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.

 Maisie heads back to her mother's. Enter Mrs. Wix, the governess who's now to be responsible for Maisie when she is with her mother. Mrs. Wix is off-putting to Maisie at first but soon wins her over. We learn that Mrs. Wix had a young daughter, Clara Matilda, who died, and Maisie can tell by Mrs. Wix's voice that she "had been ... a mother, and that this was something Miss Overmore was not, something, strangely, confusingly that mamma was even less" . So Maisie has her first experience of mother love from Mrs. Wix--more foreshadowing. Mrs. Wix is described as both poor and ugly but "peculiarly and soothingly safe," which in James-speak means super-protective of Maisie . Maisie and Mrs. Wix visit Clara Matilda's grave. It turns out that Mrs. Wix is less accomplished than Miss Overmore as well as less elegant. Instead of learning school subjects from Mrs. Wix, Maisie listens to stories--lots and lots of them. The only thing that Mrs. Wix reveals about her late husband is that he has been dead for a long time. She and Maisie never go to visit his grave.

