He was
presumably a bachelor--a man of family ties, however relaxed, though
he might have been as often absent from home would not have been as
regularly present in the same place--and there was about him a
boundless desultoriness which renewed Garnett's conviction that
there is no one on earth as idle as an American who is not busy.
From certain allusions it was plain that he had lived many years in
Paris, yet he had not taken the trouble to adapt his tongue to the
local inflections, but spoke French with the accent of one who has
formed his conception of the language from a phrase-book.
The city itself seemed to have made as little impression on him as
its speech. He appeared to have no artistic or intellectual
curiosities, to remain untouched by the complex appeal of Paris,
while preserving, perhaps the more strikingly from his very
detachment, that odd American astuteness which seems the fruit of
innocence rather than of experience. His nationality revealed itself
again in a mild interest in the political problems of his adopted
country, though they appeared to preoccupy him only as illustrating
the boundless perversity of mankind.
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