THE REVERBERATOR 
 
THE 
 
 REVERBERATOR 
 
 HENRY JAMES 
 
 Eonfcon 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 1888 
 
 The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reset ved 
 
Copyright, 
 
 1888, 
 By HENRY JAMES 
 
THE BEVEEBEBATOB. 
 
 i. 
 
 "I GUESS my daughter s in here," the old man 
 said, leading the way into the little salon de 
 lecture. He was not of the most advanced age, 
 but that is the way George Flack considered him, 
 and indeed he looked older than he was. George 
 Flack had found him sitting in the court of the 
 hotel (he sat a great deal in the court of the 
 hotel), and had gone up to him with characteristic 
 directness and asked him for Miss Francina. Poor 
 Mr. Dosson had with the greatest docility disposed 
 himself to wait upon the young man : he had as 
 a matter of course got up and made his way across 
 the court, to announce to the personage in question 
 that she had a visitor. He looked submissive 
 almost servile, as he preceded the visitor, thrust 
 ing his head forward in his quest ; but it was not 
 ? B 
 
THE KEVERBERATOR. 
 
 in Mr. Flack s line to notice that sort of thing. 
 He accepted the old gentleman s good offices as 
 he would have accepted those of a waiter, mur 
 muring no protest for the sake of making it 
 appear that he had come to see him as well. An 
 observer of these two persons would have assured 
 himself that the degree to which Mr. Dosson 
 thought it natural that any one should want to 
 see his daughter was only equalled by the degree 
 to which the young man thought it natural her 
 father should find her for him. There was a 
 superfluous drapery in the doorway of the salon 
 de lecture, which Mr. Dosson pushed aside while 
 George Flack stepped in after him. 
 
 The reading-room, of the Hotel de iTTnivers 
 et de Cheltenham was not of great proportions, 
 and had seemed to Mr. Dosson from the first 
 to consist principally of a bare, highly-polished 
 floor, on which it was easy for a relaxed elderly 
 American to slip. It was composed further, to 
 his perception, of a table with a green velvet cloth, 
 of a fireplace with a great deal of fringe and no 
 fire, of a window with a great deal of curtain and 
 no light, and of the Figaro, which he couldn t read, 
 and the New York Herald, which he had already 
 read. A single person was just now in possession 
 of these conveniences a young lady who sat with 
 her back to the window, looking straight before 
 her into the conventional room. She was dressed 
 as for the street; her empty hands rested upon 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 the arms of her chair (she had withdrawn her 
 long gloves, which were lying in her lap), and she 
 seemed to be doing nothing as hard as she could. 
 Her face was so much in shadow as to be barely 
 distinguishable ; nevertheless as soon as he saw 
 her the young man exclaimed "Why, it ain t 
 Miss Francie it s Miss Delia ! " 
 
 "Well, I guess we can fix that," said Mr. 
 Dosson, wandering further into the room and 
 drawing his feet over the floor without lifting 
 them. Whatever he did he ever seemed to 
 wander : he had a transitory air, an aspect of 
 weary yet patient non-arrival, even when he sat 
 (as he was capable of sitting for hours) in the 
 court of the inn. As he glanced down at the 
 two newspapers in their desert of green velvet he 
 raised a hopeless, uninterested glass to his eye. 
 "Delia, my dear, where is your sister?" 
 
 Delia made no movement whatever, nor did 
 any expression, so far as could be perceived, pass 
 over her large young face. She only ejaculated, 
 " Why, Mr. Flack, where did you drop from ? " 
 
 " Well, this is a good place to meet," her father 
 remarked, as if mildly, and as a mere passing 
 suggestion, to deprecate explanations. 
 
 " Any place is good where one meets old friends," 
 said George Flack, looking also at the newspapers. 
 He examined the date of the American sheet 
 and then put it down. " Well, how do you like 
 Paris?" he went on to the young lady. 
 
 B 2 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 "We quite enjoy it; but of course we re 
 familiar now." 
 
 " Well, I was in hopes I could show you some 
 thing," Mr. Flack said. 
 
 " I guess they ve seen most everything," Mr. 
 Dosson observed. 
 
 " Well, we ve seen more than you ! " exclaimed 
 his daughter. 
 
 "Well, I ve seen a good deal just sitting 
 there." 
 
 A person with a delicate ear might have 
 suspected Mr. Dosson of saying " setting ; " but he 
 would pronounce the same word in a different 
 manner at different times. 
 
 " Well, in Paris you can see everything," said 
 the young man. " I m quite enthusiastic about 
 Paris." 
 
 "Haven t you been here before?" Miss Delia 
 asked. 
 
 " Oh, yes, but it s ever fresh. And how is Miss 
 Francie \ " 
 
 "She s all right. She has gone up stairs to 
 get something; we are going out again." 
 
 " It s very attractive for the young," said Mr. 
 Dosson to the visitor. 
 
 " Well, then, I m one of the young. Do you 
 mind if I go with you ? " Mr. Flack continued, 
 to the girl. 
 
 "It ll seem like old times, on the deck," she 
 replied. " We re going to the Bon Marche." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Why don t you go to the Louvre ? It s much 
 better." 
 
 " We have just come from there : we have had 
 quite a morning." 
 
 " Well, it s a good place," the visitor continued. 
 
 " It s good for some things but it doesn t come 
 up to my idea for others." 
 
 " Oh, they ve seen everything," said Mr. Dosson. 
 Then he added, " I guess I ll go and call Francie." 
 
 " Well, tell her to hurry," Miss Delia returned, 
 swinging a glove in each hand. 
 
 "She knows my pace," Mr. Flack remarked. 
 
 " I should think she would, the way you raced ! " 
 the girl ejaculated, with memories of the Umbria. 
 "I hope you don t expect to rush round Paris 
 that way." 
 
 " I always rush. I live in a rush. That s the 
 way to get through." 
 
 " Well, I am through, I guess," said Mr. Dosson, 
 philosophically. 
 
 " Well, I ain t ! " his daughter declared, with 
 decision. 
 
 "Well, you must come round often," the old 
 gentleman continued, as a leave-taking. 
 
 "Oh, I ll come round! I ll have to rush, but 
 I ll do it." 
 
 " I ll send down Francie." And Francie s father 
 crept away. 
 
 " And please to give her some more money ! " 
 her sister called after him. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Does she keep the money ? " George Flack 
 inquired. 
 
 "Keep it?" Mr. Dosson stopped as he pushed 
 aside the portiere. " Oh, you innocent young 
 man ! " 
 
 " I guess it s the first time you were ever called 
 innocent," Delia remarked, left alone with the 
 visitor. 
 
 " Well, I was before I came to Paris." 
 
 " Well, I can t see that it has hurt us. We are 
 not extravagant." 
 
 " Wouldn t you have a right to be ? " 
 
 " I don t think any one has a right to be." 
 
 The young man, who had seated himself, looked 
 at her a moment. " That s the way you used to 
 talk." 
 
 "Well, I haven t changed." 
 
 " And Miss Francie has she ? " 
 
 " Well, you ll see," said Delia Dosson, beginning 
 to draw on her gloves. 
 
 Her companion watched her, leaning forward 
 with his elbows on the arms of his chair and his 
 hands interlocked. At last he said, interrogatively : 
 " Bon Marche ? " 
 
 " No, I got them in a little place I know." 
 
 " Well, they re Paris, anyway." 
 
 "Of course they re Paris. But you can get 
 gloves anywhere." 
 
 "You must show me the little place, anyhow," 
 Mr. Flack continued, sociably. And he observed 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 further, with the same friendliness " The old 
 gentleman seems all there." 
 
 " Oh, he s the dearest of the dear." 
 
 "He s a real gentleman of the old stamp," 
 said George Flack. 
 
 "Well, what should you think our father 
 would be?" 
 
 "I should think he would be delighted!" 
 
 "Well, he is, when we carry out our plans." 
 
 " And what are they your plans ? " asked the 
 young man. 
 
 "Oh, I never tell them." 
 
 "How then does he know whether you carry 
 them out ? " 
 
 " Well, I guess he d know it if we didn t," said 
 the girl. 
 
 " I remember how secretive you were last year. 
 You kept everything to yourself." 
 
 " Well, I know what I want," the young lady 
 pursued. 
 
 He watched her button one of her gloves, 
 deftly, with a hairpin which she disengaged from 
 some mysterious function under her bonnet. There 
 was a moment s silence and then they looked up 
 at each other. " I have an idea you don t want 
 me," said George Flack. 
 
 " Oh, yes, I do as a friend." 
 
 " Of all the mean ways of trying to get rid of 
 a man, that s the meanest ! " he exclaimed. 
 
 " Where s the meanness, when I suppose you 
 
THE REVERBEEATOR. 
 
 are not so peculiar as to wish to be anything 
 more ! " 
 
 "More to your sister, do you mean or to 
 yourself?" 
 
 " My sister is myself I haven t got any other," 
 said Delia Dosson. 
 
 " Any other sister ? " 
 
 Don t be idiotic. Are you still in the same 
 business ? " the girl went on. 
 
 "Well, I forget which one I was in." 
 
 " Why, something to do with that newspaper 
 don t you remember?" 
 
 " Yes, but it isn t that paper any more it s a 
 different one." 
 
 " Do you go round for news in the same way ? " 
 
 " Well, I try to get the people what they want. 
 It s hard work/ said the young man. 
 
 " Well, I suppose if you didn t some one else 
 would. They will have it, won t they ? " 
 
 "Yes, they will have it." But the wants 
 of the people did not appear at the present 
 moment to interest Mr. Flack as much as his 
 own. He looked at his watch and remarked 
 that the old gentleman didn t seem to have much 
 authority. 
 
 " Much authority ? " the girl repeated. 
 
 " With Miss Francie. She is taking her time, 
 or rather, I mean, she is taking mine." 
 
 "Well, if you expect to do anything with her 
 you must give her plenty of that." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " All right : I ll give her all I have." And Miss 
 Dosson s interlocutor leaned back in his chair 
 with folded arms, as if to let his companion 
 know that she would have to count with his 
 patience. But she sat there in her expressionless 
 placidity, giving no sign of alarm or defeat. He 
 was the first indeed to show a symptom of rest 
 lessness : at the end of a few moments he asked 
 the young lady if she didn t suppose her father 
 had told her sister who it was. 
 
 " Do you think that s all that s required ? " 
 Miss Dosson demanded. But she added, more 
 graciously "Probably that s the reason. She s 
 so shy." 
 
 "Oh, yes she used to look it." 
 
 " No, that s her peculiarity, that she never looks 
 it, and yet she is intensely so." 
 
 " Well, you make it up for her then, Miss Delia," 
 the young man ventured to declare. 
 
 " No, for her, I m not shy not in the 
 least." 
 
 "If it wasn t for you I think I could do some 
 thing," the young man went on. 
 
 " Well, you ve got to kill me first ! " 
 
 " I ll come down on you, somehow, in the 
 Reverberator," said George Flack. 
 
 " Oh, that s not -what the people want." 
 
 "No, unfortunately they don t care anything 
 about my affairs." 
 
 " Well, we do : we are kinder, Francie and I," 
 
10 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 said the girl. " But we desire to keep them quite 
 distinct from ours." 
 
 " Oh, yours yours : if I could only discover what 
 they are ! " the young journalist exclaimed. And 
 during the rest of the time that they sat there 
 , waiting he tried to find out. If an auditor had 
 happened to be present for the quarter of an hour 
 that elapsed and had had any attention to give 
 to these vulgar young persons he would have 
 wondered perhaps at there being so much mystery 
 on one side and so much curiosity on the other 
 wondered at least at the elaboration of inscrutable 
 projects on the part of a girl who looked to the 
 casual eye as if she were stolidly passive. Fidelia 
 Dosson, whose name had been shortened, was 
 twenty-five years old and had a large white face, 
 with the eyes very far apart. Her forehead was 
 high, but her mouth was small : her hair was light 
 and colourless, and a certain inelegant thickness 
 of figure made her appear shorter than she was. 
 Elegance indeed had not been conferred upon 
 her by Nature, and the Bon Marche and other 
 establishments had to make up for that. To a 
 feminine eye they would scarcely have appeared 
 to have acquitted themselves of their office ; but 
 even a woman would not have guessed how little 
 Fidelia cared. She always looked the same; all 
 the contrivances of Paris could not make her 
 look different, and she held them, for herself, 
 in no manner of esteem. It was a plain, blank 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 11 
 
 face, not only without movement, but with a 
 suggestion of obstinacy in its repose; and yet, 
 with its limitations, it was neither stupid nor 
 displeasing. It had an air of intelligent calm 
 a considering, pondering look that was superior, 
 somehow, to diffidence or anxiety; moreover, the 
 girl had a clear skin and a gentle, dim smile. 
 If she had been a young man (and she had, a 
 little, the head of one) it would probably have 
 been thought of her that she nursed dreams of 
 eminence in some scientific or even political 
 line. 
 
 An observer would have gathered, further, that 
 Mr. Flack s acquaintance with Mr. Dosson and his 
 daughters had had its origin in his crossing the 
 Atlantic eastward in their company more than a 
 year before and in some slight association imme 
 diately after disembarking; but that each party 
 had come and gone a good deal since then corne 
 and gone however without meeting again. It was 
 to be inferred that in this interval Miss Dosson 
 had led her father and sister back to their native 
 land and had then a second time directed their 
 course to Europe. This was a new departure, 
 said Mr. Flack, or rather a new arrival : he under 
 stood that it was not, as he called it, the same 
 old visit. She did not repudiate the accusation, 
 launched by her companion as if it might have 
 been embarrassing, of having spent her time at 
 home in Boston, and even in a suburban portion 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 of it : she confessed that, as Bostonians, they had 
 been capable of that. But now they had come 
 abroad for longer ever so much : what they had 
 gone home for was to make arrangements for a 
 European sojourn of which the limits were not to 
 be told. So far as this prospect entered into her 
 plans she freely acknowledged it. It appeared 
 to meet with George Flack s approval he also 
 had a big job on that side and it might take years, 
 so that it would be pleasant to have his friends 
 right there. He knew his way about in Paris 
 or any place like that much more than in Boston ; 
 if they had been poked away in one of those 
 clever suburbs they would have been lost to him. 
 " Oh, well, you ll see as much as you want to 
 O f us the way you ll have to take us," Delia 
 Dosson said : which led the young man to inquire 
 what way that was and to remark that he only 
 knew one way to take anything just as it came. 
 " Oh, well, you ll see," the girl rejoined ; and she 
 would give for the present no further explanation 
 of her somewhat chilling speech. In spite of it, 
 however, she professed an interest in Mr. Flack s 
 job "an interest which rested apparently upon 
 an interest in the young man himself. The 
 slightly surprised observer whom we have supposed 
 to be present would have perceived that this latter 
 sentiment was founded on a conception of Mr. 
 Flack s intrinsic brilliancy. Would his own im 
 pression have justified that? would he have 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 13 
 
 found such a conception contagious ? I forbear 
 to say positively no, for that would charge me 
 with the large responsibility of showing what 
 right our accidental observer might have had to 
 his particular standard. I prefer therefore to note 
 simply that George Flack was quite clever enough 
 to seem a person of importance to Delia Dosson. 
 He was connected (as she supposed) with literature, 
 and was not literature one of the many engaging 
 attributes of her cherished little sister? If Mr. 
 Flack was a writer Francie was a reader : had not 
 a trail of forgotten Tauchnitzes marked the former 
 line of travel of the party of three ? The elder 
 sister grabbed them up on leaving hotels and 
 railway-carriages, but usually found that she had 
 brought odd volumes. She considered, however, 
 that as a family they had a sort of superior affinity 
 with the young journalist, and would have been 
 surprised if she had been told that his acquaintance 
 was not a high advantage. 
 
 Mr. Flack s appearance was not so much a 
 property of his own as a prejudice on the part 
 of those who looked at him : whoever they might 
 be what they saw mainly in him was that they 
 had seen him before. And, oddly enough, this 
 recognition carried with it in general no ability 
 to remember that is to recall him : you could 
 not have evoked him in advance, and it was only 
 when you saw him that you knew you had seen 
 him. To carry him in your mind you must have 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 liked him very much, for no other sentiment, 
 not even aversion, would have taught you what 
 distinguished him in his group : aversion in 
 especial would have made you conscious only of 
 what confounded him. He was not a particular 
 person, but a sample or memento reminding one 
 of certain "goods" for which there is a steady 
 popular demand. You would scarcely have 
 expected him to have a name other than that of 
 his class : a number, like that of the day s news 
 paper, would have been the most that you would 
 count on, and you would have expected vaguely 
 to find the number high somewhere up in the 
 millions. As every copy of the newspaper wears 
 the same label, so that of Miss Dosson s visitor 
 would have been " Young commercial American." 
 Let me add that among the accidents cf his ap 
 pearance was that of its sometimes striking other 
 young commercial Americans as fine. He was 
 twenty-seven years of age and had a small square 
 head, a light gray overcoat, and in his right fore 
 finger a curious natural crook which might have 
 served, under pressure, to identify him. But for 
 the convenience of society he ought always to have 
 worn something conspicuous a green hat or a 
 scarlet necktie. His job was to obtain material 
 in Europe for an American "society-paper." 
 
 If it be objected to all this that when Francie 
 Dosson at last came in she addressed him as if 
 she easily placed him, the answer is that she had 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 15 
 
 been notified by her father more punctually than 
 was indicated by the manner of her response. 
 "Well, the way you do turn up," she said, 
 smiling and holding out her left hand to him: 
 in the other hand, or the hollow of her right 
 arm, she had a largeish parcel. Though she had 
 made him wait she was evidently very glad to 
 see him there ; and she as evidently required and 
 enjoyed a great deal of that sort of indulgence. 
 Her sister s attitude would have told you so even 
 if her own appearance had not. There was that 
 in her manner to the young man a perceptible 
 but indefinable shade which seemed to legitimate 
 the oddity of his having asked in particular for 
 her, as if he wished to see her to the exclusion of 
 her father and sister: a kind of special pleasure 
 which had the air of pointing to a special relation. 
 And yet a spectator, looking from Mr. George Flack 
 to Miss Francie Dosson, would have been much 
 at a loss to guess what special relation could exist 
 between them. The girl was exceedingly, extra 
 ordinarily pretty, and without discoverable resem 
 blance to her sister; and there was a brightness 
 in her a kind of still radiance which was quite 
 distinct from what is called animation. Kather 
 tall than short, slim, delicate and evidently as 
 light of hand and of foot as it was possible to be, 
 she yet gave no impression of quick movement, of 
 abundant chatter, of excitable nerves and irre 
 pressible life no hint of being of the most usual 
 
16 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 (which is perhaps also the most graceful) American 
 type. She was brilliantly but quietly pretty, 
 and your suspicion that she was a little stiff 
 was corrected only by your perception that she 
 was extremely soft. There was nothing in her 
 to confirm the implication that she had rushed 
 about the deck of a Cunarder with a newspaper 
 man. She was as straight as a wand and as fine as 
 a gem ; her neck was long and her gray eyes had 
 colour ; and from the ripple of her dark brown hair 
 to the curve of her unaffirmative chin every line 
 in her face was happy and pure. She had an 
 unformed voice and very little knowledge. 
 
 Delia got up, and they came out of the little 
 reading-room this young lady remarking to her 
 sister that she hoped she had got all the things. 
 "Well, I had a fiendish hunt for them, we 
 have got so many," Francie replied, with a curious 
 soft drawl. " There were a few dozens of the 
 pocket-handkerchiefs I couldn t find; but I 
 guess I ve got most of them, and most of the 
 gloves." 
 
 " Well, what are you carting them about for ? " 
 George Flack inquired, taking the parcel from her. 
 " You had better let me handle them. Do you 
 buy pocket-handkerchiefs by the hundred ? " 
 
 " Well, it only makes fifty apiece," said Francie, 
 smiling. " They ain t nice we re going to change 
 them." 
 
 "Oh, I won t be mixed up with that you 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 17 
 
 can t work that game on these Frenchmen ! " the 
 young man exclaimed. 
 
 "Oh, with Francie they will take anything 
 back," Delia Dosson declared. "They just love 
 her, all over." 
 
 "Well, they re like me then," said Mr. Flack, 
 with friendly hilarity. "I ll take her back, if 
 she ll come." 
 
 "Well, I don t think I am ready quite yet," 
 the girl replied. " But I hope very much we 
 shall cross with you again." 
 
 "Talk about crossing it s on these boulevards 
 we want a life-preserver ! " Delia remarked. They 
 had passed out of the hotel and the wide vista 
 of the Rue de la Paix stretched up and down. 
 There were many vehicles. 
 
 " Won t this thing do ? I ll tie it to either of 
 you," George Flack said, holding out his bundle. 
 " I suppose they won t kill you if they love you," 
 he went on, to the younger girl. 
 
 "Well, you ve got to know me first," she 
 answered, laughing and looking for a chance, 
 while they waited to pass over. 
 
 " I didn t know you when I was struck." He 
 applied his disengaged hand to her elbow and 
 propelled her across the street. She took no notice 
 of his observation, and Delia asked her, on the 
 other side, whether their father had given her 
 that money. She replied that he had given her 
 loads she felt as if he had made his will ; which 
 
 C 
 
18 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 led George Flack to say that he wished the old 
 gentleman was his father. 
 
 "Why, you don t mean to say you want to be 
 our brother ! " Francie exclaimed, as they went 
 down the Rue de la Paix. 
 
 " I should like to be Miss Delia s, if you can 
 make that out," said the young man. 
 
 " Well, then, suppose you prove it by calling 
 me a cab," Miss Delia returned. " I presume you 
 and Francie don t think this is the deck." 
 
 " Don t she feel rich ? " George Flack demanded 
 of Francie. " But we do require a cart for our 
 goods;" and he hailed a little yellow carriage, 
 which presently drew up beside the pavement. 
 The three got into it and, still emitting innocent 
 pleasantries, proceeded on their way, while at the 
 Hotel de 1 Univers et de Cheltenham Mr. Dosson 
 wandered down into the court again and took his 
 place in his customary chair. 
 
II. 
 
 THE court was roofed with glass ; the April air 
 was mild ; the cry of women selling violets came 
 in from the street and, mingling with the rich 
 hum of Paris, seemed to bring with it faintly the 
 odour of the flowers. There were other odours 
 in the place, warm, succulent and Parisian, which 
 ranged from fried fish to burnt sugar ; and there 
 were many things besides : little tables for the 
 post-prandial coffee; piles of luggage inscribed 
 (after the initials, or frequently the name, R. P. 
 Scudamore or D. Jackson Hatch), Philadelphia, 
 Pa., or St. Louis, Mo. ; rattles of unregarded bells, 
 flittings of tray-bearing waiters, conversations 
 with the second-floor windows of admonitory 
 landladies, arrivals of young women with cofnn- 
 like bandboxes covered with black oilcloth and 
 depending from a strap, sallyings forth of persons 
 staying and arrivals, just afterwards, of other 
 persons to see them ; together with vague prostra 
 tions on benches of tired heads of American 
 
 c 2 
 
20 THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 families. It was to this last element that Mr. 
 Dosson himself in some degree contributed, but 
 it must be added that he had not the extremely 
 bereft and exhausted appearance of certain of his 
 fellows. There was an air of meditative patience, 
 of habitual accommodation in him ; but you would 
 have guessed that he was enjoying a holiday 
 rather than panting for a truce, and he was not 
 so enfeebled but that he was able to get up from 
 time to time and stroll through the porte coch&re 
 to have a look at the street. 
 
 He gazed up and down for five minutes, with 
 his hands in his pockets, and then came back; 
 that appeared to content him ; he asked for very 
 little had no restlessness that these small 
 excursions would not assuage. He looked at the 
 heaped-up luggage, at the tinkling bells, at the 
 young woman from the lingtre, at the repudiated 
 visitors, at everything but the other American 
 parents. Something in his breast told him that 
 he knew all about these. It is not upon each other 
 that the animals in the same cage, in a zoological 
 collection, most turn their eyes. There was a silent 
 sociability in him and a superficial fineness of 
 grain that helped to account for his daughter 
 Francie s various delicacies. He was fair and spare 
 and had no figure; you would have seen in a 
 moment that the question of how he should hold 
 himself had never in his life occurred to him. He 
 never held himself at all; providence held him 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 21 
 
 rather (and very loosely), by an invisible string, 
 at the end of which he seemed gently to dangle 
 and waver. His face was so smooth that his thin 
 light whiskers, which grew only far back, scarcely 
 seemed native to his cheeks : they might have 
 been attached there for some harmless purpose 
 of comedy or disguise. He looked for the most 
 part as if he were thinking over, without exactly 
 understanding it, something rather droll which 
 had just occurred ; if his eyes wandered his atten 
 tion rested, and hurried, quite as little. His feet 
 were remarkably small, and his clothes, in which 
 light colours predominated, were visibly the work 
 of a French tailor : he was an American who still 
 held the tradition that it is in Paris a man dresses 
 himself best. His hat would have looked odd 
 in Bond Street or the Fifth Avenue, and his 
 necktie was loose and flowing. 
 
 Mr. Dosson, it may further be mentioned, was 
 a man of the simplest composition, a character 
 as cipherable as a sum of two figures. He had 
 a native financial faculty of the finest order, a gift 
 as direct as a beautiful tenor voice, which had 
 enabled him, without the aid of particular strength 
 of will or keenness of ambition, to build up a 
 large fortune while he was still of middle age. 
 He had a genius for happy speculation, the quick, 
 unerring instinct of a " good thing ; " and as he sat 
 there idle, amused, contented, on the edge of the 
 Parisian street, he might very well have passed 
 
22 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 for some rare performer who bad sung his song 
 or played his trick and had nothing to do till the 
 next call. And he had grown rich not because 
 he was ravenous or hard, but simply because he 
 had an ear, or a nose. He could make out the 
 tune in the discord of the market-place ; he could 
 smell success far up the wind. The second factor 
 in his little addition was that he was an unassum 
 ing father. He had no tastes, no acquirements 
 nor curiosities, and his daughters represented 
 society for him. He thought much more and much 
 oftener of these young ladies than of his bank- 
 shares and railway-stock ; they refreshed much 
 more his sense of ownership, of accumulation. 
 He never compared them with other girls; he 
 only compared his present self to what he would 
 have been without them. His view of them was 
 perfectly simple. Delia had a more unfathomable 
 profundity and Francie a wider acquaintance with 
 literature and art. Mr. Dbsson had not perhaps 
 a full perception of his younger daughter s beauty : 
 he would scarcely have pretended to judge of 
 that, more than he would of a valuable picture 
 or vase, but he believed she was cultivated up to 
 the eyes. He had a recollection of tremendous 
 school-bills and, in later days, during their travels, 
 of the way she was always leaving books behind 
 her. Moreover was not her French so good that 
 he could not understand it ? 
 
 The two girls, at any rate, were the wind in 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 23 
 
 his sail and the only directing, determining force 
 he knew ; they converted accident into purpose ; 
 without them, as he felt, he would have been the 
 tail without the kite. The wind rose and fell, 
 of course ; there were lulls and there were gales ; 
 there were intervals during which he simply floated 
 in quiet waters cast anchor and waited. This 
 appeared to be one of them now; but he could 
 be patient, knowing that he should soon again 
 inhale the brine and feel the dip of his prow. 
 When his daughters were out the determining 
 process gathered force, and their being out with a 
 brilliant young man only deepened the pleasant 
 calm. That belonged to their superior life, and 
 Mr. Dosson never doubted that George M. Flack 
 was brilliant. He represented the newspaper, 
 and the news-paper for this man of genial 
 assumptions represented Mind it was the great 
 shining presence of our time. To know that 
 Delia and Francie were out with an editor or a 
 correspondent was really to see them dancing 
 in the central glow. This is doubtless why Mr. 
 Dosson had slightly more than usual his air of 
 recovering slowly from a pleasant surprise. The 
 vision to which I allude hung before him, at 
 a convenient distance, and melted into other 
 bright confused aspects : reminiscences of Mr. 
 Flack in other relations on the ship, on the 
 deck, at the hotel at Liverpool, and in the cars. 
 Whitney Dosson was a loyal father, but he would 
 
24 THE EEVEEBEEATOE. 
 
 have thought himself simple had he not had 
 two or three strong convictions : one of which 
 was that the children should never go out with a 
 gentleman they had not seen before. The sense 
 of their having, and his having, seen Mr. Flack 
 before was comfortable to him now : it made it 
 mere placidity for him personally to forego the 
 young man s society in favour of Delia and Francie. 
 He had not hitherto been perfectly satisfied that 
 the streets and shops, the general immensity of 
 Paris, were just the right place for young ladies 
 alone. But the company of a pleasant gentleman 
 made them right a gentleman who was pleasant 
 through being up to everything, as one connected 
 with that paper (he remembered its name now, 
 it was celebrated) would have to be. To Mr. 
 Dosson, in the absence of such happy accidents, 
 his girls somehow seemed lonely ; which was not the 
 way he struck himself. They were his company 
 but he was scarcely theirs; it was as if he had 
 them more than they had him. 
 
 They were out a long time, but he felt no anxiety, 
 as he reflected that Mr. Flack s very profession 
 was a prevision of everything that could possibly 
 happen. The bright French afternoon waned 
 without bringing them back, but 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 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 25 
 
 remark disinterestedly that it was a pity to waste 
 such a lovely day indoors not 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 he 
 didn t understand nor care for : then he felt a little 
 ashamed and uncomfortable but never when he 
 lounged in that simplifying way in the court. It 
 wanted but a quarter of an hour to dinner (that 
 he could understand) when 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, 
 with a mixture of sociability and languor, on the 
 subject of what they had seen and done a 
 question into which he felt as yet a delicacy as to 
 inquiring. But they had evidently done a good 
 deal and had a good time : an impression suffi 
 cient to rescue Mr. Dosson personally from the 
 consciousness of failure. 
 
 " Won t you just step in and take dinner with 
 us ? " he asked of the young man, with a friendli 
 ness begotten of the circumstances. 
 
 " Well, that s a handsome offer," George Flack 
 replied, while Delia remarked that they had each 
 eaten about thirty cakes. 
 
 " Well, I wondered what you were doing so 
 
26 THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 long. But never mind your cakes. It s twenty 
 minutes past six, and the talk d hote is on time." 
 
 "You don t mean to say you dine at the table 
 d hote \ " Mr. Flack ejaculated. 
 
 " Why, don t you like that ? " Francie drawled 
 sweetly. 
 
 "Well, it isn t what you most build on when 
 you come to Paris. Too many flower-pots and 
 chickens legs." 
 
 " Well, would you like one of these restaurants ? " 
 asked Mr. Dosson. " I don t care, if you show us 
 a good one." 
 
 " Oh, I ll show you a good one don t you 
 worry." 
 
 "Well, you ve got to order the dinner then," 
 said Francie. 
 
 " Well, you ll see how I could do it ! " And 
 the young man looked at her very hard, with an 
 intention of softness. 
 
 "He has got an interest in some place," Delia 
 declared. "He has taken us to ever so many 
 stores, and he gets his commission." 
 
 "Well, I d 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. Flack s 
 guidance. 
 
