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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Their Silver Wedding Journey, Part I.
+by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Their Silver Wedding Journey, Part I.
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: October 23, 2004 [EBook #3371]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEIR SILVER WEDDING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY.
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+Part I.
+
+[NOTE: Several chapter heading numerals are out of order or missing in
+this 1899 edition, however the text is all present in the three volumes.
+D.W.]
+
+
+
+I.
+
+"You need the rest," said the Business End; "and your wife wants you to
+go, as well as your doctor. Besides, it's your Sabbatical year, and you,
+could send back a lot of stuff for the magazine."
+
+"Is that your notion of a Sabbatical year?" asked the editor.
+
+"No; I throw that out as a bait to your conscience. You needn't write a
+line while you're gone. I wish you wouldn't for your own sake; although
+every number that hasn't got you in it is a back number for me."
+
+"That's very nice of you, Fulkerson," said the editor. "I suppose you
+realize that it's nine years since we took 'Every Other Week' from
+Dryfoos?"
+
+"Well, that makes it all the more Sabbatical," said Fulkerson. "The two
+extra years that you've put in here, over and above the old style
+Sabbatical seven, are just so much more to your credit. It was your right
+to go, two years ago, and now it's your duty. Couldn't you look at it in
+that light?"
+
+"I dare say Mrs. March could," the editor assented. "I don't believe she
+could be brought to regard it as a pleasure on any other terms."
+
+"Of course not," said Fulkerson. "If you won't take a year, take three
+months, and call it a Sabbatical summer; but go, anyway. You can make up
+half a dozen numbers ahead, and Tom, here, knows your ways so well that
+you needn't think about 'Every Other Week' from the time you start till
+the time you try to bribe the customs inspector when you get back. I can
+take a hack at the editing myself, if Tom's inspiration gives out, and
+put a little of my advertising fire into the thing." He laid his hand on
+the shoulder of the young fellow who stood smiling by, and pushed and
+shook him in the liking there was between them. "Now you go, March! Mrs.
+Fulkerson feels just as I do about it; we had our outing last year, and
+we want Mrs. March and you to have yours. You let me go down and engage
+your passage, and--"
+
+"No, no!" the editor rebelled. "I'll think about it;" but as he turned to
+the work he was so fond of and so weary of, he tried not to think of the
+question again, till he closed his desk in the afternoon, and started to
+walk home; the doctor had said he ought to walk, and he did so, though he
+longed to ride, and looked wistfully at the passing cars.
+
+He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, it
+was a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if the
+flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had been
+going so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among the
+butterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this illusion,
+himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it mocked the
+notion. They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they were ever to
+find it again, was to be looked for in Europe, where they met when they
+were young, and they had never been quite without the hope of going back
+there, some day, for a long sojourn. They had not seen the time when they
+could do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized, even dreaming
+is not free from care; and in his dream March had been obliged to work
+pretty steadily, if not too intensely. He had been forced to forego the
+distinctly literary ambition with which he had started in life because he
+had their common living to make, and he could not make it by writing
+graceful verse, or even graceful prose. He had been many years in a
+sufficiently distasteful business, and he had lost any thought of leaving
+it when it left him, perhaps because his hold on it had always been
+rather lax, and he had not been able to conceal that he disliked it. At
+any rate, he was supplanted in his insurance agency at Boston by a
+subordinate in his office, and though he was at the same time offered a
+place of nominal credit in the employ of the company, he was able to
+decline it in grace of a chance which united the charm of congenial work
+with the solid advantage of a better salary than he had been getting for
+work he hated. It was an incredible chance, but it was rendered
+appreciably real by the necessity it involved that they should leave
+Boston, where they had lived all their married life, where Mrs. March as
+well as their children was born, and where all their tender and familiar
+ties were, and come to New York, where the literary enterprise which
+formed his chance was to be founded.
+
+It was then a magazine of a new sort, which his business partner had
+imagined in such leisure as the management of a newspaper syndicate
+afforded him, and had always thought of getting March to edit. The
+magazine which is also a book has since been realized elsewhere on more
+or less prosperous terms, but not for any long period, and 'Every Other
+Week' was apparently--the only periodical of the kind conditioned for
+survival. It was at first backed by unlimited capital, and it had the
+instant favor of a popular mood, which has since changed, but which did
+not change so soon that the magazine had not time to establish itself in
+a wide acceptance. It was now no longer a novelty, it was no longer in
+the maiden blush of its first success, but it had entered upon its second
+youth with the reasonable hope of many years of prosperity before it. In
+fact it was a very comfortable living for all concerned, and the Marches
+had the conditions, almost dismayingly perfect, in which they had often
+promised themselves to go and be young again in Europe, when they
+rebelled at finding themselves elderly in America. Their daughter was
+married, and so very much to her mother's mind that she did not worry
+about her, even though she lived so far away as Chicago, still a wild
+frontier town to her Boston imagination; and their son, as soon as he
+left college, had taken hold on 'Every Other Week', under his father's
+instruction, with a zeal and intelligence which won him Fulkerson's
+praise as a chip of the old block. These two liked each other, and worked
+into each other's hands as cordially and aptly as Fulkerson and March had
+ever done. It amused the father to see his son offering Fulkerson the
+same deference which the Business End paid to seniority in March himself;
+but in fact, Fulkerson's forehead was getting, as he said, more
+intellectual every day; and the years were pushing them all along
+together.
+
+Still, March had kept on in the old rut, and one day he fell down in it.
+He had a long sickness, and when he was well of it, he was so slow in
+getting his grip of work again that he was sometimes deeply discouraged.
+His wife shared his depression, whether he showed or whether he hid it,
+and when the doctor advised his going abroad, she abetted the doctor with
+all the strength of a woman's hygienic intuitions. March himself
+willingly consented, at first; but as soon as he got strength for his
+work, he began to temporize and to demur. He said that he believed it
+would do him just as much good to go to Saratoga, where they always had
+such a good time, as to go to Carlsbad; and Mrs. March had been obliged
+several times to leave him to his own undoing; she always took him more
+vigorously in hand afterwards.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+When he got home from the 'Every Other Week' office, the afternoon of
+that talk with the Business End, he wanted to laugh with his wife at
+Fulkerson's notion of a Sabbatical year. She did not think it was so very
+droll; she even urged it seriously against him, as if she had now the
+authority of Holy Writ for forcing him abroad; she found no relish of
+absurdity in the idea that it was his duty to take this rest which had
+been his right before.
+
+He abandoned himself to a fancy which had been working to the surface of
+his thought. "We could call it our Silver Wedding Journey, and go round
+to all the old places, and see them in the reflected light of the past."
+
+"Oh, we could!" she responded, passionately; and he had now the delicate
+responsibility of persuading her that he was joking.
+
+He could think of nothing better than a return to Fulkerson's absurdity.
+"It would be our Silver Wedding Journey just as it would be my Sabbatical
+year--a good deal after date. But I suppose that would make it all the
+more silvery."
+
+She faltered in her elation. "Didn't you say a Sabbatical year yourself?"
+she demanded.
+
+"Fulkerson said it; but it was a figurative expression."
+
+"And I suppose the Silver Wedding Journey was a figurative expression
+too!"
+
+"It was a notion that tempted me; I thought you would enjoy it. Don't you
+suppose I should be glad too, if we could go over, and find ourselves
+just as we were when we first met there?"
+
+"No; I don't believe now that you care anything about it."
+
+"Well, it couldn't be done, anyway; so that doesn't matter."
+
+"It could be done, if you were a mind to think so. And it would be the
+greatest inspiration to you. You are always longing for some chance to do
+original work, to get away from your editing, but you've let the time
+slip by without really trying to do anything; I don't call those little
+studies of yours in the magazine anything; and now you won't take the
+chance that's almost forcing itself upon you. You could write an original
+book of the nicest kind; mix up travel and fiction; get some love in."
+
+"Oh, that's the stalest kind of thing!"
+
+"Well, but you could see it from a perfectly new point of view. You could
+look at it as a sort of dispassionate witness, and treat it
+humorously--of course it is ridiculous--and do something entirely fresh."
+
+"It wouldn't work. It would be carrying water on both shoulders. The
+fiction would kill the travel, the travel would kill the fiction; the
+love and the humor wouldn't mingle any more than oil and vinegar."
+
+"Well, and what is better than a salad?"
+
+"But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing to put it on." She was
+silent, and he yielded to another fancy. "We might imagine coming upon
+our former selves over there, and travelling round with them--a wedding
+journey 'en partie carree'."
+
+"Something like that. I call it a very poetical idea," she said with a
+sort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush.
+
+"It isn't so bad," he admitted. "How young we were, in those days!"
+
+"Too young to know what a good time we were having," she said, relaxing
+her doubt for the retrospect. "I don't feel as if I really saw Europe,
+then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple. I would like to
+go, just to make sure that I had been." He was smiling again in the way
+he had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded,
+"What is it?"
+
+"Nothing. I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people who
+actually hadn't been before--carry them all through Europe, and let them
+see it in the old, simple-hearted American way."
+
+She shook her head. "You couldn't! They've all been!"
+
+"All but about sixty or seventy millions," said March.
+
+"Well, those are just the millions you don't know, and couldn't imagine."
+
+"I'm not so sure of that."
+
+"And even if you could imagine them, you couldn't make them interesting.
+All the interesting ones have been, anyway."
+
+"Some of the uninteresting ones too. I used, to meet some of that sort
+over there. I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with those
+that hadn't been."
+
+"Then why not do it? I know you could get something out of it."
+
+"It might be a good thing," he mused, "to take a couple who had passed
+their whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go; and
+had a perfect famine for Europe all the time. I could have them spend
+their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking up
+their accommodations. I could have them sail, in imagination, and
+discover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions of
+it from travels and novels against a background of purely American
+experience. We needn't go abroad to manage that. I think it would be
+rather nice."
+
+"I don't think it would be nice in the least," said Mrs. March, "and if
+you don't want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all."
+
+"Well, then, let's talk about our Silver Wedding Journey."
+
+"I see. You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it."
+
+She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really
+silent. He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to
+good-humor. He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken and
+look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she refused.
+When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she consented
+to go.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took a
+hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fancied
+some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next
+Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken. To be
+sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the afternoon
+of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that invisible
+thread of association which drew him.
+
+The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the
+outward voyage, and was looking her best. She was tipped and edged with
+shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and white-painted
+as only a ship knows how to be. A little uniformed steward ran before the
+visitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors into typical
+state-rooms on the different decks; and then let them verify their first
+impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and the luxury of the
+ladies' parlor and music-room. March made his wife observe that the
+tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so carelessly scattered
+about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the floor against rough
+weather; and he amused himself with the heavy German browns and greens
+and coppers in the decorations, which he said must have been studied in
+color from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the effect of those large
+march-panes in the roof. She laughed with him at the tastelessness of the
+race which they were destined to marvel at more and more; but she made
+him own that the stewardesses whom they saw were charmingly like
+serving-maids in the 'Fliegende Blatter'; when they went ashore she
+challenged his silence for some assent to her own conclusion that the
+Colmannia was perfect.
+
+"She has only one fault," he assented. "She's a ship."
+
+"Yes," said his wife, "and I shall want to look at the Norumbia before I
+decide."
+
+Then he saw that it was only a question which steamer they should take,
+and not whether they should take any. He explained, at first gently and
+afterwards savagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quite enough
+for him, and that the vessel was not built that he would be willing to
+cross the Atlantic in.
+
+When a man has gone so far as that he has committed himself to the
+opposite course in almost so many words; and March was neither surprised
+nor abashed when he discovered himself, before they reached home,
+offering his wife many reasons why they should go to Europe. She answered
+to all, No, he had made her realize the horror of it so much that she was
+glad to give it up. She gave it up, with the best feeling; all that she
+would ask of him was that he should never mention Europe to her again.
+She could imagine how much he disliked to go, if such a ship as the
+Colmannia did not make him want to go.
+
+At the bottom of his heart he knew that he had not used her very well. He
+had kindled her fancy with those notions of a Sabbatical year and a
+Silver Wedding Journey, and when she was willing to renounce both he had
+persisted in taking her to see the ship, only to tell her afterwards that
+he would not go abroad on any account. It was by a psychological juggle
+which some men will understand that he allowed himself the next day to
+get the sailings of the Norumbia from the steamship office; he also got a
+plan of the ship showing the most available staterooms, so that they
+might be able to choose between her and the Colmannia from all the facts.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+From this time their decision to go was none the less explicit because so
+perfectly tacit.
+
+They began to amass maps and guides. She got a Baedeker for Austria and
+he got a Bradshaw for the continent, which was never of the least use
+there, but was for the present a mine of unavailable information. He got
+a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his German. He used to read
+German, when he was a boy, with a young enthusiasm for its romantic
+poetry, and now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine, he held
+imaginary conversations with a barber, a bootmaker, and a banker, and
+tried to taste the joy which he had not known in the language of those
+poets for a whole generation. He perceived, of course, that unless the
+barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him in terms which the
+author of the phrase-book directed them to use, he should not get on with
+them beyond his first question; but he did not allow this to spoil his
+pleasure in it. In fact, it was with a tender emotion that he realized
+how little the world, which had changed in everything else so greatly,
+had changed in its ideal of a phrase-book.
+
+Mrs. March postponed the study of her Baedeker to the time and place for
+it; and addressed herself to the immediate business of ascertaining the
+respective merits of the Colmannia and Norumbia. She carried on her
+researches solely among persons of her own sex; its experiences were
+alone of that positive character which brings conviction, and she valued
+them equally at first or second hand. She heard of ladies who would not
+cross in any boat but the Colmannia, and who waited for months to get a
+room on her; she talked with ladies who said that nothing would induce
+them to cross in her. There were ladies who said she had twice the motion
+that the Norumbia had, and the vibration from her twin screws was
+frightful; it always was, on those twin-screw boats, and it did not
+affect their testimony with Mrs. March that the Norumbia was a twin-screw
+boat too. It was repeated to her in the third or fourth degree of
+hear-say that the discipline on the Colmannia was as perfect as that on
+the Cunarders; ladies whose friends had tried every line assured her that
+the table of the Norumbia was almost as good as the table of the French
+boats. To the best of the belief of lady witnesses still living who had
+friends on board, the Colmannia had once got aground, and the Norumbia
+had once had her bridge carried off by a tidal wave; or it might be the
+Colmannia; they promised to ask and let her know. Their lightest word
+availed with her against the most solemn assurances of their husbands,
+fathers, or brothers, who might be all very well on land, but in
+navigation were not to be trusted; they would say anything from a
+reckless and culpable optimism. She obliged March all the same to ask
+among them, but she recognized their guilty insincerity when he came home
+saying that one man had told him you could have played croquet on the
+deck of the Colmannia the whole way over when he crossed, and another
+that he never saw the racks on in three passages he had made in the
+Norumbia.
+
+The weight of evidence was, he thought, in favor of the Norumbia, but
+when they went another Sunday to Hoboken, and saw the ship, Mrs. March
+liked her so much less than the Colmannia that she could hardly wait for
+Monday to come; she felt sure all the good rooms on the Colmannia would
+be gone before they could engage one.
+
+From a consensus of the nerves of all the ladies left in town so late in
+the season, she knew that the only place on any steamer where your room
+ought to be was probably just where they could not get it. If you went
+too high, you felt the rolling terribly, and people tramping up and down
+on the promenade under your window kept you awake the whole night; if you
+went too low, you felt the engine thump, thump, thump in your head the
+whole way over. If you went too far forward, you got the pitching; if you
+went aft, on the kitchen side, you got the smell of the cooking. The only
+place, really, was just back of the dining-saloon on the south side of
+the ship; it was smooth there, and it was quiet, and you had the sun in
+your window all the way over. He asked her if he must take their room
+there or nowhere, and she answered that he must do his best, but that she
+would not be satisfied with any other place.
+
+In his despair he went down to the steamer office, and took a room which
+one of the clerks said was the best. When he got home, it appeared from
+reference to the ship's plan that it was the very room his wife had
+wanted from the beginning, and she praised him as if he had used a wisdom
+beyond his sex in getting it.
+
+He was in the enjoyment of his unmerited honor when a belated lady came
+with her husband for an evening call, before going into the country. At
+sight of the plans of steamers on the Marches' table, she expressed the
+greatest wonder and delight that they were going to Europe. They had
+supposed everybody knew it, by this time, but she said she had not heard
+a word of it; and she went on with some felicitations which March found
+rather unduly filial. In getting a little past the prime of life he did
+not like to be used with too great consideration of his years, and he did
+not think that he and his wife were so old that they need be treated as
+if they were going on a golden wedding journey, and heaped with all sorts
+of impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much and being so much
+the better for the little outing! Under his breath, he confounded this
+lady for her impudence; but he schooled himself to let her rejoice at
+their going on a Hanseatic boat, because the Germans were always so
+careful of you. She made her husband agree with her, and it came out that
+he had crossed several times on both the Colmannia and the Norumbia. He
+volunteered to say that the Colmannia, was a capital sea-boat; she did
+not have her nose under water all the time; she was steady as a rock; and
+the captain and the kitchen were simply out of sight; some people did
+call her unlucky.
+
+"Unlucky?" Mrs. March echoed, faintly. "Why do they call her unlucky?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. People will say anything about any boat. You know she
+broke her shaft, once, and once she got caught in the ice."
+
+Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstition of people, and she
+parted gayly with this over-good young couple. As soon as they were gone,
+March knew that she would say: "You must change that ticket, my dear. We
+will go in the Norumbia."
+
+"Suppose I can't get as good a room on the Norumbia?"
+
+"Then we must stay."
+
+In the morning after a night so bad that it was worse than no night at
+all, she said she would go to the steamship office with him and question
+them up about the Colmannia. The people there had never heard she was
+called an unlucky boat; they knew of nothing disastrous in her history.
+They were so frank and so full in their denials, and so kindly patient of
+Mrs. March's anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying conviction of
+their insincerity to her. At the end she asked what rooms were left on
+the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to looked through his
+passenger list with a shaking head. He was afraid there was nothing they
+would like.
+
+"But we would take anything," she entreated, and March smiled to think of
+his innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever dreamed of not
+going.
+
+"We merely want the best," he put in. "One flight up, no noise or dust,
+with sun in all the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days."
+
+They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do not
+understand, in the foreign steamship offices. The clerk turned
+unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in German
+which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part of a
+conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker. A brief drama
+followed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the
+Norumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it if
+they decided to take it at once.
+
+They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the Colmannia;
+it was within one of being the same number. It was so providential, if it
+was providential at all, that they were both humbly silent a moment; even
+Mrs. March was silent. In this supreme moment she would not prompt her
+husband by a word, a glance, and it was from his own free will that he
+said, "We will take it."
+
+He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one's will is never free;
+and this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all the
+events before it. No event that followed affected it, though the day
+after they had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had
+once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August. He felt
+obliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved
+nothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason
+than by all her previous unreason. Reason is what a man is never prepared
+for in women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+During nearly the whole month that now passed before the date of sailing
+it seemed to March that in some familiar aspects New York had never been
+so interesting. He had not easily reconciled himself to the place after
+his many years of Boston; but he had got used to the ugly grandeur, to
+the noise and the rush, and he had divined more and more the careless
+good-nature and friendly indifference of the vast, sprawling, ungainly
+metropolis. There were happy moments when he felt a poetry unintentional
+and unconscious in it, and he thought there was no point more favorable
+for the sense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they had a flat.
+Their windows looked down into its tree-tops, and across them to the
+truncated towers of St. George's, and to the plain red-brick,
+white-trimmed front of the Friends' Meeting House; he came and went
+between his dwelling and his office through the two places that form the
+square, and after dinner his wife and he had a habit of finding seats by
+one of the fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathers and mothers
+of the hybrid East Side children swarming there at play. The elders read
+their English or Italian or German or Yiddish journals, or gossiped, or
+merely sat still and stared away the day's fatigue; while the little ones
+raced in and out among them, crying and laughing, quarrelling and
+kissing. Sometimes a mother darted forward and caught her child from the
+brink of the basin; another taught hers to walk, holding it tightly up
+behind by its short skirts; another publicly nursed her baby to sleep.
+
+While they still dreamed, but never thought, of going to Europe, the
+Marches often said how European all this was; if these women had brought
+their knitting or sewing it would have been quite European; but as soon
+as they had decided to go, it all began to seem poignantly American. In
+like manner, before the conditions of their exile changed, and they still
+pined for the Old World, they contrived a very agreeable illusion of it
+by dining now and then at an Austrian restaurant in Union Square; but
+later when they began to be homesick for the American scenes they had not
+yet left, they had a keener retrospective joy in the strictly New York
+sunset they were bowed out into.
+
+The sunsets were uncommonly characteristic that May in Union Square. They
+were the color of the red stripes in the American flag, and when they
+were seen through the delirious architecture of the Broadway side, or
+down the perspective of the cross-streets, where the elevated trains
+silhouetted themselves against their pink, they imparted a feeling of
+pervasive Americanism in which all impression of alien savors and
+civilities was lost. One evening a fire flamed up in Hoboken, and burned
+for hours against the west, in the lurid crimson tones of a conflagration
+as memorably and appealingly native as the colors of the sunset.
+
+The weather for nearly the whole month was of a mood familiar enough in
+our early summer, and it was this which gave the sunsets their vitreous
+pink. A thrilling coolness followed a first blaze of heat, and in the
+long respite the thoughts almost went back to winter flannels. But at
+last a hot wave was telegraphed from the West, and the week before the
+Norumbia sailed was an anguish of burning days and breathless nights,
+which fused all regrets and reluctances in the hope of escape, and made
+the exiles of two continents long for the sea, with no care for either
+shore.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at dawn because they had
+scarcely lain down, and March crept out into the square for a last breath
+of its morning air before breakfast. He was now eager to be gone; he had
+broken with habit, and he wished to put all traces of the past out of
+sight. But this was curiously like all other early mornings in his
+consciousness, and he could not alienate himself from the wonted
+environment. He stood talking on every-day terms of idle speculation with
+the familiar policeman, about a stray parrot in the top of one of the
+trees, where it screamed and clawed at the dead branch to which it clung.
+Then he went carelessly indoors again as if he were secure of reading the
+reporter's story of it in that next day's paper which he should not see.
+
+The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted through the breakfast,
+which was like other breakfasts in the place they would be leaving in
+summer shrouds just as they always left it at the end of June. The
+illusion was even heightened by the fact that their son was to be in the
+apartment all summer, and it would not be so much shut up as usual. The
+heavy trunks had been sent to the ship by express the afternoon before,
+and they had only themselves and their stateroom baggage to transport to
+Hoboken; they came down to a carriage sent from a neighboring
+livery-stable, and exchanged good-mornings with a driver they knew by
+name.
+
+March had often fancied it a chief advantage of living in New York that
+you could drive to the steamer and start for Europe as if you were
+starting for Albany; he was in the enjoyment of this advantage now, but
+somehow it was not the consolation he had expected. He knew, of course,
+that if they had been coming from Boston, for instance, to sail in the
+Norumbia, they would probably have gone on board the night before, and
+sweltered through its heat among the strange smells and noises of the
+dock and wharf, instead of breakfasting at their own table, and smoothly
+bowling down the asphalt on to the ferryboat, and so to the very foot of
+the gangway at the ship's side, all in the cool of the early morning. But
+though he had now the cool of the early morning on these conditions,
+there was by no means enough of it.
+
+The sun was already burning the life out of the air, with the threat of
+another day of the terrible heat that had prevailed for a week past; and
+that last breakfast at home had not been gay, though it had been lively,
+in a fashion, through Mrs. March's efforts to convince her son that she
+did not want him to come and see them off. Of, her daughter's coming all
+the way from Chicago there was no question, and she reasoned that if he
+did not come to say good-by on board it would be the same as if they were
+not going.
+
+"Don't you want to go?" March asked with an obscure resentment.
+
+"I don't want to seem to go," she said, with the calm of those who have
+logic on their side.
+
+As she drove away with her husband she was not so sure of her
+satisfaction in the feint she had arranged, though when she saw the
+ghastly partings of people on board, she was glad she had not allowed her
+son to come. She kept saying this to herself, and when they climbed to
+the ship from the wharf, and found themselves in the crowd that choked
+the saloons and promenades and passages and stairways and landings, she
+said it more than once to her husband.
+
+She heard weary elders pattering empty politenesses of farewell with
+friends who had come to see them off, as they stood withdrawn in such
+refuges as the ship's architecture afforded, or submitted to be pushed
+and twirled about by the surging throng when they got in its way. She
+pitied these in their affliction, which she perceived that they could not
+lighten or shorten, but she had no patience with the young girls, who
+broke into shrieks of nervous laughter at the coming of certain young
+men, and kept laughing and beckoning till they made the young men see
+them; and then stretched their hands to them and stood screaming and
+shouting to them across the intervening heads and shoulders. Some girls,
+of those whom no one had come to bid good-by, made themselves merry, or
+at least noisy, by rushing off to the dining-room and looking at the
+cards on the bouquets heaping the tables, to find whether any one had
+sent them flowers. Others whom young men had brought bunches of violets
+hid their noses in them, and dropped their fans and handkerchiefs and
+card-cases, and thanked the young men for picking them up. Others, had
+got places in the music-room, and sat there with open boxes of
+long-stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up into the faces of the
+men, with becoming lifts and slants of their eyes and chins. In the midst
+of the turmoil children struggled against people's feet and knees, and
+bewildered mothers flew at the ship's officers and battered them with
+questions alien to their respective functions as they amiably stifled
+about in their thick uniforms.
+
+Sailors, slung over the ship's side on swinging seats, were placidly
+smearing it with paint at that last moment; the bulwarks were thickly set
+with the heads and arms of passengers who were making signs to friends on
+shore, or calling messages to them that lost themselves in louder noises
+midway. Some of the women in the steerage were crying; they were probably
+not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin passengers, or even
+for their health; on the wharf below March saw the face of one young girl
+twisted with weeping, and he wished he had not seen it. He turned from
+it, and looked into the eyes of his son, who was laughing at his
+shoulder. He said that he had to come down with a good-by letter from his
+sister, which he made an excuse for following them; but he had always
+meant to see them off, he owned. The letter had just come with a special
+delivery stamp, and it warned them that she had sent another good-by
+letter with some flowers on board. Mrs. March scolded at them both, but
+with tears in her eyes, and in the renewed stress of parting which he
+thought he had put from him, March went on taking note, as with alien
+senses, of the scene before him, while they all talked on together, and
+repeated the nothings they had said already.
+
+A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branching sheds where
+some freight steamers of the line lay, and seemed to mingle chemically
+with the noise which came up from the wharf next to the Norumbia. The
+mass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into the shadow of the roofs,
+and along their front came files of carriages and trucks and carts, and
+discharged the arriving passengers and their baggage, and were lost in
+the crowd, which they penetrated like slow currents, becoming clogged and
+arrested from time to time, and then beginning to move again.
+
+The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-draped galleries
+leading, fore and aft, into the ship. Bareheaded, blue-jacketed,
+brass-buttoned stewards dodged skillfully in and out among them with
+their hand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks, and ran
+before them into the different depths and heights where they hid these
+burdens, and then ran back for more. Some of the passengers followed them
+and made sure that their things were put in the right places; most of
+them remained wedged among the earlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in and
+out of the doors of the promenades.
+
+The baggage for the hold continually rose in huge blocks from the wharf,
+with a loud clucking of the tackle, and sank into the open maw of the
+ship, momently gathering herself for her long race seaward, with harsh
+hissings and rattlings and gurglings. There was no apparent reason why it
+should all or any of it end, but there came a moment when there began to
+be warnings that were almost threats of the end. The ship's whistle
+sounded, as if marking a certain interval; and Mrs. March humbly
+entreated, sternly commanded, her son to go ashore, or else be carried to
+Europe. They disputed whether that was the last signal or not; she was
+sure it was, and she appealed to March, who was moved against his reason.
+He affected to talk calmly with his son, and gave him some last charges
+about 'Every Other Week'.
+
+Some people now interrupted their leave-taking; but the arriving
+passengers only arrived more rapidly at the gang-ways; the bulks of
+baggage swung more swiftly into the air. A bell rang, and there rose
+women's cries, "Oh, that is the shore-bell!" and men's protests, "It is
+only the first bell!" More and more began to descend the gangways, fore
+and aft, and soon outnumbered those who were coming aboard.
+
+March tried not to be nervous about his son's lingering; he was ashamed
+of his anxiety; but he said in a low voice, "Better be off, Tom."
+
+His mother now said she did not care if Tom were really carried to
+Europe; and at last he said, Well, he guessed he must go ashore, as if
+there had been no question of that before; and then she clung to him and
+would not let him go; but she acquired merit with herself at last by
+pushing him into the gangway with her own hands: he nodded and waved his
+hat from its foot, and mixed with the crowd.
+
+Presently there was hardly any one coming aboard, and the sailors began
+to undo the lashings of the gangways from the ship's side; files of men
+on the wharf laid hold of their rails; the stewards guarding their
+approach looked up for the signal to come aboard; and in vivid pantomime
+forbade some belated leavetakers to ascend. These stood aside, exchanging
+bows and grins with the friends whom they could not reach; they all tried
+to make one another hear some last words. The moment came when the saloon
+gangway was detached; then it was pulled ashore, and the section of the
+bulwarks opening to it was locked, not to be unlocked on this side of the
+world. An indefinable impulse communicated itself to the steamer: while
+it still seemed motionless it moved. The thick spread of faces on the
+wharf, which had looked at times like some sort of strange flowers in a
+level field, broke into a universal tremor, and the air above them was
+filled with hats and handkerchiefs, as if with the flight of birds rising
+from the field.
+
+The Marches tried to make out their son's face; they believed that they
+did; but they decided that they had not seen him, and his mother said
+that she was glad; it would only have made it harder to bear, though she
+was glad he had come over to say good-by it had seemed so unnatural that
+he should not, when everybody else was saying good-by.
+
+On the wharf color was now taking the place of form; the scene ceased to
+have the effect of an instantaneous photograph; it was like an
+impressionistic study. As the ship swung free of the shed and got into
+the stream, the shore lost reality. Up to a certain moment, all was still
+New York, all was even Hoboken; then amidst the grotesque and monstrous
+shows of the architecture on either shore March felt himself at sea and
+on the way to Europe.
+
+The fact was accented by the trouble people were already making with the
+deck-steward about their steamer chairs, which they all wanted put in the
+best places, and March, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarily
+verifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his native shores,
+while still in full sight of them, when he suddenly reverted to them, and
+as it were landed on them again in an incident that held him breathless.
+A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad, came flying
+down the promenade from the steerage. "Capitan! Capitan! There is a
+woman!" he shouted in nondescript English. "She must go hout! She must go
+hout!" Some vital fact imparted itself to the ship's command and seemed
+to penetrate to the ship's heart; she stopped, as if with a sort of
+majestic relenting. A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder to it;
+the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby in her arms, sprawled
+safely down its rungs to the deck of the tug, and the steamer moved
+seaward again.
+
+"What is it? Oh, what is it?" his wife demanded of March's share of their
+common ignorance. A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested by the
+tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left three
+little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid some
+friends on board good-by.
+
+He passed on, and Mrs. March said, "What a charming face he had!" even
+before she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwrought
+sympathy which makes good women desire the punishment of people who have
+escaped danger. She would not hear any excuse for her. "Her children
+oughtn't to have been out of her mind for an instant."
+
+"Don't you want to send back a line to ours by the pilot?" March asked.
+
+She started from him. "Oh, was I really beginning to forget them?"
+
+In the saloon where people were scattered about writing pilot's letters
+she made him join her in an impassioned epistle of farewell, which once
+more left none of the nothings unsaid that they had many times
+reiterated. She would not let him put the stamp on, for fear it would not
+stick, and she had an agonizing moment of doubt whether it ought not to
+be a German stamp; she was not pacified till the steward in charge of the
+mail decided.
+
+"I shouldn't have forgiven myself," March said, "if we hadn't let Tom
+know that twenty minutes after he left us we were still alive and well."
+
+"It's to Bella, too," she reasoned.
+
+He found her making their state-room look homelike with their familiar
+things when he came with their daughter's steamer letter and the flowers
+and fruit she had sent. She said, Very well, they would all keep, and
+went on with her unpacking. He asked her if she did not think these home
+things made it rather ghastly, and she said if he kept on in that way she
+should certainly go back on the pilot-boat. He perceived that her nerves
+were spent. He had resisted the impulse to an ill-timed joke about the
+life-preservers under their berths when the sound of the breakfast-horn,
+wavering first in the distance, found its way nearer and clearer down
+their corridor.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+In one of the many visits to the steamship office which his wife's
+anxieties obliged him to make, March had discussed the question of seats
+in the dining-saloon. At first he had his ambition for the captain's
+table, but they convinced him more easily than he afterwards convinced
+Mrs. March that the captain's table had become a superstition of the
+past, and conferred no special honor. It proved in the event that the
+captain of the Norumbia had the good feeling to dine in a lower saloon
+among the passengers who paid least for their rooms. But while the
+Marches were still in their ignorance of this, they decided to get what
+adventure they could out of letting the head steward put them where he
+liked, and they came in to breakfast with a careless curiosity to see
+what he had done for them.
+
+There seemed scarcely a vacant place in the huge saloon; through the oval
+openings in the centre they looked down into the lower saloon and up into
+the music-room, as thickly thronged with breakfasters. The tables were
+brightened with the bouquets and the floral designs of ships, anchors,
+harps, and doves sent to the lady passengers, and at one time the Marches
+thought they were going to be put before a steam-yacht realized to the
+last detail in blue and white violets. The ports of the saloon were open,
+and showed the level sea; the ship rode with no motion except the tremor
+from her screws. The sound of talking and laughing rose with the clatter
+of knives and forks and the clash of crockery; the homely smell of the
+coffee and steak and fish mixed with the spice of the roses and
+carnations; the stewards ran hither and thither, and a young foolish joy
+of travel welled up in the elderly hearts of the pair. When the head
+steward turned out the swivel-chairs where they were to sit they both
+made an inclination toward the people already at table, as if it had been
+a company at some far-forgotten table d'hote in the later sixties. The
+head steward seemed to understand as well as speak English, but the
+table-stewards had only an effect of English, which they eked out with
+"Bleace!" for all occasions of inquiry, apology, or reassurance, as the
+equivalent of their native "Bitte!" Otherwise there was no reason to
+suppose that they did not speak German, which was the language of a good
+half of the passengers. The stewards looked English, however, in
+conformity to what seems the ideal of every kind of foreign seafaring
+people, and that went a good way toward making them intelligible.
+
+March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance, made it so tentative
+that if it should meet no response he could feel that it had been nothing
+more than a forward stoop, such as was natural in sitting down. He need
+not really have taken this precaution; those whose eyes he caught more or
+less nodded in return.
+
+A nice-looking boy of thirteen or fourteen, who had the place on the left
+of the lady in the sofa seat under the port, bowed with almost
+magisterial gravity, and made the lady on the sofa smile, as if she were
+his mother and understood him. March decided that she had been some time
+a widow; and he easily divined that the young couple on her right had
+been so little time husband and wife that they would rather not have it
+known. Next them was a young lady whom he did not at first think so
+good-looking as she proved later to be, though she had at once a pretty
+nose, with a slight upward slant at the point, long eyes under fallen
+lashes, a straight forehead, not too high, and a mouth which perhaps the
+exigencies of breakfasting did not allow all its characteristic charm.
+She had what Mrs. March thought interesting hair, of a dull black,
+roughly rolled away from her forehead and temples in a fashion not
+particularly becoming to her, and she had the air of not looking so well
+as she might if she had chosen. The elderly man on her right, it was easy
+to see, was her father; they had a family likeness, though his fair hair,
+now ashen with age, was so different from hers. He wore his beard cut in
+the fashion of the Second Empire, with a Louis Napoleonic mustache,
+imperial, and chin tuft; his neat head was cropt close; and there was
+something Gallic in its effect and something remotely military: he had
+blue eyes, really less severe than he meant, though be frowned a good
+deal, and managed them with glances of a staccato quickness, as if
+challenging a potential disagreement with his opinions.
+
+The gentleman on his right, who sat at the head of the table, was of the
+humorous, subironical American expression, and a smile at the corner of
+his kindly mouth, under an iron-gray full beard cut short, at once
+questioned and tolerated the new-comers as he glanced at them. He
+responded to March's bow almost as decidedly as the nice boy, whose
+mother he confronted at the other end of the table, and with his comely
+bulk formed an interesting contrast to her vivid slightness. She was
+brilliantly dark, behind the gleam of the gold-rimmed glasses perched on
+her pretty nose.
+
+If the talk had been general before the Marches came, it did not at once
+renew itself in that form. Nothing was said while they were having their
+first struggle with the table-stewards, who repeated the order as if to
+show how fully they had misunderstood it. The gentleman at the head of
+the table intervened at last, and then, "I'm obliged to you," March said,
+for your German. I left mine in a phrase-book in my other coat pocket."
+
+"Oh, I wasn't speaking German," said the other. "It was merely their kind
+of English."
+
+The company were in the excitement of a novel situation which disposes
+people to acquaintance, and this exchange of small pleasantries made
+every one laugh, except the father and daughter; but they had the effect
+of being tacitly amused.
+
+The mother of the nice boy said to Mrs. March, "You may not get what you
+ordered, but it will be good."
+
+"Even if you don't know what it is!" said the young bride, and then
+blushed, as if she had been too bold.
+
+Mrs. March liked the blush and the young bride for it, and she asked,
+"Have you ever been on one of these German boats before? They seem very
+comfortable."
+
+"Oh, dear, no! we've never been on any boat before." She made a little
+petted mouth of deprecation, and added, simple-heartedly, "My husband was
+going out on business, and he thought he might as well take me along."
+
+The husband seemed to feel himself brought in by this, and said he did
+not see why they should not make it a pleasure-trip, too. They put
+themselves in a position to be patronized by their deference, and in the
+pauses of his talk with the gentleman at the head of the table, March
+heard his wife abusing their inexperience to be unsparingly instructive
+about European travel. He wondered whether she would be afraid to own
+that it was nearly thirty years since she had crossed the ocean; though
+that might seem recent to people who had never crossed at all.
+
+They listened with respect as she boasted in what an anguish of wisdom
+she had decided between the Colmannia and the Norumbia. The wife said she
+did not know there was such a difference in steamers, but when Mrs. March
+perfervidly assured her that there was all the difference in the world,
+she submitted and said she supposed she ought to be thankful that they,
+had hit upon the right one. They had telegraphed for berths and taken
+what was given them; their room seemed to be very nice.
+
+"Oh," said Mrs. March, and her husband knew that she was saying it to
+reconcile them to the inevitable, "all the rooms on the Norumbia are
+nice. The only difference is that if they are on the south side you have
+the sun."
+
+"I'm not sure which is the south side," said the bride. "We seem to have
+been going west ever since we started, and I feel as if we should reach
+home in the morning if we had a good night. Is the ocean always so smooth
+as this?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no!" said Mrs. March. "It's never so smooth as this," and she
+began to be outrageously authoritative about the ocean weather. She ended
+by declaring that the June passages were always good, and that if the
+ship kept a southerly course they would have no fogs and no icebergs. She
+looked round, and caught her husband's eye. "What is it? Have I been
+bragging? Well, you understand," she added to the bride, "I've only been
+over once, a great while ago, and I don't really know anything about it,"
+and they laughed together. "But I talked so much with people after we
+decided to go, that I feel as if I had been a hundred times."
+
+"I know," said the other lady, with caressing intelligence. "That is just
+the way with--" She stopped, and looked at the young man whom the head
+steward was bringing up to take the vacant place next to March. He came
+forward, stuffing his cap into the pocket of his blue serge sack, and
+smiled down on the company with such happiness in his gay eyes that March
+wondered what chance at this late day could have given any human creature
+his content so absolute, and what calamity could be lurking round the
+corner to take it out of him. The new-comer looked at March as if he knew
+him, and March saw at a second glance that he was the young fellow who
+had told him about the mother put off after the start. He asked him
+whether there was any change in the weather yet outside, and he answered
+eagerly, as if the chance to put his happiness into the mere sound of
+words were a favor done him, that their ship had just spoken one of the
+big Hanseatic mailboats, and she had signalled back that she had met ice;
+so that they would probably keep a southerly course, and not have it
+cooler till they were off the Banks.
+
+The mother of the boy said, "I thought we must be off the Banks when I
+came out of my room, but it was only the electric fan at the foot of the
+stairs."
+
+"That was what I thought," said Mrs. March. "I almost sent my husband
+back for my shawl!" Both the ladies laughed and liked each other for
+their common experience.
+
+The gentleman at the head of the table said, "They ought to have fans
+going there by that pillar, or else close the ports. They only let in
+heat."
+
+They easily conformed to the American convention of jocosity in their
+talk; it perhaps no more represents the individual mood than the
+convention of dulness among other people; but it seemed to make the young
+man feel at home.
+
+"Why, do you think it's uncomfortably warm?" he asked, from what March
+perceived to be a meteorology of his own. He laughed and added, "It is
+pretty summerlike," as if he had not thought of it before. He talked of
+the big mail-boat, and said he would like to cross on such a boat as
+that, and then he glanced at the possible advantage of having your own
+steam-yacht like the one which he said they had just passed, so near that
+you could see what a good time the people were having on board. He began
+to speak to the Marches; his talk spread to the young couple across the
+table; it visited the mother on the sofa in a remark which she might
+ignore without apparent rejection, and without really avoiding the boy,
+it glanced off toward the father and daughter, from whom it fell, to rest
+with the gentleman at the head of the table.
+
+It was not that the father and daughter had slighted his overture, if it
+was so much as that, but that they were tacitly preoccupied, or were of
+some philosophy concerning their fellow-breakfasters which did not suffer
+them, for the present, at least, to share in the common friendliness.
+This is an attitude sometimes produced in people by a sense of just, or
+even unjust, superiority; sometimes by serious trouble; sometimes by
+transient annoyance. The cause was not so deep-seated but Mrs. March,
+before she rose from her place, believed that she had detected a slant of
+the young lady's eyes, from under her lashes, toward the young man; and
+she leaped to a conclusion concerning them in a matter where all logical
+steps are impertinent. She did not announce her arrival at this point
+till the young man had overtaken her before she got out of the saloon,
+and presented the handkerchief she had dropped under the table.
+
+He went away with her thanks, and then she said to her husband, "Well,
+he's perfectly charming, and I don't wonder she's taken with him; that
+kind of cold girl would be, though I'm not sure that she is cold. She's
+interesting, and you could see that he thought so, the more he looked at
+her; I could see him looking at her from the very first instant; he
+couldn't keep his eyes off her; she piqued his curiosity, and made him
+wonder about her."
+
+"Now, look here, Isabel! This won't do. I can stand a good deal, but I
+sat between you and that young fellow, and you couldn't tell whether he
+was looking at that girl or not."
+
+"I could! I could tell by the expression of her face."
+
+"Oh, well! If it's gone as far as that with you, I give it up. When are
+you going to have them married?"
+
+"Nonsense! I want you to find out who all those people are. How are you
+going to do it?"
+
+"Perhaps the passenger list will say," he suggested.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The list did not say of itself, but with the help of the head steward's
+diagram it said that the gentleman at the head of the table was Mr. R. M.
+Kenby; the father and the daughter were Mr. E. B. Triscoe and Miss
+Triscoe; the bridal pair were Mr. and Mrs. Leffers; the mother and her
+son were Mrs. Adding and Mr. Roswell Adding; the young man who came in
+last was Mr. L. J. Burnamy. March carried the list, with these names
+carefully checked and rearranged on a neat plan of the table, to his wife
+in her steamer chair, and left her to make out the history and the
+character of the people from it. In this sort of conjecture long
+experience had taught him his futility, and he strolled up and down and
+looked at the life about him with no wish to penetrate it deeply.
+
+Long Island was now a low yellow line on the left. Some fishing-boats
+flickered off the shore; they met a few sail, and left more behind; but
+already, and so near one of the greatest ports of the world, the spacious
+solitude of the ocean was beginning. There was no swell; the sea lay
+quite flat, with a fine mesh of wrinkles on its surface, and the sun
+flamed down upon it from a sky without a cloud. With the light fair wind,
+there was no resistance in the sultry air, the thin, dun smoke from the
+smoke-stack fell about the decks like a stifling veil.
+
+The promenades, were as uncomfortably crowded as the sidewalk of
+Fourteenth Street on a summer's day, and showed much the social average
+of a New York shopping thoroughfare. Distinction is something that does
+not always reveal itself at first sight on land, and at sea it is still
+more retrusive. A certain democracy of looks and clothes was the most
+notable thing to March in the apathetic groups and detached figures. His
+criticism disabled the saloon passengers of even so much personal appeal
+as he imagined in some of the second-cabin passengers whom he saw across
+their barrier; they had at least the pathos of their exclusion, and he
+could wonder if they felt it or envied him. At Hoboken he had seen
+certain people coming on board who looked like swells; but they had now
+either retired from the crowd, or they had already conformed to the
+prevailing type. It was very well as a type; he was of it himself; but he
+wished that beauty as well as distinction had not been so lost in it.
+
+In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhere as he once did. It
+might be that he saw life more truly than when he was young, and that his
+glasses were better than his eyes had been; but there were analogies that
+forbade his thinking so, and he sometimes had his misgivings that the
+trouble was with his glasses. He made what he could of a pretty girl who
+had the air of not meaning to lose a moment from flirtation, and was
+luring her fellow-passengers from under her sailor hat. She had already
+attached one of them; and she was hooking out for more. She kept moving
+herself from the waist up, as if she worked there on a pivot, showing now
+this side and now that side of her face, and visiting the admirer she had
+secured with a smile as from the lamp of a revolving light as she turned.
+
+While he was dwelling upon this folly, with a sense of impersonal
+pleasure in it as complete through his years as if he were already a
+disembodied spirit, the pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and he
+joined the general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expectation of
+seeing another distracted mother put off; but it was only the pilot
+leaving the ship. He was climbing down the ladder which hung over the
+boat, rising and sinking on the sea below, while the two men in her held
+her from the ship's side with their oars; in the offing lay the white
+steam-yacht which now replaces the picturesque pilot-sloop of other
+times. The Norumbia's screws turned again under half a head of steam; the
+pilot dropped from the last rung of the ladder into the boat, and caught
+the bundle of letters tossed after him. Then his men let go the line that
+was towing their craft, and the incident of the steamer's departure was
+finally closed. It had been dramatically heightened perhaps by her final
+impatience to be off at some added risks to the pilot and his men, but
+not painfully so, and March smiled to think how men whose lives are all
+of dangerous chances seem always to take as many of them as they can.
+
+He heard a girl's fresh voice saying at his shoulder, "Well, now we are
+off; and I suppose you're glad, papa!"
+
+"I'm glad we're not taking the pilot on, at least," answered the elderly
+man whom the girl had spoken to; and March turned to see the father and
+daughter whose reticence at the breakfast table had interested him. He
+wondered that he had left her out of the account in estimating the beauty
+of the ship's passengers: he saw now that she was not only extremely
+pretty, but as she moved away she was very graceful; she even had
+distinction. He had fancied a tone of tolerance, and at the same time of
+reproach in her voice, when she spoke, and a tone of defiance and not
+very successful denial in her father's; and he went back with these
+impressions to his wife, whom he thought he ought to tell why the ship
+had stopped.
+
+She had not noticed the ship's stopping, in her study of the passenger
+list, and she did not care for the pilot's leaving; but she seemed to
+think his having overheard those words of the father and daughter an
+event of prime importance. With a woman's willingness to adapt the means
+to the end she suggested that he should follow them up and try to
+overhear something more; she only partially realized the infamy of her
+suggestion when he laughed in scornful refusal.
+
+"Of course I don't want you to eavesdrop, but I do want you to find out
+about them. And about Mr. Burnamy, too. I can wait, about the others, or
+manage for myself, but these are driving me to distraction. Now, will
+you?"
+
+He said he would do anything he could with honor, and at one of the
+earliest turns he made on the other side of the ship he was smilingly
+halted by Mr. Burnamy, who asked to be excused, and then asked if he were
+not Mr. March of 'Every Other Week'; he had seen the name on the
+passenger list, and felt sure it must be the editor's. He seemed so
+trustfully to expect March to remember his own name as that of a writer
+from whom he had accepted a short poem, yet unprinted, that the editor
+feigned to do so until he really did dimly recall it. He even recalled
+the short poem, and some civil words he said about it caused Burnamy to
+overrun in confidences that at once touched and amused him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Burnamy, it seemed, had taken passage on the Norumbia because he found,
+when he arrived in New York the day before, that she was the first boat
+out. His train was so much behind time that when he reached the office of
+the Hanseatic League it was nominally shut, but he pushed in by
+sufferance of the janitor, and found a berth, which had just been given
+up, in one of the saloon-deck rooms. It was that or nothing; and he felt
+rich enough to pay for it himself if the Bird of Prey, who had cabled him
+to come out to Carlsbad as his secretary, would not stand the difference
+between the price and that of the lower-deck six-in-a-room berth which he
+would have taken if he had been allowed a choice.
+
+With the three hundred dollars he had got for his book, less the price of
+his passage, changed into German bank-notes and gold pieces, and safely
+buttoned in the breast pocket of his waistcoat, he felt as safe from
+pillage as from poverty when he came out from buying his ticket; he
+covertly pressed his arm against his breast from time to time, for the
+joy of feeling his money there and not from any fear of finding it gone.
+He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance; he could not believe it was he, as
+he rode up the lonely length of Broadway in the cable-car, between the
+wild, irregular walls of the canyon which the cable-cars have all to
+themselves at the end of a summer afternoon.
+
+He went and dined, and he thought he dined well, at a Spanish-American
+restaurant, for fifty cents, with a half-bottle of California claret
+included. When he came back to Broadway he was aware that it was
+stiflingly hot in the pinkish twilight, but he took a cable-car again in
+lack of other pastime, and the motion served the purpose of a breeze,
+which he made the most of by keeping his hat off. It did not really
+matter to him whether it was hot or cool; he was imparadised in weather
+which had nothing to do with the temperature. Partly because he was born
+to such weather, in the gayety of soul which amused some people with him,
+and partly because the world was behaving as he had always expected, he
+was opulently content with the present moment. But he thought very
+tolerantly of the future, and he confirmed himself in the decision he had
+already made, to stick to Chicago when he came back to America. New York
+was very well, and he had no sentiment about Chicago; but he had got a
+foothold there; he had done better with an Eastern publisher, he
+believed, by hailing from the West, and he did not believe it would hurt
+him with the Eastern public to keep on hailing from the West.
+
+He was glad of a chance to see Europe, but he did not mean to come home
+so dazzled as to see nothing else against the American sky. He fancied,
+for he really knew nothing, that it was the light of Europe, not its
+glare that he wanted, and he wanted it chiefly on his material, so as to
+see it more and more objectively. It was his power of detachment from
+this that had enabled him to do his sketches in the paper with such charm
+as to lure a cash proposition from a publisher when he put them together
+for a book, but he believed that his business faculty had much to do with
+his success; and he was as proud of that as of the book itself. Perhaps
+he was not so very proud of the book; he was at least not vain of it; he
+could, detach himself from his art as well as his material.
+
+Like all literary temperaments he was of a certain hardness, in spite of
+the susceptibilities that could be used to give coloring to his work. He
+knew this well enough, but he believed that there were depths of
+unprofessional tenderness in his nature. He was good to his mother, and
+he sent her money, and wrote to her in the little Indiana town where he
+had left her when he came to Chicago. After he got that invitation from
+the Bird of Prey, he explored his heart for some affection that he had
+not felt for him before, and he found a wish that his employer should not
+know it was he who had invented that nickname for him. He promptly avowed
+this in the newspaper office which formed one of the eyries of the Bird
+of Prey, and made the fellows promise not to give him away. He failed to
+move their imagination when he brought up as a reason for softening
+toward him that he was from Burnamy's own part of Indiana, and was a
+benefactor of Tippecanoe University, from which Burnamy was graduated.
+But they, relished the cynicism of his attempt; and they were glad of his
+good luck, which he was getting square and not rhomboid, as most people
+seem to get their luck. They liked him, and some of them liked him for
+his clean young life as well as for his cleverness. His life was known to
+be as clean as a girl's, and he looked like a girl with his sweet eyes,
+though he had rather more chin than most girls.
+
+The conductor came to reverse his seat, and Burnamy told him he guessed
+he would ride back with him as far as the cars to the Hoboken Ferry, if
+the conductor would put him off at the right place. It was nearly nine
+o'clock, and he thought he might as well be going over to the ship, where
+he had decided to pass the night. After he found her, and went on board,
+he was glad he had not gone sooner. A queasy odor of drainage stole up
+from the waters of the dock, and mixed with the rank, gross sweetness of
+the bags of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers; there was a coming
+and going of carts and trucks on the wharf, and on the ship a rattling of
+chains and a clucking of pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and then sudden
+silences of trampling sea-boots. Burnamy looked into the dining-saloon
+and the music-room, with the notion of trying for some naps there; then
+he went to his state-room. His room-mate, whoever he was to be, had not
+come; and he kicked off his shoes and threw off his coat and tumbled into
+his berth.
+
+He meant to rest awhile, and then get up and spend the night in receiving
+impressions. He could not think of any one who had done the facts of the
+eve of sailing on an Atlantic liner. He thought he would use the material
+first in a letter to the paper and afterwards in a poem; but he found
+himself unable to grasp the notion of its essential relation to the
+choice between chicken croquettes and sweetbreads as entrees of the
+restaurant dinner where he had been offered neither; he knew that he had
+begun to dream, and that he must get up. He was just going to get up,
+when he woke to a sense of freshness in the air, penetrating from the new
+day outside. He looked at his watch and found it was quarter past six; he
+glanced round the state-room and saw that he had passed the night alone
+in it. Then he splashed himself hastily at the basin next his berth, and
+jumped into his clothes, and went on deck, anxious to lose no feature or
+emotion of the ship's departure.
+
+When she was fairly off he returned to his room to change the thick coat
+he had put on at the instigation of the early morning air. His room-mate
+was still absent, but he was now represented by his state-room baggage,
+and Burnamy tried to infer him from it. He perceived a social quality in
+his dress-coat case, capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, and
+sole-leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to his own
+equipment. The things were not so new as his; they had an effect of
+polite experience, with a foreign registry and customs label on them here
+and there. They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge, and
+Burnamy would have said that they were certainly English things, if it
+had not been for the initials U. S. A. which followed the name of E. B.
+Triscoe on the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the foot of
+the lower berth.
+
+The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through the default of the
+passenger whose ticket he had got at the last hour; the clerk in the
+steamer office had been careful to impress him with this advantage, and
+he now imagined a trespass on his property. But he reassured himself by a
+glance at his ticket, and went out to watch the ship's passage down the
+stream and through the Narrows. After breakfast he came to his room
+again, to see what could be done from his valise to make him look better
+in the eyes of a girl whom he had seen across the table; of course he
+professed a much more general purpose. He blamed himself for not having
+got at least a pair of the white tennis-shoes which so many of the
+passengers were wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet;
+but there was a, pair of enamelled leather boots in his bag which he
+thought might do.
+
+His room was in the group of cabins on the upper deck; he had already
+missed his way to it once by mistaking the corridor which it opened into;
+and he was not sure that he was not blundering again when he peered down
+the narrow passage where he supposed it was. A lady was standing at an
+open state-room door, resting her hands against the jambs and leaning
+forward with her head within and talking to some one there. Before he
+could draw back and try another corridor he heard her say: "Perhaps he's
+some young man, and wouldn't care."
+
+Burnamy could not make out the answer that came from within. The lady
+spoke again in a tone of reluctant assent, "No, I don't suppose you
+could; but if he understood, perhaps he would offer."
+
+She drew her head out of the room, stepping back a pace, and lingering a
+moment at the threshold. She looked round over her shoulder and
+discovered Burnamy, where he stood hesitating at the head of the passage.
+She ebbed before him, and then flowed round him in her instant escape;
+with some murmured incoherencies about speaking to her father, she
+vanished in a corridor on the other side of the ship, while he stood
+staring into the doorway of his room.
+
+He had seen that she was the young lady for whom he had come to put on
+his enamelled shoes, and he saw that the person within was the elderly
+gentleman who had sat next her at breakfast. He begged his pardon, as he
+entered, and said he hoped he should not disturb him. "I'm afraid I left
+my things all over the place, when I got up this morning."
+
+The other entreated him not to mention it and went on taking from his
+hand-bag a variety of toilet appliances which the sight of made Burnamy
+vow to keep his own simple combs and brushes shut in his valise all the
+way over. "You slept on board, then," he suggested, arresting himself
+with a pair of low shoes in his hand; he decided to put them in a certain
+pocket of his steamer bag.
+
+"Oh, yes," Burnamy laughed, nervously: "I came near oversleeping, and
+getting off to sea without knowing it; and I rushed out to save myself,
+and so--"
+
+He began to gather up his belongings while he followed the movements of
+Mr. Triscoe with a wistful eye. He would have liked to offer his lower
+berth to this senior of his, when he saw him arranging to take possession
+of the upper; but he did not quite know how to manage it. He noticed that
+as the other moved about he limped slightly, unless it were rather a
+weary easing of his person from one limb to the other. He stooped to pull
+his trunk out from under the berth, and Burnamy sprang to help him.
+
+"Let me get that out for you!" He caught it up and put it on the sofa
+under the port. "Is that where you want it?"
+
+"Why, yes," the other assented. "You're very good," and as he took out
+his key to unlock the trunk he relented a little farther to the
+intimacies of the situation. "Have you arranged with the bath-steward
+yet? It's such a full boat."
+
+"No, I haven't," said Burnamy, as if he had tried and failed; till then
+he had not known that there was a bath-steward. "Shall I get him for
+you?"
+
+"No; no. Our bedroom-steward will send him, I dare say, thank you."
+
+Mr. Triscoe had got his trunk open, and Burnamy had no longer an excuse
+for lingering. In his defeat concerning the bath-steward, as he felt it
+to be, he had not the courage, now, to offer the lower berth. He went
+away, forgetting to change his shoes; but he came back, and as soon as he
+got the enamelled shoes on, and shut the shabby russet pair in his bag,
+he said, abruptly: "Mr. Triscoe, I wish you'd take the lower berth. I got
+it at the eleventh hour by some fellow's giving it up, and it isn't as if
+I'd bargained for it a month ago."
+
+The elder man gave him one of his staccato glances in which Burnamy
+fancied suspicion and even resentment. But he said, after the moment of
+reflection which he gave himself, "Why, thank you, if you don't mind,
+really."
+
+"Not at all!" cried the young man. "I should like the upper berth better.
+We'll, have the steward change the sheets."
+
+"Oh, I'll see that he does that," said Mr. Triscoe. "I couldn't allow you
+to take any trouble about it." He now looked as if he wished Burnamy
+would go, and leave him to his domestic arrangements.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+In telling about himself Burnamy touched only upon the points which he
+believed would take his listener's intelligent fancy, and he stopped so
+long before he had tired him that March said he would like to introduce
+him to his wife. He saw in the agreeable young fellow an image of his own
+youth, with some differences which, he was willing to own, were to the
+young fellow's advantage. But they were both from the middle West; in
+their native accent and their local tradition they were the same; they
+were the same in their aspirations; they were of one blood in their
+literary impulse to externate their thoughts and emotions.
+
+Burnamy answered, with a glance at his enamelled shoes, that he would be
+delighted, and when her husband brought him up to her, Mrs. March said
+she was always glad to meet the contributors to the magazine, and asked
+him whether he knew Mr. Kendricks, who was her favorite. Without giving
+him time to reply to a question that seemed to depress him, she said that
+she had a son who must be nearly his own age, and whom his father had
+left in charge of 'Every Other Week' for the few months they were to be
+gone; that they had a daughter married and living in Chicago. She made
+him sit down by her in March's chair, and before he left them March heard
+him magnanimously asking whether Mr. Kendricks was going to do something
+more for the magazine soon. He sauntered away and did not know how
+quickly Burnamy left this question to say, with the laugh and blush which
+became him in her eyes:
+
+"Mrs. March, there is something I should like to tell you about, if you
+will let me."
+
+"Why, certainly, Mr. Burnamy," she began, but she saw that he did not
+wish her to continue.
+
+"Because," he went on, "it's a little matter that I shouldn't like to go
+wrong in."
+
+He told her of his having overheard what Miss Triscoe had said to her
+father, and his belief that she was talking about the lower berth. He
+said he would have wished to offer it, of course, but now he was afraid
+they might think he had overheard them and felt obliged to do it.
+
+"I see," said Mrs. March, and she added, thoughtfully, "She looks like
+rather a proud girl."
+
+"Yes," the young fellow sighed.
+
+"She is very charming," she continued, thoughtfully, but not so
+judicially.
+
+"Well," Burnamy owned, "that is certainly one of the complications," and
+they laughed together.
+
+She stopped herself after saying, "I see what you mean," and suggested,
+"I think I should be guided by circumstances. It needn't be done at once,
+I suppose."
+
+"Well," Burnamy began, and then he broke out, with a laugh of
+embarrassment, "I've done it already."
+
+"Oh! Then it wasn't my advice, exactly, that you wanted."
+
+"No!"
+
+"And how did he take it?"
+
+"He said he should be glad to make the exchange if I really didn't mind."
+Burnamy had risen restlessly, and she did not ask him to stay. She merely
+said:
+
+"Oh, well, I'm glad it turned out so nicely."
+
+"I'm so glad you think it was the thing to do." He managed to laugh
+again, but he could not hide from her that he was not feeling altogether
+satisfied. "Would you like me to send Mr. March, if I see him?" he asked,
+as if he did not know on what other terms to get away.
+
+"Do, please!" she entreated, and it seemed to her that he had hardly left
+her when her husband came up. "Why, where in the world did he find you so
+soon?"
+
+"Did you send him for me? I was just hanging round for him to go." March
+sank into the chair at her side. "Well, is he going to marry her?"
+
+"Oh, you may laugh! But there is something very exciting!" She told him
+what had happened, and of her belief that Burnamy's handsome behavior had
+somehow not been met in kind.
+
+March gave himself the pleasure of an immense laugh. "It seems to me that
+this Mr. Burnamy of yours wanted a little more gratitude than he was
+entitled to. Why shouldn't he have offered him the lower berth? And why
+shouldn't the old gentleman have taken it just as he did? Did you want
+him to make a counteroffer of his daughter's hand? If he does, I hope Mr.
+Burnamy won't come for your advice till after he's accepted her."
+
+"He wasn't very candid. I hoped you would speak about that. Don't you
+think it was rather natural, though?"
+
+"For him, very likely. But I think you would call it sinuous in some one
+you hadn't taken a fancy to."
+
+"No, no. I wish to be just. I don't see how he could have come straight
+at it. And he did own up at last." She asked him what Burnamy had done
+for the magazine, and he could remember nothing but that one small poem,
+yet unprinted; he was rather vague about its value, but said it had
+temperament.
+
+"He has temperament, too," she commented, and she had made him tell her
+everything he knew, or could be forced to imagine about Burnamy, before
+she let the talk turn to other things.
+
+The life of the promenade had already settled into seafaring form; the
+steamer chairs were full, and people were reading or dozing in them with
+an effect of long habit. Those who would be walking up and down had begun
+their walks; some had begun going in and out of the smoking-room; ladies
+who were easily affected by the motion were lying down in the music-room.
+Groups of both sexes were standing at intervals along the rail, and the
+promenaders were obliged to double on a briefer course or work slowly
+round them. Shuffleboard parties at one point and ring-toss parties at
+another were forming among the young people. It was as lively and it was
+as dull as it would be two thousand miles at sea. It was not the least
+cooler, yet; but if you sat still you did not suffer.
+
+In the prompt monotony the time was already passing swiftly. The
+deck-steward seemed hardly to have been round with tea and bouillon, and
+he had not yet gathered up all the empty cups, when the horn for lunch
+sounded. It was the youngest of the table-stewards who gave the summons
+to meals; and whenever the pretty boy appeared with his bugle, funny
+passengers gathered round him to make him laugh, and stop him from
+winding it. His part of the joke was to fulfill his duty with gravity,
+and only to give way to a smile of triumph as he walked off.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+At lunch, in the faded excitement of their first meeting, the people at
+the Marches' table did not renew the premature intimacy of their
+breakfast talk. Mrs. March went to lie down in her berth afterwards, and
+March went on deck without her. He began to walk to and from the barrier
+between the first and second cabin promenades; lingering near it, and
+musing pensively, for some of the people beyond it looked as intelligent
+and as socially acceptable, even to their clothes, as their pecuniary
+betters of the saloon.
+
+There were two women, a mother and daughter, whom he fancied to be
+teachers, by their looks, going out for a little rest, or perhaps for a
+little further study to fit them more perfectly for their work. They
+gazed wistfully across at him whenever he came up to the barrier; and he
+feigned a conversation with them and tried to convince them that the
+stamp of inferiority which their poverty put upon them was just, or if
+not just, then inevitable. He argued with them that the sort of barrier
+which here prevented their being friends with him, if they wished it, ran
+invisibly through society everywhere but he felt ashamed before their
+kind, patient, intelligent faces, and found himself wishing to excuse the
+fact he was defending. Was it any worse, he asked them, than their not
+being invited to the entertainments of people in upper Fifth Avenue? He
+made them own that if they were let across that barrier the whole second
+cabin would have a logical right to follow; and they were silenced. But
+they continued to gape at him with their sincere, gentle eyes whenever he
+returned to the barrier in his walk, till he could bear it no longer, and
+strolled off toward the steerage.
+
+There was more reason why the passengers there should be penned into a
+little space of their own in the sort of pit made by the narrowing deck
+at the bow. They seemed to be all foreigners, and if any had made their
+fortunes in our country they were hiding their prosperity in the return
+to their own. They could hardly have come to us more shabby and squalid
+than they were going away; but he thought their average less apathetic
+than that of the saloon passengers, as he leaned over the rail and looked
+down at them. Some one had brought out an electric battery, and the
+lumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughing as they
+writhed with the current. A young mother seated flat on the deck, with
+her bare feet stuck out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughed
+and shouted with the rest; a man with his head tied in a shawl walked
+about the pen and smiled grotesquely with the well side of his
+toothache-swollen face. The owner of the battery carried it away, and a
+group of little children, with blue eyes and yellow hair, gathered in the
+space he had left, and looked up at a passenger near March who was eating
+some plums and cherries which he had brought from the luncheon table. He
+began to throw the fruit down to them, and the children scrambled for it.
