
of her husband's unfitness for real responsibilities. The day came
indeed when her breathless auditors learnt from her in bewilderment that
what ailed him was that he was, alas, simply not serious. Maisie wept
on Mrs. Wix's bosom after hearing that Sir Claude was a butterfly;
considering moreover that her governess but half-patched it up in coming
out at various moments the next few days with the opinion that it was
proper to his "station" to be careless and free. That had been proper to
every one's station that she had yet encountered save poor Mrs. Wix's
own, and the particular merit of Sir Claude had seemed precisely that he
was different from every one. She talked with him, however, as time went
on, very freely about her mother; being with him, in this relation,
wholly without the fear that had kept her silent before her father--the
fear of bearing tales and making bad things worse. He appeared to accept
the idea that he had taken her over and made her, as he said, his
particular lark; he quite agreed also that he was an awful fraud and an
idle beast and a sorry dunce. And he never said a word to her against
her mother--he only remained dumb and discouraged in the face of her
ladyship's own overtopping earnestness. There were occasions when he
even spoke as if he had wrenched his little charge from the arms of a
parent who had fought for her tooth and nail.

This was the very moral of a scene that flashed into vividness one day
when the four happened to meet without company in the drawing-room and
Maisie found herself clutched to her mother's breast and passionately
sobbed and shrieked over, made the subject of a demonstration evidently
sequent to some sharp passage just enacted. The connexion required that
while she almost cradled the child in her arms Ida should speak of her
as hideously, as fatally estranged, and should rail at Sir Claude as the
cruel author of the outrage. "He has taken you FROM me," she cried; "he
has set you AGAINST me, and you've been won away and your horrid little
mind has been poisoned! You've gone over to him, you've given yourself
up to side against me and hate me. You never open your mouth to me--you
know you don't; and you chatter to him like a dozen magpies. Don't lie
about it--I hear you all over the place. You hang about him in a way
that's barely decent--he can do what he likes with you. Well then, let
him, to his heart's content: he has been in such a hurry to take you
that we'll see if it suits him to keep you. I'm very good to break my
heart about it when you've no more feeling for me than a clammy little
fish!" She suddenly thrust the child away and, as a disgusted admission
of failure, sent her flying across the room into the arms of Mrs. Wix,
whom at this moment and even in the whirl of her transit Maisie saw,
very red, exchange a quick queer look with Sir Claude.

The impression of the look remained with her, confronting her with such
a critical little view of her mother's explosion that she felt the less
ashamed of herself for incurring the reproach with which she had been
cast off. Her father had once called her a heartless little beast,
and now, though decidedly scared, she was as stiff and cold as if the
description had been just. She was not even frightened enough to cry,
which would have been a tribute to her mother's wrongs: she was only,
more than anything else, curious about the opinion mutely expressed by
their companions. Taking the earliest opportunity to question Mrs. Wix
on this subject she elicited the remarkable reply: "Well, my dear, it's
her ladyship's game, and we must just hold on like grim death."

Maisie could interpret at her leisure these ominous words. Her
reflexions indeed at this moment thickened apace, and one of them made
her sure that her governess had conversations, private, earnest and not
infrequent, with her denounced stepfather. She perceived in the light
of a second episode that something beyond her knowledge had taken place
in the house. The things beyond her knowledge--numerous enough in
truth--had not hitherto, she believed, been the things that had been
nearest to her: she had even had in the past a small smug conviction
that in the domestic labyrinth she always kept the clue. This time too,
however, she at last found out--with the discreet aid, it had to be
confessed, of Mrs. Wix. Sir Claude's own assistance was abruptly taken
from her, for his comment on her ladyship's game was to start on the
spot, quite alone, for Paris, evidently because he wished to show
a spirit when accused of bad behaviour. He might be fond of his
stepdaughter, Maisie felt, without wishing her to be after all thrust on
him in such a way; his absence therefore, it was clear, was a protest
against the thrusting. It was while this absence lasted that our young
lady finally discovered what had happened in the house to be that her
mother was no longer in love.

The limit of a passion for Sir Claude had certainly been reached, she
judged, some time before the day on which her ladyship burst suddenly
into the schoolroom to introduce Mr. Perriam, who, as she announced
from the doorway to Maisie, wouldn't believe his ears that one had a
great hoyden of a daughter. Mr. Perriam was short and massive--Mrs.
Wix remarked afterwards that he was "too fat for the pace"; and it
would have been difficult to say of him whether his head were more
bald or his black moustache more bushy. He seemed also to have
moustaches over his eyes, which, however, by no means prevented these
polished little globes from rolling round the room as if they had been
billiard-balls impelled by Ida's celebrated stroke. Mr. Perriam wore
on the hand that pulled his moustache a diamond of dazzling lustre, in
consequence of which and of his general weight and mystery our young
lady observed on his departure that if he had only had a turban he
would have been quite her idea of a heathen Turk.

"He's quite my idea," Mrs. Wix replied, "of a heathen Jew."

"Well, I mean," said Maisie, "of a person who comes from the East."

"That's where he MUST come from," her governess opined--"he comes from
the City." In a moment she added as if she knew all about him. "He's one
of those people who have lately broken out. He'll be immensely rich."

"On the death of his papa?" the child interestedly enquired.

"Dear no--nothing hereditary. I mean he has made a mass of money."

"How much, do you think?" Maisie demanded.

Mrs. Wix reflected and sketched it. "Oh many millions."

"A hundred?"

