may
therefore be understood that he was able to conceive that a man might be
too commercial. He was very willing to grant it, but the concession, as
to his own case, was not made with any very oppressive sense of shame.
If he had been too commercial, he was ready to forget it, for in being
so he had done no man any wrong that might not be as easily forgotten.
He reflected with sober placidity that at least there were no monuments
of his "meanness" scattered about the world. If there was any reason in
the nature of things why his connection with business should have cast a
shadow upon a connection--even a connection broken--with a woman justly
proud, he was willing to sponge it out of his life forever. The thing
seemed a possibility; he could not feel it, doubtless, as keenly as some
people, and it hardly seemed worth while to flap his wings very hard to
rise to the idea; but he could feel it enough to make any sacrifice that
still remained to be made. As to what such sacrifice was now to be
made to, here Newman stopped short before a blank wall over which there
sometimes played a shadowy imagery. He had a fancy of carrying out his
life as he would have directed it if Madame de Cintre had been left to
him--of making it a religion to do nothing that she would have disliked.
In this, certainly, there was no sacrifice; but there was a pale,
oblique ray of inspiration. It would be lonely entertainment--a good
deal like a man talking to himself in the mirror for want of better
company. Yet the idea yielded Newman several half hours' dumb exaltation
as he sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched,
over the relics of an expensively poor dinner, in the undying English
twilight. If, however, his commercial imagination was dead, he felt no
contempt for the surviving actualities begotten by it. He was glad he
had been prosperous and had been a great man of business rather than a
small one; he was extremely glad he was rich. He felt no impulse to sell
all he had and give to the poor, or to retire into meditative economy
and asceticism. He was glad he was rich and tolerably young; it was
possible to think too much about buying and selling, it was a gain to
have a good slice of life left in which not to think about them. Come,
what should he think about now? Again and again Newman could think only
of one thing; his thoughts always came back to it, and as they did so,
with an emotional rush which seemed physically to expr