prompt:
Chapter: "It's a little after the time you told me to wake you, sir. You did
not come out of it as quick as common, sir."

The voice was the voice of my man Sawyer. I started bolt upright in
bed and stared around. I was in my underground chamber. The mellow
light of the lamp which always burned in the room when I occupied it
illumined the familiar walls and furnishings. By my bedside, with the
glass of sherry in his hand which Dr. Pillsbury prescribed on first
rousing from a mesmeric sleep, by way of awakening the torpid physical
functions, stood Sawyer.

"Better take this right off, sir," he said, as I stared blankly at
him. "You look kind of flushed like, sir, and you need it."

I tossed off the liquor and began to realize what had happened to me.
It was, of course, very plain. All that about the twentieth century
had been a dream. I had but dreamed of that enlightened and care-free
race of men and their ingeniously simple institutions, of the glorious
new Boston with its domes and pinnacles, its gardens and fountains,
and its universal reign of comfort. The amiable family which I had
learned to know so well, my genial host and Mentor, Dr. Leete, his
wife, and their daughter, the second and more beauteous Edith, my
betrothed,--these, too, had been but figments of a vision.

For a considerable time I remained in the attitude in which this
conviction had come over me, sitting up in bed gazing at vacancy,
absorbed in recalling the scenes and incidents of my fantastic
experience. Sawyer, alarmed at my looks, was meanwhile anxiously
inquiring what was the matter with me. Roused at length by his
importunities to a recognition of my surroundings, I pulled myself
together with an effort and assured the faithful fellow that I was all
right. "I have had an extraordinary dream, that's all, Sawyer," I
said, "a most-ex-traor-dinary-dream."

I dressed in a mechanical way, feeling lightheaded and oddly uncertain
of myself, and sat down to the coffee and rolls which Sawyer was in
the habit of providing for my refreshment before I left the house. The
morning newspaper lay by the plate. I took it up, and my eye fell on
the date, May 31, 1887. I had known, of course, from the moment I
opened my eyes that my long and detailed experience in another century
had been a dream, and yet it was startling to have it so conclusively
demonstrated that the world was but a few hours older than when I had
lain down to sleep.

Glancing at the table of contents at the head of the paper, which
reviewed the news of the morning, I read the following summary:--

*    *    *    *    *

"FOREIGN AFFAIRS.--The impending war between France and Germany.
The French Chambers asked for new military credits to meet Germany's
increase of her army. Probability that all Europe will be involved in
case of war.--Great suffering among the unemployed in London. They
demand work. Monster demonstration to be made. The authorities
uneasy.--Great strikes in Belgium. The government preparing to repress
outbreaks. Shocking facts in regard to the employment of girls in
Belgium coal mines.--Wholesale evictions in Ireland.

"HOME AFFAIRS.--The epidemic of fraud unchecked. Embezzlement of
half a million in New York.--Misappropriation of a trust fund by executors.
Orphans left penniless.--Clever system of thefts by a bank teller;
$50,000 gone.--The coal barons decide to advance the price of coal and
reduce production.--Speculators engineering a great wheat corner at
Chicago.--A clique forcing up the price of coffee.--Enormous
land-grabs of Western syndicates.--Revelations of shocking corruption
among Chicago officials. Systematic bribery.--The trials of the Boodle
aldermen to go on at New York.--Large failures of business houses.
Fears of a business crisis.--A large grist of burglaries and
larcenies.--A woman murdered in cold blood for her money at New
Haven.--A householder shot by a burglar in this city last night.--A
man shoots himself in Worcester because he could not get work. A large
family left destitute.--An aged couple in New Jersey commit suicide
rather than go to the poor-house.--Pitiable destitution among the
women wage-workers in the great cities.--Startling growth of
illiteracy in Massachusetts.--More insane asylums wanted.--Decoration
Day addresses. Professor Brown's oration on the moral grandeur of
nineteenth century civilization."

*    *    *    *    *

It was indeed the nineteenth century to which I had awaked; there
could be no kind of doubt about that. Its complete microcosm this
summary of the day's news had presented, even to that last
unmistakable touch of fatuous self-complacency. Coming after such a
damning indictment of the age as that one day's chronicle of
world-wide bloodshed, greed, and tyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthy
of Mephistopheles, and yet of all whose eyes it had met this morning I
was, perhaps, the only one who perceived the cynicism, and but
yesterday I should have perceived it no more than the others. That
strange dream it was which had made all the difference. For I know not
how long, I forgot my surroundings after this, and was again in fancy
moving in that vivid dream-world, in that glorious city, with its
homes of simple comfort and its gorgeous public palaces. Around me
were again faces unmarred by arrogance or servility, by envy or greed,
by anxious care or feverish ambition, and stately forms of men and
women who had never known fear of a fellow man or depended on his
favor, but always, in the words of that sermon which still rang in my
ears, had "stood up straight before God."

With a profound sigh and a sense of irreparable loss, not the less
poignant that it was a loss of what had never really been, I roused at
last from my reverie, and soon after left the house.

A dozen times between my door and Washington Street I had to stop and
pull myself together, such power had been in that vision of the Boston
of the future to make the real Boston strange. The squalor and
malodorousness of the town struck me, from the moment I stood upon the
street, as facts I had never before observed. But yesterday, moreover,
it had seemed quite a matter of course that some of my fellow-citizens
should wear silks, and others rags, that some should look well fed,
and others hungry. Now on the contrary the glaring disparities in the
dress and condition of the men and women who brushed each other on the
sidewalks shocked me at every step, and yet more the entire
indifference which the prosperous showed to the plight of the
unfortunate. Were these human beings, who could behold the
wretchedness of their fellows without so much as a change of
countenance? And yet, all the while, I knew well that it was I who had
changed, and not my contemporaries. I had dreamed of a city whose
people fared all alike as children of one family and were one
another's keepers in all things.

Another feature of the real Boston, which assumed the extraordinary
effect of strangeness that marks familiar things seen in a new light,
was the prevalence of advertising. There had been no personal
advertising in the Boston of the twentieth century, because there was
no need of any, but here the walls of the buildings, the windows, the
broadsides of the newspapers in every hand, the very pavements,
everything in fact in sight, save the sky, were covered with the
appeals of individuals who sought, under innumerable pretexts, to
attract the contributions of others to their support. However the
wording might vary, the tenor of all these appeals was the same:--

"Help John Jones. Never mind the rest. They are frauds. I, John Jones,
am the right one. Buy of me. Employ me. Visit me. Hear me, John Jones.
Look at me. Make no mistake, John Jones is the man and nobody else.
Let the rest starve, but for God's sake remember John Jones!"

Whether the pathos or the moral repulsiveness of the spectacle most
impressed me, so suddenly become a stranger in my own city, I know
not. Wretched men, I was moved to cry, who, because they will not
learn to be helpers of one another, are doomed to be beggars of one
another from the least to the greatest! This horrible babel of
shameless self-assertion and mutual depreciation, this stunning clamor
of conflicting boasts, appeals, and adjurations, this stupendous
system of brazen beggary, what was it all but the necessity of a
society in which the opportunity to serve the world according to his
gifts, instead of being secured to every man as the first object of
social organization, had to be fought for!

I reached Washington Street at the busiest point, and there I stood
and laughed aloud, to the scandal of the passers-by. For my life I
could not have helped it, with such a mad humor was I moved at sight
of the interminable rows of stores on either side, up and down the
street so far as I could see,--scores of them, to make the spectacle
more utterly preposterous, within a stone's throw devoted to selling
the same sort of goods. Stores! stores! stores! miles of stores! ten
thousand stores to distribute the goods needed by this one city, which
in my dream had been supplied with all things from a single warehouse,
as they were ordered through one great store in every quarter, where
the buyer, without waste of time or labor, found under one roof the
world's assortment in whatever line he desired. There the labor of
distribution had been so slight as to add but a scarcely perceptible
fraction to the cost of commodities to the user. The cost of
production was virtually all he paid. But here the mere distribution
of the goods, their handling alone, added a fourth, a third, a half
and more, to the cost. All these ten thousand plants must be paid for,
their rent, their staffs of superintendence, their platoons of
salesmen, their ten thousand sets of accountants, jobbers, and
business dependents, with all they spent in advertising themselves and
fighting one another, and the consumers must do the paying. What a
famous process for beggaring a nation!

