THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

By William Dean Howells

PART III. 

XLVIII. 

At the first station where the train stopped, a young German bowedhimself into the compartment with the Marches, and so visibly resisted animpulse to smoke that March begged him to light his cigarette. In thetalk which this friendly overture led to between them he explained thathe was a railway architect, employed by the government on that line ofroad, and was travelling officially. March spoke of Nuremberg; he ownedthe sort of surfeit he had suffered from its excessive mediaevalism, andthe young man said it was part of the new imperial patriotism to cherishthe Gothic throughout Germany; no other sort of architecture waspermitted in Nuremberg. But they would find enough classicism at Ansbach, he promised them, and he entered with sympathetic intelligence into theirwish to see this former capital when March told him they were going tostop there, in hopes of something typical of the old disjointed Germanyof the petty principalities, the little paternal despotisms now extinct. 

As they talked on, partly in German and partly in English, their purposein visiting Ansbach appeared to the Marches more meditated than it was. In fact it was somewhat accidental; Ansbach was near Nuremberg; it wasnot much out of the way to Holland. They took more and more credit tothemselves for a reasoned and definite motive, in the light of theircompanion's enthusiasm for the place, and its charm began for them withthe drive from the station through streets whose sentiment was bothItalian and French, and where there was a yellowish cast in the gray ofthe architecture which was almost Mantuan. They rested theirsensibilities, so bruised and fretted by Gothic angles and points, against the smooth surfaces of the prevailing classicistic facades of thehouses as they passed, and when they arrived at their hotel, an oldmansion of Versailles type, fronting on a long irregular square plantedwith pollard sycamores, they said that it might as well have been Lucca. 

The archway and stairway of the hotel were draped with the Bavariancolors, and they were obscurely flattered to learn that Prince Leopold, the brother of the Prince-Regent of the kingdom, had taken rooms there, on his way to the manoeuvres at Nuremberg, and was momently expected withhis suite. They realized that they were not of the princely party, however, when they were told that he had sole possession of thedining-room, and they went out to another hotel, and had their supper inkeeping delightfully native. People seemed to come there to write theirletters and make up their accounts, as well as to eat their suppers; theycalled for stationery like characters in old comedy, and the clatter ofcrockery and the scratching of pens went on together; and fortune offeredthe Marches a delicate reparation for their exclusion from their ownhotel in the cold popular reception of the prince which they got backjust in time to witness. A very small group of people, mostly women andboys, had gathered to see him arrive, but there was no cheering or anysign of public interest. Perhaps he personally merited none; he looked adull, sad man, with his plain, stubbed features; and after he had mountedto his apartment, the officers of his staff stood quite across thelanding, and barred the passage of the Americans, ignoring even Mrs. March's presence, as they talked together. 

"Well, my dear, " said her husband, "here you have it at last. This iswhat you've been living for, ever since we came to Germany. It's a greatmoment. "

"Yes. What are you going to do?"

"Who? I? Oh, nothing! This is your affair; it's for you to act. "

If she had been young, she might have withered them with a glance; shedoubted now if her dim eyes would have any such power; but she advancedsteadily upon them, and then the officers seemed aware of her, and stoodaside. 

March always insisted that they stood aside apologetically, but she heldas firmly that they stood aside impertinently, or at least indifferently, and that the insult to her American womanhood was perfectly ideal. It istrue that nothing of the kind happened again during their stay at thehotel; the prince's officers were afterwards about in the corridors andon the stairs, but they offered no shadow of obstruction to her going andcoming, and the landlord himself was not so preoccupied with hishighhotes but he had time to express his grief that she had been obligedto go out for supper. 

They satisfied the passion for the little obsolete capital which had beengrowing upon them by strolling past the old Resident at an hour sofavorable for a first impression. It loomed in the gathering dusk evenvaster than it was, and it was really vast enough for the pride of a Kingof France, much more a Margrave of Ansbach. Time had blackened andblotched its coarse limestone walls to one complexion with the statuesswelling and strutting in the figure of Roman legionaries before it, andstanding out against the evening sky along its balustraded roof, and hadsoftened to the right tint the stretch of half a dozen houses withmansard roofs and renaissance facades obsequiously in keeping with theVersailles ideal of a Resident. In the rear, and elsewhere at fitdistance from its courts, a native architecture prevailed; and at nogreat remove the Marches found themselves in a simple German town again. There they stumbled upon a little bookseller's shop blinking in a quietcorner, and bought three or four guides and small histories of Ansbach, which they carried home, and studied between drowsing and waking. Thewonderful German syntax seems at its most enigmatical in this sort ofliterature, and sometimes they lost themselves in its labyrinthscompletely, and only made their way perilously out with the help ofcumulative declensions, past articles and adjectives blindly seekingtheir nouns, to long-procrastinated verbs dancing like swamp-fires in thedistance. They emerged a little less ignorant than they went in, andbetter qualified than they would otherwise have been for their secondvisit to the Schloss, which they paid early the next morning. 

They were so early, indeed, that when they mounted from the great innercourt, much too big for Ansbach, if not for the building, and rung thecustodian's bell, a smiling maid who let them into an ante-room, whereshe kept on picking over vegetables for her dinner, said the custodianwas busy, and could not be seen till ten o'clock. She seemed, in her nookof the pretentious pile, as innocently unconscious of its history as anyhen-sparrow who had built her nest in some coign of its architecture; andher friendly, peaceful domesticity remained a wholesome human backgroundto the tragedies and comedies of the past, and held them in a picturesquerelief in which they were alike tolerable and even charming. 

The history of Ansbach strikes its roots in the soil of fable, and aboveground is a gnarled and twisted growth of good and bad from the time ofthe Great Charles to the time of the Great Frederick. Between these timesshe had her various rulers, ecclesiastical and secular, in various formsof vassalage to the empire; but for nearly four centuries her sovereigntywas in the hands of the margraves, who reigned in a constantly increasingsplendor till the last sold her outright to the King of Prussia in 1791, and went to live in England on the proceeds. She had taken her part inthe miseries and glories of the wars that desolated Germany, but afterthe Reformation, when she turned from the ancient faith to which she owedher cloistered origin under St. Gumpertus, her people had peace exceptwhen their last prince sold them to fight the battles of others. It is inthis last transaction that her history, almost in the moment when sheceased to have a history of her own, links to that of the modern world, and that it came home to the Marches in their national character; for twothousand of those poor Ansbach mercenaries were bought up by England andsent to put down a rebellion in her American colonies. 

Humanly, they were more concerned for the Last Margrave, because ofcertain qualities which made him the Best Margrave, in spite of thedefects of his qualities. He was the son of the Wild Margrave, equallyknown in the Ansbach annals, who may not have been the Worst Margrave, but who had certainly a bad trick of putting his subjects to deathwithout trial, and in cases where there was special haste, with his ownhand. He sent his son to the university at Utrecht because he believedthat the republican influences in Holland would be wholesome for him, andthen he sent him to travel in Italy; but when the boy came home lookingfrail and sick, the Wild Margrave charged his official travellingcompanion with neglect, and had the unhappy Hofrath Meyer hanged withoutprocess for this crime. One of the gentlemen of his realm, for apasquinade on the Margrave, was brought to the scaffold; he had, atvarious times, twenty-two of his soldiers shot with arrows and bullets orhanged for desertion, besides many whose penalties his clemency commutedto the loss of an ear or a nose; a Hungarian who killed his hunting-dog, he had broken alive on the wheel. A soldier's wife was hanged forcomplicity in a case of desertion; a young soldier who eloped with thegirl he loved was brought to Ansbach from a neighboring town, and hangedwith her on the same gallows. A sentry at the door of one of theMargrave's castles amiably complied with the Margrave's request to lethim take his gun for a moment, on the pretence of wishing to look at it. For this breach of discipline the prince covered him with abuse and gavehim over to his hussars, who bound him to a horse's tail and dragged himthrough the streets; he died of his injuries. The kennel-master who hadcharge of the Margrave's dogs was accused of neglecting them: withoutfurther inquiry the Margrave rode to the man's house and shot him down onhis own threshold. A shepherd who met the Margrave on a shying horse didnot get his flock out of the way quickly enough; the Margrave demandedthe pistols of a gentleman in his company, but he answered that they werenot loaded, and the shepherd's life was saved. As they returned home thegentleman fired them off. "What does that mean?" cried the Margrave, furiously. "It means, gracious lord, that you will sleep sweeter tonight, for not having heard my pistols an hour sooner. "

From this it appears that the gracious lord had his moments of regret;but perhaps it is not altogether strange that when he died, the wholepopulation "stormed through the streets to meet his funeral train, not inawe-stricken silence to meditate on the fall of human grandeur, but tounite in an eager tumult of rejoicing, as if some cruel brigand who hadlong held the city in terror were delivered over to them bound and inchains. " For nearly thirty years this blood-stained miscreant had reignedover his hapless people in a sovereign plenitude of power, which by thetheory of German imperialism in our day is still a divine right. 

They called him the Wild Margrave, in their instinctive revolt from thebelief that any man not untamably savage could be guilty of hisatrocities; and they called his son the Last Margrave, with a touch ofthe poetry which perhaps records a regret for their extinction as astate. He did not harry them as his father had done; his mild rule wasthe effect partly of the indifference and distaste for his country bred, by his long sojourns abroad; but doubtless also it was the effect of akindly nature. Even in the matter of selling a few thousands of them tofight the battles of a bad cause on the other side of the world, he hadthe best of motives, and faithfully applied the proceeds to the paymentof the state debt and the embellishment of the capital. 

His mother was a younger sister of Frederick the Great, and was soconstantly at war with her husband that probably she had nothing to dowith the marriage which the Wild Margrave forced upon their son. Lovecertainly had nothing to do with it, and the Last Margrave early escapedfrom it to the society of Mlle. Clairon, the great French tragedienne, whom he met in Paris, and whom he persuaded to come and make her homewith him in Ansbach. She lived there seventeen years, and though alwaysan alien, she bore herself with kindness to all classes, and is stillremembered there by the roll of butter which calls itself a Klarungsweckein its imperfect French. 

No roll of butter records in faltering accents the name of the brilliantand disdainful English lady who replaced this poor tragic muse in theMargrave's heart, though the lady herself lived to be the last Margravineof Ansbach, where everybody seems to have hated her with a passion whichshe doubtless knew how to return. She was the daughter of the Earl ofBerkeley, and the wife of Lord Craven, a sufficiently unfaithful andunworthy nobleman by her account, from whom she was living apart when theMargrave asked her to his capital. There she set herself to oust Mlle. Clairon with sneers and jests for the theatrical style which the actresscould not outlive. Lady Craven said she was sure Clairon's nightcap mustbe a crown of gilt paper; and when Clairon threatened to kill herself, and the Margrave was alarmed, "You forget, " said Lady Craven, "thatactresses only stab themselves under their sleeves. "

She drove Clairon from Ansbach, and the great tragedienne returned toParis, where she remained true to her false friend, and from time to timewrote him letters full of magnanimous counsel and generous tenderness. But she could not have been so good company as Lady Craven, who was avery gifted person, and knew how to compose songs and sing them, andwrite comedies and play them, and who could keep the Margrave amused inmany ways. When his loveless and childless wife died he married theEnglish woman, but he grew more and more weary of his dull little courtand his dull little country, and after a while, considering the uncertaintenure sovereigns had of their heads since the French King had lost his, and the fact that he had no heirs to follow him in his principality, heresolved to cede it for a certain sum to Prussia. To this end his newwife's urgence was perhaps not wanting. They went to England, where sheoutlived him ten years, and wrote her memoirs. 

The custodian of the Schloss came at last, and the Marches saw instantlythat he was worth waiting for. He was as vainglorious of the palace asany grand-monarching margrave of them all. He could not have been morepersonally superb in showing their different effigies if they had beenhis own family portraits, and he would not spare the strangers a singlesplendor of the twenty vast, handsome, tiresome, Versailles-like rooms heled them through. The rooms were fatiguing physically, but so poignantlyinteresting that Mrs. March would not have missed, though she perished ofher pleasure, one of the things she saw. She had for once a surfeit ofhighhoting in the pictures, the porcelains, the thrones and canopies, thetapestries, the historical associations with the margraves and theirmarriages, with the Great Frederick and the Great Napoleon. The GreatNapoleon's man Bernadotte made the Schloss his headquarters when heoccupied Ansbach after Austerlitz, and here he completed his arrangementsfor taking her bargain from Prussia and handing it over to Bavaria, withwhom it still remains. Twice the Great Frederick had sojourned in thepalace; visiting his sister Louise, the wife of the Wild Margrave, andmore than once it had welcomed her next neighbor and sister Wilhelmina, the Margravine of Baireuth, whose autobiographic voice, piercinglyplaintive and reproachful, seemed to quiver in the air. Here, oddlyenough, the spell of the Wild Margrave weakened in the presence of hisportrait, which signally failed to justify his fame of furious tyrant. That seems, indeed, to have been rather the popular and historicalconception of him than the impression he made upon his exaltedcontemporaries. The Margravine of Baireuth at any rate could so farexcuse her poor blood-stained brother-in-law as to say: "The Margrave ofAnsbach . . . Was a young prince who had been very badly educated. Hecontinually ill-treated my sister; they led the life of cat and dog. Mysister, it is true, was sometimes in fault . . . . Her education had beenvery bad. . . She was married at fourteen. "

At parting, the custodian told the Marches that he would easily haveknown them for Americans by the handsome fee they gave him; they cameaway flown with his praise; and their national vanity was again flatteredwhen they got out into the principal square of Ansbach. There, in abookseller's window, they found among the pamphlets teaching differentlanguages without a master, one devoted to the Amerikanische Sprache asdistinguished from the Englische Sprache. That there could be no mistake, the cover was printed with colors in a German ideal of the star-spangledbanner; and March said he always knew that we had a language of our own, and that now he was going in to buy that pamphlet and find out what itwas like. He asked the young shop-woman how it differed from English, which she spoke fairly well from having lived eight years in Chicago. Shesaid that it differed from the English mainly in emphasis andpronunciation. "For instance, the English say 'HALF past', and theAmericans 'Half PAST'; the English say 'laht' and the Americans say'late'. "

The weather had now been clear quite long enough, and it was rainingagain, a fine, bitter, piercing drizzle. They asked the girl if it alwaysrained in Ansbach; and she owned that it nearly always did. She said thatsometimes she longed for a little American summer; that it was neverquite warm in Ansbach; and when they had got out into the rain, Marchsaid: "It was very nice to stumble on Chicago in an Ansbach book-store. You ought to have told her you had a married daughter in Chicago. Don'tmiss another such chance. "

"We shall need another bag if we keep on buying books at this rate, " saidhis wife with tranquil irrelevance; and not to give him time for protest;she pushed him into a shop where the valises in the window perhapssuggested her thought. March made haste to forestall her there by sayingthey were Americans, but the mistress of the shop seemed to have hermisgivings, and "Born Americans, perhaps?" she ventured. She had probablynever met any but the naturalized sort, and supposed these were the onlysort. March re-assured her, and then she said she had a son living inJersey City, and she made March take his address that he might tell himhe had seen his mother; she had apparently no conception what a great wayJersey City is from New York. 

Mrs. March would not take his arm when they came out. "Now, that is whatI never can get used to in you, Basil, and I've tried to palliate it fortwenty-seven years. You know you won't look up that poor woman's son! Whydid you let her think you would?"

"How could I tell her I wouldn't? Perhaps I shall. "

"No, no! You never will. I know you're good and kind, and that's why Ican't understand your being so cruel. When we get back, how will you everfind time to go over to Jersey City?"

He could not tell, but at last he said: "I'll tell you what! You mustkeep me up to it. You know how much you enjoy making me do my duty, andthis will be such a pleasure!"

She laughed forlornly, but after a moment she took his arm; and he began, from the example of this good mother, to philosophize the continuoussimplicity and sanity of the people of Ansbach under all their civicchanges. Saints and soldiers, knights and barons, margraves, princes, kings, emperors, had come and gone, and left their single-hearted, friendly subjectfolk pretty much what they found them. The people hadsuffered and survived through a thousand wars, and apparently prosperedon under all governments and misgovernments. When the court was mostFrench, most artificial, most vicious, the citizen life must haveremained immutably German, dull, and kind. After all, he said, humanityseemed everywhere to be pretty safe, and pretty much the same. 

"Yes, that is all very well, " she returned, "and you can theorizeinterestingly enough; but I'm afraid that poor mother, there, had no morereality for you than those people in the past. You appreciate her as atype, and you don't care for her as a human being. You're nothing but adreamer, after all. I don't blame you, " she went on. "It's yourtemperament, and you can't change, now. "

"I may change for the worse, " he threatened. "I think I have, already. Idon't believe I could stand up to Dryfoos, now, as I did for poor oldLindau, when I risked your bread and butter for his. I look back inwonder and admiration at myself. I've steadily lost touch with life sincethen. I'm a trifler, a dilettante, and an amateur of the right and thegood as I used to be when I was young. Oh, I have the grace to betroubled at times, now, and once I never was. It never occurred to methen that the world wasn't made to interest me, or at the best toinstruct me, but it does, now, at times. "

She always came to his defence when he accused himself; it was the bestground he could take with her. "I think you behaved very well withBurnamy. You did your duty then. "

"Did I? I'm not so sure. At any rate, it's the last time I shall do it. I've served my term. I think I should tell him that he was all right inthat business with Stoller, if I were to meet him, now. "

"Isn't it strange, " she said, provisionally, "that we don't come upon atrace of him anywhere in Ansbach?"

"Ah, you've been hoping he would turn up!"

"Yes. I don't deny it. I feel very unhappy about him. "

"I don't. He's too much like me. He would have been quite capable ofpromising that poor woman to look up her son in Jersey City. When I thinkof that, I have no patience with Burnamy. "

"I am going to ask the landlord about him, now he's got rid of hishighhotes, " said Mrs. March. 

XLIX. 

They went home to their hotel for their midday dinner, and to the comfortof having it nearly all to themselves. Prince Leopold had risen early, like all the hard-working potentates of the continent, and got away tothe manoeuvres somewhere at six o'clock; the decorations had beenremoved, and the court-yard where the hired coach and pair of the princehad rolled in the evening before had only a few majestic ducks waddlingabout in it and quacking together, indifferent to the presence of ayellow mail-wagon, on which the driver had been apparently dozing tillthe hour of noon should sound. He sat there immovable, but at the laststroke of the clock he woke up and drove vigorously away to the station. 

The dining-room which they had been kept out of by the prince the nightbefore was not such as to embitter the sense of their wrong by itssplendor. After all, the tastes of royalty must be simple, if the princemight have gone to the Schloss and had chosen rather to stay at thismodest hotel; but perhaps the Schloss was reserved for more immediateroyalty than the brothers of prince-regents; and in that case he couldnot have done better than dine at the Golden Star. If he paid no morethan two marks, he dined as cheaply as a prince could wish, and asabundantly. The wine at Ansbach was rather thin and sour, but the bread, March declared, was the best bread in the whole world, not excepting thebread of Carlsbad. 

After dinner the Marches had some of the local pastry, not soincomparable as the bread, with their coffee, which they had served themin a pavilion of the beautiful garden remaining to the hotel from thetime when it was a patrician mansion. The garden had roses in it andseveral sorts of late summer flowers, as well as ripe cherries, currants, grapes, and a Virginia-creeper red with autumn, all harmoniouslycontemporaneous, as they might easily be in a climate where no one of theseasons can very well know itself from the others. It had not beenraining for half an hour, and the sun was scalding hot, so that theshelter of their roof was very grateful, and the puddles of the pathswere drying up with the haste which puddles have to make in Germany, between rains, if they are ever going to dry up at all. 

The landlord came out to see if they were well served, and he wassincerely obliging in the English he had learned as a waiter in London. Mrs. March made haste to ask him if a young American of the name ofBurnamy had been staying with him a few weeks before; and she describedBurnamy's beauty and amiability so vividly that the landlord, if he hadbeen a woman, could not have failed to remember him. But he failed, witha real grief, apparently, and certainly a real politeness, to recalleither his name or his person. The landlord was an intelligent, good-looking young fellow; he told them that he was lately married, andthey liked him so much that they were sorry to see him afterwardsprivately boxing the ears of the piccolo, the waiter's little understudy. Perhaps the piccolo deserved it, but they would rather not have witnessedhis punishment; his being in a dress-coat seemed to make it also anindignity. 

In the late afternoon they went to the cafe in the old Orangery of theSchloss for a cup of tea, and found themselves in the company of severalAnsbach ladies who had brought their work, in the evident habit of comingthere every afternoon for their coffee and for a dish of gossip. Theywere kind, uncomely, motherly-looking bodies; one of them combed her hairat the table; and they all sat outside of the cafe with their feet on theborders of the puddles which had not dried up there in the shade of thebuilding. 

A deep lawn, darkened at its farther edge by the long shadows of trees, stretched before them with the sunset light on it, and it was all veryquiet and friendly. The tea brought to the Marches was brewed from someherb apparently of native growth, with bits of what looked like willowleaves in it, but it was flavored with a clove in each cup, and they satcontentedly over it and tried to make out what the Ansbach ladies were, talking about. These had recognized the strangers for Americans, and oneof them explained that Americans spoke the same language as the Englishand yet were not quite the same people. 

"She differs from the girl in the book-store, " said March, translating tohis wife. "Let us get away before she says that we are not so nice as theEnglish, " and they made off toward the avenue of trees beyond the lawn. 

There were a few people walking up and down in the alley, making the mostof the moment of dry weather. They saluted one another likeacquaintances, and three clean-shaven, walnut-faced old peasants bowed inresponse to March's stare, with a self-respectful civility. They wereyeomen of the region of Ansbach, where the country round about is dottedwith their cottages, and not held in vast homeless tracts by the noblesas in North Germany. 

The Bavarian who had imparted this fact to March at breakfast, notwithout a certain tacit pride in it to the disadvantage of the Prussians, was at the supper table, and was disposed to more talk, which he managedin a stout, slow English of his own. He said he had never really spokenEnglish with an English-speaking person before, or at all since hestudied it in school at Munich. 

"I should be afraid to put my school-boy German against your English, "March said, and, when he had understood, the other laughed for pleasure, and reported the compliment to his wife in their own parlance. "YouGermans certainly beat us in languages. "

"Oh, well, " he retaliated, "the Americans beat us in some other things, "and Mrs. March felt that this was but just; she would have liked tomention a few, but not ungraciously; she and the German lady kept smilingacross the table, and trying detached vocables of their respectivetongues upon each other. 

The Bavarian said he lived in Munich still, but was in Ansbach on anaffair of business; he asked March if he were not going to see themanoeuvres somewhere. Till now the manoeuvres had merely been theinteresting background of their travel; but now, hearing that the Emperorof Germany, the King of Saxony, the Regent of Bavaria, and the King ofWurtemberg, the Grand-Dukes of Weimar and Baden, with visiting potentatesof all sorts, and innumerable lesser highhotes, foreign and domestic, were to be present, Mrs. March resolved that they must go to at least oneof the reviews. 

"If you go to Frankfort, you can see the King of Italy too, " said theBavarian, but he owned that they probably could not get into a hotelthere, and he asked why they should not go to Wurzburg, where they couldsee all the sovereigns except the King of Italy. 

"Wurzburg? Wurzburg?" March queried of his wife. "Where did we hear ofthat place?"

"Isn't it where Burnamy said Mr. Stoller had left his daughters atschool?"

"So it is! And is that on the way to the Rhine?" he asked the Bavarian. 

"No, no! Wurzburg is on the Main, about five hours from Ansbach. And itis a very interesting place. It is where the good wine comes from. "

"Oh, yes, " said March, and in their rooms his wife got out all theirguides and maps and began to inform herself and to inform him aboutWurzburg. But first she said it was very cold and he must order some firemade in the tall German stove in their parlor. The maid who came said"Gleich, " but she did not come back, and about the time they were gettingfurious at her neglect, they began getting warm. He put his hand on thestove and found it hot; then he looked down for a door in the stove wherehe might shut a damper; there was no door. 

"Good heavens!" he shouted. "It's like something in a dream, " and he ranto pull the bell for help. 

"No, no! Don't ring! It will make us ridiculous. They'll think Americansdon't know anything. There must be some way of dampening the stove; andif there isn't, I'd rather suffocate than give myself away. " Mrs. Marchran and opened the window, while her husband carefully examined the stoveat every point, and explored the pipe for the damper in vain. "Can't youfind it?" The night wind came in raw and damp, and threatened to blowtheir lamp out, and she was obliged to shut the window. 

"Not a sign of it. I will go down and ask the landlord in strictconfidence how they dampen their stoves in Ansbach. "

"Well, if you must. It's getting hotter every moment. " She followed himtimorously into the corridor, lit by a hanging lamp, turned low for thenight. 

He looked at his watch; it was eleven o'clock. "I'm afraid they're all inbed. "

"Yes; you mustn't go! We must try to find out for ourselves. What canthat door be for?"

It was a low iron door, half the height of a man, in the wall near theirroom, and it yielded to his pull. "Get a candle, " he whispered, and whenshe brought it, he stooped to enter the doorway. 

"Oh, do you think you'd better?" she hesitated. 

"You can come, too, if you're afraid. You've always said you wanted todie with me. "

"Well. But you go first. "

He disappeared within, and then came back to the doorway. "Just come inhere, a moment. " She found herself in a sort of antechamber, half theheight of her own room, and following his gesture she looked down wherein one corner some crouching monster seemed showing its fiery teeth in agrin of derision. This grin was the damper of their stove, and this waswhere the maid had kindled the fire which had been roasting them alive, and was still joyously chuckling to itself. "I think that Munich man waswrong. I don't believe we beat the Germans in anything. There isn't ahotel in the United States where the stoves have no front doors, andevery one of them has the space of a good-sized flat given up to theconvenience of kindling a fire in it. "

L. 

After a red sunset of shameless duplicity March was awakened to a rainymorning by the clinking of cavalry hoofs on the pavement of thelong-irregular square before the hotel, and he hurried out to see thepassing of the soldiers on their way to the manoeuvres. They were troopsof all arms, but mainly infantry, and as they stumped heavily through thegroups of apathetic citizens in their mud-splashed boots, they took thesteady downpour on their dripping helmets. Some of them were smoking, butnone smiling, except one gay fellow who made a joke to a serving-maid onthe sidewalk. An old officer halted his staff to scold a citizen who hadgiven him a mistaken direction. The shame of the erring man was great, and the pride of a fellow-citizen who corrected him was not less, thoughthe arrogant brute before whom they both cringed used them with equalscorn; the younger officers listened indifferently round on horsebackbehind the glitter of their eyeglasses, and one of them amused himself byturning the silver bangles on his wrist. 

Then the files of soldier slaves passed on, and March crossed the bridgespanning the gardens in what had been the city moat, and found his way tothe market-place, under the walls of the old Gothic church of St. Gumpertus. The market, which spread pretty well over the square, seemedto be also a fair, with peasants' clothes and local pottery for sale, aswell as fruits and vegetables, and large baskets of flowers, with oldwomen squatting before them. It was all as picturesque as the marketsused to be in Montreal and Quebec, and in a cloudy memory of his weddingjourney long before, he bought so lavishly of the flowers to carry backto his wife that a little girl, who saw his arm-load from her window ashe returned, laughed at him, and then drew shyly back. Her laugh remindedhim how many happy children he had seen in Germany, and how freely theyseemed to play everywhere, with no one to make them afraid. When theygrow up the women laugh as little as the men, whose rude toil thesoldiering leaves them to. 

He got home with his flowers, and his wife took them absently, and madehim join her in watching the sight which had fascinated her in the streetunder their windows. A slender girl, with a waist as slim as a corsetedofficer's, from time to time came out of the house across the way to thefirewood which had been thrown from a wagon upon the sidewalk there. Eachtime she embraced several of the heavy four-foot logs and disappearedwith them in-doors. Once she paused from her work to joke with awell-dressed man who came by; and seemed to find nothing odd in her work;some gentlemen lounging at the window over head watched her with noapparent sense of anomaly. 

"What do you think of that?" asked Mrs. March. "I think it's goodexercise for the girl, and I should like to recommend it to those fatfellows at the window. I suppose she'll saw the wood in the cellar, andthen lug it up stairs, and pile it up in the stoves' dressing-rooms. "

"Don't laugh! It's too disgraceful. "

"Well, I don't know! If you like, I'll offer these gentlemen across theway your opinion of it in the language of Goethe and Schiller. "

"I wish you'd offer my opinion of them. They've been staring in here withan opera-glass. "

"Ah, that's a different affair. There isn't much going on in Ansbach, andthey have to make the most of it. "

The lower casements of the houses were furnished with mirrors set atright angles with them, and nothing which went on in the streets waslost. Some of the streets were long and straight, and at rare momentsthey lay full of sun. At such times the Marches were puzzled by the sightof citizens carrying open umbrellas, and they wondered if they hadforgotten to put them down, or thought it not worth while in the briefrespites from the rain, or were profiting by such rare occasions to drythem; and some other sights remained baffling to the last. Once a manwith his hands pinioned before him, and a gendarme marching stolidlyafter him with his musket on his shoulder, passed under their windows;but who he was, or what he, had done, or was to suffer, they never knew. Another time a pair went by on the way to the railway station: a youngman carrying an umbrella under his arm, and a very decent-looking oldwoman lugging a heavy carpet bag, who left them to the lasting questionwhether she was the young man's servant in her best clothes, or merelyhis mother. 

Women do not do everything in Ansbach, however, the sacristans being men, as the Marches found when they went to complete their impression of thecourtly past of the city by visiting the funeral chapel of the margravesin the crypt of St. Johannis Church. In the little ex-margravely capitalthere was something of the neighborly interest in the curiosity ofstrangers which endears Italian witness. The white-haired street-sweeperof Ansbach, who willingly left his broom to guide them to the house ofthe sacristan, might have been a street-sweeper in Vicenza; and the oldsacristan, when he put his velvet skull-cap out of an upper window andprofessed his willingness to show them the chapel, disappointed them bysaying "Gleich!" instead of "Subito!" The architecture of the houses wasa party to the illusion. St. Johannis, like the older church of St. Gumpertus, is Gothic, with the two unequal towers which seem distinctiveof Ansbach; at the St. Gumpertus end of the place where they both standthe dwellings are Gothic too, and might be in Hamburg; but at the St. Johannis end they seem to have felt the exotic spirit of the court, andare of a sort of Teutonized renaissance. 

The rococo margraves and margravines used of course to worship in St. Johannis Church. Now they all, such as did not marry abroad, lie in thecrypt of the church, in caskets of bronze and copper and marble, withdraperies of black samite, more and more funereally vainglorious to thelast. Their courtly coffins are ranged in a kind of hemicycle, with thelittle coffins of the children that died before they came to theknowledge of their greatness. On one of these a kneeling figurine inbronze holds up the effigy of the child within; on another the epitaphplays tenderly with the fate of a little princess, who died in her firstyear. 

 In the Rose-month was this sweet Rose taken. For the Rose-kind hath she earth forsaken. The Princess is the Rose, that here no longer blows. From the stem by death's hand rudely shaken. Then rest in the Rose-house. Little Princess-Rosebud dear! There life's Rose shall bloom again In Heaven's sunshine clear. 

While March struggled to get this into English words, two German ladies, who had made themselves of his party, passed reverently away and left himto pay the sacristan alone. 

"That is all right, " he said, when he came out. "I think we got the mostvalue; and they didn't look as if they could afford it so well; thoughyou never can tell, here. These ladies may be the highest kind ofhighhotes practising a praiseworthy economy. I hope the lesson won't belost on us. They have saved enough by us for their coffee at theOrangery. Let us go and have a little willow-leaf tea!"

The Orangery perpetually lured them by what it had kept of the days whenan Orangery was essential to the self-respect of every sovereign prince, and of so many private gentlemen. On their way they always passed thestatue of Count Platen, the dull poet whom Heine's hate would havedelivered so cruelly over to an immortality of contempt, but who standsthere near the Schloss in a grass-plot prettily planted with flowers, andignores his brilliant enemy in the comfortable durability of bronze; andthere always awaited them in the old pleasaunce the pathos of KasparHauser's fate; which his murder affixes to it with a red stain. 

After their cups of willow leaves at the cafe they went up into that nookof the plantation where the simple shaft of church-warden's Gothiccommemorates the assassination on the spot where it befell. Here thehapless youth, whose mystery will never be fathomed on earth, used tocome for a little respite from his harsh guardian in Ansbach, homesickfor the kindness of his Nuremberg friends; and here his murderer foundhim and dealt him the mortal blow. 

March lingered upon the last sad circumstance of the tragedy in which thewounded boy dragged himself home, to suffer the suspicion and neglect ofhis guardian till death attested his good faith beyond cavil. He saidthis was the hardest thing to bear in all his story, and that he wouldlike to have a look into the soul of the dull, unkind wretch who had somisread his charge. He was going on with an inquiry that pleased himmuch, when his wife pulled him abruptly away. 

"Now, I see, you are yielding to the fascination of it, and you arewanting to take the material from Burnamy!"

"Oh, well, let him have the material; he will spoil it. And I can alwaysreject it, if he offers it to 'Every Other Week'. "

"I could believe, after your behavior to that poor woman about her son inJersey City, you're really capable of it. "

"What comprehensive inculpation! I had forgotten about that poor woman. "

LI. 

The letters which March had asked his Nuremberg banker to send them camejust as they were leaving Ansbach. The landlord sent them down to thestation, and Mrs. March opened them in the train, and read them first sothat she could prepare him if there were anything annoying in them, aswell as indulge her livelier curiosity. 

"They're from both the children, " she said, without waiting for him toask. "You can look at them later. There's a very nice letter from Mrs. Adding to me, and one from dear little Rose for you. " Then she hesitated, with her hand on a letter faced down in her lap. "And there's one fromAgatha Triscoe, which I wonder what you'll think of. " She delayed again, and then flashed it open before him, and waited with a sort ofimpassioned patience while he read it. 

He read it, and gave it back to her. "There doesn't seem to be very muchin it. "

"That's it! Don't you think I had a right to there being something in it, after all I did for her?"

"I always hoped you hadn't done anything for her, but if you have, whyshould she give herself away on paper? It's a very proper letter. "

"It's a little too proper, and it's the last I shall have to do with her. She knew that I should be on pins and needles till I heard how her fatherhad taken Burnamy's being there, that night, and she doesn't say a wordabout it. "

"The general may have had a tantrum that she couldn't describe. Perhapsshe hasn't told him, yet. "

"She would tell him instantly!" cried Mrs. March who began to find reasonin the supposition, as well as comfort for the hurt which the girl'sreticence had given her. "Or if she wouldn't, it would be because she waswaiting for the best chance. "

"That would be like the wise daughter of a difficult father. She may bewaiting for the best chance to say how he took it. No, I'm all for MissTriscoe, and I hope that now, if she's taken herself off our hands, she'll keep off. "

"It's altogether likely that he's made her promise not to tell meanything about it, " Mrs. March mused aloud. 

"That would be unjust to a person who had behaved so discreetly as youhave, " said her husband. 

They were on their way to Wurzburg, and at the first station, which was ajunction, a lady mounted to their compartment just before the train beganto move. She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been pretty, butshe bore herself with a kind of authority in spite of her thread gloves, her dowdy gray travelling-dress, and a hat of lower middle-class Englishtastelessness. She took the only seat vacant, a backward-riding placebeside a sleeping passenger who looked like a commercial traveller, butshe seemed ill at ease in it, and March offered her his seat. Sheaccepted it very promptly, and thanked him for it in the English of aGerman, and Mrs. March now classed her as a governess who had beenteaching in England and had acquired the national feeling for dress. Butin this character she found her interesting, and even a little pathetic, and she made her some overtures of talk which the other met eagerlyenough. They were now running among low hills, not so picturesque asthose between Eger and Nuremberg, but of much the same toylike quaintnessin the villages dropped here and there in their valleys. One small town, completely walled, with its gray houses and red roofs, showed through thegreen of its trees and gardens so like a colored print in a child'sstory-book that Mrs. March cried out for joy in it, and then accountedfor her rapture by explaining to the stranger that they were Americansand had never been in Germany before. The lady was not visibly affectedby the fact, she said casually that she had often been in that littletown, which she named; her uncle had a castle in the country back of it, and she came with her husband for the shooting in the autumn. By anatural transition she spoke of her children, for whom she had an Englishgoverness; she said she had never been in England, but had learnt thelanguage from a governess in her own childhood; and through it all Mrs. March perceived that she was trying to impress them with her consequence. To humor her pose, she said they had been looking up the scene of KasparHauser's death at Ansbach; and at this the stranger launched into suchintimate particulars concerning him, and was so familiar at first handswith the facts of his life, that Mrs. March let her run on, too muchamused with her pretensions to betray any doubt of her. She wondered ifMarch were enjoying it all as much, and from time to time she tried tocatch his eye, while the lady talked constantly and rather loudly, helping herself out with words from them both when her English failedher. In the safety of her perfect understanding of the case, Mrs. Marchnow submitted farther, and even suffered some patronage from her, whichin another mood she would have met with a decided snub. 