 If he had easily convinced them on this occa 
 sion that that was a more original proceeding 
 than worrying those old bones, as he called it, 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 27 
 
 at the hotel, he convinced them of other things 
 besides in the course of the following month and 
 by the aid of repeated visits. What he mainly 
 made clear to them was that it was really most 
 kind of a young man who had so many great 
 public questions on his mind to find sympathy 
 for problems which could fill 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. He 
 made them feel indeed that they didn t know 
 anything about anything, even about such a 
 matter as ordering shoes an art in which they 
 vaguely supposed themselves rather strong. He 
 had in fact great knowledge, and it was wonder 
 fully various, and he knew as many people as 
 they knew few. He had appointments very often 
 with celebrities for 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 I Univers et de Chel 
 tenham, whose social life, of narrow range, consisted 
 mainly in reading the lists of Americans who 
 " registered " at the bankers and at Galignani s. 
 Delia Dosson, in particular, had a way 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 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 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 wanted (which, as we know, was 
 what he believed the public wanted), and 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 
 think that their little party was 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 
 meetings 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 elusive 
 party had gone to Biarritz. "We know plenty 
 of people if we could only come across them," 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 29 
 
 Delia had said more than once : 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 any 
 address, superscribed with a mocking dash of the 
 pencil, " 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 gener 
 ally 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 didn t want any 
 outsiders ; he thought their little party just right. 
 Mr. Dosson s 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 people s affairs that it should doubt 
 less be mentioned to his praise that he still 
 managed to have affairs or at least an affair 
 of his own. That affair was Francie Dosson, and 
 
30 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 he was pleased to perceive how littile she cared 
 what had become of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenheirn 
 and Master Samuel and Miss Cora. He counted 
 all the things she didn t care about her soft 
 inadvertent eyes helped him to do that ; and they 
 footed up so, as he would have said, that they gave 
 him a pleasant 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 sort of 
 amused resignation, while tender, shy, indefinite 
 little fancies hummed in her brain; so that 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 ex 
 cursions and from wanderings often rather aimless 
 and casual among the boulevards and avenues of 
 the town. He regarded them at such moments 
 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 could only watch for some time when she 
 was tired. He liked to make them all feel help 
 less 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 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 31 
 
 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 they were incapable of firing a shot for 
 themselves. They had a kind of social humility ; 
 it appeared never to have occurred to them that, 
 added to their amiability, their money gave them 
 a value. This used to strike George Flack on cer 
 tain 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, or in the 
 Tuileries or 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 usually sat 
 outside on the "terrace" the little expanse of 
 small tables at the door of the establishment, 
 where Mr. Flack, on the return, could descry 
 them from afar at their post in exactly the same 
 position to which he had committed them. They 
 complained of no satiety in watching the many- 
 coloured movement of the Parisian streets ; 
 
32 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 and if some of the features in the panorama 
 were base they were only so in a version which 
 the imagination of our friends was incapable of 
 supplying. George Flack considered that he was 
 rendering a positive service to Mr. Dosson : 
 wouldn t the old gentleman have sat all day in the 
 court anyway? and wasn t the boulevard better 
 than the court ? It was his theory, too, that 
 he flattered and caressed Miss Francie s 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 gentleman s 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 ? " as if he 
 took a real interest. George Flack narrated his 
 interviews, 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, that s 
 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 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 33 
 
 wasn t in the least what she wanted. She amplified 
 this statement very soon at least as regards her 
 interpretation of Mr. Flack s designs : a certain 
 mystery still hung about her own, which, as she 
 intimated, had much more to recommend them. 
 Delia s vision of the danger as well as the advantage 
 of being a pretty girl was closely connected (and 
 this was natural) with the idea of an " engage 
 ment " : this idea was in a manner complete in 
 itself her imagination failed in the oddest way 
 to carry it into the next stage. She wanted 
 her sister to be engaged but she wanted her not 
 at all to be married, and she had not clearly 
 made up her mind as to how Francie was to 
 enjoy both the promotion and the arrest. 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 con 
 viction on this subject could have expressed itself 
 intelligibly it would have given you a glimpse 
 of a droll state of mind a dim theory that a 
 bright girl ought to be able to try successive 
 aspirants. Delia s 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 spoken of as engaged ; 
 and it never occurred to her that a repetition of 
 lovers rubs off a young lady s delicacy. She felt 
 herself a born old maid and never dreamed of a 
 lover of her own he would have been dreadfully 
 
 D 
 
34 THE REVERBERATOR, 
 
 in her way ; but she dreamed of love as something 
 in its nature very delicate. All the same she dis 
 criminated ; it did lead to something after all, and 
 she desired that for Francie it should not lead to 
 a union with Mr. Flack. She looked at such a 
 union in the light of that other view which she 
 kept as yet to herself but which she was ready 
 to produce so soon as the right occasion should 
 come up ; and she told her sister that she would 
 never speak to her again if she should let 
 
 this young man suppose And here she 
 
 always paused, plunging again into impressive 
 reticence. 
 
 " Suppose what ? " Francie asked, as if she were 
 totally unacquainted (which indeed she really was) 
 with the suppositions of young men. 
 
 " "Well, you ll see, when he begins to say things 
 you won t like." This sounded ominous on Delia s 
 part, but she had in reality very little apprehen 
 sion ; otherwise she would have risen against the 
 custom adopted by Mr. Flack of perpetually com 
 ing round : she would have given her attention 
 (though it struggled in general unsuccessfully 
 with all this side of their life) to some prompt 
 means of getting away from Paris. She told her 
 father what in her view the correspondent of the 
 Reverberator was " after " ; but it must be added 
 that she did not make him feel very strongly on 
 the matter. This however was not of importance, 
 with her inner sense that Francie would never 
 
THE BEVEEBEBATOE. 35 
 
 really do anything that is would never really like 
 anything they didn t like. 
 
 Her sister s docility was a great comfort to 
 her, especially as it was addressed in the first 
 instance to herself. She liked and disliked cer 
 tain things much more than the younger girl did 
 either ; and Francie was glad to take advantage 
 of her reasons, having so few of her own. They 
 served Delia s reasons for Mr. Dosscn 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 a cumbersome and formidable possession, 
 which it relieved her that some kind person should 
 undertake the keeping of. Delia had somehow 
 got hold of hers first before even her father, and 
 ever so much before Mr. Flack ; and it lay with 
 Delia to make any change. She could not have 
 accepted any gentleman as a husband without 
 reference to Delia, any more than she could have 
 done up her hair without a glass. The only action 
 taken by Mr. Dosson in consequence of his elder 
 daughter s revelations was to embrace the idea as 
 a subject of 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 
 upon Francie s conquest ? Mr. Flack s attributive 
 intentions became a theme of indulgent parental 
 
 D 2 
 
36 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 chaff, and the girl was neither dazzled nor annoyed 
 by such familiar references to them. " Well, he 
 has told us about half we know," she used often 
 to reply. 
 
 Among the things he told them was that this was 
 the very best time in the young lady s 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 
 work. He conducted them to this gentleman s 
 studio, where they saw several pictures by which 
 they were considerably mystified. Francie pro 
 tested that she didn t want to be done that way, 
 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. Waterlow s productions struck them 
 for the most part in the same manner as those 
 garments which ladies classify as frights, and 
 they went away with a very low opinion of the 
 young American master. George Flack told them, 
 however, that they couldn t get out of it, inasmuch 
 as he had already written home to the Reverberator 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 37 
 
 that Francie was to sit. They accepted this 
 somehow as a kind of supernatural sign that she 
 would have to ; for they believed everything that 
 they 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 didn t 
 want to go back, they wanted to go forward, and 
 he would give them an article that would fetch 
 five times the money in a couple of years. They 
 were not in search of a bargain, but they allowed 
 themselves to be inoculated with any reason which 
 they thought would be characteristic of earnest 
 people ; and he even convinced them, after a 
 little, that when once they had got used to Impres 
 sionism 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. 
 
III. 
 
 THE young ladies consented to return to the 
 Avenue de Villiers, and this time they found the 
 celebrity of the future. He was smoking cigarettes 
 with a friend, while coffee was served to the two 
 gentlemen (it was just after luncheon), on a vast 
 divan, covered with scrappy oriental rugs and 
 cushions; it looked, Francie thought, as if the 
 artist had set up a carpet-shop in a corner. She 
 thought him very pleasant; and it may be men 
 tioned without circumlocution that the young lady 
 ushered in by the vulgar American reporter, whom 
 he didn t like and who had already come too often 
 to his studio to pick up "glimpses" (the painter 
 wondered how in the world he had picked her up), 
 this charming candidate for portraiture struck 
 Charles Waterlow on the spot as an adorable model. 
 She made, it may further be declared, quite the same 
 impression on the gentleman who was with him 
 and who never took his eyes off her while her own 
 rested, afresh, on several finished and unfinished 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 39 
 
 canvases. This gentleman asked of his friend, at 
 the end of five minutes, the favour of an intro 
 duction to her ; in consequence of which Francie 
 learned that his name (she thought it singular) 
 was Gaston Probert. Mr. Probert was a kind- 
 eyed, smiling youth, who fingered the points of his 
 moustache ; he was represented by Mr. Waterlow 
 as an American, but he pronounced the American 
 language (so at least it seemed to Francie) as if 
 it had been French. 
 
 After Francie had quitted the studio with Delia 
 and Mr. Flack (her father, on this occasion, was 
 not of the party), the two young men, falling 
 back upon their divan, broke into expressions 
 of aasthetic rapture, declared that the girl had 
 qualities oh, but qualities, and a charm of line ! 
 They remained there for an hour, contemplat 
 ing these rare properties in the smoke of their 
 cigarettes. You would have gathered from their 
 conversation (though, as regards much of it, 
 only perhaps with the aid of a grammar and 
 dictionary) that the young lady possessed plastic 
 treasures of the highest order, of which she was 
 evidently quite unconscious. Before this however 
 Mr. Waterlow had come to an understanding 
 with his visitors it had been settled that Miss 
 Francina should sit for him at his first hour of 
 leisure. Unfortunately that hour presented itself 
 as still remote and he was unable to make a 
 definite appointment. He had sitters on his 
 
40 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 hands lie had at least three portraits to finish 
 before going to Spain. And he adverted with 
 bitterness to the journey to Spain a little ex 
 cursion laid out precisely with his friend Probert 
 for the last weeks of the spring, the first of the 
 southern summer, the time of the long days and 
 the real light. Gaston Probert re-echoed his regrets, 
 for though he had no business with Miss Francina 
 (he liked her name), he also wanted to see her 
 again. They half agreed to give up Spain (they 
 had, after all, been there before), so that Waterlow 
 might take the girl in hand without delay, the 
 moment he had knocked off his present work. 
 This amendment did not hold however, for other 
 considerations came up and the artist resigned 
 himself to the arrangement on which the Miss 
 Dossons had quitted him : he thought it so charac 
 teristic of their nationality that they should settle 
 a matter of that sort for themselves. This was 
 simply that they should come back in the autumn, 
 when he should be comparatively free : then there 
 would be a margin and they might all take their 
 time. At present, before long (by the time he 
 should be ready), the question of Miss Francina s 
 leaving Paris for the summer would be sure to 
 come up, and that would be a tiresome interrup 
 tion. She liked Paris, she had no plans for the 
 autumn and only wanted a reason to come back 
 about the twentieth of September. Mr. Waterlow 
 remarked humorously that she evidently bossed 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 41 
 
 the shop. Meanwhile, before starting for Spain, 
 he would see her as often as possible his eye 
 would take possession of her. 
 
 His companion envied him his eye ; he intimated 
 that he was jealous of his eye. It was perhaps 
 as a step towards establishing his right to be 
 jealous that Mr. Probert left a card upon the 
 Miss Dossons at the Hotel de I Univers et de 
 Cheltenham, having first ascertained that such 
 a proceeding would not, by the young American 
 sisters, be regarded as an unwarrantable liberty. 
 Gaston Probert was an American who had never 
 been in America, and he was obliged to take 
 counsel on such an emergency as that. He knew 
 that in Paris young men did not call at hotels 
 on honourable damsels ; but he also knew that 
 honourable damsels did not visit young men in 
 studios ; and he had no guide, no light that he 
 could trust, save the wisdom of his friend Waterlow, 
 which, however, was for the most part communi 
 cated to him in a derisive and misleading form. 
 Waterlow, who was after all himself an ornament 
 of the French and the very French school, jeered 
 at his want of national instinct, at the way he 
 never knew by which end to take hold of a com 
 patriot. Poor Probert was obliged to confess that he 
 had had terribly little practice, and in the great 
 medley of aliens and brothers (and even more of 
 sisters), he couldn t tell which was which. He 
 would have had a country and countrymen, to say 
 
42 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 nothing of countrywomen, if he could; but that 
 matter had not been settled for him and there is 
 a difficulty in settling it for one s self. Born in 
 Paris, he had been brought up altogether on 
 French lines, in a family which French society 
 had irrecoverably absorbed. His father, a Carolinian 
 and a Catholic, was a Gallomaniac of the old 
 American type. His three sisters had married 
 Frenchmen, and one of them lived in Brittany 
 and the others much of the time in Touraine. 
 His only brother had fallen, during the terrible 
 year, in defence of their adoptive country. Yet 
 Gaston, though he had had an old Legitimist 
 marquis for his godfather, was not legally one of 
 its children: his mother had, on her deathbed, 
 extorted from him the promise that he would not 
 take service in its armies; she considered, after 
 the death of her elder son (Gaston, in 1870, 
 was a boy of ten), that the family had been 
 patriotic enough for courtesy. 
 
 The youDg man therefore, between two stools, 
 had no clear sitting-place : he wanted to be as 
 American as he could and yet not less French than 
 he was ; he was afraid to give up the little that 
 he was and find that what he might be was less 
 he shrank from a flying leap which might drop 
 him in the middle of the sea. At the same time 
 he was aware that the only way to know how it 
 feels to be an American is to try it, and he had 
 many a purpose of making the westward journey. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 43 
 
 His family, however, had been so completely 
 Gallicised that the affairs of each member of it 
 were the affairs of all the rest, and his father, 
 his sisters and his brothers-in-law had not yet 
 sufficiently made this scheme their own for him 
 to feel that it was really his. It was a family 
 in which there was no individual but only a 
 collective property. Meanwhile he tried, as I say, 
 by safer enterprises, and especially by going a 
 good deal to see Charles Waterlow in the Avenue 
 de Villiers, whom he believed to be his dearest 
 friend, formed for his affection by Monsieur 
 Carolus. He had an idea that in this manner he 
 kept himself in touch with his countrymen ; and 
 he thought he tried especially when he left that 
 card on the Misses Dosson. He was in search of 
 freshness, but he need not have gone far : he 
 need only have turned his lantern upon his own 
 young breast to find a considerable store of it. 
 Like many unoccupied young men at the present 
 hour he gave much attention to art, lived as 
 much as possible in that alternative world, where 
 leisure and vagueness are so mercifully relieved of 
 their crudity. To make up for his want of talent 
 he espoused the talent of others (that is, of several), 
 and was as sensitive and conscientious about 
 them as he might have been about himself. He 
 defended certain of Waterlow s purples and greens 
 as he would have defended his own honour; and 
 in regard to two or three other painters had 
 
44 THE EEVERBERATOR. 
 
 convictions which belonged almost to the undiscuss- 
 able part of life. He had not in general a high 
 sense of success, but what kept it down particu 
 larly was his indocile hand, the fact that, such 
 as they were, Waterlow s purples and greens, for 
 instance, were far beyond him. If he had not failed 
 there other failures would not have mattered, not 
 even that of not having a country; and it was 
 on the occasion of his friend s agreement to paint 
 that strange, lovely girl, whom he liked so much 
 and whose companions he failed to like, that he 
 felt supremely without a vocation. Freshness 
 was there at least, if he had only had the method. 
 He prayed earnestly, in relation to methods, for 
 a providential reinforcement of Waterlow s sense 
 of this quality. If Waterlow had a fault it was 
 that he was sometimes a little stale. 
 
 He avenged himself for the artist s bewildering 
 treatment of his first attempt to approach Miss 
 Francie by indulging, at the end of another week, 
 in a second. He went about six o clock, when he 
 supposed she would have returned from her day s 
 wanderings, and his prudence was rewarded by 
 the sight of the young lady sitting in the court of 
 the hotel with her father and sister. Mr. Dosson 
 was new to Gaston Probert, but the visitor s in 
 telligence embraced him. The little party was as 
 usual expecting Mr. Flack at any moment, and 
 they had collected down stairs, so that he might 
 pick them up easily. They had, on the first floor, 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 45 
 
 an expensive parlour, decorated in white and 
 gold, with sofas of crimson damask ; but there 
 was something lonely in that grandeur and the 
 place had become mainly a receptacle for their 
 tall trunks, with a half-emptied paper of chocolates 
 or marrons glaces on every table. After young 
 Probert s first call his name was often on the lips 
 of the simple trio, and Mr. Dosson grew still more 
 jocose, making nothing of a secret of his percep 
 tion that Francie hit the bull s-eye " every time." 
 Mr. Waterlow had returned their visit, but that 
 was rather a matter of course, because it was 
 they who had gone after him. They had not gone 
 after the other one; it was he who had come 
 after them. When he entered the hotel, as they 
 sat there, this pursuit and its probable motive 
 became startlingly vivid. 
 
 Delia had taken the matter much more gravely 
 than her father; she said there was a great deal 
 she wanted to find out. She mused upon these 
 mysteries visibly, but without advancing much, 
 and she appealed for assistance to George Flack, 
 with a candour which he appreciated and returned. 
 If he knew anything he ought to know who Mr. 
 Probert was ; and she spoke as if it would be in 
 the natural course that he should elicit the reve 
 lation by an interview. Mr. Flack promised to 
 " nose round " ; he said the best plan would be 
 that the results should "come back" to her in 
 the Reverberator ; he appeared to think that the 
 
46 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 people could be persuaded that they wanted about 
 a column on Mr. Probert. His researches, how 
 ever, were fruitless, for in spite of the one fact 
 the girl was able to give him as a starting- 
 point, the fact that their new acquaintance had 
 spent his whole life in Paris, the young journalist 
 couldn t scare up a single person who had even 
 heard of him. He had questioned up and down 
 and all over the place, from the Rue Scribe to t*he 
 far end of Chaillot, and he knew people who knew 
 others who knew every member of the American 
 colony ; that select body which haunted poor 
 Delia s imagination, glittered and re-echoed there 
 in a hundred tormenting roundabout glimpses. 
 That was where she wanted to get Francie, as 
 she said to herself; she wanted to get her right in 
 there. She believed the members of this society 
 to constitute a little kingdom of the blest; and 
 she used to drive through the Avenue Gabriel, 
 the Rue de Marignan and the wide vistas which 
 radiate from the Arch of Triumph and are always 
 changing their names, on purpose to send up 
 wistful glances to the windows (she had learned 
 that all this was the happy quarter) of the envi 
 able but unapproachable colonists. She saw these 
 privileged mortals, as she supposed, in almost every 
 victoria that made a languid lady with a pretty 
 head flash past her, and she had no idea how 
 little honour this theory sometimes did her expa 
 triated countrywomen. Her plan was already made 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 47 
 
 to be on the field again the next winter and take 
 it up seriously, this question of getting Francie 
 in. 
 
 When Mr. Flack said to her that young Probert s 
 set couldn t be either the rose or anything near 
 it, since the oldest inhabitant had never heard 
 of them, Delia had a flash of inspiration, an in 
 tellectual flight that she herself did not measure at 
 the time. She asked if that did not perhaps prove 
 on the contrary quite the opposite that they 
 were just the cream and beyond all others. Was 
 there not a kind of inner circle, and were they not 
 somewhere about the centre of that ? George 
 Flack almost quivered at this pregnant sugges 
 tion from so unusual a quarter, for he guessed on 
 the spot that Delia Dosson had divined. "Why, 
 do you mean one of those families that have 
 worked down so far you can t find where they 
 went in ? " that was the phrase in which he recog 
 nised the truth of the girl s idea. Delia s fixed 
 eyes assented, and after a moment of cogitation 
 George Flack broke out " That s the kind of 
 family we want a sketch of ! " 
 
 " Well, perhaps they don t want to be sketched. 
 You had better find out," Delia had rejoined. 
 
 The chance to find out might have seemed to 
 present itself when Mr. Probert walked in that 
 confiding way into the hotel ; for his arrival was 
 followed, a quarter of an hour later, by that of 
 the representative of the Reverberator. Gaston 
 
48 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 liked the way they treated him; though demon 
 strative it was not artificial. Mr. Dosson said they 
 had been hoping he would come round again and 
 Delia remarked that she supposed he had had 
 quite a journey Paris was so big ; and she urged 
 his acceptance of a glass of wine or a cup of tea. 
 She added that that wasn t the place where they 
 usually received (she liked to hear herself talk of 
 " receiving "), and led the party up to her white 
 and gold saloon, where they should be so much 
 more private : she liked also to hear herself talk 
 of privacy. They sat on the red silk chairs and 
 she hoped Mr. Probert would at least taste a 
 sugared chestnut or a chocolate ; and when he 
 declined, pleading the imminence of the dinner- 
 hour, she murmured, "Well, I suppose you re 
 so used to them living so long over here." 
 The allusion to the dinner-hour led Mr. Dosson 
 to express the wish that he would go round and 
 dine with them without ceremony ; they were 
 expecting a friend he generally settled it for 
 them who was coming to take them round. 
 
 " And then we are going to the circus," Francie 
 said, speaking for the first time. 
 
 If she had not spoken before she had done 
 something still more to the purpose ; she had 
 removed any shade of doubt that might have 
 lingered in the young man s spirit as to her charm 
 of line. He was aware that his Parisian educa 
 tion, acting upon a natural aptitude, had opened 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 49 
 
 him much rendered him perhaps even mor 
 bidly sensitive to impressions of this order; 
 the society of artists, the talk of studios, the 
 attentive study of beautiful works, the sight of 
 a thousand forms of curious research and experi 
 ment, had produced in his mind a new sense, 
 the exercise of which was a conscious enjoyment, 
 and the supreme gratification of which, on several 
 occasions, had given him as many ineffaceable 
 memories. He had once said to his friend 
 Wateiiow : " I don t know whether it s a confession 
 of a very poor life, but the most important things 
 that have happened to me in this world have 
 been simply half-a-dozen impressions impres 
 sions of the eye." " Ah, malheureux, you re lost ! " 
 the painter had exclaimed, in answer to this, 
 and without even taking the trouble to explain 
 his ominous speech. Gaston Probert however 
 had not been frightened by it, and he continued 
 to be thankful for the sensitive plate that nature 
 (with culture added), enabled him to carry in his 
 brain. The impression of the eye was doubtless 
 not everything, but it was so much gained, so 
 much saved, in a world in which other treasures 
 were apt to slip through one s fingers; and 
 above all it had the merit that so many things 
 gave it and that nothing could take it away. He 
 had perceived in a moment that Francie Dosson 
 gave it; and now, seeing her a second time, he 
 felt that she conferred it in a degree which made 
 
 E 
 
50 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 acquaintance with her one of those " important " 
 facts of which he had spoken to Charles Waterlow. 
 It was in the case of such an accident as this 
 that he felt the value of his Parisian education 
 his modern sense. 
 
 It was therefore not directly the prospect of 
 the circus that induced him to accept Mr. Dosson s 
 invitation ; nor was it even the charm exerted by 
 the girl s appearing, in the few words she uttered, 
 to appeal to him for herself. It was his feeling 
 that on the edge of the glittering ring her type 
 would form his entertainment and that if he knew 
 it was rare she herself did not. He liked to he 
 conscious, but he liked others not to be. It 
 seemed to him at this moment, after he had told 
 Mr. Dosson he should be delighted to spend the 
 evening with them, that he was indeed trying 
 hard to discover how it would feel to be an 
 American; he had jumped on the ship, he was 
 pitching away to the west. He had led his sister, 
 Mme. de Bre court, to expect that he would dine 
 with her (she was having a little party), and if 
 she could see the people to whom, without a 
 scruple, with a quick sense of refreshment and 
 freedom, he now sacrificed her ! He knew who 
 was coming to his sister s, in the Place Beauvau : 
 Mme. d Outreville and M. de Grosprc, old M. 
 Courageau, Mme. de Brives, Lord and Lady 
 Trantum, Mile, de Saintonge ; but he was fascinated 
 by the idea of the contrast between what he pre- 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 51 
 
 ferred and what he gave up. His life had long 
 been wanting painfully wanting in the element 
 of contrast, and here was a chance to bring it in. 
 He seemed to see it come in powerfully with Mr. 
 Flack, after Miss Dosson had proposed that they 
 should walk off without their initiator. Her father 
 did not favour this suggestion ; he said, " We 
 want a double good dinner to-day and Mr. Flack has 
 got to order it." Upon this Delia had asked the 
 visitor if he couldn t order a Frenchman like 
 him ; and Francie had interrupted, before he could 
 answer the question <( Well, are you a French 
 man ? that s just the point, isn t it?" Gaston 
 Probert replied that he had no wish but to be of 
 her nationality, and the elder sister asked him if 
 he knew many Americans in Paris. He was obliged 
 to confess that he did not, but he hastened to add 
 that he was eager to go on, now that he had made 
 such a charming beginning. 
 
 " Oh, we ain t anything if you mean that," 
 said the young lady. "If you go on you ll go on 
 beyond us." 
 
 "We ain t anything here, my dear, but we 
 are a good deal at home," Mr. Dosson remarked, 
 smiling. 
 
 " I think we are very nice anywhere ! " Francie 
 exclaimed; upon which Gaston Probert declared 
 that they were as delightful as possible. It was 
 in these amenities that George Flack found them 
 engaged ; but there was none the less a certain 
 
52 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 eagerness in his greeting of the other guest, as if 
 he had it in mind to ask him how soon he 
 could give him half an hour. I hasten to add 
 that, with the turn the occasion presently took, 
 the correspondent of the Reverberator renounced 
 the effort to put Mr. Probert down. They all went 
 out together, and the professional impulse, usually 
 so irresistible in George Flack s mind, suffered a 
 modification. He wanted to put his fellow- visitor 
 down, but in a more human, a more passionate 
 sense. Probert talked very little to Francie, but 
 though Mr. Flack did not know that on a first 
 occasion he would have thought that violent, even 
 rather gross, he knew it was for Francie, and 
 Francie alone, that the fifth member of the party 
 was there. He said to himself suddenly and in 
 perfect sincerity that it was a mean class any 
 way, the people for whom their own country was 
 not good enough. He did not go so far however, 
 when they were seated at the admirable establish 
 ment of M. Durand, in the Place de la Madeleine, 
 as to order a bad dinner to spite his competitor 
 nor did he, to spoil this gentleman s amusement, 
 take uncomfortable seats at the pretty circus in 
 the Champs Elysees to which, at half-past eight 
 o clock, the company was conveyed (it was a drive 
 of but five minutes) in a couple of cabs. The 
 occasion therefore was superficially smooth, and he 
 could see that the sense of being disagreeable to an 
 American newspaper-man was not needed to make 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 53 
 
 his nondescript rival enjoy it. He hated his accent, 
 he hated his laugh, and he hated above all the 
 lamblike way their companions accepted him. Mr. 
 Flack was quite acute enough to make an import 
 ant observation : he cherished it and promised 
 himself to bring it to the notice of his gullible 
 friends. Gaston Probert professed a great desire 
 to be of service to the young ladies to do some 
 thing which would help them to be happy in Paris ; 
 but he gave no hint of an intention to do that 
 which would contribute most to such a result 
 bring them in contact with the other members, and 
 above all with the female members, of his family. 
 George Flack knew nothing about the matter, but 
 he required for purposes of argument that Mr. 
 Probert s family should have female members, and 
 it was lucky for him that his assumption was just. 
 He thought he foresaw the effect with which he 
 should impress it upon Francie and Delia (but 
 above all upon Delia, who would then herself im 
 press it upon Francie), that it would be time for 
 their French friend to talk when he had brought 
 his mother round. But he never would they 
 might bet their pile on that ! He never did, in the 
 sequel, in fact having, poor young man, no mother 
 to bring. Moreover he was mum (as Delia phrased 
 it to herself) about Mme. de Brecourt and Mme. 
 de Cliche : such, Miss Dosson learned from Charles 
 Waterlow, were the names of his two sisters who 
 had houses in Paris gathering at the same time 
 
54 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 the information that one of these ladies was a 
 marquise and the other a comtesse. She was less 
 exasperated by their non-appearance than Mr. 
 Flack had hoped, and it did not prevent an ex 
 cursion to dine at Saint-Germain, a week after the 
 evening spent at the circus, which included both of 
 the new admirers. It also as a matter of 
 course included Mr. Flack, for though the party 
 had been proposed in the first instance by Charles 
 Waterlow, who wished to multiply opportunities 
 for studying his future sitter, Mr. Dosson had 
 characteristically constituted himself host and ad 
 ministrator, with the young journalist as his deputy. 
 He liked to invite people and to pay for them, and 
 he disliked to be invited and paid for. He was 
 never inwardly content, on any occasion, unless a 
 great deal of money was spent, and he could be sure 
 enough of the magnitude of the sum only when he 
 himself spent it. He was too simple for conceit or 
 for pride of purse, but he always felt that any ar 
 rangements were a little shabby as to which the 
 expenses had not been referred to him. He never 
 told any one how he met them. Moreover Delia 
 had told him that if they should go to Saint- 
 Germain as guests of the artist and his friend Mr. 
 Flack would not be of the company : she was sure 
 those gentlemen would not invite him. In fact 
 she was too acute, for though he liked him little, 
 Charles Waterlow would on this occasion have 
 made a point of expressing by a hospitable attitude 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 55 
 
 his sense of obligation to a man who had brought 
 him such a subject. Delia s hint however was all- 
 sufficient for her father ; he would have thought it 
 a gross breach of friendly loyalty to take part in a 
 festival not graced by Mr. Flack s presence. His 
 idea of loyalty was that he should scarcely smoke a 
 cigar unless his friend was there to take another, 
 and he felt rather mean if he went round alone to get 
 shaved. As regards Saint-Germain, he took over 
 the project and George Flack telegraphed for a 
 table on the terrace at the Pavilion Henri Quatre. 
 Mr. Dosson had by this time learned to trust the 
 European manager of the Reverberator to spend 
 his moDey almost as he himself would. 
 
IV. 
 
 DELIA had broken out the evening they took 
 Mr. Probert to the circus ; she had apostrophised 
 Francie as they each sat in a red-damask chair 
 after ascending to their apartments. They had 
 bade their companions farewell at the door of the 
 hotel and the two gentlemen had walked off in 
 different directions. But up stairs they had 
 instinctively not separated ; they dropped into the 
 first place and sat looking at each other and at the 
 highly-decorated lamps that burned, night after 
 night, in their empty saloon. " Well, I want to 
 know when you re going to stop/ Delia said to her 
 sister, speaking as if this remark were a continua 
 tion, which it was not, of something they had 
 lately been saying. 
 
 " Stop what ? " asked Francie, reaching forward 
 for a marron. 
 
 "Stop carrying on the way you do with 
 Mr. Flack." 
 
 Francie stared, while she consumed her marron; 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 57 
 
 then she replied, in her little flat, patient voice, 
 " Why, Delia Dosson, how can you be so 
 foolish ? " 
 
 " Father, I wish you d speak to her. Francie, I 
 ain t foolish." 
 
 " What do you want me to say to her ? " 
 Mr. Dosson inquired. " I guess I ve said about 
 all I know." 
 
 " Well, that s in fun ; I want you to speak to 
 her in earnest." 
 
