He leaned forward, laying his hand on Newman’s arm compressing his lips and shaking his head.  “The fact is my dear fellow, you see, that you ought never to have gone into it.  It was not your doing, I know—­it was all my wife.  If you want to come down on her, I’ll stand off; I give you leave to hit her as hard as you like.  You know she has never had a word of reproach from me in her life, and I think she is in need of something of the kind.  Why didn’t you listen to me?  You know I didn’t believe in the thing.  I thought it at the best an amiable delusion.  I don’t profess to be a Don Juan or a gay Lothario,—­that class of man, you know; but I do pretend to know something about the harder sex.  I have never disliked a woman in my life that she has not turned out badly.  I was not at all deceived in Lizzie, for instance; I always had my doubts about her.  Whatever you may think of my present situation, I must at least admit that I got into it with my eyes open.  Now suppose you had got into something like this box with Madame de Cintre.  You may depend upon it she would have turned out a stiff one.  And upon my word I don’t see where you could have found your comfort.  Not from the marquis, my dear Newman; he wasn’t a man you could go and talk things over with in a sociable, common-sense way.  Did he ever seem to want to have you on the premises—­did he ever try to see you alone?  Did he ever ask you to come and smoke a cigar with him of an evening, or step in, when you had been calling on the ladies, and take something?  I don’t think you would have got much encouragement out of him.  And as for the old lady, she struck one as an uncommonly strong dose.  They have a great expression here, you know; they call it ‘sympathetic.’  Everything is sympathetic—­or ought to be.  Now Madame de Bellegarde is about as sympathetic as that mustard-pot.  They’re a d—­d cold-blooded lot, any way; I felt it awfully at that ball of theirs.  I felt as if I were walking up and down in the Armory, in the Tower of London!  My dear boy, don’t think me a vulgar brute for hinting at it, but you may depend upon it, all they wanted was your money.  I know something about that; I can tell when people want one’s money!  Why they stopped wanting yours I don’t know; I suppose because they could get some one else’s without working so hard for it.  It isn’t worth finding out.  It may be that it was not Madame de Cintre that backed out first, very likely the old woman put her up to it.  I suspect she and her mother are really as thick as thieves, eh?  You are well out of it, my boy; make up your mind to that.  If I express myself strongly it is all because I love you so much; and from that point of view I may say I should as soon have thought of making up to that piece of pale high-mightiness as I should have thought of making up to the Obelisk in the Place des la Concorde.”

Newman sat gazing at Tristram during this harangue with a lack-lustre eye; never yet had he seemed to himself to have outgrown so completely the phase of equal comradeship with Tom Tristram.  Mrs. Tristram’s glance at her husband had more of a spark; she turned to Newman with a slightly lurid smile.  “You must at least do justice,” she said, “to the felicity with which Mr. Tristram repairs the indiscretions of a too zealous wife.”