When Newman related to Mrs. Tristram his fruitless visit to Madame de
Cintré, she urged him not to be discouraged, but to carry out his plan
of “seeing Europe” during the summer, and return to Paris in the autumn
and settle down comfortably for the winter. “Madame de Cintré will
keep,” she said; “she is not a woman who will marry from one day to
another.” Newman made no distinct affirmation that he would come back
to Paris; he even talked about Rome and the Nile, and abstained from
professing any especial interest in Madame de Cintré’s continued
widowhood. This circumstance was at variance with his habitual
frankness, and may perhaps be regarded as characteristic of the
incipient stage of that passion which is more particularly known as the
mysterious one. The truth is that the expression of a pair of eyes that
were at once brilliant and mild had become very familiar to his memory,
and he would not easily have resigned himself to the prospect of never
looking into them again. He communicated to Mrs. Tristram a number of
other facts, of greater or less importance, as you choose; but on this
particular point he kept his own counsel. He took a kindly leave of M.
Nioche, having assured him that, so far as he was concerned, the
blue-cloaked Madonna herself might have been present at his interview
with Mademoiselle Noémie; and left the old man nursing his
breast-pocket, in an ecstasy which the acutest misfortune might have
been defied to dissipate. Newman then started on his travels, with all
his usual appearance of slow-strolling leisure, and all his essential
directness and intensity of aim. No man seemed less in a hurry, and yet
no man achieved more in brief periods. He had certain practical
instincts which served him excellently in his trade of tourist. He
found his way in foreign cities by divination, his memory was excellent
when once his attention had been at all cordially given, and he emerged
from dialogues in foreign tongues, of which he had, formally, not
understood a word, in full possession of the particular fact he had
desired to ascertain. His appetite for facts was capacious, and
although many of those which he noted would have seemed woefully dry
and colorless to the ordinary sentimental traveler, a careful
inspection of the list would have shown that he had a soft spot in his
imagination. In the charming city of Brussels—his first stopping-place
after leaving Paris—he asked a great many questions about the
street-cars, and took extreme satisfaction in the reappearance of this
familiar symbol of American civilization; but he was also greatly
struck with the beautiful Gothic tower of the Hôtel de Ville, and
wondered whether it would not be possible to “get up” something like it
in San Francisco. He stood for half an hour in the crowded square
before this edifice, in imminent danger from carriage-wheels, listening
to a toothless old cicerone mumble in broken English the touching
history of Counts Egmont and Horn; and he wrote the names of these
gentlemen—for reasons best known to himself—on the back of an old
letter.
At the outset, on his leaving Paris, his curiosity had not been
intense; passive entertainment, in the Champs Élysées and at the
theatres, seemed about as much as he need expect of himself, and
although, as he had said to Tristram, he wanted to see the mysterious,
satisfying _best_, he had not the Grand Tour in the least on his
conscience, and was not given to cross-questioning the amusement of the
hour. He believed that Europe was made for him, and not he for Europe.
He had said that he wanted to improve his mind, but he would have felt
a certain embarrassment, a certain shame, even—a false shame,
possibly—if he had caught himself looking intellectually into the
mirror. Neither in this nor in any other respect had Newman a high
sense of responsibility; it was his prime conviction that a man’s life
should be easy, and that he should be able to resolve privilege into a
matter of course. The world, to his sense, was a great bazaar, where
one might stroll about and purchase handsome things; but he was no more
conscious, individually, of social pressure than he admitted the
existence of such a thing as an obligatory purchase. He had not only a
dislike, but a sort of moral mistrust, of uncomfortable thoughts, and
it was both uncomfortable and slightly contemptible to feel obliged to
square one’s self with a standard. One’s standard was the ideal of
one’s own good-humored prosperity, the prosperity which enabled one to
give as well as take. To expand, without bothering about it—without
shiftless timidity on one side, or loquacious eagerness on the other—to
the full compass of what he would have called a “pleasant” experience,
was Newman’s most definite programme of life. He had always hated to
hurry to catch railroad trains, and yet he had always caught them; and
just so an undue solicitude for “culture” seemed a sort of silly
dawdling at the station, a proceeding properly confined to women,
foreigners, and other unpractical persons. All this admitted, Newman
enjoyed his journey, when once he had fairly entered the current, as
profoundly as the most zealous _dilettante_. One’s theories, after all,
matter little; it is one’s humor that is the great thing. Our friend
was intelligent, and he could not help that. He lounged through Belgium
and Holland and the Rhineland, through Switzerland and Northern Italy,
planning about nothing, but seeing everything. The guides and _valets
de place_ found him an excellent subject. He was always approachable,
for he was much addicted to standing about in the vestibules and
porticos of inns, and he availed himself little of the opportunities
for impressive seclusion which are so liberally offered in Europe to
gentlemen who travel with long purses. When an excursion, a church, a
gallery, a ruin, was proposed to him, the first thing Newman usually
did, after surveying his postulant in silence, from head to foot, was
to sit down at a little table and order something to drink. The
cicerone, during this process, usually retreated to a respectful
distance; otherwise I am not sure that Newman would not have bidden him
sit down and have a glass also, and tell him as an honest fellow
whether his church or his gallery was really worth a man’s trouble. At
last he rose and stretched his long legs, beckoned to the man of
monuments, looked at his watch, and fixed his eye on his adversary.
