The Reverberator | Page 6

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 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
prattled as they went down the Rue de la Paix.
"I should like to be Miss Delia's, if you can make that out," he laughed.
"Well then suppose you prove it by calling me a cab," Miss Delia
returned. "I presume you and Francie don't take this for a promenade-

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 l'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 Hodge, 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 coffinlike bandboxes covered with black
oil-cloth and depending from a strap, sallyings-forth of persons staying
and arrivals just afterwards of other persons to see them; together with
vague prostrations on benches of tired heads of American 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
ruminant resignation, of habitual accommodation in him; but you
would have guessed that he was enjoying a holiday rather than aching
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 cochere 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 little
and had no restlessness that these small excursions wouldn't assuage.
He looked at the heaped-up luggage, at the tinkling bells, at the young
women from the lingere, at the repudiated visitors, at everything but the
other American parents. Something in his breast told him that he knew

all about these. It's 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 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
that had just occurred; if his eyes wandered his attention rested, just as
it 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 noted, was a person 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