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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Their Silver Wedding Journey, Part II.
+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 II.
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: October 23, 2004 [EBook #3372]
+
+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 II.
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+They found Burnamy expecting them at the station in Carlsbad, and she
+scolded him like a mother for taking the trouble to meet them, while she
+kept back for the present any sign of knowing that he had staid over a
+day with the Triscoes in Leipsic. He was as affectionately glad to see
+her and her husband as she could have wished, but she would have liked it
+better if he had owned up at once about Leipsic. He did not, and it
+seemed to her that he was holding her at arm's-length in his answers
+about his employer. He would not say how he liked his work, or how he
+liked Mr. Stoller; he merely said that they were at Pupp's together, and
+that he had got in a good day's work already; and since he would say no
+more, she contented herself with that.
+
+The long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wound
+down the hill-side like those of an Italian mountain town, between gay
+stuccoed houses, of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; and
+the impression of a Latin country was heightened at a turn of the road
+which brought into view a colossal crucifix planted against a curtain of
+dark green foliage on the brow of one of the wooded heights that
+surrounded Carlsbad. When they reached the level of the Tepl, the
+hill-fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridges
+within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the only
+vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world.
+Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines,
+with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their black velvet
+derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowing
+robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks in
+Astrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of western
+Europeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were English,
+French or Italians. Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were
+imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have
+been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have
+passed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationality
+away in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves
+heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet.
+
+The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going and
+coming between the rows of pollard locusts on one side and the bright
+walls of the houses on the other. Under the trees were tables, served by
+pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants across the
+way. On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops full of silver,
+glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and all the idle
+frippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris, and they
+suggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no place else
+in the world, as the crowd which might have been that of other cities at
+certain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in its habitual effect.
+
+"Do you like it?" asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs. March
+saw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all. She was ready
+to bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his interest had
+got them the only rooms left in the house. This satisfied in her the
+passion for size which is at the bottom of every American heart, and
+which perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the peoples. We
+pride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we are not
+ungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger than ours, we
+are magnanimously happy in them. Pupp's, in its altogether different way,
+was larger than any hotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and when Burnamy
+told her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a day in the
+height of the season, she was personally proud of it.
+
+She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel, while the secretary led
+March off to look at the rooms reserved for them, and Burnamy hospitably
+turned the revolving octagonal case in the centre of the rotunda where
+the names of the guests were put up. They were of all nations, but there
+were so many New Yorkers whose names ended in berg, and thal, and stern,
+and baum that she seemed to be gazing upon a cyclorama of the signs on
+Broadway. A large man of unmistakable American make, but with so little
+that was of New England or New York in his presence that she might not at
+once have thought him American, lounged toward them with a quill
+toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He had a jealous blue eye, into
+which he seemed trying to put a friendly light; his straight mouth
+stretched into an involuntary smile above his tawny chin-beard, and he
+wore his soft hat so far back from his high forehead (it showed to the
+crown when he took his hat off) that he had the effect of being
+uncovered.
+
+At his approach Burnamy turned, and with a flush said: "Oh! Let me
+introduce Mr. Stoller, Mrs. March."
+
+Stoller took his toothpick out of his mouth and bowed; then he seemed to
+remember, and took off his hat. "You see Jews enough, here to make you
+feel at home?" he asked; and he added: "Well, we got some of 'em in
+Chicago, too, I guess. This young man"--he twisted his head toward
+Burnamy--"found you easy enough?"
+
+"It was very good of him to meet us," Mrs. March began. "We didn't
+expect--"
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Stoller, putting his toothpick back, and his
+hat on. "We'd got through for the day; my doctor won't let me work all I
+want to, here. Your husband's going to take the cure, they tell me. Well,
+he wants to go to a good doctor, first. You can't go and drink these
+waters hit or miss. I found that out before I came."
+
+"Oh, no!" said Mrs. March, and she wished to explain how they had been
+advised; but he said to Burnamy:
+
+"I sha'n't want you again till ten to-morrow morning. Don't let me
+interrupt you," he added patronizingly to Mrs. March. He put his hand up
+toward his hat, and sauntered away out of the door.
+
+Burnamy did not speak; and she only asked at last, to relieve the
+silence, "Is Mr. Stoller an American?"
+
+"Why, I suppose so," he answered, with an uneasy laugh. "His people were
+German emigrants who settled in Southern Indiana. That makes him as much
+American as any of us, doesn't it?"
+
+Burnamy spoke with his mind on his French-Canadian grandfather, who had
+come down through Detroit, when their name was Bonami; but Mrs. March
+answered from her eight generations of New England ancestry. "Oh, for the
+West, yes, perhaps," and they neither of them said anything more about
+Stoller.
+
+In their room, where she found March waiting for her amidst their
+arriving baggage, she was so full of her pent-up opinions of Burnamy's
+patron that she, would scarcely speak of the view from their windows of
+the wooded hills up and down the Tepl. "Yes, yes; very nice, and I know I
+shall enjoy it ever so much. But I don't know what you will think of that
+poor young Burnamy!"
+
+"Why, what's happened to him?"
+
+"Happened? Stoller's happened."
+
+"Oh, have you seen him, already? Well?"
+
+"Well, if you had been going to pick out that type of man, you'd have
+rejected him, because you'd have said he was too pat. He's like an actor
+made up for a Western millionaire. Do you remember that American in
+'L'Etranger' which Bernhardt did in Boston when she first came? He, looks
+exactly like that, and he has the worst manners. He stood talking to me
+with his hat on, and a toothpick in his mouth; and he made me feel as if
+he had bought me, along with Burnamy, and had paid too much. If you don't
+give him a setting down, Basil, I shall never speak to you; that's all.
+I'm sure Burnamy is in some trouble with him; he's got some sort of hold
+upon him; what it could be in such a short time, I can't imagine; but if
+ever a man seemed to be, in a man's power, he does, in his!
+
+"Now," said March, "your pronouns have got so far beyond me that I think
+we'd better let it all go till after supper; perhaps I shall see Stoller
+myself by that time."
+
+She had been deeply stirred by her encounter with Stoller, but she
+entered with impartial intensity into the fact that the elevator at
+Pupp's had the characteristic of always coming up and never going down
+with passengers. It was locked into its closet with a solid door, and
+there was no bell to summon it, or any place to take it except on the
+ground-floor; but the stairs by which she could descend were abundant and
+stately; and on one landing there was the lithograph of one of the
+largest and ugliest hotels in New York; how ugly it was, she said she
+should never have known if she had not seen it there.
