deas of Brooklyn Long Island,
where the seeds of his strictness had been sown.

Gaston Probert desired nothing better than to be a man; what worried
him--and it is perhaps a proof that his instinct was gravely at
fault--was a certain vagueness as to the constituents of that character.
He should approximate more nearly, as it seemed to him, to the brute
were he to sacrifice in such an effort the decencies and pieties--holy
things all of them--in which he had been reared. It was very well for
Waterlow to say that to be a "real" man it was necessary to be a little
of a brute; his friend was willing, in theory, to assent even to that.
The difficulty was in application, in practice--as to which the painter
declared that all would be easy if such account hadn't to be taken of
the marquise, the comtesse and--what was the other one?--the princess.
These young amenities were exchanged between the pair--while Gaston
explained, almost as eagerly as if he were scoring a point, that the
other one was only a baronne--during that brief journey to Spain of
which mention has already been made, during the later weeks of the
summer, after their return (the friends then spent a fortnight together
on the coast of Brittany), and above all during the autumn, when they
were settled in Paris for the winter, when Mr. Dosson had reappeared,
according to the engagement with his daughters, when the sittings for
the portrait had multiplied (the painter was unscrupulous as to the
number he demanded), and the work itself, born under a happy star,
seemed to take more and more the turn of a great thing. It was at
Granada that Gaston had really broken out; there, one balmy night, he
had dropped into his comrade's ear that he would marry Francina Dosson
or would never marry at all. The declaration was the more striking as
it had come after such an interval; many days had elapsed since their
separation from the young lady and many new and beautiful objects
appealed to them. It appeared that the smitten youth had been thinking
of her all the while, and he let his friend know that it was the dinner
at Saint-Germain that had finished him. What she had been there Waterlow
himself had seen: he wouldn't controvert the lucid proposition that she
showed a "cutting" equal to any Greek gem.

In November, in Paris--it was months and weeks before the artist began
to please himself--Gaston came often to the Avenue de Villiers toward
the end of a sitting and, till it w