THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

By William Dean Howells

PART II. 

XXVI. 

They found Burnamy expecting them at the station in Carlsbad, and shescolded him like a mother for taking the trouble to meet them, while shekept back for the present any sign of knowing that he had staid over aday with the Triscoes in Leipsic. He was as affectionately glad to seeher and her husband as she could have wished, but she would have liked itbetter if he had owned up at once about Leipsic. He did not, and itseemed to her that he was holding her at arm's-length in his answersabout his employer. He would not say how he liked his work, or how heliked Mr. Stoller; he merely said that they were at Pupp's together, andthat he had got in a good day's work already; and since he would say nomore, she contented herself with that. 

The long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wounddown the hill-side like those of an Italian mountain town, between gaystuccoed houses, of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; andthe impression of a Latin country was heightened at a turn of the roadwhich brought into view a colossal crucifix planted against a curtain ofdark green foliage on the brow of one of the wooded heights thatsurrounded Carlsbad. When they reached the level of the Tepl, thehill-fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridgeswithin walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the onlyvehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world. Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines, with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their black velvetderbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowingrobes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks inAstrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of westernEuropeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were English, French or Italians. Among the vividly dressed ladies, some wereimaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily havebeen Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might havepassed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationalityaway in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselvesheard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet. 

The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going andcoming between the rows of pollard locusts on one side and the brightwalls of the houses on the other. Under the trees were tables, served bypretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants across theway. On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops full of silver, glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and all the idlefrippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris, and theysuggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no place elsein the world, as the crowd which might have been that of other cities atcertain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in its habitual effect. 

"Do you like it?" asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs. Marchsaw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all. She was readyto bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his interest hadgot them the only rooms left in the house. This satisfied in her thepassion for size which is at the bottom of every American heart, andwhich perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the peoples. Wepride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we are notungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger than ours, weare magnanimously happy in them. Pupp's, in its altogether different way, was larger than any hotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and when Burnamytold her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a day in theheight of the season, she was personally proud of it. 

She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel, while the secretary ledMarch off to look at the rooms reserved for them, and Burnamy hospitablyturned the revolving octagonal case in the centre of the rotunda wherethe names of the guests were put up. They were of all nations, but therewere so many New Yorkers whose names ended in berg, and thal, and stern, and baum that she seemed to be gazing upon a cyclorama of the signs onBroadway. A large man of unmistakable American make, but with so littlethat was of New England or New York in his presence that she might not atonce have thought him American, lounged toward them with a quilltoothpick in the corner of his mouth. He had a jealous blue eye, intowhich he seemed trying to put a friendly light; his straight mouthstretched into an involuntary smile above his tawny chin-beard, and hewore his soft hat so far back from his high forehead (it showed to thecrown when he took his hat off) that he had the effect of beinguncovered. 

At his approach Burnamy turned, and with a flush said: "Oh! Let meintroduce Mr. Stoller, Mrs. March. "

Stoller took his toothpick out of his mouth and bowed; then he seemed toremember, and took off his hat. "You see Jews enough, here to make youfeel at home?" he asked; and he added: "Well, we got some of 'em inChicago, too, I guess. This young man"--he twisted his head towardBurnamy--"found you easy enough?"

"It was very good of him to meet us, " Mrs. March began. "We didn'texpect--"

"Oh, that's all right, " said Stoller, putting his toothpick back, and hishat on. "We'd got through for the day; my doctor won't let me work all Iwant to, here. Your husband's going to take the cure, they tell me. Well, he wants to go to a good doctor, first. You can't go and drink thesewaters hit or miss. I found that out before I came. "

"Oh, no!" said Mrs. March, and she wished to explain how they had beenadvised; but he said to Burnamy:

"I sha'n't want you again till ten to-morrow morning. Don't let meinterrupt you, " he added patronizingly to Mrs. March. He put his hand uptoward his hat, and sauntered away out of the door. 

Burnamy did not speak; and she only asked at last, to relieve thesilence, "Is Mr. Stoller an American?"

"Why, I suppose so, " he answered, with an uneasy laugh. "His people wereGerman emigrants who settled in Southern Indiana. That makes him as muchAmerican as any of us, doesn't it?"

Burnamy spoke with his mind on his French-Canadian grandfather, who hadcome down through Detroit, when their name was Bonami; but Mrs. Marchanswered from her eight generations of New England ancestry. "Oh, for theWest, yes, perhaps, " and they neither of them said anything more aboutStoller. 

In their room, where she found March waiting for her amidst theirarriving baggage, she was so full of her pent-up opinions of Burnamy'spatron that she, would scarcely speak of the view from their windows ofthe wooded hills up and down the Tepl. "Yes, yes; very nice, and I know Ishall enjoy it ever so much. But I don't know what you will think of thatpoor young Burnamy!"

"Why, what's happened to him?"

"Happened? Stoller's happened. "

"Oh, have you seen him, already? Well?"

"Well, if you had been going to pick out that type of man, you'd haverejected him, because you'd have said he was too pat. He's like an actormade up for a Western millionaire. Do you remember that American in'L'Etranger' which Bernhardt did in Boston when she first came? He, looksexactly like that, and he has the worst manners. He stood talking to mewith his hat on, and a toothpick in his mouth; and he made me feel as ifhe had bought me, along with Burnamy, and had paid too much. If you don'tgive him a setting down, Basil, I shall never speak to you; that's all. I'm sure Burnamy is in some trouble with him; he's got some sort of holdupon him; what it could be in such a short time, I can't imagine; but ifever a man seemed to be, in a man's power, he does, in his!

"Now, " said March, "your pronouns have got so far beyond me that I thinkwe'd better let it all go till after supper; perhaps I shall see Stollermyself by that time. "

She had been deeply stirred by her encounter with Stoller, but sheentered with impartial intensity into the fact that the elevator atPupp's had the characteristic of always coming up and never going downwith passengers. It was locked into its closet with a solid door, andthere was no bell to summon it, or any place to take it except on theground-floor; but the stairs by which she could descend were abundant andstately; and on one landing there was the lithograph of one of thelargest and ugliest hotels in New York; how ugly it was, she said sheshould never have known if she had not seen it there. 

The dining-room was divided into the grand saloon, where they supped amidrococo sculptures and frescoes, and the glazed veranda opening by vastwindows on a spread of tables without, which were already filling up forthe evening concert. Around them at the different tables there weregroups of faces and figures fascinating in their strangeness, with thatdistinction which abashes our American level in the presence of Europeaninequality. 

"How simple and unimpressive we are, Basil, " she said, "beside all thesepeople! I used to feel it in Europe when I was young, and now I'm certainthat we must seem like two faded-in old village photographs. We don'teven look intellectual! I hope we look good. "

"I know I do, " said March. The waiter went for their supper, and theyjoined in guessing the different nationalities in the room. A Frenchparty was easy enough; a Spanish mother and daughter were not difficult, though whether they were not South-American remained uncertain; twoelderly maiden ladies were unmistakably of central Massachusetts, andwere obviously of a book-club culture that had left no leaf unturned;some Triestines gave themselves away by their Venetian accent; but alarge group at a farther table were unassignable in the strange languagewhich they clattered loudly together, with bursts of laughter. They werea family party of old and young, they were having a good time, with afreedom which she called baronial; the ladies wore white satin, or blacklace, but the men were in sack-coats; she chose to attribute them, for noreason but their outlandishness, to Transylvania. March pretended toprefer a table full of Germans, who were unmistakably bourgeois, and yetof intellectual effect. He chose as his favorite a middle-aged man oflearned aspect, and they both decided to think of him as the HerrProfessor, but they did not imagine how perfectly the title fitted himtill he drew a long comb from his waistcoat pocket and combed his hairand beard with it above the table. 

The wine wrought with the Transylvanians, and they all jargoned togetherat once, and laughed at the jokes passing among them. One old gentlemanhad a peculiar fascination from the infantile innocence of his gums whenhe threw his head back to laugh, and showed an upper jaw toothless exceptfor two incisors, standing guard over the chasm between. Suddenly hechoked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up beforehim, and--

"Noblesse oblige, " said March, with the tone of irony which he reservedfor his wife's preoccupations with aristocracies of all sorts. "I think Iprefer my Hair Professor, bourgeois, as he is. "

The ladies attributively of central Massachusetts had risen from theirtable, and were making for the door without having paid for their supper. The head waiter ran after them; with a real delicacy for their mistake heexplained that though in most places the meals were charged in the bill, it was the custom in Carlsbad to pay for them at the table; one could seethat he was making their error a pleasant adventure to them which theycould laugh over together, and write home about without a pang. 

"And I, " said Mrs. March, shamelessly abandoning the party of thearistocracy, "prefer the manners of the lower classes. "

"Oh, yes, " he admitted. "The only manners we have at home are black ones. But you mustn't lose courage. Perhaps the nobility are not always sobaronial. "

"I don't know whether we have manners at home, " she said, "and I don'tbelieve I care. At least we have decencies. "

"Don't be a jingo, " said her husband. 

XXVII. 

Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy from duty for the day, hewas not so full of resources in himself, and he had not so general anacquaintance in the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellow makeup to him in the reading-room, that night. He laid down a New York paperten days old in despair of having left any American news in it, andpushed several continental Anglo-American papers aside with his elbow, ashe gave a contemptuous glance at the foreign journals, in Bohemian, Hungarian, German, French, and Italian, which littered the large table. 

"I wonder, " he said, "how long it'll take'em, over here, to catch on toour way of having pictures?"

Burnamy had come to his newspaper work since illustrated journalism wasestablished, and he had never had any shock from it at home, but sosensitive is youth to environment that, after four days in Europe, theNew York paper Stoller had laid down was already hideous to him. From thepolitic side of his nature, however, he temporized with Stoller'spreference. "I suppose it will be some time yet. "

"I wish, " said Stoller, with a savage disregard of expressed sequencesand relevancies, "I could ha' got some pictures to send home with thatletter this afternoon: something to show how they do things here, and bea kind of object-lesson. " This term had come up in a recent campaign whensome employers, by shutting down their works, were showing theiremployees what would happen if the employees voted their politicalopinions into effect, and Stoller had then mastered its meaning and wasfond of using it. "I'd like 'em to see the woods around here, that thecity owns, and the springs, and the donkey-carts, and the theatre, andeverything, and give 'em some practical ideas. "

Burnamy made an uneasy movement. 

"I'd 'a' liked to put 'em alongside of some of our improvements, and showhow a town can be carried on when it's managed on business principles. "

"Why didn't you think of it?"

"Really, I don't know, " said Burnamy, with a touch of impatience. 

They had not met the evening before on the best of terms. Stoller hadexpected Burnamy twenty-four hours earlier, and had shown his displeasurewith him for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might have spent atCarlsbad; and Burnamy had been unsatisfactory in accounting for thedelay. But he had taken hold so promptly and so intelligently that byworking far into the night, and through the whole forenoon, he had gotStoller's crude mass of notes into shape, and had sent off in time forthe first steamer the letter which was to appear over the proprietor'sname in his paper. It was a sort of rough but very full study of theCarlsbad city government, the methods of taxation, the municipalownership of the springs and the lands, and the public control ineverything. It condemned the aristocratic constitution of themunicipality, but it charged heavily in favor of the purity, beneficence, and wisdom of the administration, under which there was no poverty and noidleness, and which was managed like any large business. 

Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure, once or twice, andBurnamy suffered it submissively until now. But now, at the change inBurnamy's tone, he changed his manner a little. 

"Seen your friends since supper?" he asked. 

"Only a moment. They are rather tired, and they've gone to bed. "

That the fellow that edits that book you write for?"

"Yes; he owns it, too. "

The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller's respect, and he askedmore deferentially, "Makin' a good thing out of it?"

"A living, I suppose. Some of the high-class weeklies feel thecompetition of the ten-cent monthlies. But 'Every Other Week' is aboutthe best thing we've got in the literary way, and I guess it's holdingits own. "

"Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad, " Stoller said, with areturn to the sourness of his earlier mood. "I don't know as I care muchfor his looks; I seen him when he came in with you. No snap to him. " Heclicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and startedup with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and physical;as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking at Burnamy, "You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest. "

Stoller's father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to theWest with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race andclass; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana townwhere their son was born, and throve in it from the start. He couldremember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheeseand pickle the pigs' feet, which they took turns in selling at as great aprice as they could extort from the townspeople. She was a good andtender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob inmimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him tofight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, andmobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time tillthey wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through theexhaustion of their invention. No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky, rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf;and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed uponhim the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans. He hated his nativespeech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with his fatherand mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who proposed toparley with him in it on such terms as "Nix come arouce in de Dytchman'shouse. " He disused it so thoroughly that after his father took him out ofschool, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he could not get backto it. He regarded his father's business as part of his nationaldisgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away from it, andinformally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and wagon-maker. When it came to his setting up for himself in the business he had chosen, he had no help from his father, who had gone on adding dollar to dollartill he was one of the richest men in the place. 

Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, hadmany of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt ofasking him to their houses when they were young people, any more thanwhen they were children. He was long deeply in love with an American girlwhom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry anAmerican. He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who hadbeen at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home asfragilely and nasally American as anybody. She made him a good, sickly, fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with novisible taint of their German origin. 

In the mean time Jacob's father had died and left his money to his son, with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who wouldgladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if shecould. He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she lived;and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household trying sohard to be American. She could not help her native accent, but she keptsilence when her son's wife had company; and when her eldestgranddaughter began very early to have American callers, she went out ofthe room; they would not have noticed her if she had staid. 

Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to hisfinancial importance in the community. He first commended himself to theBetter Element by crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which werenow the largest business interest of the place; and he rose on a wave ofmunicipal reform to such a height of favor with the respectable classesthat he was elected on a citizens' ticket to the Legislature. In thereaction which followed he was barely defeated for Congress, and wastalked of as a dark horse who might be put up for the governorship someday; but those who knew him best predicted that he would not get far inpolitics, where his bull-headed business ways would bring him to ruinsooner or later; they said, "You can't swing a bolt like you can astrike. "

When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors by going to live inChicago, though he kept his works in the place where he and they hadgrown up together. His wife died shortly after, and within four years helost his three eldest children; his son, it was said, had begun to gowrong first. But the rumor of his increasing wealth drifted back fromChicago; he was heard of in different enterprises and speculations; atlast it was said that he had bought a newspaper, and then his boyhoodfriends decided that Jake was going into politics again. 

In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of the great city he came tounderstand better that to be an American in all respects was not thebest. His mounting sense of importance began to be retroactive in thedirection of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the little town nearWurzburg which his people had come from, and found that he had relativesstill living there, some of whom had become people of substance; andabout the time his health gave way from life-long gluttony, and he wasordered to Carlsbad, he had pretty much made up his mind to take hisyounger daughters and put them in school for a year or two in Wurzburg, for a little discipline if not education. He had now left them there, tolearn the language, which he had forgotten with such heart-burning andshame, and music, for which they had some taste. 

The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their fatherwith open threats of running away; and in his heart he did not altogetherblame them. He came away from Wurzburg raging at the disrespect for hismoney and his standing in business which had brought him a more gallinghumiliation there than anything he had suffered in his boyhood at DesVaches. It intensified him in his dear-bought Americanism to the point ofwishing to commit lese majesty in the teeth of some local dignitaries whohad snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle to shame inhis person; there was something like the bird of his step-country inStoller's pale eyes and huge beak. 

XXVIII. 

March sat with a company of other patients in the anteroom of the doctor, and when it came his turn to be prodded and kneaded, he was ashamed atbeing told he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded. The doctor wroteout a careful dietary for him, with a prescription of a certain number ofglasses of water at a certain spring and a certain number of baths, and arule for the walks he was to take before and after eating; then thedoctor patted him on the shoulder and pushed him caressingly out of hisinner office. It was too late to begin his treatment that day, but hewent with his wife to buy a cup, with a strap for hanging it over hisshoulder, and he put it on so as to be an invalid with the others atonce; he came near forgetting the small napkin of Turkish towelling whichthey stuffed into their cups, but happily the shopman called him back intime to sell it to him. 

At five the next morning he rose, and on his way to the street exchangedwith the servants cleaning the hotel stairs the first of the gloomy'Guten Morgens' which usher in the day at Carlsbad. They cannot be sofinally hopeless as they sound; they are probably expressive only of thepopular despair of getting through with them before night; but Marchheard the salutations sorrowfully groaned out on every hand as he joinedthe straggling current of invalids which swelled on the way past thesilent shops and cafes in the Alte Wiese, till it filled the street, andpoured its thousands upon the promenade before the classic colonnade ofthe Muhlbrunn. On the other bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings itssteaming waters by irregular impulses into the air under a pavilion ofiron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the source of most resort. There isan instrumental concert somewhere in Carlsbad from early rising tillbedtime; and now at the Muhlbrunn there was an orchestra already playing;and under the pillared porch, as well as before it, the multitudeshuffled up and down, draining their cups by slow sips, and then takingeach his place in the interminable line moving on to replenish them atthe spring. 

A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some vice of their climate issaid peculiarly to fit for the healing effects of Carlsbad, most took hiseye in their long gabardines of rusty black and their derby hats of plushor velvet, with their corkscrew curls coming down before their ears. Theywere old and young, they were grizzled and red and black, but they seemedall well-to-do; and what impresses one first and last at Carlsbad is thatits waters are mainly for the healing of the rich. After the Polish Jews, the Greek priests of Russian race were the most striking figures. Therewere types of Latin ecclesiastics, who were striking in their way too;and the uniforms of certain Austrian officers and soldiers brightened thepicture. Here and there a southern face, Italian or Spanish or Levantine, looked passionately out of the mass of dull German visages; for atCarlsbad the Germans, more than any other gentile nation, are to thefore. Their misfits, their absence of style, imparted the prevalenteffect; though now and then among the women a Hungarian, or Pole, orParisian, or American, relieved the eye which seeks beauty and gracerather than the domestic virtues. There were certain faces, types ofdiscomfort and disease, which appealed from the beginning to the end. Ayoung Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid South-American, were of alasting fascination to March. 

What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficultyof assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his yearsof having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their longdisuse in his homogeneous American world. The Americans themselves fusedwith the European races who were often so hard to make out; hisfellow-citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave themaway; he thought the women's voices the worst. 

At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady mechanical actiondipped the cups into the steaming source, and passed them impersonally upto their owners. With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often ahalf-hour before one's turn came, and at all a strict etiquette forbadeany attempt to anticipate it. The water was merely warm and flat, andafter the first repulsion one could forget it. March formed a childishhabit of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with agulp which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by goingsometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group ofTriestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park beyondthe Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close swardthe yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight. Heliked to sit there and look at the city beyond the Tepl, where it climbedthe wooded heights in terraces till it lost its houses in the skirts andfolds of the forest. Most mornings it rained, quietly, absent-mindedly, and this, with the chili in the air, deepened a pleasant illusion ofQuebec offered by the upper town across the stream; but there were sunnymornings when the mountains shone softly through a lustrous mist, and theair was almost warm. 

Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy's employer, whom he had sometimes noted in the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting histurn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience. Stoller explainedthat though you could have the water brought to you at your hotel, hechose to go to the spring for the sake of the air; it was something youhad got to live through; before he had that young Burnamy to help him hedid not know what to do with his time, but now, every minute he was noteating or sleeping he was working; his cure did not oblige him to walkmuch. He examined March, with a certain mixture of respect and contempt, upon the nature of the literary life, and how it differed from the lifeof a journalist. He asked if he thought Burnamy would amount to anythingas a literary man; he so far assented to March's faith in him as to say, "He's smart. " He told of leaving his daughters in school at Wurzburg; andupon the whole he moved March with a sense of his pathetic lonelinesswithout moving his liking, as he passed lumberingly on, dangling his cup. 

March gave his own cup to the little maid at his spring, and while shegave it to a second, who dipped it and handed it to a third for itsreturn to him, he heard an unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-, morning to them all in English. "Are you going to teach them UnitedStates?" he asked of a face with which he knew such an appeal would notfail. 

"Well, " the man admitted, "I try to teach them that much. They like it. You are an American? I am glad of it. I have 'most lost the use of mylungs, here. I'm a great talker, and I talk to my wife till she's aboutdead; then I'm out of it for the rest of the day; I can't speak German. "

His manner was the free, friendly manner of the West. He must be thatsort of untravelled American whom March had so seldom met, but he wasafraid to ask him if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest it shouldprove the third or fourth. "Are you taking the cure?" he asked instead. 

"Oh, no. My wife is. She'll be along directly; I come down here and drinkthe waters to encourage her; doctor said to. That gets me in for thediet, too. I've e't more cooked fruit since I been here than I ever didin my life before. Prunes? My Lord, I'm full o' prunes! Well, it does megood to see an American, to know him. I couldn't 'a' told you, it youhadn't have spoken. "

"Well, " said March, "I shouldn't have been so sure of you, either, byyour looks. "

"Yes, we can't always tell ourselves from these Dutch. But they know us, and they don't want us, except just for one thing, and that's our money. I tell you, the Americans are the chumps over here. Soon's they got allour money, or think they have, they say, 'Here, you Americans, this is mycountry; you get off;' and we got to get. Ever been over before?"

"A great while ago; so long that I can hardly believe it. "

"It's my first time. My name's Otterson: I'm from out in Iowa. "

March gave him his name, and added that he was from New York. 

"Yes. I thought you was Eastern. But that wasn't an Eastern man you wasjust with?"

"No; he's from Chicago. He's a Mr. Stoller. "

"Not the buggy man?"

"I believe he makes buggies. "

"Well, you do meet everybody here. " The Iowan was silent for a moment, asif, hushed by the weighty thought. "I wish my wife could have seen him. Ijust want her to see the man that made our buggy. I don't know what'skeeping her, this morning, " he added, apologetically. "Look at thatfellow, will you, tryin' to get away from those women!" A young officerwas doing his best to take leave of two ladies, who seemed to be motherand daughter; they detained him by their united arts, and clung to himwith caressing words and looks. He was red in the face with his politestruggles when he broke from them at last. "How they do hang on to a man, over here!" the Iowa man continued. "And the Americans are as bad as any. Why, there's one ratty little Englishman up at our place, and our girlsjust swarm after him; their mothers are worse. Well, it's so, Jenny, " hesaid to the lady who had joined them and whom March turned round to seewhen he spoke to her. "If I wanted a foreigner I should go in for a man. And these officers! Put their mustaches up at night in curl-papers, theytell me. Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr. March. Well, had your firstglass, yet, Jenny? I'm just going for my second tumbler. "

He took his wife back to the spring, and began to tell her about Stoller;she made no sign of caring for him; and March felt inculpated. Sherelented a little toward him as they drank together; when he said he mustbe going to breakfast with his wife, she asked where he breakfasted, andsaid, "Why, we go to the Posthof, too. " He answered that then they shouldbe sure some time to meet there; he did not venture further; he reflectedthat Mrs. March had her reluctances too; she distrusted people who hadamused or interested him before she met them. 

