Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/234

224 Gaston however was planted in his path on the way to the door. "And if she does break out again, in the same way?"

"In the same way?"

"In some other manifestation of that terrible order?"

"Well," said Waterlow, "you will at least have got rid of your family."

"Yes, if she does that I shall be glad they are not there! They're right, pourtant, they're right," Gaston went on, passing out of the studio with his friend.

"They're right?"

"It was a dreadful thing."

"Yes, thank heaven! It was the finger of providence, to give you your chance." This was ingenious, but, though he could glow for a moment in response to it, Francie's lover—if lover he may in his most infirm aspect be called—looked as if he mistrusted it, thought it slightly sophistical. What really shook him however was his companion's saying to him in the vestibule, when they had taken their hats and sticks and were on the point of going out: "Lord, man, how can you be so impenetrably dense? Don't you see that she's really of the softest, finest material that breathes, that she's a perfect flower of plasticity, that everything you may have an apprehension about will drop away from her like the dead leaves from a rose and that you may make of her any perfect and