 " I guess there s no one in earnest but you," 
 Francie remarked. " These are not so good as 
 the last." 
 
 " No, and there won t be if you don t look out. 
 There s something you can do if you ll just 
 keep quiet. If you can t tell difference of style, 
 well, I can." 
 
 " What s the difference of style ? " asked Mr. 
 Dosson. But before this question could be 
 answered Francie protested against the charge of 
 carrying on. Quiet ? Wasn t she as quiet as a 
 stopped clock ? Delia replied that a girl was not 
 quiet so long as she didn t keep others so; and 
 she wanted to know what her sister proposed to 
 do about Mr. Flack. " Why don t you take him and 
 let Francie take the other ? " Mr. Dosson continued. 
 
 " That s just what I m after to make her take 
 the other," said his elder daughter. 
 
 " Take him how do you mean ? " Francie 
 inquired. 
 
58 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Oh, you know how." 
 
 " Yes, I guess you know how ! " Mr. Dosson 
 laughed, with an absence of prejudice which 
 might have been thought deplorable in a 
 parent. 
 
 " Do you want to stay in Europe or not ? that s 
 what I want to know," Delia declared to her sister. 
 " If you want to go bang home you re taking the 
 right way to do it." 
 
 " What has that got to do with it ? " asked 
 Mr. Dosson. 
 
 "Should you like so much to reside at that 
 place where is it ? where his paper is published ? 
 That s where you ll have to pull up, sooner or 
 later," Delia pursued. 
 
 " Do you want to stay in Europe, father ? " 
 Francie said, with her small sweet weariness. 
 
 " It depends on what you mean by staying. I 
 want to go home some time." 
 
 " Well, then, you ve got to go without Mr. 
 Probert," Delia remarked with decision. " If you 
 think he wants to live over there " 
 
 "Why, Delia, he wants dreadfully to go he 
 told me so himself," Francie argued, with passion 
 less pauses. 
 
 "Yes, and when he gets there he ll want to 
 come back. I thought you were so much interested 
 in Paris." 
 
 " My poor child, I am interested ! " smiled 
 Francie. " Ain t I interested, father ? " 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 59 
 
 "Well, I don t know how you could act 
 differently, to show it." 
 
 " Well, I do then," said Delia. " And if you 
 don t make Mr. Flack understand I will." 
 
 " Oh, I guess he understands he s so bright," 
 Francie returned. 
 
 " Yes, I guess he does he is bright," said Mr. 
 Dosson. " Good-night, chickens," he added ; and 
 wandered off to a couch of untroubled repose. 
 
 His daughters sat up half an hour later, but 
 not by the wish of the younger girl. She was 
 always passive however, always docile when Delia 
 was, as she said, on the war-path, and though she 
 had none of her sister s insistence she was very 
 courageous in suffering. She thought Delia 
 whipped her up too much, but there was that in 
 her which would have prevented her from ever 
 running away. She could smile and smile for an 
 hour without irritation, making even pacific 
 answers, though all the while her companion s 
 grossness hurt something delicate that was in her. 
 She knew that Delia loved her not loving herself 
 meanwhile a bit as no one else in the world 
 probably ever would ; and there was something 
 droll in such plans for her plans of ambition 
 which could only involve a loss. The real answer 
 to anything, to everything Delia might say in 
 her moods of prefigurement was " Oh, if you 
 want to make out that people are thinking of me 
 or that they ever will, you ought to remember 
 
60 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 that no one can possibly think of me half as much 
 as you do. Therefore if there is to be any comfort 
 for either of us we had both much better just go 
 on as we are." She did not however on this 
 occasion, meet her sister with this syllogism, 
 because there happened to be a certain fascination 
 in the way Delia set forth the great truth that the 
 star of matrimony, for the American girl, was now 
 shining in the east in England and France and 
 Italy. They had only to look round anywhere to 
 see it : what did they hear of every day in the 
 week but of the engagement of one of their own 
 compeers to some count or some lord ? Delia 
 insisted on the fact that it was in that vast, vague 
 section of the globe to which she never alluded 
 save as " over here " that the American girl was 
 now called upon to play, under providence, her 
 part. When Francie remarked that Mr. Probert 
 was not a count nor a lord her sister rejoined that 
 she didn t care whether he was or not. To this 
 Francie replied that she herself didn t care but 
 that Delia ought to, to be consistent. 
 
 " Well, he s a prince compared with Mr. Flack," 
 Delia declared. 
 
 " He hasn t the same ability ; not half." 
 
 " He has the ability to have three sisters 
 who are just the sort of people I want you to 
 know." 
 
 " What good will they do me ? " Francie asked. 
 " They ll hate me. Before they could turn round 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 61 
 
 I should do something in perfect innocence 
 that they would think monstrous." 
 
 "Well, what would that matter if he liked 
 you ? " 
 
 " Oh, but he wouldn t, then ! He would hate 
 me too." 
 
 " Then all you ve got to do is not to do it," 
 Delia said. 
 
 " Oh, but I should every time," her sister 
 went on. 
 
 Delia looked at her a moment. " What are 
 you talking about ? " 
 
 " Yes, what am I ? It s disgusting ! " And 
 Francie sprang up. 
 
 " I m sorry you have such thoughts," said Delia, 
 sententiously. 
 
 "It s disgusting to talk about a gentleman 
 and his sisters aiid his society and everything 
 else before he has scarcely looked at you." 
 
 "It s disgusting if he isn t just dying; but it 
 isn t if he is." 
 
 " Well, I ll make him skip ! " Francie went on. 
 
 " Oh, you re worse than father ! " her sister 
 cried, giving her a push as they went to bed. 
 
 They reached Saint-Germain with their com 
 panions nearly an hour before the time that had been 
 fixed for dinner ; the purpose of this being to enable 
 them to enjoy with what remained of daylight 
 a stroll on the celebrated terrace and a study of 
 the magnificent view. The evening was splendid 
 
62 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 and the atmosphere favourable to this entertain 
 ment; the grass was vivid on the broad walk 
 beside the parapet, the park and forest were fresh 
 and leafy and the prettiest golden light hung over 
 the curving Seine and the far-spreading city. The 
 hill which forms the terrace stretched down among 
 the vineyards, with the poles delicate yet in their 
 bareness, to the river, and the prospect was 
 spotted here and there with the red legs of the 
 little sauntering soldiers of the garrison. How it 
 came, after Delia s warning in regard to her 
 carrying on (especially as she had not failed to feel 
 the force of her sister s wisdom), Francie could not 
 have told herself: certain it is that before ten 
 minutes had elapsed she perceived, first, that the 
 evening would not pass without Mr. Flack s taking 
 in some way, and for a certain time, peculiar 
 possession of her ; and then that he was already 
 doing so, that he had drawn her away from the 
 others, who were stopping behind them to exclaim 
 upon the view, that he made her walk faster, and 
 that he ended by interposing such a distance that 
 she was practically alone with him. This was 
 what he wanted, but it was not all ; she felt that 
 he wanted a great many other things. The large 
 perspective of the terrace stretched away before 
 them (Mr. Probert had said it was in the grand 
 style), and he was determined to make her walk 
 to the end. She felt sorry for his determinations ; 
 they were an idle exercise of a force intrinsically 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 63 
 
 fine, and she wanted to protest, to let him know 
 that it was really a waste of his great cleverness 
 to count upon her. She was not to be counted on ; 
 she was a vague, soft, negative being who had 
 never decided anything and never would, who had 
 not even the merit of coquetry and who only 
 asked to be let alone. She made him stop at last, 
 telling him, while she leaned against the parapet, 
 that he walked too fast ; and she looked back at 
 their companions, whom she expected to see, under 
 pressure from Delia, following at the highest speed. 
 But they were not following; they still stood there, 
 only looking, attentively enough, at the absent 
 members of the party. Delia would wave her 
 parasol, beckon her back, seod Mr. Waterlow to 
 bring her ; Francie looked from one moment to 
 another for some such manifestation as that. But 
 no manifestation came ; none at least but the odd 
 spectacle, presently, of the group turning round 
 and, evidently under Delia s direction, retracing its 
 steps. Francie guessed in a moment whatwas meant 
 by that : it was the most definite signal her sister 
 could have given. It made her feel that Delia 
 counted on her, but to such a different end, just as 
 poor Mr. Flack did, just as Delia wished to per 
 suade her that Mr. Probert did. The girl gave a 
 sigh, looking up at her companion with troubled 
 eyes, at the idea, of being made the object of con 
 verging policies. Such a thankless, bored, evasive 
 little object as she felt herself ! What Delia had 
 
64 THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 said in turning away was " Yes, I am watching 
 you, and I depend upon you to finish him up. 
 Stay there with him go off with him (I ll give 
 you half an hour if necessary), only settle him 
 once for all. It is very kind of me to give you 
 this chance ; and in return for it I expect you 
 to be able to tell me this evening that he has got 
 his answer. Shut him up ! " 
 
 Francie did not in the least dislike Mr. Flack. 
 Interested as I am in presenting her favourably to 
 the reader I am yet obliged as a veracious his 
 torian to admit that he seemed to her decidedly a 
 brilliant being. In many a girl the sort of appre 
 ciation she had of him might easily have been 
 converted by peremptory treatment from outside 
 into something more exalted. I do not misrepre 
 sent the perversity of women in saying that our 
 young lady might at this moment have replied to 
 her sister with : " No, I was not in love with him, 
 but somehow since you are so very prohibitive I 
 foresee that I shall be if he asks me." It is doubt 
 less difficult to say more for Francie s simplicity of 
 character than that she felt no need of encourag 
 ing Mr. Flack in order to prove to herself that she 
 was not bullied. She didn t care whether she were 
 bullied or not ; and she was perfectly capable of 
 letting her sister believe that she had carried 
 mildness to the point of giving up a man she had 
 a secret sentiment for in order to oblige that 
 large-brained young lady. She was not clear 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 65 
 
 herself as to whether it might not be so ; her 
 pride, what she had of it, lay in an undistributed, 
 inert form quite at the bottom of her heart and 
 she had never yet invented any consoling theory 
 to cover her want of a high spirit. She felt, as 
 she looked up at Mr. Flack, that she didn t care 
 even if he should think that she sacrificed him to 
 a childish subservience. His bright eyes were hard, 
 as if he could almost guess how cynical she was, 
 and she turned her own again towards her retreat 
 ing companions. " They are going to dinner ; we 
 oughtn t to be dawdling here," she said. 
 
 " Well, if they are going to dinner they ll have 
 to eat the napkins. I ordered it and 1 know when 
 it will be ready," George Flack replied. " Besides 
 they are not going to dinner, they are going to 
 walk in the park. Don t you worry, we sha n t lose 
 them. I wish we could ! " the young man added, 
 smiling. 
 
 " You wish we could ? " 
 
 " I should like to feel that you were under my 
 particular protection." 
 
 " Well, I don t know what the dangers are," said 
 Francie, setting herself in motion again. She went 
 after the others, but at the end of a few steps he 
 stopped her again. 
 
 " You won t have confidence. I wish you would 
 believe what I tell you." 
 
 "You haven t told me anything." And she 
 turned her back to him, looking away at the 
 
GO THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 splendid view. " I admire the scenery," she added 
 in a moment. 
 
 " Oh, bother the scenery ! I want to tell you 
 something about myself, if I could flatter myself 
 that you would take any interest in it." He had 
 thrust his cane, waist-high, into the low wall of the 
 terrace, and he leaned against it, screwing the point 
 gently round with both hands. 
 
 " I ll take an interest if I can understand," said 
 Francie. 
 
 " You can understand easy enough, if you ll try. 
 I ve got some news from America to-day that has 
 pleased me very much. The Reverberator has 
 taken a jump." 
 
 This was not what Francie had expected, but it 
 was better. " Taken a jump ? " she repeated. 
 
 " It has gone straight up. It s in the second 
 hundred thousand." 
 
 " Hundred thousand dollars ? " said Francie. 
 
 " No, Miss Francie, copies. That s the circula 
 tion. But the dollars are footing up, too." 
 
 " And do they all come to you ? " 
 
 " Precious few of them ! I wish they did ; it s a 
 pleasant property." 
 
 " Then it isn t yours ? " she asked, turning round 
 to him. It was an impulse of sympathy that made 
 her look at him now, for she already knew how 
 much he had the success of his newspaper at heart. 
 He had once told her he loved the Reverberator 
 as he had loved his first jack-knife. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 67 
 
 " Mine ? You don t mean to say you suppose I 
 own it ! " George Flack exclaimed. The light 
 projected upon her innocence by these words 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 mous 
 tache ? Well, it seems as if it had, on your father. 
 If I owned the Reverberator I shouldn t be stump 
 ing round here ; I d give my attention to another 
 branch of the business. That is I would give my 
 attention to all, but I wouldn t go round with the 
 cart. But I m going to get hold of it, 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 thing already and 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, almost sud 
 denly, with his idea, and one of his eyes half closed 
 itself knowingly, in a way that was 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 accent of 
 passion. But it was not droll to Francie ; she only 
 thought it, or supposed it, a proof of the way Mr. 
 Flack saw everything in its largest relations. 
 " There are ten thousand thins to do that haven t 
 
68 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 been done, and I am going to do them. The 
 society-news of every quarter of the globe, fur 
 nished 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 at every break 
 fast-table in the United States that s what the 
 American people want and that s what the Ameri 
 can people are going to have. I wouldn t say it 
 to every one, but I don t mind telling you, that I 
 consider I have about as fine a sense as any one of 
 what s going to be required in future over there. 
 I m going for the secrets, the chronique intime, as 
 they say here ; what the people want is just what 
 isn t told, and I m going to tell it. .Oh, they re bound 
 to have the plums ! That s about played out, any 
 way, the idea of sticking up a sign of * private 
 and thinking you can keep the place to yourself. 
 You can t do it you can t keep out the light of 
 the Press. Now what I m going to do is to set up 
 the biggest lamp yet made and to make it shine 
 all over the place. We ll see who s private then ! 
 I ll make them crowd in themselves with the in 
 formation, and as I tell you, Miss Francie, it s a 
 job in which you can give me a lovely push." 
 
 " Well, I don t see how," said Francie, candidly. 
 "I haven t got any secrets." She spoke gaily, 
 because she was relieved ; she thought she had in 
 reality 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 conception 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. CO 
 
 of such matters was of the dimmest), he desired to 
 possess himself of it, and she sufficiently compre 
 hended that money was needed for that. She 
 further seemed to perceive that he presented him 
 self to her as moneyless and that this brought 
 them round by a vague but comfortable transition 
 to a pleasant consciousness that her father was not. 
 The remaining induction, silently made, was quick 
 and happy: she should acquit herself by asking 
 her father for the sum required and just passing- 
 it over to Mr. Flack. The greatness of his enter 
 prise and the magnitude of his conceptions ap 
 peared to overshadow her as they stood there. 
 This was a delightful simplification and it did not 
 for a moment strike her as positively unnatural 
 that her companion should have a delicacy about 
 appealing to Mr. Dosson directly for pecuniary 
 aid, though indeed she was capable of thinking 
 that odd if she had meditated upon 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 satisfy the 
 young man by this casual gesture. I must add 
 unfortunately that her alarm came back to her 
 from the way in which he replied : " Do you 
 mean to say you don t know, after all I ve 
 done ? " 
 
 " I am sure I don t know what you ve done." 
 "Haven t I tried all I know to make you 
 like me?" 
 
70 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Oh dear, I do like you !" cried Francie ; " but 
 how will that help you ? " 
 
 " It will help me if you will understand that I 
 love you." 
 
 " Well, I won t understand 1 " replied the girl, 
 walking 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 laughed. 
 
 " You draw me out and then you jibe at me," 
 Mr. Flack remarked. 
 
 " I didn t draw you out. Couldn t you see me 
 just straining to get away ? " 
 
 " Don t you sympathise with rny ideas ? " 
 
 " Of course I do, Mr. Flack ; I think they re 
 splendid," said Francie, who did not in the least 
 understand them. 
 
 " Well, then, why won t you work with me ? 
 Your affection, your brightness, your faith would 
 be everything to me." 
 
 " I m very sorry but I can t I can t," the girl 
 declared. 
 
 " You could if you would, quick enough." 
 
 " Well, then, I won t ! " And as soon as 
 these words were spoken, as if to mitigate some 
 thing of their asperity, Francie paused a 
 moment and said : " You must remember that 
 T never said I would nor anything like it. I 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 thought you just wanted me to speak to my 
 father." 
 
 " Of course I supposed you would do that." 
 
 " 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 ex 
 claimed, staring. "Do you suppose I would ever 
 touch a cent of your father s money ? " a speech 
 not so hypocritical as it may sound, inasmuch as 
 the young man, who had his own refinements, had 
 never been guilty, and proposed to himself never 
 to be, of the plainness of twitching the purse- 
 strings of his potential father-in-law with his own 
 hand. He had talked to Mr. Dosson by the hour 
 about the interviewing business, but he had never 
 dreamed that this amiable man would give him 
 money as an interesting straggler. The only 
 character in which he could expect it would be 
 that of Francie s husband, and then it would come 
 to Francie not to him. This reasoning did not 
 diminish his desire to assume such a character, and 
 his love of his profession and his appreciation of 
 the girl at his side ached together in his breast 
 with the same disappointment. She saw that her 
 words had touched him like a lash; they made 
 him blush red for a moment. This caused her 
 own colour to rise she could scarcely have said 
 w hy and she hurried along again. He kept close 
 
72 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 to her ; he argued with her ; he besought her to 
 think it over, assured her he was the best fellow 
 in the world. To this she replied that if he didn t 
 leave her alone she would cry and how would he 
 like that, to bring her back in such a state to the 
 others ? He said, " Damn the others ! " but that 
 did not 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 answered 
 that she had not 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 high 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," said 
 Francie. " And I don t know who you are 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 rejoined. 
 
 " I never presented him ! I d like to kick him." 
 
 " We should never have seen him if it hadn t 
 been for you." 
 
 " That s a fact, but it doesn t make me love 
 him any the better. He s the poorest kind 
 there is." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 73 
 
 "I don t care anything about his kind." 
 
 " That s a pity, if you re going to marry him. 
 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 
 Francie. 
 
 "All right," he replied; and they presently 
 rejoined their companions. 
 
V. 
 
 GASTON PROBERT made his plan, imparting it to 
 no one but his friend Waterlow, whose help in 
 deed he needed to carry it out. These confidences 
 cost him something, for the clever young painter 
 found his predicament amusing and made no 
 scruple of showing it. Probert was too much in 
 love, however, to be discountenanced by sarcasm. 
 This fact is the more noteworthy as he knew 
 that Waterlow scoffed at him for a purpose 
 had a theory that that kind of treatment would 
 be salutary. The French taste was in Waterlow s 
 " manner," but it had not yet coloured his view 
 of the relations of a young man of spirit with 
 parents and pastors. He was Gallic to the tip 
 of his finest brush, but the humour of his early 
 American education could not fail to obtrude itself 
 in 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 a crude way (and he knew it) of allud - 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 75 
 
 ing 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 usages of France. That did injustice (and 
 this the artist also knew), to the delicate nature 
 of the bond which united 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 was most afraid of was seeming to 
 them not to love them. None the less Charles 
 Waterlow, who thought he had charming parts, 
 held that the best way had not been taken to 
 make a man of him, and the spirit in which the 
 painter sometimes endeavoured to repair this 
 mishap was altogether benevolent, though the 
 form was frequently rough. Waterlow combined 
 in an odd manner many of the forms of the 
 Parisian studio with the moral and social ideas 
 of Brooklyn, Long Island, where his first seeds 
 had been implanted. 
 
 Gaston Probert desired nothing better than to 
 be a man ; what bothered him (and it is perhaps 
 a proof that his instinct was gravely at fault), 
 was a certain vagueness as to the constituents of 
 this personage. He should be made more nearly, 
 as it seemed to him, a brute were he to sacrifice 
 in such an effort the decencies and pieties 
 holy things all of them in which he had been 
 
7G THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 reared. It was very well for Waterlow to say 
 that to be a genuine 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 that would be simple 
 enough if it only didn t take so much account 
 of the marchioness, the countess and what was 
 the other one ? the duchess. These young ameni 
 ties 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 
 laronne), during that brief journey to Spain of 
 which mention has already been made, during 
 the later weeks of the summer, after their 
 return (the young men 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, took on more and more the aspect 
 of a masterpiece. It was at Grenada that Gaston 
 really broke out; there, one balmy night, he 
 communicated to his companion that he would 
 marry Francina Dosson or would never marry any 
 one. The declaration was the more striking as it 
 came after an interval ; many days had elapsed 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 77 
 
 since their separation from the young lady and 
 many new and beautiful objects had engaged 
 their attention. It appeared that poor Probert 
 had been thinking of her all the while, and he 
 let his friend know that it was that dinner at 
 Saint Germain that had finished him. What she 
 had been there Waterlow himself had seen : he 
 would not controvert the proposition that she 
 had been irresistible. 
 
 In November, in Paris (it was months and weeks 
 before the artist began to please himself), tho 
 enamoured youth came very often to the Avenue 
 de Villiers, toward the end of a sitting ; and until 
 it was finished, not to disturb the lovely model, 
 he cultivated conversation with the elder sister : 
 Gaston Probert 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 taken himself off. The new 
 aspirant learned in fact from Miss Dosson that a 
 crisis in the affairs of his journal had recalled him 
 to the seat of that publication. When the young 
 ladies had gone (and when he did not 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 in 
 sight which enabled him to reconstitute the girl 
 on canvas with that perfection. He knew that 
 Waterlow painted her too well to be in love with 
 her and that if he himself could have attacked 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 her in that fashion he would not have wanted to 
 many her. She bloomed there, on the easel, 
 as brightly as in life, and the artist had caught 
 the sweet essence of her beauty. It was exactly 
 the way in which her lover would have chosen 
 that she should be represented, and yet it had 
 required a perfectly independent hand. Gaston 
 Probert mused on this mystery and somehow 
 felt proud of the picture and responsible for it, 
 though it was as little his property, as yet, as 
 the young lady herself. 
 
 When, in December, he told Waterlow of his 
 plan of campaign the latter said, " I will do any 
 thing 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 is much 
 the most excellent way. Why, gracious heaven, 
 all these mysteries and machinations ? " 
 
 " Oh, you don t understand, you don t under 
 stand ! " sighed Gaston Probert, with many wrinkles 
 on his brow. " One can t break with one s traditions 
 in an hour, especially when there is so much in 
 them that one likes. I shall not love her more if 
 they like her, but I shall love them more, and 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 79 
 
 I care about that. You talk as a man who has 
 nothing to consider. I have everything to con 
 sider and I am glad I have. My pleasure in 
 marrying her will be double if my father and my 
 sisters accept her, and I shall greatly enjoy work 
 ing out the business of bringing them round." 
 There were moments when Charles Wateilow 
 resented the very terminology of his friend : he 
 hated to hear a man talk about the woman he 
 loved being " accepted." If one accepted her one s 
 self or, rather, were accepted by her, that ended 
 the matter, and the effort to bring round those 
 who gave her the cold shoulder was scarcely con 
 sistent with self-respect. Probert explained that 
 of course he knew his relatives would only have 
 to know Francina to like her, to delight in her; 
 but that to know her they would first have to make 
 her acquaintance. This was the delicate point, for 
 social commerce with such people 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 to it, The 
 wedge should have a narrow end and Gaston was 
 ready to declare that he had found it. His sister 
 Susan was another name for it; 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 
 
80 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 Parisian and inflammable member of the family, 
 She was not reasonable but she was perceptive; 
 she had imagination and humour and was capable 
 of generosity and enthusiasm and even of in 
 fatuation. She had had her own infatuations and 
 ought to allow for those of others. She would not 
 like the Dossons superficially any better than his 
 father or than Margaret or 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 considerable chance that he might induce 
 her to take his point of view. She was as fond of 
 beauty and of the arts as he was ; this was one of 
 their bonds of union. She appreciated highly 
 Charles Waterlow s talent and there had been a 
 good deal of talk about his painting her portrait. 
 It is 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 stimulated her curiosity by his rhapsodies, 
 in advance, rhapsodies bearing wholly upon the 
 work itself, the example of Waterlow s powers, 
 and not upon the young lady, whom he was not 
 to let her know at first that lie had so much as 
 seen. Just at the last, just before her visit, he 
 was to tell her that he had met the girl (at the 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 81 
 
 studio), and that she was as remarkable in her 
 way as the picture. Seeing the picture and hear 
 ing this, Mme. de Brecourt, as a disinterested 
 lover of charming impressions, would express a 
 desire also to enjoy a sight of so rare a creature ; 
 upon which Waterlow was to say that that would 
 be easy if she would come in some day when Miss 
 Francie was sitting. 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 much struck as he hoped. Everything 
 depended on that, but it couldn t fail. The girl 
 would have to captivate 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 flaxen as to be nearly white, her 
 vividly red lips and protuberant, light-coloured 
 eyes. Waterlow was to do no introducing and 
 to reveal the visitor s identity only after she 
 had gone. This was a charge he grumbled at; 
 he called the whole business an odious comedy, 
 but his friend knew that if he undertook it he 
 would acquit himself honourably. After Mme. 
 de Brecourt had been captivated (the question of 
 whether Francie would be so 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 arranged 
 for her with the girl (in which each would appear 
 
 G 
 
82 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 in her proper character), and in short the plot 
 would thicken. 
 
 Gaston Probert s forecast of his difficulties 
 revealed a considerable faculty for analysis, but 
 that was not rare enough in the French composition 
 of things 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 say nattering 
 things to a man with an assurance altogether 
 her own. She was the reverse of egotistic 
 and never spoke of herself; her success in life 
 sprang from a much cleverer selection of her 
 pronouns. Waterlow, who liked her and wanted 
 to paint her ugliness (it was so charming, as he 
 would make it), 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, but her hands and 
 feet were celebrated, and her behaviour was not. 
 That of her sisters, as well, had never been 
 effectively exposed. 
 
 " But she must be charming, your young lady," 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 83 
 
 she said to Gaston, while she turned her head 
 this way and that as she stood before Francie s 
 image. "She looks like a piece of sculpture 
 or something cast in silver of the time of 
 Francis the First; something of Jean Goujon 
 or Germain Pilon." The young men exchanged 
 a glance, for this happened to be a capital com 
 parison, and Gaston replied, in a detached way, 
 that she 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 is admirable 
 votre petite admirable, admirable ! " There 
 was a lady calling in the Place Beauvau at the 
 moment old Mine. d Outreville, and she naturally 
 asked who was the object of such enthusiasm. 
 Gaston suffered Susan to answer this question ; 
 he wanted to hear what she would say. She 
 described the girl almost as well as he would 
 have done, from the point of view of the plastic, 
 with a hundred technical and critical terms, and 
 the old lady listened in silence, solemnly, rather 
 coldly, as if she thought such talk a good deal of 
 a galimatias: she belonged to the old-fashioned 
 school and held that a young lady was sufficiently 
 catalogued when it was said that she had a 
 dazzling complexion or the finest eyes in the world. 
 
 " Qu cst-ce qua c est que cette merveille ? " she 
 inquired ; to which Mme. de Brecourt replied 
 
 G 2 
 
04 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 that it was a little American whom her brother 
 had dug up. "And what do you propose to do 
 with her, may one ask ? " Mme. d Outreville 
 demanded, looking at Gaston Probert with an eye 
 which seemed to read his secret, so that for half 
 a minute he was on the point of breaking out : 
 " I propose to marry her there ! " But he con 
 tained himself, only mentioning for the present 
 that he aspired to ascertain to what uses she was 
 adapted ; meanwhile, he added, he expected to 
 look at her a good deal, in the measure in which 
 she would allow him. " Ah, that may take you 
 far ! " the old lady exclaimed, as she got up to 
 go ; and Gaston glanced at his sister, to see if this 
 idea struck her too. But she appeared almost 
 provokingly exempt from alarm : if she had been 
 suspicious it would have been easier to make 
 his confession. When he came back from ac 
 companying Mme. d Outreville to her carriage 
 he asked her if the girl at the studio 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 
 which a little American, accidentally encountered, 
 could not 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 were not nothing for her ! " Gaston 
 declared; and when his sister rejoined that he 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 85 
 
 was too amiable he brought out his revelation. 
 He had seen the young lady more often than he 
 had told her ; 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 that she had been 
 captivated he had been captivated himself. Mine, 
 de Brecourt protested that she had reserved her 
 independence of judgment, and he answered that 
 if she had thought Miss Dosson repulsive she 
 might have expressed it in another way. When 
 she inquired what he was talking about and 
 what he wanted them all to do with her, he 
 said : " I want you to treat her kindly, tenderly, 
 for such as you see her I am thinking of making 
 her my wife." 
 
 " Mercy on us you haven t asked her ? " cried 
 Mme. de Brecourt. 
 
 " No, but I have asked her sister what she would 
 say, and she tells me there would be no difficulty." 
 
 "Her sister? the little woman with the big 
 head ? " 
 
 " Her head is rather out of drawing, but it isn t 
 a part of the affair. She is very inoffensive and 
 she would be devoted to me." 
 
 " For heaven s sake then keep quiet. She is as 
 common as a dressmaker s bill." 
 
 " Not when you know her. Besides, that has 
 nothing to do with Francie. You couldn t find 
 
86 THE REVERBERATOR, 
 
 words enough a moment ago to say that Francie is 
 exquisite, and now you will be so good as to stick 
 to that. Come, be intelligent ! " 
 
 " Do you call her by her little name, like that ? " 
 Mme. de Brecon rt asked, giving him another cup 
 of tea. 
 
 " Only to you. She is perfectly simple. It is 
 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 thing of the future." 
 
 " My poor child," said Mme. de Brecourt, " 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 ! " 
 
 " I shall marry her then without your approba 
 tion." 
 
 " Very good. But if she deprives you of that 
 (you have always had it, you are used to it, it s a 
 part of your life), you will hate her at the end of 
 a month." 
 
 " I don t care. I shall have had my month." 
 " And she poor thing ? " 
 
 " Poor thing, exactly ! You will begin to pity 
 her, and that will make you cultivate her, and that 
 will make you find how adorable she is. Then 
 you ll like her, then you ll love her, then you ll see 
 
THE EEVEBBEBATOR. 87 
 
 how discriminating I have been, and we shall all 
 be happy together again." 
 
 " But how can you possibly know, with such 
 people, what you have got hold of ? " 
 
 " By having the sense of delicate things. 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 irresistible fact 
 and it will be better to accept her than to let her 
 accept you." 
 
 Gaston s sister asked him if Miss Dosson had 
 a fortune, and he said he knew nothing about 
 that. Her father apparently was rich, but he 
 didn t mean to ask for a penny with her. 
 American fortunes moreover were the last things 
 to count upon ; they had seen too many ex 
 amples of that. "Papa will never listen to 
 that," Mme. de Brecourt replied. 
 
 " Listen to what ? " 
 
 " To your not finding out to your not asking 
 for settlements comme cela se fait" 
 
 " Excuse me, papa will find out for himself; and 
 he will know perfectly whether to ask or whether 
 to leave it alone. That s the sort of thing he does 
 know. And he also knows perfectly that I am 
 very difficult to place." 
 
