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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A hundred?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

