her, and ever so much before Mr. Flack; and it lay with Delia to make
any change. She couldn't have accepted any gentleman as a party to an
engagement--which was somehow as far as her imagination went--without
reference to Delia, any more than she could have done up her hair
without a glass. The only action taken by Mr. Dosson on his elder
daughter's admonitions was to convert the general issue, as Mr. Flack
would have called it, to a theme for daily pleasantry. He was fond,
in his intercourse with his children, of some small usual joke, some
humorous refrain; and what could have been more in the line of true
domestic sport than a little gentle but unintermitted raillery on
Francie's conquest? Mr. Flack's attributive intentions became a theme of
indulgent parental chaff, and the girl was neither dazzled nor annoyed
by the freedom of all this tribute. "Well, he HAS told us about half
we know," she used to reply with an air of the judicious that the
undetected observer I am perpetually moved to invoke would have found
indescribably quaint.

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. Francie
protested that she didn't want to be done in THAT style, and Delia
declared that she would as soon have her sister shown up in a magic
lantern. They had had the fortune not to find Mr. Waterlow at home, so
that they were free to express themselves and the pictures were shown
them by his servant. They looked at them as they looked at bonnets and
confections when they went to expensive shops; as if it were a question,
among so many specimens, of the style and colour they would choose.
Mr. 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.
They accepted this somehow as a kind of supernatural sign that she would
have to