Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/85

Rh to the rigidity of the conception of the family among people who had adopted and had even to Waterlow's sense, as the phrase is, improved upon the usages of France. That did injustice (and this the artist also knew), to the delicate nature of the bond which united the different members of the house of Probert, who were each for all and all for each. Family feeling among them was not a tyranny but a religion, and in regard to Mesdames de Brécourt, de Cliché and de Douves what Gaston was most afraid of was seeming to them not to love them. None the less Charles Waterlow, who thought he had charming parts, held that the best way had not been taken to make a man of him, and the spirit in which the painter sometimes endeavoured to repair this mishap was altogether benevolent, though the form was frequently rough. Waterlow combined in an odd manner many of the forms of the Parisian studio with the moral and social ideas of Brooklyn, Long Island, where his first seeds had been implanted.

Gaston Probert desired nothing better than to be a man; what bothered him (and it is perhaps, a proof that his instinct was gravely at fault), was a certain vagueness as to the constituents of this personage. He should be made more nearly, as it seemed to him, a brute were he to sacrifice in such an effort the decencies and pieties—holy things all of them—in which he had been