Were these serious men I saw about me, or children, who did their
business on such a plan? Could they be reasoning beings, who did not
see the folly which, when the product is made and ready for use,
wastes so much of it in getting it to the user? If people eat with a
spoon that leaks half its contents between bowl and lip, are they not
likely to go hungry?

I had passed through Washington Street thousands of times before and
viewed the ways of those who sold merchandise, but my curiosity
concerning them was as if I had never gone by their way before. I took
wondering note of the show windows of the stores, filled with goods
arranged with a wealth of pains and artistic device to attract the
eye. I saw the throngs of ladies looking in, and the proprietors
eagerly watching the effect of the bait. I went within and noted the
hawk-eyed floor-walker watching for business, overlooking the clerks,
keeping them up to their task of inducing the customers to buy, buy,
buy, for money if they had it, for credit if they had it not, to buy
what they wanted not, more than they wanted, what they could not
afford. At times I momentarily lost the clue and was confused by the
sight. Why this effort to induce people to buy? Surely that had
nothing to do with the legitimate business of distributing products to
those who needed them. Surely it was the sheerest waste to force upon
people what they did not want, but what might be useful to another.
The nation was so much the poorer for every such achievement. What
were these clerks thinking of? Then I would remember that they were
not acting as distributors like those in the store I had visited in
the dream Boston. They were not serving the public interest, but their
immediate personal interest, and it was nothing to them what the
ultimate effect of their course on the general prosperity might be, if
but they increased their own hoard, for these goods were their own,
and the more they sold and the more they got for them, the greater
their gain. The more wasteful the people were, the more articles they
did not want which they could be induced to buy, the better for these
sellers. To encourage prodigality was the express aim of the ten
thousand stores of Boston.

Nor were these storekeepers and clerks a whit worse men than any
others in Boston. They must earn a living and support their families,
and how were they to find a trade to do it by which did not
necessitate placing their individual interests before those of others
and that of all? They could not be asked to starve while they waited
for an order of things such as I had seen in my dream, in which the
interest of each and that of all were identical. But, God in heaven!
what wonder, under such a system as this about me--what wonder that
the city was so shabby, and the people so meanly dressed, and so many
of them ragged and hungry!

Some time after this it was that I drifted over into South Boston and
found myself among the manufacturing establishments. I had been in
this quarter of the city a hundred times before, just as I had been on
Washington Street, but here, as well as there, I now first perceived
the true significance of what I witnessed. Formerly I had taken pride
in the fact that, by actual count, Boston had some four thousand
independent manufacturing establishments; but in this very
multiplicity and independence I recognized now the secret of the
insignificant total product of their industry.

If Washington Street had been like a lane in Bedlam, this was a
spectacle as much more melancholy as production is a more vital
function, than distribution. For not only were these four thousand
establishments not working in concert, and for that reason alone
operating at prodigious disadvantage, but, as if this did not involve
a sufficiently disastrous loss of power, they were using their utmost
skill to frustrate one another's effort, praying by night and working
by day for the destruction of one another's enterprises.

The roar and rattle of wheels and hammers resounding from every side
was not the hum of a peaceful industry, but the clangor of swords
wielded by foemen. These mills and shops were so many forts, each
under its own flag, its guns trained on the mills and shops about it,
and its sappers busy below, undermining them.

Within each one of these forts the strictest organization of industry
was insisted on; the separate gangs worked under a single central
authority. No interference and no duplicating of work were permitted.
Each had his allotted task, and none were idle. By what hiatus in the
logical faculty, by what lost link of reasoning, account, then, for
the failure to recognize the necessity of applying the same principle
to the organization of the national industries as a whole, to see that
if lack of organization could impair the efficiency of a shop, it must
have effects as much more disastrous in disabling the industries of
the nation at large as the latter are vaster in volume and more
complex in the relationship of their parts.

People would be prompt enough to ridicule an army in which there were
neither companies, battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, or army
corps,--no unit of organization, in fact, larger than the corporal's
squad, with no officer higher than a corporal, and all the corporals
equal in authority. And yet just such an army were the manufacturing
industries of nineteenth century Boston, an army of four thousand
independent squads led by four thousand independent corporals, each
with a separate plan of campaign.

Knots of idle men were to be seen here and there on every side, some
idle because they could find no work at any price, others because they
could not get what they thought a fair price.

I accosted some of the latter, and they told me their grievances. It
was very little comfort I could give them. "I am sorry for you," I
said. "You get little enough, certainly, and yet the wonder to me is,
not that industries conducted as these are do not pay you living
wages, but that they are able to pay you any wages at all."

Making my way back again after this to the peninsular city, toward
three o'clock I stood on State Street, staring, as if I had never seen
them before, at the banks and brokers' offices, and other financial
institutions, of which there had been in the State Street of my vision
no vestige. Business men, confidential clerks, and errand boys were
thronging in and out of the banks, for it wanted but a few minutes of
the closing hour. Opposite me was the bank where I did business, and
presently I crossed the street, and, going in with the crowd, stood in
a recess of the wall looking on at the army of clerks handling money,
and the cues of depositors at the tellers' windows. An old gentleman
whom I knew, a director of the bank, passing me and observing my
contemplative attitude, stopped a moment.

"Interesting sight, isn't it, Mr. West," he said. "Wonderful piece of
mechanism; I find it so myself. I like sometimes to stand and look on
at it just as you are doing. It's a poem, sir, a poem, that's what I
call it. Did you ever think, Mr. West, that the bank is the heart of
the business system? From it and to it, in endless flux and reflux,
the life blood goes. It is flowing in now. It will flow out again in
the morning;" and pleased with his little conceit, the old man passed
on smiling.

Yesterday I should have considered the simile apt enough, but since
then I had visited a world incomparably more affluent than this, in
which money was unknown and without conceivable use. I had learned
that it had a use in the world around me only because the work of
producing the nation's livelihood, instead of being regarded as the
most strictly public and common of all concerns, and as such conducted
by the nation, was abandoned to the hap-hazard efforts of individuals.
This original mistake necessitated endless exchanges to bring about
any sort of general distribution of products. These exchanges money
effected--how equitably, might be seen in a walk from the tenement
house districts to the Back Bay--at the cost of an army of men taken
from productive labor to manage it, with constant ruinous breakdowns
of its machinery, and a generally debauching influence on mankind
which had justified its description, from ancient time, as the "root
of all evil."

Alas for the poor old bank director with his poem! He had mistaken the
throbbing of an abscess for the beating of the heart. What he called
"a wonderful piece of mechanism" was an imperfect device to remedy an
unnecessary defect, the clumsy crutch of a self-made cripple.

After the banks had closed I wandered aimlessly about the business
quarter for an hour or two, and later sat a while on one of the
benches of the Common, finding an interest merely in watching the
throngs that passed, such as one has in studying the populace of a
foreign city, so strange since yesterday had my fellow citizens and
their ways become to me. For thirty years I had lived among them, and
yet I seemed to have never noted before how drawn and anxious were
their faces, of the rich as of the poor, the refined, acute faces of
the educated as well as the dull masks of the ignorant. And well it
might be so, for I saw now, as never before I had seen so plainly,
that each as he walked constantly turned to catch the whispers of a
spectre at his ear, the spectre of Uncertainty. "Do your work never so
well," the spectre was whispering,--"rise early and toil till late,
rob cunningly or serve faithfully, you shall never know security. Rich
you may be now and still come to poverty at last. Leave never so much
wealth to your children, you cannot buy the assurance that your son
may not be the servant of your servant, or that your daughter will not
have to sell herself for bread."