As they drew in among the broad vine-webbed slopes of the Wurzburg, hills, the stranger said she was going to change there, and take a trainon to Berlin. Mrs. March wondered whether she would be able to keep upthe comedy to the last; and she had to own that she carried it off veryeasily when the friends whom she was expecting did not meet her on thearrival of their train. She refused March's offers of help, and remainedquietly seated while he got out their wraps and bags. She returned with ahardy smile the cold leave Mrs. March took of her; and when a porter cameto the door, and forced his way by the Marches, to ask with anxiousservility if she, were the Baroness von-----, she bade the man get them. A 'traeger', and then come back for her. She waved them a complacentadieu before they mixed with the crowd and lost sight of her. 

"Well, my dear, " said March, addressing the snobbishness in his wifewhich he knew to be so wholly impersonal, "you've mingled with onehighhote, anyway. I must say she didn't look it, any more than the Dukeand Duchess of Orleans, and yet she's only a baroness. Think of our beingthree hours in the same compartment, and she doing all she could toimpress us and our getting no good of it! I hoped you were feeling herquality, so that we should have it in the family, anyway, and always knowwhat it was like. But so far, the highhotes have all been terriblydisappointing. "

He teased on as they followed the traeger with their baggage out of thestation; and in the omnibus on the way to their hotel, he recurred to theloss they had suffered in the baroness's failure to dramatize hernobility effectually. "After all, perhaps she was as much disappointed inus. I don't suppose we looked any more like democrats than she lookedlike an aristocrat. "

"But there's a great difference, " Mrs. March returned at last. "It isn'tat all a parallel case. We were not real democrats, and she was a realaristocrat. "

"To be sure. There is that way of looking at it. That's rather novel; Iwish I had thought of that myself. She was certainly more to blame thanwe were. "

LII. 

The square in front of the station was planted with flag-poles wreathedin evergreens; a triumphal arch was nearly finished, and a colossalallegory in imitation bronze was well on the way to completion, in honorof the majesties who were coming for the manoeuvres. The streets whichthe omnibus passed through to the Swan Inn were draped with the imperialGerman and the royal Bavarian colors; and the standards of the visitingnationalities decked the fronts of the houses where their militaryattaches were lodged; but the Marches failed to see our own banner, andwere spared for the moment the ignominy of finding it over an apothecaryshop in a retired avenue. The sun had come out, the sky overhead was of asmiling blue; and they felt the gala-day glow and thrill in the depths oftheir inextinguishable youth. 

The Swan Inn sits on one of the long quays bordering the Main, and itswindows look down upon the bridges and shipping of the river; but thetraveller reaches it by a door in the rear, through an archway into aback street, where an odor dating back to the foundation of the city iswaiting to welcome him. 

The landlord was there, too, and he greeted the Marches so cordially thatthey fully partook his grief in being able to offer them rooms on thefront of the house for two nights only. They reconciled themselves to thenecessity of then turning out for the staff of the King of Saxony, themore readily because they knew that there was no hope of better things atany other hotel. 

The rooms which they could have for the time were charming, and they camedown to supper in a glazed gallery looking out on the river picturesquewith craft of all fashions: with row-boats, sail-boats, and littlesteamers, but mainly with long black barges built up into houses in themiddle, and defended each by a little nervous German dog. Long rafts oflogs weltered in the sunset red which painted the swift current, andmantled the immeasurable vineyards of the hills around like the color oftheir ripening grapes. Directly in face rose a castled steep, which keptthe ranging walls and the bastions and battlements of the time when sucha stronghold could have defended the city from foes without or fromtumult within. The arches of a stately bridge spanned the riversunsetward, and lifted a succession of colossal figures against thecrimson sky. 

"I guess we have been wasting our time, my dear, " said March, as they, turned from this beauty to the question of supper. "I wish we had alwaysbeen here!"

Their waiter had put them at a table in a division of the gallery beyondthat which they entered, where some groups of officers were noisilysupping. There was no one in their room but a man whose face wasindistinguishable against the light, and two young girls who glanced atthem with looks at once quelled and defiant, and then after a stare atthe officers in the gallery beyond, whispered together with suppressedgiggling. The man fed on without noticing them, except now and then toutter a growl that silenced the whispering and giggling for a moment. TheMarches, from no positive evidence of any sense, decided that they wereAmericans. 

"I don't know that I feel responsible for them as theirfellow-countryman; I should, once, " he said. 

"It isn't that. It's the worry of trying to make out why they are justwhat they are, " his wife returned. 

The girls drew the man's attention to them and he looked at them for thefirst time; then after a sort of hesitation he went on with his supper. They had only begun theirs when he rose with the two girls, whom Mrs. March now saw to be of the same size and dressed alike, and came heavilytoward them. 

"I thought you was in Carlsbad, " he said bluntly to March, with a nod atMrs. March. He added, with a twist of his head toward the two girls, "Mydaughters, " and then left them to her, while he talked on with herhusband. "Come to see this foolery, I suppose. I'm on my way to the woodsfor my after-cure; but I thought I might as well stop and give the girlsa chance; they got a week's vacation, anyway. " Stoller glanced at themwith a sort of troubled tenderness in his strong dull face. 

"Oh, yes. I understood they were at school here, " said March, and heheard one of them saying, in a sweet, high pipe to his wife:

"Ain't it just splendid? I ha'n't seen anything equal to it since theWorrld's Fairr. " She spoke with a strong contortion of the Western r, andher sister hastened to put in:

"I don't think it's to be compared with the Worrld's Fairr. But theseGerman girls, here, just think it's great. It just does me good to laffat 'em, about it. I like to tell 'em about the electric fountain and theCourrt of Iionorr when they get to talkin' about the illuminationsthey're goun' to have. You goun' out to the parade? You better engageyour carriage right away if you arre. The carrs'll be a perfect jam. Father's engaged ourrs; he had to pay sixty marrks forr it. "

They chattered on without shyness and on as easy terms with a woman ofthree times their years as if she had been a girl of their own age; theywillingly took the whole talk to themselves, and had left her quiteoutside of it before Stoller turned to her. 

"I been telling Mr. March here that you better both come to the paradewith us. I guess my twospanner will hold five; or if it won't, we'll makeit. I don't believe there's a carriage left in Wurzburg; and if you go inthe cars, you'll have to walk three or four miles before you get to theparade-ground. You think it over, " he said to March. "Nobody else isgoing to have the places, anyway, and you can say yes at the last minutejust as well as now. "

He moved off with his girls, who looked over their shoulders at theofficers as they passed on through the adjoining room. 

"My dear!" cried Mrs. March. "Didn't you suppose he classed us withBurnamy in that business? Why should he be polite to us?"

"Perhaps he wants you to chaperon his daughters. He's probably heard ofyour performance at the Kurhaus ball. But he knows that I thought Burnamyin the wrong. This may be Stoller's way of wiping out an obligation. Wouldn't you like to go with him?"

"The mere thought of his being in the same town is prostrating. I'd farrather he hated us; then he would avoid us. "

"Well, he doesn't own the town, and if it comes to the worst, perhaps wecan avoid him. Let us go out, anyway, and see if we can't. "

"No, no; I'm too tired; but you go. And get all the maps and guides youcan; there's so very little in Baedeker, and almost nothing in that greathulking Bradshaw of yours; and I'm sure there must be the mostinteresting history of Wurzburg. Isn't it strange that we haven't theslightest association with the name?"

"I've been rummaging in my mind, and I've got hold of an association atlast, " said March. "It's beer; a sign in a Sixth Avenue saloon windowWurzburger Hof-Brau. "

"No matter if it is beer. Find some sketch of the history, and we'll tryto get away from the Stollers in it. I pitied those wild girls, too. Whatcrazy images of the world must fill their empty minds! How their ignorantthoughts must go whirling out into the unknown! I don't envy theirfather. Do hurry back! I shall be thinking about them every instant tillyou come. "

She said this, but in their own rooms it was so soothing to sit lookingthrough the long twilight at the lovely landscape that the sort of bruisegiven by their encounter with the Stollers had left her consciousnessbefore March returned. She made him admire first the convent church on ahill further up the river which exactly balanced the fortress in front ofthem, and then she seized upon the little books he had brought, and sethim to exploring the labyrinths of their German, with a mountingexultation in his discoveries. There was a general guide to the city, anda special guide, with plans and personal details of the approachingmanoeuvres and the princes who were to figure in them; and there was asketch of the local history: a kind of thing that the Germans know how towrite particularly, well, with little gleams of pleasant humor blinkingthrough it. For the study of this, Mrs. March realized, more and morepassionately, that they were in the very most central and convenientpoint, for the history of Wurzburg might be said to have begun with herprince-bishops, whose rule had begun in the twelfth century, and who hadbuilt, on a forgotten Roman work, the fortress of the Marienburg on thatvineyarded hill over against the Swan Inn. There had of course beenhistory before that, but 'nothing so clear, nothing so peculiarly swell, nothing that so united the glory of this world and the next as that ofthe prince-bishops. They had made the Marienburg their home, and kept itagainst foreign and domestic foes for five hundred years. Shut within itswell-armed walls they had awed the often-turbulent city across the Main;they had held it against the embattled farmers in the Peasants' War, andhad splendidly lost it to Gustavus Adolphus, and then got it back againand held it till Napoleon took it from them. He gave it with their flockto the Bavarians, who in turn briefly yielded it to the Prussians in1866, and were now in apparently final possession of it. 

Before the prince-bishops, Charlemagne and Barbarossa had come and gone, and since the prince-bishops there had been visiting thrones and kingdomsenough in the ancient city, which was soon to be illustrated by thepresence of imperial Germany, royal, Wirtemberg and Saxony, grand-ducalBaden and Weimar, and a surfeit of all the minor potentates among thosewho speak the beautiful language of the Ja. 

But none of these could dislodge the prince-bishops from that supremeplace which they had at once taken in Mrs. March's fancy. The potentateswere all going to be housed in the vast palace which the prince-bishopshad built themselves in Wurzburg as soon as they found it safe to comedown from their stronghold of Marienburg, and begin to adorn their city, and to confirm it in its intense fidelity to the Church. Tiepolo had comeup out of Italy to fresco their palace, where he wrought year after year, in that worldly taste which has somehow come to express the mostsovereign moment of ecclesiasticism. It prevailed so universally inWurzburg that it left her with the name of the Rococo City, intrenched ina period of time equally remote from early Christianity and modernProtestantism. Out of her sixty thousand souls, only ten thousand are nowof the reformed religion, and these bear about the same relation to theCatholic spirit of the place that the Gothic architecture bears to thebaroque. 

As long as the prince-bishops lasted the Wurzburgers got on very wellwith but one newspaper, and perhaps the smallest amount of merrymakingknown outside of the colony of Massachusetts Bay at the same epoch. Theprince-bishops had their finger in everybody's pie, and they portionedout the cakes and ale, which were made according to formulas of theirown. The distractions were all of a religious character; churches, convents, monasteries, abounded; ecclesiastical processions andsolemnities were the spectacles that edified if they did not amuse thedevout population. 

It seemed to March an ironical outcome of all this spiritual severitythat one of the greatest modern scientific discoveries should have beenmade in Wurzburg, and that the Roentgen rays should now be giving hername a splendor destined to eclipse the glories of her past. 

Mrs. March could not allow that they would do so; or at least that thename of Roentgen would ever lend more lustre to his city than that ofLongfellow's Walther von der Vogelweide. She was no less surprised thanpleased to realize that this friend of the birds was a Wurzburger, andshe said that their first pilgrimage in the morning should be to thechurch where he lies buried. 

LIII. 

March went down to breakfast not quite so early as his wife had planned, and left her to have her coffee in her room. He got a pleasant table inthe gallery overlooking the river, and he decided that the landscape, though it now seemed to be rather too much studied from a drop-certain, had certainly lost nothing of its charm in the clear morning light. Thewaiter brought his breakfast, and after a little delay came back with acard which he insisted was for March. It was not till he put on hisglasses and read the name of Mr. R. M. Kenby that he was able at all toagree with the waiter, who stood passive at his elbow. 

"Well, " he said, "why wasn't this card sent up last night?"

The waiter explained that the gentleman had just, given him his card, after asking March's nationality, and was then breakfasting in the nextroom. March caught up his napkin and ran round the partition wall, andKenby rose with his napkin and hurried to meet him. 

"I thought it must be you, " he called out, joyfully, as they struck theirextended hands together, "but so many people look alike, nowadays, that Idon't trust my eyes any more. "

Kenby said he had spent the time since they last met partly in Leipsicand partly in Gotha, where he had amused himself in rubbing up his rustyGerman. As soon as he realized that Wurzburg was so near he had slippeddown from Gotha for a glimpse of the manoeuvres. He added that hesupposed March was there to see them, and he asked with a quiteunembarrassed smile if they had met Mr. Adding in Carlsbad, and withoutheeding March's answer, he laughed and added: "Of course, I know she musthave told Mrs. March all about it. "

March could not deny this; he laughed, too; though in his wife's absencehe felt bound to forbid himself anything more explicit. 

"I don't give it up, you know, " Kenby went on, with perfect ease. "I'mnot a young fellow, if you call thirty-nine old. "

"At my age I don't, " March put in, and they roared together, in men'ssecurity from the encroachments of time. 

"But she happens to be the only woman I've ever really wanted to marry, for more than a few days at a stretch. You know how it is with us. "

"Oh, yes, I know, " said March, and they shouted again. 

"We're in love, and we're out of love, twenty times. But this isn't amere fancy; it's a conviction. And there's no reason why she shouldn'tmarry me. "

March smiled gravely, and his smile was not lost upon Kenby. "You meanthe boy, " he said. "Well, I like Rose, " and now March really felt sweptfrom his feet. "She doesn't deny that she likes me, but she seems tothink that her marrying again will take her from him; the fact is, itwill only give me to him. As for devoting her whole life to him, shecouldn't do a worse thing for him. What the boy needs is a man's care, and a man's will--Good heavens! You don't think I could ever be unkind tothe little soul?" Kenby threw himself forward over the table. 

"My dear fellow!" March protested. 

"I'd rather cut off my right hand!" Kenby pursued, excitedly, and then hesaid, with a humorous drop: "The fact is, I don't believe I should wanther so much if I couldn't have Rose too. I want to have them both. Sofar, I've only got no for an answer; but I'm not going to keep it. I hada letter from Rose at Carlsbad, the other day; and--"

The waiter came forward with a folded scrap of paper on his salver, whichMarch knew must be from his wife. "What is keeping you so?" she wrote. "Iam all ready. " "It's from Mrs. March, " he explained to Kenby. "I am goingout with her on some errands. I'm awfully glad to see you again. We musttalk it all over, and you must--you mustn't--Mrs. March will want to seeyou later--I--Are you in the hotel?"

"Oh yes. I'll see you at the one-o'clock table d'hote, I suppose. "

March went away with his head whirling in the question whether he shouldtell his wife at once of Kenby's presence, or leave her free for thepleasures of Wurzburg, till he could shape the fact into some safe andacceptable form. She met him at the door with her guide-books, wraps andumbrellas, and would hardly give him time to get on his hat and coat. 

"Now, I want you to avoid the Stollers as far as you can see them. Thisis to be a real wedding-journey day, with no extraneous acquaintance tobother; the more strangers the better. Wurzburg is richer than anything Iimagined. I've looked it all up; I've got the plan of the city, so thatwe can easily find the way. We'll walk first, and take carriages wheneverwe get tired. We'll go to the cathedral at once; I want a good gulp ofrococo to begin with; there wasn't half enough of it at Ansbach. Isn't itstrange how we've come round to it?"

She referred to that passion for the Gothic which they had obedientlyimbibed from Ruskin in the days of their early Italian travel andcourtship, when all the English-speaking world bowed down to him indevout aversion from the renaissance, and pious abhorrence of the rococo. 

"What biddable little things we were!" she went on, while March wasstruggling to keep Kenby in the background of his consciousness. "Therococo must have always had a sneaking charm for us, when we were pinningour faith to pointed arches; and yet I suppose we were perfectly sincere. Oh, look at that divinely ridiculous Madonna!" They were now making theirway out of the crooked footway behind their hotel toward the streetleading to the cathedral, and she pointed to the Blessed Virgin over thedoor of some religious house, her drapery billowing about her feet; herbody twisting to show the sculptor's mastery of anatomy, and the haloheld on her tossing head with the help of stout gilt rays. In fact, theVirgin's whole figure was gilded, and so was that of the child in herarms. "Isn't she delightful?"

"I see what you mean, " said March, with a dubious glance at the statue, "but I'm not sure, now, that I wouldn't like something quieter in myMadonnas. "

The thoroughfare which they emerged upon, with the cathedral ending theprospective, was full of the holiday so near at hand. The narrowsidewalks were thronged with people, both soldiers and civilians, and upthe middle of the street detachments of military came and went, haltingthe little horse-cars and the huge beer-wagons which otherwise seemed tohave the sole right to the streets of Wurzburg; they came jingling orthundering out of the aide streets and hurled themselves round thecorners reckless of the passers, who escaped alive by flatteningthemselves like posters against the house walls. There were peasants, menand women, in the costume which the unbroken course of their country lifehad kept as quaint as it was a hundred years before; there were citizensin the misfits of the latest German fashions; there were soldiers of allarms in their vivid uniforms, and from time to time there were prettyyoung girls in white dresses with low necks, and bare arms gloved to theelbows, who were following a holiday custom of the place in going aboutthe streets in ball costume. The shop windows were filled with portraitsof the Emperor and the Empress, and the Prince-Regent and the ladies ofhis family; the German and Bavarian colors draped the facades of thehouses and festooned the fantastic Madonnas posing above so many portals. The modern patriotism included the ancient piety without disturbing it;the rococo city remained ecclesiastical through its new imperialism, andkept the stamp given it by the long rule of the prince-bishops under thesovereignty of its King and the suzerainty of its Kaiser. 

The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, aswholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though theywere far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. Therearea few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, whichapproach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroquestyle. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture andsculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot deny thatthere is a prodigiously effective keeping in it all. This interior cametogether, as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers hadfelt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo. It was, unimpeachably perfect in its way, "Just, " March murmured to his wife, "asthe social and political and scientific scheme of the eighteenth centurywas perfected in certain times and places. But the odd thing is to findthe apotheosis of the rococo away up here in Germany. I wonder how muchthe prince-bishops really liked it. But they had become rococo, too! Lookat that row of their statues on both sides of the nave! What magnificentswell! How they abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would like to getbehind the pillar; he knows that he could never lend himself to thebaroque style. It expresses the eighteenth century, though. But how youlong for some little hint of the thirteenth, or even the nineteenth. "

"I don't, " she whispered back. "I'm perfectly wild with Wurzburg. I liketo have a thing go as far as it can. At Nuremberg I wanted all the GothicI could get, and in Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get. I amconsistent. "

She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as women do, all theway to the Neumunster Church, where they were going to revere the tomb ofWalther von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as forLongfellow's. The older poet lies buried within, but his monument isoutside the church, perhaps for the greater convenience of the sparrows, which now represent the birds he loved. The cenotaph is surmounted by abroad vase, and around this are thickly perched the effigies of theMeistersinger's feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church, asMrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his bequest tothemselves. In revenge for their lawless greed the defraudedbeneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like thefour-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened. 

She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapelle with herhusband in the revival of his mediaeval taste, and she was rewardedamidst its thirteenth-century sincerity by his recantation. "You areright! Baroque is the thing for Wurzburg; one can't enjoy Gothic here anymore than one could enjoy baroque in Nuremberg. "

Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage, and went to visitthe palace of the prince-bishops who had so well known how to make theheavenly take the image and superscription of the worldly; and they werejointly indignant to find it shut against the public in preparation forthe imperialities and royalties coming to occupy it. They were in timefor the noon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that the waythe retiring squad kicked their legs out in the high martial step of theGerman soldiers was a perfect expression of the insolent militarism oftheir empire, and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven that onewas an American and a republican. She softened a little toward theirsystem when it proved that the garden of the palace was still open, andyet more when she sank down upon a bench between two marble groupsrepresenting the Rape of Proserpine and the Rape of Europa. They stoodeach in a gravelled plot, thickly overrun by a growth of ivy, and thevine climbed the white naked limbs of the nymphs, who were present on apretence of gathering flowers, but really to pose at the spectators, andclad them to the waist and shoulders with an effect of modesty nevermeant by the sculptor, but not displeasing. There was an old fountainnear, its stone rim and centre of rock-work green with immemorial mould, and its basin quivering between its water-plants under the soft fall ofspray. At a waft of fitful breeze some leaves of early autumn fell fromthe trees overhead upon the elderly pair where they sat, and a littlecompany of sparrows came and hopped about their feet. Though the squarewithout was so all astir with festive expectation, there were few peoplein the garden; three or four peasant women in densely fluted white skirtsand red aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Europa and at theProserpine. 

It was a precious moment in which the charm of the city's past seemed toculminate, and they were loath to break it by speech. 

"Why didn't we have something like all this on our first weddingjourney?" she sighed at last. "To think of our battening from Boston toNiagara and back! And how hard we tried to make something of Rochesterand Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec!"

"Niagara wasn't so bad, " he said, "and I will never go back on Quebec. "

"Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic, and Carlsbad andNuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg! Perhaps this is meant as acompensation for our lost youth. But I can't enjoy it as I could when Iwas young. It's wasted on my sere and yellow leaf. I wish Burnamy andMiss Triscoe were here; I should like to try this garden on them. "

"They wouldn't care for it, " he replied, and upon a daring impulse headded, "Kenby and Mrs. Adding might. " If she took this suggestion in goodpart, he could tell her that Kenby was in Wurzburg. 

"Don't speak of them! They're in just that besotted early middle-age whenlife has settled into a self-satisfied present, with no past and nofuture; the most philistine, the most bourgeois, moment of existence. Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation of all this goes. " Sherose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed him away in the impulsivefashion of her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balustradedterrace in the background which had tempted her. 

"It isn't so bad, being elderly, " he said. "By that time we haveaccumulated enough past to sit down and really enjoy its associations. Wehave got all sorts of perspectives and points of view. We know where weare at. "

"I don't mind being elderly. The world's just as amusing as ever, andlots of disagreeable things have dropped out. It's the getting more thanelderly; it's the getting old; and then--"

They shrank a little closer together, and walked on in silence till hesaid, "Perhaps there's something else, something better--somewhere. "

They had reached the balustraded terrace, and were pausing for pleasurein the garden tops below, with the flowery spaces, and the statuedfountains all coming together. She put her hand on one of the fat littleurchin-groups on the stone coping. "I don't want cherubs, when I can havethese putti. And those old prince-bishops didn't, either!"

"I don't suppose they kept a New England conscience, " he said, with avague smile. "It would be difficult in the presence of the rococo. "

They left the garden through the beautiful gate which the old courtironsmith Oegg hammered out in lovely forms of leaves and flowers, andshaped laterally upward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand, ingracious Louis Quinze curves; and they looked back at it in the kind ofdespair which any perfection inspires. They said how feminine it was, howexotic, how expressive of a luxurious ideal of life which art hadpurified and left eternally charming. They remembered their Ruskinianyouth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it;and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainlyadmired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of thattime-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which onceinfluenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiouslyfound its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under arule sacerdotally vowed to austerity. The vast superb palace of theprince bishops, which was now to house a whole troop of sovereigns, imperial, royal, grand ducal and ducal, swelled aloft in superbamplitude; but it did not realize their historic pride so effectively asthis exquisite work of the court ironsmith. It related itself in itsaerial beauty to that of the Tiepolo frescoes which the travellers knewwere swimming and soaring on the ceilings within, and from which itseemed to accent their exclusion with a delicate irony, March said. "Oriron-mongery, " he corrected himself upon reflection. 

LIV. 

He had forgotten Kenby in these aesthetic interests, but he rememberedhim again when he called a carriage, and ordered it driven to theirhotel. It was the hour of the German mid-day table d'hote, and they wouldbe sure to meet him there. The question now was how March should own hispresence in time to prevent his wife from showing her ignorance of it toKenby himself, and he was still turning the question hopelessly over inhis mind when the sight of the hotel seemed to remind her of a fact whichshe announced. 

"Now, my dear, I am tired to death, and I am not going to sit through along table d'hote. I want you to send me up a simple beefsteak and a cupof tea to our rooms; and I don't want you to come near for hours; becauseI intend to take a whole afternoon nap. You can keep all the maps andplans, and guides, and you had better go and see what the Volksfest islike; it will give you some notion of the part the people are reallytaking in all this official celebration, and you know I don't care. Don'tcome up after dinner to see how I am getting along; I shall get along;and if you should happen to wake me after I had dropped off--"

Kenby had seen them arrive from where he sat at the reading-room window, waiting for the dinner hour, and had meant to rush out and greet Mrs. March as they passed up the corridor. But she looked so tired that he haddecided to spare her till she came down to dinner; and as he sat withMarch at their soup, he asked if she were not well. 

March explained, and he provisionally invented some regrets from her thatshe should not see Kenby till supper. 

Kenby ordered a bottle of one of the famous Wurzburg wines for theirmutual consolation in her absence, and in the friendliness which itspromoted they agreed to spend the afternoon together. No man is soinveterate a husband as not to take kindly an occasional release tobachelor companionship, and before the dinner was over they agreed thatthey would go to the Volksfest, and get some notion of the popular lifeand amusements of Wurzburg, which was one of the few places where Kenbyhad never been before; and they agreed that they would walk. 

Their way was partly up the quay of the Main, past a barrack full ofsoldiers. They met detachments of soldiers everywhere, infantry, artillery, cavalry. 

"This is going to be a great show, " Kenby said, meaning the manoeuvres, and he added, as if now he had kept away from the subject long enough andhad a right to recur to it, at least indirectly, "I should like to haveRose see it, and get his impressions. "

"I've an idea he wouldn't approve of it. His mother says his mind isturning more and more to philanthropy. "

Kenby could not forego such a chance to speak of Mrs. Adding. "It's oneof the prettiest things to see how she understands Rose. It's charming tosee them together. She wouldn't have half the attraction without him. "

"Oh, yes, " March assented. He had often wondered how a man wishing tomarry a widow managed with the idea of her children by another marriage;but if Kenby was honest; it was much simpler than he had supposed. Hecould not say this to him, however, and in a certain embarrassment he hadwith the conjecture in his presence he attempted a diversion. "We'repromised something at the Volksfest which will be a great novelty to usas Americans. Our driver told us this morning that one of the housesthere was built entirely of wood. "

When they reached the grounds of the Volksfest, this civil feature of thegreat military event at hand, which the Marches had found largely setforth in the programme of the parade, did not fully keep the glowingpromises made for it; in fact it could not easily have done so. It was ina pleasant neighborhood of new villas such as form the modern quarter ofevery German city, and the Volksfest was even more unfinished than itsenvironment. It was not yet enclosed by the fence which was to hide itswonders from the non-paying public, but March and Kenby went in throughan archway where the gate-money was as effectually collected from them asif they were barred every other entrance. 

The wooden building was easily distinguishable from the other edificesbecause these were tents and booths still less substantial. They did notmake out its function, but of the others four sheltered merry-go-rounds, four were beer-gardens, four were restaurants, and the rest were devotedto amusements of the usual country-fair type. Apparently they had littleattraction for country people. The Americans met few peasants in thegrounds, and neither at the Edison kinematograph, where they refreshedtheir patriotism with some scenes of their native life, nor at the littletheatre where they saw the sports of the arena revived, in the wrestle ofa woman with a bear, did any of the people except tradesmen and artisansseem to be taking part in the festival expression of the popularpleasure. 

The woman, who finally threw the bear, whether by slight, or by mainstrength, or by a previous understanding with him, was a slendercreature, pathetically small and not altogether plain; and March as theywalked away lapsed into a pensive muse upon her strange employ. Hewondered how she came to take it up, and whether she began with the bearwhen they were both very young, and she could easily throw him. 

"Well, women have a great deal more strength than we suppose, " Kenbybegan with a philosophical air that gave March the hope of some rationalconversation. Then his eye glazed with a far-off look, and a doting smilecame into his face. "When we went through the Dresden gallery together, Rose and I were perfectly used up at the end of an hour, but his motherkept on as long as there was anything to see, and came away as fresh as apeach. "

Then March saw that it was useless to expect anything different from him, and he let him talk on about Mrs. Adding all the rest of the way back tothe hotel. Kenby seemed only to have begun when they reached the door, and wanted to continue the subject in the reading-room. 

March pleaded his wish to find how his wife had got through theafternoon, and he escaped to her. He would have told her now that Kenbywas in the house, but he was really so sick of the fact himself that hecould not speak of it at once, and he let her go on celebrating all shehad seen from the window since she had waked from her long nap. She saidshe could never be glad enough that they had come just at that time. Soldiers had been going by the whole afternoon, and that made it sofeudal. 

"Yes, " he assented. "But aren't you coming up to the station with me tosee the Prince-Regent arrive? He's due at seven, you know. "

"I declare I had forgotten all about it. No, I'm not equal to it. Youmust go; you can tell me everything; be sure to notice how the PrincessMaria looks; the last of the Stuarts, you know; and some people considerher the rightful Queen of England; and I'll have the supper ordered, andwe can go down as soon as you've got back. "

LV. 

March felt rather shabby stealing away without Kenby; but he had reallyhad as much of Mrs. Adding as he could stand, for one day, and he waseven beginning to get sick of Rose. Besides, he had not sent back a linefor 'Every Other Week' yet, and he had made up his mind to write a sketchof the manoeuvres. To this end he wished to receive an impression of thePrince-Regent's arrival which should not be blurred or clouded by otherinterests. His wife knew the kind of thing he liked to see, and wouldhave helped him out with his observations, but Kenby would have got inthe way, and would have clogged the movement of his fancy in assigningthe facts to the parts he would like them to play in the sketch. 

At least he made some such excuses to himself as he hurried along towardthe Kaiserstrasse. The draught of universal interest in that directionhad left the other streets almost deserted, but as he approached thethoroughfare he found all the ways blocked, and the horse-cars, ordinarily so furiously headlong, arrested by the multiple ranks ofspectators on the sidewalks. The avenue leading from the railway stationto the palace was decorated with flags and garlands, and planted with thestems of young firs and birches. The doorways were crowded, and thewindows dense with eager faces peering out of the draped bunting. Thecarriageway was kept clear by mild policemen who now and then allowed oneof the crowd to cross it. 

The crowd was made up mostly of women and boys, and when March joinedthem, they had already been waiting an hour for the sight of the princeswho were to bless them with a vision of the faery race which kings alwaysare to common men. He thought the people looked dull, and therefore ableto bear the strain of expectation with patience better than a livelierrace. They relieved it by no attempt at joking; here and there a dimsmile dawned on a weary face, but it seemed an effect of amiabilityrather than humor. There was so little of this, or else it was so wellbridled by the solemnity of the occasion, that not a man, woman, or childlaughed when a bareheaded maid-servant broke through the lines and randown between them with a life-size plaster bust of the Emperor William inher arms: she carried it like an overgrown infant, and in alarm at herconspicuous part she cast frightened looks from side to side withoutarousing any sort of notice. Undeterred by her failure, a young dog, parted from his owner, and seeking him in the crowd, pursued his searchin a wild flight down the guarded roadway with an air of anxiety that inAmerica would have won him thunders of applause, and all sorts of kindlyencouragements to greater speed. But this German crowd witnessed hisprogress apparently without interest, and without a sign of pleasure. They were there to see the Prince-Regent arrive, and they did not sufferthemselves to be distracted by any preliminary excitement. Suddenly theindefinable emotion which expresses the fulfilment of expectation in awaiting crowd passed through the multitude, and before he realized itMarch was looking into the friendly gray-bearded face of thePrince-Regent, for the moment that his carriage allowed in passing. Thiscame first preceded by four outriders, and followed by other simpleequipages of Bavarian blue, full of highnesses of all grades. Beside theRegent sat his daughter-in-law, the Princess Maria, her silvered hairframing a face as plain and good as the Regent's, if not so intelligent. 

He, in virtue of having been born in Wurzburg, is officially supposed tobe specially beloved by his fellow townsmen; and they now testified theiraffection as he whirled through their ranks, bowing right and left, bywhat passes in Germany for a cheer. It is the word Hoch, groaned forthfrom abdominal depths, and dismally prolonged in a hollow roar like thatwhich the mob makes behind the scenes at the theatre before bursting invisible tumult on the stage. Then the crowd dispersed, and March cameaway wondering why such a kindly-looking Prince-Regent should not havegiven them a little longer sight of himself; after they had waited sopatiently for hours to see him. But doubtless in those countries, heconcluded, the art of keeping the sovereign precious by suffering him tobe rarely and briefly seen is wisely studied. 

On his way home he resolved to confess Kenby's presence; and he did so assoon as he sat down to supper with his wife. "I ought to have told youthe first thing after breakfast. But when I found you in that mood ofhaving the place all to ourselves, I put it off. "

"You took terrible chances, my dear, " she said, gravely. 

"And I have been terribly punished. You've no idea how much Kenby hastalked to me about Mrs. Adding!"

She broke out laughing. "Well, perhaps you've suffered enough. But youcan see now, can't you, that it would have been awful if I had met him, and let out that I didn't know he was here?"

"Terrible. But if I had told, it would have spoiled the whole morning foryou; you couldn't have thought of anything else. "

"Oh, I don't know, " she said, airily. "What should you think if I toldyou I had known he was here ever since last night?" She went on indelight at the start he gave. "I saw him come into the hotel while youwere gone for the guide-books, and I determined to keep it from you aslong as I could; I knew it would worry you. We've both been very nice;and I forgive you, " she hurried on, "because I've really got something totell you. "

"Don't tell me that Burnamy is here!"

"Don't jump to conclusions! No, Burnamy isn't here, poor fellow! Anddon't suppose that I'm guilty of concealment because I haven't told youbefore. I was just thinking whether I wouldn't spare you till morning, but now I shall let you take the brunt of it. Mrs. Adding and Rose arehere. " She gave the fact time to sink in, and then she added, "And MissTriscoe and her father are here. "

"What is the matter with Major Eltwin and his wife being here, too? Arethey in our hotel?"

"No, they are not. They came to look for rooms while you were off waitingfor the Prince-Regent, and I saw them. They intended to go to Frankfortfor the manoeuvres, but they heard that there was not even standing-roomthere, and so the general telegraphed to the Spanischer Hof, and they allcame here. As it is, he will have to room with Rose, and Agatha and Mrs. Adding will room together. I didn't think Agatha was looking very well;she looked unhappy; I don't believe she's heard, from Burnamy yet; Ihadn't a chance to ask her. And there's something else that I'm afraidwill fairly make you sick. "

"Oh, no; go on. I don't think anything can do that, after an afternoon ofKenby's confidences. "

"It's worse than Kenby, " she said with a sigh. "You know I told you atCarlsbad I thought that ridiculous old thing was making up to Mrs. Adding. "

"Kenby? Why of co--"

"Don't be stupid, my dear! No, not Kenby: General Triscoe. I wish youcould have been here to see him paying her all sort; of silly attentions, and hear him making her compliments. "

"Thank you. I think I'm just as well without it. Did she pay him sillyattentions and compliments, too?"

"That's the only thing that can make me forgive her for his wanting her. She was keeping him at arm's-length the whole time, and she was doing itso as not to make him contemptible before his daughter. "

"It must have been hard. And Rose?"

"Rose didn't seem very well. He looks thin and pale; but he's sweeterthan ever. She's certainly commoner clay than Rose. No, I won't say that!It's really nothing but General Triscoe's being an old goose about herthat makes her seem so, and it isn't fair. "

March went down to his coffee in the morning with the delicate duty oftelling Kenby that Mrs. Adding was in town. Kenby seemed to think itquite natural she should wish to see the manoeuvres, and not at allstrange that she should come to them with General Triscoe and hisdaughter. He asked if March would not go with him to call upon her afterbreakfast, and as this was in the line of his own instructions from Mrs. March, he went. 

