Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/118

 on one side or the bravado of the big appetite on the other—to the full compass of any such experience as was held to stir men's blood represented his nearest approach to a high principle. He had always hated to hurry to catch railroad-trains, and yet had always caught them; and just so an undue solicitude for the right side seemed a sort of silly dawdling at the station, a proceeding properly confined to women, foreigners and invalids. All this admitted, he enjoyed his journey, when once he had fairly entered the current, as intimately as if he had kept a diary of raptures. He lounged through Belgium and Holland and the Rhineland, through Switzerland and Northern Italy, planning about nothing and seeing all things. The guides and valets de place found him an excellent subject. He was always approachable, for he was much addicted to large lapses and long intervals, to standing about in the vestibules and porticoes of inns, and he availed himself little of the opportunities for impressive seclusion so liberally offered in Europe to gentlemen travelling with long purses. When an excursion, a church, a gallery, a ruin was proposed to him the first thing he usually did, after surveying his postulant in silence and from head to foot, was to sit down at a little table and order some light refreshment, of which he more often than not then forgot to partake. The cicerone, during this process, commonly retreated to a respectful distance; otherwise I am not sure that Newman would not have bidden him sit down and share, sit down and tell him as a decent creature if his church or his gallery were really worth one's trouble. At last 88