XXIX. 

Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he had found most of the otheragreeable things in Carlsbad, which he brought to their knowledge one byone, with such forethought that March said he hoped he should be caredfor in his declining years as an editor rather than as a father; therewas no tenderness like a young contributor's. 

Many people from the hotels on the hill found at Pupp's just the time andspace between their last cup of water and their first cup of coffee whichare prescribed at Carlsbad; but the Marches were aware somehow from thebeginning that Pupp's had not the hold upon the world at breakfast whichit had at the mid-day dinner, or at supper on the evenings when theconcert was there. Still it was amusing, and they were patient ofBurnamy's delay till he could get a morning off from Stoller and go withthem to the Posthof. He met Mrs. March in the reading-room, where Marchwas to join them on his way from the springs with his bag of bread. Theearlier usage of buying the delicate pink slices of Westphalia ham, whichform the chief motive of a Carlsbad breakfast, at a certain shop in thetown, and carrying them to the cafe with you, is no longer of suchbinding force as the custom of getting your bread at the Swiss bakery. You choose it yourself at the counter, which begins to be crowded by halfpast seven, and when you have collected the prescribed loaves into thebasket of metallic filigree given you by one of the baker's maids, sheputs it into a tissue-paper bag of a gay red color, and you join theother invalids streaming away from the bakery, their paper bags making afestive rustling as they go. 

Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely meadow-lands, a good mileup the brawling Tepl, before they join on the right side of the torrent, where the Posthof lurks nestled under trees whose boughs let the sun andrain impartially through upon its army of little tables. By this time theslow omnibus plying between Carlsbad and some villages in the valleybeyond has crossed from the left bank to the right, and keeps on pasthalf a dozen other cafes, where patients whose prescriptions marshal thembeyond the Posthof drop off by the dozens and scores. 

The road on the left bank of the Tepl is wild and overhung at points withwooded steeps, when it leaves the town; but on the right it is borderedwith shops and restaurants a great part of its length. In leafy nooksbetween these, uphill walks begin their climb of the mountains, from thefoot of votive shrines set round with tablets commemorating in German, French, Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of high-well-borns ofall those races and languages. Booths glittering with the lapidary's workin the cheaper gems, or full of the ingenious figures of the toy-makers, alternate with the shrines and the cafes on the way to the Posthof, andwith their shoulders against the overhanging cliff, spread for thepassing crowd a lure of Viennese jewelry in garnets, opals, amethysts, and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings as carrot-eating rabbits, worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and peacocks that strut about thefeet of the passers and expand their iridescent tails in mimic pride. 

Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they feltthe far-reflected charm of the crucifixes of the white-hot Italianhighways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had amechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the children, endingin a pang for the fact that they were children no longer. He waitedpolitely while Mrs. March made up her mind that she would not buy anylaces of the motherly old women who showed them under pent-roofs onway-side tables; and he waited patiently at the gate of theflower-gardens beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of sweetpeasefrom the businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful joy in herbecause she knew no English, and gave him a chance of speaking hisGerman. 

"You'll find, " he said, as they crossed the road again, "that it's wellto trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass. I should still be laggingalong in my thirties if it hadn't been for fooling, and here I am well onin my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever. "

They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the cafe at last, anda turn of the path brought them to the prospect of its tables, under thetrees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters takerefuge at other tables when it rains; it rains nearly always, and thetrunks of the trees are as green with damp as if painted; but thatmorning the sun was shining. At the verge of the open space a group ofpretty serving-maids, each with her name on a silver band pinned upon herbreast, met them and bade them a 'Guten Morgen' of almost cheerful note, but gave way, to an eager little smiling blonde, who came pushing downthe path at sight of Burnamy, and claimed him for her own. 

"Ah, Lili! We want an extra good table, this morning. These are someAmerican Excellencies, and you must do your best for them. "

"Oh, yes, " the girl answered in English, after a radiant salutation ofthe Marches; "I get you one. "

"You are a little more formerly, to-day, and I didn't had one already. "

She ran among the tables along the edge of the western edge of thegallery, and was far beyond hearing his protest that he was not earlierthan usual when she beckoned him to the table she had found. She hadcrowded it in between two belonging to other girls, and by the time herbreakfasters came up she was ready for their order, with the poutingpretence that the girls always tried to rob her of the best places. Burnamy explained proudly, when she went, that none of the other girlsever got an advantage of her; she had more custom than any three of them, and she had hired a man to help her carry her orders. The girls were allfrom the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived at home in thewinter on their summer tips; their wages were nothing, or less, forsometimes they paid for their places. 

"What a mass of information!" said March. "How did you come by it?"

"Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe. "

"It's not a bad habit, if one doesn't carry it too far. How did Lililearn her English?"

"She takes lessons in the winter. She's a perfect little electric motor. I don't believe any Yankee girl could equal her. "

"She would expect to marry a millionaire if she did. What astonishes oneover here is to see how contentedly people prosper along on their ownlevel. And the women do twice the work of the men without expecting toequal them in any other way. At Pupp's, if we go to one end of theout-door restaurant, it takes three men to wait on us: one to bring ourcoffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat, and another to makeout our bill, and I have to tip all three of them. If we go to the otherend, one girl serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make it lessthan the least I give any three of the men waiters. "

"You ought to be ashamed of that, " said his wife. 

"I'm not. I'm simply proud of your sex, my dear. "

"Women do nearly everything, here, " said Burnamy, impartially. "Theybuilt that big new Kaiserbad building: mixed the mortar, carried thehods, and laid the stone. "

"That makes me prouder of the sex than ever. But come, Mr. Burnamy! Isn'tthere anybody of polite interest that you know of in this crowd?"

"Well, I can't say, " Burnamy hesitated. 

The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove and the galleries; thetables were already filled, and men were bringing other tables on theirheads, and making places for them, with entreaties for pardon everywhere;the proprietor was anxiously directing them; the pretty serving-girlswere running to and from the kitchen in a building apart with shrill, sweet promises of haste. The morning sun fell broken through the leaveson the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and dappled the figures of themen with harlequin patches of light and shade. A tall woman, with a sortof sharpened beauty, and an artificial permanency of tint in her cheeksand yellow hair, came trailing herself up the sun-shot path, and found, with hardy insistence upon the publicity, places for the surly-looking, down-faced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle;the dog was like the black poodle out of Faust. Burnamy had heard herhistory; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on it, which hecalled Europa, not after the old fable, but because it seemed to him thatshe expressed Europe, on one side of its civilization, and had anauthorized place in its order, as she would not have had in ours. She waswhere she was by a toleration of certain social facts which correspondsin Europe to our reverence for the vested interests. In her historythere, had been officers and bankers; even foreign dignitaries; now therewas this sullen young fellow . . . . Burnamy had wondered if it would doto offer his poem to March, but the presence of the original abashed him, and in his mind he had torn the poem up, with a heartache for itsaptness. 

"I don't believe, " he said, "that I recognize-any celebrities here. "

"I'm sorry, " said March. "Mrs. March would have been glad of someHoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some merewell-borns. But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness. "

"I'm satisfied with the picturesqueness, " said his wife. "Don't worryabout me, Mr. Burnamy. "

"Why can't we have this sort of thing at home?"

"We're getting something like it in the roof-gardens, " said March. "Wecouldn't have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us. Atthis time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the lifeout of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table. At nineA. M. The mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this. So wehave to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and themosquito-line into the night air. I haven't seen a fly since I came toEurope. I really miss them; it makes me homesick. "

"There are plenty in Italy, " his wife suggested. 

"We must get down there before we go home. "

"But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in Germany? Whydid no traveller ever put it in his book? When your stewardess said so onthe steamer, I remember that you regarded it as a bluff. " He turned toBurnamy, who was listening with the deference of a contributor: "Isn'tLili rather long? I mean for such a very prompt person. Oh, no!"

But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted "Fraulein!" to Lili; with herhireling at her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between thetables. She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, "In aminute!" and vanished in the crowd. 

"Does that mean anything in particular? There's really no hurry. "

"Oh, I think she'll come now, " said Burnamy. March protested that he hadonly been amused at Lili's delay; but his wife scolded him for hisimpatience; she begged Burnamy's pardon, and repeated civilities passedbetween them. She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies werepretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the motherswere mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the fatherstoo closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats behindtheir newspapers, with noises that made her quail. There was no one soeffective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good deal onshow, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glintingfrom their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, theymoved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced women. 

"They all wear corsets, " Burnamy explained. 

"How much you know already!" said Mrs. March. "I can see that Europewon't be lost on you in anything. Oh, who's that?" A lady whose costumeexpressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grovewith a graceful tilt. Burnamy was silent. "She must be an American. Doyou know who she is?"

"Yes. " He hesitated, a little to name a woman whose tragedy had oncefilled the newspapers. 

Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination which such tragediesinspire. "What grace! Is she beautiful?"

"Very. " Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge, but somehow Mrs. Marchdid not like his knowing who she was, and how beautiful. She asked Marchto look, but he refused. 

"Those things are too squalid, " he said, and she liked him for saying it;she hoped it would not be lost upon Burnamy. 

One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the burdenoff her tray on the stone floor before her; some of the dishes broke, andthe breakfast was lost. Tears came into the girl's eyes and rolled downher hot cheeks. "There! That is what I call tragedy, " said March. "She'llhave to pay for those things. "

"Oh, give her the money, dearest!"

"How can I?"

The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili and her hirelingbehind her came bearing down upon them with their three substantialbreakfasts on two well-laden trays. She forestalled Burnamy's reproachesfor her delay, laughing and bridling, while she set down the dishes ofham and tongue and egg, and the little pots of coffee and frothed milk. 

"I could not so soon I wanted, because I was to serve an Americanprincess. "

Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of those nobleinternational marriages which fill our women with vainglory for such oftheir compatriots as make them. 

"Oh, come now, Lili!" said Burnamy. "We have queens in America, butnothing so low as princesses. This was a queen, wasn't it?"

She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmed her. "All people sayit is princess, " she insisted. 

"Well, if she's a princess we must look her up after breakfast, " saidBurnamy. "Where is she sitting?"

She pointed at a corner so far off on the other side that no one could bedistinguished, and then was gone, with a smile flashed over her shoulder, and her hireling trying to keep up with her. 

"We're all very proud of Lili's having a hired man, " said Burnamy. "Wethink it reflects credit on her customers. "

March had begun his breakfast with-the voracious appetite of anearly-rising invalid. "What coffee!"

He drew a long sigh after the first draught. 

"It's said to be made of burnt figs, " said Burnamy, from theinexhaustible advantage of his few days' priority in Carlsbad. 

"Then let's have burnt figs introduced at home as soon as possible. Butwhy burnt figs? That seems one of those doubts which are much moredifficult than faith. "

"It's not only burnt figs, " said Burnamy, with amiable superiority, "if itis burnt figs, but it's made after a formula invented by a consensus ofphysicians, and enforced by the municipality. Every cafe in Carlsbadmakes the same kind of coffee and charges the same price. "

"You are leaving us very little to find out for ourselves, " sighed March. 

"Oh, I know a lot more things. Are you fond of fishing?"

"Not very. "

"You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl, but they send anofficial with you who keeps count, and when you have had your sport, thetrout belong to the municipality just as they did before you caughtthem. "

"I don't see why that isn't a good notion: the last thing I should wantto do would be to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I was personallyacquainted with. Well, I'm never going away from Carlsbad. I don't wonderpeople get their doctors to tell them to come back. "

Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller had got togetherabout the place, and had given him to put in shape. It was run in theinterest of people who had got out of order, so that they would keepcoming to get themselves in order again; you could hardly buy anunwholesome meal in the town; all the cooking was 'kurgemass'. He wonsuch favor with his facts that he could not stop in time: he said toMarch, "But if you ever should have a fancy for a fish of your personalacquaintance, there's a restaurant up the Tepl, where they let you pickout your trout in the water; then they catch him and broil him for you, and you know what you are eating. "

"Is it a municipal restaurant?"

"Semi-municipal, " said Burnamy, laughing. 

"We'll take Mrs. March, " said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamyfelt the limitations of a woman's sense of humor, which always definethemselves for men so unexpectedly. 

He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her whathe knew about distinctions and dignities that he now saw among thebreakfasters. The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were settogether in such labyrinths that any one who left the central aisle waslost in them. The serving-girls ran more swiftly to and fro, respondingwith a more nervous shrillness to the calls of "Fraulein! Fraulein!" thatfollowed them. The proprietor, in his bare head, stood like one paralyzedby his prosperity, which sent up all round him the clash of knives andcrockery, and the confusion of tongues. It was more than an hour beforeBurnamy caught Lili's eye, and three times she promised to come and bepaid before she came. Then she said, "It is so nice, when you stay alittle, " and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who had broken thedishes in her fall near them, she almost wept with tenderness; she almostwinked with wickedness when he asked if the American princess was stillin her place. 

"Do go and see who it can be!" Mrs. March entreated. "We'll wait here, "and he obeyed. "I am not sure that I like him, " she said, as soon as hewas out of hearing. "I don't know but he's coarse, after all. Do youapprove of his knowing so many people's 'taches' already?"

"Would it be any better later?" he asked in tern. "He seemed to find youinterested. "

"It's very different with us; we're not young, " she urged, only halfseriously. 

Her husband laughed. "I see you want me to defend him. Oh, hello!" hecried, and she saw Burnamy coming toward them with a young lady, who wasnodding to them from as far as she could see them. "This is the easy kindof thing that makes you Blush for the author if you find it in a novel. "

XXX. 

Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to kiss her. "Do you knowI felt it must be you, all the time! When did you come? Where is yourfather? What hotel are you staying at?"

It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking hands with March, that it waslast night, and her father was finishing his breakfast, and it was one ofthe hotels on the hill. On the way back to her father it appeared that hewished to consult March's doctor; not that there was anything the matter. 

The general himself was not much softened by the reunion with hisfellow-Americans; he confided to them that his coffee was poisonous; buthe seemed, standing up with the Paris-New York Chronicle folded in hishand, to have drunk it all. Was March going off on his forenoon tramp? Hebelieved that was part of the treatment, which was probably all humbug, though he thought of trying it, now he was there. He was told the walkswere fine; he looked at Burnamy as if he had been praising them, andBurnamy said he had been wondering if March would not like to try amountain path back to his hotel; he said, not so sincerely, that hethought Mrs. March would like it. 

"I shall like your account of it, " she answered. "But I'll walk back on alevel, if you please. "

"Oh, yes, " Miss Triscoe pleaded, "come with us!"

She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with her father sogracefully that Mrs. March herself could scarcely have told just wherethe girl's real purpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident, orjust how she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the pleasure ofseeing Mrs. March back to her hotel. 

March went with the young people across the meadow behind the Posthof andup into the forest, which began at the base of the mountain. At firstthey tried to keep him in the range of their talk; but he fell behindmore and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was less andless possible to include him in it. When it began to concern their commonappreciation of the Marches, they even tried to get out of his hearing. 

"They're so young in their thoughts, " said Burnamy, "and they seem asmuch interested in everything as they could have been thirty years ago. They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it isnow; don't you think? I mean, in the eighteen-sixties. "

"Oh, yes, I can see that. "

"I don't know why we shouldn't be born older in each generation thanpeople were in the last. Perhaps we are, " he suggested. 

"I don't know how you mean, " said the girl, keeping vigorously up withhim; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not havehis hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it. 

"I don't believe I can quite make it out myself. But fancy a man thatbegan to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the pastexperience of the whole race--"

"He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn't he?"

"Rather monstrous, yes, " he owned, with a laugh. "But that's where thepsychological interest would come in. "

As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it. "Isuppose you've been writing all sorts of things since you came here. "

"Well, it hasn't been such a great while as it's seemed, and I've had Mr. Stoller's psychological interests to look after. "

"Oh, yes! Do you like him?"

"I don't know. He's a lump of honest selfishness. He isn't bad. You knowwhere to have him. He's simple, too. "

"You mean, like Mr. March?"

"I didn't mean that; but why not? They're not of the same generation, butStoller isn't modern. "

"I'm very curious to see him, " said the girl. 

"Do you want me to introduce him?"

"You can introduce him to papa. "

They stopped and looked across the curve of the mounting path, down onMarch, who had sunk on a way-side seat, and was mopping his forehead. Hesaw them, and called up: "Don't wait for me. I'll join you, gradually. "

"I don't want to lose you, " Burnamy called back, but he kept on with MissTriscoe. "I want to get the Hirschensprung in, " he explained. "It's thecliff where a hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet to get awayfrom an emperor who was after him. "

"Oh, yes. They have them everywhere. "

"Do they? Well, anyway, there's a noble view up there. "

There was no view on the way up. The Germans' notion of a woodland iseverywhere that of a dense forest such as their barbarous tribesprimevally herded in. It means the close-set stems of trees, with theirtops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely that you maywalk dry through it almost as long as a German shower lasts. When the sunshines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here andthere with the gold that trickles through. There is nothing of theaccident of an American wood in these forests, which have been watchedand weeded by man ever since they burst the soil. They remain nurseries, but they have the charm which no human care can alienate. The smell oftheir bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth abouttheir roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of hiscountry-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life incities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests anddimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment ofexemption from care. There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation;no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden himgood-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, andwas less intrusive than if he had not been there. 

March thought of the impassioned existence of these young people playingthe inevitable comedy of hide and seek which the youth of the race hasplayed from the beginning of time. The other invalids who haunted theforest, and passed up and down before him in fulfilment of their severalprescriptions, had a thin unreality in spite of the physical bulk thatprevailed among them, and they heightened the relief that theforest-spirit brought him from the strenuous contact of that young drama. He had been almost painfully aware that the persons in it had met, however little they knew it, with an eagerness intensified by their briefseparation, and he fancied it was the girl who had unconsciously operatedtheir reunion in response to the young man's longing, her will makingitself electrically felt through space by that sort of wirelesstelegraphy which love has long employed, and science has just begun toimagine. 

He would have been willing that they should get home alone, but he knewthat his wife would require an account of them from him, and though hecould have invented something of the kind, if it came to the worst, hewas aware that it would not do for him to arrive without them. Thethought goaded him from his seat, and he joined the upward procession ofhis fellow-sick, as it met another procession straggling downward; theways branched in all directions, with people on them everywhere, bentupon building up in a month the health which they would spend the rest ofthe year in demolishing. 

He came upon his charges unexpectedly at a turn of the path, and MissTriscoe told him that he ought to have been with them for the view fromthe Hirschensprung. It was magnificent, she said, and she made Burnamycorroborate her praise of it, and agree with her that it was worth theclimb a thousand times; he modestly accepted the credit she appearedwilling to give him, of inventing the Hirschensprung. 

XXXI. 

Between his work for Stoller and what sometimes seemed theobstructiveness of General Triscoe, Burnamy was not very much with MissTriscoe. He was not devout, but he went every Sunday to the prettyEnglish church on the hill, where he contributed beyond his means to thesupport of the English clergy on the Continent, for the sake of lookingat her back hair during the service, and losing himself in the gracefullines which defined, the girl's figure from the slant of her flowery hatto the point where the pewtop crossed her elastic waist. One happymorning the general did not come to church, and he had the fortune towalk home with her to her pension, where she lingered with him a moment, and almost made him believe she might be going to ask him to come in. 

The next evening, when he was sauntering down the row of glittering shopsbeside the Tepl, with Mrs. March, they overtook the general and hisdaughter at a place where the girl was admiring some stork-scissors inthe window; she said she wished she were still little, so that she couldget them. They walked home with the Triscoes, and then he hurried Mrs. March back to the shop. The man had already put up his shutters, and wasjust closing his door, but Burnamy pushed in, and asked to look at thestork-scissors they had seen in the window. The gas was out, and theshopman lighted a very dim candle, to show them. 

"I knew you wanted to get them for her, after what she said, Mrs. March, "he laughed, nervously, "and you must let me lend you the money. "

"Why, of course!" she answered, joyfully humoring his feint. "Shall I putmy card in for the man to send home to her with them?"

"Well--no. No. Not your card--exactly. Or, yes! Yes, you must, Isuppose. "

They made the hushing street gay with their laughter; the next eveningMiss Triscoe came upon the Marches and Burnamy where they sat aftersupper listening to the concert at Pupp's, and thanked Mrs. March for thescissors. Then she and Burnamy had their laugh again, and Miss Triscoejoined them, to her father's frowning mystification. He stared round fora table; they were all taken, and he could not refuse the interestBurnamy made with the waiters to bring them one and crowd it in. He hadto ask him to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down and heard the concertthrough beside Miss Triscoe. 

"What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of stork-scissors?" Marchdemanded, when his wife and he were alone. 

"Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest, " she began, in a tone which hefelt to be wheedling, and she told the story of the scissors. 

"Look here, my dear! Didn't you promise to let this love-affair alone?"

"That was on the ship. And besides, what would you have done, I shouldlike to know? Would you have refused to let him buy them for her?" Sheadded, carelessly, "He wants us to go to the Kurhaus ball with him. "

"Oh, does he!"

"Yes. He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if wewill chaperon them. And I promised that you would. "

"That I would?"

"It will do just as well if you go. And it will be very amusing; you cansee something of Carlsbad society. "

"But I'm not going!" he declared. "It would interfere with my cure. Thesitting up late would be bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and Ishould eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do all sorts ofunwholesome things. "

"Nonsense! The refreshments will be 'kurgemass', of course. "

"You can go yourself, " he said. 

A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty as it is beforetwenty, but still it has claims upon the imagination, and the novelcircumstance of a ball in the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for Mrs. March. It was the annual reunion which is given by municipal authority inthe large hall above the bathrooms; it is frequented with safety andpleasure by curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it began to havefor Mrs. March the charm of duty; she believed that she could finallyhave made March go in her place, but she felt that she ought really to goin his, and save him from the late hours and the late supper. 