+
+An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face, said, "I shouldn't
+want a child of mine down there."
+
+"No," March responded, "it isn't quite what one would choose for one's
+own. It's astonishing, though, how we reconcile ourselves to it in the
+case of others."
+
+"I suppose it's something we'll have to get used to on the other side,"
+suggested the stranger.
+
+"Well," answered March, "you have some opportunities to get used to it on
+this side, if you happen to live in New York," and he went on to speak of
+the raggedness which often penetrated the frontier of comfort where he
+lived in Stuyvesant Square, and which seemed as glad of alms in food or
+money as this poverty of the steerage.
+
+The other listened restively like a man whose ideals are disturbed. "I
+don't believe I should like to live in New York, much," he said, and
+March fancied that he wished to be asked where he did live. It appeared
+that he lived in Ohio, and he named his town; he did not brag of it, but
+he said it suited him. He added that he had never expected to go to
+Europe, but that he had begun to run down lately, and his doctor thought
+he had better go out and try Carlsbad.
+
+March said, to invite his further confidence, that this was exactly his
+own case. The Ohio man met the overture from a common invalidism as if it
+detracted from his own distinction; and he turned to speak of the
+difficulty, he had in arranging his affairs for leaving home. His heart
+opened a little with the word, and he said how comfortable he and his
+wife were in their house, and how much they both hated to shut it up.
+When March offered him his card, he said he had none of his own with him,
+but that his name was Eltwin. He betrayed a simple wish to have March
+realize the local importance he had left behind him; and it was not hard
+to comply; March saw a Grand Army button in the lapel of his coat, and he
+knew that he was in the presence of a veteran.
+
+He tried to guess his rank; in telling his wife about him, when he went
+down to find her just before dinner, but he ended with a certain sense of
+affliction. "There are too many elderly invalids on this ship. I knock
+against people of my own age everywhere. Why aren't your youthful lovers
+more in evidence, my dear? I don't believe they are lovers, and I begin
+to doubt if they're young even."
+
+"It wasn't very satisfactory at lunch, certainly," she owned. "But I know
+it will be different at dinner." She was putting herself together after a
+nap that had made up for the lost sleep of the night before. "I want you
+to look very nice, dear. Shall you dress for dinner?" she asked her
+husband's image in the state-room glass which she was preoccupying.
+
+"I shall dress in my pea-jacket and sea-boots," it answered.
+
+"I have heard that they always dress for dinner on the big Cunard and
+White Star boats, when it's good weather," she went on, placidly. "I
+shouldn't want those people to think you were not up in the convenances."
+
+They both knew that she meant the reticent father and daughter, and March
+flung out, "I shouldn't want them to think you weren't. There's such a
+thing as overdoing."
+
+She attacked him at another point. "What has annoyed you? What else have
+you been doing?"
+
+"Nothing. I've been reading most of the afternoon."
+
+"The Maiden Knight?"
+
+This was the book which nearly everybody had brought on board. It was
+just out, and had caught an instant favor, which swelled later to a tidal
+wave. It depicted a heroic girl in every trying circumstance of mediaeval
+life, and gratified the perennial passion of both sexes for historical
+romance, while it flattered woman's instinct of superiority by the
+celebration of her unintermitted triumphs, ending in a preposterous and
+wholly superfluous self-sacrifice.
+
+March laughed for pleasure in her guess, and she pursued, "I suppose you
+didn't waste time looking if anybody had brought the last copy of 'Every
+Other Week'?"
+
+"Yes, I did; and I found the one you had left in your steamer chair--for
+advertising purposes, probably."
+
+"Mr. Burnamy has another," she said. "I saw it sticking out of his pocket
+this morning."
+
+"Oh, yes. He told me he had got it on the train from Chicago to see if it
+had his poem in it. He's an ingenuous soul--in some ways."
+
+"Well, that is the very reason why you ought to find out whether the men
+are going to dress, and let him know. He would never think of it
+himself."
+
+"Neither would I," said her husband.
+
+"Very well, if you wish to spoil his chance at the outset," she sighed.
+
+She did not quite know whether to be glad or not that the men were all in
+sacks and cutaways at dinner; it saved her, from shame for her husband
+and Mr. Burnamy; but it put her in the wrong. Every one talked; even the
+father and daughter talked with each other, and at one moment Mrs. March
+could not be quite sure that the daughter had not looked at her when she
+spoke. She could not be mistaken in the remark which the father addressed
+to Burnamy, though it led to nothing.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The dinner was uncommonly good, as the first dinner out is apt to be; and
+it went gayly on from soup to fruit, which was of the American abundance
+and variety, and as yet not of the veteran freshness imparted by the
+ice-closet. Everybody was eating it, when by a common consciousness they
+were aware of alien witnesses. They looked up as by a single impulse, and
+saw at the port the gaunt face of a steerage passenger staring down upon
+their luxury; he held on his arm a child that shared his regard with yet
+hungrier eyes. A boy's nose showed itself as if tiptoed to the height of
+the man's elbow; a young girl peered over his other arm.
+
+The passengers glanced at one another; the two table-stewards, with their
+napkins in their hands, smiled vaguely, and made some indefinite
+movements.
+
+The bachelor at the head of the table broke the spell. "I'm glad it
+didn't begin with the Little Neck clams!"
+
+"Probably they only let those people come for the dessert," March
+suggested.
+
+The widow now followed the direction of the other eyes; and looked up
+over her shoulder; she gave a little cry, and shrank down. The young
+bride made her petted mouth, in appeal to the company; her husband looked
+severe, as if he were going to do something, but refrained, not to make a
+scene. The reticent father threw one of his staccato glances at the port,
+and Mrs. March was sure that she saw the daughter steal a look at
+Burnamy.
+
+The young fellow laughed. "I don't suppose there's anything to be done
+about it, unless we pass out a plate."
+
+Mr. Kenby shook his head. "It wouldn't do. We might send for the captain.
+Or the chief steward."
+
+The faces at the port vanished. At other ports profiles passed and
+repassed, as if the steerage passengers had their promenade under them,
+but they paused no more.
+
+The Marches went up to their steamer chairs, and from her exasperated
+nerves Mrs. March denounced the arrangement of the ship which had made
+such a cruel thing possible.
+
+"Oh," he mocked, "they had probably had a good substantial meal of their
+own, and the scene of our banquet was of the quality of a picture, a
+purely aesthetic treat. But supposing it wasn't, we're doing something
+like it every day and every moment of our lives. The Norumbia is a piece
+of the whole world's civilization set afloat, and passing from shore to
+shore with unchanged classes, and conditions. A ship's merely a small
+stage, where we're brought to close quarters with the daily drama of
+humanity."
+
+"Well, then," she protested, "I don't like being brought to close
+quarters with the daily drama of humanity, as you call it. And I don't
+believe that the large English ships are built so that the steerage
+passengers can stare in at the saloon windows while one is eating; and
+I'm sorry we came on the Norumbia."
+
+"Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn't hide anything," he began, and he was
+going to speak of the men in the furnace pits of the steamer, how they
+fed the fires in a welding heat, and as if they had perished in it crept
+out on the forecastle like blanched phantasms of toil; but she interposed
+in time.
+
+"If there's anything worse, for pity's sake don't tell me," she
+entreated, and he forebore.
+
+He sat thinking how once the world had not seemed to have even death in
+it, and then how as he had grown older death had come into it more and
+more, and suffering was lurking everywhere, and could hardly be kept out
+of sight. He wondered if that young Burnamy now saw the world as he used
+to see it, a place for making verse and making love, and full of beauty
+of all kinds waiting to be fitted with phrases. He had lived a happy
+life; Burnamy would be lucky if he should live one half as happy; and yet
+if he could show him his whole happy life, just as it had truly been,
+must not the young man shrink from such a picture of his future?
+
+"Say something," said his wife. "What are you thinking about?"
+
+"Oh, Burnamy," he answered, honestly enough.
+
+"I was thinking about the children," she said. "I am glad Bella didn't
+try to come from Chicago to see us off; it would have been too silly; she
+is getting to be very sensible. I hope Tom won't take the covers off the
+furniture when he has the fellows in to see him."
+
+"Well, I want him to get all the comfort he can out of the place, even if
+the moths eat up every stick of furniture."
+
+"Yes, so do I. And of course you're wishing that you were there with
+him!" March laughed guiltily. "Well, perhaps it was a crazy thing for us
+to start off alone for Europe, at our age."
+
+"Nothing of the kind," he retorted in the necessity he perceived for
+staying her drooping spirits. "I wouldn't be anywhere else on any
+account. Isn't it perfectly delicious? It puts me in mind of that night
+on the Lake Ontario boat, when we were starting for Montreal. There was
+the same sort of red sunset, and the air wasn't a bit softer than this."
+
+He spoke of a night on their wedding-journey when they were sill new
+enough from Europe to be comparing everything at home with things there.
+
+"Well, perhaps we shall get into the spirit of it again," she said, and
+they talked a long time of the past.
+
+All the mechanical noises were muffled in the dull air, and the wash of
+the ship's course through the waveless sea made itself pleasantly heard.
+In the offing a steamer homeward bound swam smoothly by, so close that
+her lights outlined her to the eye; she sent up some signal rockets that
+soared against the purple heaven in green and crimson, and spoke to the
+Norumbia in the mysterious mute phrases of ships that meet in the dark.
+
+Mrs. March wondered what had become of Burnamy; the promenades were much
+freer now than they had been since the ship sailed; when she rose to go
+below, she caught sight of Burnamy walking the deck transversely with
+some lady. She clutched her husband's arm and stayed him in rich
+conjecture.
+
+"Do you suppose he can have got her to walking with him already?"
+
+They waited till Burnamy and his companion came in sight again. She was
+tilting forward, and turning from the waist, now to him and now from him.
+
+"No; it's that pivotal girl," said March; and his wife said, "Well, I'm
+glad he won't be put down by them."
+
+In the music-room sat the people she meant, and at the instant she passed
+on down the stairs, the daughter was saying to the father, "I don't see
+why you didn't tell me sooner, papa."
+
+"It was such an unimportant matter that I didn't think to mention it. He
+offered it, and I took it; that was all. What difference could it have
+made to you?"
+
+"None. But one doesn't like to do any one an injustice."
+
+"I didn't know you were thinking anything about it."
+
+"No, of course not."
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+The voyage of the Norumbia was one of those which passengers say they
+have never seen anything like, though for the first two or three days out
+neither the doctor nor the deck-steward could be got, to prophesy when
+the ship would be in. There was only a day or two when it could really be
+called rough, and the sea-sickness was confined to those who seemed
+wilful sufferers; they lay on the cushioned benching around the
+stairs-landing, and subsisted on biscuit and beef tea without qualifying
+the monotonous well-being of the other passengers, who passed without
+noticing them.
+
+The second morning there was rain, and the air freshened, but the leaden
+sea lay level as before. The sun shone in the afternoon; with the sunset
+the fog came thick and white; the ship lowed dismally through the night;
+from the dense folds of the mist answering noises called back to her.
+Just before dark two men in a dory shouted up to her close under her
+bows, and then melted out of sight; when the dark fell the lights of
+fishing-schooners were seen, and their bells pealed; once loud cries from
+a vessel near at hand made themselves heard. Some people in the
+dining-saloon sang hymns; the smoking-room was dense with cigar fumes,
+and the card-players dealt their hands in an atmosphere emulous of the
+fog without.
+
+The Norumbia was off the Banks, and the second day of fog was cold as if
+icebergs were haunting the opaque pallor around her. In the ranks of
+steamer chairs people lay like mummies in their dense wrappings; in the
+music-room the little children of travel discussed the different lines of
+steamers on which they had crossed, and babes of five and seven disputed
+about the motion on the Cunarders and White Stars; their nurses tried in
+vain to still them in behalf of older passengers trying to write letters
+there.
+
+By the next morning the ship had run out of the fog; and people who could
+keep their feet said they were glad of the greater motion which they
+found beyond the Banks. They now talked of the heat of the first days
+out, and how much they had suffered; some who had passed the night on
+board before sailing tried to impart a sense of their misery in trying to
+sleep.
+
+A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the sailors stretched
+canvas along the weather promenade and put up a sheathing of boards
+across the bow end to keep off the rain. Yet a day or two more and the
+sea had fallen again and there was dancing on the widest space of the lee
+promenade.
+
+The little events of the sea outside the steamer offered themselves in
+their poor variety. Once a ship in the offing, with all its square sails
+set, lifted them like three white towers from the deep. On the rim of the
+ocean the length of some westward liner blocked itself out against the
+horizon, and swiftly trailed its smoke out of sight. A few tramp
+steamers, lounging and lunging through the trough of the sea, were
+overtaken and left behind; an old brigantine passed so close that her
+rusty iron sides showed plain, and one could discern the faces of the
+people on board.
+
+The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any life beyond her. One day
+a small bird beat the air with its little wings, under the roof of the
+promenade, and then flittered from sight over the surface, of the waste;
+a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their rise, plunged clumsily
+from wave to wave. The deep itself had sometimes the unreality, the
+artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre. Commonly it was livid and
+cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately misted, and
+where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely iridescent
+under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by the falling
+spray. These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like painted
+canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth cleavage.
+Where it met the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the rougher
+weather carved itself along the horizon in successions of surges.
+
+If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours; then the clouds
+broke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dim
+evening thickened over the waters. Sometimes the moon looked through the
+ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, and
+shook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship. Through every
+change, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with the
+pulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man's heart stops) in a
+course which had nothing to mark it but the spread of the furrows from
+her sides, and the wake that foamed from her stern to the western verge
+of the sea.
+
+The life of the ship, like the life of the sea, was a sodden monotony,
+with certain events which were part of the monotony. In the morning the
+little steward's bugle called the passengers from their dreams, and half
+an hour later called them to their breakfast, after such as chose had
+been served with coffee by their bedroom-stewards. Then they went on
+deck, where they read, or dozed in their chairs, or walked up and down,
+or stood in the way of those who were walking; or played shuffleboard and
+ring-toss; or smoked, and drank whiskey and aerated waters over their
+cards and papers in the smoking-room; or wrote letters in the saloon or
+the music-room. At eleven o'clock they spoiled their appetites for lunch
+with tea or bouillon to the music of a band of second-cabin stewards; at
+one, a single blast of the bugle called them to lunch, where they glutted
+themselves to the torpor from which they afterwards drowsed in their
+berths or chairs. They did the same things in the afternoon that they had
+done in the forenoon; and at four o'clock the deck-stewards came round
+with their cups and saucers, and their plates of sandwiches, again to the
+music of the band. There were two bugle-calls for dinner, and after
+dinner some went early to bed, and some sat up late and had grills and
+toast. At twelve the lights were put out in the saloons and the
+smoking-rooms.
+
+There were various smells which stored themselves up in the consciousness
+to remain lastingly relative to certain moments and places: a whiff of
+whiskey and tobacco that exhaled from the door of the smoking-room; the
+odor of oil and steam rising from the open skylights over the
+engine-room; the scent of stale bread about the doors of the
+dining-saloon.
+
+The life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, only more monotonous. The
+walking was limited; the talk was the tentative talk of people aware that
+there was no refuge if they got tired of one another. The flirting
+itself, such as there was of it, must be carried on in the glare of the
+pervasive publicity; it must be crude and bold, or not be at all.
+
+There seemed to be very little of it. There were not many young people on
+board of saloon quality, and these were mostly girls. The young men were
+mainly of the smoking-room sort; they seldom risked themselves among the
+steamer chairs. It was gayer in the second cabin, and gayer yet in the
+steerage, where robuster emotions were operated by the accordion. The
+passengers there danced to its music; they sang to it and laughed to it
+unabashed under the eyes of the first-cabin witnesses clustered along the
+rail above the pit where they took their rude pleasures.
+
+With March it came to his spending many hours of each long, swift day in
+his berth with a book under the convenient electric light. He was safe
+there from the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves only to
+fall into disintegration, and cling to him afterwards as inorganic
+particles of weather-guessing, and smoking-room gossip about the ship's
+run.
+
+In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought that he saw some faces of
+the great world, the world of wealth and fashion; but these afterward
+vanished, and left him to wonder where they hid themselves. He did not
+meet them even in going to and from his meals; he could only imagine them
+served in those palatial state-rooms whose interiors the stewards now and
+then rather obtruded upon the public. There were people whom he
+encountered in the promenades when he got up for the sunrise, and whom he
+never saw at other times; at midnight he met men prowling in the dark
+whom he never met by day. But none of these were people of the great
+world. Before six o'clock they were sometimes second-cabin passengers,
+whose barrier was then lifted for a little while to give them the freedom
+of the saloon promenade.
+
+From time to time he thought he would look up his Ohioan, and revive from
+a closer study of him his interest in the rare American who had never
+been to Europe. But he kept with his elderly wife, who had the effect of
+withholding him from March's advances. Young Mr. and Mrs. Leffers threw
+off more and more their disguise of a long-married pair, and became
+frankly bride and groom. They seldom talked with any one else, except at
+table; they walked up and down together, smiling into each others faces;
+they sat side by side in their steamer chairs; one shawl covered them
+both, and there was reason to believe that they were holding each other's
+hands under it.
+
+Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. March when her husband was
+straying about the ship or reading in his berth; and the two ladies must
+have exchanged autobiographies, for Mrs. March was able to tell him just
+how long Mrs. Adding had been a widow, what her husband died of, and what
+had been done to save him; how she was now perfectly wrapt up in her boy,
+and was taking him abroad, with some notion of going to Switzerland,
+after the summer's travel, and settling down with him at school there.
+She and Mrs. March became great friends; and Rose, as his mother called
+him, attached himself reverently to March, not only as a celebrity of the
+first grade in his quality of editor of 'Every Other Week', but as a sage
+of wisdom and goodness, with whom he must not lose the chance of counsel
+upon almost every hypothesis and exigency of life.
+
+March could not bring himself to place Burnamy quite where he belonged in
+contemporary literature, when Rose put him very high in virtue of the
+poem which he heard Burnamy was going to have printed in 'Every Other
+Week', and of the book which he was going to have published; and he let
+the boy bring to the young fellow the flattery which can come to any
+author but once, in the first request for his autograph that Burnamy
+confessed to have had. They were so near in age, though they were ten
+years apart, that Rose stood much more in awe of Burnamy than of others
+much more his seniors. He was often in the company of Kenby, whom he
+valued next to March as a person acquainted with men; he consulted March
+upon Kenby's practice of always taking up the language of the country he
+visited, if it were only for a fortnight; and he conceived a higher
+opinion of him from March's approval.
+
+Burnamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him talk about himself when he
+supposed he was talking about literature, in the hope that she could get
+him to talk about the Triscoes; but she listened in vain as he poured
+out-his soul in theories of literary art, and in histories of what he had
+written and what he meant to write. When he passed them where they sat
+together, March heard the young fellow's perpetually recurring I, I, I,
+my, my, my, me, me, me; and smiled to think how she was suffering under
+the drip-drip of his innocent egotism.
+
+She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentions to the pivotal
+girl, and Miss Triscoe's indifference to him, in which a less penetrating
+scrutiny could have detected no change from meal to meal. It was only at
+table that she could see them together, or that she could note any break
+in the reserve of the father and daughter. The signs of this were so fine
+that when she reported them March laughed in scornful incredulity. But at
+breakfast the third day out, the Triscoes, with the authority of people
+accustomed to social consideration, suddenly turned to the Marches, and
+began to make themselves agreeable; the father spoke to March of 'Every
+Other Week', which he seemed to know of in its relation to him; and the
+young girl addressed herself to Mrs. March's motherly sense not the less
+acceptably because indirectly. She spoke of going out with her father for
+an indefinite time, as if it were rather his wish than hers, and she made
+some inquiries about places in Germany; they had never been in Germany.
+They had some idea of Dresden; but the idea of Dresden with its American
+colony seemed rather tiresome; and did Mrs. March know anything about
+Weimar?
+
+Mrs. March was obliged to say that she knew nothing about anyplace in
+Germany; and she explained perhaps too fully where and why she was going
+with her husband. She fancied a Boston note in that scorn for the
+tiresomeness of Dresden; but the girl's style was of New York rather than
+of Boston, and her accent was not quite of either place. Mrs. March began
+to try the Triscoes in this place and in that, to divine them and to
+class them. She had decided from the first that they were society people,
+but they were cultivated beyond the average of the few swells whom she
+had met; and there had been nothing offensive in their manner of holding
+themselves aloof from the other people at the table; they had a right to
+do that if they chose.
+
+When the young Lefferses came in to breakfast, the talk went on between
+these and the Marches; the Triscoes presently left the table, and Mrs.
+March rose soon after, eager for that discussion of their behavior which
+March knew he should not be able to postpone.
+
+He agreed with her that they were society people, but she could not at
+once accept his theory that they had themselves been the objects of an
+advance from them because of their neutral literary quality, through
+which they were of no social world, but potentially common to any. Later
+she admitted this, as she said, for the sake of argument, though what she
+wanted him to see, now, was that this was all a step of the girl's toward
+finding out something about Burnamy.
+
+The same afternoon, about the time the deck-steward was making his round
+with his cups, Miss Triscoe abruptly advanced upon her from a neighboring
+corner of the bulkhead, and asked, with the air of one accustomed to have
+her advances gratefully received, if she might sit by her. The girl took
+March's vacant chair, where she had her cup of bouillon, which she
+continued to hold untasted in her hand after the first sip. Mrs. March
+did the same with hers, and at the moment she had got very tired of doing
+it, Burnamy came by, for the hundredth time that day, and gave her a
+hundredth bow with a hundredth smile. He perceived that she wished to get
+rid of her cup, and he sprang to her relief.
+
+"May I take yours too?" he said very passively to Miss Triscoe.
+
+"You are very good." she answered, and gave it.
+
+Mrs. March with a casual air suggested, "Do you know Mr. Burnamy, Miss
+Triscoe?" The girl said a few civil things, but Burnamy did not try to
+make talk with her while he remained a few moments before Mrs. March. The
+pivotal girl came in sight, tilting and turning in a rare moment of
+isolation at the corner of the music-room, and he bowed abruptly, and
+hurried off to join her.
+
+Miss Triscoe did not linger; she alleged the necessity of looking up her
+father, and went away with a smile so friendly that Mrs. March might
+easily have construed it to mean that no blame attached itself to her in
+Miss Triscoe's mind.
+
+"Then you don't feel that it was a very distinct success?" her husband
+asked on his return.
+
+"Not on the surface," she said.
+
+"Better let ill enough alone," he advised.
+
+She did not heed him. "All the same she cares for him. The very fact that
+she was so cold shows that."
+
+"And do you think her being cold will make him care for her?"
+
+"If she wants it to."
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+At dinner that day the question of 'The Maiden Knight' was debated among
+the noises and silences of the band. Young Mrs. Leffers had brought the
+book to the table with her; she said she had not been able to lay it down
+before the last horn sounded; in fact she could have been seen reading it
+to her husband where he sat under the same shawl, the whole afternoon.
+
+"Don't you think it's perfectly fascinating," she asked Mrs. Adding, with
+her petted mouth.
+
+"Well," said the widow, doubtfully, "it's nearly a week since I read it,
+and I've had time to get over the glow."
+
+"Oh, I could just read it forever!" the bride exclaimed.
+
+"I like a book," said her husband, "that takes me out of myself. I don't
+want to think when I'm reading."
+
+March was going to attack this ideal, but he reflected in time that Mr.
+Leffers had really stated his own motive in reading. He compromised.
+"Well, I like the author to do my thinking for me."
+
+"Yes," said the other, "that is what I mean."
+
+"The question is whether 'The Maiden Knight' fellow does it," said Kenby,
+taking duck and pease from the steward at his shoulder.
+
+"What my wife likes in it is to see what one woman can do and be
+single-handed," said March.
+
+"No," his wife corrected him, "what a man thinks she can."
+
+"I suppose," said Mr. Triscoe, unexpectedly, "that we're like the English
+in our habit of going off about a book like a train of powder."
+
+"If you'll say a row of bricks," March assented, "I'll agree with you.
+It's certainly Anglo-Saxon to fall over one another as we do, when we get
+going. It would be interesting to know just how much liking there is in
+the popularity of a given book."
+
+"It's like the run of a song, isn't it?" Kenby suggested. "You can't
+stand either, when it reaches a given point."
+
+He spoke to March and ignored Triscoe, who had hitherto ignored the rest
+of the table.
+
+"It's very curious," March said. "The book or the song catches a mood, or
+feeds a craving, and when one passes or the other is glutted--"
+
+"The discouraging part is," Triscoe put in, still limiting himself to the
+Marches, "that it's never a question of real taste. The things that go
+down with us are so crude, so coarsely spiced; they tickle such a vulgar
+palate--Now in France, for instance," he suggested.
+
+"Well, I don't know," returned the editor. "After all, we eat a good deal
+of bread, and we drink more pure water than any other people. Even when
+we drink it iced, I fancy it isn't so bad as absinthe."
+
+The young bride looked at him gratefully, but she said, "If we can't get
+ice-water in Europe, I don't know what Mr. Leffers will do," and the talk
+threatened to pass among the ladies into a comparison of American and
+European customs.
+
+Burnamy could not bear to let it. "I don't pretend to be very well up in
+French literature," he began, "but I think such a book as 'The Maiden
+Knight' isn't such a bad piece of work; people are liking a pretty
+well-built story when they like it. Of course it's sentimental, and it
+begs the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic in
+character, and it makes the reader imagine it too. The man who wrote that
+book may be a donkey half the time, but he's a genius the other half.
+By-and-by he'll do something--after he's come to see that his 'Maiden
+Knight' was a fool--that I believe even you won't be down on, Mr. March,
+if he paints a heroic type as powerfully as he does in this book."
+
+He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and though he deferred to
+March in the end, he deferred with authority still. March liked him for
+coming to the defence of a young writer whom he had not himself learned
+to like yet. "Yes," he said, "if he has the power you say, and can keep
+it after he comes to his artistic consciousness!"
+
+Mrs. Leffers, as if she thought things were going her way, smiled; Rose
+Adding listened with shining eyes expectantly fixed on March; his mother
+viewed his rapture with tender amusement. The steward was at Kenby's
+shoulder with the salad and his entreating "Bleace!" and Triscoe seemed
+to be questioning whether he should take any notice of Burnamy's general
+disagreement. He said at last: "I'm afraid we haven't the documents. You
+don't seem to have cared much for French books, and I haven't read 'The
+Maiden Knight'." He added to March: "But I don't defend absinthe.
+Ice-water is better. What I object to is our indiscriminate taste both
+for raw whiskey--and for milk-and-water."
+
+No one took up the question again, and it was Kenby who spoke next. "The
+doctor thinks, if this weather holds, that we shall be into Plymouth
+Wednesday morning. I always like to get a professional opinion on the
+ship's run."
+
+In the evening, as Mrs. March was putting away in her portfolio the
+journal-letter which she was writing to send back from Plymouth to her
+children, Miss Triscoe drifted to the place where she sat at their table
+in the dining-room by a coincidence which they both respected as casual.
+
+"We had quite a literary dinner," she remarked, hovering for a moment
+near the chair which she later sank into. "It must have made you feel
+very much at home. Or perhaps you're so tired of it at home that you
+don't talk about books."
+
+"We always talk shop, in some form or other," said Mrs. March. "My
+husband never tires of it. A good many of the contributors come to us,
+you know."
+
+"It must be delightful," said the girl. She added as if she ought to
+excuse herself for neglecting an advantage that might have been hers if
+she had chosen, "I'm sorry one sees so little of the artistic and
+literary set. But New York is such a big place."
+
+"New York people seem to be very fond of it," said Mrs. March. "Those who
+have always lived there."
+
+"We haven't always lived there," said the girl. "But I think one has a
+good time there--the best time a girl can have. It's all very well coming
+over for the summer; one has to spend the summer somewhere. Are you going
+out for a long time?"
+
+"Only for the summer. First to Carlsbad."
+
+"Oh, yes. I suppose we shall travel about through Germany, and then go to
+Paris. We always do; my father is very fond of it."
+
+"You must know it very well," said Mrs. March, aimlessly.
+
+"I was born there,--if that means knowing it. I lived there--till I was
+eleven years old. We came home after my mother died."
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs. March.
+
+The girl did not go further into her family history; but by one of those
+leaps which seem to women as logical as other progressions, she arrived
+at asking, "Is Mr. Burnamy one of the contributors?"
+
+Mrs. March laughed. "He is going to be, as soon as his poem is printed."
+
+"Poem?"
+
+"Yes. Mr. March thinks it's very good."
+
+"I thought he spoke very nicely about 'The Maiden Knight'. And he has
+been very nice to papa. You know they have the same room."
+
+"I think Mr. Burnamy told me," Mrs. March said.
+
+The girl went on. "He had the lower berth, and he gave it up to papa;
+he's done everything but turn himself out of doors."
+
+"I'm sure he's been very glad," Mrs. March ventured on Burnamy's behalf,
+but very softly, lest if she breathed upon these budding confidences they
+should shrink and wither away.
+
+"I always tell papa that there's no country like America for real
+unselfishness; and if they're all like that, in Chicago!" The girl
+stopped, and added with a laugh, "But I'm always quarrelling with papa
+about America."
+
+"We have a daughter living in Chicago," said Mrs. March, alluringly.
+
+But Miss Triscoe refused the bait, either because she had said all she
+meant, or because she had said all she would, about Chicago, which Mrs.
+March felt for the present to be one with Burnamy. She gave another of
+her leaps. "I don't see why people are so anxious to get it like Europe,
+at home. They say that there was a time when there were no chaperons
+before hoops, you know." She looked suggestively at Mrs. March, resting
+one slim hand on the table, and controlling her skirt with the other, as
+if she were getting ready to rise at any moment. "When they used to sit
+on their steps."
+
+"It was very pleasant before hoops--in every way," said Mrs. March. "I
+was young, then; and I lived in Boston, where I suppose it was always
+simpler than in New York. I used to sit on our steps. It was delightful
+for girls--the freedom."
+
+"I wish I had lived before hoops," said Miss Triscoe.
+
+"Well, there must be places where it's before hoops yet: Seattle, and
+Portland, Oregon, for all I know," Mrs. March suggested. "And there must
+be people in that epoch everywhere."
+
+"Like that young lady who twists and turns?" said Miss Triscoe, giving
+first one side of her face and then the other. "They have a good time. I
+suppose if Europe came to us in one way it had to come in another. If it
+came in galleries and all that sort of thing, it had to come in
+chaperons. You'll think I'm a great extremist, Mrs. March; but sometimes
+I wish there was more America instead of less. I don't believe it's as
+bad as people say. Does Mr. March," she asked, taking hold of the chair
+with one hand, to secure her footing from any caprice of the sea, while
+she gathered her skirt more firmly into the other, as she rose, "does he
+think that America is going--all wrong?"
+
+"All wrong? How?"
+
+"Oh, in politics, don't you know. And government, and all that. And
+bribing. And the lower classes having everything their own way. And the
+horrid newspapers. And everything getting so expensive; and no regard for
+family, or anything of that kind."
+
+Mrs. March thought she saw what Miss Triscoe meant, but she answered,
+still cautiously, "I don't believe he does always. Though there are times
+when he is very much disgusted. Then he says that he is getting too
+old--and we always quarrel about that--to see things as they really are.
+He says that if the world had been going the way that people over fifty
+have always thought it was going, it would have gone to smash in the time
+of the anthropoidal apes."
+
+"Oh, yes: Darwin," said Miss Triscoe, vaguely. "Well, I'm glad he doesn't
+give it up. I didn't know but I was holding out just because I had argued
+so much, and was doing it out of--opposition. Goodnight!" She called her
+salutation gayly over her shoulder, and Mrs. March watched her gliding
+out of the saloon with a graceful tilt to humor the slight roll of the
+ship, and a little lurch to correct it, once or twice, and wondered if
+Burnamy was afraid of her; it seemed to her that if she were a young man
+she should not be afraid of Miss Triscoe.
+
+The next morning, just after she had arranged herself in her steamer
+chair, he approached her, bowing and smiling, with the first of his many
+bows and smiles for the day, and at the same time Miss Triscoe came
+toward her from the opposite direction. She nodded brightly to him, and
+he gave her a bow and smile too; he always had so many of them to spare.
+
+"Here is your chair!" Mrs. March called to her, drawing the shawl out of
+the chair next her own. "Mr. March is wandering about the ship
+somewhere."
+
+"I'll keep it for him," said Miss Triscoe, and as Burnamy offered to take
+the shawl that hung in the hollow of her arm, she let it slip into his
+hand with an "Oh; thank you," which seemed also a permission for him to
+wrap it about her in the chair.
+
+He stood talking before the ladies, but he looked up and down the
+promenade. The pivotal girl showed herself at the corner of the
+music-room, as she had done the day before. At first she revolved there
+as if she were shedding her light on some one hidden round the corner;
+then she moved a few paces farther out and showed herself more obviously
+alone. Clearly she was there for Burnamy to come and walk with her; Mrs.
+March could see that, and she felt that Miss Triscoe saw it too. She
+waited for her to dismiss him to his flirtation; but Miss Triscoe kept
+chatting on, and he kept answering, and making no motion to get away.
+Mrs. March began to be as sorry for her as she was ashamed for him. Then
+she heard him saying, "Would you like a turn or two?" and Miss Triscoe
+answering, "Why, yes, thank you," and promptly getting out of her chair
+as if the pains they had both been at to get her settled in it were all
+nothing.
+
+She had the composure to say, "You can leave your shawl with me, Miss
+Triscoe," and to receive her fervent, "Oh, thank you," before they sailed
+off together, with inhuman indifference to the girl at the corner of the
+music-room. Then she sank into a kind of triumphal collapse, from which
+she roused herself to point her husband to the chair beside her when he
+happened along.
+
+He chose to be perverse about her romance. "Well, now, you had better let
+them alone. Remember Kendricks." He meant one of their young friends
+whose love-affair they had promoted till his happy marriage left them in
+lasting doubt of what they had done. "My sympathies are all with the
+pivotal girl. Hadn't she as much right to him, for the time being, or for
+good and all, as Miss Triscoe?"
+
+"That depends upon what you think of Burnamy."
+
+"Well, I don't like to see a girl have a young man snatched away from her
+just when she's made sure of him. How do you suppose she is feeling now?"
+
+"She isn't feeling at all. She's letting her revolving light fall upon
+half a dozen other young men by this time, collectively or consecutively.
+All that she wants to make sure of is that they're young men--or old
+ones, even."
+
+March laughed, but not altogether at what his wife said. "I've been
+having a little talk with Papa Triscoe, in the smoking-room."
+
+"You smell like it," said his wife, not to seem too eager: "Well?"
+
+"Well, Papa Triscoe seems to be in a pout. He doesn't think things are
+going as they should in America. He hasn't been consulted, or if he has,
+his opinion hasn't been acted upon."
+
+"I think he's horrid," said Mrs. March. "Who are they?"
+
+"I couldn't make out, and I couldn't ask. But I'll tell you what I
+think."
+
+"What?"
+
+"That there's no chance for, Burnamy. He's taking his daughter out to
+marry her to a crowned head."
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+It was this afternoon that the dance took place on the south promenade.
+Everybody came and looked, and the circle around the waltzers was three
+or four deep. Between the surrounding heads and shoulders, the hats of
+the young ladies wheeling and whirling, and the faces of the men who were
+wheeling and whirling them, rose and sank with the rhythm of their steps.
+The space allotted to the dancing was walled to seaward with canvas, and
+was prettily treated with German, and American flags: it was hard to go
+wrong with flags, Miss Triscoe said, securing herself under Mrs. March's
+wing.
+
+Where they stood they could see Burnamy's face, flashing and flushing in
+the dance; at the end of the first piece he came to them, and remained
+talking and laughing till the music began again.
+
+"Don't you want to try it?" he asked abruptly of Miss Triscoe.
+
+"Isn't it rather--public?" she asked back.
+
+Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl had put through her arm
+thrill with temptation; but Burnamy could not.
+
+"Perhaps it is rather obvious," he said, and he made a long glide over
+the deck to the feet of the pivotal girl, anticipating another young man
+who was rapidly advancing from the opposite quarter. The next moment her
+hat and his face showed themselves in the necessary proximity to each
+other within the circle.
+
+"How well she dances!" said Miss Triscoe.
+
+"Do you think so? She looks as if she had been wound up and set going."
+
+"She's very graceful," the girl persisted.
+
+The day ended with an entertainment in the saloon for one of the marine
+charities which address themselves to the hearts and pockets of
+passengers on all steamers. There were recitations in English and German,
+and songs from several people who had kindly consented, and ever more
+piano performance. Most of those who took part were of the race gifted in
+art and finance; its children excelled in the music, and its fathers
+counted the gate-money during the last half of the programme, with an
+audible clinking of the silver on the table before them.
+
+Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March was herself chaperoned
+by Mr. Burnamy: her husband had refused to come to the entertainment. She
+hoped to leave Burnamy and Miss Triscoe together before the evening
+ended; but Miss Triscoe merely stopped with her father, in quitting the
+saloon, to laugh at some features of the entertainment, as people who
+take no part in such things do; Burnamy stood up to exchange some
+unimpassioned words with her, and then they said good-night.
+
+The next morning, at five o'clock, the Norumbia came to anchor in the
+pretty harbor of Plymouth. In the cool early light the town lay distinct
+along the shore, quaint with its small English houses, and stately with
+come public edifices of unknown function on the uplands; a country-seat
+of aristocratic aspect showed itself on one of the heights; on another
+the tower of a country church peered over the tree-tops; there were lines
+of fortifications, as peaceful, at their distance, as the stone walls
+dividing the green fields. The very iron-clads in the harbor close at
+hand contributed to the amiable gayety of the scene under the pale blue
+English sky, already broken with clouds from which the flush of the
+sunrise had not quite faded. The breath of the land came freshly out over
+the water; one could almost smell the grass and the leaves. Gulls wheeled
+and darted over the crisp water; the tones of the English voices on the
+tender were pleasant to the ear, as it fussed and scuffled to the ship's
+side. A few score of the passengers left her; with their baggage they
+formed picturesque groups on the tender's deck, and they set out for the
+shore waving their hands and their handkerchiefs to the friends they left
+clustering along the rail of the Norumbia. Mr. and Mrs. Leffers bade
+March farewell, in the final fondness inspired by his having coffee with
+them before they left the ship; they said they hated to leave.
+
+The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast tables were promptly
+filled, except such as the passengers landing at Plymouth had vacated;
+these were stripped of their cloths, and the remaining commensals placed
+at others. The seats of the Lefferses were given to March's old Ohio
+friend and his wife. He tried to engage them in the tally which began to
+be general in the excitement of having touched land; but they shyly held
+aloof.
+
+Some English newspapers had come aboard from the tug, and there was the
+usual good-natured adjustment of the American self-satisfaction, among
+those who had seen them, to the ever-surprising fact that our continent
+is apparently of no interest to Europe. There were some meagre New York
+stock-market quotations in the papers; a paragraph in fine print
+announced the lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recorded a
+coal-mining strike in Pennsylvania.
+
+"I always have to get used to it over again," said Kenby. "This is the
+twentieth time I have been across, and I'm just as much astonished as I
+was the first, to find out that they don't want to know anything about us
+here."
+
+"Oh," said March, "curiosity and the weather both come from the west. San
+Francisco wants to know about Denver, Denver about Chicago, Chicago about
+New York, and New York about London; but curiosity never travels the
+other way any more than a hot wave or a cold wave."
+
+"Ah, but London doesn't care a rap about Vienna," said Kenby.
+
+"Well, some pressures give out before they reach the coast, on our own
+side. It isn't an infallible analogy."
+
+Triscoe was fiercely chewing a morsel, as if in haste to take part in the
+discussion. He gulped it, and broke out. "Why should they care about us,
+anyway?"
+
+March lightly ventured, "Oh, men and brothers, you know."
+
+"That isn't sufficient ground. The Chinese are men and brothers; so are
+the South-Americans and Central-Africans, and Hawaiians; but we're not
+impatient for the latest news about them. It's civilization that
+interests civilization."
+
+"I hope that fact doesn't leave us out in the cold with the barbarians?"
+Burnamy put in, with a smile.
+
+"Do you think we are civilized?" retorted the other.
+
+"We have that superstition in Chicago," said Burnamy. He added, still
+smiling, "About the New-Yorkers, I mean."
+
+"You're more superstitious in Chicago than I supposed. New York is an
+anarchy, tempered by vigilance committees."
+
+"Oh, I don't think you can say that," Kenby cheerfully protested, "since
+the Reformers came in. Look at our streets!"
+
+"Yes, our streets are clean, for the time being, and when we look at them
+we think we have made a clean sweep in our manners and morals. But how
+long do you think it will be before Tammany will be in the saddle again?"
+
+"Oh, never in the world!" said the optimistic head of the table.
+
+"I wish I had your faith; or I should if I didn't feel that it is one of
+the things that help to establish Tammanys with us. You will see our
+Tammany in power after the next election." Kenby laughed in a
+large-hearted incredulity; and his laugh was like fuel to the other's
+flame. "New York is politically a mediaeval Italian republic, and it's
+morally a frontier mining-town. Socially it's--" He stopped as if he
+could not say what.
+
+"I think it's a place where you have a very nice time, papa," said his
+daughter, and Burnamy smiled with her; not because he knew anything about
+it.
+
+Her father went on as if he had not heard her. "It's as vulgar and crude
+as money can make it. Nothing counts but money, and as soon as there's
+enough, it counts for everything. In less than a year you'll have Tammany
+in power; it won't be more than a year till you'll have it in society."
+
+"Oh no! Oh no!" came from Kenby. He did not care much for society, but he
+vaguely respected it as the stronghold of the proprieties and the
+amenities.
+
+"Isn't society a good place for Tammany to be in?" asked March in the
+pause Triscoe let follow upon Kenby's laugh.
+
+"There's no reason why it shouldn't be. Society is as bad as all the rest
+of it. And what New York is, politically, morally, and socially, the
+whole country wishes to be and tries to be."
+
+There was that measure of truth in the words which silences; no one could
+find just the terms of refutation.
+
+"Well," said Kenby at last, "it's a good thing there are so many lines to
+Europe. We've still got the right to emigrate."
+
+"Yes, but even there we don't escape the abuse of our infamous newspapers
+for exercising a man's right to live where he chooses. And there is no
+country in Europe--except Turkey, or Spain--that isn't a better home for
+an honest man than the United States."
+
+The Ohioan had once before cleared his throat as if he were going to
+speak. Now, he leaned far enough forward to catch Triscoe's eye, and
+said, slowly and distinctly: "I don't know just what reason you have to
+feel as you do about the country. I feel differently about it
+myself--perhaps because I fought for it."
+
+At first, the others were glad of this arrogance; it even seemed an
+answer; but Burnamy saw Miss Triscoe's cheek, flush, and then he doubted
+its validity.
+
+Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, as if to expend a
+violent impulse upon it. He said, coldly, "I was speaking from that
+stand-point."
+
+The Ohioan shrank back in his seat, and March felt sorry for him, though
+he had put himself in the wrong. His old hand trembled beside his plate,
+and his head shook, while his lips formed silent words; and his shy wife
+was sharing his pain and shame.
+
+Kenby began to talk about the stop which the Norumbia was to make at
+Cherbourg, and about what hour the next day they should all be in
+Cuxhaven. Miss Triscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Line
+before, and asked several questions. Her father did not speak again, and
+after a little while he rose without waiting for her to make the move
+from table; he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto. Eltwin rose at
+the same time, and March feared that he might be going to provoke another
+defeat, in some way.
+
+Eltwin lifted his voice, and said, trying to catch Triscoe's eye, "I
+think I ought to beg your pardon, sir. I do beg your pardon."
+
+March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the offer of his reparation as
+distinct as his aggression had been; and now he quaked for Triscoe, whose
+daughter he saw glance apprehensively at her father as she swayed aside
+to let the two men come together.
+
+"That is all right, Colonel--"
+
+"Major," Eltwin conscientiously interposed.
+
+"Major," Triscoe bowed; and he put out his hand and grasped the hand
+which had been tremulously rising toward him. "There can't be any doubt
+of what we did, no matter what we've got."
+
+"No, no!" said the other, eagerly. "That was what I meant, sir. I don't
+think as you do; but I believe that a man who helped to save the country
+has a right to think what he pleases about it."
+
+Triscoe said, "That is all right, my dear sir. May I ask your regiment?"
+
+The Marches let the old fellows walk away together, followed by the wife
+of the one and the daughter of the other. They saw the young girl making
+some graceful overtures of speech to the elder woman as they went.
+
+"That was rather fine, my dear," said Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, I don't know. It was a little too dramatic, wasn't it? It wasn't
+what I should have expected of real life."
+
+"Oh, you spoil everything! If that's the spirit you're going through
+Europe in!"
+
+"It isn't. As soon as I touch European soil I shall reform."
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+That was not the first time General Triscoe had silenced question of his
+opinions with the argument he had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldom
+able to use it so aptly. He always found that people suffered, his belief
+in our national degeneration much more readily when they knew that he had
+left a diplomatic position in Europe (he had gone abroad as secretary of
+a minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union. Some millions of
+other men had gone into the war from the varied motives which impelled
+men at that time; but he was aware that he had distinction, as a man of
+property and a man of family, in doing so. His family had improved as
+time passed, and it was now so old that back of his grandfather it was
+lost in antiquity. This ancestor had retired from the sea and become a
+merchant in his native Rhode Island port, where his son established
+himself as a physician, and married the daughter of a former slave-trader
+whose social position was the highest in the place; Triscoe liked to
+mention his maternal grandfather when he wished a listener to realize
+just how anomalous his part in a war against slavery was; it heightened
+the effect of his pose.
+
+He fought gallantly through the war, and he was brevetted
+Brigadier-General at the close. With this honor, and with the wound which
+caused an almost imperceptible limp in his gait, he won the heart of a
+rich New York girl, and her father set him up in a business, which was
+not long in going to pieces in his hands. Then the young couple went to
+live in Paris, where their daughter was born, and where the mother died
+when the child was ten years old. A little later his father-in-law died,
+and Triscoe returned to New York, where he found the fortune which his
+daughter had inherited was much less than he somehow thought he had a
+right to expect.
+
+The income from her fortune was enough to live on, and he did not go back
+to Paris, where, in fact, things were not so much to his mind under the
+Republic as they had been under the Second Empire. He was still willing
+to do something for his country, however, and he allowed his name to be
+used on a citizen's ticket in his district; but his provision-man was
+sent to Congress instead. Then he retired to Rhode Island and attempted
+to convert his shore property into a watering-place; but after being
+attractively plotted and laid out with streets and sidewalks, it allured
+no one to build on it except the birds and the chipmonks, and he came
+back to New York, where his daughter had remained in school.
+
+One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea, after she left
+school; and she entered upon a series of dinners, dances, theatre
+parties, and receptions of all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring
+through her fingers left no engagement-ring on them. She had no duties,
+but she seldom got out of humor with her pleasures; she had some odd
+tastes of her own, and in a society where none but the most serious books
+were ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good ones, and had
+romantic ideas of a life that she vaguely called bohemian. Her character
+was never tested by anything more trying than the fear that her father
+might take her abroad to live; he had taken her abroad several times for
+the summer.
+
+The dreaded trial did not approach for several years after she had ceased
+to be a bud; and then it came when her father was again willing to serve
+his country in diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels, or even at
+Berne. Reasons of political geography prevented his appointment anywhere,
+but General Triscoe having arranged his affairs for going abroad on the
+mission he had expected, decided to go without it. He was really very fit
+for both of the offices he had sought, and so far as a man can deserve
+public place by public service, he had deserved it. His pessimism was
+uncommonly well grounded, and if it did not go very deep, it might well
+have reached the bottom of his nature.
+
+His daughter had begun to divine him at the early age when parents
+suppose themselves still to be mysteries to their children. She did not
+think it necessary ever to explain him to others; perhaps she would not
+have found it possible; and now after she parted from Mrs. Eltwin and
+went to sit down beside Mrs. March she did not refer to her father. She
+said how sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and what sort of
+place did Mrs. March suppose it was where Mrs. Eltwin lived? They seemed
+to have everything there, like any place. She had wanted to ask Mrs.
+Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had not quite dared.
+
+Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March's suggestion he took one of
+the chairs on her other side, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at the
+Channel Islands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg, where
+the Norumbia was to land again. The young people talked across Mrs. March
+to each other, and said how charming the islands were, in their
+gray-green insubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward, like
+airy clefts in low banks of clouds. It seemed all the nicer not to know
+just which was which; but when the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg, he
+suggested that they could see better by going round to the other side of
+the ship. Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when she had gone off with
+Burnamy, marked her allegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her.
+
+Every one was restless in breaking with the old life at sea. There had
+been an equal unrest when the ship first sailed; people had first come
+aboard in the demoralization of severing their ties with home, and they
+shrank from forming others. Then the charm of the idle, eventless life
+grew upon them, and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitable
+end.
+
+Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of disintegration
+were felt in all the once-more-repellant particles. Burnamy and Miss
+Triscoe, as they hung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hated
+to have the voyage over. They had liked leaving Plymouth and being at sea
+again; they wished that they need not be reminded of another debarkation
+by the energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage from the
+hold.
+
+They approved of the picturesqueness of three French vessels of war that
+passed, dragging their kraken shapes low through the level water. At
+Cherbourg an emotional French tender came out to the ship, very different
+in her clamorous voices and excited figures from the steady self-control
+of the English tender at Plymouth; and they thought the French
+fortifications much more on show than the English had been. Nothing
+marked their youthful date so much to the Marches, who presently joined
+them, as their failure to realize that in this peaceful sea the great
+battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought. The elder couple
+tried to affect their imaginations with the fact which reanimated the
+spectre of a dreadful war for themselves; but they had to pass on and,
+leave the young people unmoved.
+
+Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkation of the pivotal girl,
+whom she saw standing on the deck of the tender, with her hands at her
+waist, and giving now this side and now that side of her face to the
+young men waving their hats to her from the rail of the ship. Burnamy was
+not of their number, and he seemed not to know that the girl was leaving
+him finally to Miss Triscoe. If Miss Triscoe knew it she did nothing the
+whole of that long, last afternoon to profit by the fact. Burnamy spent a
+great part of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he showed an
+intolerable resignation to the girl's absence.
+
+"Yes," said March, taking the place Burnamy left at last, "that terrible
+patience of youth!"
+
+"Patience? Folly! Stupidity! They ought to be together every instant! Do
+they suppose that life is full of such chances? Do they think that fate
+has nothing to do but--"
+
+She stopped for a fit climax, and he suggested, "Hang round and wait on
+them?"
+
+"Yes! It's their one chance in a life-time, probably."
+
+"Then you've quite decided that they're in love?" He sank comfortably
+back, and put up his weary legs on the chair's extension with the
+conviction that love had no such joy as that to offer.
+
+"I've decided that they're intensely interested in each other."
+
+"Then what more can we ask of them? And why do you care what they do or
+don't do with their chance? Why do you wish their love well, if it's
+that? Is marriage such a very certain good?"
+
+"It isn't all that it might be, but it's all that there is. What would
+our lives have been without it?" she retorted.
+
+"Oh, we should have got on. It's such a tremendous risk that we, ought to
+go round begging people to think twice, to count a hundred, or a
+nonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point. I don't mind
+their flirting; that amuses them; but marrying is a different thing. I
+doubt if Papa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law he
+hadn't selected himself, and his daughter doesn't strike me as a young
+lady who has any wisdom to throw away on a choice. She has her little
+charm; her little gift of beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the other
+things that go with her age and sex; but what could she do for a fellow
+like Burnamy, who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fame to
+climb, with an old mother at the bottom of it to look after? You wouldn't
+want him to have an eye on Miss Triscoe's money, even if she had money,
+and I doubt if she has much. It's all very pretty to have a girl like her
+fascinated with a youth of his simple traditions; though Burnamy isn't
+altogether pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to a place in the
+very world she belongs to. I don't think it's for us to promote the
+affair."
+
+"Well, perhaps you're right," she sighed. "I will let them alone from
+this out. Thank goodness, I shall not have them under my eyes very long."
+
+"Oh, I don't think there's any harm done yet," said her husband, with a
+laugh.
+
+At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind he meant that she
+suffered from an illogical disappointment. The young people got through
+the meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table
+first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement;
+she kept on chatting with March till his wife took him away to their
+chairs on deck.
+
+There were a few more ships in sight than there were in mid-ocean; but
+the late twilight thickened over the North Sea quite like the night after
+they left New York, except that it was colder; and their hearts turned to
+their children, who had been in abeyance for the week past, with a
+remorseful pang. "Well," she said, "I wish we were going to be in New York
+to-morrow, instead of Hamburg."
+
+"Oh, no! Oh, no!" he protested. "Not so bad as that, my dear. This is the
+last night, and it's hard to manage, as the last night always is. I
+suppose the last night on earth--"
+
+"Basil!" she implored.
+
+"Well, I won't, then. But what I want is to see a Dutch lugger. I've
+never seen a Dutch lugger, and--"
+
+She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to the signal he was
+silent; though it seemed afterwards that he ought to have gone on talking
+as if he did not see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by. They
+were walking close together, and she was leaning forward and looking up
+into his face while he talked.
+
+"Now," Mrs. March whispered, long after they were out of hearing, "let us
+go instantly. I wouldn't for worlds have them see us here when they get
+found again. They would feel that they had to stop and speak, and that
+would spoil everything. Come!"
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and modestly waited for Miss
+Triscoe's prompting. He had not to wait long.
+
+"And then, how soon did you think of printing your things in a book?"
+
+"Oh, about as soon as they began to take with the public."
+
+"How could you tell that they were-taking?"
+
+"They were copied into other papers, and people talked about them."
+
+"And that was what made Mr. Stoller want you to be his secretary?"
+
+"I don't believe it was. The theory in the office was that he didn't
+think much of them; but he knows I can write shorthand, and put things
+into shape."
+
+"What things?"
+
+"Oh--ideas. He has a notion of trying to come forward in politics. He
+owns shares in everything but the United States Senate--gas, electricity,
+railroads, aldermen, newspapers--and now he would like some Senate.
+That's what I think."
+
+She did not quite understand, and she was far from knowing that this
+cynic humor expressed a deadlier pessimism than her father's fiercest
+accusals of the country. "How fascinating it is!" she said, innocently.
+
+"And I suppose they all envy your coming out?"
+
+"In the office?"
+
+"Yes. I should envy, them--staying."
+
+Burnamy laughed. "I don't believe they envy me. It won't be all roses for
+me--they know that. But they know that I can take care of myself if it
+isn't." He remembered something one of his friends in the office had said
+of the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would feel if he ever tried his
+beak on him in the belief that he was soft.
+
+She abruptly left the mere personal question. "And which would you rather
+write: poems or those kind of sketches?"
+
+"I don't know," said Burnamy, willing to talk of himself on any terms. "I
+suppose that prose is the thing for our time, rather more; but there are
+things you can't say in prose. I used to write a great deal of verse in
+college; but I didn't have much luck with editors till Mr. March took
+this little piece for 'Every Other Week'."
+
+"Little? I thought it was a long poem!"
+
+Burnamy laughed at the notion. "It's only eight lines."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl. "What is it about?"
+
+He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which he found incredible in
+a person of his make. "I can repeat it if you won't give me away to Mrs.
+March."
+
+"Oh, no indeed!" He said the lines over to her very simply and well."
+They are beautiful--beautiful!"
+
+"Do you think so?" he gasped, in his joy at her praise.
+
+"Yes, lovely. Do you know, you are the first literary man--the only
+literary man--I ever talked with. They must go out--somewhere! Papa must
+meet them at his clubs. But I never do; and so I'm making the most of
+you."
+
+"You can't make too much of me, Miss Triscoe," said Burnamy.
+
+She would not mind his mocking. "That day you spoke about 'The Maiden
+Knight', don't you know, I had never heard any talk about books in that
+way. I didn't know you were an author then."
+
+"Well, I'm not much of an author now," he said, cynically, to retrieve
+his folly in repeating his poem to her.
+
+"Oh, that will do for you to say. But I know what Mrs. March thinks."
+
+He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; 'Every Other
+Week' was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously
+neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs.
+March's interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know
+just how much she thought of him as a writer? "Did she like the poem."
+
+Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about the
+poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March's
+liking for Burnamy. "But it wouldn't do to tell you all she said!" This
+was not what he hoped, but he was richly content when she returned to his
+personal history. "And you didn't know any one when, you went up to
+Chicago from--"
+
+"Tippecanoe? Not exactly that. I wasn't acquainted with any one in the
+office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing to
+let me try my hand. That was all I could ask."
+
+"Of course! You knew you could do the rest. Well, it is like a romance. A
+woman couldn't have such an adventure as that!" sighed the girl.
+
+"But women do!" Burnamy retorted. "There is a girl writing on the paper
+now--she's going to do the literary notices while I'm gone--who came to
+Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who's made
+her way single-handed from interviewing up."
+
+"Oh," said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm. "Is she
+nice?"
+
+"She's mighty clever, and she's nice enough, too, though the kind of
+journalism that women do isn't the most dignified. And she's one of the
+best girls I know, with lots of sense."
+
+"It must be very interesting," said Miss Triscoe, with little interest in
+the way she said it. "I suppose you're quite a little community by
+yourselves."
+
+"On the paper?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don't.
+There's quite a regiment of people on a big paper. If you'd like to come
+out," Burnamy ventured, "perhaps you could get the Woman's Page to do."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for
+dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette."
+
+He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, "Do women
+write it?"
+
+He laughed reminiscently. "Well, not always. We had one man who used to
+do it beautifully--when he was sober. The department hasn't had any
+permanent head since."
+
+He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no
+doubt she had not taken it in fully. She abruptly left the subject. "Do
+you know what time we really get in to-morrow?"
+
+"About one, I believe--there's a consensus of stewards to that effect,
+anyway." After a pause he asked, "Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?"
+
+"We are going to Dresden, first, I believe. Then we may go on down to
+Vienna. But nothing is settled, yet."
+
+"Are you going direct to Dresden?"
+
+"I don't know. We may stay in Hamburg a day or two."
+
+"I've got to go straight to Carlsbad. There's a sleeping-car that will
+get me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal. But I hope you'll let me
+be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow."
+
+"You're very kind. You've been very good already--to papa." He protested
+that he had not been at all good. "But he's used to taking care of
+himself on the other side. Oh, it's this side, now!"
+
+"So it is! How strange that seems! It's actually Europe. But as long as
+we're at sea, we can't realize it. Don't you hate to have experiences
+slip through your fingers?"
+
+"I don't know. A girl doesn't have many experiences of her own; they're
+always other people's."
+
+This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth.
+He only suggested, "Well; sometimes they make other people have the
+experiences."
+
+Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left
+the question. "Do you understand German?"
+
+"A little. I studied it at college, and I've cultivated a sort of
+beer-garden German in Chicago. I can ask for things."
+
+"I can't, except in French, and that's worse than English, in Germany, I
+hear."
+
+"Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment. Will
+you?"
+
+She did not answer. "It must be rather late, isn't it?" she asked. He let
+her see his watch, and she said, "Yes, it's very late," and led the way
+within. "I must look after my packing; papa's always so prompt, and I
+must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left
+home; we expect to get one in Dresden. Good-night!"
+
+Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered
+whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense of
+novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the
+first young lady he had known who had a maid. The fact awed him; Miss
+Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and
+disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the
+shore. No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage. People went
+and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were no
+longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for a
+moment.
+
+In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below
+had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered
+with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfast the
+bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in the
+corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and people
+who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going to give,
+anxiously conferred together. The question whether you ought ever to give
+the head steward anything pressed crucially at the early lunch, and Kenby
+brought only a partial relief by saying that he always regarded the head
+steward as an officer of the ship. March made the experiment of offering
+him six marks, and the head steward took them quite as if he were not an
+officer of the ship. He also collected a handsome fee for the music,
+which is the tax levied on all German ships beyond the tolls exacted on
+the steamers of other nations.
+
+After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer
+cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle
+much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been
+for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied
+themselves at home again.
+
+Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream where
+the Norumbia had dropped anchor. People who had brought their
+hand-baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it that
+people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledge
+them afresh not to forget it. The tender came alongside, and the transfer
+of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work that every
+one sat down in some other's chair. At last the trunks were all on the
+tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the gangways with
+the hand-baggage. "Is this Hoboken?" March murmured in his wife's ear,
+with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the reversed
+action of the kinematograph.
+
+On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among the
+companions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowded
+together under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashing
+rain. Burnamy's smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized Miss
+Triscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far from
+Burnamy's smile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins, whom
+he was helping look after their bags and bundles. Rose Adding was talking
+with Kenby, and apparently asking his opinion of something; Mrs. Adding
+sat near them tranquilly enjoying her son.
+
+Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage, large and small, and
+after he had satisfied her, he furtively satisfied himself by a fresh
+count that it was all there. But he need not have taken the trouble;
+their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard over it; his eyes
+expressed a contemptuous pity for their anxiety, whose like he must have
+been very tired of. He brought their handbags into the customs-room at
+the station where they landed; and there took a last leave and a last fee
+with unexpected cordiality.
+
+Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the distraction which the
+customs inspectors of all countries bring to travellers; and again they
+were united during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was also the
+restaurant. It was full of strange noises and figures and odors--the
+shuffling of feet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervous German
+voices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of cigars.
+Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing at the door with a
+letter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals, "Krahnay,
+Krahnay!" When March could bear it no longer he went up to him and
+shouted, "Crane! Crane!" and the man bowed gratefully, and began to cry,
+"Kren! Kren!" But whether Mr. Crane got his letter or not, he never knew.
+
+People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sending
+home cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbear
+cabling to his son, though he felt it absurd. There was a great deal of
+talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girls
+behind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then served
+them with what they chose for them. Otherwise the Germans, though
+voluble, were unsmiling, and here on the threshold of their empire the
+travellers had their first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitual
+with these amiable people.
+
+Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March where he sat with his wife,
+and leaned over her son to ask, "Do you know what lese-majesty is? Rose
+is afraid I've committed it!"
+
+"No, I don't," said March. "But it's the unpardonable sin. What have you
+been doing?"
+
+"I asked the official at the door when our train would start, and when he
+said at half past three, I said, 'How tiresome!' Rose says the railroads
+belong to the state here, and that if I find fault with the time-table,
+it's constructive censure of the Emperor, and that's lese-majesty." She
+gave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March's face with an
+appealing smile.
+
+"Well, I don't think you'll be arrested this time, Mrs. Adding; but I
+hope it will be a warning to Mrs. March. She's been complaining of the
+coffee."
+
+"Indeed I shall say what I like," said Mrs. March. "I'm an American."
+
+"Well, you'll find you're a German, if you like to say anything
+disagreeable about the coffee in the restaurant of the Emperor's railroad
+station; the first thing you know I shall be given three months on your
+account."
+
+Mrs. Adding asked: "Then they won't punish ladies? There, Rose! I'm safe,
+you see; and you're still a minor, though you are so wise for your
+years."
+
+She went back to her table, where Kenby came and sat down by her.
+
+"I don't know that I quite like her playing on that sensitive child,",
+said Mrs. March. "And you've joined with her in her joking. Go and speak,
+to him!"
+
+The boy was slowly following his mother, with his head fallen. March
+overtook him, and he started nervously at the touch of a hand on his
+shoulder, and then looked gratefully up into the man's face. March tried
+to tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he said: "Oh, yes. I
+understood that. But I got to thinking; and I don't want my mother to
+take any risks."
+
+"I don't believe she will, really, Rose. But I'll speak to her, and tell
+her she can't be too cautious."
+
+"Not now, please!" the boy entreated.
+
+"Well, I'll find another chance," March assented. He looked round and
+caught a smiling nod from Burnamy, who was still with the Eltwins; the
+Triscoes were at a table by themselves; Miss Triseoe nodded too, but her
+father appeared not to see March. "It's all right, with Rose," he said,
+when he sat down again by his wife; "but I guess it's all over with
+Burnamy," and he told her what he had seen. "Do you think it came to any
+displeasure between them last night? Do you suppose he offered himself,
+and she--"
+
+"What nonsense!" said Mrs. March, but she was not at peace. "It's her
+father who's keeping her away from him."
+
+"I shouldn't mind that. He's keeping her away from us, too." But at that
+moment Miss Triscoe as if she had followed his return from afar, came
+over to speak to his wife. She said they were going on to Dresden that
+evening, and she was afraid they might have no chance to see each other
+on the train or in Hamburg. March, at this advance, went to speak with
+her father; he found him no more reconciled to Europe than America.
+
+"They're Goths," he said of the Germans. "I could hardly get that stupid
+brute in the telegraph-office to take my despatch."
+
+On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe; he was not altogether
+surprised to meet Burnamy with her, now. The young fellow asked if he
+could be of any use to him, and then he said he would look him up in the
+train. He seemed in a hurry, but when he walked away with Miss Triscoe he
+did not seem in a hurry.
+
+March remarked upon the change to his wife, and she sighed, "Yes, you can
+see that as far as they're concerned."
+
+"It's a great pity that there should be parents to complicate these
+affairs," he said. "How simple it would be if there were no parties to
+them but the lovers! But nature is always insisting upon fathers and
+mothers, and families on both sides."
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The long train which they took at last was for the Norumbia's people
+alone, and it was of several transitional and tentative types of cars.
+Some were still the old coach-body carriages; but most were of a strange
+corridor arrangement, with the aide at the aide, and the seats crossing
+from it, with compartments sometimes rising to the roof, and sometimes
+rising half-way. No two cars seemed quite alike, but all were very
+comfortable; and when the train began to run out through the little
+sea-side town into the country, the old delight of foreign travel began.
