em rather
brittle and trenchant, acquired in his application of them an extreme
geniality. In his younger years he had been suspected of low tastes,
and his mother had greatly feared he would make a slip in the mud of the
highway and bespatter the family shield. He had been treated, therefore,
to more than his share of schooling and drilling, but his instructors
had not succeeded in mounting him upon stilts. They could not spoil his
safe spontaneity, and he remained the least cautious and the most lucky
of young nobles. He had been tied with so short a rope in his youth that
he had now a mortal grudge against family discipline. He had been known
to say, within the limits of the family, that, light-headed as he was,
the honor of the name was safer in his hands than in those of some of
it's other members, and that if a day ever came to try it, they should
see. His talk was an odd mixture of almost boyish garrulity and of the
reserve and discretion of the man of the world, and he seemed to Newman,
as afterwards young members of the Latin races often seemed to him,
now amusingly juvenile and now appallingly mature. In America, Newman
reflected, lads of twenty-five and thirty have old heads and young
hearts, or at least young morals; here they have young heads and very
aged hearts, morals the most grizzled and wrinkled.

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

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

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

"I had not a penny when I began to range."

"Ah, but your poverty was your capital. Being an American, it was
impossible you should remain what you were born, and being born poor--do
I understand it?--it was therefore inevitable that you should become
rich. You were in a position that makes one's mouth water; you looked
round you and saw a world full of things you had only to step up to and
take hold of. When I was twenty, I looked around me and saw a world with
everything ticketed 'Hands off!' and the deuce of it was that the ticket
seemed meant only for me. I couldn't go into business, I couldn't make
money, because I was a Bellegarde. I coul