o get on with her; it always was easy to get on with out-and-out
rascals.

"And is it by that elegant term," said Mrs. Tristram, "that you
designate the Marquise de Bellegarde?"

"Well," said Newman, "she is wicked, she is an old sinner."

"What is her crime?" asked Mrs. Tristram.

"I shouldn't wonder if she had murdered some one--all from a sense of
duty, of course."

"How can you be so dreadful?" sighed Mrs. Tristram.

"I am not dreadful. I am speaking of her favorably."

"Pray what will you say when you want to be severe?"

"I shall keep my severity for some one else--for the marquis. There's a
man I can't swallow, mix the drink as I will."

"And what has HE done?"

"I can't quite make out; it is something dreadfully bad, something
mean and underhand, and not redeemed by audacity, as his mother's
misdemeanors may have been. If he has never committed murder, he has at
least turned his back and looked the other way while some one else was
committing it."

In spite of this invidious hypothesis, which must be taken for nothing
more than an example of the capricious play of "American humor," Newman
did his best to maintain an easy and friendly style of communication
with M. de Bellegarde. So long as he was in personal contact with people
he disliked extremely to have anything to forgive them, and he was
capable of a good deal of unsuspected imaginative effort (for the sake
of his own personal comfort) to assume for the time that they were
good fellows. He did his best to treat the marquis as one; he believed
honestly, moreover, that he could not, in reason, be such a confounded
fool as he seemed. Newman's familiarity was never importunate; his sense
of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory,
but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had
never been put on a scanty allowance and consequently was innocent of
ungraceful eagerness. His tranquil unsuspectingness of the relativity
of his own place in the social scale was probably irritating to M.
de Bellegarde, who saw himself reflected in the mind of his potential
brother-in-law in a crude and colorless form, unpleasantly dissimilar
to the impressive image projected upon his own intellectual mirror. He
never forgot himself for an instant, and replied to what he must have
considered Newman's "advances" with mechanical politeness. Newman, who
was constantly forgetting himself, and indulging in an unlimited amount
of