They found Mrs. Adding with the Triscoes, and March saw nothing that wasnot merely friendly, or at the most fatherly, in the general's behaviortoward her. If Mrs. Adding or Miss Triscoe saw more, they hid it in aguise of sisterly affection for each other. At the most the generalshowed a gayety which one would not have expected of him under anyconditions, and which the fact that he and Rose had kept each other awakea good deal the night before seemed so little adapted to call out. Hejoked with Rose about their room and their beds, and put on a comraderywith him that was not a perfect fit, and that suffered by contrast withthe pleasure of the boy and Kenby in meeting. There was a certainquestion in the attitude of Mrs. Adding till March helped Kenby toaccount for his presence; then she relaxed in an effect of security sotacit that words overstate it, and began to make fun of Rose. 

March could not find that Miss Triscoe looked unhappy, as his wife hadsaid; he thought simply that she had grown plainer; but when he reportedthis, she lost her patience with him. In a girl, she said, plainness wasunhappiness; and she wished to know when he would ever learn to look aninch below the surface: She was sure that Agatha Triscoe had not heardfrom Burnamy since the Emperor's birthday; that she was at swords'-pointswith her father, and so desperate that she did not care what became ofher. 

He had left Kenby with the others, and now, after his wife had talkedherself tired of them all, he proposed going out again to look about thecity, where there was nothing for the moment to remind them of thepresence of their friends or even of their existence. She answered thatshe was worrying about all those people, and trying to work out theirproblem for them. He asked why she did not let them work it outthemselves as they would have to do, after all her worry, and she saidthat where her sympathy had been excited she could not stop worrying, whether it did any good or not, and she could not respect any one whocould drop things so completely out of his mind as he could; she hadnever been able to respect that in him. 

"I know, my dear, " he assented. "But I don't think it's a question ofmoral responsibility; it's a question of mental structure, isn't it? Yourconsciousness isn't built in thought-tight compartments, and one emotiongoes all through it, and sinks you; but I simply close the doors and shutthe emotion in, and keep on. "

The fancy pleased him so much that he worked it out in all itsimplications, and could not, after their long experience of each other, realize that she was not enjoying the joke too, till she said she sawthat he merely wished to tease. Then, too late, he tried to share herworry; but she protested that she was not worrying at all; that she carednothing about those people: that she was nervous, she was tired; and shewished he would leave her, and go out alone. 

He found himself in the street again, and he perceived that he must bewalking fast when a voice called him by name, and asked him what hishurry was. The voice was Stoller's, who got into step with him andfollowed the first with a second question. 

"Made up your mind to go to the manoeuvres with me?"

His bluntness made it easy for March to answer: "I'm afraid my wifecouldn't stand the drive back and forth. "

"Come without her. "

"Thank you. It's very kind of you. I'm not certain that I shall go atall. If I do, I shall run out by train, and take my chances with thecrowd. "

Stoller insisted no further. He felt no offence at the refusal of hisoffer, or chose to show none. He said, with the same uncouth abruptnessas before: "Heard anything of that fellow since he left Carlsbad?"

"Burnamy?"

"Mm. "

"No. "

"Know where he is?"

"I don't in the least. "

Stoller let another silence elapse while they hurried on, before he said, "I got to thinking what he done afterwards. He wasn't bound to look outfor me; he might suppose I knew what I was about. "

March turned his face and stared in Stoller's, which he was letting hangforward as he stamped heavily on. Had the disaster proved less than hehad feared, and did he still want Burnamy's help in patching up thebroken pieces; or did he really wish to do Burnamy justice to his friend?

In any case March's duty was clear. "I think Burnamy was bound to lookout for you; Mr. Stoller, and I am glad to know that he saw it in thesame light. "

"I know he did, " said Stoker with a blaze as from a long-smoulderingfury, "and damn him, I'm not going to have it. I'm not going to, pleadthe baby act with him, or with any man. You tell him so, when you get thechance. You tell him I don't hold him accountable for anything I made himdo. That ain't business; I don't want him around me, any more; but if hewants to go back to the paper he can have his place. You tell him I standby what I done; and it's all right between him and me. I hain't doneanything about it, the way I wanted him to help me to; I've let it lay, and I'm a-going to. I guess it ain't going to do me any harm, after all;our people hain't got very long memories; but if it is, let it. You tellhim it's all right. "

"I don't know where he is, Mr. Stoller, and I don't know that I care tobe the bearer of your message, " said March. 

"Why not?"

"Why, for one thing, I don't agree with you that it's all right. Yourchoosing to stand by the consequences of Burnamy's wrong doesn't undo it. As I understand, you don't pardon it--"

Stoller gulped and did not answer at once. Then he said, "I stand by whatI done. I'm not going to let him say I turned him down for doing what Itold him to, because I hadn't the sense to know what I was about. "

"Ah, I don't think it's a thing he'll like to speak of in any case, " saidMarch. 

Stoller left him, at the corner they had reached, as abruptly as he hadjoined him, and March hurried back to his wife, and told her what hadjust passed between him and Stoller. 

She broke out, "Well, I am surprised at you, my dear! You have alwaysaccused me of suspecting people, and attributing bad motives; and hereyou've refused even to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt. Hemerely wanted to save his savage pride with you, and that's all he wantsto do with Burnamy. How could it hurt the poor boy to know that Stollerdoesn't blame him? Why should you refuse to give his message to Burnamy?I don't want you to ridicule me for my conscience any more, Basil; you'retwice as bad as I ever was. Don't you think that a person can everexpiate an offence? I've often heard you say that if any one owned hisfault, he put it from him, and it was the same as if it hadn't been; andhasn't Burnamy owned up over and over again? I'm astonished at you, dearest. "

March was in fact somewhat astonished at himself in the light of herreasoning; but she went on with some sophistries that restored him to hisself-righteousness. 

"I suppose you think he has interfered with Stoller's political ambition, and injured him in that way. Well, what if he has? Would it be a goodthing to have a man like that succeed in politics? You're always sayingthat the low character of our politicians is the ruin of the country; andI'm sure, " she added, with a prodigious leap over all the sequences, "that Mr. Stoller is acting nobly; and it's your duty to help him relieveBurnamy's mind. " At the laugh he broke into she hastened to say, "Or ifyou won't, I hope you'll not object to my doing so, for I shall, anyway!"

She rose as if she were going to begin at once, in spite of his laughing;and in fact she had already a plan for coming to Stoller's assistance bygetting at Burnamy through Miss Triscoe, whom she suspected of knowingwhere he was. There had been no chance for them to speak of him eitherthat morning or the evening before, and after a great deal of controversywith herself in her husband's presence she decided to wait till they camenaturally together the next morning for the walk to the Capuchin Churchon the hill beyond the river, which they had agreed to take. She couldnot keep from writing a note to Miss Triscoe begging her to be sure tocome, and hinting that she had something very important to speak of. 

She was not sure but she had been rather silly to do this, but when theymet the girl confessed that she had thought of giving up the walk, andmight not have come except for Mrs. March's note. She had come with Rose, and had left him below with March; Mrs. Adding was coming later withKenby and General Triscoe. 

Mrs. March lost no time in telling her the great news; and if she hadbeen in doubt before of the girl's feeling for Burnamy she was now innone. She had the pleasure of seeing her flush with hope, and then thepain which was also a pleasure, of seeing her blanch with dismay. 

"I don't know where he is, Mrs. March. I haven't heard a word from himsince that night in Carlsbad. I expected--I didn't know but you--"

Mrs. March shook her head. She treated the fact skillfully as somethingto be regretted simply because it would be such a relief to Burnamy toknow how Mr. Stoller now felt. Of course they could reach him somehow;you could always get letters to people in Europe, in the end; and, infact, it was altogether probable that he was that very instant inWurzburg; for if the New York-Paris Chronicle had wanted him to write upthe Wagner operas, it would certainly want him to write up themanoeuvres. She established his presence in Wurzburg by such anirrefragable chain of reasoning that, at a knock outside, she was justable to kelp back a scream, while she ran to open the door. It was notBurnamy, as in compliance with every nerve it ought to have been, but herhusband, who tried to justify his presence by saying that they were allwaiting for her and Miss Triscoe, and asked when they were coming. 

She frowned him silent, and then shut herself outside with him longenough to whisper, "Say she's got a headache, or anything you please; butdon't stop talking here with me, or I shall go wild. " She then shutherself in again, with the effect of holding him accountable for thewhole affair. 

LVI. 

General Triscoe could not keep his irritation, at hearing that hisdaughter was not coming, out of the excuses he made to Mrs. Adding; hesaid again and again that it must seem like a discourtesy to her. Shegayly disclaimed any such notion; she would not hear of putting off theirexcursion to another day; it had been raining just long enough to givethem a reasonable hope of a few hours' drought, and they might not haveanother dry spell for weeks. She slipped off her jacket after theystarted, and gave it to Kenby, but she let General Triscoe hold herumbrella over her, while he limped beside her. She seemed to March, as hefollowed with Rose, to be playing the two men off against each other, with an ease which he wished his wife could be there to see, and to judgearight. 

They crossed by the Old Bridge, which is of the earliest years of theseventh century, between rows of saints whose statues surmount the piers. Some are bishops as well as saints; one must have been at Rome in hisday, for he wore his long thick beard in the fashion of Michelangelo'sMoses. He stretched out toward the passers two fingers of blessing andwas unaware of the sparrow which had lighted on them and was giving himthe effect of offering it to the public admiration. Squads of soldierstramping by turned to look and smile, and the dull faces of citizenslighted up at the quaint sight. Some children stopped and remained veryquiet, not to scare away the bird; and a cold-faced, spiritual-lookingpriest paused among them as if doubting whether to rescue theabsent-minded bishop from a situation derogatory to his dignity; but hepassed on, and then the sparrow suddenly flew off. 

Rose Adding had lingered for the incident with March, but they now pushedon, and came up with the others at the end of the bridge, where theyfound them in question whether they had not better take a carriage anddrive to the foot of the hill before they began their climb. Marchthanked them, but said he was keeping up the terms of his cure, and wasgetting in all the walking he could. Rose begged his mother not toinclude him in the driving party; he protested that he was feeling sowell, and the walk was doing him good. His mother consented, if he wouldpromise not to get tired, and then she mounted into the two-spanner whichhad driven instinctively up to their party when their parley began, andGeneral Triscoe took the place beside her, while Kenby, with smilingpatience, seated himself in front. 

Rose kept on talking with March about Wurzburg and its history, which itseemed he had been reading the night before when he could not sleep. Heexplained, "We get little histories of the places wherever we go. That'swhat Mr. Kenby does, you know. "

"Oh, yes, " said March. 

"I don't suppose I shall get a chance to read much here, " Rose continued, "with General Triscoe in the room. He doesn't like the light. "

"Well, well. He's rather old, you know. And you musn't read too much, Rose. It isn't good for you. "

"I know, but if I don't read, I think, and that keeps me awake worse. Ofcourse, I respect General Triscoe for being in the war, and gettingwounded, " the boy suggested. 

"A good many did it, " March was tempted to say. 

The boy did not notice his insinuation. "I suppose there were some thingsthey did in the army, and then they couldn't get over the habit. ButGeneral Grant says in his 'Life' that he never used a profane expletive. "

"Does General Triscoe?"

Rose answered reluctantly, "If anything wakes him in the night, or if hecan't make these German beds over to suit him--"

"I see. " March turned his face to hide the smile which he would not havelet the boy detect. He thought best not to let Rose resume hisimpressions of the general; and in talk of weightier matters they foundthemselves at that point of the climb where the carriage was waiting forthem. From this point they followed an alley through ivied, garden walls, till they reached the first of the balustraded terraces which ascend tothe crest of the hill where the church stands. Each terrace is plantedwith sycamores, and the face of the terrace wall supports a bass-reliefcommemorating with the drama of its lifesize figures the stations of thecross. 

Monks and priests were coming and going, and dropped on the steps leadingfrom terrace to terrace were women and children on their knees in prayer. It was all richly reminiscent of pilgrim scenes in other Catholic lands;but here there was a touch of earnest in the Northern face of theworshipers which the South had never imparted. Even in the beautifulrococo interior of the church at the top of the hill there was a sense ofsomething deeper and truer than mere ecclesiasticism; and March came outof it in a serious muse while the boy at his side did nothing tointerrupt. A vague regret filled his heart as he gazed silently out overthe prospect of river and city and vineyard, purpling together below thetop where he stood, and mixed with this regret was a vague resentment ofhis wife's absence. She ought to have been there to share his pang andhis pleasure; they had so long enjoyed everything together that withouther he felt unable to get out of either emotion all there was in it. 

The forgotten boy stole silently down the terraces after the rest of theparty who had left him behind with March. At the last terrace theystopped and waited; and after a delay that began to be long to Mrs. Adding, she wondered aloud what could have become of them. 

Kenby promptly offered to go back and see, and she consented in seemingto refuse: "It isn't worth while. Rose has probably got Mr. March intosome deep discussion, and they've forgotten all about us. But if you willgo, Mr. Kenby, you might just remind Rose of my existence. " She let himlay her jacket on her shoulders before he left her, and then she sat downon one of the steps, which General Triscoe kept striking with the pointof her umbrella as he stood before her. 

"I really shall have to take it from you if you do that any more, " shesaid, laughing up in his face. "I'm serious. "

He stopped. "I wish I could believe you were serious, for a moment. "

"You may, if you think it will do you any good. But I don't see why. "

The general smiled, but with a kind of tremulous eagerness which mighthave been pathetic to any one who liked him. "Do you know this is almostthe first time I have spoken alone with you?"

"Really, I hadn't noticed, " said Mrs. Adding. 

General Triscoe laughed in rather a ghastly way. "Well, that'sencouraging, at least, to a man who's had his doubts whether it wasn'tintended. "

"Intended? By whom? What do you mean, General Triscoe? Why in the worldshouldn't you have spoken alone with me before?"

He was not, with all his eagerness, ready to say, and while she smiledpleasantly she had the look in her eyes of being brought to bay and beingprepared, if it must come to that, to have the worst over, then andthere. She was not half his age, but he was aware of her having norespect for his years; compared with her average American past as heunderstood it, his social place was much higher, but, she was not in theleast awed by it; in spite of his war record she was making him behavelike a coward. He was in a false position, and if he had any one buthimself to blame he had not her. He read her equal knowledge of thesefacts in the clear eyes that made him flush and turn his own away. 

Then he started with a quick "Hello!" and stood staring up at the stepsfrom the terrace above, where Rose Adding was staying himself weakly by aclutch of Kenby on one side and March on the other. 

His mother looked round and caught herself up from where she sat and rantoward him. "Oh, Rose!"

"It's nothing, mother, " he called to her, and as she dropped on her kneesbefore him he sank limply against her. "It was like what I had inCarlsbad; that's all. Don't worry about me, please!"

"I'm not worrying, Rose, " she said with courage of the same texture ashis own. "You've been walking too much. You must go back in the carriagewith us. Can't you have it come here?" she asked Kenby. 

"There's no road, Mrs. Adding. But if Rose would let me carry him--"

"I can walk, " the boy protested, trying to lift himself from her neck. 

"No, no! you mustn't. " She drew away and let him fall into the arms thatKenby put round him. He raised the frail burden lightly to his shoulder, and moved strongly away, followed by the eyes of the spectators who hadgathered about the little group, but who dispersed now, and went back totheir devotions. 

March hurried after Kenby with Mrs. Adding, whom he told he had justmissed Rose and was looking about for him, when Kenby came with hermessage for them. They made sure that he was nowhere about the church, and then started together down the terraces. At the second or thirdstation below they found the boy clinging to the barrier that protectedthe bass-relief from the zeal of the devotees. He looked white and sick, though he insisted that he was well, and when he turned to come away withthem he reeled and would have fallen if Kenby had not caught him. Kenbywanted to carry him, but Rose would not let him, and had made his waydown between them. 

"Yea, he has such a spirit, " she said, "and I've no doubt he's sufferingnow more from Mr. Kenby's kindness than from his own sickness he had oneof these giddy turns in Carlsbad, though, and I shall certainly have adoctor to see him. "

"I think I should, Mrs. Adding, " said March, not too gravely, for itseemed to him that it was not quite his business to alarm her further, ifshe was herself taking the affair with that seriousness. He questionedwhether she was taking it quite seriously enough, when she turned with alaugh, and called to General Triscoe, who was limping down the steps ofthe last terrace behind them:

"Oh, poor General Triscoe! I thought you had gone on ahead. "

General Triscoe could not enter into the joke of being forgotten, apparently. He assisted with gravity at the disposition of the party forthe return, when they all reached the carriage. Rose had the place besidehis mother, and Kenby wished March to take his with the general and lethim sit with the driver; but he insisted that he would rather walk home, and he did walk till they had driven out of eight. Then he called apassing one-spanner, and drove to his hotel in comfort and silence. 

LVII. 

Kenby did not come to the Swan before supper; then he reported that thedoctor had said Rose was on the verge of a nervous collapse. He hadoverworked at school, but the immediate trouble was the high, thin air, which the doctor said he must be got out of at once, into a quiet placeat the sea-shore somewhere. He had suggested Ostend; or some point on theFrench coast; Kenby had thought of Schevleningen, and the doctor had saidthat would do admirably. 

"I understood from Mrs. Adding, " he concluded, "that you were going. There for your after-cure, Mr. March, and I didn't know but you might begoing soon. "

At the mention of Schevleningen the Marches had looked at each other witha guilty alarm, which they both tried to give the cast of affectionatesympathy but she dismissed her fear that he might be going to let hiscompassion prevail with him to his hurt when he said: "Why, we ought tohave been there before this, but I've been taking my life in my hands intrying to see a little of Germany, and I'm afraid now that Mrs. March hasher mind too firmly fixed on Berlin to let me think of going toSchevleningen till we've been there. "

"It's too bad!" said Mrs. March, with real regret. "I wish we weregoing. " But she had not the least notion of gratifying her wish; and theywere all silent till Kenby broke out:

"Look here! You know how I feel about Mrs Adding! I've been pretty frankwith Mr. March myself, and I've had my suspicions that she's been frankwith you, Mrs. March. There isn't any doubt about my wanting to marryher, and up to this time there hasn't been any doubt about her notwanting to marry me. But it isn't a question of her or of me, now. It's aquestion of Rose. I love the boy, " and Kenby's voice shook, and hefaltered a moment. "Pshaw! You understand. "

"Indeed I do, Mr. Kenby, " said Mrs. March. "I perfectly understand you. "

"Well, I don't think Mrs. Adding is fit to make the journey with himalone, or to place herself in the best way after she gets toSchevleningen. She's been badly shaken up; she broke down before thedoctor; she said she didn't know what to do; I suppose she'sfrightened--"

Kenby stopped again, and March asked, "When is she going?"

"To-morrow, " said Kenby, and he added, "And now the question is, whyshouldn't I go with her?"

Mrs. March gave a little start, and looked at her husband, but he saidnothing, and Kenby seemed not to have supposed that he would sayanything. 

"I know it would be very American, and all that, but I happen to be anAmerican, and it wouldn't be out of character for me. I suppose, " heappealed to Mrs. March, "that it's something I might offer to do if itwere from New York to Florida--and I happened to be going there? And Idid happen to be going to Holland. "

"Why, of course, Mr. Kenby, " she responded, with such solemnity thatMarch gave way in an outrageous laugh. 

Kenby laughed, and Mrs. March laughed too, but with an inner note ofprotest. 

"Well, " Kenby continued, still addressing her, "what I want you to do isto stand by me when I propose it. "

Mrs. March gathered strength to say, "No, Mr. Kenby, it's your ownaffair, and you must take the responsibility. "

"Do you disapprove?"

"It isn't the same as it would be at home. You see that yourself. "

"Well, " said Kenby, rising, "I have to arrange about their getting awayto-morrow. It won't be easy in this hurly-burly that's coming off. "

"Give Rose our love; and tell Mrs. Adding that I'll come round and seeher to-morrow before she starts. "

"Oh! I'm afraid you can't, Mrs. March. They're to start at six in themorning. "

"They are! Then we must go and see them tonight. We'll be there almost assoon as you are. "

March went up to their rooms with, his wife, and she began on the stairs:

"Well, my dear, I hope you realize that your laughing so gave uscompletely away. And what was there to keep grinning about, all through?"

"Nothing but the disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love. It's alwaysthe most amusing thing in the world; but to see it trying to pass itselfoff in poor old Kenby as duty and humanity, and disinterested affectionfor Rose, was more than I could stand. I don't apologize for laughing; Iwanted to yell. "

His effrontery and his philosophy both helped to save him; and she saidfrom the point where he had side-tracked her mind: "I don't call itdisingenuous. He was brutally frank. He's made it impossible to treat theaffair with dignity. I want you to leave the whole thing to me, from thisout. Now, will you?"

On their way to the Spanischer Hof she arranged in her own mind for Mrs. Adding to get a maid, and for the doctor to send an assistant with her onthe journey, but she was in such despair with her scheme that she had notthe courage to right herself when Mrs. Adding met her with the appeal:

"Oh, Mrs. March, I'm so glad you approve of Mr. Kenby's plan. It doesseem the only thing to do. I can't trust myself alone with Rose, and Mr. Kenby's intending to go to Schevleningen a few days later anyway. Thoughit's too bad to let him give up the manoeuvres. "

"I'm sure he won't mind that, " Mrs. March's voice said mechanically, while her thought was busy with the question whether this scandalousduplicity was altogether Kenby's, and whether Mrs. Adding was asguiltless of any share in it as she looked. She looked pitifullydistracted; she might not have understood his report; or Kenby mightreally have mistaken Mrs. March's sympathy for favor. 

"No, he only lives to do good, " Mrs. Adding returned. "He's with Rose;won't you come in and see them?"

Rose was lying back on the pillows of a sofa, from which they would notlet him get up. He was full of the trip to Holland, and had alreadypushed Kenby, as Kenby owned, beyond the bounds of his very generalknowledge of the Dutch language, which Rose had plans for taking up afterthey were settled in Schevleningen. The boy scoffed at the notion that hewas not perfectly well, and he wished to talk with March on the pointswhere he had found Kenby wanting. 

"Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me, Rose, " the editor protested, and he amplified his ignorance for the boy's good to an extent which Rosesaw was a joke. He left Holland to talk about other things which hismother thought quite as bad for him. He wished to know if March did notthink that the statue of the bishop with the sparrow on its finger was asubject for a poem; and March said gayly that if Rose would write it hewould print it in 'Every Other Week'. 

The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter. "No, I couldn't do it. But Iwish Mr. Burnamy had seen it. He could. Will you tell him about it?" Hewanted to know if March had heard from Burnamy lately, and in the midstof his vivid interest he gave a weary sigh. 

His mother said that now he had talked enough, and bade him say good-byto the Marches, who were coming so soon to Holland, anyway. Mrs. Marchput her arms round him to kiss him, and when she let him sink back hereyes were dim. 

"You see how frail he is?" said Mrs. Adding. "I shall not let him out ofmy sight, after this, till he's well again. "

She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby away with them which was notlost upon the witnesses. He asked them to come into the reading-room amoment with him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were going to make someexcuse to her for himself; but he said: "I don't know how we're to manageabout the Triscoes. The general will have a room to himself, but if Mrs. Adding takes Rose in with her, it leaves Miss Triscoe out, and thereisn't a room to be had in this house for love or money. Do you think, " heappealed directly to Mrs. March, "that it would do to offer her my roomat the Swan?"

"Why, yes, " she assented, with a reluctance rather for the complicity inwhich he had already involved her, and for which he was still unpunished, than for what he was now proposing. "Or she could come in with me, andMr. March could take it. "

"Whichever you think, " said Kenby so submissively that she relented, toask:

"And what will you do?"

He laughed. "Well, people have been known to sleep in a chair. I shallmanage somehow. "

"You might offer to go in with the general, " March suggested, and the menapparently thought this was a joke. Mrs. March did not laugh in herfeminine worry about ways and means. 

"Where is Miss Triscoe?" she asked. "We haven't seen them. "

"Didn't Mrs. Adding tell you? They went to supper at a restaurant; thegeneral doesn't like the cooking here. They ought to have been backbefore this. "

He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she said, "I suppose you wouldlike us to wait. "

"It would be very kind of you. "

"Oh, it's quite essential, " she returned with an airy freshness whichKenby did not seem to feel as painfully as he ought. 

They all sat down, and the Triscoes came in after a few minutes, and acloud on the general's face lifted at the proposition Kenby left Mrs. March to make. 

"I thought that child ought to be in his mother's charge, " he said. Withhis own comfort provided for, he made no objections to Mrs. March's plan;and Agatha went to take leave of Rose and his mother. "By-the-way, " thegeneral turned to March, "I found Stoller at the restaurant where wesupped. He offered me a place in his carriage for the manoeuvres. How areyou going?"

"I think I shall go by train. I don't fancy the long drive. "

"Well, I don't know that it's worse than the long walk after you leavethe train, " said the general from the offence which any difference oftaste was apt to give him. "Are you going by train, too?" he asked Kenbywith indifference. 

"I'm not going at all, " said Kenby. "I'm leaving Wurzburg in themorning. "

"Oh, indeed, " said the general. 

Mrs. March could not make out whether he knew that Kenby was going withRose and Mrs. Adding, but she felt that there must be a full and openrecognition of the fact among them. "Yes, " she said, "isn't it fortunatethat Mr. Kenby should be going to Holland, too! I should have been sounhappy about them if Mrs. Adding had been obliged to make that longjourney with poor little Rose alone. "

"Yes, yes; very fortunate, certainly, " said the general colorlessly. 

Her husband gave her a glance of intelligent appreciation; but Kenby wastoo simply, too densely content with the situation to know the value ofwhat she had done. She thought he must certainly explain, as he walkedback with her to the Swan, whether he had misrepresented her to Mrs. Adding, or Mrs. Adding had misunderstood him. Somewhere there had been anerror, or a duplicity which it was now useless to punish; and Kenby wasso apparently unconscious of it that she had not the heart to be crosswith him. She heard Miss Triscoe behind her with March laughing in thegayety which the escape from her father seemed to inspire in her. She waspromising March to go with him in the morning to see the Emperor andEmpress of Germany arrive at the station, and he was warning her that ifshe laughed there, like that, she would subject him to fine andimprisonment. She pretended that she would like to see him led offbetween two gendarmes, but consented to be a little careful when he askedher how she expected to get back to her hotel without him, if such athing happened. 

LVIII. 

After all, Miss Triscoe did not go with March; she preferred to sleep. The imperial party was to arrive at half past seven, but at six the crowdwas already dense before the station, and all along the street leading tothe Residenz. It was a brilliant day, with the promise of sunshine, through which a chilly wind blew, for the manoeuvres. The colors of allthe German states flapped in this breeze from the poles wreathed withevergreen which encircled the square; the workmen putting the lasttouches on the bronzed allegory hurried madly to be done, and they had, scarcely finished their labors when two troops of dragoons rode into theplace and formed before the station, and waited as motionlessly as theirhorses would allow. 

These animals were not so conscious as lions at the approach of princes;they tossed and stamped impatiently in the long interval before theRegent and his daughter-in-law came to welcome their guests. All thehuman beings, both those who were in charge and those who were undercharge, were in a quiver of anxiety to play their parts well, as if therewere some heavy penalty for failure in the least point. The policemenkeeping the people, in line behind the ropes which restrained themtrembled with eagerness; the faces of some of the troopers twitched. Aninvoluntary sigh went up from the crowd as the Regent's carriageappeared, heralded by outriders, and followed by other plain carriages ofBavarian blue with liveries of blue and silver. Then the whistle of theKaiser's train sounded; a trumpeter advanced and began to blow histrumpet as they do in the theatre; and exactly at the appointed momentthe Emperor and Empress came out of the station through the brillianthuman alley leading from it, mounted their carriages, with the stagetrumpeter always blowing, and whirled swiftly round half the square andflashed into the corner toward the Residenz out of sight. The same hollowgroans of Ho-o-o-ch greeted and followed them from the spectators as hadwelcomed the Regent when he first arrived among his fellow-townsmen, withthe same effect of being the conventional cries of a stage mob behind thescenes. 

The Emperor was like most of his innumerable pictures, with a swarthyface from which his blue eyes glanced pleasantly; he looked good-humoredif not good-natured; the Empress smiled amiably beneath her deeplyfringed white parasol, and they both bowed right and left inacknowledgment of those hollow groans; but again it seemed, to March thatsovereignty, gave the popular curiosity, not to call it devotion, ascantier return than it merited. He had perhaps been insensibly workingtoward some such perception as now came to him that the great differencebetween Europe and America was that in Europe life is histrionic anddramatized, and that in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere. He wondered whether the innate conviction ofequality, the deep, underlying sense of a common humanity transcendingall social and civic pretences, was what gave their theatrical effect tothe shows of deference from low to high, and of condescension from highto low. If in such encounters of sovereigns and subjects, the prince didnot play his part so well as the people, it might be that he had a harderpart to play, and that to support his dignity at all, to keep from beingfound out the sham that he essentially was, he had to hurry across thestage amidst the distracting thunders of the orchestra. If the star staidto be scrutinized by the soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poorsupernumeraries and scene-shifters might see that he was a tallow candlelike themselves. 

In the censorious mood induced by the reflection that he had waited anhour and a half for half a minute's glimpse of the imperial party, Marchnow decided not to go to the manoeuvres, where he might be subjected tostill greater humiliation and disappointment. He had certainly come toWurzburg for the manoeuvres, but Wurzburg had been richly repaying initself; and why should he stifle half an hour in an overcrowded train, and struggle for three miles on foot against that harsh wind, to see amultitude of men give proofs of their fitness to do manifold murder? Hewas, in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and the only thingthat really troubled him was the question of how he should justify hisrecreance to his wife. This did alloy the pleasure with which he began, after an excellent breakfast at a neighboring cafe, to stroll about thestreets, though he had them almost to himself, so many citizens hadfollowed the soldiers to the manoeuvres. 

It was not till the soldiers began returning from the manoeuvres, dusty-footed, and in white canvas overalls drawn over their trousers tosave them, that he went back to Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe at the Swan. He had given them time enough to imagine him at the review, and to wonderwhether he had seen General Triscoe and the Stollers there, and they methim with such confident inquiries that he would not undeceive them atonce. He let them divine from his inventive answers that he had not goneto the manoeuvres, which put them in the best humor with themselves, andthe girl said it was so cold and rough that she wished her father had notgone, either. The general appeared just before dinner and frankly avowedthe same wish. He was rasping and wheezing from the dust which filled hislungs; he looked blown and red, and he was too angry with the company hehad been in to have any comments on the manoeuvres. He referred to themilitary chiefly in relation to the Miss Stollers' ineffectualflirtations, which he declared had been outrageous. Their father hadapparently no control over them whatever, or else was too ignorant toknow that they were misbehaving. They were without respect or reverencefor any one; they had talked to General Triscoe as if he were a boy oftheir own age, or a dotard whom nobody need mind; they had not only keptup their foolish babble before him, they had laughed and giggled, theyhad broken into snatches of American song, they had all but whistled anddanced. They made loud comments in Illinois English--on the cuteness ofthe officers whom they admired, and they had at one time actually got outtheir handkerchiefs. He supposed they meant to wave them at the officers, but at the look he gave them they merely put their hats together andsnickered in derision of him. They were American girls of the worst type;they conformed to no standard of behavior; their conduct was personal. They ought to be taken home. 

Mrs. March said she saw what he meant, and she agreed with him that theywere altogether unformed, and were the effect of their own ignorantcaprices. Probably, however, it was too late to amend them by taking themaway. 

"It would hide them, at any rate, " he answered. "They would sink backinto the great mass of our vulgarity, and not be noticed. We behave likea parcel of peasants with our women. We think that if no harm is meant orthought, we may risk any sort of appearance, and we do things that arescandalously improper simply because they are innocent. That may be allvery well at home, but people who prefer that sort of thing had betterstay there, where our peasant manners won't make them conspicuous. "

As their train ran northward out of Wurzburg that afternoon, Mrs. Marchrecurred to the general's closing words. "That was a slap at Mrs. Addingfor letting Kenby go off with her. "

She took up the history of the past twenty-four hours, from the timeMarch had left her with Miss Triscoe when he went with her father and theAddings and Kenby to see that church. She had had no chance to bring upthese arrears until now, and she atoned to herself for the delay bymaking the history very full, and going back and adding touches at anypoint where she thought she had scanted it. After all, it consistedmainly of fragmentary intimations from Miss Triscoe and of half-utteredquestions which her own art now built into a coherent statement. 

March could not find that the general had much resented Burnamy'sclandestine visit to Carlsbad when his daughter told him of it, or thathe had done more than make her promise that she would not keep up theacquaintance upon any terms unknown to him. 

"Probably, " Mrs. March said, "as long as he had any hopes of Mrs. Adding, he was a little too self-conscious to be very up and down about Burnamy. "

"Then you think he was really serious about her?"

"Now my dear! He was so serious that I suppose he was never so completelytaken aback in his life as when he met Kenby in Wurzburg and saw how shereceived him. Of course, that put an end to the fight. "

"The fight?"

"Yes--that Mrs. Adding and Agatha were keeping up to prevent his offeringhimself. "

"Oh! And how do you know that they were keeping up the fight together?"

"How do I? Didn't you see yourself what friends they were? Did you tellhim what Stoller had, said about Burnamy?"

"I had no chance. I don't know that I should have done it, anyway. Itwasn't my affair. "

"Well, then, I think you might. It would have been everything for thatpoor child; it would have completely justified her in her own eyes. "

"Perhaps your telling her will serve the same purpose. "

"Yes, I did tell her, and I am glad of it. She had a right to know it. "

"Did she think Stoller's willingness to overlook Burnamy's performancehad anything to do with its moral quality?"

Mrs. March was daunted for the moment, but she said, "I told her youthought that if a person owned to a fault they disowned it, and put itaway from them just as if it had never been committed; and that if aperson had taken their punishment for a wrong they had done, they hadexpiated it so far as anybody else was concerned. And hasn't poor Burnamydone both?"

As a moralist March was flattered to be hoist with his own petard, but asa husband he was not going to come down at once. "I thought probably youhad told her that. You had it pat from having just been over it with me. When has she heard from him?"

"Why, that's the strangest thing about it. She hasn't heard at all. Shedoesn't know where he is. She thought we must know. She was terriblybroken up. "

"How did she show it?"

"She didn't show it. Either you want to tease, or you've forgotten howsuch things are with young people--or at least girls. "

"Yes, it's all a long time ago with me, and I never was a girl. Besides, the frank and direct behavior of Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been veryobliterating to my early impressions of love-making. "

"It certainly hasn't been ideal, " said Mrs. March with a sigh. 

"Why hasn't it been ideal?" he asked. "Kenby is tremendously in love withher; and I believe she's had a fancy for him from the beginning. If ithadn't been for Rose she would have accepted him at once; and now he'sessential to them both in their helplessness. As for Papa Triscoe and hisEuropeanized scruples, if they have any reality at all they're theresiduum of his personal resentment, and Kenby and Mrs. Adding havenothing to do with their unreality. His being in love with her is noreason why he shouldn't be helpful to her when she needs him, and everyreason why he should. I call it a poem, such as very few people have theluck to live out together. "

Mrs. March listened with mounting fervor, and when he stopped, she criedout, "Well, my dear, I do believe you are right! It is ideal, as you say;it's a perfect poem. And I shall always say--"

She stopped at the mocking light which she caught in his look, andperceived that he had been amusing himself with her perennial enthusiasmfor all sorts of love-affairs. But she averred that she did not care;what he had said was true, and she should always hold him to it. 

They were again in the wedding-journey sentiment in which they had leftCarlsbad, when they found themselves alone together after their escapefrom the pressure of others' interests. The tide of travel was towardsFrankfort, where the grand parade was to take place some days later. Theywere going to Weimar, which was so few hours out of their way that theysimply must not miss it; and all the way to the old literary capital theywere alone in their compartment, with not even a stranger, much less afriend to molest them. The flying landscape without was of their ownearly autumnal mood, and when the vineyards of Wurzburg ceased to purpleit, the heavy after-math of hay and clover, which men, women, andchildren were loading on heavy wains, and driving from the meadowseverywhere, offered a pastoral and pleasing change. It was always theGerman landscape; sometimes flat and fertile, sometimes hilly and poor;often clothed with dense woods, but always charming, with castled tops inruin or repair, and with levels where Gothic villages drowsed withintheir walls, and dreamed of the mediaeval past, silent, without apparentlife, except for some little goose-girl driving her flock before her asshe sallied out into the nineteenth century in search of fresh pasturage. 

