The American (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907)/Chapter 7
VII
One evening very late, about five days after this episode, Newman's servant brought him a card which proved to be that of young M. de Bellegarde. When a few moments later he went to receive his visitor he found him standing in the middle of the greatest of his gilded saloons and eyeing it from cornice to carpet. Count Valentin's face, it seemed to him, expressed not less than usual a sense of the inherent comedy of things. "What the devil is he laughing at now?" our hero asked himself; but he put the question without acrimony, for he felt in Madame de Cintré's brother a free and adventurous nature, and he had a presentiment that on this basis of the natural and the bold they were destined to understand each other. Only if there was food for mirth he wished to have a glimpse of it too.
"To begin with," said the young man as he extended his hand, "have I come too late?"
"Too late for what?"
"To smoke a cigar with you."
"You would have to come early to do that," Newman said. "I don't know how to smoke."
"Ah, you're a strong man!"
"But I keep cigars," he added. "Sit down."
His visitor looked about. "Surely I may n't smoke here."
"What's the matter? Is the room too small?"
"It's too large. It's like smoking in a ball-room or a church."
"That's what you were laughing at just now?" Newman asked; "the size of my room?"
"It's not size only, but splendour and harmony, beauty of detail. It was the smile of sympathy and of admiration."
Newman looked at him harder and then, "So it is very ridiculous?" he enquired.
"Ridiculous, my dear sir? It's sublime."
"That of course is the same thing," said Newman. "Make yourself comfortable. Your coming to see me, I take it, is an act of sympathy and a sign of confidence. You were not obliged to. Therefore if anything round here amuses you it will be all in a pleasant way. Laugh as loud as you please; I like to have my little entertainment a success. Only I must make this request: that you explain the joke to me as soon as you can speak. I don't want to lose anything myself."
His friend gave him a long look of unresentful perplexity. He laid his hand on his sleeve and seemed on the point of saying something, but suddenly checked himself, leaned back in his chair and puffed at his cigar. At last, however, breaking silence, "Certainly," he began, "my coming to see you is the frank demonstration you recognise. I have been, nevertheless, in a measure encouraged—or urged—to the step. My sister, in a word, has asked it of me, and a request from my sister is, for me, a law. I was near you just now and I observed lights in what I supposed to be your rooms. It was not a ceremonious hour for making a call, but I was not sorry to do something that would show me as not performing a mere ceremony."
"Well, here I am for you as large as life," said Newman as he extended his legs.
"I don't know what you mean," the young man went on, by giving me unlimited leave to laugh. Certainly I'm a great laugher; it's the only way, in general, is n't it? not to—well, not to crever d'ennui. But it's not in order that we may laugh together—or separately—that I have, I may say, sought your acquaintance. To speak with a confidence and a candour which I find rapidly getting the better of me, you have interested me without having done me the honour, I think, in the least to try for it—by having acted so consistently in your own interest: that, I mean, of your enlightened curiosity." All this was uttered, to Newman's sense, with a marked proficiency, as from a habit of intercourse that was yet not "office" intercourse, and, in spite of the speaker's excellent English, with the perfect form, as our friend supposed, of the superlative Frenchman; but there was at the same time something in it of a more personal and more pressing intention. What this might prove to have for him Newman suddenly found himself rather yearning to know. M. de Bellegarde was a foreigner to the last roll of his so frequent rotary r; and if he had met him out in bare Arizona he would have felt it proper to address him with a "How-d'ye-do, Mosseer?" Yet there was that in his physiognomy which seemed to suspend a bold bridge of gilt wire over the impassable gulf produced by difference of race. He was but middling high and of robust and agile aspect. Valentin de Bellegarde, his host was afterwards to learn, had a mortal dread of not keeping the robustness down sufficiently to keep the agility up; he was afraid of growing stout; he was too short a story as he said, to afford an important digression. He rode and fenced and practised gymnastics with unremitting zeal, and you could n't congratulate him on his appearance without making him turn