 " To place ? " 
 
 " To find a wife for. I m neither fish nor flesh, 
 I have 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 
 
88 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 talking as if we could make grand terms. You 
 and the others are well enough : qui prend mari 
 prend pays, and you have names which (at least so 
 your husbands say) are tremendously illustrious. 
 But papa and I I ask you ! " 
 
 "As a family nous sommes tr&s-lien," said Mme. 
 de Brecourt. " You know what we are it doesn t 
 need any explanation. We are as good as anything 
 there is and have always been thought so. You 
 might do anything you like." 
 
 " Well, I shall never take to marry a French 
 woman." 
 
 "Thank you, my dear!" Mme. de Brecourt 
 exclaimed. 
 
 " No sister of mine is really French," returned 
 the young man. 
 
 " No brother of mine is really mad. Marry 
 whomever you like," Susan went on ; " only let her 
 be the best of her kind. Let her be a lady. Trust me, 
 I ve studied life. That s the only thing that s safe." 
 
 "Francie is 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 
 dialect as they speak ! " 
 
 " My dear, her English is quite as good as yours. 
 You don t even know how bad yours is," said 
 Gaston Probert. 
 
 " Well, I don t say Parus and I never asked 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 89 
 
 an Englishman to marry me. You know what our 
 feelings are," his companion pursued ; " our con 
 victions, our susceptibilities. We may be wrong 
 we may be hollow we may be pretentious ; we 
 may not be able to say on what it all rests ; but 
 there we are, and the fact is insurmountable. It 
 is 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 are 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 Mme. 
 de Brecourt s voice, but her brother made her no 
 immediate answer, only indulging restlessly in 
 several turns about the room. At last he observed, 
 taking up his hat: "I shall come to an under 
 standing 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 looked at him a moment; 
 he had his hand on the knob of the door. " What 
 do you mean by her father s appearing rich ? 
 That s such a vague term. What do you suppose 
 his means to be ? " 
 
 " Ah, that s a question she would never ask ! " 
 cried the young man, passing out. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE next morning he found himself sitting on 
 one of the red satin sofas beside Mr. Dosson, in 
 this gentleman s private room at the Hotel de 
 I llnivers et de Cheltenham. Delia and Francie 
 had established their father in the old quarters ; 
 they expected to spend the winter in Paris but 
 they 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 re 
 source of sitting in the court, and he had not yet 
 discovered an effective substitute for this recrea 
 tion. Without Mr. Flack, at the cafes, he felt too 
 much like a non-consumer. But he was patient 
 and ruminant ; Gaston 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 in the way of acquiring 
 a beautiful pair of horses (it is perhaps not super- 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 91 
 
 fluous to say that tins was a perfectly straight 
 proceeding on the young man s part), which Mr. 
 Dosson, little as he resembled a sporting character, 
 found it a welcome pastime on fine afternoons to 
 drive, with a highly scientific hand, from a smart 
 Americaine, in the Bois de Boulogne. There was 
 a reading-room at the banker s, 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 a large scope to their faculty for endless re 
 petition, for monotonous insistence, for vague and 
 aimless discussion. On leaving Mme. de Brecourt 
 Francie s lover had written to Delia that he de 
 sired half an hour s private conversation with her 
 father on the morrow at half-past eleven ; his im 
 patience 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 ac 
 quitted 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. Probert was placed side- 
 wise, a hand on each knee, almost facing him, 
 on the edge of the seat. 
 
92 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " 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 criminal in you not to satisfy yourself on that 
 point. My income is derived from three sources. 
 First, some property left me by my dear mother. 
 Second, a legacy from my poor brother, who 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), and 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 softly continued. 
 
 " Then my father is so good as to make me a 
 little allowance ; and some day I shall have more 
 from him." 
 
 Mr. Dosson was silent a moment ; then he 
 observed, " 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 only rejoined, mildly, impersonally : 
 
 "Well, I guess there won t be any trouble about 
 that. And what does my daughter say ? " 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 93 
 
 " I haven t spoken to her yet." 
 
 " Haven t spoken to her ? " 
 
 "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 said, 
 humorously. There was an element of reproach 
 in this and Gaston Probert was mystified, for the 
 inquiry 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 have exposed 
 yourself this way to me ? " the old gentleman 
 went on. 
 
 " Well, I have a sort of confidence. It may be 
 vain, but God grant not ! I think she likes me 
 personally, but what I am afraid of is that she 
 may consider that 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 are very simple, kindly, respectable 
 people, as you will see in a day or two for your 
 self. My father and sisters will do themselves the 
 honour to wait upon you," the young man de 
 clared, with a temerity the sense of which made 
 his voice tremble. 
 
 " We shall be very happy to see them, sir," Mr. 
 
94 THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 Dosson returned, cheerfully. " Well now, let s 
 see," he added, musing sociably. "Don t you 
 expect to embrace any regular occupation ? " 
 
 Probert looked at him, smiling. " Have you 
 anything of that sort, sir ? " 
 
 " Well, you have me there ! " Mr. Dosson ad 
 mitted, with a comprehensive sigh. " 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 Mr. 
 Dosson turned a speculative eye upon him. 
 
 " Well, I don t think she will miss anything, 
 That is, if she does she will find other things 
 instead." 
 
 " I presume she ll miss Delia, and even me, a 
 little." 
 
 " Oh, it s easy to prevent that," said Gaston 
 Probert. 
 
 " Well, of course we shall be on hand. Con 
 tinue to reside in Paris ? " Mr. Dosson went on. 
 
 " I will live anywhere in the world she likes. 
 Of course my people are here that s a great tie. 
 I am not without hope that it may with time 
 become a reason for your daughter." 
 
 " Oh, any reason ll do where Paris is concerned. 
 Take some lunch ? " Mr. Dosson added, looking at 
 his watch. 
 
THE EEVERBERATOK. 95 
 
 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 am touched by your confidence. You take 
 me just as I am, with no recommendation beyond 
 my own word." 
 
 "Well, Mr. Probert, 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 / trusted you, ain t it ? " 
 
 " I guess it is ! " said Gaston, smiling. 
 
 His companion laid his hand on the door but 
 he 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" 
 
 " A gentleman last year ? " 
 
 " Mr. Flack. You met him surely. A very fine 
 man. I thought she favoured him." 
 
 " Seigneur Lieu ! " Gaston Probert murmured, 
 under his breath. 
 
 Mr. Dosson had opened the door, he made his 
 companion pass into the little dining-room, where 
 the table was spread for the noon-day breakfast. 
 "Where are the chickens?" he inquired, disap- 
 
96 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 pointedly. Gaston thought at first that he missed 
 a dish from the board, but he recognised the next 
 moment the old man s usual designation of his 
 daughters. These young ladies presently came in, 
 but Francie looked away from Mr. Probert. The 
 suggestion just dropped by her father had given 
 him a shock (the idea of the girl s " favouring " the 
 newspaper-man was inconceivable), but the charm 
 ing way she avoided his eye convinced him that 
 he had nothing to 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 Francie repeated the 
 expression, interrogatively, not understanding it. 
 " You can send him a note, saying you wont," 
 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 looked at her a moment very gravely. " 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 should 
 have said, Oh, well, if you don t want it any more 
 than that ! 
 
 " Well, I wish it was you," said Francie. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 97 
 
 " That Mr. Probert was me ? " 
 
 "No; that you were the one he liked." 
 
 Francie Dosson, are you thinking of Mr. 
 Flack ? " her sister broke out, suddenly. 
 
 " No, not much." 
 
 " Well then, what s the matter ? " 
 
 " You have ideas and opinions ; you know whose 
 place it is and what s due and what isn t. You 
 could meet them all." 
 
 " Why, how can you say, when that s just what 
 I m trying to find out ! " 
 
 " It doesn t matter any way ; it will never come 
 off," said Francie. 
 
 " What do you mean by that ? " 
 
 " He ll give me up in a few weeks. I shall do 
 something." 
 
 " 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 replied, in 
 one of her rare impatiences. 
 
 " Then why are you so queer ? " 
 
 " Oh, I m tired ! " said Francie, turning away. 
 And this was the simple truth ; she was tired of 
 the consideration her sister saw fit to devote to the 
 question of Mr. Probert s not having, since their 
 return to Paris, brought his belongings to see them. 
 She was overdone with Delia s theories on this 
 subject, which varied from day to day, from the 
 assertion that he was keeping his intercourse with 
 
 H 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 his American friends hidden from them because 
 they were uncompromising, in their grandeur, to 
 the doctrine that that grandeur would descend 
 some day upon the Hotel de 1 Univers et de Chel 
 tenham and carry Francie away in a blaze of glory. 
 Sometimes Delia put forth the view that they 
 ought to make certain of Gaston s omissions the 
 ground of a challenge ; at other times she opined 
 that they ought to take no notice of them. Francie, 
 in this connection, had no theories, no impulses of 
 her own ; and now she was all at once happy .and 
 freshly glad and in love and sceptical and fright 
 ened and indifferent. Her lover had talked to her 
 but little about his kinsfolk, 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 Gaston 
 saw that gentleman, and the exalted ladies 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 wished to know 
 what he meant by their trusting her, and he had 
 explained that it would appear to them too good to 
 be true that she should be kind to him : some 
 thing exactly of that sort was what they dreamed 
 of for him. But they had dreamed before and been 
 disappointed, and now they were on their guard. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 99 
 
 From the moment they should feel they were on 
 solid ground they would join hands and dance 
 round her. Francie s answer to this fanciful state 
 ment was that she didn t know what the young 
 man was talking about, and he indulged in no at 
 tempt on that occasion to render his meaning more 
 clear; the consequence of which was that he felt 
 he made a poor appearance. His uneasiness had 
 not passed away, for many things in truth were 
 dark to him. He could not see his father fraternis 
 ing with Mr. Dosson, he could not see Margaret and 
 Jane recognising an alliance in which Delia was 
 one of the allies. He had answered for them be 
 cause 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 judgment of this young lady, committed 
 herself; she had really comprehended her, and her 
 subsequent protest when she found what was in 
 his heart had been a retractation which he would 
 make her in turn retract. The girl had been re 
 vealed to her. and she would come round. A 
 simple interview with Francie would suffice for this 
 result : he promised himself that at the end of half 
 an hour she should be an enthusiastic convert. At 
 the end of an hour she would believe that she her 
 self had invented the match had discovered the 
 damsel. He would pack her off to the others as 
 
 H 2 
 
100 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 the author of the project; she would take it all 
 upon herself, would represent her brother even as 
 a little tepid. She would show nothing of that sort, 
 but boast of her wisdom and energy ; and she would 
 enjoy the comedy so that she would forget she 
 had opposed him even for a moment. Gaston 
 Probert was a very honourable young man, but his 
 programme involved a good many fibs. 
 
VII. 
 
 IT may as well be said at once that it was even 
 tually carried out, and that in the course of a 
 fortnight old Mr. Probe rt and his daughters alighted 
 successively at the Hotel de 1 Univers et de Chel 
 tenham. Francie s visit with her intended to Mme. 
 de Brecourt bore exactly the fruit the young man 
 had foreseen and was followed the very next day by 
 a call from this lady. She took Francie out with 
 her in her carriage and kept her the whole after 
 noon, driving her over half Paris, chattering with 
 her, kissing her, delighting in her, telling her they 
 were already sisters, paying her compliments which 
 made the girl envy her art of beautiful expression. 
 After she had carried her home the countess rushed 
 off to her father s, reflecting with pleasure that at 
 that hour she should probably find her sister Mar 
 guerite there. Mme. de Cliche was with the old 
 man 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 
 
102 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 troubles ; for Maxime de Cliche was not quite the 
 pearl that they originally had supposed. Mme. de 
 Brecourt knew what Marguerite did whenever she 
 took that little ottoman and drew it close to her 
 father s 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 know ; but 
 that did not 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 if she had 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 plaintive, complicated stories, 
 to which her father listened with such 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 con 
 nected with her first going into the world. Al- 
 phonse and she had had an apartment, by her 
 father s kindness, under that familiar roof, 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 confi 
 dences now ; she announced her trouvaille and did 
 battle for it bravely. 
 
 Five days later (there had been lively work in 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 103 
 
 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. 
 Prohert went to see the Dossons with his son. 
 Mme. de Brecourt paid them another visit, a kind 
 of 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 tension and responsibility. M. de Douves 
 was the person who took the family, all round, most 
 seriously and most deprecated anything in the 
 nature of crude and precipitate action. He was a 
 very small black gentleman, with thick eyebrows 
 and high heels (in the country, in 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 fainilh c est moi " ap 
 peared to be his tacit formula, and he carried his 
 umbrella (he had very bad ones), with a kind of 
 sceptral air. Mme. de Brecourt went so far as to 
 believe that his wife, in confirmation of this, took 
 herself in a manner for 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, 
 
104 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 and in the Vendee she was thought majestic, in 
 spite of old clothes, of which she was fond 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/o?/ like 
 her husband, and the action of her mind was 
 wholly restricted to questions of relationship and 
 alliance. She had an extraordinary patience of 
 research and tenacity of grasp of 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. There was a 
 certain expectation that she would leave memoirs. 
 In Mme. de Brecourt s eyes this pair were very 
 shabby, they did not payer de mine they fairly 
 smelt of their province ; " but for the reality of the 
 thing," she often said to herself, " they are worth 
 all of us. We are diluted and they are pure, and 
 any one with an eye would see it." " The thing 
 was the legitimist principle, the ancient faith and 
 even, a little, the 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 wanted to go out when he heard of 
 the approach of Gaston s relations, and the young 
 man had to instruct him that this wouldn t do. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 105 
 
 The apartment in question had had a various ex 
 perience, but it had probably never witnessed 
 stranger doings than these laudable social efforts. 
 Gaston was taught to feel that his family made a 
 great sacrifice for him, but in a very few days he 
 said to himself that he was safe, now they knew 
 the worst. They made the sacrifice, they definitely 
 agreed to it. but they judged it well that he should 
 measure the full extent of it. "Gaston must 
 never, never, never be allowed to forget what we 
 have done for him :" Mnie. de Brecourt told him 
 that Marguerite de Cliche had expressed herself 
 in that sense, at one of the family conclaves from 
 which he had been absent. These high commis 
 sions 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 promis 
 ing. He flattered himself that he showed infinite 
 patience and tact, and Ids 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 kind of cheerful glow in 
 regard to Mr. Dosson and Delia, whom he could not 
 defend nor lucidly explain nor make people like, 
 but whom he had ended, after so many days of 
 
i03 THE IIEVERBERATOR. 
 
 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 talk 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 native delicacy. 
 Their native delicacy, above all; we must work 
 that ! " And the brother and sister excited each 
 other magnanimously to this undertaking. Some 
 times, it must be added, they exchanged a glance 
 which expressed a sudden slightly alarmed sense 
 of the responsibility they had put on. 
 
 On the day Mr. Probert called at the Hotel de 
 I Univers et de Cheltenham with his son, the 
 pair walked away together, back to the Cours la 
 Reine, without any immediate conversation. All 
 that was said was some words 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 acceptance of the Dossons 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 not been noisy a confusion of sounds ; which 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 107 
 
 was very happy, for Mr. Probert was particular in 
 this he could bear French noise but he could not 
 bear American. As for English, he maintained that 
 there was none. Mr. Dossoii had scarcely spoken to 
 him and yet had remained perfectly placid, which 
 was exactly what Gaston would have chosen. 
 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 her spell had worked : it was impossible the 
 old man should not 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 ! " This exclamation gave 
 Gaston much pleasure ; he passed his hand into his 
 father s arm. It promised well ; it denoted a senti 
 ment of tenderness for the dear little Dossons, con 
 fronted with a row of fierce French critics, judged 
 by standards that they had never even heard of. 
 The meeting of the two parents had not made the 
 problem of their commerce any more clear; 
 but young Probert was reminded freshly by his 
 father s ejaculation of that characteristic kindness 
 which was really what he had built upon. The 
 
108 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 old gentleman, Leaven knew, had prejudices, 
 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, 
 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 Heine 
 Mr. Probert said : " I think you told me you are 
 dining out." 
 
 " Yes, with our friends." 
 
 " Our friends ? Comme vous y allcz ! Come 
 in and see me, then, on your return ; but not later 
 than half-past ten." 
 
 From this the young man saw that he had 
 swallowed the dose ; if he had made up his mind 
 that it wouldn t do he would have announced 
 the circumstance without more delay. This re 
 flection was most agreeable, for Gaston was per 
 fectly aware of how little he himself would have 
 enjoyed a struggle. He would have carried it 
 through, but he could not bear to think of it, and 
 the sense that he was spared it made him feel at 
 peace with all the world. The dinner at the hotel 
 became a little banquet in honour of this state 
 of things, especially as Francie and Delia raved, 
 us they said, about his papa. 
 
 " Well, I expected something nice, but he goes 
 far beyond," Delia remarked. " That s my idea of 
 a gentleman." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 100 
 
 " Ah, for that ! " said Gaston. 
 
 " He s so sweet. I m not a bit afraid of him," 
 Francie declared. 
 
 " Why should you be ? " 
 
 " Well, I am of you," the girl went on. 
 
 " Much you show it ! " her lover exclaimed. 
 
 " Yes, I am," she insisted, " at the bottom 
 of all." 
 
 " Well, that s what a lady should be of her 
 husband." 
 
 " Well, I don t know ; I m more afraid than that. 
 You ll see." 
 
 " I wish you were afraid of talking nonsense," 
 said Gaston Probert. 
 
 Mr. Dosson made no observation whatever about 
 their honourable visitor ; he listened in genial, un 
 prejudiced silence. It is 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 did not mean that he had not been 
 pleased. Mr. Dosson had simply nothing to say; 
 he had not, like Gaston, a sensitive plate in his 
 brain, and the important events of his life had 
 never been personal impressions. His mind had 
 had absolutely no history of that sort, and Mr. 
 Probert s appearance had not 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 
 candid even than this, in Gaston s view (and it 
 
110 THE EEVEBBEBATOB. 
 
 was quite touchingly so), 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 that the ladies and 
 the gentlemen alike had covered them with en 
 dearments, were candidly, 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 for their feelings 
 forms resembling singularly little the feelings 
 themselves. Francie took people at their word 
 when they told her that the whole mani&re 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 
 would not have occurred to the girl that such things 
 need have been said as a mere garniture. Her 
 lover, whose life had been surrounded with garni 
 ture and who therefore might have been expected 
 not to notice it, had a fresh sense of it now : he 
 reflected that manner might be a very misleading 
 symbol, might cover pitfalls and bottomless gulfs, 
 when it had attained that perfection and corre 
 sponded so little to fact. What he had wanted 
 was that his people should be very civil at the 
 hotel ; but with such a high standard of compli- 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. Ill 
 
 ment 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 ; it 
 was magnificent in its way. 
 
VIII. 
 
 WHEN, on coming home the evening after his 
 father had made the acquaintance of the Dossons, 
 Gaston went into the room in which the old man 
 habitually sat, Mr. Probert said, laying down his 
 book and keeping on his glasses : " Of course you 
 will go on living with me. You must understand 
 that I don t consent to your going away. You 
 will have to occupy the rooms that Susan and 
 Alphonse had." 
 
 Gaston observed with pleasure the transition 
 from the conditional to the future and also the 
 circumstance that his father was quietly reading, 
 according to his custom when he sat at home of 
 an evening. This proved he was 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 grown so 
 much smaller. He sat there alone, turning his 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 113 
 
 pages softly, contentedly, with the lamp-light 
 shining on his refined old head and embroidered 
 dressing-gown. Formerly he was 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 
 animal, and indeed except perhaps poor Jane, 
 in her damp old castle in Brittany they were 
 all social animals. 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 there was a circle round the 
 fire and winged words flew about and there was 
 always some clever person before the chimney- 
 piece, holding or challenging the rest. 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 liked to take possession of the 
 hearthrug. People left it to him; he was so 
 transparent, like a glass screen, and he never 
 triumphed in argument. 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 essence of some dozen good houses, most of 
 them over the river, in the conservative faubourg, 
 
 1 
 
114 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 and several to-day emptied receptacles, extin 
 guished fires. They made up Mr. Probert s world 
 a world not too small for him and yet not too 
 large, though some of them supposed themselves 
 to be very 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 extinction of Mme. de 
 Marignac, to whom the old gentleman used still 
 to go three or four evenings out of the seven 
 and sometimes even in the morning besides. 
 Gaston was well aware what a place she had held 
 in his father s life and affection, how 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 how much she 
 had had to do with marrying his sisters. He was 
 not ignorant 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 
 had not 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 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 115 
 
 need of being explicit. This adoptive Parisian was 
 by nature presupposing, but he was admirably gentle 
 (that was why they let him talk to them before 
 the fire lie was such a sympathising oracle), and 
 after the death of his wife and of Mme. de 
 Marignac, who had been her friend too, he was 
 gentler than before. Gaston had been able to see 
 that it made him care less for everything (except 
 indeed the true faith, to which he drew still closer), 
 and this increase of indifference doubtless helped 
 to explain his collapse in relation to common 
 Americans. 
 
 " We shall be thankful for any rooms you will 
 give us," the young man 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 will fill it out a good deal, I suppose, with 
 Mr. Dossori 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 are not intrusive ; they 
 are essentially modest people ; they won t put 
 themselves upon us. They have great natural 
 discretion." 
 
 " Do you answer for that ? Susan does ; she is 
 always assuring one of it," Mr. Probert said. 
 " The father has so much that he wouldn t even 
 speak to me." 
 
 " He didn t know what to say to you." 
 
 I 2 
 
116 THE REVERBERATOR, 
 
 " How then shall I know what to say to him ? " 
 
 " Ah, you always know ! " Gaston exclaimed. 
 
 "How will that help us if he doesn t know 
 what to answer ? " 
 
 " You will draw him out he is full of bonhomie" 
 
 11 Well, I won t quarrel with your lonlwmmc (if 
 he s silent there are much worse faults), nor even 
 with the fat young lady, though she is evidently 
 vulgar. It is not for ourselves I am afraid ; it s 
 for them. They will be very unhappy." 
 
 " Never, never ! " said Gaston. " They are too 
 simple. They are not morbid. And don t you 
 like Francie ? You haven t told me so," he added 
 in a moment. 
 
 " She says Par us, my dear boy." 
 
 "Ah, to Susan too that seemed the principal 
 obstacle. But she has got over it. I mean Susan 
 has got over the obstacle. We shall make her 
 speak French; she has a capital 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 is very pretty and I m sure 
 she is 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 expe 
 rience everything), that I have seen beauties with 
 out number. I have known the most charming 
 women of our time women of an order to which 
 Miss Francie, con rispctto parlando, will never 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 117 
 
 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, I feel how standards alter. J ai vu mieux 
 que $a, mon clier. However, I accept everything 
 to-day, as you know ; when once one has lost one s 
 enthusiasm everything is the same, and one might 
 as well perish by the sword as by famine." 
 
 " I hoped she would fascinate you on the spot," 
 Gaston remarked, rather ruefully. 
 
 " Fascinate the language you fellows use ! " 
 
 " Well, she will yet." 
 
 " She will never know at least that she doesn t : 
 I will promise you that," said Mr. Probert. 
 
 "Ah, be sincere with her, father she s worth 
 it ! " his son broke out. 
 
 When the old gentleman took that tone, the 
 tone of vast experience and a fastidiousness justi 
 fied by ineffable recollections, Gaston was more 
 provoked than he could say, though he was also 
 considerably amused, for he had a good while since 
 made up his mind that there was an element of 
 stupidity in it. It was fatuous to square one s 
 self so serenely in the absence of a sense : so far 
 from being fine it was gross not to feel Francie 
 Dosson. He thanked God he did. He didn t 
 know what old frumps his father might have fre 
 quented (the style of 1830, with long curls in 
 front, a vapid simper, a Scotch plaid dress and a 
 body, in a point suggestive of twenty whalebones, 
 
118 THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 coming down to the knees), but he could remem 
 ber 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 which to-day even the least 
 bad, Canova s would draw down a public casti- 
 gation upon their authors. 
 
 " 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 
 superb. We can t be more mercenary than he." 
 
 " He waived the question of his own, you mean ? : 
 said Mr. Probert, 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 119 
 
 "Yes, and of yours. But it will be all right/ 
 The young man flattered himself that that was as 
 far as he was willing to go, in the way of bribery. 
 
 " Well, it s your affair or your sisters / his 
 father returned. " It s their idea that it will be 
 all right." 
 
 " I should think they would be weary of chat 
 tering ! " Gaston exclaimed, impatiently. 
 
 Mr. Probert looked at him a moment with a 
 vague surprise, but he only said, " I think they 
 are. But the period of discussion is over. We 
 have taken the jump." He added, in a moment, 
 as if from the desire to say something more con 
 ciliatory : " Alphonse and Maxime are quite of 
 your opinion." 
 
 " Of my opinion ? " 
 
 " That she is 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 be 
 longed to one of the reasons for which his children 
 regarded him as an old darling that Gaston could 
 feel after an instant that he comprehended 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 pro 
 test at Gaston s petulance was the more commend 
 able as he was capable, for his part, of thinking it 
 important that ccs messieurs should like the little 
 girl at the hotel. Gaston was not, and it would 
 
120 THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 have seemed to him a proof that he was in servi 
 tude indeed if he had accepted such an assurance 
 as that as if it mattered. 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 dis 
 pleased M. de Brecourt as he cared whether she 
 displeased Maxime and Kaoul. The old gentleman 
 continued to read, and in a few moments Gaston 
 cam e back. He had expressed surprise, j ust before, 
 that his sisters should have found so much to dis 
 cuss in the idea of his marriage, but he looked at 
 his father now with an air of having more to say 
 an intimation that the subject must not be con 
 sidered as exhausted. " It seems rather odd to 
 me that you should all appear to accept the step 
 I am about to take as a sort of disagreeable neces 
 sity, when I myself hold that I have been so 
 exceedingly fortunate." 
 
 Mr. Probert lowered his book accommodatingly 
 and rested his eyes upon the fire. "You won t 
 be content till we are enthusiastic. She seems a 
 good girl certainly, and in that you are fortunate." 
 
 " I don t think you can tell me what would be 
 better what you would have preferred," said the 
 young man. 
 
 " What I would have preferred ? In the first 
 place you must remember that I was not madly 
 impatient to see you married." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 121 
 
 " I can imagine that, and yet I can t imagine 
 that, as things have turned out, you shouldn t be 
 struck with the felicity. To get something so 
 charming, and to get it of our own species." 
 
 " Of our own species ? Tudieu ! " said Mr. 
 Probert looking up. 
 
 " Surely it is infinitely fresher and more amusing 
 for me to marry an American. There s a dreari 
 ness in the way we have Gallicised." 
 
 "Against Americans I have nothing to say; 
 some of them are the best thing the world contains. 
 That s precisely why one can choose. They are 
 far from being all like that." 
 
 "Like what, dear father?" 
 
 " Comma ces gens-Id. 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 
 curiosities." 
 
 " Well, perhaps they are sufficiently so as it is," 
 said Mr. Probert, with a little conclusive sigh. 
 
 " Yes, let them pass for that. They will surprise 
 you." 
 
 " Not too much, I hope ! " cried the old man, 
 opening his volume again. 
 
 It will doubtless not startle the reader to learn 
 that the complexity of things among the Proberts 
 was such as to make it impossible for Gaston to 
 proceed to the celebration of his nuptials, with 
 all the needful circumstances of material prepara- 
 
122 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 tion and social support, before some three months 
 should have expired. He chafed however but 
 moderately at the delay, for he reflected that 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 the modus mvendi 
 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 disconnec 
 tion. He knew that Mr. Dosson would do what 
 ever Delia liked and that Delia would like to 
 " start " her sister. Whether or no she expected 
 to be present at the finish, she had a definite 
 purpose of seeing the beginning of the race. Mr. 
 Probert notified Mr. Dosson of what he proposed 
 to " do " for his son, and Mr. Dosson appeared 
 more amused than anything else at the news. 
 He announced, in return, no intentions in regard 
 to Francie, and his queer silence was the cause 
 of another convocation of the house of Probert. 
 Here Mme. de Brecourt s valorous spirit won an 
 other victory ; she maintained, as she informed her 
 brother, that there was no possible policy but a 
 policy of confidence. " Lord help us, is that what 
 they call confidence ? " the young man exclaimed, 
 o-uessing the way they all looked at each other; 
 and he wondered how they would look next at 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 123 
 
 poor Mr. Dosson. Fortunately he could always fall 
 back, for reassurance, upon that revelation of their 
 perfect manners ; though indeed he thoroughly 
 knew that on the day they should really attempt 
 interference make a row which might render 
 him helpless and culminate in a rupture their 
 courtesy would show its finest flower. 
 
 Mr. Probert s property was altogether in the 
 United States : he resembled various other persons 
 to whom American impressions are mainly accept 
 able in the form of dividends. The manner in 
 which he desired to benefit his son on the occasion 
 of the latter s marriage rendered certain visitations 
 and reinvestments necessary in that country. It 
 had long been his conviction that his affairs needed 
 looking into; they had gone on for years and 
 years without an overhauling. He had thought 
 of going back to see, but now he was too old and 
 too tired and the effort was impossible. There was 
 nothing for it but for Gaston to go, and go quickly, 
 though the moment was rather awkward. The idea 
 was communicated to him and the necessity ac 
 cepted ; then the plan was relinquished : it seemed 
 such a pity he should not wait till after his marriage, 
 when he would be able to take Francie with 
 him. Francie would be such an introducer. This 
 postponement would have taken effect had it not 
 suddenly come out that Mr. Dosson himself wanted 
 to go for a few weeks, in consequence of some 
 news (it was a matter of business), that he had un- 
 
124 THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 expectedly received. It was further revealed that 
 that course presented difficulties, for he could not 
 leave his daughters alone, especially in such a 
 situation. Not only would such a proceeding 
 have given scandal to the Proberts, but Gaston 
 learned, with a good deal of surprise and not a 
 little amusement, that Delia, in consequence of 
 peculiar changes now wrought in her view of 
 things, would have felt herself obliged to protest 
 on the score of propriety. He called her 
 attention to the fact that nothing would be more 
 simple than, in the interval, for Francie to go 
 and stay with Susan or Margaret ; Delia herself in 
 that case would be free to accompany her father. 
 But this young lady declared that nothing would 
 induce her to quit the European continent until 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. 
 Moreover he was startled, he was a good deal 
 mystified, by the perverse, unsociable way in which 
 Francie asserted that, as yet, she would not lend 
 herself to any staying. After, if he liked, but 
 not till then. And she would not at the moment 
 give the reasons of her refusal ; it was only very 
 positive and even quite passionate. 
 
 All this left her intended no alternative but 
 to say to Mr. Dosson, " I am not such a fool as 
 I look. If you will coach me properly, and trust 
 me, I will rush across and transact your business 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 125 
 
 as well as my father s." Strange as it appeared, 
 
 Francie could resign herself to this separation 
 
 from her lover it would last six or seven weeks 
 
 rather than accept the hospitality of his 
 
 sisters. Mr. Dosson trusted him; he said to him, 
 
 < Well, sir, you ve got a big brain," at the end of 
 
 a morning they spent with papers and pencils; 
 
 upon which 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 would do something that would make them 
 
 all despise her. Gaston replied, in the first place, 
 
 that this was gammon and in the second he wanted 
 
 to know if she expected never to be in close 
 
 quarters with her new kinsfolk. "Ah, yes, but 
 
 then it will be safer we shall be married ! " she 
 
 returned. This little incident occurred three days 
 
 before the young man started ; but what happened 
 
 just the evening previous was that, stopping 
 
 for a last word at the Hotel dc I Univers et de 
 
 Cheltenham on his way to take the night express 
 
 to London (he was to sail from Liverpool), he 
 
 found Mr. George Flack sitting in the red satin 
 
 saloon. The correspondent of the Reverberator 
 
 had come back. 
 
