“Possibly,” rejoined M. de Bellegarde.  “But I am forced to say that I have seen a great many American citizens who didn’t seem at all set up or in the least like large stock-holders.  I never envied them.  I rather think the thing is an accomplishment of your own.”

“Oh, come,” said Newman, “you will make me proud!”

“No, I shall not.  You have nothing to do with pride, or with humility—­that is a part of this easy manner of yours.  People are proud only when they have something to lose, and humble when they have something to gain.”

“I don’t know what I have to lose,” said Newman, “but I certainly have something to gain.”

“What is it?” asked his visitor.

Newman hesitated a while.  “I will tell you when I know you better.”

“I hope that will be soon!  Then, if I can help you to gain it, I shall be happy.”

“Perhaps you may,” said Newman.

“Don’t forget, then, that I am your servant,” M. de Bellegarde answered; and shortly afterwards he took his departure.

During the next three weeks Newman saw Bellegarde several times, and without formally swearing an eternal friendship the two men established a sort of comradeship.  To Newman, Bellegarde was the ideal Frenchman, the Frenchman of tradition and romance, so far as our hero was concerned with these mystical influences.  Gallant, expansive, amusing, more pleased himself with the effect he produced than those (even when they were well pleased) for whom he produced it; a master of all the distinctively social virtues and a votary of all agreeable sensations; a devotee of something mysterious and sacred to which he occasionally alluded in terms more ecstatic even than those in which he spoke of the last pretty woman, and which was simply the beautiful though somewhat superannuated image of honor; he was irresistibly entertaining and enlivening, and he formed a character to which Newman was as capable of doing justice when he had once been placed in contact with it, as he was unlikely, in musing upon the possible mixtures of our human ingredients, mentally to have foreshadowed it.  Bellegarde did not in the least cause him to modify his needful premise that all Frenchmen are of a frothy and imponderable substance; he simply reminded him that light materials may be beaten up into a most agreeable compound.  No two companions could be more different, but their differences made a capital basis for a friendship of which the distinctive characteristic was that it was extremely amusing to each.

Valentin de Bellegarde lived in the basement of an old house in the Rue d’Anjou St. Honore, and his small apartments lay between the court of the house and an old garden which spread itself behind it—­one of those large, sunless humid gardens into which you look unexpectingly in Paris from back windows, wondering how among the grudging habitations they find their space.  When Newman returned Bellegarde’s