A man passing by thrust an advertising card in my hand, which set
forth the merits of some new scheme of life insurance. The incident
reminded me of the only device, pathetic in its admission of the
universal need it so poorly supplied, which offered these tired and
hunted men and women even a partial protection from uncertainty. By
this means, those already well-to-do, I remembered, might purchase a
precarious confidence that after their death their loved ones would
not, for a while at least, be trampled under the feet of men. But this
was all, and this was only for those who could pay well for it. What
idea was possible to these wretched dwellers in the land of Ishmael,
where every man's hand was against each and the hand of each against
every other, of true life insurance as I had seen it among the people
of that dream land, each of whom, by virtue merely of his membership
in the national family, was guaranteed against need of any sort, by a
policy underwritten by one hundred million fellow countrymen.

Some time after this it was that I recall a glimpse of myself standing
on the steps of a building on Tremont Street, looking at a military
parade. A regiment was passing. It was the first sight in that dreary
day which had inspired me with any other emotions than wondering pity
and amazement. Here at last were order and reason, an exhibition of
what intelligent cooperation can accomplish. The people who stood
looking on with kindling faces,--could it be that the sight had for
them no more than but a spectacular interest? Could they fail to see
that it was their perfect concert of action, their organization under
one control, which made these men the tremendous engine they were,
able to vanquish a mob ten times as numerous? Seeing this so plainly,
could they fail to compare the scientific manner in which the nation
went to war with the unscientific manner in which it went to work?
Would they not query since what time the killing of men had been a
task so much more important than feeding and clothing them, that a
trained army should be deemed alone adequate to the former, while the
latter was left to a mob?

It was now toward nightfall, and the streets were thronged with the
workers from the stores, the shops, and mills. Carried along with the
stronger part of the current, I found myself, as it began to grow
dark, in the midst of a scene of squalor and human degradation such as
only the South Cove tenement district could present. I had seen the
mad wasting of human labor; here I saw in direst shape the want that
waste had bred.

From the black doorways and windows of the rookeries on every side
came gusts of fetid air. The streets and alleys reeked with the
effluvia of a slave ship's between-decks. As I passed I had glimpses
within of pale babies gasping out their lives amid sultry stenches, of
hopeless-faced women deformed by hardship, retaining of womanhood no
trait save weakness, while from the windows leered girls with brows of
brass. Like the starving bands of mongrel curs that infest the streets
of Moslem towns, swarms of half-clad brutalized children filled the
air with shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among the
garbage that littered the court-yards.

There was nothing in all this that was new to me. Often had I passed
through this part of the city and witnessed its sights with feelings
of disgust mingled with a certain philosophical wonder at the
extremities mortals will endure and still cling to life. But not alone
as regarded the economical follies of this age, but equally as touched
its moral abominations, scales had fallen from my eyes since that
vision of another century. No more did I look upon the woful dwellers
in this Inferno with a callous curiosity as creatures scarcely human.
I saw in them my brothers and sisters, my parents, my children, flesh
of my flesh, blood of my blood. The festering mass of human
wretchedness about me offended not now my senses merely, but pierced
my heart like a knife, so that I could not repress sighs and groans. I
not only saw but felt in my body all that I saw.

Presently, too, as I observed the wretched beings about me more
closely, I perceived that they were all quite dead. Their bodies were
so many living sepulchres. On each brutal brow was plainly written the
_hic jacet_ of a soul dead within.

As I looked, horror struck, from one death's head to another, I was
affected by a singular hallucination. Like a wavering translucent
spirit face superimposed upon each of these brutish masks I saw the
ideal, the possible face that would have been the actual if mind and
soul had lived. It was not till I was aware of these ghostly faces,
and of the reproach that could not be gainsaid which was in their
eyes, that the full piteousness of the ruin that had been wrought was
revealed to me. I was moved with contrition as with a strong agony,
for I had been one of those who had endured that these things should
be. I had been one of those who, well knowing that they were, had not
desired to hear or be compelled to think much of them, but had gone on
as if they were not, seeking my own pleasure and profit. Therefore now
I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of
strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out
against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements,
every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called
after me as I fled: What hast thou done with thy brother Abel?

I have no clear recollection of anything after this till I found
myself standing on the carved stone steps of the magnificent home of
my betrothed in Commonwealth avenue. Amid the tumult of my thoughts
that day, I had scarcely once thought of her, but now obeying some
unconscious impulse my feet had found the familiar way to her door. I
was told that the family were at dinner, but word was sent out that I
should join them at table. Besides the family, I found several guests
present, all known to me. The table glittered with plate and costly
china. The ladies were sumptuously dressed and wore the jewels of
queens. The scene was one of costly elegance and lavish luxury. The
company was in excellent spirits, and there was plentiful laughter and
a running fire of jests.

To me it was as if, in wandering through the place of doom, my blood
turned to tears by its sights, and my spirit attuned to sorrow, pity,
and despair, I had happened in some glade upon a merry party of
roisterers. I sat in silence until Edith began to rally me upon my
sombre looks, What ailed me? The others presently joined in the
playful assault, and I became a target for quips and jests. Where had
I been, and what had I seen to make such a dull fellow of me?

"I have been in Golgotha," at last I answered. "I have seen Humanity
hanging on a cross! Do none of you know what sights the sun and stars
look down on in this city, that you can think and talk of anything
else? Do you not know that close to your doors a great multitude of
men and women, flesh of your flesh, live lives that are one agony from
birth to death? Listen! their dwellings are so near that if you hush
your laughter you will hear their grievous voices, the piteous crying
of the little ones that suckle poverty, the hoarse curses of men
sodden in misery, turned half-way back to brutes, the chaffering of an
army of women selling themselves for bread. With what have you stopped
your ears that you do not hear these doleful sounds? For me, I can
hear nothing else."

Silence followed my words. A passion of pity had shaken me as I spoke,
but when I looked around upon the company, I saw that, far from being
stirred as I was, their faces expressed a cold and hard astonishment,
mingled in Edith's with extreme mortification, in her father's with
anger. The ladies were exchanging scandalized looks, while one of the
gentlemen had put up his eyeglass and was studying me with an air of
scientific curiosity, When I saw that things which were to me so
intolerable moved them not at all, that words that melted my heart to
speak had only offended them with the speaker, I was at first stunned
and then overcome with a desperate sickness and faintness at the
heart. What hope was there for the wretched, for the world, if
thoughtful men and tender women were not moved by things like these!
Then I bethought myself that it must be because I had not spoken
aright. No doubt I had put the case badly. They were angry because
they thought I was berating them, when God knew I was merely thinking
of the horror of the fact without any attempt to assign the
responsibility for it.

I restrained my passion, and tried to speak calmly and logically that
I might correct this impression. I told them that I had not meant to
accuse them, as if they, or the rich in general, were responsible for
the misery of the world. True indeed it was, that the superfluity
which they wasted would, otherwise bestowed, relieve much bitter
suffering. These costly viands, these rich wines, these gorgeous
fabrics and glistening jewels represented the ransom of many lives.
They were verily not without the guiltiness of those who waste in a
land stricken with famine. Nevertheless, all the waste of all the
rich, were it saved, would go but a little way to cure the poverty of
the world. There was so little to divide that even if the rich went
share and share with the poor, there would be but a common fare of
crusts, albeit made very sweet then by brotherly love.

The folly of men, not their hard-heartedness, was the great cause of
the world's poverty. It was not the crime of man, nor of any class of
men, that made the race so miserable, but a hideous, ghastly mistake,
a colossal world-darkening blunder. And then I showed them how four
fifths of the labor of men was utterly wasted by the mutual warfare,
the lack of organization and concert among the workers. Seeking to
make the matter very plain, I instanced the case of arid lands where
the soil yielded the means of life only by careful use of the
watercourses for irrigation. I showed how in such countries it was
counted the most important function of the government to see that the
water was not wasted by the selfishness or ignorance of individuals,
since otherwise there would be famine. To this end its use was
strictly regulated and systematized, and individuals of their mere
caprice were not permitted to dam it or divert it, or in any way to
tamper with it.

