"Mine? You don't mean to say you suppose I own it!" George Flack shouted. The light projected upon her innocence by his tone was so strong that the girl blushed, and he went on more tenderly: "It's a pretty sight, the way you and your sister take that sort of thing for granted. Do you think property grows on you like a moustache? Well, it seems as if it had, on your father. If I owned the Reverberator I wouldn't be stumping round here; I'd give my attention to another branch of the business. That is I'd give my attention to all, but I wouldn't go round with the delivery-cart. Still, I'm going to capture the blamed thing, and I want you to help me," the young man went on; "that's just what I wanted to speak to you about. It's a big proposition as it stands, but I mean to make it bigger: the most universal society-paper the world has seen. That's where the future lies, and the man who sees it first is the man who'll make his pile. It's a field for enlightened enterprise that hasn't yet begun to be worked." He continued, glowing as if on a sudden with his idea, and one of his knowing eyes half-closed itself for an emphasis habitual with him when he talked consecutively. The effect of this would have been droll to a listener, the note of the prospectus mingling with the question of his more intimate hope. But it was not droll to Francie; she only thought it, or supposed it, a proof of the way Mr. Flack saw everything on a stupendous scale. "There are ten thousand things to do that haven't been done, and I'm going to do them. The society-news of every quarter of the globe, furnished by the prominent members themselves—oh THEY can be fixed, you'll see!—from day to day and from hour to hour and served up hot at every breakfast-table in the United States: that's what the American people want and that's what the American people are going to have. I wouldn't say it to every one, but I don't mind telling you, that I consider my guess as good as the next man's on what's going to be required in future over there. I'm going for the inside view, the choice bits, the chronique intime, as they say here; what the people want's just what ain't told, and I'm going to tell it. Oh they're bound to have the plums! That's about played out, anyway, the idea of sticking up a sign of 'private' and 'hands off' and 'no thoroughfare' and thinking you can keep the place to yourself. You ain't going to be able any longer to monopolise any fact of general interest, and it ain't going to be right you should; it ain't going to continue to be possible to keep out anywhere the light of the Press. Now what I'm going to do is to set up the biggest lamp yet made and make it shine all over the place. We'll see who's private then, and whose hands are off, and who'll frustrate the People—the People THAT WANTS TO KNOW. That's a sign of the American people that they DO want to know, and it's the sign of George P. Flack," the young man pursued with a rising spirit, "that he's going to help them. But I'll make the touchy folks crowd in THEMSELVES with their information, and as I tell you, Miss Francie, it's a job in which you can give me a lovely lift."

"Well, I don't see how," said Francie candidly. "I haven't got any choice bits or any facts of general interest." She spoke gaily because she was relieved; she thought she had in truth a glimpse of what he wanted of her. It was something better than she had feared. Since he didn't own the great newspaper—her view of such possibilities was of the dimmest—he desired to possess himself of it, and she sufficiently grasped the idea that money was needed for that. She further seemed to make out that he presented himself to her, that he hovered about her and pressed on her, as moneyless, and that this brought them round by a vague but comfortable transition to a helpful remembrance that her father was not. The remaining divination, silently achieved, was quick and happy: she should acquit herself by asking her father for the sum required and by just passing it on to Mr. Flack. The grandeur of his enterprise and the force of his reasoning appeared to overshadow her as they stood there. This was a delightful simplification and it didn't for the moment strike her as positively unnatural that her companion should have a delicacy about appealing to Mr. Dosson directly for financial aid, though indeed she would have been capable of thinking that odd had she meditated on it. There was nothing simpler to Francie than the idea of putting her hand into her father's pocket, and she felt that even Delia would be glad to appease their persecutor by this casual gesture. I must add unfortunately that her alarm came back to her from his look as he replied: "Do you mean to say you don't know, after all I've done?"

"I'm sure I don't know what you've done."

"Haven't I tried—all I know—to make you like me?"

"Oh dear, I do like you!" cried Francie; "but how will that help you?"

"It will help me if you'll understand how I love you."

"Well, I won't understand!" replied the girl as she walked off.

He followed her; they went on together in silence and then he said: "Do you mean to say you haven't found that out?"

"Oh I don't find things out—I ain't an editor!" Francie gaily quavered.

"You draw me out and then you gibe at me," Mr. Flack returned.

"I didn't draw you out. Why, couldn't you see me just strain to get away?"

"Don't you sympathise then with my ideas?"

"Of course I do, Mr. Flack; I think your ideas splendid," said Francie, who hadn't in the least taken them in.

"Well then why won't you work with me? Your affection, your brightness, your faith—to say nothing of your matchless beauty—would be everything to me."

"I'm very sorry, but I can't, I can't!" she protested.

"You could if you would, quick enough."

"Well then I won't!" And as soon as these words were spoken, as if to mitigate something of their asperity, she made her other point. "You must remember that I never said I would—nor anything like it; not one little wee mite. I thought you just wanted me to speak to poppa."

"Of course I supposed you'd do that," he allowed.

"I mean about your paper."

"About my paper?"

"So as he could give you the money—to do what you want."

"Lord, you're too sweet!" George Flack cried with an illumined stare. "Do you suppose I'd ever touch a cent of your father's money?"—a speech not rankly hypocritical, inasmuch as the young man, who made his own discriminations, had never been guilty, and proposed to himself never to be, of the indelicacy of tugging at his potential father-in-law's purse-strings with his own hand. He had talked to Mr. Dosson by the hour about his master-plan of making the touchy folks themselves fall into line, but had never dreamed this man would subsidise him as an interesting struggler. The only character in which he could expect it would be that of Francie's accepted suitor, and then the liberality would have Francie and not himself for its object. This reasoning naturally didn't lessen his impatience to take on the happy character, so that his love of his profession and his appreciation of the girl at his side now ached together in his breast with the same disappointment. She saw that her words had touched him like a lash; they made him for a moment flush to his eyes. This caused her own colour to rise—she could scarcely have said why—and she hurried along again. He kept close to her; he argued with her; he besought her to think it over, assuring her he had brains, heart and material proofs of a college education. To this she replied that if he didn't leave her alone she should cry—and how would he like that, to bring her back in such a state to the others? He answered "Damn the others!" but it didn't help his case, and at last he broke out: "Will you just tell me this, then—is it because you've promised Miss Delia?" Francie returned that she hadn't promised Miss Delia anything, and her companion went on: "Of course I know what she has got in her head: she wants to get you into the smart set—the grand monde, as they call it here; but I didn't suppose you'd let her fix your life for you. You were very different before HE turned up."

"She never fixed anything for me. I haven't got any life and I don't want to have any," Francie veraciously pleaded. "And I don't know who you're talking about either!"

"The man without a country. HE'LL pass you in—that's what your sister wants."

"You oughtn't to abuse him, because it was you that presented him," the girl pronounced.

"I never presented him! I'd like to kick him."

"We should never have seen him if it hadn't been for you," she maintained.

"That's a fact, but it doesn't make me love him any better. He's the poorest kind there is."

"I don't care anything about his kind."

"That's a pity if you're going to marry him right off! How could I know that when I took you up there?"

"Good-bye, Mr. Flack," said Francie, trying to gain ground from him.

This attempt was of course vain, and after a moment he resumed: "Will you keep me as a friend?"

"Why Mr. Flack, OF COURSE I will!" cried the easy creature.

"All right," he replied; and they presently overtook their companions.



V

Gaston Probert made his plan, confiding it only to his friend Waterlow whose help indeed he needed to carry it out. These revelations cost him something, for the ornament of the merciless school, as it might have been called, found his predicament amusing and made no scruple of showing it. Gaston was too much in love, however, to be upset by a bad joke or two. This fact is the more noteworthy as he knew that Waterlow scoffed at him for a purpose—had a view of the good to be done him by throwing him on the defensive. The French tradition, or a grimacing ghost of it, was in Waterlow's "manner," but it had not made its mark on his view of the relations of a young man of spirit with parents and pastors. He mixed his colours, as might have been said, with the general sense of France, but his early American immunities and serenities could still swell his sail in any "vital" discussion with a friend in whose life the principle of authority played so large a part. He accused Probert of being afraid of his sisters, which was an effective way—and he knew it—of alluding to the rigidity of the conception of the family among people who had adopted and had even to Waterlow's sense, as the phrase is, improved upon the "Latin" ideal. That did injustice—and this the artist also knew—to the delicate nature of the bond uniting the different members of the house of Probert, who were each for all and all for each. Family feeling among them was not a tyranny but a religion, and in regard to Mesdames de Brecourt, de Cliche and de Douves what Gaston most feared was that he might seem to them not to love them enough. None the less Charles Waterlow, who thought he had charming parts, held that the best way hadn't been taken to make a man of him, and the zeal with which the painter appeared to have proposed to repair that mistake was founded in esteem, though it sometimes flowered in freedom. Waterlow combined in odd fashion many of the forms of the Parisian studio with the moral and social ideas of Brooklyn Long Island, where the seeds of his strictness had been sown.

