What Maisie Knew by Henry James

advances,
everything made the same impression as before. Mrs. Beale had very
pretty frocks, but Miss Overmore's had been quite as good, and if papa
was much fonder of his second wife than he had been of his first Maisie
had foreseen that fondness, had followed its development almost as
closely as the person more directly involved. There was little indeed in
the commerce of her companions that her precocious experience couldn't
explain, for if they struck her as after all rather deficient in that
air of the honeymoon of which she had so often heard—in much detail,
for instance, from Mrs. Wix—it was natural to judge the circumstance
in the light of papa's proved disposition to contest the empire of the
matrimonial tie. His honeymoon, when he came back from Brighton—not
on the morrow of Mrs. Wix's visit, and not, oddly, till several days
later—his honeymoon was perhaps perceptibly tinged with the dawn of a
later stage of wedlock. There were things dislike of which, as the child
knew it, wouldn't matter to Mrs. Beale now, and their number increased
so that such a trifle as his hostility to the photograph of Sir Claude
quite dropped out of view. This pleasing object found a conspicuous
place in the schoolroom, which in truth Mr. Farange seldom entered and
in which silent admiration formed, during the time I speak of, almost
the sole scholastic exercise of Mrs. Beale's pupil.
    Maisie was not long in seeing just what her stepmother had meant by the
difference she should show in her new character. If she was her father's
wife she was not her own governess, and if her presence had had formerly
to be made regular by the theory of a humble function she was now on a
footing that dispensed with all theories and was inconsistent with all
servitude. That was what she had meant by the drop of the objection to
a school; her small companion was no longer required at home as—it was
Mrs. Beale's own amusing word—a little duenna. The argument against
a successor to Miss Overmore remained: it was composed frankly of the
fact, of which Mrs. Beale granted the full absurdity, that she was too
awfully fond of her stepdaughter to bring herself to see her in vulgar
and mercenary hands. The note of this particular danger emboldened
Maisie to put in a word for Mrs. Wix, the modest measure of whose
avidity she had taken from the first; but Mrs. Beale disposed afresh and
effectually of a candidate who would be sure to act in some horrible
and insidious way for Ida's interest and who moreover was personally
loathsome and as ignorant as a fish. She made also no more of a secret
of the awkward fact that a good school would be hideously expensive, and
of the further circumstance, which seemed to put an end to everything,
that when it came to the point papa, in spite of his previous clamour,
was really most nasty about paying. "Would you believe," Mrs. Beale
confidentially asked of her little charge, "that he says I'm a worse
expense than ever, and that a daughter and a wife together are really
more than he can afford?" It was thus that the splendid school at
Brighton lost itself in the haze of larger questions, though the fear
that it would provoke Ida to leap into the breach subsided with her
prolonged, her quite shameless non-appearance. Her daughter and her
successor were therefore left to gaze in united but helpless blankness
at all Maisie was not learning.
    This quantity was so great as to fill the child's days with a sense of
intermission to which even French Lisette gave no accent—with finished
games and unanswered questions and dreaded tests; with the habit, above
all, in her watch for a change, of hanging over banisters when the
door-bell sounded. This was the great refuge of her impatience, but
what she heard at such times was a clatter of gaiety downstairs; the
impression of which, from her earliest childhood, had built up in her
the belief that the grown-up time was the time of real amusement and
above all of real intimacy. Even