The labor of men, I explained, was the fertilizing stream which alone
rendered earth habitable. It was but a scanty stream at best, and its
use required to be regulated by a system which expended every drop to
the best advantage, if the world were to be supported in abundance.
But how far from any system was the actual practice! Every man wasted
the precious fluid as he wished, animated only by the equal motives of
saving his own crop and spoiling his neighbor's, that his might sell
the better. What with greed and what with spite some fields were
flooded while others were parched, and half the water ran wholly to
waste. In such a land, though a few by strength or cunning might win
the means of luxury, the lot of the great mass must be poverty, and of
the weak and ignorant bitter want and perennial famine.

Let but the famine-stricken nation assume the function it had
neglected, and regulate for the common good the course of the
life-giving stream, and the earth would bloom like one garden, and
none of its children lack any good thing. I described the physical
felicity, mental enlightenment, and moral elevation which would then
attend the lives of all men. With fervency I spoke of that new world,
blessed with plenty, purified by justice and sweetened by brotherly
kindness, the world of which I had indeed but dreamed, but which might
so easily be made real. But when I had expected now surely the faces
around me to light up with emotions akin to mine, they grew ever more
dark, angry, and scornful. Instead of enthusiasm, the ladies showed
only aversion and dread, while the men interrupted me with shouts of
reprobation and contempt. "Madman!" "Pestilent fellow!" "Fanatic!"
"Enemy of society!" were some of their cries, and the one who had
before taken his eyeglass to me exclaimed, "He says we are to have no
more poor. Ha! ha!"

"Put the fellow out!" exclaimed the father of my betrothed, and at the
signal the men sprang from their chairs and advanced upon me.

It seemed to me that my heart would burst with the anguish of finding
that what was to me so plain and so all-important was to them
meaningless, and that I was powerless to make it other. So hot had
been my heart that I had thought to melt an iceberg with its glow,
only to find at last the overmastering chill seizing my own vitals. It
was not enmity that I felt toward them as they thronged me, but pity
only, for them and for the world.

Although despairing, I could not give over. Still I strove with them.
Tears poured from my eyes. In my vehemence I became inarticulate. I
panted, I sobbed, I groaned, and immediately afterward found myself
sitting upright in bed in my room in Dr. Leete's house, and the
morning sun shining through the open window into my eyes. I was
gasping. The tears were streaming down my face, and I quivered in
every nerve.

*    *    *    *    *

As with an escaped convict who dreams that he has been recaptured and
brought back to his dark and reeking dungeon, and opens his eyes to
see the heaven's vault spread above him, so it was with me, as I
realized that my return to the nineteenth century had been the dream,
and my presence in the twentieth was the reality.

The cruel sights which I had witnessed in my vision, and could so well
confirm from the experience of my former life, though they had, alas!
once been, and must in the retrospect to the end of time move the
compassionate to tears, were, God be thanked, forever gone by. Long
ago oppressor and oppressed, prophet and scorner, had been dust. For
generations, rich and poor had been forgotten words.

But in that moment, while yet I mused with unspeakable thankfulness
upon the greatness of the world's salvation and my privilege in
beholding it, there suddenly pierced me like a knife a pang of shame,
remorse, and wondering self-reproach, that bowed my head upon my
breast and made me wish the grave had hid me with my fellows from the
sun. For I had been a man of that former time. What had I done to help
on the deliverance whereat I now presumed to rejoice? I who had lived
in those cruel, insensate days, what had I done to bring them to an
end? I had been every whit as indifferent to the wretchedness of my
brothers, as cynically incredulous of better things, as besotted a
worshipper of Chaos and Old Night, as any of my fellows. So far as my
personal influence went, it had been exerted rather to hinder than to
help forward the enfranchisement of the race which was even then
preparing. What right had I to hail a salvation which reproached me,
to rejoice in a day whose dawning I had mocked?

"Better for you, better for you," a voice within me rang, "had this
evil dream been the reality, and this fair reality the dream; better
your part pleading for crucified humanity with a scoffing generation,
than here, drinking of wells you digged not, and eating of trees whose
husbandmen you stoned;" and my spirit answered, "Better, truly."

When at length I raised my bowed head and looked forth from the
window, Edith, fresh as the morning, had come into the garden and was
gathering flowers. I hastened to descend to her. Kneeling before her,
with my face in the dust, I confessed with tears how little was my
worth to breathe the air of this golden century, and how infinitely
less to wear upon my breast its consummate flower. Fortunate is he
who, with a case so desperate as mine, finds a judge so merciful.

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

completion: Julian West is woken up by his manservant, Sawyer. To his horror, he finds himself back in the nineteenth century and realizes he has merely dreamed the new society. He sees the date on his newspaper. It is May 31, 1887. The captions of the news of the day tell of famine, labor strikes, violence against women, theft by rich and poor, and ends with an announcement on "Professor Brown's oration on the moral grandeur of nineteenth-century civilization." He is taken aback by this topic and shocked that no one else makes a connection between the rest of the news and this sermon. He gets up and goes out wandering through the city. He goes toward Washington Street. On his way there, he notices the poverty existing side-by-side with the richness of dress and architecture. He is struck by all the advertising, which was absent from the new society of his dreams. It seems as if all the advertisements call out for the individual to buy their products at the expense of their competitors'. At Washington Street he stands still and laughs aloud in his astonishment. He sees hundreds of stores selling similar products in competition with one another. He walks over to South Boston, where all the manufacturing establishments are. Before his dream, he had been proud of the great number of these establishments, but now he sees the waste involved in the competition among them. He marvels at the lack of rationality in this plan of production. He also notices many idle workers looking or waiting for work. When he speaks to them, they tell him their grievances and he commiserates with them, wondering at how any of these wasteful manufacturing establishments have the money to employ anyone, much less all the workers of the city. Next, he moves on to State Street, where the banks and brokers' offices are located. Everyone is in a great rush. He stands and watches it until a man of his acquaintance comes up to him assuming that he is looking at it in awe. This man calls the "wonderful piece of mechanism" of this business district a poem. He compares the bank to a heart, the heart of the business system. When the man leaves, Julian West thinks of the waste and irrationality of trusting the nation's livelihood to the "haphazard efforts of individuals." Next, Julian West goes to the Common and sits and watches people passing. As he sits there, a military parade passes by. He cannot understand why people do not realize that the organization of the military, so universally admired, should be applied to the nation's economy. Then, he walks over to South Cove, a tenement district. Poor people call out to each other roughly. Poor children run and fight in the streets. The squalor of their housing shocks Julian West's sensibilities. Even though he had seen this sight many times in the past, after his dream, he now sees these people as related to him in the human family, and he feels personally responsible for them. He realizes after a while that all these people are essentially dead. He feels a great sense of guilt over his own complacency within this system. Finally, he comes to Commonwealth Avenue, where Edith Bartlett lives. It is dinnertime, and her family is entertaining guests. They invite him into the dining room, and he notices all the richness of the setting, as well as the richness of the people's clothing. They tease him for his absence, and when he answers, he tells them he has been to Golgotha and that he has "seen humanity hanging on a cross." He asks them if they know what is going on in their society. He tells them of the horrible conditions of their fellow human beings. When he finishes, he notices they are all looking at him in anger and astonishment. Edith looks humiliated and her father looks very angry. He decides that he did not speak persuasively enough. He thinks the reaction of his audience must arise from their mistaken impression that he was blaming them, so he decides to reframe his discourse and convince them with reason and measure. He speaks calmly, reassuring them that it is not the fault of the rich. He adds that even if all income were suddenly equalized, the problems would not be solved because of the gross waste caused by the present mode of production and distribution. He describes all the waste of this system with examples and illustrations. He paints a picture of a new world possible if only people would reform the present system. The audience reacts even more strongly, calling for him to be thrown out. The men grab him and try to throw him out of the house and he struggles against them crying hysterically. He groans and suddenly finds himself sitting up in his bed at the Leetes' home. His return to the nineteenth century has itself been a dream. He is still in the twentieth century. Remembering all the sights of what he had seen in his dream, he feels an overwhelming sense of guilt that he did nothing while he lived to change things. He does not deserve to benefit from the labor and foresight of others. He sees Edith Leete walking in the garden and goes out to tell her of his worthlessness. She shows him mercy.