+Most of the houses were little and low and gray, with ivy or flowering
+vines covering their walls to their browntiled roofs; there was here and
+there a touch of Northern Gothic in the architecture; but usually where
+it was pretentious it was in the mansard taste, which was so bad with us
+a generation ago, and is still very bad in Cuxhaven.
+
+The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiar shapes of Holstein
+cattle, herded by little girls, with their hair in yellow pigtails. The
+gray, stormy sky hung low, and broke in fitful rains; but perhaps for the
+inclement season of mid-summer it was not very cold. Flowers were
+blooming along the embankments and in the rank green fields with a dogged
+energy; in the various distances were groups of trees embowering cottages
+and even villages, and always along the ditches and watercourses were
+double lines of low willows. At the first stop the train made, the
+passengers flocked to the refreshment-booth, prettily arranged beside the
+station, where the abundance of the cherries and strawberries gave proof
+that vegetation was in other respects superior to the elements. But it
+was not of the profusion of the sausages, and the ham which openly in
+slices or covertly in sandwiches claimed its primacy in the German
+affections; every form of this was flanked by tall glasses of beer.
+
+A number of the natives stood by and stared unsmiling at the train, which
+had broken out in a rash of little American flags at every window. This
+boyish display, which must have made the Americans themselves laugh, if
+their sense of humor had not been lost in their impassioned patriotism,
+was the last expression of unity among the Norumbia's passengers, and
+they met no more in their sea-solidarity. Of their table acquaintance the
+Marches saw no one except Burnamy, who came through the train looking for
+them. He said he was in one of the rear cars with the Eltwins, and was
+going to Carlsbad with them in the sleeping-car train leaving Hamburg at
+seven. He owned to having seen the Triscoes since they had left Cuxhaven;
+Mrs. March would not suffer herself to ask him whether they were in the
+same carriage with the Eltwins. He had got a letter from Mr. Stoller at
+Cuxhaven, and he begged the Marches to let him engage rooms for them at
+the hotel where he was going to stay with him.
+
+After they reached Hamburg they had flying glimpses of him and of others
+in the odious rivalry to get their baggage examined first which seized
+upon all, and in which they no longer knew one another, but selfishly
+struggled for the good-will of porters and inspectors. There was really
+no such haste; but none could govern themselves against the general
+frenzy. With the porter he secured March conspired and perspired to win
+the attention of a cold but not unkindly inspector. The officer opened
+one trunk, and after a glance at it marked all as passed, and then there
+ensued a heroic strife with the porter as to the pieces which were to go
+to the Berlin station for their journey next day, and the pieces which
+were to go to the hotel overnight. At last the division was made; the
+Marches got into a cab of the first class; and the porter, crimson and
+steaming at every pore from the physical and intellectual strain, went
+back into the station.
+
+They had got the number of their cab from the policeman who stands at the
+door of all large German stations and supplies the traveller with a
+metallic check for the sort of vehicle he demands. They were not proud,
+but it seemed best not to risk a second-class cab in a strange city, and
+when their first-class cab came creaking and limping out of the rank,
+they saw how wise they had been, if one of the second class could have
+been worse.
+
+As they rattled away from the station they saw yet another kind of
+turnout, which they were destined to see more and more in the German
+lands. It was that team of a woman harnessed with a dog to a cart which
+the women of no other country can see without a sense of personal insult.
+March tried to take the humorous view, and complained that they had not
+been offered the choice of such an equipage by the policeman, but his
+wife would not be amused. She said that no country which suffered such a
+thing could be truly civilized, though he made her observe that no city
+in the world, except Boston or Brooklyn, was probably so thoroughly
+trolleyed as Hamburg. The hum of the electric car was everywhere, and
+everywhere the shriek of the wires overhead; batlike flights of
+connecting plates traversed all the perspectives through which they drove
+to the pleasant little hotel they had chosen.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+On one hand their windows looked toward a basin of the Elbe, where
+stately white swans were sailing; and on the other to the new Rathhaus,
+over the trees that deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dim public
+garden, where water-proof old women and impervious nurses sat, and
+children played in the long twilight of the sour, rain-soaked summer of
+the fatherland. It was all picturesque, and within-doors there was the
+novelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furniture of the Germans, and
+their beds, which after so many ages of Anglo-Saxon satire remain
+immutably preposterous. They are apparently imagined for the stature of
+sleepers who have shortened as they broadened; their pillows are
+triangularly shaped to bring the chin tight upon the breast under the
+bloated feather bulk which is meant for covering, and which rises over
+the sleeper from a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neatly buttoned
+into the upper sheet, with the effect of a portly waistcoat.
+
+The hotel was illumined by the kindly splendor of the uniformed portier,
+who had met the travellers at the door, like a glowing vision of the
+past, and a friendly air diffused itself through the whole house. At the
+dinner, which, if not so cheap as they had somehow hoped, was by no means
+bad, they took counsel with the English-speaking waiter as to what
+entertainment Hamburg could offer for the evening, and by the time they
+had drunk their coffee they had courage for the Circus Renz, which seemed
+to be all there was.
+
+The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailed at the street corner,
+stopped it and got off the platform, and stood in the street until they
+were safely aboard, without telling them to step lively, or pulling them
+up the steps; or knuckling them in the back to make them move forward. He
+let them get fairly seated before he started the car, and so lost the fun
+of seeing them lurch and stagger violently, and wildly clutch each other
+for support. The Germans have so little sense of humor that probably no
+one in the car would have been amused to see the strangers flung upon the
+floor. No one apparently found it droll that the conductor should touch
+his cap to them when he asked for their fare; no one smiled at their
+efforts to make him understand where they wished to go, and he did not
+wink at the other passengers in trying to find out. Whenever the car
+stopped he descended first, and did not remount till the dismounting
+passenger had taken time to get well away from it. When the Marches got
+into the wrong car in coming home, and were carried beyond their street,
+the conductor would not take their fare.
+
+The kindly civility which environed them went far to alleviate the
+inclemency of the climate; it began to rain as soon as they left the
+shelter of the car, but a citizen of whom they asked the nearest way to
+the Circus Renz was so anxious to have them go aright that they did not
+mind the wet, and the thought of his goodness embittered March's
+self-reproach for under-tipping the sort of gorgeous heyduk, with a staff
+like a drum-major's, who left his place at the circus door to get their
+tickets. He brought them back with a magnificent bow, and was then as
+visibly disappointed with the share of the change returned to him as a
+child would have been.
+
+They went to their places with the sting of his disappointment rankling
+in their hearts. "One ought always to overpay them," March sighed, "and I
+will do it from this time forth; we shall not be much the poorer for it.
+That heyduk is not going to get off with less than a mark when we come
+out." As an earnest of his good faith he gave the old man who showed them
+to their box a tip that made him bow double, and he bought every
+conceivable libretto and play-bill offered him at prices fixed by his
+remorse.
+
+"One ought to do it," he said. "We are of the quality of good geniuses to
+these poor souls; we are Fortune in disguise; we are money found in the
+road. It is an accursed system, but they are more its victims than we."
+His wife quite agreed with him, and with the same good conscience between
+them they gave themselves up to the pure joy which the circus, of all
+modern entertainments, seems alone to inspire. The house was full from
+floor to roof when they came ins and every one was intent upon the two
+Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose drolleries spoke the
+universal language of circus humor, and needed no translation into either
+German or English. They had missed by an event or two the more patriotic
+attraction of "Miss Darlings, the American Star," as she was billed in
+English, but they were in time for one of those equestrian performances
+which leave the spectator almost exanimate from their prolixity, and the
+pantomimic piece which closed the evening.
+
+This was not given until nearly the whole house had gone out and stayed
+itself with beer and cheese and ham and sausage, in the restaurant which
+purveys these light refreshments in the summer theatres all over Germany.
+When the people came back gorged to the throat, they sat down in the
+right mood to enjoy the allegory of "The Enchanted Mountain's Fantasy;
+the Mountain episodes; the High-interesting Sledges-Courses on the Steep
+Acclivities; the Amazing-Up-rush of the thence plunging-Four Trains,
+which arrive with Lightnings-swiftness at the Top of the
+over-40-feet-high Mountain-the Highest Triumph of the To-day's
+Circus-Art; the Sledge-journey in the Wizard-mountain, and the Fairy
+Ballet in the Realm of the Ghost-prince, with Gold and Silver, Jewel,
+Bloomghosts, Gnomes, Gnomesses, and Dwarfs, in never-till-now-seen
+Splendor of Costume." The Marches were happy in this allegory, and
+happier in the ballet, which is everywhere delightfully innocent, and
+which here appealed with the large flat feet and the plain good faces of
+the 'coryphees' to all that was simplest and sweetest in their natures.
+They could not have resisted, if they had wished, that environment, of
+good-will; and if it had not been for the disappointed heyduk, they would
+have got home from their evening at the Circus Renz without a pang.
+
+They looked for him everywhere when they came out, but he had vanished,
+and they were left with a regret which, if unavailing, was not too
+poignant. In spite of it they had still an exhilaration in their release
+from the companionship of their fellow-voyagers which they analyzed as
+the psychical revulsion from the strain of too great interest in them.
+Mrs. March declared that for the present, at least, she wanted Europe
+quite to themselves; and she said that not even for the pleasure of
+seeing Burnamy and Miss Triscoe come into their box together world she
+have suffered an American trespass upon their exclusive possession of the
+Circus Renz.
+
+In the audience she had seen German officers for the first time in
+Hamburg, and she meant, if unremitting question could bring out the
+truth, to know why she had not met any others. She had read much of the
+prevalence and prepotence of the German officers who would try to push
+her off the sidewalk, till they realized that she was an American woman,
+and would then submit to her inflexible purpose of holding it. But she
+had been some seven or eight hours in Hamburg, and nothing of the kind
+had happened to her, perhaps because she had hardly yet walked a block in
+the city streets, but perhaps also because there seemed to be very few
+officers or military of any kind in Hamburg.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+Their absence was plausibly explained, the next morning, by the young
+German friend who came in to see the Marches at breakfast. He said
+Hamburg had been so long a free republic that the presence of a large
+imperial garrison was distasteful to the people, and as a matter of fact
+there were very few soldiers quartered there, whether the authorities
+chose to indulge the popular grudge or not. He was himself in a joyful
+flutter of spirits, for he had just the day before got his release from
+military service. He gave them a notion of what the rapture of a man
+reprieved from death might be, and he was as radiantly happy in the ill
+health which had got him his release as if it had been the greatest
+blessing of heaven. He bubbled over with smiling regrets that he should
+be leaving his home for the first stage of the journey which he was to
+take in search of strength, just as they had come, and he pressed them to
+say if there were not something that he could do for them.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, with a promptness surprising to her husband, who
+could think of nothing; "tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he was
+in Hamburg. My husband has always had a great passion for him and wants
+to look him up everywhere."
+
+March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young man
+had apparently never known it. His face fell; he wished to make Mrs.
+March believe that it was only Heine's uncle who had lived there; but she
+was firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came back
+gladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live in
+Konigstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily know
+the house by his bust set in its front. The portier and the head waiter
+shared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, and
+joined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them into
+their carriage.
+
+They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they should
+see in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that it
+rained there every day. As they drove off in the gray drizzle with the
+unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they bade
+their driver be very slow in taking them through Konigstrasse, so that he
+should by no means Miss Heine's dwelling, and he duly stopped in front of
+a house bearing the promised bust. They dismounted in order to revere it
+more at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer than the
+sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his cruelest
+moment, to be that of the German Milton, the respectable poet Klopstock,
+whom Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.
+
+In fact it was here that the good, much-forgotten Klopstock dwelt, when
+he came home to live with a comfortable pension from the Danish
+government; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about
+among the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some manner of house where Heine
+might have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat, or any
+sort of two-pair back. The neighbors were somewhat moved by the anxiety
+of the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors in Italy
+would have been. There was no eager and smiling sympathy in the little
+crowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient of
+question and kind in their helpless response, but they were not gay. To a
+man they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage and
+blood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of a
+stationer-and-bookseller's next to the butcher's had heard of him, but he
+had never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he never had heard where
+he lived in Hamburg.
+
+The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and
+drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their
+limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front
+escape him. He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse,
+and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness
+that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done.
+They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no
+apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon
+them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their
+timber-laced gables. The facades with their lattices stretching in bands
+quite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high in
+successions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than anything
+the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselves
+upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness which
+brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set
+ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and the
+traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress. They
+could not have said which delighted them more--the houses in the
+immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the perspectives and
+the background; but all were like the painted scenes of the stage, and
+they had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they were not persons in
+some romantic drama.
+
+The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which
+Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous
+activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the
+turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her
+shipping. At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness
+of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and
+seemed the expression of the home-side of her history. The sense of this
+gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards
+made, and assisted the digestion of some morsels of tough statistics. In
+the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of the
+greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romantic
+glamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 a
+quarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United States
+seemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval streets
+through the whole shabby length of Third Avenue.
+
+It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of commercial solidarity,
+that March went to have a look at the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautiful
+new Rathhaus. It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that; but
+it was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function of a public
+edifice, in withholding its entire interest from the stranger. He could
+not get into the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was free to him, and when
+he stepped within, it rose at him with a roar of voices and of feet like
+the New York Stock Exchange. The spectacle was not so frantic; people
+were not shaking their fists or fingers in each other's noses; but they
+were all wild in the tamer German way, and he was glad to mount from the
+Bourse to the poor little art gallery upstairs, and to shut out its
+clamor. He was not so glad when he looked round on these, his first,
+examples of modern German art. The custodian led him gently about and
+said which things were for sale, and it made his heart ache to see how
+bad they were, and to think that, bad as they were, he could not buy any
+of them.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had the irresponsible ease of
+people ticketed through, and the steamship company had still the charge
+of their baggage. But when the Marches left Hamburg for Leipsic (where
+they had decided to break the long pull to Carlsbad), all the anxieties
+of European travel, dimly remembered from former European days, offered
+themselves for recognition. A porter vanished with their hand-baggage
+before they could note any trait in him for identification; other porters
+made away with their trunks; and the interpreter who helped March buy his
+tickets, with a vocabulary of strictly railroad English, had to help him
+find the pieces in the baggage-room, curiously estranged in a mountain of
+alien boxes. One official weighed them; another obliged him to pay as
+much in freight as for a third passenger, and gave him an illegible scrap
+of paper which recorded their number and destination. The interpreter and
+the porters took their fees with a professional effect of
+dissatisfaction, and he went to wait with his wife amidst the smoking and
+eating and drinking in the restaurant. They burst through with the rest
+when the doors were opened to the train, and followed a glimpse of the
+porter with their hand-bags, as he ran down the platform, still bent upon
+escaping them, and brought him to bay at last in a car where he had got
+very good seats for them, and sank into their places, hot and humiliated
+by their needless tumult.
+
+As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect, and renewed a youthful
+joy in some of the long-estranged facts. The road was rougher than the
+roads at home; but for much less money they had the comfort, without the
+unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-class carriage. Mrs.
+March had expected to be used with the severity on the imperial railroads
+which she had failed to experience from the military on the Hamburg
+sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the whole management toward
+her. Her fellow-travellers were not lavish of their rights, as Americans
+are; what they got, that they kept; and in the run from Hamburg to
+Leipsic she had several occasions to observe that no German, however
+young or robust, dreams of offering a better place, if he has one, to a
+lady in grace to her sex or age; if they got into a carriage too late to
+secure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to the end of that
+stage. But if they appealed to their fellow-travellers for information
+about changes, or stops, or any of the little facts that they wished to
+make sure of, they were enlightened past possibility of error. At the
+point where they might have gone wrong the explanations were renewed with
+a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had not been
+forgotten. She said she could not see how any people could be both so
+selfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of saying
+something offensive:
+
+"You women are so pampered in America that you are astonished when you
+are treated in Europe like the mere human beings you are."
+
+She answered with unexpected reasonableness:
+
+"Yes, there's something in that; but when the Germans have taught us how
+despicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as human
+beings?"
+
+This was at ten o'clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and at
+last, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him. The
+darkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impression of its few
+simple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense: long levels, densely
+wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests, and
+checkered with fields of grain and grass, soaking under the thin rain
+that from time to time varied the thin sunshine.
+
+The villages and peasants' cottages were notably few; but there was here
+and there a classic or a gothic villa, which, at one point, an
+English-speaking young lady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain as
+the seat of some country gentleman; the land was in large holdings, and
+this accounted for the sparsity of villages and cottages.
+
+She then said that she was a German teacher of English, in Hamburg, and
+was going home to Potsdam for a visit. She seemed like a German girl out
+of 'The Initials', and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried to
+invest herself with some romantic interest as an American. She failed to
+move the girl's fancy, even after she had bestowed on her an immense
+bunch of roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had sent to them
+just before they left their hotel. She failed, later, on the same ground
+with the pleasant-looking English woman who got into their carriage at
+Magdeburg, and talked over the 'London Illustrated News' with an
+English-speaking Fraulein in her company; she readily accepted the fact
+of Mrs. March's nationality, but found nothing wonderful in it,
+apparently; and when she left the train she left Mrs. March to recall
+with fond regret the old days in Italy when she first came abroad, and
+could make a whole carriage full of Italians break into ohs and ahs by
+saying that she was an American, and telling how far she had come across
+the sea.
+
+"Yes," March assented, "but that was a great while ago, and Americans
+were much rarer than they are now in Europe. The Italians are so much
+more sympathetic than the Germans and English, and they saw that you
+wanted to impress them. Heaven knows how little they cared! And then, you
+were a very pretty young girl in those days; or at least I thought so."
+
+"Yes," she sighed, "and now I'm a plain old woman."
+
+"Oh, not quite so bad as that."
+
+"Yes, I am! Do you think they would have cared more if it had been Miss
+Triscoe?"
+
+"Not so much as if it had been the pivotal girl. They would have found
+her much more their ideal of the American woman; and even she would have
+had to have been here thirty years ago."
+
+She laughed a little ruefully. "Well, at any rate, I should like to know
+how Miss Triscoe would have affected them."
+
+"I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is living
+here with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank. I could
+imagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the way she
+clung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of the
+royalties to her friend. There is romance for you!"
+
+They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours'
+journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up through
+the academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and silent
+except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their feline
+purr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul. A sense of the
+past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and the
+head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to the
+endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms in
+the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found
+themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick
+succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them. The
+spell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of his
+consciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing. This
+linked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent the
+next forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotions
+tinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that since
+it was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be finally
+restored to him.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square of
+aristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture, which
+afterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite so
+characteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itself
+Little Paris. The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the pale
+yellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarly
+associated in the minds of English-speaking travellers. It was rather
+more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but a
+quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was provided
+with a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments when the
+rain forgot itself. The place was better shaded than need be in that
+sunless land by the German elms that look like ours and it was
+sufficiently stocked with German statues, that look like no others. It
+had a monument, too, of the sort with which German art has everywhere
+disfigured the kindly fatherland since the war with France. These
+monuments, though they are so very ugly, have a sort of pathos as records
+of the only war in which Germany unaided has triumphed against a foreign
+foe, but they are as tiresome as all such memorial pomps must be. It is
+not for the victories of a people that any other people can care. The
+wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or
+what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and
+sorrow, and their fame is an offence to all men not concerned in them,
+till time has softened it to a memory
+
+  "Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
+   And battles long ago."
+
+It was for some such reason that while the Marches turned with instant
+satiety from the swelling and strutting sculpture which celebrated the
+Leipsic heroes of the war of 1870, they had heart for those of the war of
+1813; and after their noonday dinner they drove willingly, in a pause of
+the rain, out between yellowing harvests of wheat and oats to the field
+where Napoleon was beaten by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians (it
+always took at least three nations to beat the little wretch) fourscore
+years before. Yet even there Mrs. March was really more concerned for the
+sparsity of corn-flowers in the grain, which in their modern character of
+Kaiserblumen she found strangely absent from their loyal function; and
+March was more taken with the notion of the little gardens which his
+guide told him the citizens could have in the suburbs of Leipsic and
+enjoy at any trolley-car distance from their homes. He saw certain of
+these gardens in groups, divided by low, unenvious fences, and sometimes
+furnished with summer-houses, where the tenant could take his pleasure in
+the evening air, with his family. The guide said he had such a garden
+himself, at a rent of seven dollars a year, where he raised vegetables
+and flowers, and spent his peaceful leisure; and March fancied that on
+the simple domestic side of their life, which this fact gave him a
+glimpse of, the Germans were much more engaging than in their character
+of victors over either the First or the Third Napoleon. But probably they
+would not have agreed with him, and probably nations will go on making
+themselves cruel and tiresome till humanity at last prevails over
+nationality.
+
+He could have put the case to the guide himself; but though the guide was
+imaginably liberated to a cosmopolitan conception of things by three
+years' service as waiter in English hotels, where he learned the
+language, he might not have risen to this. He would have tried, for he
+was a willing and kindly soul, though he was not a 'valet de place' by
+profession. There seemed in fact but one of that useless and amusing race
+(which is everywhere falling into decay through the rivalry of the
+perfected Baedeker,) left in Leipsic, and this one was engaged, so that
+the Marches had to devolve upon their ex-waiter, who was now the keeper
+of a small restaurant. He gladly abandoned his business to the care of
+his wife, in order to drive handsomely about in his best clothes, with
+strangers who did not exact too much knowledge from him. In his zeal to
+do something he possessed himself of March's overcoat when they
+dismounted at their first gallery, and let fall from its pocket his
+prophylactic flask of brandy, which broke with a loud crash on the marble
+floor in the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumed the whole
+place. The masterpieces were some excellent works of Luke Kranach, who
+seemed the only German painter worth looking at when there were any Dutch
+or Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and nature
+of the Kranachs, and remembered afterwards only the shattered fragments
+of the brandy-flask, just how they looked on the floor, and the fumes,
+how they smelt, that rose from the ruin.
+
+It might have been a warning protest of the veracities against what they
+were doing; but the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was on
+them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their
+ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well. They spared
+themselves nothing that they had time for, that day, and they felt
+falsely guilty for their omissions, as if they really had been duties to
+art and history which must be discharged, like obligations to one's maker
+and one's neighbor.
+
+They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence of the beautiful old
+Rathhaus, and they were sensible of something like a genuine emotion in
+passing the famous and venerable university; the very air of Leipsic is
+redolent of printing and publication, which appealed to March in his
+quality of editor, and they could not fail of an impression of the quiet
+beauty of the town, with its regular streets of houses breaking into
+suburban villas of an American sort, and intersected with many canals,
+which in the intervals of the rain were eagerly navigated by pleasure
+boats, and contributed to the general picturesqueness by their frequent
+bridges, even during the drizzle. There seemed to be no churches to do,
+and as it was a Sunday, the galleries were so early closed against them
+that they were making a virtue as well as a pleasure of the famous scene
+of Napoleon's first great defeat.
+
+By a concert between their guide and driver their carriage drew up at the
+little inn by the road-side, which is also a museum stocked with relics
+from the battle-field, and with objects of interest relating to it. Old
+muskets, old swords, old shoes and old coats, trumpets, drums,
+gun-carriages, wheels, helmets, cannon balls, grape-shot, and all the
+murderous rubbish which battles come to at last, with proclamations,
+autographs, caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon, and effigies of all
+the other generals engaged, and miniatures and jewels of their womenkind,
+filled room after room, through which their owner vaunted his way, with a
+loud pounding voice and a bad breath. When he wished them to enjoy some
+gross British satire or clumsy German gibe at Bonaparte's expense, and
+put his face close to begin the laugh, he was something so terrible that
+March left the place with a profound if not a reasoned regret that the
+French had not won the battle of Leipsic. He walked away musing pensively
+upon the traveller's inadequacy to the ethics of history when a breath
+could so sway him against his convictions; but even after he had cleansed
+his lungs with some deep respirations he found himself still a
+Bonapartist in the presence of that stone on the rising ground where
+Napoleon sat to watch the struggle on the vast plain, and see his empire
+slipping through his blood-stained fingers. It was with difficulty that
+he could keep from revering the hat and coat which are sculptured on the
+stone, but it was well that he succeeded, for he could not make out then
+or afterwards whether the habiliments represented were really Napoleon's
+or not, and they might have turned out to be Barclay de Tolly's.
+
+While he stood trying to solve this question of clothes he was startled
+by the apparition of a man climbing the little slope from the opposite
+quarter, and advancing toward them. He wore the imperial crossed by the
+pointed mustache once so familiar to a world much the worse for them, and
+March had the shiver of a fine moment in which he fancied the Third
+Napoleon rising to view the scene where the First had looked his coming
+ruin in the face.
+
+"Why, it's Miss Triscoe!" cried his wife, and before March had noticed
+the approach of another figure, the elder and the younger lady had rushed
+upon each other, and encountered with a kiss. At the same time the visage
+of the last Emperor resolved itself into the face of General Triscoe, who
+gave March his hand in a more tempered greeting.
+
+The ladies began asking each other of their lives since their parting two
+days before, and the men strolled a few paces away toward the distant
+prospect of Leipsic, which at that point silhouettes itself in a noble
+stretch of roofs and spires and towers against the horizon.
+
+General Triscoe seemed no better satisfied with Germany than he had been
+on first stepping ashore at Cuxhaven. He might still have been in a pout
+with his own country, but as yet he had not made up with any other; and
+he said, "What a pity Napoleon didn't thrash the whole dunderheaded lot!
+His empire would have been a blessing to them, and they would have had
+some chance of being civilized under the French. All this unification of
+nationalities is the great humbug of the century. Every stupid race
+thinks it's happy because it's united, and civilization has been set back
+a hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring the unions about;
+and more wars will have to be fought to keep them up. What a farce it is!
+What's become of the nationality of the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein, or
+the French in the Rhine Provinces, or the Italians in Savoy?"
+
+March had thought something like this himself, but to have it put by
+General Triscoe made it offensive. "I don't know. Isn't it rather
+quarrelling with the course of human events to oppose accomplished facts?
+The unifications were bound to be, just as the separations before them
+were. And so far they have made for peace, in Europe at least, and peace
+is civilization. Perhaps after a great many ages people will come
+together through their real interests, the human interests; but at
+present it seems as if nothing but a romantic sentiment of patriotism can
+unite them. By-and-by they may find that there is nothing in it."
+
+"Perhaps," said the general, discontentedly. "I don't see much promise of
+any kind in the future."
+
+"Well, I don't know. When you think of the solid militarism of Germany,
+you seem remanded to the most hopeless moment of the Roman Empire; you
+think nothing can break such a force; but my guide says that even in
+Leipsic the Socialists outnumber all the other parties, and the army is
+the great field of the Socialist propaganda. The army itself may be
+shaped into the means of democracy--even of peace."
+
+"You're very optimistic," said Triscoe, curtly. "As I read the signs, we
+are not far from universal war. In less than a year we shall make the
+break ourselves in a war with Spain." He looked very fierce as he
+prophesied, and he dotted March over with his staccato glances.
+
+"Well, I'll allow that if Tammany comes in this year, we shall have war
+with Spain. You can't ask more than that, General Triscoe?"
+
+Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had not said a word of the 'battle of
+Leipsic', or of the impersonal interests which it suggested to the men.
+For all these, they might still have been sitting in their steamer chairs
+on the promenade of the Norumbia at a period which seemed now of
+geological remoteness. The girl accounted for not being in Dresden by her
+father's having decided not to go through Berlin but to come by way of
+Leipsic, which he thought they had better see; they had come without
+stopping in Hamburg. They had not enjoyed Leipsic much; it had rained the
+whole day before, and they had not gone out. She asked when Mrs. March
+was going on to Carlsbad, and Mrs. March answered, the next morning; her
+husband wished to begin his cure at once.
+
+Then Miss Triscoe pensively wondered if Carlsbad would do her father any
+good; and Mrs. March discreetly inquired General Triscoe's symptoms.
+
+"Oh, he hasn't any. But I know he can't be well--with his gloomy
+opinions."
+
+"They may come from his liver," said Mrs. March. "Nearly everything of
+that kind does. I know that Mr. March has been terribly depressed at
+times, and the doctor said it was nothing but his liver; and Carlsbad is
+the great place for that, you know."
+
+"Perhaps I can get papa to run over some day, if he doesn't like Dresden.
+It isn't very far, is it?"
+
+They referred to Mrs. March's Baedeker together, and found that it was
+five hours.
+
+"Yes, that is what I thought," said Miss Triscoe, with a carelessness
+which convinced Mrs. March she had looked up the fact already.
+
+"If you decide to come, you must let us get rooms for you at our hotel.
+We're going to Pupp's; most of the English and Americans go to the hotels
+on the Hill, but Pupp's is in the thick of it in the lower town; and it's
+very gay, Mr. Kenby says; he's been there often. Mr. Burnamy is to get
+our rooms."
+
+"I don't suppose I can get papa to go," said Miss Triscoe, so insincerely
+that Mrs. March was sure she had talked over the different routes; to
+Carlsbad with Burnamy--probably on the way from Cuxhaven. She looked up
+from digging the point of her umbrella in the ground. "You didn't meet
+him here this morning?"
+
+Mrs. March governed herself to a calm which she respected in asking, "Has
+Mr. Burnamy been here?"
+
+"He came on with Mr. and Mrs. Eltwin, when we did, and they all decided
+to stop over a day. They left on the twelve-o'clock train to-day."
+
+Mrs. March perceived that the girl had decided not to let the facts
+betray themselves by chance, and she treated them as of no significance.
+
+"No, we didn't see him," she said, carelessly.
+
+The two men came walking slowly towards them, and Miss Triscoe said,
+"We're going to Dresden this evening, but I hope we shall meet somewhere,
+Mrs. March."
+
+"Oh, people never lose sight of each other in Europe; they can't; it's so
+little!"
+
+"Agatha," said the girl's father, "Mr. March tells me that the museum
+over there is worth seeing."
+
+"Well," the girl assented, and she took a winning leave of the Marches,
+and moved gracefully away with her father.
+
+"I should have thought it was Agnes," said Mrs. March, following them
+with her eyes before she turned upon her husband. "Did he tell you
+Burnamy had been here? Well, he has! He has just gone on to Carlsbad. He
+made, those poor old Eltwins stop over with him, so he could be with
+her."
+
+"Did she say that?"
+
+"No, but of course he did."
+
+"Then it's all settled?"
+
+"No, it isn't settled. It's at the most interesting point."
+
+"Well, don't read ahead. You always want to look at the last page."
+
+"You were trying to look at the last page yourself," she retorted, and
+she would have liked to punish him for his complex dishonesty toward the
+affair; but upon the whole she kept her temper with him, and she made him
+agree that Miss Triscoe's getting her father to Carlsbad was only a
+question of time.
+
+They parted heart's-friends with their ineffectual guide, who was
+affectionately grateful for the few marks they gave him, at the hotel
+door; and they were in just the mood to hear men singing in a farther
+room when they went down to supper. The waiter, much distracted from
+their own service by his duties to it, told them it was the breakfast
+party of students which they had heard beginning there about noon. The
+revellers had now been some six hours at table, and he said they might
+not rise before midnight; they had just got to the toasts, which were
+apparently set to music.
+
+The students of right remained a vivid color in the impression of the
+university town. They pervaded the place, and decorated it with their
+fantastic personal taste in coats and trousers, as well as their corps
+caps of green, white, red, and blue, but above all blue. They were not
+easily distinguishable from the bicyclers who were holding one of the
+dull festivals of their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps they were
+sometimes both students and bicyclers. As bicyclers they kept about in
+the rain, which they seemed not to mind; so far from being disheartened,
+they had spirits enough to take one another by the waist at times and
+waltz in the square before the hotel. At one moment of the holiday some
+chiefs among them drove away in carriages; at supper a winner of prizes
+sat covered with badges and medals; another who went by the hotel
+streamed with ribbons; and an elderly man at his side was bespattered
+with small knots and ends of them, as if he had been in an explosion of
+ribbons somewhere. It seemed all to be as exciting for them, and it was
+as tedious for the witnesses, as any gala of students and bicyclers at
+home.
+
+Mrs. March remained with an unrequited curiosity concerning their
+different colors and different caps, and she tried to make her husband
+find out what they severally meant; he pretended a superior interest in
+the nature of a people who had such a passion for uniforms that they were
+not content with its gratification in their immense army, but indulged it
+in every pleasure and employment of civil life. He estimated, perhaps not
+very accurately, that only one man out of ten in Germany wore citizens'
+dress; and of all functionaries he found that the dogs of the
+women-and-dog teams alone had no distinctive dress; even the women had
+their peasant costume.
+
+There was an industrial fair open at Leipsic which they went out of the
+city to see after supper, along with a throng of Leipsickers, whom an
+hour's interval of fine weather tempted forth on the trolley; and with
+the help of a little corporal, who took a fee for his service with the
+eagerness of a civilian, they got wheeled chairs, and renewed their
+associations with the great Chicago Fair in seeing the exposition from
+them. This was not, March said, quite the same as being drawn by a
+woman-and-dog team, which would have been the right means of doing a
+German fair; but it was something to have his chair pushed by a slender
+young girl, whose stalwart brother applied his strength to the chair of
+the lighter traveller; and it was fit that the girl should reckon the
+common hire, while the man took the common tip. They made haste to leave
+the useful aspects of the fair, and had themselves trundled away to the
+Colonial Exhibit, where they vaguely expected something like the
+agreeable corruptions of the Midway Plaisance. The idea of her colonial
+progress with which Germany is trying to affect the home-keeping
+imagination of her people was illustrated by an encampment of savages
+from her Central-African possessions. They were getting their supper at
+the moment the Marches saw them, and were crouching, half naked, around
+the fires under the kettles, and shivering from the cold, but they were
+not very characteristic of the imperial expansion, unless perhaps when an
+old man in a red blanket suddenly sprang up with a knife in his hand and
+began to chase a boy round the camp. The boy was lighter-footed, and
+easily outran the sage, who tripped at times on his blanket. None of the
+other Central Africans seemed to care for the race, and without waiting
+for the event, the American spectators ordered themselves trundled away
+to another idle feature of the fair, where they hoped to amuse themselves
+with the image of Old Leipsic.
+
+This was so faithfully studied from the past in its narrow streets and
+Gothic houses that it was almost as picturesque as the present epoch in
+the old streets of Hamburg. A drama had just begun to be represented on a
+platform of the public square in front of a fourteenth-century
+beer-house, with people talking from the windows round, and revellers in
+the costume of the period drinking beer and eating sausages at tables in
+the open air. Their eating and drinking were genuine, and in the midst of
+it a real rain began, to pour down upon them, without affecting them any
+more than if they had been Germans of the nineteenth century. But it
+drove the Americans to a shelter from which they could not see the play,
+and when it held up, they made their way back to their hotel.
+
+Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of whom were happy
+beyond the sober wont of the fatherland. The conductor took a special
+interest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, and
+genially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous.
+From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remounted
+the car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with
+an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyous
+physiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth.
+
+Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiences
+and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as
+a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide
+had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide's content
+with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became
+quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted him, or
+seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and
+were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as the kind
+hearts of the Germans of every age and sex. He was able to note, rather
+more freshly, that with all their kindness the Germans were a very
+nervous people, if not irritable, and at the least cause gave way to an
+agitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was violent while it lasted.
+Several times that day he had seen encounters between the portier and
+guests at the hotel which promised violence, but which ended peacefully
+as soon as some simple question of train-time was solved. The encounters
+always left the portier purple and perspiring, as any agitation must with
+a man so tight in his livery. He bemoaned himself after one of them as
+the victim of an unhappy calling, in which he could take no exercise. "It
+is a life of excitements, but not of movements," he explained to March;
+and when he learned where he was going, he regretted that he could not go
+to Carlsbad too. "For sugar?" he asked, as if there were overmuch of it
+in his own make.
+
+March felt the tribute, but he had to say, "No; liver."
+
+"Ah!" said the portier, with the air of failing to get on common ground
+with him.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning in
+America. Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the
+telegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying
+that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits were
+as light as the gay little clouds which blew about in the sky, when their
+train drew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charming landscape all
+the way to Carlsbad. A fatherly 'traeger' had done his best to get them
+the worst places in a non-smoking compartment, but had succeeded so
+poorly that they were very comfortable, with no companions but a mother
+and daughter, who spoke German in soft low tones together. Their
+compartment was pervaded by tobacco fumes from the smokers, but as these
+were twice as many as the non-smokers, it was only fair, and after March
+had got a window open it did not matter, really.
+
+He asked leave of the strangers in his German, and they consented in
+theirs; but he could not master the secret of the window-catch, and the
+elder lady said in English, "Let me show you," and came to his help.
+
+The occasion for explaining that they were Americans and accustomed to
+different car windows was so tempting that Mrs. March could not forbear,
+and the other ladies were affected as deeply as she could wish. Perhaps
+they were the more affected because it presently appeared that they had
+cousins in New York whom she knew of, and that they were acquainted with
+an American family that had passed the winter in Berlin. Life likes to do
+these things handsomely, and it easily turned out that this was a family
+of intimate friendship with the Marches; the names, familiarly spoken,
+abolished all strangeness between the travellers; and they entered into a
+comparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences, from which it seemed
+that the objects and interests of cultivated people in Berlin were quite
+the same as those of cultivated people in New York. Each of the parties
+to the discovery disclaimed any superiority for their respective
+civilizations; they wished rather to ascribe a greater charm and virtue
+to the alien conditions; and they acquired such merit with one another
+that when the German ladies got out of the train at Franzensbad, the
+mother offered Mrs. March an ingenious folding footstool which she had
+admired. In fact, she left her with it clasped to her breast, and bowing
+speechless toward the giver in a vain wish to express her gratitude.
+
+"That was very pretty of her, my dear," said March. "You couldn't have
+done that."
+
+"No," she confessed; "I shouldn't have had the courage. The courage of my
+emotions," she added, thoughtfully.
+
+"Ah, that's the difference! A Berliner could do it, and a Bostonian
+couldn't. Do you think it so much better to have the courage of your
+convictions?"
+
+"I don't know. It seems to me that I'm less and less certain of
+everything that I used to be sure of."
+
+He laughed, and then he said, "I was thinking how, on our wedding
+journey, long ago, that Gray Sister at the Hotel Dieu in Quebec offered
+you a rose."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"That was to your pretty youth. Now the gracious stranger gives you a
+folding stool."
+
+"To rest my poor old feet. Well, I would rather have it than a rose,
+now."
+
+"You bent toward her at just the slant you had when you took the flower
+that time; I noticed it. I didn't see that you looked so very different.
+To be sure the roses in your cheeks have turned into rosettes; but
+rosettes are very nice, and they're much more permanent; I prefer them;
+they will keep in any climate."
+
+She suffered his mockery with an appreciative sigh. "Yes, our age
+caricatures our youth, doesn't it?"
+
+"I don't think it gets much fun out of it," he assented.
+
+"No; but it can't help it. I used to rebel against it when it first
+began. I did enjoy being young."
+
+"You did, my dear," he said, taking her hand tenderly; she withdrew it,
+because though she could bear his sympathy, her New England nature could
+not bear its expression. "And so did I; and we were both young a long
+time. Travelling brings the past back, don't you think? There at that
+restaurant, where we stopped for dinner--"
+
+"Yes, it was charming! Just as it used to be! With that white cloth, and
+those tall shining bottles of wine, and the fruit in the centre, and the
+dinner in courses, and that young waiter who spoke English, and was so
+nice! I'm never going home; you may, if you like."
+
+"You bragged to those ladies about our dining-cars; and you said that our
+railroad restaurants were quite as good as the European."
+
+"I had to do that. But I knew better; they don't begin to be."
+
+"Perhaps not; but I've been thinking that travel is a good deal alike
+everywhere. It's the expression of the common civilization of the world.
+When I came out of that restaurant and ran the train down, and then found
+that it didn't start for fifteen minutes, I wasn't sure whether I was at
+home or abroad. And when we changed cars at Eger, and got into this train
+which had been baking in the sun for us outside the station, I didn't
+know but I was back in the good old Fitchburg depot. To be sure,
+Wallenstein wasn't assassinated at Boston, but I forgot his murder at
+Eger, and so that came to the same thing. It's these confounded fifty-odd
+years. I used to recollect everything."
+
+He had got up and was looking out of the window at the landscape, which
+had not grown less amiable in growing rather more slovenly since they had
+crossed the Saxon bolder into Bohemia. All the morning and early
+afternoon they had run through lovely levels of harvest, where men were
+cradling the wheat and women were binding it into sheaves in the narrow
+fields between black spaces of forest. After they left Eger, there was
+something more picturesque and less thrifty in the farming among the low
+hills which they gradually mounted to uplands, where they tasted a
+mountain quality in the thin pure air. The railroad stations were
+shabbier; there was an indefinable touch of something Southern in the
+scenery and the people. Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches of
+the streams, and where the current quickened, tall wheels were lifting
+water for the fields in circles of brimming and spilling pockets. Along
+the embankments, where a new track was being laid, barefooted women were
+at work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yellow-haired girls
+were lugging large white-headed babies, and watching the train go by. At
+an up grade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to the
+children the pfennigs which had been left over from the passage in
+Germany, and he pleased himself with his bounty, till the question
+whether the children could spend the money forced itself upon him. He sat
+down feeling less like a good genius than a cruel magician who had
+tricked them with false wealth; but he kept his remorse to himself, and
+tried to interest his wife in the difference of social and civic ideal
+expressed in the change of the inhibitory notices at the car windows,
+which in Germany had strongliest forbidden him to outlean himself, and
+now in Austria entreated him not to outbow himself. She refused to share
+in the speculation, or to debate the yet nicer problem involved by the
+placarded prayer in the washroom to the Messrs. Travellers not to take
+away the soap; and suddenly he felt himself as tired as she looked, with
+that sense of the futility of travel which lies in wait for every one who
+profits by travel.
+
+
+
+
+PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars
+    Calm of those who have logic on their side
+    Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance
+    Explained perhaps too fully
+    Futility of travel
+    Humanity may at last prevail over nationality
+    Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much
+    Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of
+    Life of the ship, like the life of the sea: a sodden monotony
+    Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous
+    Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel
+    Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all
+    Our age caricatures our youth
+    Prices fixed by his remorse
+    Recipes for dishes and diseases
+    Reckless and culpable optimism
+    Repeated the nothings they had said already
+    She cares for him: that she was so cold shows that
+    She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression
+    Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism
+    They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart
+    Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine
+    Wilful sufferers
+    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
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Their Silver Wedding Journey, Part I.
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger  <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: Several chapter heading numerals are out of order or missing in this
+1899 edition, however the text is all present in the three volumes.  D.W.]
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the authors ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY.
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+Part I.
+
+
+
+I.
+
+"You need the rest," said the Business End; "and your wife wants you to
+go, as well as your doctor. Besides, it's your Sabbatical year, and you,
+could send back a lot of stuff for the magazine."
+
+"Is that your notion of a Sabbatical year? " asked the editor.
+
+"No; I throw that out as a bait to your conscience.  You needn't write a
+line while you're gone.  I wish you wouldn't for your own sake; although
+every number that hasn't got you in it is a back number for me."
+
+"That's very nice of you, Fulkerson," said the editor.  "I suppose you
+realize that it's nine years since we took 'Every Other Week' from
+Dryfoos?"
+
+"Well, that makes it all the more Sabbatical," said Fulkerson.  "The two
+extra years that you've put in here, over and above the old style
+Sabbatical seven, are just so much more to your credit.  It was your
+right to go, two years ago, and now it's your duty.  Couldn't you look at
+it in that light?"
+
+"I dare say Mrs. March could," the editor assented.  "I don't believe she
+could be brought to regard it as a pleasure on any other terms."
+
+"Of course not," said Fulkerson.  "If you won't take a year, take three
+months, and call it a Sabbatical summer; but go, anyway.  You can make up
+half a dozen numbers ahead, and Tom, here, knows your ways so well that
+you needn't think about 'Every Other Week' from the time you start till
+the time you try to bribe the customs inspector when you get back.  I can
+take a hack at the editing myself, if Tom's inspiration gives out, and
+put a little of my advertising fire into the thing."  He laid his hand on
+the shoulder of the young fellow who stood smiling by, and pushed and
+shook him in the liking there was between them.  "Now you go, March!
+Mrs. Fulkerson feels just as I do about it; we had our outing last year,
+and we want Mrs. March and you to have yours.  You let me go down and
+engage your passage, and--"
+
+"No, no!" the editor rebelled.  "I'll think about it;" but as he turned
+to the work he was so fond of and so weary of, he tried not to think of
+the question again, till he closed his desk in the afternoon, and started
+to walk home; the doctor had said he ought to walk, and he did so, though
+he longed to ride, and looked wistfully at the passing cars.
+
+He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, it
+was a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if the
+flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had been
+going so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among the
+butterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this illusion,
+himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it mocked the
+notion.  They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they were ever
+to find it again, was to be looked for in Europe, where they met when
+they were young, and they had never been quite without the hope of going
+back there, some day, for a long sojourn.  They had not seen the time
+when they could do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized, even
+dreaming is not free from care; and in his dream March had been obliged
+to work pretty steadily, if not too intensely.  He had been forced to
+forego the distinctly literary ambition with which he had started in life
+because he had their common living to make, and he could not make it by
+writing graceful verse, or even graceful prose.  He had been many years
+in a sufficiently distasteful business, and he had lost any thought of
+leaving it when it left him, perhaps because his hold on it had always
+been rather lax, and he had not been able to conceal that he disliked it.
+At any rate, he was supplanted in his insurance agency at Boston by a
+subordinate in his office, and though he was at the same time offered a
+place of nominal credit in the employ of the company, he was able to
+decline it in grace of a chance which united the charm of congenial work
+with the solid advantage of a better salary than he had been getting for
+work he hated.  It was an incredible chance, but it was rendered
+appreciably real by the necessity it involved that they should leave
+Boston, where they had lived all their married life, where Mrs. March as
+well as their children was born, and where all their tender and familiar
+ties were, and come to New York, where the literary enterprise which
+formed his chance was to be founded.
+
+It was then a magazine of a new sort, which his business partner had
+imagined in such leisure as the management of a newspaper syndicate
+afforded him, and had always thought of getting March to edit.  The
+magazine which is also a book has since been realized elsewhere on more
+or less prosperous terms, but not for any long period, and 'Every Other
+Week' was apparently--the only periodical of the kind conditioned for
+survival.  It was at first backed by unlimited capital, and it had the
+instant favor of a popular mood, which has since changed, but which did
+not change so soon that the magazine had not time to establish itself in
+a wide acceptance.  It was now no longer a novelty, it was no longer in
+the maiden blush of its first success, but it had entered upon its second
+youth with the reasonable hope of many years of prosperity before it.  In
+fact it was a very comfortable living for all concerned, and the Marches
+had the conditions, almost dismayingly perfect, in which they had often
+promised themselves to go and be young again in Europe, when they
+rebelled at finding themselves elderly in America.  Their daughter was
+married, and so very much to her mother's mind that she did not worry
+about her, even though she lived so far away as Chicago, still a wild
+frontier town to her Boston imagination; and their son, as soon as he
+left college, had taken hold on 'Every Other Week', under his father's
+instruction, with a zeal and intelligence which won him Fulkerson's
+praise as a chip of the old block.  These two liked each other, and
+worked into each other's hands as cordially and aptly as Fulkerson and
+March had ever done.  It amused the father to see his son offering
+Fulkerson the same deference which the Business End paid to seniority in
+March himself; but in fact, Fulkerson's forehead was getting, as he said,
+more intellectual every day; and the years were pushing them all along
+together.
+
+Still, March had kept on in the old rut, and one day he fell down in it.
+He had a long sickness, and when he was well of it, he was so slow in
+getting his grip of work again that he was sometimes deeply discouraged.
+His wife shared his depression, whether he showed or whether he hid it,
+and when the doctor advised his going abroad, she abetted the doctor with
+all the strength of a woman's hygienic intuitions.  March himself
+willingly consented, at first; but as soon as he got strength for his
+work, he began to temporize and to demur.  He said that he believed it
+would do him just as much good to go to Saratoga, where they always had
+such a good time, as to go to Carlsbad; and Mrs. March had been obliged
+several times to leave him to his own undoing; she always took him more
+vigorously in hand afterwards.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+When he got home from the 'Every Other Week' office, the afternoon of
+that talk with the Business End, he wanted to laugh with his wife at
+Fulkerson's notion of a Sabbatical year.  She did not think it was so
+very droll; she even urged it seriously against him, as if she had now
+the authority of Holy Writ for forcing him abroad; she found no relish of
+absurdity in the idea that it was his duty to take this rest which had
+been his right before.
+
+He abandoned himself to a fancy which had been working to the surface of
+his thought.  "We could call it our Silver Wedding Journey, and go round
+to all the old places, and see them in the reflected light of the past."
+
+"Oh, we could!"  she responded, passionately; and he had now the delicate
+responsibility of persuading her that he was joking.
+
+He could think of nothing better than a return to Fulkerson's absurdity.
+"It would be our Silver Wedding Journey just as it would be my Sabbatical
+year--a good deal after date.  But I suppose that would make it all the
+more silvery."
+
+She faltered in her elation.  "Didn't you say a Sabbatical year
+yourself?" she demanded.
+
+"Fulkerson said it; but it was a figurative expression."
+
+"And I suppose the Silver Wedding Journey was a figurative expression
+too!"
+
+"It was a notion that tempted me; I thought you would enjoy it.  Don't
+you suppose I should be glad too, if we could go over, and find ourselves
+just as we were when we first met there?"
+
+"No; I don't believe now that you care anything about it."
+
+"Well, it couldn't be done, anyway; so that doesn't matter."
+
+"It could be done, if you were a mind to think so.  And it would be the
+greatest inspiration to you.  You are always longing for some chance to
+do original work, to get away from your editing, but you've let the time
+slip by without really trying to do anything; I don't call those little
+studies of yours in the magazine anything; and now you won't take the
+chance that's almost forcing itself upon you.  You could write an
+original book of the nicest kind; mix up travel and fiction; get some
+love in."
+
+"Oh, that's the stalest kind of thing!"
+
+"Well, but you could see it from a perfectly new point of view.  You
+could look at it as a sort of dispassionate witness, and treat it
+humorously--of course it is ridiculous--and do something entirely fresh."
+
+"It wouldn't work.  It would be carrying water on both shoulders.  The
+fiction would kill the travel, the travel would kill the fiction; the
+love and the humor wouldn't mingle any more than oil and vinegar."
+
+"Well, and what is better than a salad?"
+
+"But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing to put it on."  She
+was silent, and he yielded to another fancy.  "We might imagine coming
+upon our former selves over there, and travelling round with them--
+a wedding journey 'en partie carree'."
+
+"Something like that.  I call it a very poetical idea," she said with a
+sort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush.
+
+"It isn't so bad," he admitted.  "How young we were, in those days!"
+
+"Too young to know what a good time we were having," she said, relaxing
+her doubt for the retrospect.  "I don't feel as if I really saw Europe,
+then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple.  I would like to
+go, just to make sure that I had been."  He was smiling again in the way
+he had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded,
+"What is it?"
+
+"Nothing.  I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people who
+actually hadn't been before--carry them all through Europe, and let them
+see it in the old, simple-hearted American way."
+
+She shook her head.  "You couldn't!  They've all been!"
+
+"All but about sixty or seventy millions," said March.
+
+"Well, those are just the millions you don't know, and couldn't imagine."
+
+"I'm not so sure of that."
+
+"And even if you could imagine them, you couldn't make them interesting.
+All the interesting ones have been, anyway."
+
+"Some of the uninteresting ones too.  I used, to meet some of that sort
+over there.  I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with
+those that hadn't been."
+
+"Then why not do it? I know you could get something out of it."
+
+"It might be a good thing," he mused, "to take a couple who had passed
+their whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go; and
+had a perfect famine for Europe all the time.  I could have them spend
+their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking up
+their accommodations.  I could have them sail, in imagination, and
+discover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions of
+it from travels and novels against a background of purely American
+experience.  We needn't go abroad to manage that.  I think it would be
+rather nice."
+
+"I don't think it would be nice in the least," said Mrs. March, "and if
+you don't want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all."
+
+"Well, then, let's talk about our Silver Wedding Journey."
+
+"I see.  You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it."
+
+She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really
+silent.  He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to
+good-humor.  He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken and
+look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she refused.
+When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she consented
+to go.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took a
+hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fancied
+some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next
+Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken.  To be
+sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the afternoon
+of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that invisible
+thread of association which drew him.
+
+The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the
+outward voyage, and was looking her best.  She was tipped and edged with
+shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and white-painted
+as only a ship knows how to be.  A little uniformed steward ran before
+the visitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors into
+typical state-rooms on the different decks; and then let them verify
+their first impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and the
+luxury of the ladies' parlor and music-room.  March made his wife observe
+that the tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so carelessly
+scattered about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the floor against
+rough weather; and he amused himself with the heavy German browns and
+greens and coppers in the decorations, which he said must have been
+studied in color from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the effect of those
+large march-panes in the roof.  She laughed with him at the tastelessness
+of the race which they were destined to marvel at more and more; but she
+made him own that the stewardesses whom they saw were charmingly like
+serving-maids in the 'Fliegende Blatter'; when they went ashore she
+challenged his silence for some assent to her own conclusion that the
+Colmannia was perfect.
+
+"She has only one fault," he assented.  "She's a ship."
+
+"Yes," said his wife, "and I shall want to look at the Norumbia before I
+decide."
+
+Then he saw that it was only a question which steamer they should take,
+and not whether they should take any.  He explained, at first gently and
+afterwards savagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quite enough
+for him, and that the vessel was not built that he would be willing to
+cross the Atlantic in.
+
+When a man has gone so far as that he has committed himself to the
+opposite course in almost so many words; and March was neither surprised
+nor abashed when he discovered himself, before they reached home,
+offering his wife many reasons why they should go to Europe.  She
+answered to all, No, he had made her realize the horror of it so much
+that she was glad to give it up.  She gave it up, with the best feeling;
+all that she would ask of him was that he should never mention Europe to
+her again.  She could imagine how much he disliked to go, if such a ship
+as the Colmannia did not make him want to go.
+
+At the bottom of his heart he knew that he had not used her very well.
+He had kindled her fancy with those notions of a Sabbatical year and a
+Silver Wedding Journey, and when she was willing to renounce both he had
+persisted in taking her to see the ship, only to tell her afterwards that
+he would not go abroad on any account.  It was by a psychological juggle
+which some men will understand that he allowed himself the next day to
+get the sailings of the Norumbia from the steamship office; he also got
+a plan of the ship showing the most available staterooms, so that they
+might be able to choose between her and the Colmannia from all the facts.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+From this time their decision to go was none the less explicit because so
+perfectly tacit.
+
+They began to amass maps and guides.  She got a Baedeker for Austria and
+he got a Bradshaw for the continent, which was never of the least use
+there, but was for the present a mine of unavailable information.  He got
+a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his German.  He used to read
+German, when he was a boy, with a young enthusiasm for its romantic
+poetry, and now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine, he held
+imaginary conversations with a barber, a bootmaker, and a banker, and
+tried to taste the joy which he had not known in the language of those
+poets for a whole generation.  He perceived, of course, that unless the
+barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him in terms which the
+author of the phrase-book directed them to use, he should not get on with
+them beyond his first question; but he did not allow this to spoil his
+pleasure in it.  In fact, it was with a tender emotion that he realized
+how little the world, which had changed in everything else so greatly,
+had changed in its ideal of a phrase-book.
+
+Mrs. March postponed the study of her Baedeker to the time and place for
+it; and addressed herself to the immediate business of ascertaining the
+respective merits of the Colmannia and Norumbia.  She carried on her
+researches solely among persons of her own sex; its experiences were
+alone of that positive character which brings conviction, and she valued
+them equally at first or second hand.  She heard of ladies who would not
+cross in any boat but the Colmannia, and who waited for months to get a
+room on her; she talked with ladies who said that nothing would induce
+them to cross in her.  There were ladies who said she had twice the
+motion that the Norumbia had, and the vibration from her twin screws was
+frightful; it always was, on those twin-screw boats, and it did not
+affect their testimony with Mrs. March that the Norumbia was a twin-screw
+boat too.  It was repeated to her in the third or fourth degree of hear-
+say that the discipline on the Colmannia was as perfect as that on the
+Cunarders; ladies whose friends had tried every line assured her that the
+table of the Norumbia was almost as good as the table of the French
+boats.  To the best of the belief of lady witnesses still living who had
+friends on board, the Colmannia had once got aground, and the Norumbia
+had once had her bridge carried off by a tidal wave; or it might be the
+Colmannia; they promised to ask and let her know.  Their lightest word
+availed with her against the most solemn assurances of their husbands,
+fathers, or brothers, who might be all very well on land, but in
+navigation were not to be trusted; they would say anything from a
+reckless and culpable optimism.  She obliged March all the same to ask
+among them, but she recognized their guilty insincerity when he came home
+saying that one man had told him you could have played croquet on the
+deck of the Colmannia the whole way over when he crossed, and another
+that he never saw the racks on in three passages he had made in the
+Norumbia.
+
+The weight of evidence was, he thought, in favor of the Norumbia, but
+when they went another Sunday to Hoboken, and saw the ship, Mrs. March
+liked her so much less than the Colmannia that she could hardly wait for
+Monday to come; she felt sure all the good rooms on the Colmannia would
+be gone before they could engage one.
+
+From a consensus of the nerves of all the ladies left in town so late in
+the season, she knew that the only place on any steamer where your room
+ought to be was probably just where they could not get it.  If you went
+too high, you felt the rolling terribly, and people tramping up and down
+on the promenade under your window kept you awake the whole night; if you
+went too low, you felt the engine thump, thump, thump in your head the
+whole way over.  If you went too far forward, you got the pitching; if
+you went aft, on the kitchen side, you got the smell of the cooking.  The
+only place, really, was just back of the dining-saloon on the south side
+of the ship; it was smooth there, and it was quiet, and you had the sun
+in your window all the way over.  He asked her if he must take their room
+there or nowhere, and she answered that he must do his best, but that she
+would not be satisfied with any other place.
+
+In his despair he went down to the steamer office, and took a room which
+one of the clerks said was the best.  When he got home, it appeared from
+reference to the ship's plan that it was the very room his wife had
+wanted from the beginning, and she praised him as if he had used a wisdom
+beyond his sex in getting it.
+
+He was in the enjoyment of his unmerited honor when a belated lady came
+with her husband for an evening call, before going into the country.  At
+sight of the plans of steamers on the Marches' table, she expressed the
+greatest wonder and delight that they were going to Europe.  They had
+supposed everybody knew it, by this time, but she said she had not heard
+a word of it; and she went on with some felicitations which March found
+rather unduly filial.  In getting a little past the prime of life he did
+not like to be used with too great consideration of his years, and he did
+not think that he and his wife were so old that they need be treated as
+if they were going on a golden wedding journey, and heaped with all sorts
+of impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much and being so much
+the better for the little outing!  Under his breath, he confounded this
+lady for her impudence; but he schooled himself to let her rejoice at
+their going on a Hanseatic boat, because the Germans were always so
+careful of you.  She made her husband agree with her, and it came out
+that he had crossed several times on both the Colmannia and the Norumbia.
+He volunteered to say that the Colmannia, was a capital sea-boat; she did
+not have her nose under water all the time; she was steady as a rock; and
+the captain and the kitchen were simply out of sight; some people did
+call her unlucky.
+
+"Unlucky?" Mrs. March echoed, faintly.  "Why do they call her unlucky?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  People will say anything about any boat.  You know
+she broke her shaft, once, and once she got caught in the ice."
+
+Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstition of people, and she
+parted gayly with this over-good young couple.  As soon as they were
+gone, March knew that she would say: "You must change that ticket, my
+dear.  We will go in the Norumbia."
+
+"Suppose I can't get as good a room on the Norumbia?"
+
+"Then we must stay."
+
+In the morning after a night so bad that it was worse than no night at
+all, she said she would go to the steamship office with him and question
+them up about the Colmannia.  The people there had never heard she was
+called an unlucky boat; they knew of nothing disastrous in her history.
+They were so frank and so full in their denials, and so kindly patient of
+Mrs. March's anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying conviction of
+their insincerity to her.  At the end she asked what rooms were left on
+the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to looked through his
+passenger list with a shaking head.  He was afraid there was nothing they
+would like.
+
+"But we would take anything," she entreated, and March smiled to think of
+his innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever dreamed of not
+going.
+
+"We merely want the best," he put in.  "One flight up, no noise or dust,
+with sun in all the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days."
+
+They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do not
+understand, in the foreign steamship offices.  The clerk turned
+unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in German
+which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part of a
+conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker.  A brief drama
+followed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the
+Norumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it if
+they decided to take it at once.
+
+They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the Colmannia;
+it was within one of being the same number.  It was so providential, if
+it was providential at all, that they were both humbly silent a moment;
+even Mrs. March was silent.  In this supreme moment she would not prompt
+her husband by a word, a glance, and it was from his own free will that
+he said, "We will take it."
+
+He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one's will is never free;
+and this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all the
+events before it.  No event that followed affected it, though the day
+after they had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had
+once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August.  He felt
+obliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved
+nothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason
+than by all her previous unreason.  Reason is what a man is never
+prepared for in women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+During nearly the whole month that now passed before the date of sailing
+it seemed to March that in some familiar aspects New York had never been
+so interesting.  He had not easily reconciled himself to the place after
+his many years of Boston; but he had got used to the ugly grandeur, to
+the noise and the rush, and he had divined more and more the careless
+good-nature and friendly indifference of the vast, sprawling, ungainly
+metropolis.  There were happy moments when he felt a poetry unintentional
+and unconscious in it, and he thought there was no point more favorable
+for the sense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they had a flat.
+Their windows looked down into its tree-tops, and across them to the
+truncated towers of St. George's, and to the plain red-brick, white-
+trimmed front of the Friends' Meeting House; he came and went between his
+dwelling and his office through the two places that form the square, and
+after dinner his wife and he had a habit of finding seats by one of the
+fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathers and mothers of the
+hybrid East Side children swarming there at play.  The elders read their
+English or Italian or German or Yiddish journals, or gossiped, or merely
+sat still and stared away the day's fatigue; while the little ones raced
+in and out among them, crying and laughing, quarrelling and kissing.
+Sometimes a mother darted forward and caught her child from the brink of
+the basin; another taught hers to walk, holding it tightly up behind by
+its short skirts; another publicly nursed her baby to sleep.
+
+While they still dreamed, but never thought, of going to Europe, the
+Marches often said how European all this was; if these women had brought
+their knitting or sewing it would have been quite European; but as soon
+as they had decided to go, it all began to seem poignantly American.  In
+like manner, before the conditions of their exile changed, and they still
+pined for the Old World, they contrived a very agreeable illusion of it
+by dining now and then at an Austrian restaurant in Union Square; but
+later when they began to be homesick for the American scenes they had not
+yet left, they had a keener retrospective joy in the strictly New York
+sunset they were bowed out into.
+
+The sunsets were uncommonly characteristic that May in Union Square.
+They were the color of the red stripes in the American flag, and when
+they were seen through the delirious architecture of the Broadway side,
+or down the perspective of the cross-streets, where the elevated trains
+silhouetted themselves against their pink, they imparted a feeling of
+pervasive Americanism in which all impression of alien savors and
+civilities was lost.  One evening a fire flamed up in Hoboken, and burned
+for hours against the west, in the lurid crimson tones of a conflagration
+as memorably and appealingly native as the colors of the sunset.
+
+The weather for nearly the whole month was of a mood familiar enough in
+our early summer, and it was this which gave the sunsets their vitreous
+pink.  A thrilling coolness followed a first blaze of heat, and in the
+long respite the thoughts almost went back to winter flannels.  But at
+last a hot wave was telegraphed from the West, and the week before the
+Norumbia sailed was an anguish of burning days and breathless nights,
+which fused all regrets and reluctances in the hope of escape, and made
+the exiles of two continents long for the sea, with no care for either
+shore.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at dawn because they had
+scarcely lain down, and March crept out into the square for a last breath
+of its morning air before breakfast.  He was now eager to be gone; he had
+broken with habit, and he wished to put all traces of the past out of
+sight.  But this was curiously like all other early mornings in his
+consciousness, and he could not alienate himself from the wonted
+environment.  He stood talking on every-day terms of idle speculation
+with the familiar policeman, about a stray parrot in the top of one of
+the trees, where it screamed and clawed at the dead branch to which it
+clung.  Then he went carelessly indoors again as if he were secure of
+reading the reporter's story of it in that next day's paper which he
+should not see.
+
+The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted through the breakfast,
+which was like other breakfasts in the place they would be leaving in
+summer shrouds just as they always left it at the end of June.  The
+illusion was even heightened by the fact that their son was to be in the
+apartment all summer, and it would not be so much shut up as usual.  The
+heavy trunks had been sent to the ship by express the afternoon before,
+and they had only themselves and their stateroom baggage to transport to
+Hoboken; they came down to a carriage sent from a neighboring livery-
+stable, and exchanged good-mornings with a driver they knew by name.
+
+March had often fancied it a chief advantage of living in New York that
+you could drive to the steamer and start for Europe as if you were
+starting for Albany; he was in the enjoyment of this advantage now, but
+somehow it was not the consolation he had expected.  He knew, of course,
+that if they had been coming from Boston, for instance, to sail in the
+Norumbia, they would probably have gone on board the night before, and
+sweltered through its heat among the strange smells and noises of the
+dock and wharf, instead of breakfasting at their own table, and smoothly
+bowling down the asphalt on to the ferryboat, and so to the very foot of
+the gangway at the ship's side, all in the cool of the early morning.
+But though he had now the cool of the early morning on these conditions,
+there was by no means enough of it.
+
+The sun was already burning the life out of the air, with the threat of
+another day of the terrible heat that had prevailed for a week past; and
+that last breakfast at home had not been gay, though it had been lively,
+in a fashion, through Mrs. March's efforts to convince her son that she
+did not want him to come and see them off.  Of, her daughter's coming all
+the way from Chicago there was no question, and she reasoned that if he
+did not come to say good-by on board it would be the same as if they were
+not going.
