 reason why you shouldn't have them if you
will mind what I tell you - I alone - and not talk to other parties.« He passed
his arm into that of his companion, and the two walked for some time up and down
one of the less frequented corridors. Newman's imagination began to glow with
the idea of converting his bright, impracticable friend into a first-class man
of business. He felt for the moment a sort of spiritual zeal, the zeal of the
propagandist. Its ardour was in part the result of that general discomfort which
the sight of all uninvested capital produced in him; so fine an intelligence as
Bellegarde's ought to be dedicated to high uses. The highest uses known to
Newman's experience were certain transcendent sagacities in the handling of
railway stock. And then his zeal was quickened by his personal kindness for
Valentin; he had a sort of pity for him which he was well aware he never could
have made the Comte de Bellegarde understand. He never lost a sense of its being
pitiable that Valentin should think it a large life to revolve in varnished
boots between the Rue d'Anjou and the Rue de l'Université, taking the Boulevard
des Italiens on the way, when over there in America one's promenade was a
continent, and one's boulevard stretched from New York to San Francisco. It
mortified him, moreover, to think that Valentin lacked money; there was a
painful grotesqueness in it. It affected him as the ignorance of a companion,
otherwise without reproach, touching some rudimentary branch of learning would
have done. There were things that one knew about as a matter of course, he would
have said in such a case. Just so, if one pretended to be easy in the world, one
had money as a matter of course; one had made it! There was something almost
ridiculously anomalous to Newman in the sight of lively pretensions
unaccompanied by large investments in railroads; though I may add that he would
not have maintained that such investments were in themselves a proper ground for
pretensions. »I will make you do something,« he said to Valentin; »I will put
you through. I know half-a-dozen things in which we can make a place for you.
You will see some lively work. It will take you a little while to get used to
the life, but you will work in before long, and at the end of six months - after
you have done a thing or two on your own account - you will like it. And then it
will be
