He often passed his evenings, when Madame de Cintre had so appointed it, at the chilly fireside of Madame de Bellegarde, contenting himself with looking across the room, through narrowed eyelids, at his mistress, who always made a point, before her family, of talking to some one else.  Madame de Bellegarde sat by the fire conversing neatly and coldly with whomsoever approached her, and glancing round the room with her slowly-restless eye, the effect of which, when it lighted upon him, was to Newman’s sense identical with that of a sudden spurt of damp air.  When he shook hands with her he always asked her with a laugh whether she could “stand him” another evening, and she replied, without a laugh, that thank God she had always been able to do her duty.  Newman, talking once of the marquise to Mrs. Tristram, said that after all it was very easy to 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