Gaston Probert desired nothing better than to be a man; what worried him—and it is perhaps a proof that his instinct was gravely at fault—was a certain vagueness as to the constituents of that character. He should approximate more nearly, as it seemed to him, to the brute were he to sacrifice in such an effort the decencies and pieties—holy things all of them—in which he had been reared. It was very well for Waterlow to say that to be a "real" man it was necessary to be a little of a brute; his friend was willing, in theory, to assent even to that. The difficulty was in application, in practice—as to which the painter declared that all would be easy if such account hadn't to be taken of the marquise, the comtesse and—what was the other one?—the princess. These young amenities were exchanged between the pair—while Gaston explained, almost as eagerly as if he were scoring a point, that the other one was only a baronne—during that brief journey to Spain of which mention has already been made, during the later weeks of the summer, after their return (the friends then spent a fortnight together on the coast of Brittany), and above all during the autumn, when they were settled in Paris for the winter, when Mr. Dosson had reappeared, according to the engagement with his daughters, when the sittings for the portrait had multiplied (the painter was unscrupulous as to the number he demanded), and the work itself, born under a happy star, seemed to take more and more the turn of a great thing. It was at Granada that Gaston had really broken out; there, one balmy night, he had dropped into his comrade's ear that he would marry Francina Dosson or would never marry at all. The declaration was the more striking as it had come after such an interval; many days had elapsed since their separation from the young lady and many new and beautiful objects appealed to them. It appeared that the smitten youth had been thinking of her all the while, and he let his friend know that it was the dinner at Saint-Germain that had finished him. What she had been there Waterlow himself had seen: he wouldn't controvert the lucid proposition that she showed a "cutting" equal to any Greek gem.

In November, in Paris—it was months and weeks before the artist began to please himself—Gaston came often to the Avenue de Villiers toward the end of a sitting and, till it was finished, not to disturb the lovely model, cultivated conversation with the elder sister: the representative of the Proberts was capable of that. Delia was always there of course, but Mr. Dosson had not once turned up and the newspaper-man happily appeared to have faded from view. The new aspirant learned in fact from Miss Dosson that a crisis in the history of his journal had recalled Mr. Flack to the seat of that publication. When the young ladies had gone—and when he didn't go with them; he accompanied them not rarely—the visitor was almost lyrical in his appreciation of his friend's work; he had no jealousy of the act of appropriation that rendered possible in its turn such an act of handing over, of which the canvas constituted the field. He was sure Waterlow painted the girl too well to be in love with her and that if he himself could have dealt with her in that fashion he mightn't have wanted to deal in any other. She bloomed there on the easel with all the purity of life, and the artist had caught the very secret of her beauty. It was exactly the way in which her lover would have chosen to see her shown, and yet it had required a perfectly independent hand. Gaston mused on this mystery and somehow felt proud of the picture and responsible for it, though it was no more his property as yet than the young lady herself. When in December he put before Waterlow his plan of campaign the latter made a comment. "I'll do anything in the world you like—anything you think will help you—but it passes me, my dear fellow, why in the world you don't go to them and say: 'I've seen a girl who is as good as cake and pretty as fire, she exactly suits me, I've taken time to think of it and I know what I want; therefore I propose to make her my wife. If you happen to like her so much the better; if you don't be so good as to keep it to yourselves.' That's much the most excellent way. Why in the name of goodness all these mysteries and machinations?"

"Oh you don't understand, you don't understand!" sighed Gaston, who had never pulled so long a face. "One can't break with one's traditions in an hour, especially when there's so much in them that one likes. I shan't love her more if they like her, but I shall love THEM more, and I care about that. You talk as a man who has nothing to consider. I've everything to consider—and I'm glad I have. My pleasure in marrying her will be double if my father and my sisters accept her, and I shall greatly enjoy working out the business of bringing them round."

There were moments when Charles Waterlow resented the very vocabulary of his friend; he hated to hear a man talk about the "acceptance" by any one but himself of the woman he loved. One's own acceptance—of one's bliss—in such a case ended the matter, and the effort to bring round those who gave her the cold shoulder was scarcely consistent with the highest spirit. Young Probert explained that of course he felt his relatives would only have to know Francina to like her, to delight in her, yet also that to know her they would first have to make her acquaintance. This was the delicate point, for social commerce with such malheureux as Mr. Dosson and Delia was not in the least in their usual line and it was impossible to disconnect the poor girl from her appendages. Therefore the whole question must be approached by an oblique movement—it would never do to march straight up. The wedge should have a narrow end, which Gaston now made sure he had found. His sister Susan was another name for this subtle engine; he would break her in first and she would help him to break in the others. She was his favourite relation, his intimate friend—the most modern, the most Parisian and inflammable member of the family. She had no suite dans les idees, but she had perceptions, had imagination and humour, and was capable of generosity, of enthusiasm and even of blind infatuation. She had in fact taken two or three plunges of her own and ought to allow for those of others. She wouldn't like the Dossons superficially any better than his father or than Margaret or than Jane—he called these ladies by their English names, but for themselves, their husbands, their friends and each other they were Suzanne, Marguerite and Jeanne; but there was a good chance of his gaining her to his side. She was as fond of beauty and of the arts as he—this was one of their bonds of union. She appreciated highly Charles Waterlow's talent and there had been talk of her deciding to sit to him. It was true her husband viewed the project with so much colder an eye that it had not been carried out.

According to Gaston's plan she was to come to the Avenue de Villiers to see what the artist had done for Miss Francie; her brother was to have worked upon her in advance by his careful rhapsodies, bearing wholly on the achievement itself, the dazzling example of Waterlow's powers, and not on the young lady, whom he was not to let her know at first that he had so much as seen. Just at the last, just before her visit, he was to mention to her that he had met the girl—at the studio—and that she was as remarkable in her way as the picture. Seeing the picture and hearing this, Mme. de Brecourt, as a disinterested lover of charming impressions, and above all as an easy prey at all times to a rabid curiosity, would express a desire also to enjoy a sight of so rare a creature; on which Waterlow might pronounce it all arrangeable if she would but come in some day when Miss Francie should sit. He would give her two or three dates and Gaston would see that she didn't let the opportunity pass. She would return alone—this time he wouldn't go with her—and she would be as taken as could be hoped or needed. Everything much depended on that, but it couldn't fail. The girl would have to take her, but the girl could be trusted, especially if she didn't know who the demonstrative French lady was, with her fine plain face, her hair so blond as to be nearly white, her vividly red lips and protuberant light-coloured eyes. Their host was to do no introducing and to reveal the visitor's identity only after she had gone. That was a condition indeed this participant grumbled at; he called the whole business an odious comedy, though his friend knew that if he undertook it he would acquit himself honourably. After Mme. de Brecourt had been captivated—the question of how Francie would be affected received in advance no consideration—her brother would throw off the mask and convince her that she must now work with him. Another meeting would be managed for her with the girl—in which each would appear in her proper character; and in short the plot would thicken.

Gaston's forecast of his difficulties showed how finely he could analyse; but that was not rare enough in any French connexion to make his friend stare. He brought Suzanne de Brecourt, she was enchanted with the portrait of the little American, and the rest of the drama began to follow in its order. Mme. de Brecourt raved to Waterlow's face—she had no opinions behind people's backs—about his mastery of his craft; she could dispose the floral tributes of homage with a hand of practice all her own. She was the reverse of egotistic and never spoke of herself; her success in life sprang from a much wiser adoption of pronouns. Waterlow, who liked her and had long wanted to paint her ugliness—it was a gold-mine of charm—had two opinions about her: one of which was that she knew a hundred times less than she thought, and even than her brother thought, of what she talked about; and the other that she was after all not such a humbug as she seemed. She passed in her family for a rank radical, a bold Bohemian; she picked up expressions out of newspapers and at the petits theatres, but her hands and feet were celebrated, and her behaviour was not. That of her sisters, as well, had never been disastrously exposed.

"But she must be charming, your young lady," she said to Gaston while she turned her head this way and that as she stood before Francie's image. "She's a little Renaissance statuette cast in silver, something of Jean Goujon or Germain Pilon." The young men exchanged a glance, for this struck them as the happiest comparison, and Gaston replied in a detached way that the girl was well worth seeing.

He went in to have a cup of tea with his sister on the day he knew she would have paid her second visit to the studio, and the first words she greeted him with were: "But she's admirable—votre petite—admirable, admirable!" There was a lady calling in the Place Beauvau at the moment—old Mme. d'Outreville—who naturally asked for news of the object of such enthusiasm. Gaston suffered Susan to answer all questions and was attentive to her account of the new beauty. She described his young friend almost as well as he would have done, from the point of view of her type, her graces, her plastic value, using various technical and critical terms to which the old lady listened in silence, solemnly, rather coldly, as if she thought such talk much of a galimatias: she belonged to the old-fashioned school and held a pretty person sufficiently catalogued when it had been said she had a dazzling complexion or the finest eyes in the world.

"Qu'est-ce que c'est que cette merveille?" she enquired; to which Mme. de Brecourt made answer that it was a little American her brother had somewhere dug up. "And what do you propose to do with it, may one ask?" Mme. d'Outreville demanded, looking at Gaston with an eye that seemed to read his secret and that brought him for half a minute to the point of breaking out: "I propose to marry it—there!" But he contained himself, only pleading for the present his wish to ascertain the uses to which she was adapted; meanwhile, he added, there was nothing he so much liked as to look at her, in the measure in which she would allow him. "Ah that may take you far!" their visitor cried as she got up to go; and the young man glanced at his sister to see if she too were ironic. But she seemed almost awkwardly free from alarm; if she had been suspicious it would have been easier to make his confession. When he came back from accompanying their old friend Outreville to her carriage he asked her if Waterlow's charming sitter had known who she was and if she had been frightened. Mme. de Brecourt stared; she evidently thought that kind of sensibility implied an initiation—and into dangers—which a little American accidentally encountered couldn't possibly have. "Why should she be frightened? She wouldn't be even if she had known who I was; much less therefore when I was nothing for her."

