The American

On a brilliant day in May, in the year 1868, a gentleman was reclining at his ease on the great circular divan which at that period occupied the centre of the Salon Carré, in the Museum of the Louvre. This commodious ottoman has since been removed, to the extreme regret of all weak-kneed lovers of the fine arts, but the gentleman in question had taken serene possession of its softest spot, and, with his head thrown back and his legs outstretched, was staring at Murillo’s beautiful moon-borne Madonna in profound enjoyment of his posture. He had removed his hat, and flung down beside him a little red guide-book and an opera-glass. The day was warm; he was heated with walking, and he repeatedly passed his handkerchief over his forehead, with a somewhat wearied gesture. And yet he was evidently not a man to whom fatigue was familiar; long, lean, and muscular, he suggested the sort of vigor that is commonly known as “toughness.” But his exertions on this particular day had been of an unwonted sort, and he had performed great physical feats which left him less jaded than his tranquil stroll through the Louvre. He had looked out all the pictures to which an asterisk was affixed in those formidable pages of fine print in his Bädeker; his attention had been strained and his eyes dazzled, and he had sat down with an æsthetic headache. He had looked, moreover, not only at all the pictures, but at all the copies that were going forward around them, in the hands of those innumerable young women in irreproachable toilets who devote themselves, in France, to the propagation of masterpieces, and if the truth must be told, he had often admired the copy much more than the original. His physiognomy would have sufficiently indicated that he was a shrewd and capable fellow, and in truth he had often sat up all night over a bristling bundle of accounts, and heard the cock crow without a yawn. But Raphael and Titian and Rubens were a new kind of arithmetic, and they inspired our friend, for the first time in his life, with a vague self-mistrust.

An observer with anything of an eye for national types would have had no difficulty in determining the local origin of this undeveloped connoisseur, and indeed such an observer might have felt a certain humorous relish of the almost ideal completeness with which he filled out the national mould. The gentleman on the divan was a powerful specimen of an American. But he was not only a fine American; he was in the first place, physically, a fine man. He appeared to possess that kind of health and strength which, when found in perfection, are the most impressive—the physical capital which the owner does nothing to “keep up.” If he was a muscular Christian, it was quite without knowing it. If it was necessary to walk to a remote spot, he walked, but he had never known himself to “exercise.” He had no theory with regard to cold bathing or the use of Indian clubs; he was neither an oarsman, a rifleman, nor a fencer—he had never had time for these amusements—and he was quite unaware that the saddle is recommended for certain forms of indigestion. He was by inclination a temperate man; but he had supped the night before his visit to the Louvre at the Café Anglais—someone had told him it was an experience not to be omitted—and he had slept none the less the sleep of the just. His usual attitude and carriage were of a rather relaxed and lounging kind, but when under a special inspiration, he straightened himself, he looked like a grenadier on parade. He never smoked. He had been assured—such things are said—that cigars were excellent for the health, and he was quite capable of believing it; but he knew as little about tobacco as about homœopathy. He had a very well-formed head, with a shapely, symmetrical balance of the frontal and the occipital development, and a good deal of straight, rather dry brown hair. His complexion was brown, and his nose had a bold well-marked arch. His eye was of a clear, cold gray, and save for a rather abundant moustache he was clean-shaved. He had the flat jaw and sinewy neck which are frequent in the American type; but the traces of national origin are a matter of expression even more than of feature, and it was in this respect that our friend’s countenance was supremely eloquent. The discriminating observer we have been supposing might, however, perfectly have measured its expressiveness, and yet have been at a loss to describe it. It had that typical vagueness which is not vacuity, that blankness which is not simplicity, that look of being committed to nothing in particular, of standing in an attitude of general hospitality to the chances of life, of being very much at one’s own disposal so characteristic of many American faces. It was our friend’s eye that chiefly told his story; an eye in which innocence and experience were singularly blended. It was full of contradictory suggestions, and though it was by no means the glowing orb of a hero of romance, you could find in it almost anything you looked for. Frigid and yet friendly, frank yet cautious, shrewd yet credulous, positive yet sceptical, confident yet shy, extremely intelligent and extremely good-humored, there was something vaguely defiant in its concessions, and something profoundly reassuring in its reserve. The cut of this gentleman’s moustache, with the two premature wrinkles in the cheek above it, and the fashion of his garments, in which an exposed shirt-front and a cerulean cravat played perhaps an obtrusive part, completed the conditions of his identity. We have approached him, perhaps, at a not especially favorable moment; he is by no means sitting for his portrait. But listless as he lounges there, rather baffled on the æsthetic question, and guilty of the damning fault (as we have lately discovered it to be) of confounding the merit of the artist with that of his work (for he admires the squinting Madonna of the young lady with the boyish coiffure, because he thinks the young lady herself uncommonly taking), he is a sufficiently promising acquaintance. Decision, salubrity, jocosity, prosperity, seem to hover within his call; he is evidently a practical man, but the idea in his case, has undefined and mysterious boundaries, which invite the imagination to bestir itself on his behalf.

As the little copyist proceeded with her work, she sent every now and then a responsive glance toward her admirer. The cultivation of the fine arts appeared to necessitate, to her mind, a great deal of by-play, a great standing off with folded arms and head drooping from side to side, stroking of a dimpled chin with a dimpled hand, sighing and frowning and patting of the foot, fumbling in disordered tresses for wandering hair-pins. These performances were accompanied by a restless glance, which lingered longer than elsewhere upon the gentleman we have described. At last he rose abruptly, put on his hat, and approached the young lady. He placed himself before her picture and looked at it for some moments, during which she pretended to be quite unconscious of his inspection. Then, addressing her with the single word which constituted the strength of his French vocabulary, and holding up one finger in a manner which appeared to him to illuminate his meaning, “Combien?” he abruptly demanded.

The artist stared a moment, gave a little pout, shrugged her shoulders, put down her palette and brushes, and stood rubbing her hands.

“How much?” said our friend, in English. “Combien?”

“Monsieur wishes to buy it?” asked the young lady in French.

“Very pretty, splendide. Combien?” repeated the American.

“It pleases monsieur, my little picture? It’s a very beautiful subject,” said the young lady.

“The Madonna, yes; I am not a Catholic, but I want to buy it. Combien? Write it here.” And he took a pencil from his pocket and showed her the fly-leaf of his guide-book. She stood looking at him and scratching her chin with the pencil. “Is it not for sale?” he asked. And as she still stood reflecting, and looking at him with an eye which, in spite of her desire to treat this avidity of patronage as a very old story, betrayed an almost touching incredulity, he was afraid he had offended her. She was simply trying to look indifferent, and wondering how far she might go. “I haven’t made a mistake—pas insulté, no?” her interlocutor continued. “Don’t you understand a little English?”

The young lady’s aptitude for playing a part at short notice was remarkable. She fixed him with her conscious, perceptive eye and asked him if he spoke no French. Then, “Donnez!” she said briefly, and took the open guide-book. In the upper corner of the fly-leaf she traced a number, in a minute and extremely neat hand. Then she handed back the book and took up her palette again.

Our friend read the number: “2,000 francs.” He said nothing for a time, but stood looking at the picture, while the copyist began actively to dabble with her paint. “For a copy, isn’t that a good deal?” he asked at last. “Pas beaucoup?”

The young lady raised her eyes from her palette, scanned him from head to foot, and alighted with admirable sagacity upon exactly the right answer. “Yes, it’s a good deal. But my copy has remarkable qualities, it is worth nothing less.”

The gentleman in whom we are interested understood no French, but I have said he was intelligent, and here is a good chance to prove it. He apprehended, by a natural instinct, the meaning of the young woman’s phrase, and it gratified him to think that she was so honest. Beauty, talent, virtue; she combined everything! “But you must finish it,” he said. “finish, you know;” and he pointed to the unpainted hand of the figure.

“Oh, it shall be finished in perfection; in the perfection of perfections!” cried mademoiselle; and to confirm her promise, she deposited a rosy blotch in the middle of the Madonna’s cheek.

But the American frowned. “Ah, too red, too red!” he rejoined. “Her complexion,” pointing to the Murillo, “is—more delicate.”

“Delicate? Oh, it shall be delicate, monsieur; delicate as Sèvres biscuit. I am going to tone that down; I know all the secrets of my art. And where will you allow us to send it to you? Your address?”

“My address? Oh yes!” And the gentleman drew a card from his pocket-book and wrote something upon it. Then hesitating a moment he said, “If I don’t like it when it it’s finished, you know, I shall not be obliged to take it.”

The young lady seemed as good a guesser as himself. “Oh, I am very sure that monsieur is not capricious,” she said with a roguish smile.

“Capricious?” And at this monsieur began to laugh. “Oh no, I’m not capricious. I am very faithful. I am very constant. Comprenez?”

“Monsieur is constant; I understand perfectly. It’s a rare virtue. To recompense you, you shall have your picture on the first possible day; next week—as soon as it is dry. I will take the card of monsieur.” And she took it and read his name: “Christopher Newman.” Then she tried to repeat it aloud, and laughed at her bad accent. “Your English names are so droll!”

“Droll?” said Mr. Newman, laughing too. “Did you ever hear of Christopher Columbus?”

“Bien sûr! He invented America; a very great man. And is he your patron?”

“My patron?”

“Your patron-saint, in the calendar.”

“Oh, exactly; my parents named me for him.”

“Monsieur is American?”

“Don’t you see it?” monsieur inquired.

“And you mean to carry my little picture away over there?” and she explained her phrase with a gesture.

“Oh, I mean to buy a great many pictures—beaucoup, beaucoup,” said Christopher Newman.

“The honor is not less for me,” the young lady answered, “for I am sure monsieur has a great deal of taste.”

“But you must give me your card,” Newman said; “your card, you know.”

The young lady looked severe for an instant, and then said, “My father will wait upon you.”

But this time Mr. Newman’s powers of divination were at fault. “Your card, your address,” he simply repeated.

“My address?” said mademoiselle. Then with a little shrug, “Happily for you, you are an American! It is the first time I ever gave my card to a gentleman.” And, taking from her pocket a rather greasy portemonnaie, she extracted from it a small glazed visiting card, and presented the latter to her patron. It was neatly inscribed in pencil, with a great many flourishes, “Mlle. Noémie Nioche.” But Mr. Newman, unlike his companion, read the name with perfect gravity; all French names to him were equally droll.

“And precisely, here is my father, who has come to escort me home,” said Mademoiselle Noémie. “He speaks English. He will arrange with you.” And she turned to welcome a little old gentleman who came shuffling up, peering over his spectacles at Newman.

M. Nioche wore a glossy wig, of an unnatural color which overhung his little meek, white, vacant face, and left it hardly more expressive than the unfeatured block upon which these articles are displayed in the barber’s window. He was an exquisite image of shabby gentility. His scant ill-made coat, desperately brushed, his darned gloves, his highly polished boots, his rusty, shapely hat, told the story of a person who had “had losses” and who clung to the spirit of nice habits even though the letter had been hopelessly effaced. Among other things M. Nioche had lost courage. Adversity had not only ruined him, it had frightened him, and he was evidently going through his remnant of life on tiptoe, for fear of waking up the hostile fates. If this strange gentleman was saying anything improper to his daughter, M. Nioche would entreat him huskily, as a particular favor, to forbear; but he would admit at the same time that he was very presumptuous to ask for particular favors.

“Monsieur has bought my picture,” said Mademoiselle Noémie. “When it’s finished you’ll carry it to him in a cab.”

“In a cab!” cried M. Nioche; and he stared, in a bewildered way, as if he had seen the sun rising at midnight.

“Are you the young lady’s father?” said Newman. “I think she said you speak English.”

“Speak English—yes,” said the old man slowly rubbing his hands. “I will bring it in a cab.”

“Say something, then,” cried his daughter. “Thank him a little—not too much.”

“A little, my daughter, a little?” said M. Nioche perplexed. “How much?”

“Two thousand!” said Mademoiselle Noémie. “Don’t make a fuss or he’ll take back his word.”

“Two thousand!” cried the old man, and he began to fumble for his snuff-box. He looked at Newman from head to foot; he looked at his daughter and then at the picture. “Take care you don’t spoil it!” he cried almost sublimely.

“We must go home,” said Mademoiselle Noémie. “This is a good day’s work. Take care how you carry it!” And she began to put up her utensils.

“How can I thank you?” said M. Nioche. “My English does not suffice.”

“I wish I spoke French as well,” said Newman, good-naturedly. “Your daughter is very clever.”

“Oh, sir!” and M. Nioche looked over his spectacles with tearful eyes and nodded several times with a world of sadness. “She has had an education—très-supérieure! Nothing was spared. Lessons in pastel at ten francs the lesson, lessons in oil at twelve francs. I didn’t look at the francs then. She’s an artiste, eh?”

“Do I understand you to say that you have had reverses?” asked Newman.

“Reverses? Oh, sir, misfortunes—terrible.”

“Unsuccessful in business, eh?”

“Very unsuccessful, sir.”

“Oh, never fear, you’ll get on your legs again,” said Newman cheerily.

The old man drooped his head on one side and looked at him with an expression of pain, as if this were an unfeeling jest.

“What does he say?” demanded Mademoiselle Noémie.

M. Nioche took a pinch of snuff. “He says I will make my fortune again.”

“Perhaps he will help you. And what else?”

“He says thou art very clever.”

“It is very possible. You believe it yourself, my father?”

“Believe it, my daughter? With this evidence!” And the old man turned afresh, with a staring, wondering homage, to the audacious daub on the easel.

“Ask him, then, if he would not like to learn French.”

“To learn French?”

“To take lessons.”

“To take lessons, my daughter? From thee?”

“From you!”

“From me, my child? How should I give lessons?”

“Pas de raisons! Ask him immediately!” said Mademoiselle Noémie, with soft brevity.

M. Nioche stood aghast, but under his daughter’s eye he collected his wits, and, doing his best to assume an agreeable smile, he executed her commands. “Would it please you to receive instruction in our beautiful language?” he inquired, with an appealing quaver.

“To study French?” asked Newman, staring.

M. Nioche pressed his finger-tips together and slowly raised his shoulders. “A little conversation!”

“Conversation—that’s it!” murmured Mademoiselle Noémie, who had caught the word. “The conversation of the best society.”

“Our French conversation is famous, you know,” M. Nioche ventured to continue. “It’s a great talent.”

“But isn’t it awfully difficult?” asked Newman, very simply.

“Not to a man of esprit, like monsieur, an admirer of beauty in every form!” and M. Nioche cast a significant glance at his daughter’s Madonna.

“I can’t fancy myself chattering French!” said Newman with a laugh. “And yet, I suppose that the more a man knows the better.”

“Monsieur expresses that very happily. Hélas, oui!”

“I suppose it would help me a great deal, knocking about Paris, to know the language.”

“Ah, there are so many things monsieur must want to say: difficult things!”

“Everything I want to say is difficult. But you give lessons?”

Poor M. Nioche was embarrassed; he smiled more appealingly. “I am not a regular professor,” he admitted. “I can’t nevertheless tell him that I’m a professor,” he said to his daughter.

“Tell him it’s a very exceptional chance,” answered Mademoiselle Noémie; “an homme du monde—one gentleman conversing with another! Remember what you are—what you have been!”

“A teacher of languages in neither case! Much more formerly and much less to-day! And if he asks the price of the lessons?”

“He won’t ask it,” said Mademoiselle Noémie.

“What he pleases, I may say?”

“Never! That’s bad style.”

“If he asks, then?”

Mademoiselle Noémie had put on her bonnet and was tying the ribbons. She smoothed them out, with her soft little chin thrust forward. “Ten francs,” she said quickly.

“Oh, my daughter! I shall never dare.”

“Don’t dare, then! He won’t ask till the end of the lessons, and then I will make out the bill.”

M. Nioche turned to the confiding foreigner again, and stood rubbing his hands, with an air of seeming to plead guilty which was not intenser only because it was habitually so striking. It never occurred to Newman to ask him for a guarantee of his skill in imparting instruction; he supposed of course M. Nioche knew his own language, and his appealing forlornness was quite the perfection of what the American, for vague reasons, had always associated with all elderly foreigners of the lesson-giving class. Newman had never reflected upon philological processes. His chief impression with regard to ascertaining those mysterious correlatives of his familiar English vocables which were current in this extraordinary city of Paris was, that it was simply a matter of a good deal of unwonted and rather ridiculous muscular effort on his own part. “How did you learn English?” he asked of the old man.

“When I was young, before my miseries. Oh, I was wide awake, then. My father was a great commerçant; he placed me for a year in a counting-house in England. Some of it stuck to me; but much I have forgotten!”

“How much French can I learn in a month?”

“What does he say?” asked Mademoiselle Noémie.

M. Nioche explained.

“He will speak like an angel!” said his daughter.

But the native integrity which had been vainly exerted to secure M. Nioche’s commercial prosperity flickered up again. “Dame, monsieur!” he answered. “All I can teach you!” And then, recovering himself at a sign from his daughter, “I will wait upon you at your hotel.”

“Oh yes, I should like to learn French,” Newman went on, with democratic confidingness. “Hang me if I should ever have thought of it! I took for granted it was impossible. But if you learned my language, why shouldn’t I learn yours?” and his frank, friendly laugh drew the sting from the jest. “Only, if we are going to converse, you know, you must think of something cheerful to converse about.”

“You are very good, sir; I am overcome!” said M. Nioche, throwing out his hands. “But you have cheerfulness and happiness for two!”

“Oh no,” said Newman more seriously. “You must be bright and lively; that’s part of the bargain.”

M. Nioche bowed, with his hand on his heart. “Very well, sir; you have already made me lively.”

“Come and bring me my picture then; I will pay you for it, and we will talk about that. That will be a cheerful subject!”

Mademoiselle Noémie had collected her accessories, and she gave the precious Madonna in charge to her father, who retreated backwards out of sight, holding it at arm’s-length and reiterating his obeisance. The young lady gathered her shawl about her like a perfect Parisienne, and it was with the smile of a Parisienne that she took leave of her patron.

He wandered back to the divan and seated himself on the other side, in view of the great canvas on which Paul Veronese had depicted the marriage-feast of Cana. Wearied as he was he found the picture entertaining; it had an illusion for him; it satisfied his conception, which was ambitious, of what a splendid banquet should be. In the left-hand corner of the picture is a young woman with yellow tresses confined in a golden head-dress; she is bending forward and listening, with the smile of a charming woman at a dinner-party, to her neighbor. Newman detected her in the crowd, admired her, and perceived that she too had her votive copyist—a young man with his hair standing on end. Suddenly he became conscious of the germ of the mania of the “collector;” he had taken the first step; why should he not go on? It was only twenty minutes before that he had bought the first picture of his life, and now he was already thinking of art-patronage as a fascinating pursuit. His reflections quickened his good-humor, and he was on the point of approaching the young man with another “Combien?” Two or three facts in this relation are noticeable, although the logical chain which connects them may seem imperfect. He knew Mademoiselle Nioche had asked too much; he bore her no grudge for doing so, and he was determined to pay the young man exactly the proper sum. At this moment, however, his attention was attracted by a gentleman who had come from another part of the room and whose manner was that of a stranger to the gallery, although he was equipped with neither guide-book nor opera-glass. He carried a white sun-umbrella, lined with blue silk, and he strolled in front of the Paul Veronese, vaguely looking at it, but much too near to see anything but the grain of the canvas. Opposite to Christopher Newman he paused and turned, and then our friend, who had been observing him, had a chance to verify a suspicion aroused by an imperfect view of his face. The result of this larger scrutiny was that he presently sprang to his feet, strode across the room, and, with an outstretched hand, arrested the gentleman with the blue-lined umbrella. The latter stared, but put out his hand at a venture. He was corpulent and rosy, and though his countenance, which was ornamented with a beautiful flaxen beard, carefully divided in the middle and brushed outward at the sides, was not remarkable for intensity of expression, he looked like a person who would willingly shake hands with anyone. I know not what Newman thought of his face, but he found a want of response in his grasp.

“Oh, come, come,” he said, laughing; “don’t say, now, you don’t know me—if I have not got a white parasol!”

The sound of his voice quickened the other’s memory, his face expanded to its fullest capacity, and he also broke into a laugh. “Why, Newman—I’ll be blowed! Where in the world—I declare—who would have thought? You know you have changed.”

“You haven’t!” said Newman.

“Not for the better, no doubt. When did you get here?”

“Three days ago.”

“Why didn’t you let me know?”

“I had no idea you were here.”

“I have been here these six years.”

“It must be eight or nine since we met.”

“Something of that sort. We were very young.”

“It was in St. Louis, during the war. You were in the army.”

“Oh no, not I! But you were.”

“I believe I was.”

“You came out all right?”

“I came out with my legs and arms—and with satisfaction. All that seems very far away.”

“And how long have you been in Europe?”

“Seventeen days.”

“First time?”

“Yes, very much so.”

“Made your everlasting fortune?”

Christopher Newman was silent a moment, and then with a tranquil smile he answered, “Yes.”

“And come to Paris to spend it, eh?”

“Well, we shall see. So they carry those parasols here—the men-folk?”

“Of course they do. They’re great things. They understand comfort out here.”

“Where do you buy them?”

“Anywhere, everywhere.”

“Well, Tristram, I’m glad to get hold of you. You can show me the ropes. I suppose you know Paris inside out.”

Mr. Tristram gave a mellow smile of self-gratulation. “Well, I guess there are not many men that can show me much. I’ll take care of you.”

“It’s a pity you were not here a few minutes ago. I have just bought a picture. You might have put the thing through for me.”

“Bought a picture?” said Mr. Tristram, looking vaguely round at the walls. “Why, do they sell them?”

“I mean a copy.”

“Oh, I see. These,” said Mr. Tristram, nodding at the Titians and Vandykes, “these, I suppose, are originals.”

“I hope so,” cried Newman. “I don’t want a copy of a copy.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Tristram, mysteriously, “you can never tell. They imitate, you know, so deucedly well. It’s like the jewellers, with their false stones. Go into the Palais Royal, there; you see ‘Imitation’ on half the windows. The law obliges them to stick it on, you know; but you can’t tell the things apart. To tell the truth,” Mr. Tristram continued, with a wry face, “I don’t do much in pictures. I leave that to my wife.”

“Ah, you have got a wife?”

“Didn’t I mention it? She’s a very nice woman; you must know her. She’s up there in the Avenue d’Iéna.”

“So you are regularly fixed—house and children and all.”

“Yes, a tip-top house and a couple of youngsters.”

“Well,” said Christopher Newman, stretching his arms a little, with a sigh, “I envy you.”

“Oh no! you don’t!” answered Mr. Tristram, giving him a little poke with his parasol.

“I beg your pardon; I do!”

“Well, you won’t, then, when—when—”

“You don’t certainly mean when I have seen your establishment?”

“When you have seen Paris, my boy. You want to be your own master here.”

“Oh, I have been my own master all my life, and I’m tired of it.”

“Well, try Paris. How old are you?”

“Thirty-six.”

“C’est le bel âge, as they say here.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that a man shouldn’t send away his plate till he has eaten his fill.”

“All that? I have just made arrangements to take French lessons.”

“Oh, you don’t want any lessons. You’ll pick it up. I never took any.”

“I suppose you speak French as well as English?”

“Better!” said Mr. Tristram, roundly. “It’s a splendid language. You can say all sorts of bright things in it.”

“But I suppose,” said Christopher Newman, with an earnest desire for information, “that you must be bright to begin with.”

“Not a bit; that’s just the beauty of it.”

The two friends, as they exchanged these remarks, had remained standing where they met, and leaning against the rail which protected the pictures. Mr. Tristram at last declared that he was overcome with fatigue and should be happy to sit down. Newman recommended in the highest terms the great divan on which he had been lounging, and they prepared to seat themselves. “This is a great place; isn’t it?” said Newman, with ardor.

“Great place, great place. Finest thing in the world.” And then, suddenly, Mr. Tristram hesitated and looked about him. “I suppose they won’t let you smoke here.”

Newman stared. “Smoke? I’m sure I don’t know. You know the regulations better than I.”

“I? I never was here before!”

“Never! in six years?”

“I believe my wife dragged me here once when we first came to Paris, but I never found my way back.”

“But you say you know Paris so well!”

“I don’t call this Paris!” cried Mr. Tristram, with assurance. “Come; let’s go over to the Palais Royal and have a smoke.”

“I don’t smoke,” said Newman.

“A drink, then.”

And Mr. Tristram led his companion away. They passed through the glorious halls of the Louvre, down the staircases, along the cool, dim galleries of sculpture, and out into the enormous court. Newman looked about him as he went, but he made no comments, and it was only when they at last emerged into the open air that he said to his friend, “It seems to me that in your place I should have come here once a week.”

“Oh, no you wouldn’t!” said Mr. Tristram. “You think so, but you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t have had time. You would always mean to go, but you never would go. There’s better fun than that, here in Paris. Italy’s the place to see pictures; wait till you get there. There you have to go; you can’t do anything else. It’s an awful country; you can’t get a decent cigar. I don’t know why I went in there, to-day; I was strolling along, rather hard up for amusement. I sort of noticed the Louvre as I passed, and I thought I would go in and see what was going on. But if I hadn’t found you there I should have felt rather sold. Hang it, I don’t care for pictures; I prefer the reality!” And Mr. Tristram tossed off this happy formula with an assurance which the numerous class of persons suffering from an overdose of “culture” might have envied him.

The two gentlemen proceeded along the Rue de Rivoli and into the Palais Royal, where they seated themselves at one of the little tables stationed at the door of the café which projects into the great open quadrangle. The place was filled with people, the fountains were spouting, a band was playing, clusters of chairs were gathered beneath all the lime-trees, and buxom, white-capped nurses, seated along the benches, were offering to their infant charges the amplest facilities for nutrition. There was an easy, homely gaiety in the whole scene, and Christopher Newman felt that it was most characteristically Parisian.

“And now,” began Mr. Tristram, when they had tested the decoction which he had caused to be served to them, “now just give an account of yourself. What are your ideas, what are your plans, where have you come from and where are you going? In the first place, where are you staying?”

“At the Grand Hotel,” said Newman.

Mr. Tristram puckered his plump visage. “That won’t do! You must change.”

“Change?” demanded Newman. “Why, it’s the finest hotel I ever was in.”

“You don’t want a ‘fine’ hotel; you want something small and quiet and elegant, where your bell is answered and you—your person is recognized.”

“They keep running to see if I have rung before I have touched the bell,” said Newman “and as for my person they are always bowing and scraping to it.”

“I suppose you are always tipping them. That’s very bad style.”

“Always? By no means. A man brought me something yesterday, and then stood loafing in a beggarly manner. I offered him a chair and asked him if he wouldn’t sit down. Was that bad style?”

“Very!”

“But he bolted, instantly. At any rate, the place amuses me. Hang your elegance, if it bores me. I sat in the court of the Grand Hotel last night until two o’clock in the morning, watching the coming and going, and the people knocking about.”

“You’re easily pleased. But you can do as you choose—a man in your shoes. You have made a pile of money, eh?”

“I have made enough.”

“Happy the man who can say that? Enough for what?”

“Enough to rest awhile, to forget the confounded thing, to look about me, to see the world, to have a good time, to improve my mind, and, if the fancy takes me, to marry a wife.” Newman spoke slowly, with a certain dryness of accent and with frequent pauses. This was his habitual mode of utterance, but it was especially marked in the words I have just quoted.

“Jupiter! There’s a programme!” cried Mr. Tristram. “Certainly, all that takes money, especially the wife; unless indeed she gives it, as mine did. And what’s the story? How have you done it?”

Newman had pushed his hat back from his forehead, folded his arms, and stretched his legs. He listened to the music, he looked about him at the bustling crowd, at the plashing fountains, at the nurses and the babies. “I have worked!” he answered at last.

Tristram looked at him for some moments, and allowed his placid eyes to measure his friend’s generous longitude and rest upon his comfortably contemplative face. “What have you worked at?” he asked.

“Oh, at several things.”

“I suppose you’re a smart fellow, eh?”

Newman continued to look at the nurses and babies; they imparted to the scene a kind of primordial, pastoral simplicity. “Yes,” he said at last, “I suppose I am.” And then, in answer to his companion’s inquiries, he related briefly his history since their last meeting. It was an intensely Western story, and it dealt with enterprises which it will be needless to introduce to the reader in detail. Newman had come out of the war with a brevet of brigadier-general, an honor which in this case—without invidious comparisons—had lighted upon shoulders amply competent to bear it. But though he could manage a fight, when need was, Newman heartily disliked the business; his four years in the army had left him with an angry, bitter sense of the waste of precious things—life and time and money and “smartness” and the early freshness of purpose; and he had addressed himself to the pursuits of peace with passionate zest and energy. He was of course as penniless when he plucked off his shoulder-straps as when he put them on, and the only capital at his disposal was his dogged resolution and his lively perception of ends and means. Exertion and action were as natural to him as respiration; a more completely healthy mortal had never trod the elastic soil of the West. His experience, moreover, was as wide as his capacity; when he was fourteen years old, necessity had taken him by his slim young shoulders and pushed him into the street, to earn that night’s supper. He had not earned it but he had earned the next night’s, and afterwards, whenever he had had none, it was because he had gone without it to use the money for something else, a keener pleasure or a finer profit. He had turned his hand, with his brain in it, to many things; he had been enterprising, in an eminent sense of the term; he had been adventurous and even reckless, and he had known bitter failure as well as brilliant success; but he was a born experimentalist, and he had always found something to enjoy in the pressure of necessity, even when it was as irritating as the haircloth shirt of the mediæval monk. At one time failure seemed inexorably his portion; ill-luck became his bed-fellow, and whatever he touched he turned, not to gold, but to ashes. His most vivid conception of a supernatural element in the world’s affairs had come to him once when this pertinacity of misfortune was at its climax; there seemed to him something stronger in life than his own will. But the mysterious something could only be the devil, and he was accordingly seized with an intense personal enmity to this impertinent force. He had known what it was to have utterly exhausted his credit, to be unable to raise a dollar, and to find himself at nightfall in a strange city, without a penny to mitigate its strangeness. It was under these circumstances that he made his entrance into San Francisco, the scene, subsequently, of his happiest strokes of fortune. If he did not, like Dr. Franklin in Philadelphia, march along the street munching a penny-loaf, it was only because he had not the penny-loaf necessary to the performance. In his darkest days he had had but one simple, practical impulse—the desire, as he would have phrased it, to see the thing through. He did so at last, buffeted his way into smooth waters, and made money largely. It must be admitted, rather nakedly, that Christopher Newman’s sole aim in life had been to make money; what he had been placed in the world for was, to his own perception, simply to wrest a fortune, the bigger the better, from defiant opportunity. This idea completely filled his horizon and satisfied his imagination. Upon the uses of money, upon what one might do with a life into which one had succeeded in injecting the golden stream, he had up to his thirty-fifth year very scantily reflected. Life had been for him an open game, and he had played for high stakes. He had won at last and carried off his winnings; and now what was he to do with them? He was a man to whom, sooner or later, the question was sure to present itself, and the answer to it belongs to our story. A vague sense that more answers were possible than his philosophy had hitherto dreamt of had already taken possession of him, and it seemed softly and agreeably to deepen as he lounged in this brilliant corner of Paris with his friend.

“I must confess,” he presently went on, “that here I don’t feel at all smart. My remarkable talents seem of no use. I feel as simple as a little child, and a little child might take me by the hand and lead me about.”

“Oh, I’ll be your little child,” said Tristram, jovially; “I’ll take you by the hand. Trust yourself to me.”

“I am a good worker,” Newman continued, “but I rather think I am a poor loafer. I have come abroad to amuse myself, but I doubt whether I know how.”

“Oh, that’s easily learned.”

“Well, I may perhaps learn it, but I am afraid I shall never do it by rote. I have the best will in the world about it, but my genius doesn’t lie in that direction. As a loafer I shall never be original, as I take it that you are.”

“Yes,” said Tristram, “I suppose I am original; like all those immoral pictures in the Louvre.”

“Besides,” Newman continued, “I don’t want to work at pleasure, any more than I played at work. I want to take it easily. I feel deliciously lazy, and I should like to spend six months as I am now, sitting under a tree and listening to a band. There’s only one thing; I want to hear some good music.”

“Music and pictures! Lord, what refined tastes! You are what my wife calls intellectual. I ain’t, a bit. But we can find something better for you to do than to sit under a tree. To begin with, you must come to the club.”

“What club?”

“The Occidental. You will see all the Americans there; all the best of them, at least. Of course you play poker?”

“Oh, I say,” cried Newman, with energy, “you are not going to lock me up in a club and stick me down at a card-table! I haven’t come all this way for that.”

“What the deuce have you come for! You were glad enough to play poker in St. Louis, I recollect, when you cleaned me out.”

“I have come to see Europe, to get the best out of it I can. I want to see all the great things, and do what the clever people do.”

“The clever people? Much obliged. You set me down as a blockhead, then?”

Newman was sitting sidewise in his chair, with his elbow on the back and his head leaning on his hand. Without moving he looked a while at his companion with his dry, guarded, half-inscrutable, and yet altogether good-natured smile. “Introduce me to your wife!” he said at last.

Tristram bounced about in his chair. “Upon my word, I won’t. She doesn’t want any help to turn up her nose at me, nor do you, either!”

“I don’t turn up my nose at you, my dear fellow; nor at anyone, or anything. I’m not proud, I assure you I’m not proud. That’s why I am willing to take example by the clever people.”

“Well, if I’m not the rose, as they say here, I have lived near it. I can show you some clever people, too. Do you know General Packard? Do you know C. P. Hatch? Do you know Miss Kitty Upjohn?”

“I shall be happy to make their acquaintance; I want to cultivate society.”

Tristram seemed restless and suspicious; he eyed his friend askance, and then, “What are you up to, anyway?” he demanded. “Are you going to write a book?”

Christopher Newman twisted one end of his moustache a while, in silence, and at last he made answer. “One day, a couple of months ago, something very curious happened to me. I had come on to New York on some important business; it was rather a long story—a question of getting ahead of another party, in a certain particular way, in the stock-market. This other party had once played me a very mean trick. I owed him a grudge, I felt awfully savage at the time, and I vowed that, when I got a chance, I would, figuratively speaking, put his nose out of joint. There was a matter of some sixty thousand dollars at stake. If I put it out of his way, it was a blow the fellow would feel, and he really deserved no quarter. I jumped into a hack and went about my business, and it was in this hack—this immortal, historical hack—that the curious thing I speak of occurred. It was a hack like any other, only a trifle dirtier, with a greasy line along the top of the drab cushions, as if it had been used for a great many Irish funerals. It is possible I took a nap; I had been traveling all night, and though I was excited with my errand, I felt the want of sleep. At all events I woke up suddenly, from a sleep or from a kind of a reverie, with the most extraordinary feeling in the world—a mortal disgust for the thing I was going to do. It came upon me like that!” and he snapped his fingers—“as abruptly as an old wound that begins to ache. I couldn’t tell the meaning of it; I only felt that I loathed the whole business and wanted to wash my hands of it. The idea of losing that sixty thousand dollars, of letting it utterly slide and scuttle and never hearing of it again, seemed the sweetest thing in the world. And all this took place quite independently of my will, and I sat watching it as if it were a play at the theatre. I could feel it going on inside of me. You may depend upon it that there are things going on inside of us that we understand mighty little about.”

“Jupiter! you make my flesh creep!” cried Tristram. “And while you sat in your hack, watching the play, as you call it, the other man marched in and bagged your sixty thousand dollars?”

“I have not the least idea. I hope so, poor devil! but I never found out. We pulled up in front of the place I was going to in Wall Street, but I sat still in the carriage, and at last the driver scrambled down off his seat to see whether his carriage had not turned into a hearse. I couldn’t have got out, any more than if I had been a corpse. What was the matter with me? Momentary idiocy, you’ll say. What I wanted to get out of was Wall Street. I told the man to drive down to the Brooklyn ferry and to cross over. When we were over, I told him to drive me out into the country. As I had told him originally to drive for dear life down town, I suppose he thought me insane. Perhaps I was, but in that case I am insane still. I spent the morning looking at the first green leaves on Long Island. I was sick of business; I wanted to throw it all up and break off short; I had money enough, or if I hadn’t I ought to have. I seemed to feel a new man inside my old skin, and I longed for a new world. When you want a thing so very badly you had better treat yourself to it. I didn’t understand the matter, not in the least; but I gave the old horse the bridle and let him find his way. As soon as I could get out of the game I sailed for Europe. That is how I come to be sitting here.”

“You ought to have bought up that hack,” said Tristram; “it isn’t a safe vehicle to have about. And you have really sold out, then; you have retired from business?”

“I have made over my hand to a friend; when I feel disposed, I can take up the cards again. I dare say that a twelvemonth hence the operation will be reversed. The pendulum will swing back again. I shall be sitting in a gondola or on a dromedary, and all of a sudden I shall want to clear out. But for the present I am perfectly free. I have even bargained that I am to receive no business letters.”

“Oh, it’s a real caprice de prince,” said Tristram. “I back out; a poor devil like me can’t help you to spend such very magnificent leisure as that. You should get introduced to the crowned heads.”

Newman looked at him a moment, and then, with his easy smile, “How does one do it?” he asked.

“Come, I like that!” cried Tristram. “It shows you are in earnest.”

“Of course I am in earnest. Didn’t I say I wanted the best? I know the best can’t be had for mere money, but I rather think money will do a good deal. In addition, I am willing to take a good deal of trouble.”

“You are not bashful, eh?”

“I haven’t the least idea. I want the biggest kind of entertainment a man can get. People, places, art, nature, everything! I want to see the tallest mountains, and the bluest lakes, and the finest pictures and the handsomest churches, and the most celebrated men, and the most beautiful women.”

