impressions from everything he saw.  But nevertheless in his secret soul he detested Europe, and he felt an irritating need to protest against Newman’s gross intellectual hospitality.  Mr. Babcock’s moral malaise, I am afraid, lay deeper than where any definition of mine can reach it.  He mistrusted the European temperament, he suffered from the European climate, he hated the European dinner-hour; European life seemed to him unscrupulous and impure.  And yet he had an exquisite sense of beauty; and as beauty was often inextricably associated with the above displeasing conditions, as he wished, above all, to be just and dispassionate, and as he was, furthermore, extremely devoted to “culture,” he could not bring himself to decide that Europe was utterly bad.  But he thought it was very bad indeed, and his quarrel with Newman was that this unregulated epicure had a sadly insufficient perception of the bad.  Babcock himself really knew as little about the bad, in any quarter of the world, as a nursing infant, his most vivid realization of evil had been the discovery that one of his college classmates, who was studying architecture in Paris had a love affair with a young woman who did not expect him to marry her.  Babcock had related this incident to Newman, and our hero had applied an epithet of an unflattering sort to the young girl.  The next day his companion asked him whether he was very sure he had used exactly the right word to characterize the young architect’s mistress.  Newman stared and laughed.  “There are a great many words to express that idea,” he said; “you can take your choice!”

“Oh, I mean,” said Babcock, “was she possibly not to be considered in a different light?  Don’t you think she really expected him to marry her?”

“I am sure I don’t know,” said Newman.  “Very likely she did; I have no doubt she is a grand woman.”  And he began to laugh again.

“I didn’t mean that either,” said Babcock, “I was only afraid that I might have seemed yesterday not to remember—­not to consider; well, I think I will write to Percival about it.”

And he had written to Percival (who answered him in a really impudent fashion), and he had reflected that it was somehow, raw and reckless in Newman to assume in that off-hand manner that the young woman in Paris might be “grand.”  The brevity of Newman’s judgments very often shocked and discomposed him.  He had a way of damning people without farther appeal, or of pronouncing them capital company in the face of uncomfortable symptoms, which seemed unworthy of a man whose conscience had been properly cultivated.  And yet poor Babcock liked him, and remembered that even if he was sometimes perplexing and painful, this was not a reason for giving him up.  Goethe recommended seeing human nature in the most various forms, and Mr. Babcock thought Goethe perfectly splendid.  He often tried, in odd half-hours of conversation to infuse into Newman a little of his own spiritual