"Very well, then, " she said at last, "I will go. "

It appeared that any civil person might go to the reunion who chose topay two florins and a half. There must have been some sort ofrestriction, and the ladies of Burnamy's party went with a good deal ofamused curiosity to see what the distinctions were; but they saw noneunless it was the advantages which the military had. The long hall overthe bathrooms shaped itself into a space for the dancing at one end, andall the rest of it was filled with tables, which at half past eight werecrowded with people, eating, drinking, and smoking. The military enjoyedthe monopoly of a table next the rail dividing the dancing from thedining space. There the tight-laced Herr Hauptmanns and Herr Lieutenantssat at their sausage and beer and cigars in the intervals of the waltzes, and strengthened themselves for a foray among the gracious Fraus andFrauleins on the benches lining three sides of the dancing-space. Fromthe gallery above many civilian spectators looked down upon the gayety, and the dress-coats of a few citizens figured among the uniforms. 

As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fashion found their way tothe dancing-floor, and toward ten o'clock it became rather crowded. Aparty of American girls showed their Paris dresses in the transatlanticversions of the waltz. At first they danced with the young men who camewith them; but after a while they yielded to the custom of the place, anddanced with any of the officers who asked them. 

"I know it's the custom, " said Mrs. March to Miss Triscoe, who was at herside in one of the waltzes she had decided to sit out, so as not to bedancing all the time with Burnamy, "but I never can like it without anintroduction. "

"No, " said the girl, with the air of putting temptation decidedly away, "I don't believe papa would, either. "

A young officer came up, and drooped in mute supplication before her. Sheglanced at Mrs. March, who turned her face away; and she excused herselfwith the pretence that she had promised the dance, and by good fortune, Burnamy, who had been unscrupulously waltzing with a lady he did notknow, came up at the moment. She rose and put her hand on his arm, andthey both bowed to the officer before they whirled away. The officerlooked after them with amiable admiration; then he turned to Mrs. Marchwith a light of banter in his friendly eyes, and was unmistakably askingher to dance. She liked his ironical daring, she liked it so much thatshe forgot her objection to partners without introductions; she forgother fifty-odd years; she forgot that she was a mother of grown childrenand even a mother-in-law; she remembered only the step of her out-datedwaltz. 

It seemed to be modern enough for the cheerful young officer, and theywere suddenly revolving with the rest. . . A tide of long-forgottengirlhood welled up in her heart, and she laughed as she floated off on itpast the astonished eyes of Miss Triscoe and Burnamy. She saw themfalter, as if they had lost their step in their astonishment; then theyseemed both to vanish, and her partner had released her, and was helpingMiss Triscoe up from the floor; Burnamy was brushing the dust from hisknees, and the citizen who had bowled them over was boisterouslyapologizing and incessantly bowing. 

"Oh, are you hurt?" Mrs. March implored. "I'm sure you must be killed;and I did it! I don't know, what I was thinking of!"

The girl laughed. "I'm not hurt a bit!"

They had one impulse to escape from the place, and from the sympathy andcongratulation. In the dressing-room she declared again that she was allright. "How beautifully you waltz, Mrs. March!" she said, and she laughedagain, and would not agree with her that she had been ridiculous. "ButI'm glad those American girls didn't see me. And I can't be too thankfulpapa didn't come!"

Mrs. March's heart sank at the thought of what General Triscoe wouldthink of her. "You must tell him I did it. I can never lift up my head!"

"No, I shall not. No one did it, " said the girl, magnanimously. Shelooked down sidelong at her draperies. "I was so afraid I had torn mydress! I certainly heard something rip. "

It was one of the skirts of Burnamy's coat, which he had caught into hishand and held in place till he could escape to the men's dressing-room, where he had it pinned up so skillfully that the damage was not suspectedby the ladies. He had banged his knee abominably too; but they did notsuspect that either, as he limped home on the air beside them, first toMiss Triscoe's pension, and then to Mrs. March's hotel. 

It was quite eleven o'clock, which at Carlsbad is as late as three in themorning anywhere else, when she let herself into her room. She decidednot to tell her husband, then; and even at breakfast, which they had atthe Posthof, she had not got to her confession, though she had told himeverything else about the ball, when the young officer with whom she haddanced passed between the tables near her. He caught her eye and bowedwith a smile of so much meaning that March asked, "Who's your prettyyoung friend?"

"Oh, that!" she answered carelessly. "That was one of the officers at theball, " and she laughed. 

"You seem to be in the joke, too, " he said. "What is it?"

"Oh, something. I'll tell you some time. Or perhaps you'll find out. "

"I'm afraid you won't let me wait. "

"No, I won't, " and now she told him. She had expected teasing, ridicule, sarcasm, anything but the psychological interest mixed with a sort ofretrospective tenderness which he showed. "I wish I could have seen you;I always thought you danced well. " He added: "It seems that you need achaperon too. "

The next morning, after March and General Triscoe had started off uponone of the hill climbs, the young people made her go with them for a walkup the Tepl, as far as the cafe of the Freundschaftsaal. In the groundsan artist in silhouettes was cutting out the likenesses of people whosupposed themselves to have profiles, and they begged Mrs. March to sitfor hers. It was so good that she insisted on Miss Triscoe's sitting inturn, and then Burnamy. Then he had the inspiration to propose that theyshould all three sit together, and it appeared that such a group waswithin the scope of the silhouettist's art; he posed them in his littlebower, and while he was mounting the picture they took turns, at fivekreutzers each, in listening to American tunes played by his Edisonphonograph. 

Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moral fibre; but shetried to draw the line at letting Burnamy keep the group. "Why not?" hepleaded. 

"You oughtn't to ask, " she returned. "You've no business to have MissTriscoe's picture, if you must know. "

"But you're there to chaperon us!" he persisted. 

He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she said, "You need achaperon who doesn't lose her head, in a silhouette. " But it seemeduseless to hold out after that, and she heard herself asking, "Shall welet him keep it, Miss Triscoe?"

Burnamy went off to his work with Stoller, carrying the silhouette withhim, and she kept on with Miss Triscoe to her hotel. In turning from thegate after she parted with the girl she found herself confronted withMrs. Adding and Rose. The ladies exclaimed at each other in anastonishment from which they had to recover before they could begin totalk, but from the first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Adding hadsomething to say. The more freely to say it she asked Mrs. March into herhotel, which was in the same street with the pension of the Triscoes, andshe let her boy go off about the exploration of Carlsbad; he promised tobe back in an hour. 

"Well, now what scrape are you in?" March asked when his wife came home, and began to put off her things, with signs of excitement which he couldnot fail to note. He was lying down after a long tramp, and he seemedvery comfortable. 

His question suggested something of anterior import, and she told himabout the silhouettes, and the advantage the young people had taken oftheir power over her through their knowledge of her foolish behavior atthe ball. 

He said, lazily: "They seem to be working you for all you're worth. Isthat it?"

"No; there is something worse. Something's happened which throws all thatquite in the shade. Mrs. Adding is here. "

"Mrs. Adding?" he repeated, with a dimness for names which she would notallow was growing on him. 

"Don't be stupid, dear! Mrs. Adding, who sat opposite Mr. Kenby on theNorumbia. The mother of the nice boy. "

"Oh, yes! Well, that's good!"

"No, it isn't! Don't say such a thing--till you know!" she cried, with acertain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomed seriousness in thefact. He sat up as if better to confront the mystery. "I have been at herhotel, and she has been telling me that she's just come from Berlin, andthat Mr. Kenby's been there, and--Now I won't have you making a joke ofit, or breaking out about it, as if it were not a thing to be looked for;though of course with the others on our hands you're not to blame for notthinking of it. But you can see yourself that she's young andgood-looking. She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were notfor him, I don't believe she would hesitate--"

"For heaven's sake, what are you driving at?" March broke in, and sheanswered him as vehemently:

"He's asked her to marry him!"

"Kenby? Mrs. Adding?"

"Yes!"

"Well, now, Isabel, this won't do! They ought to be ashamed ofthemselves. With that morbid, sensitive boy! It's shocking--"

"Will you listen? Or do you want me to stop?" He arrested himself at herthreat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence timeto sink in, "She refused him, of course!"

"Oh, all right, then!"

"You take it in such a way that I've a great mind not to tell youanything more about it. "

"I know you have, " he said, stretching himself out again; "but you'll doit, all the same. You'd have been awfully disappointed if I had been calmand collected. "

"She refused him, " she began again, "although she respects him, becauseshe feels that she ought to devote herself to her son. Of course she'svery young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a mantwice her age, and she's not thirty-five yet. I don't think she evercared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something abouthim. "

"I never heard of him. I--"

Mrs. March made a "tchck!" that would have recalled the most consequentof men from the most logical and coherent interpretation to the trueintent of her words. He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely:"Well, I won't do it. If she's refused him, that's the end of it; sheneedn't know anything about him, and she has no right to. "

"Now I think differently, " said Mrs. March, with an inductive air. "Ofcourse she has to know about him, now. " She stopped, and March turned hishead and looked expectantly at her. "He said he would not consider heranswer final, but would hope to see her again and--She's afraid he mayfollow her--What are you looking at me so for?"

"Is he coming here?"

"Am I to blame if he is? He said he was going to write to her. "

March burst into a laugh. "Well, they haven't been beating about thebush! When I think how Miss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from thefirst moment she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she wasrunning from him, and he imagines that he has been boldly following her, without the least hope from her, I can't help admiring the simpledirectness of these elders. "

"And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what will you say?" she cut ineagerly. 

"I'll say I don't like the subject. What am I in Carlsbad for? I came forthe cure, and I'm spending time and money on it. I might as well go andtake my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to listen toKenby. "

"I know it's bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people, "said Mrs. March. "I don't believe he'll want to talk with you; but if--"

"Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel? I'm not going to have them round in mybread-trough!"

"She isn't. She's at one of the hotels on the hill. "

"Very well, let her stay there, then. They can manage their love-affairsin their own way. The only one I care the least for is the boy. "

"Yes, it is forlorn for him. But he likes Mr. Kenby, and--No, it'shorrid, and you can't make it anything else!"

"Well, I'm not trying to. " He turned his face away. "I must get my nap, now. " After she thought he must have fallen asleep, he said, "The firstthing you know, those old Eltwins will be coming round and telling usthat they're going to get divorced. " Then he really slept. 

XXXII. 

The mid-day dinner at Pupp's was the time to see the Carlsbad world, andthe Marches had the habit of sitting long at table to watch it. 

There was one family in whom they fancied a sort of literary quality, asif they had come out of some pleasant German story, but they never knewanything about them. The father by his dress must have been a Protestantclergyman; the mother had been a beauty and was still very handsome; thedaughter was good-looking, and of a good-breeding which was both girlishand ladylike. They commended themselves by always taking the table d'hotedinner, as the Marches did, and eating through from the soup and the rankfresh-water fish to the sweet, upon the same principle: the husband ateall the compote and gave the others his dessert, which was not good forhim. A young girl of a different fascination remained as much a mystery. She was small and of an extreme tenuity, which became more bewildering asshe advanced through her meal, especially at supper, which she made of along cucumber pickle, a Frankfort sausage of twice the pickle's length, and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she held a shivering littlehound; she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly maid, and had everyeffect of being a gracious Fraulein. A curious contrast to her Teutonicvoracity was the temperance of a young Latin swell, imaginably fromTrieste, who sat long over his small coffee and cigarette, and tranquillymused upon the pages of an Italian newspaper. At another table there wasa very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing draperies of white, whocommanded a sallow family of South-Americans, and loudly harangued themin South-American Spanish; she flared out in a picture which nowherelacked strong effects; and in her background lurked a mysterious blackface and figure, ironically subservient to the old man, the mild boy, andthe pretty young girl in the middle distance of the family group. 

Amidst the shows of a hardened worldliness there were touching glimpsesof domesticity and heart: a young bride fed her husband soup from her ownplate with her spoon, unabashed by the publicity; a mother and her twopretty daughters hung about a handsome officer, who must have been newlybetrothed to one of the girls; and, the whole family showed a helplessfondness for him, which he did not despise, though he held it in check;the girls dressed alike, and seemed to have for their whole change ofcostume a difference from time to time in the color of their sleeves. TheMarches believed they had seen the growth of the romance which hadeventuated so happily; and they saw other romances which did not in anywise eventuate. Carlsbad was evidently one of the great marriage marts ofmiddle Europe, where mothers brought their daughters to be admired, andeverywhere the flower of life was blooming for the hand of love. It blewby on all the promenades in dresses and hats as pretty as they could bebought or imagined; but it was chiefly at Pupp's that it flourished. Forthe most part it seemed to flourish in vain, and to be destined to be putby for another season to dream, bulblike, of the coming summer in thequiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian homes. 

Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than the spectators knew; butfor their own pleasure they would not have had their pang for it less;and March objected to having a more explicit demand upon his sympathy. "We could have managed, " he said, at the close of their dinner, as helooked compassionately round upon the parterre of young girls, "we couldhave managed with Burnamy and Miss Triscoe; but to have Mrs. Adding andKenby launched upon us is too much. Of course I like Kenby, and if thewidow alone were concerned I would give him my blessing: a wife more or awidow less is not going to disturb the equilibrium of the universe;but--" He stopped, and then he went on: "Men and women are well enough. They complement each other very agreeably, and they have very good timestogether. But why should they get in love?--It is sure to make themuncomfortable to themselves and annoying to others. " He broke off, andstared about him. "My dear, this is really charming--almost as charmingas the Posthof. " The crowd spread from the open vestibule of the hoteland the shelter of its branching pavilion roofs until it was dimmed inthe obscurity of the low grove across the way in an ultimate depth wherethe musicians were giving the afternoon concert. Between its twostationary divisions moved a current of promenaders, with some sucheffect as if the colors of a lovely garden should have liquefied andflowed in mingled rose and lilac, pink and yellow, and white and orange, and all the middle tints of modern millinery. Above on one side were theagreeable bulks of architecture, in the buff and gray of Carlsbad; andfar beyond on the other were the upland slopes, with villas and longcurves of country roads, belted in with miles of wall. "It would be aboutas offensive to have a love-interest that one personally knew aboutintruded here, " he said, "as to have a two-spanner carriage driventhrough this crowd. It ought to be forbidden by the municipality. "

Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with her eyes, and sheanswered: "See that handsome young Greek priest! Isn't he anarchimandrite? The portier said he was. "

"Then let him pass for an archimandrite. Now, " he recurred to hisgrievance again, dreamily, "I have got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, andpoison his mind against Burnamy, and I shall have to instil a few dropsof venomous suspicion against Kenby into the heart of poor little RoseAdding. Oh;" he broke out, "they will spoil everything. They'll be withus morning, noon, and night, " and he went on to work the joke of repiningat his lot. The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers' pretence ofbeing interested in something besides themselves, which they were no morecapable of than so many lunatics. How could they care for pretty girlsplaying tennis on an upland level, in the waning afternoon? Or a cartfulof peasant women stopping to cross themselves at a way-side shrine? Or awhistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some waysideraspberries to touch his hat and say good-morning? Or those preposterousmaidens sprinkling linen on the grass from watering-pots while the skieswere full of rain? Or that blacksmith shop where Peter the Great made ahorseshoe. Or the monument of the young warrior-poet Koerner, with agentle-looking girl and her mother reading and knitting on a bench beforeit? These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what could lovers reallycare for them? A peasant girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fastasleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog, lay in his harness nearher with one drowsy eye half open for her and the other for the contentsof their cart; a boy chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyondthe Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all the neighbors; the negrodoor-keeper at the Golden Shield who ought to have spoken our SouthernEnglish, but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweet afternoonstillness in the woods; the good German mothers crocheting at the Posthofconcerts. Burnamy as a young poet might hate felt the precious quality ofthese things, if his senses had not been holden by Miss Triscoe; and shemight have felt it if only he had done so. But as it was it would be lostupon their preoccupation; with Mrs. Adding and Kenby it would behopeless. 

A day or two after Mrs: March had met Mrs. Adding, she went with herhusband to revere a certain magnificent blackamoor whom he had discoveredat the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg, where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and looked, in theblack of his skin and the white of his flowing costume, like a colossalfigure carved in ebony and ivory. They took a roundabout way through astreet entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is apension if it is not n hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimentalprettiness; with each a little garden before it, and a bower with an irontable in it for breakfasting and supping out-doors; and he said that theywould be the very places for bridal couples who wished to spend thehoney-moon in getting well of the wedding surfeit. She denounced him forsaying such a thing as that, and for his inconsistency in complaining oflovers while he was willing to think of young married people. Hecontended that there was a great difference in the sort of demand thatyoung married people made upon the interest of witnesses, and that theywere at least on their way to sanity; and before they agreed, they hadcome to the hotel with the blackamoor at the door. While they lingered, sharing the splendid creature's hospitable pleasure in the spectacle heformed, they were aware of a carriage with liveried coachman and footmanat the steps of the hotel; the liveries were very quiet anddistinguished, and they learned that the equipage was waiting for thePrince of Coburg, or the Princess of Montenegro, or Prince Henry ofPrussia; there were differing opinions among the twenty or thirtybystanders. Mrs. March said she did not care which it was; and she waspatient of the denouement, which began to postpone itself with delicatedelays. After repeated agitations at the door among portiers, proprietors, and waiters, whose fluttered spirits imparted their thrillto the spectators, while the coachman and footman remainedsculpturesquely impassive in their places, the carriage moved aside andlet an energetic American lady and her family drive up to the steps. Thehotel people paid her a tempered devotion, but she marred the effect byrushing out and sitting on a balcony to wait for the delaying royalties. There began to be more promises of their early appearance; a footman gotdown and placed himself at the carriage door; the coachman stiffenedhimself on his box; then he relaxed; the footman drooped, and evenwandered aside. There came a moment when at some signal the carriagedrove quite away from the portal and waited near the gate of thestableyard; it drove back, and the spectators redoubled their attention. Nothing happened, and some of them dropped off. At last an indescribablesignificance expressed itself in the official group at the door; a man ina high hat and dresscoat hurried out; a footman hurried to meet him; theyspoke inaudibly together. The footman mounted to his place; the coachmangathered up his reins and drove rapidly out of the hotel-yard, down thestreet, round the corner, out of sight. The man in the tall hat anddress-coat went in; the official group at the threshold dissolved; thestatue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evidently the Hoheit ofCoburg, or Montenegro, or Prussia, was not going to take the air. 

"My dear, this is humiliating. "

"Not at all! I wouldn't have missed it for anything. Think how near wecame to seeing them!"

"I shouldn't feel so shabby if we had seen them. But to hang round herein this plebeian abeyance, and then to be defeated and defrauded at last!I wonder how long this sort of thing is going on?"

"What thing?"

"This base subjection of the imagination to the Tom Foolery of the Ages. "

"I don't know what you mean. I'm sure it's very natural to want to see aPrince. "

"Only too natural. It's so deeply founded in nature that after denyingroyalty by word and deed for a hundred years, we Americans are hungrierfor it than anybody else. Perhaps we may come back to it!"

"Nonsense!"

They looked up at the Austrian flag on the tower of the hotel, languidlycurling and uncurling in the bland evening air, as it had over a thousandyears of stupid and selfish monarchy, while all the generous republics ofthe Middle Ages had perished, and the commonwealths of later times hadpassed like fever dreams. That dull, inglorious empire had antedated oroutlived Venice and Genoa, Florence and Siena, the England of Cromwell, the Holland of the Stadtholders, and the France of many revolutions, andall the fleeting democracies which sprang from these. 

March began to ask himself how his curiosity differed from that of theEuropeans about him; then he became aware that these had detachedthemselves, and left him exposed to the presence of a fellow countryman. It was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turned upon March with hilariousrecognition. "Hello! Most of the Americans in Carlsbad seem to be hanginground here for a sight of these kings. Well, we don't have a great manyof 'em, and it's natural we shouldn't want to miss any. But now, youEastern fellows, you go to Europe every summer, and yet you don't seem toget enough of 'em. Think it's human nature, or did it get so ground intous in the old times that we can't get it out, no difference what we say?"

"That's very much what I've been asking myself, " said March. "Perhapsit's any kind of show. We'd wait nearly as long for the President to comeout, wouldn't we?"

"I reckon we would. But we wouldn't for his nephew, or his secondcousin. "

"Well, they wouldn't be in the way of the succession. "

"I guess you're right. " The Iowan seemed better satisfied with March'sphilosophy than March felt himself, and he could not forbear adding:

"But I don't, deny that we should wait for the President because he's akind of king too. I don't know that we shall ever get over wanting to seekings of some kind. Or at least my wife won't. May I present you to Mrs. March?"

"Happy to meet you, Mrs. March, " said the Iowan. "Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson. I'm the fool in my family, and I know just how you feel about achance like this. I don't mean that you're--"

They all laughed at the hopeless case, and Mrs. March said, with one ofher unexpected likings: "I understand, Mr. Otterson. And I would ratherbe our kind of fool than the kind that pretends not to care for the sightof a king. "

"Like you and me, Mrs. Otterson, " said March. 

"Indeed, indeed, " said the lady, "I'd like to see a king too, if itdidn't take all night. Good-evening, " she said, turning her husband aboutwith her, as if she suspected a purpose of patronage in Mrs. March, andwas not going to have it. 

Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly: "The troublewith me is that when I do get a chance to talk English, there's such aflow of language it carries me away, and I don't know just where I'mlanding. "

XXXIII. 

There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbad that summer. Oneday the Duchess of Orleans drove over from Marienbad, attended by theDuke on his bicycle. After luncheon, they reappeared for a moment beforemounting to her carriage with their Secretaries: two young Frenchgentlemen whose dress and bearing better satisfied Mrs. March's exactingpassion for an aristocratic air in their order. The Duke was fat andfair, as a Bourbon should be, and the Duchess fatter, though not so fair, as became a Hapsburg, but they were both more plebeian-looking than theirretainers, who were slender as well as young, and as perfectly appointedas English tailors could imagine them. 

