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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Bad--?" Maisie echoed with wonder.

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

"Younger than you?"

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

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

 Miss Overmore starts neglecting Maisie's lessons because she is now busy looking after Mr. Farange and his many guests. Miss Overmore and Mr. Farange toy with the idea of sending Maisie to a school or getting her a second governess, but nothing comes of either idea. Maisie starts spending a lot of time by herself. Maisie also realizes that her stay with her father has lasted longer than it was supposed to; Miss Overmore tells her that this is because her mom doesn't care about her. We hear through Miss Overmore that Mrs. Farange, while traveling, has "picked up" a younger male companion . Miss Overmore tells the girl that Maisie is providing a cover for her relationship with Mr. Farange; without Maisie as an excuse for Miss Overmore's presence in the house, they would cause a scandal. Miss Overmore forbids Maisie to write to Mrs. Wix and then bad-mouths her some more to Maisie.