+
+"Don't you want to go?" March asked with an obscure resentment.
+
+"I don't want to seem to go," she said, with the calm of those who have
+logic on their side.
+
+As she drove away with her husband she was not so sure of her
+satisfaction in the feint she had arranged, though when she saw the
+ghastly partings of people on board, she was glad she had not allowed her
+son to come.  She kept saying this to herself, and when they climbed to
+the ship from the wharf, and found themselves in the crowd that choked
+the saloons and promenades and passages and stairways and landings, she
+said it more than once to her husband.
+
+She heard weary elders pattering empty politenesses of farewell with
+friends who had come to see them off, as they stood withdrawn in such
+refuges as the ship's architecture afforded, or submitted to be pushed
+and twirled about by the surging throng when they got in its way.  She
+pitied these in their affliction, which she perceived that they could not
+lighten or shorten, but she had no patience with the young girls, who
+broke into shrieks of nervous laughter at the coming of certain young
+men, and kept laughing and beckoning till they made the young men see
+them; and then stretched their hands to them and stood screaming and
+shouting to them across the intervening heads and shoulders.  Some girls,
+of those whom no one had come to bid good-by, made themselves merry,
+or at least noisy, by rushing off to the dining-room and looking at the
+cards on the bouquets heaping the tables, to find whether any one had
+sent them flowers.  Others whom young men had brought bunches of violets
+hid their noses in them, and dropped their fans and handkerchiefs and
+card-cases, and thanked the young men for picking them up.  Others, had
+got places in the music-room, and sat there with open boxes of long-
+stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up into the faces of the men,
+with becoming lifts and slants of their eyes and chins.  In the midst of
+the turmoil children struggled against people's feet and knees, and
+bewildered mothers flew at the ship's officers and battered them with
+questions alien to their respective functions as they amiably stifled
+about in their thick uniforms.
+
+Sailors, slung over the ship's side on swinging seats, were placidly
+smearing it with paint at that last moment; the bulwarks were thickly set
+with the heads and arms of passengers who were making signs to friends on
+shore, or calling messages to them that lost themselves in louder noises
+midway.  Some of the women in the steerage were crying; they were
+probably not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin
+passengers, or even for their health; on the wharf below March saw the
+face of one young girl twisted with weeping, and he wished he had not
+seen it.  He turned from it, and looked into the eyes of his son, who was
+laughing at his shoulder.  He said that he had to come down with a good-
+by letter from his sister, which he made an excuse for following them;
+but he had always meant to see them off, he owned.  The letter had just
+come with a special delivery stamp, and it warned them that she had sent
+another good-by letter with some flowers on board.  Mrs. March scolded at
+them both, but with tears in her eyes, and in the renewed stress of
+parting which he thought he had put from him, March went on taking note,
+as with alien senses, of the scene before him, while they all talked on
+together, and repeated the nothings they had said already.
+
+A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branching sheds where
+some freight steamers of the line lay, and seemed to mingle chemically
+with the noise which came up from the wharf next to the Norumbia.  The
+mass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into the shadow of the roofs,
+and along their front came files of carriages and trucks and carts, and
+discharged the arriving passengers and their baggage, and were lost in
+the crowd, which they penetrated like slow currents, becoming clogged and
+arrested from time to time, and then beginning to move again.
+
+The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-draped galleries
+leading, fore and aft, into the ship.  Bareheaded, blue-jacketed, brass-
+buttoned stewards dodged skillfully in and out among them with their
+hand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks, and ran before
+them into the different depths and heights where they hid these burdens,
+and then ran back for more.  Some of the passengers followed them and
+made sure that their things were put in the right places; most of them
+remained wedged among the earlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in and out
+of the doors of the promenades.
+
+The baggage for the hold continually rose in huge blocks from the wharf,
+with a loud clucking of the tackle, and sank into the open maw of the
+ship, momently gathering herself for her long race seaward, with harsh
+hissings and rattlings and gurglings.  There was no apparent reason why
+it should all or any of it end, but there came a moment when there began
+to be warnings that were almost threats of the end.  The ship's whistle
+sounded, as if marking a certain interval; and Mrs. March humbly
+entreated, sternly commanded, her son to go ashore, or else be carried to
+Europe.  They disputed whether that was the last signal or not; she was
+sure it was, and she appealed to March, who was moved against his reason.
+He affected to talk calmly with his son, and gave him some last charges
+about 'Every Other Week'.
+
+Some people now interrupted their leave-taking; but the arriving
+passengers only arrived more rapidly at the gang-ways; the bulks of
+baggage swung more swiftly into the air.  A bell rang, and there rose
+women's cries, "Oh, that is the shore-bell!" and men's protests, "It is
+only the first bell!  "More and more began to descend the gangways, fore
+and aft, and soon outnumbered those who were coming aboard.
+
+March tried not to be nervous about his son's lingering; he was ashamed
+of his anxiety; but he said in a low voice, "Better be off, Tom."
+
+His mother now said she did not care if Tom were really carried to
+Europe; and at last he said, Well, he guessed he must go ashore, as if
+there had been no question of that before; and then she clung to him and
+would not let him go; but she acquired merit with herself at last by
+pushing him into the gangway with her own hands: he nodded and waved his
+hat from its foot, and mixed with the crowd.
+
+Presently there was hardly any one coming aboard, and the sailors began
+to undo the lashings of the gangways from the ship's side; files of men
+on the wharf laid hold of their rails; the stewards guarding their
+approach looked up for the signal to come aboard; and in vivid pantomime
+forbade some belated leavetakers to ascend.  These stood aside,
+exchanging bows and grins with the friends whom they could not reach;
+they all tried to make one another hear some last words.  The moment came
+when the saloon gangway was detached; then it was pulled ashore, and the
+section of the bulwarks opening to it was locked, not to be unlocked on
+this side of the world.  An indefinable impulse communicated itself to
+the steamer: while it still seemed motionless it moved.  The thick spread
+of faces on the wharf, which had looked at times like some sort of
+strange flowers in a level field, broke into a universal tremor, and the
+air above them was filled with hats and handkerchiefs, as if with the
+flight of birds rising from the field.
+
+The Marches tried to make out their son's face; they believed that they
+did; but they decided that they had not seen him, and his mother said
+that she was glad; it would only have made it harder to bear, though she
+was glad he had come over to say good-by it had seemed so unnatural that
+he should not, when everybody else was saying good-by.
+
+On the wharf color was now taking the place of form; the scene ceased to
+have the effect of an instantaneous photograph; it was like an
+impressionistic study.  As the ship swung free of the shed and got into
+the stream, the shore lost reality.  Up to a certain moment, all was
+still New York, all was even Hoboken; then amidst the grotesque and
+monstrous shows of the architecture on either shore March felt himself at
+sea and on the way to Europe.
+
+The fact was accented by the trouble people were already making with the
+deck-steward about their steamer chairs, which they all wanted put in the
+best places, and March, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarily
+verifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his native shores,
+while still in full sight of them, when he suddenly reverted to them, and
+as it were landed on them again in an incident that held him breathless.
+A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad, came flying
+down the promenade from the steerage.  "Capitan!  Capitan!  There is a
+woman!" he shouted in nondescript English.  "She must go hout! She must
+go hout!"  Some vital fact imparted itself to the ship's command and
+seemed to penetrate to the ship's heart; she stopped, as if with a sort
+of majestic relenting.  A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder to
+it; the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby in her arms, sprawled
+safely down its rungs to the deck of the tug, and the steamer moved
+seaward again.
+
+"What is it?  Oh, what is it?" his wife demanded of March's share of
+their common ignorance.  A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested
+by the tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left
+three little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid
+some friends on board good-by.
+
+He passed on, and Mrs. March said, "What a charming face he had!" even
+before she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwrought
+sympathy which makes good women desire the punishment of people who have
+escaped danger.  She would not hear any excuse for her.  "Her children
+oughtn't to have been out of her mind for an instant."
+
+"Don't you want to send back a line to ours by the pilot?" March asked.
+
+She started from him.  "Oh, was I really beginning to forget them?"
+
+In the saloon where people were scattered about writing pilot's letters
+she made him join her in an impassioned epistle of farewell, which once
+more left none of the nothings unsaid that they had many times
+reiterated.  She would not let him put the stamp on, for fear it would
+not stick, and she had an agonizing moment of doubt whether it ought not
+to be a German stamp; she was not pacified till the steward in charge of
+the mail decided.
+
+"I shouldn't have forgiven myself," March said, "if we hadn't let Tom
+know that twenty minutes after he left us we were still alive and well."
+
+"It's to Bella, too," she reasoned.
+
+He found her making their state-room look homelike with their familiar
+things when he came with their daughter's steamer letter and the flowers
+and fruit she had sent.  She said, Very well, they would all keep, and
+went on with her unpacking.  He asked her if she did not think these home
+things made it rather ghastly, and she said if he kept on in that way she
+should certainly go back on the pilot-boat.  He perceived that her nerves
+were spent.  He had resisted the impulse to an ill-timed joke about the
+life-preservers under their berths when the sound of the breakfast-horn,
+wavering first in the distance, found its way nearer and clearer down
+their corridor.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+In one of the many visits to the steamship office which his wife's
+anxieties obliged him to make, March had discussed the question of seats
+in the dining-saloon.  At first he had his ambition for the captain's
+table, but they convinced him more easily than he afterwards convinced
+Mrs. March that the captain's table had become a superstition of the
+past, and conferred no special honor.  It proved in the event that the
+captain of the Norumbia had the good feeling to dine in a lower saloon
+among the passengers who paid least for their rooms.  But while the
+Marches were still in their ignorance of this, they decided to get what
+adventure they could out of letting the head steward put them where he
+liked, and they came in to breakfast with a careless curiosity to see
+what he had done for them.
+
+There seemed scarcely a vacant place in the huge saloon; through the oval
+openings in the centre they looked down into the lower saloon and up into
+the music-room, as thickly thronged with breakfasters.  The tables were
+brightened with the bouquets and the floral designs of ships, anchors,
+harps, and doves sent to the lady passengers, and at one time the Marches
+thought they were going to be put before a steam-yacht realized to the
+last detail in blue and white violets.  The ports of the saloon were
+open, and showed the level sea; the ship rode with no motion except the
+tremor from her screws.  The sound of talking and laughing rose with the
+clatter of knives and forks and the clash of crockery; the homely smell
+of the coffee and steak and fish mixed with the spice of the roses and
+carnations; the stewards ran hither and thither, and a young foolish joy
+of travel welled up in the elderly hearts of the pair.  When the head
+steward turned out the swivel-chairs where they were to sit they both
+made an inclination toward the people already at table, as if it had been
+a company at some far-forgotten table d'hote in the later sixties.  The
+head steward seemed to understand as well as speak English, but the
+table-stewards had only an effect of English, which they eked out with
+"Bleace!" for all occasions of inquiry, apology, or reassurance, as the
+equivalent of their native "Bitte!"  Otherwise there was no reason to
+suppose that they did not speak German, which was the language of a good
+half of the passengers.  The stewards looked English, however, in
+conformity to what seems the ideal of every kind of foreign seafaring
+people, and that went a good way toward making them intelligible.
+
+March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance, made it so tentative
+that if it should meet no response he could feel that it had been nothing
+more than a forward stoop, such as was natural in sitting down.  He need
+not really have taken this precaution; those whose eyes he caught more or
+less nodded in return.
+
+A nice-looking boy of thirteen or fourteen, who had the place on the left
+of the lady in the sofa seat under the port, bowed with almost
+magisterial gravity, and made the lady on the sofa smile, as if she were
+his mother and understood him.  March decided that she had been some time
+a widow; and he easily divined that the young couple on her right had
+been so little time husband and wife that they would rather not have it
+known.  Next them was a young lady whom he did not at first think so
+good-looking as she proved later to be, though she had at once a pretty
+nose, with a slight upward slant at the point, long eyes under fallen
+lashes, a straight forehead, not too high, and a mouth which perhaps the
+exigencies of breakfasting did not allow all its characteristic charm.
+She had what Mrs. March thought interesting hair, of a dull black,
+roughly rolled away from her forehead and temples in a fashion not
+particularly becoming to her, and she had the air of not looking so well
+as she might if she had chosen.  The elderly man on her right, it was
+easy to see, was her father; they had a family likeness, though his fair
+hair, now ashen with age, was so different from hers.  He wore his beard
+cut in the fashion of the Second Empire, with a Louis Napoleonic
+mustache, imperial, and chin tuft; his neat head was cropt close; and
+there was something Gallic in its effect and something remotely military:
+he had blue eyes, really less severe than he meant, though be frowned a
+good deal, and managed them with glances of a staccato quickness, as if
+challenging a potential disagreement with his opinions.
+
+The gentleman on his right, who sat at the head of the table, was of the
+humorous, subironical American expression, and a smile at the corner of
+his kindly mouth, under an iron-gray full beard cut short, at once
+questioned and tolerated the new-comers as he glanced at them.  He
+responded to March's bow almost as decidedly as the nice boy, whose
+mother he confronted at the other end of the table, and with his comely
+bulk formed an interesting contrast to her vivid slightness.  She was
+brilliantly dark, behind the gleam of the gold-rimmed glasses perched on
+her pretty nose.
+
+If the talk had been general before the Marches came, it did not at once
+renew itself in that form.  Nothing was said while they were having their
+first struggle with the table-stewards, who repeated the order as if to
+show how fully they had misunderstood it.  The gentleman at the head of
+the table intervened at last, and then, "I'm obliged to you," March said,
+for your German.  I left mine in a phrase-book in my other coat pocket."
+
+"Oh, I wasn't speaking German," said the other.  It was merely their kind
+of English."
+
+The company were in the excitement of a novel situation which disposes
+people to acquaintance, and this exchange of small pleasantries made
+every one laugh, except the father and daughter; but they had the effect
+of being tacitly amused.
+
+The mother of the nice boy said to Mrs. March, "You may not get what you
+ordered, but it will be good."
+
+"Even if you don't know what it is!"  said the young bride, and then
+blushed, as if she had been too bold.
+
+Mrs. March liked the blush and the young bride for it, and she asked,
+"Have you ever been on one of these German boats before? They seem very
+comfortable."
+
+"Oh, dear, no! we've never been on any boat before."  She made a little
+petted mouth of deprecation, and added, simple-heartedly, "My husband was
+going out on business, and he thought he might as well take me along."
+
+The husband seemed to feel himself brought in by this, and said he did
+not see why they should not make it a pleasure-trip, too.  They put
+themselves in a position to be patronized by their deference, and in the
+pauses of his talk with the gentleman at the head of the table, March
+heard his wife abusing their inexperience to be unsparingly instructive
+about European travel.  He wondered whether she would be afraid to own
+that it was nearly thirty years since she had crossed the ocean; though
+that might seem recent to people who had never crossed at all.
+
+They listened with respect as she boasted in what an anguish of wisdom
+she had decided between the Colmannia and the Norumbia.  The wife said
+she did not know there was such a difference in steamers, but when Mrs.
+March perfervidly assured her that there was all the difference in the
+world, she submitted and said she supposed she ought to be thankful that
+they, had hit upon the right one.  They had telegraphed for berths and
+taken what was given them; their room seemed to be very nice.
+
+"Oh," said Mrs. March, and her husband knew that she was saying it to
+reconcile them to the inevitable, "all the rooms on the Norumbia are
+nice.  The only difference is that if they are on the south side you have
+the sun."
+
+"I'm not sure which is the south side," said the bride.  "We seem to have
+been going west ever since we started, and I feel as if we should reach
+home in the morning if we had a good night.  Is the ocean always so
+smooth as this?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no!" said Mrs. March.  "It's never so smooth as this," and she
+began to be outrageously authoritative about the ocean weather.  She
+ended by declaring that the June passages were always good, and that if
+the ship kept a southerly course they would have no fogs and no icebergs.
+She looked round, and caught her husband's eye.  "What is it?  Have I
+been bragging?  Well, you understand," she added to the bride, "I've only
+been over once, a great while ago, and I don't really know anything about
+it," and they laughed together.  "But I talked so much with people after
+we decided to go, that I feel as if I had been a hundred times."
+
+"I know," said the other lady, with caressing intelligence.  "That is
+just the way with--" She stopped, and looked at the young man whom the
+head steward was bringing up to take the vacant place next to March.  He
+came forward, stuffing his cap into the pocket of his blue serge sack,
+and smiled down on the company with such happiness in his gay eyes that
+March wondered what chance at this late day could have given any human
+creature his content so absolute, and what calamity could be lurking
+round the corner to take it out of him.  The new-comer looked at March as
+if he knew him, and March saw at a second glance that he was the young
+fellow who had told him about the mother put off after the start.  He
+asked him whether there was any change in the weather yet outside, and he
+answered eagerly, as if the chance to put his happiness into the mere
+sound of words were a favor done him, that their ship had just spoken one
+of the big Hanseatic mailboats, and she had signalled back that she had
+met ice; so that they would probably keep a southerly course, and not
+have it cooler till they were off the Banks.
+
+The mother of the boy said, "I thought we must be off the Banks when I
+came out of my room, but it was only the electric fan at the foot of the
+stairs."
+
+"That was what I thought," said Mrs. March.  "I almost sent my husband
+back for my shawl!"  Both the ladies laughed and liked each other for
+their common experience.
+
+The gentleman at the head of the table said, "They ought to have fans
+going there by that pillar, or else close the ports.  They only let in
+heat."
+
+They easily conformed to the American convention of jocosity in their
+talk; it perhaps no more represents the individual mood than the
+convention of dulness among other people; but it seemed to make the young
+man feel at home.
+
+"Why, do you think it's uncomfortably warm?," he asked, from what March
+perceived to be a meteorology of his own.  He laughed and added, "It is
+pretty summerlike," as if he had not thought of it before.  He talked of
+the big mail-boat, and said he would like to cross on such a boat as
+that, and then he glanced at the possible advantage of having your own
+steam-yacht like the one which he said they had just passed, so near that
+you could see what a good time the people were having on board.  He began
+to speak to the Marches; his talk spread to the young couple across the
+table; it visited the mother on the sofa in a remark which she might
+ignore without apparent rejection, and without really avoiding the boy,
+it glanced off toward the father and daughter, from whom it fell, to rest
+with the gentleman at the head of the table.
+
+It was not that the father and daughter had slighted his overture, if it
+was so much as that, but that they were tacitly preoccupied, or were of
+some philosophy concerning their fellow-breakfasters which did not suffer
+them, for the present, at least, to share in the common friendliness.
+This is an attitude sometimes produced in people by a sense of just, or
+even unjust, superiority; sometimes by serious trouble; sometimes by
+transient annoyance.  The cause was not so deep-seated but Mrs. March,
+before she rose from her place, believed that she had detected a slant of
+the young lady's eyes, from under her lashes, toward the young man; and
+she leaped to a conclusion concerning them in a matter where all logical
+steps are impertinent.  She did not announce her arrival at this point
+till the young man had overtaken her before she got out of the saloon,
+and presented the handkerchief she had dropped under the table.
+
+He went away with her thanks, and then she said to her husband, "Well,
+he's perfectly charming, and I don't wonder she's taken with him; that
+kind of cold girl would be, though I'm not sure that she is cold.  She's
+interesting, and you could see that he thought so, the more he looked at
+her; I could see him looking at her from the very first instant; he
+couldn't keep his eyes off her; she piqued his curiosity, and made him
+wonder about her."
+
+"Now, look here, Isabel!  This won't do.  I can stand a good deal, but I
+sat between you and that young fellow, and you couldn't tell whether he
+was looking at that girl or not."
+
+"I could!  I could tell by the expression of her face."
+
+"Oh, well!  If it's gone as far as that with you, I give it up.  When are
+you going to have them married?"
+
+"Nonsense! I want you to find out who all those people are.  How are you
+going to do it?"
+
+"Perhaps the passenger list will say," he suggested.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The list did not say of itself, but with the help of the head steward's
+diagram it said that the gentleman at the head of the table was Mr. R.
+M. Kenby; the father and the daughter were Mr. E. B. Triscoe and Miss
+Triscoe; the bridal pair were Mr. and Mrs. Leffers; the mother and her
+son were Mrs. Adding and Mr. Roswell Adding; the young man who came in
+last was Mr. L. J. Burnamy.  March carried the list, with these names
+carefully checked and rearranged on a neat plan of the table, to his wife
+in her steamer chair, and left her to make out the history and the
+character of the people from it.  In this sort of conjecture long
+experience had taught him his futility, and he strolled up and down and
+looked at the life about him with no wish to penetrate it deeply.
+
+Long Island was now a low yellow line on the left.  Some fishing-boats
+flickered off the shore; they met a few sail, and left more behind; but
+already, and so near one of the greatest ports of the world, the spacious
+solitude of the ocean was beginning.  There was no swell; the sea lay
+quite flat, with a fine mesh of wrinkles on its surface, and the sun
+flamed down upon it from a sky without a cloud.  With the light fair
+wind, there was no resistance in the sultry air, the thin, dun smoke from
+the smoke-stack fell about the decks like a stifling veil.
+
+The promenades, were as uncomfortably crowded as the sidewalk of
+Fourteenth Street on a summer's day, and showed much the social average
+of a New York shopping thoroughfare.  Distinction is something that does
+not always reveal itself at first sight on land, and at sea it is still
+more retrusive.  A certain democracy of looks and clothes was the most
+notable thing to March in the apathetic groups and detached figures.  His
+criticism disabled the saloon passengers of even so much personal appeal
+as he imagined in some of the second-cabin passengers whom he saw across
+their barrier; they had at least the pathos of their exclusion, and he
+could wonder if they felt it or envied him.  At Hoboken he had seen
+certain people coming on board who looked like swells; but they had now
+either retired from the crowd, or they had already conformed to the
+prevailing type.  It was very well as a type; he was of it himself; but
+he wished that beauty as well as distinction had not been so lost in it.
+
+In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhere as he once did.  It
+might be that he saw life more truly than when he was young, and that his
+glasses were better than his eyes had been; but there were analogies that
+forbade his thinking so, and he sometimes had his misgivings that the
+trouble was with his glasses.  He made what he could of a pretty girl who
+had the air of not meaning to lose a moment from flirtation, and was
+luring her fellow-passengers from under her sailor hat.  She had already
+attached one of them; and she was hooking out for more.  She kept moving
+herself from the waist up, as if she worked there on a pivot, showing now
+this side and now that side of her face, and visiting the admirer she had
+secured with a smile as from the lamp of a revolving light as she turned.
+
+While he was dwelling upon this folly, with a sense of impersonal
+pleasure in it as complete through his years as if he were already a
+disembodied spirit, the pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and he
+joined the general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expectation of
+seeing another distracted mother put off; but it was only the pilot
+leaving the ship.  He was climbing down the ladder which hung over the
+boat, rising and sinking on the sea below, while the two men in her held
+her from the ship's side with their oars; in the offing lay the white
+steam-yacht which now replaces the picturesque pilot-sloop of other
+times.  The Norumbia's screws turned again under half a head of steam;
+the pilot dropped from the last rung of the ladder into the boat, and
+caught the bundle of letters tossed after him.  Then his men let go the
+line that was towing their craft, and the incident of the steamer's
+departure was finally closed.  It had been dramatically heightened
+perhaps by her final impatience to be off at some added risks to the
+pilot and his men, but not painfully so, and March smiled to think how
+men whose lives are all of dangerous chances seem always to take as many
+of them as they can.
+
+He heard a girl's fresh voice saying at his shoulder, "Well, now we are
+off; and I suppose you're glad, papa!"
+
+"I'm glad we're not taking the pilot on, at least," answered the elderly
+man whom the girl had spoken to; and March turned to see the father and
+daughter whose reticence at the breakfast table had interested him.  He
+wondered that he had left her out of the account in estimating the beauty
+of the ship's passengers: he saw now that she was not only extremely
+pretty, but as she moved away she was very graceful; she even had
+distinction.  He had fancied a tone of tolerance, and at the same time of
+reproach in her voice, when she spoke, and a tone of defiance and not
+very successful denial in her father's; and he went back with these
+impressions to his wife, whom he thought he ought to tell why the ship
+had stopped.
+
+She had not noticed the ship's stopping, in her study of the passenger
+list, and she did not care for the pilot's leaving; but she seemed to
+think his having overheard those words of the father and daughter an
+event of prime importance.  With a woman's willingness to adapt the means
+to the end she suggested that he should follow them up and try to
+overhear something more; she only partially realized the infamy of her
+suggestion when he laughed in scornful refusal.
+
+"Of course I don't want you to eavesdrop, but I do want you to find out
+about them.  And about Mr. Burnamy, too.  I can wait, about the others,
+or manage for myself, but these are driving me to distraction.  Now, will
+you?"
+
+He said he would do anything he could with honor, and at one of the
+earliest turns he made on the other side of the ship he was smilingly
+halted by Mr. Burnamy, who asked to be excused, and then asked if he were
+not Mr. March of 'Every Other Week'; he had seen the name on the
+passenger list, and felt sure it must be the editor's.  He seemed so
+trustfully to expect March to remember his own name as that of a writer
+from whom he had accepted a short poem, yet unprinted, that the editor
+feigned to do so until he really did dimly recall it.  He even recalled
+the short poem, and some civil words he said about it caused Burnamy to
+overrun in confidences that at once touched and amused him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Burnamy, it seemed, had taken passage on the Norumbia because he found,
+when he arrived in New York the day before, that she was the first boat
+out.  His train was so much behind time that when he reached the office
+of the Hanseatic League it was nominally shut, but he pushed in by
+sufferance of the janitor, and found a berth, which had just been given
+up, in one of the saloon-deck rooms.  It was that or nothing; and he felt
+rich enough to pay for it himself if the Bird of Prey, who had cabled him
+to come out to Carlsbad as his secretary, would not stand the difference
+between the price and that of the lower-deck six-in-a-room berth which he
+would have taken if he had been allowed a choice.
+
+With the three hundred dollars he had got for his book, less the price of
+his passage, changed into German bank-notes and gold pieces, and safely
+buttoned in the breast pocket of his waistcoat, he felt as safe from
+pillage as from poverty when he came out from buying his ticket; he
+covertly pressed his arm against his breast from time to time, for the
+joy of feeling his money there and not from any fear of finding it gone.
+He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance; he could not believe it was he,
+as he rode up the lonely length of Broadway in the cable-car, between the
+wild, irregular walls of the canyon which the cable-cars have all to
+themselves at the end of a summer afternoon.
+
+He went and dined, and he thought he dined well, at a Spanish-American
+restaurant, for fifty cents, with a half-bottle of California claret
+included.  When he came back to Broadway he was aware that it was
+stiflingly hot in the pinkish twilight, but he took a cable-car again in
+lack of other pastime, and the motion served the purpose of a breeze,
+which he made the most of by keeping his hat off.  It did not really
+matter to him whether it was hot or cool; he was imparadised in weather
+which had nothing to do with the temperature.  Partly because he was born
+to such weather, in the gayety of soul which amused some people with him,
+and partly because the world was behaving as he had always expected, he
+was opulently content with the present moment.  But he thought very
+tolerantly of the future, and he confirmed himself in the decision he had
+already made, to stick to Chicago when he came back to America.  New York
+was very well, and he had no sentiment about Chicago; but he had got a
+foothold there; he had done better with an Eastern publisher, he
+believed, by hailing from the West, and he did not believe it would hurt
+him with the Eastern public to keep on hailing from the West.
+
+He was glad of a chance to see Europe, but he did not mean to come home
+so dazzled as to see nothing else against the American sky.  He fancied,
+for he really knew nothing, that it was the light of Europe, not its
+glare that he wanted, and he wanted it chiefly on his material, so as to
+see it more and more objectively.  It was his power of detachment from
+this that had enabled him to do his sketches in the paper with such charm
+as to lure a cash proposition from a publisher when he put them together
+for a book, but he believed that his business faculty had much to do with
+his success; and he was as proud of that as of the book itself.  Perhaps
+he was not so very proud of the book; he was at least not vain of it; he
+could, detach himself from his art as well as his material.
+
+Like all literary temperaments he was of a certain hardness, in spite of
+the susceptibilities that could be used to give coloring to his work.
+He knew this well enough, but he believed that there were depths of
+unprofessional tenderness in his nature.  He was good to his mother, and
+he sent her money, and wrote to her in the little Indiana town where he
+had left her when he came to Chicago.  After he got that invitation from
+the Bird of Prey, he explored his heart for some affection that he had
+not felt for him before, and he found a wish that his employer should not
+know it was he who had invented that nickname for him.  He promptly
+avowed this in the newspaper office which formed one of the eyries of the
+Bird of Prey, and made the fellows promise not to give him away.  He
+failed to move their imagination when he brought up as a reason for
+softening toward him that he was from Burnamy's own part of Indiana, and
+was a benefactor of Tippecanoe University, from which Burnamy was
+graduated.  But they, relished the cynicism of his attempt; and they were
+glad of his good luck, which he was getting square and not rhomboid, as
+most people seem to get their luck.  They liked him, and some of them
+liked him for his clean young life as well as for his cleverness.  His
+life was known to be as clean as a girl's, and he looked like a girl with
+his sweet eyes, though he had rather more chin than most girls.
+
+The conductor came to reverse his seat, and Burnamy told him he guessed
+he would ride back with him as far as the cars to the Hoboken Ferry, if
+the conductor would put him off at the right place.  It was nearly nine
+o'clock, and he thought he might as well be going over to the ship, where
+he had decided to pass the night.  After he found her, and went on board,
+he was glad he had not gone sooner.  A queasy odor of drainage stole up
+from the waters of the dock, and mixed with the rank, gross sweetness of
+the bags of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers; there was a coming
+and going of carts and trucks on the wharf, and on the ship a rattling of
+chains and a clucking of pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and then sudden
+silences of trampling sea-boots.  Burnamy looked into the dining-saloon
+and the music-room, with the notion of trying for some naps there; then
+he went to his state-room.  His room-mate, whoever he was to be, had not
+come; and he kicked off his shoes and threw off his coat and tumbled into
+his berth.
+
+He meant to rest awhile, and then get up and spend the night in receiving
+impressions.  He could not think of any one who had done the facts of the
+eve of sailing on an Atlantic liner.  He thought he would use the
+material first in a letter to the paper and afterwards in a poem; but he
+found himself unable to grasp the notion of its essential relation to the
+choice between chicken croquettes and sweetbreads as entrees of the
+restaurant dinner where he had been offered neither; he knew that he had
+begun to dream, and that he must get up.  He was just going to get up,
+when he woke to a sense of freshness in the air, penetrating from the new
+day outside.  He looked at his watch and found it was quarter past six;
+he glanced round the state-room and saw that he had passed the night
+alone in it.  Then he splashed himself hastily at the basin next his
+berth, and jumped into his clothes, and went on deck, anxious to lose no
+feature or emotion of the ship's departure.
+
+When she was fairly off he returned to his room to change the thick coat
+he had put on at the instigation of the early morning air.  His room-mate
+was still absent, but he was now represented by his state-room baggage,
+and Burnamy tried to infer him from it.  He perceived a social quality in
+his dress-coat case, capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, and
+sole-leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to his own
+equipment.  The things were not so new as his; they had an effect of
+polite experience, with a foreign registry and customs label on them here
+and there.  They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge, and
+Burnamy would have said that they were certainly English things, if it
+had not been for the initials U. S. A.  which followed the name of E. B.
+Triscoe on the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the foot of
+the lower berth.
+
+The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through the default of the
+passenger whose ticket he had got at the last hour; the clerk in the
+steamer office had been careful to impress him with this advantage, and
+he now imagined a trespass on his property.  But he reassured himself by
+a glance at his ticket, and went out to watch the ship's passage down the
+stream and through the Narrows.  After breakfast he came to his room
+again, to see what could be done from his valise to make him look better
+in the eyes of a girl whom he had seen across the table; of course he
+professed a much more general purpose.  He blamed himself for not having
+got at least a pair of the white tennis-shoes which so many of the
+passengers were wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet;
+but there was a, pair of enamelled leather boots in his bag which he
+thought might do.
+
+His room was in the group of cabins on the upper deck; he had already
+missed his way to it once by mistaking the corridor which it opened into;
+and he was not sure that he was not blundering again when he peered down
+the narrow passage where he supposed it was.  A lady was standing at an
+open state-room door, resting her hands against the jambs and leaning
+forward with her head within and talking to some one there.  Before he
+could draw back and try another corridor he heard her say: "Perhaps he's
+some young man, and wouldn't care.
+
+Burnamy could not make out the answer that came from within.  The lady
+spoke again in a tone of reluctant assent, "No, I don't suppose you
+could; but if he understood, perhaps he would offer."
+
+She drew her head out of the room, stepping back a pace, and lingering a
+moment at the threshold.  She looked round over her shoulder and
+discovered Burnamy, where he stood hesitating at the head of the passage.
+She ebbed before him, and then flowed round him in her instant escape;
+with some murmured incoherencies about speaking to her father, she
+vanished in a corridor on the other side of the ship, while he stood
+staring into the doorway of his room.
+
+He had seen that she was the young lady for whom he had come to put on
+his enamelled shoes, and he saw that the person within was the elderly
+gentleman who had sat next her at breakfast.  He begged his pardon, as he
+entered, and said he hoped he should not disturb him.  "I'm afraid I left
+my things all over the place, when I got up this morning."
+
+The other entreated him not to mention it and went on taking from his
+hand-bag a variety of toilet appliances which the sight of made Burnamy
+vow to keep his own simple combs and brushes shut in his valise all the
+way over.  "You slept on board, then," he suggested, arresting himself
+with a pair of low shoes in his hand; he decided to put them in a certain
+pocket of his steamer bag.
+
+"Oh, yes," Burnamy laughed, nervously: "I came near oversleeping, and
+getting off to sea without knowing it; and I rushed out to save myself,
+and so--"
+
+He began to gather up his belongings while he followed the movements of
+Mr. Triscoe with a wistful eye.  He would have liked to offer his lower
+berth to this senior of his, when he saw him arranging to take possession
+of the upper; but he did not quite know how to manage it.  He noticed
+that as the other moved about he limped slightly, unless it were rather a
+weary easing of his person from one limb to the other.  He stooped to
+pull his trunk out from under the berth, and Burnamy sprang to help him.
+
+"Let me get that out for you!" He caught it up and put it on the sofa
+under the port.  "Is that where you want it?"
+
+"Why, yes," the other assented.  "You're very good," and as he took out
+his key to unlock the trunk he relented a little farther to the
+intimacies of the situation.  "Have you arranged with the bath-steward
+yet?  It's such a full boat."
+
+"No, I haven't," said Burnamy, as if he had tried and failed; till then
+he had not known that there was a bath-steward.  "Shall I get him for
+you?"
+
+"No; no.  Our bedroom-steward will send him, I dare say, thank you."
+
+Mr. Triscoe had got his trunk open, and Burnamy had no longer an excuse
+for lingering.  In his defeat concerning the bath-steward, as he felt it
+to be, he had not the courage, now, to offer the lower berth.  He went
+away, forgetting to change his shoes; but he came back, and as soon as he
+got the enamelled shoes on, and shut the shabby russet pair in his bag,
+he said, abruptly: "Mr. Triscoe, I wish you'd take the lower berth.  I
+got it at the eleventh hour by some fellow's giving it up, and it isn't
+as if I'd bargained for it a month ago."
+
+The elder man gave him one of his staccato glances in which Burnamy
+fancied suspicion and even resentment.  But he said, after the moment of
+reflection which he gave himself, "Why, thank you, if you don't mind,
+really."
+
+"Not at all!" cried the young man.  "I should like the upper berth
+better.  We'll, have the steward change the sheets."
+
+"Oh, I'll see that he does that," said Mr. Triscoe.  "I couldn't allow
+you to take any trouble about it."  He now looked as if he wished Burnamy
+would go, and leave him to his domestic arrangements.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+In telling about himself Burnamy touched only upon the points which he
+believed would take his listener's intelligent fancy, and he stopped so
+long before he had tired him that March said he would like to introduce
+him to his wife.  He saw in the agreeable young fellow an image of his
+own youth, with some differences which, he was willing to own, were to
+the young fellow's advantage.  But they were both from the middle West;
+in their native accent and their local tradition they were the same; they
+were the same in their aspirations; they were of one blood in their
+literary impulse to externate their thoughts and emotions.
+
+Burnamy answered, with a glance at his enamelled shoes, that he would be
+delighted, and when her husband brought him up to her, Mrs. March said
+she was always glad to meet the contributors to the magazine, and asked
+him whether he knew Mr. Kendricks, who was her favorite.  Without giving
+him time to reply to a question that seemed to depress him, she said that
+she had a son who must be nearly his own age, and whom his father had
+left in charge of 'Every Other Week' for the few months they were to be
+gone; that they had a daughter married and living in Chicago.  She made
+him sit down by her in March's chair, and before he left them March heard
+him magnanimously asking whether Mr. Kendricks was going to do something
+more for the magazine soon.  He sauntered away and did not know how
+quickly Burnamy left this question to say, with the laugh and blush which
+became him in her eyes:
+
+"Mrs. March, there is something I should like to tell you about, if you
+will let me."
+
+"Why, certainly, Mr. Burnamy," she began, but she saw that he did not
+wish her to continue.
+
+"Because," he went on, "it's a little matter that I shouldn't like to go
+wrong in."
+
+He told her of his having overheard what Miss Triscoe had said to her
+father, and his belief that she was talking about the lower berth.  He
+said he would have wished to offer it, of course, but now he was afraid
+they might think he had overheard them and felt obliged to do it.
+
+"I see," said Mrs. March, and she added, thoughtfully, "She looks like
+rather a proud girl."
+
+"Yes," the young fellow sighed.
+
+"She is very charming," she continued, thoughtfully, but not so
+judicially.
+
+"Well," Burnamy owned, "that is certainly one of the complications," and
+they laughed together.
+
+She stopped herself after saying, "I see what you mean," and suggested,
+"I think I should be guided by circumstances.  It needn't be done at
+once, I suppose."
+
+"Well," Burnamy began, and then he broke out, with a laugh of
+embarrassment, "I've done it already."
+
+"Oh!  Then it wasn't my advice, exactly, that you wanted."
+
+"No!"
+
+"And how did he take it?"
+
+"He said he should be glad to make the exchange if I really didn't mind."
+Burnamy had risen restlessly, and she did not ask him to stay.  She
+merely said:
+
+"Oh, well, I'm glad it turned out so nicely."
+
+"I'm so glad you think it was the thing to do."  He managed to laugh
+again, but he could not hide from her that he was not feeling altogether
+satisfied.  "Would you like me to send Mr. March, if I see him?" he
+asked, as if he did not know on what other terms to get away.
+
+"Do, please!" she entreated, and it seemed to her that he had hardly left
+her when her husband came up.  "Why, where in the world did he find you
+so soon?"
+
+"Did you send him for me? I was just hanging round for him to go."  March
+sank into the chair at her side.  "Well, is he going to marry her?"
+
+"Oh, you may laugh!  But there is something very exciting!"  She told him
+what had happened, and of her belief that Burnamy's handsome behavior had
+somehow not been met in kind.
+
+March gave himself the pleasure of an immense laugh.  "It seems to me
+that this Mr. Burnamy of yours wanted a little more gratitude than he was
+entitled to.  Why shouldn't he have offered him the lower berth?  And why
+shouldn't the old gentleman have taken it just as he did?  Did you want
+him to make a counteroffer of his daughter's hand?  If he does, I hope
+Mr. Burnamy won't come for your advice till after he's accepted her."
+
+"He wasn't very candid.  I hoped you would speak about that.  Don't you
+think it was rather natural, though?"
+
+"For him, very likely.  But I think you would call it sinuous in some one
+you hadn't taken a fancy to."
+
+"No, no.  I wish to be just.  I don't see how he could have come straight
+at it.  And he did own up at last."  She asked him what Burnamy had done
+for the magazine, and he could remember nothing but that one small poem,
+yet unprinted; he was rather vague about its value, but said it had
+temperament.
+
+"He has temperament, too," she commented, and she had made him tell her
+everything he knew, or could be forced to imagine about Burnamy, before
+she let the talk turn to other things.
+
+The life of the promenade had already settled into seafaring form; the
+steamer chairs were full, and people were reading or dozing in them with
+an effect of long habit.  Those who would be walking up and down had
+begun their walks; some had begun going in and out of the smoking-room;
+ladies who were easily affected by the motion were lying down in the
+music-room.  Groups of both sexes were standing at intervals along the
+rail, and the promenaders were obliged to double on a briefer course or
+work slowly round them.  Shuffleboard parties at one point and ring-toss
+parties at another were forming among the young people.  It was as lively
+and it was as dull as it would be two thousand miles at sea.  It was not
+the least cooler, yet; but if you sat still you did not suffer.
+
+In the prompt monotony the time was already passing swiftly.  The deck-
+steward seemed hardly to have been round with tea and bouillon, and he
+had not yet gathered up all the empty cups, when the horn for lunch
+sounded.  It was the youngest of the table-stewards who gave the summons
+to meals; and whenever the pretty boy appeared with his bugle, funny
+passengers gathered round him to make him laugh, and stop him from
+winding it.  His part of the joke was to fulfill his duty with gravity,
+and only to give way to a smile of triumph as he walked off.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+At lunch, in the faded excitement of their first meeting, the people at
+the Marches' table did not renew the premature intimacy of their
+breakfast talk.  Mrs. March went to lie down in her berth afterwards, and
+March went on deck without her.  He began to walk to and from the barrier
+between the first and second cabin promenades; lingering near it, and
+musing pensively, for some of the people beyond it looked as intelligent
+and as socially acceptable, even to their clothes, as their pecuniary
+betters of the saloon.
+
+There were two women, a mother and daughter, whom he fancied to be
+teachers, by their looks, going out for a little rest, or perhaps for a
+little further study to fit them more perfectly for their work.  They
+gazed wistfully across at him whenever he came up to the barrier; and he
+feigned a conversation with them and tried to convince them that the
+stamp of inferiority which their poverty put upon them was just, or if
+not just, then inevitable.  He argued with them that the sort of barrier
+which here prevented their being friends with him, if they wished it, ran
+invisibly through society everywhere but he felt ashamed before their
+kind, patient, intelligent faces, and found himself wishing to excuse the
+fact he was defending.  Was it any worse, he asked them, than their not
+being invited to the entertainments of people in upper Fifth Avenue?  He
+made them own that if they were let across that barrier the whole second
+cabin would have a logical right to follow; and they were silenced.  But
+they continued to gape at him with their sincere, gentle eyes whenever he
+returned to the barrier in his walk, till he could bear it no longer, and
+strolled off toward the steerage.
+
+There was more reason why the passengers there should be penned into a
+little space of their own in the sort of pit made by the narrowing deck
+at the bow.  They seemed to be all foreigners, and if any had made their
+fortunes in our country they were hiding their prosperity in the return
+to their own.  They could hardly have come to us more shabby and squalid
+than they were going away; but he thought their average less apathetic
+than that of the saloon passengers, as he leaned over the rail and looked
+down at them.  Some one had brought out an electric battery, and the
+lumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughing as they
+writhed with the current.  A young mother seated flat on the deck, with
+her bare feet stuck out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughed
+and shouted with the rest; a man with his head tied in a shawl walked
+about the pen and smiled grotesquely with the well side of his toothache-
+swollen face.  The owner of the battery carried it away, and a group of
+little children, with blue eyes and yellow hair, gathered in the space he
+had left, and looked up at a passenger near March who was eating some
+plums and cherries which he had brought from the luncheon table.  He
+began to throw the fruit down to them, and the children scrambled for it.
+
+An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face, said, "I shouldn't
+want a child of mine down there."
+
+"No," March responded, "it isn't quite what one would choose for one's
+own.  It's astonishing, though, how we reconcile ourselves to it in the
+case of others."
+
+"I suppose it's something we'll have to get used to on the other side,"
+suggested the stranger.
+
+"Well," answered March, "you have some opportunities to get used to it on
+this side, if you happen to live in New York," and he went on to speak of
+the raggedness which often penetrated the frontier of comfort where he
+lived in Stuyvesant Square, and which seemed as glad of alms in food or
+money as this poverty of the steerage.
+
+The other listened restively like a man whose ideals are disturbed.
+"I don't believe I should like to live in New York, much," he said, and
+March fancied that he wished to be asked where he did live.  It appeared
+that he lived in Ohio, and he named his town; he did not brag of it, but
+he said it suited him.  He added that he had never expected to go to
+Europe, but that he had begun to run down lately, and his doctor thought
+he had better go out and try Carlsbad.
+
+March said, to invite his further confidence, that this was exactly his
+own case.  The Ohio man met the overture from a common invalidism as if
+it detracted from his own distinction; and he turned to speak of the
+difficulty, he had in arranging his affairs for leaving home.  His heart
+opened a little with the word, and he said how comfortable he and his
+wife were in their house, and how much they both hated to shut it up.
+When March offered him his card, he said he had none of his own with him,
+but that his name was Eltwin.  He betrayed a simple wish to have March
+realize the local importance he had left behind him; and it was not hard
+to comply; March saw a Grand Army button in the lapel of his coat, and he
+knew that he was in the presence of a veteran.
+
+He tried to guess his rank; in telling his wife about him, when he went
+down to find her just before dinner, but he ended with a certain sense of
+affliction.  "There are too many elderly invalids on this ship.  I knock
+against people of my own age everywhere.  Why aren't your youthful lovers
+more in evidence, my dear?  I don't believe they are lovers, and I begin
+to doubt if they're young even."
+
+"It wasn't very satisfactory at lunch, certainly," she owned.  "But I
+know it will be different at dinner."  She was putting herself together
+after a nap that had made up for the lost sleep of the night before.
+"I want you to look very nice, dear.  Shall you dress for dinner?" she
+asked her husband's image in the state-room glass which she was
+preoccupying.
+
+"I shall dress in my pea-jacket and sea-boots," it answered.
+
+"I have heard that they always dress for dinner on the big Cunard and
+White Star boats, when it's good weather," she went on, placidly.
+"I shouldn't want those people to think you were not up in the
+convenances."
+
+They both knew that she meant the reticent father and daughter, and March
+flung out, "I shouldn't want them to think you weren't.  There's such a
+thing as overdoing."
+
+She attacked him at another point.  "What has annoyed you?  What else
+have you been doing?"
+
+"Nothing.  I've been reading most of the afternoon."
+
+"The Maiden Knight?"
+
+This was the book which nearly everybody had brought on board.  It was
+just out, and had caught an instant favor, which swelled later to a tidal
+wave.  It depicted a heroic girl in every trying circumstance of
+mediaeval life, and gratified the perennial passion of both sexes for
+historical romance, while it flattered woman's instinct of superiority by
+the celebration of her unintermitted triumphs, ending in a preposterous
+and wholly superfluous self-sacrifice.
+
+March laughed for pleasure in her guess, and she pursued, "I suppose you
+didn't waste time looking if anybody had brought the last copy of 'Every
+Other Week'?"
+
+"Yes, I did; and I found the one you had left in your steamer chair--for
+advertising purposes, probably."
+
+"Mr. Burnamy has another," she said.  "I saw it sticking out of his
+pocket this morning."
+
+"Oh, yes.  He told me he had got it on the train from Chicago to see if
+it had his poem in it.  He's an ingenuous soul--in some ways."
+
+"Well, that is the very reason why you ought to find out whether the men
+are going to dress, and let him know.  He would never think of it
+himself."
+
+"Neither would I," said her husband.
+
+"Very well, if you wish to spoil his chance at the outset," she sighed.
+
+She did not quite know whether to be glad or not that the men were all in
+sacks and cutaways at dinner; it saved her, from shame for her husband
+and Mr. Burnamy; but it put her in the wrong.  Every one talked; even the
+father and daughter talked with each other, and at one moment Mrs. March
+could not be quite sure that the daughter had not looked at her when she
+spoke.  She could not be mistaken in the remark which the father
+addressed to Burnamy, though it led to nothing.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The dinner was uncommonly good, as the first dinner out is apt to be; and
+it went gayly on from soup to fruit, which was of the American abundance
+and variety, and as yet not of the veteran freshness imparted by the ice-
+closet.  Everybody was eating it, when by a common consciousness they
+were aware of alien witnesses.  They looked up as by a single impulse,
+and saw at the port the gaunt face of a steerage passenger staring down
+upon their luxury; he held on his arm a child that shared his regard with
+yet hungrier eyes.  A boy's nose showed itself as if tiptoed to the
+height of the man's elbow; a young girl peered over his other arm.
+
+The passengers glanced at one another; the two table-stewards, with their
+napkins in their hands, smiled vaguely, and made some indefinite
+movements.
+
+The bachelor at the head of the table broke the spell.  "I'm glad it
+didn't begin with the Little Neck clams!"
+
+"Probably they only let those people come for the dessert," March
+suggested.
+
+The widow now followed the direction of the other eyes; and looked up
+over her shoulder; she gave a little cry, and shrank down.  The young
+bride made her petted mouth, in appeal to the company; her husband looked
+severe, as if he were going to do something, but refrained, not to make a
+scene.  The reticent father threw one of his staccato glances at the
+port, and Mrs. March was sure that she saw the daughter steal a look at
+Burnamy.
+
+The young fellow laughed.  "I don't suppose there's anything to be done
+about it, unless we pass out a plate."
+
+Mr. Kenby shook his head.  "It wouldn't do.  We might send for the
+captain.  Or the chief steward."
+
+The faces at the port vanished.  At other ports profiles passed and
+repassed, as if the steerage passengers had their promenade under them,
+but they paused no more.
+
+The Marches went up to their steamer chairs, and from her exasperated
+nerves Mrs. March denounced the arrangement of the ship which had made
+such a cruel thing possible.
+
+"Oh," he mocked, "they had probably had a good substantial meal of their
+own, and the scene of our banquet was of the quality of a picture, a
+purely aesthetic treat.  But supposing it wasn't, we're doing something
+like it every day and every moment of our lives.  The Norumbia is a piece
+of the whole world's civilization set afloat, and passing from shore to
+shore with unchanged classes, and conditions.  A ship's merely a small
+stage, where we're brought to close quarters with the daily drama of
+humanity."
+
+"Well, then," she protested, "I don't like being brought to close
+quarters with the daily drama of humanity, as you call it.  And I don't
+believe that the large English ships are built so that the steerage
+passengers can stare in at the saloon windows while one is eating; and
+I'm sorry we came on the Norumbia."
+
+"Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn't hide anything," he began, and he was
+going to speak of the men in the furnace pits of the steamer, how they
+fed the fires in a welding heat, and as if they had perished in it crept
+out on the forecastle like blanched phantasms of toil; but she interposed
+in time.
+
+"If there's anything worse, for pity's sake don't tell me," she
+entreated, and he forebore.
+
+He sat thinking how once the world had not seemed to have even death in
+it, and then how as he had grown older death had come into it more and
+more, and suffering was lurking everywhere, and could hardly be kept out
+of sight.  He wondered if that young Burnamy now saw the world as he used
+to see it, a place for making verse and making love, and full of beauty
+of all kinds waiting to be fitted with phrases.  He had lived a happy
+life; Burnamy would be lucky if he should live one half as happy; and yet
+if he could show him his whole happy life, just as it had truly been,
+must not the young man shrink from such a picture of his future?
+
+"Say something," said his wife.  "What are you thinking about?"
+
+"Oh, Burnamy," he answered, honestly enough.
+
+"I was thinking about the children," she said.  "I am glad Bella didn't
+try to come from Chicago to see us off; it would have been too silly; she
+is getting to be very sensible.  I hope Tom won't take the covers off the
+furniture when he has the fellows in to see him."
+
+"Well, I want him to get all the comfort he can out of the place, even if
+the moths eat up every stick of furniture."
+
+"Yes, so do I.  And of course you're wishing that you were there with
+him!"  March laughed guiltily.  "Well, perhaps it was a crazy thing for
+us to start off alone for Europe, at our age."
+
+"Nothing of the kind," he retorted in the necessity he perceived for
+staying her drooping spirits.  "I wouldn't be anywhere else on any
+account.  Isn't it perfectly delicious?  It puts me in mind of that night
+on the Lake Ontario boat, when we were starting for Montreal.  There was
+the same sort of red sunset, and the air wasn't a bit softer than this."
+
+He spoke of a night on their wedding-journey when they were sill new
+enough from Europe to be comparing everything at home with things there.
+
+"Well, perhaps we shall get into the spirit of it again," she said, and
+they talked a long time of the past.
+
+All the mechanical noises were muffled in the dull air, and the wash of
+the ship's course through the waveless sea made itself pleasantly heard.
+In the offing a steamer homeward bound swam smoothly by, so close that
+her lights outlined her to the eye; she sent up some signal rockets that
+soared against the purple heaven in green and crimson, and spoke to the
+Norumbia in the mysterious mute phrases of ships that meet in the dark.
+
+Mrs. March wondered what had become of Burnamy; the promenades were much
+freer now than they had been since the ship sailed; when she rose to go
+below, she caught sight of Burnamy walking the deck transversely with
+some lady.  She clutched her husband's arm and stayed him in rich
+conjecture.
+
+"Do you suppose he can have got her to walking with him already?"
+
+They waited till Burnamy and his companion came in sight again.  She was
+tilting forward, and turning from the waist, now to him and now from him.
+
+"No; it's that pivotal girl," said March; and his wife said, "Well, I'm
+glad he won't be put down by them."
+
+In the music-room sat the people she meant, and at the instant she passed
+on down the stairs, the daughter was saying to the father, "I don't see
+why you didn't tell me sooner, papa."
+
+"It was such an unimportant matter that I didn't think to mention it.
+He offered it, and I took it; that was all.  What difference could it
+have made to you?"
+
+"None.  But one doesn't like to do any one an injustice."
+
+"I didn't know you were thinking anything about it."
+
+"No, of course not."
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+The voyage of the Norumbia was one of those which passengers say they
+have never seen anything like, though for the first two or three days out
+neither the doctor nor the deck-steward could be got, to prophesy when
+the ship would be in.  There was only a day or two when it could really
+be called rough, and the sea-sickness was confined to those who seemed
+wilful sufferers; they lay on the cushioned benching around the stairs-
+landing, and subsisted on biscuit and beef tea without qualifying the
+monotonous well-being of the other passengers, who passed without
+noticing them.
+
+The second morning there was rain, and the air freshened, but the leaden
+sea lay level as before.  The sun shone in the afternoon; with the sunset
+the fog came thick and white; the ship lowed dismally through the night;
+from the dense folds of the mist answering noises called back to her.
+Just before dark two men in a dory shouted up to her close under her
+bows, and then melted out of sight; when the dark fell the lights of
+fishing-schooners were seen, and their bells pealed; once loud cries from
+a vessel near at hand made themselves heard.  Some people in the dining-
+saloon sang hymns; the smoking-room was dense with cigar fumes, and the
+card-players dealt their hands in an atmosphere emulous of the fog
+without.
+
+The Norumbia was off the Banks, and the second day of fog was cold as if
+icebergs were haunting the opaque pallor around her.  In the ranks of
+steamer chairs people lay like mummies in their dense wrappings; in the
+music-room the little children of travel discussed the different lines of
+steamers on which they had crossed, and babes of five and seven disputed
+about the motion on the Cunarders and White Stars; their nurses tried in
+vain to still them in behalf of older passengers trying to write letters
+there.
+
+By the next morning the ship had run out of the fog; and people who could
+keep their feet said they were glad of the greater motion which they
+found beyond the Banks.  They now talked of the heat of the first days
+out, and how much they had suffered; some who had passed the night on
+board before sailing tried to impart a sense of their misery in trying to
+sleep.
+
+A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the sailors stretched
+canvas along the weather promenade and put up a sheathing of boards
+across the bow end to keep off the rain.  Yet a day or two more and the
+sea had fallen again and there was dancing on the widest space of the lee
+promenade.
+
+The little events of the sea outside the steamer offered themselves in
+their poor variety.  Once a ship in the offing, with all its square sails
+set, lifted them like three white towers from the deep.  On the rim of
+the ocean the length of some westward liner blocked itself out against
+the horizon, and swiftly trailed its smoke out of sight.  A few tramp
+steamers, lounging and lunging through the trough of the sea, were
+overtaken and left behind; an old brigantine passed so close that her
+rusty iron sides showed plain, and one could discern the faces of the
+people on board.
+
+The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any life beyond her.  One
+day a small bird beat the air with its little wings, under the roof of
+the promenade, and then flittered from sight over the surface, of the
+waste; a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their rise, plunged
+clumsily from wave to wave.  The deep itself had sometimes the unreality,
+the artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre.  Commonly it was
+livid and cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately
+misted, and where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely
+iridescent under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by
+the falling spray.  These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like
+painted canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth
+cleavage.  Where it met the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the
+rougher weather carved itself along the horizon in successions of surges.
+
+If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours; then the clouds
+broke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dim
+evening thickened over the waters.  Sometimes the moon looked through the
+ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, and
+shook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship.  Through every
+change, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with the
+pulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man's heart stops) in a
+course which had nothing to mark it but the spread of the furrows from
+her sides, and the wake that foamed from her stern to the western verge
+of the sea.
+
+The life of the ship, like the life of the sea, was a sodden monotony,
+with certain events which were part of the monotony.  In the morning the
+little steward's bugle called the passengers from their dreams, and half
+an hour later called them to their breakfast, after such as chose had
+been served with coffee by their bedroom-stewards.  Then they went on
+deck, where they read, or dozed in their chairs, or walked up and down,
+or stood in the way of those who were walking; or played shuffleboard and
+ring-toss; or smoked, and drank whiskey and aerated waters over their
+cards and papers in the smoking-room; or wrote letters in the saloon or
+the music-room.  At eleven o'clock they spoiled their appetites for lunch
+with tea or bouillon to the music of a band of second-cabin stewards; at
+one, a single blast of the bugle called them to lunch, where they glutted
+themselves to the torpor from which they afterwards drowsed in their
+berths or chairs.  They did the same things in the afternoon that they
+had done in the forenoon; and at four o'clock the deck-stewards came
+round with their cups and saucers, and their plates of sandwiches, again
+to the music of the band.  There were two bugle-calls for dinner, and
+after dinner some went early to bed, and some sat up late and had grills
+and toast.  At twelve the lights were put out in the saloons and the
+smoking-rooms.
+
+There were various smells which stored themselves up in the consciousness
+to remain lastingly relative to certain moments and places: a whiff of
+whiskey and tobacco that exhaled from the door of the smoking-room; the
+odor of oil and steam rising from the open skylights over the engine-
+room; the scent of stale bread about the doors of the dining-saloon.
+
+The life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, only more monotonous.
+The walking was limited; the talk was the tentative talk of people aware
+that there was no refuge if they got tired of one another.  The flirting
+itself, such as there was of it, must be carried on in the glare of the
+pervasive publicity; it must be crude and bold, or not be at all.
+
+There seemed to be very little of it.  There were not many young people
+on board of saloon quality, and these were mostly girls.  The young men
+were mainly of the smoking-room sort; they seldom risked themselves among
+the steamer chairs.  It was gayer in the second cabin, and gayer yet in
+the steerage, where robuster emotions were operated by the accordion.
+The passengers there danced to its music; they sang to it and laughed to
+it unabashed under the eyes of the first-cabin witnesses clustered along
+the rail above the pit where they took their rude pleasures.
+
+With March it came to his spending many hours of each long, swift day in
+his berth with a book under the convenient electric light.  He was safe
+there from the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves only to
+fall into disintegration, and cling to him afterwards as inorganic
+particles of weather-guessing, and smoking-room gossip about the ship's
+run.
+
+In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought that he saw some faces of
+the great world, the world of wealth and fashion; but these afterward
+vanished, and left him to wonder where they hid themselves.  He did not
+meet them even in going to and from his meals; he could only imagine them
+served in those palatial state-rooms whose interiors the stewards now and
+then rather obtruded upon the public.  There were people whom he
+encountered in the promenades when he got up for the sunrise, and whom he
+never saw at other times; at midnight he met men prowling in the dark
+whom he never met by day.  But none of these were people of the great
+world.  Before six o'clock they were sometimes second-cabin passengers,
+whose barrier was then lifted for a little while to give them the freedom
+of the saloon promenade.
+
+From time to time he thought he would look up his Ohioan, and revive from
+a closer study of him his interest in the rare American who had never
+been to Europe.  But he kept with his elderly wife, who had the effect of
+withholding him from March's advances.  Young Mr. and Mrs. Leffers threw
+off more and more their disguise of a long-married pair, and became
+frankly bride and groom.  They seldom talked with any one else, except at
+table; they walked up and down together, smiling into each others faces;
+they sat side by side in their steamer chairs; one shawl covered them
+both, and there was reason to believe that they were holding each other's
+hands under it.
+
+Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. March when her husband was
+straying about the ship or reading in his berth; and the two ladies must
+have exchanged autobiographies, for Mrs. March was able to tell him just
+how long Mrs. Adding had been a widow, what her husband died of, and what
+had been done to save him; how she was now perfectly wrapt up in her boy,
+and was taking him abroad, with some notion of going to Switzerland,
+after the summer's travel, and settling down with him at school there.
+She and Mrs. March became great friends; and Rose, as his mother called
+him, attached himself reverently to March, not only as a celebrity of the
+first grade in his quality of editor of 'Every Other Week', but as a sage
+of wisdom and goodness, with whom he must not lose the chance of counsel
+upon almost every hypothesis and exigency of life.
+
+March could not bring himself to place Burnamy quite where he belonged in
+contemporary literature, when Rose put him very high in virtue of the
+poem which he heard Burnamy was going to have printed in 'Every Other
+Week', and of the book which he was going to have published; and he let
+the boy bring to the young fellow the flattery which can come to any
+author but once, in the first request for his autograph that Burnamy
+confessed to have had.  They were so near in age, though they were ten
+years apart, that Rose stood much more in awe of Burnamy than of others
+much more his seniors.  He was often in the company of Kenby, whom he
+valued next to March as a person acquainted with men; he consulted March
+upon Kenby's practice of always taking up the language of the country he
+visited, if it were only for a fortnight; and he conceived a higher
+opinion of him from March's approval.
+
+Burnamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him talk about himself when he
+supposed he was talking about literature, in the hope that she could get
+him to talk about the Triscoes; but she listened in vain as he poured
+out-his soul in theories of literary art, and in histories of what he had
+written and what he meant to write.  When he passed them where they sat
+together, March heard the young fellow's perpetually recurring I, I, I,
+my, my, my, me, me, me; and smiled to think how she was suffering under
+the drip-drip of his innocent egotism.
+
+She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentions to the pivotal
+girl, and Miss Triscoe's indifference to him, in which a less penetrating
+scrutiny could have detected no change from meal to meal.  It was only at
+table that she could see them together, or that she could note any break
+in the reserve of the father and daughter.  The signs of this were so
+fine that when she reported them March laughed in scornful incredulity.
+But at breakfast the third day out, the Triscoes, with the authority of
+people accustomed to social consideration, suddenly turned to the
+Marches, and began to make themselves agreeable; the father spoke to
+March of 'Every Other Week', which he seemed to know of in its relation
+to him; and the young girl addressed herself to Mrs. March's motherly
+sense not the less acceptably because indirectly.  She spoke of going out
+with her father for an indefinite time, as if it were rather his wish
+than hers, and she made some inquiries about places in Germany; they had
+never been in Germany.  They had some idea of Dresden; but the idea of
+Dresden with its American colony seemed rather tiresome; and did Mrs.
+March know anything about Weimar?
+
+Mrs. March was obliged to say that she knew nothing about anyplace in
+Germany; and she explained perhaps too fully where and why she was going
+with her husband.  She fancied a Boston note in that scorn for the
+tiresomeness of Dresden; but the girl's style was of New York rather than
+of Boston, and her accent was not quite of either place.  Mrs. March
+began to try the Triscoes in this place and in that, to divine them and
+to class them.  She had decided from the first that they were society
+people, but they were cultivated beyond the average of the few swells
+whom she had met; and there had been nothing offensive in their manner of
+holding themselves aloof from the other people at the table; they had a
+right to do that if they chose.
+
+When the young Lefferses came in to breakfast, the talk went on between
+these and the Marches; the Triscoes presently left the table, and Mrs.
+March rose soon after, eager for that discussion of their behavior which
+March knew he should not be able to postpone.
+
+He agreed with her that they were society people, but she could not at
+once accept his theory that they had themselves been the objects of an
+advance from them because of their neutral literary quality, through
+which they were of no social world, but potentially common to any.  Later
+she admitted this, as she said, for the sake of argument, though what she
+wanted him to see, now, was that this was all a step of the girl's toward
+finding out something about Burnamy.
+
+The same afternoon, about the time the deck-steward was making his round
+with his cups, Miss Triscoe abruptly advanced upon her from a neighboring
+corner of the bulkhead, and asked, with the air of one accustomed to have
+her advances gratefully received, if she might sit by her.  The girl took
+March's vacant chair, where she had her cup of bouillon, which she
+continued to hold untasted in her hand after the first sip.  Mrs. March
+did the same with hers, and at the moment she had got very tired of doing
+it, Burnamy came by, for the hundredth time that day, and gave her a
+hundredth bow with a hundredth smile.  He perceived that she wished to
+get rid of her cup, and he sprang to her relief.
+
+"May I take yours too?" he said very passively to Miss Triscoe.
+
+"You are very good."  she answered, and gave it.
+
+Mrs. March with a casual air suggested, "Do you know Mr. Burnamy, Miss
+Triscoe?  "The girl said a few civil things, but Burnamy did not try to
+make talk with her while he remained a few moments before Mrs. March.
+The pivotal girl came in sight, tilting and turning in a rare moment of
+isolation at the corner of the music-room, and he bowed abruptly, and
+hurried off to join her.
+
+Miss Triscoe did not linger; she alleged the necessity of looking up her
+father, and went away with a smile so friendly that Mrs. March might
+easily have construed it to mean that no blame attached itself to her in
+Miss Triscoe's mind.
+
+"Then you don't feel that it was a very distinct success?" her husband
+asked on his return.
+
+"Not on the surface," she said.
+
+"Better let ill enough alone," he advised.
