Henry James

“ He liked to be intensely conscious, but liked others not to be. It seemed to him at this moment, after he had told Mr. Dosson he should be delighted to spend the evening with them, that he was indeed trying hard to measure how it would feel to recover the national tie; he had jumped on the ship, he was pitching away to the west. He had led his sister, Mme. de Brecourt, to expect that he would dine with her—she was having a little party; so that if she could see the people to whom, without a scruple, with a quick sense of refreshment and freedom, he now sacrificed her! ”

“ The reading-room of the Hotel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham was none too ample, and had seemed to Mr. Dosson from the first to consist principally of a highly-polished floor on the bareness of which it was easy for a relaxed elderly American to slip. It was composed further, to his perception, of a table with a green velvet cloth, of a fireplace with a great deal of fringe and no fire, of a window with a great deal of curtain and no light, and of the Figaro, which he couldn’t read, and the New York Herald, which he had already read. ”

“ Francie gave an exclamation of impatience and incredulity, and Mr. Flack pursued: “Don’t you remember what you told me that time we had that talk at Saint-Germain, on the terrace? You said I might remain your friend.”
“Well, that’s all right,” said the girl.
“Then ain’t we interested in the development of our friends—in their impressions, their situations and adventures? Especially a person like me, who has got to know life whether he wants to or no—who has got to know the world.”
“Do you mean to say I could teach you about life?” Francie beautifully gaped. ”

“ If an observer had chanced to be present for the quarter of an hour that elapsed, and had had any attention to give to these vulgar young persons, he would have wondered perhaps at there being so much mystery on one side and so much curiosity on the other—wondered at least at the elaboration of inscrutable projects on the part of a girl who looked to the casual eye as if she were stolidly passive. Fidelia Dosson, whose name had been shortened, was twenty-five years old and had a large white face, in which the eyes were far apart. ”

“ Her absence had not been long and when she re-entered the familiar salon at the hotel she found her father and sister sitting there together as if they had timed her by their watches, a prey, both of them, to curiosity and suspense. Mr. Dosson however gave no sign of impatience; he only looked at her in silence through the smoke of his cigar—he profaned the red satin splendour with perpetual fumes—as she burst into the room. ”

“ Oh the most awful thing; a newspaper sent this morning from America to my father—containing two horrible columns of vulgar lies and scandal about our family, about all of us, about you, about your picture, about poor Marguerite, calling her ‘Margot,’ about Maxime and Leonie de Villepreux, saying he’s her lover, about all our affairs, about Gaston, about your marriage, about your sister and your dresses and your dimples, about our darling father, whose history it professes to relate in the most ignoble, the most revolting terms. ”

“ It had never in life occurred to her withal that a succession of lovers, or just even a repetition of experiments, may have anything to say to a young lady’s delicacy. She felt herself a born old maid and never dreamed of a lover of her own—he would have been dreadfully in her way; but she dreamed of love as something in its nature essentially refined. All the same she discriminated; it did lead to something after all, and she desired that for Francie it shouldn’t lead to a union with Mr. Flack. ”

“ Francie’s answer to this ingenuity was that she didn’t know what he was talking about, and he indulged in no attempt on that occasion to render his meaning more clear; the consequence of which was that he felt he bore as yet with an insufficient mass, he cut, to be plain, a poor figure. His uneasiness had not passed away, for many things in truth were dark to him. He couldn’t see his father fraternising with Mr. Dosson, he couldn’t see Margaret and Jane recognising an alliance in which Delia was one of the allies. ”

“ Besides, that has nothing to do with Francie. You couldn’t find words enough a moment ago to express that Francie’s exquisite, and now you’ll be so good as to stick to that. Come—feel it all; since you HAVE such a free mind.”
“Do you call her by her little name like that?” Mme. de Brecourt asked, giving him another cup of tea.
“Only to you. She’s perfectly simple. It’s impossible to imagine anything better. And think of the delight of having that charming object before one’s eyes—always, always! It makes a different look-out for life.” ”

