Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/191

Rh than had been announced and bristled so much less than was to have been feared with explanations of the anguish of the Proberts, this did not diminish the girl's sense of responsibility nor make the case a whit less grave. It only showed how sensitive and fastidious the Proberts were and therefore with what difficulty they could forgive. Moreover Francie made an other reflection as she lay there—for Delia kept her in bed nearly three days, feeling that for the moment at any rate that was an effectual reply to the wish she had signified that they should leave Paris. Perhaps they had got coarse and callous, Francie said to herself; perhaps they had read so many articles like that that they had lost their delicacy, the sense of certain differences and decencies. Then, very weak and vague and passive as she was now, in the bedimmed room, in the soft Parisian bed, and with Delia treating her as much as possible like a sick person, she thought of the lively and chatty letters that they had always seen in the papers and wondered whether they all meant a violation of sanctities, a convulsion of homes, a burning of smitten faces, a rupture of girls' engagements. It was present to her as an agreeable negative, I must add, that her father and sister took no strenuous view of her responsibility or of their own: they neither brought the matter up to her as a crime nor made her worse through her feeling that they hovered about in tacit disapproval. There was a pleasant, cheerful helplessness in her father in regard