"Oh, well, you'll see as much as you want of us--the way you'll have to
take us," Delia Dosson said: which led the young man to ask which that
way was and to guess he had never known but one way to take anything--
which was just as it came. "Oh well, you'll see what you'll make of it,"
the girl returned; and she would give for the present no further
explanation of her somewhat chilling speech. In spite if it however she
professed an interest in Mr. Flack's announced undertaking--an interest
springing apparently from an interest in the personage himself. The man
of wonderments and measurements we have smuggled into the scene would
have gathered that Miss Dosson's attention was founded on a conception
of Mr. Flack's intrinsic brilliancy. Would his own impression have
justified that?--would he have found such a conception contagious? I
forbear to ridicule the thought, for that would saddle me with the care
of showing what right our officious observer might have had to his
particular standard. Let us therefore simply note that George Flack had
grounds for looming publicly large to an uninformed young woman. He was
connected, as she supposed, with literature, and wasn't a sympathy with
literature one of the many engaging attributes of her so generally
attractive little sister? If Mr. Flack was a writer Francie was a
reader: hadn't a trail of forgotten Tauchnitzes marked the former line
of travel of the party of three? The elder girl grabbed at them on
leaving hotels and railway-carriages, but usually found that she had
brought odd volumes. She considered however that as a family they had an
intellectual link with the young journalist, and would have been
surprised if she had heard the advantage of his acquaintance questioned.

Mr. Flack's appearance was not so much a property of his own as a
prejudice or a fixed liability of those who looked at him: whoever they
might be what they saw mainly in him was that they had seen him before.