"It wouldn't do for the very highest sort of Highhotes, " March declared, "to look their own consequence personally; they have to leave that, likeeverything else, to their inferiors. "

By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March's the German Hoheit had now becomeHighhote, which was so much more descriptive that they had permanentlyadopted it, and found comfort to their republican pride in the mockerywhich it poured upon the feudal structure of society. They applied itwith a certain compunction, however, to the King of Servia, who came afew days after the Duke and Duchess: he was such a young King, and ofsuch a little country. They watched for him from the windows of thereading-room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the three sidesof the square before the hotel, and the two plain public carriages whichbrought the King and his suite drew tamely up at the portal, where theproprietor and some civic dignitaries received him. His moderatedapproach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which Americansare used, allowed Mrs. March to make sure of the pale, slight, insignificant, amiable-looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign shewas ambuscading. Then no appeal to her principles could keep her frompeeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda, where the Kinggraciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and the proprietor, and vanished into the elevator. She was destined to see him so oftenafterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her dining andsupping by that of the simple potentate, who had his meals in one of thepublic rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in sack-coats likehimself, after the informal manner of the place. 

Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourningabroad, in the interval of a successful rebellion, was at the opera onenight with some of his faithful followers. Burnamy had offered Mrs. March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and her husband with him, places in a box; but after she eagerly accepted, it seemed that he wishedher to advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her fatherto join them. 

"Why not?" she returned, with an arching of the eyebrows. 

"Why, " he said, "perhaps I had better make a clean breast of it. "

"Perhaps you had, " she said, and they both laughed, though he laughedwith a knot between his eyes. 

"The fact is, you know, this isn't my treat, exactly. It's Mr. Stoller's. " At the surprise in her face he hurried on. "He's got back hisfirst letter in the paper, and he's so much pleased with the way he readsin print, that he wants to celebrate. "

"Yes, " said Mrs. March, non-committally. 

Burnamy laughed again. "But he's bashful, and he isn't sure that youwould all take it in the right way. He wants you as friends of mine; andhe hasn't quite the courage to ask you himself. "

This seemed to Mrs. March so far from bad that she said: "That's verynice of him. Then he's satisfied with--with your help? I'm glad of that. "

"Thank you. He's met the Triscoes, and he thought it would be pleasant toyou if they went, too. "

"Oh, certainly. "

"He thought, " Burnamy went on, with the air of feeling his way, "that wemight all go to the opera, and then--then go for a little supperafterwards at Schwarzkopf's. "

He named the only place in Carlsbad where you can sup so late as teno'clock; as the opera begins at six, and is over at half past eight, nonebut the wildest roisterers frequent the place. 

"Oh!" said Mrs. March. "I don't know how a late supper would agree withmy husband's cure. I should have to ask him. "

"We could make it very hygienic, " Burnamy explained. 

In repeating his invitation she blamed Burnamy's uncandor so much thatMarch took his part, as perhaps she intended, and said, "Oh, nonsense, "and that he should like to go in for the whole thing; and General Triscoeaccepted as promptly for himself and his daughter. That made six people, Burnamy counted up, and he feigned a decent regret that there was notroom for Mrs. Adding and her son; he would have liked to ask them. 

Mrs. March did not enjoy it so much as coming with her husband alone whenthey took two florin seats in the orchestra for the comedy. The comedyalways began half an hour earlier than the opera, and they had afive-o'clock supper at the Theatre-Cafe before they went, and they got tosleep by nine o'clock; now they would be up till half past ten at least, and that orgy at Schwarzkopf's might not be at all good for him. Butstill she liked being there; and Miss Triscoe made her take the bestseat; Burnamy and Stoller made the older men take the other seats besidethe ladies, while they sat behind, or stood up, when they, wished to see, as people do in the back of a box. Stoller was not much at ease inevening dress, but he bore himself with a dignity which was not perhapsso gloomy as it looked; Mrs. March thought him handsome in his way, andrequired Miss Triscoe to admire him. As for Burnamy's beauty it was notnecessary to insist upon that; he had the distinction of slender youth;and she liked to think that no Highhote there was of a more patricianpresence than this yet unprinted contributor to 'Every Other Week'. Heand Stoller seemed on perfect terms; or else in his joy he was able tohide the uneasiness which she had fancied in him from the first time shesaw them together, and which had never been quite absent from his mannerin Stoller's presence. Her husband always denied that it existed, or ifit did that it was anything but Burnamy's effort to get on common groundwith an inferior whom fortune had put over him. 

The young fellow talked with Stoller, and tried to bring him into therange of the general conversation. He leaned over the ladies, from timeto time, and pointed out the notables whom he saw in the house; she wasglad, for his sake, that he did not lean less over her than over MissTriscoe. He explained certain military figures in the boxes opposite, andcertain ladies of rank who did not look their rank; Miss Triscoe, to Mrs. March's thinking, looked their united ranks, and more; her dress was verysimple, but of a touch which saved it from being insipidly girlish; herbeauty was dazzling. 

"Do you see that old fellow in the corner chair just behind theorchestra?" asked Burnamy. "He's ninety-six years old, and he comes tothe theatre every night, and falls asleep as soon as the curtain rises, and sleeps through till the end of the act. "

"How dear!" said the girl, leaning forward to fix the nonagenarian withher glasses, while many other glasses converged upon her. "Oh, wouldn'tyou like to know him, Mr. March?"

"I should consider it a liberal education. They have brought these thingsto a perfect system in Europe. There is nothing to make life passsmoothly like inflexible constancy to an entirely simple custom. Mydear, " he added to his wife, "I wish we'd seen this sage before. He'dhave helped us through a good many hours of unintelligible comedy. I'malways coming as Burnamy's guest, after this. "

The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his triumph, and casting an eyeabout the theatre to cap it, he caught sight of that other potentate. Hewhispered joyfully, "Ah! We've got two kings here to-night, " and heindicated in a box of their tier just across from that where the King ofServia sat, the well-known face of the King of New York. 

"He isn't bad-looking, " said March, handing his glass to General Triscoe. "I've not seen many kings in exile; a matter of a few Carlist princes andex-sovereign dukes, and the good Henry V. Of France, once, when I wasstaying a month in Venice; but I don't think they any of them looked thepart better. I suppose he has his dream of recurring power like therest. "

"Dream!" said General Triscoe with the glass at his eyes. "He's dead sureof it. "

"Oh, you don't really mean that!"

"I don't know why I should have changed my mind. "

"Then it's as if we were in the presence of Charles II. Just before hewas called back to England, or Napoleon in the last moments of Elba. It'sbetter than that. The thing is almost unique; it's a new situation inhistory. Here's a sovereign who has no recognized function, no legalstatus, no objective existence. He has no sort of public being, except inthe affection of his subjects. It took an upheaval little short of anearthquake to unseat him. His rule, as we understand it, was bad for allclasses; the poor suffered more than the rich; the people have now hadthree years of self-government; and yet this wonderful man has such ahold upon the masses that he is going home to win the cause of oppressionat the head of the oppressed. When he's in power again, he will be assubjective as ever, with the power of civic life and death, and anidolatrous following perfectly ruthless in the execution of his will. "

"We've only begun, " said the general. "This kind of king is municipal, now; but he's going to be national. And then, good-by, Republic!"

"The only thing like it, " March resumed, too incredulous of the evilfuture to deny himself the aesthetic pleasure of the parallel, "is therise of the Medici in Florence, but even the Medici were not meremanipulators of pulls; they had some sort of public office, with somesort of legislated tenure of it. The King of New York is sovereign byforce of will alone, and he will reign in the voluntary submission of themajority. Is our national dictator to be of the same nature and quality?"

"It would be the scientific evolution, wouldn't it?"

The ladies listened with the perfunctory attention which women pay to anysort of inquiry which is not personal. Stoller had scarcely spoken yet;he now startled them all by demanding, with a sort of vindictive force, "Why shouldn't he have the power, if they're willing to let him?"

"Yes, " said General Triscoe, with a tilt of his head towards March. "That's what we must ask ourselves more and more. "

March leaned back in his chair, and looked up over his shoulder atStoller. "Well, I don't know. Do you think it's quite right for a man touse an unjust power, even if others are willing that he should?"

Stoller stopped with an air of bewilderment as if surprised on the pointof saying that he thought just this. He asked instead, "What's wrongabout it?"

"Well, that's one of those things that have to be felt, I suppose. But ifa man came to you, and offered to be your slave for a certainconsideration--say a comfortable house, and a steady job, that wasn't toohard--should you feel it morally right to accept the offer? I don't saythink it right, for there might be a kind of logic for it. "

Stoller seemed about to answer; he hesitated; and before he had made anyresponse, the curtain rose. 

XXXIV. 

There are few prettier things than Carlsbad by night from one of the manybridges which span the Tepl in its course through the town. If it is astarry night, the torrent glides swiftly away with an inverted firmamentin its bosom, to which the lamps along its shores and in the houses oneither side contribute a planetary splendor of their own. By nine o'clockeverything is hushed; not a wheel is heard at that dead hour; the fewfeet shuffling stealthily through the Alte Wiese whisper a caution ofsilence to those issuing with a less guarded tread from the opera; thelittle bowers that overhang the stream are as dark and mute as therestaurants across the way which serve meals in them by day; the wholeplace is as forsaken as other cities at midnight. People get quickly hometo bed, or if they have a mind to snatch a belated joy, they slip intothe Theater-Cafe, where the sleepy Frauleins serve them, in an exemplarydrowse, with plates of cold ham and bottles of the gently gaseous watersof Giesshubl. Few are of the bold badness which delights in a supper atSchwarzkopf's, and even these are glad of the drawn curtains which hidetheir orgy from the chance passer. 

The invalids of Burnamy's party kept together, strengthening themselvesin a mutual purpose not to be tempted to eat anything which was notstrictly 'kurgemass'. Mrs. March played upon the interest which each ofthem felt in his own case so artfully that she kept them talking of theircure, and left Burnamy and Miss Triscoe to a moment on the bridge, bywhich they profited, while the others strolled on, to lean against theparapet and watch the lights in the skies and the water, and be alonetogether. The stream shone above and below, and found its way out of andinto the darkness under the successive bridges; the town climbed into thenight with lamp-lit windows here and there, till the woods of thehill-sides darkened down to meet it, and fold it in an embrace from whichsome white edifice showed palely in the farthest gloom. 

He tried to make her think they could see that great iron crucifix whichwatches over it day and night from its piny cliff. He had a fancy for apoem, very impressionistic, which should convey the notion of thecrucifix's vigil. He submitted it to her; and they remained talking tillthe others had got out of sight and hearing; and she was letting him keepthe hand on her arm which he had put there to hold her from falling overthe parapet, when they were both startled by approaching steps, and avoice calling, "Look here! Who's running this supper party, anyway?"

His wife had detached March from her group for the mission, as soon asshe felt that the young people were abusing her kindness. They answeredhim with hysterical laughter, and Burnamy said, "Why, it's Mr. Stoller'streat, you know. "

At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequiously met the party on thethreshold and bowed them into a pretty inner room, with a table set fortheir supper, Stoller had gained courage to play the host openly. Heappointed General Triscoe to the chief seat; he would have put hisdaughter next to him, if the girl had not insisted upon Mrs. March'shaving the place, and going herself to sit next to March, whom she saidshe had not been able to speak a word to the whole evening. But she didnot talk a great deal to him; he smiled to find how soon he dropped outof the conversation, and Burnamy, from his greater remoteness across thetable, dropped into it. He really preferred the study of Stoller, whoseinstinct of a greater worldly quality in the Triscoes interested him; hecould see him listening now to what General Triscoe was saying to Mrs. March, and now to what Burnamy was saying to Miss Triscoe; his strong, selfish face, as he turned it on the young people, expressed a mingledgrudge and greed that was very curious. 

Stoller's courage, which had come and gone at moments throughout, rose atthe end, and while they lingered at the table well on to the hour of ten, he said, in the sort of helpless offence he had with Burnamy, "What's thereason we can't all go out tomorrow to that old castle you was talkingabout?"

"To Engelhaus? I don't know any reason, as far as I'm concerned, "answered Burnamy; but he refused the initiative offered him, and Stollerwas obliged to ask March:

"You heard about it?"

"Yes. " General Triscoe was listening, and March added for him, "It wasthe hold of an old robber baron; Gustavus Adolphus knocked it down, andit's very picturesque, I believe. "

"It sounds promising, " said the general. "Where is it?"

"Isn't to-morrow our mineral bath?" Mrs. March interposed between herhusband and temptation. 

"No; the day after. Why, it's about ten or twelve miles out on the oldpostroad that Napoleon took for Prague. "

"Napoleon knew a good road when he saw it, " said the general, and healone of the company lighted a cigar. He was decidedly in favor of theexcursion, and he arranged for it with Stoller, whom he had the effect ofusing for his pleasure as if he were doing him a favor. They were six, and two carriages would take them: a two-spanner for four, and aone-spanner for two; they could start directly after dinners and get homein time for supper. 

Stoller asserted himself to say: "That's all right, then. I want you tobe my guests, and I'll see about the carriages. " He turned to Burnamy:"Will you order them?"

"Oh, " said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, "the portier willget them. "

"I don't understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept. Surely, he can't like that man!" said Mrs. March to her husband in their ownroom. 

"Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential. The general seems to me, capableof letting even an enemy serve his turn. Why didn't you speak, if youdidn't want to go?"

"Why didn't you?"

"I wanted to go. "

"And I knew it wouldn't do to let Miss Triscoe go alone; I could see thatshe wished to go. "

"Do you think Burnamy did?"

"He seemed rather indifferent. And yet he must have realized that hewould be with Miss Triscoe the whole afternoon. "

XXXV. 

If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the one-spanner, and theothers followed in the two-spanner, it was not from want of politeness onthe part of the young people in offering to give up their places to eachof their elders in turn. It would have been grotesque for either March orStoller to drive with the girl; for her father it was apparently noquestion, after a glance at the more rigid uprightness of the seat in theone-spanner; and he accepted the place beside Mrs. March on the back seatof the two-spanner without demur. He asked her leave to smoke, and thenhe scarcely spoke to her. But he talked to the two men in front of himalmost incessantly, haranguing them upon the inferiority of ourconditions and the futility of our hopes as a people, with the effect ofbewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could have got on withTriscoe's contempt for the worthlessness of our working-classes, but didnot know what to do with his scorn of the vulgarity and venality of theiremployers. He accused some of Stoller's most honored and enviedcapitalists of being the source of our worst corruptions, and guiltierthan the voting-cattle whom they bought and sold. 

"I think we can get rid of the whole trouble if we go at it the rightway, " Stoller said, diverging for the sake of the point he wished tobring in. "I believe in having the government run on business principles. They've got it here in Carlsbad, already, just the right sort of thing, and it works. I been lookin' into it, and I got this young man, yonder"--he twisted his hand in the direction of the one-spanner! "tohelp me put it in shape. I believe it's going to make our folks think, the best ones among them. Here!" He drew a newspaper out of his pocket, folded to show two columns in their full length, and handed it toTriscoe, who took it with no great eagerness, and began to run his eyeover it. "You tell me what you think of that. I've put it out for a kindof a feeler. I got some money in that paper, and I just thought I'd letour people see how a city can be managed on business principles. "

He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought whilehe read, and keep him up to the work, and he ignored the Marches soentirely that they began in self-defence to talk with each other. 

Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to thebreezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields ofharvest. They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the serriedstems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew straight asstalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened under a sky ofunwonted cloudlessness. Narrow strips of wheat and rye, which the menwere cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices were binding, alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and breadths ofbeets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed land. In themeadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy rowen, the girlslifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving themselves the lighterlabor of ordering the load. From the upturned earth, where there ought tohave been troops of strutting crows, a few sombre ravens rose. But theycould not rob the scene of its gayety; it smiled in the sunshine withcolors which vividly followed the slope of the land till they were dimmedin the forests on the far-off mountains. Nearer and farther, the cottagesand villages shone in the valleys, or glimmered through the veils of thedistant haze. Over all breathed the keen pure air of the hills, with asentiment of changeless eld, which charmed March, back to his boyhood, where he lost the sense of his wife's presence, and answered her vaguely. She talked contentedly on in the monologue to which the wives ofabsent-minded men learn to resign themselves. They were both roused fromtheir vagary by the voice of General Triscoe. He was handing back thefolded newspaper to Stoller, and saying, with a queer look at him overhis glasses, "I should like to see what your contemporaries have to sayto all that. "

"Well, sir, " Stoller returned, "maybe I'll have the chance to show you. They got my instructions over there to send everything to me. "

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape. They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape, after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, whowere no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in thetwo-spanner behind. They were talking of the hero and heroine of a novelthey had both read, and he was saying, "I suppose you think he was justlypunished. "

"Punished?" she repeated. "Why, they got married, after all!"

"Yes, but you could see that they were not going to be happy. "

"Then it seems to me that she was punished; too. "

"Well, yes; you might say that. The author couldn't help that. "

Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:

"I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero. The girl wasvery exacting. "

"Why, " said Burnamy, "I supposed that women hated anything like deceptionin men too much to tolerate it at all. Of course, in this case, he didn'tdeceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn't that worse?"

"Yes, that was worse. She could have forgiven him for deceiving her. "

"Oh!"

"He might have had to do that. She wouldn't have minded his fibbingoutright, so much, for then it wouldn't have seemed to come from hisnature. But if he just let her believe what wasn't true, and didn't say aword to prevent her, of course it was worse. It showed something weak, something cowardly in him. "

Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh. "I suppose it did. But don't youthink it's rather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds of courage?"

"Yes, it is, " she assented. "That is why I say she was too exacting. Buta man oughn't to defend him. "

Burnamy's laugh had more pleasure in it, now. "Another woman might?"

"No. She might excuse him. "

He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was rather far behind, andhe spoke to their driver bidding him go slowly till it caught up withthem. By the time it did so, they were so close to it that they coulddistinguish the lines of its wandering and broken walls. Ever since theyhad climbed from the wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to theopen plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater detail. Thedetached mound of rock on which it stood rose like an island in the midstof the plain, and commanded the highways in every direction. 

"I believe, " Burnamy broke out, with a bitterness apparently relevant tothe ruin alone, "that if you hadn't required any quarterings of nobilityfrom him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron. He's arobber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn't have any scruple in levyingtribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repairand his crossbowmen were not on a strike. But they would be on a strike, probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-unioncrossbowmen. "

If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as thecivility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than hemeant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, "I don't see how you canhave anything to do with him, if you feel so about him. "

"Oh, " Burnamy replied in kind, "he buys my poverty and not my will. Andperhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more. "

"Have you been doing something very wicked?"

"What should you have to say to me, if I had?" he bantered. 

"Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you, " she mocked back. 

They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a villagestreet up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned. A church atits base looked out upon an irregular square. 

A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide adarkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind him. He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village's claimsupon the visitors' interest; he mastered, after a moment, their wishes inrespect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it; at the top, hesaid, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would admit them. 

XXXVI. 

The, path to the castle slanted upward across the shoulder of the hill, to a certain point, and there some rude stone steps mounted moredirectly. Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden, bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the cleanbitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf; but Nature spreads nosuch lavish feast in wood or field in the Old World as she spoils us within the New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to be all herstore, and man must make the most of them. Miss Triscoe seemed to findflowers enough in the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together for her. She took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might have both handsfor her skirt, and so did him two favors. 

A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns the ruin opened a gatefor the party at the top, and levied a tax of thirty kreutzers each uponthem, for its maintenance. The castle, by his story, had descended fromrobber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked it to pieces in thesixteenth century; three hundred years later, the present owner restoredit; and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed withbrick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin satisfyinglypermanent. The walls were not of great extent, but such as they were theyenclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground, and a cisternwhich once enabled the barons and their retainers to water their wine intime of siege. 

From that height they could overlook the neighboring highways in everydirection, and could bring a merchant train to, with a shaft from acrossbow, or a shot from an arquebuse, at pleasure. With GeneralTriscoe's leave, March praised the strategic strength of the uniqueposition, which he found expressive of the past, and yet suggestive ofthe present. It was more a difference in method than anything else thatdistinguished the levy of customs by the authorities then and now. Whatwas the essential difference, between taking tribute of travellerspassing on horseback, and collecting dues from travellers arriving bysteamer? They did not pay voluntarily in either case; but it might beproof of progress that they no longer fought the customs officials. 

"Then you believe in free trade, " said Stoller, severely. 

"No. I am just inquiring which is the best way of enforcing the tarifflaws. "

"I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night, " said Miss Triscoe, "thatpeople are kept on the docks now for hours, and ladies cry at the waytheir things are tumbled over by the inspectors. "

"It's shocking, " said Mrs. March, magisterially. 

"It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal times, " her husbandresumed. "But I'm glad the travellers make no resistance. I'm opposed toprivate war as much as I am to free trade. "

"It all comes round to the same thing at last, " said General Triscoe. "Your precious humanity--"

"Oh, I don't claim it exclusively, " March protested. 

"Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road. He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on hiscourse, and coming back to where he started. "

Stoller said, "I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here, that they will come to America and set up, if they can't stand theduties. "

"Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway, " March consented. 

If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer. He followedwith his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminatedthemselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of theruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin, upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot. The land fell awayfrom the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fieldsand in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended intothe distance. "I don't suppose, " Burnamy said, "that life ever does muchbetter than this, do you? I feel like knocking on a piece of wood andsaying 'Unberufen. ' I might knock on your bouquet; that's wood. "

"It would spoil the flowers, " she said, looking down at them in her belt. She looked up and their eyes met. 

"I wonder, " he said, presently, "what makes us always have a feeling ofdread when we are happy?"

"Do you have that, too?" she asked. 

"Yes. Perhaps it's because we know that change must come, and it must befor the worse. "

"That must be it. I never thought of it before, though. "

"If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychologicalweather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of blissor a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tearsbeforehand--it may come to that. "

"I hope it won't. I'd rather not know when I was to be happy; it wouldspoil the pleasure; and wouldn't be any compensation when it was theother way. "

A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stollerlooking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquilineprofile into relief. "Oh! Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?" he called gayly upto him. 

"I guess we've seen about all there is, " he answered. "Hadn't we betterbe going?" He probably did not mean to be mandatory. 

"All right, " said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe againwithout further notice of him. 

They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the weirdsacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and toaccount for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt, and this one built only a few years before. Then he locked the doorsafter them, and ran forward to open against their coming the chapel ofthe village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortifiedthemselves for it at the village cafe. 