"Oh you weren't nothing for her!" the brooding youth declared; and when his sister rejoined that he was trop aimable he brought out his lurking fact. He had seen the lovely creature more often than he had mentioned; he had particularly wished that SHE should see her. Now he wanted his father and Jane and Margaret to do the same, and above all he wanted them to like her even as she, Susan, liked her. He was delighted she had been taken—he had been so taken himself. Mme. de Brecourt protested that she had reserved her independence of judgement, and he answered that if she thought Miss Dosson repulsive he might have expressed it in another way. When she begged him to tell her what he was talking about and what he wanted them all to do with the child he said: "I want you to treat her kindly, tenderly, for such as you see her I'm thinking of bringing her into the family."

"Mercy on us—you haven't proposed for her?" cried Mme. de Brecourt.

"No, but I've sounded her sister as to THEIR dispositions, and she tells me that if I present myself there will be no difficulty."

"Her sister?—the awful little woman with the big head?"

"Her head's rather out of drawing, but it isn't a part of the affair. She's very inoffensive; she would be devoted to me."

"For heaven's sake then keep quiet. She's as common as a dressmaker's bill."

"Not when you know her. Besides, that has nothing to do with Francie. You couldn't find words enough a moment ago to express that Francie's exquisite, and now you'll be so good as to stick to that. Come—feel it all; since you HAVE such a free mind."

"Do you call her by her little name like that?" Mme. de Brecourt asked, giving him another cup of tea.

"Only to you. She's perfectly simple. It's impossible to imagine anything better. And think of the delight of having that charming object before one's eyes—always, always! It makes a different look-out for life."

Mme. Brecourt's lively head tossed this argument as high as if she had carried a pair of horns. "My poor child, what are you thinking of? You can't pick up a wife like that—the first little American that comes along. You know I hoped you wouldn't marry at all—what a pity I think it for a man. At any rate if you expect us to like Miss—what's her name?—Miss Fancy, all I can say is we won't. We can't DO that sort of thing!"

"I shall marry her then," the young man returned, "without your leave given!"

"Very good. But if she deprives you of our approval—you've always had it, you're used to it and depend on it, it's a part of your life—you'll hate her like poison at the end of a month."

"I don't care then. I shall have always had my month."

"And she—poor thing?"

"Poor thing exactly! You'll begin to pity her, and that will make you cultivate charity, and cultivate HER WITH it; which will then make you find out how adorable she is. Then you'll like her, then you'll love her, then you'll see what a perfect sense for the right thing, the right thing for ME, I've had, and we shall all be happy together again."

"But how can you possibly know, with such people," Mme. de Brecourt demanded, "what you've got hold of?"

"By having a feeling for what's really, what's delicately good and charming. You pretend to have it, and yet in such a case as this you try to be stupid. Give that up; you might as well first as last, for the girl's an exquisite fact, she'll PREVAIL, and it will be better to accept her than to let her accept you."

Mme. de Brecourt asked him if Miss Dosson had a fortune, and he said he knew nothing about that. Her father certainly must be rich, but he didn't mean to ask for a penny with her. American fortunes moreover were the last things to count upon; a truth of which they had seen too many examples. To this his sister had replied: "Papa will never listen to that."

"Listen to what?"

"To your not finding out, to your not asking for settlements—comme cela se fait."

"Pardon me, papa will find out for himself; and he'll know perfectly whether to ask or whether to leave it alone. That's the sort of thing he does know. And he knows quite as well that I'm very difficult to place."

"You'll be difficult, my dear, if we lose you," Mme. de Brecourt laughed, "to replace!"

"Always at any rate to find a wife for. I'm neither fish nor flesh. I've no country, no career, no future; I offer nothing; I bring nothing. What position under the sun do I confer? There's a fatuity in our talking as if we could make grand terms. You and the others are well enough: qui prend mari prend pays, and you've names about which your husbands take a great stand. But papa and I—I ask you!"

"As a family nous sommes tres-bien," said Mme. de Brecourt. "You know what we are—it doesn't need any explanation. We're as good as anything there is and have always been thought so. You might do anything you like."

"Well, I shall never like to marry—when it comes to that—a Frenchwoman."

"Thank you, my dear"—and Mme. de Brecourt tossed her head.

"No sister of mine's really French," returned the young man.

"No brother of mine's really mad. Marry whomever you like," Susan went on; "only let her be the best of her kind. Let her be at least a gentlewoman. Trust me, I've studied life. That's the only thing that's safe."

"Francie's the equal of the first lady in the land."

"With that sister—with that hat? Never—never!"

"What's the matter with her hat?"

"The sister's told a story. It was a document—it described them, it classed them. And such a PATOIS as they speak!"

"My dear, her English is quite as good as yours. You don't even know how bad yours is," the young man went on with assurance.

"Well, I don't say 'Parus' and I never asked an Englishman to marry me. You know what our feelings are," his companion as ardently pursued; "our convictions, our susceptibilities. We may be wrong, we may be hollow, we may be pretentious, we mayn't be able to say on what it all rests; but there we are, and the fact's insurmountable. It's simply impossible for us to live with vulgar people. It's a defect, no doubt; it's an immense inconvenience, and in the days we live in it's sadly against one's interest. But we're made like that and we must understand ourselves. It's of the very essence of our nature, and of yours exactly as much as of mine or of that of the others. Don't make a mistake about it—you'll prepare for yourself a bitter future. I know what becomes of us. We suffer, we go through tortures, we die!"

The accent of passionate prophecy was in this lady's voice, but her brother made her no immediate answer, only indulging restlessly in several turns about the room. At last he took up his hat. "I shall come to an understanding with her to-morrow, and the next day, about this hour, I shall bring her to see you. Meanwhile please say nothing to any one."

Mme. de Brecourt's eyes lingered on him; he had grasped the knob of the door. "What do you mean by her father's being certainly rich? That's such a vague term. What do you suppose his fortune to be?"

"Ah that's a question SHE would never ask!" her brother cried as he left her.



VI

The next morning he found himself seated on one of the red-satin sofas beside Mr. Dosson in this gentleman's private room at the Hotel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham. Delia and Francie had established their father in the old quarters; they expected to finish the winter in Paris, but had not taken independent apartments, for they had an idea that when you lived that way it was grand but lonely—you didn't meet people on the staircase. The temperature was now such as to deprive the good gentleman of his usual resource of sitting in the court, and he had not yet discovered an effective substitute for this recreation. Without Mr. Flack, at the cafes, he felt too much a non-consumer. But he was patient and ruminant; young Probert grew to like him and tried to invent amusements for him; took him to see the great markets, the sewers and the Bank of France, and put him, with the lushest disinterestedness, in the way of acquiring a beautiful pair of horses, which Mr. Dosson, little as he resembles a sporting character, found it a great resource, on fine afternoons, to drive with a highly scientific hand and from a smart Americaine, in the Bois de Boulogne. There was a reading-room at the bankers' where he spent hours engaged in a manner best known to himself, and he shared the great interest, the constant topic of his daughters—the portrait that was going forward in the Avenue de Villiers.

This was the subject round which the thoughts of these young ladies clustered and their activity revolved; it gave free play to their faculty for endless repetition, for monotonous insistence, for vague and aimless discussion. On leaving Mme. de Brecourt Francie's lover had written to Delia that he desired half an hour's private conversation with her father on the morrow at half-past eleven; his impatience forbade him to wait for a more canonical hour. He asked her to be so good as to arrange that Mr. Dosson should be there to receive him and to keep Francie out of the way. Delia acquitted herself to the letter.

"Well, sir, what have you got to show?" asked Francie's father, leaning far back on the sofa and moving nothing but his head, and that very little, toward his interlocutor. Gaston was placed sidewise, a hand on each knee, almost facing him, on the edge of the seat.

"To show, sir—what do you mean?"

"What do you do for a living? How do you subsist?"

"Oh comfortably enough. Of course it would be remiss in you not to satisfy yourself on that point. My income's derived from three sources. First some property left me by my dear mother. Second a legacy from my poor brother—he had inherited a small fortune from an old relation of ours who took a great fancy to him (he went to America to see her) which he divided among the four of us in the will he made at the time of the War."'

"The war—what war?" asked Mr. Dosson.

"Why the Franco-German—"

"Oh THAT old war!" And Mr. Dosson almost laughed. "Well?" he mildly continued.

"Then my father's so good as to make me a decent allowance; and some day I shall have more—from him."

Mr. Dosson appeared to think these things over. "Why, you seem to have fixed it so you live mostly on other folks."

"I shall never attempt to live on you, sir!" This was spoken with some vivacity by our young man; he felt the next moment that he had said something that might provoke a retort. But his companion showed no sharpness.

"Well, I guess there won't be any trouble about that. And what does my daughter say?"

"I haven't spoken to her yet."

"Haven't spoken to the person most interested?"

"I thought it more orthodox to break ground with you first."

"Well, when I was after Mrs. Dosson I guess I spoke to her quick enough," Francie's father just a little dryly stated. There was an element of reproach in this and Gaston was mystified, for the question about his means a moment before had been in the nature of a challenge.

"How will you feel if she won't have you after you've exposed yourself this way to me?" Mr. Dosson went on.

"Well, I've a sort of confidence. It may be vain, but God grant not! I think she likes me personally, but what I'm afraid of is that she may consider she knows too little about me. She has never seen my people—she doesn't know what may be before her."

"Do you mean your family—the folks at home?" said Mr. Dosson. "Don't you believe that. Delia has moused around—SHE has found out. Delia's thorough!"

"Well, we're very simple kindly respectable people, as you'll see in a day or two for yourself. My father and sisters will do themselves the honour to wait upon you," the young man announced with a temerity the sense of which made his voice tremble.