“ Gaston Probert however had not been frightened by it, and he continued to be thankful for the sensitive plate that nature had lodged in his brain and that culture had brought to so high a polish. The experience of the eye was doubtless not everything, but it was so much gained, so much saved, in a world in which other treasures were apt to slip through one’s fingers; and above all it had the merit that so many things gave it and that nothing could take it away. He had noted in a moment how straight Francie Dosson gave it ”

“ Gaston kept echoing. “In self-preservation?”
“To save from destruction the last scrap of your independence. That’s a much more important matter even than not treating her shabbily. They’re doing their best to kill you morally—to render you incapable of individual life.”
Gaston was immensely struck. “They are—they are!” he declared with enthusiasm.
“Well then, if you believe it, for heaven’s sake go and marry her to-morrow!” Waterlow threw down his implements and added: “And come out of this—into the air.” ”

“ To get something so charming and to get it of our own species!” Gaston explained.
“Of our own species? Tudieu!” said his father, looking up.
“Surely it’s infinitely fresher and more amusing for me to marry an American. There’s a sad want of freshness—there’s even a provinciality—in the way we’ve Gallicised.”
“Against Americans I’ve nothing to say; some of them are the best thing the world contains. That’s precisely why one can choose. They’re far from doing all like that.” ”

“ He looked at the heaped-up luggage, at the tinkling bells, at the young women from the lingere, at the repudiated visitors, at everything but the other American parents. Something in his breast told him that he knew all about these. It’s not upon each other that the animals in the same cage, in a zoological collection, most turn their eyes. There was a silent sociability in him and a superficial fineness of grain that helped to account for his daughter Francie’s various delicacies. ”

“ It is doubtless difficult to say more for Francie’s simplicity of character than that she felt no need of encouraging Mr. Flack in order to prove to herself that she wasn’t bullied. She didn’t care whether she were bullied or not, and she was perfectly capable of letting Delia believe her to have carried mildness to the point of giving up a man she had a secret sentiment for in order to oblige a relative who fairly brooded with devotion. ”

“ Dosson’s nature was the view that if these people had done bad things they ought to be ashamed of themselves and he couldn’t pity them, and that if they hadn’t done them there was no need of making such a rumpus about other people’s knowing. It was therefore, in spite of the young man’s rough exit, still in the tone of American condonation that he had observed to Delia: “He says that’s what they like over there and that it stands to reason that if you start a paper you’ve got to give them what they like. If you want the people with you, you’ve got to be with the people.” ”

“ We’re as good as anything there is and have always been thought so. You might do anything you like.”
“Well, I shall never like to marry—when it comes to that—a Frenchwoman.”
“Thank you, my dear”—and Mme. de Brecourt tossed her head.
“No sister of mine’s really French,” returned the young man.
“No brother of mine’s really mad. Marry whomever you like,” Susan went on; “only let her be the best of her kind. Let her be at least a gentlewoman. Trust me, I’ve studied life. That’s the only thing that’s safe.”
“Francie’s the equal of the first lady in the land.” ”

“ When in December he put before Waterlow his plan of campaign the latter made a comment. “I’ll do anything in the world you like—anything you think will help you—but it passes me, my dear fellow, why in the world you don’t go to them and say: ‘I’ve seen a girl who is as good as cake and pretty as fire, she exactly suits me, I’ve taken time to think of it and I know what I want; therefore I propose to make her my wife. If you happen to like her so much the better; if you don’t be so good as to keep it to yourselves.’ That’s much the most excellent way. ”

“ Francie brought out with the highest spirit.
“I defend you, my dear young lady—I insist that you’re only a wretched victim like ourselves,” M. de Brecourt remarked, approaching her with a smile. “I see the hand of a woman in it, you know,” he went on to the others; “for there are strokes of a vulgarity that a man doesn’t sink to—he can’t, his very organisation prevents him—even if he be the dernier des goujats. But please don’t doubt that I’ve maintained that woman not to be you.” ”