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

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

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

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

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

completion: Henry James includes a short chapter titled "What Maisie Knew. In this chapter, James gives the background of the situation that will play out over the course of the novel. A newly divorced couple, Beale and Ida Farange, are squabbling in court regarding the finances and care of their young daughter, Maisie. It is decided by the court that Maisie will be "divided in two" , which is to say that each of her parents "would take her, in rotation, for six months at a time". This is a surprising and disturbing verdict, as neither of Maisie's parents seem fit to raise a child, and many who had been following the drawn-out legal proceedings assumed Maisie would be put in the care of someone else entirely. It is foreshadowed that Maisie's movement back and forth, especially the disparagement of her father by her mother and vice versa, will be detrimental for her development. James also introduces Beale and Ida Farange and the society they are part of. The author writes that, "This was a society in which for the most part people were occupied only with chatter" ; as a result people were actually pleased to be outraged and take sides during and after the Farange's legal dispute. Physically, both Faranges are tall and attractive, though Ida has strangely long arms which contribute to her extraordinary skill in billiards. Beale was once a foreign diplomat, but at the time of the story has "only twenty-five hundred". It is implied that Ida spent his money during their marriage, and she too has almost no money to her name. The author accounts for Maisie's care by explaining that "The child was provided for, thanks to a crafty godmother" , a matter which is not explicitly mentioned again in the book


prompt:
Chapter: In that lively sense of the immediate which is the very air of a child's
mind the past, on each occasion, became for her as indistinct as
the future: she surrendered herself to the actual with a good faith
that might have been touching to either parent. Crudely as they had
calculated they were at first justified by the event: she was the little
feathered shuttlecock they could fiercely keep flying between them. The
evil they had the gift of thinking or pretending to think of each other
they poured into her little gravely-gazing soul as into a boundless
receptacle, and each of them had doubtless the best conscience in the
world as to the duty of teaching her the stern truth that should be her
safeguard against the other. She was at the age for which all stories
are true and all conceptions are stories. The actual was the absolute,
the present alone was vivid. The objurgation for instance launched
in the carriage by her mother after she had at her father's bidding
punctually performed was a missive that dropped into her memory with the
dry rattle of a letter falling into a pillar-box. Like the letter it
was, as part of the contents of a well-stuffed post-bag, delivered in
due course at the right address. In the presence of these overflowings,
after they had continued for a couple of years, the associates of either
party sometimes felt that something should be done for what they called
"the real good, don't you know?" of the child. The only thing done,
however, in general, took place when it was sighingly remarked that she
fortunately wasn't all the year round where she happened to be at the
awkward moment, and that, furthermore, either from extreme cunning or
from extreme stupidity, she appeared not to take things in.

The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents,
corresponded with a great date in her small still life: the complete
vision, private but final, of the strange office she filled. It was
literally a moral revolution and accomplished in the depths of her
nature. The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms
and legs; old forms and phrases began to have a sense that frightened
her. She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy
rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of
concealment. She puzzled out with imperfect signs, but with a prodigious
spirit, that she had been a centre of hatred and a messenger of insult,
and that everything was bad because she had been employed to make it so.
Her parted lips locked themselves with the determination to be employed
no longer. She would forget everything, she would repeat nothing, and
when, as a tribute to the successful application of her system, she
began to be called a little idiot, she tasted a pleasure new and keen.
When therefore, as she grew older, her parents in turn announced before
her that she had grown shockingly dull, it was not from any real
contraction of her little stream of life. She spoiled their fun, but she
practically added to her own. She saw more and more; she saw too much.
It was Miss Overmore, her first governess, who on a momentous occasion
had sown the seeds of secrecy; sown them not by anything she said, but
by a mere roll of those fine eyes which Maisie already admired. Moddle
had become at this time, after alternations of residence of which the
child had no clear record, an image faintly embalmed in the remembrance
of hungry disappearances from the nursery and distressful lapses in the
alphabet, sad embarrassments, in particular, when invited to recognise
something her nurse described as "the important letter haitch." Miss
Overmore, however hungry, never disappeared: this marked her somehow as
of higher rank, and the character was confirmed by a prettiness that
Maisie supposed to be extraordinary. Mrs. Farange had described her as
almost too pretty, and some one had asked what that mattered so long as
Beale wasn't there. "Beale or no Beale," Maisie had heard her mother
reply, "I take her because she's a lady and yet awfully poor. Rather
nice people, but there are seven sisters at home. What do people mean?"

Maisie didn't know what people meant, but she knew very soon all the
names of all the sisters; she could say them off better than she could
say the multiplication-table. She privately wondered moreover, though
she never asked, about the awful poverty, of which her companion also
never spoke. Food at any rate came up by mysterious laws; Miss Overmore
never, like Moddle, had on an apron, and when she ate she held her fork
with her little finger curled out. The child, who watched her at many
moments, watched her particularly at that one. "I think you're lovely,"
she often said to her; even mamma, who was lovely too, had not such a
pretty way with the fork. Maisie associated this showier presence with
her now being "big," knowing of course that nursery-governesses were
only for little girls who were not, as she said, "really" little. She
vaguely knew, further, somehow, that the future was still bigger than
she, and that a part of what made it so was the number of governesses
lurking in it and ready to dart out. Everything that had happened
when she was really little was dormant, everything but the positive
certitude, bequeathed from afar by Moddle, that the natural way for a
child to have her parents was separate and successive, like her mutton
and her pudding or her bath and her nap.

"DOES he know he lies?"--that was what she had vivaciously asked Miss
Overmore on the occasion which was so suddenly to lead to a change in
her life.

"Does he know--" Miss Overmore stared; she had a stocking pulled over
her hand and was pricking at it with a needle which she poised in the
act. Her task was homely, but her movement, like all her movements,
graceful.

"Why papa."

"That he 'lies'?"

"That's what mamma says I'm to tell him--'that he lies and he knows he
lies.'" Miss Overmore turned very red, though she laughed out till her
head fell back; then she pricked again at her muffled hand so hard
that Maisie wondered how she could bear it. "AM I to tell him?" the
child went on. It was then that her companion addressed her in the
unmistakeable language of a pair of eyes of deep dark grey. "I can't say
No," they replied as distinctly as possible; "I can't say No, because
I'm afraid of your mamma, don't you see? Yet how can I say Yes after
your papa has been so kind to me, talking to me so long the other day,
smiling and flashing his beautiful teeth at me the time we met him in
the Park, the time when, rejoicing at the sight of us, he left the
gentlemen he was with and turned and walked with us, stayed with us for
half an hour?" Somehow in the light of Miss Overmore's lovely eyes that
incident came back to Maisie with a charm it hadn't had at the time, and
this in spite of the fact that after it was over her governess had never
but once alluded to it. On their way home, when papa had quitted them,
she had expressed the hope that the child wouldn't mention it to mamma.
Maisie liked her so, and had so the charmed sense of being liked by her,
that she accepted this remark as settling the matter and wonderingly
conformed to it. The wonder now lived again, lived in the recollection
of what papa had said to Miss Overmore: "I've only to look at you to see
you're a person I can appeal to for help to save my daughter." Maisie's
ignorance of what she was to be saved from didn't diminish the pleasure
of the thought that Miss Overmore was saving her. It seemed to make them
cling together as in some wild game of "going round."

