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Title: The American

Author: Henry James

Release Date: January 2, 2007 [EBook #177]
[This file was last updated on March 12, 2006]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Pauline J. Iacono, John Hamm and David Widger








THE AMERICAN

by Henry James

1877





CHAPTER I


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 Carre, 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 Badeker; his
attention had been strained and his eyes dazzled, and he had sat down
with an aesthetic 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 Cafe Anglais--some one
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 homeopathy.
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 mustache 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 skeptical, 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 mustache, 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 aesthetic
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 byplay, 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
simply trying to look indifferent, and wondering how far she might go.
"I haven't made a mistake--pas insulte, 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 Sevres
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 sur! 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 porte-monnaie,
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. Noemie 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 Noemie. "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 Noemie. "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 Noemie. "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 Noemie. "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--tres-superieure! 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, ah!"

"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 Noemie.

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 Noemie, 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 Noemie, 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. Helas, 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 Noemie;
"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 Noemie.

"What he pleases, I may say?"

"Never! That's bad style."

"If he asks, then?"

Mademoiselle Noemie 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 commercant; he placed me for a year in a
counting-house in England. Some of it stuck to me; but I have
forgotten!"

"How much French can I learn in a month?"

"What does he say?" asked Mademoiselle Noemie.

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 Noemie 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.



CHAPTER II


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 any one.
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 menfolk?"

"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 jewelers, 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'Iena."

"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 age, 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 cafe 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 gayety 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 mediaeval 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 any one, 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, any way?" he demanded. "Are you going to
write a book?"

Christopher Newman twisted one end of his mustache 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!"



CHAPTER III


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 facades 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 installments.

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 every one'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'Iena. 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'Iena, 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'Iena 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."

"Voila 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'Universite, 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 Cintre'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 mustache. "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 Cintre, 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 Cintre 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 Cintre,
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 Cintre. "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 Cintre 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 Cintre'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 Cintre was her dearest
Claire, and her especial admiration but Madame de Cintre had found it
impossible to dine with her and Madame de Cintre 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 Cintre 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 Cintre 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 Cintre shook her friend's hand.

"A moment longer," said Mrs. Tristram.

Madame de Cintre 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 Cintre'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 facade 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, graveled 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 Cintre 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 Cintre.

"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 defense, 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 Cintre. 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 Cintre," 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
Cintre 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!"



CHAPTER IV


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 Noemie, 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 cafe, 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--, charcutiere 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 Theatre
Francais.

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 Noemie
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
Noemie'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 Noemie 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
Noemie 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 tete. 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. Noemie 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 Noemie discovered that
she passed her life in her arm-chair 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 Noemie 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 Noemie 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 Carre. 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 Noemie, "we will pass the
review."

They walked slowly round the room, then passed into the others and
strolled about for half an hour. Mademoiselle Noemie 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 Noemie, 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 Noemie, "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 Noemie.

"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 Noemie.

"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 Noemie 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 Noemie 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 fiancee?"

"Yes, I am tolerably free."

"You are very happy," said Mademoiselle Noemie, 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 Noemie 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 Carre?" 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 Noemie 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
Medicis? 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
Noemie'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 aesthetic 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 Noemie, but with her extraordinary
smile.

"I know very little about pictures or now 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 Noemie.

"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
Noemie. "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 maitres de cafes! 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-by!" 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.



CHAPTER V


When Newman related to Mrs. Tristram his fruitless visit to Madame de
Cintre, 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 Cintre 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 Cintre'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 Noemie; 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 Hotel 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 Elysees 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'hote 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