"We shall be very happy to see them, sir," his host cheerfully returned. "Well now, let's see," the good gentleman socially mused. "Don't you expect to embrace any regular occupation?"

Gaston smiled at him as from depths. "Have YOU anything of that sort, sir?"

"Well, you have me there!" Mr. Dosson resignedly sighed. "It doesn't seem as if I required anything, I'm looked after so well. The fact is the girls support me."

"I shall not expect Miss Francie to support me," said Gaston Probert.

"You're prepared to enable her to live in the style to which she's accustomed?" And his friend turned on him an eye as of quite patient speculation.

"Well, I don't think she'll miss anything. That is if she does she'll find other things instead."

"I presume she'll miss Delia, and even me a little," it occurred to Mr. Dosson to mention.

"Oh it's easy to prevent that," the young man threw off.

"Well, of course we shall be on hand." After which Mr. Dosson continued to follow the subject as at the same respectful distance. "You'll continue to reside in Paris?"

"I'll live anywhere in the world she likes. Of course my people are here—that's a great tie. I'm not without hope that it may—with time—become a reason for your daughter," Gaston handsomely wound up.

"Oh any reason'll do where Paris is concerned. Take some lunch?" Mr. Dosson added, looking at his watch.

They rose to their feet, but before they had gone many steps—the meals of this amiable family were now served in an adjoining room—the young man stopped his companion. "I can't tell you how kind I think it—the way you treat me, and how I'm touched by your confidence. You take me just as I am, with no recommendation beyond my own word."

"Well, Mr. Probert," said his host, "if we didn't like you we wouldn't smile on you. Recommendations in that case wouldn't be any good. And since we do like you there ain't any call for them either. I trust my daughters; if I didn't I'd have stayed at home. And if I trust them, and they trust you, it's the same as if I trusted you, ain't it?"

"I guess it is!" Gaston delightedly smiled.

His companion laid a hand on the door, but paused a moment. "Now are you very sure?"

"I thought I was, but you make me nervous."

"Because there was a gentleman here last year—I'd have put my money on HIM."

Gaston wondered. "A gentleman—last year?"

"Mr. Flack. You met him surely. A very fine man. I thought he rather hit it off with her."

"Seigneur Dieu!" Gaston Probert murmured under his breath.

Mr. Dosson had opened the door; he made his companion pass into the small dining-room where the table was spread for the noonday breakfast. "Where are the chickens?" he disappointedly asked. His visitor at first supposed him to have missed a customary dish from the board, but recognised the next moment his usual designation of his daughters. These young ladies presently came in, but Francie looked away from the suitor for her hand. The suggestion just dropped by her father had given him a shock—the idea of the newspaper-man's personal success with so rare a creature was inconceivable—but her charming way of avoiding his eye convinced him he had nothing to really fear from Mr. Flack.

That night—it had been an exciting day—Delia remarked to her sister that of course she could draw back; upon which as Francie repeated the expression with her so markedly looser grasp, "You can send him a note saying you won't," Delia explained.

"Won't marry him?"

"Gracious, no! Won't go to see his sister. You can tell him it's her place to come to see you first."

"Oh I don't care," said Francie wearily.

Delia judged this with all her weight. "Is that the way you answered him when he asked you?"

"I'm sure I don't know. He could tell you best."

"If you were to speak to ME that way I guess I'd have said 'Oh well, if you don't want it any more than that—!'"

"Well, I wish it WAS you," said Francie.

"That Mr. Probert was me?"

"No—that you were the one he's after."

"Francie Dosson, are you thinking of Mr. Flack?" her sister suddenly broke out.

"No, not much."

"Well then what's the matter?"

"You've ideas and opinions; you know whose place it is and what's due and what ain't. You could meet them all," Francie opined.

But Delia was indifferent to this tribute. "Why how can you say, when that's just what I'm trying to find out!"

"It doesn't matter anyway; it will never come off," Francie went on.

"What do you mean by that?"

"He'll give me up in a few weeks. I'll be sure to do something."

"Do something—?"

"Well, that will break the charm," Francie sighed with the sweetest feeblest fatalism.

"If you say that again I shall think you do it on purpose!" Delia declared. "ARE you thinking of George Flack?" she repeated in a moment.

"Oh do leave him alone!" Francie answered in one of her rare irritations.

"Then why are you so queer?"

"Oh I'm tired!"—and the girl turned impatiently away. And this was the simple truth; she was tired of the consideration her sister saw fit to devote to the question of Gaston's not having, since their return to Paris, brought the old folks, as they used to say at home, to see them. She was overdone with Delia's theories on this subject, which varied, from the view that he was keeping his intercourse with his American friends unguessed by them because they were uncompromising in their grandeur, to the presumption that that grandeur would descend some day upon the Hotel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham and carry Francie away in a blaze of glory. Sometimes Delia played in her earnest way with the idea that they ought to make certain of Gaston's omissions the ground of a challenge; at other times she gave her reasons for judging that they ought to take no notice of them. Francie, in this connexion, had neither doctrine nor instinct of her own; and now she was all at once happy and uneasy, all at once in love and in doubt and in fear and in a state of native indifference. Her lover had dwelt to her but little on his domestic circle, and she had noticed this circumstance the more because of a remark dropped by Charles Waterlow to the effect that he and his father were great friends: the word seemed to her odd in that application. She knew he saw that gentleman and the types of high fashion, as she supposed, Mr. Probert's daughters, very often, and she therefore took for granted that they knew he saw her. But the most he had done was to say they would come and see her like a shot if once they should believe they could trust her. She had wanted to know what he meant by their trusting her, and he had explained that it would seem to them too good to be true—that she should be kind to HIM: something exactly of that sort was what they dreamed of for him. But they had dreamed before and been disappointed and were now on their guard. From the moment they should feel they were on solid ground they would join hands and dance round her. Francie's answer to this ingenuity was that she didn't know what he was talking about, and he indulged in no attempt on that occasion to render his meaning more clear; the consequence of which was that he felt he bore as yet with an insufficient mass, he cut, to be plain, a poor figure. His uneasiness had not passed away, for many things in truth were dark to him. He couldn't see his father fraternising with Mr. Dosson, he couldn't see Margaret and Jane recognising an alliance in which Delia was one of the allies. He had answered for them because that was the only thing to do, and this only just failed to be criminally reckless. What saved it was the hope he founded upon Mme. de Brecourt and the sense of how well he could answer to the others for Francie. He considered that Susan had in her first judgement of his young lady committed herself; she had really taken her in, and her subsequent protest when she found what was in his heart had been a denial which he would make her in turn deny. The girl's slow sweetness once acting, she would come round. A simple interview with Francie would suffice for this result—by the end of half an hour she should be an enthusiastic convert. By the end of an hour she would believe she herself had invented the match—had discovered the pearl. He would pack her off to the others as the author of the plan; she would take it all upon herself, would represent him even as hanging a little back. SHE would do nothing of that sort, but would boast of her superior flair, and would so enjoy the comedy as to forget she had resisted him even a moment. The young man had a high sense of honour but was ready in this forecast for fifty fibs.



VII

It may as well be said at once that his prevision was soon made good and that in the course of a fortnight old Mr. Probert and his daughters alighted successively at the Hotel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham. Francie's visit with her intended to Mme. de Brecourt bore exactly the fruit her admirer had foretold and was followed the very next day by a call from this lady. She took the girl out with her in her carriage and kept her the whole afternoon, driving her half over Paris, chattering with her, kissing her, delighting in her, telling her they were already sisters, paying her compliments that made Francie envy her art of saying things as she had never heard things said—for the excellent reason, among many, that she had never known such things COULD be. After she had dropped her charge this critic rushed off to her father's, reflecting with pleasure that at that hour she should probably find her sister Marguerite there. Mme. de Cliche was with their parent in fact—she had three days in the week for coming to the Cours la Reine; she sat near him in the firelight, telling him presumably her troubles, for, Maxime de Cliche having proved not quite the pearl they had originally supposed, Mme. de Brecourt knew what Marguerite did whenever she took that little ottoman and drew it close to the paternal chair: she gave way to her favourite vice, that of dolefulness, which lengthened her long face more: it was unbecoming if she only knew it. The family was intensely united, as we see; but that didn't prevent Mme. de Brecourt's having a certain sympathy for Maxime: he too was one of themselves, and she asked herself what SHE would have done had she been a well-constituted man with a wife whose cheeks were like decks in a high sea. It was the twilight hour in the winter days, before the lamps, that especially brought her out; then she began her long stories about her complicated cares, to which her father listened with angelic patience. Mme. de Brecourt liked his particular room in the old house in the Cours la Reine; it reminded her of her mother's life and her young days and her dead brother and the feelings connected with her first going into the world. Alphonse and she had had an apartment, by her father's kindness, under the roof that covered in associations as the door of a linen-closet preserves herbaceous scents, so that she continued to pop in and out, full of her fresh impressions of society, just as she had done when she was a girl. She broke into her sister's confidences now; she announced her trouvaille and did battle for it bravely.

