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"Well, I hope it will be a good one!" she said with a groan of oppression as from the crushing majesty of their fate. When Francie, two days later, passed with Mr. Flack into Charles Waterlow's studio she found Mme. de Cliche before the great canvas.
Waterlow's productions took their place for the most part in the category of those creations known to ladies as frights, and our friends retired with the lowest opinion of the young American master. George Flack told them however that they couldn't get out of it, inasmuch as he had already written home to the Reverberator that Francie was to sit.
It was the fact of this surrender on his visitor's part that excited Waterlow's secret scorn: family feeling was all very well, but to see it triumph as a superstition calling for the blood-sacrifice made him feel he would as soon be a blackamoor on his knees before a fetish. He now measured for the first time the root it had taken in Gaston's nature.
He accused Probert of being afraid of his sisters, which was an effective way and he knew it of alluding to the rigidity of the conception of the family among people who had adopted and had even to Waterlow's sense, as the phrase is, improved upon the "Latin" ideal.
Waterlow's new picture, and about you as the subject of it, and about your being engaged to a member of the grand old monde, and about what was going on in the grand old monde, which would naturally attract attention through that? Why Miss Francie," Mr. Flack ever so blandly pursued, "you regularly TALKED as if you did." "Did I talk a great deal?" asked Francie.
But she seemed almost awkwardly free from alarm; if she had been suspicious it would have been easier to make his confession. When he came back from accompanying their old friend Outreville to her carriage he asked her if Waterlow's charming sitter had known who she was and if she had been frightened.
She was as fond of beauty and of the arts as he this was one of their bonds of union. She appreciated highly Charles Waterlow's talent and there had been talk of her deciding to sit to him. It was true her husband viewed the project with so much colder an eye that it had not been carried out.
He defended certain of Waterlow's purples and greens as he would have defended his own honour, and there was a genius or two, not yet fully acclaimed by the vulgar, in regard to whom he had convictions that belonged almost to the undiscussable part of life.
Mme. de Brecourt raved to Waterlow's face she had no opinions behind people's backs about his mastery of his craft; she could dispose the floral tributes of homage with a hand of practice all her own. She was the reverse of egotistic and never spoke of herself; her success in life sprang from a much wiser adoption of pronouns.
Besides, the law might be against me Scotland's iniquitous law; but in Heaven's sight Maude was my wife, not the other. So I temporized, hoping that time might bring about a relief, for Dr. Mair told me that Miss Waterlow's health was failing. However, she lived on, and " Lady Hartledon started up, her face blanching. "Is she not dead now? Was she living when you married me? Am I your wife?"
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