Mrs. Wix was not sure of the number, but there were enough of them to
have seemed to warm up for the time the penury of the schoolroom--to
linger there as an afterglow of the hot heavy light Mr. Perriam sensibly
shed. This was also, no doubt, on his part, an effect of that enjoyment
of life with which, among her elders, Maisie had been in contact from
her earliest years--the sign of happy maturity, the old familiar note of
overflowing cheer. "How d'ye do, ma'am? How d'ye do, little miss?"--he
laughed and nodded at the gaping figures. "She has brought me up for a
peep--it's true I wouldn't take you on trust. She's always talking about
you, but she'd never produce you; so to-day I challenged her on the
spot. Well, you ain't a myth, my dear--I back down on that," the visitor
went on to Maisie; "nor you either, miss, though you might be, to be
sure!"

"I bored him with you, darling--I bore every one," Ida said, "and to
prove that you ARE a sweet thing, as well as a fearfully old one, I told
him he could judge for himself. So now he sees that you're a dreadful
bouncing business and that your poor old Mummy's at least sixty!"--and
her ladyship smiled at Mr. Perriam with the charm that her daughter had
heard imputed to her at papa's by the merry gentlemen who had so often
wished to get from him what they called a "rise." Her manner at that
instant gave the child a glimpse more vivid than any yet enjoyed of the
attraction that papa, in remarkable language, always denied she could
put forth.

Mr. Perriam, however, clearly recognised it in the humour with which he
met her. "I never said you ain't wonderful--did I ever say it, hey?" and
he appealed with pleasant confidence to the testimony of the schoolroom,
about which itself also he evidently felt something might be expected of
him. "So this is their little place, hey? Charming, charming, charming!"
he repeated as he vaguely looked round. The interrupted students clung
together as if they had been personally exposed; but Ida relieved their
embarrassment by a hunch of her high shoulders. This time the smile she
addressed to Mr. Perriam had a beauty of sudden sadness. "What on earth
is a poor woman to do?"

The visitor's grimace grew more marked as he continued to look, and
the conscious little schoolroom felt still more like a cage at a
menagerie. "Charming, charming, charming!" Mr. Perriam insisted; but
the parenthesis closed with a prompt click. "There you are!" said her
ladyship. "By-bye!" she sharply added. The next minute they were on the
stairs, and Mrs. Wix and her companion, at the open door and looking
mutely at each other, were reached by the sound of the large social
current that carried them back to their life.

It was singular perhaps after this that Maisie never put a question
about Mr. Perriam, and it was still more singular that by the end of a
week she knew all she didn't ask. What she most particularly knew--and
the information came to her, unsought, straight from Mrs. Wix--was that
Sir Claude wouldn't at all care for the visits of a millionaire who was
in and out of the upper rooms. How little he would care was proved by
the fact that under the sense of them Mrs. Wix's discretion broke down
altogether; she was capable of a transfer of allegiance, capable, at the
altar of propriety, of a desperate sacrifice of her ladyship. As against
Mrs. Beale, she more than once intimated, she had been willing to do
the best for her, but as against Sir Claude she could do nothing for
her at all. It was extraordinary the number of things that, still
without a question, Maisie knew by the time her stepfather came back
from Paris--came bringing her a splendid apparatus for painting in
water-colours and bringing Mrs. Wix, by a lapse of memory that would
have been droll if it had not been a trifle disconcerting, a second and
even a more elegant umbrella. He had forgotten all about the first,
with which, buried in as many wrappers as a mummy of the Pharaohs, she
wouldn't for the world have done anything so profane as use it. Maisie
knew above all that though she was now, by what she called an informal
understanding, on Sir Claude's "side," she had yet not uttered a word
to him about Mr. Perriam. That gentleman became therefore a kind of
flourishing public secret, out of the depths of which governess and
pupil looked at each other portentously from the time their friend was
restored to them. He was restored in great abundance, and it was marked
that, though he appeared to have felt the need to take a stand against
the risk of being too roughly saddled with the offspring of others, he
at this period exposed himself more than ever before to the presumption
of having created expectations.

If it had become now, for that matter, a question of sides, there was at
least a certain amount of evidence as to where they all were. Maisie of
course, in such a delicate position, was on nobody's; but Sir Claude had
all the air of being on hers. If therefore Mrs. Wix was on Sir Claude's,
her ladyship on Mr. Perriam's and Mr. Perriam presumably on her
ladyship's, this left only Mrs. Beale and Mr. Farange to account for.
Mrs. Beale clearly was, like Sir Claude, on Maisie's, and papa, it was
to be supposed, on Mrs. Beale's. Here indeed was a slight ambiguity,
as papa's being on Mrs. Beale's didn't somehow seem to place him quite
on his daughter's. It sounded, as this young lady thought it over,
very much like puss-in-the-corner, and she could only wonder if the
distribution of parties would lead to a rushing to and fro and a
changing of places. She was in the presence, she felt, of restless
change: wasn't it restless enough that her mother and her stepfather
should already be on different sides? That was the great thing that had
domestically happened. Mrs. Wix, besides, had turned another face: she
had never been exactly gay, but her gravity was now an attitude as
public as a posted placard. She seemed to sit in her new dress and brood
over her lost delicacy, which had become almost as doleful a memory as
that of poor Clara Matilda. "It IS hard for him," she often said to her
companion; and it was surprising how competent on this point Maisie
was conscious of being to agree with her. Hard as it was, however, Sir
Claude had never shown to greater advantage than in the gallant generous
sociable way he carried it off: a way that drew from Mrs. Wix a hundred
expressions of relief at his not having suffered it to embitter him.
It threw him more and more at last into the schoolroom, where he
had plainly begun to recognise that if he was to have the credit of
perverting the innocent child he might also at least have the amusement.
He never came into the place without telling its occupants that they
were the nicest people in the house--a remark which always led them to
say to each other "Mr. Perriam!" as loud as ever compressed lips and
enlarged eyes could make them articulate. He caused Maisie to remember
what she had said to Mrs. Beale about his having the nature of a good
nurse, and, rather more than she intended before Mrs. Wix, to bring the
whole thing out by once remarking to him that none of her good nurses
had smoked quite so much in the nursery. This had no more effect than
it was meant to on his cigarettes: he was always smoking, but always
declaring that it was death to him not to lead a domestic life.

