“I’m sure I don’t know,” Francie said listlessly.
“‘Don’t give up an old friend—there’s nothing on earth so mean.’ Now isn’t Gaston Probert an old friend?”
“It will be very simple—he’ll give me up.”
“Then he’ll be worse than a worm.”
“Not in the least—he’ll give me up as he took me. He’d never have asked me to marry him if he hadn’t been able to get THEM to accept me: he thinks everything in life of THEM. If they cast me off now he’ll do just the same. He’ll have to choose between us, and when it comes to that he’ll never choose me.”
“He’ll never choose Mr. Flack, if that’s what you mean—if you’re going to identify yourself so with HIM!”
“Oh I wish he’d never been born!” Francie wailed; after which she suddenly shivered. And then she added that she was sick—she was going to bed, and her sister took her off to her room.
Mr. Dosson that afternoon, sitting by his younger daughter’s bedside, read the dreadful “piece” out to both his children from the copy of the Reverberator he had secured on the boulevard. It is a remarkable fact that as a family they were rather disappointed in this composition, in which their curiosity found less to repay it than it had expected, their resentment against Mr. Flack less to stimulate it, their fluttering effort to take the point of view of the Proberts less to sustain it, and their acceptance of the promulgation of Francie’s innocent remarks as a natural incident of the life of the day less to make them reconsider it. The letter from Paris appeared lively, “chatty,” highly calculated to please, and so far as the personalities contained in it were concerned Mr. Dosson wanted to know if they weren’t aware over here of the charges brought every day against the most prominent men in Boston. “If there was anything in that style they might talk,” he said; and he scanned the effusion afresh with a certain surprise at not finding in it some imputation of pecuniary malversation. The effect of an acquaintance with the text was to depress Delia, who didn’t exactly see what there was in it to take back or explain away. However, she was aware there were some points they didn’t understand, and doubtless these were the scandalous places—the things that had so worked up the Proberts. But why should they have minded if other people didn’t understand the allusions (these were peculiar, but peculiarly incomprehensible) any better than she did? The whole thing struck Francie herself as infinitely less lurid than Mme. de Brecourt’s account of it, and the part about her own situation and her beautiful picture seemed to make even less of the subject than it easily might have done. It was scanty, it was “skimpy,” and if Mr. Waterlow was offended it wouldn’t be because they had published too much about him. It was nevertheless clear to her that there were a lot of things SHE hadn’t told Mr. Flack, as well as a great many she had: perhaps those were the things that lady had put in—Florine or Dorine—the one she had mentioned at Mme. de Brecourt’s.
All the same, if the communication in the Reverberator let them down, at the hotel, more gently than had seemed likely and bristled so much less than was to have been feared with explanations of the anguish of the Proberts, this didn’t diminish the girl’s sense of responsibility nor make the case a whit less grave. It only showed how sensitive and fastidious the Proberts were and therefore with what difficulty they would come round to condonation. Moreover Francie made another reflexion as she lay there—for Delia kept her in bed nearly three days, feeling this to be for the moment at any rate an effectual reply to any absurd heroics about leaving Paris. Perhaps they had got “case-hardened” Francie said to herself; perhaps they had read so many such bad things that they had lost the delicacy of their palate, as people were said to do who lived on food too violently spiced. Then, very weak and vague and passive as she was now, in the bedimmed room, in the soft Parisian bed and with Delia treating her as much as possible like a sick person, she thought of the lively and chatty letters they had always seen in the papers and wondered if they ALL meant a violation of sanctities, a convulsion of homes, a burning of smitten faces, a rupture of girls’ engagements. It was present to her as an agreeable negative, I must add, that her father and sister took no strenuous view of her responsibility or of their own: they neither brought the matter home to her as a crime nor made her worse through her feeling them anxiously understate their blame. There was a pleasant cheerful helplessness in her father on this head as on every other. There could be no more discussion among them on such a question than there had ever been, for none was needed to show that for these candid minds the newspapers and all they contained were a part of the general fatality of things, of the recurrent freshness of the universe, coming out like the sun in the morning or the stars at night or the wind and the weather at all times.
The thing that worried Francie most while Delia kept her in bed was the apprehension of what her father might do; but this was not a fear of what he might do to Mr. Flack. He would go round perhaps to Mr. Probert’s or to Mme. de Brecourt’s and reprimand them for having made things so rough to his “chicken.” It was true she had scarcely ever seen him reprimand any one for anything; but on the other hand nothing like this had ever happened before to her or to Delia. They had made each other cry once or twice, but no one else had ever made them, and no one had ever broken out on them that way and frightened them half to death. Francie wanted her father not to go round; she had a sense that those other people had somehow stores of comparison, of propriety, of superiority, in any discussion, which he couldn’t command. She wanted nothing done and no communication to pass—only a proud unbickering silence on the part of the Dossons. If the Proberts made a noise and they made none it would be they who would have the best appearance. Moreover now, with each elapsing day, she felt she did wish to see Gaston about it. Her desire was to wait, counting the hours, so that she might just clearly explain, saying two or three things. Perhaps these things wouldn’t make it better—very likely they wouldn’t; but at any rate nothing would have been done in the interval, at least on her part and her father’s and Delia’s, to make it worse. She told her father that she wouldn’t, as Delia put it, “want to have him” go round, and was in some degree relieved at perceiving that he didn’t seem very clear as to what it was open to him to say to their alienated friends. He wasn’t afraid but was uncertain. His relation to almost everything that had happened to them as a family from a good while back was a sense of the absence of precedents, and precedents were particularly absent now, for he had never before seen a lot of people in a rage about a piece in the paper.