Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/62

52 eagerness in his greeting of the other guest, as if he had it in mind to ask him how soon he could give him half an hour. I hasten to add that, with the turn the occasion presently took, the correspondent of the Reverberator renounced the effort to put Mr. Probert down. They all went out together, and the professional impulse, usually so irresistible in George Flack's mind, suffered a modification. He wanted to put his fellow-visitor down, but in a more human, a more passionate sense. Probert talked very little to Francie, but though Mr. Flack did not know that on a first occasion he would have thought that violent, even rather gross, he knew it was for Francie, and Francie alone, that the fifth member of the party was there. He said to himself suddenly and in perfect sincerity that it was a mean class any way, the people for whom their own country was not good enough. He did not go so far however, when they were seated at the admirable establishment of M. Durand, in the Place de la Madeleine, as to order a bad dinner to spite his competitor; nor did he, to spoil this gentleman's amusement, take uncomfortable seats at the pretty circus in the Champs Elysées to which, at half-past eight o'clock, the company was conveyed (it was a drive of but five minutes) in a couple of cabs. The occasion therefore was superficially smooth, and he could see that the sense of being disagreeable to an American newspaper-man was not needed to make