He led one after all in the schoolroom, and there were hours of late
evening, when she had gone to bed, that Maisie knew he sat there talking
with Mrs. Wix of how to meet his difficulties. His consideration for
this unfortunate woman even in the midst of them continued to show him
as the perfect gentleman and lifted the subject of his courtesy into an
upper air of beatitude in which her very pride had the hush of anxiety.
"He leans on me--he leans on me!" she only announced from time to time;
and she was more surprised than amused when, later on, she accidentally
found she had given her pupil the impression of a support literally
supplied by her person. This glimpse of a misconception led her to be
explicit--to put before the child, with an air of mourning indeed for
such a stoop to the common, that what they talked about in the small
hours, as they said, was the question of his taking right hold of life.
The life she wanted him to take right hold of was the public: "she"
being, I hasten to add, in this connexion, not the mistress of his fate,
but only Mrs. Wix herself. She had phrases about him that were full of
easy understanding, yet full of morality. "He's a wonderful nature, but
he can't live like the lilies. He's all right, you know, but he must
have a high interest." She had more than once remarked that his affairs
were sadly involved, but that they must get him--Maisie and she
together apparently--into Parliament. The child took it from her with a
flutter of importance that Parliament was his natural sphere, and she
was the less prepared to recognise a hindrance as she had never heard
of any affairs whatever that were not involved. She had in the old
days once been told by Mrs. Beale that her very own were, and with the
refreshment of knowing that she HAD affairs the information hadn't in
the least overwhelmed her. It was true and perhaps a little alarming
that she had never heard of any such matters since then. Full of
charm at any rate was the prospect of some day getting Sir Claude in;
especially after Mrs. Wix, as the fruit of more midnight colloquies,
once went so far as to observe that she really believed it was all
that was wanted to save him. This critic, with these words, struck her
disciple as cropping up, after the manner of mamma when mamma talked,
quite in a new place. The child stared as at the jump of a kangaroo.
"Save him from what?"

Mrs. Wix debated, then covered a still greater distance. "Why just from
awful misery."

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

completion: Maisie's mother says, in her characteristically cruel way, that she has washed her hands of Maisie and tells Maisie that Sir Claude is now responsible for her. Maisie senses that "something beyond her knowledge had taken place in the house." Then, she realizes "that her mother was no longer in love" . There is a new man in Ida's life, and Maisie soon meets him: a millionaire named Mr. Perriam, who visits Ida's house while Sir Claude is away. Maisie tries to figure out who is on her side and realizes that her stepparents and Mrs. Wix are looking out for her, but her biological parents aren't. Our heroine also has the feeling that things are about to change. Sir Claude and Mrs. Wix start to have late-night conversations, during which the "perfect gentleman" asks his friend the governess for advice about how to get out of the bad marriage he's in . Mrs. Wix and Maisie fantasize about getting Sir Claude into Parliament, and Mrs. Wix tells Maisie that this will be just the thing needed to "save" Sir Claude . Maisie asks what Sir Claude needs to be saved from, and Mrs. Wix responds: "awful misery" .


prompt:
Chapter: She had not at the moment explained her ominous speech, but the light of
remarkable events soon enabled her companion to read it. It may indeed
be said that these days brought on a high quickening of Maisie's direct
perceptions, of her sense of freedom to make out things for herself.
This was helped by an emotion intrinsically far from sweet--the increase
of the alarm that had most haunted her meditations. She had no need to
be told, as on the morrow of the revelation of Sir Claude's danger she
was told by Mrs. Wix, that her mother wanted more and more to know why
the devil her father didn't send for her: she had too long expected
mamma's curiosity on this point to express itself sharply. Maisie could
meet such pressure so far as meeting it was to be in a position to
reply, in words directly inspired, that papa would be hanged before he'd
again be saddled with her. She therefore recognised the hour that in
troubled glimpses she had long foreseen, the hour when--the phrase for
it came back to her from Mrs. Beale--with two fathers, two mothers and
two homes, six protections in all, she shouldn't know "wherever" to
go. Such apprehension as she felt on this score was not diminished
by the fact that Mrs. Wix herself was suddenly white with terror: a
circumstance leading Maisie to the further knowledge that this lady
was still more scared on her own behalf than on that of her pupil. A
governess who had only one frock was not likely to have either two
fathers or two mothers: accordingly if even with these resources Maisie
was to be in the streets, where in the name of all that was dreadful
was poor Mrs. Wix to be? She had had, it appeared, a tremendous brush
with Ida, which had begun and ended with the request that she would be
pleased on the spot to "bundle." It had come suddenly but completely,
this signal of which she had gone in fear. The companions confessed to
each other the dread each had hidden the worst of, but Mrs. Wix was
better off than Maisie in having a plan of defence. She declined indeed
to communicate it till it was quite mature; but meanwhile, she hastened
to declare, her feet were firm in the schoolroom. They could only be
loosened by force: she would "leave" for the police perhaps, but she
wouldn't leave for mere outrage. That would be to play her ladyship's
game, and it would take another turn of the screw to make her desert her
darling. Her ladyship had come down with extraordinary violence: it had
been one of many symptoms of a situation strained--"between them all,"
as Mrs. Wix said, "but especially between the two"--to the point of God
only knew what.

Her description of the crisis made the child blanch. "Between which
two?--papa and mamma?"

