“Well, for me to be a little less miserable for a quarter of an hour. It makes me so to see you look so happy.”
“It makes you miserable?”—Francie took it gaily but guardedly.
“You ought to understand—when I say something so noble.” And settling himself on the sofa Mr. Flack continued: “Well, how do you get on without Mr. Probert?”
“Very well indeed, thank you.” The tone in which the girl spoke was not an encouragement to free pleasantry, so that if he continued his enquiries it was with as much circumspection as he had perhaps ever in his life recognised himself as having to apply to a given occasion. He was eminently capable of the sense that it wasn’t in his interest to strike her as indiscreet and profane; he only wanted still to appear a real reliable “gentleman friend.” At the same time he was not indifferent to the profit for him of her noticing in him a sense as of a good fellow once badly “sold,” which would always give him a certain pull on what he called to himself her lovely character. “Well, you’re in the real ‘grand’ old monde now, I suppose,” he resumed at last, not with an air of undue derision—rather with a kind of contemporary but detached wistfulness.
“Oh I’m not in anything; I’m just where I’ve always been.”
“I’m sorry; I hoped you’d tell me a good lot about it,” said Mr. Flack, not with levity.
“You think too much of that. What do you want to know so much about it for?”
Well, he took some trouble for his reason. “Dear Miss Francie, a poor devil of a journalist who has to get his living by studying-up things has to think TOO much, sometimes, in order to think, or at any rate to do, enough. We find out what we can—AS we can, you see.”
She did seem to catch in it the note of pathos. “What do you want to study-up?”
“Everything! I take in everything. It all depends on my opportunity. I try and learn—I try and improve. Every one has something to tell—or to sell; and I listen and watch—well, for what I can drink in or can buy. I hoped YOU’D have something to tell—for I’m not talking now of anything but THAT. I don’t believe but what you’ve seen a good deal of new life. You won’t pretend they ain’t working you right in, charming as you are.”