he fell into a rather reflective mood.  Without in the least intending it or knowing it, he attempted to read the moral of his strange misadventure.  He asked himself, in his quieter hours, whether perhaps, after all, he was more commercial than was pleasant.  We know that it was in obedience to a strong reaction against questions exclusively commercial that he had come out to pick up aesthetic entertainment in Europe; it 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 express itself in a sudden upward choking, he leaned forward—­the waiter having left the room—­and, resting his arms on the table, buried his troubled face.