otch plaid dress and a corsage, in a point
suggestive of twenty whalebones, coming down to the knees--but he could
remember Mme. de Marignac's Tuesdays and Thursdays and Fridays, with
Sundays and other days thrown in, and the taste that prevailed in that
milieu: the books they admired, the verses they read and recited, the
pictures, great heaven! they thought good, and the three busts of the
lady of the house in different corners (as a Diana, a Druidess and a
Croyante: her shoulders were supposed to make up for her head), effigies
the public ridicule attaching to which to-day would--even the least bad,
Canova's--make their authors burrow in holes for shame.

"And what else is she worth?" Mr. Probert asked after a momentary
hesitation.

"How do you mean, what else?"

"Her immense prospects, that's what Susan has been putting forward.
Susan's insistence on them was mainly what brought over Jane. Do you
mind my speaking of them?"

Gaston was obliged to recognise privately the importance of Jane's
having been brought over, but he hated to hear it spoken of as if he
were under an obligation to it. "To whom, sir?" he asked.

"Oh only to you."

"You can't do less than Mr. Dosson. As I told you, he waived the
question of money and he was splendid. We can't be more mercenary than
he."

"He waived the question of his own, you mean?" said Mr. Probert.

"Yes, and of yours. But it will be all right." The young man flattered
himself that this was as near as he was willing to go to any view of
pecuniary convenience.

"Well, it's your affair--or your sisters'," his father returned.

"It's their idea that we see where we are and that we make the best of
it."

"It's very good of them to make the best of it and I should think they'd
be tired of their own chatter," Gaston impatiently sighed.

Mr. Probert looked at him a moment in vague surprise, but only said: "I
think they are. However, the period of discussion's closed. We've taken
the jump." He then added as to put the matter a little less dryly:
"Alphonse and Maxime are quite of your opinion."

"Of my opinion?"

"That she's charming."

"Confound them then, I'm not of theirs!" The form of this rejoinder
was childishly perverse, and it made Mr. Probert stare again; but it
belonged to one of the reasons for which his children regarded him as
an old darling that Gaston could suppose him after an instant to embrace
it. The old man said nothing, but took up his book, and