They were out a long time, but he felt no anxiety, as he reflected that Mr. Flacks very profession would somehow make everything turn out to their profit. The bright French afternoon waned without bringing them back, yet Mr. Dosson still revolved about the court till he might have been taken for a valet de place hoping to pick up custom. The landlady smiled at him sometimes as she passed and re-passed, and even ventured to remark disinterestedly that it was a pity to waste such a lovely day indoorsnot to take a turn and see what was going on in Paris. But Mr. Dosson had no sense of waste: that came to him much more when he was confronted with historical monuments or beauties of nature or art, which affected him as the talk of people naming others, naming friends of theirs, whom he had never heard of: then he was aware of a degree of waste for the others, as if somebody lost somethingbut never when he lounged in that simplifying yet so comprehensive way in the court. It wanted but a quarter of an hour to dinnerTHAT historic fact was not beyond his measurewhen Delia and Francie at last met his view, still accompanied by Mr. Flack and sauntering in, at a little distance from each other, with a jaded air which was not in the least a tribute to his possible solicitude. They dropped into chairs and joked with each other, mingling sociability and languor, on the subject of what they had seen and donea question into which he felt as yet the delicacy of enquiring. But they had evidently done a good deal and had a good time: an impression sufficient to rescue Mr. Dosson personally from the consciousness of failure. Wont you just step in and take dinner with us? he asked of the young man with a friendliness to which everything appeared to minister.
Well, thats a handsome offer, George Flack replied while Delia put it on record that they had each eaten about thirty cakes.
Well, I wondered what you were doing so long. But never mind your cakes. Its twenty minutes past six, and the table dhotes on time.
You dont mean to say you dine at the table dhote! Mr. Flack cried.
Why, dont you like that?and Francies candour of appeal to their comrades taste was celestial.
Well, it isnt what you must build on when you come to Paris. Too many flowerpots and chickens legs.
Well, would you like one of these restaurants? asked Mr. Dosson. I dont careif you show us a good one.
Oh Ill show you a good onedont you worry. Mr. Flacks tone was ever that of keeping the poor gentleman mildly but firmly in his place.
Well, youve got to order the dinner then, said Francie.
Well, youll see how I could do it! He towered over her in the pride of this feat.
He has got an interest in some place, Delia declared. He has taken us to ever so many stores where he gets his commission.
Well, Id pay you to take them round, said Mr. Dosson; and with much agreeable trifling of this kind it was agreed that they should sally forth for the evening meal under Mr. Flacks guidance.
If he had easily convinced them on this occasion that that was a more original proceeding than worrying those old bones, as he called it, at the hotel, he convinced them of other things besides in the course of the following month and by the aid of profuse attentions. What he mainly made clear to them was that it was really most kind of a young man who had so many big things on his mind to find sympathy for questions, for issues, he used to call them, that could occupy the telegraph and the press so little as theirs. He came every day to set them in the right path, pointing out its charms to them in a way that made them feel how much they had been in the wrong. It made them feel indeed that they didnt know anything about anything, even about such a matter as ordering shoesan art in which they had vaguely supposed themselves rather strong. He had in fact great knowledge, which was wonderfully various, and he knew as many people as they knew few. He had appointmentsvery often with celebritiesfor every hour of the day, and memoranda, sometimes in shorthand, on tablets with elastic straps, with which he dazzled the simple folk at the Hotel de lUnivers et de Cheltenham, whose social life, of narrow range, consisted mainly in reading the lists of Americans who registered at the bankers and at Galignanis. Delia Dosson in particular had a trick of poring solemnly over these records which exasperated Mr. Flack, who skimmed them and found what he wanted in the flash of an eye: she kept the others waiting while she satisfied herself that Mr. and Mrs. D. S. Rosenheim and Miss Cora Rosenheim and Master Samuel Rosenheim had left for Brussels.