pale at your imputation of its increase. He had a round head, high above the ears, a crop of hair at once dense and silky, a broad, low forehead, a short nose, of the ironical and enquiring rather than of the dogmatic or sensitive cast, and a moustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance. He resembled his sister not in feature, but in the expression of his fair open eyes, completely void, as they were in his case, of introspection, and in the fine freshness of his smile, which was like a gush of crystalline water. The charm of his face was above all in its being intensely, being frankly, ardently, gallantly alive. You might have seen it in the form of a bell with the long pull dangling in the young man's conscious soul; at a touch of the silken cord the silver sound would fill the air. There was something in this quick play which assured you he was not economising his consciousness, not living in a corner of it to spare the furniture of the rest. He was squarely encamped in the centre and was keeping open house. When he flared into gaiety it was the movement of a hand that in emptying a cup turns it upside down; he gave you all the strength of the liquor. He inspired Newman with something of the kindness our hero used to feel in his earlier years for those of his companions who could perform strange and clever tricks—make their joints crack in queer places or whistle at the back of their mouths. "My sister told me," he said, "that I ought to come and remove the impression I had taken such apparent pains to produce on you; the impression of my labouring under some temporary disorder. Did it strike you that what I said did n't make a sense?"
"Well, I thought I had never seen any one like you in real life," Newman returned. "Not in real quiet home life."
"Ah then Claire's right." And Count Valentin watched his host for a moment through his smoke-wreaths. "And yet even if it is the case I think we had better let it stand. I had no idea of putting you off by any violence of any kind; I wanted on the contrary to produce a favourable impression. Since I did nevertheless make a fool of myself I was perhaps luckily inspired, for I must n't seem to set up a claim for consistency which, in the sequel of our acquaintance, I may by no means justify. Set me down as a shocking trifler with intervals of high lucidity and even of extraordinary energy."
"Oh, I guess you know what you're about," said Newman.
"When I'm sane I'm very sane; that I admit," his guest returned. "But I did n't come here to talk about myself. I should like to ask you a few questions. You allow me?"
"Well, give me a specimen."
"You live here all alone?"
"Absolutely. With whom should I live?"
"For the moment," smiled M. de Bellegarde, "I'm asking questions, not answering them. You've come over to Paris for your pleasure?"
Newman had a pause. "Every one asks me that!" he said with his almost pathetic plainness. "It sounds quite foolish—as if I were to get my pleasure somehow under a writ of extradition."
"But at any rate you've a reason for being here."
"Oh, call it for my pleasure!" said Newman. "Though it represents me as trying to reclaim a hopeless absentee it describes well enough the logic of my conduct."
"And you're enjoying what you find?"
"Well, I'm keeping my head."
Count Valentin puffed his cigar again in silence. "For myself," he resumed at last, "I'm entirely at your service. Anything I can do for you will make me very happy. Call on me at your convenience. Is there any one you wish to know—anything you wish to see? It's a pity you should n't fully avail yourself of Paris."
"Well, I guess I avail myself," said Newman serenely. "I'm much obliged to you."
"Honestly speaking," his visitor went on, "there's something absurd to me in hearing myself make you these offers. They represent a great deal of good-will, but they represent little else. You're a successful man, and I am a râté—by which we mean a dead failure—and it's a turning of the tables to talk as if I could lend you a hand."
"How does it come that you have n't succeeded?" Newman ingenuously asked.
"Oh, I'm not a failure to wring your heart," the young man returned. "I've not fallen from a height, and my fiasco has made no noise and luckily no scandal. But you stand up, so very straight, for accomplished facts. You've made a fortune, you've raised an edifice, you're a financial, practical power, you can travel about the world till you've found a soft spot and lie down on it with the consciousness of having earned your rest. And all—so fabulously!—in the flower of your magnificent manhood. Is not that true? Well, imagine the exact reverse of all that and you have votre serviteur. I've done nothing, and there's not a poor pitiful thing for me to do."