“Settle down in Paris, then. There are no mountains that I know of, and the only lake is in the Bois du Boulogne, and not particularly blue. But there is everything else: plenty of pictures and churches, no end of celebrated men, and several beautiful women.”

“But I can’t settle down in Paris at this season, just as summer is coming on.”

“Oh, for the summer go up to Trouville.”

“What is Trouville?”

“The French Newport. Half the Americans go.”

“Is it anywhere near the Alps?”

“About as near as Newport is to the Rocky Mountains.”

“Oh, I want to see Mont Blanc,” said Newman, “and Amsterdam, and the Rhine, and a lot of places. Venice in particular. I have great ideas about Venice.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Tristram, rising, “I see I shall have to introduce you to my wife!”

He performed this ceremony on the following day, when, by appointment, Christopher Newman went to dine with him. Mr. and Mrs. Tristram lived behind one of those chalk-colored façades which decorate with their pompous sameness the broad avenues manufactured by Baron Haussmann in the neighborhood of the Arc de Triomphe. Their apartment was rich in the modern conveniences, and Tristram lost no time in calling his visitor’s attention to their principal household treasures, the gas-lamps and the furnace-holes. “Whenever you feel homesick,” he said, “you must come up here. We’ll stick you down before a register, under a good big burner, and—”

“And you will soon get over your homesickness,” said Mrs. Tristram.

Her husband stared; his wife often had a tone which he found inscrutable he could not tell for his life whether she was in jest or in earnest. The truth is that circumstances had done much to cultivate in Mrs. Tristram a marked tendency to irony. Her taste on many points differed from that of her husband, and though she made frequent concessions it must be confessed that her concessions were not always graceful. They were founded upon a vague project she had of some day doing something very positive, something a trifle passionate. What she meant to do she could by no means have told you; but meanwhile, nevertheless, she was buying a good conscience, by instalments.

It should be added, without delay, to anticipate misconception, that her little scheme of independence did not definitely involve the assistance of another person, of the opposite sex; she was not saving up virtue to cover the expenses of a flirtation. For this there were various reasons. To begin with, she had a very plain face and she was entirely without illusions as to her appearance. She had taken its measure to a hair’s breadth, she knew the worst and the best, she had accepted herself. It had not been, indeed, without a struggle. As a young girl she had spent hours with her back to her mirror, crying her eyes out; and later she had from desperation and bravado adopted the habit of proclaiming herself the most ill-favored of women, in order that she might—as in common politeness was inevitable—be contradicted and reassured. It was since she had come to live in Europe that she had begun to take the matter philosophically. Her observation, acutely exercised here, had suggested to her that a woman’s first duty is not to be beautiful, but to be pleasing, and she encountered so many women who pleased without beauty that she began to feel that she had discovered her mission. She had once heard an enthusiastic musician, out of patience with a gifted bungler, declare that a fine voice is really an obstacle to singing properly; and it occurred to her that it might perhaps be equally true that a beautiful face is an obstacle to the acquisition of charming manners. Mrs. Tristram, then, undertook to be exquisitely agreeable, and she brought to the task a really touching devotion. How well she would have succeeded I am unable to say; unfortunately she broke off in the middle. Her own excuse was the want of encouragement in her immediate circle. But I am inclined to think that she had not a real genius for the matter, or she would have pursued the charming art for itself. The poor lady was very incomplete. She fell back upon the harmonies of the toilet, which she thoroughly understood, and contented herself with dressing in perfection. She lived in Paris, which she pretended to detest, because it was only in Paris that one could find things to exactly suit one’s complexion. Besides out of Paris it was always more or less of a trouble to get ten-button gloves. When she railed at this serviceable city and you asked her where she would prefer to reside, she returned some very unexpected answer. She would say in Copenhagen, or in Barcelona; having, while making the tour of Europe, spent a couple of days at each of these places. On the whole, with her poetic furbelows and her misshapen, intelligent little face, she was, when you knew her, a decidedly interesting woman. She was naturally shy, and if she had been born a beauty, she would (having no vanity) probably have remained shy. Now, she was both diffident and importunate; extremely reserved sometimes with her friends, and strangely expansive with strangers. She despised her husband; despised him too much, for she had been perfectly at liberty not to marry him. She had been in love with a clever man who had slighted her, and she had married a fool in the hope that this thankless wit, reflecting on it, would conclude that she had no appreciation of merit, and that he had flattered himself in supposing that she cared for his own. Restless, discontented, visionary, without personal ambitions, but with a certain avidity of imagination, she was, as I have said before, eminently incomplete. She was full—both for good and for ill—of beginnings that came to nothing; but she had nevertheless, morally, a spark of the sacred fire.

Newman was fond, under all circumstances, of the society of women, and now that he was out of his native element and deprived of his habitual interests, he turned to it for compensation. He took a great fancy to Mrs. Tristram; she frankly repaid it, and after their first meeting he passed a great many hours in her drawing-room. After two or three talks they were fast friends. Newman’s manner with women was peculiar, and it required some ingenuity on a lady’s part to discover that he admired her. He had no gallantry, in the usual sense of the term; no compliments, no graces, no speeches. Very fond of what is called chaffing, in his dealings with men, he never found himself on a sofa beside a member of the softer sex without feeling extremely serious. He was not shy, and so far as awkwardness proceeds from a struggle with shyness, he was not awkward; grave, attentive, submissive, often silent, he was simply swimming in a sort of rapture of respect. This emotion was not at all theoretic, it was not even in a high degree sentimental; he had thought very little about the “position” of women, and he was not familiar either sympathetically or otherwise, with the image of a President in petticoats. His attitude was simply the flower of his general good-nature, and a part of his instinctive and genuinely democratic assumption of everyone’s right to lead an easy life. If a shaggy pauper had a right to bed and board and wages and a vote, women, of course, who were weaker than paupers, and whose physical tissue was in itself an appeal, should be maintained, sentimentally, at the public expense. Newman was willing to be taxed for this purpose, largely, in proportion to his means. Moreover, many of the common traditions with regard to women were with him fresh personal impressions; he had never read a novel! He had been struck with their acuteness, their subtlety, their tact, their felicity of judgment. They seemed to him exquisitely organized. If it is true that one must always have in one’s work here below a religion, or at least an ideal, of some sort, Newman found his metaphysical inspiration in a vague acceptance of final responsibility to some illumined feminine brow.

He spent a great deal of time in listening to advice from Mrs. Tristram; advice, it must be added, for which he had never asked. He would have been incapable of asking for it, for he had no perception of difficulties, and consequently no curiosity about remedies. The complex Parisian world about him seemed a very simple affair; it was an immense, amazing spectacle, but it neither inflamed his imagination nor irritated his curiosity. He kept his hands in his pockets, looked on good-humoredly, desired to miss nothing important, observed a great many things narrowly, and never reverted to himself. Mrs. Tristram’s “advice” was a part of the show, and a more entertaining element, in her abundant gossip, than the others. He enjoyed her talking about himself; it seemed a part of her beautiful ingenuity; but he never made an application of anything she said, or remembered it when he was away from her. For herself, she appropriated him; he was the most interesting thing she had had to think about in many a month. She wished to do something with him—she hardly knew what. There was so much of him; he was so rich and robust, so easy, friendly, well-disposed, that he kept her fancy constantly on the alert. For the present, the only thing she could do was to like him. She told him that he was “horribly Western,” but in this compliment the adverb was tinged with insincerity. She led him about with her, introduced him to fifty people, and took extreme satisfaction in her conquest. Newman accepted every proposal, shook hands universally and promiscuously, and seemed equally unfamiliar with trepidation or with elation. Tom Tristram complained of his wife’s avidity, and declared that he could never have a clear five minutes with his friend. If he had known how things were going to turn out, he never would have brought him to the Avenue d’Iéna. The two men, formerly, had not been intimate, but Newman remembered his earlier impression of his host, and did Mrs. Tristram, who had by no means taken him into her confidence, but whose secret he presently discovered, the justice to admit that her husband was a rather degenerate mortal. At twenty-five he had been a good fellow, and in this respect he was unchanged; but of a man of his age one expected something more. People said he was sociable, but this was as much a matter of course as for a dipped sponge to expand; and it was not a high order of sociability. He was a great gossip and tattler, and to produce a laugh would hardly have spared the reputation of his aged mother. Newman had a kindness for old memories, but he found it impossible not to perceive that Tristram was nowadays a very light weight. His only aspirations were to hold out at poker, at his club, to know the names of all the cocottes, to shake hands all round, to ply his rosy gullet with truffles and champagne, and to create uncomfortable eddies and obstructions among the constituent atoms of the American colony. He was shamefully idle, spiritless, sensual, snobbish. He irritated our friend by the tone of his allusions to their native country, and Newman was at a loss to understand why the United States were not good enough for Mr. Tristram. He had never been a very conscious patriot, but it vexed him to see them treated as little better than a vulgar smell in his friend’s nostrils, and he finally broke out and swore that they were the greatest country in the world, that they could put all Europe into their breeches’ pockets, and that an American who spoke ill of them ought to be carried home in irons and compelled to live in Boston. (This, for Newman was putting it very vindictively.) Tristram was a comfortable man to snub, he bore no malice, and he continued to insist on Newman’s finishing his evening at the Occidental Club.

Christopher Newman dined several times in the Avenue d’Iéna, and his host always proposed an early adjournment to this institution. Mrs. Tristram protested, and declared that her husband exhausted his ingenuity in trying to displease her.

“Oh no, I never try, my love,” he answered. “I know you loathe me quite enough when I take my chance.”

Newman hated to see a husband and wife on these terms, and he was sure one or other of them must be very unhappy. He knew it was not Tristram. Mrs. Tristram had a balcony before her windows, upon which, during the June evenings, she was fond of sitting, and Newman used frankly to say that he preferred the balcony to the club. It had a fringe of perfumed plants in tubs, and enabled you to look up the broad street and see the Arch of Triumph vaguely massing its heroic sculptures in the summer starlight. Sometimes Newman kept his promise of following Mr. Tristram, in half an hour, to the Occidental, and sometimes he forgot it. His hostess asked him a great many questions about himself, but on this subject he was an indifferent talker. He was not what is called subjective, though when he felt that her interest was sincere, he made an almost heroic attempt to be. He told her a great many things he had done, and regaled her with anecdotes of Western life; she was from Philadelphia, and with her eight years in Paris, talked of herself as a languid Oriental. But some other person was always the hero of the tale, by no means always to his advantage; and Newman’s own emotions were but scantily chronicled. She had an especial wish to know whether he had ever been in love—seriously, passionately—and, failing to gather any satisfaction from his allusions, she at last directly inquired. He hesitated a while, and at last he said, “No!” She declared that she was delighted to hear it, as it confirmed her private conviction that he was a man of no feeling.

“Really?” he asked, very gravely. “Do you think so? How do you recognize a man of feeling?”

“I can’t make out,” said Mrs. Tristram, “whether you are very simple or very deep.”

“I’m very deep. That’s a fact.”

“I believe that if I were to tell you with a certain air that you have no feeling, you would implicitly believe me.”

“A certain air?” said Newman. “Try it and see.”

“You would believe me, but you would not care,” said Mrs. Tristram.

“You have got it all wrong. I should care immensely, but I shouldn’t believe you. The fact is I have never had time to feel things. I have had to do them, to make myself felt.”

“I can imagine that you may have done that tremendously, sometimes.”

“Yes, there’s no mistake about that.”

“When you are in a fury it can’t be pleasant.”

“I am never in a fury.”

“Angry, then, or displeased.”

“I am never angry, and it is so long since I have been displeased that I have quite forgotten it.”

“I don’t believe,” said Mrs. Tristram, “that you are never angry. A man ought to be angry sometimes, and you are neither good enough nor bad enough always to keep your temper.”

“I lose it perhaps once in five years.”

“The time is coming round, then,” said his hostess. “Before I have known you six months I shall see you in a fine fury.”

“Do you mean to put me into one?”

“I should not be sorry. You take things too coolly. It exasperates me. And then you are too happy. You have what must be the most agreeable thing in the world, the consciousness of having bought your pleasure beforehand and paid for it. You have not a day of reckoning staring you in the face. Your reckonings are over.”

“Well, I suppose I am happy,” said Newman, meditatively.

“You have been odiously successful.”

“Successful in copper,” said Newman, “only so-so in railroads, and a hopeless fizzle in oil.”

“It is very disagreeable to know how Americans have made their money. Now you have the world before you. You have only to enjoy.”

“Oh, I suppose I am very well off,” said Newman. “Only I am tired of having it thrown up at me. Besides, there are several drawbacks. I am not intellectual.”

“One doesn’t expect it of you,” Mrs. Tristram answered. Then in a moment, “Besides, you are!”

“Well, I mean to have a good time, whether or no,” said Newman. “I am not cultivated, I am not even educated; I know nothing about history, or art, or foreign tongues, or any other learned matters. But I am not a fool, either, and I shall undertake to know something about Europe by the time I have done with it. I feel something under my ribs here,” he added in a moment, “that I can’t explain—a sort of a mighty hankering, a desire to stretch out and haul in.”

“Bravo!” said Mrs. Tristram, “that is very fine. You are the great Western Barbarian, stepping forth in his innocence and might, gazing a while at this poor effete Old World and then swooping down on it.”

“Oh, come,” said Newman. “I am not a barbarian, by a good deal. I am very much the reverse. I have seen barbarians; I know what they are.”

“I don’t mean that you are a Comanche chief, or that you wear a blanket and feathers. There are different shades.”

“I am a highly civilized man,” said Newman. “I stick to that. If you don’t believe it, I should like to prove it to you.”

Mrs. Tristram was silent a while. “I should like to make you prove it,” she said, at last. “I should like to put you in a difficult place.”

“Pray do,” said Newman.

“That has a little conceited sound!” his companion rejoined.

“Oh,” said Newman, “I have a very good opinion of myself.”

“I wish I could put it to the test. Give me time and I will.” And Mrs. Tristram remained silent for some time afterwards, as if she was trying to keep her pledge. It did not appear that evening that she succeeded; but as he was rising to take his leave she passed suddenly, as she was very apt to do, from the tone of unsparing persiflage to that of almost tremulous sympathy. “Speaking seriously,” she said, “I believe in you, Mr. Newman. You flatter my patriotism.”

“Your patriotism?” Christopher demanded.

“Even so. It would take too long to explain, and you probably would not understand. Besides, you might take it—really, you might take it for a declaration. But it has nothing to do with you personally; it’s what you represent. Fortunately you don’t know all that, or your conceit would increase insufferably.”

Newman stood staring and wondering what under the sun he “represented.”

“Forgive all my meddlesome chatter and forget my advice. It is very silly in me to undertake to tell you what to do. When you are embarrassed, do as you think best, and you will do very well. When you are in a difficulty, judge for yourself.”

“I shall remember everything you have told me,” said Newman. “There are so many forms and ceremonies over here—”

“Forms and ceremonies are what I mean, of course.”

“Ah, but I want to observe them,” said Newman. “Haven’t I as good a right as another? They don’t scare me, and you needn’t give me leave to violate them. I won’t take it.”

“That is not what I mean. I mean, observe them in your own way. Settle nice questions for yourself. Cut the knot or untie it, as you choose.”

“Oh, I am sure I shall never fumble over it!” said Newman.

The next time that he dined in the Avenue d’Iéna was a Sunday, a day on which Mr. Tristram left the cards unshuffled, so that there was a trio in the evening on the balcony. The talk was of many things, and at last Mrs. Tristram suddenly observed to Christopher Newman that it was high time he should take a wife.

“Listen to her; she has the audacity!” said Tristram, who on Sunday evenings was always rather acrimonious.

“I don’t suppose you have made up your mind not to marry?” Mrs. Tristram continued.

“Heaven forbid!” cried Newman. “I am sternly resolved on it.”

“It’s very easy,” said Tristram; “fatally easy!”

“Well, then, I suppose you do not mean to wait till you are fifty.”

“On the contrary, I am in a great hurry.”

“One would never suppose it. Do you expect a lady to come and propose to you?”

“No; I am willing to propose. I think a great deal about it.”

“Tell me some of your thoughts.”

“Well,” said Newman, slowly, “I want to marry very well.”

“Marry a woman of sixty, then,” said Tristram.

“‘Well’ in what sense?”

“In every sense. I shall be hard to please.”

“You must remember that, as the French proverb says, the most beautiful girl in the world can give but what she has.”

“Since you ask me,” said Newman, “I will say frankly that I want extremely to marry. It is time, to begin with: before I know it I shall be forty. And then I’m lonely and helpless and dull. But if I marry now, so long as I didn’t do it in hot haste when I was twenty, I must do it with my eyes open. I want to do the thing in handsome style. I do not only want to make no mistakes, but I want to make a great hit. I want to take my pick. My wife must be a magnificent woman.”

“Voilà ce qui s’appelle parler!” cried Mrs. Tristram.

“Oh, I have thought an immense deal about it.”

“Perhaps you think too much. The best thing is simply to fall in love.”

“When I find the woman who pleases me, I shall love her enough. My wife shall be very comfortable.”

“You are superb! There’s a chance for the magnificent women.”

“You are not fair.” Newman rejoined. “You draw a fellow out and put him off guard, and then you laugh at him.”

“I assure you,” said Mrs. Tristram, “that I am very serious. To prove it, I will make you a proposal. Should you like me, as they say here, to marry you?”

“To hunt up a wife for me?”

“She is already found. I will bring you together.”

“Oh, come,” said Tristram, “we don’t keep a matrimonial bureau. He will think you want your commission.”

“Present me to a woman who comes up to my notions,” said Newman, “and I will marry her tomorrow.”

“You have a strange tone about it, and I don’t quite understand you. I didn’t suppose you would be so coldblooded and calculating.”

Newman was silent a while. “Well,” he said, at last, “I want a great woman. I stick to that. That’s one thing I can treat myself to, and if it is to be had I mean to have it. What else have I toiled and struggled for, all these years? I have succeeded, and now what am I to do with my success? To make it perfect, as I see it, there must be a beautiful woman perched on the pile, like a statue on a monument. She must be as good as she is beautiful, and as clever as she is good. I can give my wife a good deal, so I am not afraid to ask a good deal myself. She shall have everything a woman can desire; I shall not even object to her being too good for me; she may be cleverer and wiser than I can understand, and I shall only be the better pleased. I want to possess, in a word, the best article in the market.”

“Why didn’t you tell a fellow all this at the outset?” Tristram demanded. “I have been trying so to make you fond of me!”

“This is very interesting,” said Mrs. Tristram. “I like to see a man know his own mind.”

“I have known mine for a long time,” Newman went on. “I made up my mind tolerably early in life that a beautiful wife was the thing best worth having, here below. It is the greatest victory over circumstances. When I say beautiful, I mean beautiful in mind and in manners, as well as in person. It is a thing every man has an equal right to; he may get it if he can. He doesn’t have to be born with certain faculties, on purpose; he needs only to be a man. Then he needs only to use his will, and such wits as he has, and to try.”

“It strikes me that your marriage is to be rather a matter of vanity.”

“Well, it is certain,” said Newman, “that if people notice my wife and admire her, I shall be mightily tickled.”

“After this,” cried Mrs. Tristram, “call any man modest!”

“But none of them will admire her so much as I.”

“I see you have a taste for splendor.”

Newman hesitated a little; and then, “I honestly believe I have!” he said.

“And I suppose you have already looked about you a good deal.”

“A good deal, according to opportunity.”

“And you have seen nothing that satisfied you?”

“No,” said Newman, half reluctantly, “I am bound to say in honesty that I have seen nothing that really satisfied me.”

“You remind me of the heroes of the French romantic poets, Rolla and Fortunio and all those other insatiable gentlemen for whom nothing in this world was handsome enough. But I see you are in earnest, and I should like to help you.”

“Who the deuce is it, darling, that you are going to put upon him?” Tristram cried. “We know a good many pretty girls, thank Heaven, but magnificent women are not so common.”

“Have you any objections to a foreigner?” his wife continued, addressing Newman, who had tilted back his chair and, with his feet on a bar of the balcony railing and his hands in his pockets, was looking at the stars.

“No Irish need apply,” said Tristram.

Newman meditated a while. “As a foreigner, no,” he said at last; “I have no prejudices.”

“My dear fellow, you have no suspicions!” cried Tristram. “You don’t know what terrible customers these foreign women are; especially the ‘magnificent’ ones. How should you like a fair Circassian, with a dagger in her belt?”

Newman administered a vigorous slap to his knee. “I would marry a Japanese, if she pleased me,” he affirmed.

“We had better confine ourselves to Europe,” said Mrs. Tristram. “The only thing is, then, that the person be in herself to your taste?”

“She is going to offer you an unappreciated governess!” Tristram groaned.

“Assuredly. I won’t deny that, other things being equal, I should prefer one of my own countrywomen. We should speak the same language, and that would be a comfort. But I am not afraid of a foreigner. Besides, I rather like the idea of taking in Europe, too. It enlarges the field of selection. When you choose from a greater number, you can bring your choice to a finer point!”

“You talk like Sardanapalus!” exclaimed Tristram.

“You say all this to the right person,” said Newman’s hostess. “I happen to number among my friends the loveliest woman in the world. Neither more nor less. I don’t say a very charming person or a very estimable woman or a very great beauty; I say simply the loveliest woman in the world.”

“The deuce!” cried Tristram, “you have kept very quiet about her. Were you afraid of me?”

“You have seen her,” said his wife, “but you have no perception of such merit as Claire’s.”

“Ah, her name is Claire? I give it up.”

“Does your friend wish to marry?” asked Newman.

“Not in the least. It is for you to make her change her mind. It will not be easy; she has had one husband, and he gave her a low opinion of the species.”

“Oh, she is a widow, then?” said Newman.

“Are you already afraid? She was married at eighteen, by her parents, in the French fashion, to a disagreeable old man. But he had the good taste to die a couple of years afterward, and she is now twenty-five.”

“So she is French?”

“French by her father, English by her mother. She is really more English than French, and she speaks English as well as you or I—or rather much better. She belongs to the very top of the basket, as they say here. Her family, on each side, is of fabulous antiquity; her mother is the daughter of an English Catholic earl. Her father is dead, and since her widowhood she has lived with her mother and a married brother. There is another brother, younger, who I believe is wild. They have an old hotel in the Rue de l’Université, but their fortune is small, and they make a common household, for economy’s sake. When I was a girl I was put into a convent here for my education, while my father made the tour of Europe. It was a silly thing to do with me, but it had the advantage that it made me acquainted with Claire de Bellegarde. She was younger than I but we became fast friends. I took a tremendous fancy to her, and she returned my passion as far as she could. They kept such a tight rein on her that she could do very little, and when I left the convent she had to give me up. I was not of her monde; I am not now, either, but we sometimes meet. They are terrible people—her monde; all mounted upon stilts a mile high, and with pedigrees long in proportion. It is the skim of the milk of the old noblesse. Do you know what a Legitimist is, or an Ultramontane? Go into Madame de Cintré’s drawing-room some afternoon, at five o’clock, and you will see the best preserved specimens. I say go, but no one is admitted who can’t show his fifty quarterings.”

“And this is the lady you propose to me to marry?” asked Newman. “A lady I can’t even approach?”

“But you said just now that you recognized no obstacles.”

Newman looked at Mrs. Tristram a while, stroking his moustache. “Is she a beauty?” he demanded.

“No.”

“Oh, then it’s no use—”

“She is not a beauty, but she is beautiful, two very different things. A beauty has no faults in her face, the face of a beautiful woman may have faults that only deepen its charm.”

“I remember Madame de Cintré, now,” said Tristram. “She is as plain as a pike-staff. A man wouldn’t look at her twice.”

“In saying that he would not look at her twice, my husband sufficiently describes her,” Mrs. Tristram rejoined.

“Is she good; is she clever?” Newman asked.

“She is perfect! I won’t say more than that. When you are praising a person to another who is to know her, it is bad policy to go into details. I won’t exaggerate. I simply recommend her. Among all women I have known she stands alone; she is of a different clay.”

“I should like to see her,” said Newman, simply.

“I will try to manage it. The only way will be to invite her to dinner. I have never invited her before, and I don’t know that she will come. Her old feudal countess of a mother rules the family with an iron hand, and allows her to have no friends but of her own choosing, and to visit only in a certain sacred circle. But I can at least ask her.”

At this moment Mrs. Tristram was interrupted; a servant stepped out upon the balcony and announced that there were visitors in the drawing-room. When Newman’s hostess had gone in to receive her friends, Tom Tristram approached his guest.

“Don’t put your foot into this, my boy,” he said, puffing the last whiffs of his cigar. “There’s nothing in it!”

Newman looked askance at him, inquisitive. “You tell another story, eh?”

“I say simply that Madame de Cintré is a great white doll of a woman, who cultivates quiet haughtiness.”

“Ah, she’s haughty, eh?”

“She looks at you as if you were so much thin air, and cares for you about as much.”

“She is very proud, eh?”

“Proud? As proud as I’m humble.”

“And not good-looking?”

Tristram shrugged his shoulders: “It’s a kind of beauty you must be intellectual to understand. But I must go in and amuse the company.”

Some time elapsed before Newman followed his friends into the drawing-room. When he at last made his appearance there he remained but a short time, and during this period sat perfectly silent, listening to a lady to whom Mrs. Tristram had straightway introduced him and who chattered, without a pause, with the full force of an extraordinarily high-pitched voice. Newman gazed and attended. Presently he came to bid good-night to Mrs. Tristram.

“Who is that lady?” he asked.

“Miss Dora Finch. How do you like her?”

“She’s too noisy.”

“She is thought so bright! Certainly, you are fastidious,” said Mrs. Tristram.

Newman stood a moment, hesitating. Then at last, “Don’t forget about your friend,” he said, “Madame What’s-her-name? the proud beauty. Ask her to dinner, and give me a good notice.” And with this he departed.

Some days later he came back; it was in the afternoon. He found Mrs. Tristram in her drawing-room; with her was a visitor, a woman young and pretty, dressed in white. The two ladies had risen and the visitor was apparently taking her leave. As Newman approached, he received from Mrs. Tristram a glance of the most vivid significance, which he was not immediately able to interpret.

“This is a good friend of ours,” she said, turning to her companion, “Mr. Christopher Newman. I have spoken of you to him and he has an extreme desire to make your acquaintance. If you had consented to come and dine, I should have offered him an opportunity.”

The stranger turned her face toward Newman, with a smile. He was not embarrassed, for his unconscious sang-froid was boundless; but as he became aware that this was the proud and beautiful Madame de Cintré, the loveliest woman in the world, the promised perfection, the proposed ideal, he made an instinctive movement to gather his wits together. Through the slight preoccupation that it produced he had a sense of a long, fair face, and of two eyes that were both brilliant and mild.

“I should have been most happy,” said Madame de Cintré. “Unfortunately, as I have been telling Mrs. Tristram, I go on Monday to the country.”

Newman had made a solemn bow. “I am very sorry,” he said.

“Paris is getting too warm,” Madame de Cintré added, taking her friend’s hand again in farewell.

Mrs. Tristram seemed to have formed a sudden and somewhat venturesome resolution, and she smiled more intensely, as women do when they take such resolution. “I want Mr. Newman to know you,” she said, dropping her head on one side and looking at Madame de Cintré’s bonnet ribbons.

Christopher Newman stood gravely silent, while his native penetration admonished him. Mrs. Tristram was determined to force her friend to address him a word of encouragement which should be more than one of the common formulas of politeness; and if she was prompted by charity, it was by the charity that begins at home. Madame de Cintré was her dearest Claire, and her especial admiration but Madame de Cintré had found it impossible to dine with her and Madame de Cintré should for once be forced gently to render tribute to Mrs. Tristram.

“It would give me great pleasure,” she said, looking at Mrs. Tristram.

“That’s a great deal,” cried the latter, “for Madame de Cintré to say!”

“I am very much obliged to you,” said Newman. “Mrs. Tristram can speak better for me than I can speak for myself.”

Madame de Cintré looked at him again, with the same soft brightness. “Are you to be long in Paris?” she asked.

“We shall keep him,” said Mrs. Tristram.

“But you are keeping me!” and Madame de Cintré shook her friend’s hand.

“A moment longer,” said Mrs. Tristram.

Madame de Cintré looked at Newman again; this time without her smile. Her eyes lingered a moment. “Will you come and see me?” she asked.

Mrs. Tristram kissed her. Newman expressed his thanks, and she took her leave. Her hostess went with her to the door, and left Newman alone a moment. Presently she returned, rubbing her hands. “It was a fortunate chance,” she said. “She had come to decline my invitation. You triumphed on the spot, making her ask you, at the end of three minutes, to her house.”

“It was you who triumphed,” said Newman. “You must not be too hard upon her.”

Mrs. Tristram stared. “What do you mean?”

“She did not strike me as so proud. I should say she was shy.”

“You are very discriminating. And what do you think of her face?”

“It’s handsome!” said Newman.

“I should think it was! Of course you will go and see her.”

“To-morrow!” cried Newman.

“No, not to-morrow; the next day. That will be Sunday; she leaves Paris on Monday. If you don’t see her; it will at least be a beginning.” And she gave him Madame de Cintré’s address.

He walked across the Seine, late in the summer afternoon, and made his way through those gray and silent streets of the Faubourg St. Germain whose houses present to the outer world a face as impassive and as suggestive of the concentration of privacy within as the blank walls of Eastern seraglios. Newman thought it a queer way for rich people to live; his ideal of grandeur was a splendid façade diffusing its brilliancy outward too, irradiating hospitality. The house to which he had been directed had a dark, dusty, painted portal, which swung open in answer to his ring. It admitted him into a wide, gravelled court, surrounded on three sides with closed windows, and with a doorway facing the street, approached by three steps and surmounted by a tin canopy. The place was all in the shade; it answered to Newman’s conception of a convent. The portress could not tell him whether Madame de Cintré was visible; he would please to apply at the farther door. He crossed the court; a gentleman was sitting, bareheaded, on the steps of the portico, playing with a beautiful pointer. He rose as Newman approached, and, as he laid his hand upon the bell, said with a smile, in English, that he was afraid Newman would be kept waiting; the servants were scattered, he himself had been ringing, he didn’t know what the deuce was in them. He was a young man, his English was excellent, and his smile very frank. Newman pronounced the name of Madame de Cintré.

“I think,” said the young man, “that my sister is visible. Come in, and if you will give me your card I will carry it to her myself.”

Newman had been accompanied on his present errand by a slight sentiment, I will not say of defiance—a readiness for aggression or defence, as they might prove needful—but of reflection, good-humored suspicion. He took from his pocket, while he stood on the portico, a card upon which, under his name, he had written the words “San Francisco,” and while he presented it he looked warily at his interlocutor. His glance was singularly reassuring; he liked the young man’s face; it strongly resembled that of Madame de Cintré. He was evidently her brother. The young man, on his side, had made a rapid inspection of Newman’s person. He had taken the card and was about to enter the house with it when another figure appeared on the threshold—an older man, of a fine presence, wearing evening dress. He looked hard at Newman, and Newman looked at him. “Madame de Cintré,” the younger man repeated, as an introduction of the visitor. The other took the card from his hand, read it in a rapid glance, looked again at Newman from head to foot, hesitated a moment, and then said, gravely but urbanely, “Madame de Cintré is not at home.”

The younger man made a gesture, and then, turning to Newman, “I am very sorry, sir,” he said.

Newman gave him a friendly nod, to show that he bore him no malice, and retraced his steps. At the porter’s lodge he stopped; the two men were still standing on the portico.

“Who is the gentleman with the dog?” he asked of the old woman who reappeared. He had begun to learn French.

“That is Monsieur le Comte.”

“And the other?”

“That is Monsieur le Marquis.”

“A marquis?” said Christopher in English, which the old woman fortunately did not understand. “Oh, then he’s not the butler!”

Early one morning, before Christopher Newman was dressed, a little old man was ushered into his apartment, followed by a youth in a blouse, bearing a picture in a brilliant frame. Newman, among the distractions of Paris, had forgotten M. Nioche and his accomplished daughter; but this was an effective reminder.

“I am afraid you had given me up, sir,” said the old man, after many apologies and salutations. “We have made you wait so many days. You accused us, perhaps, of inconstancy, of bad faith. But behold me at last! And behold also the pretty Madonna. Place it on a chair, my friend, in a good light, so that monsieur may admire it.” And M. Nioche, addressing his companion, helped him to dispose the work of art.

It had been endued with a layer of varnish an inch thick and its frame, of an elaborate pattern, was at least a foot wide. It glittered and twinkled in the morning light, and looked, to Newman’s eyes, wonderfully splendid and precious. It seemed to him a very happy purchase, and he felt rich in the possession of it. He stood looking at it complacently, while he proceeded with his toilet, and M. Nioche, who had dismissed his own attendant, hovered near, smiling and rubbing his hands.

“It has wonderful finesse,” he murmured, caressingly. “And here and there are marvelous touches, you probably perceive them, sir. It attracted great attention on the Boulevard, as we came along. And then a gradation of tones! That’s what it is to know how to paint. I don’t say it because I am her father, sir; but as one man of taste addressing another I cannot help observing that you have there an exquisite work. It is hard to produce such things and to have to part with them. If our means only allowed us the luxury of keeping it! I really may say, sir—” and M. Nioche gave a little feebly insinuating laugh—“I really may say that I envy you! You see,” he added in a moment, “we have taken the liberty of offering you a frame. It increases by a trifle the value of the work, and it will save you the annoyance—so great for a person of your delicacy—of going about to bargain at the shops.”

The language spoken by M. Nioche was a singular compound, which I shrink from the attempt to reproduce in its integrity. He had apparently once possessed a certain knowledge of English, and his accent was oddly tinged with the cockneyism of the British metropolis. But his learning had grown rusty with disuse, and his vocabulary was defective and capricious. He had repaired it with large patches of French, with words anglicized by a process of his own, and with native idioms literally translated. The result, in the form in which he in all humility presented it, would be scarcely comprehensible to the reader, so that I have ventured to trim and sift it. Newman only half understood it, but it amused him, and the old man’s decent forlornness appealed to his democratic instincts. The assumption of a fatality in misery always irritated his strong good nature—it was almost the only thing that did so; and he felt the impulse to wipe it out, as it were, with the sponge of his own prosperity. The papa of Mademoiselle Noémie, however, had apparently on this occasion been vigorously indoctrinated, and he showed a certain tremulous eagerness to cultivate unexpected opportunities.

“How much do I owe you, then, with the frame?” asked Newman.

“It will make in all three thousand francs,” said the old man, smiling agreeably, but folding his hands in instinctive suppliance.

“Can you give me a receipt?”

“I have brought one,” said M. Nioche. “I took the liberty of drawing it up, in case monsieur should happen to desire to discharge his debt.” And he drew a paper from his pocket-book and presented it to his patron. The document was written in a minute, fantastic hand, and couched in the choicest language.

Newman laid down the money, and M. Nioche dropped the napoleons one by one, solemnly and lovingly, into an old leathern purse.

“And how is your young lady?” asked Newman. “She made a great impression on me.”

“An impression? Monsieur is very good. Monsieur admires her appearance?”

“She is very pretty, certainly.”

“Alas, yes, she is very pretty!”

“And what is the harm in her being pretty?”

M. Nioche fixed his eyes upon a spot on the carpet and shook his head. Then looking up at Newman with a gaze that seemed to brighten and expand, “Monsieur knows what Paris is. She is dangerous to beauty, when beauty hasn’t the sou.”

“Ah, but that is not the case with your daughter. She is rich, now.”

“Very true; we are rich for six months. But if my daughter were a plain girl I should sleep better all the same.”

“You are afraid of the young men?”

“The young and the old!”

“She ought to get a husband.”

“Ah, monsieur, one doesn’t get a husband for nothing. Her husband must take her as she is; I can’t give her a sou. But the young men don’t see with that eye.”

“Oh,” said Newman, “her talent is in itself a dowry.”

“Ah, sir, it needs first to be converted into specie!” and M. Nioche slapped his purse tenderly before he stowed it away. “The operation doesn’t take place every day.”

“Well, your young men are very shabby,” said Newman; “that’s all I can say. They ought to pay for your daughter, and not ask money themselves.”

“Those are very noble ideas, monsieur; but what will you have? They are not the ideas of this country. We want to know what we are about when we marry.”

“How big a portion does your daughter want?”

M. Nioche stared, as if he wondered what was coming next; but he promptly recovered himself, at a venture, and replied that he knew a very nice young man, employed by an insurance company, who would content himself with fifteen thousand francs.

“Let your daughter paint half a dozen pictures for me, and she shall have her dowry.”

“Half a dozen pictures—her dowry! Monsieur is not speaking inconsiderately?”

“If she will make me six or eight copies in the Louvre as pretty as that Madonna, I will pay her the same price,” said Newman.

Poor M. Nioche was speechless a moment, with amazement and gratitude, and then he seized Newman’s hand, pressed it between his own ten fingers, and gazed at him with watery eyes. “As pretty as that? They shall be a thousand times prettier—they shall be magnificent, sublime. Ah, if I only knew how to paint, myself, sir, so that I might lend a hand! What can I do to thank you? Voyons!” And he pressed his forehead while he tried to think of something.

“Oh, you have thanked me enough,” said Newman.

“Ah, here it is, sir!” cried M. Nioche. “To express my gratitude, I will charge you nothing for the lessons in French conversation.”

“The lessons? I had quite forgotten them. Listening to your English,” added Newman, laughing, “is almost a lesson in French.”

“Ah, I don’t profess to teach English, certainly,” said M. Nioche. “But for my own admirable tongue I am still at your service.”

