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Dosson had the sense of his daughter's having been roughly handled he derived some of the consolation of amusement from his persistent humorous view of the Proberts as a "body." If they were consistent with their character or with their complaint they would move en masse upon the hotel, and he hung about at home a good deal as if to wait for them.
The resentment was rather Delia's, but she kept it to herself, for she was capable of reflecting with complacency that the key of the house would after all be hers, so that she could open the door for the Proberts if the Proberts should knock.
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.
She enjoyed every positive sign that the Proberts took an interest in her, and this was a considerable symptom, Gaston's second sister's coming all that way she lived over by the Invalides to look at the portrait once more.
"Regardez-moi ca, et ca, et ca, je vous demande!" he had exclaimed, making little dashes at the canvas with his glove, toward mystifying spots, on occasions when the artist was not at hand. The Proberts always fell into French when they spoke on a question of art. "Poor dear papa, he only understands le vieux jeu!"
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.
To act like a man the hope of the Proberts must pull up the root, even if the operation should be terribly painful, should be attended with cries and tears and contortions, with baffling scruples and a sense of sacrilege, the sense of siding with strangers against his own flesh and blood.
Why the way they felt then, they detested his very name. To Mr. Flack himself? Why he had simply exposed him to the biggest snub he had ever got in his life. "Well, hanged if I understand!" poor Mr. Dosson had said. "I thought you liked the piece you think it's so queer THEY don't like it." "They," in the parlance of the Dossons, now never meant anything but the Proberts in congress assembled.
But Francie was looking at her sister as if her attention had been arrested. "How do you mean 'a deep one'?" "Why he wanted to break it off, the fiend!" Francie stared; then a deeper flush leapt to her face, already mottled as with the fine footprints of the Proberts, dancing for pain. "To break off my engagement?" "Yes, just that. But I'll be hanged if he shall. Poppa, will you allow that?"
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.
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