lady had put in--Florine or
Dorine--the one she had mentioned at Mme. de Brecourt's.

All the same, if the communication in the Reverberator let them down, at
the hotel, more gently than had seemed likely and bristled so much less
than was to have been feared with explanations of the anguish of the
Proberts, this didn't diminish the girl's sense of responsibility
nor make the case a whit less grave. It only showed how sensitive and
fastidious the Proberts were and therefore with what difficulty they
would come round to condonation. Moreover Francie made another reflexion
as she lay there--for Delia kept her in bed nearly three days, feeling
this to be for the moment at any rate an effectual reply to any absurd
heroics about leaving Paris. Perhaps they had got "case-hardened"
Francie said to herself; perhaps they had read so many such bad things
that they had lost the delicacy of their palate, as people were said to
do who lived on food too violently spiced. Then, very weak and vague and
passive as she was now, in the bedimmed room, in the soft Parisian bed
and with Delia treating her as much as possible like a sick person, she
thought of the lively and chatty letters they had always seen in the
papers and wondered if they ALL meant a violation of sanctities, a
convulsion of homes, a burning of smitten faces, a rupture of girls'
engagements. It was present to her as an agreeable negative, I must add,
that her father and sister took no strenuous view of her responsibility
or of their own: they neither brought the matter home to her as a crime
nor made her worse through her feeling them anxiously understate their
blame. There was a pleasant cheerful helplessness in her father on this
head as on every other. There could be no more discussion among them on
such a question than there had ever been, for none was needed to show
that for these candid minds the newspapers and all they contained were
a part of the general fatality of things, of the recurrent freshness
of the universe, coming out like the sun in the morning or the stars at
night or the wind and the weather at all times.

The thing that worried Francie most while Delia kept her in bed was the
apprehension of what her father might do; but this was not a fear
of what he might do to Mr. Flack. He would go round perhaps to Mr.
Probert's or to Mme. de Brecourt's and reprimand them for having made
things so rough to his "chicken." It was true she had scarcely ever seen