+
+She did not heed him.  "All the same she cares for him.  The very fact
+that she was so cold shows that."
+
+"And do you think her being cold will make him care for her?"
+
+"If she wants it to."
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+At dinner that day the question of 'The Maiden Knight' was debated among
+the noises and silences of the band.  Young Mrs. Leffers had brought the
+book to the table with her; she said she had not been able to lay it down
+before the last horn sounded; in fact she could have been seen reading it
+to her husband where he sat under the same shawl, the whole afternoon.
+
+"Don't you think it's perfectly fascinating," she asked Mrs. Adding, with
+her petted mouth.
+
+"Well," said the widow, doubtfully, "it's nearly a week since I read it,
+and I've had time to get over the glow."
+
+"Oh, I could just read it forever!" the bride exclaimed.
+
+"I like a book," said her husband, "that takes me out of myself.  I don't
+want to think when I'm reading."
+
+March was going to attack this ideal, but he reflected in time that Mr.
+Leffers had really stated his own motive in reading.  He compromised.
+"Well, I like the author to do my thinking for me."
+
+"Yes," said the other, "that is what I mean."
+
+"The question is whether 'The Maiden Knight' fellow does it," said Kenby,
+taking duck and pease from the steward at his shoulder.
+
+"What my wife likes in it is to see what one woman can do and be single-
+handed," said March.
+
+"No," his wife corrected him, "what a man thinks she can."
+
+"I suppose," said Mr. Triscoe, unexpectedly, "that we're like the English
+in our habit of going off about a book like a train of powder."
+
+"If you'll say a row of bricks," March assented, "I'll agree with you.
+It's certainly Anglo-Saxon to fall over one another as we do, when we get
+going.  It would be interesting to know just how much liking there is in
+the popularity of a given book."
+
+"It's like the run of a song, isn't it?" Kenby suggested.  "You can't
+stand either, when it reaches a given point."
+
+He spoke to March and ignored Triscoe, who had hitherto ignored the rest
+of the table.
+
+"It's very curious," March said.  "The book or the song catches a mood,
+or feeds a craving, and when one passes or the other is glutted--"
+
+"The discouraging part is," Triscoe put in, still limiting himself to the
+Marches, "that it's never a question of real taste.  The things that go
+down with us are so crude, so coarsely spiced; they tickle such a vulgar
+palate--Now in France, for instance," he suggested.
+
+"Well, I don't know," returned the editor.  "After all, we eat a good
+deal of bread, and we drink more pure water than any other people.  Even
+when we drink it iced, I fancy it isn't so bad as absinthe."
+
+The young bride looked at him gratefully, but she said, "If we can't get
+ice-water in Europe, I don't know what Mr. Leffers will do," and the talk
+threatened to pass among the ladies into a comparison of American and
+European customs.
+
+Burnamy could not bear to let it.  "I don't pretend to be very well up in
+French literature," he began, "but I think such a book as 'The Maiden
+Knight' isn't such a bad piece of work; people are liking a pretty well-
+built story when they like it.  Of course it's sentimental, and it begs
+the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic in character,
+and it makes the reader imagine it too.  The man who wrote that book may
+be a donkey half the time, but he's a genius the other half.  By-and-by
+he'll do something--after he's come to see that his 'Maiden Knight' was a
+fool--that I believe even you won't be down on, Mr. March, if he paints a
+heroic type as powerfully as he does in this book."
+
+He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and though he deferred to
+March in the end, he deferred with authority still.  March liked him for
+coming to the defence of a young writer whom he had not himself learned
+to like yet.  "Yes," he said, "if he has the power you say, and can keep
+it after he comes to his artistic consciousness!"
+
+Mrs. Leffers, as if she thought things were going her way, smiled; Rose
+Adding listened with shining eyes expectantly fixed on March; his mother
+viewed his rapture with tender amusement.  The steward was at Kenby's
+shoulder with the salad and his entreating "Bleace!" and Triscoe seemed
+to be questioning whether he should take any notice of Burnamy's general
+disagreement.  He said at last: "I'm afraid we haven't the documents.
+You don't seem to have cared much for French books, and I haven't read
+'The Maiden Knight'."  He added to March: "But I don't defend absinthe.
+Ice-water is better.  What I object to is our indiscriminate taste both
+for raw whiskey--and for milk-and-water."
+
+No one took up the question again, and it was Kenby who spoke next.
+"The doctor thinks, if this weather holds, that we shall be into Plymouth
+Wednesday morning.  I always like to get a professional opinion on the
+ship's run."
+
+In the evening, as Mrs. March was putting away in her portfolio the
+journal-letter which she was writing to send back from Plymouth to her
+children, Miss Triscoe drifted to the place where she sat at their table
+in the dining-room by a coincidence which they both respected as casual.
+
+"We had quite a literary dinner," she remarked, hovering for a moment
+near the chair which she later sank into.  "It must have made you feel
+very much at home.  Or perhaps you're so tired of it at home that you
+don't talk about books."
+
+"We always talk shop, in some form or other," said Mrs. March.
+"My husband never tires of it.  A good many of the contributors come to
+us, you know."
+
+"It must be delightful," said the girl.  She added as if she ought to
+excuse herself for neglecting an advantage that might have been hers if
+she had chosen, "I'm sorry one sees so little of the artistic and
+literary set.  But New York is such a big place."
+
+New York people seem to be very fond of it," said Mrs. March.  "Those who
+have always lived there."
+
+"We haven't always lived there," said the girl.  " But I think one has a
+good time there--the best time a girl can have.  It's all very well
+coming over for the summer; one has to spend the summer somewhere.  Are
+you going out for a long time?"
+
+"Only for the summer.  First to Carlsbad."
+
+"Oh, yes.  I suppose we shall travel about through Germany, and then go
+to Paris.  We always do; my father is very fond of it."
+
+"You must know it very well," said Mrs. March, aimlessly.
+
+"I was born there,--if that means knowing it.  I lived there--till I was
+eleven years old.  We came home after my mother died."
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs. March.
+
+The girl did not go further into her family history; but by one of those
+leaps which seem to women as logical as other progressions, she arrived
+at asking, "Is Mr. Burnamy one of the contributors?"
+
+Mrs. March laughed.  "He is going to be, as soon as his poem is printed."
+
+"Poem?"
+
+"Yes.  Mr. March thinks it's very good."
+
+"I thought he spoke very nicely about 'The Maiden Knight'.  And he has
+been very nice to papa.  You know they have the same room."
+
+"I think Mr. Burnamy told me," Mrs. March said.
+
+The girl went on.  "He had the lower berth, and he gave it up to papa;
+he's done everything but turn himself out of doors."
+
+"I'm sure he's been very glad," Mrs. March ventured on Burnamy's behalf,
+but very softly, lest if she breathed upon these budding confidences they
+should shrink and wither away.
+
+"I always tell papa that there's no country like 'America for real
+unselfishness; and if they're all like that, in Chicago!"  The girl
+stopped, and added with a laugh, " But I'm always quarrelling with papa
+about America."
+
+"We have a daughter living in Chicago," said Mrs. March, alluringly.
+
+But Miss Triscoe refused the bait, either because she had said all she
+meant, or because she had said all she would, about Chicago, which Mrs.
+March felt for the present to be one with Burnamy.  She gave another of
+her leaps.  "I don't see why people are so anxious to get it like Europe,
+at home.  They say that there was a time when there were no chaperons
+before hoops, you know."  She looked suggestively at Mrs. March, resting
+one slim hand on the table, and controlling her skirt with the other, as
+if she were getting ready to rise at any moment.  "When they used to sit
+on their steps."
+
+"It was very pleasant before hoops--in every way," said Mrs. March.
+"I was young, then; and I lived in Boston, where I suppose it was always
+simpler than in New York.  I used to sit on our steps.  It was delightful
+for girls--the freedom."
+
+"I wish I had lived before hoops," said Miss Triscoe.
+
+"Well, there must be places where it's before hoops yet: Seattle, and
+Portland, Oregon, for all I know," Mrs. March suggested.  "And there must
+be people in that epoch everywhere."
+
+"Like that young lady who twists and turns?" said Miss Triscoe, giving
+first one side of her face and then the other.  "They have a good time.
+I suppose if Europe came to us in one way it had to come in another.  If
+it came in galleries and all that sort of thing, it had to come in
+chaperons.  You'll think I'm a great extremist, Mrs. March; but sometimes
+I wish there was more America instead of less.  I don't believe it's as
+bad as people say.  Does Mr. March," she asked, taking hold of the chair
+with one hand, to secure her footing from any caprice of the sea, while
+she gathered her skirt more firmly into the other, as she rose, "does he
+think that America is going--all wrong?"
+
+"All wrong?  How?"
+
+"Oh, in politics, don't you know.  And government, and all that.  And
+bribing.  And the lower classes having everything their own way.  And the
+horrid newspapers.  And everything getting so expensive; and no regard
+for family, or anything of that kind."
+
+Mrs. March thought she saw what Miss Triscoe meant, but she answered,
+still cautiously, "I don't believe he does always.  Though there are
+times when he is very much disgusted.  Then he says that he is getting
+too old--and we always quarrel about that--to see things as they really
+are.  He says that if the world had been going the way that people over
+fifty have always thought it was going, it would have gone to smash in
+the time of the anthropoidal apes."
+
+"Oh, yes: Darwin," said Miss Triscoe, vaguely.  "Well, I'm glad he
+doesn't give it up.  I didn't know but I was holding out just because I
+had argued so much, and was doing it out of--opposition.  Goodnight!"
+She called her salutation gayly over her shoulder, and Mrs. March watched
+her gliding out of the saloon with a graceful tilt to humor the slight
+roll of the ship, and a little lurch to correct it, once or twice, and
+wondered if Burnamy was afraid of her; it seemed to her that if she were
+a young man she should not be afraid of Miss Triscoe.
+
+The next morning, just after she had arranged herself in her steamer
+chair, he approached her, bowing and smiling, with the first of his many
+bows and smiles for the day, and at the same time Miss Triscoe came
+toward her from the opposite direction.  She nodded brightly to him, and
+he gave her a bow and smile too; he always had so many of them to spare.
+
+"Here is your chair!"  Mrs. March called to her, drawing the shawl out of
+the chair next her own.  "Mr. March is wandering about the ship
+somewhere."
+
+"I'll keep it for him," said Miss Triscoe, and as Burnamy offered to take
+the shawl that hung in the hollow of her arm, she let it slip into his
+hand with an "Oh; thank you," which seemed also a permission for him to
+wrap it about her in the chair.
+
+He stood talking before the ladies, but he looked up and down the
+promenade.  The pivotal girl showed herself at the corner of the music-
+room, as she had done the day before.  At first she revolved there as if
+she were shedding her light on some one hidden round the corner; then she
+moved a few paces farther out and showed herself more obviously alone.
+Clearly she was there for Burnamy to come and walk with her; Mrs. March
+could see that, and she felt that Miss Triscoe saw it too.  She waited
+for her to dismiss him to his flirtation; but Miss Triscoe kept chatting
+on, and he kept answering, and making no motion to get away.  Mrs. March
+began to be as sorry for her as she was ashamed for him.  Then she heard
+him saying, "Would you like a turn or two?" and Miss Triscoe answering,
+"Why, yes, thank you," and promptly getting out of her chair as if the
+pains they had both been at to get her settled in it were all nothing.
+
+She had the composure to say, "You can leave your shawl with me, Miss
+Triscoe," and to receive her fervent, "Oh, thank you," before they sailed
+off together, with inhuman indifference to the girl at the corner of the
+music-room.  Then she sank into a kind of triumphal collapse, from which
+she roused herself to point her husband to the chair beside her when he
+happened along.
+
+He chose to be perverse about her romance.  "Well, now, you had better
+let them alone.  Remember Kendricks."  He meant one of their young
+friends whose love-affair they had promoted till his happy marriage left
+them in lasting doubt of what they had done.  "My sympathies are all with
+the pivotal girl.  Hadn't she as much right to him, for the time being,
+or for good and all, as Miss Triscoe?"
+
+"That depends upon what you think of Burnamy."
+
+"Well, I don't like to see a girl have a young man snatched away from her
+just when she's made sure of him.  How do you suppose she is feeling
+now?"
+
+"She isn't feeling at all.  She's letting her revolving light fall upon
+half a dozen other young men by this time, collectively or consecutively.
+All that she wants to make sure of is that they're young men--or old
+ones, even."
+
+March laughed, but not altogether at what his wife said.  "I've been
+having a little talk with Papa Triscoe, in the smoking-room."
+
+"You smell like it," said his wife, not to seem too eager: "Well?"
+
+"Well, Papa Triscoe seems to be in a pout.  He doesn't think things are
+going as they should in America.  He hasn't been consulted, or if he has,
+his opinion hasn't been acted upon."
+
+"I think he's horrid," said Mrs. March.  "Who are they?"
+
+"I couldn't make out, and I couldn't ask.  But I'll tell you what I
+think."
+
+"What?"
+
+"That there's no chance for, Burnamy.  He's taking his daughter out to
+marry her to a crowned head."
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+It was this afternoon that the dance took place on the south promenade.
+Everybody came and looked, and the circle around the waltzers was three
+or four deep.  Between the surrounding heads and shoulders, the hats of
+the young ladies wheeling and whirling, and the faces of the men who were
+wheeling and whirling them, rose and sank with the rhythm of their steps.
+The space allotted to the dancing was walled to seaward with canvas, and
+was prettily treated with German, and American flags: it was hard to go
+wrong with flags, Miss Triscoe said, securing herself under Mrs. March's
+wing.
+
+Where they stood they could see Burnamy's face, flashing and flushing in
+the dance; at the end of the first piece he came to them, and remained
+talking and laughing till the music began again.
+
+"Don't you want to try it?" he asked abruptly of Miss Triscoe.
+
+"Isn't it rather--public?" she asked back.
+
+Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl had put through her arm
+thrill with temptation; but Burnamy could not.
+
+"Perhaps it is rather obvious," he said, and he made a long glide over
+the deck to the feet of the pivotal girl, anticipating another young man
+who was rapidly advancing from the opposite quarter.  The next moment her
+hat and his face showed themselves in the necessary proximity to each
+other within the circle.
+
+"How well she dances!" said Miss Triscoe.
+
+"Do you think so?  She looks as if she had been wound up and set going."
+
+"She's very graceful," the girl persisted.
+
+The day ended with an entertainment in the saloon for one of the marine
+charities which address themselves to the hearts and pockets of
+passengers on all steamers.  There were recitations in English and
+German, and songs from several people who had kindly consented, and ever
+more piano performance.  Most of those who took part were of the race
+gifted in art and finance; its children excelled in the music, and its
+fathers counted the gate-money during the last half of the programme,
+with an audible clinking of the silver on the table before them.
+
+Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March was herself chaperoned
+by Mr. Burnamy: her husband had refused to come to the entertainment.
+She hoped to leave Burnamy and Miss Triscoe together before the evening
+ended; but Miss Triscoe merely stopped with her father, in quitting the
+saloon, to laugh at some features of the entertainment, as people who
+take no part in such things do; Burnamy stood up to exchange some
+unimpassioned words with her, and then they said good-night.
+
+The next morning, at five o'clock, the Norumbia came to anchor in the
+pretty harbor of Plymouth.  In the cool early light the town lay distinct
+along the shore, quaint with its small English houses, and stately with
+come public edifices of unknown function on the uplands; a country-seat
+of aristocratic aspect showed itself on one of the heights; on another
+the tower of a country church peered over the tree-tops; there were lines
+of fortifications, as peaceful, at their distance, as the stone walls
+dividing the green fields.  The very iron-clads in the harbor close at
+hand contributed to the amiable gayety of the scene under the pale blue
+English sky, already broken with clouds from which the flush of the
+sunrise had not quite faded.  The breath of the land came freshly out
+over the water; one could almost smell the grass and the leaves.  Gulls
+wheeled and darted over the crisp water; the tones of the English voices
+on the tender were pleasant to the ear, as it fussed and scuffled to the
+ship's side.  A few score of the passengers left her; with their baggage
+they formed picturesque groups on the tender's deck, and they set out for
+the shore waving their hands and their handkerchiefs to the friends they
+left clustering along the rail of the Norumbia.  Mr. and Mrs. Leffers
+bade March farewell, in the final fondness inspired by his having coffee
+with them before they left the ship; they said they hated to leave.
+
+The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast tables were promptly
+filled, except such as the passengers landing at Plymouth had vacated;
+these were stripped of their cloths, and the remaining commensals placed
+at others.  The seats of the Lefferses were given to March's old Ohio
+friend and his wife.  He tried to engage them in the tally which began to
+be general in the excitement of having touched land; but they shyly held
+aloof.
+
+Some English newspapers had come aboard from the tug, and there was the
+usual good-natured adjustment of the American self-satisfaction, among
+those who had seen them, to the ever-surprising fact that our continent
+is apparently of no interest to Europe.  There were some meagre New York
+stock-market quotations in the papers; a paragraph in fine print
+announced the lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recorded a coal-
+mining strike in Pennsylvania.
+
+"I always have to get used to it over again," said Kenby.  "This is the
+twentieth time I have been across, and I'm just as much astonished as I
+was the first, to find out that they don't want to know anything about us
+here."
+
+"Oh," said March, "curiosity and the weather both come from the west.
+San Francisco wants to know about Denver, Denver about Chicago, Chicago
+about New York, and New York about London; but curiosity never travels
+the other way any more than a hot wave or a cold wave."
+
+"Ah, but London doesn't care a rap about Vienna," said Kenby.
+
+"Well, some pressures give out before they reach the coast, on our own
+side.  It isn't an infallible analogy."
+
+Triscoe was fiercely chewing a morsel, as if in haste to take part in the
+discussion.  He gulped it, and broke out.  "Why should they care about
+us, anyway?"
+
+March lightly ventured, "Oh, men and brothers, you know."
+
+"That isn't sufficient ground.  The Chinese are men and brothers; so are
+the South-Americans and Central-Africans, and Hawaiians; but we're not
+impatient for the latest news about them.  It's civilization that
+interests civilization."
+
+"I hope that fact doesn't leave us out in the cold with the barbarians?"
+Burnamy put in, with a smile.
+
+"Do you think we are civilized?" retorted the other.
+
+"We have that superstition in Chicago," said Burnamy.  He added, still
+smiling, "About the New-Yorkers, I mean."
+
+"You're more superstitious in Chicago than I supposed.  New York is an
+anarchy, tempered by vigilance committees."
+
+"Oh, I don't think you can say that," Kenby cheerfully protested, "since
+the Reformers came in.  Look at our streets!"
+
+"Yes, our streets are clean, for the time being, and when we look at them
+we think we have made a clean sweep in our manners and morals.  But how
+long do you think it will be before Tammany will be in the saddle again?"
+
+"Oh, never in the world!" said the optimistic head of the table.
+
+"I wish I had your faith; or I should if I didn't feel that it is one of
+the things that help to establish Tammanys with us.  You will see our
+Tammany in power after the next election."  Kenby laughed in a large-
+hearted incredulity; and his laugh was like fuel to the other's flame.
+"New York is politically a mediaeval Italian republic, and it's morally a
+frontier mining-town.  Socially it's--" He stopped as if he could not say
+what.
+
+"I think it's a place where you have a very nice time, papa," said his
+daughter, and Burnamy smiled with her; not because he knew anything about
+it.
+
+Her father went on as if he had not heard her.  "It's as vulgar and crude
+as money can make it.  Nothing counts but money, and as soon as there's
+enough, it counts for everything.  In less than a year you'll have
+Tammany in power; it won't be more than a year till you'll have it in
+society."
+
+"Oh no! Oh no! " came from Kenby.  He did not care much for society, but
+he vaguely respected it as the stronghold of the proprieties and the
+amenities.
+
+"Isn't society a good place for Tammany to be in?" asked March in the
+pause Triscoe let follow upon Kenby's laugh.
+
+"There's no reason why it shouldn't be.  Society is as bad as all the
+rest of it.  And what New York is, politically, morally, and socially,
+the whole country wishes to be and tries to be."
+
+There was that measure of truth in the words which silences; no one could
+find just the terms of refutation.
+
+"Well," said Kenby at last, "it's a good thing there are so many lines to
+Europe.  We've still got the right to emigrate."
+
+"Yes, but even there we don't escape the abuse of our infamous newspapers
+for exercising a man's right to live where he chooses.  And there is no
+country in Europe--except Turkey, or Spain--that isn't a better home for
+an honest man than the United States."
+
+The Ohioan had once before cleared his throat as if he were going to
+speak.  Now, he leaned far enough forward to catch Triscoe's eve, and
+said, slowly and distinctly: "I don't know just what reason you have to
+feel as you do about the country.  I feel differently about it myself--
+perhaps because I fought for it."
+
+At first, the others were glad of this arrogance; it even seemed an
+answer; but Burnamy saw Miss Triscoe's cheek, flush, and then he doubted
+its validity.
+
+Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, as if to expend a
+violent impulse upon it.  He said, coldly, "I was speaking from that
+stand-point."
+
+The Ohioan shrank back in his seat, and March felt sorry for him, though
+he had put himself in the wrong.  His old hand trembled beside his plate,
+and his head shook, while his lips formed silent words; and his shy wife
+was sharing his pain and shame.
+
+Kenby began to talk about the stop which the Norumbia was to make at
+Cherbourg, and about what hour the next day they should all be in
+Cuxhaven.  Miss Triscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Line
+before, and asked several questions.  Her father did not speak again, and
+after a little while he rose without waiting for her to make the move
+from table; he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto.  Eltwin rose
+at the same time, and March feared that he might be going to provoke
+another defeat, in some way.
+
+Eltwin lifted his voice, and said, trying to catch Triscoe's eye, "I
+think I ought to beg your pardon, sir.  I do beg your pardon."
+
+March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the offer of his reparation as
+distinct as his aggression had been; and now he quaked for Triscoe, whose
+daughter he saw glance apprehensively at her father as she swayed aside
+to let the two men come together.
+
+"That is all right, Colonel--"
+
+"Major," Eltwin conscientiously interposed.
+
+"Major," Triscoe bowed; and he put out his hand and grasped the hand
+which had been tremulously rising toward him.  "There can't be any doubt
+of what we did, no matter what we've got."
+
+"No, no!"  said the other, eagerly.  "That was what I meant, sir.  I
+don't think as you do; but I believe that a man who helped to save the
+country has a right to think what he pleases about it."
+
+Triscoe said, "That is all right, my dear sir.  May I ask your regiment?"
+
+The Marches let the old fellows walk away together, followed by the wife
+of the one and the daughter of the other.  They saw the young girl making
+some graceful overtures of speech to the elder woman as they went.
+
+"That was rather fine, my dear," said Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, I don't know.  It was a little too dramatic, wasn't it?  It wasn't
+what I should have expected of real life."
+
+"Oh, you spoil everything!  If that's the spirit you're going through
+Europe in!"
+
+"It isn't.  As soon as I touch European soil I shall reform."
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+That was not the first time General Triscoe had silenced question of his
+opinions with the argument he had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldom
+able to use it so aptly.  He always found that people suffered, his
+belief in our national degeneration much more readily when they knew that
+he had left a diplomatic position in Europe (he had gone abroad as
+secretary of a minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union.
+Some millions of other men had gone into the war from the varied motives
+which impelled men at that time; but he was aware that he had
+distinction, as a man of property and a man of family, in doing so.  His
+family had improved as time passed, and it was now so old that back of
+his grandfather it was lost in antiquity.  This ancestor had retired from
+the sea and become a merchant in his native Rhode Island port, where his
+son established himself as a physician, and married the daughter of a
+former slave-trader whose social position was the highest in the place;
+Triscoe liked to mention his maternal grandfather when he wished a
+listener to realize just how anomalous his part in a war against slavery
+was; it heightened the effect of his pose.
+
+He fought gallantly through the war, and he was brevetted Brigadier-
+General at the close.  With this honor, and with the wound which caused
+an almost imperceptible limp in his gait, he won the heart of a rich New
+York girl, and her father set him up in a business, which was not long in
+going to pieces in his hands.  Then the young couple went to live in
+Paris, where their daughter was born, and where the mother died when the
+child was ten years old.  A little later his father-in-law died, and
+Triscoe returned to New York, where he found the fortune which his
+daughter had inherited was much less than he somehow thought he had a
+right to expect.
+
+The income from her fortune was enough to live on, and he did not go back
+to Paris, where, in fact, things were not so much to his mind under the
+Republic as they had been under the Second Empire.  He was still willing
+to do something for his country, however, and he allowed his name to be
+used on a citizen's ticket in his district; but his provision-man was
+sent to Congress instead.  Then he retired to Rhode Island and attempted
+to convert his shore property into a watering-place; but after being
+attractively plotted and laid out with streets and sidewalks, it allured
+no one to build on it except the birds and the chipmonks, and he came
+back to New York, where his daughter had remained in school.
+
+One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea, after she left
+school; and she entered upon a series of dinners, dances, theatre
+parties, and receptions of all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring
+through her fingers left no engagement-ring on them.  She had no duties,
+but she seldom got out of humor with her pleasures; she had some odd
+tastes of her own, and in a society where none but the most serious books
+were ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good ones, and had
+romantic ideas of a life that she vaguely called bohemian.  Her character
+was never tested by anything more trying than the fear that her father
+might take her abroad to live; he had taken her abroad several times for
+the summer.
+
+The dreaded trial did not approach for several years after she had ceased
+to be a bud; and then it came when her father was again willing to serve
+his country in diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels, or even at
+Berne.  Reasons of political geography prevented his appointment
+anywhere, but General Triscoe having arranged his affairs for going
+abroad on the mission he had expected, decided to go without it.  He was
+really very fit for both of the offices he had sought, and so far as a
+man can deserve public place by public service, he had deserved it.
+His pessimism was uncommonly well grounded, and if it did not go very
+deep, it might well have reached the bottom of his nature.
+
+His daughter had begun to divine him at the early age when parents
+suppose themselves still to be mysteries to their children.  She did not
+think it necessary ever to explain him to others; perhaps she would not
+have found it possible; and now after she parted from Mrs. Eltwin and
+went to sit down beside Mrs. March she did not refer to her father.  She
+said how sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and what sort of
+place did Mrs. March suppose it was where Mrs. Eltwin lived?  They seemed
+to have everything there, like any place.  She had wanted to ask Mrs.
+Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had not quite dared.
+
+Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March's suggestion he took one of
+the chairs on her other side, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at the
+Channel Islands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg, where
+the Norumbia was to land again.  The young people talked across Mrs.
+March to each other, and said how charming the islands were, in their
+gray-green insubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward, like
+airy clefts in low banks of clouds.  It seemed all the nicer not to know
+just which was which; but when the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg, he
+suggested that they could see better by going round to the other side of
+the ship.  Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when she had gone off with
+Burnamy, marked her allegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her.
+
+Every one was restless in breaking with the old life at sea.  There had
+been an equal unrest when the ship first sailed; people had first come
+aboard in the demoralization of severing their ties with home, and they
+shrank from forming others.  Then the charm of the idle, eventless life
+grew upon them, and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitable
+end.
+
+Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of disintegration
+were felt in all the once-more-repellant particles.  Burnamy and Miss
+Triscoe, as they hung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hated
+to have the voyage over.  They had liked leaving Plymouth and being at
+sea again; they wished that they need not be reminded of another
+debarkation by the energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage
+from the hold.
+
+They approved of the picturesqueness of three French vessels of war that
+passed, dragging their kraken shapes low through the level water.  At
+Cherbourg an emotional French tender came out to the ship, very different
+in her clamorous voices and excited figures from the steady self-control
+of the English tender at Plymouth; and they thought the French
+fortifications much more on show than the English had been.  Nothing
+marked their youthful date so much to the Marches, who presently joined
+them, as their failure to realize that in this peaceful sea the great
+battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought.  The elder
+couple tried to affect their imaginations with the fact which reanimated
+the spectre of a dreadful war for themselves; but they had to pass on
+and, leave the young people unmoved.
+
+Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkation of the pivotal girl,
+whom she saw standing on the deck of the tender, with her hands at her
+waist, and giving now this side and now that side of her face to the
+young men waving their hats to her from the rail of the ship.  Burnamy
+was not of their number, and he seemed not to know that the girl was
+leaving him finally to Miss Triscoe.  If Miss Triscoe knew it she did
+nothing the whole of that long, last afternoon to profit by the fact.
+Burnamy spent a great part of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he
+showed an intolerable resignation to the girl's absence.
+
+"Yes," said March, taking the place Burnamy left at last, "that terrible
+patience of youth!"
+
+"Patience?  Folly!  Stupidity!  They ought to be together every instant!
+Do they suppose that life is full of such chances?  Do they think that
+fate has nothing to do but--"
+
+She stopped for a fit climax, and he suggested, "Hang round and wait on
+them?"
+
+"Yes!  It's their one chance in a life-time, probably."
+
+"Then you've quite decided that they're in love?"  He sank comfortably
+back, and put up his weary legs on the chair's extension with the
+conviction that love had no such joy as that to offer.
+
+"I've decided that they're intensely interested in each other."
+
+"Then what more can we ask of them?  And why do you care what they do or
+don't do with their chance?  Why do you wish their love well, if it's
+that?  Is marriage such a very certain good?"
+
+"It isn't all that it might be, but it's all that there is.  What would
+our lives have been without it?" she retorted.
+
+"Oh, we should have got on.  It's such a tremendous risk that we, ought
+to go round begging people to think twice, to count a hundred, or a
+nonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point.  I don't mind
+their flirting; that amuses them; but marrying is a different thing.
+I doubt if Papa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law
+he hadn't selected himself, and his daughter doesn't strike me as a young
+lady who has any wisdom to throw away on a choice.  She has her little
+charm; her little gift of beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the other
+things that go with her age and sex; but what could she do for a fellow
+like Burnamy, who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fame to
+climb, with an old mother at the bottom of it to look after?  You
+wouldn't want him to have an eye on Miss Triscoe's money, even if she had
+money, and I doubt if she has much.  It's all very pretty to have a girl
+like her fascinated with a youth of his simple traditions; though Burnamy
+isn't altogether pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to a place
+in the very world she belongs to.  I don't think it's for us to promote
+the affair."
+
+"Well, perhaps you're right," she sighed.  "I will let them alone from
+this out.  Thank goodness, I shall not have them under my eyes very
+long."
+
+"Oh, I don't think there's any harm done yet," said her husband, with a
+laugh.
+
+At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind he meant that she
+suffered from an illogical disappointment.  The young people got through
+the meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table
+first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement;
+she kept on chatting with March till his wife took him away to their
+chairs on deck.
+
+There were a few more ships in sight than there were in mid-ocean; but
+the late twilight thickened over the North Sea quite like the night after
+they left New York, except that it was colder; and their hearts turned to
+their children, who had been in abeyance for the week past, with a
+remorseful pang.  "Well, she said, "I wish we were going to be in New
+York to-morrow, instead of Hamburg."
+
+"Oh, no! Oh, no!" he protested.  "Not so bad as that, my dear.  This is
+the last night, and it's hard to manage, as the last night always is.  I
+suppose the last night on earth--"
+
+"Basil!" she implored.
+
+"Well, I won't, then.  But what I want is to see a Dutch lugger.  I've
+never seen a Dutch lugger, and--"
+
+She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to the signal he was
+silent; though it seemed afterwards that he ought to have gone on talking
+as if he did not see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by.  They
+were walking close together, and she was leaning forward and looking up
+into his face while he talked.
+
+"Now," Mrs. March whispered, long after they were out of hearing, "let us
+go instantly.  I wouldn't for worlds have them see us here when they get
+found again.  They would feel that they had to stop and speak, and that
+would spoil everything.  Come!
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and modestly waited for Miss
+Triscoe's prompting.  He had not to wait long.
+
+"And then, how soon did you think of printing your things in a book?"
+
+"Oh, about as soon as they began to take with the public."
+
+"How could you tell that they were-taking?"
+
+"They were copied into other papers, and people talked about them."
+
+"And that was what made Mr. Stoller want you to be his secretary?"
+
+"I don't believe it was.  The theory in the office was that he didn't
+think much of them; but he knows I can write shorthand, and put things
+into shape."
+
+"What things?"
+
+"Oh--ideas.  He has a notion of trying to come forward in politics.  He
+owns shares in everything but the United States Senate--gas, electricity,
+railroads, aldermen, newspapers--and now he would like some Senate.
+That's what I think."
+
+She did not quite understand, and she was far from knowing that this
+cynic humor expressed a deadlier pessimism than her father's fiercest
+accusals of the country.  "How fascinating it is!"  she said, innocently.
+
+"And I suppose they all envy your coming out?"
+
+"In the office?"
+
+"Yes.  I should envy, them--staying."
+
+Burnamy laughed.  "I don't believe they envy me.  It won't be all roses
+for me--they know that.  But they know that I can take care of myself if
+it isn't."  He remembered something one of his friends in the office had
+said of the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would feel if he ever tried
+his beak on him in the belief that he was soft.
+
+She abruptly left the mere personal question.  "And which would you
+rather write: poems or those kind of sketches?"
+
+"I don't know," said Burnamy, willing to talk of himself on any terms.
+"I suppose that prose is the thing for our time, rather more; but there
+are things you can't say in prose.  I used to write a great deal of verse
+in college; but I didn't have much luck with editors till Mr. March took
+this little piece for 'Every Other Week'."
+
+"Little?  I thought it was a long poem!"
+
+Burnamy laughed at the notion.  "It's only eight lines."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl.  "What is it about?"
+
+He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which he found incredible in
+a person of his make.  "I can repeat it if you won't give me away to Mrs.
+March."
+
+"Oh, no indeed!"  He said the lines over to her very simply and well."
+They are beautiful--beautiful!"
+
+"Do you think so?" he gasped, in his joy at her praise.
+
+"Yes, lovely.  Do you know, you are the first literary man--the only
+literary man--I ever talked with.  They must go out--somewhere!  Papa
+must meet them at his clubs.  But I never do; and so I'm making the most
+of you."
+
+"You can't make too much of me, Miss Triscoe," said Burnamy.
+
+She would not mind his mocking.  "That day you spoke about 'The Maiden
+Knight', don't you know, I had never heard any talk about books in that
+way.  I didn't know you were an author then."
+
+"Well, I'm not much of an author now," he said, cynically, to retrieve
+his folly in repeating his poem to her.
+
+"Oh, that will do for you to say.  But I know what Mrs. March thinks."
+
+He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; 'Every Other
+Week' was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously
+neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs.
+March's interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know
+just how much she thought of him as a writer?  "Did she like the poem."
+
+Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about the
+poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March's
+liking for Burnamy.  "But it wouldn't do to tell you all she said!"
+This was not what he hoped, but be was richly content when she returned
+to his personal history.  "And you didn't know any one when, you went up
+to Chicago from--"
+
+"Tippecanoe?  Not exactly that.  I wasn't acquainted with any one in the
+office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing to
+let me try my hand.  That was all I could ask."
+
+"Of course!  You knew you could do the rest.  Well, it is like a romance.
+A woman couldn't have such an adventure as that!" sighed the girl.
+
+"But women do!" Burnamy retorted.  "There is a girl writing on the paper
+now--she's going to do the literary notices while I'm gone--who came to
+Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who's made
+her way single-handed from interviewing up."
+
+"Oh," said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm.
+"Is she nice?"
+
+"She's mighty clever, and she's nice enough, too, though the kind of
+journalism that women do isn't the most dignified.  And she's one of the
+best girls I know, with lots of sense."
+
+"It must be very interesting," said Miss Triscoe, with little interest in
+the way she said it.  "I suppose you're quite a little community by
+yourselves."
+
+"On the paper?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don't.
+There's quite a regiment of people on a big paper.  If you'd like to come
+out," Burnamy ventured, "perhaps you could get the Woman's Page to do."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for
+dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette."
+
+He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, "Do women
+write it?"
+
+He laughed reminiscently.  "Well, not always.  We had one man who used to
+do it beautifully--when he was sober.  The department hasn't had any
+permanent head since."
+
+He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no
+doubt she had not taken it in fully.  She abruptly left the subject.
+"Do you know what time we really get in to-morrow?"
+
+"About one, I believe--there's a consensus of stewards to that effect,
+anyway."  After a pause he asked, "Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?"
+
+"We are going to Dresden, first, I believe.  Then we may go on down to
+Vienna.  But nothing is settled, yet."
+
+"Are you going direct to Dresden?"
+
+"I don't know.  We may stay in Hamburg a day or two."
+
+"I've got to go straight to Carlsbad.  There's a sleeping-car that will
+get me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal.  But I hope you'll let
+me be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow."
+
+"You're very kind.  You've been very good already--to papa."
+He protested that he had not been at all good.  "But he's used to taking
+care of himself on the other side.  Oh, it's this side, now!"
+
+"So it is!  How strange that seems!  It's actually Europe.  But as long
+as we're at sea, we can't realize it.  Don't you hate to have experiences
+slip through your fingers?"
+
+"I don't know.  A girl doesn't have many experiences of her own; they're
+always other people's."
+
+This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth.
+He only suggested, "Well; sometimes they make other people have the
+experiences."
+
+Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left
+the question.  "Do you understand German?"
+
+"A little.  I studied it at college, and I've cultivated a sort of beer-
+garden German in Chicago.  I can ask for things."
+
+"I can't, except in French, and that's worse than English, in Germany,
+I hear."
+
+"Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment.  Will
+you?"
+
+She did not answer.  "It must be rather late, isn't it?" she asked.  He
+let her see his watch, and she said, "Yes, it's very late," and led the
+way within.  "I must look after my packing; papa's always so prompt, and
+I must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left
+home; we expect to get one in Dresden.  Good-night!"
+
+Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered
+whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense of
+novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the
+first young lady he had known who had a maid.  The fact awed him; Miss
+Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and
+disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the
+shore.  No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage.  People
+went and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were
+no longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for
+a moment.
+
+In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below
+had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered
+with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls.  At an early hour after breakfast
+the bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in
+the corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and
+people who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going
+to give, anxiously conferred together.  The question whether you ought
+ever to give the head steward anything pressed crucially at the early
+lunch, and Kenby brought only a partial relief by saying that he always
+regarded the head steward as an officer of the ship.  March made the
+experiment of offering him six marks, and the head steward took them
+quite as if he were not an officer of the ship.  He also collected a
+handsome fee for the music, which is the tax levied on all German ships
+beyond the tolls exacted on the steamers of other nations.
+
+After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer
+cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle
+much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been
+for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied
+themselves at home again.
+
+Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream where
+the Norumbia had dropped anchor.  People who had brought their hand-
+baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it that
+people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledge
+them afresh not to forget it.  The tender came alongside, and the
+transfer of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work
+that every one sat down in some other's chair.  At last the trunks were
+all on the tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the
+gangways with the hand-baggage.  "Is this Hoboken?" March murmured in his
+wife's ear, with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the
+reversed action of the kinematograph.
+
+On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among the
+companions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowded
+together under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashing
+rain.  Burnamy's smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized Miss
+Triscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far from
+Burnamy's smile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins, whom
+he was helping look after their bags and bundles.  Rose Adding was
+talking with Kenby, and apparently asking his opinion of something; Mrs.
+Adding sat near them tranquilly enjoying her son.
+
+Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage, large and small, and
+after he had satisfied her, he furtively satisfied himself by a fresh
+count that it was all there.  But he need not have taken the trouble;
+their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard over it; his eyes
+expressed a contemptuous pity for their anxiety, whose like he must have
+been very tired of.  He brought their handbags into the customs-room at
+the station where they landed; and there took a last leave and a last fee
+with unexpected cordiality.
+
+Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the distraction which the
+customs inspectors of all countries bring to travellers; and again they
+were united during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was also the
+restaurant.  It was full of strange noises and figures and odors--the
+shuffling of feet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervous German
+voices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of cigars.
+Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing at the door with a
+letter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals, "Krahnay,
+Krahnay!  "When March could bear it no longer he went up to him and
+shouted, "Crane! Crane!" and the man bowed gratefully, and began to cry,
+"Kren! Kren!"  But whether Mr. Crane got his letter or not, he never
+knew.
+
+People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sending
+home cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbear
+cabling to his son, though he felt it absurd.  There was a great deal of
+talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girls
+behind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then served
+them with what they chose for them.  Otherwise the Germans, though
+voluble, were unsmiling, and here on the threshold of their empire the
+travellers had their first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitual
+with these amiable people.
+
+Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March where he sat with his wife,
+and leaned over her son to ask, "Do you know what lese-majesty is?  Rose
+is afraid I've committed it!"
+
+"No, I don't," said March.  "But it's the unpardonable sin.  What have
+you been doing?"
+
+"I asked the official at the door when our train would start, and when he
+said at half past three, I said, 'How tiresome!' Rose says the railroads
+belong to the state here, and that if I find fault with the time-table,
+it's constructive censure of the Emperor, and that's lese-majesty."  She
+gave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March's face with an
+appealing smile.
+
+"Well, I don't think you'll be arrested this time, Mrs. Adding; but I
+hope it will be a warning to Mrs. March.  She's been complaining of the
+coffee."
+
+"Indeed I shall say what I like," said Mrs. March.  "I'm an American."
+
+"Well, you'll find you're a German, if you like to say anything
+disagreeable about the coffee in the restaurant of the Emperor's railroad
+station; the first thing you know I shall be given three months on your
+account."
+
+Mrs. Adding asked: "Then they won't punish ladies?  There, Rose!  I'm
+safe, you see; and you're still a minor, though you are so wise for your
+years."
+
+She went back to her table, where Kenby came and sat down by her.
+
+"I don't know that I quite like her playing on that sensitive child,",
+said Mrs. March.  "And you've joined with her in her joking.  Go and
+speak, to him!"
+
+The boy was slowly following his mother, with his head fallen.  March
+overtook him, and he started nervously at the touch of a hand on his
+shoulder, and then looked gratefully up into the man's face.  March tried
+to tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he said: "Oh, yes.
+I understood that.  But I got to thinking; and I don't want my mother to
+take any risks."
+
+"I don't believe she will, really, Rose.  But I'll speak to her, and tell
+her she can't be too cautious."
+
+"Not now, please!" the boy entreated.
+
+"Well, I'll find another chance," March assented.  He looked round and
+caught a smiling nod from Burnamy, who was still with the Eltwins; the
+Triscoes were at a table by themselves; Miss Triseoe nodded too, but her
+father appeared not to see March.  "It's all right, with Rose," he said,
+when he sat down again by his wife; "but I guess it's all over with
+Burnamy," and he told her what he had seen.  "Do you think it came to any
+displeasure between them last night?  Do you suppose he offered himself,
+and she--"
+
+"What nonsense! " said Mrs. March, but she was not at peace.  "It's her
+father who's keeping her away from him."
+
+"I shouldn't mind that.  He's keeping her away from us, too."  But at
+that moment Miss Triscoe as if she had followed his return from afar,
+came over to speak to his wife.  She said they were going on to Dresden
+that evening, and she was afraid they might have no chance to see each
+other on the train or in Hamburg.  March, at this advance, went to speak
+with her father; he found him no more reconciled to Europe than America.
+
+"They're Goths," he said of the Germans.  "I could hardly get that stupid
+brute in the telegraph-office to take my despatch."
+
+On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe; he was not altogether
+surprised to meet Burnamy with her, now.  The young fellow asked if he
+could be of any use to him, and then he said he would look him up in the
+train.  He seemed in a hurry, but when he walked away with Miss Triscoe
+he did not seem in a hurry.
+
+March remarked upon the change to his wife, and she sighed, "Yes, you can
+see that as far as they're concerned."
+
+"It's a great pity that there should be parents to complicate these
+affairs," he said.  "How simple it would be if there were no parties to
+them but the lovers!  But nature is always insisting upon fathers and
+mothers, and families on both sides."
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The long train which they took at last was for the Norumbia's people
+alone, and it was of several transitional and tentative types of cars.
+Some were still the old coach-body carriages; but most were of a strange
+corridor arrangement, with the aide at the aide, and the seats crossing
+from it, with compartments sometimes rising to the roof, and sometimes
+rising half-way.  No two cars seemed quite alike, but all were very
+comfortable; and when the train began to run out through the little sea-
+side town into the country, the old delight of foreign travel began.
+Most of the houses were little and low and gray, with ivy or flowering
+vines covering their walls to their browntiled roofs; there was here and
+there a touch of Northern Gothic in the architecture; but usually where
+it was pretentious it was in the mansard taste, which was so bad with us
+a generation ago, and is still very bad in Cuxhaven.
+
+The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiar shapes of Holstein
+cattle, herded by little girls, with their hair in yellow pigtails.  The
+gray, stormy sky hung low, and broke in fitful rains; but perhaps for the
+inclement season of mid-summer it was not very cold.  Flowers were
+blooming along the embankments and in the rank green fields with a dogged
+energy; in the various distances were groups of trees embowering cottages
+and even villages, and always along the ditches and watercourses were
+double lines of low willows.  At the first stop the train made, the
+passengers flocked to the refreshment-booth, prettily arranged beside the
+station, where the abundance of the cherries and strawberries gave proof
+that vegetation was in other respects superior to the elements.  But it
+was not of the profusion of the sausages, and the ham which openly in
+slices or covertly in sandwiches claimed its primacy in the German
+affections; every form of this was flanked by tall glasses of beer.
+
+A number of the natives stood by and stared unsmiling at the train, which
+had broken out in a rash of little American flags at every window.  This
+boyish display, which must have made the Americans themselves laugh, if
+their sense of humor had not been lost in their impassioned patriotism,
+was the last expression of unity among the Norumbia's passengers, and
+they met no more in their sea-solidarity.  Of their table acquaintance
+the Marches saw no one except Burnamy, who came through the train looking
+for them.  He said he was in one of the rear cars with the Eltwins, and
+was going to Carlsbad with them in the sleeping-car train leaving Hamburg
+at seven.  He owned to having seen the Triscoes since they had left
+Cuxhaven; Mrs. March would not suffer herself to ask him whether they
+were in the same carriage with the Eltwins.  He had got a letter from
+Mr. Stoller at Cuxhaven, and he begged the Marches to let him engage
+rooms for them at the hotel where he was going to stay with him.
+
+After they reached Hamburg they had flying glimpses of him and of others
+in the odious rivalry to get their baggage examined first which seized
+upon all, and in which they no longer knew one another, but selfishly
+struggled for the good-will of porters and inspectors.  There was really
+no such haste; but none could govern themselves against the general
+frenzy.  With the porter he secured March conspired and perspired to win
+the attention of a cold but not unkindly inspector.  The officer opened
+one trunk, and after a glance at it marked all as passed, and then there
+ensued a heroic strife with the porter as to the pieces which were to go
+to the Berlin station for their journey next day, and the pieces which
+were to go to the hotel overnight.  At last the division was made; the
+Marches got into a cab of the first class; and the porter, crimson and
+steaming at every pore from the physical and intellectual strain, went
+back into the station.
+
+They had got the number of their cab from the policeman who stands at the
+door of all large German stations and supplies the traveller with a
+metallic check for the sort of vehicle he demands.  They were not proud,
+but it seemed best not to risk a second-class cab in a strange city, and
+when their first-class cab came creaking and limping out of the rank,
+they saw how wise they had been, if one of the second class could have
+been worse.
+
+As they rattled away from the station they saw yet another kind of
+turnout, which they were destined to see more and more in the German
+lands.  It was that team of a woman harnessed with a dog to a cart which
+the women of no other country can see without a sense of personal insult.
+March tried to take the humorous view, and complained that they had not
+been offered the choice of such an equipage by the policeman, but his
+wife would not be amused.  She said that no country which suffered such a
+thing could be truly civilized, though he made her observe that no city
+in the world, except Boston or Brooklyn, was probably so thoroughly
+trolleyed as Hamburg.  The hum of the electric car was everywhere, and
+everywhere the shriek of the wires overhead; batlike flights of
+connecting plates traversed all the perspectives through which they drove
+to the pleasant little hotel they had chosen.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+On one hand their windows looked toward a basin of the Elbe, where
+stately white swans were sailing; and on the other to the new Rathhaus,
+over the trees that deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dim public
+garden, where water-proof old women and impervious nurses sat, and
+children played in the long twilight of the sour, rain-soaked summer of
+the fatherland.  It was all picturesque, and within-doors there was the
+novelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furniture of the Germans, and
+their beds, which after so many ages of Anglo-Saxon satire remain
+immutably preposterous.  They are apparently imagined for the stature of
+sleepers who have shortened as they broadened; their pillows are
+triangularly shaped to bring the chin tight upon the breast under the
+bloated feather bulk which is meant for covering, and which rises over
+the sleeper from a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neatly buttoned
+into the upper sheet, with the effect of a portly waistcoat.
+
+The hotel was illumined by the kindly splendor of the uniformed portier,
+who had met the travellers at the door, like a glowing vision of the
+past, and a friendly air diffused itself through the whole house.  At the
+dinner, which, if not so cheap as they had somehow hoped, was by no means
+bad, they took counsel with the English-speaking waiter as to what
+entertainment Hamburg could offer for the evening, and by the time they
+had drunk their coffee they had courage for the Circus Renz, which seemed
+to be all there was.
+
+The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailed at the street corner,
+stopped it and got off the platform, and stood in the street until they
+were safely aboard, without telling them to step lively, or pulling them
+up the steps; or knuckling them in the back to make them move forward.
+He let them get fairly seated before be started the car, and so lost the
+fun of seeing them lurch and stagger violently, and wildly clutch each
+other for support.  The Germans have so little sense of humor that
+probably no one in the car would have been amused to see the strangers
+flung upon the floor.  No one apparently found it droll that the
+conductor should touch his cap to them when he asked for their fare; no
+one smiled at their efforts to make him understand where they wished to
+go, and he did not wink at the other passengers in trying to find out.
+Whenever the car stopped he descended first, and did not remount till the
+dismounting passenger had taken time to get well away from it.  When the
+Marches got into the wrong car in coming home, and were carried beyond
+their street, the conductor would not take their fare.
+
+The kindly civility which environed them went far to alleviate the
+inclemency of the climate; it began to rain as soon as they left the
+shelter of the car, but a citizen of whom they asked the nearest way to
+the Circus Renz was so anxious to have them go aright that they did not
+mind the wet, and the thought of his goodness embittered March's self-
+reproach for under-tipping the sort of gorgeous heyduk, with a staff like
+a drum-major's, who left his place at the circus door to get their
+tickets.  He brought them back with a magnificent bow, and was then as
+visibly disappointed with the share of the change returned to him as a
+child would have been.
+
+They went to their places with the sting of his disappointment rankling
+in their hearts.  "One ought always to overpay them," March sighed, "and
+I will do it from this time forth; we shall not be much the poorer for
+it.  That heyduk is not going to get off with less than a mark when we
+come out."  As an earnest of his good faith he gave the old man who
+showed them to their box a tip that made him bow double, and he bought
+every conceivable libretto and play-bill offered him at prices fixed by
+his remorse.
+
+"One ought to do it," he said.  "We are of the quality of good geniuses
+to these poor souls; we are Fortune in disguise; we are money found in
+the road.  It is an accursed system, but they are more its victims than
+we."  His wife quite agreed with him, and with the same good conscience
+between them they gave themselves up to the pure joy which the circus,
+of all modern entertainments, seems alone to inspire.  The house was full
+from floor to roof when they came ins and every one was intent upon the
+two Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose drolleries spoke the
+universal language of circus humor, and needed no translation into either
+German or English.  They had missed by an event or two the more patriotic
+attraction of "Miss Darlings, the American Star," as she was billed in
+English, but they were in time for one of those equestrian performances
+which leave the spectator almost exanimate from their prolixity, and the
+pantomimic piece which closed the evening.
+
+This was not given until nearly the whole house had gone out and stayed
+itself with beer and cheese and ham and sausage, in the restaurant which
+purveys these light refreshments in the summer theatres all over Germany.
+When the people came back gorged to the throat, they sat down in the
+right mood to enjoy the allegory of "The Enchanted Mountain's Fantasy";
+the Mountain episodes; the High-interesting Sledges-Courses on the Steep
+Acclivities; the Amazing-Up-rush of the thence plunging-Four Trains,
+which arrive with Lightnings-swiftness at the Top of the over-40-feet-
+high Mountain-the Highest Triumph of the To-day's Circus-Art; the Sledge-
+journey in the Wizard-mountain, and the Fairy Ballet in the Realm of the
+Ghost-prince, with Gold and Silver, Jewel, Bloomghosts, Gnomes,
+Gnomesses, and Dwarfs, in never-till-now-seen Splendor of Costume."  The
+Marches were happy in this allegory, and happier in the ballet, which is
+everywhere delightfully innocent, and which here appealed with the large
+flat feet and the plain good faces of the 'coryphees' to all that was
+simplest and sweetest in their natures.  They could not have resisted, if
+they had wished, that environment, of good-will; and if it had not been
+for the disappointed heyduk, they would have got home from their evening
+at the Circus Renz without a pang.
+
+They looked for him everywhere when they came out, but he had vanished,
+and they were left with a regret which, if unavailing, was not too
+poignant.  In spite of it they had still an exhilaration in their release
+from the companionship of their fellow-voyagers which they analyzed as
+the psychical revulsion from the strain of too great interest in them.
+Mrs. March declared that for the present, at least, she wanted Europe
+quite to themselves; and she said that not even for the pleasure of
+seeing Burnamy and Miss Triscoe come into their box together world she
+have suffered an American trespass upon their exclusive possession of the
+Circus Renz.
+
+In the audience she had seen German officers for the first time in
+Hamburg, and she meant, if unremitting question could bring out the
+truth, to know why she had not met any others.  She had read much of the
+prevalence and prepotence of the German officers who would try to push
+her off the sidewalk, till they realized that she was an American woman,
+and would then submit to her inflexible purpose of holding it.  But she
+had been some seven or eight hours in  Hamburg, and nothing of the kind
+had happened to her, perhaps because she had hardly yet walked a block in
+the city streets, but perhaps also because there seemed to be very few
+officers or military of  any kind in Hamburg.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+Their absence was plausibly explained, the next morning, by the young
+German friend who came in to see the Marches at breakfast.  He said
+Hamburg had been so long a free republic that the presence of a large
+imperial garrison was distasteful to the people, and as a matter of fact
+there were very few soldiers quartered there, whether the authorities
+chose to indulge the popular grudge or not.  He was himself in a joyful
+flutter of spirits, for he had just the day before got his release from
+military service.  He gave them a notion of what the rapture of a man
+reprieved from death might be, and he was as radiantly happy in the ill
+health which had got him his release as if it had been the greatest
+blessing of heaven.  He bubbled over with smiling regrets that he should
+be leaving his home for the first stage of the journey which he was to
+take in search of strength, just as they had come, and he pressed them to
+say if there were not something that he could do for them.
+
+Yes," said Mrs. March, with a promptness surprising to her husband, who
+could think of nothing; "tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he was
+in Hamburg.  My husband has always had a great passion for him and wants
+to look him up everywhere."
+
+March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young man
+had apparently never known it.  His face fell; he wished to make Mrs.
+March believe that it was only Heine's uncle who had lived there; but she
+was firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came back
+gladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live in
+Konigstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily know
+the house by his bust set in its front.  The portier and the head waiter
+shared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, and
+joined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them into
+their carriage.
+
+They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they should
+see in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that it
+rained there every day.  As they drove off in the gray drizzle with the
+unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they bade
+their driver be very slow in taking them through Konigstrasse, so that he
+should by no means miss Heine's dwelling, and he duly stopped in front of
+a house bearing the promised bust.  They dismounted in order to revere it
+more at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer than the
+sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his cruelest
+moment, to be that of the German Milton, the respectable poet Klopstock,
+whom Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.
+
+In fact it was here that the good, much-forgotten Klopstock dwelt,
+when he came home to live with a comfortable pension from the Danish
+government; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about
+among the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some manner of house where Heine
+might have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat, or any
+sort of two-pair back.  The neighbors were somewhat moved by the anxiety
+of the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors in Italy
+would have been.  There vas no eager and smiling sympathy in the little
+crowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient of
+question and kind in their helpless response, but they were not gay.
+To a man they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage and
+blood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of a
+stationer-and-bookseller's next to the butcher's had heard of him, but he
+had never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he never had heard where
+he lived in Hamburg.
+
+The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and
+drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their
+limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front
+escape him.  He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse,
+and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness
+that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done.
+They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no
+apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon
+them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their
+timber-laced gables.  The facades with their lattices stretching in bands
+quite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high in
+successions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than anything
+the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselves
+upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness which
+brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set
+ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and the
+traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress.  They
+could not have said which delighted them more--the houses in the
+immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the perspectives and
+the background; but all were like the painted scenes of the stage, and
+they had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they were not persons in
+some romantic drama.
+
+The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which
+Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous
+activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the
+turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her
+shipping.  At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness
+of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and
+seemed the expression of the home-side of her history.  The sense of this
+gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards
+made, and assisted the digestion of some morsels of tough statistics.
+In the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of the
+greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romantic
+glamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 a
+quarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United States
+seemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval streets
+through the whole shabby length of Third Avenue.
+
+It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of commercial solidarity,
+that March went to have a look at the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautiful
+new Rathhaus.  It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that;
+but it was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function of a public
+edifice, in withholding its entire interest from the stranger.  He could
+not get into the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was free to him, and when
+he stepped within, it rose at him with a roar of voices and of feet like
+the New York Stock Exchange.  The spectacle was not so frantic; people
+were not shaking their fists or fingers in each other's noses; but they
+were all wild in the tamer German way, and he was glad to mount from the
+Bourse to the poor little art gallery upstairs, and to shut out its
+clamor.  He was not so glad when he looked round on these, his first,
+examples of modern German art.  The custodian led him gently about and
+said which things were for sale, and it made his heart ache to see how
+bad they were, and to think that, bad as they were, he could not buy any
+of them.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had the irresponsible ease of
+people ticketed through, and the steamship company had still the charge
+of their baggage.  But when the Marches left Hamburg for Leipsic (where
+they had decided to break the long pull to Carlsbad), all the anxieties
+of European travel, dimly remembered from former European days, offered
+themselves for recognition.  A porter vanished with their hand-baggage
+before they could note any trait in him for identification; other porters
+made away with their trunks; and the interpreter who helped March buy his
+tickets, with a vocabulary of strictly railroad English, had to help him
+find the pieces in the baggage-room, curiously estranged in a mountain of
+alien boxes.  One official weighed them; another obliged him to pay as
+much in freight as for a third passenger, and gave him an illegible scrap
+of paper which recorded their number and destination.  The interpreter
+and the porters took their fees with a professional effect of
+dissatisfaction, and he went to wait with his wife amidst the smoking and
+eating and drinking in the restaurant.  They burst through with the rest
+when the doors were opened to the train, and followed a glimpse of the
+porter with their hand-bags, as he ran down the platform, still bent upon
+escaping them, and brought him to bay at last in a car where he had got
+very good seats for them, and sank into their places, hot and humiliated
+by their needless tumult.
+
+As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect, and renewed a youthful
+joy in some of the long-estranged facts.  The road was rougher than the
+roads at home; but for much less money they had the comfort, without the
+unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-class carriage.  Mrs.
+March had expected to be used with the severity on the imperial railroads
+which she had failed to experience from the military on the Hamburg
+sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the whole management toward
+her.  Her fellow-travellers were not lavish of their rights, as Americans
+are; what they got, that they kept; and in the run from Hamburg to
+Leipsic she had several occasions to observe that no German, however
+young or robust, dreams of offering a better place, if he has one, to a
+lady in grace to her sex or age; if they got into a carriage too late to
+secure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to the end of that
+stage.  But if they appealed to their fellow-travellers for information
+about changes, or stops, or any of the little facts that they wished to
+make sure of, they were enlightened past possibility of error.  At the
+point where they might have gone wrong the explanations were renewed with
+a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had not been
+forgotten.  She said she could not see how any people could be both so
+selfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of saying
+something offensive:
+
+"You women are so pampered in America that you are astonished when you
+are treated in Europe like the mere human beings you are."
+
+She answered with unexpected reasonableness:
+
+"Yes, there's something in that; but when the Germans have taught us how
+despicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as human
+beings?"
+
+This was at ten o'clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and at
+last, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him.  The
+darkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impression of its few
+simple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense: long levels, densely
+wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests, and
+checkered with fields of grain and grass, soaking under the thin rain
+that from time to time varied the thin sunshine.
+
+The villages and peasants' cottages were notably few; but there was here
+and there a classic or a gothic villa, which, at one point, an English-
+speaking young lady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain as the
+seat of some country gentleman; the land was in large holdings, and this
+accounted for the sparsity of villages and cottages.
+
+She then said that she was a German teacher of English, in Hamburg, and
+was going home to Potsdam for a visit.  She seemed like a German girl out
+of 'The Initials', and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried to
+invest herself with some romantic interest as an American.  She failed to
+move the girl's fancy, even after she had bestowed on her an immense
+bunch of roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had sent to them
+just before they left their hotel.  She failed, later, on the same ground
+with the pleasant-looking English woman who got into their carriage at
+Magdeburg, and talked over the 'London Illustrated News' with an English-
+speaking Fraulein in her company; she readily accepted the fact of Mrs.
+March's nationality, but found nothing wonderful in it, apparently; and
+when she left the train she left Mrs. March to recall with fond regret
+the old days in Italy when she first came abroad, and could make a whole
+carriage full of Italians break into ohs and ahs by saying that she was
+an American, and telling how far she had come across the sea.
+
+"Yes," March assented, "but that was a great while ago, and Americans
+were much rarer than they are now in Europe.  The Italians are so much
+more sympathetic than the Germans and English, and they saw that you
+wanted to impress them.  Heaven knows how little they cared!  And then,
+you were a very pretty young girl in those days; or at least I thought
+so."
+
+"Yes," she sighed, "and now I'm a plain old woman."
+
+"Oh, not quite so bad as that."
+
+"Yes, I am!  Do you think they would have cared more if it had been Miss
+Triscoe?"
+
+"Not so much as if it had been the pivotal girl.  They would have found
+her much more their ideal of the American woman; and even she would have
+had to have been here thirty years ago."
+
+She laughed a little ruefully.  "Well, at any rate, I should like to know
+how Miss Triscoe would have affected them."
+
+"I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is living
+here with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank.  I could
+imagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the way she
+clung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of the
+royalties to her friend.  There is romance for you!"
+
+They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours'
+journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up through
+the academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and silent
+except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their feline
+purr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul.  A sense of the
+past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and the
+head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to the
+endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms in
+the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found
+themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick
+succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them.
+The spell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of his
+consciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing.
+This linked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent
+the next forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotions
+tinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that since
+it was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be finally
+restored to him.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square of
+aristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture, which
+afterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite so
+characteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itself
+Little Paris.  The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the pale
+yellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarly
+associated in the minds of English-speaking travellers.  It was rather
+more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but a
+quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was provided
+with a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments when the
+rain forgot itself.  The place was better shaded than need be in that
+sunless land by the German elms that look like ours and it was
+sufficiently stocked with German statues, that look like no others.  It
+had a monument, too, of the sort with which German art has everywhere
+disfigured the kindly fatherland since the war with France.  These
+monuments, though they are so very ugly, have a sort of pathos as records
+of the only war in which Germany unaided has triumphed against a foreign
+foe, but they are as tiresome as all such memorial pomps must be.  It is
+not for the victories of a people that any other people can care.  The
+wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or
+what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and
+sorrow, and their fame is an offence to all men not concerned in them,
+till time has softened it to a memory
+
+    "Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
+     And battles long ago."
+
+It was for some such reason that while the Marches turned with instant
+satiety from the swelling and strutting sculpture which celebrated the
+Leipsic heroes of the war of 1870, they had heart for those of the war of
+1813; and after their noonday dinner they drove willingly, in a pause of
+the rain, out between yellowing harvests of wheat and oats to the field
+where Napoleon was beaten by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians (it
+always took at least three nations to beat the little wretch) fourscore
+years before.  Yet even there Mrs. March was really more concerned for
+the sparsity of corn-flowers in the grain, which in their modern
+character of Kaiserblumen she found strangely absent from their loyal
+function; and March was more taken with the notion of the little gardens
+which his guide told him the citizens could have in the suburbs of
+Leipsic and enjoy at any trolley-car distance from their homes.  He saw
+certain of these gardens in groups, divided by low, unenvious fences, and
+sometimes furnished with summer-houses, where the tenant could take his
+pleasure in the evening air, with his family.  The guide said he had such
+a garden himself, at a rent of seven dollars a year, where he raised
+vegetables and flowers, and spent his peaceful leisure; and March fancied
+that on the simple domestic side of their life, which this fact gave him
+a glimpse of, the Germans were much more engaging than in their character
+of victors over either the First or the Third Napoleon.  But probably
+they would not have agreed with him, and probably nations will go on
+making themselves cruel and tiresome till humanity at last prevails over
+nationality.
+
+He could have put the case to the guide himself; but though the guide was
+imaginably liberated to a cosmopolitan conception of things by three
+years' service as waiter in English hotels, where he learned the
+language, he might not have risen to this.  He would have tried, for he
+was a willing and kindly soul, though he was not a 'valet de place' by
+profession.  There seemed in fact but one of that useless and amusing
+race (which is everywhere falling into decay through the rivalry of the
+perfected Baedeker,) left in Leipsic, and this one was engaged, so that
+the Marches had to devolve upon their ex-waiter, who was now the keeper
+of a small restaurant.  He gladly abandoned his business to the care of
+his wife, in order to drive handsomely about in his best clothes, with
+strangers who did not exact too much knowledge from him.  In his zeal to
+do something he possessed himself of March's overcoat when they
+dismounted at their first gallery, and let fall from its pocket his
+prophylactic flask of brandy, which broke with a loud crash on the marble
+floor in the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumed the whole
+place.  The masterpieces were some excellent works of Luke Kranach, who
+seemed the only German painter worth looking at when there were any Dutch
+or Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and nature
+of the Kranachs, and remembered afterwards only the shattered fragments
+of the brandy-flask, just how they looked on the floor, and the fumes,
+how they smelt, that rose from the ruin.
