as 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 si