“Since you are here, then,” said Newman, “we will begin. This is a very good hour. I am going to have my coffee; come every morning at half-past nine and have yours with me.”

“Monsieur offers me my coffee, also?” cried M. Nioche. “Truly, my beaux jours are coming back.”

“Come,” said Newman, “let us begin. The coffee is almighty hot. How do you say that in French?”

Every day, then, for the following three weeks, the minutely respectable figure of M. Nioche made its appearance, with a series of little inquiring and apologetic obeisances, among the aromatic fumes of Newman’s morning beverage. I don’t know how much French our friend learned, but, as he himself said, if the attempt did him no good, it could at any rate do him no harm. And it amused him; it gratified that irregularly sociable side of his nature which had always expressed itself in a relish for ungrammatical conversation, and which often, even in his busy and preoccupied days, had made him sit on rail fences in young Western towns, in the twilight, in gossip hardly less than fraternal with humorous loafers and obscure fortune-seekers. He had notions, wherever he went, about talking with the natives; he had been assured, and his judgment approved the advice, that in traveling abroad it was an excellent thing to look into the life of the country. M. Nioche was very much of a native and, though his life might not be particularly worth looking into, he was a palpable and smoothly-rounded unit in that picturesque Parisian civilization which offered our hero so much easy entertainment and propounded so many curious problems to his inquiring and practical mind. Newman was fond of statistics; he liked to know how things were done; it gratified him to learn what taxes were paid, what profits were gathered, what commercial habits prevailed, how the battle of life was fought. M. Nioche, as a reduced capitalist, was familiar with these considerations, and he formulated his information, which he was proud to be able to impart, in the neatest possible terms and with a pinch of snuff between finger and thumb. As a Frenchman—quite apart from Newman’s napoleons—M. Nioche loved conversation, and even in his decay his urbanity had not grown rusty. As a Frenchman, too, he could give a clear account of things, and—still as a Frenchman—when his knowledge was at fault he could supply its lapses with the most convenient and ingenious hypotheses. The little shrunken financier was intensely delighted to have questions asked him, and he scraped together information, by frugal processes, and took notes, in his little greasy pocket-book, of incidents which might interest his munificent friend. He read old almanacs at the book-stalls on the quays, and he began to frequent another café, where more newspapers were taken and his postprandial demitasse cost him a penny extra, and where he used to con the tattered sheets for curious anecdotes, freaks of nature, and strange coincidences. He would relate with solemnity the next morning that a child of five years of age had lately died at Bordeaux, whose brain had been found to weigh sixty ounces—the brain of a Napoleon or a Washington! or that Madame P—, charcutière in the Rue de Clichy, had found in the wadding of an old petticoat the sum of three hundred and sixty francs, which she had lost five years before. He pronounced his words with great distinctness and sonority, and Newman assured him that his way of dealing with the French tongue was very superior to the bewildering chatter that he heard in other mouths. Upon this M. Nioche’s accent became more finely trenchant than ever, he offered to read extracts from Lamartine, and he protested that, although he did endeavor according to his feeble lights to cultivate refinement of diction, monsieur, if he wanted the real thing, should go to the Théâtre Français.

Newman took an interest in French thriftiness and conceived a lively admiration for Parisian economies. His own economic genius was so entirely for operations on a larger scale, and, to move at his ease, he needed so imperatively the sense of great risks and great prizes, that he found an ungrudging entertainment in the spectacle of fortunes made by the aggregation of copper coins, and in the minute subdivision of labor and profit. He questioned M. Nioche about his own manner of life, and felt a friendly mixture of compassion and respect over the recital of his delicate frugalities. The worthy man told him how, at one period, he and his daughter had supported existence comfortably upon the sum of fifteen sous per diem; recently, having succeeded in hauling ashore the last floating fragments of the wreck of his fortune, his budget had been a trifle more ample. But they still had to count their sous very narrowly, and M. Nioche intimated with a sigh that Mademoiselle Noémie did not bring to this task that zealous cooperation which might have been desired.

“But what will you have?”’ he asked, philosophically. “One is young, one is pretty, one needs new dresses and fresh gloves; one can’t wear shabby gowns among the splendors of the Louvre.”

“But your daughter earns enough to pay for her own clothes,” said Newman.

M. Nioche looked at him with weak, uncertain eyes. He would have liked to be able to say that his daughter’s talents were appreciated, and that her crooked little daubs commanded a market; but it seemed a scandal to abuse the credulity of this free-handed stranger, who, without a suspicion or a question, had admitted him to equal social rights. He compromised, and declared that while it was obvious that Mademoiselle Noémie’s reproductions of the old masters had only to be seen to be coveted, the prices which, in consideration of their altogether peculiar degree of finish, she felt obliged to ask for them had kept purchasers at a respectful distance. “Poor little one!” said M. Nioche, with a sigh; “it is almost a pity that her work is so perfect! It would be in her interest to paint less well.”

“But if Mademoiselle Noémie has this devotion to her art,” Newman once observed, “why should you have those fears for her that you spoke of the other day?”

M. Nioche meditated: there was an inconsistency in his position; it made him chronically uncomfortable. Though he had no desire to destroy the goose with the golden eggs—Newman’s benevolent confidence—he felt a tremulous impulse to speak out all his trouble. “Ah, she is an artist, my dear sir, most assuredly,” he declared. “But, to tell you the truth, she is also a franche coquette. I am sorry to say,” he added in a moment, shaking his head with a world of harmless bitterness, “that she comes honestly by it. Her mother was one before her!”

“You were not happy with your wife?” Newman asked.

M. Nioche gave half a dozen little backward jerks of his head. “She was my purgatory, monsieur!”

“She deceived you?”

“Under my nose, year after year. I was too stupid, and the temptation was too great. But I found her out at last. I have only been once in my life a man to be afraid of; I know it very well; it was in that hour! Nevertheless I don’t like to think of it. I loved her—I can’t tell you how much. She was a bad woman.”

“She is not living?”

“She has gone to her account.”

“Her influence on your daughter, then,” said Newman encouragingly, “is not to be feared.”

“She cared no more for her daughter than for the sole of her shoe! But Noémie has no need of influence. She is sufficient to herself. She is stronger than I.”

“She doesn’t obey you, eh?”

“She can’t obey, monsieur, since I don’t command. What would be the use? It would only irritate her and drive her to some coup de tête. She is very clever, like her mother; she would waste no time about it. As a child—when I was happy, or supposed I was—she studied drawing and painting with first-class professors, and they assured me she had a talent. I was delighted to believe it, and when I went into society I used to carry her pictures with me in a portfolio and hand them round to the company. I remember, once, a lady thought I was offering them for sale, and I took it very ill. We don’t know what we may come to! Then came my dark days, and my explosion with Madame Nioche. Noémie had no more twenty-franc lessons; but in the course of time, when she grew older, and it became highly expedient that she should do something that would help to keep us alive, she bethought herself of her palette and brushes. Some of our friends in the quartier pronounced the idea fantastic: they recommended her to try bonnet making, to get a situation in a shop, or—if she was more ambitious—to advertise for a place of dame de compagnie. She did advertise, and an old lady wrote her a letter and bade her come and see her. The old lady liked her, and offered her her living and six hundred francs a year; but Noémie discovered that she passed her life in her armchair and had only two visitors, her confessor and her nephew: the confessor very strict, and the nephew a man of fifty, with a broken nose and a government clerkship of two thousand francs. She threw her old lady over, bought a paint-box, a canvas, and a new dress, and went and set up her easel in the Louvre. There in one place and another, she has passed the last two years; I can’t say it has made us millionaires. But Noémie tells me that Rome was not built in a day, that she is making great progress, that I must leave her to her own devices. The fact is, without prejudice to her genius, that she has no idea of burying herself alive. She likes to see the world, and to be seen. She says, herself, that she can’t work in the dark. With her appearance it is very natural. Only, I can’t help worrying and trembling and wondering what may happen to her there all alone, day after day, amid all that coming and going of strangers. I can’t be always at her side. I go with her in the morning, and I come to fetch her away, but she won’t have me near her in the interval; she says I make her nervous. As if it didn’t make me nervous to wander about all day without her! Ah, if anything were to happen to her!” cried M. Nioche, clenching his two fists and jerking back his head again, portentously.

“Oh, I guess nothing will happen,” said Newman.

“I believe I should shoot her!” said the old man, solemnly.

“Oh, we’ll marry her,” said Newman, “since that’s how you manage it; and I will go and see her tomorrow at the Louvre and pick out the pictures she is to copy for me.”

M. Nioche had brought Newman a message from his daughter, in acceptance of his magnificent commission, the young lady declaring herself his most devoted servant, promising her most zealous endeavor, and regretting that the proprieties forbade her coming to thank him in person. The morning after the conversation just narrated, Newman reverted to his intention of meeting Mademoiselle Noémie at the Louvre. M. Nioche appeared preoccupied, and left his budget of anecdotes unopened; he took a great deal of snuff, and sent certain oblique, appealing glances toward his stalwart pupil. At last, when he was taking his leave, he stood a moment, after he had polished his hat with his calico pocket-handkerchief, with his small, pale eyes fixed strangely upon Newman.

“What’s the matter?” our hero demanded.

“Excuse the solicitude of a father’s heart!” said M. Nioche. “You inspire me with boundless confidence, but I can’t help giving you a warning. After all, you are a man, you are young and at liberty. Let me beseech you, then, to respect the innocence of Mademoiselle Nioche!”

Newman had wondered what was coming, and at this he broke into a laugh. He was on the point of declaring that his own innocence struck him as the more exposed, but he contented himself with promising to treat the young girl with nothing less than veneration. He found her waiting for him, seated upon the great divan in the Salon Carré. She was not in her working-day costume, but wore her bonnet and gloves and carried her parasol, in honor of the occasion. These articles had been selected with unerring taste, and a fresher, prettier image of youthful alertness and blooming discretion was not to be conceived. She made Newman a most respectful curtsey and expressed her gratitude for his liberality in a wonderfully graceful little speech. It annoyed him to have a charming young girl stand there thanking him, and it made him feel uncomfortable to think that this perfect young lady, with her excellent manners and her finished intonation, was literally in his pay. He assured her, in such French as he could muster, that the thing was not worth mentioning, and that he considered her services a great favor.

“Whenever you please, then,” said Mademoiselle Noémie, “we will pass the review.”

They walked slowly round the room, then passed into the others and strolled about for half an hour. Mademoiselle Noémie evidently relished her situation, and had no desire to bring her public interview with her striking-looking patron to a close. Newman perceived that prosperity agreed with her. The little thin-lipped, peremptory air with which she had addressed her father on the occasion of their former meeting had given place to the most lingering and caressing tones.

“What sort of pictures do you desire?” she asked. “Sacred, or profane?”

“Oh, a few of each,” said Newman. “But I want something bright and gay.”

“Something gay? There is nothing very gay in this solemn old Louvre. But we will see what we can find. You speak French to-day like a charm. My father has done wonders.”

“Oh, I am a bad subject,” said Newman. “I am too old to learn a language.”

“Too old? Quelle folie!” cried Mademoiselle Noémie, with a clear, shrill laugh. “You are a very young man. And how do you like my father?”

“He is a very nice old gentleman. He never laughs at my blunders.”

“He is very comme il faut, my papa,” said Mademoiselle Noémie, “and as honest as the day. Oh, an exceptional probity! You could trust him with millions.”

“Do you always obey him?” asked Newman.

“Obey him?”

“Do you do what he bids you?”

The young girl stopped and looked at him; she had a spot of color in either cheek, and in her expressive French eye, which projected too much for perfect beauty, there was a slight gleam of audacity. “Why do you ask me that?” she demanded.

“Because I want to know.”

“You think me a bad girl?” And she gave a strange smile.

Newman looked at her a moment; he saw that she was pretty, but he was not in the least dazzled. He remembered poor M. Nioche’s solicitude for her “innocence,” and he laughed as his eyes met hers. Her face was the oddest mixture of youth and maturity, and beneath her candid brow her searching little smile seemed to contain a world of ambiguous intentions. She was pretty enough, certainly to make her father nervous; but, as regards her innocence, Newman felt ready on the spot to affirm that she had never parted with it. She had simply never had any; she had been looking at the world since she was ten years old, and he would have been a wise man who could tell her any secrets. In her long mornings at the Louvre she had not only studied Madonnas and St. Johns; she had kept an eye upon all the variously embodied human nature around her, and she had formed her conclusions. In a certain sense, it seemed to Newman, M. Nioche might be at rest; his daughter might do something very audacious, but she would never do anything foolish. Newman, with his long-drawn, leisurely smile, and his even, unhurried utterance, was always, mentally, taking his time; and he asked himself, now, what she was looking at him in that way for. He had an idea that she would like him to confess that he did think her a bad girl.

“Oh, no,” he said at last; “it would be very bad manners in me to judge you that way. I don’t know you.”

“But my father has complained to you,” said Mademoiselle Noémie.

“He says you are a coquette.”

“He shouldn’t go about saying such things to gentlemen! But you don’t believe it?”

“No,” said Newman gravely, “I don’t believe it.”

She looked at him again, gave a shrug and a smile, and then pointed to a small Italian picture, a Marriage of St. Catherine. “How should you like that?” she asked.

“It doesn’t please me,” said Newman. “The young lady in the yellow dress is not pretty.”

“Ah, you are a great connoisseur,” murmured Mademoiselle Noémie.

“In pictures? Oh, no; I know very little about them.”

“In pretty women, then.”

“In that I am hardly better.”

“What do you say to that, then?” the young girl asked, indicating a superb Italian portrait of a lady. “I will do it for you on a smaller scale.”

“On a smaller scale? Why not as large as the original?”

Mademoiselle Noémie glanced at the glowing splendor of the Venetian masterpiece and gave a little toss of her head. “I don’t like that woman. She looks stupid.”

“I do like her,” said Newman. “Decidedly, I must have her, as large as life. And just as stupid as she is there.”

The young girl fixed her eyes on him again, and with her mocking smile, “It certainly ought to be easy for me to make her look stupid!” she said.

“What do you mean?” asked Newman, puzzled.

She gave another little shrug. “Seriously, then, you want that portrait—the golden hair, the purple satin, the pearl necklace, the two magnificent arms?”

“Everything—just as it is.”

“Would nothing else do, instead?”

“Oh, I want some other things, but I want that too.”

Mademoiselle Noémie turned away a moment, walked to the other side of the hall, and stood there, looking vaguely about her. At last she came back. “It must be charming to be able to order pictures at such a rate. Venetian portraits, as large as life! You go at it en prince. And you are going to travel about Europe that way?”

“Yes, I intend to travel,” said Newman.

“Ordering, buying, spending money?”

“Of course I shall spend some money.”

“You are very happy to have it. And you are perfectly free?”

“How do you mean, free?”

“You have nothing to bother you—no family, no wife, no fiancée?”

“Yes, I am tolerably free.”

“You are very happy,” said Mademoiselle Noémie, gravely.

“Je le veux bien!” said Newman, proving that he had learned more French than he admitted.

“And how long shall you stay in Paris?” the young girl went on.

“Only a few days more.”

“Why do you go away?”

“It is getting hot, and I must go to Switzerland.”

“To Switzerland? That’s a fine country. I would give my new parasol to see it! Lakes and mountains, romantic valleys and icy peaks! Oh, I congratulate you. Meanwhile, I shall sit here through all the hot summer, daubing at your pictures.”

“Oh, take your time about it,” said Newman. “Do them at your convenience.”

They walked farther and looked at a dozen other things. Newman pointed out what pleased him, and Mademoiselle Noémie generally criticised it, and proposed something else. Then suddenly she diverged and began to talk about some personal matter.

“What made you speak to me the other day in the Salon Carré?” she abruptly asked.

“I admired your picture.”

“But you hesitated a long time.”

“Oh, I do nothing rashly,” said Newman.

“Yes, I saw you watching me. But I never supposed you were going to speak to me. I never dreamed I should be walking about here with you to-day. It’s very curious.”

“It is very natural,” observed Newman.

“Oh, I beg your pardon; not to me. Coquette as you think me, I have never walked about in public with a gentleman before. What was my father thinking of, when he consented to our interview?”

“He was repenting of his unjust accusations,” replied Newman.

Mademoiselle Noémie remained silent; at last she dropped into a seat. “Well then, for those five it is fixed,” she said. “Five copies as brilliant and beautiful as I can make them. We have one more to choose. Shouldn’t you like one of those great Rubenses—the marriage of Marie de Médicis? Just look at it and see how handsome it is.”

“Oh, yes; I should like that,” said Newman. “Finish off with that.”

“Finish off with that—good!” And she laughed. She sat a moment, looking at him, and then she suddenly rose and stood before him, with her hands hanging and clasped in front of her. “I don’t understand you,” she said with a smile. “I don’t understand how a man can be so ignorant.”

“Oh, I am ignorant, certainly,” said Newman, putting his hands into his pockets.

“It’s ridiculous! I don’t know how to paint.”

“You don’t know how?”

“I paint like a cat; I can’t draw a straight line. I never sold a picture until you bought that thing the other day.” And as she offered this surprising information she continued to smile.

Newman burst into a laugh. “Why do you tell me this?” he asked.

“Because it irritates me to see a clever man blunder so. My pictures are grotesque.”

“And the one I possess—”

“That one is rather worse than usual.”

“Well,” said Newman, “I like it all the same!”

She looked at him askance. “That is a very pretty thing to say,” she answered; “but it is my duty to warn you before you go farther. This order of yours is impossible, you know. What do you take me for? It is work for ten men. You pick out the six most difficult pictures in the Louvre, and you expect me to go to work as if I were sitting down to hem a dozen pocket handkerchiefs. I wanted to see how far you would go.”

Newman looked at the young girl in some perplexity. In spite of the ridiculous blunder of which he stood convicted, he was very far from being a simpleton, and he had a lively suspicion that Mademoiselle Noémie’s sudden frankness was not essentially more honest than her leaving him in error would have been. She was playing a game; she was not simply taking pity on his æsthetic verdancy. What was it she expected to win? The stakes were high and the risk was great; the prize therefore must have been commensurate. But even granting that the prize might be great, Newman could not resist a movement of admiration for his companion’s intrepidity. She was throwing away with one hand, whatever she might intend to do with the other, a very handsome sum of money.

“Are you joking,” he said, “or are you serious?”

“Oh, serious!” cried Mademoiselle Noémie, but with her extraordinary smile.

“I know very little about pictures or how they are painted. If you can’t do all that, of course you can’t. Do what you can, then.”

“It will be very bad,” said Mademoiselle Noémie.

“Oh,” said Newman, laughing, “if you are determined it shall be bad, of course it will. But why do you go on painting badly?”

“I can do nothing else; I have no real talent.”

“You are deceiving your father, then.”

The young girl hesitated a moment. “He knows very well!”

“No,” Newman declared; “I am sure he believes in you.”

“He is afraid of me. I go on painting badly, as you say, because I want to learn. I like it, at any rate. And I like being here; it is a place to come to, every day; it is better than sitting in a little dark, damp room, on a court, or selling buttons and whalebones over a counter.”

“Of course it is much more amusing,” said Newman. “But for a poor girl isn’t it rather an expensive amusement?”

“Oh, I am very wrong, there is no doubt about that,” said Mademoiselle Noémie. “But rather than earn my living as some girls do—toiling with a needle, in little black holes, out of the world—I would throw myself into the Seine.”

“There is no need of that,” Newman answered; “your father told you my offer?”

“Your offer?”

“He wants you to marry, and I told him I would give you a chance to earn your dot.”

“He told me all about it, and you see the account I make of it! Why should you take such an interest in my marriage?”

“My interest was in your father. I hold to my offer; do what you can, and I will buy what you paint.”

She stood for some time, meditating, with her eyes on the ground. At last, looking up, “What sort of a husband can you get for twelve thousand francs?” she asked.

“Your father tells me he knows some very good young men.”

“Grocers and butchers and little maîtres de cafés! I will not marry at all if I can’t marry well.”

“I would advise you not to be too fastidious,” said Newman. “That’s all the advice I can give you.”

“I am very much vexed at what I have said!” cried the young girl. “It has done me no good. But I couldn’t help it.”

“What good did you expect it to do you?”

“I couldn’t help it, simply.”

Newman looked at her a moment. “Well, your pictures may be bad,” he said, “but you are too clever for me, nevertheless. I don’t understand you. Good-bye!” And he put out his hand.

She made no response, and offered him no farewell. She turned away and seated herself sidewise on a bench, leaning her head on the back of her hand, which clasped the rail in front of the pictures. Newman stood a moment and then turned on his heel and retreated. He had understood her better than he confessed; this singular scene was a practical commentary upon her father’s statement that she was a frank coquette.

When Newman related to Mrs. Tristram his fruitless visit to Madame de Cintré, she urged him not to be discouraged, but to carry out his plan of “seeing Europe” during the summer, and return to Paris in the autumn and settle down comfortably for the winter. “Madame de Cintré will keep,” she said; “she is not a woman who will marry from one day to another.” Newman made no distinct affirmation that he would come back to Paris; he even talked about Rome and the Nile, and abstained from professing any especial interest in Madame de Cintré’s continued widowhood. This circumstance was at variance with his habitual frankness, and may perhaps be regarded as characteristic of the incipient stage of that passion which is more particularly known as the mysterious one. The truth is that the expression of a pair of eyes that were at once brilliant and mild had become very familiar to his memory, and he would not easily have resigned himself to the prospect of never looking into them again. He communicated to Mrs. Tristram a number of other facts, of greater or less importance, as you choose; but on this particular point he kept his own counsel. He took a kindly leave of M. Nioche, having assured him that, so far as he was concerned, the blue-cloaked Madonna herself might have been present at his interview with Mademoiselle Noémie; and left the old man nursing his breast-pocket, in an ecstasy which the acutest misfortune might have been defied to dissipate. Newman then started on his travels, with all his usual appearance of slow-strolling leisure, and all his essential directness and intensity of aim. No man seemed less in a hurry, and yet no man achieved more in brief periods. He had certain practical instincts which served him excellently in his trade of tourist. He found his way in foreign cities by divination, his memory was excellent when once his attention had been at all cordially given, and he emerged from dialogues in foreign tongues, of which he had, formally, not understood a word, in full possession of the particular fact he had desired to ascertain. His appetite for facts was capacious, and although many of those which he noted would have seemed woefully dry and colorless to the ordinary sentimental traveler, a careful inspection of the list would have shown that he had a soft spot in his imagination. In the charming city of Brussels—his first stopping-place after leaving Paris—he asked a great many questions about the street-cars, and took extreme satisfaction in the reappearance of this familiar symbol of American civilization; but he was also greatly struck with the beautiful Gothic tower of the Hôtel de Ville, and wondered whether it would not be possible to “get up” something like it in San Francisco. He stood for half an hour in the crowded square before this edifice, in imminent danger from carriage-wheels, listening to a toothless old cicerone mumble in broken English the touching history of Counts Egmont and Horn; and he wrote the names of these gentlemen—for reasons best known to himself—on the back of an old letter.

At the outset, on his leaving Paris, his curiosity had not been intense; passive entertainment, in the Champs Élysées and at the theatres, seemed about as much as he need expect of himself, and although, as he had said to Tristram, he wanted to see the mysterious, satisfying best, he had not the Grand Tour in the least on his conscience, and was not given to cross-questioning the amusement of the hour. He believed that Europe was made for him, and not he for Europe. He had said that he wanted to improve his mind, but he would have felt a certain embarrassment, a certain shame, even—a false shame, possibly—if he had caught himself looking intellectually into the mirror. Neither in this nor in any other respect had Newman a high sense of responsibility; it was his prime conviction that a man’s life should be easy, and that he should be able to resolve privilege into a matter of course. The world, to his sense, was a great bazaar, where one might stroll about and purchase handsome things; but he was no more conscious, individually, of social pressure than he admitted the existence of such a thing as an obligatory purchase. He had not only a dislike, but a sort of moral mistrust, of uncomfortable thoughts, and it was both uncomfortable and slightly contemptible to feel obliged to square one’s self with a standard. One’s standard was the ideal of one’s own good-humored prosperity, the prosperity which enabled one to give as well as take. To expand, without bothering about it—without shiftless timidity on one side, or loquacious eagerness on the other—to the full compass of what he would have called a “pleasant” experience, was Newman’s most definite programme of life. He had always hated to hurry to catch railroad trains, and yet he had always caught them; and just so an undue solicitude for “culture” seemed a sort of silly dawdling at the station, a proceeding properly confined to women, foreigners, and other unpractical persons. All this admitted, Newman enjoyed his journey, when once he had fairly entered the current, as profoundly as the most zealous dilettante. One’s theories, after all, matter little; it is one’s humor that is the great thing. Our friend was intelligent, and he could not help that. He lounged through Belgium and Holland and the Rhineland, through Switzerland and Northern Italy, planning about nothing, but seeing everything. The guides and valets de place found him an excellent subject. He was always approachable, for he was much addicted to standing about in the vestibules and porticos of inns, and he availed himself little of the opportunities for impressive seclusion which are so liberally offered in Europe to gentlemen who travel with long purses. When an excursion, a church, a gallery, a ruin, was proposed to him, the first thing Newman usually did, after surveying his postulant in silence, from head to foot, was to sit down at a little table and order something to drink. The cicerone, during this process, usually retreated to a respectful distance; otherwise I am not sure that Newman would not have bidden him sit down and have a glass also, and tell him as an honest fellow whether his church or his gallery was really worth a man’s trouble. At last he rose and stretched his long legs, beckoned to the man of monuments, looked at his watch, and fixed his eye on his adversary. “What is it?” he asked. “How far?” And whatever the answer was, although he sometimes seemed to hesitate, he never declined. He stepped into an open cab, made his conductor sit beside him to answer questions, bade the driver go fast (he had a particular aversion to slow driving) and rolled, in all probability through a dusty suburb, to the goal of his pilgrimage. If the goal was a disappointment, if the church was meagre, or the ruin a heap of rubbish, Newman never protested or berated his cicerone; he looked with an impartial eye upon great monuments and small, made the guide recite his lesson, listened to it religiously, asked if there was nothing else to be seen in the neighborhood, and drove back again at a rattling pace. It is to be feared that his perception of the difference between good architecture and bad was not acute, and that he might sometimes have been seen gazing with culpable serenity at inferior productions. Ugly churches were a part of his pastime in Europe, as well as beautiful ones, and his tour was altogether a pastime. But there is sometimes nothing like the imagination of these people who have none, and Newman, now and then, in an unguided stroll in a foreign city, before some lonely, sad-towered church, or some angular image of one who had rendered civic service in an unknown past, had felt a singular inward tremor. It was not an excitement or a perplexity; it was a placid, fathomless sense of diversion.

He encountered by chance in Holland a young American, with whom, for a time, he formed a sort of traveler’s partnership. They were men of a very different cast, but each, in his way, was so good a fellow that, for a few weeks at least, it seemed something of a pleasure to share the chances of the road. Newman’s comrade, whose name was Babcock, was a young Unitarian minister, a small, spare, neatly-attired man, with a strikingly candid physiognomy. He was a native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and had spiritual charge of a small congregation in another suburb of the New England metropolis. His digestion was weak and he lived chiefly on Graham bread and hominy—a regimen to which he was so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be blighted when, on landing on the Continent, he found that these delicacies did not flourish under the table d’hôte system. In Paris he had purchased a bag of hominy at an establishment which called itself an American Agency, and at which the New York illustrated papers were also to be procured, and he had carried it about with him, and shown extreme serenity and fortitude in the somewhat delicate position of having his hominy prepared for him and served at anomalous hours, at the hotels he successively visited. Newman had once spent a morning, in the course of business, at Mr. Babcock’s birthplace, and, for reasons too recondite to unfold, his visit there always assumed in his mind a jocular cast. To carry out his joke, which certainly seems poor so long as it is not explained, he used often to address his companion as “Dorchester.” Fellow-travelers very soon grow intimate but it is highly improbable that at home these extremely dissimilar characters would have found any very convenient points of contact. They were, indeed, as different as possible. Newman, who never reflected on such matters, accepted the situation with great equanimity, but Babcock used to meditate over it privately; used often, indeed, to retire to his room early in the evening for the express purpose of considering it conscientiously and impartially. He was not sure that it was a good thing for him to associate with our hero, whose way of taking life was so little his own. Newman was an excellent, generous fellow; Mr. Babcock sometimes said to himself that he was a noble fellow, and, certainly, it was impossible not to like him. But would it not be desirable to try to exert an influence upon him, to try to quicken his moral life and sharpen his sense of duty? He liked everything, he accepted everything, he found amusement in everything; he was not discriminating, he had not a high tone. The young man from Dorchester accused Newman of a fault which he considered very grave, and which he did his best to avoid: what he would have called a want of “moral reaction.” Poor Mr. Babcock was extremely fond of pictures and churches, and carried Mrs. Jameson’s works about in his trunk; he delighted in æsthetic analysis, and received peculiar impressions from everything he saw. But nevertheless in his secret soul he detested Europe, and he felt an irritating need to protest against Newman’s gross intellectual hospitality. Mr. Babcock’s moral malaise, I am afraid, lay deeper than where any definition of mine can reach it. He mistrusted the European temperament, he suffered from the European climate, he hated the European dinner-hour; European life seemed to him unscrupulous and impure. And yet he had an exquisite sense of beauty; and as beauty was often inextricably associated with the above displeasing conditions, as he wished, above all, to be just and dispassionate, and as he was, furthermore, extremely devoted to “culture,” he could not bring himself to decide that Europe was utterly bad. But he thought it was very bad indeed, and his quarrel with Newman was that this unregulated epicure had a sadly insufficient perception of the bad. Babcock himself really knew as little about the bad, in any quarter of the world, as a nursing infant, his most vivid realization of evil had been the discovery that one of his college classmates, who was studying architecture in Paris had a love affair with a young woman who did not expect him to marry her. Babcock had related this incident to Newman, and our hero had applied an epithet of an unflattering sort to the young girl. The next day his companion asked him whether he was very sure he had used exactly the right word to characterize the young architect’s mistress. Newman stared and laughed. “There are a great many words to express that idea,” he said; “you can take your choice!”

“Oh, I mean,” said Babcock, “was she possibly not to be considered in a different light? Don’t you think she really expected him to marry her?”

“I am sure I don’t know,” said Newman. “Very likely she did; I have no doubt she is a grand woman.” And he began to laugh again.

“I didn’t mean that either,” said Babcock, “I was only afraid that I might have seemed yesterday not to remember—not to consider; well, I think I will write to Percival about it.”

And he had written to Percival (who answered him in a really impudent fashion), and he had reflected that it was somehow, raw and reckless in Newman to assume in that off-hand manner that the young woman in Paris might be “grand.” The brevity of Newman’s judgments very often shocked and discomposed him. He had a way of damning people without farther appeal, or of pronouncing them capital company in the face of uncomfortable symptoms, which seemed unworthy of a man whose conscience had been properly cultivated. And yet poor Babcock liked him, and remembered that even if he was sometimes perplexing and painful, this was not a reason for giving him up. Goethe recommended seeing human nature in the most various forms, and Mr. Babcock thought Goethe perfectly splendid. He often tried, in odd half-hours of conversation to infuse into Newman a little of his own spiritual starch, but Newman’s personal texture was too loose to admit of stiffening. His mind could no more hold principles than a sieve can hold water. He admired principles extremely, and thought Babcock a mighty fine little fellow for having so many. He accepted all that his high-strung companion offered him, and put them away in what he supposed to be a very safe place; but poor Babcock never afterwards recognized his gifts among the articles that Newman had in daily use.

They traveled together through Germany and into Switzerland, where for three or four weeks they trudged over passes and lounged upon blue lakes. At last they crossed the Simplon and made their way to Venice. Mr. Babcock had become gloomy and even a trifle irritable; he seemed moody, absent, preoccupied; he got his plans into a tangle, and talked one moment of doing one thing and the next of doing another. Newman led his usual life, made acquaintances, took his ease in the galleries and churches, spent an unconscionable amount of time in strolling in the Piazza San Marco, bought a great many bad pictures, and for a fortnight enjoyed Venice grossly. One evening, coming back to his inn, he found Babcock waiting for him in the little garden beside it. The young man walked up to him, looking very dismal, thrust out his hand, and said with solemnity that he was afraid they must part. Newman expressed his surprise and regret, and asked why a parting had become necessary. “Don’t be afraid I’m tired of you,” he said.

“You are not tired of me?” demanded Babcock, fixing him with his clear gray eye.

“Why the deuce should I be? You are a very plucky fellow. Besides, I don’t grow tired of things.”

“We don’t understand each other,” said the young minister.

“Don’t I understand you?” cried Newman. “Why, I hoped I did. But what if I don’t; where’s the harm?”

“I don’t understand you,” said Babcock. And he sat down and rested his head on his hand, and looked up mournfully at his immeasurable friend.

“Oh Lord, I don’t mind that!” cried Newman, with a laugh.

“But it’s very distressing to me. It keeps me in a state of unrest. It irritates me; I can’t settle anything. I don’t think it’s good for me.”

“You worry too much; that’s what’s the matter with you,” said Newman.

“Of course it must seem so to you. You think I take things too hard, and I think you take things too easily. We can never agree.”

“But we have agreed very well all along.”

“No, I haven’t agreed,” said Babcock, shaking his head. “I am very uncomfortable. I ought to have separated from you a month ago.”

“Oh, horrors! I’ll agree to anything!” cried Newman.

Mr. Babcock buried his head in both hands. At last looking up, “I don’t think you appreciate my position,” he said. “I try to arrive at the truth about everything. And then you go too fast. For me, you are too passionate, too extravagant. I feel as if I ought to go over all this ground we have traversed again, by myself, alone. I am afraid I have made a great many mistakes.”

“Oh, you needn’t give so many reasons,” said Newman. “You are simply tired of my company. You have a good right to be.”

“No, no, I am not tired!” cried the pestered young divine. “It is very wrong to be tired.”

“I give it up!” laughed Newman. “But of course it will never do to go on making mistakes. Go your way, by all means. I shall miss you; but you have seen I make friends very easily. You will be lonely yourself; but drop me a line, when you feel like it, and I will wait for you anywhere.”

“I think I will go back to Milan. I am afraid I didn’t do justice to Luini.”

“Poor Luini!” said Newman.

“I mean that I am afraid I overestimated him. I don’t think that he is a painter of the first rank.”

“Luini?” Newman exclaimed; “why, he’s enchanting—he’s magnificent! There is something in his genius that is like a beautiful woman. It gives one the same feeling.”

Mr. Babcock frowned and winced. And it must be added that this was, for Newman, an unusually metaphysical flight; but in passing through Milan he had taken a great fancy to the painter. “There you are again!” said Mr. Babcock. “Yes, we had better separate.” And on the morrow he retraced his steps and proceeded to tone down his impressions of the great Lombard artist.

A few days afterwards Newman received a note from his late companion which ran as follows:—

My Dear Mr. Newman,—I am afraid that my conduct at Venice, a week ago, seemed to you strange and ungrateful, and I wish to explain my position, which, as I said at the time, I do not think you appreciate. I had long had it on my mind to propose that we should part company, and this step was not really so abrupt as it seemed. In the first place, you know, I am traveling in Europe on funds supplied by my congregation, who kindly offered me a vacation and an opportunity to enrich my mind with the treasures of nature and art in the Old World. I feel, therefore, as if I ought to use my time to the very best advantage. I have a high sense of responsibility. You appear to care only for the pleasure of the hour, and you give yourself up to it with a violence which I confess I am not able to emulate. I feel as if I must arrive at some conclusion and fix my belief on certain points. Art and life seem to me intensely serious things, and in our travels in Europe we should especially remember the immense seriousness of Art. You seem to hold that if a thing amuses you for the moment, that is all you need ask for it, and your relish for mere amusement is also much higher than mine. You put, however, a kind of reckless confidence into your pleasure which at times, I confess, has seemed to me—shall I say it?—almost cynical. Your way at any rate is not my way, and it is unwise that we should attempt any longer to pull together. And yet, let me add that I know there is a great deal to be said for your way; I have felt its attraction, in your society, very strongly. But for this I should have left you long ago. But I was so perplexed. I hope I have not done wrong. I feel as if I had a great deal of lost time to make up. I beg you take all this as I mean it, which, Heaven knows, is not invidiously. I have a great personal esteem for you and hope that some day, when I have recovered my balance, we shall meet again. I hope you will continue to enjoy your travels, only do remember that Life and Art are extremely serious. Believe me your sincere friend and well-wisher,

BENJAMIN BABCOCK

P. S. I am greatly perplexed by Luini.

This letter produced in Newman’s mind a singular mixture of exhilaration and awe. At first, Mr. Babcock’s tender conscience seemed to him a capital farce, and his traveling back to Milan only to get into a deeper muddle appeared, as the reward of his pedantry, exquisitely and ludicrously just. Then Newman reflected that these are mighty mysteries, that possibly he himself was indeed that baleful and barely mentionable thing, a cynic, and that his manner of considering the treasures of art and the privileges of life was probably very base and immoral. Newman had a great contempt for immorality, and that evening, for a good half hour, as he sat watching the star-sheen on the warm Adriatic, he felt rebuked and depressed. He was at a loss how to answer Babcock’s letter. His good nature checked his resenting the young minister’s lofty admonitions, and his tough, inelastic sense of humor forbade his taking them seriously. He wrote no answer at all but a day or two afterward he found in a curiosity shop a grotesque little statuette in ivory, of the sixteenth century, which he sent off to Babcock without a commentary. It represented a gaunt, ascetic-looking monk, in a tattered gown and cowl, kneeling with clasped hands and pulling a portentously long face. It was a wonderfully delicate piece of carving, and in a moment, through one of the rents of his gown, you espied a fat capon hung round the monk’s waist. In Newman’s intention what did the figure symbolize? Did it mean that he was going to try to be as “high-toned” as the monk looked at first, but that he feared he should succeed no better than the friar, on a closer inspection, proved to have done? It is not supposable that he intended a satire upon Babcock’s own asceticism, for this would have been a truly cynical stroke. He made his late companion, at any rate, a very valuable little present.