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

completion: As Maisie is passed like a "little feathered shuttlecock" from parent to parent, rather than focusing on the past or the future, she simply lives in the present. Her parents tell her terrible things about one another, and she absorbs all of it. Eventually, to get out of passing on her parents' spiteful comments, Maisie learns to pretend to be stupid. On the inside, she is actually extremely mature and astute in her observations about her parents. She finds her ruse of being stupid enjoyable, and when her parents call her hateful names as a result of her not understanding or passing on their comments, she "taste a pleasure new and keen". At Ida Farange's house, Maisie is again cared for by a servant--a governess named Miss Overmore. Miss Overmore is a young woman who is very pretty and is poor because she comes from a large family. Maisie is intrigued by Miss Overmore; she learns the names of all of her sisters and admires the way she genteelly holds her fork while eating. One day, Maisie asks Miss Overmore whether her father actually knows that he lies, as her mother has told her. Miss Overmore is shocked by the question, and answers by saying that she can't tell Maisie no because she is afraid of Ida, but she also doesn't want to disparage Beale because he was friendly to her when they met once at the park. Maisie remembers the encounter, particularly thinking about how her father told Miss Overmore, "I've only to look at you to see you're a person I can appeal to for help to save my daughter"


prompt:
Chapter: She was therefore all the more startled when her mother said to her in
connexion with something to be done before her next migration: "You
understand of course that she's not going with you."

Maisie turned quite faint. "Oh I thought she was."

"It doesn't in the least matter, you know, what you think," Mrs. Farange
loudly replied; "and you had better indeed for the future, miss, learn
to keep your thoughts to yourself." This was exactly what Maisie had
already learned, and the accomplishment was just the source of her
mother's irritation. It was of a horrid little critical system, a
tendency, in her silence, to judge her elders, that this lady suspected
her, liking as she did, for her own part, a child to be simple and
confiding. She liked also to hear the report of the whacks she
administered to Mr. Farange's character, to his pretensions to peace
of mind: the satisfaction of dealing them diminished when nothing came
back. The day was at hand, and she saw it, when she should feel more
delight in hurling Maisie at him than in snatching her away; so much so
that her conscience winced under the acuteness of a candid friend who
had remarked that the real end of all their tugging would be that each
parent would try to make the little girl a burden to the other--a sort
of game in which a fond mother clearly wouldn't show to advantage. The
prospect of not showing to advantage, a distinction in which she held
she had never failed, begot in Ida Farange an ill humour of which
several persons felt the effect. She determined that Beale at any rate
should feel it; she reflected afresh that in the study of how to be
odious to him she must never give way. Nothing could incommode him more
than not to get the good, for the child, of a nice female appendage who
had clearly taken a fancy to her. One of the things Ida said to the
appendage was that Beale's was a house in which no decent woman could
consent to be seen. It was Miss Overmore herself who explained to
Maisie that she had had a hope of being allowed to accompany her to her
father's, and that this hope had been dashed by the way her mother took
it. "She says that if I ever do such a thing as enter his service I must
never expect to show my face in this house again. So I've promised not
to attempt to go with you. If I wait patiently till you come back here
we shall certainly be together once more."

Waiting patiently, and above all waiting till she should come back
there, seemed to Maisie a long way round--it reminded her of all the
things she had been told, first and last, that she should have if she'd
be good and that in spite of her goodness she had never had at all.
"Then who'll take care of me at papa's?"

"Heaven only knows, my own precious!" Miss Overmore replied, tenderly
embracing her. There was indeed no doubt that she was dear to this
beautiful friend. What could have proved it better than the fact that
before a week was out, in spite of their distressing separation and her
mother's prohibition and Miss Overmore's scruples and Miss Overmore's
promise, the beautiful friend had turned up at her father's? The little
lady already engaged there to come by the hour, a fat dark little lady
with a foreign name and dirty fingers, who wore, throughout, a bonnet
that had at first given her a deceptive air, too soon dispelled, of
not staying long, besides asking her pupil questions that had nothing
to do with lessons, questions that Beale Farange himself, when two or
three were repeated to him, admitted to be awfully low--this strange
apparition faded before the bright creature who had braved everything
for Maisie's sake. The bright creature told her little charge frankly
what had happened--that she had really been unable to hold out. She had
broken her vow to Mrs. Farange; she had struggled for three days and
then had come straight to Maisie's papa and told him the simple truth.
She adored his daughter; she couldn't give her up; she'd make for her
any sacrifice. On this basis it had been arranged that she should stay;
her courage had been rewarded; she left Maisie in no doubt as to the
amount of courage she had required. Some of the things she said made
a particular impression on the child--her declaration for instance
that when her pupil should get older she'd understand better just how
"dreadfully bold" a young lady, to do exactly what she had done, had
to be.

"Fortunately your papa appreciates it; he appreciates it IMMENSELY"--
that was one of the things Miss Overmore also said, with a striking
insistence on the adverb. Maisie herself was no less impressed with
what this martyr had gone through, especially after hearing of the
terrible letter that had come from Mrs. Farange. Mamma had been so
angry that, in Miss Overmore's own words, she had loaded her with
insult--proof enough indeed that they must never look forward to being
together again under mamma's roof. Mamma's roof, however, had its turn,
this time, for the child, of appearing but remotely contingent, so that,
to reassure her, there was scarce a need of her companion's secret,
solemnly confided--the probability there would be no going back to mamma
at all. It was Miss Overmore's private conviction, and a part of the
same communication, that if Mr. Farange's daughter would only show a
really marked preference she would be backed up by "public opinion" in
holding on to him. Poor Maisie could scarcely grasp that incentive, but
she could surrender herself to the day. She had conceived her first
passion, and the object of it was her governess. It hadn't been put to
her, and she couldn't, or at any rate she didn't, put it to herself,
that she liked Miss Overmore better than she liked papa; but it would
have sustained her under such an imputation to feel herself able
to reply that papa too liked Miss Overmore exactly as much. He had
particularly told her so. Besides she could easily see it.

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

completion: The author notes that at this point in the arrangement, Ida feels "more delight in hurling Maisie at than in snatching her away". Thus, Ida decides not to send Miss Overmore along with Maisie when she goes back to her father's house purely to bother Beale, since she knows that Maisie likes Miss Overmore and will be upset to move houses without her. Miss Overmore tells Maisie that she tried to plead with Ida to go along with Maisie, but she was told that she would be fired if she attempted to do so. In the end, Miss Overmore promises Maisie that she'll still be at Ida's house when Maisie returns. When Maisie moves back to Beale's house, Miss Overmore follows her within the week, breaking her promise to Ida. Miss Overmore reports that Ida insulted her harshly when she left, but that Beale greatly appreciates Miss Overmore's presence. Miss Overmore tells Maisie that if she shows a "marked preference" for living with her father and Miss Overmore, she may never have to go back to her mother's house. Maisie is not able to fully conceptualize this, but she knows that she likes Miss Overmore more than her father. She notes that her father seems to like Miss Overmore too


prompt:
Chapter: All this led her on, but it brought on her fate as well, the day when
her mother would be at the door in the carriage in which Maisie now rode
on no occasions but these. There was no question at present of Miss
Overmore's going back with her: it was universally recognised that her
quarrel with Mrs. Farange was much too acute. The child felt it from
the first; there was no hugging nor exclaiming as that lady drove her
away--there was only a frightening silence, unenlivened even by the
invidious enquiries of former years, which culminated, according to its
stern nature, in a still more frightening old woman, a figure awaiting
her on the very doorstep. "You're to be under this lady's care," said
her mother. "Take her, Mrs. Wix," she added, addressing the figure
impatiently and giving the child a push from which Maisie gathered that
she wished to set Mrs. Wix an example of energy. Mrs. Wix took her and,
Maisie felt the next day, would never let her go. She had struck her at
first, just after Miss Overmore, as terrible; but something in her voice
at the end of an hour touched the little girl in a spot that had never
even yet been reached. Maisie knew later what it was, though doubtless
she couldn't have made a statement of it: these were things that a few
days' talk with Mrs. Wix quite lighted up. The principal one was a
matter Mrs. Wix herself always immediately mentioned: she had had a
little girl quite of her own, and the little girl had been killed on
the spot. She had had absolutely nothing else in all the world, and her
affliction had broken her heart. It was comfortably established between
them that Mrs. Wix's heart was broken. What Maisie felt was that she had
been, with passion and anguish, a mother, and that this was something
Miss Overmore was not, something (strangely, confusingly) that mamma was
even less.

