had no restlessness that these small excursions wouldn't assuage. He
looked at the heaped-up luggage, at the tinkling bells, at the young
women from the lingere, at the repudiated visitors, at everything but
the other American parents. Something in his breast told him that he
knew all about these. It's not upon each other that the animals in the
same cage, in a zoological collection, most turn their eyes. There was a
silent sociability in him and a superficial fineness of grain that
helped to account for his daughter Francie's various delicacies. He was
fair and spare and had no figure; you would have seen in a moment that
the question of how he should hold himself had never in his life
occurred to him. He never held himself at all; providence held him
rather--and very loosely--by an invisible string at the end of which he
seemed gently to dangle and waver. His face was so smooth that his thin
light whiskers, which grew only far back, scarcely seemed native to his
cheeks: they might have been attached there for some harmless purpose of
comedy or disguise. He looked for the most part as if he were thinking
over, without exactly understanding it, something rather droll that had
just occurred; if his eyes wandered his attention rested, just as it
hurried, quite as little. His feet were remarkably small, and his
clothes, in which light colours predominated, were visibly the work of a
French tailor: he was an American who still held the tradition that it
is in Paris a man dresses himself best. His hat would have looked odd in
Bond Street or the Fifth Avenue, and his necktie was loose and flowing.

Mr. Dosson, it may further be noted, was a person of the simplest
composition, a character as cipherable as a sum of two figures. He had a
native financial faculty of the finest order, a gift as direct as a
beautiful tenor voice, which had enabled him, without the aid of
particular strength of will or keenness of ambition, to build up a large
fortune while he was still of middle age. He had a genius for happy