Newman, on leaving Venice, went through the Tyrol to Vienna, and then returned westward, through Southern Germany. The autumn found him at Baden-Baden, where he spent several weeks. The place was charming, and he was in no hurry to depart; besides, he was looking about him and deciding what to do for the winter. His summer had been very full, and he sat under the great trees beside the miniature river that trickles past the Baden flower-beds, he slowly rummaged it over. He had seen and done a great deal, enjoyed and observed a great deal; he felt older, and yet he felt younger too. He remembered Mr. Babcock and his desire to form conclusions, and he remembered also that he had profited very little by his friend’s exhortation to cultivate the same respectable habit. Could he not scrape together a few conclusions? Baden-Baden was the prettiest place he had seen yet, and orchestral music in the evening, under the stars, was decidedly a great institution. This was one of his conclusions! But he went on to reflect that he had done very wisely to pull up stakes and come abroad; this seeing of the world was a very interesting thing. He had learned a great deal; he couldn’t say just what, but he had it there under his hat-band. He had done what he wanted; he had seen the great things, and he had given his mind a chance to “improve,” if it would. He cheerfully believed that it had improved. Yes, this seeing of the world was very pleasant, and he would willingly do a little more of it. Thirty-six years old as he was, he had a handsome stretch of life before him yet, and he need not begin to count his weeks. Where should he take the world next? I have said he remembered the eyes of the lady whom he had found standing in Mrs. Tristram’s drawing-room; four months had elapsed, and he had not forgotten them yet. He had looked—he had made a point of looking—into a great many other eyes in the interval, but the only ones he thought of now were Madame de Cintré’s. If he wanted to see more of the world, should he find it in Madame de Cintré’s eyes? He would certainly find something there, call it this world or the next. Throughout these rather formless meditations he sometimes thought of his past life and the long array of years (they had begun so early) during which he had had nothing in his head but “enterprise.” They seemed far away now, for his present attitude was more than a holiday, it was almost a rupture. He had told Tristram that the pendulum was swinging back and it appeared that the backward swing had not yet ended. Still “enterprise,” which was over in the other quarter wore to his mind a different aspect at different hours. In its train a thousand forgotten episodes came trooping back into his memory. Some of them he looked complacently enough in the face; from some he averted his head. They were old efforts, old exploits, antiquated examples of “smartness” and sharpness. Some of them, as he looked at them, he felt decidedly proud of; he admired himself as if he had been looking at another man. And, in fact, many of the qualities that make a great deed were there: the decision, the resolution, the courage, the celerity, the clear eye, and the strong hand. Of certain other achievements it would be going too far to say that he was ashamed of them for Newman had never had a stomach for dirty work. He was blessed with a natural impulse to disfigure with a direct, unreasoning blow the comely visage of temptation. And certainly, in no man could a want of integrity have been less excusable. Newman knew the crooked from the straight at a glance, and the former had cost him, first and last, a great many moments of lively disgust. But none the less some of his memories seemed to wear at present a rather graceless and sordid mien, and it struck him that if he had never done anything very ugly, he had never, on the other hand, done anything particularly beautiful. He had spent his years in the unremitting effort to add thousands to thousands, and, now that he stood well outside of it, the business of money-getting appeared tolerably dry and sterile. It is very well to sneer at money-getting after you have filled your pockets, and Newman, it may be said, should have begun somewhat earlier to moralize thus delicately. To this it may be answered that he might have made another fortune, if he chose; and we ought to add that he was not exactly moralizing. It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.

During his stay at Baden-Baden he received a letter from Mrs. Tristram, scolding him for the scanty tidings he had sent to his friends of the Avenue d’Iéna, and begging to be definitely informed that he had not concocted any horrid scheme for wintering in outlying regions, but was coming back sanely and promptly to the most comfortable city in the world. Newman’s answer ran as follows:—

“I supposed you knew I was a miserable letter-writer, and didn’t expect anything of me. I don’t think I have written twenty letters of pure friendship in my whole life; in America I conducted my correspondence altogether by telegrams. This is a letter of pure friendship; you have got hold of a curiosity, and I hope you will value it. You want to know everything that has happened to me these three months. The best way to tell you, I think, would be to send you my half dozen guide-books, with my pencil-marks in the margin. Wherever you find a scratch or a cross, or a ‘Beautiful!’ or a ‘So true!’ or a ‘Too thin!’ you may know that I have had a sensation of some sort or other. That has been about my history, ever since I left you. Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Italy—I have been through the whole list, and I don’t think I am any the worse for it. I know more about Madonnas and church-steeples than I supposed any man could. I have seen some very pretty things, and shall perhaps talk them over this winter, by your fireside. You see, my face is not altogether set against Paris. I have had all kinds of plans and visions, but your letter has blown most of them away. ‘L’appétit vient en mangeant,’ says the French proverb, and I find that the more I see of the world the more I want to see. Now that I am in the shafts, why shouldn’t I trot to the end of the course? Sometimes I think of the far East, and keep rolling the names of Eastern cities under my tongue: Damascus and Bagdad, Medina and Mecca. I spent a week last month in the company of a returned missionary, who told me I ought to be ashamed to be loafing about Europe when there are such big things to be seen out there. I do want to explore, but I think I would rather explore over in the Rue de l’Université. Do you ever hear from that pretty lady? If you can get her to promise she will be at home the next time I call, I will go back to Paris straight. I am more than ever in the state of mind I told you about that evening; I want a first-class wife. I have kept an eye on all the pretty girls I have come across this summer, but none of them came up to my notion, or anywhere near it. I should have enjoyed all this a thousand times more if I had had the lady just mentioned by my side. The nearest approach to her was a Unitarian minister from Boston, who very soon demanded a separation, for incompatibility of temper. He told me I was low-minded, immoral, a devotee of ‘art for art’—whatever that is: all of which greatly afflicted me, for he was really a sweet little fellow. But shortly afterwards I met an Englishman, with whom I struck up an acquaintance which at first seemed to promise well—a very bright man, who writes in the London papers and knows Paris nearly as well as Tristram. We knocked about for a week together, but he very soon gave me up in disgust. I was too virtuous by half; I was too stern a moralist. He told me, in a friendly way, that I was cursed with a conscience; that I judged things like a Methodist and talked about them like an old lady. This was rather bewildering. Which of my two critics was I to believe? I didn’t worry about it and very soon made up my mind they were both idiots. But there is one thing in which no one will ever have the impudence to pretend I am wrong, that is, in being your faithful friend,

Newman gave up Damascus and Bagdad and returned to Paris before the autumn was over. He established himself in some rooms selected for him by Tom Tristram, in accordance with the latter’s estimate of what he called his social position. When Newman learned that his social position was to be taken into account, he professed himself utterly incompetent, and begged Tristram to relieve him of the care. “I didn’t know I had a social position,” he said, “and if I have, I haven’t the smallest idea what it is. Isn’t a social position knowing some two or three thousand people and inviting them to dinner? I know you and your wife and little old Mr. Nioche, who gave me French lessons last spring. Can I invite you to dinner to meet each other? If I can, you must come to-morrow.”

“That is not very grateful to me,” said Mrs. Tristram, “who introduced you last year to every creature I know.”

“So you did; I had quite forgotten. But I thought you wanted me to forget,” said Newman, with that tone of simple deliberateness which frequently marked his utterance, and which an observer would not have known whether to pronounce a somewhat mysteriously humorous affection of ignorance or a modest aspiration to knowledge; “you told me you disliked them all.”

“Ah, the way you remember what I say is at least very flattering. But in future,” added Mrs. Tristram, “pray forget all the wicked things and remember only the good ones. It will be easily done, and it will not fatigue your memory. But I forewarn you that if you trust my husband to pick out your rooms, you are in for something hideous.”

“Hideous, darling?” cried Tristram.

“To-day I must say nothing wicked; otherwise I should use stronger language.”

“What do you think she would say, Newman?” asked Tristram. “If she really tried, now? She can express displeasure, volubly, in two or three languages; that’s what it is to be intellectual. It gives her the start of me completely, for I can’t swear, for the life of me, except in English. When I get mad I have to fall back on our dear old mother tongue. There’s nothing like it, after all.”

Newman declared that he knew nothing about tables and chairs, and that he would accept, in the way of a lodging, with his eyes shut, anything that Tristram should offer him. This was partly veracity on our hero’s part, but it was also partly charity. He knew that to pry about and look at rooms, and make people open windows, and poke into sofas with his cane, and gossip with landladies, and ask who lived above and who below—he knew that this was of all pastimes the dearest to Tristram’s heart, and he felt the more disposed to put it in his way as he was conscious that, as regards his obliging friend, he had suffered the warmth of ancient good-fellowship somewhat to abate. Besides, he had no taste for upholstery; he had even no very exquisite sense of comfort or convenience. He had a relish for luxury and splendor, but it was satisfied by rather gross contrivances. He scarcely knew a hard chair from a soft one, and he possessed a talent for stretching his legs which quite dispensed with adventitious facilities. His idea of comfort was to inhabit very large rooms, have a great many of them, and be conscious of their possessing a number of patented mechanical devices—half of which he should never have occasion to use. The apartments should be light and brilliant and lofty; he had once said that he liked rooms in which you wanted to keep your hat on. For the rest, he was satisfied with the assurance of any respectable person that everything was “handsome.” Tristram accordingly secured for him an apartment to which this epithet might be lavishly applied. It was situated on the Boulevard Haussmann, on the first floor, and consisted of a series of rooms, gilded from floor to ceiling a foot thick, draped in various light shades of satin, and chiefly furnished with mirrors and clocks. Newman thought them magnificent, thanked Tristram heartily, immediately took possession, and had one of his trunks standing for three months in his drawing-room.

One day Mrs. Tristram told him that her beautiful friend, Madame de Cintré, had returned from the country; that she had met her three days before, coming out of the Church of St. Sulpice; she herself having journeyed to that distant quarter in quest of an obscure lace-mender, of whose skill she had heard high praise.

“And how were those eyes?” Newman asked.

“Those eyes were red with weeping, if you please!” said Mrs. Tristram. “She had been to confession.”

“It doesn’t tally with your account of her,” said Newman, “that she should have sins to confess.”

“They were not sins; they were sufferings.”

“How do you know that?”

“She asked me to come and see her; I went this morning.”

“And what does she suffer from?”

“I didn’t ask her. With her, somehow, one is very discreet. But I guessed, easily enough. She suffers from her wicked old mother and her Grand Turk of a brother. They persecute her. But I can almost forgive them, because, as I told you, she is a saint, and a persecution is all that she needs to bring out her saintliness and make her perfect.”

“That’s a comfortable theory for her. I hope you will never impart it to the old folks. Why does she let them bully her? Is she not her own mistress?”

“Legally, yes, I suppose; but morally, no. In France you must never say nay to your mother, whatever she requires of you. She may be the most abominable old woman in the world, and make your life a purgatory; but, after all, she is ma mère, and you have no right to judge her. You have simply to obey. The thing has a fine side to it. Madame de Cintré bows her head and folds her wings.”

“Can’t she at least make her brother leave off?”

“Her brother is the chef de la famille, as they say; he is the head of the clan. With those people the family is everything; you must act, not for your own pleasure, but for the advantage of the family.”

“I wonder what my family would like me to do!” exclaimed Tristram.

“I wish you had one!” said his wife.

“But what do they want to get out of that poor lady?” Newman asked.

“Another marriage. They are not rich, and they want to bring more money into the family.”

“There’s your chance, my boy!” said Tristram.

“And Madame de Cintré objects,” Newman continued.

“She has been sold once; she naturally objects to being sold again. It appears that the first time they made rather a poor bargain; M. de Cintré left a scanty property.”

“And to whom do they want to marry her now?”

“I thought it best not to ask; but you may be sure it is to some horrid old nabob, or to some dissipated little duke.”

“There’s Mrs. Tristram, as large as life!” cried her husband. “Observe the richness of her imagination. She has not a single question—it’s vulgar to ask questions—and yet she knows everything. She has the history of Madame de Cintré’s marriage at her fingers’ ends. She has seen the lovely Claire on her knees, with loosened tresses and streaming eyes, and the rest of them standing over her with spikes and goads and red-hot irons, ready to come down on her if she refuses the tipsy duke. The simple truth is that they made a fuss about her milliner’s bill or refused her an opera-box.”

Newman looked from Tristram to his wife with a certain mistrust in each direction. “Do you really mean,” he asked of Mrs. Tristram, “that your friend is being forced into an unhappy marriage?”

“I think it extremely probable. Those people are very capable of that sort of thing.”

“It is like something in a play,” said Newman; “that dark old house over there looks as if wicked things had been done in it, and might be done again.”

“They have a still darker old house in the country Madame de Cintré tells me, and there, during the summer this scheme must have been hatched.”

“Must have been; mind that!” said Tristram.

“After all,” suggested Newman, after a silence, “she may be in trouble about something else.”

“If it is something else, then it is something worse,” said Mrs. Tristram, with rich decision.

Newman was silent a while, and seemed lost in meditation. “Is it possible,” he asked at last, “that they do that sort of thing over here? that helpless women are bullied into marrying men they hate?”

“Helpless women, all over the world, have a hard time of it,” said Mrs. Tristram. “There is plenty of bullying everywhere.”

“A great deal of that kind of thing goes on in New York,” said Tristram. “Girls are bullied or coaxed or bribed, or all three together, into marrying nasty fellows. There is no end of that always going on in the Fifth Avenue, and other bad things besides. The Mysteries of the Fifth Avenue! Someone ought to show them up.”

“I don’t believe it!” said Newman, very gravely. “I don’t believe that, in America, girls are ever subjected to compulsion. I don’t believe there have been a dozen cases of it since the country began.”

“Listen to the voice of the spread eagle!” cried Tristram.

“The spread eagle ought to use his wings,” said Mrs. Tristram. “Fly to the rescue of Madame de Cintré!”

“To her rescue?”

“Pounce down, seize her in your talons, and carry her off. Marry her yourself.”

Newman, for some moments, answered nothing; but presently, “I should suppose she had heard enough of marrying,” he said. “The kindest way to treat her would be to admire her, and yet never to speak of it. But that sort of thing is infamous,” he added; “it makes me feel savage to hear of it.”

He heard of it, however, more than once afterward. Mrs. Tristram again saw Madame de Cintré, and again found her looking very sad. But on these occasions there had been no tears; her beautiful eyes were clear and still. “She is cold, calm, and hopeless,” Mrs. Tristram declared, and she added that on her mentioning that her friend Mr. Newman was again in Paris and was faithful in his desire to make Madame de Cintré’s acquaintance, this lovely woman had found a smile in her despair, and declared that she was sorry to have missed his visit in the spring and that she hoped he had not lost courage. “I told her something about you,” said Mrs. Tristram.

“That’s a comfort,” said Newman, placidly. “I like people to know about me.”

A few days after this, one dusky autumn afternoon, he went again to the Rue de l’Université. The early evening had closed in as he applied for admittance at the stoutly guarded Hôtel de Bellegarde. He was told that Madame de Cintré was at home; he crossed the court, entered the farther door, and was conducted through a vestibule, vast, dim, and cold, up a broad stone staircase with an ancient iron balustrade, to an apartment on the second floor. Announced and ushered in, he found himself in a sort of paneled boudoir, at one end of which a lady and gentleman were seated before the fire. The gentleman was smoking a cigarette; there was no light in the room save that of a couple of candles and the glow from the hearth. Both persons rose to welcome Newman, who, in the firelight, recognized Madame de Cintré. She gave him her hand with a smile which seemed in itself an illumination, and, pointing to her companion, said softly, “My brother.” The gentleman offered Newman a frank, friendly greeting, and our hero then perceived him to be the young man who had spoken to him in the court of the hotel on his former visit and who had struck him as a good fellow.

“Mrs. Tristram has spoken to me a great deal of you,” said Madame de Cintré gently, as she resumed her former place.

Newman, after he had seated himself, began to consider what, in truth, was his errand. He had an unusual, unexpected sense of having wandered into a strange corner of the world. He was not given, as a general thing, to anticipating danger, or forecasting disaster, and he had had no social tremors on this particular occasion. He was not timid and he was not impudent. He felt too kindly toward himself to be the one, and too good-naturedly toward the rest of the world to be the other. But his native shrewdness sometimes placed his ease of temper at its mercy; with every disposition to take things simply, it was obliged to perceive that some things were not so simple as others. He felt as one does in missing a step, in an ascent, where one expected to find it. This strange, pretty woman, sitting in fire-side talk with her brother, in the gray depths of her inhospitable-looking house—what had he to say to her? She seemed enveloped in a sort of fantastic privacy; on what grounds had he pulled away the curtain? For a moment he felt as if he had plunged into some medium as deep as the ocean, and as if he must exert himself to keep from sinking. Meanwhile he was looking at Madame de Cintré, and she was settling herself in her chair and drawing in her long dress and turning her face towards him. Their eyes met; a moment afterwards she looked away and motioned to her brother to put a log on the fire. But the moment, and the glance which traversed it, had been sufficient to relieve Newman of the first and the last fit of personal embarrassment he was ever to know. He performed the movement which was so frequent with him, and which was always a sort of symbol of his taking mental possession of a scene—he extended his legs. The impression Madame de Cintré had made upon him on their first meeting came back in an instant; it had been deeper than he knew. She was pleasing, she was interesting; he had opened a book and the first lines held his attention.

She asked him several questions: how lately he had seen Mrs. Tristram, how long he had been in Paris, how long he expected to remain there, how he liked it. She spoke English without an accent, or rather with that distinctively British accent which, on his arrival in Europe, had struck Newman as an altogether foreign tongue, but which, in women, he had come to like extremely. Here and there Madame de Cintré’s utterance had a faint shade of strangeness but at the end of ten minutes Newman found himself waiting for these soft roughnesses. He enjoyed them, and he marveled to see that gross thing, error, brought down to so fine a point.

“You have a beautiful country,” said Madame de Cintré, presently.

“Oh, magnificent!” said Newman. “You ought to see it.”

“I shall never see it,” said Madame de Cintré with a smile.

“Why not?” asked Newman.

“I don’t travel; especially so far.”

“But you go away sometimes; you are not always here?”

“I go away in summer, a little way, to the country.”

Newman wanted to ask her something more, something personal, he hardly knew what. “Don’t you find it rather—rather quiet here?” he said; “so far from the street?” Rather “gloomy,” he was going to say, but he reflected that that would be impolite.

“Yes, it is very quiet,” said Madame de Cintré; “but we like that.”

“Ah, you like that,” repeated Newman, slowly.

“Besides, I have lived here all my life.”

“Lived here all your life,” said Newman, in the same way.

“I was born here, and my father was born here before me, and my grandfather, and my great-grandfathers. Were they not, Valentin?” and she appealed to her brother.

“Yes, it’s a family habit to be born here!” the young man said with a laugh, and rose and threw the remnant of his cigarette into the fire, and then remained leaning against the chimney-piece. An observer would have perceived that he wished to take a better look at Newman, whom he covertly examined, while he stood stroking his moustache.

“Your house is tremendously old, then,” said Newman.

“How old is it, brother?” asked Madame de Cintré.

The young man took the two candles from the mantel-shelf, lifted one high in each hand, and looked up toward the cornice of the room, above the chimney-piece. This latter feature of the apartment was of white marble, and in the familiar rococo style of the last century; but above it was a paneling of an earlier date, quaintly carved, painted white, and gilded here and there. The white had turned to yellow, and the gilding was tarnished. On the top, the figures ranged themselves into a sort of shield, on which an armorial device was cut. Above it, in relief, was a date—1627. “There you have it,” said the young man. “That is old or new, according to your point of view.”

“Well, over here,” said Newman, “one’s point of view gets shifted round considerably.” And he threw back his head and looked about the room. “Your house is of a very curious style of architecture,” he said.

“Are you interested in architecture?” asked the young man at the chimney-piece.

“Well, I took the trouble, this summer,” said Newman, “to examine—as well as I can calculate—some four hundred and seventy churches. Do you call that interested?”

“Perhaps you are interested in theology,” said the young man.

“Not particularly. Are you a Roman Catholic, madam?” And he turned to Madame de Cintré.

“Yes, sir,” she answered, gravely.

Newman was struck with the gravity of her tone; he threw back his head and began to look round the room again. “Had you never noticed that number up there?” he presently asked.

She hesitated a moment, and then, “In former years,” she said.

Her brother had been watching Newman’s movement. “Perhaps you would like to examine the house,” he said.

Newman slowly brought down his eyes and looked at him; he had a vague impression that the young man at the chimney-piece was inclined to irony. He was a handsome fellow, his face wore a smile, his moustaches were curled up at the ends, and there was a little dancing gleam in his eye. “Damn his French impudence!” Newman was on the point of saying to himself. “What the deuce is he grinning at?” He glanced at Madame de Cintré; she was sitting with her eyes fixed on the floor. She raised them, they met his, and she looked at her brother. Newman turned again to this young man and observed that he strikingly resembled his sister. This was in his favor, and our hero’s first impression of the Count Valentin, moreover, had been agreeable. His mistrust expired, and he said he would be very glad to see the house.

The young man gave a frank laugh, and laid his hand on one of the candlesticks. “Good, good!” he exclaimed. “Come, then.”

But Madame de Cintré rose quickly and grasped his arm, “Ah, Valentin!” she said. “What do you mean to do?”

“To show Mr. Newman the house. It will be very amusing.”

She kept her hand on his arm, and turned to Newman with a smile. “Don’t let him take you,” she said; “you will not find it amusing. It is a musty old house, like any other.”

“It is full of curious things,” said the count, resisting. “Besides, I want to do it; it is a rare chance.”

“You are very wicked, brother,” Madame de Cintré answered.

“Nothing venture, nothing have!” cried the young man. “Will you come?”

Madame de Cintré stepped toward Newman, gently clasping her hands and smiling softly. “Would you not prefer my society, here, by my fire, to stumbling about dark passages after my brother?”

“A hundred times!” said Newman. “We will see the house some other day.”

The young man put down his candlestick with mock solemnity, and, shaking his head, “Ah, you have defeated a great scheme, sir!” he said.

“A scheme? I don’t understand,” said Newman.

“You would have played your part in it all the better. Perhaps some day I shall have a chance to explain it.”

“Be quiet, and ring for the tea,” said Madame de Cintré.

The young man obeyed, and presently a servant brought in the tea, placed the tray on a small table, and departed. Madame de Cintré, from her place, busied herself with making it. She had but just begun when the door was thrown open and a lady rushed in, making a loud rustling sound. She stared at Newman, gave a little nod and a “Monsieur!” and then quickly approached Madame de Cintré and presented her forehead to be kissed. Madame de Cintré saluted her, and continued to make tea. The new-comer was young and pretty, it seemed to Newman; she wore her bonnet and cloak, and a train of royal proportions. She began to talk rapidly in French. “Oh, give me some tea, my beautiful one, for the love of God! I’m exhausted, mangled, massacred.” Newman found himself quite unable to follow her; she spoke much less distinctly than M. Nioche.

“That is my sister-in-law,” said the Count Valentin, leaning towards him.

“She is very pretty,” said Newman.

“Exquisite,” answered the young man, and this time, again, Newman suspected him of irony.

His sister-in-law came round to the other side of the fire with her cup of tea in her hand, holding it out at arm’s-length, so that she might not spill it on her dress, and uttering little cries of alarm. She placed the cup on the mantel-shelf and begun to unpin her veil and pull off her gloves, looking meanwhile at Newman.

“Is there anything I can do for you, my dear lady?” the Count Valentin asked, in a sort of mock-caressing tone.

“Present monsieur,” said his sister-in-law.

The young man answered, “Mr. Newman!”

“I can’t courtesy to you, monsieur, or I shall spill my tea,” said the lady. “So Claire receives strangers, like that?” she added, in a low voice, in French, to her brother-in-law.

“Apparently!” he answered with a smile. Newman stood a moment, and then he approached Madame de Cintré. She looked up at him as if she were thinking of something to say. But she seemed to think of nothing; so she simply smiled. He sat down near her and she handed him a cup of tea. For a few moments they talked about that, and meanwhile he looked at her. He remembered what Mrs. Tristram had told him of her “perfection” and of her having, in combination, all the brilliant things that he dreamed of finding. This made him observe her not only without mistrust, but without uneasy conjectures; the presumption, from the first moment he looked at her, had been in her favor. And yet, if she was beautiful, it was not a dazzling beauty. She was tall and moulded in long lines; she had thick fair hair, a wide forehead, and features with a sort of harmonious irregularity. Her clear gray eyes were strikingly expressive; they were both gentle and intelligent, and Newman liked them immensely; but they had not those depths of splendor—those many-colored rays—which illumine the brows of famous beauties. Madame de Cintré was rather thin, and she looked younger than probably she was. In her whole person there was something both youthful and subdued, slender and yet ample, tranquil yet shy; a mixture of immaturity and repose, of innocence and dignity. What had Tristram meant, Newman wondered, by calling her proud? She was certainly not proud now, to him; or if she was, it was of no use, it was lost upon him; she must pile it up higher if she expected him to mind it. She was a beautiful woman, and it was very easy to get on with her. Was she a countess, a marquise, a kind of historical formation? Newman, who had rarely heard these words used, had never been at pains to attach any particular image to them; but they occurred to him now and seemed charged with a sort of melodious meaning. They signified something fair and softly bright, that had easy motions and spoke very agreeably.

“Have you many friends in Paris; do you go out?” asked Madame de Cintré, who had at last thought of something to say.

“Do you mean do I dance, and all that?”

“Do you go dans le monde, as we say?”

“I have seen a good many people. Mrs. Tristram has taken me about. I do whatever she tells me.”

“By yourself, you are not fond of amusements?”

“Oh yes, of some sorts. I am not fond of dancing, and that sort of thing; I am too old and sober. But I want to be amused; I came to Europe for that.”

“But you can be amused in America, too.”

“I couldn’t; I was always at work. But after all, that was my amusement.”

At this moment Madame de Bellegarde came back for another cup of tea, accompanied by the Count Valentin. Madame de Cintré, when she had served her, began to talk again with Newman, and recalling what he had last said, “In your own country you were very much occupied?” she asked.

“I was in business. I have been in business since I was fifteen years old.”

“And what was your business?” asked Madame de Bellegarde, who was decidedly not so pretty as Madame de Cintré.

“I have been in everything,” said Newman. “At one time I sold leather; at one time I manufactured wash-tubs.”

Madame de Bellegarde made a little grimace. “Leather? I don’t like that. Wash-tubs are better. I prefer the smell of soap. I hope at least they made your fortune.” She rattled this off with the air of a woman who had the reputation of saying everything that came into her head, and with a strong French accent.

Newman had spoken with cheerful seriousness, but Madame de Bellegarde’s tone made him go on, after a meditative pause, with a certain light grimness of jocularity. “No, I lost money on wash-tubs, but I came out pretty square on leather.”

“I have made up my mind, after all,” said Madame de Bellegarde, “that the great point is—how do you call it?—to come out square. I am on my knees to money; I don’t deny it. If you have it, I ask no questions. For that I am a real democrat—like you, monsieur. Madame de Cintré is very proud; but I find that one gets much more pleasure in this sad life if one doesn’t look too close.”

“Just Heaven, dear madam, how you go at it,” said the Count Valentin, lowering his voice.

“He’s a man one can speak to, I suppose, since my sister receives him,” the lady answered. “Besides, it’s very true; those are my ideas.”

“Ah, you call them ideas,” murmured the young man.

“But Mrs. Tristram told me you had been in the army—in your war,” said Madame de Cintré.

“Yes, but that is not business!” said Newman.

“Very true!” said M. de Bellegarde. “Otherwise perhaps I should not be penniless.”

“Is it true,” asked Newman in a moment, “that you are so proud? I had already heard it.”

Madame de Cintré smiled. “Do you find me so?”

“Oh,” said Newman, “I am no judge. If you are proud with me, you will have to tell me. Otherwise I shall not know it.”

Madame de Cintré began to laugh. “That would be pride in a sad position!” she said.

“It would be partly,” Newman went on, “because I shouldn’t want to know it. I want you to treat me well.”

Madame de Cintré, whose laugh had ceased, looked at him with her head half averted, as if she feared what he was going to say.

“Mrs. Tristram told you the literal truth,” he went on; “I want very much to know you. I didn’t come here simply to call to-day; I came in the hope that you might ask me to come again.”

“Oh, pray come often,” said Madame de Cintré.

“But will you be at home?” Newman insisted. Even to himself he seemed a trifle “pushing,” but he was, in truth, a trifle excited.

“I hope so!” said Madame de Cintré.

Newman got up. “Well, we shall see,” he said smoothing his hat with his coat-cuff.

“Brother,” said Madame de Cintré, “invite Mr. Newman to come again.”

The Count Valentin looked at our hero from head to foot with his peculiar smile, in which impudence and urbanity seemed perplexingly commingled. “Are you a brave man?” he asked, eying him askance.

“Well, I hope so,” said Newman.

“I rather suspect so. In that case, come again.”

“Ah, what an invitation!” murmured Madame de Cintré, with something painful in her smile.

“Oh, I want Mr. Newman to come—particularly,” said the young man. “It will give me great pleasure. I shall be desolate if I miss one of his visits. But I maintain he must be brave. A stout heart, sir!” And he offered Newman his hand.

“I shall not come to see you; I shall come to see Madame de Cintré,” said Newman.

“You will need all the more courage.”

“Ah, Valentin!” said Madame de Cintré, appealingly.

“Decidedly,” cried Madame de Bellegarde, “I am the only person here capable of saying something polite! Come to see me; you will need no courage,” she said.

Newman gave a laugh which was not altogether an assent, and took his leave. Madame de Cintré did not take up her sister’s challenge to be gracious, but she looked with a certain troubled air at the retreating guest.

One evening very late, about a week after his visit to Madame de Cintré, Newman’s servant brought him a card. It was that of young M. de Bellegarde. When, a few moments later, he went to receive his visitor, he found him standing in the middle of his great gilded parlor and eying it from cornice to carpet. M. de Bellegarde’s face, it seemed to Newman, expressed a sense of lively entertainment. “What the devil is he laughing at now?” our hero asked himself. But he put the question without acrimony, for he felt that Madame de Cintré’s brother was a good fellow, and he had a presentiment that on this basis of good fellowship they were destined to understand each other. Only, if there was anything to laugh at, he wished to have a glimpse of it too.

“To begin with,” said the young man, as he extended his hand, “have I come too late?”

“Too late for what?” asked Newman.

“To smoke a cigar with you.”

“You would have to come early to do that,” said Newman. “I don’t smoke.”

“Ah, you are a strong man!”

“But I keep cigars,” Newman added. “Sit down.”

“Surely, I may not smoke here,” said M. de Bellegarde.

“What is the matter? Is the room too small?”

“It is too large. It is like smoking in a ball-room, or a church.”

“That is what you were laughing at just now?” Newman asked; “the size of my room?”

“It is not size only,” replied M. de Bellegarde, “but splendor, and harmony, and beauty of detail. It was the smile of admiration.”

Newman looked at him a moment, and then, “So it is very ugly?” he inquired.

“Ugly, my dear sir? It is magnificent.”

“That is the same thing, I suppose,” said Newman. “Make yourself comfortable. Your coming to see me, I take it, is an act of friendship. You were not obliged to. Therefore, if anything around here amuses you, it will be all in a pleasant way. Laugh as loud as you please; I like to see my visitors cheerful. Only, I must make this request: that you explain the joke to me as soon as you can speak. I don’t want to lose anything, myself.”

M. de Bellegarde stared, with a look of unresentful perplexity. He laid his hand on Newman’s sleeve and seemed on the point of saying something, but he suddenly checked himself, leaned back in his chair, and puffed at his cigar. At last, however, breaking silence,—“Certainly,” he said, “my coming to see you is an act of friendship. Nevertheless I was in a measure obliged to do so. My sister asked me to come, and a request from my sister is, for me, a law. I was near you, and I observed lights in what I supposed were your rooms. It was not a ceremonious hour for making a call, but I was not sorry to do something that would show I was not performing a mere ceremony.”

“Well, here I am as large as life,” said Newman, extending his legs.

“I don’t know what you mean,” the young man went on “by giving me unlimited leave to laugh. Certainly I am a great laugher, and it is better to laugh too much than too little. But it is not in order that we may laugh together—or separately—that I have, I may say, sought your acquaintance. To speak with almost impudent frankness, you interest me!” All this was uttered by M. de Bellegarde with the modulated smoothness of the man of the world, and in spite of his excellent English, of the Frenchman; but Newman, at the same time that he sat noting its harmonious flow, perceived that it was not mere mechanical urbanity. Decidedly, there was something in his visitor that he liked. M. de Bellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, and if Newman had met him on a Western prairie he would have felt it proper to address him with a “How-d’ye-do, Mosseer?” But there was something in his physiognomy which seemed to cast a sort of aerial bridge over the impassable gulf produced by difference of race. He was below the middle height, and robust and agile in figure. Valentin de Bellegarde, Newman afterwards learned, had a mortal dread of the robustness overtaking the agility; he was afraid of growing stout; he was too short, as he said, to afford a belly. He rode and fenced and practiced gymnastics with unremitting zeal, and if you greeted him with a “How well you are looking” he started and turned pale. In your well he read a grosser monosyllable. He had a round head, high above the ears, a crop of hair at once dense and silky, a broad, low forehead, a short nose, of the ironical and inquiring rather than of the dogmatic or sensitive cast, and a moustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance. He resembled his sister not in feature, but in the expression of his clear, bright eye, completely void of introspection, and in the way he smiled. The great point in his face was that it was intensely alive—frankly, ardently, gallantly alive. The look of it was like a bell, of which the handle might have been in the young man’s soul: at a touch of the handle it rang with a loud, silver sound. There was something in his quick, light brown eye which assured you that he was not economizing his consciousness. He was not living in a corner of it to spare the furniture of the rest. He was squarely encamped in the centre and he was keeping open house. When he smiled, it was like the movement of a person who in emptying a cup turns it upside down: he gave you the last drop of his jollity. He inspired Newman with something of the same kindness that our hero used to feel in his earlier years for those of his companions who could perform strange and clever tricks—make their joints crack in queer places or whistle at the back of their mouths.

“My sister told me,” M. de Bellegarde continued, “that I ought to come and remove the impression that I had taken such great pains to produce upon you; the impression that I am a lunatic. Did it strike you that I behaved very oddly the other day?”

“Rather so,” said Newman.

“So my sister tells me.” And M. de Bellegarde watched his host for a moment through his smoke-wreaths. “If that is the case, I think we had better let it stand. I didn’t try to make you think I was a lunatic, at all; on the contrary, I wanted to produce a favorable impression. But if, after all, I made a fool of myself, it was the intention of Providence. I should injure myself by protesting too much, for I should seem to set up a claim for wisdom which, in the sequel of our acquaintance, I could by no means justify. Set me down as a lunatic with intervals of sanity.”

“Oh, I guess you know what you are about,” said Newman.

“When I am sane, I am very sane; that I admit,” M. de Bellegarde answered. “But I didn’t come here to talk about myself. I should like to ask you a few questions. You allow me?”

“Give me a specimen,” said Newman.

“You live here all alone?”

“Absolutely. With whom should I live?”

“For the moment,” said M. de Bellegarde with a smile “I am asking questions, not answering them. You have come to Paris for your pleasure?”

Newman was silent a while. Then, at last, “Everyone asks me that!” he said with his mild slowness. “It sounds so awfully foolish.”

“But at any rate you had a reason.”

“Oh, I came for my pleasure!” said Newman. “Though it is foolish, it is true.”

“And you are enjoying it?”

Like any other good American, Newman thought it as well not to truckle to the foreigner. “Oh, so-so,” he answered.

M. de Bellegarde puffed his cigar again in silence. “For myself,” he said at last, “I am entirely at your service. Anything I can do for you I shall be very happy to do. Call upon me at your convenience. Is there anyone you desire to know—anything you wish to see? It is a pity you should not enjoy Paris.”

“Oh, I do enjoy it!” said Newman, good-naturedly. “I’m much obliged to you.”

“Honestly speaking,” M. de Bellegarde went on, “there is something absurd to me in hearing myself make you these offers. They represent a great deal of goodwill, but they represent little else. You are a successful man and I am a failure, and it’s a turning of the tables to talk as if I could lend you a hand.”

“In what way are you a failure?” asked Newman.

“Oh, I’m not a tragical failure!” cried the young man with a laugh. “I have fallen from a height, and my fiasco has made no noise. You, evidently, are a success. You have made a fortune, you have built up an edifice, you are a financial, commercial power, you can travel about the world until you have found a soft spot, and lie down in it with the consciousness of having earned your rest. Is not that true? Well, imagine the exact reverse of all that, and you have me. I have done nothing—I can do nothing!”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story. Some day I will tell you. Meanwhile, I’m right, eh? You are a success? You have made a fortune? It’s none of my business, but, in short, you are rich?”

“That’s another thing that it sounds foolish to say,” said Newman. “Hang it, no man is rich!”

“I have heard philosophers affirm,” laughed M. de Bellegarde, “that no man was poor; but your formula strikes me as an improvement. As a general thing, I confess, I don’t like successful people, and I find clever men who have made great fortunes very offensive. They tread on my toes; they make me uncomfortable. But as soon as I saw you, I said to myself. ‘Ah, there is a man with whom I shall get on. He has the good-nature of success and none of the morgue; he has not our confoundedly irritable French vanity.’ In short, I took a fancy to you. We are very different, I’m sure; I don’t believe there is a subject on which we think or feel alike. But I rather think we shall get on, for there is such a thing, you know, as being too different to quarrel.”

