Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/116

106 familiar intercourse, by liking extremely himself. The way to get on with them—it was an immense simplification—was just to love them; one could do that even if one couldn't talk with them. He succeeded in making Mme. de Brécourt seize this nuance; she embraced the idea with her quick inflammability. "Yes," she said, "we must insist on their positive, not on their negative merits: their infinite generosity, their native delicacy. Their native delicacy, above all; we must work that!" And the brother and sister excited each other magnanimously to this undertaking. Sometimes, it must be added, they exchanged a glance which expressed a sudden slightly alarmed sense of the responsibility they had put on.

On the day Mr. Probert called at the Hôtel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham with his son, the pair walked away together, back to the Cours la Reine, without any immediate conversation. All that was said was some words of Mr. Probert's, with Gaston's rejoinder, as they crossed the Place de la Concorde.

"We should have to have them to dinner."

The young man noted his father's conditional, as if his acceptance of the Dossons were not yet complete; but he guessed all the same that the sight of them had not made a difference for the worse: they had let the old gentleman down more easily than was to have been feared. The call had not been noisy—a confusion of sounds; which