They were served by a little hunch-back maid; and she told them who livedin the chief house of the village. It was uncommonly pretty; where allthe houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as thedwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the great man of the place. March admired the cat which rubbed against her skirt while she stood andtalked, and she took his praises modestly for the cat; but they wroughtupon the envy, of her brother so that he ran off to the garden, and cameback with two fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held up, with an armacross each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the spectators. 

"Oh, give him something!" Mrs. March entreated. "He's such a dear. "

"No, no! I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat outdone, "he refused; and then he was about to yield. 

"Hold on!" said Stoller, assuming the host. "I got the change. "

He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March had meant her husband toreward his naivete with half a florin at least; but he seemed to feelthat he had now ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himselfin charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel; he made MissTriscoe let him carry her jacket when she found it warm. 

The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother whodesigned it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy inthe triangular form of the structure and the decorative details. Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and thenthe ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the threeside-altars. The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a Germanversion of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic at the time; thecarving is coarse, and the color harsh and unsoftened by years, though itis broken and obliterated in places. 

The sacristan said that the chapel was never used for anything butfuneral services, and he led the way out into the cemetery, where hewished to display the sepultural devices. The graves here were plantedwith flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies; but a spacefenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown withweeds and brambles: This space, he said, was for suicides; but to Marchit was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in consecratedground where the stones had photographs of the dead on porcelain let intothem. One was the picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been thewife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed to her in theinscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of irony, themagnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house of thevillage. He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest theattention of the strangers, and he led them with less apparenthopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with thefigure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject muchcelebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to hisparty; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and Marchtried to make him understand that they appreciated it. He knew that hiswife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great favor inshowing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of grief in thepoor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile of those whohad taken their own lives and were parted in death from the more patientsufferers who had waited for God to take them. With a curious, unpainfulself-analysis he noted that the older members of the party, who in thecourse of nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from itsshows; but the young girl and the young man had not borne to look onthem, and had quickly escaped from the place, somewhere outside the gate. Was it the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with death whichnature brings to life at last, or was it merely the effect, or defect, ofossified sensibilities, of toughened nerves?

"That is all?" he asked of the spectral sacristan. 

"That is all, " the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coincommensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be somethinghandsome. 

"No, no, " said Stoller, detecting his gesture. "Your money a'n't good. "

He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regardedthem with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so patient. In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have franklysaid it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and whispereda sad "Danke. "

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where theywere sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner. 

"Oh, have I lost my glove in there?" said Mrs. March, looking at herhands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to. 

"Let me go and find it for you, " Burnamy entreated. 

"Well, " she consented, and she added, "If the sacristan has found it, give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow. "

As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, andher heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence: somemen would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand. Hecame back directly, saying, "No, he didn't find it. "

She laughed, and held both gloves up. "No wonder! I had it all the time. Thank you ever so much. "

"How are we going to ride back?" asked Stoller. 

Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably. No one elsespoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, "Oh, I think the waywe came, is best. "

"Did that absurd creature, " she apostrophized her husband as soon as shegot him alone after their arrival at Pupp's, "think I was going to lethim drive back with Agatha?"

"I wonder, " said March, "if that's what Burnamy calls her now?"

"I shall despise him if it isn't. "

XXXVII. 

Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supper which they had eatenin a silence natural with two men who have been off on a picnic together. He did not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in, and the youngman did not sit down after putting his letters before him. He said, withan effort of forcing himself to speak at once, "I have looked through thepapers, and there is something that I think you ought to see. "

"What do you mean?" said Stoller. 

Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certainarticles were strongly circumscribed in ink. The papers varied, but theireditorials did not, in purport at least. Some were grave and some weregay; one indignantly denounced; another affected an ironicalbewilderment; the third simply had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller. Theyall, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad asthe praise of municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with himgleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on the accession of theHonorable Jacob to their ranks. 

Stoller read the articles, one after another, with parted lips andgathering drops of perspiration on his upper lip, while Burnamy waited onfoot. He flung the papers all down at last. "Why, they're a pack offools! They don't know what they're talking about! I want city governmentcarried on on business principles, by the people, for the people. I don'tcare what they say! I know I'm right, and I'm going ahead on this line ifit takes all--" The note of defiance died out of his voice at the sightof Burnamy's pale face. "What's the matter with you?"

"There's nothing the matter with me. "

"Do you mean to tell me it is"--he could not bring himself to use theword--"what they say?"

"I suppose, " said Burnamy, with a dry mouth, "it's what you may callmunicipal socialism. "

Stoller jumped from his seat. "And you knew it when you let me do it?"

"I supposed you knew what you were about. "

"It's a lie!" Stoller advanced upon him, wildly, and Burnamy took a stepbackward. 

"Look out!" shouted Burnamy. "You never asked me anything about it. Youtold me what you wanted done, and I did it. How could I believe you weresuch an ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you were talkingabout?" He added, in cynical contempt, "But you needn't worry. You canmake it right with the managers by spending a little more money than youexpected to spend. "

Stoller started as if the word money reminded him of something. "I cantake care of myself, young man. How much do I owe you?"

"Nothing!" said Burnamy, with an effort for grandeur which failed him. 

The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffee at the Posthof, hecame dragging himself toward them with such a haggard air that Mrs. Marchcalled, before he reached their table, "Why, Mr. Burnamy, what's thematter?"

He smiled miserably. "Oh, I haven't slept very well. May I have my coffeewith you? I want to tell you something; I want you to make me. But Ican't speak till the coffee comes. Fraulein!" he besought a waitressgoing off with a tray near them. "Tell Lili, please, to bring me somecoffee--only coffee. "

He tried to make some talk about the weather, which was rainy, and theMarches helped him, but the poor endeavor lagged wretchedly in theinterval between the ordering and the coming of the coffee. "Ah, thankyou, Lili, " he said, with a humility which confirmed Mrs. March in herinstant belief that he had been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and beenrejected. After gulping his coffee, he turned to her: "I want to saygood-by. I'm going away. "

"From Carlsbad?" asked Mrs. March with a keen distress. 

The water came into his eyes. "Don't, don't be good to me, Mrs. March! Ican't stand it. But you won't, when you know. "

He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressing himself moreand more to the intelligence of March, who let him go on withoutquestion, and laid a restraining hand upon his wife when he saw her aboutto prompt him. At the end, "That's all, " he said, huskily, and then heseemed to be waiting for March's comment. He made none, and the youngfellow was forced to ask, "Well, what do you think, Mr. March?"

"What do you think yourself?"

"I think, I behaved badly, " said Burnamy, and a movement of protest fromMrs. March nerved him to add: "I could make out that it was not mybusiness to tell him what he was doing; but I guess it was; I guess Iought to have stopped him, or given him a chance to stop himself. Isuppose I might have done it, if he had treated me decently when I turnedup a day late, here; or hadn't acted toward me as if I were a hand in hisbuggy-works that had come in an hour after the whistle sounded. "

He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone in Mrs. March's eyes;but her husband only looked the more serious. 

He asked gently, "Do you offer that fact as an explanation, or as ajustification. "

Burnamy laughed forlornly. "It certainly wouldn't justify me. You mightsay that it made the case all the worse for me. " March forbore to say, and Burnamy went on. "But I didn't suppose they would be onto him soquick, or perhaps at all. I thought--if I thought anything--that it wouldamuse some of the fellows in the office, who know about those things. " Hepaused, and in March's continued silence he went on. "The chance was onein a hundred that anybody else would know where he had brought up. "

"But you let him take that chance, " March suggested. 

"Yes, I let him take it. Oh, you know how mixed all these things are!"

"Yes. "

"Of course I didn't think it out at the time. But I don't deny that I hada satisfaction in the notion of the hornets' nest he was poking his thickhead into. It makes me sick, now, to think I had. I oughtn't to have lethim; he was perfectly innocent in it. After the letter went, I wanted totell him, but I couldn't; and then I took the chances too. I don'tbelieve he could have ever got forward in politics; he's too honest--orhe isn't dishonest in the right way. But that doesn't let me out. I don'tdefend myself! I did wrong; I behaved badly. But I've suffered for it. 

"I've had a foreboding all the time that it would come to the worst, andfelt like a murderer with his victim when I've been alone with Stoller. When I could get away from him I could shake it off, and even believethat it hadn't happened. You can't think what a nightmare it's been!Well, I've ruined Stoller politically, but I've ruined myself, too. I'vespoiled my own life; I've done what I can never explain to--to the peopleI want to have believe in me; I've got to steal away like the thief I am. Good-by!" He jumped to his feet, and put out his hand to March, and thento Mrs. March. 

"Why, you're not going away now!" she cried, in a daze. 

"Yes, I am. I shall leave Carlsbad on the eleven-o'clock train. I don'tthink I shall see you again. " He clung to her hand. "If you see GeneralTriscoe--I wish you'd tell them I couldn't--that I had to--that I wascalled away suddenly--Good-by!" He pressed her hand and dropped it, andmixed with the crowd. Then he came suddenly back, with a final appeal toMarch: "Should you--do you think I ought to see Stoller, and--and tellhim I don't think I used him fairly?"

"You ought to know--" March began. 

But before he could say more, Burnamy said, "You're right, " and was offagain. 

"Oh, how hard you were with him, my dear!" Mrs. March lamented. 

"I wish, " he said, "if our boy ever went wrong that some one would be astrue to him as I was to that poor fellow. He condemned himself; and hewas right; he has behaved very badly. "

"You always overdo things so, when you act righteously!"

"Now, Isabel!"

"Oh, yes, I know what you will say. But I should have tempered justicewith mercy. "

Her nerves tingled with pity for Burnamy, but in her heart she was gladthat her husband had had strength to side with him against himself, andshe was proud of the forbearance with which he had done it. In theirearlier married life she would have confidently taken the initiative onall moral questions. She still believed that she was better fitted fortheir decision by her Puritan tradition and her New England birth, butonce in a great crisis when it seemed a question of their living, she hadweakened before it, and he, with no such advantages, had somehow met theissue with courage and conscience. She could not believe he did so byinspiration, but she had since let him take the brunt of all such issuesand the responsibility. He made no reply, and she said: "I suppose you'lladmit now there was always something peculiar in the poor boy's manner toStoller. "

He would confess no more than that there ought to have been. "I don't seehow he could stagger through with that load on his conscience. I'm notsure I like his being able to do so. "

She was silent in the misgiving which she shared with him, but she said:"I wonder how far it has gone with him and Miss Triscoe?"

"Well, from his wanting you to give his message to the general in theplural--"

"Don't laugh! It's wicked to laugh! It's heartless!" she cried, hysterically. "What will he do, poor fellow?"

"I've an idea that he will light on his feet, somehow. But, at any rate, he's doing the right thing in going to own up to Stoller. "

"Oh, Stoller! I care nothing for Stoller! Don't speak to me of Stoller!"

Burnamy fond the Bird of Prey, as he no longer had the heart to call him, walking up and down in his room like an eagle caught in a trap. Heerected his crest fiercely enough, though, when the young fellow came inat his loudly shouted, "Herein!"

"What do you want?" he demanded, brutally. 

This simplified Burnamy's task, while it made it more loathsome. Heanswered not much less brutally, "I want to tell you that I think I usedyou badly, that I let you betray yourself, that I feel myself to blame. "He could have added, "Curse you!" without change of tone. 

Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lower teeth like a dog'swhen he snarls. "You want to get back!"

"No, " said Burnamy, mildly, and with increasing sadness as he spoke. "Idon't want to get back. Nothing would induce me. I'm going away on thefirst train. "

"Well, you're not!" shouted Stoller. "You've lied me into this--"

"Look out!" Burnamy turned white. 

"Didn't you lie me into it, if you let me fool myself, as you say?"Stoller pursued, and Burnamy felt himself weaken through his wrath. "Well, then, you got to lie me out of it. I been going over the damnthing, all night--and you can do it for me. I know you can do it, " hegave way in a plea that was almost a whimper. "Look here! You see if youcan't. I'll make it all right with you. I'll pay you whatever you thinkis right--whatever you say. "

"Oh!" said Burnamy, in otherwise unutterable disgust. 

"You kin, " Stoller went on, breaking down more and more into his adoptedHoosier, in the stress of his anxiety. "I know you kin, Mr. Burnamy. " Hepushed the paper containing his letter into Burnamy's hands, and pointedout a succession of marked passages. "There! And here! And this place!Don't you see how you could make out that it meant something else, or wasjust ironical?" He went on to prove how the text might be given thecomplexion he wished, and Burnamy saw that he had really thought it notimpossibly out. "I can't put it in writing as well as you; but I've doneall the work, and all you've got to do is to give it some of them turnsof yours. I'll cable the fellows in our office to say I've beenmisrepresented, and that my correction is coming. We'll get it into shapehere together, and then I'll cable that. I don't care for the money. AndI'll get our counting-room to see this scoundrel"--he picked up the paperthat had had fun with him--"and fix him all right, so that he'll ask fora suspension of public opinion, and--You see, don't you?"

The thing did appeal to Burnamy. If it could be done, it would enable himto make Stoller the reparation he longed to make him more than anythingelse in the world. But he heard himself saying, very gently, almosttenderly, "It might be done, Mr. Stoller. But I couldn't do it. Itwouldn't be honest--for me. "

"Yah!" yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper into a wad and flung itinto Burnamy's face. "Honest, you damn humbug! You let me in for this, when you knew I didn't mean it, and now you won't help me out because ita'n't honest! Get out of my room, and get out quick before I--"

He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightened himself, with "If youdare!" He knew that he was right in refusing; but he knew that Stollerwas right, too, and that he had not meant the logic of what he had saidin his letter, and of what Burnamy had let him imply. He braved Stoller'sonset, and he left his presence untouched, but feeling as little a moralhero as he well could. 

XXXVIII. 

General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day'spleasure, and in the self-reproach of a pessimist who has lost his pointof view for a time, and has to work back to it. He began at the belatedbreakfast with his daughter when she said, after kissing him gayly, inthe small two-seated bower where they breakfasted at their hotel whenthey did not go to the Posthof, "Didn't you have a nice time, yesterday, papa?"

She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at him across the littleiron table, as she lifted the pot to pour out his coffee. 

"What do you call a nice time?" he temporized, not quite able to resisther gayety. 

"Well, the kind of time I had. "

"Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass? I took cold in thatold church, and the tea at that restaurant must have been brewed in abrass kettle. I suffered all night from it. And that ass from Illinois--"

"Oh, poor papa! I couldn't go with Mr. Stoller alone, but I might havegone in the two-spanner with him and let you have Mr. Or Mrs. March inthe one-spanner. "

"I don't know. Their interest in each other isn't so interesting to otherpeople as they seem to think. "

"Do you feel that way really, papa? Don't you like their being so much inlove still?"

"At their time of life? Thank you it's bad enough in young people. "

The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupied in pouring outher father's coffee. 

He tasted it, and then he drank pretty well all of it; but he said, as heput his cup down, "I don't know what they make this stuff of. I wish Ihad a cup of good, honest American coffee. "

"Oh, there's nothing like American food!" said his daughter, with so muchconciliation that he looked up sharply. 

But whatever he might have been going to say was at least postponed bythe approach of a serving-maid, who brought a note to his daughter. Sheblushed a little at sight of it, and then tore it open and read:

"I am going away from Carlsbad, for a fault of my own which forbids me tolook you in the face. If you wish to know the worst of me, ask Mrs. March. I have no heart to tell you. "

Agatha read these mystifying words of Burnamy's several times over in asilent absorption with them which left her father to look after himself, and he had poured out a second cup of coffee with his own hand, and wasreaching for the bread beside her before she came slowly back to a senseof his presence. 

"Oh, excuse me, papa, " she said, and she gave him the butter. "Here's avery strange letter from Mr. Burnamy, which I think you'd better see. "She held the note across the table to him, and watched his face as heread it. 

After he had read it twice, he turned the sheet over, as people do withletters that puzzle them, in the vain hope of something explanatory onthe back. Then he looked up and asked: "What do you suppose he's beendoing?"

"I don't believe he's been doing anything. It's something that Mr. Stoller's been doing to him. "

"I shouldn't infer that from his own words. What makes you think thetrouble is with Stoller?"

"He said--he said yesterday--something about being glad to be throughwith him, because he disliked him so much he was always afraid ofwronging him. And that proves that now Mr. Stoller has made him believethat he's done wrong, and has worked upon him till he does believe it. "

"It proves nothing of the kind, " said the general, recurring to the note. After reading it again, he looked keenly at her: "Am I to understand thatyou have given him the right to suppose you would want to know theworst--or the best of him?"

The girl's eyes fell, and she pushed her knife against her plate. Shebegan: "No--"

"Then confound his impudence!" the general broke out. "What business hashe to write to you at all about this?"

"Because he couldn't go away without it!" she returned; and she met herfather's eye courageously. "He had a right to think we were his friends;and if he has done wrong, or is in disgrace any way, isn't it manly ofhim to wish to tell us first himself?"

Her father could not say that it was not. But he could and did say, verysceptically: "Stuff! Now, see here, Agatha: what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to see Mrs. March, and then--"

"You mustn't do anything of the kind, my dear, " said her father, gently. "You've no right to give yourself away to that romantic old goose. " Heput up his hand to interrupt her protest. "This thing has got to be goneto the bottom of. But you're not to do it. I will see March myself. Wemust consider your dignity in this matter--and mine. And you may as wellunderstand that I'm not going to have any nonsense. It's got to bemanaged so that it can't be supposed we're anxious about it, one way orthe other, or that he was authorized to write to you in this way--"

"No, no! He oughtn't to have done so. He was to blame. He couldn't havewritten to you, though, papa--"

"Well, I don't know why. But that's no reason why we should let it beunderstood that he has written to you. I will see March; and I willmanage to see his wife, too. I shall probably find them in thereading-room at Pupp's, and--"

The Marches were in fact just coming in from their breakfast at thePosthof, and he met them at the door of Pupp's, where they all sat downon one of the iron settees of the piazza, and began to ask one anotherquestions of their minds about the pleasure of the day before, and tobeat about the bush where Burnamy lurked in their common consciousness. 

Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting him. "You knew, " shesaid, "that Mr. Burnamy had left us?"

"Left! Why?" asked the general. 

She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this she found it best totrust her husband's poverty of invention. She looked at him, and heanswered for her with a promptness that made her quake at first, butfinally seemed the only thing, if not the best thing: "He's had sometrouble with Stoller. " He went on to tell the general just what thetrouble was. 

At the end the general grunted as from an uncertain mind. "You think he'sbehaved badly. "

"I think he's behaved foolishly--youthfully. But I can understand howstrongly he was tempted. He could say that he was not authorized to stopStoller in his mad career. "

At this Mrs. March put her hand through her husband's arm. 

"I'm not so sure about that, " said the general. 

March added: "Since I saw him this morning, I've heard something thatdisposes me to look at his performance in a friendlier light. It'ssomething that Stoller told me himself; to heighten my sense of Burnamy'swickedness. He seems to have felt that I ought to know what a serpent Iwas cherishing in my bosom, " and he gave Triscoe the facts of Burnamy'sinjurious refusal to help Stoller put a false complexion on the opinionshe had allowed him ignorantly to express. 

The general grunted again. "Of course he had to refuse, and he hasbehaved like a gentleman so far. But that doesn't justify him in havinglet Stoller get himself into the scrape. "

"No, " said March. "It's a tough nut for the casuist to try his tooth on. And I must say I feel sorry for Stoller. "

Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm. "I don't, one bit. He wasthoroughly selfish from first to last. He has got just what he deserved. "

"Ah, very likely, " said her husband. "The question is about Burnamy'spart in giving him his deserts; he had to leave him to them, of course. "

The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter of his eye-glasses, and left the subject as of no concern to him. "I believe, " he said, rising, "I'll have a look at some of your papers, " and he went into thereading-room. 

"Now, " said Mrs. March, "he will go home and poison that poor girl'smind. And, you will have yourself to thank for prejudicing him againstBurnamy. "

"Then why didn't you do it yourself, my dear?" he teased; but he wasreally too sorry for the whole affair, which he nevertheless enjoyed asan ethical problem. 

The general looked so little at the papers that before March went off forhis morning walk he saw him come out of the reading-room and take his waydown the Alte Wiese. He went directly back to his daughter, and reportedBurnamy's behavior with entire exactness. He dwelt upon his making thebest of a bad business in refusing to help Stoller out of it, dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it was a badbusiness. 

"Now, you know all about it, " he said at the end, "and I leave the wholething to you. If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March. I don't know but I'drather you'd satisfy yourself--"

"I will not see Mrs. March. Do you think I would go back of you in thatway? I am satisfied now. "

XXXIX. 

Instead of Burnamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now breakfasted with theMarches at the Posthof, and the boy was with March throughout the day agood deal. He rectified his impressions of life in Carlsbad by March'sgreater wisdom and experience, and did his best to anticipate hisopinions and conform to his conclusions. This was not easy, for sometimeshe could not conceal from himself, that March's opinions were whimsical, and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not always conceal from Marchthat he was matching them with Kenby's on some points, and suffering fromtheir divergence. He came to join the sage in his early visit to thesprings, and they walked up and down talking; and they went off togetheron long strolls in which Rose was proud to bear him company. He waspatient of the absences from which he was often answered, and he learnedto distinguish between the earnest and the irony of which March's repliesseemed to be mixed. He examined him upon many features of Germancivilization, but chiefly upon the treatment of women in it; and uponthis his philosopher was less satisfactory than he could have wished himto be. He tried to excuse his trifling as an escape from the painfulstress of questions which he found so afflicting himself; but in thematter of the woman-and-dog teams, this was not easy. March owned thatthe notion of their being yokemates was shocking; but he urged that itwas a stage of evolution, and a distinct advance upon the time when womendragged the carts without the help of the dogs; and that the time mightnot be far distant when the dogs would drag the carts without the help ofthe women. 

Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he wastroubled by his friend's apparent acceptance of unjust things on theirpicturesque side. Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink ofthe turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in hismouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing bythe river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women werereaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutchthe stems together and cut them with their hooked blades. "Ah, delightful!" March took off his hat as if to salute the pleasant sight. 

"But don't you think, Mr. March, " the boy ventured, "that the man hadbetter be cutting the wheat, and letting the women watch the cows?"

"Well, I don't know. There are more of them; and he wouldn't be half sograceful as they are, with that flow of their garments, and the sway oftheir aching backs. " The boy smiled sadly, and March put his hand on hisshoulder as they walked on. "You find a lot of things in Europe that needputting right, don't you, Rose?"

