rom everything he saw. But nevertheless in his secret soul
he detested Europe, and he felt an irritating need to protest against
Newman's gross intellectual hospitality. Mr. Babcock's moral malaise, I
am afraid, lay deeper than where any definition of mine can reach it.
He mistrusted the European temperament, he suffered from the European
climate, he hated the European dinner-hour; European life seemed to him
unscrupulous and impure. And yet he had an exquisite sense of beauty;
and as beauty was often inextricably associated with the above
displeasing conditions, as he wished, above all, to be just and
dispassionate, and as he was, furthermore, extremely devoted to
"culture," he could not bring himself to decide that Europe was utterly
bad. But he thought it was very bad indeed, and his quarrel with Newman
was that this unregulated epicure had a sadly insufficient perception
of the bad. Babcock himself really knew as little about the bad, in any
quarter of the world, as a nursing infant, his most vivid realization of
evil had been the discovery that one of his college classmates, who was
studying architecture in Paris had a love affair with a young woman who
did not expect him to marry her. Babcock had related this incident to
Newman, and our hero had applied an epithet of an unflattering sort to
the young girl. The next day his companion asked him whether he was
very sure he had used exactly the right word to characterize the young
architect's mistress. Newman stared and laughed. "There are a great many
words to express that idea," he said; "you can take your choice!"

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

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

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

And he had written to Percival (who answered him in a really impudent
fashion), and he had reflected that it was somehow, raw and reckless in
Newman to assume in that off-hand manner that the young woman in Paris
might be "grand." The brevity of Newman's judgments very often shocked
and discomposed him. He had a way of damning people without farther
appeal, or of pronouncing them capital company in the f