Chapter 13

Mr. Dosson, as we know, was, almost more than anything else, loosely
contemplative, and the present occasion could only minister to that side
of his nature, especially as, so far at least as his observation of his
daughters went, it had not urged him into uncontrollable movement. But
the truth is that the intensity, or rather the continuity, of his
meditations did engender an act not perceived by these young ladies,
though its consequences presently became definite enough. While he
waited for the Proberts to arrive in a phalanx and noted that they
failed to do so he had plenty of time to ask himself--and also to ask
Delia--questions about Mr. Flack. So far as they were addressed to his
daughter they were promptly answered, for Delia had been ready from the
first, as we have seen, to pronounce upon the conduct of the young
journalist. Her view of it was clearer every hour; there was a
difference however in the course of action which she judged this view to
demand. At first he was to have been blown up sky-high for the mess he
had got them into--profitless as the process might be and vain the
satisfaction; he was to have been scourged with the sharpest lashes the
sense of violated confidence could inflict. At present he was not to be
touched with a ten-foot pole, but rather cut dead, cast off and ignored,
let alone to his dying day: Delia quickly caught at this for the right
grand way of showing displeasure. Such was the manner in which she
characterised it in her frequent conversations with her father, if that
can be called conversation which consisted of his serenely smoking while
she poured forth arguments that kept repetition abreast of variety. The
same cause will according to application produce effects without
sameness: as a mark of which truth the catastrophe that made Delia
express freely the hope she might never again see so much as the end of
Mr. Flack's nose had just the opposite action on her parent. The best
balm for his mystification would have been to let his eyes sociably
travel over his young friend's whole person; this would have been to
deal again with quantities and forces he could measure and in terms he
could understand. If indeed the difference had been pushed further the
girl would have kept the field, for she had the advantage of being able
to motive her attitude, to which Mr. Dosson could have opposed but an
indefensible, in fact an inarticulate, laxity. She had touched on her
deepest conviction in saying to Francie that the correspondent of the
Reverberator had played them that trick on purpose to get them into such
trouble with the Proberts that he might see his own hopes bloom again in
the heat of their disaster. This had many of the appearances of a
strained interpretation, but that