"Why what's the matter with all the things?"
"It would take me time to say. Some day I 'll tell you. Meanwhile I'm right, eh? You're a horrid success? You've made more money than was ever made before by one so young and so candid? It's none of my business, but in short you're beastly rich?"
"That's another thing it sounds foolish to say," said Newman. "Do you think that's all I am?"
"No, I think you're original—that's why I'm here. We're very different, you and I, as products, I'm sure; I don't believe there's a subject on which we judge or feel alike. But I rather guess we shall get on, for there's such a thing, you know, as being—like fish and fowl—too different to quarrel."
"Oh, I never quarrel," said Newman rather shortly.
"You mean you just shoot? Well, I notify you that till I'm shot," his visitor declared, "I shall have had a greater sense of safety with you than I have perhaps ever known in any relation of life. And as a sense of danger is clearly a thing impossible to you, we shall therefore be all right."
With the preamble embodied in these remarks he paid our hero a long visit; as the two men sat with their heels on Newman's glowing hearth they heard the small hours of the morning strike larger from a far-off belfry. Valentin de Bellegarde was by his own confession at all times a great chatterer, and on this occasion the habit of promptness of word and tone was on him almost as a fever. It was a tradition of his race that people of its blood always conferred a favour by their attentions, and, as his real confidence was as rare as his general surface was bright, he had a double reason for never fearing his friendship could be importunate. Late blossom though he might be, moreover, of an ancient stem, tradition (since I have used the word) had in his nature neither visible guards nor alarms, but was as muffled in sociability and urbanity as an old dowager in her laces and strings of pearls. Valentin was by the measure of the society about him a gentilhomme of purest strain, and his rule of life, so far as it was definite, had been to keep up the character. This, it seemed to him, might agreeably engage a young man of ordinary good parts. But he attained his best values by instinct rather than by theory, and the amiability of his character was so great that certain of the aristocratic virtues lost, at his touch, their rigour without losing, as it were, their temper. In his younger years he had been suspected of low tastes, and his mother had greatly feared from him some such slip in the common mire as might bespatter the family shield. He had been treated therefore to more than his share of schooling and drilling, but his instructors had not succeeded in mounting him upon stilts. They had never troubled his deepest depths of serenity, and he had remained somehow as fortunate as he was rash. He had long been tied with so short a rope, however, that he had now a mortal grudge against family discipline. He had been known to say within the limits of the family that, featherhead though he might be, the honour of the name was safer in his hands than in those of some of its other members, and that if a day ever came to try it they would see. He had missed no secret for making high spirits consort with good manners, and he seemed to Newman, as afterwards young members of the Latin races often seemed to him, now almost infantile and now appallingly mature. In America, Newman reflected, "growing" men had old heads and young hearts, or at least young morals; here they had young heads and very aged hearts, morals the most grizzled and wrinkled.
"What I envy you is your liberty," Count Valentin found occasion to observe; "your wide range, your freedom to come and go, your not having a lot of people, who take themselves all too seriously, expecting something of you. I live," he added with a sigh, "beneath the eyes of my admirable mother."
"Is n't it then your own fault? What's to hinder your ranging?" Newman asked.
"There's a delightful simplicity in that question. Everything in life is to hinder it. To begin with I have n't a penny."
"Well, I had n't a penny when I began to range."
