Chapter 3 - Page 2

regrets, for
though he had no business with Miss Francina, whose name he yet liked,
he also wanted to see her again. They half-agreed to give up Spain--they
had after all been there before--so that Waterlow might take the girl in
hand without delay, the moment he had knocked off his present work. This
amendment broke down indeed, for other considerations came up and the
artist resigned himself to the arrangement on which the young women had
quitted him: he thought it so characteristic of their nationality that
they should settle a matter of that sort for themselves. This was simply
that they should come back in the autumn, when he should be
comparatively free: then there would be a margin and they might all take
their time. At present, before long--by the time he should be ready--the
question of the pretty one's leaving Paris for the summer would be sure
to rise, and that would be a tiresome interruption. The pretty one
clearly liked Paris, she had no plans for the autumn and only wanted a
reason to come back about the twentieth of September. Mr. Waterlow
remarked humorously that she evidently bossed the shop. Meanwhile,
before starting for Spain, he would see her as often as possible--his
eye would take possession of her.

His companion envied his eye, even expressed jealousy of his eye. It was
perhaps as a step towards establishing his right to jealousy that Mr.
Probert left a card upon the Miss Dossons at the Hotel de l'Univers et
de Cheltenham, having first ascertained that such a proceeding would
not, by the young American sisters, be regarded as an unwarrantable
liberty. Gaston Probert was an American who had never been in America
and was obliged to take counsel on such an emergency as that. He knew
that in Paris young men didn't call at hotels on blameless maids, but he
also knew that blameless maids, unattended by a parent, didn't visit
young men in studios; and he had no guide, no light he could trust--none
save the wisdom of his friend Waterlow, which was for the most part
communicated to him in a derisive and misleading form. Waterlow, who was
after all himself an ornament of the French, and the very French,
school, jeered at the other's want of native instinct, at the way he
never knew by which end to take hold of a compatriot. Poor Probert was
obliged to confess to his terrible paucity of practice, and that in the
great medley of aliens and brothers--and even more of sisters--he
couldn't tell which was which. He would have had a country and
countrymen, to say nothing of countrywomen, if he could; but that matter
had never been properly settled for him, and it's one there's ever a
great difficulty in a gentleman's settling for himself. Born in Paris,
he had been brought up altogether on French lines,