"Dear no. I mean between your mother and HIM."

Maisie, in this, recognised an opportunity to be really deep.
"'Him'?--Mr. Perriam?"

She fairly brought a blush to the scared face. "Well, my dear, I must
say what you DON'T know ain't worth mentioning. That it won't go on for
ever with Mr. Perriam--since I MUST meet you--you can suppose? But I
meant dear Sir Claude."

Maisie stood corrected rather than abashed. "I see. But it's about Mr.
Perriam he's angry?"

Mrs. Wix waited. "He says he's not."

"Not angry? He has told you so?"

Mrs. Wix looked at her hard. "Not about HIM!"

"Then about some one else?"

Mrs. Wix looked at her harder. "About some one else."

"Lord Eric?" the child promptly brought forth.

At this, of a sudden, her governess was more agitated. "Oh why, little
unfortunate, should we discuss their dreadful names?"--and she threw
herself for the millionth time on Maisie's neck. It took her pupil but
a moment to feel that she quivered with insecurity, and, the contact
of her terror aiding, the pair in another instant were sobbing in each
other's arms. Then it was that, completely relaxed, demoralised as she
had never been, Mrs. Wix suffered her wound to bleed and her resentment
to gush. Her great bitterness was that Ida had called her false,
denounced her hypocrisy and duplicity, reviled her spying and tattling,
her lying and grovelling to Sir Claude. "Me, ME!" the poor woman wailed,
"who've seen what I've seen and gone through everything only to cover
her up and ease her off and smooth her down? If I've been an 'ipocrite
it's the other way round: I've pretended, to him and to her, to myself
and to you and to every one, NOT to see! It serves me right to have held
my tongue before such horrors!"

What horrors they were her companion forbore too closely to enquire,
showing even signs not a few of an ability to take them for granted.
That put the couple more than ever, in this troubled sea, in the same
boat, so that with the consciousness of ideas on the part of her fellow
mariner Maisie could sit close and wait. Sir Claude on the morrow came
in to tea, and then the ideas were produced. It was extraordinary how
the child's presence drew out their full strength. The principal one was
startling, but Maisie appreciated the courage with which her governess
handled it. It simply consisted of the proposal that whenever and
wherever they should seek refuge Sir Claude should consent to share
their asylum. On his protesting with all the warmth in nature against
this note of secession she asked what else in the world was left to them
if her ladyship should stop supplies.

"Supplies be hanged, my dear woman!" said their delightful friend.
"Leave supplies to me--I'll take care of supplies."

Mrs. Wix rose to it. "Well, it's exactly because I knew you'd be so glad
to do so that I put the question before you. There's a way to look after
us better than any other. The way's just to come along with us."

It hung before Maisie, Mrs. Wix's way, like a glittering picture, and
she clasped her hands in ecstasy. "Come along, come along, come along!"

Sir Claude looked from his stepdaughter back to her governess. "Do you
mean leave this house and take up my abode with you?"

"It will be the right thing--if you feel as you've told me you feel."
Mrs. Wix, sustained and uplifted, was now as clear as a bell.

Sir Claude had the air of trying to recall what he had told her; then
the light broke that was always breaking to make his face more pleasant.
"It's your happy thought that I shall take a house for you?"

"For the wretched homeless child. Any roof--over OUR heads--will do for
us; but of course for you it will have to be something really nice."

Sir Claude's eyes reverted to Maisie, rather hard, as she thought; and
there was a shade in his very smile that seemed to show her--though she
also felt it didn't show Mrs. Wix--that the accommodation prescribed
must loom to him pretty large. The next moment, however, he laughed
gaily enough. "My dear lady, you exaggerate tremendously MY poor little
needs." Mrs. Wix had once mentioned to her young friend that when Sir
Claude called her his dear lady he could do anything with her; and
Maisie felt a certain anxiety to see what he would do now. Well, he only
addressed her a remark of which the child herself was aware of feeling
the force. "Your plan appeals to me immensely; but of course--don't you
see--I shall have to consider the position I put myself in by leaving my
wife."

"You'll also have to remember," Mrs. Wix replied, "that if you don't
look out your wife won't give you time to consider. Her ladyship will
leave YOU."

"Ah my good friend, I do look out!" the young man returned while Maisie
helped herself afresh to bread and butter. "Of course if that happens I
shall have somehow to turn round; but I hope with all my heart it won't.
I beg your pardon," he continued to his stepdaughter, "for appearing to
discuss that sort of possibility under your sharp little nose. But the
fact is I FORGET half the time that Ida's your sainted mother."

"So do I!" said Maisie, her mouth full of bread and butter and to put
him the more in the right.

Her protectress, at this, was upon her again. "The little desolate
precious pet!" For the rest of the conversation she was enclosed in Mrs.
Wix's arms, and as they sat there interlocked Sir Claude, before them
with his tea-cup, looked down at them in deepening thought. Shrink
together as they might they couldn't help, Maisie felt, being a very
large lumpish image of what Mrs. Wix required of his slim fineness.
She knew moreover that this lady didn't make it better by adding in a
moment: "Of course we shouldn't dream of a whole house. Any sort of
little lodging, however humble, would be only too blest."

"But it would have to be something that would hold us all," said Sir
Claude.

"Oh yes," Mrs. Wix concurred; "the whole point's our being together.
While you're waiting, before you act, for her ladyship to take some
step, our position here will come to an impossible pass. You don't
know what I went through with her for you yesterday--and for our poor
darling; but it's not a thing I can promise you often to face again. She
cast me out in horrible language--she has instructed the servants not to
wait on me."

"Oh the poor servants are all right!" Sir Claude eagerly cried.

