Maisie's step-parents like her a lot, though, and fall in love with each other so they can fight over her too. The whole novel is excessively, over-determinedly parallel—Maisie and her stepfather discover Mom and her new lover in the park; then Maisie and her stepmother discover Dad and his new lover at the lecture hall. Meanwhile, Maisie herself loves the people who are kind to her and wants to believe her parents are both good, so she's disappointed a lot. In turn, she disappoints her governess Mrs. Wix, who at the end of the novel is requesting that Maisie and she and Sir Claude all run away together and keep adjoining houses in some English country village. Maisie says no because she'd rather take Sir Claude's moral-responsibility-free option (which is...what? I seem to have forgotten), and Mrs. Wix leaves wondering just what Maisie knew—whether she's just as blind and amoral and selfish as her parents and their spouses have been, I guess. Mrs. Wix seems to think so.
The problem is that it's hard to tell how OLD Maisie is—whether she doesn't know things because, as Mrs. Wix says, she has no moral sense, or whether it's just because she's too young still to understand how shitty she's being to Mrs. Wix. Mrs. Wix is the only person who can do a good job at loving Maisie, and Maisie gives her up. This is sad, but what is the sad for? I always feel this about reading James: that he just likes to see his characters be miserable. He makes them make themselves suffer so much. I wish he'd be nicer to them.
