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’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