What Maisie Knew by Henry James Page A

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."

XII
*
    She had not at the moment explained her ominous speech, but the light of
remarkable events soon enabled her companion to read it. It may indeed
be said that these days brought on a high quickening of Maisie's direct
perceptions, of her sense of freedom to make out things for herself.
This was helped by an emotion intrinsically far from sweet—the increase
of the alarm that had most haunted her meditations. She had no need to
be told, as on the morrow of the revelation of Sir Claude's danger she
was told by Mrs. Wix, that her mother wanted more and more to know why
the devil her father didn't send for her: she had too long expected
mamma's curiosity on this point to express itself sharply. Maisie could
meet such pressure so far as meeting it was to be in a position to
reply, in words directly inspired, that papa would be hanged before he'd
again be saddled with her. She therefore recognised the hour that in
troubled glimpses she had long foreseen, the hour when—the phrase for
it came back to her from Mrs. Beale—with two fathers, two mothers and
two homes, six protections in all, she shouldn't know "wherever" to
go. Such apprehension as she felt on this score was not diminished
by the fact that Mrs. Wix herself was suddenly white with terror: a
circumstance leading Maisie to the further knowledge that this lady
was still more scared on her own behalf than on that of her pupil. A
governess who had only one frock was not likely to have either two
fathers or two mothers: accordingly if even with these resources Maisie
was to be in the streets, where in the name of all that was dreadful
was poor Mrs. Wix to be? She had had, it appeared, a tremendous brush
with Ida, which had begun and ended with the request that she would be
pleased on the spot to "bundle." It had come suddenly but completely,
this signal of which she had gone in fear. The companions confessed to
each other the dread each had hidden the worst of, but Mrs. Wix was
better off than Maisie in having a plan of defence. She declined indeed
to communicate it till it was quite mature; but meanwhile, she hastened
to declare, her feet were firm in the schoolroom. They could