As their train mounted among the Thuringian uplands they were aware of afiner, cooler air through their open window. The torrents foamed whiteout of the black forests of fir and pine, and brawled along the valleys, where the hamlets roused themselves in momentary curiosity as the trainroared into them from the many tunnels. The afternoon sunshine had theglister of mountain sunshine everywhere, and the travellers had apleasant bewilderment in which their memories of Switzerland and theWhite Mountains mixed with long-dormant emotions from Adirondacksojourns. They chose this place and that in the lovely region where theylamented that they had not come at once for the after-cure, and theyappointed enough returns to it in future years to consume all the summersthey had left to live. 

LIX. 

It was falling night when they reached Weimar, where they found at thestation a provision of omnibuses far beyond the hotel accommodations. They drove first to the Crown-Prince, which was in a promising state ofreparation, but which for the present could only welcome them to anapartment where a canvas curtain cut them off from a freshly plasteredwall. The landlord deplored the fact, and sent hospitably out to try andplace them at the Elephant. But the Elephant was full, and the RussianCourt was full too. Then the landlord of the Crown-Prince bethoughthimself of a new hotel, of the second class, indeed, but very nice, wherethey might get rooms, and after the delay of an hour, they got a carriageand drove away from the Crown-Prince, where the landlord continued to thelast as benevolent as if they had been a profit instead of a loss to him. 

The streets of the town at nine o'clock were empty and quiet, and theyinstantly felt the academic quality of the place. Through the pale nightthey could see that the architecture was of the classic sentiment whichthey were destined to feel more and more; at one point they caught afleeting glimpse of two figures with clasped hands and half embraced, which they knew for the statues of Goethe and Schiller; and when theymounted to their rooms at the Grand-Duke of Saxe-Weimar, they passedunder a fresco representing Goethe and four other world-famous poets, Shakspere, Milton, Tasso, and Schiller. The poets all looked likeGermans, as was just, and Goethe was naturally chief among them; hemarshalled the immortals on their way, and Schiller brought up the rearand kept them from going astray in an Elysium where they did not speakthe language. For the rest, the hotel was brand-new, of a quite Americanfreshness, and was pervaded by a sweet smell as of straw matting, andprovided with steam-radiators. In the sense of its homelikeness theMarches boasted that they were never going away from it. 

In the morning they discovered that their windows looked out on thegrand-ducal museum, with a gardened space before and below itsclassicistic bulk, where, in a whim of the weather, the gay flowers werefull of sun. In a pleasant illusion of taking it unawares, March strolledup through the town; but Weimar was as much awake at that hour as at anyof the twenty-four, and the tranquillity of its streets, where heencountered a few passers several blocks apart, was their habitual mood. He came promptly upon two objects which he would willingly have shunned:a 'denkmal' of the Franco-German war, not so furiously bad as most Germanmonuments, but antipathetic and uninteresting, as all patriotic monumentsare; and a woman-and-dog team. In the shock from this he was sensiblethat he had not seen any woman-and-dog teams for some time, and hewondered by what civic or ethnic influences their distribution was socontrolled that they should have abounded in Hamburg, Leipsic, andCarlsbad, and wholly ceased in Nuremberg, Ansbach, and Wurzburg, toreappear again in Weimar, though they seemed as characteristic of allGermany as the ugly denkmals to her victories over France. 

The Goethe and Schiller monument which he had glimpsed the night beforewas characteristic too, but less offensively so. German statues at thebest are conscious; and the poet-pair, as the inscription calls them, have the air of showily confronting posterity with their clasped hands, and of being only partially rapt from the spectators. But they were moreunconscious than any other German statues that March had seen, and hequelled a desire to ask Goethe, as he stood with his hand on Schiller'sshoulder, and looked serenely into space far above one of the typicalequipages of his country, what he thought of that sort of thing. But uponreflection he did not know why Goethe should be held personallyresponsible for the existence of the woman-and-dog team. He felt that hemight more reasonably attribute to his taste the prevalence of classicprofiles which he began to note in the Weimar populace. This could be asympathetic effect of that passion for the antique which the poet broughtback with him from his sojourn in Italy; though many of the people, especially the children, were bow-legged. Perhaps the antique had: begunin their faces, and had not yet got down to their legs; in any case theywere charming children, and as a test of their culture, he had a mind toask a little girl if she could tell him where the statue of Herder was, which he thought he might as well take in on his ramble, and so be donewith as many statues as he could. She answered with a pretty regret inher tender voice, "That I truly cannot, " and he was more satisfied thanif she could, for he thought it better to be a child and honest, than toknow where any German statue was. 

He easily found it for himself in the place which is called the HerderPlatz after it. He went into the Peter and Paul Church there; whereHerder used to preach sermons, sometimes not at all liked by the nobilityand gentry for their revolutionary tendency; the sovereign was shieldedfrom the worst effects of his doctrine by worshipping apart from othersinners in a glazed gallery. Herder is buried in the church, and when youask where, the sacristan lifts a wooden trap-door in the pavement, andyou think you are going down into the crypt, but you are only to seeHerder's monumental stone, which is kept covered so to save it frompassing feet. Here also is the greatest picture of that great soul LukeKranach, who had sincerity enough in his paining to atone for all theswelling German sculptures in the world. It is a crucifixion, and thecross is of a white birch log, such as might have been cut out of theWeimar woods, shaved smooth on the sides, with the bark showing at theedges. Kranach has put himself among the spectators, and a stream ofblood from the side of the Savior falls in baptism upon the painter'shead. He is in the company of John the Baptist and Martin Luther; Lutherstands with his Bible open, and his finger on the line, "The blood ofJesus cleanseth us. "

Partly because he felt guilty at doing all these things without his wife, and partly because he was now very hungry, March turned from them and gotback to his hotel, where she was looking out for him from their openwindow. She had the air of being long domesticated there, as she laugheddown at seeing him come; and the continued brilliancy of the weatheradded to the illusion of home. 

It was like a day of late spring in Italy or America; the sun in thatgardened hollow before the museum was already hot enough to make him gladof the shelter of the hotel. The summer seemed to have come back tooblige them, and when they learned that they were to see Weimar in afestive mood because this was Sedan Day, their curiosity, if not theirsympathy, accepted the chance gratefully. But they were almost moved towish that the war had gone otherwise when they learned that all thepublic carriages were engaged, and they must have one from a stable ifthey wished to drive after breakfast. Still it was offered them for sucha modest number of marks, and their driver proved so friendly andconversable, that they assented to the course of history, and were moreand more reconciled as they bowled along through the grand-ducal parkbeside the waters of the classic Ilm. 

The waters of the classic Ilm are sluggish and slimy in places, and inplaces clear and brooklike, but always a dull dark green in color. Theyflow in the shadow of pensive trees, and by the brinks of sunny meadows, where the after-math wanders in heavy windrows, and the children sportjoyously over the smooth-mown surfaces in all the freedom that there isin Germany. At last, after immemorial appropriation the owners of theearth are everywhere expropriated, and the people come into the pleasureif not the profit of it. At last, the prince, the knight, the noblefinds, as in his turn the plutocrat will find, that his property is notfor him, but for all; and that the nation is to enjoy what he takes fromit and vainly thinks to keep from it. Parks, pleasaunces, gardens, setapart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landless poor in the OldWorld, and perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some state-sickruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child born to the solitudeof sovereignty, as they each look down from their palace windows upon theleisure of overwork taking its little holiday amidst beauty vainlycreated for the perpetual festival of their empty lives. 

March smiled to think that in this very Weimar, where sovereignty hadgraced and ennobled itself as nowhere else in the world by thecompanionship of letters and the arts, they still were not hurrying firstto see the palace of a prince, but were involuntarily making it second tothe cottage of a poet. But in fact it is Goethe who is forever the princein Weimar. His greatness blots out its history, his name fills the city;the thought of him is its chiefest imitation and largest hospitality. Thetravellers remembered, above all other facts of the grand-ducal park, that it was there he first met Christiane Vulpius, beautiful and young, when he too was beautiful and young, and took her home to be his love, tothe just and lasting displeasure of Fran von Stein, who was even lessreconciled when, after eighteen years of due reflection, the love ofGoethe and Christiane became their marriage. They, wondered just where itwas he saw the young girl coming to meet him as the Grand-Duke's ministerwith an office-seeking petition from her brother, Goethe's brotherauthor, long famed and long forgotten for his romantic tale of "RinaldoRinaldini. "

They had indeed no great mind, in their American respectability, for thatrather matter-of-fact and deliberate liaison, and little as theirsympathy was for the passionless intellectual intrigue with the Frau vonStein, it cast no halo of sentiment about the Goethe cottage to supposethat there his love-life with Christiane began. Mrs. March even resentedthe fact, and when she learned later that it was not the fact at all, sheremoved it from her associations with the pretty place almostindignantly. 

In spite of our facile and multiple divorces we Americans are worshipersof marriage, and if a great poet, the minister of a prince, is going tomarry a poor girl, we think he had better not wait till their son isalmost of age. Mrs. March would not accept as extenuating circumstancesthe Grand-Duke's godfatherhood, or Goethe's open constancy to Christiane, or the tardy consecration of their union after the French sack of, Weimar, when the girl's devotion had saved him from the rudeness of themarauding soldiers. For her New England soul there were no degrees insuch guilt; and, perhaps there are really not so many as people havetried to think, in their deference to Goethe's greatness. But certainlythe affair was not so simple for a grand-ducal minister of world-widerenown, and he might well have felt its difficulties, for he could nothave been proof against the censorious public opinion of Weimar, or theyet more censorious private opinion of Fran von Stein. 

On that lovely Italo-American morning no ghost of these old deadembarrassments lingered within or without the Goethe garden-house. Thetrees which the poet himself planted flung a sun-shot shadow upon it, andabout its feet basked a garden of simple flowers, from which the sweetlame girl who limped through the rooms and showed them, gathered aparting nosegay for her visitors. The few small livingrooms were abovethe ground-floor, with kitchen and offices below in the Italian fashion;in one of the little chambers was the camp-bed which Goethe carried withhim on his journeys through Italy; and in the larger room at the frontstood the desk where he wrote, with the chair before it from which hemight just have risen. 

All was much more livingly conscious of the great man gone than the proudlittle palace in the town, which so abounds with relics and memorials ofhim. His library, his study, his study table, with everything on it justas he left it when

 "Cadde la stanca mana"

are there, and there is the death-chair facing the window, from which hegasped for "more light" at last. The handsome, well-arranged rooms arefull of souvenirs of his travel, and of that passion for Italy which hedid so much to impart to all German hearts, and whose modern waningleaves its records here of an interest pathetically, almost amusingly, faded. They intimate the classic temper to which his mind tended more andmore, and amidst the multitude of sculptures, pictures, prints, drawings, gems, medals, autographs, there is the sense of the many-mindedness, theuniversal taste, for which he found room in little Weimar, but not in hiscontemporaneous Germany. But it is all less keenly personal, lessintimate than the simple garden-house, or else, with the great troop ofpeople going through it, and the custodians lecturing in various voicesand languages to the attendant groups, the Marches had it less tothemselves, and so imagined him less in it. 

LX. 

All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivableness which is common tothem everywhere, and very probably if one could meet their proprietors inthem one would as little remember them apart afterwards as the palacesthemselves. It will not do to lift either houses or men far out of theaverage; they become spectacles, ceremonies; they cease to have charm, tohave character, which belong to the levels of life, where alone there areease and comfort, and human nature may be itself, with all the littledelightful differences repressed in those who represent and typify. 

As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducal Residenz atWeimar, March felt everywhere the strong wish of the prince who wasGoethe's friend to ally himself with literature, and to be human at leastin the humanities. He came honestly by his passion for poets; his motherhad known it in her time, and Weimar was the home of Wieland and ofHerder before the young Grand-Duke came back from his travels bringingGoethe with him, and afterwards attracting Schiller. The story of thatgreat epoch is all there in the Residenz, told as articulately as apalace can. 

There are certain Poets' Rooms, frescoed with illustrations of Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland; there is the room where Goethe and the Grand-Dukeused to play chess together; there is the conservatory opening from itwhere they liked to sit and chat; everywhere in the pictures andsculptures, the engraving and intaglios, are the witnesses of the tastesthey shared, the love they both had for Italy, and for beautiful Italianthings. The prince was not so great a prince but that he could verynearly be a man; the court was perhaps the most human court that everwas; the Grand-Duke and the grand poet were first boon companions, andthen monarch and minister working together for the good of the country;they were always friends, and yet, as the American saw in the light ofthe New World, which he carried with him, how far from friends! At bestit was make-believe, the make-believe of superiority and inferiority, themake-believe of master and man, which could only be the more painful andghastly for the endeavor of two generous spirits to reach and rescue eachother through the asphyxiating unreality; but they kept up the show ofequality faithfully to the end. Goethe was born citizen of a freerepublic, and his youth was nurtured in the traditions of liberty; he wasone of the greatest souls of any time, and he must have known theimpossibility of the thing they pretended; but he died and made no sign, and the poet's friendship with the prince has passed smoothly intohistory as one of the things that might really be. They worked and playedtogether; they dined and danced, they picnicked and poetized, each on hisown side of the impassable gulf; with an air of its not being there whichprobably did not deceive their contemporaries so much as posterity. 

A part of the palace was of course undergoing repair; and in the gallerybeyond the conservatory a company of workmen were sitting at a tablewhere they had spread their luncheon. They were somewhat subdued by theconsciousness of their august environment; but the sight of them wascharming; they gave a kindly interest to the place which it had wantedbefore; and which the Marches felt again in another palace where thecustodian showed them the little tin dishes and saucepans which theGerman Empress Augusta and her sisters played with when they werechildren. The sight of these was more affecting even than the witheredwreaths which they had left on the death-bed of their mother, and whichare still mouldering there. 

This was in the Belvedere, the country house on the height overlookingWeimar, where the grand-ducal family spend the month of May, and wherethe stranger finds himself amid overwhelming associations of Goethe, although the place is so full of relics and memorials of the owners. Itseemed in fact to be a storehouse for the wedding-presents of the wholeconnection, which were on show in every room; Mrs. March hardly knewwhether they heightened the domestic effect or took from it; but theyenabled her to verify with the custodian's help certain royalintermarriages which she had been in doubt about before. 

Her zeal for these made such favor with him that he did not spare them aportrait of all those which March hoped to escape; he passed them over, scarcely able to stand, to the gardener, who was to show them theopen-air theatre where Goethe used to take part in the plays. 

The Natur-Theater was of a classic ideal, realized in the trained vinesand clipped trees which formed the coulisses. There was a grassy spacefor the chorus and the commoner audience, and then a few semicirculargradines cut in the turf, one alcove another, where the more honoredspectators sat. Behind the seats were plinths bearing the busts ofGoethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder. It was all very pretty, and ifever the weather in Weimar was dry enough to permit a performance, itmust have been charming to see a play in that open day to which the dramais native, though in the late hours it now keeps in the thick air ofmodern theatres it has long forgotten the fact. It would be difficult tobe Greek under a German sky, even when it was not actually raining, butMarch held that with Goethe's help it might have been done at Weimar, andhis wife and he proved themselves such enthusiasts for the Natur-Theaterthat the walnut-faced old gardener who showed it put together a sheaf ofthe flowers that grew nearest it and gave them to Mrs. March for asouvenir. 

They went for a cup of tea to the cafe which looks, as from anothereyebrow of the hill, out over lovely little Weimar in the plain below. Ina moment of sunshine the prospect was very smiling; but their spiritssank over their tea when it came; they were at least sorry they had notasked for coffee. Most of the people about them were taking beer, including the pretty girls of a young ladies' school, who were there withtheir books and needle-work, in the care of one of the teachers, apparently for the afternoon. 

Mrs. March perceived that they were not so much engaged with their booksor their needle-work but they had eyes for other things, and she followedthe glances of the girls till they rested upon the people at a tablesomewhat obliquely to the left. These were apparently a mother anddaughter, and they were listening to a young man who sat with his back toMrs. March, and leaned low over the table talking to them. They were bothsmiling radiantly, and as the girl smiled she kept turning herself fromthe waist up, and slanting her face from this side to that, as if to makesure that every one saw her smiling. 

Mrs. March felt her husband's gaze following her own, and she had justtime to press her finger firmly on his arm and reduce his cry ofastonishment to the hoarse whisper in which he gasped, "Good gracious!It's the pivotal girl!"

At the same moment the girl rose with her mother, and with the young man, who had risen too, came directly toward the Marches on their way out ofthe place without noticing them, though Burnamy passed so near that Mrs. March could almost have touched him. 

She had just strength to say, "Well, my dear! That was the cut direct. "

She said this in order to have her husband reassure her. "Nonsense! Henever saw us. Why didn't you speak to him?"

"Speak to him? I never shall speak to him again. No! This is the last ofMr. Burnamy for me. I shouldn't have minded his not recognizing us, for, as you say, I don't believe he saw us; but if he could go back to such agirl as that, and flirt with her, after Miss Triscoe, that's all I wishto know of him. Don't you try to look him up, Basil! I'm glad-yes, I'mglad he doesn't know how Stoller has come to feel about him; he deservesto suffer, and I hope he'll keep on suffering: You were quite right, mydear--and it shows how true your instinct is in such things (I don't callit more than instinct)--not to tell him what Stoller said, and I don'twant you ever should. "

She had risen in her excitement, and was making off in such haste thatshe would hardly give him time to pay for their tea, as she pulled himimpatiently to their carriage. 

At last he got a chance to say, "I don't think I can quite promise that;my mind's been veering round in the other direction. I think I shall tellhim. "

"What! After you've seen him flirting with that girl? Very well, then, you won't, my dear; that's all! He's behaving very basely to Agatha. "

"What's his flirtation with all the girls in the universe to do with myduty to him? He has a right to know what Stoller thinks. And as to hisbehaving badly toward Miss Triscoe, how has he done it? So far as youknow, there is nothing whatever between them. She either refused himoutright, that last night in Carlsbad, or else she made impossibleconditions with him. Burnamy is simply consoling himself, and I don'tblame him. "

"Consoling himself with a pivotal girl!" cried Mrs. March. 

"Yes, with a pivotal girl. Her pivotality may be a nervous idiosyncrasy, or it may be the effect of tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turningand twisting that way to get breath. But attribute the worst motive: sayit is to make people look at her! Well, Burnamy has a right to look withthe rest; and I am not going to renounce him because he takes refuge withone pretty girl from another. It's what men have been doing from thebeginning of time. "

"Oh, I dare say!"

"Men, " he went on, "are very delicately constituted; very peculiarly. They have been known to seek the society of girls in general, of anygirl, because some girl has made them happy; and when some girl has madethem unhappy, they are still more susceptible. Burnamy may be merelyamusing himself, or he may be consoling himself; but in either case Ithink the pivotal girl has as much right to him as Miss Triscoe. She hadhim first; and I'm all for her. "

LXI. 

Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl and her mother off on thetrain which they were taking that evening for Frankfort and Hombourg, andstrolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease with himself. While he was with the girl and near her he had felt the attraction bywhich youth impersonally draws youth, the charm which mere maid has formere man; but once beyond the range of this he felt sick at heart andashamed. He was aware of having used her folly as an anodyne for the painwhich was always gnawing at him, and he had managed to forget it in herfolly, but now it came back, and the sense that he had been reckless ofher rights came with it. He had done his best to make her think him inlove with her, by everything but words; he wondered how he could be suchan ass, such a wicked ass, as to try making her promise to write to himfrom Frankfort; he wished never to see her again, and he wished stillless to hear from her. It was some comfort to reflect that she had notpromised, but it was not comfort enough to restore him to suchfragmentary self-respect as he had been enjoying since he parted withAgatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not even get back to the resentmentwith which he had been staying himself somewhat before the pivotal girlunexpectedly appeared with her mother in Weimar. 

It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no official observance of theholiday, perhaps because the Grand-Duke was away at the manoeuvres, withall the other German princes. Burnamy had hoped for some voluntaryexcitement among the people, at least enough to warrant him in making apaper about Sedan Day in Weimar, which he could sell somewhere; but thenight was falling, and there was still no sign of popular rejoicing overthe French humiliation twenty-eight years before, except in the multitudeof Japanese lanterns which the children were everywhere carrying at theends of sticks. Babies had them in their carriages, and the effect of thefloating lights in the winding, up-and-down-hill streets was charmingeven to Burnamy's lack-lustre eyes. He went by his hotel and on to a cafewith a garden, where there was a patriotic, concert promised; he suppedthere, and then sat dreamily behind his beer, while the music banged andbrayed round him unheeded. 

Presently he heard a voice of friendly banter saying in English, "May Isit at your table?" and he saw an ironical face looking down on him. "There doesn't seem any other place. "

"Why, Mr. March!" Burnamy sprang up and wrung the hand held out to him, but he choked with his words of recognition; it was so good to see thisfaithful friend again, though he saw him now as he had seen him last, just when he had so little reason to be proud of himself. 

March settled his person in the chair facing Burnamy, and then glancedround at the joyful jam of people eating and drinking, under a firmamentof lanterns. "This is pretty, " he said, "mighty pretty. I shall make Mrs. March sorry for not coming, when I go back. "

"Is Mrs. March--she is--with you--in Weimar?" Burnamy asked stupidly. 

March forbore to take advantage of him. "Oh, yes. We saw you out atBelvedere this afternoon. Mrs. March thought for a moment that you meantnot to see us. A woman likes to exercise her imagination in those littleflights. "

"I never dreamed of your being there--I never saw--" Burnamy began. 

"Of course not. Neither did Mrs. Etkins, nor Miss Etkins; she was lookingvery pretty. Have you been here some time?"

"Not long. A week or so. I've been at the parade at Wurzburg. "

"At Wurzburg! Ah, how little the world is, or how large Wurzburg is! Wewere there nearly a week, and we pervaded the place. But there was agreat crowd for you to hide in from us. What had I better take?" A waiterhad come up, and was standing at March's elbow. "I suppose I mustn't sithere without ordering something?"

"White wine and selters, " said Burnamy vaguely. 

"The very thing! Why didn't I think of it? It's a divine drink: itsatisfies without filling. I had it a night or two before we left home, in the Madison Square Roof Garden. Have you seen 'Every Other Week'lately?"

"No, " said Burnamy, with more spirit than he had yet shown. 

"We've just got our mail from Nuremberg. The last number has a poem in itthat I rather like. " March laughed to see the young fellow's face lightup with joyful consciousness. "Come round to my hotel, after you're tiredhere, and I'll let you see it. There's no hurry. Did you notice thelittle children with their lanterns, as you came along? It's the gentlesteffect that a warlike memory ever came to. The French themselves couldn'thave minded those innocents carrying those soft lights on the day oftheir disaster. You ought to get something out of that, and I've got asubject in trust for you from Rose Adding. He and his mother were atWurzburg; I'm sorry to say the poor little chap didn't seem very well. They've gone to Holland for the sea air. " March had been talking forquantity in compassion of the embarrassment in which Burnamy seemedbound; but he questioned how far he ought to bring comfort to the youngfellow merely because he liked him. So far as he could make out, Burnamyhad been doing rather less than nothing to retrieve himself since theyhad met; and it was by an impulse that he could not have logicallydefended to Mrs. March that he resumed. "We found another friend of yoursin Wurzburg: Mr. Stoller. "

"Mr. Stoller?" Burnamy faintly echoed. 

"Yes; he was there to give his daughters a holiday during the manoeuvres;and they made the most of it. He wanted us to go to the parade with hisfamily but we declined. The twins were pretty nearly the death of GeneralTriscoe. "

Again Burnamy echoed him. "General Triscoe?"

"Ah, yes: I didn't tell you. General Triscoe and his daughter had come onwith Mrs. Adding and Rose. Kenby--you remember Kenby, On theNorumbia?--Kenby happened to be there, too; we were quite a family party;and Stoller got the general to drive out to the manoeuvres with him andhis girls. "

Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed letting himself go. He didnot know what he should say to Mrs. March when he came to confess havingtold Burnamy everything before she got a chance at him; he pushed onrecklessly, upon the principle, which probably will not hold in morals, that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. "I have a message foryou from Mr. Stoller. "

"For me?" Burnamy gasped. 

"I've been wondering how I should put it, for I hadn't expected to seeyou. But it's simply this: he wants you to know--and he seemed to want meto know--that he doesn't hold you accountable in the way he did. He'sthought it all over, and he's decided that he had no right to expect youto save him from his own ignorance where he was making a show ofknowledge. As he said, he doesn't choose to plead the baby act. He saysthat you're all right, and your place on the paper is open to you. "

Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now he seemed braced forinstant response. "I think he's wrong, " he said, so harshly that thepeople at the next table looked round. "His feeling as he does hasnothing to do with the fact, and it doesn't let me out. "

March would have liked to take him in his arms; he merely said, "I thinkyou're quite right, as to that. But there's such a thing as forgiveness, you know. It doesn't change the nature of what you've done; but as far asthe sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it. "

"Yes, I understand that. But I can't accept his forgiveness if I hatehim. "

"But perhaps you won't always hate him. Some day you may have a chance todo him a good turn. It's rather banale; but there doesn't seem any otherway. Well, I have given you his message. Are you going with me to getthat poem?"

When March had given Burnamy the paper at his hotel, and Burnamy had putit in his pocket, the young man said he thought he would take somecoffee, and he asked March to join him in the dining-room where they hadstood talking. 

"No, thank you, " said the elder, "I don't propose sitting up all night, and you'll excuse me if I go to bed now. It's a little informal to leavea guest--"

"You're not leaving a guest! I'm at home here. I'm staying in this hoteltoo. "

March said, "Oh!" and then he added abruptly, "Good-night, " and went upstairs under the fresco of the five poets. 

"Whom were you talking with below?" asked Mrs. March through the dooropening into his room from hers. 

"Burnamy, " he answered from within. "He's staying in this house. He letme know just as I was going to turn him out for the night. It's one ofthose little uncandors of his that throw suspicion on his honesty ingreat things. "

"Oh! Then you've been telling him, " she said, with a mental bound highabove and far beyond the point. 

"Everything. "

"About Stoller, too?"

"About Stoller and his daughters, and Mrs. Adding and Rose and Kenby andGeneral Triscoe--and Agatha. "

"Very well. That's what I call shabby. Don't ever talk to me again aboutthe inconsistencies of women. But now there's something perfectlyfearful. "

"What is it?"

"A letter from Miss Triscoe came after you were gone, asking us to findrooms in some hotel for her and her father to-morrow. He isn't well, andthey're coming. And I've telegraphed them to come here. Now what do yousay?"

LXII. 

They could see no way out of the trouble, and Mrs. March could not resignherself to it till her husband suggested that she should consider itprovidential. This touched the lingering superstition in which she hadbeen ancestrally taught to regard herself as a means, when in a verytight place, and to leave the responsibility with the moral government ofthe universe. As she now perceived, it had been the same as ordered thatthey should see Burnamy under such conditions in the afternoon that theycould not speak to him, and hear where he was staying; and in an inferiordegree it had been the same as ordered that March should see him in theevening and tell him everything, so that she should know just how to actwhen she saw him in the morning. If he could plausibly account for therenewal of his flirtation with Miss Elkins, or if he seemed generallyworthy apart from that, she could forgive him. 

It was so pleasant when he came in at breakfast with his well-rememberedsmile, that she did not require from him any explicit defence. While theytalked she was righting herself in an undercurrent of drama with MissTriscoe, and explaining to her that they could not possibly wait over forher and her father in Weimar, but must be off that day for Berlin, asthey had made all their plans. It was not easy, even in drama where onehas everything one's own way, to prove that she could not without impietyso far interfere with the course of Providence as to prevent MissTriscoe's coming with her father to the same hotel where Burnamy wasstaying. She contrived, indeed, to persuade her that she had not known hewas staying there when she telegraphed them where to come, and that inthe absence of any open confidence from Miss Triscoe she was not obligedto suppose that his presence would be embarrassing. 

March proposed leaving her with Burnamy while he went up into the townand interviewed the house of Schiller, which he had not done yet; and assoon as he got himself away she came to business, breaking altogetherfrom the inner drama with Miss Triscoe and devoting herself to Burnamy. They had already got so far as to have mentioned the meeting with theTriscoes in Wurzburg, and she said: "Did Mr. March tell you they werecoming here? Or, no! We hadn't heard then. Yes, they are comingto-morrow. They may be going to stay some time. She talked of Weimar whenwe first spoke of Germany on the ship. " Burnamy said nothing, and shesuddenly added, with a sharp glance, "They wanted us to get them rooms, and we advised their coming to this house. " He started verysatisfactorily, and "Do you think they would be comfortable, here?" shepursued. 

"Oh, yes, very. They can have my room; it's southeast; I shall be goinginto other quarters. " She did not say anything; and "Mrs. March, " hebegan again, "what is the use of my beating about the bush? You must knowwhat I went back to Carlsbad for, that night--"

"No one ever told--"

"Well, you must have made a pretty good guess. But it was a failure. Iought to have failed, and I did. She said that unless her father likedit--And apparently he hasn't liked it. " Burnamy smiled ruefully. 

"How do you know? She didn't know where you were!"

"She could have got word to me if she had had good news for me. They'veforwarded other letters from Pupp's. But it's all right; I had nobusiness to go back to Carlsbad. Of course you didn't know I was in thishouse when you told them to come; and I must clear out. I had betterclear out of Weimar, too. "

"No, I don't think so; I have no right to pry into your affairs, but--"

"Oh, they're wide enough open!"

"And you may have changed your mind. I thought you might, when I saw youyesterday at Belvedere--"

"I was only trying to make bad worse. "

"Then I think the situation has changed entirely through what Mr. Stollersaid to Mr. March. "

"I can't see how it has. I committed an act of shabby treachery, and I'mas much to blame as if he still wanted to punish me for it. "

"Did Mr. March say that to you?"

"No; I said that to Mr. March; and he couldn't answer it, and you can't. You're very good, and very kind, but you can't answer it. "

"I can answer it very well, " she boasted, but she could find nothingbetter to say than, "It's your duty to her to see her and let her know. "

"Doesn't she know already?"

"She has a right to know it from you. I think you are morbid, Mr. Burnamy. You know very well I didn't like your doing that to Mr. Stoller. I didn't say so at the time, because you seemed to feel it enoughyourself. But I did like your owning up to it, " and here Mrs. Marchthought it time to trot out her borrowed battle-horse again. "My husbandalways says that if a person owns up to an error, fully and faithfully, as you've always done, they make it the same in its consequences to themas if it had never been done. "

"Does Mr. March say that?" asked Burnamy with a relenting smile. 

"Indeed he does!"

Burnamy hesitated; then he asked, gloomily again:

"And what about the consequences to the, other fellow?"

"A woman, " said Mrs. March, "has no concern with them. And besides, Ithink you've done all you could to save Mr. Stoller from theconsequences. "

"I haven't done anything. "

"No matter. You would if you could. I wonder, " she broke off, to preventhis persistence at a point where her nerves were beginning to give way, "what can be keeping Mr. March?"

Nothing much more important, it appeared later, than the pleasure ofsauntering through the streets on the way to the house of Schiller, andlooking at the pretty children going to school, with books under theirarms. It was the day for the schools to open after the long summervacation, and there was a freshness of expectation in the shining faceswhich, if it could not light up his own graybeard visage, could at leasttouch his heart:

When he reached the Schiller house he found that it was really not theSchiller house, but the Schiller flat, of three or four rooms, one flightup, whose windows look out upon the street named after the poet. Thewhole place is bare and clean; in one corner of the large room frontingthe street stands Schiller's writing-table, with his chair before it;with the foot extending toward this there stands, in another corner, thenarrow bed on which he died; some withered wreaths on the pillow frame apicture of his deathmask, which at first glance is like his dead facelying there. It is all rather tasteless, and all rather touching, and theplace with its meagre appointments, as compared with the rich Goethehouse, suggests that personal competition with Goethe in which Schilleris always falling into the second place. Whether it will be finally sowith him in literature it is too early to ask of time, and upon otherpoints eternity will not be interrogated. "The great, Goethe and the goodSchiller, " they remain; and yet, March reasoned, there was something goodin Goethe and something great, in Schiller. 

He was so full of the pathos of their inequality before the world that hedid not heed the warning on the door of the pastry-shop near the Schillerhouse, and on opening it he bedaubed his hand with the fresh paint on it. He was then in such a state, that he could not bring his mind to bearupon the question of which cakes his wife would probably prefer, and hestood helplessly holding up his hand till the good woman behind thecounter discovered his plight, and uttered a loud cry of compassion. Sheran and got a wet napkin, which she rubbed with soap, and then sheinstructed him by word and gesture to rub his hand upon it, and she didnot leave him till his rescue was complete. He let her choose a varietyof the cakes for him, and came away with a gay paper bag full of them, and with the feeling that he had been in more intimate relations with thelife of Weimar than travellers are often privileged to be. He argued fromthe instant and intelligent sympathy of the pastry woman a high grade ofculture in all classes; and he conceived the notion of pretending to Mrs. March that he had got these cakes from, a descendant of Schiller. 

His deceit availed with her for the brief moment in which she always, after so many years' experience of his duplicity, believed anything hetold her. They dined merrily together at their hotel, and then Burnamycame down to the station with them and was very comfortable to March inhelping him to get their tickets and their baggage registered. The trainwhich was to take them to Halle, where they were to change for Berlin, was rather late, and they had but ten minutes after it came in before itwould start again. Mrs. March was watching impatiently at the window ofthe waiting-room for the dismounting passengers to clear the platform andallow the doors to be opened; suddenly she gave a cry, and turned and raninto the passage by which the new arrivals were pouring out toward thesuperabundant omnibuses. March and Burnamy, who had been talking apart, mechanically rushed after her and found her kissing Miss Triscoe andshaking hands with the general amidst a tempest of questions and answers, from which it appeared that the Triscoes had got tired of staying inWurzburg, and had simply come on to Weimar a day sooner than they hadintended. 

The, general was rather much bundled up for a day which was mild for aGerman summer day, and he coughed out an explanation that he had taken anabominable cold at that ridiculous parade, and had not shaken it off yet. He had a notion that change of air would be better for him; it could notbe worse. 

He seemed a little vague as to Burnamy, rather than inimical. While theladies were still talking eagerly together in proffer and acceptance ofMrs. March's lamentations that she should be going away just as MissTriscoe was coming, he asked if the omnibus for their hotel was there. Heby no means resented Burnamy's assurance that it was, and he did notrefuse to let him order their baggage, little and large, loaded upon it. By the time this was done, Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had so fardetached themselves from each other that they could separate after onemore formal expression of regret and forgiveness. With a lament intowhich she poured a world of inarticulate emotions, Mrs. March wrenchedherself from the place, and suffered herself, to be pushed toward hertrain. But with the last long look which she cast over her shoulder, before she vanished into the waiting-room, she saw Miss Triscoe andBurnamy transacting the elaborate politenesses of amiable strangers withregard to the very small bag which the girl had in her hand. He succeededin relieving her of it; and then he led the way out of the station on theleft of the general, while Miss Triscoe brought up the rear. 

LXIII. 

From the window of the train as it drew out Mrs. March tried for aglimpse of the omnibus in which her proteges were now rolling awaytogether. As they were quite out of sight in the omnibus, which wasitself out of sight, she failed, but as she fell back against her seatshe treated the recent incident with a complexity and simultaneity ofwhich no report can give an idea. At the end one fatal convictionremained: that in everything she had said she had failed to explain toMiss Triscoe how Burnamy happened to be in Weimar and how he happened tobe there with them in the station. She required March to say how she hadoverlooked the very things which she ought to have mentioned first, andwhich she had on the point of her tongue the whole time. She went overthe entire ground again to see if she could discover the reason why shehad made such an unaccountable break, and it appeared that she was led toit by his rushing after her with Burnamy before she had had a chance tosay a word about him; of course she could not say anything in hispresence. This gave her some comfort, and there was consolation in thefact that she had left them together without the least intention orconnivance, and now, no matter what happened, she could not accuseherself, and he could not accuse her of match-making. 

He said that his own sense of guilt was so great that he should not dreamof accusing her of anything except of regret that now she could neverclaim the credit of bringing the lovers together under circumstances sofavorable. As soon as they were engaged they could join in renouncing herwith a good conscience, and they would probably make this the basis oftheir efforts to propitiate the general. 

She said she did not care, and with the mere removal of the lovers inspace, her interest in them began to abate. They began to be of a minorimportance in the anxieties of the change of trains at Halle, and in theexcitement of settling into the express from Frankfort there were momentswhen they were altogether forgotten. The car was of almost Americanlength, and it ran with almost American smoothness; when the conductorcame and collected an extra fare for their seats, the Marches felt thatif the charge had been two dollars instead of two marks they would havehad every advantage of American travel. 

