turning to Newman, with sustained urbanity, "You are
traveling for your pleasure?" he asked.'

"Oh, I am knocking about to pick up one thing and another. Of course I
get a good deal of pleasure out of it."

"What especially interests you?" inquired the marquis.

"Well, everything interests me," said Newman. "I am not particular.
Manufactures are what I care most about."

"That has been your specialty?"

"I can't say I have any specialty. My specialty has been to make the
largest possible fortune in the shortest possible time." Newman made
this last remark very deliberately; he wished to open the way, if it
were necessary, to an authoritative statement of his means.

M. de Bellegarde laughed agreeably. "I hope you have succeeded," he
said.

"Yes, I have made a fortune in a reasonable time. I am not so old, you
see."

"Paris is a very good place to spend a fortune. I wish you great
enjoyment of yours." And M. de Bellegarde drew forth his gloves and
began to put them on.

Newman for a few moments watched him sliding his white hands into the
white kid, and as he did so his feelings took a singular turn. M. de
Bellegarde's good wishes seemed to descend out of the white expanse of
his sublime serenity with the soft, scattered movement of a shower of
snow-flakes. Yet Newman was not irritated; he did not feel that he was
being patronized; he was conscious of no especial impulse to introduce
a discord into so noble a harmony. Only he felt himself suddenly in
personal contact with the forces with which his friend Valentin had
told him that he would have to contend, and he became sensible of their
intensity. He wished to make some answering manifestation, to stretch
himself out at his own length, to sound a note at the uttermost end
of HIS scale. It must be added that if this impulse was not vicious or
malicious, it was by no means void of humorous expectancy. Newman was
quite as ready to give play to that loosely-adjusted smile of his, if
his hosts should happen to be shocked, as he was far from deliberately
planning to shock them.

"Paris is a very good place for idle people," he said, "or it is a very
good place if your family has been settled here for a long time, and you
have made acquaintances and got your relations round you; or if you have
got a good big house like this, and a wife and children and mother and
sister, and everything comfortable. I don't like that way of living all
in rooms next door to each ot