+
+It might have been a warning protest of the veracities against what they
+were doing; but the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was on
+them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their
+ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well.  They spared
+themselves nothing that they had time for, that day, and they felt
+falsely guilty for their omissions, as if they really had been duties to
+art and history which must be discharged, like obligations to one's maker
+and one's neighbor.
+
+They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence of the beautiful old
+Rathhaus, and they were sensible of something like a genuine emotion in
+passing the famous and venerable university; the very air of Leipsic is
+redolent of printing and publication, which appealed to March in his
+quality of editor, and they could not fail of an impression of the quiet
+beauty of the town, with its regular streets of houses breaking into
+suburban villas of an American sort, and intersected with many canals,
+which in the intervals of the rain were eagerly navigated by pleasure
+boats, and contributed to the general picturesqueness by their frequent
+bridges, even during the drizzle.  There seemed to be no churches to do,
+and as it was a Sunday, the galleries were so early closed against them
+that they were making a virtue as well as a pleasure of the famous scene
+of Napoleon's first great defeat.
+
+By a concert between their guide and driver their carriage drew up at the
+little inn by the road-side, which is also a museum stocked with relics
+from the battle-field, and with objects of interest relating to it.  Old
+muskets, old swords, old shoes and old coats, trumpets, drums, gun-
+carriages, wheels, helmets, cannon balls, grape-shot, and all the
+murderous rubbish which battles come to at last, with proclamations,
+autographs, caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon, and effigies of all
+the other generals engaged, and miniatures and jewels of their womenkind,
+filled room after room, through which their owner vaunted his way, with a
+loud pounding voice and a bad breath.  When he wished them to enjoy some
+gross British satire or clumsy German gibe at Bonaparte's expense, and
+put his face close to begin the laugh, he was something so terrible that
+March left the place with a profound if not a reasoned regret that the
+French had not won the battle of Leipsic.  He walked away musing
+pensively upon the traveller's inadequacy to the ethics of history when a
+breath could so sway him against his convictions; but even after he had
+cleansed his lungs with some deep respirations he found himself still a
+Bonapartist in the presence of that stone on the rising ground where
+Napoleon sat to watch the struggle on the vast plain, and see his empire
+slipping through his blood-stained fingers.  It was with difficulty that
+he could keep from revering the hat and coat which are sculptured on the
+stone, but it was well that he succeeded, for he could not make out then
+or afterwards whether the habiliments represented were really Napoleon's
+or not, and they might have turned out to be Barclay de Tolly's.
+
+While he stood trying to solve this question of clothes he was startled
+by the apparition of a man climbing the little slope from the opposite
+quarter, and advancing toward them.  He wore the imperial crossed by the
+pointed mustache once so familiar to a world much the worse for them, and
+March had the shiver of a fine moment in which he fancied the Third
+Napoleon rising to view the scene where the First had looked his coming
+ruin in the face.
+
+"Why, it's Miss Triscoe!" cried his wife, and before March had noticed
+the approach of another figure, the elder and the younger lady had rushed
+upon each other, and encountered with a kiss.  At the same time the
+visage of the last Emperor resolved itself into the face of General
+Triscoe, who gave March his hand in a more tempered greeting.
+
+The ladies began asking each other of their lives since their parting two
+days before, and the men strolled a few paces away toward the distant
+prospect of Leipsic, which at that point silhouettes itself in a noble
+stretch of roofs and spires and towers against the horizon.
+
+General Triscoe seemed no better satisfied with Germany than he had been
+on first stepping ashore at Cuxhaven.  He might still have been in a pout
+with his own country, but as yet he had not made up with any other; and
+he said, "What a pity Napoleon didn't thrash the whole dunderheaded lot!
+His empire would have been a blessing to them, and they would have had
+some chance of being civilized under the French.  All this unification of
+nationalities is the great humbug of the century.  Every stupid race
+thinks it's happy because it's united, and civilization has been set back
+a hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring the unions about;
+and more wars will have to be fought to keep them up.  What a farce it
+is! What's become of the nationality of the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein,
+or the French in the Rhine Provinces, or the Italians in Savoy?"
+
+March had thought something like this himself, but to have it put by
+General Triscoe made it offensive.  "I don't know.  Isn't it rather
+quarrelling with the course of human events to oppose accomplished facts?
+The unifications were bound to be, just as the separations before them
+were.  And so far they have made for peace, in Europe at least, and peace
+is civilization.  Perhaps after a great many ages people will come
+together through their real interests, the human interests; but at
+present it seems as if nothing but a romantic sentiment of patriotism can
+unite them.  By-and-by they may find that there is nothing in it."
+
+"Perhaps," said the general, discontentedly.  "I don't see much promise
+of any kind in the future."
+
+"Well, I don't know.  When you think of the solid militarism of Germany,
+you seem remanded to the most hopeless moment of the Roman Empire; you
+think nothing can break such a force; but my guide says that even in
+Leipsic the Socialists outnumber all the other parties, and the army is
+the great field of the Socialist propaganda.  The army itself may be
+shaped into the means of democracy--even of peace."
+
+"You're very optimistic," said Triscoe, curtly.  "As I read the signs,
+we are not far from universal war.  In less than a year we shall make the
+break ourselves in a war with Spain."  He looked very fierce as he
+prophesied, and he dotted March over with his staccato glances.
+
+"Well, I'll allow that if Tammany comes in this year, we shall have war
+with Spain.  You can't ask more than that, General Triscoe?"
+
+Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had not said a word of the 'battle of
+Leipsic', or of the impersonal interests which it suggested to the men.
+For all these, they might still have been sitting in their steamer chairs
+on the promenade of the Norumbia at a period which seemed now of
+geological remoteness.  The girl accounted for not being in Dresden by
+her father's having decided not to go through Berlin but to come by way
+of Leipsic, which he thought they had better see; they had come without
+stopping in Hamburg.  They had not enjoyed Leipsic much; it had rained
+the whole day before, and they had not gone out.  She asked when Mrs.
+March was going on to Carlsbad, and Mrs. March answered, the next
+morning; her husband wished to begin his cure at once.
+
+Then Miss Triscoe pensively wondered if Carlsbad would do her father any
+good; and Mrs. March discreetly inquired General Triscoe's symptoms.
+
+"Oh, he hasn't any.  But I know he can't be well--with his gloomy
+opinions."
+
+"They may come from his liver," said Mrs. March.  "Nearly everything of
+that kind does.  I know that Mr. March has been terribly depressed at
+times, and the doctor said it was nothing but his liver; and Carlsbad is
+the great place for that, you know."
+
+"Perhaps I can get papa to run over some day, if he doesn't like Dresden.
+It isn't very far, is it?"
+
+They referred to Mrs. March's Baedeker together, and found that it was
+five hours.
+
+"Yes, that is what I thought," said Miss Triscoe, with a carelessness
+which convinced Mrs. March she had looked up the fact already.
+
+"If you decide to come, you must let us get rooms for you at our hotel.
+We're going to Pupp's; most of the English and Americans go to the hotels
+on the Hill, but Pupp's is in the thick of it in the lower town; and it's
+very gay, Mr. Kenby says; he's been there often.  Mr. Burnamy is to get
+our rooms."
+
+"I don't suppose I can get papa to go," said Miss Triscoe, so insincerely
+that Mrs. March was sure she had talked over the different routes; to
+Carlsbad with Burnamy--probably on the way from Cuxhaven.  She looked up
+from digging the point of her umbrella in the ground.  "You didn't meet
+him here this morning?"
+
+Mrs. March governed herself to a calm which she respected in asking, "Has
+Mr. Burnamy been here?"
+
+"He came on with Mr. and Mrs. Eltwin, when we did, and they all decided
+to stop over a day.  They left on the twelve-o'clock train to-day."
+
+Mrs. March perceived that the girl had decided not to let the facts
+betray themselves by chance, and she treated them as of no significance.
+
+"No, we didn't see him," she said, carelessly.
+
+The two men came walking slowly towards them, and Miss Triscoe said,
+"We're going to Dresden this evening, but I hope we shall meet somewhere,
+Mrs. March."
+
+"Oh, people never lose sight of each other in Europe; they can't; it's so
+little!"
+
+"Agatha," said the girl's father, "Mr. March tells me that the museum
+over there is worth seeing."
+
+"Well," the girl assented, and she took a winning leave of the Marches,
+and moved gracefully away with her father.
+
+"I should have thought it was Agnes," said Mrs. March, following them
+with her eyes before she turned upon her husband.  "Did he tell you
+Burnamy had been here?  Well, he has!  He has just gone on to Carlsbad.
+He made, those poor old Eltwins stop over with him, so he could be with
+her."
+
+"Did she say that?"
+
+"No, but of course he did."
+
+"Then it's all settled?"
+
+"No, it isn't settled.  It's at the most interesting point."
+
+"Well, don't read ahead.  You always want to look at the last page."
+
+"You were trying to look at the last page yourself," she retorted, and
+she would have liked to punish him for his complex dishonesty toward the
+affair; but upon the whole she kept her temper with him, and she made him
+agree that Miss Triscoe's getting her father to Carlsbad was only a
+question of time.
+
+They parted heart's-friends with their ineffectual guide, who was
+affectionately grateful for the few marks they gave him, at the hotel
+door; and they were in just the mood to hear men singing in a farther .
+room when they went down to supper.  The waiter, much distracted from
+their own service by his duties to it, told them it was the breakfast
+party of students which they had heard beginning there about noon.  The
+revellers had now been some six hours at table, and he said they might
+not rise before midnight; they had just got to the toasts, which were
+apparently set to music.
+
+The students of right remained a vivid color in the impression of the
+university town.  They pervaded the place, and decorated it with their
+fantastic personal taste in coats and trousers, as well as their corps
+caps of green, white, red, and blue, but above all blue.  They were not
+easily distinguishable from the bicyclers who were holding one of the
+dull festivals of their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps they were
+sometimes both students and bicyclers.  As bicyclers they kept about in
+the rain, which they seemed not to mind; so far from being disheartened,
+they had spirits enough to take one another by the waist at times and
+waltz in the square before the hotel.  At one moment of the holiday some
+chiefs among them drove away in carriages; at supper a winner of prizes
+sat covered with badges and medals; another who went by the hotel
+streamed with ribbons; and an elderly man at his side was bespattered
+with small knots and ends of them, as if he had been in an explosion of
+ribbons somewhere.  It seemed all to be as exciting for them, and it was
+as tedious for the witnesses, as any gala of students and bicyclers at
+home.
+
+Mrs. March remained with an unrequited curiosity concerning their
+different colors and different caps, and she tried to make her husband
+find out what they severally meant; he pretended a superior interest in
+the nature of a people who had such a passion for uniforms that they were
+not content with its gratification in their immense army, but indulged it
+in every pleasure and employment of civil life.  He estimated, perhaps
+not very accurately, that only one man out of ten in Germany wore
+citizens' dress; and of all functionaries he found that the dogs of the
+women-and-dog teams alone had no distinctive dress; even the women had
+their peasant costume.
+
+There was an industrial fair open at Leipsic which they went out of the
+city to see after supper, along with a throng of Leipsickers, whom an
+hour's interval of fine weather tempted forth on the trolley; and with
+the help of a little corporal, who took a fee for his service with the
+eagerness of a civilian, they got wheeled chairs, and renewed their
+associations with the great Chicago Fair in seeing the exposition from
+them.  This was not, March said, quite the same as being drawn by a
+woman-and-dog team, which would have been the right means of doing a
+German fair; but it was something to have his chair pushed by a slender
+young girl, whose stalwart brother applied his strength to the chair of
+the lighter traveller; and it was fit that the girl should reckon the
+common hire, while the man took the common tip.  They made haste to leave
+the useful aspects of the fair, and had themselves trundled away to the
+Colonial Exhibit, where they vaguely expected something like the
+agreeable corruptions of the Midway Plaisance.  The idea of her colonial
+progress with which Germany is trying to affect the home-keeping
+imagination of her people was illustrated by an encampment of savages
+from her Central-African possessions.  They were getting their supper at
+the moment the Marches saw them, and were crouching, half naked, around
+the fires under the kettles, and shivering from the cold, but they were
+not very characteristic of the imperial expansion, unless perhaps when an
+old man in a red blanket suddenly sprang up with a knife in his hand and
+began to chase a boy round the camp.  The boy was lighter-footed, and
+easily outran the sage, who tripped at times on his blanket.  None of the
+other Central Africans seemed to care for the race, and without waiting
+for the event, the American spectators ordered themselves trundled away
+to another idle feature of the fair, where they hoped to amuse themselves
+with the image of Old Leipsic.
+
+This was so faithfully studied from the past in its narrow streets and
+Gothic houses that it was almost as picturesque as the present epoch in
+the old streets of Hamburg.  A drama had just begun to be represented on
+a platform of the public square in front of a fourteenth-century beer-
+house, with people talking from the windows round, and revellers in the
+costume of the period drinking beer and eating sausages at tables in the
+open air.  Their eating and drinking were genuine, and in the midst of it
+a real rain began, to pour down upon them, without affecting them any
+more than if they had been Germans of the nineteenth century.  But it
+drove the Americans to a shelter from which they could not see the play,
+and when it held up, they made their way back to their hotel.
+
+Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of whom were happy
+beyond the sober wont of the fatherland.  The conductor took a special
+interest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, and
+genially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous.
+From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remounted
+the car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with
+an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyous
+physiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth.
+
+Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiences
+and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as
+a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide
+had said house-rent was very low.  He generalized from the guide's
+content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he
+became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted
+him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat
+better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large
+as the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex.  He was able to
+note, rather more freshly, that with all their kindness the Germans were
+a very nervous people, if not irritable, and at the least cause gave way
+to an agitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was violent while it
+lasted.  Several times that day he had seen encounters between the
+portier and guests at the hotel which promised violence, but which ended
+peacefully as soon as some simple question of train-time was solved.
+The encounters always left the portier purple and perspiring, as any
+agitation must with a man so tight in his livery.  He bemoaned himself
+after one of them as the victim of an unhappy calling, in which he could
+take no exercise.  "It is a life of excitements, but not of movements,"
+he explained to March; and when he learned where he was going, he
+regretted that he could not go to Carlsbad too.  "For sugar?" he asked,
+as if there were overmuch of it in his own make.
+
+March felt the tribute, but he had to say, " No; liver."
+
+"Ah!" said the portier, with the air of failing to get on common ground
+with him.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning in
+America.  Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the
+telegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying
+that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits were
+as light as the gay little clouds which blew about in the sky, when their
+train drew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charming landscape all
+the way to Carlsbad.  A fatherly 'traeger' had done his best to get them
+the worst places in a non-smoking compartment, but had succeeded so
+poorly that they were very comfortable, with no companions but a mother
+and daughter, who spoke German in soft low tones together.  Their
+compartment was pervaded by tobacco fumes from the smokers, but as these
+were twice as many as the non-smokers, it was only fair, and after March
+had got a window open it did not matter, really.
+
+He asked leave of the strangers in his German, and they consented in
+theirs; but he could not master the secret of the window-catch, and the
+elder lady said in English, "Let me show you," and came to his help.
+
+The occasion for explaining that they were Americans and accustomed to
+different car windows was so tempting that Mrs. March could not forbear,
+and the other ladies were affected as deeply as she could wish.  Perhaps
+they were the more affected because it presently appeared that they had
+cousins in New York whom she knew of, and that they were acquainted with
+an American family that had passed the winter in Berlin.  Life likes to
+do these things handsomely, and it easily turned out that this was a
+family of intimate friendship with the Marches; the names, familiarly
+spoken, abolished all strangeness between the travellers; and they
+entered into a comparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences, from
+which it seemed that the objects and interests of cultivated people in
+Berlin were quite the same as those of cultivated people in New York.
+Each of the parties to the discovery disclaimed any superiority for their
+respective civilizations; they wished rather to ascribe a greater charm
+and virtue to the alien conditions; and they acquired such merit with one
+another that when the German ladies got out of the train at Franzensbad,
+the mother offered Mrs. March an ingenious folding footstool which she
+had admired.  In fact, she left her with it clasped to her breast, and
+bowing speechless toward the giver in a vain wish to express her
+gratitude.
+
+"That was very pretty of her, my dear," said March.  "You couldn't have
+done that."
+
+"No," she confessed; "I shouldn't have had the courage.  The courage of
+my emotions," she added, thoughtfully.
+
+"Ah, that's the difference!  A Berliner could do it, and a Bostonian
+couldn't.  Do you think it so much better to have the courage of your
+convictions?"
+
+"I don't know.  It seems to me that I'm less and less certain of
+everything that I used to be sure of."
+
+He laughed, and then he said, "I was thinking how, on our wedding
+journey, long ago, that Gray Sister at the Hotel Dieu in Quebec offered
+you a rose."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"That was to your pretty youth.  Now the gracious stranger gives you a
+folding stool."
+
+"To rest my poor old feet.  Well, I would rather have it than a rose,
+now."
+
+"You bent toward her at just the slant you had when you took the flower
+that time; I noticed it.  I didn't see that you looked so very different.
+To be sure the roses in your cheeks have turned into rosettes; but
+rosettes are very nice, and they're much more permanent; I prefer them;
+they will keep in any climate."
+
+She suffered his mockery with an appreciative sigh.  "Yes, our age
+caricatures our youth, doesn't it?"
+
+"I don't think it gets much fun out of it," he assented.
+
+"No; but it can't help it.  I used to rebel against it when it first
+began.  I did enjoy being young."
+
+"You did, my dear," he said, taking her hand tenderly; she withdrew it,
+because though she could bear his sympathy, her New England nature could
+not bear its expression.  "And so did I; and we were both young a long
+time.  Travelling brings the past back, don't you think?  There at that
+restaurant, where we stopped for dinner--"
+
+"Yes, it was charming!  Just as it used to be!  With that white cloth,
+and those tall shining bottles of wine, and the fruit in the centre, and
+the dinner in courses, and that young waiter who spoke English, and was
+so nice!  I'm never going home; you may, if you like."
+
+"You bragged to those ladies about our dining-cars; and you said that our
+railroad restaurants were quite as good as the European."
+
+"I had to do that.  But I knew better; they don't begin to be."
+
+"Perhaps not; but I've been thinking that travel is a good deal alike
+everywhere.  It's the expression of the common civilization of the world.
+When I came out of that restaurant and ran the train down, and then found
+that it didn't start for fifteen minutes, I wasn't sure whether I was at
+home or abroad.  And when we changed cars at Eger, and got into this
+train which had been baking in the sun for us outside the station, I
+didn't know but I was back in the good old Fitchburg depot.  To be sure,
+Wallenstein wasn't assassinated at Boston, but I forgot his murder at
+Eger, and so that came to the same thing.  It's these confounded fifty-
+odd years.  I used to recollect everything.
+
+He had got up and was looking out of the window at the landscape, which
+had not grown less amiable in growing rather more slovenly since they had
+crossed the Saxon bolder into Bohemia.  All the morning and early
+afternoon they had run through lovely levels of harvest, where men were
+cradling the wheat and women were binding it into sheaves in the narrow
+fields between black spaces of forest.  After they left Eger, there was
+something more picturesque and less thrifty in the farming among the low
+hills which they gradually mounted to uplands, where they tasted a
+mountain quality in the thin pure air.  The railroad stations were
+shabbier; there was an indefinable touch of something Southern in the
+scenery and the people.  Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches of
+the streams, and where the current quickened, tall wheels were lifting
+water for the fields in circles of brimming and spilling pockets.  Along
+the embankments, where a new track was being laid, barefooted women were
+at work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yellow-haired girls
+were lugging large white-headed babies, and watching the train go by.
+At an up grade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to the
+children the pfennigs which had been left over from the passage in
+Germany, and he pleased himself with his bounty, till the question
+whether the children could spend the money forced itself upon him.  He
+sat down feeling less like a good genius than a cruel magician who had
+tricked them with false wealth; but he kept his remorse to himself, and
+tried to interest his wife in the difference of social and civic ideal
+expressed in the change of the inhibitory notices at the car windows,
+which in Germany had strongliest forbidden him to outlean himself, and
+now in Austria entreated him not to outbow himself.  She refused to share
+in the speculation, or to debate the yet nicer problem involved by the
+placarded prayer in the washroom to the Messrs. Travellers not to take
+away the soap; and suddenly he felt himself as tired as she looked, with
+that sense of the futility of travel which lies in wait for every one who
+profits by travel.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Calm of those who have logic on their side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance . . . . . . . .
+Explained perhaps too fully. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Futility of travel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Humanity may at last prevail over nationality. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much. . . . . . . . . . .
+Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of . . . . . . . . . .
+Life of the ship, like the life of the sea:  a sodden monotony . . . . .
+Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous. . . . .
+Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all. . . . . . . . . . .
+Our age caricatures our youth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Prices fixed by his remorse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Recipes for dishes and diseases. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Reckless and culpable optimism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Repeated the nothings they had said already. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+She cares for him:  that she was so cold shows that. . . . . . . . . . .
+She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression. . . . . . . . . . .
+Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism. . . . . . . . . .
+They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart . . . . . . .
+Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine. . . . . .
+Wilful sufferers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+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 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Silver Wedding Journey V1,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Silver Wedding Journey, by Howells, v1
+#18 in our series by William Dean Howells
+
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+Title: Their Silver Wedding Journey, v1
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3371]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 03/23/01]
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+Edition: 11
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Silver Wedding Journey, by Howells, v1
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+
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks at the end of this file
+for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making
+an entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY.
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+Part I.
+
+
+
+I.
+
+"You need the rest," said the Business End; "and your wife wants you to
+go, as well as your doctor. Besides, it's your Sabbatical year, and you,
+could send back a lot of stuff for the magazine."
+
+"Is that your notion of a Sabbatical year?" asked the editor.
+
+"No; I throw that out as a bait to your conscience.  You needn't write a
+line while you're gone.  I wish you wouldn't for your own sake; although
+every number that hasn't got you in it is a back number for me."
+
+"That's very nice of you, Fulkerson," said the editor.  "I suppose you
+realize that it's nine years since we took 'Every Other Week' from
+Dryfoos?"
+
+"Well, that makes it all the more Sabbatical," said Fulkerson.  "The two
+extra years that you've put in here, over and above the old style
+Sabbatical seven, are just so much more to your credit.  It was your
+right to go, two years ago, and now it's your duty.  Couldn't you look at
+it in that light?"
+
+"I dare say Mrs. March could," the editor assented.  "I don't believe she
+could be brought to regard it as a pleasure on any other terms."
+
+"Of course not," said Fulkerson.  "If you won't take a year, take three
+months, and call it a Sabbatical summer; but go, anyway.  You can make up
+half a dozen numbers ahead, and Tom, here, knows your ways so well that
+you needn't think about 'Every Other Week' from the time you start till
+the time you try to bribe the customs inspector when you get back.  I can
+take a hack at the editing myself, if Tom's inspiration gives out, and
+put a little of my advertising fire into the thing."  He laid his hand on
+the shoulder of the young fellow who stood smiling by, and pushed and
+shook him in the liking there was between them.  "Now you go, March!
+Mrs. Fulkerson feels just as I do about it; we had our outing last year,
+and we want Mrs. March and you to have yours.  You let me go down and
+engage your passage, and--"
+
+"No, no!" the editor rebelled.  "I'll think about it;" but as he turned
+to the work he was so fond of and so weary of, he tried not to think of
+the question again, till he closed his desk in the afternoon, and started
+to walk home; the doctor had said he ought to walk, and he did so, though
+he longed to ride, and looked wistfully at the passing cars.
+
+He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, it
+was a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if the
+flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had been
+going so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among the
+butterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this illusion,
+himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it mocked the
+notion.  They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they were ever
+to find it again, was to be looked for in Europe, where they met when
+they were young, and they had never been quite without the hope of going
+back there, some day, for a long sojourn.  They had not seen the time
+when they could do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized, even
+dreaming is not free from care; and in his dream March had been obliged
+to work pretty steadily, if not too intensely.  He had been forced to
+forego the distinctly literary ambition with which he had started in life
+because he had their common living to make, and he could not make it by
+writing graceful verse, or even graceful prose.  He had been many years
+in a sufficiently distasteful business, and he had lost any thought of
+leaving it when it left him, perhaps because his hold on it had always
+been rather lax, and he had not been able to conceal that he disliked it.
+At any rate, he was supplanted in his insurance agency at Boston by a
+subordinate in his office, and though he was at the same time offered a
+place of nominal credit in the employ of the company, he was able to
+decline it in grace of a chance which united the charm of congenial work
+with the solid advantage of a better salary than he had been getting for
+work he hated.  It was an incredible chance, but it was rendered
+appreciably real by the necessity it involved that they should leave
+Boston, where they had lived all their married life, where Mrs. March as
+well as their children was born, and where all their tender and familiar
+ties were, and come to New York, where the literary enterprise which
+formed his chance was to be founded.
+
+It was then a magazine of a new sort, which his business partner had
+imagined in such leisure as the management of a newspaper syndicate
+afforded him, and had always thought of getting March to edit.  The
+magazine which is also a book has since been realized elsewhere on more
+or less prosperous terms, but not for any long period, and 'Every Other
+Week' was apparently--the only periodical of the kind conditioned for
+survival.  It was at first backed by unlimited capital, and it had the
+instant favor of a popular mood, which has since changed, but which did
+not change so soon that the magazine had not time to establish itself in
+a wide acceptance.  It was now no longer a novelty, it was no longer in
+the maiden blush of its first success, but it had entered upon its second
+youth with the reasonable hope of many years of prosperity before it.  In
+fact it was a very comfortable living for all concerned, and the Marches
+had the conditions, almost dismayingly perfect, in which they had often
+promised themselves to go and be young again in Europe, when they
+rebelled at finding themselves elderly in America.  Their daughter was
+married, and so very much to her mother's mind that she did not worry
+about her, even though she lived so far away as Chicago, still a wild
+frontier town to her Boston imagination; and their son, as soon as he
+left college, had taken hold on 'Every Other Week', under his father's
+instruction, with a zeal and intelligence which won him Fulkerson's
+praise as a chip of the old block.  These two liked each other, and
+worked into each other's hands as cordially and aptly as Fulkerson and
+March had ever done.  It amused the father to see his son offering
+Fulkerson the same deference which the Business End paid to seniority in
+March himself; but in fact, Fulkerson's forehead was getting, as he said,
+more intellectual every day; and the years were pushing them all along
+together.
+
+Still, March had kept on in the old rut, and one day he fell down in it.
+He had a long sickness, and when he was well of it, he was so slow in
+getting his grip of work again that he was sometimes deeply discouraged.
+His wife shared his depression, whether he showed or whether he hid it,
+and when the doctor advised his going abroad, she abetted the doctor with
+all the strength of a woman's hygienic intuitions.  March himself
+willingly consented, at first; but as soon as he got strength for his
+work, he began to temporize and to demur.  He said that he believed it
+would do him just as much good to go to Saratoga, where they always had
+such a good time, as to go to Carlsbad; and Mrs. March had been obliged
+several times to leave him to his own undoing; she always took him more
+vigorously in hand afterwards.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+When he got home from the 'Every Other Week' office, the afternoon of
+that talk with the Business End, he wanted to laugh with his wife at
+Fulkerson's notion of a Sabbatical year.  She did not think it was so
+very droll; she even urged it seriously against him, as if she had now
+the authority of Holy Writ for forcing him abroad; she found no relish of
+absurdity in the idea that it was his duty to take this rest which had
+been his right before.
+
+He abandoned himself to a fancy which had been working to the surface of
+his thought.  "We could call it our Silver Wedding Journey, and go round
+to all the old places, and see them in the reflected light of the past."
+
+"Oh, we could!"  she responded, passionately; and he had now the delicate
+responsibility of persuading her that he was joking.
+
+He could think of nothing better than a return to Fulkerson's absurdity.
+"It would be our Silver Wedding Journey just as it would be my Sabbatical
+year--a good deal after date.  But I suppose that would make it all the
+more silvery."
+
+She faltered in her elation.  "Didn't you say a Sabbatical year
+yourself?" she demanded.
+
+"Fulkerson said it; but it was a figurative expression."
+
+"And I suppose the Silver Wedding Journey was a figurative expression
+too!"
+
+"It was a notion that tempted me; I thought you would enjoy it.  Don't
+you suppose I should be glad too, if we could go over, and find ourselves
+just as we were when we first met there?"
+
+"No; I don't believe now that you care anything about it."
+
+"Well, it couldn't be done, anyway; so that doesn't matter."
+
+"It could be done, if you were a mind to think so.  And it would be the
+greatest inspiration to you.  You are always longing for some chance to
+do original work, to get away from your editing, but you've let the time
+slip by without really trying to do anything; I don't call those little
+studies of yours in the magazine anything; and now you won't take the
+chance that's almost forcing itself upon you.  You could write an
+original book of the nicest kind; mix up travel and fiction; get some
+love in."
+
+"Oh, that's the stalest kind of thing!"
+
+"Well, but you could see it from a perfectly new point of view.  You
+could look at it as a sort of dispassionate witness, and treat it
+humorously--of course it is ridiculous--and do something entirely fresh."
+
+"It wouldn't work.  It would be carrying water on both shoulders.  The
+fiction would kill the travel, the travel would kill the fiction; the
+love and the humor wouldn't mingle any more than oil and vinegar."
+
+"Well, and what is better than a salad?"
+
+"But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing to put it on."  She
+was silent, and he yielded to another fancy.  "We might imagine coming
+upon our former selves over there, and travelling round with them--
+a wedding journey 'en partie carree'."
+
+"Something like that.  I call it a very poetical idea," she said with a
+sort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush.
+
+"It isn't so bad," he admitted.  "How young we were, in those days!"
+
+"Too young to know what a good time we were having," she said, relaxing
+her doubt for the retrospect.  "I don't feel as if I really saw Europe,
+then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple.  I would like to
+go, just to make sure that I had been."  He was smiling again in the way
+he had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded,
+"What is it?"
+
+"Nothing.  I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people who
+actually hadn't been before--carry them all through Europe, and let them
+see it in the old, simple-hearted American way."
+
+She shook her head.  "You couldn't!  They've all been!"
+
+"All but about sixty or seventy millions," said March.
+
+"Well, those are just the millions you don't know, and couldn't imagine."
+
+"I'm not so sure of that."
+
+"And even if you could imagine them, you couldn't make them interesting.
+All the interesting ones have been, anyway."
+
+"Some of the uninteresting ones too.  I used, to meet some of that sort
+over there.  I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with
+those that hadn't been."
+
+"Then why not do it? I know you could get something out of it."
+
+"It might be a good thing," he mused, "to take a couple who had passed
+their whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go; and
+had a perfect famine for Europe all the time.  I could have them spend
+their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking up
+their accommodations.  I could have them sail, in imagination, and
+discover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions of
+it from travels and novels against a background of purely American
+experience.  We needn't go abroad to manage that.  I think it would be
+rather nice."
+
+"I don't think it would be nice in the least," said Mrs. March, "and if
+you don't want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all."
+
+"Well, then, let's talk about our Silver Wedding Journey."
+
+"I see.  You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it."
+
+She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really
+silent.  He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to
+good-humor.  He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken and
+look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she refused.
+When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she consented
+to go.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took a
+hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fancied
+some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next
+Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken.  To be
+sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the afternoon
+of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that invisible
+thread of association which drew him.
+
+The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the
+outward voyage, and was looking her best.  She was tipped and edged with
+shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and white-painted
+as only a ship knows how to be.  A little uniformed steward ran before
+the visitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors into
+typical state-rooms on the different decks; and then let them verify
+their first impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and the
+luxury of the ladies' parlor and music-room.  March made his wife observe
+that the tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so carelessly
+scattered about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the floor against
+rough weather; and he amused himself with the heavy German browns and
+greens and coppers in the decorations, which he said must have been
+studied in color from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the effect of those
+large march-panes in the roof.  She laughed with him at the tastelessness
+of the race which they were destined to marvel at more and more; but she
+made him own that the stewardesses whom they saw were charmingly like
+serving-maids in the 'Fliegende Blatter'; when they went ashore she
+challenged his silence for some assent to her own conclusion that the
+Colmannia was perfect.
+
+"She has only one fault," he assented.  "She's a ship."
+
+"Yes," said his wife, "and I shall want to look at the Norumbia before I
+decide."
+
+Then he saw that it was only a question which steamer they should take,
+and not whether they should take any.  He explained, at first gently and
+afterwards savagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quite enough
+for him, and that the vessel was not built that he would be willing to
+cross the Atlantic in.
+
+When a man has gone so far as that he has committed himself to the
+opposite course in almost so many words; and March was neither surprised
+nor abashed when he discovered himself, before they reached home,
+offering his wife many reasons why they should go to Europe.  She
+answered to all, No, he had made her realize the horror of it so much
+that she was glad to give it up.  She gave it up, with the best feeling;
+all that she would ask of him was that he should never mention Europe to
+her again.  She could imagine how much he disliked to go, if such a ship
+as the Colmannia did not make him want to go.
+
+At the bottom of his heart he knew that he had not used her very well.
+He had kindled her fancy with those notions of a Sabbatical year and a
+Silver Wedding Journey, and when she was willing to renounce both he had
+persisted in taking her to see the ship, only to tell her afterwards that
+he would not go abroad on any account.  It was by a psychological juggle
+which some men will understand that he allowed himself the next day to
+get the sailings of the Norumbia from the steamship office; he also got
+a plan of the ship showing the most available staterooms, so that they
+might be able to choose between her and the Colmannia from all the facts.
+
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+From this time their decision to go was none the less explicit because so
+perfectly tacit.
+
+They began to amass maps and guides.  She got a Baedeker for Austria and
+he got a Bradshaw for the continent, which was never of the least use
+there, but was for the present a mine of unavailable information.  He got
+a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his German.  He used to read
+German, when he was a boy, with a young enthusiasm for its romantic
+poetry, and now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine, he held
+imaginary conversations with a barber, a bootmaker, and a banker, and
+tried to taste the joy which he had not known in the language of those
+poets for a whole generation.  He perceived, of course, that unless the
+barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him in terms which the
+author of the phrase-book directed them to use, he should not get on with
+them beyond his first question; but he did not allow this to spoil his
+pleasure in it.  In fact, it was with a tender emotion that he realized
+how little the world, which had changed in everything else so greatly,
+had changed in its ideal of a phrase-book.
+
+Mrs. March postponed the study of her Baedeker to the time and place for
+it; and addressed herself to the immediate business of ascertaining the
+respective merits of the Colmannia and Norumbia.  She carried on her
+researches solely among persons of her own sex; its experiences were
+alone of that positive character which brings conviction, and she valued
+them equally at first or second hand.  She heard of ladies who would not
+cross in any boat but the Colmannia, and who waited for months to get a
+room on her; she talked with ladies who said that nothing would induce
+them to cross in her.  There were ladies who said she had twice the
+motion that the Norumbia had, and the vibration from her twin screws was
+frightful; it always was, on those twin-screw boats, and it did not
+affect their testimony with Mrs. March that the Norumbia was a twin-screw
+boat too.  It was repeated to her in the third or fourth degree of hear-
+say that the discipline on the Colmannia was as perfect as that on the
+Cunarders; ladies whose friends had tried every line assured her that the
+table of the Norumbia was almost as good as the table of the French
+boats.  To the best of the belief of lady witnesses still living who had
+friends on board, the Colmannia had once got aground, and the Norumbia
+had once had her bridge carried off by a tidal wave; or it might be the
+Colmannia; they promised to ask and let her know.  Their lightest word
+availed with her against the most solemn assurances of their husbands,
+fathers, or brothers, who might be all very well on land, but in
+navigation were not to be trusted; they would say anything from a
+reckless and culpable optimism.  She obliged March all the same to ask
+among them, but she recognized their guilty insincerity when he came home
+saying that one man had told him you could have played croquet on the
+deck of the Colmannia the whole way over when he crossed, and another
+that he never saw the racks on in three passages he had made in the
+Norumbia.
+
+The weight of evidence was, he thought, in favor of the Norumbia, but
+when they went another Sunday to Hoboken, and saw the ship, Mrs. March
+liked her so much less than the Colmannia that she could hardly wait for
+Monday to come; she felt sure all the good rooms on the Colmannia would
+be gone before they could engage one.
+
+From a consensus of the nerves of all the ladies left in town so late in
+the season, she knew that the only place on any steamer where your room
+ought to be was probably just where they could not get it.  If you went
+too high, you felt the rolling terribly, and people tramping up and down
+on the promenade under your window kept you awake the whole night; if you
+went too low, you felt the engine thump, thump, thump in your head the
+whole way over.  If you went too far forward, you got the pitching; if
+you went aft, on the kitchen side, you got the smell of the cooking.  The
+only place, really, was just back of the dining-saloon on the south side
+of the ship; it was smooth there, and it was quiet, and you had the sun
+in your window all the way over.  He asked her if he must take their room
+there or nowhere, and she answered that he must do his best, but that she
+would not be satisfied with any other place.
+
+In his despair he went down to the steamer office, and took a room which
+one of the clerks said was the best.  When he got home, it appeared from
+reference to the ship's plan that it was the very room his wife had
+wanted from the beginning, and she praised him as if he had used a wisdom
+beyond his sex in getting it.
+
+He was in the enjoyment of his unmerited honor when a belated lady came
+with her husband for an evening call, before going into the country.  At
+sight of the plans of steamers on the Marches' table, she expressed the
+greatest wonder and delight that they were going to Europe.  They had
+supposed everybody knew it, by this time, but she said she had not heard
+a word of it; and she went on with some felicitations which March found
+rather unduly filial.  In getting a little past the prime of life he did
+not like to be used with too great consideration of his years, and he did
+not think that he and his wife were so old that they need be treated as
+if they were going on a golden wedding journey, and heaped with all sorts
+of impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much and being so much
+the better for the little outing!  Under his breath, he confounded this
+lady for her impudence; but he schooled himself to let her rejoice at
+their going on a Hanseatic boat, because the Germans were always so
+careful of you.  She made her husband agree with her, and it came out
+that he had crossed several times on both the Colmannia and the Norumbia.
+He volunteered to say that the Colmannia, was a capital sea-boat; she did
+not have her nose under water all the time; she was steady as a rock; and
+the captain and the kitchen were simply out of sight; some people did
+call her unlucky.
+
+"Unlucky?" Mrs. March echoed, faintly.  "Why do they call her unlucky?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  People will say anything about any boat.  You know
+she broke her shaft, once, and once she got caught in the ice."
+
+Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstition of people, and she
+parted gayly with this over-good young couple.  As soon as they were
+gone, March knew that she would say: "You must change that ticket, my
+dear.  We will go in the Norumbia."
+
+"Suppose I can't get as good a room on the Norumbia?"
+
+"Then we must stay."
+
+In the morning after a night so bad that it was worse than no night at
+all, she said she would go to the steamship office with him and question
+them up about the Colmannia.  The people there had never heard she was
+called an unlucky boat; they knew of nothing disastrous in her history.
+They were so frank and so full in their denials, and so kindly patient of
+Mrs. March's anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying conviction of
+their insincerity to her.  At the end she asked what rooms were left on
+the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to looked through his
+passenger list with a shaking head.  He was afraid there was nothing they
+would like.
+
+"But we would take anything," she entreated, and March smiled to think of
+his innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever dreamed of not
+going.
+
+"We merely want the best," he put in.  "One flight up, no noise or dust,
+with sun in all the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days."
+
+They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do not
+understand, in the foreign steamship offices.  The clerk turned
+unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in German
+which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part of a
+conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker.  A brief drama
+followed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the
+Norumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it if
+they decided to take it at once.
+
+They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the Colmannia;
+it was within one of being the same number.  It was so providential, if
+it was providential at all, that they were both humbly silent a moment;
+even Mrs. March was silent.  In this supreme moment she would not prompt
+her husband by a word, a glance, and it was from his own free will that
+he said, "We will take it."
+
+He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one's will is never free;
+and this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all the
+events before it.  No event that followed affected it, though the day
+after they had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had
+once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August.  He felt
+obliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved
+nothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason
+than by all her previous unreason.  Reason is what a man is never
+prepared for in women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+During nearly the whole month that now passed before the date of sailing
+it seemed to March that in some familiar aspects New York had never been
+so interesting.  He had not easily reconciled himself to the place after
+his many years of Boston; but he had got used to the ugly grandeur, to
+the noise and the rush, and he had divined more and more the careless
+good-nature and friendly indifference of the vast, sprawling, ungainly
+metropolis.  There were happy moments when he felt a poetry unintentional
+and unconscious in it, and he thought there was no point more favorable
+for the sense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they had a flat.
+Their windows looked down into its tree-tops, and across them to the
+truncated towers of St. George's, and to the plain red-brick, white-
+trimmed front of the Friends' Meeting House; he came and went between his
+dwelling and his office through the two places that form the square, and
+after dinner his wife and he had a habit of finding seats by one of the
+fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathers and mothers of the
+hybrid East Side children swarming there at play.  The elders read their
+English or Italian or German or Yiddish journals, or gossiped, or merely
+sat still and stared away the day's fatigue; while the little ones raced
+in and out among them, crying and laughing, quarrelling and kissing.
+Sometimes a mother darted forward and caught her child from the brink of
+the basin; another taught hers to walk, holding it tightly up behind by
+its short skirts; another publicly nursed her baby to sleep.
+
+While they still dreamed, but never thought, of going to Europe, the
+Marches often said how European all this was; if these women had brought
+their knitting or sewing it would have been quite European; but as soon
+as they had decided to go, it all began to seem poignantly American.  In
+like manner, before the conditions of their exile changed, and they still
+pined for the Old World, they contrived a very agreeable illusion of it
+by dining now and then at an Austrian restaurant in Union Square; but
+later when they began to be homesick for the American scenes they had not
+yet left, they had a keener retrospective joy in the strictly New York
+sunset they were bowed out into.
+
+The sunsets were uncommonly characteristic that May in Union Square.
+They were the color of the red stripes in the American flag, and when
+they were seen through the delirious architecture of the Broadway side,
+or down the perspective of the cross-streets, where the elevated trains
+silhouetted themselves against their pink, they imparted a feeling of
+pervasive Americanism in which all impression of alien savors and
+civilities was lost.  One evening a fire flamed up in Hoboken, and burned
+for hours against the west, in the lurid crimson tones of a conflagration
+as memorably and appealingly native as the colors of the sunset.
+
+The weather for nearly the whole month was of a mood familiar enough in
+our early summer, and it was this which gave the sunsets their vitreous
+pink.  A thrilling coolness followed a first blaze of heat, and in the
+long respite the thoughts almost went back to winter flannels.  But at
+last a hot wave was telegraphed from the West, and the week before the
+Norumbia sailed was an anguish of burning days and breathless nights,
+which fused all regrets and reluctances in the hope of escape, and made
+the exiles of two continents long for the sea, with no care for either
+shore.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at dawn because they had
+scarcely lain down, and March crept out into the square for a last breath
+of its morning air before breakfast.  He was now eager to be gone; he had
+broken with habit, and he wished to put all traces of the past out of
+sight.  But this was curiously like all other early mornings in his
+consciousness, and he could not alienate himself from the wonted
+environment.  He stood talking on every-day terms of idle speculation
+with the familiar policeman, about a stray parrot in the top of one of
+the trees, where it screamed and clawed at the dead branch to which it
+clung.  Then he went carelessly indoors again as if he were secure of
+reading the reporter's story of it in that next day's paper which he
+should not see.
+
+The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted through the breakfast,
+which was like other breakfasts in the place they would be leaving in
+summer shrouds just as they always left it at the end of June.  The
+illusion was even heightened by the fact that their son was to be in the
+apartment all summer, and it would not be so much shut up as usual.  The
+heavy trunks had been sent to the ship by express the afternoon before,
+and they had only themselves and their stateroom baggage to transport to
+Hoboken; they came down to a carriage sent from a neighboring livery-
+stable, and exchanged good-mornings with a driver they knew by name.
+
+March had often fancied it a chief advantage of living in New York that
+you could drive to the steamer and start for Europe as if you were
+starting for Albany; he was in the enjoyment of this advantage now, but
+somehow it was not the consolation he had expected.  He knew, of course,
+that if they had been coming from Boston, for instance, to sail in the
+Norumbia, they would probably have gone on board the night before, and
+sweltered through its heat among the strange smells and noises of the
+dock and wharf, instead of breakfasting at their own table, and smoothly
+bowling down the asphalt on to the ferryboat, and so to the very foot of
+the gangway at the ship's side, all in the cool of the early morning.
+But though he had now the cool of the early morning on these conditions,
+there was by no means enough of it.
+
+The sun was already burning the life out of the air, with the threat of
+another day of the terrible heat that had prevailed for a week past; and
+that last breakfast at home had not been gay, though it had been lively,
+in a fashion, through Mrs. March's efforts to convince her son that she
+did not want him to come and see them off.  Of, her daughter's coming all
+the way from Chicago there was no question, and she reasoned that if he
+did not come to say good-by on board it would be the same as if they were
+not going.
+
+"Don't you want to go?" March asked with an obscure resentment.
+
+"I don't want to seem to go," she said, with the calm of those who have
+logic on their side.
+
+As she drove away with her husband she was not so sure of her
+satisfaction in the feint she had arranged, though when she saw the
+ghastly partings of people on board, she was glad she had not allowed her
+son to come.  She kept saying this to herself, and when they climbed to
+the ship from the wharf, and found themselves in the crowd that choked
+the saloons and promenades and passages and stairways and landings, she
+said it more than once to her husband.
+
+She heard weary elders pattering empty politenesses of farewell with
+friends who had come to see them off, as they stood withdrawn in such
+refuges as the ship's architecture afforded, or submitted to be pushed
+and twirled about by the surging throng when they got in its way.  She
+pitied these in their affliction, which she perceived that they could not
+lighten or shorten, but she had no patience with the young girls, who
+broke into shrieks of nervous laughter at the coming of certain young
+men, and kept laughing and beckoning till they made the young men see
+them; and then stretched their hands to them and stood screaming and
+shouting to them across the intervening heads and shoulders.  Some girls,
+of those whom no one had come to bid good-by, made themselves merry,
+or at least noisy, by rushing off to the dining-room and looking at the
+cards on the bouquets heaping the tables, to find whether any one had
+sent them flowers.  Others whom young men had brought bunches of violets
+hid their noses in them, and dropped their fans and handkerchiefs and
+card-cases, and thanked the young men for picking them up.  Others, had
+got places in the music-room, and sat there with open boxes of long-
+stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up into the faces of the men,
+with becoming lifts and slants of their eyes and chins.  In the midst of
+the turmoil children struggled against people's feet and knees, and
+bewildered mothers flew at the ship's officers and battered them with
+questions alien to their respective functions as they amiably stifled
+about in their thick uniforms.
+
+Sailors, slung over the ship's side on swinging seats, were placidly
+smearing it with paint at that last moment; the bulwarks were thickly set
+with the heads and arms of passengers who were making signs to friends on
+shore, or calling messages to them that lost themselves in louder noises
+midway.  Some of the women in the steerage were crying; they were
+probably not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin
+passengers, or even for their health; on the wharf below March saw the
+face of one young girl twisted with weeping, and he wished he had not
+seen it.  He turned from it, and looked into the eyes of his son, who was
+laughing at his shoulder.  He said that he had to come down with a good-
+by letter from his sister, which he made an excuse for following them;
+but he had always meant to see them off, he owned.  The letter had just
+come with a special delivery stamp, and it warned them that she had sent
+another good-by letter with some flowers on board.  Mrs. March scolded at
+them both, but with tears in her eyes, and in the renewed stress of
+parting which he thought he had put from him, March went on taking note,
+as with alien senses, of the scene before him, while they all talked on
+together, and repeated the nothings they had said already.
+
+A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branching sheds where
+some freight steamers of the line lay, and seemed to mingle chemically
+with the noise which came up from the wharf next to the Norumbia.  The
+mass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into the shadow of the roofs,
+and along their front came files of carriages and trucks and carts, and
+discharged the arriving passengers and their baggage, and were lost in
+the crowd, which they penetrated like slow currents, becoming clogged and
+arrested from time to time, and then beginning to move again.
+
+The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-draped galleries
+leading, fore and aft, into the ship.  Bareheaded, blue-jacketed, brass-
+buttoned stewards dodged skillfully in and out among them with their
+hand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks, and ran before
+them into the different depths and heights where they hid these burdens,
+and then ran back for more.  Some of the passengers followed them and
+made sure that their things were put in the right places; most of them
+remained wedged among the earlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in and out
+of the doors of the promenades.
+
+The baggage for the hold continually rose in huge blocks from the wharf,
+with a loud clucking of the tackle, and sank into the open maw of the
+ship, momently gathering herself for her long race seaward, with harsh
+hissings and rattlings and gurglings.  There was no apparent reason why
+it should all or any of it end, but there came a moment when there began
+to be warnings that were almost threats of the end.  The ship's whistle
+sounded, as if marking a certain interval; and Mrs. March humbly
+entreated, sternly commanded, her son to go ashore, or else be carried to
+Europe.  They disputed whether that was the last signal or not; she was
+sure it was, and she appealed to March, who was moved against his reason.
+He affected to talk calmly with his son, and gave him some last charges
+about 'Every Other Week'.
+
+Some people now interrupted their leave-taking; but the arriving
+passengers only arrived more rapidly at the gang-ways; the bulks of
+baggage swung more swiftly into the air.  A bell rang, and there rose
+women's cries, "Oh, that is the shore-bell!" and men's protests, "It is
+only the first bell!  "More and more began to descend the gangways, fore
+and aft, and soon outnumbered those who were coming aboard.
+
+March tried not to be nervous about his son's lingering; he was ashamed
+of his anxiety; but he said in a low voice, "Better be off, Tom."
+
+His mother now said she did not care if Tom were really carried to
+Europe; and at last he said, Well, he guessed he must go ashore, as if
+there had been no question of that before; and then she clung to him and
+would not let him go; but she acquired merit with herself at last by
+pushing him into the gangway with her own hands: he nodded and waved his
+hat from its foot, and mixed with the crowd.
+
+Presently there was hardly any one coming aboard, and the sailors began
+to undo the lashings of the gangways from the ship's side; files of men
+on the wharf laid hold of their rails; the stewards guarding their
+approach looked up for the signal to come aboard; and in vivid pantomime
+forbade some belated leavetakers to ascend.  These stood aside,
+exchanging bows and grins with the friends whom they could not reach;
+they all tried to make one another hear some last words.  The moment came
+when the saloon gangway was detached; then it was pulled ashore, and the
+section of the bulwarks opening to it was locked, not to be unlocked on
+this side of the world.  An indefinable impulse communicated itself to
+the steamer: while it still seemed motionless it moved.  The thick spread
+of faces on the wharf, which had looked at times like some sort of
+strange flowers in a level field, broke into a universal tremor, and the
+air above them was filled with hats and handkerchiefs, as if with the
+flight of birds rising from the field.
+
+The Marches tried to make out their son's face; they believed that they
+did; but they decided that they had not seen him, and his mother said
+that she was glad; it would only have made it harder to bear, though she
+was glad he had come over to say good-by it had seemed so unnatural that
+he should not, when everybody else was saying good-by.
+
+On the wharf color was now taking the place of form; the scene ceased to
+have the effect of an instantaneous photograph; it was like an
+impressionistic study.  As the ship swung free of the shed and got into
+the stream, the shore lost reality.  Up to a certain moment, all was
+still New York, all was even Hoboken; then amidst the grotesque and
+monstrous shows of the architecture on either shore March felt himself at
+sea and on the way to Europe.
+
+The fact was accented by the trouble people were already making with the
+deck-steward about their steamer chairs, which they all wanted put in the
+best places, and March, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarily
+verifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his native shores,
+while still in full sight of them, when he suddenly reverted to them, and
+as it were landed on them again in an incident that held him breathless.
+A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad, came flying
+down the promenade from the steerage.  "Capitan!  Capitan!  There is a
+woman!" he shouted in nondescript English.  "She must go hout! She must
+go hout!"  Some vital fact imparted itself to the ship's command and
+seemed to penetrate to the ship's heart; she stopped, as if with a sort
+of majestic relenting.  A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder to
+it; the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby in her arms, sprawled
+safely down its rungs to the deck of the tug, and the steamer moved
+seaward again.
+
+"What is it?  Oh, what is it?" his wife demanded of March's share of
+their common ignorance.  A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested
+by the tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left
+three little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid
+some friends on board good-by.
+
+He passed on, and Mrs. March said, "What a charming face he had!" even
+before she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwrought
+sympathy which makes good women desire the punishment of people who have
+escaped danger.  She would not hear any excuse for her.  "Her children
+oughtn't to have been out of her mind for an instant."
+
+"Don't you want to send back a line to ours by the pilot?" March asked.
+
+She started from him.  "Oh, was I really beginning to forget them?"
+
+In the saloon where people were scattered about writing pilot's letters
+she made him join her in an impassioned epistle of farewell, which once
+more left none of the nothings unsaid that they had many times
+reiterated.  She would not let him put the stamp on, for fear it would
+not stick, and she had an agonizing moment of doubt whether it ought not
+to be a German stamp; she was not pacified till the steward in charge of
+the mail decided.
+
+"I shouldn't have forgiven myself," March said, "if we hadn't let Tom
+know that twenty minutes after he left us we were still alive and well."
+
+"It's to Bella, too," she reasoned.
+
+He found her making their state-room look homelike with their familiar
+things when he came with their daughter's steamer letter and the flowers
+and fruit she had sent.  She said, Very well, they would all keep, and
+went on with her unpacking.  He asked her if she did not think these home
+things made it rather ghastly, and she said if he kept on in that way she
+should certainly go back on the pilot-boat.  He perceived that her nerves
+were spent.  He had resisted the impulse to an ill-timed joke about the
+life-preservers under their berths when the sound of the breakfast-horn,
+wavering first in the distance, found its way nearer and clearer down
+their corridor.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+In one of the many visits to the steamship office which his wife's
+anxieties obliged him to make, March had discussed the question of seats
+in the dining-saloon.  At first he had his ambition for the captain's
+table, but they convinced him more easily than he afterwards convinced
+Mrs. March that the captain's table had become a superstition of the
+past, and conferred no special honor.  It proved in the event that the
+captain of the Norumbia had the good feeling to dine in a lower saloon
+among the passengers who paid least for their rooms.  But while the
+Marches were still in their ignorance of this, they decided to get what
+adventure they could out of letting the head steward put them where he
+liked, and they came in to breakfast with a careless curiosity to see
+what he had done for them.
+
+There seemed scarcely a vacant place in the huge saloon; through the oval
+openings in the centre they looked down into the lower saloon and up into
+the music-room, as thickly thronged with breakfasters.  The tables were
+brightened with the bouquets and the floral designs of ships, anchors,
+harps, and doves sent to the lady passengers, and at one time the Marches
+thought they were going to be put before a steam-yacht realized to the
+last detail in blue and white violets.  The ports of the saloon were
+open, and showed the level sea; the ship rode with no motion except the
+tremor from her screws.  The sound of talking and laughing rose with the
+clatter of knives and forks and the clash of crockery; the homely smell
+of the coffee and steak and fish mixed with the spice of the roses and
+carnations; the stewards ran hither and thither, and a young foolish joy
+of travel welled up in the elderly hearts of the pair.  When the head
+steward turned out the swivel-chairs where they were to sit they both
+made an inclination toward the people already at table, as if it had been
+a company at some far-forgotten table d'hote in the later sixties.  The
+head steward seemed to understand as well as speak English, but the
+table-stewards had only an effect of English, which they eked out with
+"Bleace!" for all occasions of inquiry, apology, or reassurance, as the
+equivalent of their native "Bitte!"  Otherwise there was no reason to
+suppose that they did not speak German, which was the language of a good
+half of the passengers.  The stewards looked English, however, in
+conformity to what seems the ideal of every kind of foreign seafaring
+people, and that went a good way toward making them intelligible.
+
+March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance, made it so tentative
+that if it should meet no response he could feel that it had been nothing
+more than a forward stoop, such as was natural in sitting down.  He need
+not really have taken this precaution; those whose eyes he caught more or
+less nodded in return.
+
+A nice-looking boy of thirteen or fourteen, who had the place on the left
+of the lady in the sofa seat under the port, bowed with almost
+magisterial gravity, and made the lady on the sofa smile, as if she were
+his mother and understood him.  March decided that she had been some time
+a widow; and he easily divined that the young couple on her right had
+been so little time husband and wife that they would rather not have it
+known.  Next them was a young lady whom he did not at first think so
+good-looking as she proved later to be, though she had at once a pretty
+nose, with a slight upward slant at the point, long eyes under fallen
+lashes, a straight forehead, not too high, and a mouth which perhaps the
+exigencies of breakfasting did not allow all its characteristic charm.
+She had what Mrs. March thought interesting hair, of a dull black,
+roughly rolled away from her forehead and temples in a fashion not
+particularly becoming to her, and she had the air of not looking so well
+as she might if she had chosen.  The elderly man on her right, it was
+easy to see, was her father; they had a family likeness, though his fair
+hair, now ashen with age, was so different from hers.  He wore his beard
+cut in the fashion of the Second Empire, with a Louis Napoleonic
+mustache, imperial, and chin tuft; his neat head was cropt close; and
+there was something Gallic in its effect and something remotely military:
+he had blue eyes, really less severe than he meant, though be frowned a
+good deal, and managed them with glances of a staccato quickness, as if
+challenging a potential disagreement with his opinions.
+
+The gentleman on his right, who sat at the head of the table, was of the
+humorous, subironical American expression, and a smile at the corner of
+his kindly mouth, under an iron-gray full beard cut short, at once
+questioned and tolerated the new-comers as he glanced at them.  He
+responded to March's bow almost as decidedly as the nice boy, whose
+mother he confronted at the other end of the table, and with his comely
+bulk formed an interesting contrast to her vivid slightness.  She was
+brilliantly dark, behind the gleam of the gold-rimmed glasses perched on
+her pretty nose.
+
+If the talk had been general before the Marches came, it did not at once
+renew itself in that form.  Nothing was said while they were having their
+first struggle with the table-stewards, who repeated the order as if to
+show how fully they had misunderstood it.  The gentleman at the head of
+the table intervened at last, and then, "I'm obliged to you," March said,
+for your German.  I left mine in a phrase-book in my other coat pocket."
+
+"Oh, I wasn't speaking German," said the other.  "It was merely their kind
+of English."
+
+The company were in the excitement of a novel situation which disposes
+people to acquaintance, and this exchange of small pleasantries made
+every one laugh, except the father and daughter; but they had the effect
+of being tacitly amused.
+
+The mother of the nice boy said to Mrs. March, "You may not get what you
+ordered, but it will be good."
+
+"Even if you don't know what it is!"  said the young bride, and then
+blushed, as if she had been too bold.
+
+Mrs. March liked the blush and the young bride for it, and she asked,
+"Have you ever been on one of these German boats before? They seem very
+comfortable."
+
+"Oh, dear, no! we've never been on any boat before."  She made a little
+petted mouth of deprecation, and added, simple-heartedly, "My husband was
+going out on business, and he thought he might as well take me along."
+
+The husband seemed to feel himself brought in by this, and said he did
+not see why they should not make it a pleasure-trip, too.  They put
+themselves in a position to be patronized by their deference, and in the
+pauses of his talk with the gentleman at the head of the table, March
+heard his wife abusing their inexperience to be unsparingly instructive
+about European travel.  He wondered whether she would be afraid to own
+that it was nearly thirty years since she had crossed the ocean; though
+that might seem recent to people who had never crossed at all.
+
+They listened with respect as she boasted in what an anguish of wisdom
+she had decided between the Colmannia and the Norumbia.  The wife said
+she did not know there was such a difference in steamers, but when Mrs.
+March perfervidly assured her that there was all the difference in the
+world, she submitted and said she supposed she ought to be thankful that
+they, had hit upon the right one.  They had telegraphed for berths and
+taken what was given them; their room seemed to be very nice.
+
+"Oh," said Mrs. March, and her husband knew that she was saying it to
+reconcile them to the inevitable, "all the rooms on the Norumbia are
+nice.  The only difference is that if they are on the south side you have
+the sun."
+
+"I'm not sure which is the south side," said the bride.  "We seem to have
+been going west ever since we started, and I feel as if we should reach
+home in the morning if we had a good night.  Is the ocean always so
+smooth as this?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no!" said Mrs. March.  "It's never so smooth as this," and she
+began to be outrageously authoritative about the ocean weather.  She
+ended by declaring that the June passages were always good, and that if
+the ship kept a southerly course they would have no fogs and no icebergs.
+She looked round, and caught her husband's eye.  "What is it?  Have I
+been bragging?  Well, you understand," she added to the bride, "I've only
+been over once, a great while ago, and I don't really know anything about
+it," and they laughed together.  "But I talked so much with people after
+we decided to go, that I feel as if I had been a hundred times."
+
+"I know," said the other lady, with caressing intelligence.  "That is
+just the way with--" She stopped, and looked at the young man whom the
+head steward was bringing up to take the vacant place next to March.  He
+came forward, stuffing his cap into the pocket of his blue serge sack,
+and smiled down on the company with such happiness in his gay eyes that
+March wondered what chance at this late day could have given any human
+creature his content so absolute, and what calamity could be lurking
+round the corner to take it out of him.  The new-comer looked at March as
+if he knew him, and March saw at a second glance that he was the young
+fellow who had told him about the mother put off after the start.  He
+asked him whether there was any change in the weather yet outside, and he
+answered eagerly, as if the chance to put his happiness into the mere
+sound of words were a favor done him, that their ship had just spoken one
+of the big Hanseatic mailboats, and she had signalled back that she had
+met ice; so that they would probably keep a southerly course, and not
+have it cooler till they were off the Banks.
+
+The mother of the boy said, "I thought we must be off the Banks when I
+came out of my room, but it was only the electric fan at the foot of the
+stairs."
+
+"That was what I thought," said Mrs. March.  "I almost sent my husband
+back for my shawl!"  Both the ladies laughed and liked each other for
+their common experience.
+
+The gentleman at the head of the table said, "They ought to have fans
+going there by that pillar, or else close the ports.  They only let in
+heat."
+
+They easily conformed to the American convention of jocosity in their
+talk; it perhaps no more represents the individual mood than the
+convention of dulness among other people; but it seemed to make the young
+man feel at home.
+
+"Why, do you think it's uncomfortably warm?" he asked, from what March
+perceived to be a meteorology of his own.  He laughed and added, "It is
+pretty summerlike," as if he had not thought of it before.  He talked of
+the big mail-boat, and said he would like to cross on such a boat as
+that, and then he glanced at the possible advantage of having your own
+steam-yacht like the one which he said they had just passed, so near that
+you could see what a good time the people were having on board.  He began
+to speak to the Marches; his talk spread to the young couple across the
+table; it visited the mother on the sofa in a remark which she might
+ignore without apparent rejection, and without really avoiding the boy,
+it glanced off toward the father and daughter, from whom it fell, to rest
+with the gentleman at the head of the table.
+
+It was not that the father and daughter had slighted his overture, if it
+was so much as that, but that they were tacitly preoccupied, or were of
+some philosophy concerning their fellow-breakfasters which did not suffer
+them, for the present, at least, to share in the common friendliness.
+This is an attitude sometimes produced in people by a sense of just, or
+even unjust, superiority; sometimes by serious trouble; sometimes by
+transient annoyance.  The cause was not so deep-seated but Mrs. March,
+before she rose from her place, believed that she had detected a slant of
+the young lady's eyes, from under her lashes, toward the young man; and
+she leaped to a conclusion concerning them in a matter where all logical
+steps are impertinent.  She did not announce her arrival at this point
+till the young man had overtaken her before she got out of the saloon,
+and presented the handkerchief she had dropped under the table.
+
+He went away with her thanks, and then she said to her husband, "Well,
+he's perfectly charming, and I don't wonder she's taken with him; that
+kind of cold girl would be, though I'm not sure that she is cold.  She's
+interesting, and you could see that he thought so, the more he looked at
+her; I could see him looking at her from the very first instant; he
+couldn't keep his eyes off her; she piqued his curiosity, and made him
+wonder about her."
+
+"Now, look here, Isabel!  This won't do.  I can stand a good deal, but I
+sat between you and that young fellow, and you couldn't tell whether he
+was looking at that girl or not."
+
+"I could!  I could tell by the expression of her face."
+
+"Oh, well!  If it's gone as far as that with you, I give it up.  When are
+you going to have them married?"
+
+"Nonsense! I want you to find out who all those people are.  How are you
+going to do it?"
+
+"Perhaps the passenger list will say," he suggested.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The list did not say of itself, but with the help of the head steward's
+diagram it said that the gentleman at the head of the table was Mr. R.
+M. Kenby; the father and the daughter were Mr. E. B. Triscoe and Miss
+Triscoe; the bridal pair were Mr. and Mrs. Leffers; the mother and her
+son were Mrs. Adding and Mr. Roswell Adding; the young man who came in
+last was Mr. L. J. Burnamy.  March carried the list, with these names
+carefully checked and rearranged on a neat plan of the table, to his wife
+in her steamer chair, and left her to make out the history and the
+character of the people from it.  In this sort of conjecture long
+experience had taught him his futility, and he strolled up and down and
+looked at the life about him with no wish to penetrate it deeply.
+
+Long Island was now a low yellow line on the left.  Some fishing-boats
+flickered off the shore; they met a few sail, and left more behind; but
+already, and so near one of the greatest ports of the world, the spacious
+solitude of the ocean was beginning.  There was no swell; the sea lay
+quite flat, with a fine mesh of wrinkles on its surface, and the sun
+flamed down upon it from a sky without a cloud.  With the light fair
+wind, there was no resistance in the sultry air, the thin, dun smoke from
+the smoke-stack fell about the decks like a stifling veil.
