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 Elysees 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