+
+The dining-room was divided into the grand saloon, where they supped amid
+rococo sculptures and frescoes, and the glazed veranda opening by vast
+windows on a spread of tables without, which were already filling up for
+the evening concert. Around them at the different tables there were
+groups of faces and figures fascinating in their strangeness, with that
+distinction which abashes our American level in the presence of European
+inequality.
+
+"How simple and unimpressive we are, Basil," she said, "beside all these
+people! I used to feel it in Europe when I was young, and now I'm certain
+that we must seem like two faded-in old village photographs. We don't
+even look intellectual! I hope we look good."
+
+"I know I do," said March. The waiter went for their supper, and they
+joined in guessing the different nationalities in the room. A French
+party was easy enough; a Spanish mother and daughter were not difficult,
+though whether they were not South-American remained uncertain; two
+elderly maiden ladies were unmistakably of central Massachusetts, and
+were obviously of a book-club culture that had left no leaf unturned;
+some Triestines gave themselves away by their Venetian accent; but a
+large group at a farther table were unassignable in the strange language
+which they clattered loudly together, with bursts of laughter. They were
+a family party of old and young, they were having a good time, with a
+freedom which she called baronial; the ladies wore white satin, or black
+lace, but the men were in sack-coats; she chose to attribute them, for no
+reason but their outlandishness, to Transylvania. March pretended to
+prefer a table full of Germans, who were unmistakably bourgeois, and yet
+of intellectual effect. He chose as his favorite a middle-aged man of
+learned aspect, and they both decided to think of him as the Herr
+Professor, but they did not imagine how perfectly the title fitted him
+till he drew a long comb from his waistcoat pocket and combed his hair
+and beard with it above the table.
+
+The wine wrought with the Transylvanians, and they all jargoned together
+at once, and laughed at the jokes passing among them. One old gentleman
+had a peculiar fascination from the infantile innocence of his gums when
+he threw his head back to laugh, and showed an upper jaw toothless except
+for two incisors, standing guard over the chasm between. Suddenly he
+choked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up before
+him, and--
+
+"Noblesse oblige," said March, with the tone of irony which he reserved
+for his wife's preoccupations with aristocracies of all sorts. "I think I
+prefer my Hair Professor, bourgeois, as he is."
+
+The ladies attributively of central Massachusetts had risen from their
+table, and were making for the door without having paid for their supper.
+The head waiter ran after them; with a real delicacy for their mistake he
+explained that though in most places the meals were charged in the bill,
+it was the custom in Carlsbad to pay for them at the table; one could see
+that he was making their error a pleasant adventure to them which they
+could laugh over together, and write home about without a pang.
+
+"And I," said Mrs. March, shamelessly abandoning the party of the
+aristocracy, "prefer the manners of the lower classes."
+
+"Oh, yes," he admitted. "The only manners we have at home are black ones.
+But you mustn't lose courage. Perhaps the nobility are not always so
+baronial."
+
+"I don't know whether we have manners at home," she said, "and I don't
+believe I care. At least we have decencies."
+
+"Don't be a jingo," said her husband.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy from duty for the day, he
+was not so full of resources in himself, and he had not so general an
+acquaintance in the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellow make
+up to him in the reading-room, that night. He laid down a New York paper
+ten days old in despair of having left any American news in it, and
+pushed several continental Anglo-American papers aside with his elbow, as
+he gave a contemptuous glance at the foreign journals, in Bohemian,
+Hungarian, German, French, and Italian, which littered the large table.
+
+"I wonder," he said, "how long it'll take'em, over here, to catch on to
+our way of having pictures?"
+
+Burnamy had come to his newspaper work since illustrated journalism was
+established, and he had never had any shock from it at home, but so
+sensitive is youth to environment that, after four days in Europe, the
+New York paper Stoller had laid down was already hideous to him. From the
+politic side of his nature, however, he temporized with Stoller's
+preference. "I suppose it will be some time yet."
+
+"I wish," said Stoller, with a savage disregard of expressed sequences
+and relevancies, "I could ha' got some pictures to send home with that
+letter this afternoon: something to show how they do things here, and be
+a kind of object-lesson." This term had come up in a recent campaign when
+some employers, by shutting down their works, were showing their
+employees what would happen if the employees voted their political
+opinions into effect, and Stoller had then mastered its meaning and was
+fond of using it. "I'd like 'em to see the woods around here, that the
+city owns, and the springs, and the donkey-carts, and the theatre, and
+everything, and give 'em some practical ideas."
+
+Burnamy made an uneasy movement.
+
+"I'd 'a' liked to put 'em alongside of some of our improvements, and show
+how a town can be carried on when it's managed on business principles."
+
+"Why didn't you think of it?"
+
+"Really, I don't know," said Burnamy, with a touch of impatience.
+
+They had not met the evening before on the best of terms. Stoller had
+expected Burnamy twenty-four hours earlier, and had shown his displeasure
+with him for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might have spent at
+Carlsbad; and Burnamy had been unsatisfactory in accounting for the
+delay. But he had taken hold so promptly and so intelligently that by
+working far into the night, and through the whole forenoon, he had got
+Stoller's crude mass of notes into shape, and had sent off in time for
+the first steamer the letter which was to appear over the proprietor's
+name in his paper. It was a sort of rough but very full study of the
+Carlsbad city government, the methods of taxation, the municipal
+ownership of the springs and the lands, and the public control in
+everything. It condemned the aristocratic constitution of the
+municipality, but it charged heavily in favor of the purity, beneficence,
+and wisdom of the administration, under which there was no poverty and no
+idleness, and which was managed like any large business.
+
+Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure, once or twice, and
+Burnamy suffered it submissively until now. But now, at the change in
+Burnamy's tone, he changed his manner a little.
+
+"Seen your friends since supper?" he asked.
+
+"Only a moment. They are rather tired, and they've gone to bed."
+
+That the fellow that edits that book you write for?"
+
+"Yes; he owns it, too."
+
+The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller's respect, and he asked
+more deferentially, "Makin' a good thing out of it?"
+
+"A living, I suppose. Some of the high-class weeklies feel the
+competition of the ten-cent monthlies. But 'Every Other Week' is about
+the best thing we've got in the literary way, and I guess it's holding
+its own."
+
+"Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad," Stoller said, with a
+return to the sourness of his earlier mood. "I don't know as I care much
+for his looks; I seen him when he came in with you. No snap to him." He
+clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and started
+up with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and physical;
+as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking at Burnamy,
+"You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest."
