really do anything--that is would never really like anything--her
nearest relatives didn't like. Her sister's docility was a great comfort
to Delia, the more that she herself, taking it always for granted, was
the first to profit by it. She liked and disliked certain things much
more than her junior did either; and Francie cultivated the convenience
of her reasons, having so few of her own. They served--Delia's reasons--
for Mr. Dosson as well, so that Francie was not guilty of any particular
irreverence in regarding her sister rather than her father as the
controller of her fate. A fate was rather an unwieldy and terrible
treasure, which it relieved her that some kind person should undertake
to administer. Delia had somehow got hold of hers first--before even her
father, 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