How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #10
"Isn't he sympathetic?" asked Mrs. Wix, who had clearly, on the strength of his charming portrait, made up her mind that Sir Claude promised her a future. "You can see, I hope," she added with much expression, "that he's a perfect gentleman!" Maisie had never before heard the word "sympathetic" applied to anybody's face; she heard it with pleasure and from that moment it agreeably remained with her. (XI.20)
Here, James makes two statements: 1) That young people absorb knowledge quickly. 2) That young people take great pleasure from learning new things.
Quote #11
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." (XI.20-22)
A lot of what James suggests about youth suggests that youth does not equal obliviousness. The young are super-aware of their surroundings and especially pick up on people acting in similar fashions. Maisie is spooked that Mrs. Wix is talking like her mamma—this is probably extra spooky because of how awful her mom is.
Quote #12
This was the second source—I have just alluded to the first—of the child's consciousness of something that, very hopefully, she described to herself as a new phase; and it also presented in the brightest light the fresh enthusiasm with which Mrs. Beale always reappeared and which really gave Maisie a happier sense than she had yet had of being very dear at least to two persons. That she had small remembrance at present of a third illustrates, I am afraid, a temporary oblivion of Mrs. Wix, an accident to be explained only by a state of unnatural excitement. (XVII.4)
Young people not only are aware of beginnings and endings— here, Maisie knows that she is entering a new phase—but they also can chart their own happiness. James thinks that kiddos have almost as well-developed an understanding of themselves in relation to their past as old fogies do.