Chapter 5 - Page 2

declared that all would be easy if such account hadn't to be taken of
the marquise, the comtesse and--what was the other one?--the princess.
These young amenities were exchanged between the pair--while Gaston
explained, almost as eagerly as if he were scoring a point, that the
other one was only a baronne--during that brief journey to Spain of
which mention has already been made, during the later weeks of the
summer, after their return (the friends then spent a fortnight together
on the coast of Brittany), and above all during the autumn, when they
were settled in Paris for the winter, when Mr. Dosson had reappeared,
according to the engagement with his daughters, when the sittings for
the portrait had multiplied (the painter was unscrupulous as to the
number he demanded), and the work itself, born under a happy star,
seemed to take more and more the turn of a great thing. It was at
Granada that Gaston had really broken out; there, one balmy night, he
had dropped into his comrade's ear that he would marry Francina Dosson
or would never marry at all. The declaration was the more striking as it
had come after such an interval; many days had elapsed since their
separation from the young lady and many new and beautiful objects
appealed to them. It appeared that the smitten youth had been thinking
of her all the while, and he let his friend know that it was the dinner
at Saint-Germain that had finished him. What she had been there Waterlow
himself had seen: he wouldn't controvert the lucid proposition that she
showed a "cutting" equal to any Greek gem.

In November, in Paris--it was months and weeks before the artist began
to please himself--Gaston came often to the Avenue de Villiers toward
the end of a sitting and, till it was finished, not to disturb the
lovely model, cultivated conversation with the elder sister: the
representative of the Proberts was capable of that. Delia was always
there of course, but Mr. Dosson had not once turned up and the
newspaper-man happily appeared to have faded from view. The new aspirant
learned in fact from Miss Dosson that a crisis in the history of his
journal had recalled Mr. Flack to the seat of that publication. When the
young ladies had gone--and when he didn't go with them; he accompanied
them not rarely--the visitor was almost lyrical in his appreciation of
his friend's work; he had no jealousy of the act of appropriation that
rendered possible in its turn such an act of handing over, of which the
canvas constituted the field. He was sure Waterlow painted the girl too
well to be in love with her and that if he himself could have dealt with
her in that fashion he mightn't have wanted to deal in any other. She
bloomed there on the easel with all the purity of life, and