So it was that in the course of an extraordinarily short time she
found herself as deeply absorbed in the image of the little dead
Clara Matilda, who, on a crossing in the Harrow Road, had been knocked
down and crushed by the cruellest of hansoms, as she had ever found
herself in the family group made vivid by one of seven. "She's your
little dead sister," Mrs. Wix ended by saying, and Maisie, all in
a tremor of curiosity and compassion, addressed from that moment a
particular piety to the small accepted acquisition. Somehow she wasn't
a real sister, but that only made her the more romantic. It contributed
to this view of her that she was never to be spoken of in that character
to any one else--least of all to Mrs. Farange, who wouldn't care for
her nor recognise the relationship: it was to be just an unutterable and
inexhaustible little secret with Mrs. Wix. Maisie knew everything about
her that could be known, everything she had said or done in her little
mutilated life, exactly how lovely she was, exactly how her hair was
curled and her frocks were trimmed. Her hair came down far below her
waist--it was of the most wonderful golden brightness, just as Mrs.
Wix's own had been a long time before. Mrs. Wix's own was indeed very
remarkable still, and Maisie had felt at first that she should never get
on with it. It played a large part in the sad and strange appearance,
the appearance as of a kind of greasy greyness, which Mrs. Wix had
presented on the child's arrival. It had originally been yellow, but
time had turned that elegance to ashes, to a turbid sallow unvenerable
white. Still excessively abundant, it was dressed in a manner of which
the poor lady appeared not yet to have recognised the supersession, with
a glossy braid, like a large diadem, on the top of the head, and behind,
at the nape of the neck, a dingy rosette like a large button. She wore
glasses which, in humble reference to a divergent obliquity of vision,
she called her straighteners, and a little ugly snuff-coloured dress
trimmed with satin bands in the form of scallops and glazed with
antiquity. The straighteners, she explained to Maisie, were put on for
the sake of others, whom, as she believed, they helped to recognise the
bearing, otherwise doubtful, of her regard; the rest of the melancholy
garb could only have been put on for herself. With the added suggestion
of her goggles it reminded her pupil of the polished shell or corslet
of a horrid beetle. At first she had looked cross and almost cruel; but
this impression passed away with the child's increased perception of
her being in the eyes of the world a figure mainly to laugh at. She
was as droll as a charade or an animal toward the end of the "natural
history"--a person whom people, to make talk lively, described to each
other and imitated. Every one knew the straighteners; every one knew the
diadem and the button, the scallops and satin bands; every one, though
Maisie had never betrayed her, knew even Clara Matilda.

It was on account of these things that mamma got her for such low pay,
really for nothing: so much, one day when Mrs. Wix had accompanied her
into the drawing-room and left her, the child heard one of the ladies
she found there--a lady with eyebrows arched like skipping-ropes and
thick black stitching, like ruled lines for musical notes on beautiful
white gloves--announce to another. She knew governesses were poor; Miss
Overmore was unmentionably and Mrs. Wix ever so publicly so. Neither
this, however, nor the old brown frock nor the diadem nor the button,
made a difference for Maisie in the charm put forth through everything,
the charm of Mrs. Wix's conveying that somehow, in her ugliness and her
poverty, she was peculiarly and soothingly safe; safer than any one
in the world, than papa, than mamma, than the lady with the arched
eyebrows; safer even, though so much less beautiful, than Miss Overmore,
on whose loveliness, as she supposed it, the little girl was faintly
conscious that one couldn't rest with quite the same tucked-in and
kissed-for-good-night feeling. Mrs. Wix was as safe as Clara Matilda,
who was in heaven and yet, embarrassingly, also in Kensal Green, where
they had been together to see her little huddled grave. It was from
something in Mrs. Wix's tone, which in spite of caricature remained
indescribable and inimitable, that Maisie, before her term with her
mother was over, drew this sense of a support, like a breast-high
banister in a place of "drops," that would never give way. If she knew
her instructress was poor and queer she also knew she was not nearly so
"qualified" as Miss Overmore, who could say lots of dates straight off
(letting you hold the book yourself), state the position of Malabar, play
six pieces without notes and, in a sketch, put in beautifully the trees
and houses and difficult parts. Maisie herself could play more pieces
than Mrs. Wix, who was moreover visibly ashamed of her houses and trees
and could only, with the help of a smutty forefinger, of doubtful
legitimacy in the field of art, do the smoke coming out of the chimneys.
They dealt, the governess and her pupil, in "subjects," but there were
many the governess put off from week to week and that they never got to
at all: she only used to say "We'll take that in its proper order." Her
order was a circle as vast as the untravelled globe. She had not the
spirit of adventure--the child could perfectly see how many subjects she
was afraid of. She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through
which indeed there curled the blue river of truth. She knew swarms of
stories, mostly those of the novels she had read; relating them with
a memory that never faltered and a wealth of detail that was Maisie's
delight. They were all about love and beauty and countesses and
wickedness. Her conversation was practically an endless narrative,
a great garden of romance, with sudden vistas into her own life and
gushing fountains of homeliness. These were the parts where they most
lingered; she made the child take with her again every step of her long,
lame course and think it beyond magic or monsters. Her pupil acquired a
vivid vision of every one who had ever, in her phrase, knocked against
her--some of them oh so hard!--every one literally but Mr. Wix, her
husband, as to whom nothing was mentioned save that he had been dead for
ages. He had been rather remarkably absent from his wife's career, and
Maisie was never taken to see his grave.

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

completion: Maisie does return to her mother's care, and Miss Overmore obviously cannot come with her. Maisie is given a new governess at her mother's house, an older woman named Mrs. Wix. Maisie does not like Mrs. Wix at first because she is not as pretty as Miss Overmore, but after hearing her voice, Maisie likes her. Maisie finds out that Mrs. Wix had a young daughter of her own named Clara Matilda who died after she was run over by a carriage. Mrs. Wix's strange appearance and demeanor is described in great detail. She wears glasses because her eyes naturally point outwards, and she dresses in drab, unfashionable clothing. Maisie thinks that while Mrs. Wix seemed cruel or strict at the beginning, she was actually deserving of sympathy, since "in the eyes of the world a figure mainly to laugh at". Mrs. Wix seems to be even poorer than Miss Overmore, and Ida pays her very little to care for Maisie. However, Maisie comes to feel very safe and nurtured by her. They generally do little studying, as Maisie had with Miss Overmore, because Mrs. Wix is not very educated herself. Instead, Mrs. Wix tells Maisie stories, both fictional and from her life. Maisie learns all about Clara Matilda, and even accompanies Mrs. Wix to her grave, but she never learns anything about Mrs. Wix's husband


prompt:
Chapter: The second parting from Miss Overmore had been bad enough, but this
first parting from Mrs. Wix was much worse. The child had lately been to
the dentist's and had a term of comparison for the screwed-up intensity
of the scene. It was dreadfully silent, as it had been when her tooth
was taken out; Mrs. Wix had on that occasion grabbed her hand and they
had clung to each other with the frenzy of their determination not to
scream. Maisie, at the dentist's, had been heroically still, but just
when she felt most anguish had become aware of an audible shriek on the
part of her companion, a spasm of stifled sympathy. This was reproduced
by the only sound that broke their supreme embrace when, a month later,
the "arrangement," as her periodical uprootings were called, played the
part of the horrible forceps. Embedded in Mrs. Wix's nature as her tooth
had been socketed in her gum, the operation of extracting her would
really have been a case for chloroform. It was a hug that fortunately
left nothing to say, for the poor woman's want of words at such an
hour seemed to fall in with her want of everything. Maisie's alternate
parent, in the outermost vestibule--he liked the impertinence of
crossing as much as that of his late wife's threshold--stood over them
with his open watch and his still more open grin, while from the only
corner of an eye on which something of Mrs. Wix's didn't impinge the
child saw at the door a brougham in which Miss Overmore also waited.
She remembered the difference when, six months before, she had been
torn from the breast of that more spirited protectress. Miss Overmore,
then also in the vestibule, but of course in the other one, had been
thoroughly audible and voluble; her protest had rung out bravely and she
had declared that something--her pupil didn't know exactly what--was
a regular wicked shame. That had at the time dimly recalled to Maisie
the far-away moment of Moddle's great outbreak: there seemed always to
be "shames" connected in one way or another with her migrations. At
present, while Mrs. Wix's arms tightened and the smell of her hair was
strong, she further remembered how, in pacifying Miss Overmore, papa had
made use of the words "you dear old duck!"--an expression which, by its
oddity, had stuck fast in her young mind, having moreover a place well
prepared for it there by what she knew of the governess whom she now
always mentally characterised as the pretty one. She wondered whether
this affection would be as great as before: that would at all events be
the case with the prettiness Maisie could see in the face which showed
brightly at the window of the brougham.

