, was enough to occupy comfortably a young man of ordinary good
parts. But all that he was he was by instinct and not by theory, and the
amiability of his character was so great that certain of the aristocratic
virtues, which in some aspects seem rather brittle and trenchant, acquired in
his application of them an extreme geniality. In his younger years he had been
suspected of low tastes, and his mother had greatly feared he would make a slip
in the mud of the highway and bespatter the family shield. He had been treated,
therefore, to more than his share of schooling and drilling, but his instructors
had not succeeded in mounting him upon stilts. They could not spoil his safe
spontaneity, and he remained the least cautious and the most lucky of young
nobles. He had been tied with so short a rope in his youth that he had now a
mortal grudge against family discipline. He had been known to say, within the
limits of the family, that, lightheaded as he was, the honour of the name was
safer in his hands than in those of some of its other members, and that if a day
ever came to try it, they should see. His talk was an odd mixture of almost
boyish garrulity and of the reserve and discretion of the man of the world, and
he seemed to Newman, as afterwards young members of the Latin races often seemed
to him, now amusingly juvenile and now appallingly mature. In America, Newman
reflected, lads of twenty-five and thirty have old heads and young hearts, or at
least young morals; here they have young heads and very aged hearts, morals the
most grizzled and wrinkled.
    »What I envy you is your liberty,« observed M. de Bellegarde, »your wide
range, your freedom to come and go, your not having a lot of people, who take
themselves awfully seriously, expecting something of you. I live,« he added with
a sigh, »beneath the eyes of my admirable mother.«
    »It is your own fault; what is to hinder you ranging?« said Newman.
    »There is a delightful simplicity in that remark! Everything is to hinder
me. To begin with, I have not a penny.«
    »I had not a penny when I began to range.«
    »Ah, but your poverty was your capital. Being an American, it was impossible
you should remain what you were born, and being born poor - do I understand it?
- it was therefore inevitable that you should become rich. You were in a
position that makes