Five days later—there had been lively work in the meantime; Gaston turned so pale at moments that she feared it would all result in a mortal illness for him, and Marguerite shed gallons of tears—Mr. Probert went to see the Dossons with his son. Mme. de Brecourt paid them another visit, a real official affair as she deemed it, accompanied by her husband; and the Baron de Douves and his wife, written to by Gaston, by his father and by Margaret and Susan, came up from the country full of anxious participation. M. de Douves was the person who took the family, all round, most seriously and who most deprecated any sign of crude or precipitate action. He was a very small black gentleman with thick eyebrows and high heels—in the country and the mud he wore sabots with straw in them—who was suspected by his friends of believing that he looked like Louis XIV. It is perhaps a proof that something of the quality of this monarch was really recognised in him that no one had ever ventured to clear up this point by a question. "La famille c'est moi" appeared to be his tacit formula, and he carried his umbrella—he had very bad ones, Gaston thought—with something of a sceptral air. Mme. de Brecourt went so far as to believe that his wife, in confirmation of this, took herself for a species of Mme. de Maintenon: she had lapsed into a provincial existence as she might have harked back to the seventeenth century; the world she lived in seemed about as far away. She was the largest, heaviest member of the family, and in the Vendee was thought majestic despite the old clothes she fondly affected and which added to her look of having come down from a remote past or reverted to it. She was at bottom an excellent woman, but she wrote roy and foy like her husband, and the action of her mind was wholly restricted to questions of relationship and alliance. She had extraordinary patience of research and tenacity of grasp for a clue, and viewed people solely in the light projected upon them by others; that is not as good or wicked, ugly or handsome, wise or foolish, but as grandsons, nephews, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters-in-law, cousins and second cousins. You might have supposed, to listen to her, that human beings were susceptible of no attribute but that of a dwindling or thickening consanguinity. There was a certain expectation that she would leave rather formidable memoirs. In Mme. de Brecourt's eyes this pair were very shabby, they didn't payer de mine—they fairly smelt of their province; "but for the reality of the thing," she often said to herself, "they're worth all of us. We're diluted and they're pure, and any one with an eye would see it." "The thing" was the legitimist principle, the ancient faith and even a little the right, the unconscious, grand air.

The Marquis de Cliche did his duty with his wife, who mopped the decks, as Susan said, for the occasion, and was entertained in the red-satin drawing-room by Mr. Dosson, Delia and Francie. Mr. Dosson had wanted and proposed to be somewhere else when he heard of the approach of Gaston's relations, and the fond youth had to instruct him that this wouldn't do. The apartment in question had had a range of vision, but had probably never witnessed stranger doings than these laudable social efforts. Gaston was taught to feel that his family had made a great sacrifice for him, but in a very few days he said to himself that now they knew the worst he was safe. They made the sacrifice, they definitely agreed to it, but they thought proper he should measure the full extent of it. "Gaston must never, never, never be allowed to forget what we've done for him:" Mme. de Brecourt told him that Marguerite de Cliche had expressed herself in that sense at one of the family conclaves from which he was absent. These high commissions sat for several days with great frequency, and the young man could feel that if there was help for him in discussion his case was promising. He flattered himself that he showed infinite patience and tact, and his expenditure of the latter quality in particular was in itself his only reward, for it was impossible he should tell Francie what arts he had to practise for her. He liked to think however that he practised them successfully; for he held that it was by such arts the civilised man is distinguished from the savage. What they cost him was made up simply in this—that his private irritation produced a degree of adoptive heat in regard to Mr. Dosson and Delia, whom he could neither justify nor coherently account for nor make people like, but whom he had ended after so many days of familiar intercourse by liking extremely himself. The way to get on with them—it was an immense simplification—was just to love them: one could do that even if one couldn't converse with them. He succeeded in making Mme. de Brecourt seize this nuance; she embraced the idea with her quick inflammability. "Yes," she said, "we must insist on their positive, not on their negative merits: their infinite generosity, their untutored, their intensely native and instinctive delicacy. Ah their charming primitive instincts—we must work those!" And the brother and sister excited each other magnanimously to this undertaking. Sometimes, it must be added, they exchanged a look that seemed to sound with a slight alarm the depth of their responsibility.

On the day Mr. Probert called at the Hotel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham with his son the pair walked away together, back to the Cours la Reine, without immediate comments. The only words uttered were three or four of Mr. Probert's, with Gaston's rejoinder, as they crossed the Place de la Concorde.

"We should have to have them to dinner." The young man noted his father's conditional, as if his assent to the strange alliance were not yet complete; but he guessed all the same that the sight of them had not made a difference for the worse: they had let the old gentleman down more easily than was to have been feared. The call had had above all the immense luck that it hadn't been noisy—a confusion of underbred sounds; which was very happy, for Mr. Probert was particular in this: he could bear French noise but couldn't for the life of him bear American. As for English he maintained that there was no such thing: England was a country with the straw down in all the thoroughfares of talk. Mr. Dosson had scarcely spoken and yet had remained perfectly placid, which was exactly what Gaston would have chosen. No hauteur could have matched it—he had gone so little out of his way. Francie's lover knew moreover—though he was a little disappointed that no charmed exclamation should have been dropped as they quitted the hotel—that the girl's rare spell had worked: it was impossible the old man shouldn't have liked her.

"Ah do ask them, and let it be very soon," he replied. "They'll like it so much."

"And whom can they meet—who can meet THEM?"

"Only the family—all of us: au complet. Other people we can have later."

"All of us au complet—that makes eight. And the three of THEM," said Mr. Probert. Then he added: "Poor creatures!" The fine ironic humane sound of it gave Gaston much pleasure; he passed his hand into his father's arm. It promised well; it made the intelligent, the tender allowance for the dear little Dossons confronted with a row of fierce French critics, judged by standards they had never even heard of. The meeting of the two parents had not made the problem of their commerce any more clear; but our youth was reminded afresh by his elder's hinted pity, his breathed charity, of the latent liberality that was really what he had built on. The dear old governor, goodness knew, had prejudices and superstitions, but if they were numerous, and some of them very curious, they were not rigid. He had also such nice inconsistent feelings, such irrepressible indulgences, such humorous deviations, and they would ease everything off. He was in short an old darling, and with an old darling in the long run one was always safe. When they reached the house in the Cours la Reine Mr. Probert said: "I think you told me you're dining out."

"Yes, with our friends."

"'Our friends'? Comme vous y allez! Come in and see me then on your return; but not later than half-past ten."

From this the young man saw he had swallowed the dose; if he had found it refuse to go down he would have cried for relief without delay. This reflexion was highly agreeable, for Gaston perfectly knew how little he himself would have enjoyed a struggle. He would have carried it through, but he couldn't bear to think of that, and the sense of the further arguments he was spared made him feel at peace with all the world. The dinner at the hotel became the gayest of banquets in honour of this state of things, especially as Francie and Delia raved, as they said, about his poppa.

"Well, I expected something nice, but he goes far beyond!" Delia declared. "That's my idea of a real gentleman."

"Ah for that—!" said Gaston.

"He's too sweet for anything. I'm not a bit afraid of him," Francie contributed.

"Why in the world should you be?"

"Well, I am of you," the girl professed.

"Much you show it!" her lover returned.

"Yes, I am," she insisted, "at the bottom of all."

"Well, that's what a lady should be—afraid of her lord and master."

"Well, I don't know; I'm more afraid than that. You'll see."

"I wish you were afraid of talking nonsense," said happy Gaston.

Mr. Dosson made no observation whatever about their grave bland visitor; he listened in genial unprejudiced silence. It was a sign of his prospective son-in-law's perfect comprehension of him that Gaston knew this silence not to be in any degree restrictive: it didn't at all mean he hadn't been pleased. Mr. Dosson had nothing to say because nothing had been given him; he hadn't, like his so differently-appointed young friend, a sensitive plate for a brain, and the important events of his life had never been personal impressions. His mind had had absolutely no history with which anything occurring in the present connexion could be continuous, and Mr. Probert's appearance had neither founded a state nor produced a revolution. If the young man had asked him how he liked his father he would have said at the most: "Oh I guess he's all right!" But what was more touchingly candid even than this in Gaston's view was the attitude of the good gentleman and his daughters toward the others, Mesdames de Douves, de Brecourt and de Cliche and their husbands, who had now all filed before them. They believed the ladies and the gentlemen alike to have covered them with frank endearments, to have been artlessly and gushingly glad to make their acquaintance. They had not in the least seen what was manner, the minimum of decent profession, and what the subtle resignation of old races who have known a long historical discipline and have conventional forms and tortuous channels and grimacing masks for their impulses—forms resembling singularly little the feelings themselves. Francie took people at their word when they told her that the whole maniere d'etre of her family inspired them with an irresistible sympathy: that was a speech of which Mme. de Cliche had been capable, speaking as if for all the Proberts and for the old noblesse of France. It wouldn't have occurred to the girl that such things need have been said as for mere frilling and finish. Her lover, whose life affected her as a picture, of high price in itself but set in a frame too big and too heavy for it, and who therefore might have taken for granted any amount of gilding, yet made his reflexions on it now; he noticed how a manner might be a very misleading symbol, might cover pitfalls and bottomless gulfs, when it had reached that perfection and corresponded so little to fact. What he had wanted was that his people should be as easy as they could see their way to being, but with such a high standard of compliment where after all was sincerity? And without sincerity how could people get on together when it came to their settling down to common life? Then the Dossons might have surprises, and the surprises would be painful in proportion as their present innocence was great. As to the high standard itself there was no manner of doubt: there ought to be preserved examples of that perfection.



VIII

When on coming home again this evening, meanwhile, he complied with his father's request by returning to the room in which the old man habitually sat, Mr. Probert laid down his book and kept on his glasses. "Of course you'll continue to live with me. You'll understand that I don't consent to your going away. You'll have the rooms occupied at first by Susan and Alphonse."

