Chapter 2 - Page 2

understanding it, something rather droll that had
just occurred; if his eyes wandered his attention rested, just as it
hurried, quite as little. His feet were remarkably small, and his
clothes, in which light colours predominated, were visibly the work of a
French tailor: he was an American who still held the tradition that it
is in Paris a man dresses himself best. His hat would have looked odd in
Bond Street or the Fifth Avenue, and his necktie was loose and flowing.

Mr. Dosson, it may further be noted, was a person of the simplest
composition, a character as cipherable as a sum of two figures. He had a
native financial faculty of the finest order, a gift as direct as a
beautiful tenor voice, which had enabled him, without the aid of
particular strength of will or keenness of ambition, to build up a large
fortune while he was still of middle age. He had a genius for happy
speculation, the quick unerring instinct of a "good thing"; and as he
sat there idle amused contented, on the edge of the Parisian street, he
might very well have passed for some rare performer who had sung his
song or played his trick and had nothing to do till the next call. And
he had grown rich not because he was ravenous or hard, but simply
because he had an ear, not to term it a nose. He could make out the tune
in the discord of the market-place; he could smell success far up the
wind. The second factor in his little addition was that he was an
unassuming father. He had no tastes, no acquirements, no curiosities,
and his daughters represented all society for him. He thought much more
and much oftener of these young ladies than of his bank-shares and
railway-stock; they crowned much more his sense of accumulated property.
He never compared them with other girls; he only compared his present
self with what he would have been without them. His view of them was
perfectly simple. Delia had a greater direct knowledge of life and
Francie a wider acquaintance with literature and art. Mr. Dosson had not
perhaps a full perception of his younger daughter's beauty: he would
scarcely have pretended to judge of that, more than he would of a
valuable picture or vase, but he believed she was cultivated up to the
eyes. He had a recollection of tremendous school-bills and, in later
days, during their travels, of the way she was always leaving books
behind her. Moreover wasn't her French so good that he couldn't
understand it?

The two girls, at any rate, formed the breeze in his sail and the only
directing determinant force he knew; when anything happened--and he was
under the impression that things DID happen--they were there for it to
have happened TO. Without them in short, as he felt, he would have been
the tail without the kite.