“Oh, I never quarrel,” said Newman.

“Never! Sometimes it’s a duty—or at least it’s a pleasure. Oh, I have had two or three delicious quarrels in my day!” and M. de Bellegarde’s handsome smile assumed, at the memory of these incidents, an almost voluptuous intensity.

With the preamble embodied in his share of the foregoing fragment of dialogue, he paid our hero a long visit; as the two men sat with their heels on Newman’s glowing hearth, they heard the small hours of the morning striking larger from a far-off belfry. Valentin de Bellegarde was, by his own confession, at all times a great chatterer, and on this occasion he was evidently in a particularly loquacious mood. It was a tradition of his race that people of its blood always conferred a favor by their smiles, and as his enthusiasms were as rare as his civility was constant, he had a double reason for not suspecting that his friendship could ever be importunate. Moreover, the flower of an ancient stem as he was, tradition (since I have used the word) had in his temperament nothing of disagreeable rigidity. It was muffled in sociability and urbanity, as an old dowager in her laces and strings of pearls. Valentin was what is called in France a gentilhomme, of the purest source, and his rule of life, so far as it was definite, was to play the part of a gentilhomme. This, it seemed to him, was enough to occupy comfortably a young man of ordinary good parts. But all that he was he was by instinct and not by theory, and the amiability of his character was so great that certain of the aristocratic virtues, which in some aspects seem rather brittle and trenchant, acquired in his application of them an extreme geniality. In his younger years he had been suspected of low tastes, and his mother had greatly feared he would make a slip in the mud of the highway and bespatter the family shield. He had been treated, therefore, to more than his share of schooling and drilling, but his instructors had not succeeded in mounting him upon stilts. They could not spoil his safe spontaneity, and he remained the least cautious and the most lucky of young nobles. He had been tied with so short a rope in his youth that he had now a mortal grudge against family discipline. He had been known to say, within the limits of the family, that, light-headed as he was, the honor of the name was safer in his hands than in those of some of its other members, and that if a day ever came to try it, they should see. His talk was an odd mixture of almost boyish garrulity and of the reserve and discretion of the man of the world, and he seemed to Newman, as afterwards young members of the Latin races often seemed to him, now amusingly juvenile and now appallingly mature. In America, Newman reflected, lads of twenty-five and thirty have old heads and young hearts, or at least young morals; here they have young heads and very aged hearts, morals the most grizzled and wrinkled.

“What I envy you is your liberty,” observed M. de Bellegarde, “your wide range, your freedom to come and go, your not having a lot of people, who take themselves awfully seriously, expecting something of you. I live,” he added with a sigh, “beneath the eyes of my admirable mother.”

“It is your own fault; what is to hinder your ranging?” said Newman.

“There is a delightful simplicity in that remark! Everything is to hinder me. To begin with, I have not a penny.”

“I had not a penny when I began to range.”

“Ah, but your poverty was your capital. Being an American, it was impossible you should remain what you were born, and being born poor—do I understand it?—it was therefore inevitable that you should become rich. You were in a position that makes one’s mouth water; you looked round you and saw a world full of things you had only to step up to and take hold of. When I was twenty, I looked around me and saw a world with everything ticketed ‘Hands off!’ and the deuce of it was that the ticket seemed meant only for me. I couldn’t go into business, I couldn’t make money, because I was a Bellegarde. I couldn’t go into politics, because I was a Bellegarde—the Bellegardes don’t recognize the Bonapartes. I couldn’t go into literature, because I was a dunce. I couldn’t marry a rich girl, because no Bellegarde had ever married a roturière, and it was not proper that I should begin. We shall have to come to it, yet. Marriageable heiresses, de notre bord, are not to be had for nothing; it must be name for name, and fortune for fortune. The only thing I could do was to go and fight for the Pope. That I did, punctiliously, and received an apostolic flesh-wound at Castlefidardo. It did neither the Holy Father nor me any good, that I could see. Rome was doubtless a very amusing place in the days of Caligula, but it has sadly fallen off since. I passed three years in the Castle of St. Angelo, and then came back to secular life.”

“So you have no profession—you do nothing,” said Newman.

“I do nothing! I am supposed to amuse myself, and, to tell the truth, I have amused myself. One can, if one knows how. But you can’t keep it up forever. I am good for another five years, perhaps, but I foresee that after that I shall lose my appetite. Then what shall I do? I think I shall turn monk. Seriously, I think I shall tie a rope round my waist and go into a monastery. It was an old custom, and the old customs were very good. People understood life quite as well as we do. They kept the pot boiling till it cracked, and then they put it on the shelf altogether.”

“Are you very religious?” asked Newman, in a tone which gave the inquiry a grotesque effect.

M. de Bellegarde evidently appreciated the comical element in the question, but he looked at Newman a moment with extreme soberness. “I am a very good Catholic. I respect the Church. I adore the blessed Virgin. I fear the Devil.”

“Well, then,” said Newman, “you are very well fixed. You have got pleasure in the present and religion in the future; what do you complain of?”

“It’s a part of one’s pleasure to complain. There is something in your own circumstances that irritates me. You are the first man I have ever envied. It’s singular, but so it is. I have known many men who, besides any factitious advantages that I may possess, had money and brains into the bargain; but somehow they have never disturbed my good-humor. But you have got something that I should have liked to have. It is not money, it is not even brains—though no doubt yours are excellent. It is not your six feet of height, though I should have rather liked to be a couple of inches taller. It’s a sort of air you have of being thoroughly at home in the world. When I was a boy, my father told me that it was by such an air as that that people recognized a Bellegarde. He called my attention to it. He didn’t advise me to cultivate it; he said that as we grew up it always came of itself. I supposed it had come to me, because I think I have always had the feeling. My place in life was made for me, and it seemed easy to occupy it. But you who, as I understand it, have made your own place, you who, as you told us the other day, have manufactured wash-tubs—you strike me, somehow, as a man who stands at his ease, who looks at things from a height. I fancy you going about the world like a man traveling on a railroad in which he owns a large amount of stock. You make me feel as if I had missed something. What is it?”

“It is the proud consciousness of honest toil—of having manufactured a few wash-tubs,” said Newman, at once jocose and serious.

“Oh no; I have seen men who had done even more, men who had made not only wash-tubs, but soap—strong-smelling yellow soap, in great bars; and they never made me the least uncomfortable.”

“Then it’s the privilege of being an American citizen,” said Newman. “That sets a man up.”

“Possibly,” rejoined M. de Bellegarde. “But I am forced to say that I have seen a great many American citizens who didn’t seem at all set up or in the least like large stock-holders. I never envied them. I rather think the thing is an accomplishment of your own.”

“Oh, come,” said Newman, “you will make me proud!”

“No, I shall not. You have nothing to do with pride, or with humility—that is a part of this easy manner of yours. People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.”

“I don’t know what I have to lose,” said Newman, “but I certainly have something to gain.”

“What is it?” asked his visitor.

Newman hesitated a while. “I will tell you when I know you better.”

“I hope that will be soon! Then, if I can help you to gain it, I shall be happy.”

“Perhaps you may,” said Newman.

“Don’t forget, then, that I am your servant,” M. de Bellegarde answered; and shortly afterwards he took his departure.

During the next three weeks Newman saw Bellegarde several times, and without formally swearing an eternal friendship the two men established a sort of comradeship. To Newman, Bellegarde was the ideal Frenchman, the Frenchman of tradition and romance, so far as our hero was concerned with these mystical influences. Gallant, expansive, amusing, more pleased himself with the effect he produced than those (even when they were well pleased) for whom he produced it; a master of all the distinctively social virtues and a votary of all agreeable sensations; a devotee of something mysterious and sacred to which he occasionally alluded in terms more ecstatic even than those in which he spoke of the last pretty woman, and which was simply the beautiful though somewhat superannuated image of honor; he was irresistibly entertaining and enlivening, and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable of doing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it, as he was unlikely, in musing upon the possible mixtures of our human ingredients, mentally to have foreshadowed it. Bellegarde did not in the least cause him to modify his needful premise that all Frenchmen are of a frothy and imponderable substance; he simply reminded him that light materials may be beaten up into a most agreeable compound. No two companions could be more different, but their differences made a capital basis for a friendship of which the distinctive characteristic was that it was extremely amusing to each.

Valentin de Bellegarde lived in the basement of an old house in the Rue d’Anjou St. Honoré, and his small apartments lay between the court of the house and an old garden which spread itself behind it—one of those large, sunless humid gardens into which you look unexpectingly in Paris from back windows, wondering how among the grudging habitations they find their space. When Newman returned Bellegarde’s visit, he hinted that his lodging was at least as much a laughing matter as his own. But its oddities were of a different cast from those of our hero’s gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky, contracted, and crowded with curious bric-à-brac. Bellegarde, penniless patrician as he was, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts. Here and there was one of those uncomfortable tributes to elegance in which the upholsterer’s art, in France, is so prolific; a curtain recess with a sheet of looking-glass in which, among the shadows, you could see nothing; a divan on which, for its festoons and furbelows, you could not sit; a fireplace draped, flounced, and frilled to the complete exclusion of fire. The young man’s possessions were in picturesque disorder, and his apartment was pervaded by the odor of cigars, mingled with perfumes more inscrutable. Newman thought it a damp, gloomy place to live in, and was puzzled by the obstructive and fragmentary character of the furniture.

Bellegarde, according to the custom of his country talked very generously about himself, and unveiled the mysteries of his private history with an unsparing hand. Inevitably, he had a vast deal to say about women, and he used frequently to indulge in sentimental and ironical apostrophes to these authors of his joys and woes. “Oh, the women, the women, and the things they have made me do!” he would exclaim with a lustrous eye. “C’est égal, of all the follies and stupidities I have committed for them I would not have missed one!” On this subject Newman maintained an habitual reserve; to expatiate largely upon it had always seemed to him a proceeding vaguely analogous to the cooing of pigeons and the chattering of monkeys, and even inconsistent with a fully developed human character. But Bellegarde’s confidences greatly amused him, and rarely displeased him, for the generous young Frenchman was not a cynic. “I really think,” he had once said, “that I am not more depraved than most of my contemporaries. They are tolerably depraved, my contemporaries!” He said wonderfully pretty things about his female friends, and, numerous and various as they had been, declared that on the whole there was more good in them than harm. “But you are not to take that as advice,” he added. “As an authority I am very untrustworthy. I’m prejudiced in their favor; I’m an idealist!” Newman listened to him with his impartial smile, and was glad, for his own sake, that he had fine feelings; but he mentally repudiated the idea of a Frenchman having discovered any merit in the amiable sex which he himself did not suspect. M. de Bellegarde, however, did not confine his conversation to the autobiographical channel; he questioned our hero largely as to the events of his own life, and Newman told him some better stories than any that Bellegarde carried in his budget. He narrated his career, in fact, from the beginning, through all its variations, and whenever his companion’s credulity, or his habits of gentility, appeared to protest, it amused him to heighten the color of the episode. Newman had sat with Western humorists in knots, round cast-iron stoves, and seen “tall” stories grow taller without toppling over, and his own imagination had learned the trick of piling up consistent wonders. Bellegarde’s regular attitude at last became that of laughing self-defense; to maintain his reputation as an all-knowing Frenchman, he doubted of everything, wholesale. The result of this was that Newman found it impossible to convince him of certain time-honored verities.

“But the details don’t matter,” said M. de Bellegarde. “You have evidently had some surprising adventures; you have seen some strange sides of life, you have revolved to and fro over a whole continent as I walked up and down the Boulevard. You are a man of the world with a vengeance! You have spent some deadly dull hours, and you have done some extremely disagreeable things: you have shoveled sand, as a boy, for supper, and you have eaten roast dog in a gold-diggers’ camp. You have stood casting up figures for ten hours at a time, and you have sat through Methodist sermons for the sake of looking at a pretty girl in another pew. All that is rather stiff, as we say. But at any rate you have done something and you are something; you have used your will and you have made your fortune. You have not stupified yourself with debauchery and you have not mortgaged your fortune to social conveniences. You take things easily, and you have fewer prejudices even than I, who pretend to have none, but who in reality have three or four. Happy man, you are strong and you are free. But what the deuce,” demanded the young man in conclusion, “do you propose to do with such advantages? Really to use them you need a better world than this. There is nothing worth your while here.”

“Oh, I think there is something,” said Newman.

“What is it?”

“Well,” murmured Newman, “I will tell you some other time!”

In this way our hero delayed from day to day broaching a subject which he had very much at heart. Meanwhile, however, he was growing practically familiar with it; in other words, he had called again, three times, on Madame de Cintré. On only two of these occasions had he found her at home, and on each of them she had other visitors. Her visitors were numerous and extremely loquacious, and they exacted much of their hostess’s attention. She found time, however, to bestow a little of it on Newman, in an occasional vague smile, the very vagueness of which pleased him, allowing him as it did to fill it out mentally, both at the time and afterwards, with such meanings as most pleased him. He sat by without speaking, looking at the entrances and exits, the greetings and chatterings, of Madame de Cintré’s visitors. He felt as if he were at the play, and as if his own speaking would be an interruption; sometimes he wished he had a book, to follow the dialogue; he half expected to see a woman in a white cap and pink ribbons come and offer him one for two francs. Some of the ladies looked at him very hard—or very soft, as you please; others seemed profoundly unconscious of his presence. The men looked only at Madame de Cintré. This was inevitable; for whether one called her beautiful or not, she entirely occupied and filled one’s vision, just as an agreeable sound fills one’s ear. Newman had but twenty distinct words with her, but he carried away an impression to which solemn promises could not have given a higher value. She was part of the play that he was seeing acted, quite as much as her companions; but how she filled the stage and how much better she did it! Whether she rose or seated herself; whether she went with her departing friends to the door and lifted up the heavy curtain as they passed out, and stood an instant looking after them and giving them the last nod; or whether she leaned back in her chair with her arms crossed and her eyes resting, listening and smiling; she gave Newman the feeling that he should like to have her always before him, moving slowly to and fro along the whole scale of expressive hospitality. If it might be to him, it would be well; if it might be for him, it would be still better! She was so tall and yet so light, so active and yet so still, so elegant and yet so simple, so frank and yet so mysterious! It was the mystery—it was what she was off the stage, as it were—that interested Newman most of all. He could not have told you what warrant he had for talking about mysteries; if it had been his habit to express himself in poetic figures he might have said that in observing Madame de Cintré he seemed to see the vague circle which sometimes accompanies the partly-filled disk of the moon. It was not that she was reserved; on the contrary, she was as frank as flowing water. But he was sure she had qualities which she herself did not suspect.

He had abstained for several reasons from saying some of these things to Bellegarde. One reason was that before proceeding to any act he was always circumspect, conjectural, contemplative; he had little eagerness, as became a man who felt that whenever he really began to move he walked with long steps. And then, it simply pleased him not to speak—it occupied him, it excited him. But one day Bellegarde had been dining with him, at a restaurant, and they had sat long over their dinner. On rising from it, Bellegarde proposed that, to help them through the rest of the evening, they should go and see Madame Dandelard. Madame Dandelard was a little Italian lady who had married a Frenchman who proved to be a rake and a brute and the torment of her life. Her husband had spent all her money, and then, lacking the means of obtaining more expensive pleasures, had taken, in his duller hours, to beating her. She had a blue spot somewhere, which she showed to several persons, including Bellegarde. She had obtained a separation from her husband, collected the scraps of her fortune (they were very meagre) and come to live in Paris, where she was staying at a hôtel garni. She was always looking for an apartment, and visiting, inquiringly, those of other people. She was very pretty, very childlike, and she made very extraordinary remarks. Bellegarde had made her acquaintance, and the source of his interest in her was, according to his own declaration, a curiosity as to what would become of her. “She is poor, she is pretty, and she is silly,” he said, “it seems to me she can go only one way. It’s a pity, but it can’t be helped. I will give her six months. She has nothing to fear from me, but I am watching the process. I am curious to see just how things will go. Yes, I know what you are going to say: this horrible Paris hardens one’s heart. But it quickens one’s wits, and it ends by teaching one a refinement of observation! To see this little woman’s little drama play itself out, now, is, for me, an intellectual pleasure.”

“If she is going to throw herself away,” Newman had said, “you ought to stop her.”

“Stop her? How stop her?”

“Talk to her; give her some good advice.”

Bellegarde laughed. “Heaven deliver us both! Imagine the situation! Go and advise her yourself.”

It was after this that Newman had gone with Bellegarde to see Madame Dandelard. When they came away, Bellegarde reproached his companion. “Where was your famous advice?” he asked. “I didn’t hear a word of it.”

“Oh, I give it up,” said Newman, simply.

“Then you are as bad as I!” said Bellegarde.

“No, because I don’t take an ‘intellectual pleasure’ in her prospective adventures. I don’t in the least want to see her going down hill. I had rather look the other way. But why,” he asked, in a moment, “don’t you get your sister to go and see her?”

Bellegarde stared. “Go and see Madame Dandelard—my sister?”

“She might talk to her to very good purpose.”

Bellegarde shook his head with sudden gravity. “My sister can’t see that sort of person. Madame Dandelard is nothing at all; they would never meet.”

“I should think,” said Newman, “that your sister might see whom she pleased.” And he privately resolved that after he knew her a little better he would ask Madame de Cintré to go and talk to the foolish little Italian lady.

After his dinner with Bellegarde, on the occasion I have mentioned, he demurred to his companion’s proposal that they should go again and listen to Madame Dandelard describe her sorrows and her bruises.

“I have something better in mind,” he said; “come home with me and finish the evening before my fire.”

Bellegarde always welcomed the prospect of a long stretch of conversation, and before long the two men sat watching the great blaze which scattered its scintillations over the high adornments of Newman’s ball-room.

“Tell me something about your sister,” Newman began abruptly.

Bellegarde turned and gave him a quick look. “Now that I think of it, you have never yet asked me a question about her.”

“I know that very well.”

“If it is because you don’t trust me, you are very right,” said Bellegarde. “I can’t talk of her rationally. I admire her too much.”

“Talk of her as you can,” rejoined Newman. “Let yourself go.”

“Well, we are very good friends; we are such a brother and sister as have not been seen since Orestes and Electra. You have seen her; you know what she is: tall, thin, light, imposing, and gentle, half a grande dame and half an angel; a mixture of pride and humility, of the eagle and the dove. She looks like a statue which had failed as stone, resigned itself to its grave defects, and come to life as flesh and blood, to wear white capes and long trains. All I can say is that she really possesses every merit that her face, her glance, her smile, the tone of her voice, lead you to expect; it is saying a great deal. As a general thing, when a woman seems very charming, I should say ‘Beware!’ But in proportion as Claire seems charming you may fold your arms and let yourself float with the current; you are safe. She is so good! I have never seen a woman half so perfect or so complete. She has everything; that is all I can say about her. There!” Bellegarde concluded; “I told you I should rhapsodize.”

Newman was silent a while, as if he were turning over his companion’s words. “She is very good, eh?” he repeated at last.

“Divinely good!”

“Kind, charitable, gentle, generous?”

“Generosity itself; kindness double-distilled!”

“Is she clever?”

“She is the most intelligent woman I know. Try her, some day, with something difficult, and you will see.”

“Is she fond of admiration?”

“Parbleu!” cried Bellegarde; “what woman is not?”

“Ah, when they are too fond of admiration they commit all kinds of follies to get it.”

“I did not say she was too fond!” Bellegarde exclaimed. “Heaven forbid I should say anything so idiotic. She is not too anything! If I were to say she was ugly, I should not mean she was too ugly. She is fond of pleasing, and if you are pleased she is grateful. If you are not pleased, she lets it pass and thinks the worst neither of you nor of herself. I imagine, though, she hopes the saints in heaven are, for I am sure she is incapable of trying to please by any means of which they would disapprove.”

“Is she grave or gay?” asked Newman.

“She is both; not alternately, for she is always the same. There is gravity in her gaiety, and gaiety in her gravity. But there is no reason why she should be particularly gay.”

“Is she unhappy?”

“I won’t say that, for unhappiness is according as one takes things, and Claire takes them according to some receipt communicated to her by the Blessed Virgin in a vision. To be unhappy is to be disagreeable, which, for her, is out of the question. So she has arranged her circumstances so as to be happy in them.”

“She is a philosopher,” said Newman.

“No, she is simply a very nice woman.”

“Her circumstances, at any rate, have been disagreeable?”

Bellegarde hesitated a moment—a thing he very rarely did. “Oh, my dear fellow, if I go into the history of my family I shall give you more than you bargain for.”

“No, on the contrary, I bargain for that,” said Newman.

“We shall have to appoint a special séance, then, beginning early. Suffice it for the present that Claire has not slept on roses. She made at eighteen a marriage that was expected to be brilliant, but that turned out like a lamp that goes out; all smoke and bad smell. M. de Cintré was sixty years old, and an odious old gentleman. He lived, however, but a short time, and after his death his family pounced upon his money, brought a lawsuit against his widow, and pushed things very hard. Their case was a good one, for M. de Cintré, who had been trustee for some of his relatives, appeared to have been guilty of some very irregular practices. In the course of the suit some revelations were made as to his private history which my sister found so displeasing that she ceased to defend herself and washed her hands of the property. This required some pluck, for she was between two fires, her husband’s family opposing her and her own family forcing her. My mother and my brother wished her to cleave to what they regarded as her rights. But she resisted firmly, and at last bought her freedom—obtained my mother’s assent to dropping the suit at the price of a promise.”

“What was the promise?”

“To do anything else, for the next ten years, that was asked of her—anything, that is, but marry.”

“She had disliked her husband very much?”

“No one knows how much!”

“The marriage had been made in your horrible French way,” Newman continued, “made by the two families, without her having any voice?”

“It was a chapter for a novel. She saw M. de Cintré for the first time a month before the wedding, after everything, to the minutest detail, had been arranged. She turned white when she looked at him, and white she remained till her wedding-day. The evening before the ceremony she swooned away, and she spent the whole night in sobs. My mother sat holding her two hands, and my brother walked up and down the room. I declared it was revolting and told my sister publicly that if she would refuse, downright, I would stand by her. I was told to go about my business, and she became Comtesse de Cintré.”

“Your brother,” said Newman, reflectively, “must be a very nice young man.”

“He is very nice, though he is not young. He is upward of fifty, fifteen years my senior. He has been a father to my sister and me. He is a very remarkable man; he has the best manners in France. He is extremely clever; indeed he is very learned. He is writing a history of The Princesses of France Who Never Married.” This was said by Bellegarde with extreme gravity, looking straight at Newman, and with an eye that betokened no mental reservation; or that, at least, almost betokened none.

Newman perhaps discovered there what little there was, for he presently said, “You don’t love your brother.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Bellegarde, ceremoniously; “well-bred people always love their brothers.”

“Well, I don’t love him, then!” Newman answered.

“Wait till you know him!” rejoined Bellegarde, and this time he smiled.

“Is your mother also very remarkable?” Newman asked, after a pause.

“For my mother,” said Bellegarde, now with intense gravity, “I have the highest admiration. She is a very extraordinary woman. You cannot approach her without perceiving it.”

“She is the daughter, I believe, of an English nobleman.”

“Of the Earl of St. Dunstan’s.”

“Is the Earl of St. Dunstan’s a very old family?”

“So-so; the sixteenth century. It is on my father’s side that we go back—back, back, back. The family antiquaries themselves lose breath. At last they stop, panting and fanning themselves, somewhere in the ninth century, under Charlemagne. That is where we begin.”

“There is no mistake about it?” said Newman.

“I’m sure I hope not. We have been mistaken at least for several centuries.”

“And you have always married into old families?”

“As a rule; though in so long a stretch of time there have been some exceptions. Three or four Bellegardes, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, took wives out of the bourgeoisie—married lawyers’ daughters.”

“A lawyer’s daughter; that’s very bad, is it?” asked Newman.

“Horrible! one of us, in the Middle Ages, did better: he married a beggar-maid, like King Cophetua. That was really better; it was like marrying a bird or a monkey; one didn’t have to think about her family at all. Our women have always done well; they have never even gone into the petite noblesse. There is, I believe, not a case on record of a misalliance among the women.”

Newman turned this over for a while, and, then at last he said, “You offered, the first time you came to see me to render me any service you could. I told you that some time I would mention something you might do. Do you remember?”

“Remember? I have been counting the hours.”

“Very well; here’s your chance. Do what you can to make your sister think well of me.”

Bellegarde stared, with a smile. “Why, I’m sure she thinks as well of you as possible, already.”

“An opinion founded on seeing me three or four times? That is putting me off with very little. I want something more. I have been thinking of it a good deal, and at last I have decided to tell you. I should like very much to marry Madame de Cintré.”

Bellegarde had been looking at him with quickened expectancy, and with the smile with which he had greeted Newman’s allusion to his promised request. At this last announcement he continued to gaze; but his smile went through two or three curious phases. It felt, apparently, a momentary impulse to broaden; but this it immediately checked. Then it remained for some instants taking counsel with itself, at the end of which it decreed a retreat. It slowly effaced itself and left a look of seriousness modified by the desire not to be rude. Extreme surprise had come into the Count Valentin’s face; but he had reflected that it would be uncivil to leave it there. And yet, what the deuce was he to do with it? He got up, in his agitation, and stood before the chimney-piece, still looking at Newman. He was a longer time thinking what to say than one would have expected.

“If you can’t render me the service I ask,” said Newman, “say it out!”

“Let me hear it again, distinctly,” said Bellegarde. “It’s very important, you know. I shall plead your cause with my sister, because you want—you want to marry her? That’s it, eh?”

“Oh, I don’t say plead my cause, exactly; I shall try and do that myself. But say a good word for me, now and then—let her know that you think well of me.”

At this, Bellegarde gave a little light laugh.

“What I want chiefly, after all,” Newman went on, “is just to let you know what I have in mind. I suppose that is what you expect, isn’t it? I want to do what is customary over here. If there is anything particular to be done, let me know and I will do it. I wouldn’t for the world approach Madame de Cintré without all the proper forms. If I ought to go and tell your mother, why I will go and tell her. I will go and tell your brother, even. I will go and tell anyone you please. As I don’t know anyone else, I begin by telling you. But that, if it is a social obligation, is a pleasure as well.”

“Yes, I see—I see,” said Bellegarde, lightly stroking his chin. “You have a very right feeling about it, but I’m glad you have begun with me.” He paused, hesitated, and then turned away and walked slowly the length of the room. Newman got up and stood leaning against the mantel-shelf, with his hands in his pockets, watching Bellegarde’s promenade. The young Frenchman came back and stopped in front of him. “I give it up,” he said; “I will not pretend I am not surprised. I am—hugely! Ouf! It’s a relief.”

“That sort of news is always a surprise,” said Newman. “No matter what you have done, people are never prepared. But if you are so surprised, I hope at least you are pleased.”

“Come!” said Bellegarde. “I am going to be tremendously frank. I don’t know whether I am pleased or horrified.”

“If you are pleased, I shall be glad,” said Newman, “and I shall be—encouraged. If you are horrified, I shall be sorry, but I shall not be discouraged. You must make the best of it.”

“That is quite right—that is your only possible attitude. You are perfectly serious?”

“Am I a Frenchman, that I should not be?” asked Newman. “But why is it, by the bye, that you should be horrified?”

Bellegarde raised his hand to the back of his head and rubbed his hair quickly up and down, thrusting out the tip of his tongue as he did so. “Why, you are not noble, for instance,” he said.

“The devil I am not!” exclaimed Newman.

“Oh,” said Bellegarde a little more seriously, “I did not know you had a title.”

“A title? What do you mean by a title?” asked Newman. “A count, a duke, a marquis? I don’t know anything about that, I don’t know who is and who is not. But I say I am noble. I don’t exactly know what you mean by it, but it’s a fine word and a fine idea; I put in a claim to it.”

“But what have you to show, my dear fellow, what proofs?”

“Anything you please! But you don’t suppose I am going to undertake to prove that I am noble. It is for you to prove the contrary.”

“That’s easily done. You have manufactured wash-tubs.”

Newman stared a moment. “Therefore I am not noble? I don’t see it. Tell me something I have not done—something I cannot do.”

“You cannot marry a woman like Madame de Cintré for the asking.”

“I believe you mean,” said Newman slowly, “that I am not good enough.”

“Brutally speaking—yes!”

Bellegarde had hesitated a moment, and while he hesitated Newman’s attentive glance had grown somewhat eager. In answer to these last words he for a moment said nothing. He simply blushed a little. Then he raised his eyes to the ceiling and stood looking at one of the rosy cherubs that was painted upon it. “Of course I don’t expect to marry any woman for the asking,” he said at last; “I expect first to make myself acceptable to her. She must like me, to begin with. But that I am not good enough to make a trial is rather a surprise.”

Bellegarde wore a look of mingled perplexity, sympathy, and amusement. “You should not hesitate, then, to go up to-morrow and ask a duchess to marry you?”

“Not if I thought she would suit me. But I am very fastidious; she might not at all.”

Bellegarde’s amusement began to prevail. “And you should be surprised if she refused you?”

Newman hesitated a moment. “It sounds conceited to say yes, but nevertheless I think I should. For I should make a very handsome offer.”

“What would it be?”

“Everything she wishes. If I get hold of a woman that comes up to my standard, I shall think nothing too good for her. I have been a long time looking, and I find such women are rare. To combine the qualities I require seems to be difficult, but when the difficulty is vanquished it deserves a reward. My wife shall have a good position, and I’m not afraid to say that I shall be a good husband.”

“And these qualities that you require—what are they?”

“Goodness, beauty, intelligence, a fine education, personal elegance—everything, in a word, that makes a splendid woman.”

“And noble birth, evidently,” said Bellegarde.

“Oh, throw that in, by all means, if it’s there. The more the better!”

“And my sister seems to you to have all these things?”

“She is exactly what I have been looking for. She is my dream realized.”

“And you would make her a very good husband?”

“That is what I wanted you to tell her.”

Bellegarde laid his hand on his companion’s arm a moment, looked at him with his head on one side, from head to foot, and then, with a loud laugh, and shaking the other hand in the air, turned away. He walked again the length of the room, and again he came back and stationed himself in front of Newman. “All this is very interesting—it is very curious. In what I said just now I was speaking, not for myself, but for my tradition, my superstitions. For myself, really, your proposal tickles me. It startled me at first, but the more I think of it the more I see in it. It’s no use attempting to explain anything; you won’t understand me. After all, I don’t see why you need; it’s no great loss.”

“Oh, if there is anything more to explain, try it! I want to proceed with my eyes open. I will do my best to understand.”

“No,” said Bellegarde, “it’s disagreeable to me; I give it up. I liked you the first time I saw you, and I will abide by that. It would be quite odious for me to come talking to you as if I could patronize you. I have told you before that I envy you; vous m’imposez, as we say. I didn’t know you much until within five minutes. So we will let things go, and I will say nothing to you that, if our positions were reversed, you would not say to me.”

I do not know whether in renouncing the mysterious opportunity to which he alluded, Bellegarde felt that he was doing something very generous. If so, he was not rewarded; his generosity was not appreciated. Newman quite failed to recognize the young Frenchman’s power to wound his feelings, and he had now no sense of escaping or coming off easily. He did not thank his companion even with a glance. “My eyes are open, though,” he said, “so far as that you have practically told me that your family and your friends will turn up their noses at me. I have never thought much about the reasons that make it proper for people to turn up their noses, and so I can only decide the question off-hand. Looking at it in that way I can’t see anything in it. I simply think, if you want to know, that I’m as good as the best. Who the best are, I don’t pretend to say. I have never thought much about that either. To tell the truth, I have always had rather a good opinion of myself; a man who is successful can’t help it. But I will admit that I was conceited. What I don’t say yes to is that I don’t stand high—as high as anyone else. This is a line of speculation I should not have chosen, but you must remember you began it yourself. I should never have dreamed that I was on the defensive, or that I had to justify myself; but if your people will have it so, I will do my best.”

“But you offered, a while ago, to make your court as we say, to my mother and my brother.”

“Damn it!” cried Newman, “I want to be polite.”

“Good!” rejoined Bellegarde; “this will go far, it will be very entertaining. Excuse my speaking of it in that cold-blooded fashion, but the matter must, of necessity, be for me something of a spectacle. It’s positively exciting. But apart from that I sympathize with you, and I shall be actor, so far as I can, as well as spectator. You are a capital fellow; I believe in you and I back you. The simple fact that you appreciate my sister will serve as the proof I was asking for. All men are equal—especially men of taste!”

“Do you think,” asked Newman presently, “that Madame de Cintré is determined not to marry?”

“That is my impression. But that is not against you; it’s for you to make her change her mind.”

“I am afraid it will be hard,” said Newman, gravely.

“I don’t think it will be easy. In a general way I don’t see why a widow should ever marry again. She has gained the benefits of matrimony—freedom and consideration—and she has got rid of the drawbacks. Why should she put her head into the noose again? Her usual motive is ambition: if a man can offer her a great position, make her a princess or an ambassadress she may think the compensation sufficient.”

“And—in that way—is Madame de Cintré ambitious?”

“Who knows?” said Bellegarde, with a profound shrug. “I don’t pretend to say all that she is or all that she is not. I think she might be touched by the prospect of becoming the wife of a great man. But in a certain way, I believe, whatever she does will be the improbable. Don’t be too confident, but don’t absolutely doubt. Your best chance for success will be precisely in being, to her mind, unusual, unexpected, original. Don’t try to be anyone else; be simply yourself, out and out. Something or other can’t fail to come of it; I am very curious to see what.”

“I am much obliged to you for your advice,” said Newman. “And,” he added with a smile, “I am glad, for your sake, I am going to be so amusing.”

“It will be more than amusing,” said Bellegarde; “it will be inspiring. I look at it from my point of view, and you from yours. After all, anything for a change! And only yesterday I was yawning so as to dislocate my jaw, and declaring that there was nothing new under the sun! If it isn’t new to see you come into the family as a suitor, I am very much mistaken. Let me say that, my dear fellow; I won’t call it anything else, bad or good; I will simply call it new.” And overcome with a sense of the novelty thus foreshadowed, Valentin de Bellegarde threw himself into a deep armchair before the fire, and, with a fixed, intense smile, seemed to read a vision of it in the flame of the logs. After a while he looked up. “Go ahead, my boy; you have my good wishes,” he said. “But it is really a pity you don’t understand me, that you don’t know just what I am doing.”

“Oh,” said Newman, laughing, “don’t do anything wrong. Leave me to myself, rather, or defy me, out and out. I wouldn’t lay any load on your conscience.”

Bellegarde sprang up again; he was evidently excited; there was a warmer spark even than usual in his eye. “You never will understand—you never will know,” he said; “and if you succeed, and I turn out to have helped you, you will never be grateful, not as I shall deserve you should be. You will be an excellent fellow always, but you will not be grateful. But it doesn’t matter, for I shall get my own fun out of it.” And he broke into an extravagant laugh. “You look puzzled,” he added; “you look almost frightened.”

“It is a pity,” said Newman, “that I don’t understand you. I shall lose some very good jokes.”

“I told you, you remember, that we were very strange people,” Bellegarde went on. “I give you warning again. We are! My mother is strange, my brother is strange, and I verily believe that I am stranger than either. You will even find my sister a little strange. Old trees have crooked branches, old houses have queer cracks, old races have odd secrets. Remember that we are eight hundred years old!”

“Very good,” said Newman; “that’s the sort of thing I came to Europe for. You come into my programme.”

“Touchez-là, then,” said Bellegarde, putting out his hand. “It’s a bargain: I accept you; I espouse your cause. It’s because I like you, in a great measure; but that is not the only reason!” And he stood holding Newman’s hand and looking at him askance.

“What is the other one?”

“I am in the Opposition. I dislike someone else.”

“Your brother?” asked Newman, in his unmodulated voice.

Bellegarde laid his fingers upon his lips with a whispered hush! “Old races have strange secrets!” he said. “Put yourself into motion, come and see my sister, and be assured of my sympathy!” And on this he took his leave.

Newman dropped into a chair before his fire, and sat a long time staring into the blaze.

He went to see Madame de Cintré the next day, and was informed by the servant that she was at home. He passed as usual up the large, cold staircase and through a spacious vestibule above, where the walls seemed all composed of small door panels, touched with long-faded gilding; whence he was ushered into the sitting-room in which he had already been received. It was empty, and the servant told him that Madame la Comtesse would presently appear. He had time, while he waited, to wonder whether Bellegarde had seen his sister since the evening before, and whether in this case he had spoken to her of their talk. In this case Madame de Cintré’s receiving him was an encouragement. He felt a certain trepidation as he reflected that she might come in with the knowledge of his supreme admiration and of the project he had built upon it in her eyes; but the feeling was not disagreeable. Her face could wear no look that would make it less beautiful, and he was sure beforehand that however she might take the proposal he had in reserve, she would not take it in scorn or in irony. He had a feeling that if she could only read the bottom of his heart and measure the extent of his good will toward her, she would be entirely kind.

