Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/51

Rh the shop. Meanwhile, before starting for Spain, he would see her as often as possible—his eye would take possession of her.

His companion envied him his eye; he intimated that he was jealous of his eye. It was perhaps as a step towards establishing his right to be jealous that Mr. Probert left a card upon the Miss Dossons at the Hôtel de l'Univers et de Cheltenham, having first ascertained that such a proceeding would not, by the young American sisters, be regarded as an unwarrantable liberty. Gaston Probert was an American who had never been in America, and he was obliged to take counsel on such an emergency as that. He knew that in Paris young men did not call at hotels on honourable damsels; but he also knew that honourable damsels did not visit young men in studios; and he had no guide, no light that he could trust, save the wisdom of his friend Waterlow, which, however, was for the most part communicated to him in a derisive and misleading form. Waterlow, who was after all himself an ornament of the French and the very French school, jeered at his want of national instinct, at the way he never knew by which end to take hold of a compatriot. Poor Probert was obliged to confess that he had had terribly little practice, and in the great medley of aliens and brothers (and even more of sisters), he couldn't tell which was which. He would have had a country and countrymen, to say