Page:The Novels and Tales of Henry James, Volume 2 (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907).djvu/97

 every morning at half-past nine and have yours with me."

"Monsieur offers me my coffee also?" cried M. Nioche. "Truly my beaux jours are coming back."

"Allons, enfants de la patrie," said Newman; "let's begin! The coffee's ripping hot. How do you say that in French?"

Every day then, for the following three weeks, the minutely respectable figure of M. Nioche made its appearance, with a series of little enquiring and apologetic obeisances, among the aromatic fumes of Newman's morning beverage. I know not what progress he made; but, as he himself said, if he did n't learn a great deal, at least he did n't learn much harm. And it amused him; it gratified that irregularly sociable side of his nature which had always expressed itself in a relish for ungrammatical conversation and which often, even in his busy and preoccupied days, had made him sit on rail fences in the twilight of young Western towns and gossip scarce less than fraternally with humorous loafers and obscure fortune-seekers. He had notions, wherever he went, about talking with the natives; he had been assured, and his judgement approved the advice, that in travelling abroad it was an excellent thing to look into the life of the country. M. Nioche was very much of a native, and though his life might not be particularly worth looking into he was a palpable and smoothly-rounded unit in that "stiff" sum of civilisation and sophistication which offered our hero so much easy entertainment and proposed so many curious problems to his idle but active mind. 67