Chapter 5

Gaston Probert made his plan, confiding it only to his friend Waterlow
whose help indeed he needed to carry it out. These revelations cost him
something, for the ornament of the merciless school, as it might have
been called, found his predicament amusing and made no scruple of
showing it. Gaston was too much in love, however, to be upset by a bad
joke or two. This fact is the more noteworthy as he knew that Waterlow
scoffed at him for a purpose--had a view of the good to be done him by
throwing him on the defensive. The French tradition, or a grimacing
ghost of it, was in Waterlow's "manner," but it had not made its mark on
his view of the relations of a young man of spirit with parents and
pastors. He mixed his colours, as might have been said, with the general
sense of France, but his early American immunities and serenities could
still swell his sail in any "vital" discussion with a friend in whose
life the principle of authority played so large a part. He accused
Probert of being afraid of his sisters, which was an effective way--and
he knew it--of alluding to the rigidity of the conception of the family
among people who had adopted and had even to Waterlow's sense, as the
phrase is, improved upon the "Latin" ideal. That did injustice--and this
the artist also knew--to the delicate nature of the bond uniting the
different members of the house of Probert, who were each for all and all
for each. Family feeling among them was not a tyranny but a religion,
and in regard to Mesdames de Brecourt, de Cliche and de Douves what
Gaston most feared was that he might seem to them not to love them
enough. None the less Charles Waterlow, who thought he had charming
parts, held that the best way hadn't been taken to make a man of him,
and the zeal with which the painter appeared to have proposed to repair
that mistake was founded in esteem, though it sometimes flowered in
freedom. Waterlow combined in odd fashion many of the forms of the
Parisian studio with the moral and social ideas of Brooklyn Long Island,
where the seeds of his strictness had been sown.

Gaston Probert desired nothing better than to be a man; what worried
him--and it is perhaps a proof that his instinct was gravely at fault--
was a certain vagueness as to the constituents of that character. He
should approximate more nearly, as it seemed to him, to the brute were
he to sacrifice in such an effort the decencies and pieties--holy things
all of them--in which he had been reared. It was very well for Waterlow
to say that to be a "real" man it was necessary to be a little of a
brute; his friend was willing, in theory, to assent even to that. The
difficulty was in application, in practice--as to which the painter