+
+Stoller's father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to the
+West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race and
+class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana town
+where their son was born, and throve in it from the start. He could
+remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese
+and pickle the pigs' feet, which they took turns in selling at as great a
+price as they could extort from the townspeople. She was a good and
+tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in
+mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to
+fight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and
+mobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time till
+they wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through the
+exhaustion of their invention. No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky,
+rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf;
+and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed upon
+him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans. He hated his native
+speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with his father
+and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who proposed to
+parley with him in it on such terms as "Nix come arouce in de Dytchman's
+house." He disused it so thoroughly that after his father took him out of
+school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he could not get back
+to it. He regarded his father's business as part of his national
+disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away from it, and
+informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and wagon-maker.
+When it came to his setting up for himself in the business he had chosen,
+he had no help from his father, who had gone on adding dollar to dollar
+till he was one of the richest men in the place.
+
+Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had
+many of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of
+asking him to their houses when they were young people, any more than
+when they were children. He was long deeply in love with an American girl
+whom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry an
+American. He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who had
+been at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home as
+fragilely and nasally American as anybody. She made him a good, sickly,
+fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with no
+visible taint of their German origin.
+
+In the mean time Jacob's father had died and left his money to his son,
+with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who would
+gladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if she
+could. He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she lived;
+and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household trying so
+hard to be American. She could not help her native accent, but she kept
+silence when her son's wife had company; and when her eldest
+granddaughter began very early to have American callers, she went out of
+the room; they would not have noticed her if she had staid.
+
+Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to his
+financial importance in the community. He first commended himself to the
+Better Element by crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which were
+now the largest business interest of the place; and he rose on a wave of
+municipal reform to such a height of favor with the respectable classes
+that he was elected on a citizens' ticket to the Legislature. In the
+reaction which followed he was barely defeated for Congress, and was
+talked of as a dark horse who might be put up for the governorship some
+day; but those who knew him best predicted that he would not get far in
+politics, where his bull-headed business ways would bring him to ruin
+sooner or later; they said, "You can't swing a bolt like you can a
+strike."
+
+When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors by going to live in
+Chicago, though he kept his works in the place where he and they had
+grown up together. His wife died shortly after, and within four years he
+lost his three eldest children; his son, it was said, had begun to go
+wrong first. But the rumor of his increasing wealth drifted back from
+Chicago; he was heard of in different enterprises and speculations; at
+last it was said that he had bought a newspaper, and then his boyhood
+friends decided that Jake was going into politics again.
+
+In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of the great city he came to
+understand better that to be an American in all respects was not the
+best. His mounting sense of importance began to be retroactive in the
+direction of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the little town near
+Wurzburg which his people had come from, and found that he had relatives
+still living there, some of whom had become people of substance; and
+about the time his health gave way from life-long gluttony, and he was
+ordered to Carlsbad, he had pretty much made up his mind to take his
+younger daughters and put them in school for a year or two in Wurzburg,
+for a little discipline if not education. He had now left them there, to
+learn the language, which he had forgotten with such heart-burning and
+shame, and music, for which they had some taste.
+
+The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their father
+with open threats of running away; and in his heart he did not altogether
+blame them. He came away from Wurzburg raging at the disrespect for his
+money and his standing in business which had brought him a more galling
+humiliation there than anything he had suffered in his boyhood at Des
+Vaches. It intensified him in his dear-bought Americanism to the point of
+wishing to commit lese majesty in the teeth of some local dignitaries who
+had snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle to shame in
+his person; there was something like the bird of his step-country in
+Stoller's pale eyes and huge beak.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.
+
+March sat with a company of other patients in the anteroom of the doctor,
+and when it came his turn to be prodded and kneaded, he was ashamed at
+being told he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded. The doctor wrote
+out a careful dietary for him, with a prescription of a certain number of
+glasses of water at a certain spring and a certain number of baths, and a
+rule for the walks he was to take before and after eating; then the
+doctor patted him on the shoulder and pushed him caressingly out of his
+inner office. It was too late to begin his treatment that day, but he
+went with his wife to buy a cup, with a strap for hanging it over his
+shoulder, and he put it on so as to be an invalid with the others at
+once; he came near forgetting the small napkin of Turkish towelling which
+they stuffed into their cups, but happily the shopman called him back in
+time to sell it to him.
+
+At five the next morning he rose, and on his way to the street exchanged
+with the servants cleaning the hotel stairs the first of the gloomy
+'Guten Morgens' which usher in the day at Carlsbad. They cannot be so
+finally hopeless as they sound; they are probably expressive only of the
+popular despair of getting through with them before night; but March
+heard the salutations sorrowfully groaned out on every hand as he joined
+the straggling current of invalids which swelled on the way past the
+silent shops and cafes in the Alte Wiese, till it filled the street, and
+poured its thousands upon the promenade before the classic colonnade of
+the Muhlbrunn. On the other bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings its
+steaming waters by irregular impulses into the air under a pavilion of
+iron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the source of most resort. There is
+an instrumental concert somewhere in Carlsbad from early rising till
+bedtime; and now at the Muhlbrunn there was an orchestra already playing;
+and under the pillared porch, as well as before it, the multitude
+shuffled up and down, draining their cups by slow sips, and then taking
+each his place in the interminable line moving on to replenish them at
+the spring.
+
+A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some vice of their climate is
+said peculiarly to fit for the healing effects of Carlsbad, most took his
+eye in their long gabardines of rusty black and their derby hats of plush
+or velvet, with their corkscrew curls coming down before their ears. They
+were old and young, they were grizzled and red and black, but they seemed
+all well-to-do; and what impresses one first and last at Carlsbad is that
+its waters are mainly for the healing of the rich. After the Polish Jews,
+the Greek priests of Russian race were the most striking figures. There
+were types of Latin ecclesiastics, who were striking in their way too;
+and the uniforms of certain Austrian officers and soldiers brightened the
+picture. Here and there a southern face, Italian or Spanish or Levantine,
+looked passionately out of the mass of dull German visages; for at
+Carlsbad the Germans, more than any other gentile nation, are to the
+fore. Their misfits, their absence of style, imparted the prevalent
+effect; though now and then among the women a Hungarian, or Pole, or
+Parisian, or American, relieved the eye which seeks beauty and grace
+rather than the domestic virtues. There were certain faces, types of
+discomfort and disease, which appealed from the beginning to the end. A
+young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid South-American, were of a
+lasting fascination to March.
