The Reverberator | Page 9

"registered" at the bankers' and at
Galignani's. Delia Dosson in particular had a trick of poring solemnly
over these records which exasperated Mr. Flack, who skimmed them
and found what he wanted in the flash of an eye: she kept the others
waiting while she satisfied herself that Mr. and Mrs. D. S. Rosenheim
and Miss Cora Rosenheim and Master Samuel Rosenheim had "left for
Brussels."
Mr. Flack was wonderful on all occasions in finding what he 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 find their little
party not sufficient to itself, by wishing, as he expressed it, to work in
new stuff. He might have been easy, however, for he had sufficient
chance to observe how it was always the fate of the Dossons to miss
their friends. They were continually looking out for reunions and
combinations that never came off, hearing that people had been in Paris
only after they had gone away, or feeling convinced that they were
there but not to be found through their not having registered, or
wondering whether they should overtake them if they should go to
Dresden, and then making up their minds to start for Dresden only to
learn at the eleventh hour, through some accident, that the hunted game
had "left for" Biarritz even as the Rosenheims for Brussels. "We know
plenty of people if we could only come across them," Delia had more
than once observed: she scanned the Continent with a wondering
baffled gaze and talked of the unsatisfactory way in which friends at
home would "write out" that other friends were "somewhere in

Europe." She expressed the wish that such correspondents as that might
be in a place that was not at all vague. Two or three times people had
called at the hotel when they were out and had left cards for them
without an address and superscribed with some mocking dash of the
pencil--"So sorry to miss you!" or "Off to-morrow!" The girl sat
looking at these cards, handling them and turning them over for a
quarter of an hour at a time; she produced them days afterwards,
brooding upon them afresh as if they were a mystic clue. George Flack
generally knew where they were, the people who were "somewhere in
Europe." Such knowledge came to him by a kind of intuition, by the
voices of the air, by indefinable and unteachable processes. But he held
his peace on purpose; he 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 doubtless 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 he was pleased to perceive how little SHE
cared what had become of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenheim and Master Samuel
and Miss Cora. He counted all the things she 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 the rich sense of a free field. If she
had so few interests there was the greater possibility that a young man
of bold conceptions and cheerful manners might become one. She had
usually the air of waiting for something, with a pretty listlessness or an
amused resignation, while tender shy indefinite little fancies hummed
in her brain. Thus she would perhaps recognise in him the reward of
patience. George Flack was aware that he exposed his friends to
considerable fatigue: he brought them back pale and taciturn from
suburban excursions and from wanderings often rather aimless and
casual among the boulevards and avenues of the town. He regarded
them at such times with complacency however, for these were hours of
diminished resistance: he had an idea that he should be able eventually
to circumvent Delia if he only could catch her some day sufficiently,
that is physically, prostrate. He liked to make them all feel helpless and
dependent, and this was not difficult with people who were so modest

and artless, so unconscious of the boundless power of wealth.
Sentiment, in our young man, was not a scruple nor a source of
weakness;