words the mass of their compatriots--wouldn't be unpersuadable that they
wanted about a column on Mr. Probert. His researches were to prove none
the less fruitless, for in spite of the vivid fact the girl was able to
give him as a starting-point, the fact that their new acquaintance had
spent his whole life in Paris, the young journalist couldn't scare up a
single person who had even heard of him. He had questioned up and down
and all over the place, from the Rue Scribe to the far end of Chaillot,
and he knew people who knew others who knew every member of the American
colony; that select settled body, which haunted poor Delia's
imagination, glittered and re-echoed there in a hundred tormenting
roundabout glimpses. That was where she wanted to "get" Francie, as she
said to herself; she wanted to get her right in there. She believed the
members of this society to constitute a little kingdom of the blest; and
she used to drive through the Avenue Gabriel, the Rue de Marignan and
the wide vistas which radiate from the Arch of Triumph and are always
changing their names, on purpose to send up wistful glances to the
windows--she had learned that all this was the happy quarter--of the
enviable but unapproachable colonists. She saw these privileged mortals,
as she supposed, in almost every victoria that made a languid lady with
a pretty head dash past her, and she had no idea how little honour this
theory sometimes did her expatriated countrywomen. Her plan was already
made to be on the field again the next winter and take it up seriously,
this question of getting Francie in.

When Mr. Flack remarked that young Probert's net couldn't be either the
rose or anything near it, since they had shed no petal, at any general
shake, on the path of the oldest inhabitant, Delia had a flash of
inspiration, an intellectual flight that she herself didn't measure at
the time. She asked if that didn't perhaps prove on the contrary quite
the opposite--that they were just THE cream and beyond all others.