The Reverberator | Page 8

were his company but he scarcely theirs; it was
as if they belonged to him more than he to them.
They were out a long time, but he felt no anxiety, as he reflected that
Mr. Flack's very profession would somehow make everything turn out
to their profit. The bright French afternoon waned without bringing
them back, yet Mr. Dosson still revolved about the court till he might
have been taken for a valet de place hoping to pick up custom. The
landlady smiled at him sometimes as she passed and re-passed, and
even ventured to remark disinterestedly that it was a pity to waste such
a lovely day 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 affected him as the talk of people naming others,
naming friends of theirs, whom he had never heard of: then he was
aware of a degree of waste for the others, as if somebody lost
something--but never when he lounged in that simplifying yet so
comprehensive way in the court. It wanted but a quarter of an hour to
dinner--THAT historic fact was not beyond his measure--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, mingling sociability and languor,

on the subject of what they had seen and done--a question into which
he felt as yet the delicacy of enquiring. But they had evidently done a
good deal and had a good time: an impression sufficient to rescue Mr.
Dosson personally from the consciousness of failure. "Won't you just
step in and take dinner with us?" he asked of the young man with a
friendliness to which everything appeared to minister.
"Well, that's a handsome offer," George Flack replied while Delia put it
on record that they had each eaten about thirty cakes.
"Well, I wondered what you were doing so long. But never mind your
cakes. It's twenty minutes past six, and the table d'hote's on time."
"You don't mean to say you dine at the table d'hote!" Mr. Flack cried.
"Why, don't you like that?"--and Francie's candour of appeal to their
comrade's taste was celestial.
"Well, it isn't what you must build on when you come to Paris. Too
many flowerpots and chickens' legs."
"Well, would you like one of these restaurants?" asked Mr. Dosson. "I
don't care--if you show us a good one."
"Oh I'll show you a good one--don't you worry." Mr. Flack's tone was
ever that of keeping the poor gentleman mildly but firmly in his place.
"Well, you've got to order the dinner then," said Francie.
"Well, you'll see how I could do it!" He towered over her in the pride of
this feat.
"He has got an interest in some place," Delia declared. "He has taken us
to ever so many stores where he gets his commission."
"Well, 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 occasion that that was a more
original proceeding than worrying those old bones, as he called it, at
the hotel, he convinced them of other things besides in the course of the
following month and by the aid of profuse attentions. What he mainly
made clear to them was that it was really most kind of a young man
who had so many big things on his mind to find sympathy for questions,
for issues, he used to call them, that could occupy the telegraph and the
press so little as theirs. He came every day to set them in the right path,
pointing out its charms to them in a way that made them feel how much
they had been in the wrong. It made them feel indeed that they didn't

know anything about anything, even about such a matter as ordering
shoes--an art in which they had vaguely supposed themselves rather
strong. He had in fact great knowledge, which was wonderfully various,
and he knew as many people as they knew few. He had
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 l'Univers et de
Cheltenham, whose social life, of narrow range, consisted mainly in
reading the lists of Americans who