He, Frank
Parke, had told her once that if her brush failed she
had only to try her pen, though he made use of no such
commonplace as that. He said it, too, at the end of half
an hour's talk with her, only half an hour. Elfrida,
when she wished to be exact with her vanity, told herself
that it could not have been more than twenty-five minutes.
She wished for particular reasons to be exact with it
now, and she did not fail to give proper weight to the
fact that Frank Parke had never seen her before that day.
The Paris correspondent of the _Daily Dial_ was well
enough known to be of the _monde_, and rich enough to be
as bourgeois as anybody. Therefore some of the people
who knew him thought it odd that at his age this gentleman
should prefer the indelicacies of the Quartier to those
of "tout Paris," and the bad vermouth and cheap cigars
of the Rue Luxembourg to the peculiarly excellent quality
of champagne with which the president's wife made her
social atonement to the Faubourg St. Germain. But it was
so, and its being so rendered Frank Parke's opinion that
Miss Bell could write if she chose to try, not only
supremely valuable to her, but available for the second
time if necessary, which was perhaps more important.
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