+
+What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficulty
+of assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his years
+of having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their long
+disuse in his homogeneous American world. The Americans themselves fused
+with the European races who were often so hard to make out; his
+fellow-citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave them
+away; he thought the women's voices the worst.
+
+At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady mechanical action
+dipped the cups into the steaming source, and passed them impersonally up
+to their owners. With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often a
+half-hour before one's turn came, and at all a strict etiquette forbade
+any attempt to anticipate it. The water was merely warm and flat, and
+after the first repulsion one could forget it. March formed a childish
+habit of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with a
+gulp which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by going
+sometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group of
+Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park beyond
+the Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close sward
+the yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight. He
+liked to sit there and look at the city beyond the Tepl, where it climbed
+the wooded heights in terraces till it lost its houses in the skirts and
+folds of the forest. Most mornings it rained, quietly, absent-mindedly,
+and this, with the chili in the air, deepened a pleasant illusion of
+Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream; but there were sunny
+mornings when the mountains shone softly through a lustrous mist, and the
+air was almost warm.
+
+Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy's employer,
+whom he had sometimes noted in the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his
+turn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience. Stoller explained
+that though you could have the water brought to you at your hotel, he
+chose to go to the spring for the sake of the air; it was something you
+had got to live through; before he had that young Burnamy to help him he
+did not know what to do with his time, but now, every minute he was not
+eating or sleeping he was working; his cure did not oblige him to walk
+much. He examined March, with a certain mixture of respect and contempt,
+upon the nature of the literary life, and how it differed from the life
+of a journalist. He asked if he thought Burnamy would amount to anything
+as a literary man; he so far assented to March's faith in him as to say,
+"He's smart." He told of leaving his daughters in school at Wurzburg; and
+upon the whole he moved March with a sense of his pathetic loneliness
+without moving his liking, as he passed lumberingly on, dangling his cup.
+
+March gave his own cup to the little maid at his spring, and while she
+gave it to a second, who dipped it and handed it to a third for its
+return to him, he heard an unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-,
+morning to them all in English. "Are you going to teach them United
+States?" he asked of a face with which he knew such an appeal would not
+fail.
+
+"Well," the man admitted, "I try to teach them that much. They like it.
+You are an American? I am glad of it. I have 'most lost the use of my
+lungs, here. I'm a great talker, and I talk to my wife till she's about
+dead; then I'm out of it for the rest of the day; I can't speak German."
+
+His manner was the free, friendly manner of the West. He must be that
+sort of untravelled American whom March had so seldom met, but he was
+afraid to ask him if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest it should
+prove the third or fourth. "Are you taking the cure?" he asked instead.
+
+"Oh, no. My wife is. She'll be along directly; I come down here and drink
+the waters to encourage her; doctor said to. That gets me in for the
+diet, too. I've e't more cooked fruit since I been here than I ever did
+in my life before. Prunes? My Lord, I'm full o' prunes! Well, it does me
+good to see an American, to know him. I couldn't 'a' told you, it you
+hadn't have spoken."
+
+"Well," said March, "I shouldn't have been so sure of you, either, by
+your looks."
+
+"Yes, we can't always tell ourselves from these Dutch. But they know us,
+and they don't want us, except just for one thing, and that's our money.
+I tell you, the Americans are the chumps over here. Soon's they got all
+our money, or think they have, they say, 'Here, you Americans, this is my
+country; you get off;' and we got to get. Ever been over before?"
+
+"A great while ago; so long that I can hardly believe it."
+
+"It's my first time. My name's Otterson: I'm from out in Iowa."
+
+March gave him his name, and added that he was from New York.
+
+"Yes. I thought you was Eastern. But that wasn't an Eastern man you was
+just with?"
+
+"No; he's from Chicago. He's a Mr. Stoller."
+
+"Not the buggy man?"
+
+"I believe he makes buggies."
+
+"Well, you do meet everybody here." The Iowan was silent for a moment, as
+if, hushed by the weighty thought. "I wish my wife could have seen him. I
+just want her to see the man that made our buggy. I don't know what's
+keeping her, this morning," he added, apologetically. "Look at that
+fellow, will you, tryin' to get away from those women!" A young officer
+was doing his best to take leave of two ladies, who seemed to be mother
+and daughter; they detained him by their united arts, and clung to him
+with caressing words and looks. He was red in the face with his polite
+struggles when he broke from them at last. "How they do hang on to a man,
+over here!" the Iowa man continued. "And the Americans are as bad as any.
+Why, there's one ratty little Englishman up at our place, and our girls
+just swarm after him; their mothers are worse. Well, it's so, Jenny," he
+said to the lady who had joined them and whom March turned round to see
+when he spoke to her. "If I wanted a foreigner I should go in for a man.
+And these officers! Put their mustaches up at night in curl-papers, they
+tell me. Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr. March. Well, had your first
+glass, yet, Jenny? I'm just going for my second tumbler."
+
+He took his wife back to the spring, and began to tell her about Stoller;
+she made no sign of caring for him; and March felt inculpated. She
+relented a little toward him as they drank together; when he said he must
+be going to breakfast with his wife, she asked where he breakfasted, and
+said, "Why, we go to the Posthof, too." He answered that then they should
+be sure some time to meet there; he did not venture further; he reflected
+that Mrs. March had her reluctances too; she distrusted people who had
+amused or interested him before she met them.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.
+
+Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he had found most of the other
+agreeable things in Carlsbad, which he brought to their knowledge one by
+one, with such forethought that March said he hoped he should be cared
+for in his declining years as an editor rather than as a father; there
+was no tenderness like a young contributor's.
+
+Many people from the hotels on the hill found at Pupp's just the time and
+space between their last cup of water and their first cup of coffee which
+are prescribed at Carlsbad; but the Marches were aware somehow from the
+beginning that Pupp's had not the hold upon the world at breakfast which
+it had at the mid-day dinner, or at supper on the evenings when the
+concert was there. Still it was amusing, and they were patient of
+Burnamy's delay till he could get a morning off from Stoller and go with
+them to the Posthof. He met Mrs. March in the reading-room, where March
+was to join them on his way from the springs with his bag of bread. The
+earlier usage of buying the delicate pink slices of Westphalia ham, which
+form the chief motive of a Carlsbad breakfast, at a certain shop in the
+town, and carrying them to the cafe with you, is no longer of such
+binding force as the custom of getting your bread at the Swiss bakery.
+You choose it yourself at the counter, which begins to be crowded by half
+past seven, and when you have collected the prescribed loaves into the
+basket of metallic filigree given you by one of the baker's maids, she
+puts it into a tissue-paper bag of a gay red color, and you join the
+other invalids streaming away from the bakery, their paper bags making a
+festive rustling as they go.