On the way to Berlin the country was now fertile and flat, and nowsterile and flat; near the capital the level sandy waste spread almost toits gates. The train ran quickly through the narrow fringe of suburbs, and then they were in one of those vast Continental stations which putour outdated depots to shame. The good 'traeger' who took possession ofthem and their hand-bags, put their boxes on a baggage-bearing drosky, and then got them another drosky for their personal transportation. Thiswas a drosky of the first-class, but they would not have thought it so, either from the vehicle itself, or from the appearance of the driver andhis horses. The public carriages of Germany are the shabbiest in theworld; at Berlin the horses look like old hair trunks and the driverslike their moth-eaten contents. 

The Marches got no splendor for the two prices they paid, and theirapproach to their hotel on Unter den Linden was as unimpressive as theignoble avenue itself. It was a moist, cold evening, and the mean, tiresome street, slopped and splashed under its two rows of small trees, to which the thinning leaves clung like wet rags, between long lines ofshops and hotels which had neither the grace of Paris nor the grandiosityof New York. March quoted in bitter derision:

 "Bees, bees, was it your hydromel, Under the Lindens?"

and his wife said that if Commonwealth Avenue in Boston could be imaginedwith its trees and without their beauty, flanked by the architecture ofSixth Avenue, with dashes of the west side of Union Square, that would bethe famous Unter den Linden, where she had so resolutely decided thatthey would stay while in Berlin. 

They had agreed upon the hotel, and neither could blame the other becauseit proved second-rate in everything but its charges. They ate a poorishtable d'hote dinner in such low spirits that March had no heart to get arise from his wife by calling her notice to the mouse which fed upon thecrumbs about their feet while they dined. Their English-speaking waitersaid that it was a very warm evening, and they never knew whether thiswas because he was a humorist, or because he was lonely and wished totalk, or because it really was a warm evening, for Berlin. When they hadfinished, they went out and drove about the greater part of the eveninglooking for another hotel, whose first requisite should be that it wasnot on Unter den Linden. What mainly determined Mrs. March in favor ofthe large, handsome, impersonal place they fixed upon was the fact thatit was equipped for steam-heating; what determined March was the factthat it had a passenger-office where when he wished to leave, he couldbuy his railroad tickets and have his baggage checked without themaddening anxiety, of doing it at the station. But it was precisely inthese points that the hotel which admirably fulfilled its other functionsfell short. The weather made a succession of efforts throughout theirstay to clear up cold; it merely grew colder without clearing up, butthis seemed to offer no suggestion of steam for heating their bleakapartment and the chilly corridors to the management. With the help of alarge lamp which they kept burning night and day they got the temperatureof their rooms up to sixty; there was neither stove nor fireplace, thecold electric bulbs diffused a frosty glare; and in the vast, statelydining-room with its vaulted roof, there was nothing to warm them buttheir plates, and the handles of their knives and forks, which, by amysterious inspiration, were always hot. When they were ready to go, March experienced from the apathy of the baggage clerk and the reluctanceof the porters a more piercing distress than any he had known at therailroad stations; and one luckless valise which he ordered sent afterhim by express reached his bankers in Paris a fortnight overdue, with anaccumulation of charges upon it outvaluing the books which it contained. 

But these were minor defects in an establishment which had many merits, and was mainly of the temperament and intention of the large Englishrailroad hotels. They looked from their windows down into a gardenedsquare, peopled with a full share of the superabounding statues of Berlinand frequented by babies and nurse maids who seemed not to mind the coldany more than the stone kings and generals. The aspect of this square, like the excellent cooking of the hotel and the architecture of theimperial capital, suggested the superior civilization of Paris. Even therows of gray houses and private palaces of Berlin are in the Frenchtaste, which is the only taste there is in Berlin. The suggestion ofParis is constant, but it is of Paris in exile, and without the chicwhich the city wears in its native air. The crowd lacks this as much asthe architecture and the sculpture; there is no distinction among the menexcept for now and then a military figure, and among the women no stylesuch as relieves the commonplace rash of the New York streets. TheBerliners are plain and ill dressed, both men and women, and even thelittle children are plain. Every one is ill dressed, but no one isragged, and among the undersized homely folk of the lower classes thereis no such poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults the sight inNew York. That which distinctly recalls our metropolis is the loftypassage of the elevated trains intersecting the prospectives of manystreets; but in Berlin the elevated road is carried on massive brickarchways and not lifted upon gay, crazy iron ladders like ours. 

When you look away from this, and regard Berlin on its aesthetic, sideyou are again in that banished Paris, whose captive art-soul is made toserve, so far as it may be enslaved to such an effect, in the celebrationof the German triumph over France. Berlin has never the presence of agreat capital, however, in spite of its perpetual monumental insistence. There is no streaming movement in broad vistas; the dull lookingpopulation moves sluggishly; there is no show of fine equipages. Theprevailing tone of the city and the sky is gray; but under the cloudyheaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in the architecture. Thereare hints of the older German cities in some of the remote and observestreets, but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which in fact the actualBerlin hardly antedates. 

There are easily more statues in Berlin than in any other city in theworld, but they only unite in failing to give Berlin an artistic air. They stand in long rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments; theypoise on one leg above domes and arches; they shelter themselves inniches; they ride about on horseback; they sit or lounge on streetcorners or in garden walks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort whichfails of any impression. If they were only furiously baroque they wouldbe something, and it may be from a sense of this that there is aself-assertion in the recent sculptures, which are always patriotic, morenoisy and bragging than anything else in perennial brass. This offensiveart is the modern Prussian avatar of the old German romantic spirit, andbears the same relation to it that modern romanticism in literature bearsto romance. It finds its apotheosis in the monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I. , a vast incoherent group of swelling and swaggering bronze, commemoratingthe victory of the first Prussian Emperor in the war with the last FrenchEmperor, and avenging the vanquished upon the victors by its ugliness. The ungainly and irrelevant assemblage of men and animals backs away fromthe imperial palace, and saves itself too soon from plunging over theborder of a canal behind it, not far from Rauch's great statue of thegreat Frederic. To come to it from the simplicity and quiet of that noblework is like passing from some exquisite masterpiece of naturalisticacting to the rant and uproar of melodrama; and the Marches stood stunnedand bewildered by its wild explosions. 

When they could escape they found themselves so convenient to theimperial palace that they judged best to discharge at once the obligationto visit it which must otherwise weigh upon them. They entered the courtwithout opposition from the sentinel, and joined other strangersstraggling instinctively toward a waiting-room in one corner of thebuilding, where after they had increased to some thirty, a custodian tookcharge of them, and led them up a series of inclined plains of brick tothe state apartments. In the antechamber they found a provision ofimmense felt over-shoes which they were expected to put on for theirpassage over the waxed marquetry of the halls. These roomy slippers weredesigned for the accommodation of the native boots; and upon the mixedcompany of foreigners the effect was in the last degree humiliating. Thewomen's skirts some what hid their disgrace, but the men were openly putto shame, and they shuffled forward with their bodies at a convenientincline like a company of snow-shoers. In the depths of his own abasementMarch heard a female voice behind him sighing in American accents, "Tothink I should be polishing up these imperial floors with my republicanfeet!"

The protest expressed the rebellion which he felt mounting in his ownheart as they advanced through the heavily splendid rooms, in thehistorical order of the family portraits recording the rise of thePrussian sovereigns from Margraves to Emperors. He began to realize herethe fact which grew open him more and more that imperial Germany is notthe effect of a popular impulse but of a dynastic propensity. There isnothing original in the imperial palace, nothing national; it embodiesand proclaims a powerful personal will, and in its adaptations of Frenchart it appeals to no emotion in the German witness nobler than his pridein the German triumph over the French in war. March found it tiresomebeyond the tiresome wont of palaces, and he gladly shook off the sense ofit with his felt shoes. "Well, " he confided to his wife when they werefairly out-of-doors, "if Prussia rose in the strength of silence, asCarlyle wants us to believe, she is taking it out in talk now, and talltalk. "

"Yes, isn't she!" Mrs. March assented, and with a passionate desire forexcess in a bad thing, which we all know at times, she looked eagerlyabout her for proofs of that odious militarism of the empire, which oughtto have been conspicuous in the imperial capital; but possibly becausethe troops were nearly all away at the manoeuvres, there were hardly morein the streets than she had sometimes seen in Washington. Again theGerman officers signally failed to offer her any rudeness when she metthem on the side-walks. There were scarcely any of them, and perhaps thatmight have been the reason why they were not more aggressive; but a wholecompany of soldiers marching carelessly up to the palace from theBrandenburg gate, without music, or so much style as our own militiaoften puts on, regarded her with inoffensive eyes so far as they lookedat her. She declared that personally there was nothing against thePrussians; even when in uniform they were kindly and modest-looking men;it was when they got up on pedestals, in bronze or marble, that they, began to bully and to brag. 

LXIV. 

The dinner which the Marches got at a restaurant on Unter den Lindenalmost redeemed the avenue from the disgrace it had fallen into withthem. It was, the best meal they had yet eaten in Europe, and as to factand form was a sort of compromise between a French dinner and an Englishdinner which they did not hesitate to pronounce Prussian. The waiter whoserved it was a friendly spirit, very sensible of their intelligentappreciation of the dinner; and from him they formed a more respectfulopinion of Berlin civilization than they had yet held. After the mannerof strangers everywhere they judged the country they were visiting fromsuch of its inhabitants as chance brought them in contact with; and itwould really be a good thing for nations that wish to stand well with theworld at large to look carefully to the behavior of its cabmen and carconductors, its hotel clerks and waiters, its theatre-ticket sellers andushers, its policemen and sacristans, its landlords and salesmen; for bythese rather than by its society women and its statesmen and divines, isit really judged in the books of travellers; some attention also shouldbe paid to the weather, if the climate is to be praised. In the railroadcafe at Potsdam there was a waiter so rude to the Marches that if theyhad not been people of great strength of character he would have undonethe favorable impression the soldiers and civilians of Berlin generallyhad been at such pains to produce in them; and throughout the week ofearly September which they passed there, it rained so much and sobitterly, it was so wet and so cold, that they might have come awaythinking it's the worst climate in the world, if it had not been for aman whom they saw in one of the public gardens pouring a heavy streamfrom his garden hose upon the shrubbery already soaked and shuddering inthe cold. But this convinced them that they were suffering from weatherand not from the climate, which must really be hot and dry; and they wenthome to their hotel and sat contentedly down in a temperature of sixtydegrees. The weather, was not always so bad; one day it was dry coldinstead of wet cold, with rough, rusty clouds breaking a blue sky;another day, up to eleven in the forenoon, it was like Indian summer;then it changed to a harsh November air; and then it relented and endedso mildly, that they hired chairs in the place before the imperial palacefor five pfennigs each, and sat watching the life before them. Motherlywomen-folk were there knitting; two American girls in chairs near themchatted together; some fine equipages, the only ones they saw in Berlin, went by; a dog and a man (the wife who ought to have been in harness wasprobably sick, and the poor fellow was forced to take her place) passeddragging a cart; some schoolboys who had hung their satchels upon the lowrailing were playing about the base of the statue of King William III. Inthe joyous freedom of German childhood. 

They seemed the gayer for the brief moments of sunshine, but to theAmericans, who were Southern by virtue of their sky, the brightness had asense of lurking winter in it, such as they remembered feeling on a sunnyday in Quebec. The blue heaven looked sad; but they agreed that it fitlyroofed the bit of old feudal Berlin which forms the most ancient wing ofthe Schloss. This was time-blackened and rude, but at least it did nottry to be French, and it overhung the Spree which winds through the cityand gives it the greatest charm it has. In fact Berlin, which isotherwise so grandiose without grandeur and so severe withoutimpressiveness, is sympathetic wherever the Spree opens it to the sky. The stream is spanned by many bridges, and bridges cannot well beunpicturesque, especially if they have statues to help them out. TheSpree abounds in bridges, and it has a charming habit of slow hay-ladenbarges; at the landings of the little passenger-steamers which ply uponit there are cafes and summer-gardens, and these even in the inclementair of September suggested a friendly gayety. 

The Marches saw it best in the tour of the elevated road in Berlin whichthey made in an impassioned memory of the elevated road in New York. Thebrick viaducts which carry this arch the Spree again and again in theircourse through and around the city, but with never quite such spectaculareffects as our spidery tressels, achieve. The stations are pleasant, sometimes with lunch-counters and news-stands, but have not thecomic-opera-chalet prettiness of ours, and are not so frequent. The roadis not so smooth, the cars not so smooth-running or so swift. On theother hand they are comfortably cushioned, and they are neverovercrowded. The line is at times above, at times below the houses, andat times on a level with them, alike in city and in suburbs. The trainwhirled out of thickly built districts, past the backs of the old houses, into outskirts thinly populated, with new houses springing up withoutorder or continuity among the meadows and vegetable-gardens, and alongthe ready-made, elm-planted avenues, where wooden fences divided thevacant lots. Everywhere the city was growing out over the country, inblocks and detached edifices of limestone, sandstone, red and yellowbrick, larger or smaller, of no more uniformity than our suburbandwellings, but never of their ugliness or lawless offensiveness. 

In an effort for the intimate life of the country March went twosuccessive mornings for his breakfast to the Cafe Bauer, which has someadmirable wall-printings, and is the chief cafe on Unter den Linden; buton both days there were more people in the paintings than out of them. The second morning the waiter who took his order recognized him andasked, "Wie gestern?" and from this he argued an affectionate constancyin the Berliners, and a hospitable observance of the tastes of strangers. At his bankers, on the other hand, the cashier scrutinized his signatureand remarked that it did not look like the signature in his letter ofcredit, and then he inferred a suspicious mind in the moneyed classes ofPrussia; as he had not been treated with such unkind doubt by Hebrewbankers anywhere, he made a mental note that the Jews were politer thanthe Christians in Germany. In starting for Potsdam he asked a traegerwhere the Potsdam train was and the man said, "Dat train dare, " and incoming back he helped a fat old lady out of the car, and she thanked himin English. From these incidents, both occurring the same day in the sameplace, the inference of a widespread knowledge of our language in allclasses of the population was inevitable. 

In this obvious and easy manner he studied contemporary civilization inthe capital. He even carried his researches farther, and went one rainyafternoon to an exhibition of modern pictures in a pavilion of theThiergarten, where from the small attendance he inferred an indifferenceto the arts which he would not ascribe to the weather. One evening at asummer theatre where they gave the pantomime of the 'Puppenfee' and theoperetta of 'Hansel and Gretel', he observed that the greater part of theaudience was composed of nice plain young girls and children, and henoted that there was no sort of evening dress; from the large number ofAmericans present he imagined a numerous colony in Berlin, where theymast have an instinctive sense of their co-nationality, since one of themin the stress of getting his hat and overcoat when they all came out, confidently addressed him in English. But he took stock of hisimpressions with his wife, and they seemed to him so few, after all, thathe could not resist a painful sense of isolation in the midst of theenvironment. 

They made a Sunday excursion to the Zoological Gardens in theThiergarten, with a large crowd of the lower classes, but though they hada great deal of trouble in getting there by the various kinds ofhorsecars and electric cars, they did not feel that they had got near tothe popular life. They endeavored for some sense of Berlin society bydriving home in a drosky, and on the way they passed rows of beautifulhouses, in French and Italian taste, fronting the deep, damp green parkfrom the Thiergartenstrasse, in which they were confident cultivated anddelightful people lived; but they remained to the last with nothing buttheir unsupported conjecture. 

LXV. 

Their excursion to Potsdam was the cream of their sojourn in Berlin. Theychose for it the first fair morning, and they ran out over the flat sandyplains surrounding the capital, and among the low hills surroundingPotsdam before it actually began to rain. 

They wished immediately to see Sans Souci for the great Frederick's sake, and they drove through a lively shower to the palace, where they waitedwith a horde of twenty-five other tourists in a gusty colonnade beforethey were led through Voltaire's room and Frederick's death chamber. 

The French philosopher comes before the Prussian prince at Sans Soucieven in the palatial villa which expresses the wilful caprice of thegreat Frederick as few edifices have embodied the whims or tastes oftheir owners. The whole affair is eighteenth-century French, as theGermans conceived it. The gardened terrace from which the low, one-storybuilding, thickly crusted with baroque sculptures, looks down into amany-colored parterre, was luxuriantly French, and sentimentally Frenchthe colonnaded front opening to a perspective of artificial ruins, withbroken pillars lifting a conscious fragment of architrave against thesky. Within, all again was French in the design, the decoration and thefurnishing. At that time there, was in fact no other taste, andFrederick, who despised and disused his native tongue, was resolved uponFrench taste even in his intimate companionship. The droll story of hiscoquetry with the terrible free spirit which he got from France to be hisguest is vividly reanimated at Sans Souci, where one breathes the veryair in which the strangely assorted companions lived, and in which theyparted so soon to pursue each other with brutal annoyance on one side, and with merciless mockery on the other. Voltaire was long ago revengedupon his host for all the indignities he suffered from him in theircomedy; he left deeply graven upon Frederick's fame the trace of thoselacerating talons which he could strike to the quick; and it is thesingular effect of this scene of their brief friendship that one feelsthere the pre-eminence of the wit in whatever was most important tomankind. 

The rain had lifted a little and the sun shone out on the bloom of thelovely parterre where the Marches profited by a smiling moment to wanderamong the statues and the roses heavy with the shower. Then they walkedback to their carriage and drove to the New Palace, which expresses indiffering architectural terms the same subjection to an alien ideal ofbeauty. It is thronged without by delightfully preposterous rococcostatues, and within it is rich in all those curiosities and memorials ofroyalty with which palaces so well know how to fatigue the flesh andspirit of their visitors. 

The Marches escaped from it all with sighs and groans of relief, andbefore they drove off to see the great fountain of the Orangeries, theydedicated a moment of pathos to the Temple of Friendship which Frederickbuilt in memory of unhappy Wilhelmina of Beyreuth, the sister he loved inthe common sorrow of their wretched home, and neglected when he came tohis kingdom. It is beautiful in its rococco way, swept up to on itsterrace by most noble staircases, and swaggered over by baroqueallegories of all sorts: Everywhere the statues outnumbered the visitors, who may have been kept away by the rain; the statues naturally did notmind it. 

Sometime in the midst of their sight-seeing the Marches had dinner in amildewed restaurant, where a compatriotic accent caught their ear in avoice saying to the waiter, "We are in a hurry. " They looked round andsaw that it proceeded from the pretty nose of a young American girl, whosat with a party of young American girls at a neighboring table. Thenthey perceived that all the people in that restaurant were Americans, mostly young girls, who all looked as if they were in a hurry. Butneither their beauty nor their impatience had the least effect with thewaiter, who prolonged the dinner at his pleasure, and alarmed the Marcheswith the misgiving that they should not have time for the final palace ontheir list. 

This was the palace where the father of Frederick, the mad old FrederickWilliam, brought up his children with that severity which Solomon urgedbut probably did not practise. It is a vast place, but they had time forit all, though the custodian made the most of them as the latest comersof the day, and led them through it with a prolixity as great as theirwaiter's. He was a most friendly custodian, and when he found that theyhad some little notion of what they wanted to see, he mixed zeal with hispatronage, and in a manner made them his honored guests. They saweverything but the doorway where the faithful royal father used to lie inwait for his children and beat them, princes and princesses alike, withhis knobby cane as they came through. They might have seen this doorwaywithout knowing it; but from the window overlooking the parade-groundwhere his family watched the manoeuvres of his gigantic grenadiers, theymade sure of just such puddles as Frederick William forced his family tosit with their feet in, while they dined alfresco on pork and cabbage;and they visited the room of the Smoking Parliament where he ruled hisconvives with a rod of iron, and made them the victims of his bad jokes. The measuring-board against which he took the stature of his tallgrenadiers is there, and one room is devoted to those masterpieces whichhe used to paint in the agonies of gout. His chef d'oeuvre contains afigure with two left feet, and there seemed no reason why it might not. Have had three. In another room is a small statue of Carlyle, who did somuch to rehabilitate the house which the daughter of it, Wilhelmina, didso much to demolish in the regard of men. 

The palace is now mostly kept for guests, and there is a chamber whereNapoleon slept, which is not likely to be occupied soon by any otherself-invited guest of his nation. It is perhaps to keep the princes ofEurope humble that hardly a palace on the Continent is without thechamber of this adventurer, who, till he stooped to be like them, waseasily their master. Another democracy had here recorded its invasion inthe American stoves which the custodian pointed out in the corridor whenMrs, March, with as little delay as possible, had proclaimed theircountry. The custodian professed an added respect for them from the fact, and if he did not feel it, no doubt he merited the drink money which theylavished on him at parting. 

Their driver also was a congenial spirit, and when he let them out of hiscarriage at the station, he excused the rainy day to them. He was a merryfellow beyond the wont of his nation, and he-laughed at the bad weather, as if it had been a good joke on them. 

His gayety, and the red sunset light, which shone on the stems of thepines on the way back to Berlin, contributed to the content in which theyreviewed their visit to Potsdam. They agreed that the place was perfectlycharming, and that it was incomparably expressive of kingly will andpride. These had done there on the grand scale what all the Germanprinces and princelings had tried to do in imitation and emulation ofFrench splendor. In Potsdam the grandeur, was not a historical growth asat Versailles, but was the effect of family genius, in which there wasoften the curious fascination of insanity. 

They felt this strongly again amidst the futile monuments of theHohenzollern Museum, in Berlin, where all the portraits, effigies, personal belongings and memorials of that gifted, eccentric race aregathered and historically disposed. The princes of the mighty line whostand out from the rest are Frederick the Great and his infuriate. Father; and in the waxen likeness of the son, a small thin figure, terribly spry, and a face pitilessly alert, appears something of themadness which showed in the life of the sire. 

They went through many rooms in which the memorials of the kings andqueens, the emperors and empresses were carefully ordered, and felt nokindness except before the relics relating to the Emperor Frederick andhis mother. In the presence of the greatest of the dynasty theyexperienced a kind of terror which March expressed, when they were safelyaway, in the confession of his joy that those people were dead. 

LXVI. 

The rough weather which made Berlin almost uninhabitable to Mrs. Marchhad such an effect with General Triscoe at Weimar that under the ordersof an English-speaking doctor he retreated from it altogether and went tobed. Here he escaped the bronchitis which had attacked him, and hisconvalesence left him so little to complain of that he could not alwayskeep his temper. In the absence of actual offence, either from hisdaughter or from Burnamy, his sense of injury took a retroactive form; itcentred first in Stoller and the twins; then it diverged toward RoseAdding, his mother and Kenby, and finally involved the Marches in thesame measure of inculpation; for they had each and all had part, directlyor indirectly, in the chances that brought on his cold. 

He owed to Burnamy the comfort of the best room in the hotel, and he wasconstantly dependent upon his kindness; but he made it evident that hedid not over-value Burnamy's sacrifice and devotion, and that it was notan unmixed pleasure, however great a convenience, to have him about. Ingiving up his room, Burnamy had proposed going out of the hotelaltogether; but General Triscoe heard of this with almost as greatvexation as he had accepted the room. He besought him not to go, but soungraciously that his daughter was ashamed, and tried to atone for hismanner by the kindness of her own. 

Perhaps General Triscoe would not have been without excuse if he were noteager to have her share with destitute merit the fortune which she hadhitherto shared only with him. He was old, and certain luxuries hadbecome habits if not necessaries with him. Of course he did not say thisto himself; and still less did he say it to her. But he let her see thathe did not enjoy the chance which had thrown them again in such closerelations with Burnamy, and he did pot hide his belief that the Marcheswere somehow to blame for it. This made it impossible for her to write atonce to Mrs. March as she had promised; but she was determined that itshould not make her unjust to Burnamy. She would not avoid him; she wouldnot let anything that had happened keep her from showing that she felthis kindness and was glad of his help. 

Of course they knew no one else in Weimar, and his presence merely as afellow-countryman would have been precious. He got them a doctor, againstGeneral Triscoe's will; he went for his medicines; he lent him books andpapers; he sat with him and tried to amuse him. But with the girl heattempted no return to the situation at Carlsbad; there is nothing likethe delicate pride of a young man who resolves to forego unfair advantagein love. 

The day after their arrival, when her father was making up for the sleephe had lost by night, she found herself alone in the little reading-roomof the hotel with Burnamy for the first time, and she said: "I supposeyou must have been all over Weimar by this time. "

"Well, I've been here, off and on, almost a month. It's an interestingplace. There's a good deal of the old literary quality left. "

"And you enjoy that! I saw"--she added this with a little unnecessaryflush--"your poem in the paper you lent papa. "

"I suppose I ought to have kept that back. But I couldn't. " He laughed, and she said:

"You must find a great deal of inspiration in such a literary place. "

"It isn't lying about loose, exactly. " Even in the serious and perplexingsituation in which he found himself he could not help being amused withher unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and commonplaceconceptions of it. They had their value with him as those of a morefashionable world than his own, which he believed was somehow a greaterworld. At the same time he believed that she was now interposing thembetween the present and the past, and forbidding with them any return tothe mood of their last meeting in Carlsbad. He looked at her ladylikecomposure and unconsciousness, and wondered if she could be the sameperson and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd thatnight and heard and said words palpitant with fate. Perhaps there hadbeen no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination. He must leave herto recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt bitterly thatthere was nothing for him but submission and patience; if she never didso, there was nothing for him but acquiescence. 

In this talk and in the talks they had afterwards she seemed willingenough to speak of what had happened since: of coming on to Wurzburg withthe Addings and of finding the Marches there; of Rose's collapse, and ofhis mother's flight seaward with him in the care of Kenby, who was sofortunately going to Holland, too. He on his side told her of going toWurzburg for the manoeuvres, and they agreed that it was very strangethey had not met. 

She did not try to keep their relations from taking the domesticcharacter which was inevitable, and it seemed to him that this in itselfwas significant of a determination on her part that was fatal to hishopes. With a lover's indefinite power of blinding himself to what isbefore his eyes, he believed that if she had been more diffident of him, more uneasy in his presence, he should have had more courage; but for herto breakfast unafraid with him, to meet him at lunch and dinner in thelittle dining-room where they were often the only guests, and always theonly English-speaking guests, was nothing less than prohibitive. 

In the hotel service there was one of those men who are porters in thisworld, but will be angels in the next, unless the perfect goodness oftheir looks, the constant kindness of their acts, belies them. TheMarches had known and loved the man in their brief stay, and he had beenthe fast friend of Burnamy from the moment they first saw each other atthe station. He had tenderly taken possession of General Triscoe on hisarrival, and had constituted himself the nurse and keeper of theirascible invalid, in the intervals of going to the trains, with a zealthat often relieved his daughter and Burnamy. The general in factpreferred him to either, and a tacit custom grew up by which when Augustknocked at his door, and offered himself in his few words of serviceableEnglish, that one of them who happened to be sitting with the generalgave way, and left him in charge. The retiring watcher was then apt toencounter the other watcher on the stairs, or in the reading-room, or inthe tiny, white-pebbled door-yard at a little table in the shade of thewooden-tubbed evergreens. From the habit of doing this they one daysuddenly formed the habit of going across the street to that gardenedhollow before and below the Grand-Ducal Museum. There was here a bench inthe shelter of some late-flowering bush which the few other frequentersof the place soon recognized as belonging to the young strangers, so thatthey would silently rise and leave it to them when they saw them coming. Apparently they yielded not only to their right, but to a certainauthority which resides in lovers, and which all other men, andespecially all other women, like to acknowledge and respect. 

In the absence of any civic documents bearing upon the affair it isdifficult to establish the fact that this was the character in whichAgatha and Burnamy were commonly regarded by the inhabitants of Weimar. But whatever their own notion of their relation was, if it was not thatof a Brant and a Brautigam, the people of Weimar would have been puzzledto say what it was. It was known that the gracious young lady's father, who would naturally have accompanied them, was sick, and in the fact thatthey were Americans much extenuation was found for whatever wasphenomenal in their unencumbered enjoyment of each other's society. 

If their free American association was indistinguishably like the peasantinformality which General Triscoe despised in the relations of Kenby andMrs. Adding, it is to be said in his excuse that he could not be fullycognizant of it, in the circumstances, and so could do nothing to preventit. His pessimism extended to his health; from the first he believedhimself worse than the doctor thought him, and he would have had someother physician if he had not found consolation in their difference ofopinion and the consequent contempt which he was enabled to cherish forthe doctor in view of the man's complete ignorance of the case. In proofof his own better understanding of it, he remained in bed some time afterthe doctor said he might get up. 

Nearly ten days had passed before he left his room, and it was not tillthen that he clearly saw how far affairs had gone with his daughter andBurnamy, though even then his observance seemed to have anticipatedtheirs. He found them in a quiet acceptance of the fortune which hadbrought them together, so contented that they appeared to ask nothingmore of it. The divine patience and confidence of their youth mightsometimes have had almost the effect of indifference to a witness who hadseen its evolution from the moods of the first few days of their reunionin Weimar. To General Triscoe, however, it looked like an understandingwhich had been made without reference to his wishes, and had not beendirectly brought to his knowledge. 

"Agatha, " he said, after due note of a gay contest between her andBurnamy over the pleasure and privilege of ordering his supper sent tohis room when he had gone back to it from his first afternoon in the openair, "how long is that young man going to stay in Weimar?"

"Why, I don't know!" she answered, startled from her work of beating thesofa pillows into shape, and pausing with one of them in her hand. "Inever asked him. " She looked down candidly into his face where he sat inan easy-chair waiting for her arrangement of the sofa. "What makes youask?"

He answered with another question. "Does he know that we had thought ofstaying here?"

"Why, we've always talked of that, haven't we? Yes, he knows it. Didn'tyou want him to know it, papa? You ought to have begun on the ship, then. Of course I've asked him what sort of place it was. I'm sorry if youdidn't want me to. "

"Have I said that? It's perfectly easy to push on to Paris. Unless--"

"Unless what?" Agatha dropped the pillow, and listened respectfully. Butin spite of her filial attitude she could not keep her youth and strengthand courage from quelling the forces of the elderly man. 

He said querulously, "I don't see why you take that tone with me. Youcertainly know what I mean. But if you don't care to deal openly with me, I won't ask you. " He dropped his eyes from her face, and at the same timea deep blush began to tinge it, growing up from her neck to her forehead. "You must know--you're not a child, " he continued, still with avertedeyes, "that this sort of thing can't go on. .. It must be something else, or it mustn't be anything at all. I don't ask you for your confidence, and you know that I've never sought to control you. "

This was not the least true, but Agatha answered, either absently orprovisionally, "No. "

"And I don't seek to do so now. If you have nothing that you wish to tellme--"

He waited, and after what seemed a long time, she asked as if she had notheard him, "Will you lie down a little before your supper, papa?"

"I will lie down when I feel like it, " he answered. "Send August with thesupper; he can look after me. "

His resentful tone, even more than his words, dismissed her, but she lefthim without apparent grievance, saying quietly, "I will send August. "

LXVII. 

Agatha did not come down to supper with Burnamy. She asked August, whenshe gave him her father's order, to have a cup of tea sent to her room, where, when it came, she remained thinking so long that it was rathertepid by the time she drank it. 

Then she went to her window, and looked out, first above and next below. Above, the moon was hanging over the gardened hollow before the Museumwith the airy lightness of an American moon. Below was Burnamy behind thetubbed evergreens, sitting tilted in his chair against the house wall, with the spark of his cigar fainting and flashing like an Americanfirefly. Agatha went down to the door, after a little delay, and seemedsurprised to find him there; at least she said, "Oh!" in a tone ofsurprise. 

Burnamy stood up, and answered, "Nice night. "

"Beautiful!" she breathed. "I didn't suppose the sky in Germany couldever be so clear. "

"It seems to be doing its best. "

"The flowers over there look like ghosts in the light, " she saiddreamily. 

"They're not. Don't you want to get your hat and wrap, and go over andexpose the fraud?"

"Oh, " she answered, as if it were merely a question of the hat and wrap, "I have them. "

They sauntered through the garden walks for a while, long enough to haveascertained that there was not a veridical phantom among the flowers, ifthey had been looking, and then when they came to their accustomed seat, they sat down, and she said, "I don't know that I've seen the moon soclear since we left Carlsbad. " At the last word his heart gave a jumpthat seemed to lodge it in his throat and kept him from speaking, so thatshe could resume without interruption, "I've got something of yours, thatyou left at the Posthof. The girl that broke the dishes found it, andLili gave it to Mrs. March for you. " This did not account for Agatha'shaving the thing, whatever it was; but when she took a handkerchief fromher belt, and put out her hand with it toward him, he seemed to find thather having it had necessarily followed. He tried to take it from her, buthis own hand trembled so that it clung to hers, and he gasped, "Can't yousay now, what you wouldn't say then?"

The logical sequence was no more obvious than be fore; but she apparentlyfelt it in her turn as he had felt it in his. She whispered back, "Yes, "and then she could not get out anything more till she entreated in ahalf-stifled voice, "Oh, don't!"

"No, no!" he panted. "I won't--I oughtn't to have done it--I beg yourpardon--I oughtn't to have spoken, --even--I--"

She returned in a far less breathless and tremulous fashion, but stillbetween laughing and crying, "I meant to make you. And now, if you'reever sorry, or I'm ever too topping about anything, you can be perfectlyfree to say that you'd never have spoken if you hadn't seen that I wantedyou to. "

"But I didn't see any such thing, " he protested. "I spoke because Icouldn't help it any longer. "

She laughed triumphantly. "Of course you think so! And that shows thatyou are only a man after all; in spite of your finessing. But I am goingto have the credit of it. I knew that you were holding back because youwere too proud, or thought you hadn't the right, or something. Weren'tyou?" She startled him with the sudden vehemence of her challenge: "Ifyou pretend, that you weren't I shall never forgive you!"

"But I was! Of course I was. I was afraid--"

"Isn't that what I said?" She triumphed over him with another laugh, andcowered a little closer to him, if that could be. 

They were standing, without knowing how they had got to their feet; andnow without any purpose of the kind, they began to stroll again among thegarden paths, and to ask and to answer questions, which touched everypoint of their common history, and yet left it a mine of inexhaustibleknowledge for all future time. Out of the sweet and dear delight of thisencyclopedian reserve two or three facts appeared with a presentdistinctness. One of these was that Burnamy had regarded her refusal tobe definite at Carlsbad as definite refusal, and had meant never to seeher again, and certainly never to speak again of love to her. Anotherpoint was that she had not resented his coming back that last night, buthad been proud and happy in it as proof of his love, and had always meantsomehow to let him know that she was torched by his trusting her enoughto come back while he was still under that cloud with Mr. Stoller. Withfurther logic, purely of the heart, she acquitted him altogether of wrongin that affair, and alleged in proof, what Mr. Stoller had said of it toMr. March. Burnamy owned that he knew what Stoller had said, but even inhis present condition he could not accept fully her reading of thatobscure passage of his life. He preferred to put the question by, andperhaps neither of them cared anything about it except as it related tothe fact that they were now each other's forever. 

They agreed that they must write to Mr. And Mrs. March at once; or atleast, Agatha said, as soon as she had spoken to her father. At hermention of her father she was aware of a doubt, a fear, in Burnamy whichexpressed itself by scarcely more than a spiritual consciousness from hisarm to the hands which she had clasped within it. "He has alwaysappreciated you, " she said courageously, "and I know he will see it inthe right light. "

She probably meant no more than to affirm her faith in her own abilityfinally to bring her father to a just mind concerning it; but Burnamyaccepted her assurance with buoyant hopefulness, and said he would seeGeneral Triscoe the first thing in the morning. 

"No, I will see him, " she said, "I wish to see him first; he will expectit of me. We had better go in, now, " she added, but neither made anymotion for the present to do so. On the contrary, they walked in theother direction, and it was an hour after Agatha declared their duty inthe matter before they tried to fulfil it. 

Then, indeed, after they returned to the hotel, she lost no time in goingto her father beyond that which must be given to a long hand-pressureunder the fresco of the five poets on the stairs landing, where her waysand Burnamy's parted. She went into her own room, and softly opened thedoor into her father's and listened. 

"Well?" he said in a sort of challenging voice. 

"Have you been asleep?" she asked. 

"I've just blown out my light. What has kept you?"

She did not reply categorically. Standing there in the sheltering dark, she said, "Papa, I wasn't very candid with you, this afternoon. I amengaged to Mr. Burnamy. "

"Light the candle, " said her father. "Or no, " he added before she coulddo so. "Is it quite settled?"

"Quite, " she answered in a voice that admitted of no doubt. "That is, asfar as it can be, without you. "

"Don't be a hypocrite, Agatha, " said the general. "And let me try to getto sleep. You know I don't like it, and you know I can't help it. "

"Yes, " the girl assented. 

