“I don’t know what you mean,” the young man went on “by giving me unlimited leave to laugh.  Certainly I am a great laugher, and it is better to laugh too much than too little.  But it is not in order that we may laugh together—­or separately—­that I have, I may say, sought your acquaintance.  To speak with almost impudent frankness, you interest me!” All this was uttered by M. de Bellegarde with the modulated smoothness of the man of the world, and in spite of his excellent English, of the Frenchman; but Newman, at the same time that he sat noting its harmonious flow, perceived that it was not mere mechanical urbanity.  Decidedly, there was something in his visitor that he liked.  M. de Bellegarde was a foreigner to his finger-tips, and if Newman had met him on a Western prairie he would have felt it proper to address him with a “How-d’ye-do, Mosseer?” But there was something in his physiognomy which seemed to cast a sort of aerial bridge over the impassable gulf produced by difference of race.  He was below the middle height, and robust and agile in figure.  Valentin de Bellegarde, Newman afterwards learned, had a mortal dread of the robustness overtaking the agility; he was afraid of growing stout; he was too short, as he said, to afford a belly.  He rode and fenced and practiced gymnastics with unremitting zeal, and if you greeted him with a “How well you are looking” he started and turned pale.  In your well he read a grosser monosyllable.  He had a round head, high above the ears, a crop of hair at once dense and silky, a broad, low forehead, a short nose, of the ironical and inquiring rather than of the dogmatic or sensitive cast, and a mustache as delicate as that of a page in a romance.  He resembled his sister not in feature, but in the expression of his clear, bright eye, completely void of introspection, and in the way he smiled.  The great point in his face was that it was intensely alive—­frankly, ardently, gallantly alive.  The look of it was like a bell, of which the handle might have been in the young man’s soul:  at a touch of the handle it rang with a loud, silver sound.  There was something in his quick, light brown eye which assured you that he was not economizing his consciousness.  He was not living in a corner of it to spare the furniture of the rest.  He was squarely encamped in the centre and he was keeping open house.  When he smiled, it was like the movement of a person who in emptying a cup turns it upside down:  he gave you the last drop of his jollity.  He inspired Newman with something of the same kindness that our hero used to feel in his earlier years for those of his companions who could perform strange and clever tricks—­make their joints crack in queer places or whistle at the back of their mouths.

“My sister told me,” M. de Bellegarde continued, “that I ought to come and remove the impression that I had taken such great pains to produce upon you; the impression that I am a lunatic.  Did it strike you that I behaved very oddly the other day?”