+
+The promenades, were as uncomfortably crowded as the sidewalk of
+Fourteenth Street on a summer's day, and showed much the social average
+of a New York shopping thoroughfare.  Distinction is something that does
+not always reveal itself at first sight on land, and at sea it is still
+more retrusive.  A certain democracy of looks and clothes was the most
+notable thing to March in the apathetic groups and detached figures.  His
+criticism disabled the saloon passengers of even so much personal appeal
+as he imagined in some of the second-cabin passengers whom he saw across
+their barrier; they had at least the pathos of their exclusion, and he
+could wonder if they felt it or envied him.  At Hoboken he had seen
+certain people coming on board who looked like swells; but they had now
+either retired from the crowd, or they had already conformed to the
+prevailing type.  It was very well as a type; he was of it himself; but
+he wished that beauty as well as distinction had not been so lost in it.
+
+In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhere as he once did.  It
+might be that he saw life more truly than when he was young, and that his
+glasses were better than his eyes had been; but there were analogies that
+forbade his thinking so, and he sometimes had his misgivings that the
+trouble was with his glasses.  He made what he could of a pretty girl who
+had the air of not meaning to lose a moment from flirtation, and was
+luring her fellow-passengers from under her sailor hat.  She had already
+attached one of them; and she was hooking out for more.  She kept moving
+herself from the waist up, as if she worked there on a pivot, showing now
+this side and now that side of her face, and visiting the admirer she had
+secured with a smile as from the lamp of a revolving light as she turned.
+
+While he was dwelling upon this folly, with a sense of impersonal
+pleasure in it as complete through his years as if he were already a
+disembodied spirit, the pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and he
+joined the general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expectation of
+seeing another distracted mother put off; but it was only the pilot
+leaving the ship.  He was climbing down the ladder which hung over the
+boat, rising and sinking on the sea below, while the two men in her held
+her from the ship's side with their oars; in the offing lay the white
+steam-yacht which now replaces the picturesque pilot-sloop of other
+times.  The Norumbia's screws turned again under half a head of steam;
+the pilot dropped from the last rung of the ladder into the boat, and
+caught the bundle of letters tossed after him.  Then his men let go the
+line that was towing their craft, and the incident of the steamer's
+departure was finally closed.  It had been dramatically heightened
+perhaps by her final impatience to be off at some added risks to the
+pilot and his men, but not painfully so, and March smiled to think how
+men whose lives are all of dangerous chances seem always to take as many
+of them as they can.
+
+He heard a girl's fresh voice saying at his shoulder, "Well, now we are
+off; and I suppose you're glad, papa!"
+
+"I'm glad we're not taking the pilot on, at least," answered the elderly
+man whom the girl had spoken to; and March turned to see the father and
+daughter whose reticence at the breakfast table had interested him.  He
+wondered that he had left her out of the account in estimating the beauty
+of the ship's passengers: he saw now that she was not only extremely
+pretty, but as she moved away she was very graceful; she even had
+distinction.  He had fancied a tone of tolerance, and at the same time of
+reproach in her voice, when she spoke, and a tone of defiance and not
+very successful denial in her father's; and he went back with these
+impressions to his wife, whom he thought he ought to tell why the ship
+had stopped.
+
+She had not noticed the ship's stopping, in her study of the passenger
+list, and she did not care for the pilot's leaving; but she seemed to
+think his having overheard those words of the father and daughter an
+event of prime importance.  With a woman's willingness to adapt the means
+to the end she suggested that he should follow them up and try to
+overhear something more; she only partially realized the infamy of her
+suggestion when he laughed in scornful refusal.
+
+"Of course I don't want you to eavesdrop, but I do want you to find out
+about them.  And about Mr. Burnamy, too.  I can wait, about the others,
+or manage for myself, but these are driving me to distraction.  Now, will
+you?"
+
+He said he would do anything he could with honor, and at one of the
+earliest turns he made on the other side of the ship he was smilingly
+halted by Mr. Burnamy, who asked to be excused, and then asked if he were
+not Mr. March of 'Every Other Week'; he had seen the name on the
+passenger list, and felt sure it must be the editor's.  He seemed so
+trustfully to expect March to remember his own name as that of a writer
+from whom he had accepted a short poem, yet unprinted, that the editor
+feigned to do so until he really did dimly recall it.  He even recalled
+the short poem, and some civil words he said about it caused Burnamy to
+overrun in confidences that at once touched and amused him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Burnamy, it seemed, had taken passage on the Norumbia because he found,
+when he arrived in New York the day before, that she was the first boat
+out.  His train was so much behind time that when he reached the office
+of the Hanseatic League it was nominally shut, but he pushed in by
+sufferance of the janitor, and found a berth, which had just been given
+up, in one of the saloon-deck rooms.  It was that or nothing; and he felt
+rich enough to pay for it himself if the Bird of Prey, who had cabled him
+to come out to Carlsbad as his secretary, would not stand the difference
+between the price and that of the lower-deck six-in-a-room berth which he
+would have taken if he had been allowed a choice.
+
+With the three hundred dollars he had got for his book, less the price of
+his passage, changed into German bank-notes and gold pieces, and safely
+buttoned in the breast pocket of his waistcoat, he felt as safe from
+pillage as from poverty when he came out from buying his ticket; he
+covertly pressed his arm against his breast from time to time, for the
+joy of feeling his money there and not from any fear of finding it gone.
+He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance; he could not believe it was he,
+as he rode up the lonely length of Broadway in the cable-car, between the
+wild, irregular walls of the canyon which the cable-cars have all to
+themselves at the end of a summer afternoon.
+
+He went and dined, and he thought he dined well, at a Spanish-American
+restaurant, for fifty cents, with a half-bottle of California claret
+included.  When he came back to Broadway he was aware that it was
+stiflingly hot in the pinkish twilight, but he took a cable-car again in
+lack of other pastime, and the motion served the purpose of a breeze,
+which he made the most of by keeping his hat off.  It did not really
+matter to him whether it was hot or cool; he was imparadised in weather
+which had nothing to do with the temperature.  Partly because he was born
+to such weather, in the gayety of soul which amused some people with him,
+and partly because the world was behaving as he had always expected, he
+was opulently content with the present moment.  But he thought very
+tolerantly of the future, and he confirmed himself in the decision he had
+already made, to stick to Chicago when he came back to America.  New York
+was very well, and he had no sentiment about Chicago; but he had got a
+foothold there; he had done better with an Eastern publisher, he
+believed, by hailing from the West, and he did not believe it would hurt
+him with the Eastern public to keep on hailing from the West.
+
+He was glad of a chance to see Europe, but he did not mean to come home
+so dazzled as to see nothing else against the American sky.  He fancied,
+for he really knew nothing, that it was the light of Europe, not its
+glare that he wanted, and he wanted it chiefly on his material, so as to
+see it more and more objectively.  It was his power of detachment from
+this that had enabled him to do his sketches in the paper with such charm
+as to lure a cash proposition from a publisher when he put them together
+for a book, but he believed that his business faculty had much to do with
+his success; and he was as proud of that as of the book itself.  Perhaps
+he was not so very proud of the book; he was at least not vain of it; he
+could, detach himself from his art as well as his material.
+
+Like all literary temperaments he was of a certain hardness, in spite of
+the susceptibilities that could be used to give coloring to his work.
+He knew this well enough, but he believed that there were depths of
+unprofessional tenderness in his nature.  He was good to his mother, and
+he sent her money, and wrote to her in the little Indiana town where he
+had left her when he came to Chicago.  After he got that invitation from
+the Bird of Prey, he explored his heart for some affection that he had
+not felt for him before, and he found a wish that his employer should not
+know it was he who had invented that nickname for him.  He promptly
+avowed this in the newspaper office which formed one of the eyries of the
+Bird of Prey, and made the fellows promise not to give him away.  He
+failed to move their imagination when he brought up as a reason for
+softening toward him that he was from Burnamy's own part of Indiana, and
+was a benefactor of Tippecanoe University, from which Burnamy was
+graduated.  But they, relished the cynicism of his attempt; and they were
+glad of his good luck, which he was getting square and not rhomboid, as
+most people seem to get their luck.  They liked him, and some of them
+liked him for his clean young life as well as for his cleverness.  His
+life was known to be as clean as a girl's, and he looked like a girl with
+his sweet eyes, though he had rather more chin than most girls.
+
+The conductor came to reverse his seat, and Burnamy told him he guessed
+he would ride back with him as far as the cars to the Hoboken Ferry, if
+the conductor would put him off at the right place.  It was nearly nine
+o'clock, and he thought he might as well be going over to the ship, where
+he had decided to pass the night.  After he found her, and went on board,
+he was glad he had not gone sooner.  A queasy odor of drainage stole up
+from the waters of the dock, and mixed with the rank, gross sweetness of
+the bags of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers; there was a coming
+and going of carts and trucks on the wharf, and on the ship a rattling of
+chains and a clucking of pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and then sudden
+silences of trampling sea-boots.  Burnamy looked into the dining-saloon
+and the music-room, with the notion of trying for some naps there; then
+he went to his state-room.  His room-mate, whoever he was to be, had not
+come; and he kicked off his shoes and threw off his coat and tumbled into
+his berth.
+
+He meant to rest awhile, and then get up and spend the night in receiving
+impressions.  He could not think of any one who had done the facts of the
+eve of sailing on an Atlantic liner.  He thought he would use the
+material first in a letter to the paper and afterwards in a poem; but he
+found himself unable to grasp the notion of its essential relation to the
+choice between chicken croquettes and sweetbreads as entrees of the
+restaurant dinner where he had been offered neither; he knew that he had
+begun to dream, and that he must get up.  He was just going to get up,
+when he woke to a sense of freshness in the air, penetrating from the new
+day outside.  He looked at his watch and found it was quarter past six;
+he glanced round the state-room and saw that he had passed the night
+alone in it.  Then he splashed himself hastily at the basin next his
+berth, and jumped into his clothes, and went on deck, anxious to lose no
+feature or emotion of the ship's departure.
+
+When she was fairly off he returned to his room to change the thick coat
+he had put on at the instigation of the early morning air.  His room-mate
+was still absent, but he was now represented by his state-room baggage,
+and Burnamy tried to infer him from it.  He perceived a social quality in
+his dress-coat case, capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, and
+sole-leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to his own
+equipment.  The things were not so new as his; they had an effect of
+polite experience, with a foreign registry and customs label on them here
+and there.  They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge, and
+Burnamy would have said that they were certainly English things, if it
+had not been for the initials U. S. A.  which followed the name of E. B.
+Triscoe on the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the foot of
+the lower berth.
+
+The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through the default of the
+passenger whose ticket he had got at the last hour; the clerk in the
+steamer office had been careful to impress him with this advantage, and
+he now imagined a trespass on his property.  But he reassured himself by
+a glance at his ticket, and went out to watch the ship's passage down the
+stream and through the Narrows.  After breakfast he came to his room
+again, to see what could be done from his valise to make him look better
+in the eyes of a girl whom he had seen across the table; of course he
+professed a much more general purpose.  He blamed himself for not having
+got at least a pair of the white tennis-shoes which so many of the
+passengers were wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet;
+but there was a, pair of enamelled leather boots in his bag which he
+thought might do.
+
+His room was in the group of cabins on the upper deck; he had already
+missed his way to it once by mistaking the corridor which it opened into;
+and he was not sure that he was not blundering again when he peered down
+the narrow passage where he supposed it was.  A lady was standing at an
+open state-room door, resting her hands against the jambs and leaning
+forward with her head within and talking to some one there.  Before he
+could draw back and try another corridor he heard her say: "Perhaps he's
+some young man, and wouldn't care."
+
+Burnamy could not make out the answer that came from within.  The lady
+spoke again in a tone of reluctant assent, "No, I don't suppose you
+could; but if he understood, perhaps he would offer."
+
+She drew her head out of the room, stepping back a pace, and lingering a
+moment at the threshold.  She looked round over her shoulder and
+discovered Burnamy, where he stood hesitating at the head of the passage.
+She ebbed before him, and then flowed round him in her instant escape;
+with some murmured incoherencies about speaking to her father, she
+vanished in a corridor on the other side of the ship, while he stood
+staring into the doorway of his room.
+
+He had seen that she was the young lady for whom he had come to put on
+his enamelled shoes, and he saw that the person within was the elderly
+gentleman who had sat next her at breakfast.  He begged his pardon, as he
+entered, and said he hoped he should not disturb him.  "I'm afraid I left
+my things all over the place, when I got up this morning."
+
+The other entreated him not to mention it and went on taking from his
+hand-bag a variety of toilet appliances which the sight of made Burnamy
+vow to keep his own simple combs and brushes shut in his valise all the
+way over.  "You slept on board, then," he suggested, arresting himself
+with a pair of low shoes in his hand; he decided to put them in a certain
+pocket of his steamer bag.
+
+"Oh, yes," Burnamy laughed, nervously: "I came near oversleeping, and
+getting off to sea without knowing it; and I rushed out to save myself,
+and so--"
+
+He began to gather up his belongings while he followed the movements of
+Mr. Triscoe with a wistful eye.  He would have liked to offer his lower
+berth to this senior of his, when he saw him arranging to take possession
+of the upper; but he did not quite know how to manage it.  He noticed
+that as the other moved about he limped slightly, unless it were rather a
+weary easing of his person from one limb to the other.  He stooped to
+pull his trunk out from under the berth, and Burnamy sprang to help him.
+
+"Let me get that out for you!" He caught it up and put it on the sofa
+under the port.  "Is that where you want it?"
+
+"Why, yes," the other assented.  "You're very good," and as he took out
+his key to unlock the trunk he relented a little farther to the
+intimacies of the situation.  "Have you arranged with the bath-steward
+yet?  It's such a full boat."
+
+"No, I haven't," said Burnamy, as if he had tried and failed; till then
+he had not known that there was a bath-steward.  "Shall I get him for
+you?"
+
+"No; no.  Our bedroom-steward will send him, I dare say, thank you."
+
+Mr. Triscoe had got his trunk open, and Burnamy had no longer an excuse
+for lingering.  In his defeat concerning the bath-steward, as he felt it
+to be, he had not the courage, now, to offer the lower berth.  He went
+away, forgetting to change his shoes; but he came back, and as soon as he
+got the enamelled shoes on, and shut the shabby russet pair in his bag,
+he said, abruptly: "Mr. Triscoe, I wish you'd take the lower berth.  I
+got it at the eleventh hour by some fellow's giving it up, and it isn't
+as if I'd bargained for it a month ago."
+
+The elder man gave him one of his staccato glances in which Burnamy
+fancied suspicion and even resentment.  But he said, after the moment of
+reflection which he gave himself, "Why, thank you, if you don't mind,
+really."
+
+"Not at all!" cried the young man.  "I should like the upper berth
+better.  We'll, have the steward change the sheets."
+
+"Oh, I'll see that he does that," said Mr. Triscoe.  "I couldn't allow
+you to take any trouble about it."  He now looked as if he wished Burnamy
+would go, and leave him to his domestic arrangements.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+In telling about himself Burnamy touched only upon the points which he
+believed would take his listener's intelligent fancy, and he stopped so
+long before he had tired him that March said he would like to introduce
+him to his wife.  He saw in the agreeable young fellow an image of his
+own youth, with some differences which, he was willing to own, were to
+the young fellow's advantage.  But they were both from the middle West;
+in their native accent and their local tradition they were the same; they
+were the same in their aspirations; they were of one blood in their
+literary impulse to externate their thoughts and emotions.
+
+Burnamy answered, with a glance at his enamelled shoes, that he would be
+delighted, and when her husband brought him up to her, Mrs. March said
+she was always glad to meet the contributors to the magazine, and asked
+him whether he knew Mr. Kendricks, who was her favorite.  Without giving
+him time to reply to a question that seemed to depress him, she said that
+she had a son who must be nearly his own age, and whom his father had
+left in charge of 'Every Other Week' for the few months they were to be
+gone; that they had a daughter married and living in Chicago.  She made
+him sit down by her in March's chair, and before he left them March heard
+him magnanimously asking whether Mr. Kendricks was going to do something
+more for the magazine soon.  He sauntered away and did not know how
+quickly Burnamy left this question to say, with the laugh and blush which
+became him in her eyes:
+
+"Mrs. March, there is something I should like to tell you about, if you
+will let me."
+
+"Why, certainly, Mr. Burnamy," she began, but she saw that he did not
+wish her to continue.
+
+"Because," he went on, "it's a little matter that I shouldn't like to go
+wrong in."
+
+He told her of his having overheard what Miss Triscoe had said to her
+father, and his belief that she was talking about the lower berth.  He
+said he would have wished to offer it, of course, but now he was afraid
+they might think he had overheard them and felt obliged to do it.
+
+"I see," said Mrs. March, and she added, thoughtfully, "She looks like
+rather a proud girl."
+
+"Yes," the young fellow sighed.
+
+"She is very charming," she continued, thoughtfully, but not so
+judicially.
+
+"Well," Burnamy owned, "that is certainly one of the complications," and
+they laughed together.
+
+She stopped herself after saying, "I see what you mean," and suggested,
+"I think I should be guided by circumstances.  It needn't be done at
+once, I suppose."
+
+"Well," Burnamy began, and then he broke out, with a laugh of
+embarrassment, "I've done it already."
+
+"Oh!  Then it wasn't my advice, exactly, that you wanted."
+
+"No!"
+
+"And how did he take it?"
+
+"He said he should be glad to make the exchange if I really didn't mind."
+Burnamy had risen restlessly, and she did not ask him to stay.  She
+merely said:
+
+"Oh, well, I'm glad it turned out so nicely."
+
+"I'm so glad you think it was the thing to do."  He managed to laugh
+again, but he could not hide from her that he was not feeling altogether
+satisfied.  "Would you like me to send Mr. March, if I see him?" he
+asked, as if he did not know on what other terms to get away.
+
+"Do, please!" she entreated, and it seemed to her that he had hardly left
+her when her husband came up.  "Why, where in the world did he find you
+so soon?"
+
+"Did you send him for me? I was just hanging round for him to go."  March
+sank into the chair at her side.  "Well, is he going to marry her?"
+
+"Oh, you may laugh!  But there is something very exciting!"  She told him
+what had happened, and of her belief that Burnamy's handsome behavior had
+somehow not been met in kind.
+
+March gave himself the pleasure of an immense laugh.  "It seems to me
+that this Mr. Burnamy of yours wanted a little more gratitude than he was
+entitled to.  Why shouldn't he have offered him the lower berth?  And why
+shouldn't the old gentleman have taken it just as he did?  Did you want
+him to make a counteroffer of his daughter's hand?  If he does, I hope
+Mr. Burnamy won't come for your advice till after he's accepted her."
+
+"He wasn't very candid.  I hoped you would speak about that.  Don't you
+think it was rather natural, though?"
+
+"For him, very likely.  But I think you would call it sinuous in some one
+you hadn't taken a fancy to."
+
+"No, no.  I wish to be just.  I don't see how he could have come straight
+at it.  And he did own up at last."  She asked him what Burnamy had done
+for the magazine, and he could remember nothing but that one small poem,
+yet unprinted; he was rather vague about its value, but said it had
+temperament.
+
+"He has temperament, too," she commented, and she had made him tell her
+everything he knew, or could be forced to imagine about Burnamy, before
+she let the talk turn to other things.
+
+The life of the promenade had already settled into seafaring form; the
+steamer chairs were full, and people were reading or dozing in them with
+an effect of long habit.  Those who would be walking up and down had
+begun their walks; some had begun going in and out of the smoking-room;
+ladies who were easily affected by the motion were lying down in the
+music-room.  Groups of both sexes were standing at intervals along the
+rail, and the promenaders were obliged to double on a briefer course or
+work slowly round them.  Shuffleboard parties at one point and ring-toss
+parties at another were forming among the young people.  It was as lively
+and it was as dull as it would be two thousand miles at sea.  It was not
+the least cooler, yet; but if you sat still you did not suffer.
+
+In the prompt monotony the time was already passing swiftly.  The deck-
+steward seemed hardly to have been round with tea and bouillon, and he
+had not yet gathered up all the empty cups, when the horn for lunch
+sounded.  It was the youngest of the table-stewards who gave the summons
+to meals; and whenever the pretty boy appeared with his bugle, funny
+passengers gathered round him to make him laugh, and stop him from
+winding it.  His part of the joke was to fulfill his duty with gravity,
+and only to give way to a smile of triumph as he walked off.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+At lunch, in the faded excitement of their first meeting, the people at
+the Marches' table did not renew the premature intimacy of their
+breakfast talk.  Mrs. March went to lie down in her berth afterwards, and
+March went on deck without her.  He began to walk to and from the barrier
+between the first and second cabin promenades; lingering near it, and
+musing pensively, for some of the people beyond it looked as intelligent
+and as socially acceptable, even to their clothes, as their pecuniary
+betters of the saloon.
+
+There were two women, a mother and daughter, whom he fancied to be
+teachers, by their looks, going out for a little rest, or perhaps for a
+little further study to fit them more perfectly for their work.  They
+gazed wistfully across at him whenever he came up to the barrier; and he
+feigned a conversation with them and tried to convince them that the
+stamp of inferiority which their poverty put upon them was just, or if
+not just, then inevitable.  He argued with them that the sort of barrier
+which here prevented their being friends with him, if they wished it, ran
+invisibly through society everywhere but he felt ashamed before their
+kind, patient, intelligent faces, and found himself wishing to excuse the
+fact he was defending.  Was it any worse, he asked them, than their not
+being invited to the entertainments of people in upper Fifth Avenue?  He
+made them own that if they were let across that barrier the whole second
+cabin would have a logical right to follow; and they were silenced.  But
+they continued to gape at him with their sincere, gentle eyes whenever he
+returned to the barrier in his walk, till he could bear it no longer, and
+strolled off toward the steerage.
+
+There was more reason why the passengers there should be penned into a
+little space of their own in the sort of pit made by the narrowing deck
+at the bow.  They seemed to be all foreigners, and if any had made their
+fortunes in our country they were hiding their prosperity in the return
+to their own.  They could hardly have come to us more shabby and squalid
+than they were going away; but he thought their average less apathetic
+than that of the saloon passengers, as he leaned over the rail and looked
+down at them.  Some one had brought out an electric battery, and the
+lumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughing as they
+writhed with the current.  A young mother seated flat on the deck, with
+her bare feet stuck out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughed
+and shouted with the rest; a man with his head tied in a shawl walked
+about the pen and smiled grotesquely with the well side of his toothache-
+swollen face.  The owner of the battery carried it away, and a group of
+little children, with blue eyes and yellow hair, gathered in the space he
+had left, and looked up at a passenger near March who was eating some
+plums and cherries which he had brought from the luncheon table.  He
+began to throw the fruit down to them, and the children scrambled for it.
+
+An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face, said, "I shouldn't
+want a child of mine down there."
+
+"No," March responded, "it isn't quite what one would choose for one's
+own.  It's astonishing, though, how we reconcile ourselves to it in the
+case of others."
+
+"I suppose it's something we'll have to get used to on the other side,"
+suggested the stranger.
+
+"Well," answered March, "you have some opportunities to get used to it on
+this side, if you happen to live in New York," and he went on to speak of
+the raggedness which often penetrated the frontier of comfort where he
+lived in Stuyvesant Square, and which seemed as glad of alms in food or
+money as this poverty of the steerage.
+
+The other listened restively like a man whose ideals are disturbed.
+"I don't believe I should like to live in New York, much," he said, and
+March fancied that he wished to be asked where he did live.  It appeared
+that he lived in Ohio, and he named his town; he did not brag of it, but
+he said it suited him.  He added that he had never expected to go to
+Europe, but that he had begun to run down lately, and his doctor thought
+he had better go out and try Carlsbad.
+
+March said, to invite his further confidence, that this was exactly his
+own case.  The Ohio man met the overture from a common invalidism as if
+it detracted from his own distinction; and he turned to speak of the
+difficulty, he had in arranging his affairs for leaving home.  His heart
+opened a little with the word, and he said how comfortable he and his
+wife were in their house, and how much they both hated to shut it up.
+When March offered him his card, he said he had none of his own with him,
+but that his name was Eltwin.  He betrayed a simple wish to have March
+realize the local importance he had left behind him; and it was not hard
+to comply; March saw a Grand Army button in the lapel of his coat, and he
+knew that he was in the presence of a veteran.
+
+He tried to guess his rank; in telling his wife about him, when he went
+down to find her just before dinner, but he ended with a certain sense of
+affliction.  "There are too many elderly invalids on this ship.  I knock
+against people of my own age everywhere.  Why aren't your youthful lovers
+more in evidence, my dear?  I don't believe they are lovers, and I begin
+to doubt if they're young even."
+
+"It wasn't very satisfactory at lunch, certainly," she owned.  "But I
+know it will be different at dinner."  She was putting herself together
+after a nap that had made up for the lost sleep of the night before.
+"I want you to look very nice, dear.  Shall you dress for dinner?" she
+asked her husband's image in the state-room glass which she was
+preoccupying.
+
+"I shall dress in my pea-jacket and sea-boots," it answered.
+
+"I have heard that they always dress for dinner on the big Cunard and
+White Star boats, when it's good weather," she went on, placidly.
+"I shouldn't want those people to think you were not up in the
+convenances."
+
+They both knew that she meant the reticent father and daughter, and March
+flung out, "I shouldn't want them to think you weren't.  There's such a
+thing as overdoing."
+
+She attacked him at another point.  "What has annoyed you?  What else
+have you been doing?"
+
+"Nothing.  I've been reading most of the afternoon."
+
+"The Maiden Knight?"
+
+This was the book which nearly everybody had brought on board.  It was
+just out, and had caught an instant favor, which swelled later to a tidal
+wave.  It depicted a heroic girl in every trying circumstance of
+mediaeval life, and gratified the perennial passion of both sexes for
+historical romance, while it flattered woman's instinct of superiority by
+the celebration of her unintermitted triumphs, ending in a preposterous
+and wholly superfluous self-sacrifice.
+
+March laughed for pleasure in her guess, and she pursued, "I suppose you
+didn't waste time looking if anybody had brought the last copy of 'Every
+Other Week'?"
+
+"Yes, I did; and I found the one you had left in your steamer chair--for
+advertising purposes, probably."
+
+"Mr. Burnamy has another," she said.  "I saw it sticking out of his
+pocket this morning."
+
+"Oh, yes.  He told me he had got it on the train from Chicago to see if
+it had his poem in it.  He's an ingenuous soul--in some ways."
+
+"Well, that is the very reason why you ought to find out whether the men
+are going to dress, and let him know.  He would never think of it
+himself."
+
+"Neither would I," said her husband.
+
+"Very well, if you wish to spoil his chance at the outset," she sighed.
+
+She did not quite know whether to be glad or not that the men were all in
+sacks and cutaways at dinner; it saved her, from shame for her husband
+and Mr. Burnamy; but it put her in the wrong.  Every one talked; even the
+father and daughter talked with each other, and at one moment Mrs. March
+could not be quite sure that the daughter had not looked at her when she
+spoke.  She could not be mistaken in the remark which the father
+addressed to Burnamy, though it led to nothing.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+The dinner was uncommonly good, as the first dinner out is apt to be; and
+it went gayly on from soup to fruit, which was of the American abundance
+and variety, and as yet not of the veteran freshness imparted by the ice-
+closet.  Everybody was eating it, when by a common consciousness they
+were aware of alien witnesses.  They looked up as by a single impulse,
+and saw at the port the gaunt face of a steerage passenger staring down
+upon their luxury; he held on his arm a child that shared his regard with
+yet hungrier eyes.  A boy's nose showed itself as if tiptoed to the
+height of the man's elbow; a young girl peered over his other arm.
+
+The passengers glanced at one another; the two table-stewards, with their
+napkins in their hands, smiled vaguely, and made some indefinite
+movements.
+
+The bachelor at the head of the table broke the spell.  "I'm glad it
+didn't begin with the Little Neck clams!"
+
+"Probably they only let those people come for the dessert," March
+suggested.
+
+The widow now followed the direction of the other eyes; and looked up
+over her shoulder; she gave a little cry, and shrank down.  The young
+bride made her petted mouth, in appeal to the company; her husband looked
+severe, as if he were going to do something, but refrained, not to make a
+scene.  The reticent father threw one of his staccato glances at the
+port, and Mrs. March was sure that she saw the daughter steal a look at
+Burnamy.
+
+The young fellow laughed.  "I don't suppose there's anything to be done
+about it, unless we pass out a plate."
+
+Mr. Kenby shook his head.  "It wouldn't do.  We might send for the
+captain.  Or the chief steward."
+
+The faces at the port vanished.  At other ports profiles passed and
+repassed, as if the steerage passengers had their promenade under them,
+but they paused no more.
+
+The Marches went up to their steamer chairs, and from her exasperated
+nerves Mrs. March denounced the arrangement of the ship which had made
+such a cruel thing possible.
+
+"Oh," he mocked, "they had probably had a good substantial meal of their
+own, and the scene of our banquet was of the quality of a picture, a
+purely aesthetic treat.  But supposing it wasn't, we're doing something
+like it every day and every moment of our lives.  The Norumbia is a piece
+of the whole world's civilization set afloat, and passing from shore to
+shore with unchanged classes, and conditions.  A ship's merely a small
+stage, where we're brought to close quarters with the daily drama of
+humanity."
+
+"Well, then," she protested, "I don't like being brought to close
+quarters with the daily drama of humanity, as you call it.  And I don't
+believe that the large English ships are built so that the steerage
+passengers can stare in at the saloon windows while one is eating; and
+I'm sorry we came on the Norumbia."
+
+"Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn't hide anything," he began, and he was
+going to speak of the men in the furnace pits of the steamer, how they
+fed the fires in a welding heat, and as if they had perished in it crept
+out on the forecastle like blanched phantasms of toil; but she interposed
+in time.
+
+"If there's anything worse, for pity's sake don't tell me," she
+entreated, and he forebore.
+
+He sat thinking how once the world had not seemed to have even death in
+it, and then how as he had grown older death had come into it more and
+more, and suffering was lurking everywhere, and could hardly be kept out
+of sight.  He wondered if that young Burnamy now saw the world as he used
+to see it, a place for making verse and making love, and full of beauty
+of all kinds waiting to be fitted with phrases.  He had lived a happy
+life; Burnamy would be lucky if he should live one half as happy; and yet
+if he could show him his whole happy life, just as it had truly been,
+must not the young man shrink from such a picture of his future?
+
+"Say something," said his wife.  "What are you thinking about?"
+
+"Oh, Burnamy," he answered, honestly enough.
+
+"I was thinking about the children," she said.  "I am glad Bella didn't
+try to come from Chicago to see us off; it would have been too silly; she
+is getting to be very sensible.  I hope Tom won't take the covers off the
+furniture when he has the fellows in to see him."
+
+"Well, I want him to get all the comfort he can out of the place, even if
+the moths eat up every stick of furniture."
+
+"Yes, so do I.  And of course you're wishing that you were there with
+him!"  March laughed guiltily.  "Well, perhaps it was a crazy thing for
+us to start off alone for Europe, at our age."
+
+"Nothing of the kind," he retorted in the necessity he perceived for
+staying her drooping spirits.  "I wouldn't be anywhere else on any
+account.  Isn't it perfectly delicious?  It puts me in mind of that night
+on the Lake Ontario boat, when we were starting for Montreal.  There was
+the same sort of red sunset, and the air wasn't a bit softer than this."
+
+He spoke of a night on their wedding-journey when they were sill new
+enough from Europe to be comparing everything at home with things there.
+
+"Well, perhaps we shall get into the spirit of it again," she said, and
+they talked a long time of the past.
+
+All the mechanical noises were muffled in the dull air, and the wash of
+the ship's course through the waveless sea made itself pleasantly heard.
+In the offing a steamer homeward bound swam smoothly by, so close that
+her lights outlined her to the eye; she sent up some signal rockets that
+soared against the purple heaven in green and crimson, and spoke to the
+Norumbia in the mysterious mute phrases of ships that meet in the dark.
+
+Mrs. March wondered what had become of Burnamy; the promenades were much
+freer now than they had been since the ship sailed; when she rose to go
+below, she caught sight of Burnamy walking the deck transversely with
+some lady.  She clutched her husband's arm and stayed him in rich
+conjecture.
+
+"Do you suppose he can have got her to walking with him already?"
+
+They waited till Burnamy and his companion came in sight again.  She was
+tilting forward, and turning from the waist, now to him and now from him.
+
+"No; it's that pivotal girl," said March; and his wife said, "Well, I'm
+glad he won't be put down by them."
+
+In the music-room sat the people she meant, and at the instant she passed
+on down the stairs, the daughter was saying to the father, "I don't see
+why you didn't tell me sooner, papa."
+
+"It was such an unimportant matter that I didn't think to mention it.
+He offered it, and I took it; that was all.  What difference could it
+have made to you?"
+
+"None.  But one doesn't like to do any one an injustice."
+
+"I didn't know you were thinking anything about it."
+
+"No, of course not."
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+The voyage of the Norumbia was one of those which passengers say they
+have never seen anything like, though for the first two or three days out
+neither the doctor nor the deck-steward could be got, to prophesy when
+the ship would be in.  There was only a day or two when it could really
+be called rough, and the sea-sickness was confined to those who seemed
+wilful sufferers; they lay on the cushioned benching around the stairs-
+landing, and subsisted on biscuit and beef tea without qualifying the
+monotonous well-being of the other passengers, who passed without
+noticing them.
+
+The second morning there was rain, and the air freshened, but the leaden
+sea lay level as before.  The sun shone in the afternoon; with the sunset
+the fog came thick and white; the ship lowed dismally through the night;
+from the dense folds of the mist answering noises called back to her.
+Just before dark two men in a dory shouted up to her close under her
+bows, and then melted out of sight; when the dark fell the lights of
+fishing-schooners were seen, and their bells pealed; once loud cries from
+a vessel near at hand made themselves heard.  Some people in the dining-
+saloon sang hymns; the smoking-room was dense with cigar fumes, and the
+card-players dealt their hands in an atmosphere emulous of the fog
+without.
+
+The Norumbia was off the Banks, and the second day of fog was cold as if
+icebergs were haunting the opaque pallor around her.  In the ranks of
+steamer chairs people lay like mummies in their dense wrappings; in the
+music-room the little children of travel discussed the different lines of
+steamers on which they had crossed, and babes of five and seven disputed
+about the motion on the Cunarders and White Stars; their nurses tried in
+vain to still them in behalf of older passengers trying to write letters
+there.
+
+By the next morning the ship had run out of the fog; and people who could
+keep their feet said they were glad of the greater motion which they
+found beyond the Banks.  They now talked of the heat of the first days
+out, and how much they had suffered; some who had passed the night on
+board before sailing tried to impart a sense of their misery in trying to
+sleep.
+
+A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the sailors stretched
+canvas along the weather promenade and put up a sheathing of boards
+across the bow end to keep off the rain.  Yet a day or two more and the
+sea had fallen again and there was dancing on the widest space of the lee
+promenade.
+
+The little events of the sea outside the steamer offered themselves in
+their poor variety.  Once a ship in the offing, with all its square sails
+set, lifted them like three white towers from the deep.  On the rim of
+the ocean the length of some westward liner blocked itself out against
+the horizon, and swiftly trailed its smoke out of sight.  A few tramp
+steamers, lounging and lunging through the trough of the sea, were
+overtaken and left behind; an old brigantine passed so close that her
+rusty iron sides showed plain, and one could discern the faces of the
+people on board.
+
+The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any life beyond her.  One
+day a small bird beat the air with its little wings, under the roof of
+the promenade, and then flittered from sight over the surface, of the
+waste; a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their rise, plunged
+clumsily from wave to wave.  The deep itself had sometimes the unreality,
+the artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre.  Commonly it was
+livid and cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately
+misted, and where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely
+iridescent under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by
+the falling spray.  These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like
+painted canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth
+cleavage.  Where it met the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the
+rougher weather carved itself along the horizon in successions of surges.
+
+If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours; then the clouds
+broke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dim
+evening thickened over the waters.  Sometimes the moon looked through the
+ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, and
+shook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship.  Through every
+change, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with the
+pulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man's heart stops) in a
+course which had nothing to mark it but the spread of the furrows from
+her sides, and the wake that foamed from her stern to the western verge
+of the sea.
+
+The life of the ship, like the life of the sea, was a sodden monotony,
+with certain events which were part of the monotony.  In the morning the
+little steward's bugle called the passengers from their dreams, and half
+an hour later called them to their breakfast, after such as chose had
+been served with coffee by their bedroom-stewards.  Then they went on
+deck, where they read, or dozed in their chairs, or walked up and down,
+or stood in the way of those who were walking; or played shuffleboard and
+ring-toss; or smoked, and drank whiskey and aerated waters over their
+cards and papers in the smoking-room; or wrote letters in the saloon or
+the music-room.  At eleven o'clock they spoiled their appetites for lunch
+with tea or bouillon to the music of a band of second-cabin stewards; at
+one, a single blast of the bugle called them to lunch, where they glutted
+themselves to the torpor from which they afterwards drowsed in their
+berths or chairs.  They did the same things in the afternoon that they
+had done in the forenoon; and at four o'clock the deck-stewards came
+round with their cups and saucers, and their plates of sandwiches, again
+to the music of the band.  There were two bugle-calls for dinner, and
+after dinner some went early to bed, and some sat up late and had grills
+and toast.  At twelve the lights were put out in the saloons and the
+smoking-rooms.
+
+There were various smells which stored themselves up in the consciousness
+to remain lastingly relative to certain moments and places: a whiff of
+whiskey and tobacco that exhaled from the door of the smoking-room; the
+odor of oil and steam rising from the open skylights over the engine-
+room; the scent of stale bread about the doors of the dining-saloon.
+
+The life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, only more monotonous.
+The walking was limited; the talk was the tentative talk of people aware
+that there was no refuge if they got tired of one another.  The flirting
+itself, such as there was of it, must be carried on in the glare of the
+pervasive publicity; it must be crude and bold, or not be at all.
+
+There seemed to be very little of it.  There were not many young people
+on board of saloon quality, and these were mostly girls.  The young men
+were mainly of the smoking-room sort; they seldom risked themselves among
+the steamer chairs.  It was gayer in the second cabin, and gayer yet in
+the steerage, where robuster emotions were operated by the accordion.
+The passengers there danced to its music; they sang to it and laughed to
+it unabashed under the eyes of the first-cabin witnesses clustered along
+the rail above the pit where they took their rude pleasures.
+
+With March it came to his spending many hours of each long, swift day in
+his berth with a book under the convenient electric light.  He was safe
+there from the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves only to
+fall into disintegration, and cling to him afterwards as inorganic
+particles of weather-guessing, and smoking-room gossip about the ship's
+run.
+
+In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought that he saw some faces of
+the great world, the world of wealth and fashion; but these afterward
+vanished, and left him to wonder where they hid themselves.  He did not
+meet them even in going to and from his meals; he could only imagine them
+served in those palatial state-rooms whose interiors the stewards now and
+then rather obtruded upon the public.  There were people whom he
+encountered in the promenades when he got up for the sunrise, and whom he
+never saw at other times; at midnight he met men prowling in the dark
+whom he never met by day.  But none of these were people of the great
+world.  Before six o'clock they were sometimes second-cabin passengers,
+whose barrier was then lifted for a little while to give them the freedom
+of the saloon promenade.
+
+From time to time he thought he would look up his Ohioan, and revive from
+a closer study of him his interest in the rare American who had never
+been to Europe.  But he kept with his elderly wife, who had the effect of
+withholding him from March's advances.  Young Mr. and Mrs. Leffers threw
+off more and more their disguise of a long-married pair, and became
+frankly bride and groom.  They seldom talked with any one else, except at
+table; they walked up and down together, smiling into each others faces;
+they sat side by side in their steamer chairs; one shawl covered them
+both, and there was reason to believe that they were holding each other's
+hands under it.
+
+Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. March when her husband was
+straying about the ship or reading in his berth; and the two ladies must
+have exchanged autobiographies, for Mrs. March was able to tell him just
+how long Mrs. Adding had been a widow, what her husband died of, and what
+had been done to save him; how she was now perfectly wrapt up in her boy,
+and was taking him abroad, with some notion of going to Switzerland,
+after the summer's travel, and settling down with him at school there.
+She and Mrs. March became great friends; and Rose, as his mother called
+him, attached himself reverently to March, not only as a celebrity of the
+first grade in his quality of editor of 'Every Other Week', but as a sage
+of wisdom and goodness, with whom he must not lose the chance of counsel
+upon almost every hypothesis and exigency of life.
+
+March could not bring himself to place Burnamy quite where he belonged in
+contemporary literature, when Rose put him very high in virtue of the
+poem which he heard Burnamy was going to have printed in 'Every Other
+Week', and of the book which he was going to have published; and he let
+the boy bring to the young fellow the flattery which can come to any
+author but once, in the first request for his autograph that Burnamy
+confessed to have had.  They were so near in age, though they were ten
+years apart, that Rose stood much more in awe of Burnamy than of others
+much more his seniors.  He was often in the company of Kenby, whom he
+valued next to March as a person acquainted with men; he consulted March
+upon Kenby's practice of always taking up the language of the country he
+visited, if it were only for a fortnight; and he conceived a higher
+opinion of him from March's approval.
+
+Burnamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him talk about himself when he
+supposed he was talking about literature, in the hope that she could get
+him to talk about the Triscoes; but she listened in vain as he poured
+out-his soul in theories of literary art, and in histories of what he had
+written and what he meant to write.  When he passed them where they sat
+together, March heard the young fellow's perpetually recurring I, I, I,
+my, my, my, me, me, me; and smiled to think how she was suffering under
+the drip-drip of his innocent egotism.
+
+She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentions to the pivotal
+girl, and Miss Triscoe's indifference to him, in which a less penetrating
+scrutiny could have detected no change from meal to meal.  It was only at
+table that she could see them together, or that she could note any break
+in the reserve of the father and daughter.  The signs of this were so
+fine that when she reported them March laughed in scornful incredulity.
+But at breakfast the third day out, the Triscoes, with the authority of
+people accustomed to social consideration, suddenly turned to the
+Marches, and began to make themselves agreeable; the father spoke to
+March of 'Every Other Week', which he seemed to know of in its relation
+to him; and the young girl addressed herself to Mrs. March's motherly
+sense not the less acceptably because indirectly.  She spoke of going out
+with her father for an indefinite time, as if it were rather his wish
+than hers, and she made some inquiries about places in Germany; they had
+never been in Germany.  They had some idea of Dresden; but the idea of
+Dresden with its American colony seemed rather tiresome; and did Mrs.
+March know anything about Weimar?
+
+Mrs. March was obliged to say that she knew nothing about anyplace in
+Germany; and she explained perhaps too fully where and why she was going
+with her husband.  She fancied a Boston note in that scorn for the
+tiresomeness of Dresden; but the girl's style was of New York rather than
+of Boston, and her accent was not quite of either place.  Mrs. March
+began to try the Triscoes in this place and in that, to divine them and
+to class them.  She had decided from the first that they were society
+people, but they were cultivated beyond the average of the few swells
+whom she had met; and there had been nothing offensive in their manner of
+holding themselves aloof from the other people at the table; they had a
+right to do that if they chose.
+
+When the young Lefferses came in to breakfast, the talk went on between
+these and the Marches; the Triscoes presently left the table, and Mrs.
+March rose soon after, eager for that discussion of their behavior which
+March knew he should not be able to postpone.
+
+He agreed with her that they were society people, but she could not at
+once accept his theory that they had themselves been the objects of an
+advance from them because of their neutral literary quality, through
+which they were of no social world, but potentially common to any.  Later
+she admitted this, as she said, for the sake of argument, though what she
+wanted him to see, now, was that this was all a step of the girl's toward
+finding out something about Burnamy.
+
+The same afternoon, about the time the deck-steward was making his round
+with his cups, Miss Triscoe abruptly advanced upon her from a neighboring
+corner of the bulkhead, and asked, with the air of one accustomed to have
+her advances gratefully received, if she might sit by her.  The girl took
+March's vacant chair, where she had her cup of bouillon, which she
+continued to hold untasted in her hand after the first sip.  Mrs. March
+did the same with hers, and at the moment she had got very tired of doing
+it, Burnamy came by, for the hundredth time that day, and gave her a
+hundredth bow with a hundredth smile.  He perceived that she wished to
+get rid of her cup, and he sprang to her relief.
+
+"May I take yours too?" he said very passively to Miss Triscoe.
+
+"You are very good."  she answered, and gave it.
+
+Mrs. March with a casual air suggested, "Do you know Mr. Burnamy, Miss
+Triscoe?  "The girl said a few civil things, but Burnamy did not try to
+make talk with her while he remained a few moments before Mrs. March.
+The pivotal girl came in sight, tilting and turning in a rare moment of
+isolation at the corner of the music-room, and he bowed abruptly, and
+hurried off to join her.
+
+Miss Triscoe did not linger; she alleged the necessity of looking up her
+father, and went away with a smile so friendly that Mrs. March might
+easily have construed it to mean that no blame attached itself to her in
+Miss Triscoe's mind.
+
+"Then you don't feel that it was a very distinct success?" her husband
+asked on his return.
+
+"Not on the surface," she said.
+
+"Better let ill enough alone," he advised.
+
+She did not heed him.  "All the same she cares for him.  The very fact
+that she was so cold shows that."
+
+"And do you think her being cold will make him care for her?"
+
+"If she wants it to."
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+At dinner that day the question of 'The Maiden Knight' was debated among
+the noises and silences of the band.  Young Mrs. Leffers had brought the
+book to the table with her; she said she had not been able to lay it down
+before the last horn sounded; in fact she could have been seen reading it
+to her husband where he sat under the same shawl, the whole afternoon.
+
+"Don't you think it's perfectly fascinating," she asked Mrs. Adding, with
+her petted mouth.
+
+"Well," said the widow, doubtfully, "it's nearly a week since I read it,
+and I've had time to get over the glow."
+
+"Oh, I could just read it forever!" the bride exclaimed.
+
+"I like a book," said her husband, "that takes me out of myself.  I don't
+want to think when I'm reading."
+
+March was going to attack this ideal, but he reflected in time that Mr.
+Leffers had really stated his own motive in reading.  He compromised.
+"Well, I like the author to do my thinking for me."
+
+"Yes," said the other, "that is what I mean."
+
+"The question is whether 'The Maiden Knight' fellow does it," said Kenby,
+taking duck and pease from the steward at his shoulder.
+
+"What my wife likes in it is to see what one woman can do and be single-
+handed," said March.
+
+"No," his wife corrected him, "what a man thinks she can."
+
+"I suppose," said Mr. Triscoe, unexpectedly, "that we're like the English
+in our habit of going off about a book like a train of powder."
+
+"If you'll say a row of bricks," March assented, "I'll agree with you.
+It's certainly Anglo-Saxon to fall over one another as we do, when we get
+going.  It would be interesting to know just how much liking there is in
+the popularity of a given book."
+
+"It's like the run of a song, isn't it?" Kenby suggested.  "You can't
+stand either, when it reaches a given point."
+
+He spoke to March and ignored Triscoe, who had hitherto ignored the rest
+of the table.
+
+"It's very curious," March said.  "The book or the song catches a mood,
+or feeds a craving, and when one passes or the other is glutted--"
+
+"The discouraging part is," Triscoe put in, still limiting himself to the
+Marches, "that it's never a question of real taste.  The things that go
+down with us are so crude, so coarsely spiced; they tickle such a vulgar
+palate--Now in France, for instance," he suggested.
+
+"Well, I don't know," returned the editor.  "After all, we eat a good
+deal of bread, and we drink more pure water than any other people.  Even
+when we drink it iced, I fancy it isn't so bad as absinthe."
+
+The young bride looked at him gratefully, but she said, "If we can't get
+ice-water in Europe, I don't know what Mr. Leffers will do," and the talk
+threatened to pass among the ladies into a comparison of American and
+European customs.
+
+Burnamy could not bear to let it.  "I don't pretend to be very well up in
+French literature," he began, "but I think such a book as 'The Maiden
+Knight' isn't such a bad piece of work; people are liking a pretty well-
+built story when they like it.  Of course it's sentimental, and it begs
+the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic in character,
+and it makes the reader imagine it too.  The man who wrote that book may
+be a donkey half the time, but he's a genius the other half.  By-and-by
+he'll do something--after he's come to see that his 'Maiden Knight' was a
+fool--that I believe even you won't be down on, Mr. March, if he paints a
+heroic type as powerfully as he does in this book."
+
+He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and though he deferred to
+March in the end, he deferred with authority still.  March liked him for
+coming to the defence of a young writer whom he had not himself learned
+to like yet.  "Yes," he said, "if he has the power you say, and can keep
+it after he comes to his artistic consciousness!"
+
+Mrs. Leffers, as if she thought things were going her way, smiled; Rose
+Adding listened with shining eyes expectantly fixed on March; his mother
+viewed his rapture with tender amusement.  The steward was at Kenby's
+shoulder with the salad and his entreating "Bleace!" and Triscoe seemed
+to be questioning whether he should take any notice of Burnamy's general
+disagreement.  He said at last: "I'm afraid we haven't the documents.
+You don't seem to have cared much for French books, and I haven't read
+'The Maiden Knight'."  He added to March: "But I don't defend absinthe.
+Ice-water is better.  What I object to is our indiscriminate taste both
+for raw whiskey--and for milk-and-water."
+
+No one took up the question again, and it was Kenby who spoke next.
+"The doctor thinks, if this weather holds, that we shall be into Plymouth
+Wednesday morning.  I always like to get a professional opinion on the
+ship's run."
+
+In the evening, as Mrs. March was putting away in her portfolio the
+journal-letter which she was writing to send back from Plymouth to her
+children, Miss Triscoe drifted to the place where she sat at their table
+in the dining-room by a coincidence which they both respected as casual.
+
+"We had quite a literary dinner," she remarked, hovering for a moment
+near the chair which she later sank into.  "It must have made you feel
+very much at home.  Or perhaps you're so tired of it at home that you
+don't talk about books."
+
+"We always talk shop, in some form or other," said Mrs. March.
+"My husband never tires of it.  A good many of the contributors come to
+us, you know."
+
+"It must be delightful," said the girl.  She added as if she ought to
+excuse herself for neglecting an advantage that might have been hers if
+she had chosen, "I'm sorry one sees so little of the artistic and
+literary set.  But New York is such a big place."
+
+New York people seem to be very fond of it," said Mrs. March.  "Those who
+have always lived there."
+
+"We haven't always lived there," said the girl.  "But I think one has a
+good time there--the best time a girl can have.  It's all very well
+coming over for the summer; one has to spend the summer somewhere.  Are
+you going out for a long time?"
+
+"Only for the summer.  First to Carlsbad."
+
+"Oh, yes.  I suppose we shall travel about through Germany, and then go
+to Paris.  We always do; my father is very fond of it."
+
+"You must know it very well," said Mrs. March, aimlessly.
+
+"I was born there,--if that means knowing it.  I lived there--till I was
+eleven years old.  We came home after my mother died."
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs. March.
+
+The girl did not go further into her family history; but by one of those
+leaps which seem to women as logical as other progressions, she arrived
+at asking, "Is Mr. Burnamy one of the contributors?"
+
+Mrs. March laughed.  "He is going to be, as soon as his poem is printed."
+
+"Poem?"
+
+"Yes.  Mr. March thinks it's very good."
+
+"I thought he spoke very nicely about 'The Maiden Knight'.  And he has
+been very nice to papa.  You know they have the same room."
+
+"I think Mr. Burnamy told me," Mrs. March said.
+
+The girl went on.  "He had the lower berth, and he gave it up to papa;
+he's done everything but turn himself out of doors."
+
+"I'm sure he's been very glad," Mrs. March ventured on Burnamy's behalf,
+but very softly, lest if she breathed upon these budding confidences they
+should shrink and wither away.
+
+"I always tell papa that there's no country like America for real
+unselfishness; and if they're all like that, in Chicago!"  The girl
+stopped, and added with a laugh, "But I'm always quarrelling with papa
+about America."
+
+"We have a daughter living in Chicago," said Mrs. March, alluringly.
+
+But Miss Triscoe refused the bait, either because she had said all she
+meant, or because she had said all she would, about Chicago, which Mrs.
+March felt for the present to be one with Burnamy.  She gave another of
+her leaps.  "I don't see why people are so anxious to get it like Europe,
+at home.  They say that there was a time when there were no chaperons
+before hoops, you know."  She looked suggestively at Mrs. March, resting
+one slim hand on the table, and controlling her skirt with the other, as
+if she were getting ready to rise at any moment.  "When they used to sit
+on their steps."
+
+"It was very pleasant before hoops--in every way," said Mrs. March.
+"I was young, then; and I lived in Boston, where I suppose it was always
+simpler than in New York.  I used to sit on our steps.  It was delightful
+for girls--the freedom."
+
+"I wish I had lived before hoops," said Miss Triscoe.
+
+"Well, there must be places where it's before hoops yet: Seattle, and
+Portland, Oregon, for all I know," Mrs. March suggested.  "And there must
+be people in that epoch everywhere."
+
+"Like that young lady who twists and turns?" said Miss Triscoe, giving
+first one side of her face and then the other.  "They have a good time.
+I suppose if Europe came to us in one way it had to come in another.  If
+it came in galleries and all that sort of thing, it had to come in
+chaperons.  You'll think I'm a great extremist, Mrs. March; but sometimes
+I wish there was more America instead of less.  I don't believe it's as
+bad as people say.  Does Mr. March," she asked, taking hold of the chair
+with one hand, to secure her footing from any caprice of the sea, while
+she gathered her skirt more firmly into the other, as she rose, "does he
+think that America is going--all wrong?"
+
+"All wrong?  How?"
+
+"Oh, in politics, don't you know.  And government, and all that.  And
+bribing.  And the lower classes having everything their own way.  And the
+horrid newspapers.  And everything getting so expensive; and no regard
+for family, or anything of that kind."
+
+Mrs. March thought she saw what Miss Triscoe meant, but she answered,
+still cautiously, "I don't believe he does always.  Though there are
+times when he is very much disgusted.  Then he says that he is getting
+too old--and we always quarrel about that--to see things as they really
+are.  He says that if the world had been going the way that people over
+fifty have always thought it was going, it would have gone to smash in
+the time of the anthropoidal apes."
+
+"Oh, yes: Darwin," said Miss Triscoe, vaguely.  "Well, I'm glad he
+doesn't give it up.  I didn't know but I was holding out just because I
+had argued so much, and was doing it out of--opposition.  Goodnight!"
+She called her salutation gayly over her shoulder, and Mrs. March watched
+her gliding out of the saloon with a graceful tilt to humor the slight
+roll of the ship, and a little lurch to correct it, once or twice, and
+wondered if Burnamy was afraid of her; it seemed to her that if she were
+a young man she should not be afraid of Miss Triscoe.
+
+The next morning, just after she had arranged herself in her steamer
+chair, he approached her, bowing and smiling, with the first of his many
+bows and smiles for the day, and at the same time Miss Triscoe came
+toward her from the opposite direction.  She nodded brightly to him, and
+he gave her a bow and smile too; he always had so many of them to spare.
+
+"Here is your chair!"  Mrs. March called to her, drawing the shawl out of
+the chair next her own.  "Mr. March is wandering about the ship
+somewhere."
+
+"I'll keep it for him," said Miss Triscoe, and as Burnamy offered to take
+the shawl that hung in the hollow of her arm, she let it slip into his
+hand with an "Oh; thank you," which seemed also a permission for him to
+wrap it about her in the chair.
+
+He stood talking before the ladies, but he looked up and down the
+promenade.  The pivotal girl showed herself at the corner of the music-
+room, as she had done the day before.  At first she revolved there as if
+she were shedding her light on some one hidden round the corner; then she
+moved a few paces farther out and showed herself more obviously alone.
+Clearly she was there for Burnamy to come and walk with her; Mrs. March
+could see that, and she felt that Miss Triscoe saw it too.  She waited
+for her to dismiss him to his flirtation; but Miss Triscoe kept chatting
+on, and he kept answering, and making no motion to get away.  Mrs. March
+began to be as sorry for her as she was ashamed for him.  Then she heard
+him saying, "Would you like a turn or two?" and Miss Triscoe answering,
+"Why, yes, thank you," and promptly getting out of her chair as if the
+pains they had both been at to get her settled in it were all nothing.
+
+She had the composure to say, "You can leave your shawl with me, Miss
+Triscoe," and to receive her fervent, "Oh, thank you," before they sailed
+off together, with inhuman indifference to the girl at the corner of the
+music-room.  Then she sank into a kind of triumphal collapse, from which
+she roused herself to point her husband to the chair beside her when he
+happened along.
+
+He chose to be perverse about her romance.  "Well, now, you had better
+let them alone.  Remember Kendricks."  He meant one of their young
+friends whose love-affair they had promoted till his happy marriage left
+them in lasting doubt of what they had done.  "My sympathies are all with
+the pivotal girl.  Hadn't she as much right to him, for the time being,
+or for good and all, as Miss Triscoe?"
+
+"That depends upon what you think of Burnamy."
+
+"Well, I don't like to see a girl have a young man snatched away from her
+just when she's made sure of him.  How do you suppose she is feeling
+now?"
+
+"She isn't feeling at all.  She's letting her revolving light fall upon
+half a dozen other young men by this time, collectively or consecutively.
+All that she wants to make sure of is that they're young men--or old
+ones, even."
+
+March laughed, but not altogether at what his wife said.  "I've been
+having a little talk with Papa Triscoe, in the smoking-room."
+
+"You smell like it," said his wife, not to seem too eager: "Well?"
+
+"Well, Papa Triscoe seems to be in a pout.  He doesn't think things are
+going as they should in America.  He hasn't been consulted, or if he has,
+his opinion hasn't been acted upon."
+
+"I think he's horrid," said Mrs. March.  "Who are they?"
+
+"I couldn't make out, and I couldn't ask.  But I'll tell you what I
+think."
+
+"What?"
+
+"That there's no chance for, Burnamy.  He's taking his daughter out to
+marry her to a crowned head."
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+It was this afternoon that the dance took place on the south promenade.
+Everybody came and looked, and the circle around the waltzers was three
+or four deep.  Between the surrounding heads and shoulders, the hats of
+the young ladies wheeling and whirling, and the faces of the men who were
+wheeling and whirling them, rose and sank with the rhythm of their steps.
+The space allotted to the dancing was walled to seaward with canvas, and
+was prettily treated with German, and American flags: it was hard to go
+wrong with flags, Miss Triscoe said, securing herself under Mrs. March's
+wing.
+
+Where they stood they could see Burnamy's face, flashing and flushing in
+the dance; at the end of the first piece he came to them, and remained
+talking and laughing till the music began again.
+
+"Don't you want to try it?" he asked abruptly of Miss Triscoe.
+
+"Isn't it rather--public?" she asked back.
+
+Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl had put through her arm
+thrill with temptation; but Burnamy could not.
+
+"Perhaps it is rather obvious," he said, and he made a long glide over
+the deck to the feet of the pivotal girl, anticipating another young man
+who was rapidly advancing from the opposite quarter.  The next moment her
+hat and his face showed themselves in the necessary proximity to each
+other within the circle.
+
+"How well she dances!" said Miss Triscoe.
+
+"Do you think so?  She looks as if she had been wound up and set going."
+
+"She's very graceful," the girl persisted.
+
+The day ended with an entertainment in the saloon for one of the marine
+charities which address themselves to the hearts and pockets of
+passengers on all steamers.  There were recitations in English and
+German, and songs from several people who had kindly consented, and ever
+more piano performance.  Most of those who took part were of the race
+gifted in art and finance; its children excelled in the music, and its
+fathers counted the gate-money during the last half of the programme,
+with an audible clinking of the silver on the table before them.
+
+Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March was herself chaperoned
+by Mr. Burnamy: her husband had refused to come to the entertainment.
+She hoped to leave Burnamy and Miss Triscoe together before the evening
+ended; but Miss Triscoe merely stopped with her father, in quitting the
+saloon, to laugh at some features of the entertainment, as people who
+take no part in such things do; Burnamy stood up to exchange some
+unimpassioned words with her, and then they said good-night.
+
+The next morning, at five o'clock, the Norumbia came to anchor in the
+pretty harbor of Plymouth.  In the cool early light the town lay distinct
+along the shore, quaint with its small English houses, and stately with
+come public edifices of unknown function on the uplands; a country-seat
+of aristocratic aspect showed itself on one of the heights; on another
+the tower of a country church peered over the tree-tops; there were lines
+of fortifications, as peaceful, at their distance, as the stone walls
+dividing the green fields.  The very iron-clads in the harbor close at
+hand contributed to the amiable gayety of the scene under the pale blue
+English sky, already broken with clouds from which the flush of the
+sunrise had not quite faded.  The breath of the land came freshly out
+over the water; one could almost smell the grass and the leaves.  Gulls
+wheeled and darted over the crisp water; the tones of the English voices
+on the tender were pleasant to the ear, as it fussed and scuffled to the
+ship's side.  A few score of the passengers left her; with their baggage
+they formed picturesque groups on the tender's deck, and they set out for
+the shore waving their hands and their handkerchiefs to the friends they
+left clustering along the rail of the Norumbia.  Mr. and Mrs. Leffers
+bade March farewell, in the final fondness inspired by his having coffee
+with them before they left the ship; they said they hated to leave.
+
+The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast tables were promptly
+filled, except such as the passengers landing at Plymouth had vacated;
+these were stripped of their cloths, and the remaining commensals placed
+at others.  The seats of the Lefferses were given to March's old Ohio
+friend and his wife.  He tried to engage them in the tally which began to
+be general in the excitement of having touched land; but they shyly held
+aloof.
+
+Some English newspapers had come aboard from the tug, and there was the
+usual good-natured adjustment of the American self-satisfaction, among
+those who had seen them, to the ever-surprising fact that our continent
+is apparently of no interest to Europe.  There were some meagre New York
+stock-market quotations in the papers; a paragraph in fine print
+announced the lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recorded a coal-
+mining strike in Pennsylvania.
+
+"I always have to get used to it over again," said Kenby.  "This is the
+twentieth time I have been across, and I'm just as much astonished as I
+was the first, to find out that they don't want to know anything about us
+here."
+
+"Oh," said March, "curiosity and the weather both come from the west.
+San Francisco wants to know about Denver, Denver about Chicago, Chicago
+about New York, and New York about London; but curiosity never travels
+the other way any more than a hot wave or a cold wave."
+
+"Ah, but London doesn't care a rap about Vienna," said Kenby.
+
+"Well, some pressures give out before they reach the coast, on our own
+side.  It isn't an infallible analogy."
+
+Triscoe was fiercely chewing a morsel, as if in haste to take part in the
+discussion.  He gulped it, and broke out.  "Why should they care about
+us, anyway?"
+
+March lightly ventured, "Oh, men and brothers, you know."
+
+"That isn't sufficient ground.  The Chinese are men and brothers; so are
+the South-Americans and Central-Africans, and Hawaiians; but we're not
+impatient for the latest news about them.  It's civilization that
+interests civilization."
+
+"I hope that fact doesn't leave us out in the cold with the barbarians?"
+Burnamy put in, with a smile.
+
+"Do you think we are civilized?" retorted the other.
+
+"We have that superstition in Chicago," said Burnamy.  He added, still
+smiling, "About the New-Yorkers, I mean."
+
+"You're more superstitious in Chicago than I supposed.  New York is an
+anarchy, tempered by vigilance committees."
+
+"Oh, I don't think you can say that," Kenby cheerfully protested, "since
+the Reformers came in.  Look at our streets!"
+
+"Yes, our streets are clean, for the time being, and when we look at them
+we think we have made a clean sweep in our manners and morals.  But how
+long do you think it will be before Tammany will be in the saddle again?"
+
+"Oh, never in the world!" said the optimistic head of the table.
+
+"I wish I had your faith; or I should if I didn't feel that it is one of
+the things that help to establish Tammanys with us.  You will see our
+Tammany in power after the next election."  Kenby laughed in a large-
+hearted incredulity; and his laugh was like fuel to the other's flame.
+"New York is politically a mediaeval Italian republic, and it's morally a
+frontier mining-town.  Socially it's--" He stopped as if he could not say
+what.
+
+"I think it's a place where you have a very nice time, papa," said his
+daughter, and Burnamy smiled with her; not because he knew anything about
+it.
+
+Her father went on as if he had not heard her.  "It's as vulgar and crude
+as money can make it.  Nothing counts but money, and as soon as there's
+enough, it counts for everything.  In less than a year you'll have
+Tammany in power; it won't be more than a year till you'll have it in
+society."
+
+"Oh no! Oh no!" came from Kenby.  He did not care much for society, but
+he vaguely respected it as the stronghold of the proprieties and the
+amenities.
+
+"Isn't society a good place for Tammany to be in?" asked March in the
+pause Triscoe let follow upon Kenby's laugh.
+
+"There's no reason why it shouldn't be.  Society is as bad as all the
+rest of it.  And what New York is, politically, morally, and socially,
+the whole country wishes to be and tries to be."
+
+There was that measure of truth in the words which silences; no one could
+find just the terms of refutation.
+
+"Well," said Kenby at last, "it's a good thing there are so many lines to
+Europe.  We've still got the right to emigrate."
+
+"Yes, but even there we don't escape the abuse of our infamous newspapers
+for exercising a man's right to live where he chooses.  And there is no
+country in Europe--except Turkey, or Spain--that isn't a better home for
+an honest man than the United States."
+
+The Ohioan had once before cleared his throat as if he were going to
+speak.  Now, he leaned far enough forward to catch Triscoe's eve, and
+said, slowly and distinctly: "I don't know just what reason you have to
+feel as you do about the country.  I feel differently about it myself--
+perhaps because I fought for it."
+
+At first, the others were glad of this arrogance; it even seemed an
+answer; but Burnamy saw Miss Triscoe's cheek, flush, and then he doubted
+its validity.
+
+Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, as if to expend a
+violent impulse upon it.  He said, coldly, "I was speaking from that
+stand-point."
+
+The Ohioan shrank back in his seat, and March felt sorry for him, though
+he had put himself in the wrong.  His old hand trembled beside his plate,
+and his head shook, while his lips formed silent words; and his shy wife
+was sharing his pain and shame.