"Yes; I know it's silly. "

"Well, I'm not sure. But I'm afraid it's useless. You see, these oldcustoms go such a way back, and are so grounded in conditions. We thinkthey might be changed, if those who rule could be got to see how crueland ugly they are; but probably they couldn't. I'm afraid that theEmperor of Austria himself couldn't change them, in his sovereignplenitude of power. The Emperor is only an old custom too, and he's asmuch grounded in the conditions as any. " This was the serious way Rosefelt that March ought always to talk; and he was too much grieved tolaugh when he went on. "The women have so much of the hard work to do, over here, because the emperors need the men for their armies. Theycouldn't let their men cut wheat unless it was for their officers'horses, in the field of some peasant whom it would ruin. "

If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to work these paradoxes forthe boy's confusion. She said the child adored him, and it was asacrilege to play with his veneration. She always interfered to save him, but with so little logic though so much justice that Rose suffered ahumiliation from her championship, and was obliged from a sense ofself-respect to side with the mocker. She understood this, andmagnanimously urged it as another reason why her husband should nottrifle with Rose's ideal of him; to make his mother laugh at him waswicked. 

"Oh, I'm not his only ideal, " March protested. "He adores Kenby too, andevery now and then he brings me to book with a text from Kenby's gospel. "

Mrs. March caught her breath. "Kenby! Do you really think, then, thatshe--"

"Oh, hold on, now! It isn't a question of Mrs. Adding; and I don't sayRose had an eye on poor old Kenby as a step-father. I merely want you tounderstand that I'm the object of a divided worship, and that when I'moff duty as an ideal I don't see why I shouldn't have the fun of makingMrs. Adding laugh. You can't pretend she isn't wrapped up in the boy. You've said that yourself. "

"Yes, she's wrapped up in him; she'd give her life for him; but she is solight. I didn't suppose she was so light; but it's borne in upon me moreand more. "

They were constantly seeing Rose and his mother, in the sort of abeyancethe Triscoes had fallen into. One afternoon the Addings came to Mrs. March's room to look from her windows at a parade of bicyclers' clubsfrom the neighboring towns. The spectacle prospered through its firsthalf-hour, with the charm which German sentiment and ingenuity, are ableto lend even a bicycle parade. The wheelmen and wheelwomen filed by onmachines wreathed with flowers and ribbons, and decked with streamingbanners. Here and there one sat under a moving arch of blossoms, or in abower of leaves and petals, and they were all gay with their clubcostumes and insignia. In the height of the display a sudden mountainshower gathered and broke upon them. They braved it till it became adrenching down-pour; then they leaped from their machines and fled to anyshelter they could find, under trees and in doorways. The men used theirgreater agility to get the best places, and kept them; the women made noappeal for them by word or look, but took the rain in the open as if theyexpected nothing else. 

Rose watched the scene with a silent intensity which March interpreted. "There's your chance, Rose. Why don't you go down and rebuke thosefellows?"

Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and Mrs. March promptlyattacked her husband in his behalf. "Why don't you go and rebuke themyourself?"

"Well, for one thing, there isn't any conversation in my phrase-bookBetween an indignant American Herr and a Party of German Wheelmen whohave taken Shelter from the Rain and are keeping the Wheelwomen out inthe Wet. " Mrs. Adding shrieked her delight, and he was flattered intogoing on. "For another thing, I think it's very well for you ladies torealize from an object-lesson of this sort what spoiled children of ourcivilization you are. It ought to make you grateful for your privileges. "

"There is something in that, " Mrs. Adding joyfully consented. 

"Oh, there is no civilization but ours, " said Mrs. March, in a burst ofvindictive patriotism. "I am more and more convinced of it the longer Istay in Europe. "

"Perhaps that's why we like to stay so long in Europe; it strengthens usin the conviction that America is the only civilized country in theworld, " said March. 

The shower passed as quickly as it had gathered, and the band which ithad silenced for a moment burst forth again in the music which fills theCarlsbad day from dawn till dusk. Just now, it began to play a pot pourriof American airs; at the end some unseen Americans under the trees belowclapped and cheered. 

"That was opportune of the band, " said March. "It must have been atelepathic impulse from our patriotism in the director. But a pot pourriof American airs is like that tablet dedicating the American Park up hereon the Schlossberg, which is signed by six Jews and one Irishman. Theonly thing in this medley that's the least characteristic or original isDixie; and I'm glad the South has brought us back into the Union. "

"You don't know one note from another, my dear, " said his wife. 

"I know the 'Washington Post. '"

"And don't you call that American?"

"Yes, if Sousa is an American name; I should have thought it wasPortuguese. "

"Now that sounds a little too much like General Triscoe's pessimism, "said Mrs. March; and she added: "But whether we have any nationalmelodies or not, we don't poke women out in the rain and keep themsoaking!"

"No, we certainly don't, " he assented, with such a well-studied effect ofyielding to superior logic that Mrs. Adding screamed for joy. 

The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, "I hope Rose isn'tacting on my suggestion?"

"I hate to have you tease him, dearest, " his wife interposed. 

"Oh, no, " the mother said, laughing still, but with a note of tendernessin her laugh, which dropped at last to a sigh. "He's too much afraid oflese-majesty, for that. But I dare say he couldn't stand the sight. He'squeer. "

"He's beautiful!" said Mrs. March. 

"He's good, " the mother admitted. "As good as the day's long. He's nevergiven me a moment's trouble--but he troubles me. If you can understand!"

"Oh, I do understand!" Mrs. March returned. "By his innocence, you mean. That is the worst of children. Their innocence breaks our hearts andmakes us feel ourselves such dreadful old things. "

"His innocence, yes, " pursued Mrs. Adding, "and his ideals. " She began tolaugh again. "He may have gone off for a season of meditation and prayerover the misbehavior of these bicyclers. His mind is turning that way agood deal lately. It's only fair to tell you, Mr. March, that he seems tobe giving up his notion of being an editor. You mustn't be disappointed. "

"I shall be sorry, " said the editor. "But now that you mention it, Ithink I have noticed that Rose seems rather more indifferent toperiodical literature. I supposed he might simply have exhausted hisquestions--or my answers. "

"No; it goes deeper than that. I think it's Europe that's turned his mindin the direction of reform. At any rate he thinks now he will be areformer. "

"Really! What kind of one? Not religious, I hope?"

"No. His reform has a religious basis, but its objects are social. Idon't make it out, exactly; but I shall, as soon as Rose does. He tellsme everything, and sometimes I don't feel equal to it, spiritually oreven intellectually. "

"Don't laugh at him, Mrs. Adding!" Mrs. March entreated. 

"Oh, he doesn't mind my laughing, " said the mother, gayly. Rose cameshyly back into the room, and she said, "Well, did you rebuke those badbicyclers?" and she laughed again. 

"They're only a custom, too, Rose, ", said March, tenderly. "Like the manresting while the women worked, and the Emperor, and all the rest of it. "

"Oh, yes, I know, " the boy returned. 

"They ride modern machines, but they live in the tenth century. That'swhat we're always forgetting when we come to Europe and see thesebarbarians enjoying all our up-to-date improvements. "

"There, doesn't that console you?" asked his mother, and she took him awaywith her, laughing back from the door. "I don't believe it does, a bit!"

"I don't believe she understands the child, " said Mrs. March. "She isvery light, don't you think? I don't know, after all, whether it wouldn'tbe a good thing for her to marry Kenby. She is very easygoing, and shewill be sure to marry somebody. "

She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, and he said, "You might putthese ideas to her. "

XL. 

With the passage of the days and weeks, the strange faces which hadfamiliarized themselves at the springs disappeared; even some of thosewhich had become the faces of acquaintance began to go. In thediminishing crowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen; thesad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemed never to have quite gothis bearings after his error with General Triscoe, seldom showed itself. The Triscoes themselves kept out of the Marches' way, or they fancied so;Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their daily encounter. 

It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-August, but at Carlsbadthe sun was so late getting up over the hills that as people went totheir breakfasts at the cafes up the valley of the Tepl they found himlooking very obliquely into it at eight o'clock in the morning. Theyellow leaves were thicker about the feet of the trees, and the grass wassilvery gray with the belated dews. The breakfasters were fewer than theyhad been, and there were more little barefooted boys and girls with cupsof red raspberries which they offered to the passers with cries of"Himbeeren! Himbeeren!" plaintive as the notes of birds left songless bythe receding summer. 

March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and Mrs. Adding boughtrecklessly of it, and ate it under his eyes with their coffee and bread, pouring over it pots of clotted cream that the 'schone' Lili broughtthem. Rose pretended an indifference to it, which his mother betrayed wasa sacrifice in behalf of March's inability. 

Lili's delays in coming to be paid had been such that the Marches nowtried to pay her when she brought their breakfast, but they sometimesforgot, and then they caught her whenever she came near them. In thisevent she liked to coquet with their impatience; she would lean againsttheir table, and say: "Oh, no. You stay a little. It is so nice. " One dayafter such an entreaty, she said, "The queen is here, this morning. "

Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes. "The queen!"

"Yes; the young lady. Mr. Burnamy was saying she was a queen. She isthere with her father. " She nodded in the direction of a distant corner, and the Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and the general. "She isnot seeming so gayly as she was being. "

March smiled. "We are none of us so gayly as we were being, Lili. Thesummer is going. "

"But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?" the girl asked, restingher tray on the corner of the table. 

"No, I'm afraid he won't, " March returned sadly. 

"He was very good. He was paying the proprietor for the dishes thatAugusta did break when she was falling down. He was paying before he wentaway, when he was knowing that the proprietor would make Augusta to pay. "

"Ah!" said March, and his wife said, "That was like him!" and she eagerlyexplained to Mrs. Adding how good and great Burnamy had been in thischaracteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to add somepathetic facts about Augusta's poverty and gratitude. "I think MissTriscoe ought to know it. There goes the wretch, now!" she broke off. "Don't look at him!" She set her husband the example of averting his facefrom the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middle aisle of thegrove, and looking to the right and left for a vacant table. "Ugh! I hopehe won't be able to find a single place. "

Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, while Rose watched March'sface with grave sympathy. "He certainly doesn't deserve one. Don't let uskeep you from offering Miss Triscoe any consolation you can. " They gotup, and the boy gathered up the gloves, umbrella, and handkerchief whichthe ladies let drop from their laps. 

"Have you been telling?" March asked his wife. 

"Have I told you anything?" she demanded of Mrs. Adding in turn. "Anything that you didn't as good as know, already?"

"Not a syllable!" Mrs. Adding replied in high delight. "Come, Rose!"

"Well, I suppose there's no use saying anything, " said March, after sheleft them. 

"She had guessed everything, without my telling her, " said his wife. 

"About Stoller?"

"Well-no. I did tell her that part, but that was nothing. It was aboutBurnamy and Agatha that she knew. She saw it from the first. "

"I should have thought she would have enough to do to look after poor oldKenby. "

"I'm not sure, after all, that she cares for him. If she doesn't, sheoughtn't to let him write to her. Aren't you going over to speak to theTriscoes?"

"No, certainly not. I'm going back to the hotel. There ought to be somesteamer letters this morning. Here we are, worrying about these strangersall the time, and we never give a thought to our own children on theother side of the ocean. "

"I worry about them, too, " said the mother, fondly. "Though there isnothing to worry about, " she added. 

"It's our duty to worry, " he insisted. 

At the hotel the portier gave them four letters. There was one from eachof their children: one very buoyant, not to say boisterous, from thedaughter, celebrating her happiness in her husband, and the loveliness ofChicago as a summer city ("You would think she was born out there!"sighed her mother); and one from the son, boasting his well-being inspite of the heat they were having ("And just think how cool it is here!"his mother upbraided herself), and the prosperity of 'Every Other Week'. There was a line from Fulkerson, praising the boy's editorial instinct, and ironically proposing March's resignation in his favor. 

"I do believe we could stay all winter, just as well as not, " said Mrs. March, proudly. "What does 'Burnamy say?"

"How do you know it's from him?"

"Because you've been keeping your hand on it! Give it here. "

"When I've read it. "

The letter was dated at Ansbach, in Germany, and dealt, except for somemessages of affection to Mrs. March, with a scheme for a paper whichBurnamy wished to write on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought he could useit in 'Every Other Week'. He had come upon a book about that haplessfoundling in Nuremberg, and after looking up all his traces there he hadgone on to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his death so pathetically. Burnamy said he could not give any notion of the enchantment ofNuremberg; but he besought March, if he was going to the Tyrol for hisafter-cure, not to fail staying a day or so in the wonderful place. Hethought March would enjoy Ansbach too, in its way. 

"And, not a word--not a syllable--about Miss Triscoe!" cried Mrs. March. "Shall you take his paper?"

"It would be serving him right, if I refused it, wouldn't it?"

They never knew what it cost Burnamy to keep her name out of his letter, or by what an effort of the will he forbade himself even to tell of hisparting interview with Stoller. He had recovered from his remorse forletting Stoller give himself away; he was still sorry for that, but he nolonger suffered; yet he had not reached the psychological moment when hecould celebrate his final virtue in the matter. He was glad he had beenable to hold out against the temptation to retrieve himself by anotherwrong; but he was humbly glad, and he felt that until happier chancebrought him and his friends together he must leave them to their mercifulconjectures. He was young, and he took the chance, with an aching heart. If he had been older, he might not have taken it. 

XLI. 

The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently, in late August, in thegood weather which is pretty sure to fall then, if ever in the Austriansummer. For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had been building ascaffolding for the illumination in the woods on a height overlooking thetown, and making unobtrusive preparations at points within it. 

The day was important as the last of March's cure, and its pleasuresbegan for him by a renewal of his acquaintance in its first kindlinesswith the Eltwins. He had met them so seldom that at one time he thoughtthey must have gone away, but now after his first cup he saw the quiet, sad old pair, sitting together on a bench in the Stadt Park, and he askedleave to sit down with them till it was time for the next. Eltwin saidthat this was their last day, too; and explained that his wife alwayscame with him to the springs, while he took the waters. 

"Well, " he apologized, "we're all that's left, and I suppose we like tokeep together. " He paused, and at the look in March's face he suddenlywent on. "I haven't been well for three or four years; but I alwaysfought against coming out here, when the doctors wanted me to. I said Icouldn't leave home; and, I don't suppose I ever should. But my home leftme. "

As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, and March saw her stealher withered hand into his. 

"We'd had a large family, but they'd all died off, with one thing oranother, and here in the spring we lost our last daughter. Seemedperfectly well, and all at once she died; heart-failure, they called it. It broke me up, and mother, here, got at me to go. And so we're here. "His voice trembled; and his eyes softened; then they flashed up, andMarch heard him add, in a tone that astonished him less when he lookedround and saw General Triscoe advancing toward them, "I don't know whatit is always makes me want to kick that man. "

The general lifted his hat to their group, and hoped that Mrs. Eltwin waswell, and Major Eltwin better. He did not notice their replies, but saidto March, "The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp's readingroom, to gowith them to the Posthof for breakfast. "

"Aren't you going, too?" asked March. 

"No, thank you, " said the general, as if it were much finer not; "I shallbreakfast at our pension. " He strolled off with the air of a man who hasdone more than his duty. 

"I don't suppose I ought to feel that way, " said Eltwin, with a remorsewhich March suspected a reproachful pressure of his wife's hand hadprompted in him. "I reckon he means well. "

"Well, I don't know, " March said, with a candor he could not whollyexcuse. 

On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wife for her interest inthe romantic woes of her lovers, in a world where there was such realpathos as these poor old people's; but in the company of Miss Triscoe hecould not give himself this pleasure. He tried to amuse her on the wayfrom Pupp's, with the doubt he always felt in passing the CafeSans-Souci, whether he should live to reach the Posthof where he meant tobreakfast. She said, "Poor Mr. March!" and laughed inattentively; when hewent on to philosophize the commonness of the sparse company alwaysobservable at the Sans-Souci as a just effect of its Laodicean situationbetween Pupp's and the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and his wifefrowned at him. 

The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal bloomsfor sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of therowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; apoor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to thevarious cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling likesere foliage as it moved. 

At the Posthof the 'schone' Lili alone was as gay, as in the prime ofJuly. She played archly about the guests she welcomed to a table in asunny spot in the gallery. "You are tired of Carlsbad?" she saidcaressingly to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before her. 

"Not of the Posthof, " said the girl, listlessly. 

"Posthof, and very little Lili?" She showed, with one forefinger onanother, how very little she was. 

Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to Mrs. March, withabrupt seriousness, "Augusta was finding a handkerchief under the table, and she was washing it and ironing it before she did bring it. I havescolded her, and I have made her give it to me. "

She took from under her apron a man's handkerchief, which she offered toMrs. March. It bore, as she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B. But, "Whose can it be?" they asked each other. 

"Why, Burnamy's, " said March; and Lili's eyes danced. "Give it here!"

His wife caught it farther away. "No, I'm going to see whose it is, first; if it's his, I'll send it to him myself. "

She tried to put it into the pocket which was not in her dress by slidingit down her lap; then she handed it to the girl, who took it with acareless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it. 

Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once inCarlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off andwas holding them in her lap. They fell to the ground when she now rosefrom breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up. Miss Triscoe was tooquick for her. 

"Oh, let me carry them for you!" she entreated, and after a tenderstruggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearingthem through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist. She was not thekind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not thekind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and letMarch go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in theStadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath. 

Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invitedthe girl's advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting itin every case, with Miss Triscoe's eager approval. In the Stadt Park theysat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite feints ofrecovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased effusion. 

When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had beensitting, they seemed to be followed. They looked round and saw no onemore alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim inspite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hatbrims are. He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, "Something leftlying, " passed on. 

They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at theirskirts to see if there was anything amiss with them, and Miss Triscoeperceived her hands empty of Mrs. March's sandals and of Burnamy'shandkerchief. 

"Oh, I put it in one of the toes!" she lamented, and she fled back totheir bench, alarming in her course the fears of a gendarme for thepublic security, and putting a baby in its nurse's arms into such doubtsof its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry. She laughedbreathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March. "That comes of having no pocket;I didn't suppose I could forget your sandals, Mrs. March! Wasn't itabsurd?"

"It's one of those things, " Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards, "that they can always laugh over together. "

"They? And what about Burnamy's behavior to Stoller?"

"Oh, I don't call that anything but what will come right. Of course hecan make it up to him somehow. And I regard his refusal to do wrong whenStoller wanted him to as quite wiping out the first offence. "

"Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behind you. My only hope isthat when we leave here tomorrow, her pessimistic papa's poison willneutralize yours somehow. "

XLII. 

One of the pleasantest incidents of March's sojourn in Carlsbad was hisintroduction to the manager of the municipal theatre by a common friendwho explained the editor in such terms to the manager that he conceivedof him as a brother artist. This led to much bowing and smiling from themanager when the Marches met him in the street, or in their frequentvisits to the theatre, with which March felt that it might well haveended, and still been far beyond his desert. He had not thought of goingto the opera on the Emperor's birthnight, but after dinner a box camefrom the manager, and Mrs. March agreed with him that they could not indecency accept so great a favor. At the same time she argued that theycould not in decency refuse it, and that to show their sense of thepleasure done them, they must adorn their box with all the beauty anddistinction possible; in other words, she said they must ask Miss Triscoeand her father. 

"And why not Major Eltwin and his wife? Or Mrs. Adding and Rose?"

She begged him, simply in his own interest, not to be foolish; and theywent early, so as to be in their box when their guests came. The foyer ofthe theatre was banked with flowers, and against a curtain of evergreensstood a high-pedestalled bust of the paternal Caesar, with whoseside-whiskers a laurel crown comported itself as well as it could. At thefoot of the grand staircase leading to the boxes the manager stood inevening dress, receiving his friends and their felicitations upon thehonor which the theatre was sure to do itself on an occasion so august. The Marches were so cordial in their prophecies that the manager yieldedto an artist's impulse and begged his fellow-artist to do him thepleasure of coming behind the scenes between the acts of the opera; hebowed a heart-felt regret to Mrs. March that he could not make theinvitation include her, and hoped that she would not be too lonely whileher husband was gone. 

She explained that they had asked friends, and she should not be alone, and then he entreated March to bring any gentleman who was his guest withhim. On the way up to their box, she pressed his arm as she used in theiryoung married days, and asked him if it was not perfect. "I wish we weregoing to have it all to ourselves; no one else can appreciate the wholesituation. Do you think we have made a mistake in having the Triscoes?"

"We!" he retorted. "Oh, that's good! I'm going to shirk him, when itcomes to going behind the scenes. "

"No, no, dearest, " she entreated. "Snubbing will only make it worse. Wemust stand it to the bitter end, now. "

The curtain rose upon another laurelled bust of the Emperor, with achorus of men formed on either side, who broke into the grave and noblestrains of the Austrian Hymn, while every one stood. Then the curtainfell again, and in the interval before the opera could begin, GeneralTriscoe and his daughter came in. 

Mrs. March took the splendor in which the girl appeared as a tribute toher hospitality. She had hitherto been a little disappointed of the openhomage to American girlhood which her readings of international romancehad taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patriotic vanity feastedfull. Fat highhotes of her own sex levelled their lorgnettes at MissTriscoe all around the horseshoe, with critical glances which fellblunted from her complexion and costume; the house was brilliant with themilitary uniforms, which we have not yet to mingle with our unrivalledmillinery, and the ardent gaze of the young officers dwelt on the perfectmould of her girlish arms and neck, and the winning lines of her face. The girl's eyes shone with a joyful excitement, and her little head, defined by its dark hair, trembled as she slowly turned it from side toside, after she removed the airy scarf which had covered it. Her father, in evening dress, looked the Third Emperor complaisant to a civiloccasion, and took a chair in the front of the box without resistance;and the ladies disputed which should yield the best place to the other, till Miss Triscoe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for the first act atleast. 

The piece had to be cut a good deal to give people time for theilluminations afterwards; but as it was it gave scope to the actress who, 'als Gast' from a Viennese theatre, was the chief figure in it. Shemerited the distinction by the art which still lingered, deeply embeddedin her massive balk, but never wholly obscured. 

