Indeed, if Maisie defies the conventions of childhood, her parents just as ironically do not—at least when it comes to themselves. The word “game” appears no fewer than twenty-five times in the novel, and only rarely does it apply directly to Maisie. [End Page 101] Rather, it typically identifies the sinister amusements and strategies of Maisie’s parents and of Mrs. Beale. So accustomed to the “frolic menace” of adult games (53), of being played back and forth between her parents like the “little feathered shuttlecock,” or of being the center of a “frightening game,” a flirtatious “merry little scrimmage” between father and governess (53), Maisie “from her earliest childhood, had built up in her the belief that the grown-up time was the time of real amusement” (69).

As hostage and weapon by turns, Maisie is always within but never at one with her domestic environment.

Maisie Farange, for James, is no less than the “extraordinary ‘ironic centre'” for the novel, a source and “pretext” for the narrative’s spreading and ever-devolving “system of misbehaviour” (PR xi, vii). But implicit in this treatment is a surprising “extraordinary” esteem for the child’s divided state. What James early emphasized as the “divided” quality of his child protagonist, he later endeared in translation, recharacterizing Maisie in his notebooks as “the partagé child” (126, 134). Eric Savoy has observed that “In the world of Henry James, the surest sign of an expatriate’s sophistication is the tendency—at once emphatic and off-hand—to sprinkle the conversational mix with French words and phrases” (196). Partagé certainly adds an element of sophistication, elevating the referential complexity of Maisie’s division.