“What is it?” he asked. “How far?” And whatever the answer was,
although he sometimes seemed to hesitate, he never declined. He stepped
into an open cab, made his conductor sit beside him to answer
questions, bade the driver go fast (he had a particular aversion to
slow driving) and rolled, in all probability through a dusty suburb, to
the goal of his pilgrimage. If the goal was a disappointment, if the
church was meagre, or the ruin a heap of rubbish, Newman never
protested or berated his cicerone; he looked with an impartial eye upon
great monuments and small, made the guide recite his lesson, listened
to it religiously, asked if there was nothing else to be seen in the
neighborhood, and drove back again at a rattling pace. It is to be
feared that his perception of the difference between good architecture
and bad was not acute, and that he might sometimes have been seen
gazing with culpable serenity at inferior productions. Ugly churches
were a part of his pastime in Europe, as well as beautiful ones, and
his tour was altogether a pastime. But there is sometimes nothing like
the imagination of these people who have none, and Newman, now and
then, in an unguided stroll in a foreign city, before some lonely,
sad-towered church, or some angular image of one who had rendered civic
service in an unknown past, had felt a singular inward tremor. It was
not an excitement or a perplexity; it was a placid, fathomless sense of
diversion.
He encountered by chance in Holland a young American, with whom, for a
time, he formed a sort of traveler’s partnership. They were men of a
very different cast, but each, in his way, was so good a fellow that,
for a few weeks at least, it seemed something of a pleasure to share
the chances of the road. Newman’s comrade, whose name was Babcock, was
a young Unitarian minister, a small, spare, neatly-attired man, with a
strikingly candid physiognomy. He was a native of Dorchester,
Massachusetts, and had spiritual charge of a small congregation in
another suburb of the New England metropolis. His digestion was weak
and he lived chiefly on Graham bread and hominy—a regimen to which he
was so much attached that his tour seemed to him destined to be
blighted when, on landing on the Continent, he found that these
delicacies did not flourish under the _table d’hôte_ system. In Paris
he had purchased a bag of hominy at an establishment which called
itself an American Agency, and at which the New York illustrated papers
were also to be procured, and he had carried it about with him, and
shown extreme serenity and fortitude in the somewhat delicate position
of having his hominy prepared for him and served at anomalous hours, at
the hotels he successively visited. Newman had once spent a morning, in
the course of business, at Mr. Babcock’s birthplace, and, for reasons
too recondite to unfold, his visit there always assumed in his mind a
jocular cast. To carry out his joke, which certainly seems poor so long
as it is not explained, he used often to address his companion as
“Dorchester.” Fellow-travelers very soon grow intimate but it is highly
improbable that at home these extremely dissimilar characters would
have found any very convenient points of contact. They were, indeed, as
different as possible. Newman, who never reflected on such matters,
accepted the situation with great equanimity, but Babcock used to
meditate over it privately; used often, indeed, to retire to his room
early in the evening for the express purpose of considering it
conscientiously and impartially. He was not sure that it was a good
thing for him to associate with our hero, whose way of taking life was
so little his own. Newman was an excellent, generous fellow; Mr.