Gaston noted with pleasure the transition from the conditional to the future tense, and also the circumstance that his father had been lost in a book according to his now confirmed custom of evening ease. This proved him not too much off the hinge. He read a great deal, and very serious books; works about the origin of things—of man, of institutions, of speech, of religion. This habit he had taken up more particularly since the circle of his social life had contracted. He sat there alone, turning his pages softly, contentedly, with the lamplight shining on his refined old head and embroidered dressing-gown. He had used of old to be out every night in the week—Gaston was perfectly aware that to many dull people he must even have appeared a little frivolous. He was essentially a social creature and indeed—except perhaps poor Jane in her damp old castle in Brittany—they were all social creatures. That was doubtless part of the reason why the family had acclimatised itself in France. They had affinities with a society of conversation; they liked general talk and old high salons, slightly tarnished and dim, containing precious relics, where winged words flew about through a circle round the fire and some clever person, before the chimney-piece, held or challenged the others. That figure, Gaston knew, especially in the days before he could see for himself, had very often been his father, the lightest and most amiable specimen of the type that enjoyed easy possession of the hearth-rug. People left it to him; he was so transparent, like a glass screen, and he never triumphed in debate. His word on most subjects was not felt to be the last (it was usually not more conclusive than a shrugging inarticulate resignation, an "Ah you know, what will you have?"); but he had been none the less a part of the very prestige of some dozen good houses, most of them over the river, in the conservative faubourg, and several to-day profaned shrines, cold and desolate hearths. These had made up Mr. Probert's pleasant world—a world not too small for him and yet not too large, though some of them supposed themselves great institutions. Gaston knew the succession of events that had helped to make a difference, the most salient of which were the death of his brother, the death of his mother, and above all perhaps the demise of Mme. de Marignac, to whom the old boy used still to go three or four evenings out of the seven and sometimes even in the morning besides. Gaston fully measured the place she had held in his father's life and affection, and the terms on which they had grown up together—her people had been friends of his grandfather when that fine old Southern worthy came, a widower with a young son and several negroes, to take his pleasure in Paris in the time of Louis Philippe—and the devoted part she had played in marrying his sisters. He was quite aware that her friendship and all its exertions were often mentioned as explaining their position, so remarkable in a society in which they had begun after all as outsiders. But he would have guessed, even if he had not been told, what his father said to that. To offer the Proberts a position was to carry water to the fountain; they hadn't left their own behind them in Carolina; it had been large enough to stretch across the sea. As to what it was in Carolina there was no need of being explicit. This adoptive Parisian was by nature presupposing, but he was admirably urbane—that was why they let him talk so before the fire; he was the oracle persuasive, the conciliatory voice—and after the death of his wife and of Mme. de Marignac, who had been her friend too, the young man's mother's, he was gentler, if more detached, than before. Gaston had already felt him to care in consequence less for everything—except indeed for the true faith, to which he drew still closer—and this increase of indifference doubtless helped to explain his present charming accommodation.

"We shall be thankful for any rooms you may give us," his son said. "We shall fill out the house a little, and won't that be rather an improvement, shrunken as you and I have become?"

"You'll fill it out a good deal, I suppose, with Mr. Dosson and the other girl."

"Ah Francie won't give up her father and sister, certainly; and what should you think of her if she did? But they're not intrusive; they're essentially modest people; they won't put themselves upon us. They have great natural discretion," Gaston declared.

"Do you answer for that? Susan does; she's always assuring one of it," Mr. Probert said. "The father has so much that he wouldn't even speak to me."

"He didn't, poor dear man, know what to say."

"How then shall I know what to say to HIM?"

"Ah you always know!" Gaston smiled.

"How will that help us if he doesn't know what to answer?"

"You'll draw him out. He's full of a funny little shade of bonhomie."

"Well, I won't quarrel with your bonhomme," said Mr. Probert—"if he's silent there are much worse faults; nor yet with the fat young lady, though she's evidently vulgar—even if you call it perhaps too a funny little shade. It's not for ourselves I'm afraid; it's for them. They'll be very unhappy."

"Never, never!" said Gaston. "They're too simple. They'll remain so. They're not morbid nor suspicious. And don't you like Francie? You haven't told me so," he added in a moment.

"She talks about 'Parus,' my dear boy."

"Ah to Susan too that seemed the great barrier. But she has got over it. I mean Susan has got over the barrier. We shall make her speak French; she has a real disposition for it; her French is already almost as good as her English."

"That oughtn't to be difficult. What will you have? Of course she's very pretty and I'm sure she's good. But I won't tell you she is a marvel, because you must remember—you young fellows think your own point of view and your own experience everything—that I've seen beauties without number. I've known the most charming women of our time—women of an order to which Miss Francie, con rispetto parlando, will never begin to belong. I'm difficult about women—how can I help it? Therefore when you pick up a little American girl at an inn and bring her to us as a miracle, feel how standards alter. J'ai vu mieux que ca, mon cher. However, I accept everything to-day, as you know; when once one has lost one's enthusiasm everything's the same and one might as well perish by the sword as by famine."

"I hoped she'd fascinate you on the spot," Gaston rather ruefully remarked.

"'Fascinate'—the language you fellows use! How many times in one's life is one likely to be fascinated?"

"Well, she'll charm you yet."

"She'll never know at least that she doesn't: I'll engage for that," said Mr. Probert handsomely.

"Ah be sincere with her, father—she's worth it!" his son broke out.

When the elder man took that tone, the tone of vast experience and a fastidiousness justified by ineffable recollections, our friend was more provoked than he could say, though he was also considerably amused, for he had a good while since, made up his mind about the element of rather stupid convention in it. It was fatuous to miss so little the fine perceptions one didn't have: so far from its showing experience it showed a sad simplicity not to FEEL Francie Dosson. He thanked God she was just the sort of imponderable infinite quantity, such as there were no stupid terms for, that he did feel. He didn't know what old frumps his father might have frequented—the style of 1830, with long curls in front, a vapid simper, a Scotch plaid dress and a corsage, in a point suggestive of twenty whalebones, coming down to the knees—but he could remember Mme. de Marignac's Tuesdays and Thursdays and Fridays, with Sundays and other days thrown in, and the taste that prevailed in that milieu: the books they admired, the verses they read and recited, the pictures, great heaven! they thought good, and the three busts of the lady of the house in different corners (as a Diana, a Druidess and a Croyante: her shoulders were supposed to make up for her head), effigies the public ridicule attaching to which to-day would—even the least bad, Canova's—make their authors burrow in holes for shame.

"And what else is she worth?" Mr. Probert asked after a momentary hesitation.

"How do you mean, what else?"

"Her immense prospects, that's what Susan has been putting forward. Susan's insistence on them was mainly what brought over Jane. Do you mind my speaking of them?"

Gaston was obliged to recognise privately the importance of Jane's having been brought over, but he hated to hear it spoken of as if he were under an obligation to it. "To whom, sir?" he asked.

"Oh only to you."

"You can't do less than Mr. Dosson. As I told you, he waived the question of money and he was splendid. We can't be more mercenary than he."

"He waived the question of his own, you mean?" said Mr. Probert.

"Yes, and of yours. But it will be all right." The young man flattered himself that this was as near as he was willing to go to any view of pecuniary convenience.

"Well, it's your affair—or your sisters'," his father returned.

"It's their idea that we see where we are and that we make the best of it."

"It's very good of them to make the best of it and I should think they'd be tired of their own chatter," Gaston impatiently sighed.

Mr. Probert looked at him a moment in vague surprise, but only said: "I think they are. However, the period of discussion's closed. We've taken the jump." He then added as to put the matter a little less dryly: "Alphonse and Maxime are quite of your opinion."

"Of my opinion?"

"That she's charming."

"Confound them then, I'm not of theirs!" The form of this rejoinder was childishly perverse, and it made Mr. Probert stare again; but it belonged to one of the reasons for which his children regarded him as an old darling that Gaston could suppose him after an instant to embrace it. The old man said nothing, but took up his book, and his son, who had been standing before the fire, went out of the room. His abstention from protest at Gaston's petulance was the more generous as he was capable, for his part, of feeling it to make for a greater amenity in the whole connexion that ces messieurs should like the little girl at the hotel. Gaston didn't care a straw what it made for, and would have seen himself in bondage indeed had he given a second thought to the question. This was especially the case as his father's mention of the approval of two of his brothers-in-law appeared to point to a possible disapproval on the part of the third. Francie's lover cared as little whether she displeased M. de Brecourt as he cared whether she pleased Maxime and Raoul. Mr. Probert continued to read, and in a few moments Gaston was with him again. He had expressed surprise, just before, at the wealth of discussion his sisters had been ready to expend in his interest, but he managed to convey now that there was still a point of a certain importance to be made. "It seems rather odd to me that you should all appear to accept the step I'M about to take as a necessity disagreeable at the best, when I myself hold that I've been so exceedingly fortunate."

Mr. Probert lowered his book accommodatingly and rested his eyes on the fire. "You won't be content till we're enthusiastic. She seems an amiable girl certainly, and in that you're fortunate."

"I don't think you can tell me what would be better—what you'd have preferred," the young man said.

"What I should have preferred? In the first place you must remember that I wasn't madly impatient to see you married."

"I can imagine that, and yet I can't imagine that as things have turned out you shouldn't be struck with my felicity. To get something so charming and to get it of our own species!" Gaston explained.

"Of our own species? Tudieu!" said his father, looking up.

"Surely it's infinitely fresher and more amusing for me to marry an American. There's a sad want of freshness—there's even a provinciality—in the way we've Gallicised."

"Against Americans I've nothing to say; some of them are the best thing the world contains. That's precisely why one can choose. They're far from doing all like that."

"Like what, dear father?"