"Ah, but your poverty was your capital! Being of your race and stamp, it was impossible you should remain what you were born, and being born poor—do I understand it?—it was therefore inevitable you should become as different from that as possible. You were in a position that makes one's mouth water; you looked round you and saw a world full of things you had only to step up to and take hold of. When I was twenty I looked round me and saw a world with everything ticketed 'Don't touch,' and the deuce of it was that the ticket seemed meant only for me. I could n't go into business, I could n't make money, because I was a Bellegarde. I could n't go into politics because I was a Bellegarde—the Bellegardes don't recognise the Bonapartes. I could n't go into literature because I was a dunce. I could n't marry a rich girl because no Bellegarde had for ages married a roturière and it was n't urgent I should deviate. We shall have to face it, however—you'll see. Marriageable heiresses, de notre bord, are not to be had for nothing; it must be name for name and fortune for fortune. The only thing I could do was to go and fight for the Pope. That I did, punctiliously, and received an apostolic flesh-wound at Castelfidardo. It did neither the Holy Father nor me any good that I could make out. Rome was doubtless a very amusing place in the days of Heliogabalus, but it has sadly fallen off since. I was immured for three years, like some of the choicest scoundrels in history, in the castle of Saint Angelo, and then I came back to secular life."
Newman followed very much as he had followed ciceroni through museums. "So you've no active interest?—you do absolutely nothing?"
"As hard as ever I can. I'm supposed to amuse myself and to pass my time, and, to tell the truth, I've had some good moments. They come somehow, in spite of one, and the thing is then to recognise them. But you can't keep on the watch for them for ever. I'm good for three or four years more perhaps, but I foresee that after that I shall spring a leak and begin to sink. I shan't float any more, I shall go straight to the bottom. Then, at the bottom, what shall I do? I think I shall turn monk. Seriously, I think I shall tie a rope round my waist and go into a monastery. It was an old custom and the old customs were very good. People understood life quite as well as we do. They kept the pot boiling till it cracked, and then put it on the shelf altogether."
"Do you attend church regularly?" asked Newman in a tone which gave the enquiry a quaint effect.
His friend evidently appreciated this element, yet looked at him with due decorum. "I'm a very good Catholic. I cherish the Faith. I adore the blessed Virgin. I fear the Father of Lies."
"Well then," said Newman, "you're very well fixed. You've got pleasure in the present and paradise in the future: what do you complain of?"
"It's a part of one's pleasure to complain. There's something in your own situation that rubs me up. You're the first man about whom I've ever found myself saying 'Oh, if I were he—!' It's singular, but so it is. I've known many men who, besides any factitious advantages that I may possess, had money and brains into the bargain, yet they've never disturbed my inward peace. You've got something it worries me to have missed. It's not money, it's not even brains—though evidently yours have been excellent for your purpose. It's not your superfluous stature, though I should have rather liked to be a couple of inches taller. It's a sort of air you have of being imperturbably, being irremoveably and indestructibly (that's the thing!) at home in the world. When I was a boy my father assured me it was by just such an air that people recognised a Bellegarde. He called my attention to it. He did n't advise me to cultivate it; he said that as we grew up it always came of itself. I supposed it had come to me because I think I've always had the feeling it represents. My place in life had been made for me and it seemed easy to occupy. But you who, as I understand it, have made your own place, you who, as you told us the other day, have made and sold articles of vulgar household use—you strike me, in a fashion of your own, as a man who stands about at his ease and looks straight over ever so many high walls. I seem to see you move everywhere like a big stockholder on his favourite railroad. You make me feel awfully my want of shares. And yet the world used to be supposed to be ours. What is it I miss?"
"It's the proud consciousness of honest toil, of having produced something yourself that somebody has been willing to pay you for—since that's the definite measure. Since you speak of my wash-tubs—which were lovely—is n't it just they and their loveliness that make up my good conscience?"
"Oh no; I've seen men who had gone beyond wash-tubs, who had made mountains of soap—strong-smelling yellow soap, in great bars; and they've left me perfectly cold."
"Then it's just the regular treat of being an American citizen," said Newman. "That sets a man right up."
"Possibly," his guest returned; "but I'm forced to say I've seen a great many American citizens who did n't seem at all set up or in the least like large stockholders. I never envied them. I rather think the thing's some diabolical secret of your own."
"Oh come," Newman laughed, "you'll persuade me against my humility."