IX. 
 
 ME. FLACK S relations with his old friends did 
 not, after his appearance in Paris, take on that 
 familiarity and frequency which had marked their 
 intercourse a year before : he let them know 
 frankly that he could easily see the situation was 
 quite different. 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 ? 
 Won t you come round there with us some day ? " 
 Mr. Dosson asked ; not having perceived for him 
 self any reason why the young journalist should 
 not be a welcome and congruous figure in the 
 Cours la Heine. 
 
 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 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 127 
 
 forward. When he maintained that the Dossons 
 had " shed " him, Mr. Dosson exclaimed, " Well, I 
 guess you ll grow again ! " And Francie observed 
 that it was no use for him to pose as a martyr, in 
 asmuch as 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 she was a good deal less accessible than she 
 had been the previous spring, for Mesdames do 
 Brecourt and de Cliche (the former much more 
 than the latter) took a considerable number of her 
 hours. In spite of her protest to Gaston against 
 a premature intimacy with his sisters, she spent 
 whole days in their company (they had so much 
 to tell her about what her new life would be, and 
 it was generally very pleasant), and she thought it 
 would be nice if in these intervals he should give 
 himself to her father and even to Delia as he used 
 to do. 
 
 But the flaw of a certain insincerity in Mr. 
 Flack s nature seemed to be established by his 
 present tendency to rare visits. He evidently 
 did not care for her father for himself, and though 
 Mr. Dosson was the least querulous of men she 
 divined that he suspected their old companion 
 had 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 sharp 
 
128 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 cicerone rushing back to them, with his drab over 
 coat flying in the wind; but this expectation 
 usually died away. He missed Gaston because 
 Gaston this winter had so often ordered his dinner 
 for him, and his society was not sought by the count 
 and the marquis, whose mastery of English was 
 small and their other distractions great. Mr. Pro- 
 bert, it was true, had shown something of a frater 
 nising spirit ; he had come twice to the hotel, since 
 his son s departure, and he had said, smiling and 
 reproachful, " You neglect us, you neglect us ! " 
 Mr. Dosson had not understood what he meant 
 by this till Delia explained after the visitor with 
 drew, and even then the remedy for the neglect, 
 administered two or three days later, had not 
 borne any particular 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 the words " So sorry ! " Her father had 
 told her he would give the card if she wanted, but 
 he 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 polite 
 ness on the article of his sons-in-law. Ought not 
 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 sub 
 ject came up in George Flack s presence, the old 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 129 
 
 man said he would go round if Mr. Flack would 
 accompany him. " All right ! " said Mr. Flack, 
 and this conception became a reality, with the 
 accidental abatement that the objects of the de 
 monstration were absent. " Suppose they get in ? " 
 Delia had said lugubriously to her sister. 
 
 ".Well, what if they do ? " Francie asked. 
 
 " Why, the count and the marquis won t be 
 interested in Mr. Flack." 
 
 "Well then, perhaps he will be interested in 
 them. He can write something about them. 
 They will like that." 
 
 " Do you think they would ? " Delia demanded, 
 in solemn dubiousness. 
 
 " Why, yes, if he should say fine things." 
 
 " They do like fine things," said Delia. " They 
 get off so many themselves. Only the way Mr. 
 Flack does it it s a different style." 
 
 t( Well, people like to be praised in any style." 
 
 " That s so," Delia rejoined, musingly. 
 
 One afternoon, coming in about three o clock, 
 Mr. Flack found Francie alone. She had ex 
 pressed a wish, after luncheon, for a couple of 
 hours of independence : she intended to write to 
 Gaston, and having accidentally missed a post 
 promised herself that her letter should be of 
 double its usual length. Her companions re 
 spected her desire for solicitude, Mr. Dosson taking 
 himself off to his daily session in the reading-room 
 of the American bank and Delia (the girls had 
 
 K 
 
130 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 now a luxurious coach at their command) 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 in address 
 ing her lover had a painful sense of literary re 
 sponsibility. Her father and Delia had a theory 
 that when she shut herself up that way she poured 
 forth wonderful pages it was part of her high 
 cultivation. At any rate, when George Flack was 
 ushered in she was still bending over her blotting- 
 book on one of the gilded tables and there was an 
 inkstain on her pointed forefinger. It was no dis 
 loyalty to Gaston but only at the most a sense of 
 weariness in regard to the epistolary form that 
 made her glad to see her visitor. She didn t know 
 how to finish her letter ; but Mr. Flack seemed in 
 
 a manner to terminate it. 
 
 " I wouldn t have ventured to propose this, but I 
 
 guess I can do with it, now it s come," the young 
 
 man announced. 
 
 " 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 ? " 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 131 
 
 " You ought to understand, when I say some 
 thing magnanimous." 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 en 
 couragement to free pleasantry, so that if Mr. Flack 
 continued his inquiries it was in a guarded and 
 respectful manner. He was eminently capable of 
 reflecting that it was not in his interest to strike 
 her as indiscreet and profane , he only wanted to 
 appear friendly, worthy of confidence. At the 
 same time he was not averse to the idea that she 
 should still perceive in him a certain sense of in 
 jury, and that could be indicated only by a touch 
 of bitterness here and there. The injury, the 
 bitterness might make her pity him. " Well, you 
 are in the grand monde, I suppose/ he resumed at 
 last, not with an air of derision but resignedly, 
 sympathetically. 
 
 " Oh, I m not in anything ; I m just where I ve 
 always been." 
 
 " I m sorry ; I hoped you would tell me about 
 it," said Mr. Flack, gravely. 
 
 " You think too much of that. What do you 
 want to know about it for ? " 
 
 " Dear Miss Francie, a poor devil of a journalist 
 who has to get his living by studying up things, 
 he has to think too much, sometimes, in order to 
 
 K 2 
 
132 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 think, or at any rate to do, enough. We find out 
 what we can as we can." 
 
 Francie listened to this as if it had had 
 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, and I listen and watch and make my profit 
 of it. I hoped you would have something to tell. 
 I don t believe but what you ve seen a good deal 
 of new life. You won t pretend they haven t 
 roped you in, charming as you are." 
 
 " Do you mean if they ve been kind to me ? 
 They ve been very kind," Francie said. " 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," the girl went on. " You can t 
 resist them, really ; they have such lovely ways." 
 
 "I should like to hear you talk about their 
 ways," her companion observed, after a silence. 
 
 "Oh, I could talk 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 ? " 
 
 " You re foolish if you do, and you would be 
 foolish to say it again," Francie replied. 
 
 " Oh, I don t want to say anything, I ve had my 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 133 
 
 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 trans 
 formations, their adventures ? Especially a person 
 like me, who has got to know life who has got 
 to know the world." 
 
 " Do you mean to say I could teach you about 
 life ? " Francie demanded. 
 
 " About some kinds, certainly. You know a 
 lot of people whom it s difficult to get at unless 
 one takes some extraordinary measures, as you 
 have done." 
 
 " What do you mean ? What measures have I 
 taken ? " 
 
 " Well, they have to get hold of you and it s 
 the same thing. Pouncing on you, to secure you ; 
 I call that energetic, and don t you think I ought 
 to know ? " asked Mr. Flack, smiling. " I thought 
 / was energetic, but they got ahead of me. 
 They re a society apart, and they must be very 
 curious." 
 
 " Yes, they re curious," Francie admitted, with a 
 little sigh. Then she inquired : " Do you want to 
 put them in the paper ? " 
 
134 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 George Flack hesitated a moment ; 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 a certain particular way. If I can t get it in 
 the shape I like it I don t want it at all ; genuine, 
 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 repeated ; and above 
 all I don t want to print it. There s plenty of 
 that flowing in, and the best part of the job is to 
 keep it out. People just yearn to come in; they re 
 dying to, 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 le something ! " 
 
 " We sometimes see the Reverberator ; you have 
 some fine pieces," Francie replied. 
 
 " Sometimes, only ? Don t they send it to your 
 father 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. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR, 135 
 
 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 is so changed." 
 
 "Are you the proprietor of the paper now ? " 
 the girl went on, determined not to notice this 
 sentimental allusion. 
 
 " What do you care ? It wouldn t even be 
 delicate in me to tell you ; for I do remember the 
 way you said you would try and get your father to 
 help me. Don t say you ve forgotten it, because 
 you almost made me cry. Any way, 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 whisper once in 
 a w hile c Courage, courage ; you ll come out all 
 right. You see I m a working man and I don t 
 pretend to be anything else," Mr. Flack 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 tmvailleur, as they say here. I rejoice 
 in it ; but there is one dark spot in it, all the 
 same." 
 
 " And what is that ? " asked Francie. 
 " That it makes you ashamed of me." 
 
13G THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Oh, how can you say ? " And she got up, as 
 if a sense of oppression, of vague discomfort, 
 had come over her. Her visitor made her 
 fidgety. 
 
 " 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 
 he stood there looking at her with his bright eyes, 
 with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. As 
 she hesitated he continued, " Then I m not such 
 a friend after all." 
 
 Francie rested her eyes for a moment on the 
 carpet ;- then, raising them " Where should 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 in case he should take a fancy 
 to change it. But I hope he won t change it it s 
 so pretty as it is ! " Francie declared, smiling. 
 
 " 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." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 137 
 
 "Why, I thought you went everywhere into 
 the palaces of kings ! " Francie cried. 
 
 " I go where I m welcome, not where I m not. 
 I don t want to push into that studio _ alone ; he 
 doesn t like me. Oh, you needn t protest," the 
 young man went on ; " if one is sensitive one is 
 sensitive. 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 am afraid she said " hadn t have been " " I 
 never would have sat to him." 
 
 Mr. Flack smiled at her in silence for an instant. 
 " If it hadn t been for me I think you never would 
 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 
 have 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 
 sha n t be afraid to go in, for you have a right to 
 take any one you like to see your picture. It s 
 always done." 
 
 "Oh, the day you re afraid, Mr. Flack! 
 Francie exclaimed, laughing. She had been 
 much struck by his reminder of what they all 
 
138 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 owed him ; for he truly had been their initiator, 
 the instrument, under providence, that had opened 
 a great new interest to them, and it shocked her 
 generosity, the intimation that he saw himself 
 cast off or disavowed after the prize was gained. 
 Her mind had not lingered on her personal in 
 debtedness 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 acknowledgment. It had the effect that simpli 
 fication always has, it raised her spirits, made her 
 merry. 
 
 " Of course I must be quite square with you," 
 the young man said. " 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/ 
 
 " J espere lien ! " 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 lie likes it or not. If 
 you like it, that s the principal thing." 
 
 " Oh, I shall be awfully proud." 
 
 " I shall speak of you personally I shall say 
 you are the prettiest girl that has ever come over." 
 
 " You may say what you like," Francie rejoined. 
 " It will be immense fun to be in the newspapers. 
 Come for me at this hour day after to-morrow." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 139 
 
 " You re too kind," said George Flack, taking up 
 his hat. He smoothed it down a moment, with 
 his glove ; then he said " I wonder if you will 
 mind our going alone ? " 
 
 "Alone?" 
 
 " I mean just you and me." 
 
 " Oh, don t you be afraid ! Father and Delia 
 have seen it about thirty times." 
 
 " That will be delightful, then. And it will 
 help me to feel, more than anything else could 
 make me do, that we are still old friends. I ll 
 come at 3.15," Mr. Flack went on, but without 
 even yet taking his departure. He asked two 
 or three questions about the hotel, whether it 
 were as good as last year and there were 
 many people in it and they could keep their 
 rooms warm ; then, suddenly, in a different 
 order and scarcely waiting for the girl s answer, he 
 said : " And now, for instance, are they very 
 bigoted? That s one of the things I should 
 like to know." 
 
 "Very bigoted?" 
 
 "Ain t they tremendous Catholics always 
 talking about the Holy Father, and that sort of 
 thing? I mean Mr. Probe rt, the old gentleman," 
 Mr. Flack added. " And those ladies, and all the 
 rest of them." 
 
 " They are very religious," said Francie. " They 
 are the most religious people I ever saw. They 
 just adore the Holy Father. They know him 
 
140 THE KEVERBERATOK. 
 
 personally quite well. They are always going 
 down to Rome." 
 
 " And do they mean to introduce you to him ? " 
 
 " How do you mean, to introduce me ? " 
 
 " Why, to make you a Catholic, to take you 
 also down to Rome." 
 
 " Oh, we are going to Rome for our voyage de 
 noces!" said Francie, gaily. "Just for. a peep." 
 
 "And "won t you have to have a Catholic 
 marriage ? They won t consent to a Protestant 
 one." 
 
 " We are going to have a lovely one, just like 
 one that Mme. de Brecourt took me to see at 
 the Madeleine." 
 
 " And will it be at the Madeleine too ? " 
 
 " Yes, unless we have it at Notre Dame." 
 
 " And how will your father and sister like that ? " 
 
 " Our having it at Notre Dame ? " 
 
 "Yes, or at the Madeleine. Your not having 
 it at the American church." 
 
 "Oh, Delia wants it at the best place," said 
 Francie, simply. Then she added : " And you 
 know father ain t much on religion." 
 
 " Well now, that s what I call a genuine fact, 
 the sort I was talking about," Mr. Flack replied. 
 Whereupon he at last took himself off, repeating 
 that he would come in two days later, at 3.15 
 sharp. 
 
 Francie gave an account of his visit to her 
 sister, on the return of the latter young lady, and 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 141 
 
 mentioned the agreement they had come to in 
 relation to the drive. Delia, at this, looked grave, 
 asseverating that she didn t know that it was right 
 (" as " it was right, Delia usually said,) that Francie 
 should be so intimate with other gentlemen 
 after she was engaged. 
 
 "Intimate? You wouldn t think it s very 
 intimate if you were to see me ! " cried Francie, 
 laughing. 
 
 " I m sure I don t want to see you," Delia 
 declared; and her sister, becoming strenuous, 
 authoritative, went on: " Delia Dosson, do you 
 realise that if it hadn t been for Mr. Flack we 
 would never have had that picture, and that if it 
 hadn t been for that picture I should never have 
 got engaged ? " 
 
 "It would have been better if you hadn t, if 
 that s the way you are going to behave. Nothing 
 would induce me to go with you." 
 
 This was what suited Francie ; but she was 
 nevertheless struck by Delia s rigidity. " I m only 
 going to take him to see Mr. Waterlow," she 
 explained. 
 
 " Has he become all of a sudden too shy to go 
 alone ? " 
 
 " Well, you know Mr. Waterlow doesn t like 
 him and he has made him feel it. You know 
 Gaston told us so." 
 
 " He told us he couldn t bear him : that s what 
 he told us," said Delia. 
 
142 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 "All the more reason I should be kind to him. 
 Why, Delia, do realise," Francie went on. 
 
 " That s just what I do," returned the elder girl; 
 " but things that are very different from those you 
 want me to. You have queer reasons." 
 
 " I have others too that you may like better. 
 He wants to put a piece in the paper about it." 
 
 * About your picture ? " 
 
 " Yes, and about me. All about the whole 
 thing." 
 
 Delia stared a moment. " Well, I hope it will 
 be a good one ! " she said with a little sigh of 
 resignation, as if she were accepting the burden of 
 a still larger fate. 
 
X. 
 
 WHEN Francie, two days later, passed with Mr. 
 Flack into Charles Waterlow s studio she found 
 Mme. de Cliche before the great canvas. She was 
 pleased by every sign that the Proberts took an 
 interest in her, and this was a considerable 
 symptom, Gaston s second sister s coming all that 
 way (she lived over by the Invalides) to look at the 
 portrait once more. Francie knew she had seen it 
 at an earlier stage ; the work had excited curiosity 
 and discussion among the Proberts from the first of 
 their making her acquaintance and they went into 
 considerations about it which had not occurred to 
 the original and her companions frequently 
 (as we know) as these good people had conversed 
 on the subject. Gaston had told her that opinions 
 differed much in the family as to the merit of 
 the work and that Margaret, precisely, had gone 
 so far as to say that it might be a masterpiece 
 of tone but it didn t make her look like a lady. 
 His father on the other hand had no objection to 
 
144 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 offer to the character in which it represented her 
 but he didn t think it well painted. " Eegardez- 
 moi pa, ct $a, et $a> je vous demande I " he had 
 exclaimed, making little dashes at the canvas, to 
 ward spots that appeared to him eccentric, with his 
 glove, on occasions when the artist was not at 
 hand. The Proberts always fell into French when 
 they spoke on a question of art. " Poor dear papa, 
 he only understands le vicux jeu ! " Gaston had ex 
 plained, and he had still further to expound what 
 he meant by the old game. The novelty of Charles 
 Waterlow s game had already been a mystifica 
 tion to Mr. Probert. 
 
 Francie remembered now (she had forgotten it) 
 that Margaret de Cliche had told her she meant 
 to come again. She hoped the marquise thought 
 by this time that, on canvas at least, she looked 
 a little more like a lady. Mme. de Cliche smiled 
 at her at any rate and kissed her, as if in fact 
 there could be no mistake. She smiled also at Mr. 
 Flack, on Francie s introducing him, and only 
 looked grave when, after she had asked where the 
 others were the papa and the yrandcsoeur the girl 
 replied that she hadn t the least idea : her party 
 consisted only of herself and Mr. Flack. Then Mme. 
 de Cliche became very stern indeed assumed an 
 aspect that brought back Francie s sense that she 
 was the individual, among all Gaston s belongings, 
 who had pleased her least from the first. Mme. 
 de Douves was superficially more formidable but 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 145 
 
 with her the second impression was most com 
 forting. It was just this second impression of 
 the marquise that was not. There were perhaps 
 others behind it but the girl had not yet arrived 
 at them. Mr. Waterlow might not have been 
 very fond of Mr. Flack, but he was none the less 
 perfectly civil to him, and took much trouble to 
 show him all the work that he had in hand, drag 
 ging out canvases, changing lights, taking him off 
 to see things at the other end of the great room. 
 While the two gentlemen were at a distance 
 Mme. de Cliche expressed to Francie the con 
 fidence that she would allow her to see her home : 
 on which/ Francie replied that she was not going 
 home, she was going somewhere else with Mr. 
 Flack. And she explained, as if it simplified the 
 matter, that this gentleman was an editor. 
 
 Her interlocutress echoed the term and Francie 
 developed her explanation. He was not the only 
 editor, but one of the many editors, of a great 
 American paper. He was going to publish an 
 article about her picture. Gaston knew him 
 perfectly; it was Mr. Flack who had been the 
 cause of Gaston s being presented to her. Mme. de 
 Cliche looked across at him as if the inadequacy 
 of the cause projected an unfavourable light upon 
 the effect ; she inquired whether Francie thought 
 Gaston would like her to drive about Paris alone 
 with an editor. " I m sure I don t know. I never 
 asked him ! " said Francie. " He ought to want 
 
14G THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 me to be polite to a person who did so much for 
 us." Soon after this Mme. de Cliche withdrew, 
 without looking afresh at Mr. Flack, though he 
 stood in her path as she approached the door. 
 She did not kiss our young lady again, and the 
 girl observed that her leave-taking consisted of 
 the simple words, "Adieu, mademoiselle." She 
 had already perceived that in proportion as the Pro- 
 berts became majestic they had recourse to French. 
 
 She and Mr. Flack remained in the studio 
 but a short time longer; and when they were 
 seated in the carriage again, at the door (they 
 had come in Mr. Dosson s open landau), her com 
 panion said, " And now where shall we go ? " 
 He spoke as if on their way from the hotel he 
 had not touched upon the pleasant vision of a 
 little turn in the Bois. He had insisted then 
 that the day was made on purpose, the air full 
 of spring. At present he seemed to wish to give 
 himself the pleasure of making his companion 
 choose that particular alternative. But she only 
 answered, rather impatiently: 
 
 " Wherever you like, wherever you like." And 
 she sat there swaying her parasol, looking about 
 her, giving no order. 
 
 " Au Bois," said George Flack to the coachman, 
 leaning back on the soft cushions. For a few 
 moments after the carriage had taken its easy 
 elastic start they were silent; but presently he 
 went on, " Was that lady one of your relations ? " 
 
THE EEVEEBEEATOE. 147 
 
 " Do you mean one of Mr. Probert s ? She is 
 his sister." 
 
 " Is there any particular reason in that why 
 she shouldn t say good-morning to me ? " 
 
 " She didn t want you to remain with me. She 
 wanted to carry me off." 
 
 " What has she got against me ? " asked Mr. 
 Flack. 
 
 Francie seemed to consider a little. "Oh, it s 
 these French ideas." 
 
 " Some of them are very base," said her 
 companion. 
 
 The girl made no rejoinder; she only turned 
 her eyes to right and left, admiring the splendid 
 day, the shining city. The great architectural 
 vista was fair : the tall houses, with their 
 polished shop-fronts, their balconies, their signs 
 with accented letters, seemed to make a glitter 
 of gilt and crystal as they rose into the sunny air. 
 The colour of everything was cool and pretty and 
 the sound of everything gay ; the sense of a 
 costly spectacle was everywhere. "Well, I like 
 Paris, anyway ! " Francie exclaimed at last. 
 
 " It s lucky for you, since you ve got to live 
 here." 
 
 "I haven t got to, there s no obligation. We 
 haven t settled anything about that." 
 
 " Hasn t that lady settled it for you ? " 
 
 " Yes, very likely she has," said Francie, placidly. 
 " I don t like her so well as the others." 
 
 L 2 
 
148 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 "You like the others very much?" 
 
 " Of course I do. So would you if they had 
 made so much of you." 
 
 " That one at the studio didn t make much of 
 me, certainly." 
 
 "Yes, she s the most haughty," said Francie. 
 
 "Well, what is it all about?" Mr. Flack in 
 quired. " Who are they, anyway ? " 
 
 "Oh, it would take me three hours to tell 
 you," the girl replied, laughing. " They go back 
 a thousand years." 
 
 "Well, we ve got a thousand years I mean 
 three hours." And George Flack settled himself 
 more on his cushions and inhaled the pleasant 
 air. "I do enjoy this drive, Miss Francie," he 
 went on. "It s many a day since I ve been to 
 the Bois. I don t fool round much among the 
 trees." 
 
 Francie replied candidly that for her too the 
 occasion was very agreeable, and Mr. Flack pursued, 
 looking round him with a smile, irrelevantly 
 and cheerfully: "Yes, these French ideas! I 
 don t see how you can stand them. Those they 
 have about young ladies are horrid." 
 
 " Well, they tell me you like them better after 
 you are married." 
 
 "Why, after they are married they re worse 
 I mean the ideas. Every one knows that." 
 
 "Well, they can make you like anything, the 
 way they talk," Francie said. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 149 
 
 " And do they talk a great deal ? " 
 
 " Well, I should think so. They don t do much 
 else, and they talk about the queerest things 
 things I never heard of." 
 
 "Ah, that I ll engage!" George Flack 
 exclaimed. 
 
 " Of course I have had most conversation with 
 Mr. Probert." 
 
 " The old gentleman ? " 
 
 " No, very little with him. I mean with Gaston. 
 But it s not he that has told me most it s Mme. 
 de Brecourt. She relates and relates it s very 
 interesting. She has told me all their histories, all 
 their troubles and complications." 
 
 " Complications ? " 
 
 " That s what she calls them. It seems very 
 different from America. It s just like a story 
 they have such strange feelings. But there are 
 things you can see without being told." 
 
 " What sort of things ? " 
 
 "Well, like Mme. de Cliche s " But Francie 
 paused, as if for a word. 
 
 " Do you mean her complications ? " 
 
 " Yes, and her husband s She has terrible ones. 
 That s why one must forgive her if she is rather 
 peculiar. She is very unhappy." 
 
 " Do you mean through her husband ? " 
 "Yes, he likes other ladies better. He flirts 
 with Mme. de Brives." 
 "Mme. de Brives?" 
 
150 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 "Yes, she s lovely," said Francie. "She isn t 
 very young, but she s fearfully attractive. And he 
 used to go every day to have tea with Mme. de 
 Villepreux. Mme. de Cliche can t bear Mme. de 
 Villepreux." 
 
 " Lord, what a low character he must be ! " 
 George Flack exclaimed. 
 
 " Oh, his mother was very bad. That was one 
 thing they had against the marriage." 
 " Who had ? against what marriage ? " 
 " When Maggie Probert became engaged." 
 "Is that what they call her Maggie?" 
 "Her brother does; but every one else calls 
 her Margot. Old Mme. de Cliche had a horrid 
 reputation. Every one hated her." 
 
 "Except those, I suppose, who liked her too 
 much. And who is Mme. de Villepreux?" 
 " She s the daughter of Mme. de Marignac." 
 " And who is Mme. de Marignac ? " 
 " Oh, she s dead," said Francie. " She used to be 
 a great friend of Mr. Probert of Gaston s father." 
 " He used to go to tea with her ? " 
 " Almost every day. Susan says he has never 
 been the same since her death." 
 
 " Ah, poor man ! And who is Susan ? " 
 "Why, Mme. de Brecourt. Mr. Probert just 
 loved Mme. de Marignac. Mme. de Villepreux 
 isn t so nice as her mother. She was brought 
 up with the Proberts, like a sister, and now she 
 carries on with Maxime." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 "With Maxime?" 
 "That s M. de Cliche." 
 
 "Oh, I see I see!" murmured George Flack, 
 responsively. They had reached the top of the 
 Champs Elyse es and were passing below the 
 wondrous arch to which that gentle eminence 
 forms a pedestal and which looks down even on 
 splendid Paris from its immensity and across 
 at the vain mask of the Tuileries and the river- 
 moated Louvre and the twin towers of Notre 
 Dame, painted blue by the distance. The con 
 fluence of carriages a sounding stream, in which 
 our friends become engaged rolled into the large 
 avenue leading to the Bois de Boulogne. Mr. 
 Flack evidently enjoyed the scene ; he gazed about 
 him at their neighbours, at the villas and gardens 
 on either hand ; he took in the prospect of the 
 far-stretching brown boskages and smooth alleys 
 of the wood, of the hour that they had yet to 
 spend there, of the rest of Francie s artless prattle, 
 of the place near the lake where they could alight 
 and walk a little ; even of the bench where they 
 might sit down. " I see, I see," he repeated with 
 appreciation. " You make me feel quite as if I 
 were in the grand monde." 
 
XI. 
 
 ONE day, at noon, shortly before the time for 
 which Gaston had announced his return, a note was 
 brought to Francie from Mme. de Brecourt. It 
 caused her some agitation, though it contained a 
 clause intended to guard her against vain fears. 
 " Please come to me the moment you have received 
 this I have sent the carriage. I will explain 
 when you get here what I want to see you about. 
 Nothing has happened to Gaston. We are all 
 here." The coupe from the Place Beauvau was 
 waiting at the door of the hotel and the girl had 
 but a hurried conference with her father and sister ; 
 if conference it could be called in which vagueness 
 on one side encountered blankness on the other. 
 " It s for something bad something bad," Francie 
 said, while she tied her bonnet ; though she was 
 unable to think what it could be. Delia, who 
 looked a good deal scared, offered to accompany 
 her ; upon which Mr. Dosson made the first remark 
 of a practical character in which he had indulged 
 in relation to his daughter s alliance. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 153 
 
 " No you won t no you won t, my dear. They 
 may whistle for Francie, but let them see that they 
 can t whistle for all of us." It was the first sign 
 he had given of being jealous of the dignity of the 
 Dossons. That question had never troubled him. 
 
 " I know what it is," said Delia, while she ar 
 ranged her sister s garments. " They want to talk 
 about religion. They have got the priests ; there s 
 some bishop, or perhaps some cardinal. They want 
 to baptise you." 
 
 " You d better take a waterproof ! " Francie s 
 father called after her as she flitted away. 
 
 She wondered, rolling toward the Place Beauvau, 
 what they were all there for ; that announcement 
 balanced against the reassurance conveyed in the 
 phrase about Gaston. She liked them individually 
 but in their collective form they made her uneasy. 
 In their family parties there was always something 
 of the tribunal. Mme. de Brecourt came out to 
 meet her in the vestibule, drawing her quickly into 
 a small room (not the salon Francie knew it as 
 her hostess s "own room," a lovely boudoir), in 
 which, considerably to the girl s relief, the rest of 
 the family were not assembled. Yet she guessed 
 in a moment that they were near at hand they 
 were waiting. Susan looked flushed and strange ; 
 she had a queer smile ; she kissed her as if she 
 didn t know that she was doing it. She laughed as 
 she greeted her, but her laugh was nervous; she 
 was different every way from anything Francie had 
 
154 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 hitherto seen. By the time our young lady had 
 perceived these things she was sitting beside her on 
 a sofa and Mine, de Brecourt had her hand, which 
 she held so tight that it almost hurt her. Susan s 
 eyes were in their nature salient, but on this oc 
 casion they seemed to have started out of her head. 
 
 " We are upside down terribly agitated. A 
 bomb has fallen into the house." 
 
 "What s the matter what s the matter ? " Francie 
 asked, pale, with parted lips. She had a sudden 
 wild idea that Gaston might have found out in 
 America that her father had no money, had lost it 
 all ; that it had been stolen during their long 
 absence. But would he cast her off for that ? 
 
 "You must understand the closeness of our 
 union with you from our sending for you this way 
 the first, the only person in a crisis. Our joys 
 are your joys and our indignations are yours." 
 
 " What is the matter, please ? " the girl repeated. 
 Their "indignations" opened up a gulf; it 
 flashed upon her, with a shock of mortification 
 that the idea had not come sooner, that something 
 would have come out : a piece in the paper, from 
 Mr. Flack, about her portrait and even (a little) 
 about herself. But that was only more mystify 
 ing; for certainly Mr. Flack could only have 
 published something pleasant something to be 
 proud of. Had he by some incredible perversity 
 or treachery stated that the picture was bad, 
 or even that she was ? She grew dizzy, remember- 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 155 
 
 ing how she had refused him and how little he 
 had liked it, that day at Saint-Germain. But they 
 had made that up over and over, especially 
 when they sat so long on a bench together (the 
 time they drove,) in the Bois de Boulogne. 
 
 " Oh, the most awful thing ; a newspaper sent 
 this morning from America to my father contain 
 ing two horrible columns of vulgar lies and scandal 
 about our family, about all of us, about you, 
 about your picture, about poor Marguerite, call 
 ing her M argot/ about Maxime and Leonie de 
 Villepreux, saying he s her lover, about all our 
 affairs, about Gaston, about your marriage, about 
 your sister and your dresses and your dimples, about 
 our darling father, whose history it professes 
 to relate, in the most ignoble, the most revolting 
 terms. Papa s in the most awful state ! " said Mme. 
 de Brecourt, panting to take breath. She had spoken 
 with the volubility of horror and passion. " You 
 are outraged with us and you must suffer with 
 us," she went on. " But who has done it ? Who 
 has done it ? Who has done it ? >? 
 
 " Why, Mr. Flack Mr. Flack ! " Francie quickly 
 replied. She was appalled, overwhelmed ; but 
 her foremost feeling was the wish not to appear 
 to disavow her knowledge. 
 
