ourse of
the following month and by the aid of profuse attentions. What he mainly
made clear to them was that it was really most kind of a young man who
had so many big things on his mind to find sympathy for questions, for
issues, he used to call them, that could occupy the telegraph and the
press so little as theirs. He came every day to set them in the right
path, pointing out its charms to them in a way that made them feel how
much they had been in the wrong. It made them feel indeed that they
didn't know anything about anything, even about such a matter as
ordering shoes--an art in which they had vaguely supposed themselves
rather strong. He had in fact great knowledge, which was wonderfully
various, and he knew as many people as they knew few. He had
appointments--very often with celebrities--for every hour of the day,
and memoranda, sometimes in shorthand, on tablets with elastic straps,
with which he dazzled the simple folk at the Hotel de l'Univers et de
Cheltenham, whose social life, of narrow range, consisted mainly in
reading the lists of Americans who "registered" at the bankers' and at
Galignani's. Delia Dosson in particular had a trick of poring solemnly
over these records which exasperated Mr. Flack, who skimmed them and
found what he wanted in the flash of an eye: she kept the others waiting
while she satisfied herself that Mr. and Mrs. D. S. Rosenheim and Miss
Cora Rosenheim and Master Samuel Rosenheim had "left for Brussels."

Mr. Flack was wonderful on all occasions in finding what he
wanted--which, as we know, was what he believed the public wanted--and
Delia was the only one of the party with whom he was sometimes a little
sharp. He had embraced from the first the idea that she was his enemy,
and he alluded to it with almost tiresome frequency, though always in a
humorous fearless strain. Even more than by her fashion of hanging over
the registers she provoked him by appearing to find their little party
not sufficient to itself, by wishing, as he expressed it, to work in new
stuff. He might have been easy, however, for he had sufficient chance to
observe how it was always the fate of the Dossons to miss their friends.
They were continually looking out for reunions and combinations that
never came off, hearing that people had been in Paris only after they
had gone away, or feeling convinced that they were there but not to be
found through their not having registered, or wondering whether they
should