Oughtn’t Mr. Dosson perhaps to call personally, and not simply through the medium of the visits paid by his daughters to their wives, on Messieurs de Brecourt and de Cliche? Once when this subject came up in George Flack’s presence the old man said he would go round if Mr. Flack would accompany him. “All right, we’ll go right along!” Mr. Flack had responded, and this inspiration had become a living fact qualified only by the “mercy,” to Delia Dosson, that the other two gentlemen were not at home. “Suppose they SHOULD get in?” she had said lugubriously to her sister. “Well, what if they do?” Francie had asked. “Why the count and the marquis won’t be interested in Mr. Flack.” “Well then perhaps he’ll be interested in them. He can write something about them. They’ll like that.” “Do you think they would?” Delia had solemnly weighed it. “Why, yes, if he should say fine things.” “They do like fine things,” Delia had conceded. “They get off so many themselves. Only the way Mr. Flack does it’s a different style.” “Well, people like to be praised in any style.” “That’s so,” Delia had continued to brood. One afternoon, coming in about three o’clock, Mr. Flack found Francie alone. She had expressed a wish after luncheon for a couple of hours of independence: intending to write to Gaston, and having accidentally missed a post, she had determined her letter should be of double its usual length. Her companions had respected her claim for solitude, Mr. Dosson taking himself off to his daily session in the reading-room of the American bank and Delia--the girls had now at their command a landau as massive as the coach of an ambassador--driving away to the dressmaker’s, a frequent errand, to superintend and urge forward the progress of her sister’s wedding-clothes. Francie was not skilled in composition; she wrote slowly and had in thus addressing her lover much the same sense of sore tension she supposed she should have in standing at the altar with him. Her father and Delia had a theory that when she shut herself up that way she poured forth pages that would testify to her costly culture. When George Flack was ushered in at all events she was still bent over her blotting-book at one of the gilded tables, and there was an inkstain on her pointed forefinger. It was no disloyalty to Gaston, but only at the most an echo as of the sweetness of “recess time” in old school mornings that made her glad to see her visitor. She hadn’t quite known how to finish her letter, in the infinite of the bright propriety of her having written it, but Mr. Flack seemed to set a practical human limit. “I wouldn’t have ventured,” he observed on entering, “to propose this, but I guess I can do with it now it’s come.” “What can you do with?” she asked, wiping her pen. “Well this happy chance. Just you and me together.” “I don’t know what it’s a chance for.” “Well, for me to be a little less miserable for a quarter of an hour. It makes me so to see you look so happy.”