But would it not be desirable to try to exert an influence upon him, to try to quicken his moral life and sharpen his sense of duty?
He liked everything, he accepted everything, he found amusement in everything; he was not discriminating, he had not a high tone.

The young man from Dorchester accused Newman of a fault which he considered very grave, and which he did his best to avoid: what he would have called a want of "moral reaction." Poor Mr.Babcock was extremely fond of pictures and churches, and carried Mrs.Jameson's works about in his trunk; he delighted in aesthetic analysis, and received peculiar impressions from everything he saw.

But nevertheless in his secret soul he detested Europe, and he felt an irritating need to protest against Newman's gross intellectual hospitality.

Mr.Babcock's moral malaise, I am afraid, lay deeper than where any definition of mine can reach it.
He mistrusted the European temperament, he suffered from the European climate, he hated the European dinner-hour; European life seemed to him unscrupulous and impure.

And yet he had an exquisite sense of beauty; and as beauty was often inextricably associated with the above displeasing conditions, as he wished, above all, to be just and dispassionate, and as he was, furthermore, extremely devoted to "culture," he could not bring himself to decide that Europe was utterly bad.