"They're certainly better than their mistress. It's too dreadful that I
should sit here and say of your wife, Sir Claude, and of Maisie's own
mother, that she's lower than a domestic; but my being betrayed into
such remarks is just a reason the more for our getting away. I shall
stay till I'm taken by the shoulders, but that may happen any day. What
also may perfectly happen, you must permit me to repeat, is that she'll
go off to get rid of us."

"Oh if she'll only do that!" Sir Claude laughed. "That would be the very
making of us!"

"Don't say it--don't say it!" Mrs. Wix pleaded. "Don't speak of anything
so fatal. You know what I mean. We must all cling to the right. You
mustn't be bad."

Sir Claude set down his tea-cup; he had become more grave and he
pensively wiped his moustache. "Won't all the world say I'm awful if I
leave the house before--before she has bolted? They'll say it was my
doing so that made her bolt."

Maisie could grasp the force of this reasoning, but it offered no check
to Mrs. Wix. "Why need you mind that--if you've done it for so high a
motive? Think of the beauty of it," the good lady pressed.

"Of bolting with YOU?" Sir Claude ejaculated.

She faintly smiled--she even faintly coloured. "So far from doing you
harm it will do you the highest good. Sir Claude, if you'll listen to
me, it will save you."

"Save me from what?"

Maisie, at this question, waited with renewed suspense for an answer
that would bring the thing to some finer point than their companion
had brought it to before. But there was on the contrary only more
mystification in Mrs. Wix's reply. "Ah from you know what!"

"Do you mean from some other woman!"

"Yes--from a real bad one."

Sir Claude at least, the child could see, was not mystified; so little
indeed that a smile of intelligence broke afresh in his eyes. He turned
them in vague discomfort to Maisie, and then something in the way she
met them caused him to chuck her playfully under the chin. It was not
till after this that he good-naturedly met Mrs. Wix. "You think me much
worse than I am."

"If that were true," she returned, "I wouldn't appeal to you. I do, Sir
Claude, in the name of all that's good in you--and oh so earnestly! We
can help each other. What you'll do for our young friend here I needn't
say. That isn't even what I want to speak of now. What I want to speak
of is what you'll GET--don't you see?--from such an opportunity to take
hold. Take hold of US--take hold of HER. Make her your duty--make her
your life: she'll repay you a thousand-fold!"

It was to Mrs. Wix, during this appeal, that Maisie's contemplation
transferred itself: partly because, though her heart was in her throat
for trepidation, her delicacy deterred her from appearing herself to
press the question; partly from the coercion of seeing Mrs. Wix come out
as Mrs. Wix had never come before--not even on the day of her call at
Mrs. Beale's with the news of mamma's marriage. On that day Mrs. Beale
had surpassed her in dignity, but nobody could have surpassed her now.
There was in fact at this moment a fascination for her pupil in the hint
she seemed to give that she had still more of that surprise behind. So
the sharpened sense of spectatorship was the child's main support, the
long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding
in the fury of it--she had had a glimpse of the game of football--a sort
of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity. It gave her often
an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a manner as if
she could only get at experience by flattening her nose against a pane
of glass. Such she felt to be the application of her nose while she
waited for the effect of Mrs. Wix's eloquence. Sir Claude, however,
didn't keep her long in a position so ungraceful: he sat down and opened
his arms to her as he had done the day he came for her at her father's,
and while he held her there, looking at her kindly, but as if their
companion had brought the blood a good deal to his face, he said:

"Dear Mrs. Wix is magnificent, but she's rather too grand about it.
I mean the situation isn't after all quite so desperate or quite so
simple. But I give you my word before her, and I give it to her before
you, that I'll never, never, forsake you. Do you hear that, old fellow,
and do you take it in? I'll stick to you through everything."

Maisie did take it in--took it with a long tremor of all her little
being; and then as, to emphasise it, he drew her closer she buried her
head on his shoulder and cried without sound and without pain. While she
was so engaged she became aware that his own breast was agitated, and
gathered from it with rapture that his tears were as silently flowing.
Presently she heard a loud sob from Mrs. Wix--Mrs. Wix was the only one
who made a noise.

She was to have made, for some time, none other but this, though
within a few days, in conversation with her pupil, she described her
intercourse with Ida as little better than the state of being battered.
There was as yet nevertheless no attempt to eject her by force, and she
recognised that Sir Claude, taking such a stand as never before, had
intervened with passion and with success. As Maisie remembered--and
remembered wholly without disdain--that he had told her he was afraid of
her ladyship, the little girl took this act of resolution as a proof of
what, in the spirit of the engagement sealed by all their tears, he was
really prepared to do. Mrs. Wix spoke to her of the pecuniary sacrifice
by which she herself purchased the scant security she enjoyed and which,
if it was a defence against the hand of violence, yet left her exposed
to incredible rudeness. Didn't her ladyship find every hour of the
day some artful means to humiliate and trample upon her? There was a
quarter's salary owing her--a great name, even Maisie could suspect,
for a small matter; she should never see it as long as she lived, but
keeping quiet about it put her ladyship, thank heaven, a little in one's
power. Now that he was doing so much else she could never have the
grossness to apply for it to Sir Claude. He had sent home for schoolroom
consumption a huge frosted cake, a wonderful delectable mountain with
geological strata of jam, which might, with economy, see them through
many days of their siege; but it was none the less known to Mrs. Wix
that his affairs were more and more involved, and her fellow partaker
looked back tenderly, in the light of these involutions, at the
expression of face with which he had greeted the proposal that he should
set up another establishment. Maisie felt that if their maintenance
should hang by a thread they must still demean themselves with the
highest delicacy. What he was doing was simply acting without delay, so
far as his embarrassments permitted, on the inspiration of his elder
friend. There was at this season a wonderful month of May--as soft as a
drop of the wind in a gale that had kept one awake--when he took out his
stepdaughter with a fresh alacrity and they rambled the great town in
search, as Mrs. Wix called it, of combined amusement and instruction.