Babcock sometimes said to himself that he was a _noble_ fellow, and,
certainly, it was impossible not to like him. But would it not be
desirable to try to exert an influence upon him, to try to quicken his
moral life and sharpen his sense of duty? He liked everything, he
accepted everything, he found amusement in everything; he was not
discriminating, he had not a high tone. The young man from Dorchester
accused Newman of a fault which he considered very grave, and which he
did his best to avoid: what he would have called a want of “moral
reaction.” Poor Mr. Babcock was extremely fond of pictures and
churches, and carried Mrs. Jameson’s works about in his trunk; he
delighted in æsthetic analysis, and received peculiar impressions from
everything he saw. But nevertheless in his secret soul he detested
Europe, and he felt an irritating need to protest against Newman’s
gross intellectual hospitality. Mr. Babcock’s moral _malaise_, I am
afraid, lay deeper than where any definition of mine can reach it. He
mistrusted the European temperament, he suffered from the European
climate, he hated the European dinner-hour; European life seemed to him
unscrupulous and impure. And yet he had an exquisite sense of beauty;
and as beauty was often inextricably associated with the above
displeasing conditions, as he wished, above all, to be just and
dispassionate, and as he was, furthermore, extremely devoted to
“culture,” he could not bring himself to decide that Europe was utterly
bad. But he thought it was very bad indeed, and his quarrel with Newman
was that this unregulated epicure had a sadly insufficient perception
of the bad. Babcock himself really knew as little about the bad, in any
quarter of the world, as a nursing infant, his most vivid realization
of evil had been the discovery that one of his college classmates, who
was studying architecture in Paris had a love affair with a young woman
who did not expect him to marry her. Babcock had related this incident
to Newman, and our hero had applied an epithet of an unflattering sort
to the young girl. The next day his companion asked him whether he was
very sure he had used exactly the right word to characterize the young
architect’s mistress. Newman stared and laughed. “There are a great
many words to express that idea,” he said; “you can take your choice!”
“Oh, I mean,” said Babcock, “was she possibly not to be considered in a
different light? Don’t you think she _really_ expected him to marry
her?”
“I am sure I don’t know,” said Newman. “Very likely she did; I have no
doubt she is a grand woman.” And he began to laugh again.
“I didn’t mean that either,” said Babcock, “I was only afraid that I
might have seemed yesterday not to remember—not to consider; well, I
think I will write to Percival about it.”
And he had written to Percival (who answered him in a really impudent
fashion), and he had reflected that it was somehow, raw and reckless in
Newman to assume in that off-hand manner that the young woman in Paris
might be “grand.” The brevity of Newman’s judgments very often shocked
and discomposed him. He had a way of damning people without farther
appeal, or of pronouncing them capital company in the face of
uncomfortable symptoms, which seemed unworthy of a man whose conscience
had been properly cultivated. And yet poor Babcock liked him, and
remembered that even if he was sometimes perplexing and painful, this
was not a reason for giving him up. Goethe recommended seeing human
nature in the most various forms, and Mr. Babcock thought Goethe
perfectly splendid. He often tried, in odd half-hours of conversation
to infuse into Newman a little of his own spiritual starch, but
Newman’s personal texture was too loose to admit of stiffening. His
mind could no more hold principles than a sieve can hold water. He
admired principles extremely, and thought Babcock a mighty fine little
fellow for having so many. He accepted all that his high-strung
companion offered him, and put them away in what he supposed to be a
very safe place; but poor Babcock never afterwards recognized his gifts
among the articles that Newman had in daily use.
They traveled together through Germany and into Switzerland, where for
three or four weeks they trudged over passes and lounged upon blue
lakes. At last they crossed the Simplon and made their way to Venice.
Mr. Babcock had become gloomy and even a trifle irritable; he seemed
moody, absent, preoccupied; he got his plans into a tangle, and talked
one moment of doing one thing and the next of doing another. Newman led
his usual life, made acquaintances, took his ease in the galleries and
churches, spent an unconscionable amount of time in strolling in the
Piazza San Marco, bought a great many bad pictures, and for a fortnight
enjoyed Venice grossly. One evening, coming back to his inn, he found
Babcock waiting for him in the little garden beside it. The young man
walked up to him, looking very dismal, thrust out his hand, and said
with solemnity that he was afraid they must part. Newman expressed his
surprise and regret, and asked why a parting had become necessary.
“Don’t be afraid I’m tired of you,” he said.
“You are not tired of me?” demanded Babcock, fixing him with his clear
gray eye.