+
+Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely meadow-lands, a good mile
+up the brawling Tepl, before they join on the right side of the torrent,
+where the Posthof lurks nestled under trees whose boughs let the sun and
+rain impartially through upon its army of little tables. By this time the
+slow omnibus plying between Carlsbad and some villages in the valley
+beyond has crossed from the left bank to the right, and keeps on past
+half a dozen other cafes, where patients whose prescriptions marshal them
+beyond the Posthof drop off by the dozens and scores.
+
+The road on the left bank of the Tepl is wild and overhung at points with
+wooded steeps, when it leaves the town; but on the right it is bordered
+with shops and restaurants a great part of its length. In leafy nooks
+between these, uphill walks begin their climb of the mountains, from the
+foot of votive shrines set round with tablets commemorating in German,
+French, Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of high-well-borns of
+all those races and languages. Booths glittering with the lapidary's work
+in the cheaper gems, or full of the ingenious figures of the toy-makers,
+alternate with the shrines and the cafes on the way to the Posthof, and
+with their shoulders against the overhanging cliff, spread for the
+passing crowd a lure of Viennese jewelry in garnets, opals, amethysts,
+and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings as carrot-eating rabbits,
+worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and peacocks that strut about the
+feet of the passers and expand their iridescent tails in mimic pride.
+
+Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they felt
+the far-reflected charm of the crucifixes of the white-hot Italian
+highways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had a
+mechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the children, ending
+in a pang for the fact that they were children no longer. He waited
+politely while Mrs. March made up her mind that she would not buy any
+laces of the motherly old women who showed them under pent-roofs on
+way-side tables; and he waited patiently at the gate of the
+flower-gardens beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of sweetpease
+from the businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful joy in her
+because she knew no English, and gave him a chance of speaking his
+German.
+
+"You'll find," he said, as they crossed the road again, "that it's well
+to trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass. I should still be lagging
+along in my thirties if it hadn't been for fooling, and here I am well on
+in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever."
+
+They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the cafe at last, and
+a turn of the path brought them to the prospect of its tables, under the
+trees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters take
+refuge at other tables when it rains; it rains nearly always, and the
+trunks of the trees are as green with damp as if painted; but that
+morning the sun was shining. At the verge of the open space a group of
+pretty serving-maids, each with her name on a silver band pinned upon her
+breast, met them and bade them a 'Guten Morgen' of almost cheerful note,
+but gave way, to an eager little smiling blonde, who came pushing down
+the path at sight of Burnamy, and claimed him for her own.
+
+"Ah, Lili! We want an extra good table, this morning. These are some
+American Excellencies, and you must do your best for them."
+
+"Oh, yes," the girl answered in English, after a radiant salutation of
+the Marches; "I get you one."
+
+"You are a little more formerly, to-day, and I didn't had one already."
+
+She ran among the tables along the edge of the western edge of the
+gallery, and was far beyond hearing his protest that he was not earlier
+than usual when she beckoned him to the table she had found. She had
+crowded it in between two belonging to other girls, and by the time her
+breakfasters came up she was ready for their order, with the pouting
+pretence that the girls always tried to rob her of the best places.
+Burnamy explained proudly, when she went, that none of the other girls
+ever got an advantage of her; she had more custom than any three of them,
+and she had hired a man to help her carry her orders. The girls were all
+from the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived at home in the
+winter on their summer tips; their wages were nothing, or less, for
+sometimes they paid for their places.
+
+"What a mass of information!" said March. "How did you come by it?"
+
+"Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe."
+
+"It's not a bad habit, if one doesn't carry it too far. How did Lili
+learn her English?"
+
+"She takes lessons in the winter. She's a perfect little electric motor.
+I don't believe any Yankee girl could equal her."
+
+"She would expect to marry a millionaire if she did. What astonishes one
+over here is to see how contentedly people prosper along on their own
+level. And the women do twice the work of the men without expecting to
+equal them in any other way. At Pupp's, if we go to one end of the
+out-door restaurant, it takes three men to wait on us: one to bring our
+coffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat, and another to make
+out our bill, and I have to tip all three of them. If we go to the other
+end, one girl serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make it less
+than the least I give any three of the men waiters."
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of that," said his wife.
+
+"I'm not. I'm simply proud of your sex, my dear."
+
+"Women do nearly everything, here," said Burnamy, impartially. "They
+built that big new Kaiserbad building: mixed the mortar, carried the
+hods, and laid the stone."
+
+"That makes me prouder of the sex than ever. But come, Mr. Burnamy! Isn't
+there anybody of polite interest that you know of in this crowd?"
+
+"Well, I can't say," Burnamy hesitated.
+
+The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove and the galleries; the
+tables were already filled, and men were bringing other tables on their
+heads, and making places for them, with entreaties for pardon everywhere;
+the proprietor was anxiously directing them; the pretty serving-girls
+were running to and from the kitchen in a building apart with shrill,
+sweet promises of haste. The morning sun fell broken through the leaves
+on the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and dappled the figures of the
+men with harlequin patches of light and shade. A tall woman, with a sort
+of sharpened beauty, and an artificial permanency of tint in her cheeks
+and yellow hair, came trailing herself up the sun-shot path, and found,
+with hardy insistence upon the publicity, places for the surly-looking,
+down-faced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle;
+the dog was like the black poodle out of Faust. Burnamy had heard her
+history; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on it, which he
+called Europa, not after the old fable, but because it seemed to him that
+she expressed Europe, on one side of its civilization, and had an
+authorized place in its order, as she would not have had in ours. She was
+where she was by a toleration of certain social facts which corresponds
+in Europe to our reverence for the vested interests. In her history
+there, had been officers and bankers; even foreign dignitaries; now there
+was this sullen young fellow . . . . Burnamy had wondered if it would do
+to offer his poem to March, but the presence of the original abashed him,
+and in his mind he had torn the poem up, with a heartache for its
+aptness.
+
+"I don't believe," he said, "that I recognize-any celebrities here."
+
+"I'm sorry," said March. "Mrs. March would have been glad of some
+Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some mere
+well-borns. But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness."
+
+"I'm satisfied with the picturesqueness," said his wife. "Don't worry
+about me, Mr. Burnamy."
+
+"Why can't we have this sort of thing at home?"
+
+"We're getting something like it in the roof-gardens," said March. "We
+couldn't have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us. At
+this time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the life
+out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table. At nine
+A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this. So we
+have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and the
+mosquito-line into the night air. I haven't seen a fly since I came to
+Europe. I really miss them; it makes me homesick."