+
+Kenby began to talk about the stop which the Norumbia was to make at
+Cherbourg, and about what hour the next day they should all be in
+Cuxhaven.  Miss Triscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Line
+before, and asked several questions.  Her father did not speak again, and
+after a little while he rose without waiting for her to make the move
+from table; he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto.  Eltwin rose
+at the same time, and March feared that he might be going to provoke
+another defeat, in some way.
+
+Eltwin lifted his voice, and said, trying to catch Triscoe's eye, "I
+think I ought to beg your pardon, sir.  I do beg your pardon."
+
+March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the offer of his reparation as
+distinct as his aggression had been; and now he quaked for Triscoe, whose
+daughter he saw glance apprehensively at her father as she swayed aside
+to let the two men come together.
+
+"That is all right, Colonel--"
+
+"Major," Eltwin conscientiously interposed.
+
+"Major," Triscoe bowed; and he put out his hand and grasped the hand
+which had been tremulously rising toward him.  "There can't be any doubt
+of what we did, no matter what we've got."
+
+"No, no!"  said the other, eagerly.  "That was what I meant, sir.  I
+don't think as you do; but I believe that a man who helped to save the
+country has a right to think what he pleases about it."
+
+Triscoe said, "That is all right, my dear sir.  May I ask your regiment?"
+
+The Marches let the old fellows walk away together, followed by the wife
+of the one and the daughter of the other.  They saw the young girl making
+some graceful overtures of speech to the elder woman as they went.
+
+"That was rather fine, my dear," said Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, I don't know.  It was a little too dramatic, wasn't it?  It wasn't
+what I should have expected of real life."
+
+"Oh, you spoil everything!  If that's the spirit you're going through
+Europe in!"
+
+"It isn't.  As soon as I touch European soil I shall reform."
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+That was not the first time General Triscoe had silenced question of his
+opinions with the argument he had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldom
+able to use it so aptly.  He always found that people suffered, his
+belief in our national degeneration much more readily when they knew that
+he had left a diplomatic position in Europe (he had gone abroad as
+secretary of a minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union.
+Some millions of other men had gone into the war from the varied motives
+which impelled men at that time; but he was aware that he had
+distinction, as a man of property and a man of family, in doing so.  His
+family had improved as time passed, and it was now so old that back of
+his grandfather it was lost in antiquity.  This ancestor had retired from
+the sea and become a merchant in his native Rhode Island port, where his
+son established himself as a physician, and married the daughter of a
+former slave-trader whose social position was the highest in the place;
+Triscoe liked to mention his maternal grandfather when he wished a
+listener to realize just how anomalous his part in a war against slavery
+was; it heightened the effect of his pose.
+
+He fought gallantly through the war, and he was brevetted Brigadier-
+General at the close.  With this honor, and with the wound which caused
+an almost imperceptible limp in his gait, he won the heart of a rich New
+York girl, and her father set him up in a business, which was not long in
+going to pieces in his hands.  Then the young couple went to live in
+Paris, where their daughter was born, and where the mother died when the
+child was ten years old.  A little later his father-in-law died, and
+Triscoe returned to New York, where he found the fortune which his
+daughter had inherited was much less than he somehow thought he had a
+right to expect.
+
+The income from her fortune was enough to live on, and he did not go back
+to Paris, where, in fact, things were not so much to his mind under the
+Republic as they had been under the Second Empire.  He was still willing
+to do something for his country, however, and he allowed his name to be
+used on a citizen's ticket in his district; but his provision-man was
+sent to Congress instead.  Then he retired to Rhode Island and attempted
+to convert his shore property into a watering-place; but after being
+attractively plotted and laid out with streets and sidewalks, it allured
+no one to build on it except the birds and the chipmonks, and he came
+back to New York, where his daughter had remained in school.
+
+One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea, after she left
+school; and she entered upon a series of dinners, dances, theatre
+parties, and receptions of all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring
+through her fingers left no engagement-ring on them.  She had no duties,
+but she seldom got out of humor with her pleasures; she had some odd
+tastes of her own, and in a society where none but the most serious books
+were ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good ones, and had
+romantic ideas of a life that she vaguely called bohemian.  Her character
+was never tested by anything more trying than the fear that her father
+might take her abroad to live; he had taken her abroad several times for
+the summer.
+
+The dreaded trial did not approach for several years after she had ceased
+to be a bud; and then it came when her father was again willing to serve
+his country in diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels, or even at
+Berne.  Reasons of political geography prevented his appointment
+anywhere, but General Triscoe having arranged his affairs for going
+abroad on the mission he had expected, decided to go without it.  He was
+really very fit for both of the offices he had sought, and so far as a
+man can deserve public place by public service, he had deserved it.
+His pessimism was uncommonly well grounded, and if it did not go very
+deep, it might well have reached the bottom of his nature.
+
+His daughter had begun to divine him at the early age when parents
+suppose themselves still to be mysteries to their children.  She did not
+think it necessary ever to explain him to others; perhaps she would not
+have found it possible; and now after she parted from Mrs. Eltwin and
+went to sit down beside Mrs. March she did not refer to her father.  She
+said how sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and what sort of
+place did Mrs. March suppose it was where Mrs. Eltwin lived?  They seemed
+to have everything there, like any place.  She had wanted to ask Mrs.
+Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had not quite dared.
+
+Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March's suggestion he took one of
+the chairs on her other side, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at the
+Channel Islands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg, where
+the Norumbia was to land again.  The young people talked across Mrs.
+March to each other, and said how charming the islands were, in their
+gray-green insubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward, like
+airy clefts in low banks of clouds.  It seemed all the nicer not to know
+just which was which; but when the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg, he
+suggested that they could see better by going round to the other side of
+the ship.  Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when she had gone off with
+Burnamy, marked her allegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her.
+
+Every one was restless in breaking with the old life at sea.  There had
+been an equal unrest when the ship first sailed; people had first come
+aboard in the demoralization of severing their ties with home, and they
+shrank from forming others.  Then the charm of the idle, eventless life
+grew upon them, and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitable
+end.
+
+Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of disintegration
+were felt in all the once-more-repellant particles.  Burnamy and Miss
+Triscoe, as they hung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hated
+to have the voyage over.  They had liked leaving Plymouth and being at
+sea again; they wished that they need not be reminded of another
+debarkation by the energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage
+from the hold.
+
+They approved of the picturesqueness of three French vessels of war that
+passed, dragging their kraken shapes low through the level water.  At
+Cherbourg an emotional French tender came out to the ship, very different
+in her clamorous voices and excited figures from the steady self-control
+of the English tender at Plymouth; and they thought the French
+fortifications much more on show than the English had been.  Nothing
+marked their youthful date so much to the Marches, who presently joined
+them, as their failure to realize that in this peaceful sea the great
+battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought.  The elder
+couple tried to affect their imaginations with the fact which reanimated
+the spectre of a dreadful war for themselves; but they had to pass on
+and, leave the young people unmoved.
+
+Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkation of the pivotal girl,
+whom she saw standing on the deck of the tender, with her hands at her
+waist, and giving now this side and now that side of her face to the
+young men waving their hats to her from the rail of the ship.  Burnamy
+was not of their number, and he seemed not to know that the girl was
+leaving him finally to Miss Triscoe.  If Miss Triscoe knew it she did
+nothing the whole of that long, last afternoon to profit by the fact.
+Burnamy spent a great part of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he
+showed an intolerable resignation to the girl's absence.
+
+"Yes," said March, taking the place Burnamy left at last, "that terrible
+patience of youth!"
+
+"Patience?  Folly!  Stupidity!  They ought to be together every instant!
+Do they suppose that life is full of such chances?  Do they think that
+fate has nothing to do but--"
+
+She stopped for a fit climax, and he suggested, "Hang round and wait on
+them?"
+
+"Yes!  It's their one chance in a life-time, probably."
+
+"Then you've quite decided that they're in love?"  He sank comfortably
+back, and put up his weary legs on the chair's extension with the
+conviction that love had no such joy as that to offer.
+
+"I've decided that they're intensely interested in each other."
+
+"Then what more can we ask of them?  And why do you care what they do or
+don't do with their chance?  Why do you wish their love well, if it's
+that?  Is marriage such a very certain good?"
+
+"It isn't all that it might be, but it's all that there is.  What would
+our lives have been without it?" she retorted.
+
+"Oh, we should have got on.  It's such a tremendous risk that we, ought
+to go round begging people to think twice, to count a hundred, or a
+nonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point.  I don't mind
+their flirting; that amuses them; but marrying is a different thing.
+I doubt if Papa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law
+he hadn't selected himself, and his daughter doesn't strike me as a young
+lady who has any wisdom to throw away on a choice.  She has her little
+charm; her little gift of beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the other
+things that go with her age and sex; but what could she do for a fellow
+like Burnamy, who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fame to
+climb, with an old mother at the bottom of it to look after?  You
+wouldn't want him to have an eye on Miss Triscoe's money, even if she had
+money, and I doubt if she has much.  It's all very pretty to have a girl
+like her fascinated with a youth of his simple traditions; though Burnamy
+isn't altogether pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to a place
+in the very world she belongs to.  I don't think it's for us to promote
+the affair."
+
+"Well, perhaps you're right," she sighed.  "I will let them alone from
+this out.  Thank goodness, I shall not have them under my eyes very
+long."
+
+"Oh, I don't think there's any harm done yet," said her husband, with a
+laugh.
+
+At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind he meant that she
+suffered from an illogical disappointment.  The young people got through
+the meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table
+first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement;
+she kept on chatting with March till his wife took him away to their
+chairs on deck.
+
+There were a few more ships in sight than there were in mid-ocean; but
+the late twilight thickened over the North Sea quite like the night after
+they left New York, except that it was colder; and their hearts turned to
+their children, who had been in abeyance for the week past, with a
+remorseful pang.  "Well, she said, "I wish we were going to be in New
+York to-morrow, instead of Hamburg."
+
+"Oh, no! Oh, no!" he protested.  "Not so bad as that, my dear.  This is
+the last night, and it's hard to manage, as the last night always is.  I
+suppose the last night on earth--"
+
+"Basil!" she implored.
+
+"Well, I won't, then.  But what I want is to see a Dutch lugger.  I've
+never seen a Dutch lugger, and--"
+
+She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to the signal he was
+silent; though it seemed afterwards that he ought to have gone on talking
+as if he did not see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by.  They
+were walking close together, and she was leaning forward and looking up
+into his face while he talked.
+
+"Now," Mrs. March whispered, long after they were out of hearing, "let us
+go instantly.  I wouldn't for worlds have them see us here when they get
+found again.  They would feel that they had to stop and speak, and that
+would spoil everything.  Come!"
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and modestly waited for Miss
+Triscoe's prompting.  He had not to wait long.
+
+"And then, how soon did you think of printing your things in a book?"
+
+"Oh, about as soon as they began to take with the public."
+
+"How could you tell that they were-taking?"
+
+"They were copied into other papers, and people talked about them."
+
+"And that was what made Mr. Stoller want you to be his secretary?"
+
+"I don't believe it was.  The theory in the office was that he didn't
+think much of them; but he knows I can write shorthand, and put things
+into shape."
+
+"What things?"
+
+"Oh--ideas.  He has a notion of trying to come forward in politics.  He
+owns shares in everything but the United States Senate--gas, electricity,
+railroads, aldermen, newspapers--and now he would like some Senate.
+That's what I think."
+
+She did not quite understand, and she was far from knowing that this
+cynic humor expressed a deadlier pessimism than her father's fiercest
+accusals of the country.  "How fascinating it is!"  she said, innocently.
+
+"And I suppose they all envy your coming out?"
+
+"In the office?"
+
+"Yes.  I should envy, them--staying."
+
+Burnamy laughed.  "I don't believe they envy me.  It won't be all roses
+for me--they know that.  But they know that I can take care of myself if
+it isn't."  He remembered something one of his friends in the office had
+said of the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would feel if he ever tried
+his beak on him in the belief that he was soft.
+
+She abruptly left the mere personal question.  "And which would you
+rather write: poems or those kind of sketches?"
+
+"I don't know," said Burnamy, willing to talk of himself on any terms.
+"I suppose that prose is the thing for our time, rather more; but there
+are things you can't say in prose.  I used to write a great deal of verse
+in college; but I didn't have much luck with editors till Mr. March took
+this little piece for 'Every Other Week'."
+
+"Little?  I thought it was a long poem!"
+
+Burnamy laughed at the notion.  "It's only eight lines."
+
+"Oh!" said the girl.  "What is it about?"
+
+He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which he found incredible in
+a person of his make.  "I can repeat it if you won't give me away to Mrs.
+March."
+
+"Oh, no indeed!"  He said the lines over to her very simply and well."
+They are beautiful--beautiful!"
+
+"Do you think so?" he gasped, in his joy at her praise.
+
+"Yes, lovely.  Do you know, you are the first literary man--the only
+literary man--I ever talked with.  They must go out--somewhere!  Papa
+must meet them at his clubs.  But I never do; and so I'm making the most
+of you."
+
+"You can't make too much of me, Miss Triscoe," said Burnamy.
+
+She would not mind his mocking.  "That day you spoke about 'The Maiden
+Knight', don't you know, I had never heard any talk about books in that
+way.  I didn't know you were an author then."
+
+"Well, I'm not much of an author now," he said, cynically, to retrieve
+his folly in repeating his poem to her.
+
+"Oh, that will do for you to say.  But I know what Mrs. March thinks."
+
+He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; 'Every Other
+Week' was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously
+neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs.
+March's interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know
+just how much she thought of him as a writer?  "Did she like the poem."
+
+Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about the
+poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March's
+liking for Burnamy.  "But it wouldn't do to tell you all she said!"
+This was not what he hoped, but be was richly content when she returned
+to his personal history.  "And you didn't know any one when, you went up
+to Chicago from--"
+
+"Tippecanoe?  Not exactly that.  I wasn't acquainted with any one in the
+office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing to
+let me try my hand.  That was all I could ask."
+
+"Of course!  You knew you could do the rest.  Well, it is like a romance.
+A woman couldn't have such an adventure as that!" sighed the girl.
+
+"But women do!" Burnamy retorted.  "There is a girl writing on the paper
+now--she's going to do the literary notices while I'm gone--who came to
+Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who's made
+her way single-handed from interviewing up."
+
+"Oh," said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm.
+"Is she nice?"
+
+"She's mighty clever, and she's nice enough, too, though the kind of
+journalism that women do isn't the most dignified.  And she's one of the
+best girls I know, with lots of sense."
+
+"It must be very interesting," said Miss Triscoe, with little interest in
+the way she said it.  "I suppose you're quite a little community by
+yourselves."
+
+"On the paper?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don't.
+There's quite a regiment of people on a big paper.  If you'd like to come
+out," Burnamy ventured, "perhaps you could get the Woman's Page to do."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for
+dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette."
+
+He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, "Do women
+write it?"
+
+He laughed reminiscently.  "Well, not always.  We had one man who used to
+do it beautifully--when he was sober.  The department hasn't had any
+permanent head since."
+
+He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no
+doubt she had not taken it in fully.  She abruptly left the subject.
+"Do you know what time we really get in to-morrow?"
+
+"About one, I believe--there's a consensus of stewards to that effect,
+anyway."  After a pause he asked, "Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?"
+
+"We are going to Dresden, first, I believe.  Then we may go on down to
+Vienna.  But nothing is settled, yet."
+
+"Are you going direct to Dresden?"
+
+"I don't know.  We may stay in Hamburg a day or two."
+
+"I've got to go straight to Carlsbad.  There's a sleeping-car that will
+get me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal.  But I hope you'll let
+me be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow."
+
+"You're very kind.  You've been very good already--to papa."
+He protested that he had not been at all good.  "But he's used to taking
+care of himself on the other side.  Oh, it's this side, now!"
+
+"So it is!  How strange that seems!  It's actually Europe.  But as long
+as we're at sea, we can't realize it.  Don't you hate to have experiences
+slip through your fingers?"
+
+"I don't know.  A girl doesn't have many experiences of her own; they're
+always other people's."
+
+This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth.
+He only suggested, "Well; sometimes they make other people have the
+experiences."
+
+Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left
+the question.  "Do you understand German?"
+
+"A little.  I studied it at college, and I've cultivated a sort of beer-
+garden German in Chicago.  I can ask for things."
+
+"I can't, except in French, and that's worse than English, in Germany,
+I hear."
+
+"Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment.  Will
+you?"
+
+She did not answer.  "It must be rather late, isn't it?" she asked.  He
+let her see his watch, and she said, "Yes, it's very late," and led the
+way within.  "I must look after my packing; papa's always so prompt, and
+I must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left
+home; we expect to get one in Dresden.  Good-night!"
+
+Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered
+whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense of
+novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the
+first young lady he had known who had a maid.  The fact awed him; Miss
+Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and
+disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the
+shore.  No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage.  People
+went and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were
+no longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for
+a moment.
+
+In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below
+had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered
+with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls.  At an early hour after breakfast
+the bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in
+the corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and
+people who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going
+to give, anxiously conferred together.  The question whether you ought
+ever to give the head steward anything pressed crucially at the early
+lunch, and Kenby brought only a partial relief by saying that he always
+regarded the head steward as an officer of the ship.  March made the
+experiment of offering him six marks, and the head steward took them
+quite as if he were not an officer of the ship.  He also collected a
+handsome fee for the music, which is the tax levied on all German ships
+beyond the tolls exacted on the steamers of other nations.
+
+After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer
+cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle
+much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been
+for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied
+themselves at home again.
+
+Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream where
+the Norumbia had dropped anchor.  People who had brought their hand-
+baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it that
+people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledge
+them afresh not to forget it.  The tender came alongside, and the
+transfer of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work
+that every one sat down in some other's chair.  At last the trunks were
+all on the tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the
+gangways with the hand-baggage.  "Is this Hoboken?" March murmured in his
+wife's ear, with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the
+reversed action of the kinematograph.
+
+On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among the
+companions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowded
+together under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashing
+rain.  Burnamy's smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized Miss
+Triscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far from
+Burnamy's smile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins, whom
+he was helping look after their bags and bundles.  Rose Adding was
+talking with Kenby, and apparently asking his opinion of something; Mrs.
+Adding sat near them tranquilly enjoying her son.
+
+Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage, large and small, and
+after he had satisfied her, he furtively satisfied himself by a fresh
+count that it was all there.  But he need not have taken the trouble;
+their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard over it; his eyes
+expressed a contemptuous pity for their anxiety, whose like he must have
+been very tired of.  He brought their handbags into the customs-room at
+the station where they landed; and there took a last leave and a last fee
+with unexpected cordiality.
+
+Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the distraction which the
+customs inspectors of all countries bring to travellers; and again they
+were united during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was also the
+restaurant.  It was full of strange noises and figures and odors--the
+shuffling of feet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervous German
+voices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of cigars.
+Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing at the door with a
+letter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals, "Krahnay,
+Krahnay!  "When March could bear it no longer he went up to him and
+shouted, "Crane! Crane!" and the man bowed gratefully, and began to cry,
+"Kren! Kren!"  But whether Mr. Crane got his letter or not, he never
+knew.
+
+People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sending
+home cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbear
+cabling to his son, though he felt it absurd.  There was a great deal of
+talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girls
+behind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then served
+them with what they chose for them.  Otherwise the Germans, though
+voluble, were unsmiling, and here on the threshold of their empire the
+travellers had their first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitual
+with these amiable people.
+
+Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March where he sat with his wife,
+and leaned over her son to ask, "Do you know what lese-majesty is?  Rose
+is afraid I've committed it!"
+
+"No, I don't," said March.  "But it's the unpardonable sin.  What have
+you been doing?"
+
+"I asked the official at the door when our train would start, and when he
+said at half past three, I said, 'How tiresome!' Rose says the railroads
+belong to the state here, and that if I find fault with the time-table,
+it's constructive censure of the Emperor, and that's lese-majesty."  She
+gave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March's face with an
+appealing smile.
+
+"Well, I don't think you'll be arrested this time, Mrs. Adding; but I
+hope it will be a warning to Mrs. March.  She's been complaining of the
+coffee."
+
+"Indeed I shall say what I like," said Mrs. March.  "I'm an American."
+
+"Well, you'll find you're a German, if you like to say anything
+disagreeable about the coffee in the restaurant of the Emperor's railroad
+station; the first thing you know I shall be given three months on your
+account."
+
+Mrs. Adding asked: "Then they won't punish ladies?  There, Rose!  I'm
+safe, you see; and you're still a minor, though you are so wise for your
+years."
+
+She went back to her table, where Kenby came and sat down by her.
+
+"I don't know that I quite like her playing on that sensitive child,",
+said Mrs. March.  "And you've joined with her in her joking.  Go and
+speak, to him!"
+
+The boy was slowly following his mother, with his head fallen.  March
+overtook him, and he started nervously at the touch of a hand on his
+shoulder, and then looked gratefully up into the man's face.  March tried
+to tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he said: "Oh, yes.
+I understood that.  But I got to thinking; and I don't want my mother to
+take any risks."
+
+"I don't believe she will, really, Rose.  But I'll speak to her, and tell
+her she can't be too cautious."
+
+"Not now, please!" the boy entreated.
+
+"Well, I'll find another chance," March assented.  He looked round and
+caught a smiling nod from Burnamy, who was still with the Eltwins; the
+Triscoes were at a table by themselves; Miss Triseoe nodded too, but her
+father appeared not to see March.  "It's all right, with Rose," he said,
+when he sat down again by his wife; "but I guess it's all over with
+Burnamy," and he told her what he had seen.  "Do you think it came to any
+displeasure between them last night?  Do you suppose he offered himself,
+and she--"
+
+"What nonsense!" said Mrs. March, but she was not at peace.  "It's her
+father who's keeping her away from him."
+
+"I shouldn't mind that.  He's keeping her away from us, too."  But at
+that moment Miss Triscoe as if she had followed his return from afar,
+came over to speak to his wife.  She said they were going on to Dresden
+that evening, and she was afraid they might have no chance to see each
+other on the train or in Hamburg.  March, at this advance, went to speak
+with her father; he found him no more reconciled to Europe than America.
+
+"They're Goths," he said of the Germans.  "I could hardly get that stupid
+brute in the telegraph-office to take my despatch."
+
+On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe; he was not altogether
+surprised to meet Burnamy with her, now.  The young fellow asked if he
+could be of any use to him, and then he said he would look him up in the
+train.  He seemed in a hurry, but when he walked away with Miss Triscoe
+he did not seem in a hurry.
+
+March remarked upon the change to his wife, and she sighed, "Yes, you can
+see that as far as they're concerned."
+
+"It's a great pity that there should be parents to complicate these
+affairs," he said.  "How simple it would be if there were no parties to
+them but the lovers!  But nature is always insisting upon fathers and
+mothers, and families on both sides."
+
+
+
+
+XIX.
+
+The long train which they took at last was for the Norumbia's people
+alone, and it was of several transitional and tentative types of cars.
+Some were still the old coach-body carriages; but most were of a strange
+corridor arrangement, with the aide at the aide, and the seats crossing
+from it, with compartments sometimes rising to the roof, and sometimes
+rising half-way.  No two cars seemed quite alike, but all were very
+comfortable; and when the train began to run out through the little sea-
+side town into the country, the old delight of foreign travel began.
+Most of the houses were little and low and gray, with ivy or flowering
+vines covering their walls to their browntiled roofs; there was here and
+there a touch of Northern Gothic in the architecture; but usually where
+it was pretentious it was in the mansard taste, which was so bad with us
+a generation ago, and is still very bad in Cuxhaven.
+
+The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiar shapes of Holstein
+cattle, herded by little girls, with their hair in yellow pigtails.  The
+gray, stormy sky hung low, and broke in fitful rains; but perhaps for the
+inclement season of mid-summer it was not very cold.  Flowers were
+blooming along the embankments and in the rank green fields with a dogged
+energy; in the various distances were groups of trees embowering cottages
+and even villages, and always along the ditches and watercourses were
+double lines of low willows.  At the first stop the train made, the
+passengers flocked to the refreshment-booth, prettily arranged beside the
+station, where the abundance of the cherries and strawberries gave proof
+that vegetation was in other respects superior to the elements.  But it
+was not of the profusion of the sausages, and the ham which openly in
+slices or covertly in sandwiches claimed its primacy in the German
+affections; every form of this was flanked by tall glasses of beer.
+
+A number of the natives stood by and stared unsmiling at the train, which
+had broken out in a rash of little American flags at every window.  This
+boyish display, which must have made the Americans themselves laugh, if
+their sense of humor had not been lost in their impassioned patriotism,
+was the last expression of unity among the Norumbia's passengers, and
+they met no more in their sea-solidarity.  Of their table acquaintance
+the Marches saw no one except Burnamy, who came through the train looking
+for them.  He said he was in one of the rear cars with the Eltwins, and
+was going to Carlsbad with them in the sleeping-car train leaving Hamburg
+at seven.  He owned to having seen the Triscoes since they had left
+Cuxhaven; Mrs. March would not suffer herself to ask him whether they
+were in the same carriage with the Eltwins.  He had got a letter from
+Mr. Stoller at Cuxhaven, and he begged the Marches to let him engage
+rooms for them at the hotel where he was going to stay with him.
+
+After they reached Hamburg they had flying glimpses of him and of others
+in the odious rivalry to get their baggage examined first which seized
+upon all, and in which they no longer knew one another, but selfishly
+struggled for the good-will of porters and inspectors.  There was really
+no such haste; but none could govern themselves against the general
+frenzy.  With the porter he secured March conspired and perspired to win
+the attention of a cold but not unkindly inspector.  The officer opened
+one trunk, and after a glance at it marked all as passed, and then there
+ensued a heroic strife with the porter as to the pieces which were to go
+to the Berlin station for their journey next day, and the pieces which
+were to go to the hotel overnight.  At last the division was made; the
+Marches got into a cab of the first class; and the porter, crimson and
+steaming at every pore from the physical and intellectual strain, went
+back into the station.
+
+They had got the number of their cab from the policeman who stands at the
+door of all large German stations and supplies the traveller with a
+metallic check for the sort of vehicle he demands.  They were not proud,
+but it seemed best not to risk a second-class cab in a strange city, and
+when their first-class cab came creaking and limping out of the rank,
+they saw how wise they had been, if one of the second class could have
+been worse.
+
+As they rattled away from the station they saw yet another kind of
+turnout, which they were destined to see more and more in the German
+lands.  It was that team of a woman harnessed with a dog to a cart which
+the women of no other country can see without a sense of personal insult.
+March tried to take the humorous view, and complained that they had not
+been offered the choice of such an equipage by the policeman, but his
+wife would not be amused.  She said that no country which suffered such a
+thing could be truly civilized, though he made her observe that no city
+in the world, except Boston or Brooklyn, was probably so thoroughly
+trolleyed as Hamburg.  The hum of the electric car was everywhere, and
+everywhere the shriek of the wires overhead; batlike flights of
+connecting plates traversed all the perspectives through which they drove
+to the pleasant little hotel they had chosen.
+
+
+
+
+XX.
+
+On one hand their windows looked toward a basin of the Elbe, where
+stately white swans were sailing; and on the other to the new Rathhaus,
+over the trees that deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dim public
+garden, where water-proof old women and impervious nurses sat, and
+children played in the long twilight of the sour, rain-soaked summer of
+the fatherland.  It was all picturesque, and within-doors there was the
+novelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furniture of the Germans, and
+their beds, which after so many ages of Anglo-Saxon satire remain
+immutably preposterous.  They are apparently imagined for the stature of
+sleepers who have shortened as they broadened; their pillows are
+triangularly shaped to bring the chin tight upon the breast under the
+bloated feather bulk which is meant for covering, and which rises over
+the sleeper from a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neatly buttoned
+into the upper sheet, with the effect of a portly waistcoat.
+
+The hotel was illumined by the kindly splendor of the uniformed portier,
+who had met the travellers at the door, like a glowing vision of the
+past, and a friendly air diffused itself through the whole house.  At the
+dinner, which, if not so cheap as they had somehow hoped, was by no means
+bad, they took counsel with the English-speaking waiter as to what
+entertainment Hamburg could offer for the evening, and by the time they
+had drunk their coffee they had courage for the Circus Renz, which seemed
+to be all there was.
+
+The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailed at the street corner,
+stopped it and got off the platform, and stood in the street until they
+were safely aboard, without telling them to step lively, or pulling them
+up the steps; or knuckling them in the back to make them move forward.
+He let them get fairly seated before be started the car, and so lost the
+fun of seeing them lurch and stagger violently, and wildly clutch each
+other for support.  The Germans have so little sense of humor that
+probably no one in the car would have been amused to see the strangers
+flung upon the floor.  No one apparently found it droll that the
+conductor should touch his cap to them when he asked for their fare; no
+one smiled at their efforts to make him understand where they wished to
+go, and he did not wink at the other passengers in trying to find out.
+Whenever the car stopped he descended first, and did not remount till the
+dismounting passenger had taken time to get well away from it.  When the
+Marches got into the wrong car in coming home, and were carried beyond
+their street, the conductor would not take their fare.
+
+The kindly civility which environed them went far to alleviate the
+inclemency of the climate; it began to rain as soon as they left the
+shelter of the car, but a citizen of whom they asked the nearest way to
+the Circus Renz was so anxious to have them go aright that they did not
+mind the wet, and the thought of his goodness embittered March's self-
+reproach for under-tipping the sort of gorgeous heyduk, with a staff like
+a drum-major's, who left his place at the circus door to get their
+tickets.  He brought them back with a magnificent bow, and was then as
+visibly disappointed with the share of the change returned to him as a
+child would have been.
+
+They went to their places with the sting of his disappointment rankling
+in their hearts.  "One ought always to overpay them," March sighed, "and
+I will do it from this time forth; we shall not be much the poorer for
+it.  That heyduk is not going to get off with less than a mark when we
+come out."  As an earnest of his good faith he gave the old man who
+showed them to their box a tip that made him bow double, and he bought
+every conceivable libretto and play-bill offered him at prices fixed by
+his remorse.
+
+"One ought to do it," he said.  "We are of the quality of good geniuses
+to these poor souls; we are Fortune in disguise; we are money found in
+the road.  It is an accursed system, but they are more its victims than
+we."  His wife quite agreed with him, and with the same good conscience
+between them they gave themselves up to the pure joy which the circus,
+of all modern entertainments, seems alone to inspire.  The house was full
+from floor to roof when they came ins and every one was intent upon the
+two Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose drolleries spoke the
+universal language of circus humor, and needed no translation into either
+German or English.  They had missed by an event or two the more patriotic
+attraction of "Miss Darlings, the American Star," as she was billed in
+English, but they were in time for one of those equestrian performances
+which leave the spectator almost exanimate from their prolixity, and the
+pantomimic piece which closed the evening.
+
+This was not given until nearly the whole house had gone out and stayed
+itself with beer and cheese and ham and sausage, in the restaurant which
+purveys these light refreshments in the summer theatres all over Germany.
+When the people came back gorged to the throat, they sat down in the
+right mood to enjoy the allegory of "The Enchanted Mountain's Fantasy;
+the Mountain episodes; the High-interesting Sledges-Courses on the Steep
+Acclivities; the Amazing-Up-rush of the thence plunging-Four Trains,
+which arrive with Lightnings-swiftness at the Top of the over-40-feet-
+high Mountain-the Highest Triumph of the To-day's Circus-Art; the Sledge-
+journey in the Wizard-mountain, and the Fairy Ballet in the Realm of the
+Ghost-prince, with Gold and Silver, Jewel, Bloomghosts, Gnomes,
+Gnomesses, and Dwarfs, in never-till-now-seen Splendor of Costume."  The
+Marches were happy in this allegory, and happier in the ballet, which is
+everywhere delightfully innocent, and which here appealed with the large
+flat feet and the plain good faces of the 'coryphees' to all that was
+simplest and sweetest in their natures.  They could not have resisted, if
+they had wished, that environment, of good-will; and if it had not been
+for the disappointed heyduk, they would have got home from their evening
+at the Circus Renz without a pang.
+
+They looked for him everywhere when they came out, but he had vanished,
+and they were left with a regret which, if unavailing, was not too
+poignant.  In spite of it they had still an exhilaration in their release
+from the companionship of their fellow-voyagers which they analyzed as
+the psychical revulsion from the strain of too great interest in them.
+Mrs. March declared that for the present, at least, she wanted Europe
+quite to themselves; and she said that not even for the pleasure of
+seeing Burnamy and Miss Triscoe come into their box together world she
+have suffered an American trespass upon their exclusive possession of the
+Circus Renz.
+
+In the audience she had seen German officers for the first time in
+Hamburg, and she meant, if unremitting question could bring out the
+truth, to know why she had not met any others.  She had read much of the
+prevalence and prepotence of the German officers who would try to push
+her off the sidewalk, till they realized that she was an American woman,
+and would then submit to her inflexible purpose of holding it.  But she
+had been some seven or eight hours in  Hamburg, and nothing of the kind
+had happened to her, perhaps because she had hardly yet walked a block in
+the city streets, but perhaps also because there seemed to be very few
+officers or military of  any kind in Hamburg.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.
+
+Their absence was plausibly explained, the next morning, by the young
+German friend who came in to see the Marches at breakfast.  He said
+Hamburg had been so long a free republic that the presence of a large
+imperial garrison was distasteful to the people, and as a matter of fact
+there were very few soldiers quartered there, whether the authorities
+chose to indulge the popular grudge or not.  He was himself in a joyful
+flutter of spirits, for he had just the day before got his release from
+military service.  He gave them a notion of what the rapture of a man
+reprieved from death might be, and he was as radiantly happy in the ill
+health which had got him his release as if it had been the greatest
+blessing of heaven.  He bubbled over with smiling regrets that he should
+be leaving his home for the first stage of the journey which he was to
+take in search of strength, just as they had come, and he pressed them to
+say if there were not something that he could do for them.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, with a promptness surprising to her husband, who
+could think of nothing; "tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he was
+in Hamburg.  My husband has always had a great passion for him and wants
+to look him up everywhere."
+
+March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young man
+had apparently never known it.  His face fell; he wished to make Mrs.
+March believe that it was only Heine's uncle who had lived there; but she
+was firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came back
+gladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live in
+Konigstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily know
+the house by his bust set in its front.  The portier and the head waiter
+shared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, and
+joined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them into
+their carriage.
+
+They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they should
+see in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that it
+rained there every day.  As they drove off in the gray drizzle with the
+unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they bade
+their driver be very slow in taking them through Konigstrasse, so that he
+should by no means miss Heine's dwelling, and he duly stopped in front of
+a house bearing the promised bust.  They dismounted in order to revere it
+more at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer than the
+sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his cruelest
+moment, to be that of the German Milton, the respectable poet Klopstock,
+whom Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.
+
+In fact it was here that the good, much-forgotten Klopstock dwelt,
+when he came home to live with a comfortable pension from the Danish
+government; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about
+among the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some manner of house where Heine
+might have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat, or any
+sort of two-pair back.  The neighbors were somewhat moved by the anxiety
+of the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors in Italy
+would have been.  There vas no eager and smiling sympathy in the little
+crowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient of
+question and kind in their helpless response, but they were not gay.
+To a man they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage and
+blood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of a
+stationer-and-bookseller's next to the butcher's had heard of him, but he
+had never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he never had heard where
+he lived in Hamburg.
+
+The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and
+drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their
+limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front
+escape him.  He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse,
+and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness
+that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done.
+They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no
+apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon
+them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their
+timber-laced gables.  The facades with their lattices stretching in bands
+quite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high in
+successions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than anything
+the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselves
+upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness which
+brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set
+ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and the
+traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress.  They
+could not have said which delighted them more--the houses in the
+immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the perspectives and
+the background; but all were like the painted scenes of the stage, and
+they had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they were not persons in
+some romantic drama.
+
+The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which
+Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous
+activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the
+turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her
+shipping.  At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness
+of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and
+seemed the expression of the home-side of her history.  The sense of this
+gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards
+made, and assisted the digestion of some morsels of tough statistics.
+In the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of the
+greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romantic
+glamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 a
+quarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United States
+seemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval streets
+through the whole shabby length of Third Avenue.
+
+It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of commercial solidarity,
+that March went to have a look at the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautiful
+new Rathhaus.  It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that;
+but it was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function of a public
+edifice, in withholding its entire interest from the stranger.  He could
+not get into the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was free to him, and when
+he stepped within, it rose at him with a roar of voices and of feet like
+the New York Stock Exchange.  The spectacle was not so frantic; people
+were not shaking their fists or fingers in each other's noses; but they
+were all wild in the tamer German way, and he was glad to mount from the
+Bourse to the poor little art gallery upstairs, and to shut out its
+clamor.  He was not so glad when he looked round on these, his first,
+examples of modern German art.  The custodian led him gently about and
+said which things were for sale, and it made his heart ache to see how
+bad they were, and to think that, bad as they were, he could not buy any
+of them.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.
+
+In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had the irresponsible ease of
+people ticketed through, and the steamship company had still the charge
+of their baggage.  But when the Marches left Hamburg for Leipsic (where
+they had decided to break the long pull to Carlsbad), all the anxieties
+of European travel, dimly remembered from former European days, offered
+themselves for recognition.  A porter vanished with their hand-baggage
+before they could note any trait in him for identification; other porters
+made away with their trunks; and the interpreter who helped March buy his
+tickets, with a vocabulary of strictly railroad English, had to help him
+find the pieces in the baggage-room, curiously estranged in a mountain of
+alien boxes.  One official weighed them; another obliged him to pay as
+much in freight as for a third passenger, and gave him an illegible scrap
+of paper which recorded their number and destination.  The interpreter
+and the porters took their fees with a professional effect of
+dissatisfaction, and he went to wait with his wife amidst the smoking and
+eating and drinking in the restaurant.  They burst through with the rest
+when the doors were opened to the train, and followed a glimpse of the
+porter with their hand-bags, as he ran down the platform, still bent upon
+escaping them, and brought him to bay at last in a car where he had got
+very good seats for them, and sank into their places, hot and humiliated
+by their needless tumult.
+
+As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect, and renewed a youthful
+joy in some of the long-estranged facts.  The road was rougher than the
+roads at home; but for much less money they had the comfort, without the
+unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-class carriage.  Mrs.
+March had expected to be used with the severity on the imperial railroads
+which she had failed to experience from the military on the Hamburg
+sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the whole management toward
+her.  Her fellow-travellers were not lavish of their rights, as Americans
+are; what they got, that they kept; and in the run from Hamburg to
+Leipsic she had several occasions to observe that no German, however
+young or robust, dreams of offering a better place, if he has one, to a
+lady in grace to her sex or age; if they got into a carriage too late to
+secure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to the end of that
+stage.  But if they appealed to their fellow-travellers for information
+about changes, or stops, or any of the little facts that they wished to
+make sure of, they were enlightened past possibility of error.  At the
+point where they might have gone wrong the explanations were renewed with
+a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had not been
+forgotten.  She said she could not see how any people could be both so
+selfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of saying
+something offensive:
+
+"You women are so pampered in America that you are astonished when you
+are treated in Europe like the mere human beings you are."
+
+She answered with unexpected reasonableness:
+
+"Yes, there's something in that; but when the Germans have taught us how
+despicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as human
+beings?"
+
+This was at ten o'clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and at
+last, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him.  The
+darkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impression of its few
+simple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense: long levels, densely
+wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests, and
+checkered with fields of grain and grass, soaking under the thin rain
+that from time to time varied the thin sunshine.
+
+The villages and peasants' cottages were notably few; but there was here
+and there a classic or a gothic villa, which, at one point, an English-
+speaking young lady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain as the
+seat of some country gentleman; the land was in large holdings, and this
+accounted for the sparsity of villages and cottages.
+
+She then said that she was a German teacher of English, in Hamburg, and
+was going home to Potsdam for a visit.  She seemed like a German girl out
+of 'The Initials', and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried to
+invest herself with some romantic interest as an American.  She failed to
+move the girl's fancy, even after she had bestowed on her an immense
+bunch of roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had sent to them
+just before they left their hotel.  She failed, later, on the same ground
+with the pleasant-looking English woman who got into their carriage at
+Magdeburg, and talked over the 'London Illustrated News' with an English-
+speaking Fraulein in her company; she readily accepted the fact of Mrs.
+March's nationality, but found nothing wonderful in it, apparently; and
+when she left the train she left Mrs. March to recall with fond regret
+the old days in Italy when she first came abroad, and could make a whole
+carriage full of Italians break into ohs and ahs by saying that she was
+an American, and telling how far she had come across the sea.
+
+"Yes," March assented, "but that was a great while ago, and Americans
+were much rarer than they are now in Europe.  The Italians are so much
+more sympathetic than the Germans and English, and they saw that you
+wanted to impress them.  Heaven knows how little they cared!  And then,
+you were a very pretty young girl in those days; or at least I thought
+so."
+
+"Yes," she sighed, "and now I'm a plain old woman."
+
+"Oh, not quite so bad as that."
+
+"Yes, I am!  Do you think they would have cared more if it had been Miss
+Triscoe?"
+
+"Not so much as if it had been the pivotal girl.  They would have found
+her much more their ideal of the American woman; and even she would have
+had to have been here thirty years ago."
+
+She laughed a little ruefully.  "Well, at any rate, I should like to know
+how Miss Triscoe would have affected them."
+
+"I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is living
+here with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank.  I could
+imagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the way she
+clung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of the
+royalties to her friend.  There is romance for you!"
+
+They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours'
+journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up through
+the academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and silent
+except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their feline
+purr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul.  A sense of the
+past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and the
+head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to the
+endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms in
+the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found
+themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick
+succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them.
+The spell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of his
+consciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing.
+This linked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent
+the next forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotions
+tinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that since
+it was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be finally
+restored to him.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.
+
+Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square of
+aristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture, which
+afterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite so
+characteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itself
+Little Paris.  The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the pale
+yellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarly
+associated in the minds of English-speaking travellers.  It was rather
+more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but a
+quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was provided
+with a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments when the
+rain forgot itself.  The place was better shaded than need be in that
+sunless land by the German elms that look like ours and it was
+sufficiently stocked with German statues, that look like no others.  It
+had a monument, too, of the sort with which German art has everywhere
+disfigured the kindly fatherland since the war with France.  These
+monuments, though they are so very ugly, have a sort of pathos as records
+of the only war in which Germany unaided has triumphed against a foreign
+foe, but they are as tiresome as all such memorial pomps must be.  It is
+not for the victories of a people that any other people can care.  The
+wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or
+what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and
+sorrow, and their fame is an offence to all men not concerned in them,
+till time has softened it to a memory
+
+    "Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
+     And battles long ago."
+
+It was for some such reason that while the Marches turned with instant
+satiety from the swelling and strutting sculpture which celebrated the
+Leipsic heroes of the war of 1870, they had heart for those of the war of
+1813; and after their noonday dinner they drove willingly, in a pause of
+the rain, out between yellowing harvests of wheat and oats to the field
+where Napoleon was beaten by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians (it
+always took at least three nations to beat the little wretch) fourscore
+years before.  Yet even there Mrs. March was really more concerned for
+the sparsity of corn-flowers in the grain, which in their modern
+character of Kaiserblumen she found strangely absent from their loyal
+function; and March was more taken with the notion of the little gardens
+which his guide told him the citizens could have in the suburbs of
+Leipsic and enjoy at any trolley-car distance from their homes.  He saw
+certain of these gardens in groups, divided by low, unenvious fences, and
+sometimes furnished with summer-houses, where the tenant could take his
+pleasure in the evening air, with his family.  The guide said he had such
+a garden himself, at a rent of seven dollars a year, where he raised
+vegetables and flowers, and spent his peaceful leisure; and March fancied
+that on the simple domestic side of their life, which this fact gave him
+a glimpse of, the Germans were much more engaging than in their character
+of victors over either the First or the Third Napoleon.  But probably
+they would not have agreed with him, and probably nations will go on
+making themselves cruel and tiresome till humanity at last prevails over
+nationality.
+
+He could have put the case to the guide himself; but though the guide was
+imaginably liberated to a cosmopolitan conception of things by three
+years' service as waiter in English hotels, where he learned the
+language, he might not have risen to this.  He would have tried, for he
+was a willing and kindly soul, though he was not a 'valet de place' by
+profession.  There seemed in fact but one of that useless and amusing
+race (which is everywhere falling into decay through the rivalry of the
+perfected Baedeker,) left in Leipsic, and this one was engaged, so that
+the Marches had to devolve upon their ex-waiter, who was now the keeper
+of a small restaurant.  He gladly abandoned his business to the care of
+his wife, in order to drive handsomely about in his best clothes, with
+strangers who did not exact too much knowledge from him.  In his zeal to
+do something he possessed himself of March's overcoat when they
+dismounted at their first gallery, and let fall from its pocket his
+prophylactic flask of brandy, which broke with a loud crash on the marble
+floor in the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumed the whole
+place.  The masterpieces were some excellent works of Luke Kranach, who
+seemed the only German painter worth looking at when there were any Dutch
+or Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and nature
+of the Kranachs, and remembered afterwards only the shattered fragments
+of the brandy-flask, just how they looked on the floor, and the fumes,
+how they smelt, that rose from the ruin.
+
+It might have been a warning protest of the veracities against what they
+were doing; but the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was on
+them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their
+ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well.  They spared
+themselves nothing that they had time for, that day, and they felt
+falsely guilty for their omissions, as if they really had been duties to
+art and history which must be discharged, like obligations to one's maker
+and one's neighbor.
+
+They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence of the beautiful old
+Rathhaus, and they were sensible of something like a genuine emotion in
+passing the famous and venerable university; the very air of Leipsic is
+redolent of printing and publication, which appealed to March in his
+quality of editor, and they could not fail of an impression of the quiet
+beauty of the town, with its regular streets of houses breaking into
+suburban villas of an American sort, and intersected with many canals,
+which in the intervals of the rain were eagerly navigated by pleasure
+boats, and contributed to the general picturesqueness by their frequent
+bridges, even during the drizzle.  There seemed to be no churches to do,
+and as it was a Sunday, the galleries were so early closed against them
+that they were making a virtue as well as a pleasure of the famous scene
+of Napoleon's first great defeat.
+
+By a concert between their guide and driver their carriage drew up at the
+little inn by the road-side, which is also a museum stocked with relics
+from the battle-field, and with objects of interest relating to it.  Old
+muskets, old swords, old shoes and old coats, trumpets, drums, gun-
+carriages, wheels, helmets, cannon balls, grape-shot, and all the
+murderous rubbish which battles come to at last, with proclamations,
+autographs, caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon, and effigies of all
+the other generals engaged, and miniatures and jewels of their womenkind,
+filled room after room, through which their owner vaunted his way, with a
+loud pounding voice and a bad breath.  When he wished them to enjoy some
+gross British satire or clumsy German gibe at Bonaparte's expense, and
+put his face close to begin the laugh, he was something so terrible that
+March left the place with a profound if not a reasoned regret that the
+French had not won the battle of Leipsic.  He walked away musing
+pensively upon the traveller's inadequacy to the ethics of history when a
+breath could so sway him against his convictions; but even after he had
+cleansed his lungs with some deep respirations he found himself still a
+Bonapartist in the presence of that stone on the rising ground where
+Napoleon sat to watch the struggle on the vast plain, and see his empire
+slipping through his blood-stained fingers.  It was with difficulty that
+he could keep from revering the hat and coat which are sculptured on the
+stone, but it was well that he succeeded, for he could not make out then
+or afterwards whether the habiliments represented were really Napoleon's
+or not, and they might have turned out to be Barclay de Tolly's.
+
+While he stood trying to solve this question of clothes he was startled
+by the apparition of a man climbing the little slope from the opposite
+quarter, and advancing toward them.  He wore the imperial crossed by the
+pointed mustache once so familiar to a world much the worse for them, and
+March had the shiver of a fine moment in which he fancied the Third
+Napoleon rising to view the scene where the First had looked his coming
+ruin in the face.
+
+"Why, it's Miss Triscoe!" cried his wife, and before March had noticed
+the approach of another figure, the elder and the younger lady had rushed
+upon each other, and encountered with a kiss.  At the same time the
+visage of the last Emperor resolved itself into the face of General
+Triscoe, who gave March his hand in a more tempered greeting.
+
+The ladies began asking each other of their lives since their parting two
+days before, and the men strolled a few paces away toward the distant
+prospect of Leipsic, which at that point silhouettes itself in a noble
+stretch of roofs and spires and towers against the horizon.
+
+General Triscoe seemed no better satisfied with Germany than he had been
+on first stepping ashore at Cuxhaven.  He might still have been in a pout
+with his own country, but as yet he had not made up with any other; and
+he said, "What a pity Napoleon didn't thrash the whole dunderheaded lot!
+His empire would have been a blessing to them, and they would have had
+some chance of being civilized under the French.  All this unification of
+nationalities is the great humbug of the century.  Every stupid race
+thinks it's happy because it's united, and civilization has been set back
+a hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring the unions about;
+and more wars will have to be fought to keep them up.  What a farce it
+is! What's become of the nationality of the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein,
+or the French in the Rhine Provinces, or the Italians in Savoy?"
+
+March had thought something like this himself, but to have it put by
+General Triscoe made it offensive.  "I don't know.  Isn't it rather
+quarrelling with the course of human events to oppose accomplished facts?
+The unifications were bound to be, just as the separations before them
+were.  And so far they have made for peace, in Europe at least, and peace
+is civilization.  Perhaps after a great many ages people will come
+together through their real interests, the human interests; but at
+present it seems as if nothing but a romantic sentiment of patriotism can
+unite them.  By-and-by they may find that there is nothing in it."
+
+"Perhaps," said the general, discontentedly.  "I don't see much promise
+of any kind in the future."
+
+"Well, I don't know.  When you think of the solid militarism of Germany,
+you seem remanded to the most hopeless moment of the Roman Empire; you
+think nothing can break such a force; but my guide says that even in
+Leipsic the Socialists outnumber all the other parties, and the army is
+the great field of the Socialist propaganda.  The army itself may be
+shaped into the means of democracy--even of peace."
+
+"You're very optimistic," said Triscoe, curtly.  "As I read the signs,
+we are not far from universal war.  In less than a year we shall make the
+break ourselves in a war with Spain."  He looked very fierce as he
+prophesied, and he dotted March over with his staccato glances.
+
+"Well, I'll allow that if Tammany comes in this year, we shall have war
+with Spain.  You can't ask more than that, General Triscoe?"
+
+Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had not said a word of the 'battle of
+Leipsic', or of the impersonal interests which it suggested to the men.
+For all these, they might still have been sitting in their steamer chairs
+on the promenade of the Norumbia at a period which seemed now of
+geological remoteness.  The girl accounted for not being in Dresden by
+her father's having decided not to go through Berlin but to come by way
+of Leipsic, which he thought they had better see; they had come without
+stopping in Hamburg.  They had not enjoyed Leipsic much; it had rained
+the whole day before, and they had not gone out.  She asked when Mrs.
+March was going on to Carlsbad, and Mrs. March answered, the next
+morning; her husband wished to begin his cure at once.
+
+Then Miss Triscoe pensively wondered if Carlsbad would do her father any
+good; and Mrs. March discreetly inquired General Triscoe's symptoms.
+
+"Oh, he hasn't any.  But I know he can't be well--with his gloomy
+opinions."
+
+"They may come from his liver," said Mrs. March.  "Nearly everything of
+that kind does.  I know that Mr. March has been terribly depressed at
+times, and the doctor said it was nothing but his liver; and Carlsbad is
+the great place for that, you know."
+
+"Perhaps I can get papa to run over some day, if he doesn't like Dresden.
+It isn't very far, is it?"
+
+They referred to Mrs. March's Baedeker together, and found that it was
+five hours.
+
+"Yes, that is what I thought," said Miss Triscoe, with a carelessness
+which convinced Mrs. March she had looked up the fact already.
+
+"If you decide to come, you must let us get rooms for you at our hotel.
+We're going to Pupp's; most of the English and Americans go to the hotels
+on the Hill, but Pupp's is in the thick of it in the lower town; and it's
+very gay, Mr. Kenby says; he's been there often.  Mr. Burnamy is to get
+our rooms."
+
+"I don't suppose I can get papa to go," said Miss Triscoe, so insincerely
+that Mrs. March was sure she had talked over the different routes; to
+Carlsbad with Burnamy--probably on the way from Cuxhaven.  She looked up
+from digging the point of her umbrella in the ground.  "You didn't meet
+him here this morning?"
+
+Mrs. March governed herself to a calm which she respected in asking, "Has
+Mr. Burnamy been here?"
+
+"He came on with Mr. and Mrs. Eltwin, when we did, and they all decided
+to stop over a day.  They left on the twelve-o'clock train to-day."
+
+Mrs. March perceived that the girl had decided not to let the facts
+betray themselves by chance, and she treated them as of no significance.
+
+"No, we didn't see him," she said, carelessly.
+
+The two men came walking slowly towards them, and Miss Triscoe said,
+"We're going to Dresden this evening, but I hope we shall meet somewhere,
+Mrs. March."
+
+"Oh, people never lose sight of each other in Europe; they can't; it's so
+little!"
+
+"Agatha," said the girl's father, "Mr. March tells me that the museum
+over there is worth seeing."
+
+"Well," the girl assented, and she took a winning leave of the Marches,
+and moved gracefully away with her father.
+
+"I should have thought it was Agnes," said Mrs. March, following them
+with her eyes before she turned upon her husband.  "Did he tell you
+Burnamy had been here?  Well, he has!  He has just gone on to Carlsbad.
+He made, those poor old Eltwins stop over with him, so he could be with
+her."
+
+"Did she say that?"
+
+"No, but of course he did."
+
+"Then it's all settled?"
+
+"No, it isn't settled.  It's at the most interesting point."
+
+"Well, don't read ahead.  You always want to look at the last page."
+
+"You were trying to look at the last page yourself," she retorted, and
+she would have liked to punish him for his complex dishonesty toward the
+affair; but upon the whole she kept her temper with him, and she made him
+agree that Miss Triscoe's getting her father to Carlsbad was only a
+question of time.
+
+They parted heart's-friends with their ineffectual guide, who was
+affectionately grateful for the few marks they gave him, at the hotel
+door; and they were in just the mood to hear men singing in a farther
+room when they went down to supper.  The waiter, much distracted from
+their own service by his duties to it, told them it was the breakfast
+party of students which they had heard beginning there about noon.  The
+revellers had now been some six hours at table, and he said they might
+not rise before midnight; they had just got to the toasts, which were
+apparently set to music.
+
+The students of right remained a vivid color in the impression of the
+university town.  They pervaded the place, and decorated it with their
+fantastic personal taste in coats and trousers, as well as their corps
+caps of green, white, red, and blue, but above all blue.  They were not
+easily distinguishable from the bicyclers who were holding one of the
+dull festivals of their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps they were
+sometimes both students and bicyclers.  As bicyclers they kept about in
+the rain, which they seemed not to mind; so far from being disheartened,
+they had spirits enough to take one another by the waist at times and
+waltz in the square before the hotel.  At one moment of the holiday some
+chiefs among them drove away in carriages; at supper a winner of prizes
+sat covered with badges and medals; another who went by the hotel
+streamed with ribbons; and an elderly man at his side was bespattered
+with small knots and ends of them, as if he had been in an explosion of
+ribbons somewhere.  It seemed all to be as exciting for them, and it was
+as tedious for the witnesses, as any gala of students and bicyclers at
+home.
+
+Mrs. March remained with an unrequited curiosity concerning their
+different colors and different caps, and she tried to make her husband
+find out what they severally meant; he pretended a superior interest in
+the nature of a people who had such a passion for uniforms that they were
+not content with its gratification in their immense army, but indulged it
+in every pleasure and employment of civil life.  He estimated, perhaps
+not very accurately, that only one man out of ten in Germany wore
+citizens' dress; and of all functionaries he found that the dogs of the
+women-and-dog teams alone had no distinctive dress; even the women had
+their peasant costume.
+
+There was an industrial fair open at Leipsic which they went out of the
+city to see after supper, along with a throng of Leipsickers, whom an
+hour's interval of fine weather tempted forth on the trolley; and with
+the help of a little corporal, who took a fee for his service with the
+eagerness of a civilian, they got wheeled chairs, and renewed their
+associations with the great Chicago Fair in seeing the exposition from
+them.  This was not, March said, quite the same as being drawn by a
+woman-and-dog team, which would have been the right means of doing a
+German fair; but it was something to have his chair pushed by a slender
+young girl, whose stalwart brother applied his strength to the chair of
+the lighter traveller; and it was fit that the girl should reckon the
+common hire, while the man took the common tip.  They made haste to leave
+the useful aspects of the fair, and had themselves trundled away to the
+Colonial Exhibit, where they vaguely expected something like the
+agreeable corruptions of the Midway Plaisance.  The idea of her colonial
+progress with which Germany is trying to affect the home-keeping
+imagination of her people was illustrated by an encampment of savages
+from her Central-African possessions.  They were getting their supper at
+the moment the Marches saw them, and were crouching, half naked, around
+the fires under the kettles, and shivering from the cold, but they were
+not very characteristic of the imperial expansion, unless perhaps when an
+old man in a red blanket suddenly sprang up with a knife in his hand and
+began to chase a boy round the camp.  The boy was lighter-footed, and
+easily outran the sage, who tripped at times on his blanket.  None of the
+other Central Africans seemed to care for the race, and without waiting
+for the event, the American spectators ordered themselves trundled away
+to another idle feature of the fair, where they hoped to amuse themselves
+with the image of Old Leipsic.
+
+This was so faithfully studied from the past in its narrow streets and
+Gothic houses that it was almost as picturesque as the present epoch in
+the old streets of Hamburg.  A drama had just begun to be represented on
+a platform of the public square in front of a fourteenth-century beer-
+house, with people talking from the windows round, and revellers in the
+costume of the period drinking beer and eating sausages at tables in the
+open air.  Their eating and drinking were genuine, and in the midst of it
+a real rain began, to pour down upon them, without affecting them any
+more than if they had been Germans of the nineteenth century.  But it
+drove the Americans to a shelter from which they could not see the play,
+and when it held up, they made their way back to their hotel.
+
+Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of whom were happy
+beyond the sober wont of the fatherland.  The conductor took a special
+interest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, and
+genially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous.
+From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remounted
+the car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with
+an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyous
+physiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth.
+
+Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiences
+and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as
+a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide
+had said house-rent was very low.  He generalized from the guide's
+content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he
+became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man's clothes fitted
+him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat
+better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large
+as the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex.  He was able to
+note, rather more freshly, that with all their kindness the Germans were
+a very nervous people, if not irritable, and at the least cause gave way
+to an agitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was violent while it
+lasted.  Several times that day he had seen encounters between the
+portier and guests at the hotel which promised violence, but which ended
+peacefully as soon as some simple question of train-time was solved.
+The encounters always left the portier purple and perspiring, as any
+agitation must with a man so tight in his livery.  He bemoaned himself
+after one of them as the victim of an unhappy calling, in which he could
+take no exercise.  "It is a life of excitements, but not of movements,"
+he explained to March; and when he learned where he was going, he
+regretted that he could not go to Carlsbad too.  "For sugar?" he asked,
+as if there were overmuch of it in his own make.
+
+March felt the tribute, but he had to say, "No; liver."
+
+"Ah!" said the portier, with the air of failing to get on common ground
+with him.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.
+
+The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning in
+America.  Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the
+telegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying
+that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits were
+as light as the gay little clouds which blew about in the sky, when their
+train drew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charming landscape all
+the way to Carlsbad.  A fatherly 'traeger' had done his best to get them
+the worst places in a non-smoking compartment, but had succeeded so
+poorly that they were very comfortable, with no companions but a mother
+and daughter, who spoke German in soft low tones together.  Their
+compartment was pervaded by tobacco fumes from the smokers, but as these
+were twice as many as the non-smokers, it was only fair, and after March
+had got a window open it did not matter, really.
+
+He asked leave of the strangers in his German, and they consented in
+theirs; but he could not master the secret of the window-catch, and the
+elder lady said in English, "Let me show you," and came to his help.
+
+The occasion for explaining that they were Americans and accustomed to
+different car windows was so tempting that Mrs. March could not forbear,
+and the other ladies were affected as deeply as she could wish.  Perhaps
+they were the more affected because it presently appeared that they had
+cousins in New York whom she knew of, and that they were acquainted with
+an American family that had passed the winter in Berlin.  Life likes to
+do these things handsomely, and it easily turned out that this was a
+family of intimate friendship with the Marches; the names, familiarly
+spoken, abolished all strangeness between the travellers; and they
+entered into a comparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences, from
+which it seemed that the objects and interests of cultivated people in
+Berlin were quite the same as those of cultivated people in New York.
+Each of the parties to the discovery disclaimed any superiority for their
+respective civilizations; they wished rather to ascribe a greater charm
+and virtue to the alien conditions; and they acquired such merit with one
+another that when the German ladies got out of the train at Franzensbad,
+the mother offered Mrs. March an ingenious folding footstool which she
+had admired.  In fact, she left her with it clasped to her breast, and
+bowing speechless toward the giver in a vain wish to express her
+gratitude.
+
+"That was very pretty of her, my dear," said March.  "You couldn't have
+done that."
+
+"No," she confessed; "I shouldn't have had the courage.  The courage of
+my emotions," she added, thoughtfully.
+
+"Ah, that's the difference!  A Berliner could do it, and a Bostonian
+couldn't.  Do you think it so much better to have the courage of your
+convictions?"
+
+"I don't know.  It seems to me that I'm less and less certain of
+everything that I used to be sure of."
+
+He laughed, and then he said, "I was thinking how, on our wedding
+journey, long ago, that Gray Sister at the Hotel Dieu in Quebec offered
+you a rose."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"That was to your pretty youth.  Now the gracious stranger gives you a
+folding stool."
+
+"To rest my poor old feet.  Well, I would rather have it than a rose,
+now."
+
+"You bent toward her at just the slant you had when you took the flower
+that time; I noticed it.  I didn't see that you looked so very different.
+To be sure the roses in your cheeks have turned into rosettes; but
+rosettes are very nice, and they're much more permanent; I prefer them;
+they will keep in any climate."
+
+She suffered his mockery with an appreciative sigh.  "Yes, our age
+caricatures our youth, doesn't it?"
+
+"I don't think it gets much fun out of it," he assented.
+
+"No; but it can't help it.  I used to rebel against it when it first
+began.  I did enjoy being young."
+
+"You did, my dear," he said, taking her hand tenderly; she withdrew it,
+because though she could bear his sympathy, her New England nature could
+not bear its expression.  "And so did I; and we were both young a long
+time.  Travelling brings the past back, don't you think?  There at that
+restaurant, where we stopped for dinner--"
+
+"Yes, it was charming!  Just as it used to be!  With that white cloth,
+and those tall shining bottles of wine, and the fruit in the centre, and
+the dinner in courses, and that young waiter who spoke English, and was
+so nice!  I'm never going home; you may, if you like."
+
+"You bragged to those ladies about our dining-cars; and you said that our
+railroad restaurants were quite as good as the European."
+
+"I had to do that.  But I knew better; they don't begin to be."
+
+"Perhaps not; but I've been thinking that travel is a good deal alike
+everywhere.  It's the expression of the common civilization of the world.
+When I came out of that restaurant and ran the train down, and then found
+that it didn't start for fifteen minutes, I wasn't sure whether I was at
+home or abroad.  And when we changed cars at Eger, and got into this
+train which had been baking in the sun for us outside the station, I
+didn't know but I was back in the good old Fitchburg depot.  To be sure,
+Wallenstein wasn't assassinated at Boston, but I forgot his murder at
+Eger, and so that came to the same thing.  It's these confounded fifty-
+odd years.  I used to recollect everything."
+
+He had got up and was looking out of the window at the landscape, which
+had not grown less amiable in growing rather more slovenly since they had
+crossed the Saxon bolder into Bohemia.  All the morning and early
+afternoon they had run through lovely levels of harvest, where men were
+cradling the wheat and women were binding it into sheaves in the narrow
+fields between black spaces of forest.  After they left Eger, there was
+something more picturesque and less thrifty in the farming among the low
+hills which they gradually mounted to uplands, where they tasted a
+mountain quality in the thin pure air.  The railroad stations were
+shabbier; there was an indefinable touch of something Southern in the
+scenery and the people.  Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches of
+the streams, and where the current quickened, tall wheels were lifting
+water for the fields in circles of brimming and spilling pockets.  Along
+the embankments, where a new track was being laid, barefooted women were
+at work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yellow-haired girls
+were lugging large white-headed babies, and watching the train go by.
+At an up grade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to the
+children the pfennigs which had been left over from the passage in
+Germany, and he pleased himself with his bounty, till the question
+whether the children could spend the money forced itself upon him.  He
+sat down feeling less like a good genius than a cruel magician who had
+tricked them with false wealth; but he kept his remorse to himself, and
+tried to interest his wife in the difference of social and civic ideal
+expressed in the change of the inhibitory notices at the car windows,
+which in Germany had strongliest forbidden him to outlean himself, and
+now in Austria entreated him not to outbow himself.  She refused to share
+in the speculation, or to debate the yet nicer problem involved by the
+placarded prayer in the washroom to the Messrs. Travellers not to take
+away the soap; and suddenly he felt himself as tired as she looked, with
+that sense of the futility of travel which lies in wait for every one who
+profits by travel.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Bad wars, or what are comically called good wars
+Calm of those who have logic on their side
+Decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance
+Explained perhaps too fully
+Futility of travel
+Humanity may at last prevail over nationality
+Impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much
+Less certain of everything that I used to be sure of
+Life of the ship, like the life of the sea:  a sodden monotony
+Life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, but more monotonous
+Madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel
+Night so bad that it was worse than no night at all
+Our age caricatures our youth
+Prices fixed by his remorse
+Recipes for dishes and diseases
+Reckless and culpable optimism
+Repeated the nothings they had said already
+She cares for him:  that she was so cold shows that
+She could bear his sympathy, but not its expression
+Suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism
+They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart
+Unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine
+Wilful sufferers
+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
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Silver Wedding Journey, v1
+by William Dean Howells
+
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