Chapter 4

Delia had broken out the evening they took Mr. Probert to the circus;
she had apostrophised Francie as they each sat in a red-damask chair
after ascending to their apartments. They had bade their companions
farewell at the door of the hotel and the two gentlemen had walked off
in different directions. But upstairs they had instinctively not
separated; they dropped into the first places and sat looking at each
other and at the highly-decorated lamps that burned night after night in
their empty saloon. "Well, I want to know when you're going to stop,"
Delia said to her sister, speaking as if this remark were a
continuation, which it was not, of something they had lately been
saying.

"Stop what?" asked Francie, reaching forward for a marron.

"Stop carrying-on the way you do--with Mr. Flack."

Francie stared while she consumed her marron; then she replied in her
small flat patient voice: "Why, Delia Dosson, how can you be so
foolish?"

"Father, I wish you'd speak to her. Francie, I ain't foolish," Delia
submitted.

"What do you want me to say to her?" Mr. Dosson enquired. "I guess I've
said about all I know."

"Well, that's in fun. I want you to speak to her in earnest."

"I guess there's no one in earnest but you," Francie remarked. "These
ain't so good as the last."

"NO, and there won't be if you don't look out. There's something you can
do if you'll just keep quiet. If you can't tell difference of style,
well, I can!" Delia cried.

"What's the difference of style?" asked Mr. Dosson. But before this
question could be answered Francie protested against the charge of
"carrying-on." Quiet? Wasn't she as quiet as a Quaker meeting? Delia
replied that a girl wasn't quiet so long as she didn't keep others so;
and she wanted to know what her sister proposed to do about Mr. Flack.
"Why don't you take him and let Francie take the other?" Mr. Dosson
continued.

"That's just what I'm after--to make her take the other," said his elder
daughter.

"Take him--how do you mean?" Francie returned.

"Oh you know how."

"Yes, I guess you know how!" Mr. Dosson laughed with an absence of
prejudice that might have been deplored in a parent.

"Do you want to stay in Europe or not? that's what _I_ want to know,"
Delia pursued to her sister. "If you want to go bang home you're taking
the right way to do it."

"What has that got to do with it?" Mr. Dosson audibly wondered.

"Should you like so much to reside at that place--where is it?--where