+
+"There are plenty in Italy," his wife suggested.
+
+"We must get down there before we go home."
+
+"But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in Germany? Why
+did no traveller ever put it in his book? When your stewardess said so on
+the steamer, I remember that you regarded it as a bluff." He turned to
+Burnamy, who was listening with the deference of a contributor: "Isn't
+Lili rather long? I mean for such a very prompt person. Oh, no!"
+
+But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted "Fraulein!" to Lili; with her
+hireling at her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between the
+tables. She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, "In a
+minute!" and vanished in the crowd.
+
+"Does that mean anything in particular? There's really no hurry."
+
+"Oh, I think she'll come now," said Burnamy. March protested that he had
+only been amused at Lili's delay; but his wife scolded him for his
+impatience; she begged Burnamy's pardon, and repeated civilities passed
+between them. She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies were
+pretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the mothers
+were mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the fathers
+too closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats behind
+their newspapers, with noises that made her quail. There was no one so
+effective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good deal on
+show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glinting
+from their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, they
+moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced women.
+
+"They all wear corsets," Burnamy explained.
+
+"How much you know already!" said Mrs. March. "I can see that Europe
+won't be lost on you in anything. Oh, who's that?" A lady whose costume
+expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove
+with a graceful tilt. Burnamy was silent. "She must be an American. Do
+you know who she is?"
+
+"Yes." He hesitated, a little to name a woman whose tragedy had once
+filled the newspapers.
+
+Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination which such tragedies
+inspire. "What grace! Is she beautiful?"
+
+"Very." Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge, but somehow Mrs. March
+did not like his knowing who she was, and how beautiful. She asked March
+to look, but he refused.
+
+"Those things are too squalid," he said, and she liked him for saying it;
+she hoped it would not be lost upon Burnamy.
+
+One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the burden
+off her tray on the stone floor before her; some of the dishes broke, and
+the breakfast was lost. Tears came into the girl's eyes and rolled down
+her hot cheeks. "There! That is what I call tragedy," said March. "She'll
+have to pay for those things."
+
+"Oh, give her the money, dearest!"
+
+"How can I?"
+
+The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili and her hireling
+behind her came bearing down upon them with their three substantial
+breakfasts on two well-laden trays. She forestalled Burnamy's reproaches
+for her delay, laughing and bridling, while she set down the dishes of
+ham and tongue and egg, and the little pots of coffee and frothed milk.
+
+"I could not so soon I wanted, because I was to serve an American
+princess."
+
+Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of those noble
+international marriages which fill our women with vainglory for such of
+their compatriots as make them.
+
+"Oh, come now, Lili!" said Burnamy. "We have queens in America, but
+nothing so low as princesses. This was a queen, wasn't it?"
+
+She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmed her. "All people say
+it is princess," she insisted.
+
+"Well, if she's a princess we must look her up after breakfast," said
+Burnamy. "Where is she sitting?"
+
+She pointed at a corner so far off on the other side that no one could be
+distinguished, and then was gone, with a smile flashed over her shoulder,
+and her hireling trying to keep up with her.
+
+"We're all very proud of Lili's having a hired man," said Burnamy. "We
+think it reflects credit on her customers."
+
+March had begun his breakfast with-the voracious appetite of an
+early-rising invalid. "What coffee!"
+
+He drew a long sigh after the first draught.
+
+"It's said to be made of burnt figs," said Burnamy, from the
+inexhaustible advantage of his few days' priority in Carlsbad.
+
+"Then let's have burnt figs introduced at home as soon as possible. But
+why burnt figs? That seems one of those doubts which are much more
+difficult than faith."
+
+"It's not only burnt figs," said Burnamy, with amiable superiority, "if it
+is burnt figs, but it's made after a formula invented by a consensus of
+physicians, and enforced by the municipality. Every cafe in Carlsbad
+makes the same kind of coffee and charges the same price."
+
+"You are leaving us very little to find out for ourselves," sighed March.
+
+"Oh, I know a lot more things. Are you fond of fishing?"
+
+"Not very."
+
+"You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl, but they send an
+official with you who keeps count, and when you have had your sport, the
+trout belong to the municipality just as they did before you caught
+them."
+
+"I don't see why that isn't a good notion: the last thing I should want
+to do would be to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I was personally
+acquainted with. Well, I'm never going away from Carlsbad. I don't wonder
+people get their doctors to tell them to come back."
+
+Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller had got together
+about the place, and had given him to put in shape. It was run in the
+interest of people who had got out of order, so that they would keep
+coming to get themselves in order again; you could hardly buy an
+unwholesome meal in the town; all the cooking was 'kurgemass'. He won
+such favor with his facts that he could not stop in time: he said to
+March, "But if you ever should have a fancy for a fish of your personal
+acquaintance, there's a restaurant up the Tepl, where they let you pick
+out your trout in the water; then they catch him and broil him for you,
+and you know what you are eating."
+
+"Is it a municipal restaurant?"
+
+"Semi-municipal," said Burnamy, laughing.
+
+"We'll take Mrs. March," said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamy
+felt the limitations of a woman's sense of humor, which always define
+themselves for men so unexpectedly.
+
+He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her what
+he knew about distinctions and dignities that he now saw among the
+breakfasters. The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were set
+together in such labyrinths that any one who left the central aisle was
+lost in them. The serving-girls ran more swiftly to and fro, responding
+with a more nervous shrillness to the calls of "Fraulein! Fraulein!" that
+followed them. The proprietor, in his bare head, stood like one paralyzed
+by his prosperity, which sent up all round him the clash of knives and
+crockery, and the confusion of tongues. It was more than an hour before
+Burnamy caught Lili's eye, and three times she promised to come and be
+paid before she came. Then she said, "It is so nice, when you stay a
+little," and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who had broken the
+dishes in her fall near them, she almost wept with tenderness; she almost
+winked with wickedness when he asked if the American princess was still
+in her place.
+
+"Do go and see who it can be!" Mrs. March entreated. "We'll wait here,"
+and he obeyed. "I am not sure that I like him," she said, as soon as he
+was out of hearing. "I don't know but he's coarse, after all. Do you
+approve of his knowing so many people's 'taches' already?"
+
+"Would it be any better later?" he asked in tern. "He seemed to find you
+interested."
+
+"It's very different with us; we're not young," she urged, only half
+seriously.