"That is grand, isn't it?" said March, following one of the tremendousstrokes by which she overcame her physical disadvantages. "It's fine tosee how her art can undo, for one splendid instant, the work of all thosesteins of beer, those illimitable licks of sausage, those boundlessfields of cabbage. But it's rather pathetic. "

"It's disgusting, " said his wife; and at this General Triscoe, who hadbeen watching the actress through his lorgnette, said, as if hiscontrary-mindedness were irresistibly invoked:

"Well, I don't know. It's amusing. Do you suppose we shall see her whenwe go behind, March?"

He still professed a desire to do so when the curtain fell, and theyhurried to the rear door of the theatre. It was slightly ajar, and theypulled it wide open, with the eagerness of their age and nation, andbegan to mount the stairs leading up from it between rows of painteddancing-girls, who had come out for a breath of air, and who pressedthemselves against the walls to make room for the intruders. With theirrouged faces, and the stare of their glassy eyes intensified by thecoloring of their brows and lashes, they were like painted statues, asthey stood there with their crimsoned lips parted in astonished smiles. 

"This is rather weird, " said March, faltering at the sight. "I wonder ifwe might ask these young ladies where to go?" General Triscoe made noanswer, and was apparently no more prepared than himself to accost thefiles of danseuses, when they were themselves accosted by an angry voicefrom the head of the stairs with a demand for their business. The voicebelonged to a gendarme, who descended toward them and seemed as deeplyscandalized at their appearance as they could have been at that of theyoung ladies. 

March explained, in his ineffective German, with every effect ofimprobability, that they were there by appointment of the manager, andwished to find his room. 

The gendarme would not or could not make anything out of it. He presseddown upon them, and laying a rude hand on a shoulder of either, began toforce them back to the door. The mild nature of the editor might haveyielded to his violence, but the martial spirit of General Triscoe wasroused. He shrugged the gendarme's hand from his shoulder, and with avoice as furious as his own required him, in English, to say what thedevil he meant. The gendarme rejoined with equal heat in German; thegeneral's tone rose in anger; the dancing-girls emitted some littleshrieks of alarm, and fled noisily up the stairs. From time to time Marchinterposed with a word of the German which had mostly deserted him in hishour of need; but if it had been a flow of intelligible expostulation, itwould have had no effect upon the disputants. They grew more outrageous, till the manager himself, appeared at the head of the stairs, andextended an arresting hand over the hubbub. As soon as the situationclarified itself he hurried down to his visitors with a polite roar ofapology and rescued them from the gendarme, and led them up to his roomand forced them into arm-chairs with a rapidity of reparation which didnot exhaust itself till he had entreated them with every circumstance ofcivility to excuse an incident so mortifying to him. But with all hishaste he lost so much time in this that he had little left to show themthrough the theatre, and their presentation to the prima donna wasreduced to the obeisances with which they met and parted as she went uponthe stage at the lifting of the curtain. In the lack of a common languagethis was perhaps as well as a longer interview; and nothing could havebeen more honorable than their dismissal at the hands of the gendarme whohad received them so stormily. He opened the door for them, and stoodwith his fingers to his cap saluting, in the effect of being a whole fileof grenadiers. 

XLIII. 

At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of the box where he had beensitting with the ladies during the absence of the gentlemen. He hadknocked at the door almost as soon as they disappeared, and if he did notfully share the consternation which his presence caused, he looked sofrightened that Mrs. March reserved the censure which the sight of himinspired, and in default of other inspiration treated his coming simplyas a surprise. She shook hands with him, and then she asked him to sitdown, and listened to his explanation that he had come back to Carlsbadto write up the birthnight festivities, on an order from the Paris-NewYork Chronicle; that he had seen them in the box and had ventured to tookin. He was pale, and so discomposed that the heart of justice wassoftened more and more in Mrs. March's breast, and she left him to thetalk that sprang up, by an admirable effect of tact in the young lady, between him and Miss Triscoe. 

After all, she decided, there was nothing criminal in his being inCarlsbad, and possibly in the last analysis there was nothing so verywicked in his being in her box. One might say that it was not very niceof him after he had gone away under such a cloud; but on the other handit was nice, though in a different way, if he longed so much to see MissTriscoe that he could not help coming. It was altogether in his favorthat he was so agitated, though he was momently becoming less agitated;the young people were beginning to laugh at the notion of Mr. March andGeneral Triscoe going behind the scenes. Burnamy said he envied them thechance; and added, not very relevantly, that he had come from Baireuth, where he had seen the last of the Wagner performances. He said he wasgoing back to Baireuth, but not to Ansbach again, where he had finishedlooking up that Kaspar Hauser business. He seemed to think Mrs. Marchwould know about it, and she could not help saying; Oh, yes, Mr. Marchwas so much interested. She wondered if she ought to tell him about hishandkerchief; but she remembered in time that she had left it in MissTriscoe's keeping. She wondered if the girl realized how handsome he was. He was extremely handsome, in his black evening dress, with his Tuxedo, and the pallor of his face repeated in his expanse of shirt front. 

At the bell for the rising of the curtain he rose too, and took theiroffered hands. In offering hers Mrs. March asked if he would not stay andspeak with Mr. March and the general; and now for the first time herecognized anything clandestine in his visit. He laughed nervously, andsaid, "No, thank you!" and shut himself out. 

"We must tell them, " said Mrs. March, rather interrogatively, and she wasglad that the girl answered with a note of indignation. 

"Why, certainly, Mrs. March. "

They could not tell them at once, for the second act had begun when Marchand the general came back; and after the opera was over and they got outinto the crowded street there was no chance, for the general was obligedto offer his arm to Mrs. March, while her husband followed with hisdaughter. 

The facades of the theatre and of the hotels were outlined with thicklyset little lamps, which beaded the arches of the bridges spanning theTepl, and lighted the casements and portals of the shops. High above all, against the curtain of black woodland on the mountain where its skeletonhad been growing for days, glittered the colossal effigy of thedoubleheaded eagle of Austria, crowned with the tiara of the Holy RomanEmpire; in the reflected splendor of its myriad lamps the pale Christlooked down from the mountain opposite upon the surging multitudes in thestreets and on the bridges. 

They were most amiable multitudes, March thought, and they respondeddocilely to the entreaties of the policemen who stood on the steps of thebridges, and divided their encountering currents with patient appeals of"Bitte schon! Bitte schon!" He laughed to think of a New York cop saying"Please prettily! Please prettily!" to a New York crowd which he wishedto have go this way or that, and then he burned with shame to think howfar our manners were from civilization, wherever our heads and heartsmight be, when he heard a voice at his elbow:

"A punch with a club would start some of these fellows along quicker. "

It was Stoller, and March turned from him to lose his disgust in thesudden terror of perceiving that Miss Triscoe was no longer at his side. Neither could he see his wife and General Triscoe, and he began to pushfrantically about in the crowd looking for the girl. He had aninterminable five or ten minutes in his vain search, and he was going tocall out to her by name, when Burnamy saved him from the hopelessabsurdity by elbowing his way to him with Miss. Triscoe on his arm. 

"Here she is, Mr. March, " he said, as if there were nothing strange inhis having been there to find her; in fact he had followed them all fromthe theatre, and at the moment he saw the party separated, and MissTriscoe carried off helpless in the human stream, had plunged in andrescued her. Before March could formulate any question in hisbewilderment, Burnamy was gone again; the girl offered no explanation forhim, and March had not yet decided to ask any when he caught sight of hiswife and General Triscoe standing tiptoe in a doorway and craning theirnecks upward and forward to scan the crowd in search of him and hischarge. Then he looked round at her and opened his lips to express theastonishment that filled him, when he was aware of an ominous shining ofher eyes and trembling of her hand on his arm. 

She pressed his arm nervously, and he understood her to beg him toforbear at once all question of her and all comment on Burnamy's presenceto her father. 

It would not have been just the time for either. Not only Mrs. March waswith the general, but Mrs. Adding also; she had called to them from thatplace, where she was safe with Rose when she saw them eddying about inthe crowd. The general was still, expressing a gratitude which becamemore pressing the more it was disclaimed; he said casually at sight ofhis daughter, "Ah; you've found us, have you?" and went on talking toMrs. Adding, who nodded to them laughingly, and asked, "Did you see mebeckoning?"

"Look here, my dear!" March said to his wife as soon as they parted fromthe rest, the general gallantly promising that his daughter and he wouldsee Mrs. Adding safe to her hotel, and were making their way slowly homealone. "Did you know that Burnamy was in Carlsbad?"

"He's going away on the twelve-o'clock train tonight, " she answered, firmly. 

"What has that got to do with it? Where did you see him?"

"In the box, while you were behind the scenes. "

She told him all about it, and he listened in silent endeavor for theground of censure from which a sense of his own guilt forced him. Sheasked suddenly, "Where did you see him?" and he told her in turn. 

He added severely, "Her father ought to know. Why didn't you tell him?"

"Why didn't you?" she retorted with great reason. 

"Because I didn't think he was just in the humor for it. " He began tolaugh as he sketched their encounter with the gendarme, but she did notseem to think it amusing; and he became serious again. "Besides, I wasafraid she was going to blubber, any way. "

"She wouldn't have blubbered, as you call it. I don't know why you needbe so disgusting! It would have given her just the moral support sheneeded. Now she will have to tell him herself, and he will blame us. Youought to have spoken; you could have done it easily and naturally whenyou came up with her. You will have yourself to thank for all the troublethat comes of it, now, my dear. "

He shouted in admiration of her skill in shifting the blame on him. "Allright! I should have had to stand it, even if you hadn't behaved withangelic wisdom. "

"Why, " she said, after reflection, "I don't see what either of us hasdone. We didn't get Burnamy to come here, or connive at his presence inany way. "

"Oh! Make Triscoe believe that! He knows you've done all you could tohelp the affair on. "

"Well, what if I have? He began making up to Mrs. Adding himself as soonas he saw her, to-night. She looked very pretty. "

"Well, thank Heaven! we're off to-morrow morning, and I hope we've seenthe last of them. They've done what they could to spoil my cure, but I'mnot going to have them spoil my aftercure. "

XLIV. 

Mrs. March had decided not to go to the Posthof for breakfast, where theyhad already taken a lavish leave of the 'schone' Lili, with a sense ofbeing promptly superseded in her affections. They found a place in thered-table-cloth end of the pavilion at Pupp's, and were served by thepretty girl with the rose-bud mouth whom they had known only asEin-und-Zwanzig, and whose promise of "Komm' gleich, bitte schon!" waslike a bird's note. Never had the coffee been so good, the bread soaerially light, the Westphalian ham so tenderly pink. A young marriedcouple whom they knew came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and satdown with them, like their own youth, for a moment. 

"If you had told them we were going, dear, " said Mrs. March, when thecouple were themselves gone, "we should have been as old as ever. Don'tlet us tell anybody, this morning, that we're going. I couldn't bear it. "

They had been obliged to take the secretary of the hotel into theirconfidence, in the process of paying their bill. He put on his high hatand came out to see them off. The portier was already there, standing atthe step of the lordly two-spanner which they had ordered for the longdrive to the station. The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offerthem a fellow-republican's good wishes for their journey; Herr Pupphimself appeared at the last moment to hope for their return anothersummer. Mrs. March bent a last look of interest upon the proprietor astheir two-spanner whirled away. 

"They say that he is going to be made a count. "

"Well, I don't object, " said March. "A man who can feed fourteen thousandpeople, mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an archduke. "

At the station something happened which touched them even more than theselast attentions of the hotel. They were in their compartment, and were inthe act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting theirbundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March's name called. 

They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed withexcitement and his eyes glowing. "I was afraid I shouldn't get here intime, " he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers. 

"Why Rose! From your mother?"

"From me, " he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor, when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace. "I want tokiss you, " she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to themfrom the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for herhandkerchief. "I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetestchild!"

"He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I'm sorry toleave behind, " March assented. "He's the only unmarried one that wasn'tin danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been somerather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I'm notsure that I should have been safe even from Rose. Carlsbad has been aninterruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now thatit will begin again. "

"Yes, " said his wife, "now we can have each other all to ourselves. "

"Yes. It's been very different from our first wedding journey in that. Itisn't that we're not so young now as we were, but that we don't seem somuch our own property. We used to be the sole proprietors, and now weseem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come inand set our dearest interests on the sidewalk. The disadvantage of livingalong is that we get too much into the hands of other people. "

"Yes, it is. I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too. "

"I don't know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we haddied young--or younger, " he suggested. 

"No, I don't know that it is, " she assented. She added, from an absencewhere he was sufficiently able to locate her meaning, "I hope she'llwrite and tell me what her father says and does when she tells him thathe was there. "

There were many things, in the weather, the landscape, their soleoccupancy of an unsmoking compartment, while all the smoking compartmentsround overflowed with smokers, which conspired to offer them a pleasingillusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect that they almost heldeach other's hands. In later life there are such moments when theyouthful emotions come back, as certain birds do in winter, and theelderly heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it were young. But itis best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs. March joined her husband inmocking it, when he made her observe how fit it was that their silverwedding journey should be resumed as part of his after-cure. If he hadfound the fountain of youth in the warm, flat, faintly nauseous water ofthe Felsenquelle, he was not going to call himself twenty-eight againtill his second month of the Carlsbad regimen was out, and he had gotback to salad and fruit. 

At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it thatthey could form a life-long friendship for the old English-speakingwaiter who served them, and would not suffer them to hurry themselves. The hills had already fallen away, and they ran along through a cheerfulcountry, with tracts of forest under white clouds blowing about in a bluesky, and gayly flinging their shadows down upon the brown ploughed land, and upon the yellow oat-fields, where women were cutting the leisurelyharvest with sickles, and where once a great girl with swarthy bare armsunbent herself from her toil, and rose, a statue of rude vigor andbeauty, to watch them go by. Hedges of evergreen enclosed the yellowoat-fields, where slow wagons paused to gather the sheaves of the weekbefore, and then loitered away with them. Flocks of geese waddled insculpturesque relief against the close-cropt pastures, herded by littlegirls with flaxen pigtails, whose eyes, blue as corn-flowers, followedthe flying train. There were stretches of wild thyme purpling long barrenacreages, and growing up the railroad banks almost to the railsthemselves. From the meadows the rowen, tossed in long loose windrows, sent into their car a sad autumnal fragrance which mingled with thetobacco smoke, when two fat smokers emerged into the narrow corridoroutside their compartments and tried to pass each other. Their vaststomachs beat together in a vain encounter. 

"Zu enge!" said one, and "Ja, zu enge!" said the other, and they laughedinnocently in each other's' faces, with a joy in their recognition of thecorridor's narrowness as great as if it had been a stroke of the finestwit. 

All the way the land was lovely, and as they drew near Nuremberg it grewenchanting, with a fairy quaintness. The scenery was Alpine, but thescale was toy-like, as befitted the region, and the mimic peaks andvalleys with green brooks gushing between them, and strange rock formsrecurring in endless caprice, seemed the home of children's story. Allthe gnomes and elves might have dwelt there in peaceful fellowship withthe peasants who ploughed the little fields, and gathered the garlandedhops, and lived in the farmsteads and village houses with those hightimber-laced gables. 

"We ought to have come here long ago with the children, when they werechildren, " said March. 

"No, " his wife returned; "it would have been too much for them. Nobodybut grown people could bear it. "

The spell which began here was not really broken by anything thatafterwards happened in Nuremberg, though the old toy-capital wastrolley-wired through all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a hotellighted by electricity and heated by steam, and equipped with an elevatorwhich was so modern that it came down with them as well as went up. Allthe things that assumed to be of recent structure or invention were asnothing against the dense past, which overwhelmed them with the sense ofa world elsewhere outlived. In Nuremberg it is not the quaint or thepicturesque that is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact and thecommonplace. Here, more than anywhere else, you are steeped in the gothicspirit which expresses itself in a Teutonic dialect of homely sweetness, of endearing caprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive grace andbeauty almost never. It is the architectural speech of a strenuous, gross, kindly, honest people's fancy; such as it is it was inexhaustible, and such as it is it was bewitching for the travellers. 

They could hardly wait till they had supper before plunging into theancient town, and they took the first tram-car at a venture. It was asort of transfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a little inside. Of the city gate to a trolley-car. The conductor with their fare demandedtheir destination; March frankly owned that they did not know where theywanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductor chose; and theconductor, after reflection, decided to put them down at the publicgarden, which, as one of the newest things in the city, would make themost favorable impression upon strangers. It was in fact so like allother city gardens, with the foliage of its trimly planted alleys, thatit sheltered them effectually from the picturesqueness of Nuremberg, andthey had a long, peaceful hour on one of its benches, where they restedfrom their journey, and repented their hasty attempt to appropriate thecharm of the city. 

The next morning it rained, according to a custom which the elevator-boy(flown with the insolent recollection of a sunny summer in Milan) saidwas invariable in Nuremberg; but after the one-o'clock table d'hote theytook a noble two-spanner carriage, and drove all round the city. Everywhere the ancient moat, thickly turfed and planted with trees andshrubs, stretched a girdle of garden between their course and the wallbeautifully old, with knots of dead ivy clinging to its crevices, orbroad meshes of the shining foliage mantling its blackened masonry. Atile-roofed open gallery ran along the top, where so many centuries ofsentries had paced, and arched the massive gates with heavily mouldedpiers, where so countlessly the fierce burgher troops had sallied forthagainst their besiegers, and so often the leaguer hosts had dashedthemselves in assault. The blood shed in forgotten battles would haveflooded the moat where now the grass and flowers grew, or here and therea peaceful stretch of water stagnated. 

The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, where the Hapsburg Kaisersdwelt when they visited their faithful imperial city. From its rampartsthe incredible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best shows itself, and if onehas any love for the distinctive quality of Teutonic architecture it ishere that more than anywhere else one may feast it. The prospect of towerand spire and gable is of such a mediaeval richness, of such an aboundingfulness, that all incidents are lost in it. The multitudinous roofs ofred-brown tiles, blinking browsily from their low dormers, press upon oneanother in endless succession; they cluster together on a rise of groundand sink away where the street falls, but they nowhere disperse orscatter, and they end abruptly at the other rim of the city, beyond whichlooms the green country, merging in the remoter blue of misty uplands. 

A pretty young girl waited at the door of the tower for the visitors togather in sufficient number, and then led them through the terriblemuseum, discanting in the same gay voice and with the same smiling air onall the murderous engines and implements of torture. First in German andthen in English she explained the fearful uses of the Iron Maiden, shewinningly illustrated the action of the racks and wheels on which men hadbeen stretched and broken, and she sweetly vaunted a sword which hadbeheaded eight hundred persons. When she took the established fee fromMarch she suggested, with a demure glance, "And what more you please forsaying it in English. "

"Can you say it in Russian?" demanded a young man, whose eyes he had seendwelling on her from the beginning. She laughed archly, and respondedwith some Slavic words, and then delivered her train of sight-seers overto the custodian who was to show them through the halls and chambers ofthe Burg. These were undergoing the repairs which the monuments of thepast are perpetually suffering in the present, and there was some specialpainting and varnishing for the reception of the Kaiser, who was comingto Nuremberg for the military manoeuvres then at hand. But if they hadbeen in the unmolested discomfort of their unlivable magnificence, theirsplendor was such as might well reconcile the witness to the superiorcomfort of a private station in our snugger day. The Marches came outowning that the youth which might once have found the romantic glories ofthe place enough was gone from them. But so much of it was left to herthat she wished to make him stop and look at the flirtation which hadblossomed out between that pretty young girl and the Russian, whom theyhad scarcely missed from their party in the Burg. He had apparently neverparted from the girl, and now as they sat together on the threshold ofthe gloomy tower, he most have been teaching her more Slavic words, forthey were both laughing as if they understood each other perfectly. 

In his security from having the affair in any wise on his hands, Marchwould have willingly lingered, to see how her education got on; but itbegan to rain, The rain did not disturb the lovers, but it obliged theelderly spectators to take refuge in their carriage; and they drove offto find the famous Little Goose Man. This is what every one does atNuremberg; it would be difficult to say why. When they found the LittleGoose Man, he was only a mediaeval fancy in bronze, who stood on hispedestal in the market-place and contributed from the bill of the gooseunder his arm a small stream to the rainfall drenching the wet wares ofthe wet market-women round the fountain, and soaking their cauliflowersand lettuce, their grapes and pears, their carrots and turnips, to thewatery flavor of all fruits and vegetables in Germany. 

The air was very raw and chill; but after supper the clouds cleared away, and a pleasant evening tempted the travellers out. The portier dissembledany slight which their eagerness for the only amusement he could think ofinspired, and directed them to a popular theatre which was giving asummer season at low prices to the lower classes, and which theysurprised, after some search, trying to hide itself in a sort of backsquare. They got the best places at a price which ought to have beenmortifyingly cheap, and found themselves, with a thousand other harmlessbourgeois folk, in a sort of spacious, agreeable barn, of a decoration byno means ugly, and of a certain artless comfort. Each seat fronted ashelf at the back of the seat before it, where the spectator could puthis hat; there was a smaller shelf for his stein of the beer passedconstantly throughout the evening; and there was a buffet where he couldstay himself with cold ham and other robust German refreshments. 

It was "The Wedding Journey to Nuremberg" upon which they had oddlychanced, and they accepted as a national tribute the character of anAmerican girl in it. She was an American girl of the advanced pattern, and she came and went at a picnic on the arm of a head waiter. She seemedto have no office in the drama except to illustrate a German conceptionof American girlhood, but even in this simple function she seemed ratherto puzzle the German audience; perhaps because of the occasional Englishwords which she used. 

To the astonishment of her compatriots, when they came out of the theatreit was not raining; the night was as brilliantly starlit as a night couldbe in Germany, and they sauntered home richly content through the narrowstreets and through the beautiful old Damenthor, beyond which their hotellay. How pretty, they said, to call that charming port the Ladies' Gate!They promised each other to find out why, and they never did so, butsatisfied themselves by assigning it to the exclusive use of the slimmaidens and massive matrons of the old Nuremberg patriciate, whom theyimagined trailing their silken splendors under its arch in perpetualprocession. 

XLV. 

