“I do nothing!  I am supposed to amuse myself, and, to tell the truth, I have amused myself.  One can, if one knows how.  But you can’t keep it up forever.  I am good for another five years, perhaps, but I foresee that after that I shall lose my appetite.  Then what shall I do?  I think I shall turn monk.  Seriously, I think I shall tie a rope round my waist and go into a monastery.  It was an old custom, and the old customs were very good.  People understood life quite as well as we do.  They kept the pot boiling till it cracked, and then they put it on the shelf altogether.”

“Are you very religious?” asked Newman, in a tone which gave the inquiry a grotesque effect.

M. de Bellegarde evidently appreciated the comical element in the question, but he looked at Newman a moment with extreme soberness.  “I am a very good Catholic.  I respect the Church.  I adore the blessed Virgin.  I fear the Devil.”

“Well, then,” said Newman, “you are very well fixed.  You have got pleasure in the present and religion in the future; what do you complain of?”

“It’s a part of one’s pleasure to complain.  There is something in your own circumstances that irritates me.  You are the first man I have ever envied.  It’s singular, but so it is.  I have known many men who, besides any factitious advantages that I may possess, had money and brains into the bargain; but somehow they have never disturbed my good-humor.  But you have got something that I should have liked to have.  It is not money, it is not even brains—­though no doubt yours are excellent.  It is not your six feet of height, though I should have rather liked to be a couple of inches taller.  It’s a sort of air you have of being thoroughly at home in the world.  When I was a boy, my father told me that it was by such an air as that that people recognized a Bellegarde.  He called my attention to it.  He didn’t advise me to cultivate it; he said that as we grew up it always came of itself.  I supposed it had come to me, because I think I have always had the feeling.  My place in life was made for me, and it seemed easy to occupy it.  But you who, as I understand it, have made your own place, you who, as you told us the other day, have manufactured wash-tubs—­you strike me, somehow, as a man who stands at his ease, who looks at things from a height.  I fancy you going about the world like a man traveling on a railroad in which he owns a large amount of stock.  You make me feel as if I had missed something.  What is it?”

“It is the proud consciousness of honest toil—­of having manufactured a few wash-tubs,” said Newman, at once jocose and serious.

“Oh no; I have seen men who had done even more, men who had made not only wash-tubs, but soap—­strong-smelling yellow soap, in great bars; and they never made me the least uncomfortable.”

“Then it’s the privilege of being an American citizen,” said Newman.  “That sets a man up.”