Chapter 2

The court was roofed with glass; the April air was mild; the cry of
women selling violets came in from the street and, mingling with the
rich hum of Paris, seemed to bring with it faintly the odour of the
flowers. There were other odours in the place, warm succulent and
Parisian, which ranged from fried fish to burnt sugar; and there were
many things besides: little tables for the post-prandial coffee; piles
of luggage inscribed (after the initials or frequently the name) R. P.
Scudamore or D. Jackson Hodge, Philadelphia Pa., or St. Louis Mo.;
rattles of unregarded bells, flittings of tray-bearing waiters,
conversations with the second-floor windows of admonitory landladies,
arrivals of young women with coffinlike bandboxes covered with black
oil-cloth and depending from a strap, sallyings-forth of persons staying
and arrivals just afterwards of other persons to see them; together with
vague prostrations on benches of tired heads of American families. It
was to this last element that Mr. Dosson himself in some degree
contributed, but it must be added that he had not the extremely bereft
and exhausted appearance of certain of his fellows. There was an air of
ruminant resignation, of habitual accommodation in him; but you would
have guessed that he was enjoying a holiday rather than aching for a
truce, and he was not so enfeebled but that he was able to get up from
time to time and stroll through the porte cochere to have a look at the
street.

He gazed up and down for five minutes with his hands in his pockets, and
then came back; that appeared to content him; he asked for little and
had no restlessness that these small excursions wouldn't assuage. He
looked at the heaped-up luggage, at the tinkling bells, at the young
women from the lingere, at the repudiated visitors, at everything but
the other American parents. Something in his breast told him that he
knew all about these. It's not upon each other that the animals in the
same cage, in a zoological collection, most turn their eyes. There was a
silent sociability in him and a superficial fineness of grain that
helped to account for his daughter Francie's various delicacies. He was
fair and spare and had no figure; you would have seen in a moment that
the question of how he should hold himself had never in his life
occurred to him. He never held himself at all; providence held him
rather--and very loosely--by an invisible string at the end of which he
seemed gently to dangle and waver. His face was so smooth that his thin
light whiskers, which grew only far back, scarcely seemed native to his
cheeks: they might have been attached there for some harmless purpose of
comedy or disguise. He looked for the most part as if he were thinking
over, without exactly