She came in at last, after so long an interval that he wondered whether she had been hesitating. She smiled with her usual frankness, and held out her hand; she looked at him straight with her soft and luminous eyes, and said, without a tremor in her voice, that she was glad to see him and that she hoped he was well. He found in her what he had found before—that faint perfume of a personal shyness worn away by contact with the world, but the more perceptible the more closely you approached her. This lingering diffidence seemed to give a peculiar value to what was definite and assured in her manner; it made it seem like an accomplishment, a beautiful talent, something that one might compare to an exquisite touch in a pianist. It was, in fact, Madame de Cintré’s “authority,” as they say of artists, that especially impressed and fascinated Newman; he always came back to the feeling that when he should complete himself by taking a wife, that was the way he should like his wife to interpret him to the world. The only trouble, indeed, was that when the instrument was so perfect it seemed to interpose too much between you and the genius that used it. Madame de Cintré gave Newman the sense of an elaborate education, of her having passed through mysterious ceremonies and processes of culture in her youth, of her having been fashioned and made flexible to certain exalted social needs. All this, as I have affirmed, made her seem rare and precious—a very expensive article, as he would have said, and one which a man with an ambition to have everything about him of the best would find it highly agreeable to possess. But looking at the matter with an eye to private felicity, Newman wondered where, in so exquisite a compound, nature and art showed their dividing line. Where did the special intention separate from the habit of good manners? Where did urbanity end and sincerity begin? Newman asked himself these questions even while he stood ready to accept the admired object in all its complexity; he felt that he could do so in profound security, and examine its mechanism afterwards, at leisure.

“I am very glad to find you alone,” he said. “You know I have never had such good luck before.”

“But you have seemed before very well contented with your luck,” said Madame de Cintré. “You have sat and watched my visitors with an air of quiet amusement. What have you thought of them?”

“Oh, I have thought the ladies were very elegant and very graceful, and wonderfully quick at repartee. But what I have chiefly thought has been that they only helped me to admire you.” This was not gallantry on Newman’s part—an art in which he was quite unversed. It was simply the instinct of the practical man, who had made up his mind what he wanted, and was now beginning to take active steps to obtain it.

Madame de Cintré started slightly, and raised her eyebrows; she had evidently not expected so fervid a compliment. “Oh, in that case,” she said with a laugh, “your finding me alone is not good luck for me. I hope someone will come in quickly.”

“I hope not,” said Newman. “I have something particular to say to you. Have you seen your brother?”

“Yes, I saw him an hour ago.”

“Did he tell you that he had seen me last night?”

“He said so.”

“And did he tell you what we had talked about?”

Madame de Cintré hesitated a moment. As Newman asked these questions she had grown a little pale, as if she regarded what was coming as necessary, but not as agreeable. “Did you give him a message to me?” she asked.

“It was not exactly a message—I asked him to render me a service.”

“The service was to sing your praises, was it not?” And she accompanied this question with a little smile, as if to make it easier to herself.

“Yes, that is what it really amounts to,” said Newman. “Did he sing my praises?”

“He spoke very well of you. But when I know that it was by your special request, of course I must take his eulogy with a grain of salt.”

“Oh, that makes no difference,” said Newman. “Your brother would not have spoken well of me unless he believed what he was saying. He is too honest for that.”

“Are you very deep?” said Madame de Cintré. “Are you trying to please me by praising my brother? I confess it is a good way.”

“For me, any way that succeeds will be good. I will praise your brother all day, if that will help me. He is a noble little fellow. He has made me feel, in promising to do what he can to help me, that I can depend upon him.”

“Don’t make too much of that,” said Madame de Cintré. “He can help you very little.”

“Of course I must work my way myself. I know that very well; I only want a chance to. In consenting to see me, after what he told you, you almost seem to be giving me a chance.”

“I am seeing you,” said Madame de Cintré, slowly and gravely, “because I promised my brother I would.”

“Blessings on your brother’s head!” cried Newman. “What I told him last evening was this: that I admired you more than any woman I had ever seen, and that I should like immensely to make you my wife.” He uttered these words with great directness and firmness, and without any sense of confusion. He was full of his idea, he had completely mastered it, and he seemed to look down on Madame de Cintré, with all her gathered elegance, from the height of his bracing good conscience. It is probable that this particular tone and manner were the very best he could have hit upon. Yet the light, just visibly forced smile with which his companion had listened to him died away, and she sat looking at him with her lips parted and her face as solemn as a tragic mask. There was evidently something very painful to her in the scene to which he was subjecting her, and yet her impatience of it found no angry voice. Newman wondered whether he was hurting her; he could not imagine why the liberal devotion he meant to express should be disagreeable. He got up and stood before her, leaning one hand on the chimney-piece. “I know I have seen you very little to say this,” he said, “so little that it may make what I say seem disrespectful. That is my misfortune! I could have said it the first time I saw you. Really, I had seen you before; I had seen you in imagination; you seemed almost an old friend. So what I say is not mere gallantry and compliments and nonsense—I can’t talk that way, I don’t know how, and I wouldn’t, to you, if I could. It’s as serious as such words can be. I feel as if I knew you and knew what a beautiful, admirable woman you are. I shall know better, perhaps, some day, but I have a general notion now. You are just the woman I have been looking for, except that you are far more perfect. I won’t make any protestations and vows, but you can trust me. It is very soon, I know, to say all this; it is almost offensive. But why not gain time if one can? And if you want time to reflect—of course you do—the sooner you begin, the better for me. I don’t know what you think of me; but there is no great mystery about me; you see what I am. Your brother told me that my antecedents and occupations were against me; that your family stands, somehow, on a higher level than I do. That is an idea which of course I don’t understand and don’t accept. But you don’t care anything about that. I can assure you that I am a very solid fellow, and that if I give my mind to it I can arrange things so that in a very few years I shall not need to waste time in explaining who I am and what I am. You will decide for yourself whether you like me or not. What there is you see before you. I honestly believe I have no hidden vices or nasty tricks. I am kind, kind, kind! Everything that a man can give a woman I will give you. I have a large fortune, a very large fortune; some day, if you will allow me, I will go into details. If you want brilliancy, everything in the way of brilliancy that money can give you, you shall have. And as regards anything you may give up, don’t take for granted too much that its place cannot be filled. Leave that to me; I’ll take care of you; I shall know what you need. Energy and ingenuity can arrange everything. I’m a strong man! There, I have said what I had on my heart! It was better to get it off. I am very sorry if it’s disagreeable to you; but think how much better it is that things should be clear. Don’t answer me now, if you don’t wish it. Think about it, think about it as slowly as you please. Of course I haven’t said, I can’t say, half I mean, especially about my admiration for you. But take a favorable view of me; it will only be just.”

During this speech, the longest that Newman had ever made, Madame de Cintré kept her gaze fixed upon him, and it expanded at the last into a sort of fascinated stare. When he ceased speaking she lowered her eyes and sat for some moments looking down and straight before her. Then she slowly rose to her feet, and a pair of exceptionally keen eyes would have perceived that she was trembling a little in the movement. She still looked extremely serious. “I am very much obliged to you for your offer,” she said. “It seems very strange, but I am glad you spoke without waiting any longer. It is better the subject should be dismissed. I appreciate all you say; you do me great honor. But I have decided not to marry.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” cried Newman, in a tone absolutely naïf from its pleading and caressing cadence. She had turned away, and it made her stop a moment with her back to him. “Think better of that. You are too young, too beautiful, too much made to be happy and to make others happy. If you are afraid of losing your freedom, I can assure you that this freedom here, this life you now lead, is a dreary bondage to what I will offer you. You shall do things that I don’t think you have ever thought of. I will take you anywhere in the wide world that you propose. Are you unhappy? You give me a feeling that you are unhappy. You have no right to be, or to be made so. Let me come in and put an end to it.”

Madame de Cintré stood there a moment longer, looking away from him. If she was touched by the way he spoke, the thing was conceivable. His voice, always very mild and interrogative, gradually became as soft and as tenderly argumentative as if he had been talking to a much-loved child. He stood watching her, and she presently turned round again, but this time she did not look at him, and she spoke in a quietness in which there was a visible trace of effort.

“There are a great many reasons why I should not marry,” she said, “more than I can explain to you. As for my happiness, I am very happy. Your offer seems strange to me, for more reasons also than I can say. Of course you have a perfect right to make it. But I cannot accept it—it is impossible. Please never speak of this matter again. If you cannot promise me this, I must ask you not to come back.”

“Why is it impossible?” Newman demanded. “You may think it is, at first, without its really being so. I didn’t expect you to be pleased at first, but I do believe that if you will think of it a good while, you may be satisfied.”

“I don’t know you,” said Madame de Cintré. “Think how little I know you.”

“Very little, of course, and therefore I don’t ask for your ultimatum on the spot. I only ask you not to say no, and to let me hope. I will wait as long as you desire. Meanwhile you can see more of me and know me better, look at me as a possible husband—as a candidate—and make up your mind.”

Something was going on, rapidly, in Madame de Cintré’s thoughts; she was weighing a question there, beneath Newman’s eyes, weighing it and deciding it. “From the moment I don’t very respectfully beg you to leave the house and never return,” she said, “I listen to you, I seem to give you hope. I have listened to you—against my judgment. It is because you are eloquent. If I had been told this morning that I should consent to consider you as a possible husband, I should have thought my informant a little crazy. I am listening to you, you see!” And she threw her hands out for a moment and let them drop with a gesture in which there was just the slightest expression of appealing weakness.

“Well, as far as saying goes, I have said everything,” said Newman. “I believe in you, without restriction, and I think all the good of you that it is possible to think of a human creature. I firmly believe that in marrying me you will be safe. As I said just now,” he went on with a smile, “I have no bad ways. I can do so much for you. And if you are afraid that I am not what you have been accustomed to, not refined and delicate and punctilious, you may easily carry that too far. I am delicate! You shall see!”

Madame de Cintré walked some distance away, and paused before a great plant, an azalea, which was flourishing in a porcelain tub before her window. She plucked off one of the flowers and, twisting it in her fingers, retraced her steps. Then she sat down in silence, and her attitude seemed to be a consent that Newman should say more.

“Why should you say it is impossible you should marry?” he continued. “The only thing that could make it really impossible would be your being already married. Is it because you have been unhappy in marriage? That is all the more reason! Is it because your family exert a pressure upon you, interfere with you, annoy you? That is still another reason; you ought to be perfectly free, and marriage will make you so. I don’t say anything against your family—understand that!” added Newman, with an eagerness which might have made a perspicacious observer smile. “Whatever way you feel toward them is the right way, and anything that you should wish me to do to make myself agreeable to them I will do as well as I know how. Depend upon that!”

Madame de Cintré rose again and came toward the fireplace, near which Newman was standing. The expression of pain and embarrassment had passed out of her face, and it was illuminated with something which, this time at least, Newman need not have been perplexed whether to attribute to habit or to intention, to art or to nature. She had the air of a woman who has stepped across the frontier of friendship and, looking around her, finds the region vast. A certain checked and controlled exaltation seemed mingled with the usual level radiance of her glance. “I will not refuse to see you again,” she said, “because much of what you have said has given me pleasure. But I will see you only on this condition: that you say nothing more in the same way for a long time.”

“For how long?”

“For six months. It must be a solemn promise.”

“Very well, I promise.”

“Good-bye, then,” she said, and extended her hand.

He held it a moment, as if he were going to say something more. But he only looked at her; then he took his departure.

That evening, on the Boulevard, he met Valentin de Bellegarde. After they had exchanged greetings, Newman told him that he had seen Madame de Cintré a few hours before.

“I know it,” said Bellegarde. “I dined in the Rue de l’Université.” And then, for some moments, both men were silent. Newman wished to ask Bellegarde what visible impression his visit had made and the Count Valentin had a question of his own. Bellegarde spoke first.

“It’s none of my business, but what the deuce did you say to my sister?”

“I am willing to tell you,” said Newman, “that I made her an offer of marriage.”

“Already!” And the young man gave a whistle. “‘Time is money!’ Is that what you say in America? And Madame de Cintré?” he added, with an interrogative inflection.

“She did not accept my offer.”

“She couldn’t, you know, in that way.”

“But I’m to see her again,” said Newman.

“Oh, the strangeness of woman!” exclaimed Bellegarde. Then he stopped, and held Newman off at arms’-length. “I look at you with respect!” he exclaimed. “You have achieved what we call a personal success! Immediately, now, I must present you to my brother.”

“Whenever you please!” said Newman.

Newman continued to see his friends the Tristrams with a good deal of frequency, though if you had listened to Mrs. Tristram’s account of the matter you would have supposed that they had been cynically repudiated for the sake of grander acquaintance. “We were all very well so long as we had no rivals—we were better than nothing. But now that you have become the fashion, and have your pick every day of three invitations to dinner, we are tossed into the corner. I am sure it is very good of you to come and see us once a month; I wonder you don’t send us your cards in an envelope. When you do, pray have them with black edges; it will be for the death of my last illusion.” It was in this incisive strain that Mrs. Tristram moralized over Newman’s so-called neglect, which was in reality a most exemplary constancy. Of course she was joking, but there was always something ironical in her jokes, as there was always something jocular in her gravity.

“I know no better proof that I have treated you very well,” Newman had said, “than the fact that you make so free with my character. Familiarity breeds contempt; I have made myself too cheap. If I had a little proper pride I would stay away a while, and when you asked me to dinner say I was going to the Princess Borealska’s. But I have not any pride where my pleasure is concerned, and to keep you in the humor to see me—if you must see me only to call me bad names—I will agree to anything you choose; I will admit that I am the biggest snob in Paris.” Newman, in fact, had declined an invitation personally given by the Princess Borealska, an inquiring Polish lady to whom he had been presented, on the ground that on that particular day he always dined at Mrs. Tristram’s; and it was only a tenderly perverse theory of his hostess of the Avenue d’Iéna that he was faithless to his early friendships. She needed the theory to explain a certain moral irritation by which she was often visited; though, if this explanation was unsound, a deeper analyst than I must give the right one. Having launched our hero upon the current which was bearing him so rapidly along, she appeared but half-pleased at its swiftness. She had succeeded too well; she had played her game too cleverly and she wished to mix up the cards. Newman had told her, in due season, that her friend was “satisfactory.” The epithet was not romantic, but Mrs. Tristram had no difficulty in perceiving that, in essentials, the feeling which lay beneath it was. Indeed, the mild, expansive brevity with which it was uttered, and a certain look, at once appealing and inscrutable, that issued from Newman’s half-closed eyes as he leaned his head against the back of his chair, seemed to her the most eloquent attestation of a mature sentiment that she had ever encountered. Newman was, according to the French phrase, only abounding in her own sense, but his temperate raptures exerted a singular effect upon the ardor which she herself had so freely manifested a few months before. She now seemed inclined to take a purely critical view of Madame de Cintré, and wished to have it understood that she did not in the least answer for her being a compendium of all the virtues. “No woman was ever so good as that woman seems,” she said. “Remember what Shakespeare calls Desdemona; ‘a supersubtle Venetian.’ Madame de Cintré is a supersubtle Parisian. She is a charming woman, and she has five hundred merits; but you had better keep that in mind.” Was Mrs. Tristram simply finding out that she was jealous of her dear friend on the other side of the Seine, and that in undertaking to provide Newman with an ideal wife she had counted too much on her own disinterestedness? We may be permitted to doubt it. The inconsistent little lady of the Avenue d’Iéna had an insuperable need of changing her place, intellectually. She had a lively imagination, and she was capable, at certain times, of imagining the direct reverse of her most cherished beliefs, with a vividness more intense than that of conviction. She got tired of thinking aright; but there was no serious harm in it, as she got equally tired of thinking wrong. In the midst of her mysterious perversities she had admirable flashes of justice. One of these occurred when Newman related to her that he had made a formal proposal to Madame de Cintré. He repeated in a few words what he had said, and in a great many what she had answered. Mrs. Tristram listened with extreme interest.

“But after all,” said Newman, “there is nothing to congratulate me upon. It is not a triumph.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Tristram; “it is a great triumph. It is a great triumph that she did not silence you at the first word, and request you never to speak to her again.”

“I don’t see that,” observed Newman.

“Of course you don’t; Heaven forbid you should! When I told you to go on your own way and do what came into your head, I had no idea you would go over the ground so fast. I never dreamed you would offer yourself after five or six morning-calls. As yet, what had you done to make her like you? You had simply sat—not very straight—and stared at her. But she does like you.”

“That remains to be seen.”

“No, that is proved. What will come of it remains to be seen. That you should propose to marry her, without more ado, could never have come into her head. You can form very little idea of what passed through her mind as you spoke; if she ever really marries you, the affair will be characterized by the usual justice of all human beings towards women. You will think you take generous views of her; but you will never begin to know through what a strange sea of feeling she passed before she accepted you. As she stood there in front of you the other day, she plunged into it. She said ‘Why not?’ to something which, a few hours earlier, had been inconceivable. She turned about on a thousand gathered prejudices and traditions as on a pivot, and looked where she had never looked hitherto. When I think of it—when I think of Claire de Cintré and all that she represents, there seems to me something very fine in it. When I recommended you to try your fortune with her I of course thought well of you, and in spite of your sins I think so still. But I confess I don’t see quite what you are and what you have done, to make such a woman do this sort of thing for you.”

“Oh, there is something very fine in it!” said Newman with a laugh, repeating her words. He took an extreme satisfaction in hearing that there was something fine in it. He had not the least doubt of it himself, but he had already begun to value the world’s admiration of Madame de Cintré, as adding to the prospective glory of possession.

It was immediately after this conversation that Valentin de Bellegarde came to conduct his friend to the Rue de l’Université to present him to the other members of his family. “You are already introduced,” he said, “and you have begun to be talked about. My sister has mentioned your successive visits to my mother, and it was an accident that my mother was present at none of them. I have spoken of you as an American of immense wealth, and the best fellow in the world, who is looking for something very superior in the way of a wife.”

“Do you suppose,” asked Newman, “that Madame de Cintré has related to your mother the last conversation I had with her?”

“I am very certain that she has not; she will keep her own counsel. Meanwhile you must make your way with the rest of the family. Thus much is known about you: you have made a great fortune in trade, you are a little eccentric, and you frankly admire our dear Claire. My sister-in-law, whom you remember seeing in Madame de Cintré’s sitting-room, took, it appears, a fancy to you; she has described you as having beaucoup de cachet. My mother, therefore, is curious to see you.”

“She expects to laugh at me, eh?” said Newman.

“She never laughs. If she does not like you, don’t hope to purchase favor by being amusing. Take warning by me!”

This conversation took place in the evening, and half an hour later Valentin ushered his companion into an apartment of the house of the Rue de l’Université into which he had not yet penetrated, the salon of the dowager Marquise de Bellegarde. It was a vast, high room, with elaborate and ponderous mouldings, painted a whitish gray, along the upper portion of the walls and the ceiling; with a great deal of faded and carefully repaired tapestry in the doorways and chair-backs; a Turkey carpet in light colors, still soft and deep, in spite of great antiquity, on the floor, and portraits of each of Madame de Bellegarde’s children, at the age of ten, suspended against an old screen of red silk. The room was illumined, exactly enough for conversation, by half a dozen candles, placed in odd corners, at a great distance apart. In a deep armchair, near the fire, sat an old lady in black; at the other end of the room another person was seated at the piano, playing a very expressive waltz. In this latter person Newman recognized the young Marquise de Bellegarde.

Valentin presented his friend, and Newman walked up to the old lady by the fire and shook hands with her. He received a rapid impression of a white, delicate, aged face, with a high forehead, a small mouth, and a pair of cold blue eyes which had kept much of the freshness of youth. Madame de Bellegarde looked hard at him, and returned his hand-shake with a sort of British positiveness which reminded him that she was the daughter of the Earl of St. Dunstan’s. Her daughter-in-law stopped playing and gave him an agreeable smile. Newman sat down and looked about him, while Valentin went and kissed the hand of the young marquise.

“I ought to have seen you before,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “You have paid several visits to my daughter.”

“Oh, yes,” said Newman, smiling; “Madame de Cintré and I are old friends by this time.”

“You have gone fast,” said Madame de Bellegarde.

“Not so fast as I should like,” said Newman, bravely.

“Oh, you are very ambitious,” answered the old lady.

“Yes, I confess I am,” said Newman, smiling.

Madame de Bellegarde looked at him with her cold fine eyes, and he returned her gaze, reflecting that she was a possible adversary and trying to take her measure. Their eyes remained in contact for some moments. Then Madame de Bellegarde looked away, and without smiling, “I am very ambitious, too,” she said.

Newman felt that taking her measure was not easy; she was a formidable, inscrutable little woman. She resembled her daughter, and yet she was utterly unlike her. The coloring in Madame de Cintré was the same, and the high delicacy of her brow and nose was hereditary. But her face was a larger and freer copy, and her mouth in especial a happy divergence from that conservative orifice, a little pair of lips at once plump and pinched, that looked, when closed, as if they could not open wider than to swallow a gooseberry or to emit an “Oh, dear, no!” which probably had been thought to give the finishing touch to the aristocratic prettiness of the Lady Emmeline Atheling as represented, forty years before, in several Books of Beauty. Madame de Cintré’s face had, to Newman’s eye, a range of expression as delightfully vast as the wind-streaked, cloud-flecked distance on a Western prairie. But her mother’s white, intense, respectable countenance, with its formal gaze, and its circumscribed smile, suggested a document signed and sealed; a thing of parchment, ink, and ruled lines. “She is a woman of conventions and proprieties,” he said to himself as he looked at her; “her world is the world of things immutably decreed. But how she is at home in it, and what a paradise she finds it. She walks about in it as if it were a blooming park, a Garden of Eden; and when she sees ‘This is genteel,’ or ‘This is improper,’ written on a mile-stone she stops ecstatically, as if she were listening to a nightingale or smelling a rose.” Madame de Bellegarde wore a little black velvet hood tied under her chin, and she was wrapped in an old black cashmere shawl.

“You are an American?” she said presently. “I have seen several Americans.”

“There are several in Paris,” said Newman jocosely.

“Oh, really?” said Madame de Bellegarde. “It was in England I saw these, or somewhere else; not in Paris. I think it must have been in the Pyrenees, many years ago. I am told your ladies are very pretty. One of these ladies was very pretty! such a wonderful complexion! She presented me a note of introduction from someone—I forgot whom—and she sent with it a note of her own. I kept her letter a long time afterwards, it was so strangely expressed. I used to know some of the phrases by heart. But I have forgotten them now, it is so many years ago. Since then I have seen no more Americans. I think my daughter-in-law has; she is a great gad-about, she sees everyone.”

At this the younger lady came rustling forward, pinching in a very slender waist, and casting idly preoccupied glances over the front of her dress, which was apparently designed for a ball. She was, in a singular way, at once ugly and pretty; she had protuberant eyes, and lips strangely red. She reminded Newman of his friend, Mademoiselle Nioche; this was what that much-obstructed young lady would have liked to be. Valentin de Bellegarde walked behind her at a distance, hopping about to keep off the far-spreading train of her dress.

“You ought to show more of your shoulders behind,” he said very gravely. “You might as well wear a standing ruff as such a dress as that.”

The young woman turned her back to the mirror over the chimney-piece, and glanced behind her, to verify Valentin’s assertion. The mirror descended low, and yet it reflected nothing but a large unclad flesh surface. The young marquise put her hands behind her and gave a downward pull to the waist of her dress. “Like that, you mean?” she asked.

“That is a little better,” said Bellegarde in the same tone, “but it leaves a good deal to be desired.”

“Oh, I never go to extremes,” said his sister-in-law. And then, turning to Madame de Bellegarde, “What were you calling me just now, madame?”

“I called you a gad-about,” said the old lady. “But I might call you something else, too.”

“A gad-about? What an ugly word! What does it mean?”

“A very beautiful person,” Newman ventured to say, seeing that it was in French.

“That is a pretty compliment but a bad translation,” said the young marquise. And then, looking at him a moment, “Do you dance?”

“Not a step.”

“You are very wrong,” she said, simply. And with another look at her back in the mirror she turned away.

“Do you like Paris?” asked the old lady, who was apparently wondering what was the proper way to talk to an American.

“Yes, rather,” said Newman. And then he added with a friendly intonation, “Don’t you?”

“I can’t say I know it. I know my house—I know my friends—I don’t know Paris.”

“Oh, you lose a great deal,” said Newman, sympathetically.

Madame de Bellegarde stared; it was presumably the first time she had been condoled with on her losses.

“I am content with what I have,” she said with dignity.

Newman’s eyes, at this moment, were wandering round the room, which struck him as rather sad and shabby; passing from the high casements, with their small, thickly-framed panes, to the sallow tints of two or three portraits in pastel, of the last century, which hung between them. He ought, obviously, to have answered that the contentment of his hostess was quite natural—she had a great deal; but the idea did not occur to him during the pause of some moments which followed.

“Well, my dear mother,” said Valentin, coming and leaning against the chimney-piece, “what do you think of my dear friend Newman? Is he not the excellent fellow I told you?”

“My acquaintance with Mr. Newman has not gone very far,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “I can as yet only appreciate his great politeness.”

“My mother is a great judge of these matters,” said Valentin to Newman. “If you have satisfied her, it is a triumph.”

“I hope I shall satisfy you, some day,” said Newman, looking at the old lady. “I have done nothing yet.”

“You must not listen to my son; he will bring you into trouble. He is a sad scatterbrain.”

“Oh, I like him—I like him,” said Newman, genially.

“He amuses you, eh?”

“Yes, perfectly.”

“Do you hear that, Valentin?” said Madame de Bellegarde. “You amuse Mr. Newman.”

“Perhaps we shall all come to that!” Valentin exclaimed.

“You must see my other son,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “He is much better than this one. But he will not amuse you.”

“I don’t know—I don’t know!” murmured Valentin, reflectively. “But we shall very soon see. Here comes Monsieur mon frère.”

The door had just opened to give ingress to a gentleman who stepped forward and whose face Newman remembered. He had been the author of our hero’s discomfiture the first time he tried to present himself to Madame de Cintré. Valentin de Bellegarde went to meet his brother, looked at him a moment, and then, taking him by the arm, led him up to Newman.

“This is my excellent friend Mr. Newman,” he said very blandly. “You must know him.”

“I am delighted to know Mr. Newman,” said the marquis with a low bow, but without offering his hand.

“He is the old woman at second-hand,” Newman said to himself, as he returned M. de Bellegarde’s greeting. And this was the starting-point of a speculative theory, in his mind, that the late marquis had been a very amiable foreigner, with an inclination to take life easily and a sense that it was difficult for the husband of the stilted little lady by the fire to do so. But if he had taken little comfort in his wife he had taken much in his two younger children, who were after his own heart, while Madame de Bellegarde had paired with her eldest-born.

“My brother has spoken to me of you,” said M. de Bellegarde; “and as you are also acquainted with my sister, it was time we should meet.” He turned to his mother and gallantly bent over her hand, touching it with his lips, and then he assumed an attitude before the chimney-piece. With his long, lean face, his high-bridged nose and his small, opaque eye he looked much like an Englishman. His whiskers were fair and glossy, and he had a large dimple, of unmistakably British origin, in the middle of his handsome chin. He was “distinguished” to the tips of his polished nails, and there was not a movement of his fine, perpendicular person that was not noble and majestic. Newman had never yet been confronted with such an incarnation of the art of taking one’s self seriously; he felt a sort of impulse to step backward, as you do to get a view of a great façade.

“Urbain,” said young Madame de Bellegarde, who had apparently been waiting for her husband to take her to her ball, “I call your attention to the fact that I am dressed.”

“That is a good idea,” murmured Valentin.

“I am at your orders, my dear friend,” said M. de Bellegarde. “Only, you must allow me first the pleasure of a little conversation with Mr. Newman.”

“Oh, if you are going to a party, don’t let me keep you,” objected Newman. “I am very sure we shall meet again. Indeed, if you would like to converse with me I will gladly name an hour.” He was eager to make it known that he would readily answer all questions and satisfy all exactions.

M. de Bellegarde stood in a well-balanced position before the fire, caressing one of his fair whiskers with one of his white hands, and looking at Newman, half askance, with eyes from which a particular ray of observation made its way through a general meaningless smile. “It is very kind of you to make such an offer,” he said. “If I am not mistaken, your occupations are such as to make your time precious. You are in—a—as we say, dans les affaires.”

“In business, you mean? Oh no, I have thrown business overboard for the present. I am ‘loafing,’ as we say. My time is quite my own.”

“Ah, you are taking a holiday,” rejoined M. de Bellegarde. “‘Loafing.’ Yes, I have heard that expression.”

“Mr. Newman is American,” said Madame de Bellegarde.

“My brother is a great ethnologist,” said Valentin.

“An ethnologist?” said Newman. “Ah, you collect negroes’ skulls, and that sort of thing.”

The marquis looked hard at his brother, and began to caress his other whisker. Then, turning to Newman, with sustained urbanity, “You are traveling for your pleasure?” he asked.’

“Oh, I am knocking about to pick up one thing and another. Of course I get a good deal of pleasure out of it.”

“What especially interests you?” inquired the marquis.

“Well, everything interests me,” said Newman. “I am not particular. Manufactures are what I care most about.”

“That has been your specialty?”

“I can’t say I have any specialty. My specialty has been to make the largest possible fortune in the shortest possible time.” Newman made this last remark very deliberately; he wished to open the way, if it were necessary, to an authoritative statement of his means.

M. de Bellegarde laughed agreeably. “I hope you have succeeded,” he said.

“Yes, I have made a fortune in a reasonable time. I am not so old, you see.”

“Paris is a very good place to spend a fortune. I wish you great enjoyment of yours.” And M. de Bellegarde drew forth his gloves and began to put them on.

Newman for a few moments watched him sliding his white hands into the white kid, and as he did so his feelings took a singular turn. M. de Bellegarde’s good wishes seemed to descend out of the white expanse of his sublime serenity with the soft, scattered movement of a shower of snow-flakes. Yet Newman was not irritated; he did not feel that he was being patronized; he was conscious of no especial impulse to introduce a discord into so noble a harmony. Only he felt himself suddenly in personal contact with the forces with which his friend Valentin had told him that he would have to contend, and he became sensible of their intensity. He wished to make some answering manifestation, to stretch himself out at his own length, to sound a note at the uttermost end of his scale. It must be added that if this impulse was not vicious or malicious, it was by no means void of humorous expectancy. Newman was quite as ready to give play to that loosely-adjusted smile of his, if his hosts should happen to be shocked, as he was far from deliberately planning to shock them.

“Paris is a very good place for idle people,” he said, “or it is a very good place if your family has been settled here for a long time, and you have made acquaintances and got your relations round you; or if you have got a good big house like this, and a wife and children and mother and sister, and everything comfortable. I don’t like that way of living all in rooms next door to each other. But I am not an idler. I try to be, but I can’t manage it; it goes against the grain. My business habits are too deep-seated. Then, I haven’t any house to call my own, or anything in the way of a family. My sisters are five thousand miles away, my mother died when I was a youngster, and I haven’t any wife; I wish I had! So, you see, I don’t exactly know what to do with myself. I am not fond of books, as you are, sir, and I get tired of dining out and going to the opera. I miss my business activity. You see, I began to earn my living when I was almost a baby, and until a few months ago I have never had my hand off the plow. Elegant leisure comes hard.”

This speech was followed by a profound silence of some moments, on the part of Newman’s entertainers. Valentin stood looking at him fixedly, with his hands in his pockets, and then he slowly, with a half-sidling motion, went out of the door. The marquis continued to draw on his gloves and to smile benignantly.

“You began to earn your living when you were a mere baby?” said the marquise.

“Hardly more—a small boy.”

“You say you are not fond of books,” said M. de Bellegarde; “but you must do yourself the justice to remember that your studies were interrupted early.”

“That is very true; on my tenth birthday I stopped going to school. I thought it was a grand way to keep it. But I picked up some information afterwards,” said Newman, reassuringly.

“You have some sisters?” asked old Madame de Bellegarde.

“Yes, two sisters. Splendid women!”

“I hope that for them the hardships of life commenced less early.”

“They married very early, if you call that a hardship, as girls do in our Western country. One of them is married to the owner of the largest india-rubber house in the West.”

“Ah, you make houses also of india-rubber?” inquired the marquise.

“You can stretch them as your family increases,” said young Madame de Bellegarde, who was muffling herself in a long white shawl.

Newman indulged in a burst of hilarity, and explained that the house in which his brother-in-law lived was a large wooden structure, but that he manufactured and sold india-rubber on a colossal scale.

“My children have some little india-rubber shoes which they put on when they go to play in the Tuileries in damp weather,” said the young marquise. “I wonder whether your brother-in-law made them.”

“Very likely,” said Newman; “if he did, you may be very sure they are well made.”

“Well, you must not be discouraged,” said M. de Bellegarde, with vague urbanity.

“Oh, I don’t mean to be. I have a project which gives me plenty to think about, and that is an occupation.” And then Newman was silent a moment, hesitating, yet thinking rapidly; he wished to make his point, and yet to do so forced him to speak out in a way that was disagreeable to him. Nevertheless he continued, addressing himself to old Madame de Bellegarde, “I will tell you my project; perhaps you can help me. I want to take a wife.”

“It is a very good project, but I am no matchmaker,” said the old lady.

Newman looked at her an instant, and then, with perfect sincerity, “I should have thought you were,” he declared.

Madame de Bellegarde appeared to think him too sincere. She murmured something sharply in French, and fixed her eyes on her son. At this moment the door of the room was thrown open, and with a rapid step Valentin reappeared.

“I have a message for you,” he said to his sister-in-law. “Claire bids me to request you not to start for your ball. She will go with you.”

“Claire will go with us!” cried the young marquise. “En voilà, du nouveau!”

“She has changed her mind; she decided half an hour ago, and she is sticking the last diamond into her hair,” said Valentin.

“What has taken possession of my daughter?” demanded Madame de Bellegarde, sternly. “She has not been into the world these three years. Does she take such a step at half an hour’s notice, and without consulting me?”

“She consulted me, dear mother, five minutes since,” said Valentin, “and I told her that such a beautiful woman—she is beautiful, you will see—had no right to bury herself alive.”

“You should have referred Claire to her mother, my brother,” said M. de Bellegarde, in French. “This is very strange.”

“I refer her to the whole company!” said Valentin. “Here she comes!” And he went to the open door, met Madame de Cintré on the threshold, took her by the hand, and led her into the room. She was dressed in white; but a long blue cloak, which hung almost to her feet, was fastened across her shoulders by a silver clasp. She had tossed it back, however, and her long white arms were uncovered. In her dense, fair hair there glittered a dozen diamonds. She looked serious and, Newman thought, rather pale; but she glanced round her, and, when she saw him, smiled and put out her hand. He thought her tremendously handsome. He had a chance to look at her full in the face, for she stood a moment in the centre of the room, hesitating, apparently, what she should do, without meeting his eyes. Then she went up to her mother, who sat in her deep chair by the fire, looking at Madame de Cintré almost fiercely. With her back turned to the others, Madame de Cintré held her cloak apart to show her dress.

“What do you think of me?” she asked.

“I think you are audacious,” said the marquise. “It was but three days ago, when I asked you, as a particular favor to myself, to go to the Duchess de Lusignan’s, that you told me you were going nowhere and that one must be consistent. Is this your consistency? Why should you distinguish Madame Robineau? Who is it you wish to please to-night?”

“I wish to please myself, dear mother,” said Madame de Cintré. And she bent over and kissed the old lady.

“I don’t like surprises, my sister,” said Urbain de Bellegarde; “especially when one is on the point of entering a drawing-room.”

Newman at this juncture felt inspired to speak. “Oh, if you are going into a room with Madame de Cintré, you needn’t be afraid of being noticed yourself!”

M. de Bellegarde turned to his sister with a smile too intense to be easy. “I hope you appreciate a compliment that is paid you at your brother’s expense,” he said. “Come, come, madame.” And offering Madame de Cintré his arm he led her rapidly out of the room. Valentin rendered the same service to young Madame de Bellegarde, who had apparently been reflecting on the fact that the ball-dress of her sister-in-law was much less brilliant than her own, and yet had failed to derive absolute comfort from the reflection. With a farewell smile she sought the complement of her consolation in the eyes of the American visitor, and perceiving in them a certain mysterious brilliancy, it is not improbable that she may have flattered herself she had found it.

Newman, left alone with old Madame de Bellegarde, stood before her a few moments in silence. “Your daughter is very beautiful,” he said at last.

“She is very strange,” said Madame de Bellegarde.

“I am glad to hear it,” Newman rejoined, smiling. “It makes me hope.”

“Hope what?”

“That she will consent, some day, to marry me.”

The old lady slowly rose to her feet. “That really is your project, then?”

“Yes; will you favor it?”

“Favor it?” Madame de Bellegarde looked at him a moment and then shook her head. “No!” she said, softly.

“Will you suffer it, then? Will you let it pass?”

“You don’t know what you ask. I am a very proud and meddlesome old woman.”

“Well, I am very rich,” said Newman.

Madame de Bellegarde fixed her eyes on the floor, and Newman thought it probable she was weighing the reasons in favor of resenting the brutality of this remark. But at last, looking up, she said simply, “How rich?”

Newman expressed his income in a round number which had the magnificent sound that large aggregations of dollars put on when they are translated into francs. He added a few remarks of a financial character, which completed a sufficiently striking presentment of his resources.

Madame de Bellegarde listened in silence. “You are very frank,” she said finally. “I will be the same. I would rather favor you, on the whole, than suffer you. It will be easier.”

“I am thankful for any terms,” said Newman. “But, for the present, you have suffered me long enough. Good night!” And he took his leave.

Newman, on his return to Paris, had not resumed the study of French conversation with M. Nioche; he found that he had too many other uses for his time. M. Nioche, however, came to see him very promptly, having learned his whereabouts by a mysterious process to which his patron never obtained the key. The shrunken little capitalist repeated his visit more than once. He seemed oppressed by a humiliating sense of having been overpaid, and wished apparently to redeem his debt by the offer of grammatical and statistical information in small installments. He wore the same decently melancholy aspect as a few months before; a few months more or less of brushing could make little difference in the antique lustre of his coat and hat. But the poor old man’s spirit was a trifle more threadbare; it seemed to have received some hard rubs during the summer. Newman inquired with interest about Mademoiselle Noémie; and M. Nioche, at first, for answer, simply looked at him in lachrymose silence.

