Free The American by Henry James

impossible not to perceive that Tristram was nowadays a very light weight. His only aspirations were to hold out at poker, at his club, to know the names of all the
cocottes
, 6 to shake hands all round, to ply his rosy gullet with truffles and champagne, and to create uncomfortable eddies and obstructions among the constituent atoms of the American colony. He was shamefully 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 why the United States were not good enough for Mr. Tristram. He had never been a very conscious patriot, but it vexed him to see them treated as little better than a vulgar smell in his friend’s nostrils, and he finally broke out and swore that they were the greatest country in the world, that they could put all Europe into their breeches’ pockets, and, that an American who spoke ill of them ought to be carried home in irons and compelled to live in Boston. (This, 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.
    Christopher Newman dined several times in the Avenue d’Iéna, and his host always proposed an early adjournment to this institution. Mrs. Tristram protested, and declared that her husband exhausted his ingenuity in trying to displease her.
    “Oh no, I never try, my love,” he answered. “I know you loathe me quite enough when I take my chance.”
    Newman hated to see a husband and wife on these terms, and he was sure one or other of them must be very unhappy. He knew it was not Tristram. Mrs. Tristram had a balcony before her windows, upon which, during the June evenings, she was fond of sitting, and Newman used frankly to say that he preferred the balcony to the club. It had a fringe of perfumed plants in tubs, and enabled you to look up the broad street and see the Arch of Triumph vaguely massing its heroic sculptures in the summer starlight. Sometimes Newman kept his promise of following Mr. Tristram, in half an hour, to the Occidental, and sometimes he forgot it. His hostess asked him a great many questions about himself, but on this subject he was an indifferent talker. He was not what is called subjective, though when he felt that her interest was sincere, he made an almost heroic attempt to be. He told her a great many things he had done, and regaled her with anecdotes of Western life; she was from Philadelphia, and with her eight years in Paris, talked of herself as a languid Oriental. But some other person was always the hero of the tale, by no means always to his advantage; and Newman’s own emotions were but scantily chronicled. She had an especial wish to know whether he had ever been in love—seriously, passionately—and, failing to gather any satisfaction from his allusions, she at last directly inquired. He hesitated awhile, and at last he said: “No!” She declared that she was delighted to hear it, as it confirmed her private conviction that he was a man of no feeling.
    “Really?” he asked, very gravely. “Do you think so? How do you recognise a man of feeling?”
    “I can’t make out,” said Mrs. Tristram, “whether you are very simple or very deep.”
    “I’m very deep. That’s a fact.”
    “I believe that if I were to tell you with a certain airthat you have no feeling, you would implicitly believe me.”
    “A certain air?” said Newman. “Try it and see.”
    “You would believe me, but you would not care,” said Mrs. Tristram.
    “You have got it all wrong. I should care immensely, but I shouldn’t believe you. The fact is I have never had time to feel things. I have had to
do
them, to make myself felt.”
    “I can imagine that you may have done that tremendously, sometimes.”
    “Yes, there’s no mistake about that.”
    “When you are in a fury it can’t be pleasant.”
    “I am never in a