"Then go to bed, " said the general concisely. 

Agatha did not obey her father. She thought she ought to kiss him, butshe decided that she had better postpone this; so she merely gave him atender goodnight, to which he made no response, and shut herself into herown room, where she remained sitting and staring out into the moonlight, with a smile that never left her lips. 

When the moon sank below the horizon, the sky was pale with the comingday, but before it was fairly dawn, she saw something white, not muchgreater than some moths, moving before her window. She pulled the valvesopen and found it a bit of paper attached to a thread dangling fromabove. She broke it loose and in the morning twilight she read the greatcentral truth of the universe:

"I love you. L. J. B. "

She wrote under the tremendous inspiration:

"So do I. Don't be silly. A. T. "

She fastened the paper to the thread again, and gave it a little twitch. She waited for the low note of laughter which did not fail to flutterdown from above; then she threw herself upon the bed, and fell asleep. 

It was not so late as she thought when she woke, and it seemed, atbreakfast, that Burnamy had been up still earlier. Of the three involvedin the anxiety of the night before General Triscoe was still respitedfrom it by sleep, but he woke much more haggard than either of the youngpeople. They, in fact, were not at all haggard; the worst was over, ifbringing their engagement to his knowledge was the worst; the formalityof asking his consent which Burnamy still had to go through wasunpleasant, but after all it was a formality. Agatha told him everythingthat had passed between herself and her father, and if it had not thatcordiality on his part which they could have wished it was certainly nothopelessly discouraging. 

They agreed at breakfast that Burnamy had better have it over as quicklyas possible, and he waited only till August came down with the general'stray before going up to his room. The young fellow did not feel more athis ease than the elder meant he should in taking the chair to which thegeneral waved him from where he lay in bed; and there was no talk wastedupon the weather between them. 

"I suppose I know what you have come for, Mr. Burnamy, " said GeneralTriscoe in a tone which was rather judicial than otherwise, "and Isuppose you know why you have come. " The words certainly opened the wayfor Burnamy, but he hesitated so long to take it that the general hadabundant time to add, "I don't pretend that this event is unexpected, butI should like to know what reason you have for thinking I should wish youto marry my daughter. I take it for granted that you are attached to eachother, and we won't waste time on that point. Not to beat about the bush, on the next point, let me ask at once what your means of supporting herare. How much did you earn on that newspaper in Chicago?"

"Fifteen hundred dollars, " Burnamy answered, promptly enough. 

"Did you earn anything more, say within the last year?"

"I got three hundred dollars advance copyright for a book I sold to apublisher. " The glory had not yet faded from the fact in Burnamy's mind. 

"Eighteen hundred. What did you get for your poem in March's book?"

"That's a very trifling matter: fifteen dollars. "

"And your salary as private secretary to that man Stoller?"

"Thirty dollars a week, and my expenses. But I wouldn't take that, General Triscoe, " said Burnamy. 

General Triscoe, from his 'lit de justice', passed this point in silence. "Have you any one dependent on you?"

"My mother; I take care of my mother, " answered Burnamy, proudly. 

"Since you have broken with Stoller, what are your prospects?"

"I have none. "

"Then you don't expect to support my daughter; you expect to live uponher means. "

"I expect to do nothing of the kind!" cried Burnamy. "I should beashamed--I should feel disgraced--I should--I don't ask you--I don't askher till I have the means to support her--"

"If you were very fortunate, " continued the general, unmoved by the youngfellow's pain, and unperturbed by the fact that he had himself lived uponhis wife's means as long as she lived, and then upon his daughter's, "ifyou went back to Stoller--"

"I wouldn't go back to him. I don't say he's knowingly a rascal, but he'signorantly a rascal, and he proposed a rascally thing to me. I behavedbadly to him, and I'd give anything to undo the wrong I let him dohimself; but I'll never go back to him. "

"If you went back, on your old salary, " the general persisted pitilessly, "you would be very fortunate if you brought your earnings up totwenty-five hundred a year. "

"Yes--"

"And how far do you think that would go in supporting my daughter on thescale she is used to? I don't speak of your mother, who has the firstclaim upon you. "

Burnamy sat dumb; and his head which he had lifted indignantly when thequestion was of Stoller, began to sink. 

The general went on. "You ask me to give you my daughter when you haven'tmoney enough to keep her in gowns; you ask me to give her to astranger--"

"Not quite a stranger, General Triscoe, " Burnamy protested. "You haveknown me for three months at least, and any one who knows me in Chicagowill tell you--"

"A stranger, and worse than a stranger, " the general continued, sopleased with the logical perfection of his position that he almostsmiled, and certainly softened toward Burnamy. "It isn't a question ofliking you, Mr. Burnamy, but of knowing you; my daughter likes you; so dothe Marches; so does everybody who has met you. I like you myself. You'vedone me personally a thousand kindnesses. But I know very little of you, in spite of our three months' acquaintance; and that little is--But youshall judge for yourself! You were in the confidential employ of a manwho trusted you, and you let him betray himself. "

"I did. I don't excuse it. The thought of it burns like fire. But itwasn't done maliciously; it wasn't done falsely; it was doneinconsiderately; and when it was done, it seemed irrevocable. But itwasn't; I could have prevented, I could have stooped the mischief; and Ididn't! I can never outlive that. "

"I know, " said the general relentlessly, "that you have never attemptedany defence. That has been to your credit with me. It inclined me tooverlook your unwarranted course in writing to my daughter, when you toldher you would never see her again. What did you expect me to think, afterthat, of your coming back to see her? Or didn't you expect me to knowit?"

"I expected you to know it; I knew she would tell you. But I don't excusethat, either. It was acting a lie to come back. All I can say is that Ihad to see her again for one last time. "

"And to make sure that it was to be the last time, you offered yourselfto her. "

"I couldn't help doing that. "

"I don't say you could. I don't judge the facts at all. I leave themaltogether to you; and you shall say what a man in my position ought tosay to such a man as you have shown yourself. "

"No, I will say. " The door into the adjoining room was flung open, andAgatha flashed in from it. 

Her father looked coldly at her impassioned face. "Have you beenlistening?" he asked. 

"I have been hearing--"

"Oh!" As nearly as a man could, in bed, General Triscoe shrugged. 

"I suppose I had, a right to be in my own room. I couldn't help hearing;and I was perfectly astonished at you, papa, the cruel way you went on, after all you've said about Mr. Stoller, and his getting no more than hedeserved. "

"That doesn't justify me, " Burnamy began, but she cut him short almost asseverely as she--had dealt with her father. 

"Yes, it does! It justifies you perfectly! And his wanting you to falsifythe whole thing afterwards, more than justifies you. "

Neither of the men attempted anything in reply to her casuistry; theyboth looked equally posed by it, for different reasons; and Agatha wenton as vehemently as before, addressing herself now to one and now to theother. 

"And besides, if it didn't justify you, what you have done yourselfwould; and your never denying it, or trying to excuse it, makes it thesame as if you hadn't done it, as far as you are concerned; and that isall I care for. " Burnamy started, as if with the sense of having heardsomething like this before, and with surprise at hearing it now; and sheflushed a little as she added tremulously, "And I should never, neverblame you for it, after that; it's only trying to wriggle out of thingswhich I despise, and you've never done that. And he simply had to comeback, " she turned to her father, "and tell me himself just how it was. And you said yourself, papa--or the same as said--that he had no right tosuppose I was interested in his affairs unless he--unless--And I shouldnever have forgiven him, if he hadn't told me then that he that he hadcome back because he--felt the way he did. I consider that thatexonerated him for breaking his word, completely. If he hadn't broken hisword I should have thought he had acted very cruelly and--and strangely. And ever since then, he has behaved so nobly, so honorably, sodelicately, that I don't believe he would ever have said anythingagain--if I hadn't fairly forced him. Yes! Yes, I did!" she cried at amovement of remonstrance from Burnamy. "And I shall always be proud ofyou for it. " Her father stared steadfastly at her, and he only lifted hiseyebrows, for change of expression, when she went over to where Burnamystood, and put her hand in his with a certain childlike impetuosity. "Andas for the rest, " she declared, "everything I have is his; just aseverything of his would be mine if I had nothing. Or if he wishes to takeme without anything, then he can have me so, and I sha'n't be afraid butwe can get along somehow. " She added, "I have managed without a maid, ever since I left home, and poverty has no terrors for me!"

LXVIII. 

General Triscoe submitted to defeat with the patience which soldierslearn. He did not submit amiably; that would have been out of character, and perhaps out of reason; but Burnamy and Agatha were both so amiablethat they supplied good-humor for all. They flaunted their rapture in herfather's face as little as they could, but he may have found their serenesatisfaction, their settled confidence in their fate, as hard to bear asa more boisterous happiness would have been. 

It was agreed among them all that they were to return soon to America, and Burnamy was to find some sort of literary or journalistic employmentin New York. She was much surer than he that this could be done withperfect ease; but they were of an equal mind that General Triscoe was notto be disturbed in any of his habits, or vexed in the tenor of hisliving; and until Burnamy was at least self-supporting there must be notalk of their being married. 

The talk of their being engaged was quite enough for the time. Itincluded complete and minute auto-biographies on both sides, reciprocalanalyses of character, a scientifically exhaustive comparison of tastes, ideas and opinions; a profound study of their respective chins, noses, eyes, hands, heights, complexions, moles and freckles, with some accountof their several friends. 

In this occupation, which was profitably varied by the confession of whatthey had each thought and felt and dreamt concerning the other at everyinstant since they met, they passed rapidly the days which the persistentanxiety of General Triscoe interposed before the date of their leavingWeimar for Paris, where it was arranged that they should spend a monthbefore sailing for New York. Burnamy had a notion, which Agatha approved, of trying for something there on the New York-Paris Chronicle; and if hegot it they might not go home at once. His gains from that paper had ekedout his copyright from his book, and had almost paid his expenses ingetting the material which he had contributed to it. They were not sogreat, however, but that his gold reserve was reduced to less than ahundred dollars, counting the silver coinages which had remained to himin crossing and recrossing frontiers. He was at times dimly conscious ofhis finances, but he buoyantly disregarded the facts, as incompatiblewith his status as Agatha's betrothed, if not unworthy of his characteras a lover in the abstract. 

The afternoon before they were to leave Weimar, they spent mostly in thegarden before the Grand-Ducal Museum, in a conference so important thatwhen it came on to rain, at one moment, they put up Burnamy's umbrella, and continued to sit under it rather than interrupt the proceedings evento let Agatha go back to the hotel and look after her father's packing. Her own had been finished before dinner, so as to leave her the wholeafternoon for their conference, and to allow her father to remain inundisturbed possession of his room as long as possible. 

What chiefly remained to be put into the general's trunk were his coatsand trousers, hanging in the closet, and August took these down, andcarefully folded and packed them. Then, to make sure that nothing hadbeen forgotten, Agatha put a chair into the closet when she came in, andstood on it to examine the shelf which stretched above the hooks. 

There seemed at first to be nothing on it, and then there seemed to besomething in the further corner, which when it was tiptoed for, proved tobe a bouquet of flowers, not so faded as to seem very old; the blue satinribbon which they were tied up with, and which hung down half a yard, wasof entire freshness except far the dust of the shelf where it had lain. 

Agatha backed out into the room with her find in her hand, and examinedit near to, and then at arm's length. August stood by with a pair of thegeneral's trousers lying across his outstretched hands, and as Agathaabsently looked round at him, she caught a light of intelligence in hiseyes which changed her whole psychological relation to the witheredbouquet. Till then it had been a lifeless, meaningless bunch of flowers, which some one, for no motive, had tossed up on that dusty shelf in thecloset. At August's smile it became something else. Still she askedlightly enough, "Was ist loss, August?"

His smile deepened and broadened. "Fur die Andere, " he explained. 

Agatha demanded in English, "What do you mean by feardy ondery?"

"Oddaw lehdy. "

"Other lady?" August nodded, rejoicing in big success, and Agatha closedthe door into her own room, where the general had been put for the timeso as to be spared the annoyance of the packing; then she sat down withher hands in her lap, and the bouquet in her hands. "Now, August, " shesaid very calmly, "I want you to tell me-ich wunsche Sie zu mirsagen--what other lady--wass andere Dame--these flowers belongedto--diese Blumen gehorte zu. Verstehen Sie?"

August nodded brightly, and with German carefully adjusted to Agatha'scapacity, and with now and then a word or phrase of English, he conveyedthat before she and her Herr Father had appeared, there had been inWeimar another American Fraulein with her Frau Mother; they had notindeed staid in that hotel, but had several times supped there with theyoung Herr Bornahmee, who was occupying that room before her Herr Father. The young Herr had been much about with these American Damen, driving andwalking with them, and sometimes dining or supping with them at theirhotel, The Elephant. August had sometimes carried notes to them from theyoung Herr, and he had gone for the bouquet which the gracious Frauleinwas holding, on the morning of the day that the American Damen left bythe train for Hanover. 

August was much helped and encouraged throughout by the friendlyintelligence of the gracious Fraulein, who smiled radiantly in clearingup one dim point after another, and who now and then supplied the Englishanalogues which he sought in his effort to render his German moreluminous. 

At the end she returned to the work of packing, in which she directedhim, and sometimes assisted him with her own hands, having put thebouquet on the mantel to leave herself free. She took it up again andcarried it into her own room, when she went with August to summon herfather back to his. She bade August say to the young Herr, if he saw him, that she was going to sup with her father, and August gave her message toBurnamy, whom he met on the stairs coming down as he was going up withtheir tray. 

Agatha usually supped with her father, but that evening Burnamy was lessable than usual to bear her absence in the hotel dining-room, and he wentup to a cafe in the town for his supper. He did not stay long, and whenhe returned his heart gave a joyful lift at sight of Agatha looking outfrom her balcony, as if she were looking for him. He made her a gayflourishing bow, lifting his hat high, and she came down to meet him atthe hotel door. She had her hat on and jacket over one arm and she joinedhim at once for the farewell walk he proposed in what they had agreed tocall their garden. 

She moved a little ahead of him, and when they reached the place wherethey always sat, she shifted her jacket to the other arm and uncoveredthe hand in which she had been carrying the withered bouquet. "Here issomething I found in your closet, when I was getting papa's things out. "

"Why, what is it?" he asked innocently, as he took it from her. 

"A bouquet, apparently, " she answered, as he drew the long ribbonsthrough his fingers, and looked at the flowers curiously, with his headaslant. 

"Where did you get it?"

"On the shelf. "

It seemed a long time before Burnamy said with a long sigh, as of finalrecollection, "Oh, yes, " and then he said nothing; and they did not sitdown, but stood looking at each other. 

"Was it something you got for me, and forgot to give me?" she asked in avoice which would not have misled a woman, but which did its work withthe young man. 

He laughed and said, "Well, hardly! The general has been in the room eversince you came. "

"Oh, yes. Then perhaps somebody left it there before you had the room?"

Burnamy was silent again, but at last he said, "No, I flung it up there Ihad forgotten all about it. "

"And you wish me to forget about it, too?" Agatha asked in a gayety oftone that still deceived him. 

"It would only be fair. You made me, " he rejoined, and there wassomething so charming in his words and way, that she would have been gladto do it. 

But she governed herself against the temptation and said, "Women are notgood at forgetting, at least till they know what. "

"Oh, I'll tell you, if you want to know, " he said with a laugh, and atthe words she--sank provisionally in their accustomed seat. He sat downbeside her, but not so near as usual, and he waited so long before hebegan that it seemed as if he had forgotten again. "Why, it's nothing. Miss Etkins and her mother were here before you came, and this is abouquet that I meant to give her at the train when she left. But Idecided I wouldn't, and I threw it onto the shelf in the closet. "

"May I ask why you thought of taking a bouquet to her at the train?"

"Well, she and her mother--I had been with them a good deal, and Ithought it would be civil. "

"And why did you decide not to be civil?"

"I didn't want it to look like more than civility. "

"Were they here long?"

"About a week. They left just after the Marches came. "

Agatha seemed not to heed the answer she had exacted. She sat reclined inthe corner of the seat, with her head drooping. After an interval whichwas long to Burnamy she began to pull at a ring on the third finger ofher left hand, absently, as if she did not know what she was doing; butwhen she had got it off she held it towards Burnamy and said quietly, "Ithink you had better have this again, " and then she rose and moved slowlyand weakly away. 

He had taken the ring mechanically from her, and he stood a momentbewildered; then he pressed after her. 

"Agatha, do you--you don't mean--"

"Yes, " she said, without looking round at his face, which she knew wasclose to her shoulder. "It's over. It isn't what you've done. It's whatyou are. I believed in you, in spite of what you did to that man--andyour coming back when you said you wouldn't--and--But I see now that whatyou did was you; it was your nature; and I can't believe in you anymore. "

"Agatha!" he implored. "You're not going to be so unjust! There wasnothing between you and me when that girl was here! I had a right to--"

"Not if you really cared for me! Do you think I would have flirted withany one so soon, if I had cared for you as you pretended you did for methat night in Carlsbad? Oh, I don't say you're false. But you'refickle--"

"But I'm not fickle! From the first moment I saw you, I never cared forany one but you!"

"You have strange ways of showing your devotion. Well, say you are notfickle. Say, that I'm fickle. I am. I have changed my mind. I see that itwould never do. I leave you free to follow all the turning and twistingof your fancy. " She spoke rapidly, almost breathlessly, and she gave himno chance to get out the words that seemed to choke him. She began torun, but at the door of the hotel she stopped and waited till he camestupidly up. "I have a favor to ask, Mr. Burnamy. I beg you will not seeme again, if you can help it before we go to-morrow. My father and I areindebted to you for too many kindnesses, and you mustn't take any moretrouble on our account. August can see us off in the morning. "

She nodded quickly, and was gone in-doors while he was yet strugglingwith his doubt of the reality of what had all so swiftly happened. 

General Triscoe was still ignorant of any change in the status to whichhe had reconciled himself with so much difficulty, when he came down toget into the omnibus for the train. Till then he had been too proud toask what had become of Burnamy, though he had wondered, but now he lookedabout and said impatiently, "I hope that young man isn't going to keep uswaiting. "

Agatha was pale and worn with sleeplessness, but she said firmly, "Heisn't going, papa. I will tell you in the train. August will see to thetickets and the baggage. "

August conspired with the traeger to get them a first-class compartmentto themselves. But even with the advantages of this seclusion Agatha'sconfidences to her father were not full. She told her father that herengagement was broken for reasons that did not mean anything very wrongin Mr. Burnamy but that convinced her they could never be happy together. As she did not give the reasons, he found a natural difficulty inaccepting them, and there was something in the situation which appealedstrongly to his contrary-mindedness. Partly from this, partly from hissense of injury in being obliged so soon to adjust himself to newconditions, and partly from his comfortable feeling of security from anengagement to which his assent had been forced, he said, "I hope you'renot making a mistake. "

"Oh, no, " she answered, and she attested her conviction by a burst ofsobbing that lasted well on the way to the first stop of the train. 

LXIX. 

It would have been always twice as easy to go direct from Berlin to theHague through Hanover; but the Marches decided to go by Frankfort and theRhine, because they wished to revisit the famous river, which theyremembered from their youth, and because they wished to stop atDusseldorf, where Heinrich Heine was born. Without this Mrs. March, whokept her husband up to his early passion for the poet with a feeling thatshe was defending him from age in it, said that their silver weddingjourney would not be complete; and he began himself to think that itwould be interesting. 

They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they woke early as people doin sleeping-cars everywhere. March dressed and went out for a cup of thesame coffee of which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secret in Europeas well as America, and for a glimpse of the twilight landscape. One graylittle town, towered and steepled and red-roofed within its mediaevalwalls, looked as if it would have been warmer in something more. Therewas a heavy dew, if not a light frost, over all, and in places a pale fogbegan to lift from the low hills. Then the sun rose without dispersingthe cold, which was afterwards so severe in their room at the RussischerHof in Frankfort that in spite of the steam-radiators they sat shiveringin all their wraps till breakfast-time. 

There was no steam on in the radiators, of course; when they implored theportier for at least a lamp to warm their hands by he turned on all theelectric lights without raising the temperature in the slightest degree. Amidst these modern comforts they were so miserable that they vowed eachother to shun, as long as they were in Germany, or at least while thesummer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated and electric-lighted. They heated themselves somewhat with their wrath, and over theirbreakfast they relented so far as to suffer themselves a certain interestin the troops of all arms beginning to pass the hotel. They werefragments of the great parade, which had ended the day before, and theywere now drifting back to their several quarters of the empire. Many ofthem were very picturesque, and they had for the boys and girls runningbefore and beside them, the charm which armies and circus processionshave for children everywhere. But their passage filled with cruel anxietya large old dog whom his master had left harnessed to a milk-cart beforethe hotel door; from time to time he lifted up his voice, and called tothe absentee with hoarse, deep barks that almost shook him from his feet. 

The day continued blue and bright and cold, and the Marches gave themorning to a rapid survey of the city, glad that it was at least not wet. What afterwards chiefly remained to them was the impression of an oldtown as quaint almost and as Gothic as old Hamburg, and a new town, handsome and regular, and, in the sudden arrest of some streets, apparently overbuilt. The modern architectural taste was of courseParisian; there is no other taste for the Germans; but in the prevailingabsence of statues there was a relief from the most oppressivecharacteristic of the imperial capital which was a positive delight. Somesort of monument to the national victory over France there must havebeen; but it must have been unusually inoffensive, for it left no recordof itself in the travellers' consciousness. They were aware of gardenedsquares and avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of dignified civicedifices, and of a vast and splendid railroad station, such as the statebuilds even in minor European cities, but such as our paternalcorporations have not yet given us anywhere in America. They went to theZoological Garden, where they heard the customary Kalmucks at theirpublic prayers behind a high board fence; and as pilgrims from the mostplutrocratic country in the world March insisted that they must pay theirdevoirs at the shrine of the Rothschilds, whose natal banking-house theyrevered from the outside. 

It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds were not on his letter ofcredit; he would have been willing to pay tribute to the Genius ofFinance in the percentage on at least ten pounds. But he consoled himselfby reflecting that he did not need the money; and he consoled Mrs. Marchfor their failure to penetrate to the interior of the Rothschilds'birthplace by taking her to see the house where Goethe was born. Thepublic is apparently much more expected there, and in the friendly placethey were no doubt much more welcome than they would have been in theRothschild house. Under that roof they renewed a happy moment of Weimar, which after the lapse of a week seemed already so remote. They wondered, as they mounted the stairs from the basement opening into a clean littlecourt, how Burnamy was getting on, and whether it had yet come to thatunderstanding between him and Agatha, which Mrs. March, at least, hadmeant to be inevitable. Then they became part of some such sight-seeingretinue as followed the custodian about in the Goethe horse in Weimar, and of an emotion indistinguishable from that of their fellowsight-seers. They could make sure, afterwards, of a personal pleasure ina certain prescient classicism of the house. It somehow recalled both theGoethe houses at Weimar, and it somehow recalled Italy. It is a separatehouse of two floors above the entrance, which opens to a little court oryard, and gives access by a decent stairway to the living-rooms. Thechief of these is a sufficiently dignified parlor or salon, and the mostimportant is the little chamber in the third story where the poet firstopened his eyes to the light which he rejoiced in for so long a life, andwhich, dying, he implored to be with him more. It is as large as hisdeath-chamber in Weimar, where he breathed this prayer, and it looks downinto the Italian-looking court, where probably he noticed the world forthe first time, and thought it a paved enclosure thirty or forty feetsquare. In the birth-room they keep his puppet theatre, and the place isfairly suggestive of his childhood; later, in his youth, he could lookfrom the parlor windows and see the house where his earliest love dwelt. So much remains of Goethe in the place where he was born, and as suchthings go, it is not a little. The house is that of a prosperous andwell-placed citizen, and speaks of the senatorial quality in his familywhich Heine says he was fond of recalling, rather than the sartorialquality of the ancestor who, again as Heine says, mended the Republic'sbreeches. 

From the Goethe house, one drives by the Goethe monument to the Romer, the famous town-hall of the old free imperial city which Frankfort oncewas; and by this route the Marches drove to it, agreeing with theircoachman that he was to keep as much in the sun as possible. It was stillso cold that when they reached the Romer, and he stopped in a broad blazeof the only means of heating that they have in Frankfort in the summer, the travellers were loath to leave it for the chill interior, where theGerman emperors were elected for so many centuries. As soon as an emperorwas chosen, in the great hall effigied round with the portraits of hispredecessors, he hurried out in the balcony, ostensibly to show himselfto the people, but really, March contended, to warm up a little in thesun. The balcony was undergoing repairs that day, and the travellerscould not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest ofthe beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till theywere half-torpid with the cold. Then she abandoned to him the joint dutyof viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she baskedin the sun till he came to her. He returned shivering, after ahalf-hour's absence, and pretended that she had missed the greatest thingin the world, but as he could never be got to say just what she had lost, and under the closest cross-examination could not prove that thiscathedral was memorably different from hundreds of otherfourteenth-century cathedrals, she remained in a lasting content with theeasier part she had chosen. His only definite impression at the cathedralseemed to be confined to a Bostonian of gloomily correct type, whom hehad seen doing it with his Baedeker, and not letting an object ofinterest escape; and his account of her fellow-townsman reconciled Mrs. March more and more to not having gone. 

As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frankfort, and as the breadthof sunshine increased with the approach of noon they gave the rest of themorning to driving about and ignorantly enjoying the outside of manyGothic churches, whose names even they did not trouble themselves tolearn. They liked the river Main whenever they came to it, because it wasso lately from Wurzburg, and because it was so beautiful with itsbridges, old and new, and its boats of many patterns. They liked themarket-place in front of the Romer not only because it was full offascinating bargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but becausethere was scarcely any shade at all in it. They read from their Baedekerthat until the end of the last century no Jew was suffered to enter themarketplace, and they rejoiced to find from all appearances that the Jewshad been making up for their unjust exclusion ever since. They werealmost as numerous there as the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere else inFrankfort. These, both of the English and American branches of the race, prevailed in the hotel diningroom, where the Marches had a mid-day dinnerso good that it almost made amends for the steam-heating andelectric-lighting. 

As soon as possible after dinner they took the train for Mayence, and ranRhinewards through a pretty country into what seemed a milder climate. Itgrew so much milder, apparently, that a lady in their compartment to whomMarch offered his forward-looking seat, ordered the window down when theguard came, without asking their leave. Then the climate proved muchcolder, and Mrs. March cowered under her shawls the rest of the way, andwould not be entreated to look at the pleasant level landscape near, orthe hills far off. He proposed to put up the window as peremptorily as ithad been put down, but she stayed him with a hoarse whisper, "She may beanother Baroness!" At first he did not know what she meant, then heremembered the lady whose claims to rank her presence had so poorlyenforced on the way to Wurzburg, and he perceived that his wife waspractising a wise forbearance with their fellow-passengers, and givingher a chance to turn out any sort of highhote she chose. She failed toprofit by the opportunity; she remained simply a selfish, disagreeablewoman, of no more perceptible distinction than their otherfellow-passenger, a little commercial traveller from Vienna (theyresolved from his appearance and the lettering on his valise that he wasno other), who slept with a sort of passionate intensity all the way toMayence. 

LXX. 

The Main widened and swam fuller as they approached the Rhine, andflooded the low-lying fields in-places with a pleasant effect under a wetsunset. When they reached the station in Mayence they drove interminablyto the hotel they had chosen on the river-shore, through a city handsomerand cleaner than any American city they could think of, and great part ofthe way by a street of dwellings nobler, Mrs. March owned, than evenCommonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was planted, like that, with doublerows of trees, but lacked its green lawns; and at times the sign ofWeinhandlung at a corner, betrayed that there was no such restrictionagainst shops as keeps the Boston street so sacred. Otherwise they had toconfess once more that any inferior city of Germany is of a more properand dignified presence than the most parse-proud metropolis in America. To be sure, they said, the German towns had generally a thousand years'start; but all the same the fact galled them. 

It was very bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before theirhotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit toMayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into somethingtangible. There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream withits boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were thespires and towers and roofs of the town on either bank crowding to theriver's brink; and there within-doors was the stately portier in goldbraid, and the smiling, bowing, hand-rubbing landlord, alluring them tohis most expensive rooms, which so late in the season he would fain havehad them take. But in a little elevator, that mounted slowly, veryslowly, in the curve of the stairs, they went higher to something lower, and the landlord retired baked, and left them to the ministrations of theserving-men who arrived with their large and small baggage. All theseretired in turn when they asked to have a fire lighted in the stove, without which Mrs. March would never have taken the fine stately rooms, and sent back a pretty young girl to do it. She came indignant, notbecause she had come lugging a heavy hod of coal and a great arm-load ofwood, but because her sense of fitness was outraged by the strangedemand. 

"What!" she cried. "A fire in September!"

"Yes, " March returned, inspired to miraculous aptness in his German bythe exigency, "yes, if September is cold. "

The girl looked at him, and then, either because she thought him mad, orliked him merry, burst into a loud laugh, and kindled the fire without aword more. 

He lighted all the reluctant gas-jets in the vast gilt chandelier, and inless than half an hour the temperature of the place rose to at leastsixty-five Fahrenheit, with every promise of going higher. Mrs. Marchmade herself comfortable in a deep chair before the stove, and said shewould have her supper there; and she bade him send her just such a supperof chicken and honey and tea as they had all had in Mayence when theysupped in her aunt's parlor there all those years ago. He wished tocompute the years, but she drove him out with an imploring cry, and hewent down to a very gusty dining-room on the ground-floor, where he foundhimself alone with a young English couple and their little boy. They werefriendly, intelligent people, and would have been conversable, apparently, but for the terrible cold of the husband, which he said hehad contracted at the manoeuvres in Hombourg. March said he was going toHolland, and the Englishman was doubtful of the warmth which Marchexpected to find there. He seemed to be suffering from a suspense offaith as to the warmth anywhere; from time to time the door of thedining-room self-opened in a silent, ghostly fashion into the courtwithout, and let in a chilling draught about the legs of all, till thelittle English boy got down from his place and shut it. 

He alone continued cheerful, for March's spirits certainly did not risewhen some mumbling Americans came in and muttered over their meat atanother table. He hated to own it, but he had to own that wherever he hadmet the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race together in Europe, theelder had shown, by a superior chirpiness, to the disadvantage of theyounger. The cast clothes of the old-fashioned British offishness seemedto have fallen to the American travellers who were trying to be correctand exemplary; and he would almost rather have had back the old-stylebragging Americans whom he no longer saw. He asked of an agreeablefellow-countryman whom he found later in the reading-room, what hadbecome of these; and this compatriot said he had travelled with one onlythe day before, who had posed before their whole compartment in his scornof the German landscape, the German weather, the German government, theGerman railway management, and then turned out an American of Germanbirth! March found his wife in great bodily comfort when he went back toher, but in trouble of mind about a clock which she had discoveredstanding on the lacquered iron top of the stove. It was a French clock, of architectural pretensions, in the taste of the first Empire, and itlooked as if it had not been going since Napoleon occupied Mayence earlyin the century. But Mrs. March now had it sorely on her conscience where, in its danger from the heat of the stove, it rested with the weight ofthe Pantheon, whose classic form it recalled. She wondered that no onehad noticed it before the fire was kindled, and she required her husbandto remove it at once from the top of the stove to the mantel under themirror, which was the natural habitat of such a clock. He said nothingcould be simpler, but when he lifted it, it began to fall all apart, likea clock in the house of the Hoodoo. Its marble base dropped-off; itspillars tottered; its pediment swayed to one side. While Mrs. Marchlamented her hard fate, and implored him to hurry it together before anyone came, he contrived to reconstruct it in its new place. Then they bothbreathed freer, and returned to sit down before the stove. But at thesame moment they both saw, ineffaceably outlined on the lacquered top, the basal form of the clock. The chambermaid would see it in the morning;she would notice the removal of the clock, and would make a merit ofreporting its ruin by the heat to the landlord, and in the end they wouldbe mulcted of its value. Rather than suffer this wrong they agreed torestore it to its place, and, let it go to destruction upon its ownterms. March painfully rebuilt it where he had found it, and they went tobed with a bad conscience to worse dreams. 

He remembered, before he slept, the hour of his youth when he was inMayence before, and was so care free that he had heard with impersonaljoy two young American voices speaking English in the street under hiswindow. One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesque ofpathos in the line:

 "Oh heavens! she cried, my Heeding country save!"

and then with a laughing good-night these unseen, unknown spirits ofyouth parted and departed. Who were they, and in what different places, with what cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old, or fallensilent for evermore? It was a moonlight night, March remembered, and heremembered how he wished he were out in it with those merry fellows. 

He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreaming thought, and he wokeearly to other voices under his window. But now the voices, though young, were many and were German, and the march of feet and the stamp of hooveskept time with their singing. He drew his curtain and saw the streetfilled with broken squads of men, some afoot and some on horseback, somein uniform and some in civil dress with students' caps, looselystraggling on and roaring forth that song whose words he could not makeout. At breakfast he asked the waiter what it all meant, and he said thatthese were conscripts whose service had expired with the late manoeuvres, and who were now going home. He promised March a translation of the song, but he never gave it; and perhaps the sense of their joyful home-goingremained the more poetic with him because its utterance remainedinarticulate. 

March spent the rainy Sunday, on which they had fallen, in wanderingabout the little city alone. His wife said she was tired and would sit bythe fire, and hear about Mayence when he came in. He went to thecathedral, which has its renown for beauty and antiquity, and he thereadded to his stock of useful information the fact that the people ofMayence seemed very Catholic and very devout. They proved it bypreferring to any of the divine old Gothic shrines in the cathedral, anugly baroque altar, which was everywhere hung about with votiveofferings. A fashionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkledthemselves with holy water as reverently as if they had been old andragged. Some tourists strolled up and down the aisles with their redguide-books, and studied the objects of interest. A resplendent beadle ina cocked hat, and with along staff of authority posed before his ownecclesiastical consciousness in blue and silver. At the high altar apriest was saying mass, and March wondered whether his consciousness wasas wholly ecclesiastical as the beadle's, or whether somewhere in it hefelt the historical majesty, the long human consecration of the place. 

He wandered at random in the town through streets German and quaint andold, and streets French and fine and new, and got back to the river, which he crossed on one of the several handsome bridges. The rough riverlooked chill under a sky of windy clouds, and he felt out of season, bothas to the summer travel, and as to the journey he was making. The summerof life as well as the summer of that year was past. Better return to hisown radiator in his flat on Stuyvesant Square; to the great ugly brutaltown which, if it was not home to him, was as much home to him as to anyone. A longing for New York welled up his heart, which was perhaps reallya wish to be at work again. He said he must keep this from his wife, whoseemed not very well, and whom he must try to cheer up when he returnedto the hotel. 

But they had not a very joyous afternoon, and the evening was no gayer. They said that if they had not ordered their letters sent to Dusseldorfthey believed they should push on to Holland without stopping; and Marchwould have liked to ask, Why not push on to America? But he forbore, andhe was afterwards glad that he had done so. 

In the morning their spirits rose with the sun, though the sun got upbehind clouds as usual; and they were further animated by the impositionwhich the landlord practised upon them. After a distinct and repeatedagreement as to the price of their rooms he charged them twice as much, and then made a merit of throwing off two marks out of the twenty he hadplundered them of. 

"Now I see, " said Mrs. March, on their way down to the boat, "howfortunate it was that we baked his clock. You may laugh, but I believe wewere the instruments of justice. "

"Do you suppose that clock was never baked before?" asked her husband. "The landlord has his own arrangement with justice. When he overchargeshis parting guests he says to his conscience, Well, they baked my clock. "

LXXI. 

The morning was raw, but it was something not to have it rainy; and theclouds that hung upon the hills and hid their tops were at least as fineas the long board signs advertising chocolate on the river banks. Thesmoke rising from the chimneys of the manufactories of Mayence was not sobad, either, when one got them in the distance a little; and March likedthe way the river swam to the stems of the trees on the low grassyshores. It was like the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cairo in that, and it was yellow and thick, like the Mississippi, though he thought heremembered it blue and clear. A friendly German, of those who began tocome aboard more and more at all the landings after leaving Mayence, assured him that he was right, and that the Rhine was unusually turbidfrom the unusual rains. March had his own belief that whatever the colorof the Rhine might be the rains were not unusual, but he could notgainsay the friendly German. 

