Page:The Reverberator (2nd edition, American issue, London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1888).djvu/92

82 in her proper character), and in short the plot would thicken.

Gaston Probert's forecast of his difficulties revealed a considerable faculty for analysis, but that was not rare enough in the French composition of things to make his friend stare. He brought Suzanne de Brécourt, she was enchanted with the portrait of the little American, and the rest of the drama began to follow in its order. Mme. de Brécourt raved, to Waterlow's face (she had no opinions behind people's backs), about his mastery of his craft; she could say flattering things to a man with an assurance altogether her own. She was the reverse of egotistic and never spoke of herself; her success in life sprang from a much cleverer selection of her pronouns. Waterlow, who liked her and wanted to paint her ugliness (it was so charming, as he would make it), had two opinions about her—one of which was that she knew a hundred times less than she thought (and even than her brother thought), of what she talked about; and the other that she was after all not such a humbug as she seemed. She passed in her family for a rank radical, a bold Bohemian; she picked up expressions out of newspapers, but her hands and feet were celebrated, and her behaviour was not. That of her sisters, as well, had never been effectively exposed.

"But she must be charming, your young lady,"