get on with her; it always was
easy to get on with out-and-out rascals.
    »And is it by that elegant term,« said Mrs. Tristram, »that you designate
the Marquise de Bellegarde?«
    »Well,« said Newman, »she is wicked, she is an old sinner.«
    »What is her crime?« asked Mrs. Tristram.
    »I shouldn't wonder if she had murdered some one - all from a sense of duty,
of course.«
    »How can you be so dreadful?« sighed Mrs. Tristram.
    »I am not dreadful. I am speaking of her favourably.«
    »Pray what will you say when you want to be severe?«
    »I shall keep my severity for someone else - for the marquis. There's a man
I can't swallow, mix the drink as I will.«
    »And what has he done?«
    »I can't quite make out; it is something dreadfully bad, something mean and
underhand, and not redeemed by audacity, as his mother's misdemeanours may have
been. If he has never committed murder, he has at least turned his back and
looked the other way while someone else was committing it.«
    In spite of this invidious hypothesis, which must be taken for nothing more
than an example of the capricious play of American humour, Newman did his best
to maintain an easy and friendly style of communication with M. de Bellegarde.
So long as he was in personal contact with people, he disliked extremely to have
anything to forgive them, and he was capable of a good deal of unsuspected
imaginative effort (for the sake of his own personal comfort) to assume for the
time that they were good fellows. He did his best to treat the marquis as one;
he believed honestly, moreover, that he could not, in reason, be such a
confounded fool as he seemed. Newman's familiarity was never importunate; his
sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory, but
something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put
on a scanty allowance, and consequently was innocent of ungraceful eagerness.
His tranquil unsuspectingness of the relativity of his own place in the social
scale was probably irritating to M. de Bellegarde, who saw himself reflected in
the mind of his potential brother-in-law in a crude and colourless form,
unpleasantly dissimilar to the impressive image projected upon his own
intellectual mirror. He never forgot himself for an instant, and replied to what
he