"C'est egal, of all the follies and stupidities I have committed for them I would not have missed one!" On this subject Newman maintained an habitual reserve; to expatiate largely upon it had always seemed to him a proceeding vaguely analogous to the cooing of pigeons and the chattering of monkeys, and even inconsistent with a fully developed human character.

But Bellegarde's confidences greatly amused him, and rarely displeased him, for the generous young Frenchman was not a cynic.

"I really think," he had once said, "that I am not more depraved than most of my contemporaries.

They are tolerably depraved, my contemporaries!" He said wonderfully pretty things about his female friends, and, numerous and various as they had been, declared that on the whole there was more good in them than harm.

"But you are not to take that as advice," he added.