They rode on the top of 'buses; they visited outlying parks; they went
to cricket-matches where Maisie fell asleep; they tried a hundred places
for the best one to have tea. This was his direct way of rising to Mrs.
Wix's grand lesson--of making his little accepted charge his duty and
his life. They dropped, under incontrollable impulses, into shops that
they agreed were too big, to look at things that they agreed were too
small, and it was during these hours that Mrs. Wix, alone at home, but
a subject of regretful reference as they pulled off their gloves for
refreshment, subsequently described herself as least sheltered from the
blows her ladyship had achieved such ingenuity in dealing. She again
and again repeated that she wouldn't so much have minded having her
"attainments" held up to scorn and her knowledge of every subject
denied, hadn't she been branded as "low" in character and tone. There
was by this time no pretence on the part of any one of denying it to be
fortunate that her ladyship habitually left London every Saturday and
was more and more disposed to a return late in the week. It was almost
equally public that she regarded as a preposterous "pose," and indeed as
a direct insult to herself, her husband's attitude of staying behind to
look after a child for whom the most elaborate provision had been made.
If there was a type Ida despised, Sir Claude communicated to Maisie, it
was the man who pottered about town of a Sunday; and he also mentioned
how often she had declared to him that if he had a grain of spirit
he would be ashamed to accept a menial position about Mr. Farange's
daughter. It was her ladyship's contention that he was in craven fear
of his predecessor--otherwise he would recognise it as an obligation of
plain decency to protect his wife against the outrage of that person's
barefaced attempt to swindle her. The swindle was that Mr. Farange
put upon her the whole intolerable burden; "and even when I pay for
you myself," Sir Claude averred to his young friend, "she accuses me
the more of truckling and grovelling." It was Mrs. Wix's conviction,
they both knew, arrived at on independent grounds, that Ida's weekly
excursions were feelers for a more considerable absence. If she came
back later each week the week would be sure to arrive when she wouldn't
come back at all. This appearance had of course much to do with Mrs.
Wix's actual valour. Could they but hold out long enough the snug little
home with Sir Claude would find itself informally established.

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

completion: Maisie worries that she'll soon face "the hour when ... with two fathers, two mothers, and two homes, six protections in all, she shouldn't know 'wherever' to go" . Mrs. Wix is also frightened about her own future and Maisie's. This is because there is apparently yet another man in Ida's life. This one's name is Lord Eric. Mrs. Wix proposes that she, Sir Claude, and Maisie all go off and live together. Sir Claude says he'll have to think about this. He's worried about what people will say if he leaves his wife, Ida. Mrs. Wix begs Sir Claude, on behalf of Maisie and in the name of what's right. Sir Claude says it's not that simple but starts to take Maisie out with him, especially on weekends when Ida is away. Ida stays away more, and it seems to the others in her house that she's testing the waters, planning on a permanent departure from home. Mrs. Wix thinks this means all they have to do is wait: if Ida leaves, then she, Maisie, and Sir Claude will all live together, as planned.


prompt:
Chapter: This might moreover have been taken to be the sense of a remark made by
her stepfather as--one rainy day when the streets were all splash and
two umbrellas unsociable and the wanderers had sought shelter in the
National Gallery--Maisie sat beside him staring rather sightlessly at a
roomful of pictures which he had mystified her much by speaking of with
a bored sigh as a "silly superstition." They represented, with patches
of gold and cataracts of purple, with stiff saints and angular angels,
with ugly Madonnas and uglier babies, strange prayers and prostrations;
so that she at first took his words for a protest against devotional
idolatry--all the more that he had of late often come with her and
with Mrs. Wix to morning church, a place of worship of Mrs. Wix's own
choosing, where there was nothing of that sort; no haloes on heads,
but only, during long sermons, beguiling backs of bonnets, and where,
as her governess always afterwards observed, he gave the most earnest
attention. It presently appeared, however, that his reference was merely
to the affectation of admiring such ridiculous works--an admonition that
she received from him as submissively as she received everything. What
turn it gave to their talk needn't here be recorded: the transition to
the colourless schoolroom and lonely Mrs. Wix was doubtless an effect of
relaxed interest in what was before them. Maisie expressed in her own
way the truth that she never went home nowadays without expecting to
find the temple of her studies empty and the poor priestess cast out.
This conveyed a full appreciation of her peril, and it was in rejoinder
that Sir Claude uttered, acknowledging the source of that peril, the
reassurance at which I have glanced. "Don't be afraid, my dear: I've
squared her." It required indeed a supplement when he saw that it left
the child momentarily blank. "I mean that your mother lets me do what I
want so long as I let her do what SHE wants."

"So you ARE doing what you want?" Maisie asked.

"Rather, Miss Farange!"

Miss Farange turned it over. "And she's doing the same?"

"Up to the hilt!"

Again she considered. "Then, please, what may it be?"

"I wouldn't tell you for the whole world."

She gazed at a gaunt Madonna; after which she broke into a slow smile.
"Well, I don't care, so long as you do let her."

"Oh you monster!"--and Sir Claude's gay vehemence brought him to his
feet.

Another day, in another place--a place in Baker Street where at a hungry
hour she had sat down with him to tea and buns--he brought out a question
disconnected from previous talk. "I say, you know, what do you suppose
your father WOULD do?"

Maisie hadn't long to cast about or to question his pleasant eyes. "If
you were really to go with us? He'd make a great complaint."