“Don’t ask me, sir,” he said at last. “I sit and watch her, but I can do nothing.”

“Do you mean that she misconducts herself?”

“I don’t know, I am sure. I can’t follow her. I don’t understand her. She has something in her head; I don’t know what she is trying to do. She is too deep for me.”

“Does she continue to go to the Louvre? Has she made any of those copies for me?”

“She goes to the Louvre, but I see nothing of the copies. She has something on her easel; I suppose it is one of the pictures you ordered. Such a magnificent order ought to give her fairy-fingers. But she is not in earnest. I can’t say anything to her; I am afraid of her. One evening, last summer, when I took her to walk in the Champs Élysées, she said some things to me that frightened me.”

“What were they?”

“Excuse an unhappy father from telling you,” said M. Nioche, unfolding his calico pocket-handkerchief.

Newman promised himself to pay Mademoiselle Noémie another visit at the Louvre. He was curious about the progress of his copies, but it must be added that he was still more curious about the progress of the young lady herself. He went one afternoon to the great museum, and wandered through several of the rooms in fruitless quest of her. He was bending his steps to the long hall of the Italian masters, when suddenly he found himself face to face with Valentin de Bellegarde. The young Frenchman greeted him with ardor, and assured him that he was a godsend. He himself was in the worst of humors and he wanted someone to contradict.

“In a bad humor among all these beautiful things?” said Newman. “I thought you were so fond of pictures, especially the old black ones. There are two or three here that ought to keep you in spirits.”

“Oh, to-day,” answered Valentin, “I am not in a mood for pictures, and the more beautiful they are the less I like them. Their great staring eyes and fixed positions irritate me. I feel as if I were at some big, dull party, in a room full of people I shouldn’t wish to speak to. What should I care for their beauty? It’s a bore, and, worse still, it’s a reproach. I have a great many ennuis; I feel vicious.”

“If the Louvre has so little comfort for you, why in the world did you come here?” Newman asked.

“That is one of my ennuis. I came to meet my cousin—a dreadful English cousin, a member of my mother’s family—who is in Paris for a week for her husband, and who wishes me to point out the ‘principal beauties.’ Imagine a woman who wears a green crape bonnet in December and has straps sticking out of the ankles of her interminable boots! My mother begged I would do something to oblige them. I have undertaken to play valet de place this afternoon. They were to have met me here at two o’clock, and I have been waiting for them twenty minutes. Why doesn’t she arrive? She has at least a pair of feet to carry her. I don’t know whether to be furious at their playing me false, or delighted to have escaped them.”

“I think in your place I would be furious,” said Newman, “because they may arrive yet, and then your fury will still be of use to you. Whereas if you were delighted and they were afterwards to turn up, you might not know what to do with your delight.”

“You give me excellent advice, and I already feel better. I will be furious; I will let them go to the deuce and I myself will go with you—unless by chance you too have a rendezvous.”

“It is not exactly a rendezvous,” said Newman. “But I have in fact come to see a person, not a picture.”

“A woman, presumably?”

“A young lady.”

“Well,” said Valentin, “I hope for you with all my heart that she is not clothed in green tulle and that her feet are not too much out of focus.”

“I don’t know much about her feet, but she has very pretty hands.”

Valentin gave a sigh. “And on that assurance I must part with you?”

“I am not certain of finding my young lady,” said Newman, “and I am not quite prepared to lose your company on the chance. It does not strike me as particularly desirable to introduce you to her, and yet I should rather like to have your opinion of her.”

“Is she pretty?”

“I guess you will think so.”

Bellegarde passed his arm into that of his companion. “Conduct me to her on the instant! I should be ashamed to make a pretty woman wait for my verdict.”

Newman suffered himself to be gently propelled in the direction in which he had been walking, but his step was not rapid. He was turning something over in his mind. The two men passed into the long gallery of the Italian masters, and Newman, after having scanned for a moment its brilliant vista, turned aside into the smaller apartment devoted to the same school, on the left. It contained very few persons, but at the farther end of it sat Mademoiselle Nioche, before her easel. She was not at work; her palette and brushes had been laid down beside her, her hands were folded in her lap, and she was leaning back in her chair and looking intently at two ladies on the other side of the hall, who, with their backs turned to her, had stopped before one of the pictures. These ladies were apparently persons of high fashion; they were dressed with great splendor, and their long silken trains and furbelows were spread over the polished floor. It was at their dresses Mademoiselle Noémie was looking, though what she was thinking of I am unable to say. I hazard the supposition that she was saying to herself that to be able to drag such a train over a polished floor was a felicity worth any price. Her reflections, at any rate, were disturbed by the advent of Newman and his companion. She glanced at them quickly, and then, coloring a little, rose and stood before her easel.

“I came here on purpose to see you,” said Newman in his bad French, offering to shake hands. And then, like a good American, he introduced Valentin formally: “Allow me to make you acquainted with the Comte Valentin de Bellegarde.”

Valentin made a bow which must have seemed to Mademoiselle Noémie quite in harmony with the impressiveness of his title, but the graceful brevity of her own response made no concession to underbred surprise. She turned to Newman, putting up her hands to her hair and smoothing its delicately-felt roughness. Then, rapidly, she turned the canvas that was on her easel over upon its face. “You have not forgotten me?” she asked.

“I shall never forget you,” said Newman. “You may be sure of that.”

“Oh,” said the young girl, “there are a great many different ways of remembering a person.” And she looked straight at Valentin de Bellegarde, who was looking at her as a gentleman may when a “verdict” is expected of him.

“Have you painted anything for me?” said Newman. “Have you been industrious?”

“No, I have done nothing.” And taking up her palette, she began to mix her colors at hazard.

“But your father tells me you have come here constantly.”

“I have nowhere else to go! Here, all summer, it was cool, at least.”

“Being here, then,” said Newman, “you might have tried something.”

“I told you before,” she answered, softly, “that I don’t know how to paint.”

“But you have something charming on your easel, now,” said Valentin, “if you would only let me see it.”

She spread out her two hands, with the fingers expanded, over the back of the canvas—those hands which Newman had called pretty, and which, in spite of several paint-stains, Valentin could now admire. “My painting is not charming,” she said.

“It is the only thing about you that is not, then, mademoiselle,” quoth Valentin, gallantly.

She took up her little canvas and silently passed it to him. He looked at it, and in a moment she said, “I am sure you are a judge.”

“Yes,” he answered, “I am.”

“You know, then, that that is very bad.”

“Mon Dieu,” said Valentin, shrugging his shoulders “let us distinguish.”

“You know that I ought not to attempt to paint,” the young girl continued.

“Frankly, then, mademoiselle, I think you ought not.”

She began to look at the dresses of the two splendid ladies again—a point on which, having risked one conjecture, I think I may risk another. While she was looking at the ladies she was seeing Valentin de Bellegarde. He, at all events, was seeing her. He put down the roughly-besmeared canvas and addressed a little click with his tongue, accompanied by an elevation of the eyebrows, to Newman.

“Where have you been all these months?” asked Mademoiselle Noémie of our hero. “You took those great journeys, you amused yourself well?”

“Oh, yes,” said Newman. “I amused myself well enough.”

“I am very glad,” said Mademoiselle Noémie with extreme gentleness, and she began to dabble in her colors again. She was singularly pretty, with the look of serious sympathy that she threw into her face.

Valentin took advantage of her downcast eyes to telegraph again to his companion. He renewed his mysterious physiognomical play, making at the same time a rapid tremulous movement in the air with his fingers. He was evidently finding Mademoiselle Noémie extremely interesting; the blue devils had departed, leaving the field clear.

“Tell me something about your travels,” murmured the young girl.

“Oh, I went to Switzerland,—to Geneva and Zermatt and Zürich and all those places you know; and down to Venice, and all through Germany, and down the Rhine, and into Holland and Belgium—the regular round. How do you say that, in French—the regular round?” Newman asked of Valentin.

Mademoiselle Nioche fixed her eyes an instant on Bellegarde, and then with a little smile, “I don’t understand monsieur,” she said, “when he says so much at once. Would you be so good as to translate?”

“I would rather talk to you out of my own head,” Valentin declared.

“No,” said Newman, gravely, still in his bad French, “you must not talk to Mademoiselle Nioche, because you say discouraging things. You ought to tell her to work, to persevere.”

“And we French, mademoiselle,” said Valentin, “are accused of being false flatterers!”

“I don’t want any flattery, I want only the truth. But I know the truth.”

“All I say is that I suspect there are some things that you can do better than paint,” said Valentin.

“I know the truth—I know the truth,” Mademoiselle Noémie repeated. And, dipping a brush into a clot of red paint, she drew a great horizontal daub across her unfinished picture.

“What is that?” asked Newman.

Without answering, she drew another long crimson daub, in a vertical direction, down the middle of her canvas, and so, in a moment, completed the rough indication of a cross. “It is the sign of the truth,” she said at last.

The two men looked at each other, and Valentin indulged in another flash of physiognomical eloquence. “You have spoiled your picture,” said Newman.

“I know that very well. It was the only thing to do with it. I had sat looking at it all day without touching it. I had begun to hate it. It seemed to me something was going to happen.”

“I like it better that way than as it was before,” said Valentin. “Now it is more interesting. It tells a story. Is it for sale?”

“Everything I have is for sale,” said Mademoiselle Noémie.

“How much is this thing?”

“Ten thousand francs,” said the young girl, without a smile.

“Everything that Mademoiselle Nioche may do at present is mine in advance,” said Newman. “It makes part of an order I gave her some months ago. So you can’t have this.”

“Monsieur will lose nothing by it,” said the young girl, looking at Valentin. And she began to put up her utensils.

“I shall have gained a charming memory,” said Valentin. “You are going away? your day is over?”

“My father is coming to fetch me,” said Mademoiselle Noémie.

She had hardly spoken when, through the door behind her, which opens on one of the great white stone staircases of the Louvre, M. Nioche made his appearance. He came in with his usual even, patient shuffle, and he made a low salute to the two gentlemen who were standing before his daughter’s easel. Newman shook his hands with muscular friendliness, and Valentin returned his greeting with extreme deference. While the old man stood waiting for Noémie to make a parcel of her implements, he let his mild, oblique gaze hover toward Bellegarde, who was watching Mademoiselle Noémie put on her bonnet and mantle. Valentin was at no pains to disguise his scrutiny. He looked at a pretty girl as he would have listened to a piece of music. Attention, in each case, was simple good manners. M. Nioche at last took his daughter’s paint-box in one hand and the bedaubed canvas, after giving it a solemn, puzzled stare, in the other, and led the way to the door. Mademoiselle Noémie made the young men the salute of a duchess, and followed her father.

“Well,” said Newman, “what do you think of her?”

“She is very remarkable. Diable, diable, diable!” repeated M. de Bellegarde, reflectively; “she is very remarkable.”

“I am afraid she is a sad little adventuress,” said Newman.

“Not a little one—a great one. She has the material.” And Valentin began to walk away slowly, looking vaguely at the pictures on the walls, with a thoughtful illumination in his eye. Nothing could have appealed to his imagination more than the possible adventures of a young lady endowed with the “material” of Mademoiselle Nioche. “She is very interesting,” he went on. “She is a beautiful type.”

“A beautiful type? What the deuce do you mean?” asked Newman.

“I mean from the artistic point of view. She is an artist,—outside of her painting, which obviously is execrable.”

“But she is not beautiful. I don’t even think her very pretty.”

“She is quite pretty enough for her purposes, and it is a face and figure on which everything tells. If she were prettier she would be less intelligent, and her intelligence is half of her charm.”

“In what way,” asked Newman, who was much amused at his companion’s immediate philosophisation of Mademoiselle Nioche, “does her intelligence strike you as so remarkable?”

“She has taken the measure of life, and she has determined to be something—to succeed at any cost. Her painting, of course, is a mere trick to gain time. She is waiting for her chance; she wishes to launch herself, and to do it well. She knows her Paris. She is one of fifty thousand, so far as the mere ambition goes; but I am very sure that in the way of resolution and capacity she is a rarity. And in one gift—perfect heartlessness—I will warrant she is unsurpassed. She has not as much heart as will go on the point of a needle. That is an immense virtue. Yes, she is one of the celebrities of the future.”

“Heaven help us!” said Newman, “how far the artistic point of view may take a man! But in this case I must request that you don’t let it take you too far. You have learned a wonderful deal about Mademoiselle Noémie in a quarter of an hour. Let that suffice; don’t follow up your researches.”

“My dear fellow,” cried Bellegarde with warmth, “I hope I have too good manners to intrude.”

“You are not intruding. The girl is nothing to me. In fact, I rather dislike her. But I like her poor old father, and for his sake I beg you to abstain from any attempt to verify your theories.”

“For the sake of that seedy old gentleman who came to fetch her?” demanded Valentin, stopping short. And on Newman’s assenting, “Ah no, ah no,” he went on with a smile. “You are quite wrong, my dear fellow; you needn’t mind him.”

“I verily believe that you are accusing the poor gentleman of being capable of rejoicing in his daughter’s dishonor.”

“Voyons!” said Valentin; “who is he? what is he?”

“He is what he looks like: as poor as a rat, but very high-toned.”

“Exactly. I noticed him perfectly; be sure I do him justice. He has had losses, des malheurs, as we say. He is very low-spirited, and his daughter is too much for him. He is the pink of respectability, and he has sixty years of honesty on his back. All this I perfectly appreciate. But I know my fellow-men and my fellow-Parisians, and I will make a bargain with you.” Newman gave ear to his bargain and he went on. “He would rather his daughter were a good girl than a bad one, but if the worst comes to the worst, the old man will not do what Virginius did. Success justifies everything. If Mademoiselle Noémie makes a figure, her papa will feel—well, we will call it relieved. And she will make a figure. The old gentleman’s future is assured.”

“I don’t know what Virginius did, but M. Nioche will shoot Miss Noémie,” said Newman. “After that, I suppose his future will be assured in some snug prison.”

“I am not a cynic; I am simply an observer,” Valentin rejoined. “Mademoiselle Noémie interests me; she is extremely remarkable. If there is a good reason, in honor or decency, for dismissing her from my thoughts forever, I am perfectly willing to do it. Your estimate of the papa’s sensibilities is a good reason until it is invalidated. I promise you not to look at the young girl again until you tell me that you have changed your mind about the papa. When he has given distinct proof of being a philosopher, you will raise your interdict. Do you agree to that?”

“Do you mean to bribe him?”

“Oh, you admit, then, that he is bribable? No, he would ask too much, and it would not be exactly fair. I mean simply to wait. You will continue, I suppose, to see this interesting couple, and you will give me the news yourself.”

“Well,” said Newman, “if the old man turns out a humbug, you may do what you please. I wash my hands of the matter. For the girl herself, you may be at rest. I don’t know what harm she may do to me, but I certainly can’t hurt her. It seems to me,” said Newman, “that you are very well matched. You are both hard cases, and M. Nioche and I, I believe, are the only virtuous men to be found in Paris.”

Soon after this M. de Bellegarde, in punishment for his levity, received a stern poke in the back from a pointed instrument. Turning quickly round he found the weapon to be a parasol wielded by a lady in green gauze bonnet. Valentin’s English cousins had been drifting about unpiloted, and evidently deemed that they had a grievance. Newman left him to their mercies, but with a boundless faith in his power to plead his cause.

Three days after his introduction to the family of Madame de Cintré, Newman, coming in toward evening, found upon his table the card of the Marquis de Bellegarde. On the following day he received a note informing him that the Marquise de Bellegarde would be grateful for the honor of his company at dinner.

He went, of course, though he had to break another engagement to do it. He was ushered into the room in which Madame de Bellegarde had received him before, and here he found his venerable hostess, surrounded by her entire family. The room was lighted only by the crackling fire, which illuminated the very small pink slippers of a lady who, seated in a low chair, was stretching out her toes before it. This lady was the younger Madame de Bellegarde. Madame de Cintré was seated at the other end of the room, holding a little girl against her knee, the child of her brother Urbain, to whom she was apparently relating a wonderful story. Valentin was sitting on a puff, close to his sister-in-law, into whose ear he was certainly distilling the finest nonsense. The marquis was stationed before the fire, with his head erect and his hands behind him, in an attitude of formal expectancy.

Old Madame de Bellegarde stood up to give Newman her greeting, and there was that in the way she did so which seemed to measure narrowly the extent of her condescension. “We are all alone, you see, we have asked no one else,” she said austerely.

“I am very glad you didn’t; this is much more sociable,” said Newman. “Good evening, sir,” and he offered his hand to the marquis.

M. de Bellegarde was affable, but in spite of his dignity he was restless. He began to pace up and down the room, he looked out of the long windows, he took up books and laid them down again. Young Madame de Bellegarde gave Newman her hand without moving and without looking at him.

“You may think that is coldness,” exclaimed Valentin; “but it is not, it is warmth. It shows she is treating you as an intimate. Now she detests me, and yet she is always looking at me.”

“No wonder I detest you if I am always looking at you!” cried the lady. “If Mr. Newman does not like my way of shaking hands, I will do it again.”

But this charming privilege was lost upon our hero, who was already making his way across the room to Madame de Cintré. She looked at him as she shook hands, but she went on with the story she was telling her little niece. She had only two or three phrases to add, but they were apparently of great moment. She deepened her voice, smiling as she did so, and the little girl gazed at her with round eyes.

“But in the end the young prince married the beautiful Florabella,” said Madame de Cintré, “and carried her off to live with him in the Land of the Pink Sky. There she was so happy that she forgot all her troubles, and went out to drive every day of her life in an ivory coach drawn by five hundred white mice. Poor Florabella,” she exclaimed to Newman, “had suffered terribly.”

“She had had nothing to eat for six months,” said little Blanche.

“Yes, but when the six months were over, she had a plum-cake as big as that ottoman,” said Madame de Cintré. “That quite set her up again.”

“What a checkered career!” said Newman. “Are you very fond of children?” He was certain that she was, but he wished to make her say it.

“I like to talk with them,” she answered; “we can talk with them so much more seriously than with grown persons. That is great nonsense that I have been telling Blanche, but it is a great deal more serious than most of what we say in society.”

“I wish you would talk to me, then, as if I were Blanche’s age,” said Newman, laughing. “Were you happy at your ball the other night?”

“Ecstatically!”

“Now you are talking the nonsense that we talk in society,” said Newman. “I don’t believe that.”

“It was my own fault if I was not happy. The ball was very pretty, and everyone very amiable.”

“It was on your conscience,” said Newman, “that you had annoyed your mother and your brother.”

Madame de Cintré looked at him a moment without answering. “That is true,” she replied at last. “I had undertaken more than I could carry out. I have very little courage; I am not a heroine.” She said this with a certain soft emphasis; but then, changing her tone, “I could never have gone through the sufferings of the beautiful Florabella,” she added, not even for her prospective rewards.

Dinner was announced, and Newman betook himself to the side of the old Madame de Bellegarde. The dining-room, at the end of a cold corridor, was vast and sombre; the dinner was simple and delicately excellent. Newman wondered whether Madame de Cintré had had something to do with ordering the repast and greatly hoped she had. Once seated at table, with the various members of the ancient house of Bellegarde around him, he asked himself the meaning of his position. Was the old lady responding to his advances? Did the fact that he was a solitary guest augment his credit or diminish it? Were they ashamed to show him to other people, or did they wish to give him a sign of sudden adoption into their last reserve of favor? Newman was on his guard; he was watchful and conjectural; and yet at the same time he was vaguely indifferent. Whether they gave him a long rope or a short one he was there now, and Madame de Cintré was opposite to him. She had a tall candlestick on each side of her; she would sit there for the next hour, and that was enough. The dinner was extremely solemn and measured; he wondered whether this was always the state of things in “old families.” Madame de Bellegarde held her head very high, and fixed her eyes, which looked peculiarly sharp in her little, finely-wrinkled white face, very intently upon the table-service. The marquis appeared to have decided that the fine arts offered a safe subject of conversation, as not leading to startling personal revelations. Every now and then, having learned from Newman that he had been through the museums of Europe, he uttered some polished aphorism upon the flesh-tints of Rubens and the good taste of Sansovino. His manners seemed to indicate a fine, nervous dread that something disagreeable might happen if the atmosphere were not purified by allusions of a thoroughly superior cast. “What under the sun is the man afraid of?” Newman asked himself. “Does he think I am going to offer to swap jack-knives with him?” It was useless to shut his eyes to the fact that the marquis was profoundly disagreeable to him. He had never been a man of strong personal aversions; his nerves had not been at the mercy of the mystical qualities of his neighbors. But here was a man towards whom he was irresistibly in opposition; a man of forms and phrases and postures; a man full of possible impertinences and treacheries. M. de Bellegarde made him feel as if he were standing bare-footed on a marble floor; and yet, to gain his desire, Newman felt perfectly able to stand. He wondered what Madame de Cintré thought of his being accepted, if accepted it was. There was no judging from her face, which expressed simply the desire to be gracious in a manner which should require as little explicit recognition as possible. Young Madame de Bellegarde had always the same manners; she was always preoccupied, distracted, listening to everything and hearing nothing, looking at her dress, her rings, her finger-nails, seeming rather bored, and yet puzzling you to decide what was her ideal of social diversion. Newman was enlightened on this point later. Even Valentin did not quite seem master of his wits; his vivacity was fitful and forced, yet Newman observed that in the lapses of his talk he appeared excited. His eyes had an intenser spark than usual. The effect of all this was that Newman, for the first time in his life, was not himself; that he measured his movements, and counted his words, and resolved that if the occasion demanded that he should appear to have swallowed a ramrod, he would meet the emergency.

After dinner M. de Bellegarde proposed to his guest that they should go into the smoking-room, and he led the way toward a small, somewhat musty apartment, the walls of which were ornamented with old hangings of stamped leather and trophies of rusty arms. Newman refused a cigar, but he established himself upon one of the divans, while the marquis puffed his own weed before the fire-place, and Valentin sat looking through the light fumes of a cigarette from one to the other.

“I can’t keep quiet any longer,” said Valentin, at last. “I must tell you the news and congratulate you. My brother seems unable to come to the point; he revolves around his announcement like the priest around the altar. You are accepted as a candidate for the hand of our sister.”

“Valentin, be a little proper!” murmured the marquis, with a look of the most delicate irritation contracting the bridge of his high nose.

“There has been a family council,” the young man continued; “my mother and Urbain have put their heads together, and even my testimony has not been altogether excluded. My mother and the marquis sat at a table covered with green cloth; my sister-in-law and I were on a bench against the wall. It was like a committee at the Corps Législatif. We were called up, one after the other, to testify. We spoke of you very handsomely. Madame de Bellegarde said that if she had not been told who you were, she would have taken you for a duke—an American duke, the Duke of California. I said that I could warrant you grateful for the smallest favors—modest, humble, unassuming. I was sure that you would know your own place, always, and never give us occasion to remind you of certain differences. After all, you couldn’t help it if you were not a duke. There were none in your country; but if there had been, it was certain that, smart and active as you are, you would have got the pick of the titles. At this point I was ordered to sit down, but I think I made an impression in your favor.”

M. de Bellegarde looked at his brother with dangerous coldness, and gave a smile as thin as the edge of a knife. Then he removed a spark of cigar-ash from the sleeve of his coat; he fixed his eyes for a while on the cornice of the room, and at last he inserted one of his white hands into the breast of his waistcoat. “I must apologize to you for the deplorable levity of my brother,” he said, “and I must notify you that this is probably not the last time that his want of tact will cause you serious embarrassment.”

“No, I confess I have no tact,” said Valentin. “Is your embarrassment really painful, Newman? The marquis will put you right again; his own touch is deliciously delicate.”

“Valentin, I am sorry to say,” the marquis continued, “has never possessed the tone, the manner, that belongs to a young man in his position. It has been a great affliction to his mother, who is very fond of the old traditions. But you must remember that he speaks for no one but himself.”

“Oh, I don’t mind him, sir,” said Newman, good-humoredly. “I know what he amounts to.”

“In the good old times,” said Valentin, “marquises and counts used to have their appointed fools and jesters, to crack jokes for them. Nowadays we see a great strapping democrat keeping a count about him to play the fool. It’s a good situation, but I certainly am very degenerate.”

M. de Bellegarde fixed his eyes for some time on the floor. “My mother informed me,” he said presently, “of the announcement that you made to her the other evening.”

“That I desired to marry your sister?” said Newman.

“That you wished to arrange a marriage,” said the marquis, slowly, “with my sister, the Comtesse de Cintré. The proposal was serious, and required, on my mother’s part, a great deal of reflection. She naturally took me into her counsels, and I gave my most zealous attention to the subject. There was a great deal to be considered; more than you appear to imagine. We have viewed the question on all its faces, we have weighed one thing against another. Our conclusion has been that we favor your suit. My mother has desired me to inform you of our decision. She will have the honor of saying a few words to you on the subject herself. Meanwhile, by us, the heads of the family, you are accepted.”

Newman got up and came nearer to the marquis. “You will do nothing to hinder me, and all you can to help me, eh?”

“I will recommend my sister to accept you.”

Newman passed his hand over his face, and pressed it for a moment upon his eyes. This promise had a great sound, and yet the pleasure he took in it was embittered by his having to stand there so and receive his passport from M. de Bellegarde. The idea of having this gentleman mixed up with his wooing and wedding was more and more disagreeable to him. But Newman had resolved to go through the mill, as he imagined it, and he would not cry out at the first turn of the wheel. He was silent a while, and then he said, with a certain dryness which Valentin told him afterwards had a very grand air, “I am much obliged to you.”

“I take note of the promise,” said Valentin, “I register the vow.”

M. de Bellegarde began to gaze at the cornice again; he apparently had something more to say. “I must do my mother the justice,” he resumed, “I must do myself the justice, to say that our decision was not easy. Such an arrangement was not what we had expected. The idea that my sister should marry a gentleman—ah—in business was something of a novelty.”

“So I told you, you know,” said Valentin raising his finger at Newman.

“The novelty has not quite worn away, I confess,” the marquis went on; “perhaps it never will, entirely. But possibly that is not altogether to be regretted,” and he gave his thin smile again. “It may be that the time has come when we should make some concession to novelty. There had been no novelties in our house for a great many years. I made the observation to my mother, and she did me the honor to admit that it was worthy of attention.”

“My dear brother,” interrupted Valentin, “is not your memory just here leading you the least bit astray? Our mother is, I may say, distinguished for her small respect of abstract reasoning. Are you very sure that she replied to your striking proposition in the gracious manner you describe? You know how terribly incisive she is sometimes. Didn’t she, rather, do you the honor to say, ‘A fiddlestick for your phrases! There are better reasons than that?’”

“Other reasons were discussed,” said the marquis, without looking at Valentin, but with an audible tremor in his voice; “some of them possibly were better. We are conservative, Mr. Newman, but we are not also bigots. We judged the matter liberally. We have no doubt that everything will be comfortable.”

Newman had stood listening to these remarks with his arms folded and his eyes fastened upon M. de Bellegarde, “Comfortable?” he said, with a sort of grim flatness of intonation. “Why shouldn’t we be comfortable? If you are not, it will be your own fault; I have everything to make me so.”

“My brother means that with the lapse of time you may get used to the change”—and Valentin paused, to light another cigarette.

“What change?” asked Newman in the same tone.

“Urbain,” said Valentin, very gravely, “I am afraid that Mr. Newman does not quite realize the change. We ought to insist upon that.”

“My brother goes too far,” said M. de Bellegarde. “It is his fatal want of tact again. It is my mother’s wish, and mine, that no such allusions should be made. Pray never make them yourself. We prefer to assume that the person accepted as the possible husband of my sister is one of ourselves, and that he should have no explanations to make. With a little discretion on both sides, everything, I think, will be easy. That is exactly what I wished to say—that we quite understand what we have undertaken, and that you may depend upon our adhering to our resolution.”

Valentin shook his hands in the air and then buried his face in them. “I have less tact than I might have, no doubt; but oh, my brother, if you knew what you yourself were saying!” And he went off into a long laugh.

M. de Bellegarde’s face flushed a little, but he held his head higher, as if to repudiate this concession to vulgar perturbability. “I am sure you understand me,” he said to Newman.

“Oh no, I don’t understand you at all,” said Newman. “But you needn’t mind that. I don’t care. In fact, I think I had better not understand you. I might not like it. That wouldn’t suit me at all, you know. I want to marry your sister, that’s all; to do it as quickly as possible, and to find fault with nothing. I don’t care how I do it. I am not marrying you, you know, sir. I have got my leave, and that is all I want.”

“You had better receive the last word from my mother,” said the marquis.

“Very good; I will go and get it,” said Newman; and he prepared to return to the drawing-room.

M. de Bellegarde made a motion for him to pass first, and when Newman had gone out he shut himself into the room with Valentin. Newman had been a trifle bewildered by the audacious irony of the younger brother, and he had not needed its aid to point the moral of M. de Bellegarde’s transcendent patronage. He had wit enough to appreciate the force of that civility which consists in calling your attention to the impertinences it spares you. But he had felt warmly the delicate sympathy with himself that underlay Valentin’s fraternal irreverence, and he was most unwilling that his friend should pay a tax upon it. He paused a moment in the corridor, after he had gone a few steps, expecting to hear the resonance of M. de Bellegarde’s displeasure; but he detected only a perfect stillness. The stillness itself seemed a trifle portentous; he reflected however that he had no right to stand listening, and he made his way back to the salon. In his absence several persons had come in. They were scattered about the room in groups, two or three of them having passed into a small boudoir, next to the drawing-room, which had now been lighted and opened. Old Madame de Bellegarde was in her place by the fire, talking to a very old gentleman in a wig and a profuse white neck cloth of the fashion of 1820. Madame de Cintré was bending a listening head to the historic confidences of an old lady who was presumably the wife of the old gentleman in the neckcloth, an old lady in a red satin dress and an ermine cape, who wore across her forehead a band with a topaz set in it. Young Madame de Bellegarde, when Newman came in, left some people among whom she was sitting, and took the place that she had occupied before dinner. Then she gave a little push to the puff that stood near her, and by a glance at Newman seemed to indicate that she had placed it in position for him. He went and took possession of it; the marquis’s wife amused and puzzled him.

“I know your secret,” she said, in her bad but charming English; “you need make no mystery of it. You wish to marry my sister-in-law. C’est un beau choix. A man like you ought to marry a tall, thin woman. You must know that I have spoken in your favor; you owe me a famous taper!”

“You have spoken to Madame de Cintré?” said Newman.

“Oh no, not that. You may think it strange, but my sister-in-law and I are not so intimate as that. No; I spoke to my husband and my mother-in-law; I said I was sure we could do what we chose with you.”

“I am much obliged to you,” said Newman, laughing; “but you can’t.”

“I know that very well; I didn’t believe a word of it. But I wanted you to come into the house; I thought we should be friends.”

“I am very sure of it,” said Newman.

“Don’t be too sure. If you like Madame de Cintré so much, perhaps you will not like me. We are as different as blue and pink. But you and I have something in common. I have come into this family by marriage; you want to come into it in the same way.”

“Oh no, I don’t!” interrupted Newman. “I only want to take Madame de Cintré out of it.”

“Well, to cast your nets you have to go into the water. Our positions are alike; we shall be able to compare notes. What do you think of my husband? It’s a strange question, isn’t it? But I shall ask you some stranger ones yet.”

“Perhaps a stranger one will be easier to answer,” said Newman. “You might try me.”

“Oh, you get off very well; the old Comte de la Rochefidèle, yonder, couldn’t do it better. I told them that if we only gave you a chance you would be a perfect talon rouge. I know something about men. Besides, you and I belong to the same camp. I am a ferocious democrat. By birth I am vieille roche; a good little bit of the history of France is the history of my family. Oh, you never heard of us, of course! Ce que c’est que la gloire! We are much better than the Bellegardes, at any rate. But I don’t care a pin for my pedigree; I want to belong to my time. I’m a revolutionist, a radical, a child of the age! I am sure I go beyond you. I like clever people, wherever they come from, and I take my amusement wherever I find it. I don’t pout at the Empire; here all the world pouts at the Empire. Of course I have to mind what I say; but I expect to take my revenge with you.” Madame de Bellegarde discoursed for some time longer in this sympathetic strain, with an eager abundance which seemed to indicate that her opportunities for revealing her esoteric philosophy were indeed rare. She hoped that Newman would never be afraid of her, however he might be with the others, for, really, she went very far indeed. “Strong people”—le gens forts—were in her opinion equal, all the world over. Newman listened to her with an attention at once beguiled and irritated. He wondered what the deuce she, too, was driving at, with her hope that he would not be afraid of her and her protestations of equality. In so far as he could understand her, she was wrong; a silly, rattling woman was certainly not the equal of a sensible man, preoccupied with an ambitious passion. Madame de Bellegarde stopped suddenly, and looked at him sharply, shaking her fan. “I see you don’t believe me,” she said, “you are too much on your guard. You will not form an alliance, offensive or defensive? You are very wrong; I could help you.”

Newman answered that he was very grateful and that he would certainly ask for help; she should see. “But first of all,” he said, “I must help myself.” And he went to join Madame de Cintré.

“I have been telling Madame de la Rochefidèle that you are an American,” she said, as he came up. “It interests her greatly. Her father went over with the French troops to help you in your battles in the last century, and she has always, in consequence, wanted greatly to see an American. But she has never succeeded till to-night. You are the first—to her knowledge—that she has ever looked at.”

Madame de la Rochefidèle had an aged, cadaverous face, with a falling of the lower jaw which prevented her from bringing her lips together, and reduced her conversations to a series of impressive but inarticulate gutturals. She raised an antique eyeglass, elaborately mounted in chased silver, and looked at Newman from head to foot. Then she said something to which he listened deferentially, but which he completely failed to understand.

“Madame de la Rochefidèle says that she is convinced that she must have seen Americans without knowing it,” Madame de Cintré explained. Newman thought it probable she had seen a great many things without knowing it; and the old lady, again addressing herself to utterance, declared—as interpreted by Madame de Cintré—that she wished she had known it.

At this moment the old gentleman who had been talking to the elder Madame de Bellegarde drew near, leading the marquise on his arm. His wife pointed out Newman to him, apparently explaining his remarkable origin. M. de la Rochefidèle, whose old age was rosy and rotund, spoke very neatly and clearly, almost as prettily, Newman thought, as M. Nioche. When he had been enlightened, he turned to Newman with an inimitable elderly grace.

“Monsieur is by no means the first American that I have seen,” he said. “Almost the first person I ever saw—to notice him—was an American.”

“Ah?” said Newman, sympathetically.

“The great Dr. Franklin,” said M. de la Rochefidèle. “Of course I was very young. He was received very well in our monde.”

“Not better than Mr. Newman,” said Madame de Bellegarde. “I beg he will offer his arm into the other room. I could have offered no higher privilege to Dr. Franklin.”

Newman, complying with Madame de Bellegarde’s request, perceived that her two sons had returned to the drawing-room. He scanned their faces an instant for traces of the scene that had followed his separation from them, but the marquis seemed neither more nor less frigidly grand than usual, and Valentin was kissing ladies’ hands with at least his habitual air of self-abandonment to the act. Madame de Bellegarde gave a glance at her eldest son, and by the time she had crossed the threshold of her boudoir he was at her side. The room was now empty and offered a sufficient degree of privacy. The old lady disengaged herself from Newman’s arm and rested her hand on the arm of the marquis; and in this position she stood a moment, holding her head high and biting her small under-lip. I am afraid the picture was lost upon Newman, but Madame de Bellegarde was, in fact, at this moment a striking image of the dignity which—even in the case of a little time-shrunken old lady—may reside in the habit of unquestioned authority and the absoluteness of a social theory favorable to yourself.

“My son has spoken to you as I desired,” she said, “and you understand that we shall not interfere. The rest will lie with yourself.”

“M. de Bellegarde told me several things I didn’t understand,” said Newman, “but I made out that. You will leave me open field. I am much obliged.”

“I wish to add a word that my son probably did not feel at liberty to say,” the marquise rejoined. “I must say it for my own peace of mind. We are stretching a point; we are doing you a great favor.”

“Oh, your son said it very well; didn’t you?” said Newman.

“Not so well as my mother,” declared the marquis.

“I can only repeat—I am much obliged.”

“It is proper I should tell you,” Madame de Bellegarde went on, “that I am very proud, and that I hold my head very high. I may be wrong, but I am too old to change. At least I know it, and I don’t pretend to anything else. Don’t flatter yourself that my daughter is not proud. She is proud in her own way—a somewhat different way from mine. You will have to make your terms with that. Even Valentin is proud, if you touch the right spot—or the wrong one. Urbain is proud; that you see for yourself. Sometimes I think he is a little too proud; but I wouldn’t change him. He is the best of my children; he cleaves to his old mother. But I have said enough to show you that we are all proud together. It is well that you should know the sort of people you have come among.”

“Well,” said Newman, “I can only say, in return, that I am not proud; I shan’t mind you! But you speak as if you intended to be very disagreeable.”

“I shall not enjoy having my daughter marry you, and I shall not pretend to enjoy it. If you don’t mind that, so much the better.”

“If you stick to your own side of the contract we shall not quarrel; that is all I ask of you,” said Newman. “Keep your hands off, and give me an open field. I am very much in earnest, and there is not the slightest danger of my getting discouraged or backing out. You will have me constantly before your eyes; if you don’t like it, I am sorry for you. I will do for your daughter, if she will accept me, everything that a man can do for a woman. I am happy to tell you that, as a promise—a pledge. I consider that on your side you make me an equal pledge. You will not back out, eh?”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘backing out,’” said the marquise. “It suggests a movement of which I think no Bellegarde has ever been guilty.”