 " Mr. Flack ? do you mean that awful person? 
 He ought to be shot, he ought to be burnt 
 alive. Maxime will kill him, Maxime is in an 
 unspeakable rage. Everything is at end, we have 
 
156 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 been served up to the rabble, we shall have to 
 leave Paris. How could he know such things ? 
 and they are all too infamously false ! " The poor 
 woman poured forth her trouble in questions and 
 contradictions and groans ; she knew not what 
 to ask first, against what to protest. " Do you 
 mean that person Marguerite saw you with at Mr. 
 Waterlow s ? Oh, Francie, what has happened ? 
 She had a feeling then, a dreadful foreboding. 
 She saw you afterwards walking with him 
 in the Bois." 
 
 " Well, I didn t see her," the girl said. 
 
 "You were talking with him you were too 
 absorbed : that s what Margot says. Oh, Francie, 
 Francie ! " cried Mme. de Brecourt, catching her 
 breath. 
 
 "She tried to interfere at the studio, but I 
 wouldn t let her. He s an old friend a friend 
 of my father s, and I like him very much. What 
 my father allows, that s not for others to criticise ! " 
 Francie continued. She was frightened, extremely 
 frightened, at her companion s air of tragedy and 
 at the dreadful consequences she alluded to, con 
 sequences of an act she herself did not know, could 
 not comprehend nor measure yet. But there was 
 an instinct of bravery in her which threw her into de 
 fence defence even of George Flack, though it was 
 a part of her consternation that on her too he should 
 have practised a surprise, a sort of selfish deception. 
 
 " Oh, how can you bear with such wretches 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 157 
 
 how can your father ? What devil has he 
 
 paid to tattle to him ? " 
 
 " You scare me awfully you terrify me," said 
 the girl. " I don t know what you are talking 
 ahout. I haven t seen it, I don t understand it. 
 Of course I have talked to Mr. Flack." 
 
 " Oh, Francie, don t say it don t say it ! Dear 
 child, you haven t talked to him in that fashion : 
 vulgar horrors, and such a language ! " Mme. de 
 Bre court came nearer, took both her hands now, 
 drew her closer, seemed to plead with her. " You 
 shall see the paper ; they have got it in the other 
 room the most disgusting sheet. Margot is reading 
 it to her husband ; he can t read English, if you can 
 call it English : such a style ! Papa tried to translate 
 it to Maxiine, but he couldn t, he was too sick. 
 There is a quantity about Mme. de Marignac 
 imagine only ! And a quantity about Jeanne and 
 Raoul and their economies in the country. When 
 they see it in Brittany heaven preserve us ! " 
 
 Francie had turned very white ; she looked for 
 a minute at the carpet. " And what does it say 
 about me ? " 
 
 " Some trash about your being the great 
 American beauty, with the most odious details, 
 and your having made a match among the rare 
 old exclusives. And the strangest stulf about 
 your father his having gone into a store at 
 the age of twelve. And something about your 
 poor sister heaven help us ! And a sketch of our 
 
158 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 career in Paris, as they call it, and the way that 
 we have got on and our great pretensions. And a 
 passage about Blanche de Douves, Raoul s sister, 
 who had that disease what do they call it ? 
 that she used to steal things in shops : do you see 
 them reading that ? And how did he know such 
 a thing ? it s ages ago it s dead and buried ! " 
 "You told me, you told me yourself," said 
 Francie, quickly. She turned red the instant she 
 had spoken. 
 
 " Don t say it s you don t, don t, my darling ! " 
 cried Mme. de Brecourt, who had stared at her a 
 moment. " That s what I want, that s what you 
 must do, that s what I see you this way for, 
 first, alone. I ve answered for you, you know ; 
 you must repudiate every responsibility. Margot 
 suspects you she has got that idea she has 
 given it to the others. I have told them they 
 ought to be ashamed, that it s an outrage to you. 
 I have done everything, for the last hour, to 
 protect you. I m your godmother, you know, and 
 you mustn t disappoint me. You re incapable, 
 and you must say so, face to face, to my father. 
 Think of Gaston, cherie ; he will have seen it over 
 there, alone, far from us all. Think of his horror 
 and of his faith, of what he would expect of you." 
 Mme. de Brecourt hurried on, and her companion s 
 bewilderment deepened on seeing that the tears 
 had risen to her eyes and were pouring down her 
 cheeks. "You must say to my father, face 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 159 
 
 to face that you are incapable you are stain 
 less." 
 
 " Stainless ? " Francie repeated. " Of course I 
 knew he wanted to write a piece about the picture 
 and about my marriage." 
 
 "About your marriage of course you knew. 
 Then, wretched girl, you are at the bottom of all ! " 
 wailed Mme. de Brecourt, flinging herself away 
 from her, falling back on the sofa, covering her 
 face with her hands. 
 
 "He told me he told me when I went with 
 him to the studio!" Francie declared, passion 
 ately. "But he has printed more." 
 
 " More ? I should think so ! " And Mme. de 
 Brecourt sprang up, standing before her. "And 
 you let him about yourself? You gave him 
 facts ? " 
 
 "I told him I told him I don t know what. 
 It was for his paper he wants everything. It s 
 a very fine paper." 
 
 "A very fine paper?" Mme. de Brecourt 
 stared, with parted lips. " Have you seen, have 
 you touched the hideous sheet ? Ah, my brother, 
 my brother!" she wailed again, turning away. 
 
 " If your brother were here you wouldn t talk 
 to me this way he would protect me ! " cried 
 Francie, on her feet, seizing her little muff and 
 moving to the door. 
 
 "Go away, go away or they ll kill you!" 
 Mme. de Brecourt went on, excitedly. " After all 
 
160 THE BEVERBERATOR, 
 
 I have done for you after the way I have lied 
 for yon ! " And she sobbed, trying to repress her 
 sobs. 
 
 Francie, at this, broke out into a torrent of tears. 
 " I ll go home. Father, father ! " she almost shrieked, 
 reaching the door. 
 
 " Oh, your father he has been a nice father, 
 bringing you up in such ideas ! " These words 
 followed her with infinite scorn, but almost as 
 Mme. de Brecourt uttered them, struck by a sound, 
 she sprang after the girl, seized her, drew her 
 back and held her a moment, listening, before 
 she could pass out. " Hush hush they are com 
 ing in here, they are too anxious ! Deny deny 
 it say you know nothing! Your sister must 
 have said things and such things: say it all 
 comes from her!" 
 
 "Oh, you dreadful is that what you do?" 
 cried Francie, shaking herself free. The door 
 opened as she spoke and Mme. de Brecourt 
 walked quickly to the window, turning her back. 
 Mme. de Cliche was there and Mr. Probert and 
 M. de Brecourt and M. de Cliche. They entered 
 in silence and M. de Brecourt, coming last, closed 
 the door softly behind him. Francie had never 
 been in a court of justice, but if she had had that 
 experience these four persons would have reminded 
 her of the jury filing back into their box with their 
 verdict. They all looked at her hard as she stood 
 in the middle of the room ; Mme. de Brecourt gazed 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 161 
 
 out of the window, wiping her eyes ; Mme. de 
 Clich^ grasped a newspaper, crumpled and partly 
 folded. Francie got a quick impression, moving 
 her eyes from one face to another, that old Mr. 
 Probert was the worst; his mi]d, ravaged expres 
 sion was terrible. He was the one who looked at 
 her least; he went to the fireplace and leaned 
 on the mantel, with his head in his hands. He 
 seemed ten years older. 
 
 "Ah, mademoiselle, mademoiselle, mademoi 
 selle!" said Maxime de Cliche, slowly, impressively, 
 in a tone of the most respectful but most poignant 
 reproach. 
 
 " Have you seen it have they sent it to you ? " 
 his wife asked, thrusting the paper towards her. 
 " It s quite at your service ! " But as Francie 
 neither spoke nor took it she tossed it upon the 
 sofa, where, as it opened, falling, the girl read 
 the name of the Reverberator. Mme. de Cliche 
 carried her head very far back. 
 
 " She has nothing to do with it it s just as 
 I told you she s overwhelmed," said Mme. de 
 Brecon rt, remaining at the window. 
 
 " You would do well to read it it s worth the 
 trouble," Alphonse de Brecourt remarked, going- 
 over to his wife. Francie saw him kiss her as 
 he perceived her tears. She was angry at her 
 own ; she choked and swallowed them ; they 
 seemed somehow to put her in the wrong. 
 
 " Have you had no idea that any such mon- 
 
 M 
 
162 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 strosity would be perpetrated ? " Mme. de Cliche 
 went on, coming nearer to her. She had a manner 
 of forced calmness as if she wished it to be un 
 derstood that she was one of those who could be 
 reasonable under any provocation, though she were 
 trembling within which made Francie draw back. 
 " C est pourtant rempli de choses which we know 
 you to have been told of by what folly, great 
 heaven ! It s right and left no one is spared it s 
 a deluge of insult. My sister perhaps will have 
 told you of the apprehensions I had I couldn t 
 resist them, though I thought of nothing so awful 
 as this, God knows, the day I met you at Mr. 
 Waterlow s with your journalist." 
 
 " I have told her everything don t you see she s 
 andantie ? Let her go, let her go ! " exclaimed 
 Mme. de Brecourt, still at the window. 
 
 " Ah, your journalist, your journalist, mademoi 
 selle ! " said Maxime de Cliche, " I am very sorry 
 to have to say anything in regard to any friend of 
 yours that can give you so little pleasure ; but I 
 promise myself the satisfaction of administering 
 him with these hands a dressing he won t forget, 
 if I may trouble you so far as to ask you to Jet 
 him know it ! " 
 
 M. de Cliche fingered the points of liis 
 moustache; he diffused some powerful scent ; his 
 eyes were dreadful to Francie. She wished Mr. 
 Probert would say something kind to her; but she 
 had now determined to be strong. They were ever 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 163 
 
 so many against one ; Gaston was far away and 
 she felt heroic. " If you mean Mr. Flack I don t 
 know what you mean," she said as composedly as 
 possible to M. de Cliche". " Mr. Flack has gone 
 to London." 
 
 At this M. de Brecourt gave a free laugh and 
 his brother-in-law replied, " Ah, it s easy to go 
 to London." 
 
 " They like such things there ; they do them 
 more and more. It s as bad as America 1 " Mme. 
 de Cliche declared. 
 
 " Why have you sent for me what do you all 
 want me to do ? You might explain I am only 
 an American girl ! " said Francie, whose being 
 only an American girl, did not prevent her 
 pretty head from holding itself now as high as 
 Mme. de Cliche s. 
 
 Mme. de Brecourt came back to her quickly, 
 laying her hand on her arm. "You are very 
 nervous you had much better go home. I will 
 explain everything to them I will make them 
 understand. The carriage is here it had orders 
 to wait." 
 
 " I m not in the least nervous, but I have made 
 you all so," Francie replied, laughing. 
 
 " I defend you, my dear young lady I insist 
 that you are only a wretched victim, like ourselves/ 
 M. de Brecourt remarked, approaching her with 
 a smile. "I see the hand of a woman in it, you 
 know," he went on, to the others ; " for there are 
 
 M 2 
 
164 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 strokes of a vulgarity that a man doesn t sink 
 to (he can t, his very organisation prevents him) 
 even if he be the greatest cad on earth. But 
 please don t doubt that I have maintained that 
 that woman is not you." 
 
 "The way you talk I don t know how to 
 write," said Francie. 
 
 " My poor child, when one knows you as I 
 do ! " murmured Mme. de Brecourt, with her arm 
 around her. 
 
 "There s a lady who helps him Mr. Flack 
 has told me so," Francie continued. " She s a 
 literary lady herein Paris she writes what he tells 
 her. I think her name is Miss Topping, but she 
 calls herself Florine or Dorine," Francie added. 
 
 " Miss Dosson, you re too rare ! " Marguerite de 
 Cliche exclaimed, giving a long moan of pain 
 which ended in an incongruous laugh. "Then 
 you have been three to it," she went on ; " that 
 accounts for its perfection ! " 
 
 Francie disengaged herself again from Mme. 
 de Brecourt and went to Mr. Probert, who stood 
 looking down at the fire, with his back to her. 
 " Mr. Probert, I m very sorry at what I ve done to 
 distress you ; I had no idea you would all feel so 
 badly. I didn t mean any harm. I thought you 
 would like it." 
 
 The old man turned a little, bending his eyes 
 on her, but without taking her hand as she had hoped. 
 Usually when they met he kissed her. He did not 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 165 
 
 look angry but he looked very ill. A strange in 
 articulate sound, a kind of exclamation of amaze 
 ment and mirth, came from the others when she 
 said she thought they would like it; and indeed 
 poor Francie was far from being able to judge of 
 the droll effect of that speech " Like it like it ? " 
 said Mr. Probert, staring at her as if he were a 
 little afraid of her. 
 
 " What do you mean ? She admits she admits ! " 
 cried Mine, de Cliche to her sister. " Did you 
 arrange it all that day in the Bois to punish me 
 for having tried to separate you ? " she pursued, 
 to the girl, who stood gazing up piteously at the 
 old man. 
 
 " I don t know what he has published I haven t 
 seen it I don t understand. I thought it was 
 only to be a piece about me." 
 
 " About me ! " M. de Cliche repeated in English. 
 " Elle est divine ! " He turned away, raising his 
 shoulders and hands and then letting them fall. 
 
 Mme. de Brecourt had picked up the news 
 paper ; she rolled it together, saying to Francie that 
 she must take it home, take it home immediately 
 then she would see. She only seemed to wish to 
 get her out of the room. But Mr. Probert had 
 fixed the girl with his sick stare. " You gave 
 information for that ? You desired it ? " 
 
 " Why, I didn t desire it, but Mr. Flack did." 
 
 " Why do you know such ruffians ? Where was 
 your father ? " the old man groaned. 
 
166 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " I thought he would just praise my picture and 
 give pleasure to Mr. Waterlow," Francie went on. 
 " I thought he would just speak about my being 
 engaged and give a little account ; so many people 
 in America would be interested." 
 
 " So many people in America that s just the 
 dreadful thought, my dear," said Mine, de Brecourt^ 
 kindly. " Voyons, put it in your muff and tell us 
 what you think of it." And she continued to 
 thrust forward the scandalous journal. 
 
 But Francie took no notice of it ; she looked 
 round from Mr. Probert at the others. " I told 
 Gaston I should do something you wouldn t 
 like." 
 
 " Well, he ll believe it now ! " cried Mme. de 
 Cliche. 
 
 " My poor child, do you think he will like it any 
 better ? " asked Mme. de Brecourt. 
 
 Francie fastened her eyes on her a moment. 
 " He ll see it over there he has seen it now." 
 
 " Oh, my dear, you ll have news of him. Don t 
 be afraid ! " laughed Mine, de Cliche. 
 
 " Did he send you the paper ? " the girl went on, 
 to Mr. Probert. 
 
 " It was not directed in his hand," said M. de 
 Brecourt. " There was some stamp on the band 
 it came from the office." 
 
 "Mr. Flack is that his hideous name? 
 must have seen to that," Mme. de Brecourt 
 suggested. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 167 
 
 " Or perhaps Florine/ M. de Cliche interposed, 
 " I should like to get hold of Florine." 
 
 " I did I did tell him so ! " Francie repeated, 
 with her innocent face, alluding to her statement 
 of a moment before and speaking as if she 
 thought the circumstance detracted from the 
 offence. 
 
 v So did I so did we all ! " said Mme. de 
 Cliche. 
 
 " And will he surfer as you suffer ? " Francie 
 continued, appealing to Mr. Probert. 
 
 " Suffer, suffer ? He ll die ! " cried the old man. 
 " However, I won t answer for him ; he ll tell you 
 himself, when he returns." 
 
 " He ll die ? " asked Francie, with expanded 
 eyes. 
 
 " He ll never return how can he show him 
 self ? " said Mme. de Cliche. 
 
 " That s not true he ll come back to stand by 
 me ! " the girl flashed out. 
 
 " How could you not feel that we were the last 
 - the very last ? " asked Mr. Probert, very gently. 
 " How could you not feel that my son was the 
 very last ? " 
 
 " C est un sens qui lui manque ! " commented 
 Mme. de Cliche. 
 
 " Let her go, papa do let her go home," 
 Mme. de Brecourt pleaded. 
 
 " Surely. That s the only place for her to-day!" 
 the elder sister continued. 
 
108 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Yes, my child you oughtn t to be here. 
 It s your father he ought to understand/ said 
 Mr. Probert. 
 
 " For God s sake don t send for him let it all 
 stop ! " Mme. de Cliche exclaimed. 
 
 Francie looked at her ; then she said, " Good 
 bye, Mr. Probert good-bye, Susan." 
 
 " Give her your arm take her to the carnage," 
 she heard Mme. de Brecourt say to her husband. 
 She got to the door she hardly knew how she 
 was only conscious that Susan held her once more 
 long enough to kiss her. Poor Susan wanted to 
 comfort her ; that showed how bad (feeling as she 
 did) she believed the whole business would yet be. 
 It would be bad because Gas ton Gaston : Francie 
 did not complete that thought, yet only Gaston 
 was in her mind as she hurried to the carriage. 
 M. de Brecourt hurried beside her ; she would not 
 take his arm. But he opened the door for her 
 and as she got in she heard him murmur strangely, 
 " You are charming, mademoiselle charming, 
 charming ! " 
 
XII. 
 
 HEK absence had not been long and when she 
 re-entered the familiar salon at the hotel she found 
 her father and sister sitting there together as if 
 they were timing her a prey to curiosity and 
 suspense. Mr. Dosson however gave no sign of 
 impatience ; he only looked at her in silence 
 through the smoke of his cigar (he profaned the 
 red satin splendour with perpetual fumes,) as she 
 burst into the room. No other word than the one 
 I use expresses the tell-tale character of poor 
 Francie s ingress. She rushed to one of the tables, 
 flinging down her muff and gloves, and the next 
 moment Delia, who had sprung up as she came in, 
 had caught her in her arms and was glaring into 
 her face with a " Francie Dosson what have you 
 been through ? " Francie said nothing at first, 
 only closing her eyes and letting her sister do what 
 she would with her. "She has been crying, 
 father she has," Delia went on, pulling her down 
 upon a sofa and almost shaking her as she con- 
 
170 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 tirmed. "Will you please tell? I ve been 
 perfectly wild ! Yes you have, you dreadful ! " 
 the elder girl declared, kissing her on the eyes. 
 They opened at this compassionate pressure and 
 Francie rested them in their beautiful distress on 
 her father, who had now risen to his feet and 
 stood with his back to the fire. 
 
 " Why, daughter," said Mr. Dosson, " you look 
 as if you had had quite a worry." 
 
 " I told you I should I told you, I told you ! " 
 Francie broke out, with a trembling voice. " And 
 now it s come ! " 
 
 " You don t mean to say you ve done anything ? " 
 cried Delia, very white. 
 
 " It s all over it s all over ! " Francie pursued, 
 turning her eyes to her sister. 
 
 " Are you crazy. Francie ? " this young lady 
 asked. " I m sure you look as if you were." 
 
 " Ain t you going to be married, my child ? " 
 asked Mr. Dosson, benevolently, coming nearer 
 to her. 
 
 Francie sprang up, releasing herself from her 
 sister, and threw her arms around him. "Will 
 you take me away, father will you take me right 
 away ? " 
 
 " Of course I will, my precious. I ll take you 
 anywhere. I don t want anything it wasn t my 
 idea ! " And Mr. Dosson and Delia looked at 
 each other while the girl pressed her face upon 
 his shoulder. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 171 
 
 " I never heard such trash you can t behave 
 that way ! Has he got engaged to some one else 
 in America ? " Delia demanded. 
 
 "Why, if it s over it s over. I guess it s all 
 right," said Mr. Dosson, kissing his younger 
 daughter. " I ll go back or I ll go on. I ll go 
 anywhere you like ! " 
 
 "You won t have your daughters insulted, I 
 presume I " Delia cried. " If you don t tell me 
 this moment what has happened I ll drive straight 
 round there and find out." 
 
 " Have they insulted you, sweetie ? " asked the 
 old man, bending over the girl, who simply leaned 
 upon him with her hidden face, with no sound of 
 tears. 
 
 Francie raised her head, turning round upon 
 her sister. " Did I ever tell you anything else 
 did I ever believe in it for an hour ? " 
 
 " Oh, well, if you ve done it on purpose to 
 triumph over me we might as well go home, 
 certainly. But I think you had better wait till 
 Gaston comes." 
 
 " It will be worse when he comes if he thinks 
 the same as they do." 
 
 " Have they insulted you have they ? " Mr. 
 Dosson repeated ; while the smoke of his cigar, 
 curling round the question, gave him the air of 
 asking it with placidity. 
 
 " They think I ve insulted them they re in an 
 awful state they re almost dead. Mr. Flack has 
 
172 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 put it into the paper everything, I don t know 
 what and they think it s too fearful. They were 
 all there together all at me at once, groaning and 
 carrying on. I never saw people so affected." 
 
 Delia listened in bewilderment, staring. " So 
 affected ? " 
 
 "Ah, yes, there s a good deal of that," said 
 Mr. Dosson. 
 
 " It s too real too terrible ; you don t under 
 stand. It s all printed there that they re immoral, 
 and everything about them; everything that s 
 private and dreadful." 
 
 " Immoral, is that so ? " Mr. Dosson asked. 
 
 " And about me too, and about Gaston and my 
 marriage, and all sorts of personalities, and all 
 the names, and Mme. de Villepreux, and every 
 thing. It s all printed there and they ve read it. 
 It says that one of them steals." 
 
 " Will you be so good as to tell me what you are 
 talking about ? " Delia inquired, sternly. " Where 
 is it printed and what have we got to do with it ? " 
 
 " Some one sent it, and I told Mr. Flack." 
 
 " Do you mean his paper ? Oh the horrid brute ! " 
 Delia cried, with passion. 
 
 " Do they mind so what they see in the papers ? " 
 asked Mr. Dosson. " I guess they haven t seen 
 what I ve seen. Why, there used to be things 
 about me ! " 
 
 " Well, it is about us too, about every one. They 
 think it s the same as if I wrote it." 
 
THE REVEKBERATOR. 173 
 
 " Well, you know what you could do " said Mr. 
 Dosson, smiling at his daughter. 
 
 " Do you mean that piece about your picture 
 that you told me about when you went with him 
 again to see it ? " Delia asked. 
 
 " Oh, I don t know what piece it is ; I haven t 
 seen it." 
 
 " Haven t seen it ? Didn t they show it to 
 you ? " 
 
 " Yes but I couldn t read it. Mme. de Brecourt 
 wanted me to take it but I left it behind." 
 
 "Well, that s like you like the Tauchnitzes 
 littering up our track. I ll be bound I d see it," 
 said Delia. "Hasn t it coine, doesn t it always 
 come ? " 
 
 "I guess we haven t had the last unless it s 
 somewhere round," said Mr. Dosson. 
 
 " Father, go out and get it you can buy it on 
 the boulevard ! " Delia continued. " Francie, what 
 did you want to tell him ? " 
 
 "I didn t know; I was just conversing; he 
 seemed to take so much interest." 
 
 " Oh, he s a deep one ! " groaned Delia. 
 "Well, if folks are immoral you can t keep it 
 out of the papers and I don t know as you ought 
 to want to," Mr. Dosson remarked. " If they are 
 I m glad to know it, lovey." And he gave his 
 younger daughter a glance apparently intended to 
 show that in this case he should know what 
 to do. 
 
174 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 But Francie was looking at her sister as if her 
 attention had been arrested. " How do you mean 
 a deep one ? " 
 
 " Why, he wanted to break it off, the wretch I " 
 
 Francie stared ; then a deeper flush leapt to her 
 face, in which already there was a look of fever. 
 "To break off my engagement?" 
 
 " Yes, just that. But I ll be hanged if he shall ! 
 Father, will you allow that?" 
 
 " Allow what ? " 
 
 Why Mr. Flack s vile interference. You won t 
 let him do as he likes with us, I suppose, will 
 you ? " 
 
 It s all done it s all done ! " said Francie. The 
 tears had suddenly started into her eyes again. 
 
 " Well, he s so smart that it is likely he s too 
 smart/ said Mr. Dosson. "But what did they 
 want you to do about it ? that s what I want to 
 know." 
 
 " They wanted me to say I knew nothing about 
 it but I couldn t." 
 
 " But you didn t and you don t if you haven t 
 even read it ! " Delia returned. 
 
 " Where is the d d thing ? " her father asked, 
 looking helplessly about him. 
 
 " On the boulevard, at the very first of those 
 kiosks you come to. That old woman has it the 
 one who speaks English she always has it. Do 
 go and get it do ! " And Delia pushed him, 
 looked for his hat for him. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 175 
 
 " I knew he wanted to print something and I 
 can t say I didn t ! " Francie said. " I thought he 
 would praise my portrait and that Mr. Waterlow 
 would like that, and Gaston and every one. And 
 he talked to me about the paper he is always 
 doing that and always was and I didn t see the 
 harm. But even just knowing him they think 
 that s vile." 
 
 " Well, I should hope we can know whom we 
 like ! " Delia declared, jumping in her mystifi 
 cation and alarm from one point of view to 
 another. 
 
 Mr. Dosson had put on his hat he was going 
 out for the paper. " Why, he kept us alive last 
 year," he said. 
 
 " Well, he seems to have killed us now ! " Delia 
 cried. 
 
 " Well, don t give up an old friend," said Mr. 
 Dosson, with his hand on the door. " And don t 
 back down on anything you ve done." 
 
 " Lord, what a fuss about an old newspaper ! " 
 Delia went on, in her exasperation. " It must be 
 about two weeks old, anyway. Didn t they ever 
 see a society-paper before ? " 
 
 : They can t have seen much," said Mr. Dosson. 
 He paused, still with his hand on the door. 
 " Don t you worry Gaston will make it all 
 right." 
 
 " Gaston ? it will kill Gaston ! " 
 
 " Is that what they say ? " Delia demanded. 
 
176 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Gaston will never look at me again." 
 
 " Well, then, he ll have to look at me, said 
 Mr. Dosson. 
 
 " Do you mean that he ll give you up that 
 he ll be so abject ? " Delia went on. 
 
 " They say he s just the one who will feel it most. 
 But I m the one who does that," said Francie, with 
 a strange smile. 
 
 "They re stuffing you with lies because they 
 don t like it. He ll be tender and true," answered 
 Delia, 
 
 " When they hate me ? Never ! " And Francie 
 shook her head slowly, still with her touching 
 smile. " That s what he cared for most to make 
 them like me. " 
 
 " And isn t he a gentleman, I should like to 
 know ? " asked Delia. 
 
 " Yes, and that s why I won t marry him if 
 I ve injured him." 
 
 " Pshaw ! he has seen the papers over there. 
 You wait till he comes," Mr. Dosson enjoined, 
 passing out of the room. 
 
 The girls remained there together and after a 
 moment Delia exclaimed : " Well, he has got to 
 fix it that s one thing I can tell you." 
 
 " Who has got to fix it ? " 
 
 "Why, that villainous man. He has got to 
 publish another piece saying it s all false or all a 
 mistake." 
 
 " Yes, you had better make him," said Francie, 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 177 
 
 with a weak laugh. "You had better go after 
 him down to Nice." 
 
 " You don t mean to say he has gone to 
 Nice ? " 
 
 " Didn t he say he was going there as soon as he 
 came back from London going right through, 
 without stopping ? " 
 
 " I don t know but he did," said Delia. Then 
 she added" The coward ! " 
 
 " Why do you say that ? He can t hide at Nice 
 they can find him there." 
 
 " Are they going after him ? " 
 
 " They want to shoot him to stab him, I don t 
 know what those men." 
 
 " Well, I wish they would," said Delia. 
 
 " They had better shoot me. I shall defend him. 
 I shall protect him," Francie went on. 
 
 " How can you protect him ? You shall never 
 speak to him again." 
 
 Francie was silent a moment. " I can protect 
 him without speaking to him. I can tell the 
 simple truth that he didn t print a word but 
 what I told him." 
 
 "That can t be so. He fixed it up. They 
 always do, in the papers. Well now, he has got 
 to bring out a piece praising them up praising 
 them to the skies : that s what he has got to do ! " 
 Delia declared, with decision. 
 
 " Praising them up ? They ll hate that worse," 
 Francie returned, musingly. 
 
 N 
 
178 THE EEVEBBERATOE. 
 
 Delia stared. " What on earth do they want 
 then ? " 
 
 Francie had sunk upon the sofa ; her eyes were 
 fixed on the carpet. She made no reply to her 
 sister s question but presently she said, " We had 
 better go to-morrow, the first hour that s possible." 
 
 " Go where ? Do you mean to Nice ? " 
 
 " I don t care where. Anywhere, to get away." 
 
 " Before Gaston comes without seeing him ? " 
 
 " I don t want to see him. When they were all 
 ranting and raving at me just now I wished he 
 was there I told them so. But now I feel 
 differently I can never see him again." 
 
 " I don t suppose you re crazy, are you ? " cried 
 Delia. 
 
 "I can t tell him it wasn t me I can t, I 
 can t ! " the younger girl pursued. 
 
 Delia planted herself in front of her. " Francie 
 Dosson, if you re going to tell him you ve done 
 anything wrong you might as well stop before you 
 begin. Didn t you hear what father said ? " 
 
 I m sure I don t know," Francie replied, list 
 lessly. 
 
 " Don t give up an old friend there s nothing 
 on earth so mean. Now isn t Gaston Probert an 
 old friend ? " 
 
 " It will be very simple he will give me up." 
 
 " Then he ll be a low wretch." 
 
 " Not in the least he ll give me up as he took 
 me. He would never have asked me to marry 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 179 
 
 him if he hadn t been able to get them to accept 
 me : he thinks everything in life of them. If they 
 cast me off now he ll do just the same. He il 
 have to choose between us, and when it comes to 
 that he ll never choose me." 
 
 "He ll never choose Mr. Flack, if that s what 
 you mean if you are going to identify yourself 
 so with him ! " 
 
 <c Oh, I wish he d never been born ! " Francie 
 suddenly shivered. And then she added that she 
 was sick she was going to bed, and her sister 
 took her off to her room. 
 
 Mr. Dosson, that afternoon, sitting by Francie s 
 bedside, read out from the copy of the Re 
 verberator which he had purchased on the 
 boulevard the dreadful " piece " to his two 
 daughters. It is a remarkable fact that as a family 
 they were rather disappointed in this compo 
 sition, in which their curiosity found less to repay 
 it than it had expected, their resentment against 
 Mr. Flack less to stimulate it, their imaginative 
 effort to take the point of view of the Proberts 
 less to sustain it, and their acceptance of the 
 promulgation of Francie s innocent remarks as a 
 natural incident of the life of the day less to 
 make them reconsider it. The letter from Paris 
 appeared lively, " chatty," even brilliant, and so 
 far as the personalities contained in it were 
 concerned Mr. Dosson wanted to know if they 
 were not aware over here of the charges brought 
 
 N 2 
 
180 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 every day against the most prominent men in 
 Boston. " If there was anything in that style 
 they might talk," he said ; and he scanned the 
 effusion afresh with a certain surprise at not 
 finding in it some imputation of pecuniary mal 
 versation. The effect of an acquaintance with 
 the text was to depress Delia, who did not exactly 
 see what there was in it to take back or explain 
 away. However, she was aware there were some 
 points they didn t understand, and doubtless these 
 were the scandalous places the things that had 
 thrown the Proberts into a state. But why should 
 they be in a state if other people didn t under 
 stand the allusions they were peculiar, but 
 peculiarly incomprehensible any better than she 
 did ? The whole thing struck Francie as infinitely 
 less lurid than Mme. de Brecourt s account of it, 
 and the part about herself and her portrait seemed 
 to make even less of the subject than it easily 
 might have done. It was scanty, it was " skimpy," 
 and if Mr. Waterlow was offended it would not be 
 because they had published too much about him. 
 If was nevertheless clear to her that there were a 
 lot of things that she had not told Mr. Flack, as well 
 as a great many that she had : perhaps these were 
 the things that that lady had put in Florine or 
 Dorine the one she had mentioned at Mmc. 
 de Brecourt s. 
 