"No, I shall persuade you of nothing. You've nothing to do with humility any more than with swagger: that's just the essence of your confounded coolness. People swagger only when they've something to lose, and show their delicacy only when they've something to gain."
"I don't know what I may have to lose," said Newman, "but I can quite see a situation in which I should have something to gain."
His visitor looked at him hard. "A situation—?"
Newman hesitated. "Well, I 'll tell you more about it when I know you better."
"Ah, you'll soon know me by heart!" the young man sighed as he departed.
During the next three weeks they met again several times and, without formally swearing an eternal friendship, fell, for their course of life, instinctively into step together. Valentin de Bellegarde was to Newman the typical, ideal Frenchman, the Frenchman of tradition and romance, so far as our hero was acquainted with these mystic fields. Gallant, expansive, amusing, more pleased himself with the effect he produced than those (even when they were quite duly pleased) for whom he produced it; a master of all the distinctively social virtues and a votary of all the agreeable sensations; a devotee of something mysterious and sacred to which he occasionally alluded in terms more ecstatic even than those in which he spoke of the last pretty woman, and which was simply the beautiful though somewhat superannuated image of personal Honour; he was irresistibly entertaining and enlivening, and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable of doing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it as he was unlikely, in musing upon the possible combinations of the human mixture, mentally to have foreshadowed it. No two parties to an alliance could have come to it from a wider separation, but it was what each brought out of the queer dim distance that formed the odd attraction for the other.
Valentin lived in the basement of an old house in the Rue d'Anjou Saint Honoré, and his small apartments lay between the court of the house and a garden of equal antiquity, which spread itself behind—one of those large, sunless, humid gardens into which you look unexpectingly in Paris from back windows, wondering how among the grudging habitations they find their space. When Newman presently called on him it was to hint that such quarters were, though in a different way, at least as funny as his own. Their oddities had another sense than those of our hero's gilded saloons on the Boulevard Haussmann: the place was low, dusky, contracted, and was crowded with curious bric-à-brac. Their proprietor, penniless patrician though he might be, was an insatiable collector, and his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his floors muffled in the skins of beasts. Here and there was one of those uncomfortable tributes to elegance in which the French upholsterer's art is prolific; a curtained recess with a sheet of looking-glass as dark as a haunted pool; a divan on which, for its festoons and furbelows, you could no more sit down than on a dowager's lap; a fireplace draped, flounced, frilled, by the same analogy, to the complete exclusion of fire. The young man's possessions were in picturesque disorder, and his apartment pervaded by the odour of cigars, mingled, for inhalation, with other dim ghosts of past presences. Newman thought it, as a home, damp, gloomy and perverse, and was puzzled by the romantic incoherence of the furniture.
The charming Count, like most of his countrymen, hid none of his lights under a bushel and made little of a secret of the more interesting passages of his personal history. He had inevitably a vast deal to say about women, and could frequently indulge in sentimental and ironical apostrophes to these authors of his joys and woes. "Oh, the women, the women, and the things they've made me do!" he would exclaim with a wealth of reference. "C'est égal, of all the follies and stupidities I've committed for them there is n't one I would have missed!" On this subject Newman maintained an habitual reserve; to make it shine in the direct light of one's own experience had always seemed to him a proceeding vaguely analogous to the cooing of pigeons and the chattering of monkeys, and even inconsistent with a fully-developed human character. But his friend's confidences greatly amused and rarely displeased him, for the garden of the young man's past appeared to have begun from the earliest moment to bloom with rare flowers, amid which memory was as easy as a summer breeze. "I really think," he once said, "that I'm not more depraved than most of my contemporaries. They're joliment depraved, my contemporaries!" He threw off wonderfully pretty things about his female friends and, numerous and various as they had been, declared that his curiosity had survived the ordeal. "But you're not to take that as advice," he added, "for as an authority I must be misleading. I'm prejudiced in their favour; I'm a sentimental—in other words a donkey." Newman listened with an uncommitted smile and was glad, for his own sake, that he had fine feelings; but he mentally repudiated the idea of a Frenchman's having discovered any merit in the amiable sex he himself did n't suspect. Count Valentin, however, was not merely anecdotic and indiscreet; he welcomed every light on our hero's own life, and so far as his revelations might startle and waylay Newman could cap them as from the long habit of capping. He narrated his career, in fact, from the beginning, through all its variations, and whenever his companion's credulity or his standards appeared to protest it amused him to heighten the colour of the episode. He had sat with Western humourists in circles round cast-iron stoves and seen "tall" stories grow taller without toppling over, and his imagination had learnt the trick of building straight and high. The Count's regular attitude became at last that of lively self-defence; to mark the difference of his type from that of the occasionally witless he cultivated the wit of never being caught swallowing. The result of this was that Newman found it impossible to convince him of certain time-honoured verities.