Most of the passengers at starting were English and American; but theyshowed no prescience of the international affinition which has sincerealized itself, in their behavior toward one another. They held silentlyapart, and mingled only in the effect of one young man who kept theMarches in perpetual question whether he was a Bostonian or anEnglishman. His look was Bostonian, but his accent was English; and washe a Bostonian who had been in England long enough to get the accent, orwas he an Englishman who had been in Boston long enough to get the look?He wore a belated straw hat, and a thin sack-coat; and in the rush of theboat through the raw air they fancied him very cold, and longed to offerhim one of their superabundant wraps. At times March actually lifted ashawl from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger was English and thathe might make so bold with him; then at some glacial glint in the youngman's eye, or at some petrific expression of his delicate face, he feltthat he was a Bostonian, and lost courage and let the shawl sink again. March tried to forget him in the wonder of seeing the Germans begin toeat and drink, as soon as they came on boards either from the basketsthey had brought with them, or from the boat's provision. But heprevailed, with his smile that was like a sneer, through all the eventsof the voyage; and took March's mind off the scenery with a sudden wrenchwhen he came unexpectedly into view after a momentary disappearance. Atthe table d'hote, which was served when the landscape began to be lessinteresting, the guests were expected to hand their plates across thetable to the stewards but to keep their knives and forks throughout thedifferent courses, and at each of these partial changes March felt theyoung man's chilly eyes upon him, inculpating him for thesemi-civilization of the management. At such times he knew that he was aBostonian. 

The weather cleared, as they descended the river, and under a sky at lastcloudless, the Marches had moments of swift reversion to their formerRhine journey, when they were young and the purple light of love mantledthe vineyarded hills along the shore, and flushed the castled steeps. Thescene had lost nothing of the beauty they dimly remembered; there werecertain features of it which seemed even fairer and grander than theyremembered. The town of Bingen, where everybody who knows the poem wasmore or less born, was beautiful in spite of its factory chimneys, thoughthere were no compensating castles near it; and the castles seemed asgood as those of the theatre. Here and there some of them had beenrestored and were occupied, probably by robber barons who had gone intotrade. Others were still ruinous, and there was now and then such a meregray snag that March, at sight of it, involuntarily put his tongue to thebroken tooth which he was keeping for the skill of the first Americandentist. 

For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more, does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point onthe American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, whichmight very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams

 'Solo sitting by the shores of old romance'

and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded. "Still, still youknow, " March argued, "this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not theLoreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference. Besides, the Rhine doesn't set up to be sublime; it only means to bestoried and dreamy and romantic and it does it. And then we have reallygot no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure. "

"Well, we have got no denkmal, either, " said his wife, meaning thenational monument to the German reconquest of the Rhine, which they hadjust passed, "and that is something in our favor. "

"It was too far off for us to see how ugly it was, " he returned. 

"The denkmal at Coblenz was so near that the bronze Emperor almost rodeaboard the boat. "

He could not answer such a piece of logic as that. He yielded, and beganto praise the orcharded levels which now replaced the vine-purpled slopesof the upper river. He said they put him in mind of orchards that he hadknown in his boyhood; and they, agreed that the supreme charm of travel, after all, was not in seeing something new and strange, but in findingsomething familiar and dear in the heart of the strangeness. 

At Cologne they found this in the tumult of getting ashore with theirbaggage and driving from the steamboat landing to the railroad station, where they were to get their train for Dusseldorf an hour later. Thestation swarmed with travellers eating and drinking and smoking; but theyescaped from it for a precious half of their golden hour, and gave thetime to the great cathedral, which was built, a thousand years ago, justround the corner from the station, and is therefore very handy to it. Since they saw the cathedral last it had been finished, and now under acloudless evening sky, it soared and swept upward like a pale flame. Within it was a bit over-clean, a bit bare, but without it was one of thegreat memories of the race, the record of a faith which wrought miraclesof beauty, at least, if not piety. 

The train gave the Marches another, and last, view of it as they slowlydrew out of the city, and began to run through a level country walledwith far-off hills; past fields of buckwheat showing their stems likecoral under their black tops; past peasant houses changing their wontedshape to taller and narrower forms; past sluggish streams from which themist rose and hung over the meadows, under a red sunset, glassy cleartill the manifold factory chimneys of Dusseldorf stained it with theirdun smoke. 

This industrial greeting seemed odd from the town where Heinrich Heinewas born; but when they had eaten their supper in the capital littlehotel they found there, and went out for a stroll, they found nothing toremind them of the factories, and much to make them think of the poet. The moon, beautiful and perfect as a stage moon, came up over theshoulder of a church as they passed down a long street which they had allto themselves. Everybody seemed to have gone to bed, but at a certaincorner a girl opened a window above them, and looked out at the moon. 

When they returned to their hotel they found a highwalled garden facingit, full of black depths of foliage. In the night March woke and saw themoon standing over the garden, and silvering its leafy tops. This wasreally as it should be in the town where the idolized poet of his youthwas born; the poet whom of all others he had adored, and who had onceseemed like a living friend; who had been witness of his first love, andhad helped him to speak it. His wife used to laugh at him for hisHeine-worship in those days; but she had since come to share it, and she, even more than he, had insisted upon this pilgrimage. He thought longthoughts of the past, as he looked into the garden across the way, withan ache for his perished self and the dead companionship of his youth, all ghosts together in the silvered shadow. The trees shuddered in thenight breeze, and its chill penetrated to him where he stood. 

His wife called to him from her room, "What are you doing?"

"Oh, sentimentalizing, " he answered boldly. 

"Well, you will be sick, " she said, and he crept back into bed again. 

They had sat up late, talking in a glad excitement. But he woke early, asan elderly man is apt to do after broken slumbers, and left his wifestill sleeping. He was not so eager for the poetic interests of the townas he had been the night before; he even deferred his curiosity forHeine's birth-house to the instructive conference which he had with hiswaiter at breakfast. After all, was not it more important to knowsomething of the actual life of a simple common class of men than toindulge a faded fancy for the memory of a genius, which no amount ofassociations could feed again to its former bloom? The waiter said he wasa Nuremberger, and had learned English in London where he had served ayear for nothing. Afterwards, when he could speak three languages he gota pound a week, which seemed low for so many, though not so low as theone mark a day which he now received in Dusseldorf; in Berlin he paid thehotel two marks a day. March confided to him his secret trouble as totips, and they tried vainly to enlighten each other as to what a just tipwas. 

He went to his banker's, and when he came back he found his wife with herbreakfast eaten, and so eager for the exploration of Heine's birthplacethat she heard with indifference of his failure to get any letters. Itwas too soon to expect them, she said, and then she showed him her plan, which she had been working out ever since she woke. It contained everyplace which Heine had mentioned, and she was determined not one shouldescape them. She examined him sharply upon his condition, accusing him ofhaving taken cold when he got up in the night, and acquitting him withdifficulty. She herself was perfectly well, but a little fagged, and theymust have a carriage. 

They set out in a lordly two-spanner, which took up half the littleBolkerstrasse where Heine was born, when they stopped across the way fromhis birthhouse, so that she might first take it all in from the outsidebefore they entered it. It is a simple street, and not the cleanest ofthe streets in a town where most of them are rather dirty. Below thehouses are shops, and the first story of Heine's house is a butcher shop, with sides of pork and mutton hanging in the windows; above, where theHeine family must once have lived, a gold-beater and a frame-makerdisplayed their signs. 

But did the Heine family really once live there? The house looked sofresh and new that in spite of the tablet in its front affirming it thepoet's birthplace, they doubted; and they were not reassured by thepeople who half halted as they passed, and stared at the strangers, soanomalously interested in the place. They dismounted, and crossed to thebutcher shop where the provision man corroborated the tablet, but couldnot understand their wish to go up stairs. He did not try to preventthem, however, and they climbed to the first floor above, where a placardon the door declared it private and implored them not to knock. Was thisthe outcome of the inmate's despair from the intrusion of other pilgrimswho had wised to see the Heine dwelling-rooms? They durst not knock andask so much, and they sadly descended to the ground-floor, where theyfound a butcher boy of much greater apparent intelligence than thebutcher himself, who told them that the building in front was as new asit looked, and the house where Heine was really born was the old house inthe rear. He showed them this house, across a little court patched withmangy grass and lilac-bushes; and when they wished to visit it he led theway. The place was strewn both underfoot and overhead with feathers; ithad once been all a garden out to the street, the boy said, but fromthese feathers, as well as the odor which prevailed, and the anxiousbehavior of a few hens left in the high coop at one side, it was plainthat what remained of the garden was now a chicken slaughteryard. Therewas one well-grown tree, and the boy said it was of the poet's time; butwhen he let them into the house, he became vague as to the room whereHeine was born; it was certain only that it was somewhere upstairs andthat it could not be seen. The room where they stood was theframe-maker's shop, and they bought of him a small frame for a memorial. They bought of the butcher's boy, not so commercially, a branch of lilac;and they came away, thinking how much amused Heine himself would havebeen with their visit; how sadly, how merrily he would have mocked attheir effort to revere his birthplace. 

They were too old if not too wise to be daunted by their defeat, and theydrove next to the old court garden beside the Rhine where the poet sayshe used to play with the little Veronika, and probably did not. At anyrate, the garden is gone; the Schloss was burned down long ago; andnothing remains but a detached tower in which the good Elector JanWilhelm, of Heine's time, amused himself with his many mechanicalinventions. The tower seemed to be in process of demolition, but anintelligent workman who came down out of it, was interested in thestrangers' curiosity, and directed them to a place behind the HistoricalMuseum where they could find a bit of the old garden. It consisted of twoor three low trees, and under them the statue of the Elector by whichHeine sat with the little Veronika, if he really did. Afresh gale blowingthrough the trees stirred the bushes that backed the statue, but not thelaurel wreathing the Elector's head, and meeting in a neat point over hisforehead. The laurel wreath is stone, like the rest of the Elector, whostands there smirking in marble ermine and armor, and resting his batonon the nose of a very small lion, who, in the exigencies offoreshortening, obligingly goes to nothing but a tail under the Elector'srobe. 

This was a prince who loved himself in effigy so much that he raised anequestrian statue to his own renown in the market-place, though hemodestly refused the credit of it, and ascribed its erection to theaffection of his subjects. You see him therein a full-bottomed wig, mounted on a rampant charger with a tail as big round as a barrel, andheavy enough to keep him from coming down on his fore legs as long as helikes to hold them up. It was to this horse's back that Heine clamberedwhen a small boy, to see the French take formal possession of Dusseldorf;and he clung to the waist of the bronze Elector, who had just abdicated, while the burgomaster made a long speech, from the balcony of theRathhaus, and the Electoral arms were taken down from its doorway. 

The Rathhaus is a salad-dressing of German gothic and French rococo as toits architectural style, and is charming in its way, but the Marches werein the market-place for the sake of that moment of Heine's boyhood. Theyfelt that he might have been the boy who stopped as he ran before them, and smacked the stomach of a large pumpkin lying at the feet of an oldmarket-woman, and then dashed away before she could frame a protestagainst the indignity. From this incident they philosophized that theboys of Dusseldorf are as mischievous at the end of the century as theywere at the beginning; and they felt the fascination that such abounteous, unkempt old marketplace must have for the boys of any period. There were magnificent vegetables of all sorts in it, and if the fruitswere meagre that was the fault of the rainy summer, perhaps. Themarket-place was very dirty, and so was the narrow street leading downfrom it to the Rhine, which ran swift as a mountain torrent along aslatternly quay. A bridge of boats crossing the stream shook in the rapidcurrent, and a long procession of market carts passed slowly over, whilea cluster of scows waited in picturesque patience for the draw to open. 

They saw what a beautiful town that was for a boy to grow up in, and howmany privileges it offered, how many dangers, how many chances forhairbreadth escapes. They chose that Heine must often have rushedshrieking joyfully down that foul alley to the Rhine with other boys; andthey easily found a leaf-strewn stretch of the sluggish Dussel, in thePublic Garden, where his playmate, the little Wilhelm, lost his life andsaved the kitten's. They were not so sure of the avenue through which thepoet saw the Emperor Napoleon come riding on his small white horse whenhe took possession of the Elector's dominions. But if it was that wherethe statue of the Kaiser Wilhelm I. Comes riding on a horse led by twoVictories, both poet and hero are avenged there on the accomplished fact. Defeated and humiliated France triumphs in the badness of that foolishdenkmal (one of the worst in all denkmal-ridden Germany), and the memoryof the singer whom the Hohenzollern family pride forbids honor in hisnative place, is immortal in its presence. 

On the way back to their hotel, March made some reflections upon the openneglect, throughout Germany, of the greatest German lyrist, by which thepoet might have profited if he had been present. He contended that it wasnot altogether an effect of Hohenzollern pride, which could not suffer ajoke or two from the arch-humorist; but that Heine had said things ofGermany herself which Germans might well have found unpardonable. Heconcluded that it would not do to be perfectly frank with one's owncountry. Though, to be sure, there would always be the question whetherthe Jew-born Heine had even a step-fatherland in the Germany he loved sotenderly and mocked so pitilessly. He had to own that if he were a negropoet he would not feel bound to measure terms in speaking of America, andhe would not feel that his fame was in her keeping. 

Upon the whole he blamed Heine less than Germany and he accused her oftaking a shabby revenge, in trying to forget him; in the heat of hisresentment that there should be no record of Heine in the city where hewas born, March came near ignoring himself the fact that the poetFreiligrath was also born there. As for the famous Dusseldorf school ofpainting, which once filled the world with the worst art, he rejoicedthat it was now so dead, and he grudged the glance which the beauty ofthe new Art Academy extorted from him. It is in the French taste, and isso far a monument to the continuance in one sort of that Frenchsupremacy, of which in another sort another denkmal celebrates theoverthrow. Dusseldorf is not content with the denkmal of the Kaiser onhorseback, with the two Victories for grooms; there is a second, whichthe Marches found when they strolled out again late in the afternoon. Itis in the lovely park which lies in the heart of the city, and they feltin its presence the only emotion of sympathy which the many patrioticmonuments of Germany awakened in them. It had dignity and repose, whichthese never had elsewhere; but it was perhaps not so much for the dyingwarrior and the pitying lion of the sculpture that their hearts weremoved as for the gentle and mournful humanity of the inscription, whichdropped into equivalent English verse in March's note-book:

 Fame was enough for the Victors, and glory and verdurous laurel; Tears by their mothers wept founded this image of stone. 

To this they could forgive the vaunting record, on the reverse, of theGerman soldiers who died heroes in the war with France, the war withAustria, and even the war with poor little Denmark!

The morning had been bright and warm, and it was just that the afternoonshould be dim and cold, with a pale sun looking through a September mist, which seemed to deepen the seclusion and silence of the forest reaches;for the park was really a forest of the German sort, as parks are apt tobe in Germany. But it was beautiful, and they strayed through it, andsometimes sat down on the benches in its damp shadows, and said how muchseemed to be done in Germany for the people's comfort and pleasure. Inwhat was their own explicitly, as well as what was tacitly theirs, theywere not so restricted as we were at home, and especially the childrenseemed made fondly and lovingly free of all public things. The Marchesmet troops of them in the forest, as they strolled slowly back by thewinding Dussel to the gardened avenue leading to the park, and they foundthem everywhere gay and joyful. But their elders seemed subdued, and weresilent. The strangers heard no sound of laughter in the streets ofDusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the part of a very oldcouple, whose meeting they witnessed and who grinned and cackled at eachother like two children as they shook hands. Perhaps they were indeedchildren of that sad second childhood which one would rather not blossomback into. 

In America, life is yet a joke with us, even when it is grotesque andshameful, as it so often is; for we think we can make it right when wechoose. But there is no joking in Germany, between the first and secondchildhoods, unless behind closed doors. Even there, people do not jokeabove their breath about kings and emperors. If they joke about them inprint, they take out their laugh in jail, for the press laws are severelyenforced, and the prisons are full of able editors, serious as well ascomic. Lese-majesty is a crime that searches sinners out in every walk oflife, and it is said that in family jars a husband sometimes has the lastword of his wife by accusing her of blaspheming the sovereign, and sohaving her silenced for three months at least behind penitential bars. 

"Think, " said March, "how simply I could adjust any differences ofopinion between us in Dusseldorf. "

"Don't!" his wife implored with a burst of feeling which surprised him. "I want to go home!"

They had been talking over their day, and planning their journey toHolland for the morrow, when it came to this outburst from her in thelast half-hour before bed which they sat prolonging beside their stove. 

"What! And not go to Holland? What is to become of my after-cure?"

"Oh, it's too late for that, now. We've used up the month running about, and tiring ourselves to death. I should like to rest a week--to get intomy berth on the Norumbia and rest!"

"I guess the September gales would have something to say about that. "

"I would risk the September gales. "

LXXII. 

In the morning March came home from his bankers gay with the day'sprovisional sunshine in his heart, and joyously expectant of his wife'spleasure in the letters he was bringing. There was one from each of theirchildren, and there was one from Fulkerson, which March opened and readon the street, so as to intercept any unpleasant news there might be inthem; there were two letters for Mrs. March which he knew without openingwere from Miss Triscoe and Mrs. Adding respectively; Mrs. Adding's, fromthe postmarks, seemed to have been following them about for some time. 

"They're all right at home, " he said. "Do see what those people have beendoing. "

"I believe, " she said, taking a knife from the breakfast tray beside herbed to cut the envelopes, "that you've really cared more about them allalong than I have. "

"No, I've only been anxious to be done with them. "

She got the letters open, and holding one of them up in each hand sheread them impartially and simultaneously; then she flung them both down, and turned her face into her pillow with an impulse of her inalienablegirlishness. "Well, it is too silly. "

March felt authorized to take them up and read them consecutively; whenhe had done, so he did not differ from his wife. In one case, Agatha hadwritten to her dear Mrs. March that she and Burnamy had just that eveningbecome engaged; Mrs. Adding, on her part owned a farther step, andannounced her marriage to Mr. Kenby. Following immemorial usage in suchmatters Kenby had added a postscript affirming his happiness in unsparingterms, and in Agatha's letter there was an avowal of like effect fromBurnamy. Agatha hinted her belief that her father would soon come toregard Burnamy as she did; and Mrs. Adding professed a certainhumiliation in having realized that, after all her misgiving about him, Rose seemed rather relieved than otherwise, as if he were glad to haveher off his hands. 

"Well, " said March, "with these troublesome affairs settled, I don't seewhat there is to keep us in Europe any longer, unless it's the consensusof opinion in Tom, Bella, and Fulkerson, that we ought to stay thewinter. "

"Stay the winter!" Mrs. March rose from her pillow, and clutched the homeletters to her from the abeyance in which they had fallen on the coverletwhile she was dealing with the others. "What do you mean?"

"It seems to have been prompted by a hint you let drop, which Tom haspassed to Bella and Fulkerson. "

"Oh, but that was before we left Carlsbad!" she protested, while shedevoured the letters with her eyes, and continued to denounce theabsurdity of the writers. Her son and daughter both urged that now theirfather and mother were over there, they had better stay as long as theyenjoyed it, and that they certainly ought not to come home without goingto Italy, where they had first met, and revisiting the places which theyhad seen together when they were young engaged people: without that theirsilver wedding journey would not be complete. Her son said thateverything was going well with 'Every Other Week', and both himself andMr. Fulkerson thought his father ought to spend the winter in Italy, andget a thorough rest. "Make a job of it, March, " Fulkerson wrote, "andhave a Sabbatical year while you're at it. You may not get another. "

"Well, I can tell them, " said Mrs. March indignantly, "we shall not doanything of the kind. "

"Then you didn't mean it?"

"Mean it!" She stopped herself with a look at her husband, and askedgently, "Do you want to stay?"

"Well, I don't know, " he answered vaguely. The fact was, he was sick oftravel and of leisure; he was longing to be at home and at work again. But if there was to be any self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain; which could be fairly divided between them, and leave himthe self and her the sacrifice, he was too experienced a husband not tosee the advantage of it, or to refuse the merit. "I thought you wished tostay. "

"Yes, " she sighed, "I did. It has been very, very pleasant, and, ifanything, I have over-enjoyed myself. We have gone romping through itlike two young people, haven't we?"

"You have, " he assented. "I have always felt the weight of my years ingetting the baggage registered; they have made the baggage weigh moreevery time. "

"And I've forgotten mine. Yes, I have. But the years haven't forgottenme, Basil, and now I remember them. I'm tired. It doesn't seem as if Icould ever get up. But I dare say it's only a mood; it may be only acold; and if you wish to stay, why--we will think it over. "

"No, we won't, my dear, " he said, with a generous shame for his hypocrisyif not with a pure generosity. "I've got all the good out of it thatthere was in it, for me, and I shouldn't go home any better six monthshence than I should now. Italy will keep for another time, and so, forthe matter of that, will Holland. "

"No, no!" she interposed. "We won't give up Holland, whatever we do. Icouldn't go home feeling that I had kept you out of your after-cure; andwhen we get there, no doubt the sea air will bring me up so that I shallwant to go to Italy, too, again. Though it seems so far off, now! But goand see when the afternoon train for the Hague leaves, and I shall beready. My mind's quite made up on that point. "

"What a bundle of energy!" said her husband laughing down at her. 

He went and asked about the train to the Hague, but only to satisfy asuperficial conscience; for now he knew that they were both of one mindabout going home. He also looked up the trains for London, and found thatthey could get there by way of Ostend in fourteen hours. Then he wentback to the banker's, and with the help of the Paris-New York Chroniclewhich he found there, he got the sailings of the first steamers home. After that he strolled about the streets for a last impression ofDusseldorf, but it was rather blurred by the constantly recurring pull ofhis thoughts toward America, and he ended by turning abruptly at acertain corner, and going to his hotel. 

He found his wife dressed, but fallen again on her bed, beside which herbreakfast stood still untasted; her smile responded wanly to hisbrightness. "I'm not well, my dear, " she said. "I don't believe I couldget off to the Hague this afternoon. "

"Could you to Liverpool?" he returned. 

"To Liverpool?" she gasped. "What do you mean?"

"Merely that the Cupania is sailing on the twentieth, and I'vetelegraphed to know if we can get a room. I'm afraid it won't be a goodone, but she's the first boat out, and--"

"No, indeed, we won't go to Liverpool, and we will never go home tillyou've had your after-cure in Holland. " She was very firm in this, butshe added, "We will stay another night, here, and go to the Haguetomorrow. Sit down, and let us talk it over. Where were we?"

She lay down on the sofa, and he put a shawl over her. "We were juststarting for Liverpool. "

"No, no we weren't! Don't say such things, dearest! I want you to help mesum it all, up. You think it's been a success, don't you?"

"As a cure?"

"No, as a silver wedding journey?"

"Perfectly howling. "

"I do think we've had a good time. I never expected to enjoy myself somuch again in the world. I didn't suppose I should ever take so muchinterest in anything. It shows that when we choose to get out of our rutwe shall always find life as fresh and delightful as ever. There isnothing to prevent our coming any year, now that Tom's shown himself socapable, and having another silver wedding journey. I don't like to thinkof it's being confined to Germany quite. "

"Oh, I don't know. We can always talk of it as our German-Silver WeddingJourney. "

"That's true. But nobody would understand nowadays what you meant byGerman-silver; it's perfectly gone out. How ugly it was! A sort of greasyyellowish stuff, always getting worn through; I believe it was made wornthrough. Aunt Mary had a castor of it, that I can remember when I was achild; it went into the kitchen long before I grew up. Would a joke likethat console you for the loss of Italy?"

"It would go far to do it. And as a German-Silver Wedding Journey, it'scertainly been very complete. "

"What do you mean?"

"It's given us a representative variety of German cities. First we hadHamburg, you know, a great modern commercial centre. "

"Yes! Go on!"

"Then we had Leipsic, the academic. "

"Yes!"

"Then Carlsbad, the supreme type of a German health resort; thenNuremberg, the mediaeval; then Anspach, the extinct princely capital;then Wurzburg, the ecclesiastical rococo; then Weimar, for the literatureof a great epoch; then imperial Berlin; then Frankfort, the memory of theold free city; then Dusseldorf, the centre of the most poignant personalinterest in the world--I don't see how we could have done better, if we'dplanned it all, and not acted from successive impulses. "

"It's been grand; it's been perfect! As German-Silver Wedding Journeyit's perfect--it seems as if it had been ordered! But I will never letyou give up Holland! No, we will go this afternoon, and when I get toSchevleningen, I'll go to bed, and stay there, till you've completed yourafter-cure. "

"Do you think that will be wildly gay for the convalescent?"

She suddenly began to cry. "Oh, dearest, what shall we do? I feelperfectly broken down. I'm afraid I'm going to be sick--and away fromhome! How could you ever let me overdo, so?" She put her handkerchief toher eyes, and turned her face into the sofa pillow. 

This was rather hard upon him, whom her vivid energy and inextinguishableinterest had not permitted a moment's respite from pleasure since theyleft Carlsbad. But he had been married, too long not to understand thather blame of him was only a form of self-reproach for her ownself-forgetfulness. She had not remembered that she was no longer youngtill she had come to what he saw was a nervous collapse. The fact had itspathos and its poetry which no one could have felt more keenly than he. If it also had its inconvenience and its danger he realized these too. 

"Isabel, " he said, "we are going home. "

"Very well, then it will be your doing. "

"Quite. Do you think you could stand it as far as Cologne? We get thesleeping-car there, and you can lie down the rest of the way to Ostend. "

"This afternoon? Why I'm perfectly strong; it's merely my nerves that aregone. " She sat up, and wiped her eyes. "But Basil! If you're doing thisfor me--"

"I'm doing it for myself, " said March, as he went out of the room. 

She stood the journey perfectly well, and in the passage to Dover shesuffered so little from the rough weather that she was an example to manyrobust matrons who filled the ladies' cabin with the noise of theiranguish during the night. She would have insisted upon taking the firsttrain up to London, if March had not represented that this would notexpedite the sailing of the Cupania, and that she might as well stay theforenoon at the convenient railway hotel, and rest. It was not quite hisideal of repose that the first people they saw in the coffee-room whenthey went to breakfast should be Kenby and Rose Adding, who were havingtheir tea and toast and eggs together in the greatest apparentgood-fellowship. He saw his wife shrink back involuntarily from theencounter, but this was only to gather force for it; and the next momentshe was upon them in all the joy of the surprise. Then March allowedhimself to be as glad as the others both seemed, and he shook hands withKenby while his wife kissed Rose; and they all talked at once. In theconfusion of tongues it was presently intelligible that Mrs. Kenby wasgoing to be down in a few minutes; and Kenby took March into hisconfidence with a smile which was, almost a wink in explaining that heknew how it was with the ladies. He said that Rose and he usually gotdown to breakfast first, and when he had listened inattentively to Mrs. March's apology for being on her way home, he told her that she was luckynot to have gone to Schevleningen, where she and March would have frozento death. He said that they were going to spend September at a littleplace on the English coast, near by, where he had been the day beforewith Rose to look at lodgings, and where you could bathe all through themonth. He was not surprised that the Marches were going home, and said, Well, that was their original plan, wasn't it?

Mrs. Kenby, appearing upon this, pretended to know better, after theoutburst of joyful greeting with the Marches; and intelligently remindedKenby that he knew the Marches had intended to pass the winter in Paris. She was looking extremely pretty, but she wished only to make them seehow well Rose was looking, and she put her arm round his shoulders as shespoke, Schevleningen had done wonders for him, but it was fearfully coldthere, and now they were expecting everything from Westgate, where sheadvised March to come, too, for his after-cure: she recollected in timeto say, She forgot they were on their way home. She added that she didnot know when she should return; she was merely a passenger, now; sheleft everything to the men of the family. She had, in fact, the air ofhaving thrown off every responsibility, but in supremacy, not submission. She was always ordering Kenby about; she sent him for her handkerchief, and her rings which she had left either in the tray of her trunk, or onthe pin-cushion, or on the wash-stand or somewhere, and forbade him tocome back without them. He asked for her keys, and then with a joyfulscream she owned that she had left the door-key in the door and the wholebunch of trunk-keys in her trunk; and Kenby treated it all as thegreatest joke; Rose, too, seemed to think that Kenby would makeeverything come right, and he had lost that look of anxiety which he usedto have; at the most he showed a friendly sympathy for Kenby, for whosesake he seemed mortified at her. He was unable to regard his mother asthe delightful joke which she appeared to Kenby, but that was merelytemperamental; and he was never distressed except when she behaved withunreasonable caprice at Kenby's cost. 

As for Kenby himself he betrayed no dissatisfaction with his fate toMarch. He perhaps no longer regarded his wife as that strong characterwhich he had sometimes wearied March by celebrating; but she was stillthe most brilliant intelligence, and her charm seemed only to have grownwith his perception of its wilful limitations. He did not want to talkabout her so much; he wanted rather to talk about Rose, his health, hiseducation, his nature, and what was best to do for him. The two were onterms of a confidence and affection which perpetually amused Mrs. Kenby, but which left the sympathetic witness nothing to desire in theirrelation. 

They all came to the train when the Marches started up to London, andstood waving to them as they pulled out of the station. "Well, I can'tsee but that's all right, " he said as he sank back in his seat with asigh of relief. "I never supposed we should get out of their marriagehalf so well, and I don't feel that you quite made the match either, mydear. "

She was forced to agree with him that the Kenbys seemed happy together, and that there was nothing to fear for Rose in their happiness. He wouldbe as tenderly cared for by Kenby as he could have been by his mother, and far more judiciously. She owned that she had trembled for him tillshe had seen them all together; and now she should never tremble again. 

"Well?" March prompted, at a certain inconclusiveness in her tone ratherthan her words. 

"Well, you can see that it, isn't ideal. "

"Why isn't it ideal? I suppose you think that the marriage of Burnamy andAgatha Triscoe will be ideal, with their ignorances and inexperiences andillusions. "

"Yes! It's the illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them, and attheir age the Kenbys can't have them. "

"Kenby is a solid mass of illusion. And I believe that people can go andget as many new illusions as they want, whenever they've lost their oldones. "

"Yes, but the new illusions won't wear so well; and in marriage you wantillusions that will last. No; you needn't talk to me. It's all very well, but it isn't ideal. "

March laughed. "Ideal! What is ideal?"

"Going home!" she said with such passion that he had not the heart topoint out that they were merely returning to their old duties, cares andpains, with the worn-out illusion that these would be altogetherdifferent when they took them up again. 

LXXIII. 

In fulfilment of another ideal Mrs. March took straightway to her berthwhen she got on board the Cupania, and to her husband's admiration sheremained there till the day before they reached New York. Her theory wasthat the complete rest would do more than anything else to calm hershaken nerves; and she did not admit into her calculations the chances ofadverse weather which March would not suggest as probable in the lastweek in September. The event justified her unconscious faith. The ship'srun was of unparalled swiftness, even for the Cupania, and of unparalledsmoothness. For days the sea was as sleek as oil; the racks were never onthe tables once; the voyage was of the sort which those who make it nomore believe in at the time than those whom they afterwards weary inboasting of it. 

The ship was very full, but Mrs. March did not show the slightestcuriosity to know who her fellow-passengers were. She said that shewished to be let perfectly alone, even by her own emotions, and for thisreason she forbade March to bring her a list of the passengers till afterthey had left Queenstown lest it should be too exciting. He did not takethe trouble to look it up, therefore; and the first night out he saw noone whom he knew at dinner; but the next morning at breakfast he foundhimself to his great satisfaction at the same table with the Eltwins. They were so much at ease with him that even Mrs. Eltwin took part in thetalk, and told him how they had spent the time of her husband's rigorousafter-cure in Switzerland, and now he was going home much better thanthey had expected. She said they had rather thought of spending thewinter in Europe, but had given it up because they were both a littlehomesick. March confessed that this was exactly the case with his wifeand himself; and he had to add that Mrs. March was not very wellotherwise, and he should be glad to be at home on her account. Therecurrence of the word home seemed to deepen Eltwin's habitual gloom, andMrs. Eltwin hastened to leave the subject of their return for inquiryinto Mrs. March's condition; her interest did not so far overcome hershyness that she ventured to propose a visit to her; and March found thatthe fact of the Eltwins' presence on board did not agitate his wife. Itseemed rather to comfort her, and she said she hoped he would see all hecould of the poor old things. She asked if he had met any one else heknew, and he was able to tell her that there seemed to be a good manyswells on board, and this cheered her very much, though he did not knowthem; she liked to be near the rose, though it was not a flower that shereally cared for. 

She did not ask who the swells were, and March took no trouble to findout. He took no trouble to get a passenger-list, and he had the moretrouble when he tried at last; the lists seemed to have all vanished, asthey have a habit of doing, after the first day; the one that he madeinterest for with the head steward was a second-hand copy, and had no onehe knew in it but the Eltwins. The social solitude, however, was ratherfavorable to certain other impressions. There seemed even more elderlypeople than there were on the Norumbia; the human atmosphere was gray andsober; there was nothing of the gay expansion of the outward voyage;there was little talking or laughing among those autumnal men who weregoing seriously and anxiously home, with faces fiercely set for thecoming grapple; or necks meekly bowed for the yoke. They had eaten theircake, and it had been good, but there remained a discomfort in thedigestion. They sat about in silence, and March fancied that the flownsummer was as dreamlike to each of them as it now was to him. He hated tobe of their dreary company, but spiritually he knew that he was of it;and he vainly turned to cheer himself with the younger passengers. Somematrons who went about clad in furs amused him, for they must have beenunpleasantly warm in their jackets and boas; nothing but the hope ofbeing able to tell the customs inspector with a good conscience that thethings had been worn, would have sustained one lady draped from head tofoot in Astrakhan. 

They were all getting themselves ready for the fray or the play of thecoming winter; but there seemed nothing joyous in the preparation. Therewere many young girls, as there always are everywhere, but there were notmany young men, and such as there were kept to the smoking-room. Therewas no sign of flirtation among them; he would have given much for amoment of the pivotal girl, to see whether she could have brightenedthose gloomy surfaces with her impartial lamp. March wished that he couldhave brought some report from the outer world to cheer his wife, as hedescended to their state-room. They had taken what they could get at theeleventh hour, and they had got no such ideal room as they had in theNorumbia. It was, as Mrs. March graphically said, a basement room. It wason the north side of the ship, which is a cold exposure, and if there hadbeen any sun it could not have got into their window, which was half thetime under water. The green waves, laced with foam, hissed as they ranacross the port; and the electric fan in the corridor moaned like thewind in a gable. 

He felt a sinking of the heart as he pushed the state-room door open, andlooked at his wife lying with her face turned to the wall; and he wasgoing to withdraw, thinking her asleep, when she said quietly, "Are wegoing down?"

"Not that I know of, " he answered with a gayety he did not feel. "ButI'll ask the head steward. "

She put out her hand behind her for him to take, and clutched his fingersconvulsively. "If I'm never any better, you will always remember thishappy, summer, won't you? Oh, it's been such a happy summer! It has beenone long joy, one continued triumph! But it was too late; we were tooold; and it's broken me. "

The time had been when he would have attempted comfort; when he wouldhave tried mocking; but that time was long past; he could only prayinwardly for some sort of diversion, but what it was to be in theirbarren circumstance he was obliged to leave altogether to Providence. Heventured, pending an answer to his prayers upon the question, "Don't youthink I'd better see the doctor, and get you some sort of tonic?"

She suddenly turned and faced him. "The doctor! Why, I'm not sick, Basil!If you can see the purser and get our rooms changed, or do something tostop those waves from slapping against that horrible blinking one-eyedwindow, you can save my life; but no tonic is going to help me. "

She turned her face from him again, and buried it in the bedclothes, while he looked desperately at the racing waves, and the port that seemedto open and shut like a weary eye. 

"Oh, go away!" she implored. "I shall be better presently, but if youstand there like that--Go and see if you can't get some other room, whereI needn't feel as if I were drowning, all the way over. "

He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and having once started, he didnot stop short of the purser's office. He made an excuse of gettinggreenbacks for some English bank-notes, and then he said casually that hesupposed there would be no chance of having his room on the lower deckchanged for something a little less intimate with the sea. The purser wasnot there to take the humorous view, but he conceived that March wantedsomething higher up, and he was able to offer him a room of those on thepromenade where he had seen swells going in and out, for six hundreddollars. March did not blench, but said he would get his wife to look atit with him, and then he went out somewhat dizzily to take counsel withhimself how he should put the matter to her. She would be sure to askwhat the price of the new room would be, and he debated whether to takeit and tell her some kindly lie about it, or trust to the bracing effectof the sum named in helping restore the lost balance of her nerves. Hewas not so rich that he could throw six hundred dollars away, but theremight be worse things; and he walked up and down thinking. All at once itflashed upon him that he had better see the doctor, anyway, and find outwhether there were not some last hope in medicine before he took thedesperate step before him. He turned in half his course, and ran into alady who had just emerged from the door of the promenade laden withwraps, and who dropped them all and clutched him to save herself fromfalling. 

