Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/124

114 and several to-day emptied receptacles, extinguished fires. They made up Mr. Probert's world—a world not too small for him and yet not too large, though some of them supposed themselves to be very great institutions. Gaston knew the succession of events that had helped to make a difference, the most salient of which were the death of his brother, the death of his mother and above all perhaps the extinction of Mme. de Marignac, to whom the old gentleman used still to go three or four evenings out of the seven and sometimes even in the morning besides. Gaston was well aware what a place she had held in his father's life and affection, how they had grown up together (her people had been friends of his grandfather when that fine old Southern worthy came, a widower with a young son and several negroes, to take his pleasure in Paris in the time of Louis Philippe), and how much she had had to do with marrying his sisters. He was not ignorant that her friendship and all its exertions were often mentioned as explaining their position, so remarkable in a society in which they had begun after all as outsiders. But he would have guessed, even if he had not been told, what his father said to that. To offer the Proberts a position was to carry water to the fountain; they had not left their own behind them in Carolina; it had been large enough to stretch across the sea. As to what it was in Carolina there was no