The Reverberator Read Online Free PDF Page A

visitors, at everything but the other American parents. Something in his breast told him that he knew all about these. It is 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. He was fair and spare and had no figure; you would have seen in a moment that the question of how he should hold himself had never in his life occurred to him. He never held himself at all; providence held him rather (and very loosely), by an invisible string, at the end of which he seemed gently to dangle and waver. His face was so smooth that his thin light whiskers, which grew only far back, scarcely seemed native to his cheeks: they might have been attached there for some harmless purpose of comedy or disguise. He looked for the most part as if he were thinking over, without exactly understanding it, something rather droll which had just occurred; if his eyes wandered his attention rested, and hurried, quite as little. His feet were remarkably small, and his clothes, in which light colours predominated, were visibly the work of a French tailor: he was an American who still held the tradition that it is in Paris a man dresses himself best. Hishat would have looked odd in Bond Street or the Fifth Avenue, and his necktie was loose and flowing.
    Mr. Dosson, it may further be mentioned, was a man of the simplest composition, a character as cipherable as a sum of two figures. He had a native financial faculty of the finest order, a gift as direct as a beautiful tenor voice, which had enabled him, without the aid of particular strength of will or keenness of ambition, to build up a large fortune while he was still of middle age. He had a genius for happy speculation, the quick, unerring instinct of a “good thing;” and as he sat there idle, amused, contented, on the edge of the Parisian street, he might very well have passed for some rare performer who had sung his song or played his trick and had nothing to do till the next call. And he had grown rich not because he was ravenous or hard, but simply because he had an ear, or a nose. He could make out the tune in the discord of the market-place; he could smell success far up the wind. The second factor in his little addition was that he was an unassuming father. He had no tastes, no acquirements nor curiosities, and his daughters represented society for him. He thought much more and much oftener of these young ladies than of his bank-shares and railway-stock; they refreshed much more his sense of ownership, of accumulation. He never compared them with other girls; he only compared his present self to what he would have been without them. His view of them was perfectly simple. Delia had a more unfathomable profundity and Francie a wider acquaintance with literature and art. Mr. Dosson had not perhaps a full perception of his younger daughter’s beauty: he would scarcely have pretended to judge of that, more than he would of a valuable picture or vase, but he believed she was cultivated upto the eyes. He had a recollection of tremendous school-bills and, in later days, during their travels, of the way she was always leaving books behind her. Moreover was not her French so good that he could not understand it?
    The two girls, at any rate, were the wind in his sail and the only directing, determining force he knew; they converted accident into purpose; without them, as he felt, he would have been the tail without the kite. The wind rose and fell, of course; there were lulls and there were gales; there were intervals during which he simply floated in quiet waters—cast anchor and waited. This appeared to be one of them now; but he could be patient, knowing that he should soon again inhale the brine and feel the dip of his prow. When his daughters were out the determining process gathered force, and their being