He seemed amused at the term she employed. "Oh I shouldn't mind a
'complaint'!"

"He'd talk to every one about it," said Maisie.

"Well, I shouldn't mind that either."

"Of course not," the child hastened to respond. "You've told me you're
not afraid of him."

"The question is are you?" said Sir Claude.

Maisie candidly considered; then she spoke resolutely. "No, not of
papa."

"But of somebody else?"

"Certainly, of lots of people."

"Of your mother first and foremost of course."

"Dear, yes; more of mamma than of--than of--"

"Than of what?" Sir Claude asked as she hesitated for a comparison.

She thought over all objects of dread. "Than of a wild elephant!" she at
last declared. "And you are too," she reminded him as he laughed.

"Oh yes, I am too."

Again she meditated. "Why then did you marry her?"

"Just because I WAS afraid."

"Even when she loved you?"

"That made her the more alarming."

For Maisie herself, though her companion seemed to find it droll, this
opened up depths of gravity. "More alarming than she is now?"

"Well, in a different way. Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and
there's a great variety of kinds."

She took this in with complete intelligence. "Then I think I've got them
all."

"You?" her friend cried. "Nonsense! You're thoroughly 'game.'"

"I'm awfully afraid of Mrs. Beale," Maisie objected.

He raised his smooth brows. "That charming woman?"

"Well," she answered, "you can't understand it because you're not in the
same state."

She had been going on with a luminous "But" when, across the table, he
laid his hand on her arm. "I CAN understand it," he confessed. "I AM in
the same state."

"Oh but she likes you so!" Maisie promptly pleaded.

Sir Claude literally coloured. "That has something to do with it."

Maisie wondered again. "Being liked with being afraid?"

"Yes, when it amounts to adoration."

"Then why aren't you afraid of ME?"

"Because with you it amounts to that?" He had kept his hand on her arm.
"Well, what prevents is simply that you're the gentlest spirit on earth.
Besides--" he pursued; but he came to a pause.

"Besides--?"

"I SHOULD be in fear if you were older--there! See--you already make me
talk nonsense," the young man added. "The question's about your father.
Is he likewise afraid of Mrs. Beale?"

"I think not. And yet he loves her," Maisie mused.

"Oh no--he doesn't; not a bit!" After which, as his companion stared,
Sir Claude apparently felt that he must make this oddity fit with her
recollections. "There's nothing of that sort NOW."

But Maisie only stared the more. "They've changed?"

"Like your mother and me."

She wondered how he knew. "Then you've seen Mrs. Beale again?"

He demurred. "Oh no. She has written to me," he presently subjoined.
"SHE'S not afraid of your father either. No one at all is--really."
Then he went on while Maisie's little mind, with its filial spring
too relaxed from of old for a pang at this want of parental majesty,
speculated on the vague relation between Mrs. Beale's courage and the
question, for Mrs. Wix and herself, of a neat lodging with their friend.
"She wouldn't care a bit if Mr. Farange should make a row."

"Do you mean about you and me and Mrs. Wix? Why should she care? It
wouldn't hurt HER."

Sir Claude, with his legs out and his hand diving into his
trousers-pocket, threw back his head with a laugh just perceptibly
tempered, as she thought, by a sigh. "My dear stepchild, you're
delightful! Look here, we must pay. You've had five buns?"

"How CAN you?" Maisie demanded, crimson under the eye of the young woman
who had stepped to their board. "I've had three."

Shortly after this Mrs. Wix looked so ill that it was to be feared her
ladyship had treated her to some unexampled passage. Maisie asked if
anything worse than usual had occurred; whereupon the poor woman brought
out with infinite gloom: "He has been seeing Mrs. Beale."

"Sir Claude?" The child remembered what he had said. "Oh no--not SEEING
her!"

"I beg your pardon. I absolutely know it." Mrs. Wix was as positive as
she was dismal.

Maisie nevertheless ventured to challenge her. "And how, please, do you
know it?"

She faltered a moment. "From herself. I've been to see her."

Then on Maisie's visible surprise: "I went yesterday while you were out
with him. He has seen her repeatedly."

It was not wholly clear to Maisie why Mrs. Wix should be prostrate at
this discovery; but her general consciousness of the way things could be
both perpetrated and resented always eased off for her the strain of the
particular mystery. "There may be some mistake. He says he hasn't."

Mrs. Wix turned paler, as if this were a still deeper ground for alarm.
"He says so?--he denies that he has seen her?"

"He told me so three days ago. Perhaps she's mistaken," Maisie
suggested.

"Do you mean perhaps she lies? She lies whenever it suits her, I'm very
sure. But I know when people lie--and that's what I've loved in you,
that YOU never do. Mrs. Beale didn't yesterday at any rate. He HAS seen
her."

Maisie was silent a little. "He says not," she then repeated.
"Perhaps--perhaps--" Once more she paused.

"Do you mean perhaps HE lies?"

"Gracious goodness, no!" Maisie shouted.

Mrs. Wix's bitterness, however, again overflowed. "He does, he does,"
she cried, "and it's that that's just the worst of it! They'll take
you, they'll take you, and what in the world will then become of me?"
She threw herself afresh upon her pupil and wept over her with the
inevitable effect of causing the child's own tears to flow. But Maisie
couldn't have told you if she had been crying at the image of their
separation or at that of Sir Claude's untruth. As regards this deviation
it was agreed between them that they were not in a position to bring it
home to him. Mrs. Wix was in dread of doing anything to make him, as
she said, "worse"; and Maisie was sufficiently initiated to be able to
reflect that in speaking to her as he had done he had only wished to be
tender of Mrs. Beale. It fell in with all her inclinations to think of
him as tender, and she forbore to let him know that the two ladies had,
as SHE would never do, betrayed him.