"Comme ces gens-la. You know that if they were French, being otherwise what they are, one wouldn't look at them."

"Indeed one would; they would be such rare curiosities."

"Well, perhaps they'll do for queer fish," said Mr. Probert with a little conclusive sigh.

"Yes, let them pass at that. They'll surprise you."

"Not too much, I hope!" cried the old man, opening his volume again.

The complexity of things among the Proberts, it needn't nevertheless startle us to learn, was such as to make it impossible for Gaston to proceed to the celebration of his nuptial, with all the needful circumstances of material preparation and social support, before some three months should have expired. He chafed however but moderately under this condition, for he remembered it would give Francie time to endear herself to his whole circle. It would also have advantages for the Dossons; it would enable them to establish by simple but effective arts some modus vivendi with that rigid body. It would in short help every one to get used to everything. Mr. Dosson's designs and Delia's took no articulate form; what was mainly clear to Gaston was that his future wife's relatives had as yet no sense of disconnexion. He knew that Mr. Dosson would do whatever Delia liked and that Delia would like to "start" her sister—this whether or no she expected to be present at the rest of the race. Mr. Probert notified Mr. Dosson of what he proposed to "do" for his son, and Mr. Dosson appeared more quietly amused than anything else at the news. He announced in return no intentions in regard to Francie, and his strange silence was the cause of another convocation of the house of Probert. Here Mme. de Brecourt's bold front won another victory; she maintained, as she let her brother know, that it was too late for any policy but a policy of confidence. "Lord help us, is that what they call confidence?" the young man gasped, guessing the way they all had looked at each other; and he wondered how they would look next at poor Mr. Dosson himself. Fortunately he could always fall back, for reassurance, on the perfection of their "forms"; though indeed he thoroughly knew that these forms would never appear so striking as on the day—should such a day fatally come—of their meddling too much.

Mr. Probert's property was altogether in the United States: he resembled other discriminating persons for whom the only good taste in America was the taste of invested and paying capital. The provisions he was engaging to make for his son's marriage rendered advisable some attention, on the spot, to interests with the management of which he was acquainted only by report. It had long been his conviction that his affairs beyond the sea needed looking into; they had gone on and on for years too far from the master's eye. He had thought of making the journey in the cause of that vigilance, but now he was too old and too tired and the effort had become impossible. There was nothing therefore but for Gaston to go, and go quickly, though the time so little fostered his absence from Paris. The duty was none the less laid upon him and the question practically faced; then everything yielded to the consideration that he had best wait till after his marriage, when he might be so auspiciously accompanied by his wife. Francie would be in many ways so propitious an introducer. This abatement would have taken effect had not a call for an equal energy on Mr. Dosson's part suddenly appeared to reach and to move that gentleman. He had business on the other side, he announced, to attend to, though his starting for New York presented difficulties, since he couldn't in such a situation leave his daughters alone. Not only would such a proceeding have given scandal to the Proberts, but Gaston learned, with much surprise and not a little amusement, that Delia, in consequence of changes now finely wrought in her personal philosophy, wouldn't have felt his doing so square with propriety. The young man was able to put it to her that nothing would be simpler than, in the interval, for Francie to go and stay with Susan or Margaret; she herself in that case would be free to accompany her father. But Delia declared at this that nothing would induce her to budge from Paris till she had seen her sister through, and Gaston shrank from proposing that she too should spend five weeks in the Place Beauvau or the Rue de Lille. There was moreover a slight element of the mystifying for him in the perverse unsociable way in which Francie took up a position of marked disfavour as yet to any "visiting." AFTER, if he liked, but not till then. And she wouldn't at the moment give the reasons of her refusal; it was only very positive and even quite passionate.

All this left her troubled suitor no alternative but to say to Mr. Dosson: "I'm not, my dear sir, such a fool as I look. If you'll coach me properly, and trust me, why shouldn't I rush across and transact your business as well as my father's?" Strange as it appeared, Francie offered herself as accepting this separation from her lover, which would last six or seven weeks, rather than accept the hospitality of any member of his family. Mr. Dosson, on his side, was grateful for the solution; he remarked "Well, sir, you've got a big brain" at the end of a morning they spent with papers and pencils; and on this Gaston made his preparations to sail. Before he left Paris Francie, to do her justice, confided to him that her objection to going in such an intimate way even to Mme. de Brecourt's had been founded on a fear that in close quarters she might do something that would make them all despise her. Gaston replied, in the first place, ardently, that this was the very delirium of delicacy, and that he wanted to know in the second if she expected never to be at close quarters with "tous les siens." "Ah yes, but then it will be safer," she pleaded; "then we shall be married and by so much, shan't we? be beyond harm." In rejoinder to which he had simply kissed her; the passage taking place three days before her lover took ship. What further befell in the brief interval was that, stopping for a last word at the Hotel de l'Univers et the Cheltenham on his way to catch the night express to London—he was to sail from Liverpool—Gaston found Mr. George Flack sitting in the red-satin saloon. The correspondent of the Reverberator had come back.



IX

Mr. Flack's relations with his old friends didn't indeed, after his return, take on the familiarity and frequency of their intercourse a year before: he was the first to refer to the marked change in the situation. They had got into the high set and they didn't care about the past: he alluded to the past as if it had been rich in mutual vows, in pledges now repudiated.

"What's the matter all the same? Won't you come round there with us some day?" Mr. Dosson asked; not having perceived for himself any reason why the young journalist shouldn't be a welcome and easy presence in the Cours la Reine.

Delia wanted to know what Mr. Flack was talking about: didn't he know a lot of people that they didn't know and wasn't it natural they should have their own society? The young man's treatment of the question was humorous, and it was with Delia that the discussion mainly went forward. When he maintained that the Dossons had shamelessly "shed" him Mr. Dosson returned "Well, I guess you'll grow again!" And Francie made the point that it was no use for him to pose as a martyr, since he knew perfectly well that with all the celebrated people he saw and the way he flew round he had the most enchanting time. She was aware of being a good deal less accessible than the previous spring, for Mesdames de Brecourt and de Cliche—the former indeed more than the latter—occupied many of her hours. In spite of her having held off, to Gaston, from a premature intimacy with his sisters, she spent whole days in their company—they had so much to tell her of how her new life would shape, and it seemed mostly very pleasant—and she thought nothing could be nicer than that in these intervals he should give himself to her father, and even to Delia, as had been his wont.

But the flaw of a certain insincerity in Mr. Flack's nature was suggested by his present tendency to rare visits. He evidently didn't care for her father in himself, and though this mild parent always took what was set before him and never made fusses she is sure he felt their old companion to have fallen away. There were no more wanderings in public places, no more tryings of new cafes. Mr. Dosson used to look sometimes as he had looked of old when George Flack "located" them somewhere—as if he expected to see their heated benefactor rush back to them with his drab overcoat flying in the wind; but this appearance usually and rather touchingly subsided. He at any rate missed Gaston because Gaston had this winter so often ordered his dinner for him; and his society was not, to make it up, sought by the count and the marquis, whose mastery of English was small and their other distractions great. Mr. Probert, it was true, had shown something of a conversible spirit; he had come twice to the hotel since his son's departure and had said, smiling and reproachful, "You neglect us, you neglect us, my dear sir!" The good man had not understood what was meant by this till Delia explained after the visitor had withdrawn, and even then the remedy for the neglect, administered two or three days later, had not borne any copious fruit. Mr. Dosson called alone, instructed by his daughter, in the Cours la Reine, but Mr. Probert was not at home. He only left a card on which Delia had superscribed in advance, almost with the legibility of print, the words "So sorry!" Her father had told her he would give in the card if she wanted, but would have nothing to do with the writing. There was a discussion as to whether Mr. Probert's remark was an allusion to a deficiency of politeness on the article of his sons-in-law. Oughtn't Mr. Dosson perhaps to call personally, and not simply through the medium of the visits paid by his daughters to their wives, on Messieurs de Brecourt and de Cliche? Once when this subject came up in George Flack's presence the old man said he would go round if Mr. Flack would accompany him. "All right, we'll go right along!" Mr. Flack had responded, and this inspiration had become a living fact qualified only by the "mercy," to Delia Dosson, that the other two gentlemen were not at home. "Suppose they SHOULD get in?" she had said lugubriously to her sister.

"Well, what if they do?" Francie had asked.

"Why the count and the marquis won't be interested in Mr. Flack."

"Well then perhaps he'll be interested in them. He can write something about them. They'll like that."

"Do you think they would?" Delia had solemnly weighed it.

"Why, yes, if he should say fine things."

"They do like fine things," Delia had conceded. "They get off so many themselves. Only the way Mr. Flack does it's a different style."

"Well, people like to be praised in any style."

"That's so," Delia had continued to brood.

One afternoon, coming in about three o'clock, Mr. Flack found Francie alone. She had expressed a wish after luncheon for a couple of hours of independence: intending to write to Gaston, and having accidentally missed a post, she had determined her letter should be of double its usual length. Her companions had respected her claim for solitude, Mr. Dosson taking himself off to his daily session in the reading-room of the American bank and Delia—the girls had now at their command a landau as massive as the coach of an ambassador—driving away to the dressmaker's, a frequent errand, to superintend and urge forward the progress of her sister's wedding-clothes. Francie was not skilled in composition; she wrote slowly and had in thus addressing her lover much the same sense of sore tension she supposed she should have in standing at the altar with him. Her father and Delia had a theory that when she shut herself up that way she poured forth pages that would testify to her costly culture. When George Flack was ushered in at all events she was still bent over her blotting-book at one of the gilded tables, and there was an inkstain on her pointed forefinger. It was no disloyalty to Gaston, but only at the most an echo as of the sweetness of "recess time" in old school mornings that made her glad to see her visitor.