"Why, Mr. March!" she shrieked. 

"Miss Triscoe!" he returned, in the astonishment which he shared with herto the extent of letting the shawls he had knocked from her hold liebetween them till she began to pick them up herself. Then he joined herand in the relief of their common occupation they contrived to possesseach other of the reason of their presence on, the same boat. She hadsorrowed over Mrs. March's sad state, and he had grieved to hear that herfather was going home because he was not at all well, before they foundthe general stretched out in his steamer-chair, and waiting with a grimimpatience for his daughter. 

"But how is it you're not in the passenger-list?" he inquired of themboth, and Miss Triscoe explained that they had taken their passage at thelast moment, too late, she supposed, to get into the list. They were inLondon, and had run down to Liverpool on the chance of getting berths. Beyond this she was not definite, and there was an absence of Burnamy notonly from her company but from her conversation which mystified Marchthrough all his selfish preoccupations with his wife. She was a girl whohad her reserves, but for a girl who had so lately and rapturouslywritten them of her engagement, there was a silence concerning herbetrothed that had almost positive quality. With his longing to try MissTriscoe upon Mrs. March's malady as a remedial agent, he had now thedesire to try Mrs. March upon Miss Triscoe's mystery as a solvent. Shestood talking to him, and refusing to sit down and be wrapped up in thechair next her father. She said that if he were going to ask Mrs. Marchto let her come to her, it would not be worth while to sit down; and hehurried below. 

"Did you get it?" asked his wife, without looking round, but not soapathetically as before. 

"Oh, yes. That's all right. But now, Isabel, there's something I've gotto tell you. You'd find it out, and you'd better know it at once. "

She turned her face, and asked sternly, "What is it?"

Then he said, with, an almost equal severity, "Miss Triscoe is on board. Miss Triscoe-and-her-father. She wishes to come down and see you. "

Mrs. March sat up and began to twist her hair into shape. "And Burnamy?"

"There is no Burnamy physically, or so far as I can make out, spiritually. She didn't mention him, and I talked at least five minuteswith her. "

"Hand me my dressing-sack, " said Mrs. March, "and poke those things onthe sofa under the berth. Shut up that wash-stand, and pull the curtainacross that hideous window. Stop! Throw those towels into your berth. Putmy shoes, and your slippers into the shoe-bag on the door. Slip thebrushes into that other bag. Beat the dent out of the sofa cushion thatyour head has made. Now!"

"Then--then you will see her?"

"See her!"

Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it, and he returned withMiss Triscoe in a dreamlike simultaneity. He remembered, as he led theway into his corridor, to apologize for bringing her down into a basementroom. 

"Oh, we're in the basement, too; it was all we could get, " she said inwords that ended within the state-room he opened to her. Then he wentback and took her chair and wraps beside her father. 

He let the general himself lead the way up to his health, which he wasnot slow in reaching, and was not quick in leaving. He reminded March ofthe state he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said it had gone frombad to worse with him. At Weimar he had taken to his bed and merelyescaped from it with his life. Then they had tried Schevleningen for aweek, where, he said in a tone of some injury, they had rather thoughtthey might find them, the Marches. The air had been poison to him, andthey had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth; but thedoctor in London had thought not, and urged their going home. "All Europeis damp, you know, and dark as a pocket in winter, " he ended. 

There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decided that he must waitto see his wife if he wished to know anything, when the general, who hadbeen silent, twisted his head towards him, and said without regard to thecontext, "It was complicated, at Weimar, by that young man in the mostdevilish way. Did my daughter write to Mrs. March about--Well it came tonothing, after all; and I don't understand how, to this day. I doubt ifthey do. It was some sort of quarrel, I suppose. I wasn't consulted inthe matter either way. It appears that parents are not consulted in thesetrifling affairs, nowadays. " He had married his daughter's mother in opendefiance of her father; but in the glare of his daughter's wilfulnessthis fact had whitened into pious obedience. "I dare say I shall be told, by-and-by, and shall be expected to approve of the result. "

A fancy possessed March that by operation of temperamental laws GeneralTriscoe was no more satisfied with Burnamy's final rejection than withhis acceptance. If the engagement was ever to be renewed, it might beanother thing; but as it stood, March divined a certain favor for theyoung man in the general's attitude. But the affair was altogether toodelicate for comment; the general's aristocratic frankness in dealingwith it might have gone farther if his knowledge had been greater; but inany case March did not see how he could touch it. He could only say, Hehad always liked Burnamy, himself. 

He had his good qualities, the general owned. He did not profess tounderstand the young men of our time; but certainly the fellow had theinstincts of a gentleman. He had nothing to say against him, unless inthat business with that man--what was his name?

"Stoller?" March prompted. "I don't excuse him in that, but I don't blamehim so much, either. If punishment means atonement, he had theopportunity of making that right very suddenly, and if pardon meansexpunction, then I don't see why that offence hasn't been pretty wellwiped out. 

"Those things are not so simple as they used to seem, " said the general, with a seriousness beyond his wont in things that did not immediatelyconcern his own comfort or advantage. 

LXXVI. 

In the mean time Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe were discussing anotheroffence of Burnamy's. 

"It wasn't, " said the girl, excitedly, after a plunge through all theminor facts to the heart of the matter, "that he hadn't a perfect rightto do it, if he thought I didn't care for him. I had refused him atCarlsbad, and I had forbidden him to speak to me about--on the subject. But that was merely temporary, and he ought to have known it. He ought tohave known that I couldn't accept him, on the spur of the moment, thatway; and when he had come back, after going away in disgrace, before hehad done anything to justify himself. I couldn't have kept myself-respect; and as it was I had the greatest difficulty; and he oughtto have seen it. Of course he said afterwards that he didn't see it. Butwhen--when I found out that SHE had been in Weimar, and all that time, while I had been suffering in Carlsbad and Wurzburg, and longing to seehim--let him know how I was really feeling--he was flirting withthat--that girl, then I saw that he was a false nature, and I determinedto put an end to everything. And that is what I did; and I shall alwaysthink I--did right--and--"

The rest was lost in Agatha's handkerchief, which she put up to her eyes. Mrs. March watched her from her pillow keeping the girl's unoccupied handin her own, and softly pressing it till the storm was past sufficientlyto allow her to be heard. 

Then she said, "Men are very strange--the best of them. And from the veryfact that he was disappointed, he would be all the more apt to rush intoa flirtation with somebody else. "

Miss Triscoe took down her handkerchief from a face that had certainlynot been beautified by grief. "I didn't blame him for the flirting; ornot so much. It was his keeping it from me afterwards. He ought to havetold me the very first instant we were engaged. But he didn't. He let itgo on, and if I hadn't happened on that bouquet I might never have knownanything about it. That is what I mean by--a false nature. I wouldn'thave minded his deceiving me; but to let me deceive myself--Oh, it wastoo much!"

Agatha hid her face in her handkerchief again. She was perching on theedge of the berth, and Mrs. March said, with a glance, which she did notsee, toward the sofa, "I'm afraid that's rather a hard seat for you. 

"Oh, no, thank you! I'm perfectly comfortable--I like it--if you don'tmind?"

Mrs. March pressed her hand for answer, and after another little delay, sighed and said, "They are not like us, and we cannot help it. They aremore temporizing. "

"How do you mean?" Agatha unmasked again. 

"They can bear to keep things better than we can, and they trust to timeto bring them right, or to come right of themselves. "

"I don't think Mr. March would trust things to come right of themselves!"said Agatha in indignant accusal of Mrs. March's sincerity. 

"Ah, that's just what he would do, my dear, and has done, all along; andI don't believe we could have lived through without it: we should havequarrelled ourselves into the grave!"

"Mrs. March!"

"Yes, indeed. I don't mean that he would ever deceive me. But he wouldlet things go on, and hope that somehow they would come right without anyfuss. "

"Do you mean that he would let anybody deceive themselves?"

"I'm afraid he would--if he thought it would come right. It used to be aterrible trial to me; and it is yet, at times when I don't remember thathe means nothing but good and kindness by it. Only the other day inAnsbach--how long ago it seems!--he let a poor old woman give him herson's address in Jersey City, and allowed her to believe he would lookhim up when we got back and tell him we had seen her. I don't believe, unless I keep right round after him, as we say in New England, that he'llever go near the man. "

Agatha looked daunted, but she said, "That is a very different thing. "

"It isn't a different kind of thing. And it shows what men are, --thesweetest and best of them, that is. They are terribly apt tobe--easy-going. "

"Then you think I was all wrong?" the girl asked in a tremor. 

"No, indeed! You were right, because you really expected perfection ofhim. You expected the ideal. And that's what makes all the trouble, inmarried life: we expect too much of each other--we each expect more ofthe other than we are willing to give or can give. If I had to begin overagain, I should not expect anything at all, and then I should be sure ofbeing radiantly happy. But all this talking and all this writing aboutlove seems to turn our brains; we know that men are not perfect, even atour craziest, because women are not, but we expect perfection of them;and they seem to expect it of us, poor things! If we could keep on afterwe are in love just as we were before we were in love, and take nicethings as favors and surprises, as we did in the beginning! But we getmore and more greedy and exacting--"

"Do you think I was too exacting in wanting him to tell me everythingafter we were engaged?"

"No, I don't say that. But suppose he had put it off till you weremarried?" Agatha blushed a little, but not painfully, "Would it have beenso bad? Then you might have thought that his flirting up to the lastmoment in his desperation was a very good joke. You would have understoodbetter just how it was, and it might even have made you fonder of him. You might have seen that he had flirted with some one else because he wasso heart-broken about you. "

"Then you believe that if I could have waited till--till--but when I hadfound out, don't you see I couldn't wait? It would have been all verywell if I hadn't known it till then. But as I did know it. Don't yousee?"

"Yes, that certainly complicated it, " Mrs. March admitted. "But I don'tthink, if he'd been a false nature, he'd have owned up as he did. Yousee, he didn't try to deny it; and that's a great point gained. "

"Yes, that is true, " said Agatha, with conviction. "I saw thatafterwards. But you don't think, Mrs. March, that I was unjust or--orhasty?"

"No, indeed! You couldn't have done differently under the circumstances. You may be sure he felt that--he is so unselfish and generous--" Agathabegan to weep into her handkerchief again; Mrs. March caressed her hand. "And it will certainly come right if you feel as you do. "

"No, " the girl protested. "He can never forgive me; it's all over, everything is over. It would make very little difference to me, whathappened now--if the steamer broke her shaft, or anything. But if I canonly believe I wasn't unjust--"

Mrs. March assured her once more that she had behaved with absoluteimpartiality; and she proved to her by a process of reasoning quiteirrefragable that it was only a question of time, with which place hadnothing to do, when she and Burnamy should come together again, and allshould be made right between them. The fact that she did not know wherehe was, any more than Mrs. March herself, had nothing to do with theresult; that was a mere detail, which would settle itself. She clinchedher argument by confessing that her own engagement had been broken off, and that it had simply renewed itself. All you had to do was to keepwilling it, and waiting. There was something very mysterious in it. 

"And how long was it till--" Agatha faltered. 

"Well, in our ease it was two years. "

"Oh!" said the girl, but Mrs. March hastened to reassure her. 

"But our case was very peculiar. I could see afterwards that it needn'thave been two months, if I had been willing to acknowledge at once that Iwas in the wrong. I waited till we met. "

"If I felt that I was in the wrong, I should write, " said Agatha. "Ishouldn't care what he thought of my doing it. "

"Yes, the great thing is to make sure that you were wrong. "

They remained talking so long, that March and the general had exhaustedall the topics of common interest, and had even gone through those theydid not care for. At last the general said, "I'm afraid my daughter willtire Mrs. March. "

"Oh, I don't think she'll tire my wife. But do you want her?"

"Well, when you're going down. "

"I think I'll take a turn about the deck, and start my circulation, " saidMarch, and he did so before he went below. 

He found his wife up and dressed, and waiting provisionally on the sofa. "I thought I might as well go to lunch, " she said, and then she told himabout Agatha and Burnamy, and the means she had employed to comfort andencourage the girl. "And now, dearest, I want you to find out whereBurnamy is, and give him a hint. You will, won't you! If you could haveseen how unhappy she was!"

"I don't think I should have cared, and I'm certainly not going tomeddle. I think Burnamy has got no more than he deserved, and that he'swell rid of her. I can't imagine a broken engagement that would morecompletely meet my approval. As the case stands, they have my blessing. "

"Don't say that, dearest! You know you don't mean it. "

"I do; and I advise you to keep your hands off. You've done all and morethan you ought to propitiate Miss Triscoe. You've offered yourself up, and you've offered me up--"

"No, no, Basil! I merely used you as an illustration of what menwere--the best of them. "

"And I can't observe, " he continued, "that any one else has beenconsidered in the matter. Is Miss Triscoe the sole sufferer by Burnamy'sflirtation? What is the matter with a little compassion for the pivotalgirl?"

"Now, you know you're not serious, " said his wife; and though he wouldnot admit this, he could not be seriously sorry for the new interestwhich she took in the affair. There was no longer any question ofchanging their state-room. Under the tonic influence of the excitementshe did not go back to her berth after lunch, and she was up later afterdinner than he could have advised. She was absorbed in Agatha, but in herliberation from her hypochondria, she began also to make a comparativestudy of the American swells, in the light of her late experience withthe German highhotes. It is true that none of the swells gave her theopportunity of examining them at close range, as the highhotes had done. They kept to their, state-rooms mostly, where, after he thought she couldbear it, March told her how near he had come to making her their equal byan outlay of six hundred dollars. She now shuddered at the thought; butshe contended that in their magnificent exclusiveness they could givepoints to European princes; and that this showed again how when Americansdid try to do a thing, they beat the world. Agatha Triscoe knew who theywere, but she did not know them; they belonged to another kind of set;she spoke of them as "rich people, " and she seemed content to keep awayfrom them with Mrs. March and with the shy, silent old wife of MajorEltwin, to whom March sometimes found her talking. 

He never found her father talking with Major Eltwin. General Triscoe hadhis own friends in the smoking-room, where he held forth in a certaincorner on the chances of the approaching election in New York, and mockedtheir incredulity when he prophesied the success of Tammany and thereturn of the King. March himself much preferred Major Eltwin to thegeneral and his friends; he lived back in the talk of the Ohioan into hisown younger years in Indiana, and he was amused and touched to find howmuch the mid-Western life seemed still the same as he had known. Theconditions had changed, but not so much as they had changed in the Eastand the farther West. The picture that the major drew of them in his ownregion was alluring; it made March homesick; though he knew that heshould never go back to his native section. There was the comfort of kindin the major; and he had a vein of philosophy, spare but sweet, whichMarch liked; he liked also the meekness which had come through sorrowupon a spirit which had once been proud. 

They had both the elderly man's habit of early rising, and they usuallyfound themselves together waiting impatiently for the cup of coffee, ingenuously bad, which they served on the Cupania not earlier than halfpast six, in strict observance of a rule of the line discouraging topeople of their habits. March admired the vileness of the decoction, which he said could not be got anywhere out of the British Empire, and heasked Eltwin the first morning if he had noticed how instantly on theChannel boat they had dropped to it and to the sour, heavy, soddenBritish bread, from the spirited and airy Continental tradition of coffeeand rolls. 

The major confessed that he was no great hand to notice such things, andhe said he supposed that if the line had never lost a passenger, and gotyou to New York in six days it had a right to feed you as it pleased; hesurmised that if they could get their airing outside before they tooktheir coffee, it would give the coffee a chance to taste better; and thiswas what they afterwards did. They met, well buttoned and well mined up, on the promenade when it was yet so early that they were not at once sureof each other in the twilight, and watched the morning planets pale eastand west before the sun rose. Sometimes there were no paling planets andno rising sun, and a black sea, ridged with white, tossed under a lowdark sky with dim rifts. 

One morning, they saw the sun rise with a serenity and majesty which itrarely has outside of the theatre. The dawn began over that sea which waslike the rumpled canvas imitations of the sea on the stage, under longmauve clouds bathed in solemn light. Above these, in the pale tender sky, two silver stars hung, and the steamer's smoke drifted across them like athin dusky veil. To the right a bank of dun cloud began to burn crimson, and to burn brighter till it was like a low hill-side full of gorgeousrugosities fleeced with a dense dwarfish growth of autumnal shrubs. Thewhole eastern heaven softened and flushed through diaphanous mists; thewest remained a livid mystery. The eastern masses and flakes of cloudbegan to kindle keenly; but the stars shone clearly, and then one star, till the tawny pink hid it. All the zenith reddened, but still the sundid not show except in the color of the brilliant clouds. At last thelurid horizon began to burn like a flame-shot smoke, and a fiercelybright disc edge pierced its level, and swiftly defined itself as thesun's orb. 

Many thoughts went through March's mind; some of them were sad, but insome there was a touch of hopefulness. It might have been that beautywhich consoled him for his years; somehow he felt himself, if no longeryoung, a part of the young immortal frame of things. His state wasindefinable, but he longed to hint at it to his companion. 

"Yes, " said Eltwin, with a long deep sigh. "I feel as if I could walk outthrough that brightness and find her. I reckon that such hopes wouldn'tbe allowed to lie to us; that so many ages of men couldn't have fooledthemselves so. I'm glad I've seen this. " He was silent and they bothremained watching the rising sun till they could not bear its splendor. "Now, " said the major, "it must be time for that mud, as you call it. "Over their coffee and crackers at the end of the table which they had tothemselves, he resumed. "I was thinking all the time--we seem to thinkhalf a dozen things at once, and this was one of them--about a piece ofbusiness I've got to settle when I reach home; and perhaps you can adviseme about it; you're an editor. I've got a newspaper on my hands; I reckonit would be a pretty good thing, if it had a chance; but I don't knowwhat to do with it: I got it in trade with a fellow who has to go Westfor his lungs, but he's staying till I get back. What's become of thatyoung chap--what's his name?--that went out with us?"

"Burnamy?" prompted March, rather breathlessly. 

"Yes. Couldn't he take hold of it? I rather liked him. He's smart, isn'the?"

"Very, " said March. "But I don't know where he is. I don't know that hewould go into the country--. But he might, if--"

They entered provisionally into the case, and for argument's sakesupposed that Burnamy would take hold of the major's paper if he could begot at. It really looked to March like a good chance for him, on Eltwin'sshowing; but he was not confident of Burnamy's turning up very soon, andhe gave the major a pretty clear notion why, by entering into the youngfellow's history for the last three months. 

"Isn't it the very irony of fate?" he said to his wife when he found herin their room with a cup of the same mud he had been drinking, andreported the facts to her. 

"Irony?" she said, with all the excitement he could have imagined ordesired. "Nothing of the kind. It's a leading, if ever there was one. Itwill be the easiest thing in the world to find Burnamy. And out there shecan sit on her steps!"

He slowly groped his way to her meaning, through the hypothesis ofBurnamy's reconciliation and marriage with Agatha Triscoe, and theirsettlement in Major Eltwin's town under social conditions that implied ahabit of spending the summer evenings on their front porch. While he wasdoing this she showered him with questions and conjectures andrequisitions in which nothing but the impossibility of going ashore savedhim from the instant devotion of all his energies to a world-wide, inquiry into Burnamy's whereabouts. 

The next morning he was up before Major Eltwin got out, and found thesecond-cabin passengers free of the first-cabin promenade at an hour whentheir superiors were not using it. As he watched these inferiors, decent-looking, well-clad men and women, enjoying their privilege with afurtive air, and with stolen glances at him, he asked himself in whatsort he was their superior, till the inquiry grew painful. Then he rosefrom his chair, and made his way to the place where the material barrierbetween them was lifted, and interested himself in a few of them whoseemed too proud to avail themselves of his society on the terms made. Afigure seized his attention with a sudden fascination of conjecture andrejection: the figure of a tall young man who came out on the promenadeand without looking round, walked swiftly away to the bow of the ship, and stood there, looking down at the water in an attitude which wasbewilderingly familiar. His movement, his posture, his dress, even, wasthat of Burnamy, and March, after a first flush of pleasure, felt asickening repulsion in the notion of his presence. It would have beensuch a cheap performance on the part of life, which has all sorts ofchances at command, and need not descend to the poor tricks ofsecond-rate fiction; and he accused Burnamy of a complicity in the badtaste of the affair, though he realized, when he reflected, that if itwere really Burnamy he must have sailed in as much unconsciousness of theTriscoes as he himself had done. He had probably got out of money and hadhurried home while he had still enough to pay the second-cabin fare onthe first boat back. Clearly he was not to blame, but life was to blamefor such a shabby device; and March felt this so keenly that he wished toturn from the situation, and have nothing to do with it. He kept movingtoward him, drawn by the fatal attraction, and at a few paces' distancethe young man whirled about and showed him the face of a stranger. 

March made some witless remark on the rapid course of the ship as it cutits way through the water of the bow; the stranger answered with a strongLancashire accent; and in the talk which followed, he said he was goingout to see the cotton-mills at Fall River and New Bedford, and he seemedhopeful of some advice or information from March; then he said he must goand try to get his Missus out; March understood him to mean his wife, andhe hurried down to his own, to whom he related his hair-breadth escapefrom Burnamy. 

"I don't call it an escape at all!" she declared. "I call it the greatestpossible misfortune. If it had been Burnamy we could have brought themtogether at once, just when she has seen so clearly that she was in thewrong, and is feeling all broken up. There wouldn't have been anydifficulty about his being in the second-cabin. We could have contrivedto have them meet somehow. If the worst came to the worst you could havelent him money to pay the difference, and got him into the first-cabin. "

"I could have taken that six-hundred-dollar room for him, " said March, "and then he could have eaten with the swells. "

She answered that now he was teasing; that he was fundamentally incapableof taking anything seriously; and in the end he retired before thestewardess bringing her first coffee, with a well-merited feeling that ifit had not been for his triviality the young Lancashireman would reallyhave been Burnamy. 

LXXV. 

Except for the first day and night out from Queenstown, when the shiprolled and pitched with straining and squeaking noises, and a thumping ofthe lifted screws, there was no rough weather, and at last the ocean waslivid and oily, with a long swell, on which she swayed with noperceptible motion save from her machinery. 

Most of the seamanship seemed to be done after dark, or in those earlyhours when March found the stewards cleaning the stairs, and the sailorsscouring the promenades. He made little acquaintance with hisfellow-passengers. One morning he almost spoke with an old Quaker ladywhom he joined in looking at the Niagara flood which poured from thechurning screws; but he did not quite get the words out. On the contraryhe talked freely with an American who, bred horses on a farm nearBoulogne, and was going home to the Horse Show; he had been thirty-fiveyears out of the country, but he had preserved his Yankee accent in allits purity, and was the most typical-looking American on board. Now andthen March walked up and down with a blond Mexican whom he found of theusual well-ordered Latin intelligence, but rather flavorless; at times hesat beside a nice Jew, who talked agreeably, but only about business; andhe philosophized the race as so tiresome often because it seemed so oftenwithout philosophy. He made desperate attempts at times to interesthimself in the pool-selling in the smoking-room where the betting on theship's wonderful run was continual. 

He thought that people talked less and less as they drew nearer home; buton the last day out there was a sudden expansion, and some whom he hadnot spoken with voluntarily addressed him. The sweet, soft air was likemidsummer the water rippled gently, without a swell, blue under the clearsky, and the ship left a wide track that was silver in the sun. Therewere more sail; the first and second class baggage was got up and piledalong the steerage deck. 

Some people dressed a little more than usual for the last dinner whichwas earlier than usual, so as to be out of the way against the arrivalwhich had been variously predicted at from five to seven-thirty. Anindescribable nervousness culminated with the appearance of the customsofficers on board, who spread their papers on cleared spaces of thedining-tables, and summoned the passengers to declare that they hadnothing to declare, as a preliminary to being searched like thieves atthe dock. 

This ceremony proceeded while the Cupania made her way up the Narrows, and into the North River, where the flare of lights from the crazy steepsand cliffs of architecture on the New York shore seemed a persistence ofthe last Fourth of July pyrotechnics. March blushed for the grotesquesplendor of the spectacle, and was confounded to find some Englishmenadmiring it, till he remembered that aesthetics were not the strong pointof our race. His wife sat hand in hand with Miss Triscoe, and from timeto time made him count the pieces of small baggage in the keeping oftheir steward; while General Triscoe held aloof in a sarcastic calm. 

The steamer groped into her dock; the gangways were lifted to her side;the passengers fumbled and stumbled down their incline, and at the bottomthe Marches found themselves respectively in the arms of their son anddaughter. They all began talking at once, and ignoring and trying toremember the Triscoes to whom the young Marches were presented. Bella didher best to be polite to Agatha, and Tom offered to get an inspector forthe general at the same time as for his father. Then March, remorsefullyremembered the Eltwins, and looked about for them, so that his son mightget them an inspector too. He found the major already in the hands of aninspector, who was passing all his pieces after carelessly looking intoone: the official who received the declarations on board had noted aGrand Army button like his own in the major's lapel, and had marked hisfellow-veteran's paper with the mystic sign which procures for the bearerthe honor of being promptly treated as a smuggler, while the less favoredhave to wait longer for this indignity at the hands of their government. When March's own inspector came he was as civil and lenient as ourhateful law allows; when he had finished March tried to put a bank-notein his hand, and was brought to a just shame by his refusal of it. Thebed-room steward keeping guard over the baggage helped put-it togetherafter the search, and protested that March had feed him so handsomelythat he would stay there with it as long as they wished. This partlyrestored March's self-respect, and he could share in General Triscoe'sindignation with the Treasury ruling which obliged him to pay duty on hisown purchases in excess of the hundred-dollar limit, though his daughterhad brought nothing, and they jointly came far within the limit for two. 

He found that the Triscoes were going to a quiet old hotel on the way toStuyvesant Square, quite in his own neighborhood, and he quickly arrangedfor all the ladies and the general to drive together while he was tofollow with his son on foot and by car. They got away from the scene ofthe customs' havoc while the steamer shed, with its vast darkness dimlylit by its many lamps, still showed like a battle-field where theinspectors groped among the scattered baggage like details from thevictorious army searching for the wounded. His son clapped him on theshoulder when he suggested this notion, and said he was the same oldfather; and they got home as gayly together as the dispiriting influencesof the New York ugliness would permit. It was still in those good anddecent times, now so remote, when the city got something for the moneypaid out to keep its streets clean, and those they passed through werenot foul but merely mean. 

The ignoble effect culminated when they came into Broadway, and found itssidewalks, at an hour when those of any European metropolis would havebeen brilliant with life, as unpeopled as those of a minor country town, while long processions of cable-cars carted heaps of men and women up anddown the thoroughfare amidst the deformities of the architecture. 

The next morning the March family breakfasted late after an eveningprolonged beyond midnight in spite of half-hourly agreements that nowthey must really all go to bed. The children had both to recognize againand again how well their parents were looking; Tom had to tell his fatherabout the condition of 'Every Other Week'; Bella had to explain to hermother how sorry her husband was that he could not come on to meet themwith her, but was coming a week later to take her home, and then shewould know the reason why they could not all, go back to Chicago withhim: it was just the place for her father to live, for everybody to live. At breakfast she renewed the reasoning with which she had maintained herposition the night before; the travellers entered into a full expressionof their joy at being home again; March asked what had become of thatstray parrot which they had left in the tree-top the morning theystarted; and Mrs. March declared that this was the last Silver WeddingJourney she ever wished to take, and tried to convince them all that shehad been on the verge of nervous collapse when she reached the ship. Theysat at table till she discovered that it was very nearly eleven o'clock, and said it was disgraceful. 

Before they rose, there was a ring at the door, and a card was brought into Tom. He glanced at it, and said to his father, "Oh, yes! This man hasbeen haunting the office for the last three days. He's got to leaveto-day, and as it seemed to be rather a case of life and death with him, I said he'd probably find you here this morning. But if you don't want tosee him, I can put him off till afternoon, I suppose. "

He tossed the card to his father, who looked at it quietly, and then gaveit to his wife. "Perhaps I'd as well see him?"

"See him!" she returned in accents in which all the intensity of her soulwas centred. By an effort of self-control which no words can convey ajust sense of she remained with her children, while her husband with alaugh more teasing than can be imagined went into the drawing-room tomeet Burnamy. 

The poor fellow was in an effect of belated summer as to clothes, and helooked not merely haggard but shabby. He made an effort for dignity aswell as gayety, however, in stating himself to March, with many apologiesfor his persistency. But, he said, he was on his way West, and he wasanxious to know whether there was any chance of his 'Kasper Hauler' paperbeing taken if he finished it up. March would have been a farharder-hearted editor than he was, if he could have discouraged thesuppliant before him. He said he would take the Kasper Hauler paper andadd a band of music to the usual rate of ten dollars a thousand words. Then Burnamy's dignity gave way, if not his gayety; he began to laugh, and suddenly he broke down and confessed that he had come home in thesteerage; and was at his last cent, beyond his fare to Chicago. His strawhat looked like a withered leaf in the light of his sad facts; his thinovercoat affected March's imagination as something like the diaphanouscast shell of a locust, hopelessly resumed for comfort at the approach ofautumn. He made Burnamy sit down, after he had once risen, and he toldhim of Major Eltwin's wish to see him; and he promised to go round withhim to the major's hotel before the Eltwins left town that afternoon. 

While he prolonged the interview in this way, Mrs. March was kept frombreaking in upon them only by the psychical experiment which she wasmaking with the help and sympathy of her daughter at the window of thedining-room which looked up Sixteenth Street. At the first hint she gaveof the emotional situation which Burnamy was a main part of, her son;with the brutal contempt of young men for other young men's love affairs, said he must go to the office; he bade his mother tell his father therewas no need of his coming down that day, and he left the two womentogether. This gave the mother a chance to develop the whole fact to thedaughter with telegrammic rapidity and brevity, and then to enrich thefirst-outline with innumerable details, while they both remained at thewindow, and Mrs. March said at two-minutely intervals, with no sense ofiteration for either of them, "I told her to come in the morning, if shefelt like it, and I know she will. But if she doesn't, I shall say thereis nothing in fate, or Providence either. At any rate I'm going to stayhere and keep longing for her, and we'll see whether there's anything inthat silly theory of your father's. I don't believe there is, " she said, to be on the safe side. 

Even when she saw Agatha Triscoe enter the park gate on Rutherford Place, she saved herself from disappointment by declaring that she was notcoming across to their house. As the girl persisted in coming and coming, and at last came so near that she caught sight of Mrs. March at thewindow and nodded, the mother turned ungratefully upon her daughter, anddrove her away to her own room, so that no society detail should hinderthe divine chance. She went to the door herself when Agatha rang, andthen she was going to open the way into the parlor where March was stillcloseted with Burnamy, and pretend that she had not known they werethere. But a soberer second thought than this prevailed, and she told thegirl who it was that was within and explained the accident of hispresence. "I think, " she said nobly, "that you ought to have the chanceof going away if you don't wish to meet him. "

The girl, with that heroic precipitation which Mrs. March had noted inher from the first with regard to what she wanted to do, when Burnamy wasin question, answered, "But I do wish to meet him, Mrs. March. "

While they stood looking at each other, March came out to ask his wife ifshe would see Burnamy, and she permitted herself so much stratagem as tosubstitute Agatha, after catching her husband aside and subduing hisproposed greeting of the girl to a hasty handshake. 

Half an hour later she thought it time to join the young people, urgedlargely by the frantic interest of her daughter. But she returned fromthe half-open door without entering. "I couldn't bring myself to break inon the poor things. They are standing at the window together looking overat St. George's. "

Bella silently clasped her hands. March gave cynical laugh, and said, "Well we are in for it, my dear. " Then he added, "I hope they'll take uswith them on their Silver Wedding Journey. "

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

 Declare that they had nothing to declare Despair which any perfection inspires Disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love Fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously Held aloof in a sarcastic calm Illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them Married life: we expect too much of each other Not do to be perfectly frank with one's own country Offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him Passionate desire for excess in a bad thing Puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste Race seemed so often without philosophy Self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain She always came to his defence when he accused himself

PG EDITORS BOOKMARKS FOR THE COMPLETE TRILOGY:

 Affected absence of mind Affectional habit All the loveliness that exists outside of you, dearest is little All luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else Amusing world, if you do not refuse to be amused Anticipative homesickness Anticipative reprisal Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much Artists never do anything like other people As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting At heart every man is a smuggler Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars Ballast of her instinctive despondency Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever Beautiful with the radiance of loving and being loved Bewildering labyrinth of error Biggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelest Brag of his wife, as a good husband always does Brown-stone fronts But when we make that money here, no one loses it Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience Calm of those who have logic on their side Civilly protested and consented Clinging persistence of such natures Coldly and inaccessibly vigilant Collective silence which passes for sociality Comfort of the critical attitude Conscience weakens to the need that isn't Considerable comfort in holding him accountable Courage hadn't been put to the test Courtship Deadly summer day Death is peace and pardon Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance Declare that they had nothing to declare Despair which any perfection inspires Did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him Dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty Disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love Dividend: It's a chicken before it's hatched Does any one deserve happiness Does anything from without change us? Dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad Effort to get on common ground with an inferior Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation Evil which will not let a man forgive his victim Explained perhaps too fully Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable Family buryin' grounds Favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting Feeblest-minded are sure to lead the talk Feeling rather ashamed, --for he had laughed too Feeling of contempt for his unambitious destination Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another Fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously Futility of travel Gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it Glad; which considering, they ceased to be Got their laugh out of too many things in life Guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction Had learned not to censure the irretrievable Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance Handsome pittance Happiness is so unreasonable Happiness built upon and hedged about with misery He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices He buys my poverty and not my will Headache darkens the universe while it lasts Heart that forgives but does not forget Held aloof in a sarcastic calm Helplessness begets a sense of irresponsibility Helplessness accounts for many heroic facts in the world Hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death Homage which those who have not pay to those who have Honest selfishness Hopeful recklessness How much can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing Humanity may at last prevail over nationality Hurry up and git well--or something Hypothetical difficulty I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of yours I want to be sorry upon the easiest possible terms I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife's acquaintance I'm not afraid--I'm awfully demoralized If you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen Ignorant of her ignorance Illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much Indispensable Indulge safely in the pleasures of autobiography Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate It had come as all such calamities come, from nothing It must be your despair that helps you to bear up It don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time It 's the same as a promise, your not saying you wouldn't Jesting mood in the face of all embarrassments Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs Less intrusive than if he had not been there Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous Life of the ship, like the life of the sea: a sodden monotony Life has taught him to truckle and trick Long life of holidays which is happy marriage Love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence Made money and do not yet know that money has made them Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel Man's willingness to abide in the present Married life: we expect too much of each other Married the whole mystifying world of womankind Married for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid Marry for love two or three times Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign Muddy draught which impudently affected to be coffee Nervous woes of comfortable people Never-blooming shrub Never could have an emotion without desiring to analyze it Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all No man deserves to sufer at the hands of another No longer the gross appetite for novelty No right to burden our friends with our decisions Not do to be perfectly frank with one's own country Nothing so apt to end in mutual dislike, --except gratitude Nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it's a young mother Novelists, who really have the charge of people's thinking Oblivion of sleep Offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him Only so much clothing as the law compelled Only one of them was to be desperate at a time Our age caricatures our youth Parkman Passionate desire for excess in a bad thing Patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius Patronizing spirit of travellers in a foreign country People that have convictions are difficult Person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it Poverty as hopeless as any in the world Prices fixed by his remorse Puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste Race seemed so often without philosophy Recipes for dishes and diseases Reckless and culpable optimism Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last Rejoice in everything that I haven't done Rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage Repeated the nothings they had said already Respect for your mind, but she don't think you've got any sense Say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him Seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him Self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity Self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain Servant of those he loved She always came to his defence when he accused himself She cares for him: that she was so cold shows that She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression Shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo'--its inconvenience Sigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdom So hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do So old a world and groping still Society: All its favors are really bargains Sorry he hadn't asked more; that's human nature Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism Superstition that having and shining is the chief good Superstition of the romances that love is once for all That isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart They can only do harm by an expression of sympathy Timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes Took the world as she found it, and made the best of it Tragical character of heat Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues Tried to be homesick for them, but failed Turn to their children's opinion with deference Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine Used to having his decisions reached without his knowledge Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness Voice of the common imbecility and incoherence Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold Wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit We get too much into the hands of other people We don't seem so much our own property Weariness of buying What we can be if we must When you look it--live it Wilful sufferers Willingness to find poetry in things around them Wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do Without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child Woman harnessed with a dog to a cart Wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests Work he was so fond of and so weary of Would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase