第28章

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'Iena, 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'appetit 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'Universite.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 Iwas 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,C.N."