 All the same, if the communication in the Re 
 verberator gave them at the hotel less of a sensa- 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 181 
 
 tion than had been announced and bristled so much 
 less than was to have been feared with explana 
 tions of the anguish of the Proberts, this did not 
 diminish the girl s sense of responsibility nor make 
 the case a whit less grave. It only showed how sensi 
 tive and fastidious the Proberts were and therefore 
 with what difficulty they could forgive. Moreover 
 Francie made another reflection as she lay there for 
 Delia kept her in bed nearly three days, feeling that 
 for the moment at any rate that was an effectual re 
 ply to the wish she had signified that they should 
 leave Paris. Perhaps they had got coarse and callous, 
 Francie said to herself; perhaps they had read so 
 many articles like that that they had lost their deli 
 cacy, the sense of certain differences and decencies. 
 Then, very weak and vague and passive as she was 
 now, in the bedirnmed room, in the soft Parisian bed, 
 and with Delia treating her as much as possible 
 like a sick person, she thought of the lively and 
 chatty letters that they had always seen in the 
 papers and wondered whether they all meant a 
 violation of sanctities, a convulsion of homes, a 
 burning of smitten faces, a rupture of girls engage 
 ments. It was present to her as an agreeable nega 
 tive, I must add, that her father and sister took no 
 strenuous view of her responsibility or of their own : 
 they neither brought the matter up to her as a crime 
 nor made her worse through her feeling that they 
 hovered about in tacit disapproval. There was a 
 pleasant, cheerful helplessness in her father in regard 
 
182 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 to this as in regard to everything else. There could 
 be no more discussion among them on such a ques 
 tion than there had ever been, for none was needed 
 to illustrate the fact that for these candid minds the 
 newspapers and all they contained were a part of 
 the general fatality of things, of the recurrent fresh 
 ness of the universe, coming out like the sun in 
 the morning or the stars at night. The thing that 
 worried Francie most while Delia kept her in bed 
 was the apprehension of what her father might 
 do : but this was not a fear of what he might do 
 to Mr. Flack. He would go round perhaps to Mr. 
 Probert s or to Mme. de Brecourt s to reprimand 
 them for having made things so rough for his 
 " chicken." It was true she had scarcely ever seen 
 him reprimand any one for anything ; but on the 
 other hand nothing like that had ever happened 
 before to her or to Delia. They had made each 
 other cry once or twice but no one else had ever 
 made them, and no one had ever broken out on 
 them that way and frightened them half to death. 
 Francie wanted her father not to go round; she 
 had a sense that those other people had somehow 
 stores of censure, of superiority in any discussion, 
 which he could not command. She wanted nothing 
 done and no communication to pass only a 
 proud, unbickering silence on the part of the 
 Dossons. If the Proberts made a noise and they 
 made none it would be they who would have the 
 best appearance. Moreover, now, with each elaps- 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 183 
 
 ing day she felt that she did wish to see Gaston 
 about it. Her desire was to wait, counting the 
 hours, so that she might just explain, saying two 
 or three things. Perhaps these things would not 
 make it better very likely they would not ; but 
 at any rate nothing would have been done in the 
 interval, at least on her part and her father s and 
 Delia s, to make it worse. She told her father 
 that she should not like him to go round, and 
 she was in some degree relieved at perceiving 
 that he did not seem very clear as to what it was 
 open to him to say to the Proberts. He was not 
 afraid but he was vague. His relation to almost 
 everything that had happened to them as a family 
 for a good while back was a sense of the absence 
 of precedents, and precedents were particularly 
 absent now, for he had never before seen a lot 
 of people in a rage about a piece in the paper. 
 Delia also reassured her; she said she would see 
 to it that their father didn t dash off. She com 
 municated to her indeed that he had not the 
 smallest doubt that Gaston, in a few days, would 
 blow them all up much higher than they had 
 blown her and that he was very sorry he had let 
 her go round on that sort of summons to Mme. 
 de Brecourt s. It was for her and the rest to 
 come to Francie and to him, and if they had 
 anything practical to say they would arrive in a 
 body yet. If Mr. Dosson had the sense of his 
 daughter s having been roughly handled he derived 
 
184 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 some of the consolation of amusement from his 
 persistent humorous view of the Proberts as a 
 , " body." If they were consistent with their char 
 acter or with their complaint they would move 
 en masse upon the hotel, and he stayed at home a 
 good deal, as if he were waiting for them. Delia 
 intimated to her sister that this vision cheered 
 them up as they sat, they two, in the red salon 
 while Francie was in bed. Of course it did not ex 
 hilarate this young lady, and she even looked for 
 no brighter side now. She knew almost nothing 
 but her sharp little ache of suspense, her pre 
 sentiment of Gaston s horror, which grew all the 
 while. Delia remarked to her once that he would 
 have seen lots of society-papers over there, he 
 would have become familiar ; but this only sug 
 gested to the girl (she had strange new moments 
 of quick reasoning at present,) that that really 
 would only prepare him to be disgusted, not to 
 be indifferent. His disgust would be colder than 
 anything she had ever known and would complete 
 her knowledge of him make her understand him 
 properly for the first time. She would just meet 
 it as briefly as possible ; it would finish the busi 
 ness, wind up the episode, and all would be over. 
 He did not write ; that proved it in advance ; 
 there had now been two or three posts without a 
 letter. He had seen the paper in Boston or in 
 New York and it had struck him dumb. It was 
 very well for Delia to say that of course he didn t 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 185 
 
 write when he was on the sea : how could they 
 get his letters even if he did ? There had been 
 time before before he sailed; though Delia 
 represented that people never wrote then. They 
 were ever so much too busy at the last and they 
 were going to see their correspondents in a few 
 days anyway. The only missives that came to 
 Francie were a copy of the Reverberator, 
 addressed in Mr. Flack s hand and with a great 
 inkmark on the margin of the fatal letter, and a 
 long note from Mme. de Brecourt, received forty- 
 eight hours after the scene at her house. This 
 lady expressed herself as follows : 
 
 " MY DEAR FRANCIE, I felt very badly after you had 
 gone yesterday morning, and I had twenty minds to go 
 and see you. But we have talked it over conscientiously 
 and it appears to us that we have no right to take any such 
 step till Gaston arrives. The situation is not exclusively 
 ours but belongs to him as well, and we feel that we ought 
 to make it over to him in as simple and compact a form as 
 possible. Therefore, as we regard it, we had better not 
 touch it (it s so delicate, isn t it, rny poor child ?) but leave 
 it just as it is. They think I even exceed my powers in 
 writing you these simple lines, and that once your partici 
 pation has been c.onstatee (which was the only advantage of 
 that dreadful scene), everything should stop. But I have 
 liked you, Francie, I have believed in you, and I don t 
 wish you to be able to say that in spite of the thunderbolt 
 you have drawn down upon us I have not treated you with 
 tenderness. It is a thunderbolt indeed, my poor and inno 
 cent but disastrous little friend ! We are hearing more of 
 it already the horrible Republican papers here have (as 
 we know) already got hold of the unspeakable sheet and are 
 preparing to reproduce the article : that is such parts of it 
 as they may put forward (with innuendoes and sous-eniendus 
 to eke out the rest) without exposing themselves to a suit 
 for defamation. Poor Leonie de Villepreux has been with 
 
186 THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 us constantly and Jeanne and her husband have telegraphed 
 that we may expect them day after to-morrow. They are 
 evidently immensely emotionnes, for they almost never 
 telegraph. They wish so to receive Gaston. We have 
 determined all the same to be intensely quiet, and that will 
 be sure to be his view. Alphonse and Maxime now 
 recognise that it is best to leave Mr. Flack alone, hard as 
 it is to keep one s hands off him. Have you anything to 
 lui faire dire to my precious brother when he arrives? 
 But it is foolish of me to ask you that, for you had much 
 better not answer this. You will no doubt have an oppor 
 tunity to say to him whatever, my dear Francie, you can 
 say! It will matter comparatively little that you may 
 never be able to say it to your friend, with every 
 allowance, 
 
 " SUZANNE DE BRECOURT." 
 
 Francie looked at this letter and tossed it away 
 without reading it. Delia picked it up, read it to 
 her father, who didn t understand it, and kept it 
 in her possession, poring over it as Mr. Flack liad 
 seen her pore over the cards that were left while 
 she was out or over the registers of American 
 travellers. They knew of Gaston s arrival by his 
 telegraphing from Havre (he came back by the 
 French line), and he mentioned the hour " about 
 dinner-time " at which he should reach Paris. 
 Delia, after dinner, made her father take her to 
 the circus, so that Francie should be left alone to 
 receive her intended, who would be sure to hurry 
 round in the course of the evening. The girl 
 herself expressed no preference whatever on this 
 point, and the idea was one of Delia s masterly 
 ones, her flashes of inspiration. There was never 
 any difficulty about imposing such conceptions on 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 187 
 
 her father. But at half-past ten, when they 
 returned, the young man had not appeared, and 
 Francie remained only long enough to say, "I 
 told you so ! " with a white face and to inarch off 
 to her room with her candle. She locked herself 
 in and her sister could not get at her that night. 
 It was another of Delia s inspirations not to try, 
 after she had felt that the door was fast. She 
 forbore, in the exercise of a great discretion, but 
 she herself in the ensuing hours slept not a wink. 
 Nevertheless, the next morning, as early as ten 
 o clock, she had the energy to drag her father out 
 to the banker s and to keep him out two hours. 
 It would be inconceivable now that Gas ton should 
 not turn up before the cUjeuner. He did turn 
 up ; about eleven o clock he came in and found 
 Francie alone. She perceived, in the strangest 
 way, that he was very pale, at the same time that he 
 was sunburnt ; and not for an instant did he smile 
 at her. It was very certain that there was no 
 bright nicker in her own face, and they had the 
 most singular, the most unnatural meeting. As 
 he entered the room he said " I could not come 
 last evening ; they made it impossible ; they were 
 all there and we were up till three o clock this 
 morning." He looked as if he had been through 
 terrible things, and it was not simply the strain 
 of his attention to so much business in America. 
 What passed next she could not remember after 
 wards; it seemed only a few seconds before he 
 
188 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 said to her, slowly, holding her hand (before this 
 he had pressed his lips to hers, silently), " Is it 
 true, Francie, what they say (and they swear to 
 it !) that you told that blackguard those horrors 
 that that infamous letter is only a report of your 
 talk ? " 
 
 "I told him everything it s all me, me, ME I" 
 the girl replied, exaltedly, without pretending to 
 hesitate an instant as to what he might mean. 
 
 Gaston looked at her with deep eyes ; then he 
 walked straight away to the window and remained 
 there in silence. Francie said nothing more. 
 At last the young man went on, " And I who 
 insisted to them that there was no natural 
 delicacy like yours ! " 
 
 " Well, you ll never need to insist about any 
 thing any more ! " she cried. And with this she 
 dashed out of the room by the nearest door. When 
 Delia and Mr. Dosson returned the red salon was 
 empty and Francie was again locked into her 
 room. But this time her sister forced an entrance. 
 
XIII. 
 
 MR. DOSSON, as we know, was meditative, and 
 the present occasion could only minister to that 
 side of his nature, especially as, so far at least as 
 the observation of his daughters went, it had not 
 urged him into uncontrollable movement. But 
 the truth is that the intensity, or rather the con 
 tinuity, of his meditations did engender an act 
 which was not perceived by these young ladies, 
 though its consequences presently became definite 
 enough. While he waited for the Proberts to 
 arrive in a phalanx and noted that they failed to do 
 so he had plenty of time to ask himself and also 
 to ask Delia questions about Mr. Flack. So far 
 as they were addressed to his daughter they were 
 promptly answered, for Delia had been ready from 
 the first, as we have seen, to pronounce upon the 
 conduct of the young journalist. Her view of it 
 was clearer every hour ; there was a difference 
 however in the course of action which she judged 
 this view to demand. At first he was to be blown 
 
190 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 up for the mess he had got them into (profitless as 
 the process might be and vain the satisfaction) ; 
 he was to be visited with the harshest chastise 
 ment that the sense of violated confidence could 
 inflict. Now he was simply to be dropped, to be 
 cut, to be let alone to his dying day : the girl 
 quickly recognised that this was a much more dis 
 tinguished way of showing displeasure. It was in 
 this manner that she characterised it, in her 
 frequent conversations with her father, if that can 
 be called conversation which consisted of his 
 serenely smoking while she poured forth argu 
 ments which combined both variety and repetition. 
 The same cause will produce consequences tho 
 most diverse : a truth according to which the 
 catastrophe that made Delia express freely the 
 hope that she might never again see so much as 
 the end of Mr. Flack s nose had just the opposite 
 effect upon her father. The one thing he wanted 
 positively to do at present was to let his eyes 
 travel over his young friend s whole person : it 
 seemed to him that that would really make him 
 feel better. If there had been a discussion about 
 this the girl would have kept the field, for she had 
 the advantage of being able to tell her reasons, 
 whereas her father could not have put his into 
 words. Delia had touched on her deepest con 
 viction in saying to Francie that the correspondent 
 of the Reverberator had played them that trick 
 on purpose to get them into such trouble with the 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 191 
 
 Proberts that he might see his own hopes bloom 
 again under cover of their disaster. This had 
 many of the appearances of a strained interpreta 
 tion, but that did not prevent Delia from placing 
 it before her father several times an hour. It 
 mattered little that he should remark, in return, 
 that he didn t see what good it could do Mr. Flack 
 that Francie and he and Delia, for all he could 
 guess should be disgusted with him : to Mr. 
 Dosson s mind that was such a queer way of 
 reasoning. Delia maintained that she understood 
 perfectly, though she couldn t explain and at any 
 rate she didn t want the manoeuvring creature to 
 come flying back from Nice. She didn t want 
 him to know that there had been a scandal, that 
 they had a grievance against him, that any one 
 had so much as heard of his article or cared what 
 he published or didn t publish : above all she 
 didn t want him to know that the Proberts had 
 cooled off. Mixed up with this high rigour on 
 Miss Dosson s part was the oddest secret com 
 placency of reflection that in consequence of what 
 Mr. Flack had published the great American 
 community was in a position to know with what 
 fine folks Francie and she were associated. She 
 hoped that some of the people who used to call on 
 them when they were " off to-morrow " would take 
 the lesson to heart. 
 
 While she glowed with this consolation as well 
 as with the resentment for which it was required 
 
192 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 her father quietly addressed a few words, by 
 letter, to George Flack. This communication 
 was not of a minatory order; it expressed 
 on the contrary the loose sociability which was 
 the essence of Mr. Dosson s nature. He wanted 
 to see Mr. Flack, to talk the whole thing over, 
 and the desire to hold him to an account would 
 play but a small part in the interview. It was 
 much more definite to him that the soreness of 
 the Proberts was a kind of unexpected insanity 
 (so little did his experience match it), than that 
 a newspaper-man had misbehaved in trying to 
 turn out an attractive article. As the newspaper 
 man happened to be the person with whom he 
 had most consorted for some time back he felt 
 drawn to him in the presence of a new problem, 
 and somehow it did not seem to Mr. Dosson to 
 disqualify him as a source of comfort that it was 
 just he who had been the fountain of injury. 
 The injury was a sort of emanation of the crazy 
 Proberts. Moreover Mr. Dosson could not dislike 
 at such short notice, a man who had smoked 
 so many of his cigars, ordered so many of his 
 dinners and helped him so loyally to spend his 
 money : such acts constituted a bond, and when 
 there was a bond people gave it a little jerk 
 in time of trouble. His letter to Nice was the 
 little jerk. 
 
 The morning after Francie had turned her back 
 on Gaston and left him planted in the salon (he 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 193 
 
 Lad remained ten minutes, to see if she would 
 reappear, and then had marched out of the hotel), 
 she received by the first post a letter from him, 
 written the evening before. It conveyed his deep 
 regret that their meeting in the morning should 
 have been of so painful, so unnatural a character, 
 and the hope that she did not consider, as her 
 strange behaviour had seemed to suggest, that 
 she had anything to complain of. There was too 
 much he wanted to say and above all too much 
 he wanted to ask, for him to consent to the indefi 
 nite postponement of a necessary interview. There 
 were explanations, assurances, de part et d autre, 
 with which it was manifestly impossible that 
 either of them should dispense. He would there 
 fore propose that she should see him, and not be 
 wanting in patience to that end, on the following 
 evening. He did not propose an earlier moment 
 because his hands were terribly full at home. 
 Frankly speaking, the state of things there was 
 of the worst. Jane and her husband had just 
 arrived and had made him a violent, an unexpected 
 scene. Two of the French newspapers had got 
 hold of the article and had given the most perfi 
 dious extracts. His father had not stirred out of 
 the house, had not put his foot inside of a club, 
 for more than a week. Marguerite and Maxime 
 were immediately to start for England, for an 
 indefinite stay. They couldn t face their life in 
 Paris. For himself, he was in the breach, fighting 
 
 O 
 
194 THE REVERBERATOR, 
 
 hard and making, on her behalf, asseverations 
 which it was impossible for him to believe, in 
 spite of the dreadful defiant confession she had 
 appeared to throw at him in the morning, that 
 she would not virtually confirm. He would come 
 in as soon after nine as possible ; the morrow, up 
 to that time, would be severe in the Cours la 
 Heine, and he begged her in the meantime not 
 to doubt of his perfect tenderness. So far from 
 his distress having made it less he had never yet 
 felt so much that she had, in his affection, a 
 treasure of indulgence to draw upon. 
 
 A couple of hours after this letter arrived 
 Francie lay on one of the satin sofas with her eyes 
 closed and her hand clinched upon it in her pocket. 
 Delia sat near her with a needle in her fingers, 
 certain morsels of silk and ribbon in her lap, several 
 pins in her mouth, and her attention wandering 
 constantly from her work to her sister s face. 
 The weather was now so completely vernal that 
 Mr. Dosson was able to sit in the court, and he 
 had lately resumed this practice, in which he 
 was presumably at the present moment absorbed. 
 Delia had lowered her needle and was watching 
 Francie, to see if she were not asleep she had 
 been perfectly still for so long when her glance 
 was drawn to the door, which she heard pushed open. 
 Mr. Flack stood there, looking from one to the 
 other of the young ladies, as if to see which of 
 them would be most agreeably surprised by his visit. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR 195 
 
 " I saw your father down stairs he says it s 
 all right," said the journalist, advancing and smil 
 ing. " He told me to come straight up I had 
 quite a talk with him." 
 
 "All right all right ?" Delia Dosson repeated, 
 springing up. "Yes, indeed, I should say so." 
 Then she checked herself, asking in another 
 manner : " Is that so ? father sent you up ? " 
 And then, in still another : " Well, have you 
 had a good time at Nice ? " 
 
 "You d better all come down and see. It s 
 lovely down there. If you ll come down I ll go 
 right back. I guess you want a change," Mr. 
 Flack went on. He spoke to Delia but he looked 
 at Francie, who showed she had not been asleep 
 by the quick consciousness with which she raised 
 herself on her sofa. She gazed at the visitor with 
 parted lips, but she said nothing. He hesitated a 
 moment, then came toward her, smiling, with his 
 hand out. His bright eyes were brighter than 
 ever, but they had an odd appearance of being 
 smaller, like penetrating points. " Your father 
 has told me all about it. Did you ever hear of 
 anything so ridiculous ? " 
 
 "All about what? all about what?" said 
 Delia, whose attempt to represent happy ignorance 
 seemed likely to be spoiled by an intromission of 
 ferocity. She might succeed in appearing ignorant, 
 but she could scarcely succeed in appearing 
 happy. Francie had risen to her feet and had 
 
 o 2 
 
196 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 suffered Mr. Flack to possess himself for a moment 
 of her hand, but neither of the girls had asked 
 the young man to sit down. " I thought you were 
 going to stay a month at Nice," Delia continued. 
 
 "Well, I was, but your fathers letter started 
 me up." 
 
 "Father s letter?" 
 
 " He wrote me about the row didn t you know 
 it? Then I broke. You didn t suppose I was 
 going to stay down there when there were such 
 times up here." 
 
 " Gracious ! " Delia exclaimed. 
 " Is it pleasant at Nice ? Is it very gay ? Isn t 
 it very hot now?" Francie asked. 
 
 " Oh, it s all right. But I haven t come up here 
 to talk about Nice, have I ? " 
 
 Why not, if we want to ? " Delia inquired. 
 Mr. Flack looked at her for a moment very 
 hard, in the whites of the eyes ; then he replied, 
 turning back to her sister: "Anything you like, 
 Miss Francie. With you one subject is as good 
 as another. Can t we sit down ? Can t AVC be 
 comfortable?" he added. 
 
 " Comfortable ? of course we can ! " cried Delia, 
 but she remained erect while Francie sank upon 
 the sofa again and their companion took posses 
 sion of the nearest chair. 
 
 " Do you remember what I told you once, that 
 the people will have the plums ? " George Flack 
 asked of the younger girl. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 197 
 
 She looked for an instant as if she were trying 
 to recollect what he had told her ; then she said, 
 " Did father write to you ? " 
 
 "Of course he did. That s why I m here." 
 
 " Poor father, sometimes he doesn t know what 
 to do ! " Delia remarked. 
 
 "He told me the Reverberator has made a 
 sensation. I guessed that for myself, when I saw 
 the way the papers here were after it. That thing 
 will go the round you ll see ! What brought me 
 was learning from him that they have got their 
 backs up." 
 
 " What on earth are you talking about ? " cried 
 Delia. 
 
 Mr. Flack turned his eyes on hers in the same 
 way as a moment before; Francie sat there 
 serious, looking hard at the carpet. " What game 
 are you trying, Miss Delia? It ain t true you 
 care what I wrote, is it ? " he pursued, addressing 
 himself again to Francie. 
 
 She raised her eyes. "Did you write it 
 yourself ? " 
 
 "Wliat do you care what he wrote or what 
 does any one care ? " Delia broke in. 
 
 " It has done the paper more good than any 
 thing every one is so interested," said Mr. Flack, 
 in the tone of reasonable explanation. " And you 
 don t feel that you have anything to complain of, 
 do you ? " he added, to Francie, kindly. 
 
 "Do you mean because I told you ? " 
 
198 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Why, certainly. Didn t it all spring out of 
 that lovely drive and that walk in the Bois that 
 we had, when you took me to see your portrait ? 
 Didn t you understand that I wanted you to know 
 that the public would appreciate a column or 
 two about Mr. Waterlow s new picture, and about 
 you as the subject of it, and about your being 
 engaged to a member of the grand mcnde, and 
 about what was going on in the grand monde, 
 which would naturally attract attention through 
 that ? Why, Miss Francie, you talked as if you 
 did." 
 
 " Did I talk a great deal ? " asked Francie. 
 
 " Why, most freely it was too lovely. Don t 
 you remember when we sat there in the Bois ? " 
 
 "Oh, rubbish !" Delia ejaculated. 
 
 " Yes, and Mine, de Cliche passed." 
 
 "And you told me she was scandalised. And 
 we laughed it struck us as idiotic. I said it 
 was affected and pretentious. Your father tells 
 me she is scandalised now she and all the rest 
 of them at their names appearing in the Rever 
 berator. I don t hesitate to declare that that s 
 affected and pretentious too. It ain t genuine 
 and if it is it doesn t count. They pretend to be 
 shocked because it looks exclusive, but in point 
 of fact they like it first-rate." 
 
 " Are you talking about that old piece in 
 the paper? Mercy, wasn t that dead and buried 
 days and days ago?" Delia ejaculated. She 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 109 
 
 hovered there in a fever of irritation, fidgeted 
 by the revelation that her father had summoned 
 Mr. Flack to Paris, which struck her almost like 
 a treachery because it seemed to denote a plan. 
 A plan, and an uncommunicated plan, on Mr. 
 Dosson s part was unnatural and alarming ; and 
 there was further provocation in his appearing 
 to shirk the responsibility of it by not having 
 come up, at such a moment, with Mr. Flack. 
 Delia was impatient to know what he wanted 
 anyway. Did he want to slide back to a common, 
 though active, young man ? Did he want to put 
 Mr. Flack forward with a shallow extemporised 
 optimism as a substitute for the alienated Gaston ? 
 If she had not been afraid that something still more 
 complicating than anything that had happened yet 
 might come to pass between her two companions 
 in case of her leaving them together she would 
 have jdarted down to the court to appease her con 
 jectures, to challenge her father, and tell him she 
 should be very much obliged to him if he wouldn t 
 meddle. She felt liberated however, the next 
 moment, for something occurred that struck 
 her as a quick indication of her sister s present 
 emotion. 
 
 " Do you know the view I take of the matter, 
 according to what your father has told me ? " Mr. 
 Flack inquired. " I don t mean that he suggested 
 the interpretation, but my own knowledge of 
 the world (as the world is constituted over here !) 
 
200 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 forces it upon my mind. They are scandalised, 
 they are horrified. They never heard anything so 
 dreadful. Miss Francie, that ain t good enough ! 
 They know what s in the papers every day of 
 their lives and they know how it got there. They 
 are simply making the thing a pretext to break 
 because they don t think you re fashionable 
 enough. They re delighted to strike a pretext they 
 can work, and they re all as merry together round 
 there as a lot of boys when school don t keep. 
 That s my view of the business." 
 
 " Oh how can you say such a thing ? " drawled 
 Francie, with a tremor in her voice that struck her 
 sister. Her eyes met Delia s at the same moment, 
 and this young woman s heart bounded with the 
 sense that she was safe. Mr. Flack s indelicacy 
 attempted to prove too much (though Miss Dosson 
 had crude notions about the license of the press 
 she felt, even as an untutored woman, what a 
 false step he was now taking), and it seemed to 
 her that Francie, who was revolted (the way she 
 looked at her, in horror, showed that), could be 
 trusted to check his advance. 
 
 " What does it matter what he says, my dear ? " 
 she cried. " Do make him drop the subject he s 
 talking very wild. I m going down to see what 
 father means I never heard of anything so flat ! " 
 At the door she paused a moment to add mutely, 
 with a pressing glance, " Now just wipe him out 
 mind ! " It was the same injunction she had 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 201 
 
 launched at her from afar that day, a year before, 
 they all dined at Saint-Germain, and she could 
 remember how effective it had been then. The 
 next moment she flirted out. 
 
 As soon as she had gone Mr. Flack moved 
 nearer to Francie. " Now look here, you are not 
 going back on me, are you ? " 
 
 " Going back on you what do you mean ? " 
 
 " Ain t we together in this thing ? Surely we 
 are." 
 
 " Together together ? " Francie repeated, look 
 ing at him. 
 
 " Don t you remember what I said to you in 
 the clearest terms before we went to Waterlow s, 
 before our drive ? I notified you that I should 
 make use of the whole thing." 
 
 " Oh, yes, I understood it was all for that. I 
 told them so. I never denied it." 
 
 <: You told them so?" 
 
 " When they were crying and going on. I told 
 them I knew it I told them I gave you the 
 tip, as they say." 
 
 She felt Mr. Flack s eyes on her, strangely, as 
 she spoke these words ; then he was still nearer 
 to her he had taken her hand. " Ah, you re too 
 sweet ! " She disengaged her hand and in the 
 effort she sprang up ; but he, rising too, seemed to 
 press always nearer she had a sense (it was dis 
 agreeable) that he was demonstrative so that she 
 retreated a little before him. " They were all 
 
202 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 there roaring and raging, trying to make you 
 believe you have outraged them ? " 
 
 "All but young Mr. Probert. Certainly they 
 don t like it." 
 
 "The cowards!" said George Flack. "And 
 where was young Mr. Probert ? " 
 
 " He was away I ve told you in America." 
 
 " Ah, yes, your father told me. But now he has 
 come back doesn t he like it either ? " 
 
 " I don t know, Mr. Flack," Francie replied, 
 impatiently. 
 
 " Well, I do, then. He s a coward too he ll do 
 what his papa tells him and the countess and 
 the duchess and all the rest : he ll just back down 
 he ll give you up." 
 
 " I can t talk to you about that," said Francie. 
 
 "Why not? why is he such a sacred subject, 
 when we are together ? You can t alter that. It 
 was too lovely, your standing up for me your 
 not denying me ! " 
 
 " You put in things I never said. It seems to 
 me it was very different," the girl remarked. 
 
 " Everything is different when it s printed. 
 What else would be the good of papers ? Besides, 
 it wasn t I ; it was a lady who helps me here 
 you ve heard me speak of her : Miss Topping. She 
 wants so much to know you she wants to talk 
 with you." 
 
 " And will she publish that ? " Francie asked, 
 gravely. 
 
THE KEVEBBERATOR. 203 
 
 Mr. Flack stared a moment. " Lord, how they 
 have worked on you ! And do you think it s 
 bad ? " 
 
 " Do I think what s bad ? " 
 
 " Why, the letter we are talking about." 
 
 " Well I don t like it." 
 
 " Do you think I was dishonourable ? " 
 
 The girl made no answer to this, but after a 
 moment she said, " Why do you come here this 
 wa y why do you ask me such questions ? 
 
 He hesitated ; then he broke out : " Because I 
 love you don t you know that ? " 
 
 " Oh, please don t ! " she almost moaned, turning 
 away. 
 
 " Why won t you understand it why won t you 
 understand the rest? Don t you see how it has 
 worked round the heartless brutes they ve turned 
 into, and the way our life yours and mine is 
 bound to be the same ? Don t you see the base 
 way they treat you and that / only want to do 
 anything in the world for you ? " 
 
 Francie made no immediate response to this 
 appeal, but after a moment she began : " Why did 
 you ask me so many questions that day ? " 
 
 " Because I always ask questions it s my 
 business to ask them. Haven t you always seen 
 me ask you and ask every one all I could ? Don t 
 you know they are the very foundation of my 
 work ? I thought you sympathised with my work 
 so much you used to tell me you did." 
 
204 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Well, I did," said Francie. 
 
 " You put it in the past, I see. You don t then 
 any more/ 
 
 If this .remark was on her visitor s part the sign 
 of a rare assurance the girl s gentleness was still 
 unruffled by it. She hesitated, she even smiled ; 
 then she replied, " Oh yea, I do only not so 
 much." 
 
 " They have worked on you ; but I should have 
 thought they would have disgusted you. I don t 
 care even a little sympathy will do whatever 
 you ve got left." He paused, looking at her, but 
 she remained silent ; so he went on : " There was 
 no obligation for you to answer my questions 
 you might have shut me up, that day, with a 
 word." 
 
 " Really ? " Francie asked, with all her sweet 
 good faith in her face. "I thought I had to for 
 fear I should appear ungrateful." 
 
 "Ungrateful?" 
 
