Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/40

30 he was pleased to perceive how litttle she cared what had become of Mr. and Mrs. Rosenheim and Master Samuel and Miss Cora. He counted all the things she didn't care about—her soft inadvertent eyes helped him to do that; and they footed up so, as he would have said, that they gave him a pleasant sense of a free field. If she had so few interests there was the greater possibility that a young man of bold conceptions and cheerful manners might become one. She had usually the air of waiting for something, with a sort of amused resignation, while tender, shy, indefinite little fancies hummed in her brain; so that she would perhaps recognise in him the reward of patience. George Flack was aware that he exposed his friends to considerable fatigue; he brought them back pale and taciturn from suburban excursions and from wanderings often rather aimless and casual among the boulevards and avenues of the town. He regarded them at such moments with complacency, however, for these were hours of diminished resistance: he had an idea that he should be able eventually to circumvent Delia if he could only watch for some time when she was tired. He liked to make them all feel helpless and dependent, and this was not difficult with people who were so modest and artless, so unconscious of the boundless power of wealth. Sentiment, in our young man, was not a scruple nor a source of weakness; but he thought it