“Why the deuce should I be? You are a very plucky fellow. Besides, I
don’t grow tired of things.”
“We don’t understand each other,” said the young minister.
“Don’t I understand you?” cried Newman. “Why, I hoped I did. But what
if I don’t; where’s the harm?”
“I don’t understand _you_,” said Babcock. And he sat down and rested
his head on his hand, and looked up mournfully at his immeasurable
friend.
“Oh Lord, I don’t mind that!” cried Newman, with a laugh.
“But it’s very distressing to me. It keeps me in a state of unrest. It
irritates me; I can’t settle anything. I don’t think it’s good for me.”
“You worry too much; that’s what’s the matter with you,” said Newman.
“Of course it must seem so to you. You think I take things too hard,
and I think you take things too easily. We can never agree.”
“But we have agreed very well all along.”
“No, I haven’t agreed,” said Babcock, shaking his head. “I am very
uncomfortable. I ought to have separated from you a month ago.”
“Oh, horrors! I’ll agree to anything!” cried Newman.
Mr. Babcock buried his head in both hands. At last looking up, “I don’t
think you appreciate my position,” he said. “I try to arrive at the
truth about everything. And then you go too fast. For me, you are too
passionate, too extravagant. I feel as if I ought to go over all this
ground we have traversed again, by myself, alone. I am afraid I have
made a great many mistakes.”
“Oh, you needn’t give so many reasons,” said Newman. “You are simply
tired of my company. You have a good right to be.”
“No, no, I am not tired!” cried the pestered young divine. “It is very
wrong to be tired.”
“I give it up!” laughed Newman. “But of course it will never do to go
on making mistakes. Go your way, by all means. I shall miss you; but
you have seen I make friends very easily. You will be lonely yourself;
but drop me a line, when you feel like it, and I will wait for you
anywhere.”
“I think I will go back to Milan. I am afraid I didn’t do justice to
Luini.”
“Poor Luini!” said Newman.
“I mean that I am afraid I overestimated him. I don’t think that he is
a painter of the first rank.”
“Luini?” Newman exclaimed; “why, he’s enchanting—he’s magnificent!
There is something in his genius that is like a beautiful woman. It
gives one the same feeling.”
Mr. Babcock frowned and winced. And it must be added that this was, for
Newman, an unusually metaphysical flight; but in passing through Milan
he had taken a great fancy to the painter. “There you are again!” said
Mr. Babcock. “Yes, we had better separate.” And on the morrow he
retraced his steps and proceeded to tone down his impressions of the
great Lombard artist.
A few days afterwards Newman received a note from his late companion
which ran as follows:—
My Dear Mr. Newman,—I am afraid that my conduct at Venice, a week ago,
seemed to you strange and ungrateful, and I wish to explain my
position, which, as I said at the time, I do not think you appreciate.
I had long had it on my mind to propose that we should part company,
and this step was not really so abrupt as it seemed. In the first
place, you know, I am traveling in Europe on funds supplied by my
congregation, who kindly offered me a vacation and an opportunity to
enrich my mind with the treasures of nature and art in the Old World. I
feel, therefore, as if I ought to use my time to the very best
advantage. I have a high sense of responsibility. You appear to care
only for the pleasure of the hour, and you give yourself up to it with
a violence which I confess I am not able to emulate. I feel as if I
must arrive at some conclusion and fix my belief on certain points. Art
and life seem to me intensely serious things, and in our travels in
Europe we should especially remember the immense seriousness of Art.