The life of the Nuremberg patriciate, now extinct in the control of thecity which it builded so strenuously and maintained so heroically, isstill insistent in all its art. This expresses their pride at once andtheir simplicity with a childish literality. At its best it is never sogood as the good Italian art, whose influence is always present in itsbest. The coloring of the great canvases is Venetian, but there is nosuch democracy of greatness as in the painting at Venice; in decorationthe art of Nuremberg is at best quaint, and at the worst puerile. Wherever it had obeyed an academic intention it seemed to March poor andcoarse, as in the bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence. Thewater spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in streamsthat cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in the baseof the church there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting inits simple-hearted truth. The long ages have made it even more affectingthan the sculptor imagined it; they have blurred the faces and figures inpassing till their features are scarcely distinguishable; and thesleeping apostles seem to have dreamed themselves back into themother-marble. It is of the same tradition and impulse with that supremeglory of the native sculpture, the ineffable tabernacle of Adam Krafft, which climbs a column of the church within, a miracle of richly carvenstory; and no doubt if there were a Nuremberg sculptor doing great thingstoday, his work would be of kindred inspiration. 

The descendants of the old patrician who ordered the tabernacle at rathera hard bargain from the artist still worship on the floor below, and thedescendants of his neighbor patricians have their seats in the pewsabout, and their names cut in the proprietary plates on the pew-tops. Thevergeress who showed the Marches through the church was devout in thepraise of these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers. "So simple, and yetso noble!" she said. She was a very romantic vergeress, and she told themat unsparing length the legend of the tabernacle, how the artist fellasleep in despair of winning his patron's daughter, and saw in a visionthe master-work with the lily-like droop at top, which gained him herhand. They did not realize till too late that it was all out of a novelof Georg Ebers's, but added to the regular fee for the church a giftworthy of an inedited legend. 

Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm rarely imparted by theNuremberg manner. They missed there the constant, sweet civility ofCarlsbad, and found themselves falling flat in their endeavors for alittle cordiality. They indeed inspired with some kindness the old womanwho showed them through that cemetery where Albert Durer and Hans Sachsand many other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumental brassesof such beauty:

 "That kings to have the like, might wish to die. "

But this must have been because they abandoned themselves so willingly tothe fascination of the bronze skull on the tomb of a fourteenth-centurypatrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw hinged to theupper. She proudly clapped it up and down for their astonishment, andwaited, with a toothless smile, to let them discover the bead of a nailartfully figured in the skull; then she gave a shrill cackle of joy, andgleefully explained that the wife of this patrician had killed him bydriving a nail into his temple, and had been fitly beheaded for themurder. 

She cared so much for nothing else in the cemetery, but she consented tolet them wonder at the richness of the sculpture in the level tombs, withtheir escutcheons and memorial tablets, overrun by the long grass and thematted ivy; she even consented to share their indignation at thedestruction of some of the brasses and the theft of others. She sufferedmore reluctantly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figured insculpture at one corner of the cemetery, where the anguish of the Christhad long since faded into the stone from which it had been evoked, andthe thieves were no longer distinguishable in their penitence orimpenitence; but she parted friends with them when she saw how much theyseemed taken with the votive chapel of the noble Holzschuh family, wherea line of wooden shoes puns upon the name in the frieze, like the line ofdogs which chase one another, with bones in their mouths, around theCanossa palace at Verona. A sense of the beautiful house by the Adige waspart of the pleasing confusion which possessed them in Nuremberg wheneverthey came upon the expression of the gothic spirit common both to theGerman and northern Italian art. They knew that it was an effect whichhad passed from Germany into Italy, but in the liberal air of the olderland it had come to so much more beauty that now, when they found it inits home, it seemed something fetched from over the Alps and coarsened inthe attempt to naturalize it to an alien air. 

In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian painters from the Germanpictures they had inspired; in the great hall of the Rathhaus the nobleProcessional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph ofMaximilian somehow suggested Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar. There was tobe a banquet in the hall, under the mighty fresco, to welcome the GermanEmperor, coming the next week, and the Rathhaus was full of work-peoplefurbishing it up against his arrival, and making it difficult for thecustodian who had it in charge to show it properly to strangers. She wasof the same enthusiastic sisterhood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence andthe guardian of the old cemetery, and by a mighty effort she prevailedover the workmen so far as to lead her charges out through the corridorwhere the literal conscience of the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the roofto an exact image of a tournament as it was in Nuremberg four hundredyears ago. In this relief, thronged with men and horses, the gala-life ofthe past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed himself afterenjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality which seems thefinal effect of the German gothicism in sculpture. 

XLVI. 

On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England idealof the day by ceasing from sight-seeing. She could not have understoodthe sermon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the lingeringconscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon. Thenshe found nothing of the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholiclands. The people were resting from their week-day labors, but they werenot playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran uses, were locked against tourist curiosity. 

It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in thisancient city, where the past was so much alive in the perpetualpicturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they werefain to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness of the streetsto the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily visited theevening of their arrival. 

On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whom March asked somequestion of their way. He answered in English, and in the parley thatfollowed they discovered that they were all Americans. The strangerproved to be an American of the sort commonest in Germany, and he said hehad returned to his native country to get rid of the ague which he hadtaken on Staten Island. He had been seventeen years in New York, and nowa talk of Tammany and its chances in the next election, of pulls anddeals, of bosses and heelers, grew up between the civic step-brothers, and joined them is a common interest. The German-American said he wasbookkeeper in some glass-works which had been closed by our tariff, andhe confessed that he did not mean to return to us, though he spoke ofGerman affairs with the impartiality of an outsider. He said that theSocialist party was increasing faster than any other, and that thistacitly meant the suppression of rank and the abolition of monarchy. Hewarned March against the appearance of industrial prosperity in Germany;beggary was severely repressed, and if poverty was better clad than withus, it was as hungry and as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York. Theworking classes were kindly and peaceable; they only knifed each otherquietly on Sunday evenings after having too much beer. 

Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marches for good-by; and ashe walked down the aisle of trees in which they had been fittingtogether, he seemed to be retreating farther and farther from suchAmericanism as they had in common. He had reverted to an entirely Germaneffect of dress and figure; his walk was slow and Teutonic; he must be atype of thousands who have returned to the fatherland without wishing toown themselves its children again, and yet out of heart with the onlycountry left them. 

"He was rather pathetic, my dear, " said March, in the discomfort he knewhis wife must be feeling as well as himself. "How odd to have the lidlifted here, and see the same old problems seething and bubbling in thewitch's caldron we call civilization as we left simmering away at home!And how hard to have our tariff reach out and snatch the bread from themouths of those poor glass-workers!"

"I thought that was hard, " she sighed. "It must have been his bread, too. "

"Let's hope it was not his cake, anyway. I suppose, " he added, dreamily, "that what we used to like in Italy was the absence of all the modernactivities. The Italians didn't repel us by assuming to be of our epochin the presence of their monuments; they knew how to behave as pensivememories. I wonder if they're still as charming. "

"Oh, no, " she returned, "nothing is as charming as it used to be. And nowwe need the charm more than ever. "

He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understanding they had lived intothat only one of them was to be desperate at a time, and that they wereto take turns in cheering each other up. "Well, perhaps we don't deserveit. And I'm not sure that we need it so much as we did when we wereyoung. We've got tougher; we can stand the cold facts better now. Theymade me shiver once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable thrill. Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, if it insisted upon beingas charming as it used to be, how could we ever bear to die? We've gotthat to consider. " He yielded to the temptation of his paradox, but hedid not fail altogether of the purpose with which he began, and they tookthe trolley back to their hotel cheerful in the intrepid fancy that theyhad confronted fate when they had only had the hardihood to face aphrase. 

They agreed that now he ought really to find out something about thecontemporary life of Nuremberg, and the next morning he went out beforebreakfast, and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the hopeof intimate impressions. The peasant women, serving portions of milk fromhouse to house out of the cans in the little wagons which they drewthemselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect oftragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the sucking-pigs joltedover the pavements in handcarts; a certain majesty from the longprocession of yellow mail-wagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarianblue, trooping by in the cold small rain, impassibly dripping from theirglazed hat-brims upon their uniforms. But he could not feel that thesethings were any of them very poignantly significant; and he covered hisretreat from the actualities of Nuremberg by visiting the chiefbook-store and buying more photographs of the architecture than hewanted, and more local histories than he should ever read. He made a lasteffort for the contemporaneous life by asking the English-speaking clerkif there were any literary men of distinction living in Nuremberg, andthe clerk said there was not one. 

He went home to breakfast wondering if he should be able to make hismeagre facts serve with his wife; but he found her far from any wish tolisten to them. She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a tablenear her own, who were so absorbed in each other that they were proofagainst an interest that must otherwise have pierced them through. Thebridegroom, as he would have called himself, was a pretty little Bavarianlieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride was as pretty and aslittle, but delicately blond. Nature had admirably mated them, and if arthad helped to bring them together through the genius of the bride'smother, who was breakfasting with them, it had wrought almost as fitly. Mrs. March queried impartially who they were, where they met, and how, and just when they were going to be married; and March consented, in hispersonal immunity from their romance, to let it go on under his eyeswithout protest. But later, when they met the lovers in the street, walking arm in arm, with the bride's mother behind them gloating upontheir bliss, he said the woman ought, at her time of life, to be ashamedof such folly. She must know that this affair, by nine chances out often, could not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tiresome asmost other marriages, and yet she was abandoning herself with thoseignorant young people to the illusion that it was the finest and sweetestthing in life. 

"Well, isn't it?" his wife asked. 

"Yes, that's the worst of it. It shows how poverty-stricken life reallyis. We want somehow to believe that each pair of lovers will find thegood we have missed, and be as happy as we expected to be. "

"I think we have been happy enough, and that we've had as much good aswas wholesome for us, " she returned, hurt. 

"You're always so concrete! I meant us in the abstract. But if you willbe personal, I'll say that you've been as happy as you deserve, and gotmore good than you had any right to. "

She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that theywere walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensiblyfollowing. 

He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to theold cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, waggingin eternal accusation of his murderess. "It's rather hard on her, that heshould be having the last word, that way, " he said. "She was a woman, nomatter what mistakes she had committed. "

"That's what I call 'banale', " said Mrs. March. 

"It is, rather, " he confessed. "It makes me feel as if I must go to seethe house of Durer, after all. "

"Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later. "

It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, becauseeverybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven toDurer's house, which they found in a remote part of the town near astretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by theinterposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time theyreached it. The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and withoutbeing squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardlyhave been different in Durer's time. His dwelling, in no way impressiveoutside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of anarrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was strippedbare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none thecozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house. It was cavernous andcold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid inthe dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the Germanfashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple, neighborly existence there. It in no wise suggested the calling of anartist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer's time to takethemselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life of aprosperous citizen, and it expressed the period. 

The Marches wrote their names in the visitors' book, and paid thevisitor's fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for areproduction of one of Durer's pictures; and then they came away, by nomeans dissatisfied with his house. By its association with his sojournsin Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that itwas really no worse than Ariosto's house at Ferrara, or Petrarch's atArqua, or Michelangelo's at Florence. "But what I admire, " he said, "isour futility in going to see it. We expected to surprise some quality ofthe man left lying about in the house because he lived and died in it;and because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked him so hardto save his widow from coming to want. "

"Who said she did that?"

"A friend of his who hated her. But he had to allow that she was aGod-fearing woman, and had a New England conscience. "

"Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going. "

"Yes; but I don't like her laying her plans to survive him; though womenalways do that. "

They were going away the next day, and they sat down that evening to afinal supper in such good-humor with themselves that they were willing toinclude a young couple who came to take places at their table, thoughthey would rather have been alone. They lifted their eyes for theirexpected salutation, and recognized Mr. And Mrs. Leffers, of theNorumbia. 

The ladies fell upon each other as if they had been mother and daughter;March and the young man shook hands, in the feeling of passengersmutually endeared by the memories of a pleasant voyage. They arrived atthe fact that Mr. Leffers had received letters in England from hispartners which allowed him to prolong his wedding journey in a tour ofthe continent, while their wives were still exclaiming at their encounterin the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all sat down to have, asthe bride said, a real Norumbia time. 

She was one of those young wives who talk always with their eyessubmissively on their husbands, no matter whom they are speaking to; butshe was already unconsciously ruling him in her abeyance. No doubt shewas ruling him for his good; she had a livelier, mind than he, and sheknew more, as the American wives of young American business men alwaysdo, and she was planning wisely for their travels. She recognized hermerit in this devotion with an artless candor, which was typical ratherthan personal. March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little stroll, and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who did not let themgo without making her husband promise to wrap up well, and not get hisfeet wet. She made March promise not to take him far, and to bring himback early, which he found himself very willing to do, after an exchangeof ideas with Mr. Leffers. The young man began to talk about his wife, inher providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the sort of man hewas, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of man he was, therewas no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the reading-room. 

XLVII. 

The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinnerthe next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs. March, who said, as soon as they were gone, "I believe I would rathermeet people of our own age after this. I used to think that you couldkeep young by being with young people; but I don't, now. There world isvery different from ours. Our world doesn't really exist any more, but aslong as we keep away from theirs we needn't realize it. Young people, "she went on, "are more practical-minded than we used to be; they're quiteas sentimental; but I don't think they care so much for the higherthings. They're not so much brought up on poetry as we were, " shepursued. "That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow in ourtime; but now she didn't know of his poem on Nuremberg; she wasintelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its quaintnesswas not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred. " Her tone entreatedhim to find more meaning in her words than she had put into them. "Theycouldn't have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and that grassy, flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that pile-up ofthe roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with their Gothicfacades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow, aguish-looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of thoseoverhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before thechurches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round them!"

"I see what you mean. But do you think it's as sacred to us as it wouldhave been twenty-five years ago? I had an irreverent feeling now and thenthat Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg. "

"Oh, yes; so had I. We're that modern, if we're not so young as we were. "

"We were very simple, in those days. "

"Well, if we were simple, we knew it!"

"Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking atit. "

"We had a good time. "

"Too good. Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it hadnot been so good. We might have our cake now if we hadn't eaten it. "

"It would be mouldy, though. "

"I wonder, " he said, recurring to the Lefferses; "how we really struckthem. "

"Well, I don't believe they thought we ought to be travelling aboutalone, quite, at our age. "

"Oh, not so bad as that!" After a moment he said, "I dare say they don'tgo round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did. "

"Indeed they do! They had an awful quarrel just before they got toNuremberg: about his wanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool byexpress that she wanted to keep with them. But she said it had been alesson, and they were never going to quarrel again. " The elders looked ateach other in the light of experience, and laughed. "Well, " she ended, "that's one thing we're through with. I suppose we've come to feel morealike than we used to. "

"Or not to feel at all. How did they settle it about the baggage?"

"Oh! He insisted on her keeping it with her. " March laughed again, butthis time he laughed alone, and after a while she said: "Well, they gavejust the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean Americanphilistinism. I don't mind their thinking us queer; they must havethought Nuremberg was queer. "

"Yes. We oldsters are always queer to the young. We're eitherridiculously lively and chirpy, or we're ridiculously stiff and grim;they never expect to be like us, and wouldn't, for the world. The worstof it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don't, at thebottom of our hearts, believe we're like that, when we meet. I supposethat arrogant old ass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard. "

"I wonder, " said Mrs. March, "if she's told him yet, " and March perceivedthat she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic introspection;but he had no difficulty in following her. 

"She's had time enough. But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her. "

"Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back inthat way. I know she is dead in love with him; but she could only haveaccepted him conditionally. "

"Conditionally to his making it all right with Stoller?"

"Stoller? No! To her father's liking it. "

"Ah, that's quite as hard. What makes you think she accepted him at all?"

"What do you think she was crying about?"

"Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionally shed tears of pity. Ifshe accepted him conditionally she would have to tell her father aboutit. " Mrs. March gave him a glance of silent contempt, and he hastened toatone for his stupidity. "Perhaps she's told him on the instalment plan. She may have begun by confessing that Burnamy had been in Carlsbad. Poorold fellow, I wish we were going to find him in Ansbach! He could makethings very smooth for us. "

"Well, you needn't flatter yourself that you'll find him in Ansbach. I'msure I don't know where he is. "

"You might write to Miss Triscoe and ask. "

"I think I shall wait for Miss Triscoe to write to me, " she said, withdignity. 

"Yes, she certainly owes you that much, after all your suffering for her. I've asked the banker in Nuremberg to forward our letters to the posterestante in Ansbach. Isn't it good to see the crows again, after thoseravens around Carlsbad?"

She joined him in looking at the mild autumnal landscape through the openwindow. The afternoon was fair and warm, and in the level fields bodiesof soldiers were at work with picks and spades, getting the ground readyfor the military manoeuvres; they disturbed among the stubble foragingparties of crows, which rose from time to time with cries of indignantprotest. She said, with a smile for the crows, "Yes. And I'm thankfulthat I've got nothing on my conscience, whatever happens, " she added indismissal of the subject of Burnamy. 

"I'm thankful too, my dear. I'd much rather have things on my own. I'mmore used to that, and I believe I feel less remorse than when you're toblame. "

They might have been carried near this point by those telepathicinfluences which have as yet been so imperfectly studied. It was onlythat morning, after the lapse of a week since Burnamy's furtivereappearance in Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her father about it, and she had at that moment a longing for support and counsel that mightwell have made its mystical appeal to Mrs. March. 

She spoke at last because she could put it off no longer, rather thanbecause the right time had come. She began as they sat at breakfast. "Papa, there is something that I have got to tell you. It is somethingthat you ought to know; but I have put off telling you because--"

She hesitated for the reason, and "Well!" said her father, looking up ather from his second cup of coffee. "What is it?"

Then she answered, "Mr. Burnamy has been here. "

"In Carlsbad? When was he here?"

"The night of the Emperor's birthday. He came into the box when you werebehind the scenes with Mr. March; afterwards I met him in the crowd. "

"Well?"

"I thought you ought to know. Mrs. March said I ought to tell you. "

"Did she say you ought to wait a week?" He gave way to an irascibilitywhich he tried to check, and to ask with indifference, "Why did he comeback?"

"He was going to write about it for that paper in Paris. " The girl hadthe effect of gathering her courage up for a bold plunge. She lookedsteadily at her father, and added: "He said he came back because hecouldn't help it. He--wished to speak with me, He said he knew he had noright to suppose I cared anything about what had happened with him andMr. Stoller. He wanted to come back and tell me--that. "

Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently she was going to leavethe word to him, now. He hesitated to take it, but he asked at last witha mildness that seemed to surprise her, "Have you heard anything from himsince?"

"No. "

"Where is he?"

"I don't know. I told him I could not say what he wished; that I musttell you about it. "

The case was less simple than it would once have been for GeneralTriscoe. There was still his affection for his daughter, his wish for herhappiness, but this had always been subordinate to his sense of his owninterest and comfort, and a question had recently arisen which put hispaternal love and duty in a new light. He was no more explicit withhimself than other men are, and the most which could ever be said of himwithout injustice was that in his dependence upon her he would ratherhave kept his daughter to himself if she could not have been veryprosperously married. On the other hand, if he disliked the man for whomshe now hardly hid her liking, he was not just then ready to go toextremes concerning him. 

"He was very anxious, " she went on, "that you should know just how itwas. He thinks everything of your judgment and--and--opinion. " Thegeneral made a consenting noise in his throat. "He said that he did notwish me to 'whitewash' him to you. He didn't think he had done right; hedidn't excuse himself, or ask you to excuse him unless you could from thestand-point of a gentleman. "

The general made a less consenting noise in his throat, and asked, "Howdo you look at it, yourself, Agatha?"

"I don't believe I quite understand it; but Mrs. March--"

"Oh, Mrs. March!" the general snorted. 

"--says that Mr. March does not think so badly of it as Mr. Burnamydoes. "

"I doubt it. At any rate, I understood March quite differently. "

"She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly afterwards when Mr. Stoller wanted him to help him put a false complexion on it; that it wasall the more difficult for him to do right then, because of his remorsefor what he had done before. " As she spoke on she had become more eager. 

"There's something in that, " the general admitted, with a candor that hemade the most of both to himself and to her. "But I should like to knowwhat Stoller had to say of it all. Is there anything, " he inquired, "anyreason why I need be more explicit about it, just now?"

"N--no. Only, I thought--He thinks so much of your opinion that--if--"

"Oh, he can very well afford to wait. If he values my opinion so highlyhe can give me time to make up my mind. "

"Of course--"

"And I'm not responsible, " the general continued, significantly, "for thedelay altogether. If you had told me this before--Now, I don't knowwhether Stoller is still in town. "

He was not behaving openly with her; but she had not behaved openly withhim. She owned that to herself, and she got what comfort she could fromhis making the affair a question of what Burnamy had done to Stollerrather than of what Burnamy had said to her, and what she had answeredhim. If she was not perfectly clear as to what she wanted to do, orwished to have happen, there was now time and place in which she coulddelay and make sure. The accepted theory of such matters is that peopleknow their minds from the beginning, and that they do not change them. But experience seems to contradict this theory, or else people often actcontrary to their convictions and impulses. If the statistics wereaccessible, it might be found that many potential engagements hovered ina doubtful air, and before they touched the earth in actual promise weredissipated by the play of meteorological chances. 

When General Triscoe put down his napkin in rising he said that he wouldstep round to Pupp's and see if Stoller were still there. But on the wayhe stepped up to Mrs. Adding's hotel on the hill, and he came back, afteran interval which he seemed not to have found long, to report rathercasually that Stoller had left Carlsbad the day before. By this time thefact seemed not to concern Agatha herself very vitally. 

He asked if the Marches had left any address with her, and she answeredthat they had not. They were going to spend a few days in Nuremberg, andthen push on to Holland for Mr. March's after-cure. There was norelevance in his question unless it intimated his belief that she was inconfidential correspondence with Mrs. March, and she met this by sayingthat she was going to write her in care of their bankers; she askedwhether he wished to send any word. 

"No. I understand, " he intimated, "that there is nothing at all in thenature of a--a--an understanding, then, with--"

"No, nothing. "

"Hm!" The general waited a moment. Then he ventured, "Do you care tosay--do you wish me to know--how he took it?"

The tears came into the girl's eyes, but she governed herself to say, "He--he was disappointed. "

"He had no right to be disappointed. "

It was a question, and she answered: "He thought he had. He said--that hewouldn't--trouble me any more. "

The general did not ask at once, "And you don't know where he is now--youhaven't heard anything from him since?"

Agatha flashed through her tears, "Papa!"

"Oh! I beg your pardon. I think you told me. "

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

 Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else Effort to get on common ground with an inferior He buys my poverty and not my will Honest selfishness Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate Less intrusive than if he had not been there Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign Only one of them was to be desperate at a time Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold We don't seem so much our own property We get too much into the hands of other people