, and after their first meeting he passed a great many hours in
her drawing-room. After two or three talks, they were fast friends. Newman's
manner with women was peculiar, and it required some ingenuity on a lady's part
to discover that he admired her. He had no gallantry, in the usual sense of the
term; no compliments, no graces, no speeches. Very fond of what is called
chaffing, in his dealings with men, he never found himself on a sofa beside a
member of the softer sex without feeling extremely serious. He was not shy, and,
so far as awkwardness proceeds from a struggle with shyness, he was not awkward;
grave, attentive, submissive, often silent, he was simply swimming in a sort of
rapture of respect. This emotion was not at all theoretic, it was not even in a
high degree sentimental; he had thought very little about the position of women,
and he was not familiar, either sympathetically or otherwise, with the image of
a President in petticoats. His attitude was simply the flower of his general
good-nature, and a part of his instinctive and genuinely democratic assumption
of everyone's right to lead an easy life. If a shaggy pauper had a right to bed
and board and wages and a vote, women, of course, who were weaker than paupers,
and whose physical tissue was in itself an appeal, should be maintained,
sentimentally, at the public expense. Newman was willing to be taxed for this
purpose, largely, in proportion to his means. Moreover, many of the common
traditions with regard to women were with him fresh personal impressions; he had
never read a novel! He had been struck with their acuteness, their subtlety,
their tact, their felicity of judgment. They seemed to him exquisitely
organised. If it is true that one must always have in one's work here below a
religion, or at least an ideal, of some sort, Newman found his metaphysical
inspiration in a vague acceptance of final responsibility to some illumined
feminine brow.
    He spent a great deal of time in listening to advice from Mrs. Tristram;
advice, it must be added, for which he had never asked. He would have been
incapable of asking for it, for he had no perception of difficulties, and
consequently no curiosity about remedies. The complex Parisian world about him
seemed a very simple affair; it was an immense, amazing spectacle, but it
neither inflamed his imagination nor irritated his curiosity. He kept his hands
in his pockets, looked on good