"But the details don't matter," Valentin said, "since you've evidently had some such surprising adventures. You've seen some strange sides of life, you've revolved to and fro over a continent as I walk up and down the Boulevard. You're a man of the world to a livelier tune than ours. You've spent some awful, some deadly days, and you've done some extremely disagreeable things: you've shovelled sand, as a boy, for supper, and you've eaten boiled cat in a gold-digger's camp. You've stood casting up figures for ten hours at a time and you 've sat through Methodist sermons for the sake of looking at a pretty girl in another pew. It can't all have been very folichon. But at any rate you've done something and you are something; you've used your faculties and you've developed your character. You've not abruti yourself with debauchery, and you've not mortgaged your fortune to social conveniencies. You take things as it suits you, and you've fewer prejudices even than I, who pretend to have none, but who in reality have three or four that stand in my way. Happy man, you're strong and you're free—nothing stands in yours. But what the deuce," he wound up, "do you propose to do with such advantages? Really to use them you need a better world than this. There's nothing worth your while here."
"Oh, I guess there's something," Newman said.
"What is it?"
"Well," he sighed, "I'll tell you some other time!"
In this way he delayed from day to day broaching a subject he had greatly at heart. Meanwhile, however, he was growing practically familiar with it; in other words he had called again, three times, on Madame de Cintré. On but two of these occasions had he found her at home and on each of them she had other visitors. Her visitors were numerous and, to our hero's sense, vociferous, and they exacted much of their hostess's attention. She found time none the less to bestow a little of it on the stranger, a quantity represented in an occasional vague smile—the very vagueness of which pleased him by allowing him to fill it out mentally, both at the time and afterwards, with such meanings as most fitted. He sat by without speaking, looking at the entrances and exits, the greetings and chatterings, of Madame de Cintré's guests. He felt as if he were at the play and as if his own speaking would be an interruption; sometimes he wished he had a book to follow the dialogue; he half expected to see a woman in a white cap and pink ribbons come and offer him one for two francs. Some of the ladies gave him a very hard or a very soft stare, as he chose; others seemed profoundly unconscious of his presence. The men looked only at the mistress of the scene. This was inevitable, for whether one called her beautiful or not she entirely occupied and filled one's vision, quite as an ample, agreeable sound filled one's ear. Newman carried away after no more than twenty distinct words with her an impression to which solemn promises could not have given a higher value. She was part of the play he was seeing acted, as much a part of it as her companions, but how she filled the stage and how she bore watching, not to say studying and throwing bouquets to! Whether she rose or seated herself; whether she went with her departing friends to the door and lifted up the heavy curtain as they passed out and stood an instant looking after them and giving them the last nod; or whether she leaned back in her chair with her arms crossed and her eyes quiet, her face listening and smiling, she made this particular guest desire to have her always before him, moving through every social office open to the genius of woman, or in other words through the whole range of exquisite hospitality. If it might be hospitality to him it would be well; if it might be hospitality for him it would be still better. She was so high yet so slight, so active yet so still, so elegant yet so simple, so present yet so withdrawn! It was this unknown quantity that figured for him as a mystery; it was what she was off the stage, as he might feel, that interested him most of all. He could not have told you what warrant he had for talking of mysteries; if it had been his habit to express himself in poetic figures he might have said that in observing her he seemed to see the vague circle sometimes attending the partly-filled disc of the moon. It was not that she was effaced, and still less that she was "shy"; she was, on the contrary, as distinct as the big figure on a banknote and of as straightforward a profession. But he was sure she had qualities as yet unguessed even by herself and that it was kept for Christopher Newman to bring out.