 " Why to you after what you had done. Don t 
 you remember that it was you that introduced us 
 
 ? " And she paused, with a kind of weary 
 
 delicacy. 
 
 "Not to those snobs that are screaming like 
 frightened peacocks. I beg your pardon I haven t 
 that on my conscience !" 
 
 " Well, you introduced us to Mr. Waterlow and 
 he introduced us to to his friends," Francie 
 explained, blushing, as if it were a fault, for the 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 205 
 
 inexactness engendered by her magnanimity. 
 " That s why I thought I ought to tell you what 
 you d like." 
 
 " Why, do you suppose if I d known where that 
 first visit of ours to Waterlow was going to bring 
 
 you out I d have taken you within fifty miles " 
 
 He stopped suddenly; then in another tone, 
 " Lord, there s no one like you ! And you told 
 them it was all you?" 
 
 " Never mind what I told them." 
 
 " Miss Francie," said George Flack, " if you ll 
 marry me I ll never ask a question again. I ll go 
 into some other business." 
 
 " Then you didn t do it on purpose ? " Francie 
 asked. 
 
 " On purpose ? " 
 
 " To get me into a quarrel with them so that 
 I might be free again/ 
 
 "Well, of all the ideas !" the young man 
 
 exclaimed, staring. " Your mind never produced 
 that it was your sister s." 
 
 " Wasn t it natural it should occur to me, since 
 if, as you say, you would never consciously have 
 been the means " 
 
 " Ah, but I was the means ! " Mr. Flack 
 interrupted. "We must go, after all, by what 
 did happen." 
 
 " Well, I thanked you when I drove with you 
 and let you draw me out. So we re square, aren t 
 we ? " The term Francie used was a colloquialism 
 
206 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 generally associated with levity, but her face, as 
 she spoke, was none the less deeply serious 
 serious even to pain. 
 
 " We re square ? " Mr. Flack repeated. 
 
 " I don t think you ought to ask for anything 
 more. Good-bye." 
 
 " Good-bye ? Never ! " cried the young man. 
 
 He had an air of flushing with disappointment 
 which really showed that he had come with a 
 certain confidence of success. 
 
 Something in the way Francie repeated her 
 " Good-bye ! " indicated that she perceived this 
 and that in the vision of such a confidence 
 there was little to please her. " Do go away ! " 
 she broke out. 
 
 " Well, I ll come back very soon," said Mr. 
 Flack, taking his hat. 
 
 " Please don t I don t like it." She had now 
 contrived to pat a wide space between them. 
 
 " Oh, you tormentress ! " he groaned. He went 
 toward the door, but before he reached it he 
 turned round. " Will you tell me this, anyway ? 
 Are you going to marry Mr. Probert after 
 this ? " 
 
 " Do you want to put that in the paper ? " 
 
 " Of course I do and say you said it !" Mr. 
 Flack held up his head. 
 
 They stood looking at each other across the 
 large room. " Well then I ain t. There ! " 
 
 " That s all right," said Mr. Flack, going out. 
 
XIV. 
 
 WHEN Gaston Probert came in that evening he 
 was received by Mr. Dosson and Delia, and when 
 he asked where Franoie was he was told by Delia 
 that she would show herself half an hour later. 
 Francie had instructed her sister that as Gaston 
 would have, first of all, information to give their 
 father about the business he had transacted in 
 America he wouldn t care for a lot of women in 
 the room. When Delia made this speech before 
 Mr. Dosson the old man protested that he was not 
 in any hurry for the business ; what he wanted to 
 find out most was whether he had a good time 
 whether he liked it over there. Gaston might 
 have liked it, but he did not look as if he had had 
 a very good time. His face told of reverses, of 
 suffering ; and Delia declared to him that if she 
 had not received his assurance to the contrary she 
 would have believed he was right down sick. He 
 confessed that he had been very sick at sea and 
 was still feeling the effect of it, but insisted that 
 
208 THE EEVERBERATOR. 
 
 there was nothing the matter with him now. He 
 sat for some time with Mr. Dosson and Delia, and 
 never once alluded to the cloud that hung over 
 their relations. The girl had schooled her father 
 to reticence on this point, and the manner in 
 which she had descended upon him in the morning, 
 after Mr, Flack had come up stairs, was a lesson 
 he was not likely soon to forget. It had been 
 impressed upon him that she was indeed wiser 
 than he could pretend to be, and he was now 
 mindful that he must not speak of the "piece in 
 the paper " unless young Probert should speak of 
 it first. When Delia rushed down to him in the 
 court she began by asking him categorically whom 
 he had wished to do good to by sending Mr. Flack 
 up to their parlour. To Francie or to her ? Why } 
 the way they felt then, they detested his very 
 name. To Mr. Flack himself? Why, he had 
 simply exposed him to the biggest snub he had 
 ever got in his life. 
 
 " Well, hanged if I understand ! " poor Mr. 
 Dosson had said. " I thought you liked the piece 
 you think it s so queer they don t like it." 
 " They," in the parlance of the Dossons, now never 
 meant anything but the Proberts in congress 
 assembled. 
 
 " I don t think anything is queer but you ! " 
 Delia had retorted ; and she had let her father 
 know that she had left Francie in the very act of 
 "handling "Mr. Flack. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 209 
 
 "Is that so?" the old gentleman had asked, 
 helplessly. 
 
 Francie s visitor came down a few minutes later 
 and passed through the court and out of the hotel 
 without looking at them. Mr. Dosson had been 
 going to call after him, but Delia checked him 
 with a violent pinch. The unsociable manner of 
 the young journalist s departure added to Mr. 
 Dosson s sense of the mystery of things. I think 
 this may be said to have been the only incident in 
 the whole business that gave him a personal pang. 
 He remembered how many of his cigars he had 
 smoked with Mr. Flack and how universal a parti 
 cipant he had made him. This struck him as the 
 failure of friendship, and not the publication of 
 details about the Proberts. Deep in Mr. Dosson s 
 spirit was a sense that if these people had done 
 bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves 
 and he couldn t pity them, and if they hadn t 
 done them there was no need of making such a 
 rumpus about other people knowing. It was there 
 fore, in spite of the young man s rough exit, still 
 in the tone of American condonation that he had 
 observed to Delia : " He says that s what they like 
 over there and that it stands to reason that if you 
 start a paper you ve got to give them what they 
 like. If you want the people with you, you ve 
 got to be with the people." 
 
 "Well, there are a good many people in the 
 world. I don t think the Proberts are with us much." 
 
 p 
 
210 THE REVERBERATOR, 
 
 " Oh, he doesn t mean them," said Mr. Dosson. 
 
 "Well, I do!" cried Delia. 
 
 At one of the ormolu tables, near a lamp with a 
 pink shade, Gaston insisted on making at least 
 a partial statement. He did not say that he might 
 never have another chance, but Delia felt with 
 despair that this idea was in his mind. He was 
 very gentle, very polite, but distinctly cold, she 
 thought ; he was intensely depressed and for half 
 an hour uttered not the least little pleasantry. 
 There was no particular occasion for that when he 
 talked about " preferred bonds " with her father. 
 This was a language Delia could not translate, 
 though she had heard it from childhood. He had 
 a great many papers to show Mr. Dosson, records 
 of the mission of which he had acquitted himself, 
 but Mr. Dosson pushed them into the drawer of 
 the ormolu table with the remark that he guessed 
 they were all right. Now, after the fact, he ap 
 peared to attach but little importance to Gaston s 
 achievements an attitude which Delia perceived 
 to be slightly disconcerting to the young man. 
 Delia understood it : she had an instinctive sense 
 that her father knew a great deal more than Gaston 
 could tell him even about the work he had com 
 mitted to him, and also that there was in such 
 punctual settlements an eagerness, a literalism 
 totally foreign to Mr. Dosson s domestic habits. 
 If Gaston had cooled off he wanted at least to be 
 able to say that he had rendered them services in 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 211 
 
 America ; but now her father, for the moment at 
 least, scarcely appeared to think his services worth 
 speaking of: a circumstance that left him with 
 more of the responsibility for his cooling. What 
 Mr. Dosson wanted to know was how everything 
 had struck him over there, especially the Pickett 
 Building and the parlour-cars and Niagara and 
 the hotels he had instructed him to go to, giving 
 him an introduction in two or three cases to the 
 gentleman in charge of the office. It was in relation 
 to these themes that Gaston was guilty of a want of 
 spring, as the girl phrased it to herself; that he 
 evinced no superficial joy. He declared however, 
 repeatedly, that it was a most extraordinary country 
 most extraordinary and far beyond anything he 
 had had any conception of. " Of course I didn t 
 like everything" he said, u any more than I like 
 everything anywhere." 
 
 "Well, what didn t you like?" Mr. Dosson 
 genially inquired. 
 
 Gaston Probert hesitated. "Well, the light 
 for instance." 
 
 "The light the electric?" 
 
 " No, the solar ! I thought it rather hard, 
 too much like the scratching of a slate-pencil." 
 As Mr. Dosson looked vague at this, as if the 
 reference were to some enterprise (a great lamp- 
 company) of which he had not heard conveying 
 a suggestion that he was perhaps staying away 
 too long, Gaston immediately added : " I really 
 
212 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 think Francie might come in. I wrote to her 
 that I wanted particularly to see her." 
 
 "I will go and call her I ll make her come," 
 said Delia, going out. She left her companions 
 together and Gaston returned to the subject of Mr. 
 Munster, Mr. Dosson s former partner, to whom he 
 had taken a letter and who had shown him every 
 sort of civility. Mr. Dosson was pleased at this ; 
 nevertheless he broke out, suddenly 
 
 " Look here, you know ; if you ve got anything 
 to say that you don t think very acceptable you 
 had better say it to me" Gaston coloured, but 
 his reply was checked by Delia s quick return. 
 She announced that her sister would be obliged 
 if he would go into the little dining-room he 
 would find her there. She had something to 
 communicate to him that she could mention 
 only in private. It was very comfortable ; there 
 was a lamp and a fire. "Well, I guess she can 
 take care of herself!" Mr. Dosson, at this, com 
 mented, laughing. "What does she want to say 
 to him ? " he demanded, when Gaston had passed 
 out. 
 
 " Gracious knows ! She won t tell me. But it s 
 too flat, at his age, to live in such terror." 
 
 " In such terror ? " 
 
 " Why, of your father. You ve got to choose." 
 
 " How, to choose ? " 
 
 "Why, if there s a person you like and he 
 doesn t like." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 213 
 
 " You mean you can t choose your father," said 
 Mr. Dosson, thoughtfully. 
 
 " Of course you can t." 
 
 " Well then, please don t like any one. But 
 perhaps / should like him," added Mr. Dosson, 
 faithful to his cheerful tradition. 
 
 " I guess you d have to ! " said Delia. 
 
 In the small salle-d-manycr, when Gaston went 
 in, Francie was standing by the empty table, and 
 as soon as she saw him she said " You can t say 
 I didn t tell you that I should do something. I 
 did nothing else, from the first. So you were 
 warned again and again; you knew what to 
 expect." 
 
 "Ah, don t say that again; if you knew how 
 it acts on my nerves!" the young man groaned. 
 "You speak as if you had done it on purpose 
 to carry out your absurd threat." 
 
 " Well, what does it matter, when it s all over ? " 
 
 " It s not all over. Would to God it were ! " 
 
 The girl stared. " Don t you know what I 
 sent for you to come in here for? To bid you 
 good-bye." 
 
 " Francie, what has got into you ? " he said. 
 " What deviltry, what poison ? " It would have 
 been a singular sight to an observer, the opposi 
 tion of these young figures, so fresh, so candid, so 
 meant for confidence, but now standing apart and 
 looking at each other in a wan defiance which 
 hardened their faces. 
 
214 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Don t they despise me don t they hate me ? 
 You do yourself ! Certainly you ll be glad for me 
 to break off and spare you such a difficulty, such 
 a responsibility." 
 
 " I don t understand ; it s like some hideous 
 dream ! " Gaston Probert cried. " You act as if 
 you were doing something for a wager, and you talk 
 so. I don t believe it I don t believe a word of it." 
 " What don t you believe ? " 
 " That you told him that you told him know 
 ingly. If you ll take that back (it s too monstrous !) 
 if you ll deny it and declare you were practised upon 
 and surprised, everything can still be arranged." 
 
 " Do you want me to lie ? " asked Francie Dosson. 
 " I thought you would like it." 
 
 " Oh, Francie, Francie ! " moaned the wretched 
 youth, with tears in his eyes. 
 
 " What can be arranged ? What do you mean 
 by everything ? " she went on. 
 
 " Why, they ll accept it ; they ll ask for 
 nothing more. It s your participation they can t 
 forgive." 
 
 " They can t ? Why do you talk to me about 
 them ? I m not engaged to them." 
 
 " Oh, Francie, / am ! And it s they who are 
 buried beneath that filthy rubbish ! " 
 
 She flushed at this characterisation of Mr. Flack s 
 epistle ; then she said, in a softer voice : " I m 
 very sorry very sorry indeed. But evidently I m 
 not delicate." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 215 
 
 He looked at her, helpless and bitter. " It s 
 not the newspapers, in your country, that would 
 have made you so. Lord, they re too incredible ! 
 And the ladies have them on their tables." 
 
 " You told me we couldn t here that the Paris 
 ones are too bad," said Fiancie. 
 
 " Bad they are, God knows ; but they have never 
 published anything like that poured forth such a 
 flood of impudence on decent, quiet people who 
 only want to be left alone." 
 
 Francie sank into a chair by the table, as if she 
 were too tired to stand longer, and with her arms 
 spread out on the lamp-lit plush she looked up at 
 him. " Was it there you saw it ? " 
 
 " Yes, a few days before I sailed. I hated them 
 
 from the moment I got there 1 looked at them 
 
 very little. But that was a chance. I opened 
 the paper in the hall of an hotel (there was a big 
 marble floor and spittoons !) and my eyes fell upon 
 that horror. It made me ill." 
 
 " Did you think it was me ? " 
 
 " About as soon as I supposed it was my father. 
 But I was too mystified, too tormented." 
 
 " Then why didn t you write to me, if you 
 didn t think it was me ? " 
 
 " Write to you ? I wrote to you every three days." 
 
 "Not after that." 
 
 " Well, I may have omitted a post at the last. 
 I thought it might be Delia," Gaston added 
 in a moment. 
 
216 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " Oh, she didn t want me to do it the day I 
 went with him, the day I told him. She tried 
 to prevent me." 
 
 "Would to God then she had !" 
 
 " Haven t you told them she s delicate too ? " 
 Francie asked, in her strange tone. 
 
 Gaston made no answer to this; but he broke 
 out " What power, in heaven s name, has he got 
 over you ? What spell has he worked ? " 
 
 "He s an old friend he helped us ever so 
 much when we were first in Paris." 
 
 "But, my dearest child, what friends what a 
 man to know ! " 
 
 " If we hadn t known him we shouldn t have 
 known you. Remember that it was Mr. Flack who 
 brought us that day to Mr. Waterlow s." 
 
 " Oh, you would have come some other way," 
 said Gaston. 
 
 "Not in the least. We knew nothing about 
 any other way. He helped us in everything he 
 showed us everything. That was why I told him 
 when he asked me. I liked him for what he 
 had done." 
 
 Gaston, who had now also seated himself, 
 listened to this attentively. " I see. It was a 
 kind of delicacy." 
 
 "Oh, a kind!" She smiled. 
 
 He remained a little with his eyes on her face. 
 " W T as it for me ? " 
 
 " Of course it was for vou." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 21 
 
 " Ah, how strange you are ! " he exclaimed, 
 tenderly. " Such contradictions on sy perd. I 
 wish you would say that to them, that way. 
 Everything would be right." 
 
 " Never, never ! " said the girl. " I have wronged 
 them, and nothing will ever be the same again. 
 It was fatal. If I felt as they do I too would 
 loathe the person who should have done such a 
 thing. It doesn t seem to me so bad the thing 
 in the paper; but you know best. You must go 
 back to them. You know best," she repeated. 
 
 " They were the last, the last people in France, 
 to do it to. The sense of excruciation of pollu 
 tion," Gaston rejoined, making his reflections 
 audibly. 
 
 "Oh, you needn t tell me I saw them all 
 there!" Francie exclaimed. 
 
 " It must have been a dreadful scene. But you 
 didn t brave them, did you ? " 
 
 "Brave them what are you talking about? 
 To you that idea is incredible ! " 
 
 " No, it isn t," he said, gently. 
 
 " Well, go back to them go back," she repeated. 
 At this he half threw himself across the table, 
 to seize her hands; but she drew away and, as 
 he came nearer, pushed her chair back, springing 
 up. "You know you didn t come here to tell me 
 you are ready to give them up." 
 
 He rose to his feet, slowly. "To give them 
 up ? I have been battling with them till I m 
 
218 THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 ready to drop. You don t know how they feel 
 how they must feel." 
 
 "Oh yes, I do. All this has made me older, 
 every hour." 
 
 " It has made you more beautiful," said Gaston 
 Probert. 
 
 "I don t care. Nothing will induce me to 
 consent to any sacrifice." 
 
 "Some sacrifice there must be. Give me time 
 give me time, I ll manage it. I only wish they 
 hadn t seen you there in the Bois." 
 
 "In the Bois?" 
 
 " That Marguerite hadn t seen you with that 
 blackguard. That s the image they can t get over." 
 
 "I see you can t either, Gaston. Well, I was 
 there and I was very happy. That s all I can say. 
 You must take me as I am." 
 
 " Don t don t ; you infuriate me ! " he pleaded, 
 frowning. 
 
 Francie had seemed to soften, but she was in 
 a sudden flame again. "Of course I do, and I 
 shall do it again. We are too different. Every 
 thing makes you so. You can t give them up 
 ever, ever. Good-bye good-bye ! That s all 
 I wanted to tell you." 
 
 "I ll go and throttle him!" Gaston said, 
 lugubriously. 
 
 " Very well, go ! Good-bye." She had stepped 
 quickly to the door and had already opened it, 
 vanishing as she had done the last time. 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 219 
 
 " Francie, Francie ! " he exclaimed, following 
 her into the passage. The door was not the one 
 that led into the salon; it communicated with 
 the other apartments. The girl had plunged 
 into these he already heard her locking herself 
 in. Presently he went away, without taking leave 
 of Mr. Dosson and Delia. 
 
 "Why, he acts just like Mr. Flack," said the 
 old man, when they discovered that the interview 
 in the dining-room had come to an end. 
 
 The next day was a bad day for Charles 
 Waterlow ; his work, in the Avenue de Yilliers, 
 was terribly interrupted. Gaston Probert invited 
 himself to breakfast with him at noon and re 
 mained till the time at which the artist usually 
 went out an extravagance partly justified by a 
 previous separation of several weeks. During 
 these three or four hours Gaston walked up and 
 down the studio, while Waterlow either sat or 
 stood before his easel. He put his host out 
 vastly and acted on his nerves, but Waterlow 
 was patient with him because he was very sorry 
 for him, feeling the occasion to be a great crisis. 
 His compassion, it is true, was slightly tinged 
 with contempt : nevertheless he looked at the 
 case generously, perceived it to be one in which a 
 friend should be a friend in which he, in par 
 ticular, might see the distracted fellow through. 
 Gaston was in a fever ; he broke out into passion 
 ate arguments which were succeeded by fits of 
 
220 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 gloomy silence. He roamed .about continually, 
 with his hands in his pockets and his hair in a 
 tangle ; he could take neither a decision nor a 
 momentary rest. It struck Waterlow more than 
 ever before that he was after all essentially a 
 foreigner; he had the sensibility of one, the 
 sentimental candour, the need for sympathy, the 
 communicative despair. A real young Anglo- 
 Saxon would have buttoned himself up in his 
 embarrassment and been dry and awkward and 
 capable and unconscious of a drama ; but Gaston 
 was effusive and appealing and ridiculous and 
 graceful natural, above all, and egotistical. 
 Indeed, a real young Anglo-Saxon would not 
 have had this particular embarrassment at all 
 for he would not have parted to such an extent 
 with his moral independence. It was this weak 
 ness that excited Waterlow s secret scorn : family 
 feeling was all very well, but to see it erected 
 into a superstition affected him very much in 
 the same way as the image of a blackamoor upon 
 his knees before a fetish. He now measured for 
 the first time the root it had taken in Gaston s 
 nature. To act like a man the poor fellow must 
 pull up the root, but the operation was terribly 
 painful was attended with cries and tears and 
 contortions, with baffling scruples and a sense 
 of sacrilege, the sense of siding with strangers 
 against his own flesh and blood. Every now and 
 then he broke out "And if you see her as she 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 221 
 
 looks just now (she s too lovely too touching !) 
 you would see how right I was originally when 
 I found in her such a revelation of that type, 
 the French Renaissance, you know, the one we 
 talked about." But he reverted with at least 
 equal frequency to the idea that he seemed 
 unable to throw off, that it was like something 
 done on purpose, with a refinement of cruelty ; 
 such an accident to them, of all people on earth, 
 the very last, the very last, those who he verily 
 believed would feel it more than any family in 
 the world. When Waterlow asked what made 
 them so exceptionally ticklish he could only say 
 that they just happened to be so ; it was his father s 
 influence, his very genius, the worship of privacy 
 and good manners, a hatred of all the new 
 familiarities and profanations. The artist in 
 quired further, at last, rather wearily, what in 
 two words was the practical question his friend 
 desired that he should consider. Whether he 
 should be justified in throwing over Miss Francina 
 was that it ? 
 
 " Oh heavens, no ! For what sneak do you take 
 me ? She made a mistake, but any one might do 
 that. It s whether it strikes you that I should be 
 justified in throwing them over." 
 
 "It depends upon the sense you attach to 
 justification." 
 
 "I mean should I be miserably unhappy 
 would it be in their power to make me so ? " 
 
222 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 " To try certainly, if they are capable of any 
 thing so nasty. The only honourable conduct for 
 them is to let you alone." 
 
 "Ah, they won t do that they like me too 
 much ! " Gaston said, ingenuously. 
 
 "It s an odd way of liking. The best way to 
 show that would be to let you marry the girl you 
 love." 
 
 " Certainly but they are profoundly convinced 
 that she represents such dangers, such vulgarities, 
 such possibilities of doing other things of the same 
 sort, that it s upon them my happiness would be 
 shattered." 
 
 " Well, if you yourself have no secret for per 
 suading them of the contrary I m afraid I can t 
 teach you one." 
 
 " Yes, I ought to do it myself," said Gaston, in 
 the candour of his meditations. Then he went on, 
 in his torment of inconsistency " They never 
 believed in her from the first. My father was 
 perfectly definite about it. At heart they never 
 accepted her ; they only pretended to do so because 
 I guaranteed that she was incapable of doing a 
 thing that could ever displease them. Then no 
 sooner was my back turned than she perpetrated 
 that ! " 
 
 "That was your folly," Waterlow remarked, 
 painting away. 
 
 " My folly to turn my back ? " 
 
 " No, no to guarantee." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 223 
 
 " My clear fellow wouldn t you ? " Gaston asked, 
 staring. 
 
 " Never in the world." 
 
 " You would have thought her capable ? " 
 
 " CapaUlissima ! and I shouldn t have cared." 
 
 "Do you think her then capable of doing it 
 again ? " 
 
 " I don t care if she is ; that s the least of all 
 questions." 
 
 " The least ? " 
 
 "Ah, don t you see, wretched youth," said 
 Waterlow, pausing from his work and looking 
 up "don t you see that the question of her 
 possibilities is as nothing compared to that 
 of yours ? She s the sweetest young thing 
 I ever saw ; but even if she happened not to 
 be I should urge you to marry her, in simple 
 self-preservation." 
 
 " In self-preservation ? " 
 
 "To rescue from destruction the last remnant of 
 your independence. That s a much more important 
 matter even than not treating her shabbily. They 
 are doing their best to kill you morally to render 
 you incapable of individual life." 
 
 " They are they are ! " Gaston declared, with 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 " Well then, if you believe it, for heaven s sake 
 go and marry her to-morrow ! " Waterlow threw 
 down his implements and added, " And come out 
 of this into the air." 
 
224 THE REVERBERATOR. 
 
 Gaston however was planted in his path on the 
 way to the door. "And if she does break out 
 again, in the same way ? " 
 
 " In the same way ? " 
 
 " In some other manifestation of that terrible 
 order ? " 
 
 "Well," said Waterlow, "you will at least have 
 got rid of your family." 
 
 " Yes, if she does that I shall be glad they are 
 not there ! They re right, pourtant, they re right," 
 Gaston went on, passing out of the studio with his 
 friend. 
 
 "They re right?" 
 
 "It was a dreadful thing." 
 
 " Yes, thank heaven ! It was the finger of 
 providence, to give you your chance." This was 
 ingenious, but, though he could glow for a moment 
 in response to it, Francie s lover if lover he may 
 in his most infirm aspect be called looked as 
 if he mistrusted it, thought it slightly sophistical. 
 What really shook him however was his com 
 panion s saying to him in the vestibule, when they 
 had taken their hats and sticks and were on the 
 point of going out : " Lord, man, how can you be 
 so impenetrably dense ? Don t you see that she s 
 really of the softest, finest material that breathes, 
 that she s a perfect flower of plasticity, that every 
 thing you may have an apprehension about will 
 drop away from her like the dead leaves from a 
 rose and that you may make of her any perfect and 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 225 
 
 enchanting thing you yourself have the wifc to 
 conceive ? " 
 
 " Ah, my dear friend ! " Gaston Probert 
 murmured, gratefully, panting. 
 
 "The limit will be yours, not hers," Waterlow 
 added . 
 
 " No, no, I have done with limits," his com 
 panion rejoined, ecstatically. 
 
 That evening at ten o clock Gaston went to the 
 Hotel de I Univers et de Cheltenham and requested 
 the German waiter to introduce him into the 
 dining-room attached to Mr. Dosson s apartments 
 and then go and tell Miss Francina he was await 
 ing her there. 
 
 " Oh, you ll be better there than in the zalon 
 they have milled it with their luccatch/ said 
 the man, who always addressed him in an inten 
 tion of English and was not ignorant of the tie 
 that united the visitor to the amiable American 
 family, or perhaps even of the modifications it had 
 lately undergone. 
 
 " With their luggage ? " 
 
 "They leave to-morrow morning oh, I don t 
 think they themselves known for where, sir." 
 
 " Please then say to Miss Francina that I have 
 called on very urgent business that I m pressed, 
 pressed ! " 
 
 The eagerness of the sentiment which possessed 
 Gaston at that moment is communicative, but 
 perhaps the vividness with which the waiter placed 
 
 Q 
 
226 THE EEVEEBERATOE. 
 
 it before the young lady is better explained by 
 the fact that her lover slipped a five-franc piece 
 into his hand. At any rate she entered the dining- 
 room sooner than Gaston had ventured to hope, 
 though she corrected this promptitude a little by 
 stopping short, drawing back, when she saw how 
 pale he was and how he looked as if he had been 
 crying. 
 
 " I have chosen I have chosen," he said 
 gently, smiling at her in contradiction to these 
 indications. 
 
 " You have chosen ? " 
 
 " I have had to give them up. But I like it so 
 much better than having to give you up ! I took 
 you first with their assent. That was well enough 
 it was worth trying for. But now I take you 
 without it. We can live that way too." 
 
 " Ah, I m not worth it. You give up too much ! " 
 cried the girl. " We re going away it s all over." 
 She turned from him quickly, as if to carry out 
 her meaning, but he caught her more quickly 
 still and held her held her fast and long. She 
 had only freed herself when her father and sister 
 broke in, from the salon, attracted apparently by 
 the audible commotion. 
 
 " Oh, I thought you had at least knocked over 
 the lamp ! " Delia exclaimed. 
 
 " You must take me with you if you are going 
 away, Mr. Dosson," Gaston said. " I will start 
 whenever you like." 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 227 
 
 <: All right where shall we go ? " the old man 
 asked. 
 
 " Hadn t you decided that ? " 
 
 " Well, the girls said they would tell me." 
 
 " We were going home," said Francie. 
 
 " No we weren t not a bit ! " Delia declared. 
 
 " Oh, not there," Gaston murmured, pathetically, 
 looking at Francie. 
 
 "Well, when you ve fixed it you can take the 
 tickets," Mr. Dosson observed. 
 
 " To some place where there are no newspapers," 
 Gaston went on. 
 
 " I guess you ll have hard work to find one." 
 
 " Dear me, we needn t read them ! We wouldn t 
 have read that one if your family hadn t forced 
 us," Delia said to her prospective brother-in-law. 
 
 "Well, I shall never be forced I shall never 
 again in my life look at one," he replied. 
 
 " You ll see you ll have to 1 " laughed Mr. 
 Dosson. 
 
 " No, you ll tell us enough." 
 
 Francie had her eyes on the ground ; they were 
 all smiling but she. "Won t they forgive me, 
 ever ? " she asked, looking up. 
 
 " Yes, perfectly, if you can persuade me not to 
 marry you. But in that case what good will their 
 forgiveness do you ? " 
 
 " Well, perhaps it s better to pay for it." 
 
 "To pay for it?" 
 
 " By suffering something. For it was dreadful." 
 
228 THE REVERBERATOR 
 
 " Oh, for all you ll suffer ! " Gaston exclaimed, 
 
 shining down at her. 
 
 "It was for you only for you, as I told you," 
 the girl went on. 
 
 "Yes, don t tell me again I don t like that 
 explanation ! I ought to let you know that my 
 father now declines to do anything for me," the 
 young man added, to Mr. Dosson. 
 
 " To do anything for you ? " 
 
 "To give me any money," 
 
 "Well, that makes me feel better/ said Mr, 
 Dosson. 
 
 "There ll be enough for all especially if 
 we economise in newspapers," Delia declared, 
 jocosely. 
 
 " Well, I don t know, after all the Eever- 
 berator came for nothing," her father went on, in 
 the same spirit. 
 
 " Don t you be afraid hell ever send it now ! " 
 cried the girl. 
 
 "I m very sorry because they were lovely," 
 Francie said to Gaston, with sad eyes. 
 
 "Let us wait to say that till they come back 
 to us," Gaston returned, somewhat sententiously. 
 He really cared little at this moment whether 
 his relatives were lovely or not. 
 
 "I m sure you won t have to wait long I" Delia 
 remarked, with the same cheerfulness. 
 
 " Till they come back ? " Mr, Dosson repeated. 
 "Ah, they can t come back now. We won t take 
 
THE REVERBERATOR. 229 
 
 them in ! " The words fell from his lips with a 
 mild unexpected austerity which imposed itself, 
 producing a momentary silence, and it is a sign of 
 Gaston s complete emancipation that he did not 
 in his heart resent this image of eventual favours 
 denied to his race. The resentment was rather 
 Delia s, but she kept it to herself, for she was 
 capable of reflecting with complacency that the 
 key of the house would after all be hers, so that 
 she could open the door for the Proberts if they 
 should knock. Now that her sister s marriage was 
 really to take place her consciousness that the 
 American people would have been told so was 
 still more agreeable. The party left the Hotel do 
 TUnivers et de Cheltenham on the morrow, but it 
 appeared to the German waiter, as he accepted 
 .another five-franc piece from the happy and now 
 reckless Gaston, that they were even yet not at 
 all clear as to where they were going. 
 
 THE END. 
 
RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, 
 LONEON AND BUNGAY. 
 

 
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