Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/122

 nevertheless in his secret soul he detested Europe and felt an irritated need to protest against Newman's easy homage to so compromised a charmer, mistress of a cynicism that appeared at times to have made him cynical. 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 what he called an intimate sense of the true beautiful in life, and as this element 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 bent on putting his finger on the boundary-line, in the life of a School, between the sincere time and the insincere, he could not bring himself to decide that the kingdoms of the earth were utterly rotten. But he thought them in a bad way, and his quarrel with Newman was over some of the elements, insidious forms of evil, that this promiscuous feeder at the feast could swallow with no wry face. Babcock himself really knew as little about the forms of evil, in any quarter of the world, as about the forms of banking; his most vivid realisation of the most frequent form had been the discovery that one of his college classmates, a student of architecture in Paris, was carrying on a love-affair with a young woman who did n't in the least count on his marrying her. Babcock had described this situation to Newman, and our hero had applied an epithet marked by a rough 92