+
+Her husband laughed. "I see you want me to defend him. Oh, hello!" he
+cried, and she saw Burnamy coming toward them with a young lady, who was
+nodding to them from as far as she could see them. "This is the easy kind
+of thing that makes you Blush for the author if you find it in a novel."
+
+
+
+
+XXX.
+
+Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to kiss her. "Do you know
+I felt it must be you, all the time! When did you come? Where is your
+father? What hotel are you staying at?"
+
+It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking hands with March, that it was
+last night, and her father was finishing his breakfast, and it was one of
+the hotels on the hill. On the way back to her father it appeared that he
+wished to consult March's doctor; not that there was anything the matter.
+
+The general himself was not much softened by the reunion with his
+fellow-Americans; he confided to them that his coffee was poisonous; but
+he seemed, standing up with the Paris-New York Chronicle folded in his
+hand, to have drunk it all. Was March going off on his forenoon tramp? He
+believed that was part of the treatment, which was probably all humbug,
+though he thought of trying it, now he was there. He was told the walks
+were fine; he looked at Burnamy as if he had been praising them, and
+Burnamy said he had been wondering if March would not like to try a
+mountain path back to his hotel; he said, not so sincerely, that he
+thought Mrs. March would like it.
+
+"I shall like your account of it," she answered. "But I'll walk back on a
+level, if you please."
+
+"Oh, yes," Miss Triscoe pleaded, "come with us!"
+
+She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with her father so
+gracefully that Mrs. March herself could scarcely have told just where
+the girl's real purpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident, or
+just how she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the pleasure of
+seeing Mrs. March back to her hotel.
+
+March went with the young people across the meadow behind the Posthof and
+up into the forest, which began at the base of the mountain. At first
+they tried to keep him in the range of their talk; but he fell behind
+more and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was less and
+less possible to include him in it. When it began to concern their common
+appreciation of the Marches, they even tried to get out of his hearing.
+
+"They're so young in their thoughts," said Burnamy, "and they seem as
+much interested in everything as they could have been thirty years ago.
+They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it is
+now; don't you think? I mean, in the eighteen-sixties."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can see that."
+
+"I don't know why we shouldn't be born older in each generation than
+people were in the last. Perhaps we are," he suggested.
+
+"I don't know how you mean," said the girl, keeping vigorously up with
+him; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not have
+his hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it.
+
+"I don't believe I can quite make it out myself. But fancy a man that
+began to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the past
+experience of the whole race--"
+
+"He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn't he?"
+
+"Rather monstrous, yes," he owned, with a laugh. "But that's where the
+psychological interest would come in."
+
+As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it. "I
+suppose you've been writing all sorts of things since you came here."
+
+"Well, it hasn't been such a great while as it's seemed, and I've had Mr.
+Stoller's psychological interests to look after."
+
+"Oh, yes! Do you like him?"
+
+"I don't know. He's a lump of honest selfishness. He isn't bad. You know
+where to have him. He's simple, too."
+
+"You mean, like Mr. March?"
+
+"I didn't mean that; but why not? They're not of the same generation, but
+Stoller isn't modern."
+
+"I'm very curious to see him," said the girl.
+
+"Do you want me to introduce him?"
+
+"You can introduce him to papa."
+
+They stopped and looked across the curve of the mounting path, down on
+March, who had sunk on a way-side seat, and was mopping his forehead. He
+saw them, and called up: "Don't wait for me. I'll join you, gradually."
+
+"I don't want to lose you," Burnamy called back, but he kept on with Miss
+Triscoe. "I want to get the Hirschensprung in," he explained. "It's the
+cliff where a hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet to get away
+from an emperor who was after him."
+
+"Oh, yes. They have them everywhere."
+
+"Do they? Well, anyway, there's a noble view up there."
+
+There was no view on the way up. The Germans' notion of a woodland is
+everywhere that of a dense forest such as their barbarous tribes
+primevally herded in. It means the close-set stems of trees, with their
+tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely that you may
+walk dry through it almost as long as a German shower lasts. When the sun
+shines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here and
+there with the gold that trickles through. There is nothing of the
+accident of an American wood in these forests, which have been watched
+and weeded by man ever since they burst the soil. They remain nurseries,
+but they have the charm which no human care can alienate. The smell of
+their bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth about
+their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his
+country-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life in
+cities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests and
+dimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of
+exemption from care. There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation;
+no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him
+good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and
+was less intrusive than if he had not been there.
+
+March thought of the impassioned existence of these young people playing
+the inevitable comedy of hide and seek which the youth of the race has
+played from the beginning of time. The other invalids who haunted the
+forest, and passed up and down before him in fulfilment of their several
+prescriptions, had a thin unreality in spite of the physical bulk that
+prevailed among them, and they heightened the relief that the
+forest-spirit brought him from the strenuous contact of that young drama.
+He had been almost painfully aware that the persons in it had met,
+however little they knew it, with an eagerness intensified by their brief
+separation, and he fancied it was the girl who had unconsciously operated
+their reunion in response to the young man's longing, her will making
+itself electrically felt through space by that sort of wireless
+telegraphy which love has long employed, and science has just begun to
+imagine.
+
+He would have been willing that they should get home alone, but he knew
+that his wife would require an account of them from him, and though he
+could have invented something of the kind, if it came to the worst, he
+was aware that it would not do for him to arrive without them. The
+thought goaded him from his seat, and he joined the upward procession of
+his fellow-sick, as it met another procession straggling downward; the
+ways branched in all directions, with people on them everywhere, bent
+upon building up in a month the health which they would spend the rest of
+the year in demolishing.
+
+He came upon his charges unexpectedly at a turn of the path, and Miss
+Triscoe told him that he ought to have been with them for the view from
+the Hirschensprung. It was magnificent, she said, and she made Burnamy
+corroborate her praise of it, and agree with her that it was worth the
+climb a thousand times; he modestly accepted the credit she appeared
+willing to give him, of inventing the Hirschensprung.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.
+
+Between his work for Stoller and what sometimes seemed the
+obstructiveness of General Triscoe, Burnamy was not very much with Miss
+Triscoe. He was not devout, but he went every Sunday to the pretty
+English church on the hill, where he contributed beyond his means to the
+support of the English clergy on the Continent, for the sake of looking
+at her back hair during the service, and losing himself in the graceful
+lines which defined, the girl's figure from the slant of her flowery hat
+to the point where the pewtop crossed her elastic waist. One happy
+morning the general did not come to church, and he had the fortune to
+walk home with her to her pension, where she lingered with him a moment,
+and almost made him believe she might be going to ask him to come in.