“Our word is our word,” said Urbain. “We have given it.”

“Well, now,” said Newman, “I am very glad you are so proud. It makes me believe that you will keep it.”

The marquise was silent a moment, and then, suddenly, “I shall always be polite to you, Mr. Newman,” she declared, “but, decidedly, I shall never like you.”

“Don’t be too sure,” said Newman, laughing.

“I am so sure that I will ask you to take me back to my armchair without the least fear of having my sentiments modified by the service you render me.” And Madame de Bellegarde took his arm, and returned to the salon and to her customary place.

M. de la Rochefidèle and his wife were preparing to take their leave, and Madame de Cintré’s interview with the mumbling old lady was at an end. She stood looking about her, asking herself, apparently to whom she should next speak, when Newman came up to her.

“Your mother has given me leave—very solemnly—to come here often,” he said. “I mean to come often.”

“I shall be glad to see you,” she answered simply. And then, in a moment: “You probably think it very strange that there should be such a solemnity—as you say—about your coming.”

“Well, yes; I do, rather.”

“Do you remember what my brother Valentin said, the first time you came to see me—that we were a strange, strange family?”

“It was not the first time I came, but the second,” said Newman.

“Very true. Valentin annoyed me at the time, but now I know you better, I may tell you he was right. If you come often, you will see!” and Madame de Cintré turned away.

Newman watched her a while, talking with other people, and then he took his leave. He shook hands last with Valentin de Bellegarde, who came out with him to the top of the staircase. “Well, you have got your permit,” said Valentin. “I hope you liked the process.”

“I like your sister, more than ever. But don’t worry your brother any more for my sake,” Newman added. “I don’t mind him. I am afraid he came down on you in the smoking-room, after I went out.”

“When my brother comes down on me,” said Valentin, “he falls hard. I have a peculiar way of receiving him. I must say,” he continued, “that they came up to the mark much sooner than I expected. I don’t understand it, they must have had to turn the screw pretty tight. It’s a tribute to your millions.”

“Well, it’s the most precious one they have ever received,” said Newman.

He was turning away when Valentin stopped him, looking at him with a brilliant, softly-cynical glance. “I should like to know whether, within a few days, you have seen your venerable friend M. Nioche.”

“He was yesterday at my rooms,” Newman answered.

“What did he tell you?”

“Nothing particular.”

“You didn’t see the muzzle of a pistol sticking out of his pocket?”

“What are you driving at?” Newman demanded. “I thought he seemed rather cheerful for him.”

Valentin broke into a laugh. “I am delighted to hear it! I win my bet. Mademoiselle Noémie has thrown her cap over the mill, as we say. She has left the paternal domicile. She is launched! And M. Nioche is rather cheerful—for him! Don’t brandish your tomahawk at that rate; I have not seen her nor communicated with her since that day at the Louvre. Andromeda has found another Perseus than I. My information is exact; on such matters it always is. I suppose that now you will raise your protest.”

“My protest be hanged!” murmured Newman, disgustedly.

But his tone found no echo in that in which Valentin, with his hand on the door, to return to his mother’s apartment, exclaimed, “But I shall see her now! She is very remarkable—she is very remarkable!”

Newman kept his promise, or his menace, of going often to the Rue de l’Université, and during the next six weeks he saw Madame de Cintré more times than he could have numbered. He flattered himself that he was not in love, but his biographer may be supposed to know better. He claimed, at least, none of the exemptions and emoluments of the romantic passion. Love, he believed, made a fool of a man, and his present emotion was not folly but wisdom; wisdom sound, serene, well-directed. What he felt was an intense, all-consuming tenderness, which had for its object an extraordinarily graceful and delicate, and at the same time impressive, woman who lived in a large gray house on the left bank of the Seine. This tenderness turned very often into a positive heartache; a sign in which, certainly, Newman ought to have read the appellation which science has conferred upon his sentiment. When the heart has a heavy weight upon it, it hardly matters whether the weight be of gold or of lead; when, at any rate, happiness passes into that place in which it becomes identical with pain, a man may admit that the reign of wisdom is temporarily suspended. Newman wished Madame de Cintré so well that nothing he could think of doing for her in the future rose to the high standard which his present mood had set itself. She seemed to him so felicitous a product of nature and circumstance that his invention, musing on future combinations, was constantly catching its breath with the fear of stumbling into some brutal compression or mutilation of her beautiful personal harmony. This is what I mean by Newman’s tenderness: Madame de Cintré pleased him so, exactly as she was, that his desire to interpose between her and the troubles of life had the quality of a young mother’s eagerness to protect the sleep of her first-born child. Newman was simply charmed, and he handled his charm as if it were a music-box which would stop if one shook it. There can be no better proof of the hankering epicure that is hidden in every man’s temperament, waiting for a signal from some divine confederate that he may safely peep out. Newman at last was enjoying, purely, freely, deeply. Certain of Madame de Cintré’s personal qualities—the luminous sweetness of her eyes, the delicate mobility of her face, the deep liquidity of her voice—filled all his consciousness. A rose-crowned Greek of old, gazing at a marble goddess with his whole bright intellect resting satisfied in the act, could not have been a more complete embodiment of the wisdom that loses itself in the enjoyment of quiet harmonies.

He made no violent love to her—no sentimental speeches. He never trespassed on what she had made him understand was for the present forbidden ground. But he had, nevertheless, a comfortable sense that she knew better from day to day how much he admired her. Though in general he was no great talker, he talked much, and he succeeded perfectly in making her say many things. He was not afraid of boring her, either by his discourse or by his silence; and whether or no he did occasionally bore her, it is probable that on the whole she liked him only the better for his absence of embarrassed scruples. Her visitors, coming in often while Newman sat there, found a tall, lean, silent man in a half-lounging attitude, who laughed out sometimes when no one had meant to be droll, and remained grave in the presence of calculated witticisms, for appreciation of which he had apparently not the proper culture.

It must be confessed that the number of subjects upon which Newman had no ideas was extremely large, and it must be added that as regards those subjects upon which he was without ideas he was also perfectly without words. He had little of the small change of conversation, and his stock of ready-made formulas and phrases was the scantiest. On the other hand he had plenty of attention to bestow, and his estimate of the importance of a topic did not depend upon the number of clever things he could say about it. He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure. What it was that entertained him during some of his speechless sessions I must, however, confess myself unable to determine. We know in a general way that a great many things which were old stories to a great many people had the charm of novelty to him, but a complete list of his new impressions would probably contain a number of surprises for us. He told Madame de Cintré a hundred long stories; he explained to her, in talking of the United States, the working of various local institutions and mercantile customs. Judging by the sequel she was interested, but one would not have been sure of it beforehand. As regards her own talk, Newman was very sure himself that she herself enjoyed it: this was as a sort of amendment to the portrait that Mrs. Tristram had drawn of her. He discovered that she had naturally an abundance of gaiety. He had been right at first in saying she was shy; her shyness, in a woman whose circumstances and tranquil beauty afforded every facility for well-mannered hardihood, was only a charm the more. For Newman it had lasted some time, and even when it went it left something behind it which for a while performed the same office. Was this the tearful secret of which Mrs. Tristram had had a glimpse, and of which, as of her friend’s reserve, her high-breeding, and her profundity, she had given a sketch of which the outlines were, perhaps, rather too heavy? Newman supposed so, but he found himself wondering less every day what Madame de Cintré’s secrets might be, and more convinced that secrets were, in themselves, hateful things to her. She was a woman for the light, not for the shade; and her natural line was not picturesque reserve and mysterious melancholy, but frank, joyous, brilliant action, with just so much meditation as was necessary, and not a grain more. To this, apparently, he had succeeded in bringing her back. He felt, himself, that he was an antidote to oppressive secrets; what he offered her was, in fact, above all things a vast, sunny immunity from the need of having any.

He often passed his evenings, when Madame de Cintré had so appointed it, at the chilly fireside of Madame de Bellegarde, contenting himself with looking across the room, through narrowed eyelids, at his mistress, who always made a point, before her family, of talking to someone else. Madame de Bellegarde sat by the fire conversing neatly and coldly with whomsoever approached her, and glancing round the room with her slowly-restless eye, the effect of which, when it lighted upon him, was to Newman’s sense identical with that of a sudden spurt of damp air. When he shook hands with her he always asked her with a laugh whether she could “stand him” another evening, and she replied, without a laugh, that thank God she had always been able to do her duty. Newman, talking once of the marquise to Mrs. Tristram, said that after all it was very easy to get on with her; it always was easy to get on with out-and-out rascals.

“And is it by that elegant term,” said Mrs. Tristram, “that you designate the Marquise de Bellegarde?”

“Well,” said Newman, “she is wicked, she is an old sinner.”

“What is her crime?” asked Mrs. Tristram.

“I shouldn’t wonder if she had murdered someone—all from a sense of duty, of course.”

“How can you be so dreadful?” sighed Mrs. Tristram.

“I am not dreadful. I am speaking of her favorably.”

“Pray what will you say when you want to be severe?”

“I shall keep my severity for someone else—for the marquis. There’s a man I can’t swallow, mix the drink as I will.”

“And what has he done?”

“I can’t quite make out; it is something dreadfully bad, something mean and underhand, and not redeemed by audacity, as his mother’s misdemeanors may have been. If he has never committed murder, he has at least turned his back and looked the other way while someone else was committing it.”

In spite of this invidious hypothesis, which must be taken for nothing more than an example of the capricious play of “American humor,” Newman did his best to maintain an easy and friendly style of communication with M. de Bellegarde. So long as he was in personal contact with people he disliked extremely to have anything to forgive them, and he was capable of a good deal of unsuspected imaginative effort (for the sake of his own personal comfort) to assume for the time that they were good fellows. He did his best to treat the marquis as one; he believed honestly, moreover, that he could not, in reason, be such a confounded fool as he seemed. Newman’s familiarity was never importunate; his sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an æsthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scanty allowance and consequently was innocent of ungraceful eagerness. His tranquil unsuspectingness of the relativity of his own place in the social scale was probably irritating to M. de Bellegarde, who saw himself reflected in the mind of his potential brother-in-law in a crude and colorless form, unpleasantly dissimilar to the impressive image projected upon his own intellectual mirror. He never forgot himself for an instant, and replied to what he must have considered Newman’s “advances” with mechanical politeness. Newman, who was constantly forgetting himself, and indulging in an unlimited amount of irresponsible inquiry and conjecture, now and then found himself confronted by the conscious, ironical smile of his host. What the deuce M. de Bellegarde was smiling at he was at a loss to divine. M. de Bellegarde’s smile may be supposed to have been, for himself, a compromise between a great many emotions. So long as he smiled he was polite, and it was proper he should be polite. A smile, moreover, committed him to nothing more than politeness, and left the degree of politeness agreeably vague. A smile, too, was neither dissent—which was too serious—nor agreement, which might have brought on terrible complications. And then a smile covered his own personal dignity, which in this critical situation he was resolved to keep immaculate; it was quite enough that the glory of his house should pass into eclipse. Between him and Newman, his whole manner seemed to declare there could be no interchange of opinion; he was holding his breath so as not to inhale the odor of democracy. Newman was far from being versed in European politics, but he liked to have a general idea of what was going on about him, and he accordingly asked M. de Bellegarde several times what he thought of public affairs. M. de Bellegarde answered with suave concision that he thought as ill of them as possible, that they were going from bad to worse, and that the age was rotten to its core. This gave Newman, for the moment, an almost kindly feeling for the marquis; he pitied a man for whom the world was so cheerless a place, and the next time he saw M. de Bellegarde he attempted to call his attention to some of the brilliant features of the time. The marquis presently replied that he had but a single political conviction, which was enough for him: he believed in the divine right of Henry of Bourbon, Fifth of his name, to the throne of France. Newman stared, and after this he ceased to talk politics with M. de Bellegarde. He was not horrified nor scandalized, he was not even amused; he felt as he should have felt if he had discovered in M. de Bellegarde a taste for certain oddities of diet; an appetite, for instance, for fishbones or nutshells. Under these circumstances, of course, he would never have broached dietary questions with him.

One afternoon, on his calling on Madame de Cintré, Newman was requested by the servant to wait a few moments, as his hostess was not at liberty. He walked about the room a while, taking up her books, smelling her flowers, and looking at her prints and photographs (which he thought prodigiously pretty), and at last he heard the opening of a door to which his back was turned. On the threshold stood an old woman whom he remembered to have met several times in entering and leaving the house. She was tall and straight and dressed in black, and she wore a cap which, if Newman had been initiated into such mysteries, would have been a sufficient assurance that she was not a Frenchwoman; a cap of pure British composition. She had a pale, decent, depressed-looking face, and a clear, dull, English eye. She looked at Newman a moment, both intently and timidly, and then she dropped a short, straight English curtsey.

“Madame de Cintré begs you will kindly wait,” she said. “She has just come in; she will soon have finished dressing.”

“Oh, I will wait as long as she wants,” said Newman. “Pray tell her not to hurry.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the woman, softly; and then, instead of retiring with her message, she advanced into the room. She looked about her for a moment, and presently went to a table and began to arrange certain books and knick-knacks. Newman was struck with the high respectability of her appearance; he was afraid to address her as a servant. She busied herself for some moments with putting the table in order and pulling the curtains straight, while Newman walked slowly to and fro. He perceived at last from her reflection in the mirror, as he was passing that her hands were idle and that she was looking at him intently. She evidently wished to say something, and Newman, perceiving it, helped her to begin.

“You are English?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, please,” she answered, quickly and softly; “I was born in Wiltshire.”

“And what do you think of Paris?”

“Oh, I don’t think of Paris, sir,” she said in the same tone. “It is so long since I have been here.”

“Ah, you have been here very long?”

“It is more than forty years, sir. I came over with Lady Emmeline.”

“You mean with old Madame de Bellegarde?”

“Yes, sir. I came with her when she was married. I was my lady’s own woman.”

“And you have been with her ever since?”

“I have been in the house ever since. My lady has taken a younger person. You see I am very old. I do nothing regular now. But I keep about.”

“You look very strong and well,” said Newman, observing the erectness of her figure, and a certain venerable rosiness in her cheek.

“Thank God I am not ill, sir; I hope I know my duty too well to go panting and coughing about the house. But I am an old woman, sir, and it is as an old woman that I venture to speak to you.”

“Oh, speak out,” said Newman, curiously. “You needn’t be afraid of me.”

“Yes, sir. I think you are kind. I have seen you before.”

“On the stairs, you mean?”

“Yes, sir. When you have been coming to see the countess. I have taken the liberty of noticing that you come often.”

“Oh yes; I come very often,” said Newman, laughing. “You need not have been wide-awake to notice that.”

“I have noticed it with pleasure, sir,” said the ancient tirewoman, gravely. And she stood looking at Newman with a strange expression of face. The old instinct of deference and humility was there; the habit of decent self-effacement and knowledge of her “own place.” But there mingled with it a certain mild audacity, born of the occasion and of a sense, probably, of Newman’s unprecedented approachableness, and, beyond this, a vague indifference to the old proprieties; as if my lady’s own woman had at last begun to reflect that, since my lady had taken another person, she had a slight reversionary property in herself.

“You take a great interest in the family?” said Newman.

“A deep interest, sir. Especially in the countess.”

“I am glad of that,” said Newman. And in a moment he added, smiling, “So do I!”

“So I suppose, sir. We can’t help noticing these things and having our ideas; can we, sir?”

“You mean as a servant?” said Newman.

“Ah, there it is, sir. I am afraid that when I let my thoughts meddle with such matters I am no longer a servant. But I am so devoted to the countess; if she were my own child I couldn’t love her more. That is how I come to be so bold, sir. They say you want to marry her.”

Newman eyed his interlocutress and satisfied himself that she was not a gossip, but a zealot; she looked anxious, appealing, discreet. “It is quite true,” he said. “I want to marry Madame de Cintré.”

“And to take her away to America?”

“I will take her wherever she wants to go.”

“The farther away the better, sir!” exclaimed the old woman, with sudden intensity. But she checked herself, and, taking up a paper-weight in mosaic, began to polish it with her black apron. “I don’t mean anything against the house or the family, sir. But I think a great change would do the poor countess good. It is very sad here.”

“Yes, it’s not very lively,” said Newman. “But Madame de Cintré is gay herself.”

“She is everything that is good. You will not be vexed to hear that she has been gayer for a couple of months past than she had been in many a day before.”

Newman was delighted to gather this testimony to the prosperity of his suit, but he repressed all violent marks of elation. “Has Madame de Cintré been in bad spirits before this?” he asked.

“Poor lady, she had good reason. M. de Cintré was no husband for a sweet young lady like that. And then, as I say, it has been a sad house. It is better, in my humble opinion, that she were out of it. So, if you will excuse me for saying so, I hope she will marry you.”

“I hope she will!” said Newman.

“But you must not lose courage, sir, if she doesn’t make up her mind at once. That is what I wanted to beg of you, sir. Don’t give it up, sir. You will not take it ill if I say it’s a great risk for any lady at any time; all the more when she has got rid of one bad bargain. But if she can marry a good, kind, respectable gentleman, I think she had better make up her mind to it. They speak very well of you, sir, in the house, and, if you will allow me to say so, I like your face. You have a very different appearance from the late count, he wasn’t five feet high. And they say your fortune is beyond everything. There’s no harm in that. So I beseech you to be patient, sir, and bide your time. If I don’t say this to you, sir, perhaps no one will. Of course it is not for me to make any promises. I can answer for nothing. But I think your chance is not so bad, sir. I am nothing but a weary old woman in my quiet corner, but one woman understands another, and I think I make out the countess. I received her in my arms when she came into the world and her first wedding day was the saddest of my life. She owes it to me to show me another and a brighter one. If you will hold firm, sir—and you look as if you would—I think we may see it.”

“I am much obliged to you for your encouragement,” said Newman, heartily. “One can’t have too much. I mean to hold firm. And if Madame de Cintré marries me you must come and live with her.”

The old woman looked at him strangely, with her soft, lifeless eyes. “It may seem a heartless thing to say, sir, when one has been forty years in a house, but I may tell you that I should like to leave this place.”

“Why, it’s just the time to say it,” said Newman, fervently. “After forty years one wants a change.”

“You are very kind, sir;” and this faithful servant dropped another curtsey and seemed disposed to retire. But she lingered a moment and gave a timid, joyless smile. Newman was disappointed, and his fingers stole half shyly half irritably into his waistcoat-pocket. His informant noticed the movement. “Thank God I am not a Frenchwoman,” she said. “If I were, I would tell you with a brazen simper, old as I am, that if you please, monsieur, my information is worth something. Let me tell you so in my own decent English way. It is worth something.”

“How much, please?” said Newman.

“Simply this: a promise not to hint to the countess that I have said these things.”

“If that is all, you have it,” said Newman.

“That is all, sir. Thank you, sir. Good day, sir.” And having once more slid down telescope-wise into her scanty petticoats, the old woman departed. At the same moment Madame de Cintré came in by an opposite door. She noticed the movement of the other portière and asked Newman who had been entertaining him.

“The British female!” said Newman. “An old lady in a black dress and a cap, who curtsies up and down, and expresses herself ever so well.”

“An old lady who curtsies and expresses herself?... Ah, you mean poor Mrs. Bread. I happen to know that you have made a conquest of her.”

“Mrs. Cake, she ought to be called,” said Newman. “She is very sweet. She is a delicious old woman.”

Madame de Cintré looked at him a moment. “What can she have said to you? She is an excellent creature, but we think her rather dismal.”

“I suppose,” Newman answered presently, “that I like her because she has lived near you so long. Since your birth, she told me.”

“Yes,” said Madame de Cintré, simply; “she is very faithful; I can trust her.”

Newman had never made any reflections to this lady upon her mother and her brother Urbain; had given no hint of the impression they made upon him. But, as if she had guessed his thoughts, she seemed careful to avoid all occasion for making him speak of them. She never alluded to her mother’s domestic decrees; she never quoted the opinions of the marquis. They had talked, however, of Valentin, and she had made no secret of her extreme affection for her younger brother. Newman listened sometimes with a certain harmless jealousy; he would have liked to divert some of her tender allusions to his own credit. Once Madame de Cintré told him with a little air of triumph about something that Valentin had done which she thought very much to his honor. It was a service he had rendered to an old friend of the family; something more “serious” than Valentin was usually supposed capable of being. Newman said he was glad to hear of it, and then began to talk about something which lay upon his own heart. Madame de Cintré listened, but after a while she said, “I don’t like the way you speak of my brother Valentin.” Hereupon Newman, surprised, said that he had never spoken of him but kindly.

“It is too kindly,” said Madame de Cintré. “It is a kindness that costs nothing; it is the kindness you show to a child. It is as if you didn’t respect him.”

“Respect him? Why I think I do.”

“You think? If you are not sure, it is no respect.”

“Do you respect him?” said Newman. “If you do, I do.”

“If one loves a person, that is a question one is not bound to answer,” said Madame de Cintré.

“You should not have asked it of me, then. I am very fond of your brother.”

“He amuses you. But you would not like to resemble him.”

“I shouldn’t like to resemble anyone. It is hard enough work resembling one’s self.”

“What do you mean,” asked Madame de Cintré, “by resembling one’s self?”

“Why, doing what is expected of one. Doing one’s duty.”

“But that is only when one is very good.”

“Well, a great many people are good,” said Newman. “Valentin is quite good enough for me.”

Madame de Cintré was silent for a short time. “He is not good enough for me,” she said at last. “I wish he would do something.”

“What can he do?” asked Newman.

“Nothing. Yet he is very clever.”

“It is a proof of cleverness,” said Newman, “to be happy without doing anything.”

“I don’t think Valentin is happy, in reality. He is clever, generous, brave; but what is there to show for it? To me there is something sad in his life, and sometimes I have a sort of foreboding about him. I don’t know why, but I fancy he will have some great trouble—perhaps an unhappy end.”

“Oh, leave him to me,” said Newman, jovially. “I will watch over him and keep harm away.”

One evening, in Madame de Bellegarde’s salon, the conversation had flagged most sensibly. The marquis walked up and down in silence, like a sentinel at the door of some smooth-fronted citadel of the proprieties; his mother sat staring at the fire; young Madame de Bellegarde worked at an enormous band of tapestry. Usually there were three or four visitors, but on this occasion a violent storm sufficiently accounted for the absence of even the most devoted habitués. In the long silences the howling of the wind and the beating of the rain were distinctly audible. Newman sat perfectly still, watching the clock, determined to stay till the stroke of eleven, but not a moment longer. Madame de Cintré had turned her back to the circle, and had been standing for some time within the uplifted curtain of a window, with her forehead against the pane, gazing out into the deluged darkness. Suddenly she turned round toward her sister-in-law.

“For Heaven’s sake,” she said, with peculiar eagerness, “go to the piano and play something.”

Madame de Bellegarde held up her tapestry and pointed to a little white flower. “Don’t ask me to leave this. I am in the midst of a masterpiece. My flower is going to smell very sweet; I am putting in the smell with this gold-colored silk. I am holding my breath; I can’t leave off. Play something yourself.”

“It is absurd for me to play when you are present,” said Madame de Cintré. But the next moment she went to the piano and began to strike the keys with vehemence. She played for some time, rapidly and brilliantly; when she stopped, Newman went to the piano and asked her to begin again. She shook her head, and, on his insisting, she said, “I have not been playing for you; I have been playing for myself.” She went back to the window again and looked out, and shortly afterwards left the room. When Newman took leave, Urbain de Bellegarde accompanied him, as he always did, just three steps down the staircase. At the bottom stood a servant with his overcoat. He had just put it on when he saw Madame de Cintré coming towards him across the vestibule.

“Shall you be at home on Friday?” Newman asked.

She looked at him a moment before answering his question. “You don’t like my mother and my brother,” she said.

He hesitated a moment, and then he said softly, “No.”

She laid her hand on the balustrade and prepared to ascend the stairs, fixing her eyes on the first step.

“Yes, I shall be at home on Friday,” and she passed up the wide dusky staircase.

On the Friday, as soon as he came in, she asked him to please to tell her why he disliked her family.

“Dislike your family?” he exclaimed. “That has a horrid sound. I didn’t say so, did I? I didn’t mean it, if I did.”

“I wish you would tell me what you think of them,” said Madame de Cintré.

“I don’t think of any of them but you.”

“That is because you dislike them. Speak the truth; you can’t offend me.”

“Well, I don’t exactly love your brother,” said Newman. “I remember now. But what is the use of my saying so? I had forgotten it.”

“You are too good-natured,” said Madame de Cintré gravely. Then, as if to avoid the appearance of inviting him to speak ill of the marquis, she turned away, motioning him to sit down.

But he remained standing before her and said presently, “What is of much more importance is that they don’t like me.”

“No—they don’t,” she said.

“And don’t you think they are wrong?” Newman asked. “I don’t believe I am a man to dislike.”

“I suppose that a man who may be liked may also be disliked. And my brother—my mother,” she added, “have not made you angry?”

“Yes, sometimes.”

“You have never shown it.”

“So much the better.”

“Yes, so much the better. They think they have treated you very well.”

“I have no doubt they might have handled me much more roughly,” said Newman. “I am much obliged to them. Honestly.”

“You are generous,” said Madame de Cintré. “It’s a disagreeable position.”

“For them, you mean. Not for me.”

“For me,” said Madame de Cintré.

“Not when their sins are forgiven!” said Newman. “They don’t think I am as good as they are. I do. But we shan’t quarrel about it.”

“I can’t even agree with you without saying something that has a disagreeable sound. The presumption was against you. That you probably don’t understand.”

Newman sat down and looked at her for some time. “I don’t think I really understand it. But when you say it, I believe it.”

“That’s a poor reason,” said Madame de Cintré, smiling.

“No, it’s a very good one. You have a high spirit, a high standard; but with you it’s all natural and unaffected; you don’t seem to have stuck your head into a vise, as if you were sitting for the photograph of propriety. You think of me as a fellow who has had no idea in life but to make money and drive sharp bargains. That’s a fair description of me, but it is not the whole story. A man ought to care for something else, though I don’t know exactly what. I cared for money-making, but I never cared particularly for the money. There was nothing else to do, and it was impossible to be idle. I have been very easy to others, and to myself. I have done most of the things that people asked me—I don’t mean rascals. As regards your mother and your brother,” Newman added, “there is only one point upon which I feel that I might quarrel with them. I don’t ask them to sing my praises to you, but I ask them to let you alone. If I thought they talked ill of me to you, I should come down upon them.”

“They have let me alone, as you say. They have not talked ill of you.”

“In that case,” cried Newman, “I declare they are only too good for this world!”

Madame de Cintré appeared to find something startling in his exclamation. She would, perhaps, have replied, but at this moment the door was thrown open and Urbain de Bellegarde stepped across the threshold. He appeared surprised at finding Newman, but his surprise was but a momentary shadow across the surface of an unwonted joviality. Newman had never seen the marquis so exhilarated; his pale, unlighted countenance had a sort of thin transfiguration. He held open the door for someone else to enter, and presently appeared old Madame de Bellegarde, leaning on the arm of a gentleman whom Newman had not seen before. He had already risen, and Madame de Cintré rose, as she always did before her mother. The marquis, who had greeted Newman almost genially, stood apart, slowly rubbing his hands. His mother came forward with her companion. She gave a majestic little nod at Newman, and then she released the strange gentleman, that he might make his bow to her daughter.

“My daughter,” she said, “I have brought you an unknown relative, Lord Deepmere. Lord Deepmere is our cousin, but he has done only to-day what he ought to have done long ago—come to make our acquaintance.”

Madame de Cintré smiled, and offered Lord Deepmere her hand. “It is very extraordinary,” said this noble laggard, “but this is the first time that I have ever been in Paris for more than three or four weeks.”

“And how long have you been here now?” asked Madame de Cintré.

“Oh, for the last two months,” said Lord Deepmere.

These two remarks might have constituted an impertinence; but a glance at Lord Deepmere’s face would have satisfied you, as it apparently satisfied Madame de Cintré, that they constituted only a naïveté. When his companions were seated, Newman, who was out of the conversation, occupied himself with observing the newcomer. Observation, however, as regards Lord Deepmere’s person; had no great range. He was a small, meagre man, of some three and thirty years of age, with a bald head, a short nose and no front teeth in the upper jaw; he had round, candid blue eyes, and several pimples on his chin. He was evidently very shy, and he laughed a great deal, catching his breath with an odd, startling sound, as the most convenient imitation of repose. His physiognomy denoted great simplicity, a certain amount of brutality, and probable failure in the past to profit by rare educational advantages. He remarked that Paris was awfully jolly, but that for real, thorough-paced entertainment it was nothing to Dublin. He even preferred Dublin to London. Had Madame de Cintré ever been to Dublin? They must all come over there some day, and he would show them some Irish sport. He always went to Ireland for the fishing, and he came to Paris for the new Offenbach things. They always brought them out in Dublin, but he couldn’t wait. He had been nine times to hear La Pomme de Paris. Madame de Cintré, leaning back, with her arms folded, looked at Lord Deepmere with a more visibly puzzled face than she usually showed to society. Madame de Bellegarde, on the other hand, wore a fixed smile. The marquis said that among light operas his favorite was the Gazza Ladra. The marquise then began a series of inquiries about the duke and the cardinal, the old countess and Lady Barbara, after listening to which, and to Lord Deepmere’s somewhat irreverent responses, for a quarter of an hour, Newman rose to take his leave. The marquis went with him three steps into the hall.

“Is he Irish?” asked Newman, nodding in the direction of the visitor.

“His mother was the daughter of Lord Finucane,” said the marquis; “he has great Irish estates. Lady Bridget, in the complete absence of male heirs, either direct or collateral—a most extraordinary circumstance—came in for everything. But Lord Deepmere’s title is English and his English property is immense. He is a charming young man.”

Newman answered nothing, but he detained the marquis as the latter was beginning gracefully to recede. “It is a good time for me to thank you,” he said, “for sticking so punctiliously to our bargain, for doing so much to help me on with your sister.”

The marquis stared. “Really, I have done nothing that I can boast of,” he said.

“Oh don’t be modest,” Newman answered, laughing. “I can’t flatter myself that I am doing so well simply by my own merit. And thank your mother for me, too!” And he turned away, leaving M. de Bellegarde looking after him.

The next time Newman came to the Rue de l’Université he had the good fortune to find Madame de Cintré alone. He had come with a definite intention, and he lost no time in executing it. She wore, moreover, a look which he eagerly interpreted as expectancy.

“I have been coming to see you for six months, now,” he said, “and I have never spoken to you a second time of marriage. That was what you asked me; I obeyed. Could any man have done better?”

“You have acted with great delicacy,” said Madame de Cintré.

“Well, I’m going to change now,” said Newman. “I don’t mean that I am going to be indelicate; but I’m going to go back to where I began. I am back there. I have been all round the circle. Or rather, I have never been away from here. I have never ceased to want what I wanted then. Only now I am more sure of it, if possible; I am more sure of myself, and more sure of you. I know you better, though I don’t know anything I didn’t believe three months ago. You are everything—you are beyond everything—I can imagine or desire. You know me now; you must know me. I won’t say that you have seen the best—but you have seen the worst. I hope you have been thinking all this while. You must have seen that I was only waiting; you can’t suppose that I was changing. What will you say to me, now? Say that everything is clear and reasonable, and that I have been very patient and considerate, and deserve my reward. And then give me your hand. Madame de Cintré do that. Do it.”

“I knew you were only waiting,” she said; “and I was very sure this day would come. I have thought about it a great deal. At first I was half afraid of it. But I am not afraid of it now.” She paused a moment, and then she added, “It’s a relief.”

She was sitting on a low chair, and Newman was on an ottoman, near her. He leaned a little and took her hand, which for an instant she let him keep. “That means that I have not waited for nothing,” he said. She looked at him for a moment, and he saw her eyes fill with tears. “With me,” he went on, “you will be as safe—as safe”—and even in his ardor he hesitated a moment for a comparison—“as safe,” he said, with a kind of simple solemnity, “as in your father’s arms.”

Still she looked at him and her tears increased. Then, abruptly, she buried her face on the cushioned arm of the sofa beside her chair, and broke into noiseless sobs. “I am weak—I am weak,” he heard her say.

“All the more reason why you should give yourself up to me,” he answered. “Why are you troubled? There is nothing but happiness. Is that so hard to believe?”

“To you everything seems so simple,” she said, raising her head. “But things are not so. I like you extremely. I liked you six months ago, and now I am sure of it, as you say you are sure. But it is not easy, simply for that, to decide to marry you. There are a great many things to think about.”

“There ought to be only one thing to think about—that we love each other,” said Newman. And as she remained silent he quickly added, “Very good, if you can’t accept that, don’t tell me so.”

“I should be very glad to think of nothing,” she said at last; “not to think at all; only to shut both my eyes and give myself up. But I can’t. I’m cold, I’m old, I’m a coward; I never supposed I should marry again, and it seems to me very strange I should ever have listened to you. When I used to think, as a girl, of what I should do if I were to marry freely, by my own choice, I thought of a very different man from you.”

“That’s nothing against me,” said Newman with an immense smile; “your taste was not formed.”

His smile made Madame de Cintré smile. “Have you formed it?” she asked. And then she said, in a different tone, “Where do you wish to live?”

“Anywhere in the wide world you like. We can easily settle that.”

“I don’t know why I ask you,” she presently continued. “I care very little. I think if I were to marry you I could live almost anywhere. You have some false ideas about me; you think that I need a great many things—that I must have a brilliant, worldly life. I am sure you are prepared to take a great deal of trouble to give me such things. But that is very arbitrary; I have done nothing to prove that.” She paused again, looking at him, and her mingled sound and silence were so sweet to him that he had no wish to hurry her, any more than he would have had a wish to hurry a golden sunrise. “Your being so different, which at first seemed a difficulty, a trouble, began one day to seem to me a pleasure, a great pleasure. I was glad you were different. And yet if I had said so, no one would have understood me; I don’t mean simply to my family.”

“They would have said I was a queer monster, eh?” said Newman.

“They would have said I could never be happy with you—you were too different; and I would have said it was just because you were so different that I might be happy. But they would have given better reasons than I. My only reason”—and she paused again.

But this time, in the midst of his golden sunrise, Newman felt the impulse to grasp at a rosy cloud. “Your only reason is that you love me!” he murmured with an eloquent gesture, and for want of a better reason Madame de Cintré reconciled herself to this one.

Newman came back the next day, and in the vestibule, as he entered the house, he encountered his friend Mrs. Bread. She was wandering about in honorable idleness, and when his eyes fell upon her she delivered him one of her curtsies. Then turning to the servant who had admitted him, she said, with the combined majesty of her native superiority and of a rugged English accent, “You may retire; I will have the honor of conducting monsieur.” In spite of this combination, however, it appeared to Newman that her voice had a slight quaver, as if the tone of command were not habitual to it. The man gave her an impertinent stare, but he walked slowly away, and she led Newman upstairs. At half its course the staircase gave a bend, forming a little platform. In the angle of the wall stood an indifferent statue of an eighteenth-century nymph, simpering, sallow, and cracked. Here Mrs. Bread stopped and looked with shy kindness at her companion.

“I know the good news, sir,” she murmured.

“You have a good right to be first to know it,” said Newman. “You have taken such a friendly interest.”

Mrs. Bread turned away and began to blow the dust off the statue, as if this might be mockery.

“I suppose you want to congratulate me,” said Newman. “I am greatly obliged.” And then he added, “You gave me much pleasure the other day.”

She turned around, apparently reassured. “You are not to think that I have been told anything,” she said; “I have only guessed. But when I looked at you, as you came in, I was sure I had guessed aright.”

“You are very sharp,” said Newman. “I am sure that in your quiet way you see everything.”

“I am not a fool, sir, thank God. I have guessed something else beside,” said Mrs. Bread.

“What’s that?”

“I needn’t tell you that, sir; I don’t think you would believe it. At any rate it wouldn’t please you.”

“Oh, tell me nothing but what will please me,” laughed Newman. “That is the way you began.”

“Well, sir, I suppose you won’t be vexed to hear that the sooner everything is over the better.”

“The sooner we are married, you mean? The better for me, certainly.”

“The better for everyone.”

“The better for you, perhaps. You know you are coming to live with us,” said Newman.

“I’m extremely obliged to you, sir, but it is not of myself I was thinking. I only wanted, if I might take the liberty, to recommend you to lose no time.”

“Whom are you afraid of?”

Mrs. Bread looked up the staircase and then down and then she looked at the undusted nymph, as if she possibly had sentient ears. “I am afraid of everyone,” she said.

“What an uncomfortable state of mind!” said Newman. “Does ‘everyone’ wish to prevent my marriage?”

“I am afraid of already having said too much,” Mrs. Bread replied. “I won’t take it back, but I won’t say any more.” And she took her way up the staircase again and led him into Madame de Cintré’s salon.

Newman indulged in a brief and silent imprecation when he found that Madame de Cintré was not alone. With her sat her mother, and in the middle of the room stood young Madame de Bellegarde, in her bonnet and mantle. The old marquise, who was leaning back in her chair with a hand clasping the knob of each arm, looked at him fixedly without moving. She seemed barely conscious of his greeting; she appeared to be musing intently. Newman said to himself that her daughter had been announcing her engagement and that the old lady found the morsel hard to swallow. But Madame de Cintré, as she gave him her hand gave him also a look by which she appeared to mean that he should understand something. Was it a warning or a request? Did she wish to enjoin speech or silence? He was puzzled, and young Madame de Bellegarde’s pretty grin gave him no information.