He had abstained for several reasons from saying some of these things to her brother. One reason was that before proceeding to any act he was always circumspect, conjectural, contemplative; he had little eagerness, as became a man who felt that whenever he really began to move he walked with long steps. And then it just pleased, it occupied and excited him, not to give his case, as he would have said, prematurely away. But one day Valentine—as Newman conveniently sounded the name—had been dining with him on the boulevard and their sociability was such that they had sat long over their dinner. On rising from it the young man proposed that, to help them through the rest of the evening, they should go and see Madame Dandelard. Madame Dandelard was a little Italian lady married to a Frenchman who had proved a rake and a brute and the torment of her life. Her husband had spent all her money and then, lacking further means for alien joys, had taken, in his more intimate hours, to beating her. She had a blue spot somewhere which she showed to several persons, including the said Valentine. She had obtained a legal separation, collected the scraps of her fortune, which were meagre, and come to live in Paris, where she was staying at an hôtel garni. She was always looking for an apartment and visiting, with a hundred earnest questions and measurements, those of other people. She was very pretty and childlike and made very extraordinary remarks. Valentin enjoyed her acquaintance, and the source of his interest in her was, according to his declaration, an anxious curiosity as to what would become of her. "She's poor, she's pretty and she's silly," he said; "it seems to me she can go only one way. It's a pity, but it can't be helped. I 'll give her six months. She has nothing to fear from me, but I'm watching the process. It's merely a question of the how and the when and the where. Yes, I know what you're going to say; this horrible Paris hardens one's heart. But it quickens one's wits, and it ends by teaching one a refinement of observation. To see this little woman's little drama play itself out is now for me a pleasure of the mind."
"If she's going to throw herself away," Newman had said, "you ought to stop her."
"Stop her? How stop her?"
"Talk to her; give her some good advice."
At which the young man laughed. "'Some?' How much? Heaven deliver us both! Imagine the situation. Try giving her yourself exactly the right amount."
After which it was that Newman had gone with him to see Madame Dandelard. When they came away Valentin reproached his companion. "Where was your famous advice? I did n't hear a word of it."
"Oh, I give it up," Newman simply answered.
"Then you're as bad as I!"
"No, because I don't find it a pleasure of the mind to watch her prospective adventures. I don't in the least want to see her going down hill. I had rather look the other way. But why," our friend asked in a moment, "don't you get your sister to go and see her?"
His companion stared. "Go and see Madame Dandelard—my sister?"
"She might talk to her to very good purpose."
Valentin shook his head with sudden gravity. "My sister does n't have relations with that sort of person. Madame Dandelard's nothing at all; they d never meet."
"I should think," Newman returned, "that Madame de Cintré might see whom she pleased." And he privately resolved that, after he should know her a little better, he would ask her to go and pick up, for such "pressing" as might be possible, the little spotted blown leaf in the dusty Parisian alley. When they had dined, at all events, on the occasion I have mentioned, he demurred to the latter's proposal that they should go again and "draw" the lady on the subject of her bruises. "I've something better in mind; come home with me and finish the evening before my fire."
Valentin always rose to any implied appeal to his expository gift, and before long the two men sat watching the blaze play over the pomp of Newman's high saloon.