You seem to hold that if a thing amuses you for the moment, that is all
you need ask for it, and your relish for mere amusement is also much
higher than mine. You put, however, a kind of reckless confidence into
your pleasure which at times, I confess, has seemed to me—shall I say
it?—almost cynical. Your way at any rate is not my way, and it is
unwise that we should attempt any longer to pull together. And yet, let
me add that I know there is a great deal to be said for your way; I
have felt its attraction, in your society, very strongly. But for this
I should have left you long ago. But I was so perplexed. I hope I have
not done wrong. I feel as if I had a great deal of lost time to make
up. I beg you take all this as I mean it, which, Heaven knows, is not
invidiously. I have a great personal esteem for you and hope that some
day, when I have recovered my balance, we shall meet again. I hope you
will continue to enjoy your travels, only _do_ remember that Life and
Art _are_ extremely serious. Believe me your sincere friend and
well-wisher,
BENJAMIN BABCOCK
P. S. I am greatly perplexed by Luini.
This letter produced in Newman’s mind a singular mixture of
exhilaration and awe. At first, Mr. Babcock’s tender conscience seemed
to him a capital farce, and his traveling back to Milan only to get
into a deeper muddle appeared, as the reward of his pedantry,
exquisitely and ludicrously just. Then Newman reflected that these are
mighty mysteries, that possibly he himself was indeed that baleful and
barely mentionable thing, a cynic, and that his manner of considering
the treasures of art and the privileges of life was probably very base
and immoral. Newman had a great contempt for immorality, and that
evening, for a good half hour, as he sat watching the star-sheen on the
warm Adriatic, he felt rebuked and depressed. He was at a loss how to
answer Babcock’s letter. His good nature checked his resenting the
young minister’s lofty admonitions, and his tough, inelastic sense of
humor forbade his taking them seriously. He wrote no answer at all but
a day or two afterward he found in a curiosity shop a grotesque little
statuette in ivory, of the sixteenth century, which he sent off to
Babcock without a commentary. It represented a gaunt, ascetic-looking
monk, in a tattered gown and cowl, kneeling with clasped hands and
pulling a portentously long face. It was a wonderfully delicate piece
of carving, and in a moment, through one of the rents of his gown, you
espied a fat capon hung round the monk’s waist. In Newman’s intention
what did the figure symbolize? Did it mean that he was going to try to
be as “high-toned” as the monk looked at first, but that he feared he
should succeed no better than the friar, on a closer inspection, proved
to have done? It is not supposable that he intended a satire upon
Babcock’s own asceticism, for this would have been a truly cynical
stroke. He made his late companion, at any rate, a very valuable little
present.
Newman, on leaving Venice, went through the Tyrol to Vienna, and then
returned westward, through Southern Germany. The autumn found him at
Baden-Baden, where he spent several weeks. The place was charming, and
he was in no hurry to depart; besides, he was looking about him and
deciding what to do for the winter. His summer had been very full, and
he sat under the great trees beside the miniature river that trickles
past the Baden flower-beds, he slowly rummaged it over. He had seen and
done a great deal, enjoyed and observed a great deal; he felt older,
and yet he felt younger too. He remembered Mr. Babcock and his desire
to form conclusions, and he remembered also that he had profited very
little by his friend’s exhortation to cultivate the same respectable
habit. Could he not scrape together a few conclusions? Baden-Baden was
the prettiest place he had seen yet, and orchestral music in the
evening, under the stars, was decidedly a great institution. This was
one of his conclusions! But he went on to reflect that he had done very
wisely to pull up stakes and come abroad; this seeing of the world was
a very interesting thing. He had learned a great deal; he couldn’t say
just what, but he had it there under his hat-band. He had done what he
wanted; he had seen the great things, and he had given his mind a
chance to “improve,” if it would. He cheerfully believed that it had
improved. Yes, this seeing of the world was very pleasant, and he would
willingly do a little more of it. Thirty-six years old as he was, he
had a handsome stretch of life before him yet, and he need not begin to
count his weeks. Where should he take the world next? I have said he
remembered the eyes of the lady whom he had found standing in Mrs.
Tristram’s drawing-room; four months had elapsed, and he had not
forgotten them yet. He had looked—he had made a point of looking—into a
great many other eyes in the interval, but the only ones he thought of
now were Madame de Cintré’s. If he wanted to see more of the world,
should he find it in Madame de Cintré’s eyes? He would certainly find
something there, call it this world or the next. Throughout these
rather formless meditations he sometimes thought of his past life and
the long array of years (they had begun so early) during which he had
had nothing in his head but “enterprise.” They seemed far away now, for
his present attitude was more than a holiday, it was almost a rupture.