The brougham was a token of harmony, of the fine conditions papa would
this time offer: he had usually come for her in a hansom, with a
four-wheeler behind for the boxes. The four-wheeler with the boxes on it
was actually there, but mamma was the only lady with whom she had ever
been in a conveyance of the kind always of old spoken of by Moddle as a
private carriage. Papa's carriage was, now that he had one, still more
private, somehow, than mamma's; and when at last she found herself quite
on top, as she felt, of its inmates and gloriously rolling away, she
put to Miss Overmore, after another immense and talkative squeeze, a
question of which the motive was a desire for information as to the
continuity of a certain sentiment. "Did papa like you just the same
while I was gone?" she enquired--full of the sense of how markedly his
favour had been established in her presence. She had bethought herself
that this favour might, like her presence and as if depending on it, be
only intermittent and for the season. Papa, on whose knee she sat, burst
into one of those loud laughs of his that, however prepared she was,
seemed always, like some trick in a frightening game, to leap forth and
make her jump. Before Miss Overmore could speak he replied: "Why, you
little donkey, when you're away what have I left to do but just to love
her?" Miss Overmore hereupon immediately took her from him, and they had
a merry little scrimmage over her of which Maisie caught the surprised
perception in the white stare of an old lady who passed in a victoria.
Then her beautiful friend remarked to her very gravely: "I shall make
him understand that if he ever again says anything as horrid as that
to you I shall carry you straight off and we'll go and live somewhere
together and be good quiet little girls." The child couldn't quite make
out why her father's speech had been horrid, since it only expressed
that appreciation which their companion herself had of old described as
"immense." To enter more into the truth of the matter she appealed to
him again directly, asked if in all those months Miss Overmore hadn't
been with him just as she had been before and just as she would be now.
"Of course she has, old girl--where else could the poor dear be?" cried
Beale Farange, to the still greater scandal of their companion, who
protested that unless he straightway "took back" his nasty wicked fib
it would be, this time, not only him she would leave, but his child too
and his house and his tiresome trouble--all the impossible things he
had succeeded in putting on her. Beale, under this frolic menace, took
nothing back at all; he was indeed apparently on the point of repeating
his extravagance, but Miss Overmore instructed her little charge that
she was not to listen to his bad jokes: she was to understand that a
lady couldn't stay with a gentleman that way without some awfully proper
reason.

Maisie looked from one of her companions to the other; this was the
freshest gayest start she had yet enjoyed, but she had a shy fear of not
exactly believing them. "Well, what reason IS proper?" she thoughtfully
demanded.

"Oh a long-legged stick of a tomboy: there's none so good as that." Her
father enjoyed both her drollery and his own and tried again to get
possession of her--an effort deprecated by their comrade and leading
again to something of a public scuffle. Miss Overmore declared to the
child that she had been all the while with good friends; on which Beale
Farange went on: "She means good friends of mine, you know--tremendous
friends of mine. There has been no end of THEM about--that I WILL say
for her!" Maisie felt bewildered and was afterwards for some time
conscious of a vagueness, just slightly embarrassing, as to the subject
of so much amusement and as to where her governess had really been.
She didn't feel at all as if she had been seriously told, and no such
feeling was supplied by anything that occurred later. Her embarrassment,
of a precocious instinctive order, attached itself to the idea that
this was another of the matters it was not for her, as her mother used
to say, to go into. Therefore, under her father's roof during the time
that followed, she made no attempt to clear up her ambiguity by an
ingratiating way with housemaids; and it was an odd truth that the
ambiguity itself took nothing from the fresh pleasure promised her by
renewed contact with Miss Overmore. The confidence looked for by that
young lady was of the fine sort that explanation can't improve, and she
herself at any rate was a person superior to any confusion. For Maisie
moreover concealment had never necessarily seemed deception; she had
grown up among things as to which her foremost knowledge was that
she was never to ask about them. It was far from new to her that the
questions of the small are the peculiar diversion of the great: except
the affairs of her doll Lisette there had scarcely ever been anything at
her mother's that was explicable with a grave face. Nothing was so easy
to her as to send the ladies who gathered there off into shrieks, and
she might have practised upon them largely if she had been of a more
calculating turn. Everything had something behind it: life was like a
long, long corridor with rows of closed doors. She had learned that at
these doors it was wise not to knock--this seemed to produce from within
such sounds of derision. Little by little, however, she understood more,
for it befell that she was enlightened by Lisette's questions, which
reproduced the effect of her own upon those for whom she sat in the very
darkness of Lisette. Was she not herself convulsed by such innocence? In
the presence of it she often imitated the shrieking ladies. There were
at any rate things she really couldn't tell even a French doll. She
could only pass on her lessons and study to produce on Lisette the
impression of having mysteries in her life, wondering the while whether
she succeeded in the air of shading off, like her mother, into the
unknowable. When the reign of Miss Overmore followed that of Mrs. Wix
she took a fresh cue, emulating her governess and bridging over the
interval with the simple expectation of trust. Yes, there were matters
one couldn't "go into" with a pupil. There were for instance days when,
after prolonged absence, Lisette, watching her take off her things,
tried hard to discover where she had been. Well, she discovered a
little, but never discovered all. There was an occasion when, on her
being particularly indiscreet, Maisie replied to her--and precisely
about the motive of a disappearance--as she, Maisie, had once been
replied to by Mrs. Farange: "Find out for yourself!" She mimicked her
mother's sharpness, but she was rather ashamed afterwards, though as
to whether of the sharpness or of the mimicry was not quite clear.

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

completion: Compared to being separated from Miss Overmore, Maisie is even more devastated to be separated from Mrs. Wix when it is time to return to her father's house. To underscore the pain of the separation, the author uses a vivid extended metaphor comparing Maisie's extraction from Mrs. Wix's care to a recent dentist visit in which Maisie had a tooth pulled. Beale comes to get Maisie in a fancy carriage, and Maisie is returned to Miss Overmore's care at her father's house. Maisie is aware that Miss Overmore had been staying at Beale's house all the time she was away, so she asks Miss Overmore, "Did papa like you just the same while I was gone. Beale laughs loudly at this and responds, "When you're away what have I left to do but just to love her. hinting at a budding relationship between the two. Miss Overmore responds that it is "horrid" for him to say this , which confuses Maisie, and she is further confused when Miss Overmore tries to explain that "a lady couldn't stay with a gentleman that way without some awfully proper reason". By the end of the conversation, Maisie feels embarrassed and bewildered at the vague answers as to where Miss Overmore had been staying; she does not like the feeling of being left in the dark. Maisie lets her frustration ebb as she gets to spend more time with Miss Overmore. Maisie is given a doll named Lisette that she treats very much like she is treated by her parents and governesses. For example, the author writes, "There were. days when, after prolonged absence, Lisette, watching her take off her things, tried hard to discover where she had been. Well, she discovered a little, but never discovered all". This parallels the way Maisie feels left out of her mother's affairs and Miss Overmore's stay with her father