few days later--it was because several had elapsed without a visit from
Sir Claude--her governess turned the tables. "May I ask you, miss, if
YOU are?" Mrs. Wix brought it out, she could see, with hesitation, but
clearly intending a joke. "Why RATHER!" the child made answer, as if in
surprise at not having long ago seemed sufficiently to commit herself;
on which her friend gave a sigh of apparent satisfaction. It might in
fact have expressed positive relief. Everything was as it should be.

Yet it was not with them, they were very sure, that her ladyship was
furious, nor because she had forbidden it that there befell at last a
period--six months brought it round--when for days together he scarcely
came near them. He was "off," and Ida was "off," and they were sometimes
off together and sometimes apart; there were seasons when the simple
students had the house to themselves, when the very servants seemed
also to be "off" and dinner became a reckless forage in pantries and
sideboards. Mrs. Wix reminded her disciple on such occasions--hungry
moments often, when all the support of the reminder was required--that
the "real life" of their companions, the brilliant society in which it
was inevitable they should move and the complicated pleasures in which
it was almost presumptuous of the mind to follow them, must offer
features literally not to be imagined without being seen. At one
of these times Maisie found her opening it out that, though the
difficulties were many, it was Mrs. Beale who had now become the chief.
Then somehow it was brought fully to the child's knowledge that her
stepmother had been making attempts to see her, that her mother had
deeply resented it, that her stepfather had backed her stepmother up,
that the latter had pretended to be acting as the representative of her
father, and that her mother took the whole thing, in plain terms, very
hard. The situation was, as Mrs. Wix declared, an extraordinary muddle
to be sure. Her account of it brought back to Maisie the happy vision of