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, for they believed everything they ever heard quoted from a
newspaper. Moreover Mr. Flack explained to them that it would be idiotic
to miss such an opportunity to get something at once precious and cheap;
for it was well known that impressionism was going to be the art of the
future, and Charles Waterlow was a rising impressionist. It was a new
system altogether and the latest improvement in art. They didn't want to
go back, they wanted to go forward, and he would give them an article
that would fetch five times the money in about five years--which
somehow, as he put it, seemed a very short time, though it would have
seemed immense for anything else. They were not in search of a bargain,
but they allowed themselves to be inoculated with any reason they
thought would be characteristic of informed people; and he even