hope that
this thankless wit, reflecting on it, would conclude that she had no
appreciation of merit, and that he had flattered himself in supposing
that she cared for his own. Restless, discontented, visionary, without
personal ambitions, but with a certain avidity of imagination, she was,
as I have said before, eminently incomplete. She was full--both for
good and for ill--of beginnings that came to nothing; but she had
nevertheless, morally, a spark of the sacred fire.

Newman was fond, under all circumstances, of the society of women, and
now that he was out of his native element and deprived of his habitual
interests, he turned to it for compensation. He took a great fancy to
Mrs. Tristram; she frankly repaid it, 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 every one'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
organized. If it is true that