“ In many a girl so great a kindness might have been fanned to something of a flame by the breath of close criticism. I probably exaggerate little the perversity of pretty girls in saying that our young woman might at this moment have answered her sister with: “No, I wasn’t in love with him, but somehow, since you’re so very disgusted, I foresee that I shall be if he presses me.” ”

“ Mr. Flack looked at her for a moment very hard, in the whites of the eyes; then he replied, turning back to her sister: “Anything YOU like, Miss Francie. With you one subject’s as good as another. Can’t we sit down? Can’t we be comfortable?” he added.
“Comfortable? of course we can!” cried Delia, but she remained erect while Francie sank upon the sofa again and their companion took possession of the nearest chair.
“Do you remember what I told you once, that the people WILL have the plums?” George Flack asked with a hard buoyancy of the younger girl. ”

“ Francie replied candidly that for her too the occasion was most agreeable, and Mr. Flack pursued, looking round him with his hard smile, irrelevantly but sociably: “Yes, these French ideas! I don’t see how you can stand them. Those they have about young ladies are horrid.”
“Well, they tell me you like them better after you’re married.”
“Why after they’re married they’re worse—I mean the ideas. Every one knows that.”
“Well, they can make you like anything, the way they talk,” Francie said. ”

“ Why in the name of goodness all these mysteries and machinations?”
“Oh you don’t understand, you don’t understand!” sighed Gaston, who had never pulled so long a face. “One can’t break with one’s traditions in an hour, especially when there’s so much in them that one likes. I shan’t love her more if they like her, but I shall love THEM more, and I care about that. You talk as a man who has nothing to consider. ”

“ But it was not droll to Francie; she only thought it, or supposed it, a proof of the way Mr. Flack saw everything on a stupendous scale. “There are ten thousand things to do that haven’t been done, and I’m going to do them. The society-news of every quarter of the globe, furnished by the prominent members themselves—oh THEY can be fixed, you’ll see!—from day to day and from hour to hour and served up hot at every breakfast-table in the United States: that’s what the American people want and that’s what the American people are going to have. ”

“ Dosson had reappeared, according to the engagement with his daughters, when the sittings for the portrait had multiplied (the painter was unscrupulous as to the number he demanded) , and the work itself, born under a happy star, seemed to take more and more the turn of a great thing. It was at Granada that Gaston had really broken out; there, one balmy night, he had dropped into his comrade’s ear that he would marry Francina Dosson or would never marry at all. ”

“ Among the items of knowledge for which they were indebted to him floated the fact that this was the very best time in the young lady’s life to have her portrait painted and the best place in the world to have it done well; also that he knew a “lovely artist,” a young American of extraordinary talent, who would be delighted to undertake the job. He led his trio to this gentleman’s studio, where they saw several pictures that opened to them the strange gates of mystification. ”

“ Before he left Paris Francie, to do her justice, confided to him that her objection to going in such an intimate way even to Mme. de Brecourt’s had been founded on a fear that in close quarters she might do something that would make them all despise her. Gaston replied, in the first place, ardently, that this was the very delirium of delicacy, and that he wanted to know in the second if she expected never to be at close quarters with “tous les siens.” “Ah yes, but then it will be safer,” she pleaded; “then we shall be married and by so much, shan’t we? be beyond harm.” ”

“ She was not to be counted on; she was a vague soft negative being who had never decided anything and never would, who had not even the merit of knowing how to flirt and who only asked to be let alone. She made him stop at last, telling him, while she leaned against the parapet, that he walked too fast; and she looked back at their companions, whom she expected to see, under pressure from Delia, following at the highest speed. ”

“ You know a lot of people it’s difficult to get at unless one takes some extraordinary measures, as you’ve done.”
“What do you mean? What measures have I done?”
“Well, THEY have—to get right hold of you—and its the same thing. Pouncing on you, to secure you first—I call that energetic, and don’t you think I ought to know?” smiled Mr. Flack with much meaning. “I thought I was energetic, but they got in ahead of me. They’re a society apart, and they must be very curious.”
“Yes, they’re very curious,” Francie admitted with a resigned sigh. ”