He had told Tristram that the pendulum was swinging back and it
appeared that the backward swing had not yet ended. Still “enterprise,”
which was over in the other quarter wore to his mind a different aspect
at different hours. In its train a thousand forgotten episodes came
trooping back into his memory. Some of them he looked complacently
enough in the face; from some he averted his head. They were old
efforts, old exploits, antiquated examples of “smartness” and
sharpness. Some of them, as he looked at them, he felt decidedly proud
of; he admired himself as if he had been looking at another man. And,
in fact, many of the qualities that make a great deed were there: the
decision, the resolution, the courage, the celerity, the clear eye, and
the strong hand. Of certain other achievements it would be going too
far to say that he was ashamed of them for Newman had never had a
stomach for dirty work. He was blessed with a natural impulse to
disfigure with a direct, unreasoning blow the comely visage of
temptation. And certainly, in no man could a want of integrity have
been less excusable. Newman knew the crooked from the straight at a
glance, and the former had cost him, first and last, a great many
moments of lively disgust. But none the less some of his memories
seemed to wear at present a rather graceless and sordid mien, and it
struck him that if he had never done anything very ugly, he had never,
on the other hand, done anything particularly beautiful. He had spent
his years in the unremitting effort to add thousands to thousands, and,
now that he stood well outside of it, the business of money-getting
appeared tolerably dry and sterile. It is very well to sneer at
money-getting after you have filled your pockets, and Newman, it may be
said, should have begun somewhat earlier to moralize thus delicately.
To this it may be answered that he might have made another fortune, if
he chose; and we ought to add that he was not exactly moralizing. It
had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer
was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made
by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers.
During his stay at Baden-Baden he received a letter from Mrs. Tristram,
scolding him for the scanty tidings he had sent to his friends of the
Avenue d’Iéna, and begging to be definitely informed that he had not
concocted any horrid scheme for wintering in outlying regions, but was
coming back sanely and promptly to the most comfortable city in the
world. Newman’s answer ran as follows:—
“I supposed you knew I was a miserable letter-writer, and didn’t expect
anything of me. I don’t think I have written twenty letters of pure
friendship in my whole life; in America I conducted my correspondence
altogether by telegrams. This is a letter of pure friendship; you have
got hold of a curiosity, and I hope you will value it. You want to know
everything that has happened to me these three months. The best way to
tell you, I think, would be to send you my half dozen guide-books, with
my pencil-marks in the margin. Wherever you find a scratch or a cross,
or a ‘Beautiful!’ or a ‘So true!’ or a ‘Too thin!’ you may know that I
have had a sensation of some sort or other. That has been about my
history, ever since I left you. Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, Germany,
Italy—I have been through the whole list, and I don’t think I am any
the worse for it. I know more about Madonnas and church-steeples than I
supposed any man could. I have seen some very pretty things, and shall
perhaps talk them over this winter, by your fireside. You see, my face
is not altogether set against Paris. I have had all kinds of plans and
visions, but your letter has blown most of them away. ‘_L’appétit vient
en mangeant_,’ says the French proverb, and I find that the more I see
of the world the more I want to see. Now that I am in the shafts, why
shouldn’t I trot to the end of the course? Sometimes I think of the far
East, and keep rolling the names of Eastern cities under my tongue:
Damascus and Bagdad, Medina and Mecca. I spent a week last month in the
company of a returned missionary, who told me I ought to be ashamed to
be loafing about Europe when there are such big things to be seen out
there. I do want to explore, but I think I would rather explore over in
the Rue de l’Université. Do you ever hear from that pretty lady? If you
can get her to promise she will be at home the next time I call, I will
go back to Paris straight. I am more than ever in the state of mind I
told you about that evening; I want a first-class wife. I have kept an
eye on all the pretty girls I have come across this summer, but none of
them came up to my notion, or anywhere near it. I should have enjoyed
all this a thousand times more if I had had the lady just mentioned by
my side. The nearest approach to her was a Unitarian minister from
Boston, who very soon demanded a separation, for incompatibility of
temper. He told me I was low-minded, immoral, a devotee of ‘art for
art’—whatever that is: all of which greatly afflicted me, for he was
really a sweet little fellow. But shortly afterwards I met an
Englishman, with whom I struck up an acquaintance which at first seemed
to promise well—a very bright man, who writes in the London papers and
knows Paris nearly as well as Tristram. We knocked about for a week
together, but he very soon gave me up in disgust. I was too virtuous by
half; I was too stern a moralist. He told me, in a friendly way, that I
was cursed with a conscience; that I judged things like a Methodist and
talked about them like an old lady. This was rather bewildering. Which
of my two critics was I to believe? I didn’t worry about it and very
soon made up my mind they were both idiots. But there is one thing in
which no one will ever have the impudence to pretend I am wrong, that
is, in being your faithful friend,