She had not long to keep her secret, for the next day, when she went
out with him, he suddenly said in reference to some errand he had first
proposed: "No, we won't do that--we'll do something else." On this, a
few steps from the door, he stopped a hansom and helped her in; then
following her he gave the driver over the top an address that she lost.
When he was seated beside her she asked him where they were going; to
which he replied "My dear child, you'll see." She saw while she watched
and wondered that they took the direction of the Regent's Park; but
she didn't know why he should make a mystery of that, and it was not
till they passed under a pretty arch and drew up at a white house
in a terrace from which the view, she thought, must be lovely that,
mystified, she clutched him and broke out: "I shall see papa?"

He looked down at her with a kind smile. "No, probably not. I haven't
brought you for that."

"Then whose house is it?"

"It's your father's. They've moved here."

She looked about: she had known Mr. Farange in four or five houses, and
there was nothing astonishing in this except that it was the nicest
place yet. "But I shall see Mrs. Beale?"

"It's to see her that I brought you."

She stared, very white, and, with her hand on his arm, though they had
stopped, kept him sitting in the cab. "To leave me, do you mean?"

He could scarce bring it out. "It's not for me to say if you CAN stay.
We must look into it."

"But if I do I shall see papa?"

"Oh some time or other, no doubt." Then Sir Claude went on: "Have you
really so very great a dread of that?"

Maisie glanced away over the apron of the cab--gazed a minute at the
green expanse of the Regent's Park and, at this moment colouring to the
roots of her hair, felt the full, hot rush of an emotion more mature
than any she had yet known. It consisted of an odd unexpected shame at
placing in an inferior light, to so perfect a gentleman and so charming
a person as Sir Claude, so very near a relative as Mr. Farange. She
remembered, however, her friend's telling her that no one was seriously
afraid of her father, and she turned round with a small toss of her
head. "Oh I dare say I can manage him!"

Sir Claude smiled, but she noted that the violence with which she had
just changed colour had brought into his own face a slight compunctious
and embarrassed flush. It was as if he had caught his first glimpse of
her sense of responsibility. Neither of them made a movement to get out,
and after an instant he said to her: "Look here, if you say so we won't
after all go in."

"Ah but I want to see Mrs. Beale!" the child gently wailed.

"But what if she does decide to take you? Then, you know, you'll have to
remain."

Maisie turned it over. "Straight on--and give you up?"

"Well--I don't quite know about giving me up."

"I mean as I gave up Mrs. Beale when I last went to mamma's. I couldn't
do without you here for anything like so long a time as that." It struck
her as a hundred years since she had seen Mrs. Beale, who was on the
other side of the door they were so near and whom she yet had not taken
the jump to clasp in her arms.

"Oh I dare say you'll see more of me than you've seen of Mrs. Beale.
It isn't in ME to be so beautifully discreet," Sir Claude said. "But
all the same," he continued, "I leave the thing, now that we're here,
absolutely WITH you. You must settle it. We'll only go in if you say so.
If you don't say so we'll turn right round and drive away."

"So in that case Mrs. Beale won't take me?"

"Well--not by any act of ours."

"And I shall be able to go on with mamma?" Maisie asked.

"Oh I don't say that!"

She considered. "But I thought you said you had squared her?"

Sir Claude poked his stick at the splashboard of the cab. "Not, my dear
child, to the point she now requires."

"Then if she turns me out and I don't come here--"

Sir Claude promptly took her up. "What do I offer you, you naturally
enquire? My poor chick, that's just what I ask myself. I don't see it,
I confess, quite as straight as Mrs. Wix."

His companion gazed a moment at what Mrs. Wix saw. "You mean WE can't
make a little family?"

"It's very base of me, no doubt, but I can't wholly chuck your mother."

Maisie, at this, emitted a low but lengthened sigh, a slight sound of
reluctant assent which would certainly have been amusing to an auditor.
"Then there isn't anything else?"

"I vow I don't quite see what there is."

Maisie waited; her silence seemed to signify that she too had no
alternative to suggest. But she made another appeal. "If I come here
you'll come to see me?"

"I won't lose sight of you."

"But how often will you come?" As he hung fire she pressed him. "Often
and often?"

Still he faltered. "My dear old woman--" he began. Then he paused again,
going on the next moment with a change of tone. "You're too funny! Yes
then," he said; "often and often."

"All right!" Maisie jumped out. Mrs. Beale was at home, but not in the
drawing-room, and when the butler had gone for her the child suddenly
broke out: "But when I'm here what will Mrs. Wix do?"

"Ah you should have thought of that sooner!" said her companion with the
first faint note of asperity she had ever heard him sound.

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

completion: Sir Claude explains to Maisie that he doesn't love her mother, adding that Mrs. Beale doesn't love her father, either. This prompts Maisie to ask whether he's been seeing Mrs. Beale after all. Sir Claude says no, but he's written to her. But, here again, James is hinting at greater intimacy between Maisie's two stepparents. You guessed it: foreshadowing. Shortly after this conversation with Sir Claude, Maisie hears from Mrs. Wix that he has been secretly seeing Mrs. Beale. Mrs. Wix is convinced of this. Maisie has a hard time accepting that Sir Claude would have lied to her. But soon enough, she gets proof that he has been seeing Mrs. Beale when he takes her to her father's house to see her. Before they arrive at Mrs. Beale's, Sir Claude says that he doesn't think Mrs. Wix's plan for all of them to live together will work out. But, he says Maisie can stay with Mrs. Beale, and he will come to visit her often. Maisie accepts. Maisie realizes that this means she won't get to see Mrs. Wix or say goodbye--but only after it's too late.