Mr. Flack was wonderful on all occasions in finding what he wantedwhich, as we know, was what he believed the public wantedand Delia was the only one of the party with whom he was sometimes a little sharp. He had embraced from the first the idea that she was his enemy, and he alluded to it with almost tiresome frequency, though always in a humorous fearless strain. Even more than by her fashion of hanging over the registers she provoked him by appearing to find their little party not sufficient to itself, by wishing, as he expressed it, to work in new stuff. He might have been easy, however, for he had sufficient chance to observe how it was always the fate of the Dossons to miss their friends. They were continually looking out for reunions and combinations that never came off, hearing that people had been in Paris only after they had gone away, or feeling convinced that they were there but not to be found through their not having registered, or wondering whether they should overtake them if they should go to Dresden, and then making up their minds to start for Dresden only to learn at the eleventh hour, through some accident, that the hunted game had left for Biarritz even as the Rosenheims for Brussels. We know plenty of people if we could only come across them, Delia had more than once observed: she scanned the Continent with a wondering baffled gaze and talked of the unsatisfactory way in which friends at home would write out that other friends were somewhere in Europe. She expressed the wish that such correspondents as that might be in a place that was not at all vague. Two or three times people had called at the hotel when they were out and had left cards for them without an address and superscribed with some mocking dash of the pencilSo sorry to miss you! or Off to-morrow! The girl sat looking at these cards, handling them and turning them over for a quarter of an hour at a time; she produced them days afterwards, brooding upon them afresh as if they were a mystic clue. George Flack generally knew where they were, the people who were somewhere in Europe. Such knowledge came to him by a kind of intuition, by the voices of the air, by indefinable and unteachable processes. But he held his peace on purpose; he didnt want any outsiders; he thought their little party just right. Mr. Dossons place in the scheme of Providence was to go with Delia while he himself went with Francie, and nothing would have induced George Flack to disfigure that equation. The young man was professionally so occupied with other peoples affairs that it should doubtless be mentioned to his praise that he still managed to have affairsor at least an affairof his own. That affair was Francie Dosson, and he was pleased to perceive how little SHE cared what had become of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenheim and Master Samuel and Miss Cora. He counted all the things she didnt care abouther soft inadvertent eyes helped him to do that; and they footed up so, as he would have said, that they gave him the rich sense of a free field. If she had so few interests there was the greater possibility that a young man of bold conceptions and cheerful manners might become one. She had usually the air of waiting for something, with a pretty listlessness or an amused resignation, while tender shy indefinite little fancies hummed in her brain. Thus she would perhaps recognise in him the reward of patience. George Flack was aware that he exposed his friends to considerable fatigue: he brought them back pale and taciturn from suburban excursions and from wanderings often rather aimless and casual among the boulevards and avenues of the town. He regarded them at such times with complacency however, for these were hours of diminished resistance: he had an idea that he should be able eventually to circumvent Delia if he only could catch her some day sufficiently, that is physically, prostrate. He liked to make them all feel helpless and dependent, and this was not difficult with people who were so modest and artless, so unconscious of the boundless power of wealth. Sentiment, in our young man, was not a scruple nor a source of weakness; but he thought it really touching, the little these good people knew of what they could do with their money. They had in their hands a weapon of infinite range and yet were incapable of firing a shot for themselves. They had a sort of social humility; it appeared never to have occurred to them that, added to their loveliness, their money gave them a value. This used to strike George Flack on certain occasions when he came back to find them in the places where he had dropped them while he rushed off to give a turn to one of his screws. They never played him false, never wearied of waiting; always sat patient and submissive, usually at a cafe to which he had introduced them or in a row of chairs on the boulevard, on the level expanse of the Tuileries or in the Champs Elysees.
He introduced them to many cafes, in different parts of Paris, being careful to choose those which in his view young ladies might frequent with propriety, and there were two or three in the neighbourhood of their hotel where they became frequent and familiar figures. As the late spring days grew warmer and brighter they mainly camped out on the terrace, amid the array of small tables at the door of the establishment, where Mr. Flack, on the return, could descry them from afar at their post and in the very same postures to which he had appointed them. They complained of no satiety in watching the many-coloured movement of the Parisian streets; and if some of the features in the panorama were base they were only so in a version that the social culture of our friends was incapable of supplying. George Flack considered that he was rendering a positive service to Mr. Dosson: wouldnt the old gentleman have sat all day in the court anyway? and wasnt the boulevard better than the court? It was his theory too that he nattered and caressed Miss Francies father, for there was no one to whom he had furnished more copious details about the affairs, the projects and prospects, of the Reverberator. He had left no doubt in the old gentlemans mind as to the race he himself intended to run, and Mr. Dosson used to say to him every day, the first thing, Well, where have you got to now?quite as if he took a real interest. George Flack reported his interviews, that is his reportings, to which Delia and Francie gave attention only in case they knew something of the persons on whom the young emissary of the Reverberator had conferred this distinction; whereas Mr. Dosson listened, with his tolerant interposition of Is that so? and Well, thats good, just as submissively when he heard of the celebrity in question for the first time.
