If he had known how things were going to turn out, he never would have brought him to the Avenue d’Iena.  The two men, formerly, had not been intimate, but Newman remembered his earlier impression of his host, and did Mrs. Tristram, who had by no means taken him into her confidence, but whose secret he presently discovered, the justice to admit that her husband was a rather degenerate mortal.  At twenty-five he had been a good fellow, and in this respect he was unchanged; but of a man of his age one expected something more.  People said he was sociable, but this was as much a matter of course as for a dipped sponge to expand; and it was not a high order of sociability.  He was a great gossip and tattler, and to produce a laugh would hardly have spared the reputation of his aged mother.  Newman had a kindness for old memories, but he found it impossible not to perceive that Tristram was nowadays a very light weight.  His only aspirations were to hold out at poker, at his club, to know the names of all the cocottes, to shake hands all round, to ply his rosy gullet with truffles and champagne, and to create uncomfortable eddies and obstructions among the constituent atoms of the American colony.  He was shamefully idle, spiritless, sensual, snobbish.  He irritated our friend by the tone of his allusions to their native country, and Newman was at a loss to understand why the United States were not good enough for Mr. Tristram.  He had never been a very conscious patriot, but it vexed him to see them treated as little better than a vulgar smell in his friend’s nostrils, and he finally broke out and swore that they were the greatest country in the world, that they could put all Europe into their breeches’ pockets, and that an American who spoke ill of them ought to be carried home in irons and compelled to live in Boston. (This, for Newman was putting it very vindictively.) Tristram was a comfortable man to snub, he bore no malice, and he continued to insist on Newman’s finishing his evening at the Occidental Club.

Christopher Newman dined several times in the Avenue d’Iena, and his host always proposed an early adjournment to this institution.  Mrs. Tristram protested, and declared that her husband exhausted his ingenuity in trying to displease her.

“Oh no, I never try, my love,” he answered.  “I know you loathe me quite enough when I take my chance.”

Newman hated to see a husband and wife on these terms, and he was sure one or other of them must be very unhappy.  He knew it was not Tristram.  Mrs. Tristram had a balcony before her windows, upon which, during the June evenings, she was fond of sitting, and Newman used frankly to say that he preferred the balcony to the club.  It had a fringe of perfumed plants in tubs, and enabled you to look up the broad street and see the Arch of Triumph vaguely massing its heroic sculptures in the summer starlight.  Sometimes Newman kept his promise of following Mr. Tristram, in half an hour, to the Occidental, and