Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/87

Rh since their separation from the young lady and many new and beautiful objects had engaged their attention. It appeared that poor Probert had been thinking of her all the while, and he let his friend know that it was that dinner at Saint Germain that had finished him. What she had been there Waterlow himself had seen: he would not controvert the proposition that she had been irresistible.

In November, in Paris (it was months and weeks before the artist began to please himself), the enamoured youth came very often to the Avenue de Villiers, toward the end of a sitting; and until it was finished, not to disturb the lovely model, he cultivated conversation with the elder sister: Gaston Probert was capable of that. Delia was always there of course, but Mr. Dosson had not once turned up and the newspaper man happily appeared to have taken himself off. The new aspirant learned in fact from Miss Dosson that a crisis in the affairs of his journal had recalled him to the seat of that publication. When the young ladies had gone (and when he did not go with them—he accompanied them not rarely), the visitor was almost lyrical in his appreciation of his friend's work; he had no jealousy of the insight which enabled him to reconstitute the girl on canvas with that perfection. He knew that Waterlow painted her too well to be in love with her and that if he himself could have attacked