VI

Summary

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 Hôtel de l’Univers 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 resource of sitting in the court, and he had not yet discovered an effective substitute for this recreation. Without Mr. Flack, at the cafés, 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 superfluous to say that this 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 Américaine, 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 repetition, for monotonous insistence, for vague and aimless discussion. On leaving Mme. de Brécourt Francie's lover had written to Delia that he desired half an hour's private conversation with her father on the morrow at half-past eleven; his impatience 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 acquitted herself to the letter.