第11章

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.