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!"

 We meet Maisie, age six, and find out what her world is like while she's spending her "first term with her father" . After the impersonal preface, James's narrator shows us what it feels like to be Maisie, and the novel will remain close to her point of view throughout . In short, Maisie has got a tough life ahead of her. Beale Farange doesn't hide his anger for her benefit and bad-mouths Maisie's mother in front of his daughter on the regular. We also meet Maisie's babysitter, Moddle . Moddle is always telling Maisie what a bad pair her parents are . Moddle promises Maisie that things will be better when she goes to stay with her mother. But the chapter ends with Maisie repeating an insult per her father's request, one that's sure to get Ida Farange's goat: "'He said I was to tell you, from him,' she faithfully reported, 'that you're a nasty, horrid pig!'" . Ouch.