She hadn't quite known how to finish her letter, in the infinite of the bright propriety of her having written it, but Mr. Flack seemed to set a practical human limit.

"I wouldn't have ventured," he observed on entering, "to propose this, but I guess I can do with it now it's come."

"What can you do with?" she asked, wiping her pen.

"Well this happy chance. Just you and me together."

"I don't know what it's a chance for."

"Well, for me to be a little less miserable for a quarter of an hour. It makes me so to see you look so happy."

"It makes you miserable?"—Francie took it gaily but guardedly.

"You ought to understand—when I say something so noble." And settling himself on the sofa Mr. Flack continued: "Well, how do you get on without Mr. Probert?"

"Very well indeed, thank you." The tone in which the girl spoke was not an encouragement to free pleasantry, so that if he continued his enquiries it was with as much circumspection as he had perhaps ever in his life recognised himself as having to apply to a given occasion. He was eminently capable of the sense that it wasn't in his interest to strike her as indiscreet and profane; he only wanted still to appear a real reliable "gentleman friend." At the same time he was not indifferent to the profit for him of her noticing in him a sense as of a good fellow once badly "sold," which would always give him a certain pull on what he called to himself her lovely character. "Well, you're in the real 'grand' old monde now, I suppose," he resumed at last, not with an air of undue derision—rather with a kind of contemporary but detached wistfulness.

"Oh I'm not in anything; I'm just where I've always been."

"I'm sorry; I hoped you'd tell me a good lot about it," said Mr. Flack, not with levity.

"You think too much of that. What do you want to know so much about it for?"

Well, he took some trouble for his reason. "Dear Miss Francie, a poor devil of a journalist who has to get his living by studying-up things has to think TOO much, sometimes, in order to think, or at any rate to do, enough. We find out what we can—AS we can, you see."

She did seem to catch in it the note of pathos. "What do you want to study-up?"

"Everything! I take in everything. It all depends on my opportunity. I try and learn—I try and improve. Every one has something to tell—or to sell; and I listen and watch—well, for what I can drink in or can buy. I hoped YOU'D have something to tell—for I'm not talking now of anything but THAT. I don't believe but what you've seen a good deal of new life. You won't pretend they ain't working you right in, charming as you are."

"Do you mean if they've been kind and sweet to me? They've been very kind and sweet," Francie mid. "They want to do even more than I'll let them."

"Ah why won't you let them?" George Flack asked almost coaxingly.

"Well, I do, when it comes to anything," the girl went on. "You can't resist them really; they've got such lovely ways."

"I should like to hear you talk right out about their ways," her companion observed after a silence.

"Oh I could talk out right enough if once I were to begin. But I don't see why it should interest you."

"Don't I care immensely for everything that concerns you? Didn't I tell you that once?"—he put it very straight.

"Well, you were foolish ever, and you'd be foolish to say it again," Francie replied.

"Oh I don't want to say anything, I've had my lesson. But I could listen to you all day." Francie gave an exclamation of impatience and incredulity, and Mr. Flack pursued: "Don't you remember what you told me that time we had that talk at Saint-Germain, on the terrace? You said I might remain your friend."

"Well, that's all right," said the girl.

"Then ain't we interested in the development of our friends—in their impressions, their situations and adventures? Especially a person like me, who has got to know life whether he wants to or no—who has got to know the world."

"Do you mean to say I could teach you about life?" Francie beautifully gaped.

"About some kinds certainly. You know a lot of people it's difficult to get at unless one takes some extraordinary measures, as you've done."

"What do you mean? What measures have I done?"

"Well, THEY have—to get right hold of you—and its the same thing. Pouncing on you, to secure you first—I call that energetic, and don't you think I ought to know?" smiled Mr. Flack with much meaning. "I thought I was energetic, but they got in ahead of me. They're a society apart, and they must be very curious."

"Yes, they're very curious," Francie admitted with a resigned sigh. Then she said: "Do you want to put them in the paper?"

George Flack cast about—the air of the question was so candid, suggested so complete an exemption From prejudice. "Oh I'm very careful about what I put in the paper. I want everything, as I told you; Don't you remember the sketch I gave you of my ideals? But I want it in the right way and of the right brand. If I can't get it in the shape I like it I don't want it at all; first-rate first-hand information, straight from the tap, is what I'm after. I don't want to hear what some one or other thinks that some one or other was told that some one or other believed or said; and above all I don't want to print it. There's plenty of that flowing in, and the best part of the job's to keep it out. People just yearn to come in; they make love to me for it all over the place; there's the biggest crowd at the door. But I say to them: 'You've got to do something first, then I'll see; or at any rate you've got to BE something!'"

"We sometimes see the Reverberator. You've some fine pieces," Francie humanely replied.

"Sometimes only? Don't they send it to the old gentleman—the weekly edition? I thought I had fixed that," said George Flack.

"I don't know; it's usually lying round. But Delia reads it more than I; she reads pieces aloud. I like to read books; I read as many as I can."

"Well, it's all literature," said Mr. Flack; "it's all the press, the great institution of our time. Some of the finest books have come out first in the papers. It's the history of the age."

"I see you've got the same aspirations," Francie remarked kindly.

"The same aspirations?"

"Those you told me about that day at Saint-Germain."

"Oh I keep forgetting that I ever broke out to you that way. Everything's so changed."

"Are you the proprietor of the paper now?" the girl went on, determined not to catch this sentimental echo.

"What do you care? It wouldn't even be delicate in me to tell you; for I DO remember the way you said you'd try and get your father to help me. Don't say you've forgotten it, because you almost made me cry. Anyway, that isn't the sort of help I want now and it wasn't the sort of help I meant to ask you for then. I want sympathy and interest; I want some one to say to me once in a while 'Keep up your old heart, Mr. Flack; you'll come out all right.' You see I'm a working-man and I don't pretend to be anything else," Francie's companion went on. "I don't live on the accumulations of my ancestors. What I have I earn—what I am I've fought for: I'm a real old travailleur, as they say here. I rejoice in it, but there's one dark spot in it all the same."

"And what's that?" Francie decided not quite at once to ask.

"That it makes you ashamed of me."

"Oh how can you say?" And she got up as if a sense of oppression, of vague discomfort, had come over her. Her visitor troubled such peace as she had lately arrived at.

"You wouldn't be ashamed to go round with me?"

"Round where?"

"Well, anywhere: just to have one more walk. The very last." George Flack had got up too and stood there looking at her with his bright eyes, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. As she hesitated he continued: "Then I'm not such a friend after all."

She rested her eyes a moment on the carpet; then raising them: "Where would you like to go?"

"You could render me a service—a real service—without any inconvenience probably to yourself. Isn't your portrait finished?"

"Yes, but he won't give it up."

"Who won't give it up?"

"Why Mr. Waterlow. He wants to keep it near him to look at it in case he should take a fancy to change it. But I hope he won't change it—it's so lovely as it is!" Francie made a mild joke of saying.

"I hear it's magnificent and I want to see it," said George Flack.

"Then why don't you go?"

"I'll go if you'll take me; that's the service you can render me."

"Why I thought you went everywhere—into the palaces of kings!" Francie cried.

"I go where I'm welcome, not where I ain't. I don't want to push into that studio alone; he doesn't want me round. Oh you needn't protest," the young man went on; "if a fellow's made sensitive he has got to stay so. I feel those things in the shade of a tone of voice. He doesn't like newspaper-men. Some people don't, you know. I ought to tell you that frankly."

Francie considered again, but looking this time at her visitor. "Why if it hadn't been for you "—I'm afraid she said "hadn't have been"—"I'd never have sat to him."

Mr. Flack smiled at her in silence for a little. "If it hadn't been for me I think you'd never have met your future husband."

"Perhaps not," said Francie; and suddenly she blushed red, rather to her companion's surprise.

"I only say that to remind you that after all I've a right to ask you to show me this one little favour. Let me drive with you to-morrow, or next day or any day, to the Avenue de Villiers, and I shall regard myself as amply repaid. With you I shan't be afraid to go in, for you've a right to take any one you like to see your picture. That's the rule here."

"Oh the day you're afraid, Mr. Flack—!" Francie laughed without fear. She had been much struck by his reminder of what they all owed him; for he truly had been their initiator, the instrument, under providence, that had opened a great new interest to them, and as she was more listless about almost anything than at the sight of a person wronged she winced at his describing himself as disavowed or made light of after the prize was gained. Her mind had not lingered on her personal indebtedness to him, for it was not in the nature of her mind to linger; but at present she was glad to spring quickly, at the first word, into the attitude of acknowledgement. It had the effect of simplification after too multiplied an appeal—it brought up her spirits.

"Of course I must be quite square with you," the young man said in a tone that struck her as "higher," somehow, than any she had ever heard him use. "If I want to see the picture it's because I want to write about it. The whole thing will go bang into the Reverberator. You must understand that in advance. I wouldn't write about it without seeing it. We don't DO that"—and Mr. Flack appeared to speak proudly again for his organ.

"J'espere bien!" said Francie, who was getting on famously with her French. "Of course if you praise him Mr. Waterlow will like it."

"I don't know that he cares for my praise and I don't care much whether HE likes it or not. For you to like it's the principal thing—we must do with that."

"Oh I shall be awfully proud."

"I shall speak of you personally—I shall say you're the prettiest girl that has ever come over."

"You may say what you like," Francie returned. "It will be immense fun to be in the newspapers. Come for me at this hour day after to-morrow."