In conversation with his daughters Mr. Flack was frequently the theme, though introduced much more by the young ladies than by himself, and especially by Delia, who announced at an early period that she knew what he wanted and that it wasnt in the least what SHE wanted. She amplified this statement very soonat least as regards her interpretation of Mr. Flacks designs: a certain mystery still hung about her own, which, as she intimated, had much more to recommend them. Delias vision of the danger as well as the advantage of being a pretty girl was closely connected, as was natural, with the idea of an engagement: this idea was in a manner complete in itselfher imagination failed in the oddest way to carry it into the next stage. She wanted her sister to be engaged but wanted her not at all to be married, and had clearly never made up her mind as to how Francie was to enjoy both the peril and the shelter. It was a secret source of humiliation to her that there had as yet to her knowledge been no one with whom her sister had exchanged vows; if her conviction on this subject could have expressed itself intelligibly it would have given you a glimpse of a droll state of minda dim theory that a bright girl ought to be able to try successive aspirants. Delias conception of what such a trial might consist of was strangely innocent: it was made up of calls and walks and buggy-drives, and above all of being, in the light of these exhibitions, the theme of tongues and subject to the great imputation. It had never in life occurred to her withal that a succession of lovers, or just even a repetition of experiments, may have anything to say to a young ladys delicacy. She felt herself a born old maid and never dreamed of a lover of her ownhe would have been dreadfully in her way; but she dreamed of love as something in its nature essentially refined. All the same she discriminated; it did lead to something after all, and she desired that for Francie it shouldnt lead to a union with Mr. Flack. She looked at such a union under the influence of that other view which she kept as yet to herself but was prepared to produce so soon as the right occasion should come up; giving her sister to understand that she would never speak to her again should this young man be allowed to suppose! Which was where she always paused, plunging again into impressive reticence.
To suppose what? Francie would ask as if she were totally unacquaintedwhich indeed she really waswith the suppositions of young men.
Well, youll seewhen he begins to say things you wont like! This sounded ominous on Delias part, yet her anxiety was really but thin: otherwise she would have risen against the custom adopted by Mr. Flack of perpetually coming round. She would have given her attentionthough it struggled in general unsuccessfully with all this side of their lifeto some prompt means of getting away from Paris. She expressed to her father what in her view the correspondent of the Reverberator was after; but without, it must be added, gaining from him the sense of it as a connexion in which he could be greatly worked up. This indeed was not of importance, thanks to her inner faith that Francie would never really do anythingthat is would never really like anythingher nearest relatives didnt like. Her sisters docility was a great comfort to Delia, the more that she herself, taking it always for granted, was the first to profit by it. She liked and disliked certain things much more than her junior did either; and Francie cultivated the convenience of her reasons, having so few of her own. They servedDelias reasonsfor Mr. Dosson as well, so that Francie was not guilty of any particular irreverence in regarding her sister rather than her father as the controller of her fate. A fate was rather an unwieldy and terrible treasure, which it relieved her that some kind person should undertake to administer. Delia had somehow got hold of hers firstbefore even her father, and ever so much before Mr. Flack; and it lay with Delia to make any change. She couldnt have accepted any gentleman as a party to an engagementwhich was somehow as far as her imagination wentwithout reference to Delia, any more than she could have done up her hair without a glass. The only action taken by Mr. Dosson on his elder daughters admonitions was to convert the general issue, as Mr. Flack would have called it, to a theme for daily pleasantry. He was fond, in his intercourse with his children, of some small usual joke, some humorous refrain; and what could have been more in the line of true domestic sport than a little gentle but unintermitted raillery on Francies conquest? Mr. Flacks attributive intentions became a theme of indulgent parental chaff, and the girl was neither dazzled nor annoyed by the freedom of all this tribute. Well, he HAS told us about half we know, she used to reply with an air of the judicious that the undetected observer I am perpetually moved to invoke would have found indescribably quaint.
Among the items of knowledge for which they were indebted to him floated the fact that this was the very best time in the young ladys life to have her portrait painted and the best place in the world to have it done well; also that he knew a lovely artist, a young American of extraordinary talent, who would be delighted to undertake the job. He led his trio to this gentlemans studio, where they saw several pictures that opened to them the strange gates of mystification. Francie protested that she didnt want to be done in THAT style, and Delia declared that she would as soon have her sister shown up in a magic lantern. They had had the fortune not to find Mr. Waterlow at home, so that they were free to express themselves and the pictures were shown them by his servant. They looked at them as they looked at bonnets and confections when they went to expensive shops; as if it were a question, among so many specimens, of the style and colour they would choose. Mr. Waterlows productions took their place for the most part in the category of those creations known to ladies as frights, and our friends retired with the lowest opinion of the young American master. George Flack told them however that they couldnt get out of it, inasmuch as he had already written home to the Reverberator that Francie was to sit. They accepted this somehow as a kind of supernatural sign that she would have to, for they believed everything they ever heard quoted from a newspaper. Moreover Mr. Flack explained to them that it would be idiotic to miss such an opportunity to get something at once precious and cheap; for it was well known that impressionism was going to be the art of the future, and Charles Waterlow was a rising impressionist. It was a new system altogether and the latest improvement in art. They didnt want to go back, they wanted to go forward, and he would give them an article that would fetch five times the money in about five yearswhich somehow, as he put it, seemed a very short time, though it would have seemed immense for anything else. They were not in search of a bargain, but they allowed themselves to be inoculated with any reason they thought would be characteristic of informed people; and he even convinced them after a little that when once they had got used to impressionism they would never look at anything else. Mr. Waterlow was the man, among the young, and he had no interest in praising him, because he was not a personal friend: his reputation was advancing with strides, and any one with any sense would want to secure something before the rush.