Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/71

 Newman recalled his earlier impression of his host and did Mrs. Tristram, who had by no means taken him into her confidence, but whose secret he presently discovered, the justice to admit that her husband had somehow found means to be degenerate without the iridescence of decay. People said he was very sociable, but this was as much a matter of course as for a dipped sponge to expand; and it was a sociability affirmed, on its anecdotic side, too much at the expense of those possible partakers who were not there to guard their interest in it. He was patient at poker; he was infallible upon the names and the other attributes of all the cocottes; his criticism of cookery, his comparative view of the great "years" of champagne, enjoyed the authority of the last word. And then he was idle, spiritless, sensual, snobbish. He irritated our friend by the tone of his allusions to their native country, and Newman was at a loss to understand wherein such a country, as a whole, could fall short of Mr. Tristram's stomach. He had never been a very systematic patriot, but it vexed him to see the United States treated as little better than a vulgar smell in his friend's nostril, and he finally spoke up for them quite as if it had been Fourth of July, proclaiming that any American who ran them down ought to be carried home in irons and compelled to live in Boston—which for Newman was putting it very vindictively. Tristram was a comfortable man to snub; he bore no malice and he continued to insist on Newman's finishing his evenings at the Occidental Club. The latter dined several times in the Avenue 41