+
+The next evening, when he was sauntering down the row of glittering shops
+beside the Tepl, with Mrs. March, they overtook the general and his
+daughter at a place where the girl was admiring some stork-scissors in
+the window; she said she wished she were still little, so that she could
+get them. They walked home with the Triscoes, and then he hurried Mrs.
+March back to the shop. The man had already put up his shutters, and was
+just closing his door, but Burnamy pushed in, and asked to look at the
+stork-scissors they had seen in the window. The gas was out, and the
+shopman lighted a very dim candle, to show them.
+
+"I knew you wanted to get them for her, after what she said, Mrs. March,"
+he laughed, nervously, "and you must let me lend you the money."
+
+"Why, of course!" she answered, joyfully humoring his feint. "Shall I put
+my card in for the man to send home to her with them?"
+
+"Well--no. No. Not your card--exactly. Or, yes! Yes, you must, I
+suppose."
+
+They made the hushing street gay with their laughter; the next evening
+Miss Triscoe came upon the Marches and Burnamy where they sat after
+supper listening to the concert at Pupp's, and thanked Mrs. March for the
+scissors. Then she and Burnamy had their laugh again, and Miss Triscoe
+joined them, to her father's frowning mystification. He stared round for
+a table; they were all taken, and he could not refuse the interest
+Burnamy made with the waiters to bring them one and crowd it in. He had
+to ask him to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down and heard the concert
+through beside Miss Triscoe.
+
+"What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of stork-scissors?" March
+demanded, when his wife and he were alone.
+
+"Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest," she began, in a tone which he
+felt to be wheedling, and she told the story of the scissors.
+
+"Look here, my dear! Didn't you promise to let this love-affair alone?"
+
+"That was on the ship. And besides, what would you have done, I should
+like to know? Would you have refused to let him buy them for her?" She
+added, carelessly, "He wants us to go to the Kurhaus ball with him."
+
+"Oh, does he!"
+
+"Yes. He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if we
+will chaperon them. And I promised that you would."
+
+"That I would?"
+
+"It will do just as well if you go. And it will be very amusing; you can
+see something of Carlsbad society."
+
+"But I'm not going!" he declared. "It would interfere with my cure. The
+sitting up late would be bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and I
+should eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do all sorts of
+unwholesome things."
+
+"Nonsense! The refreshments will be 'kurgemass', of course."
+
+"You can go yourself," he said.
+
+A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty as it is before
+twenty, but still it has claims upon the imagination, and the novel
+circumstance of a ball in the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for Mrs.
+March. It was the annual reunion which is given by municipal authority in
+the large hall above the bathrooms; it is frequented with safety and
+pleasure by curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it began to have
+for Mrs. March the charm of duty; she believed that she could finally
+have made March go in her place, but she felt that she ought really to go
+in his, and save him from the late hours and the late supper.
+
+"Very well, then," she said at last, "I will go."
+
+It appeared that any civil person might go to the reunion who chose to
+pay two florins and a half. There must have been some sort of
+restriction, and the ladies of Burnamy's party went with a good deal of
+amused curiosity to see what the distinctions were; but they saw none
+unless it was the advantages which the military had. The long hall over
+the bathrooms shaped itself into a space for the dancing at one end, and
+all the rest of it was filled with tables, which at half past eight were
+crowded with people, eating, drinking, and smoking. The military enjoyed
+the monopoly of a table next the rail dividing the dancing from the
+dining space. There the tight-laced Herr Hauptmanns and Herr Lieutenants
+sat at their sausage and beer and cigars in the intervals of the waltzes,
+and strengthened themselves for a foray among the gracious Fraus and
+Frauleins on the benches lining three sides of the dancing-space. From
+the gallery above many civilian spectators looked down upon the gayety,
+and the dress-coats of a few citizens figured among the uniforms.
+
+As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fashion found their way to
+the dancing-floor, and toward ten o'clock it became rather crowded. A
+party of American girls showed their Paris dresses in the transatlantic
+versions of the waltz. At first they danced with the young men who came
+with them; but after a while they yielded to the custom of the place, and
+danced with any of the officers who asked them.
+
+"I know it's the custom," said Mrs. March to Miss Triscoe, who was at her
+side in one of the waltzes she had decided to sit out, so as not to be
+dancing all the time with Burnamy, "but I never can like it without an
+introduction."
+
+"No," said the girl, with the air of putting temptation decidedly away,
+"I don't believe papa would, either."
+
+A young officer came up, and drooped in mute supplication before her. She
+glanced at Mrs. March, who turned her face away; and she excused herself
+with the pretence that she had promised the dance, and by good fortune,
+Burnamy, who had been unscrupulously waltzing with a lady he did not
+know, came up at the moment. She rose and put her hand on his arm, and
+they both bowed to the officer before they whirled away. The officer
+looked after them with amiable admiration; then he turned to Mrs. March
+with a light of banter in his friendly eyes, and was unmistakably asking
+her to dance. She liked his ironical daring, she liked it so much that
+she forgot her objection to partners without introductions; she forgot
+her fifty-odd years; she forgot that she was a mother of grown children
+and even a mother-in-law; she remembered only the step of her out-dated
+waltz.
+
+It seemed to be modern enough for the cheerful young officer, and they
+were suddenly revolving with the rest. . . A tide of long-forgotten
+girlhood welled up in her heart, and she laughed as she floated off on it
+past the astonished eyes of Miss Triscoe and Burnamy. She saw them
+falter, as if they had lost their step in their astonishment; then they
+seemed both to vanish, and her partner had released her, and was helping
+Miss Triscoe up from the floor; Burnamy was brushing the dust from his
+knees, and the citizen who had bowled them over was boisterously
+apologizing and incessantly bowing.
+
+"Oh, are you hurt?" Mrs. March implored. "I'm sure you must be killed;
+and I did it! I don't know, what I was thinking of!"
+
+The girl laughed. "I'm not hurt a bit!"
+
+They had one impulse to escape from the place, and from the sympathy and
+congratulation. In the dressing-room she declared again that she was all
+right. "How beautifully you waltz, Mrs. March!" she said, and she laughed
+again, and would not agree with her that she had been ridiculous. "But
+I'm glad those American girls didn't see me. And I can't be too thankful
+papa didn't come!"
+
+Mrs. March's heart sank at the thought of what General Triscoe would
+think of her. "You must tell him I did it. I can never lift up my head!"
+
+"No, I shall not. No one did it," said the girl, magnanimously. She
+looked down sidelong at her draperies. "I was so afraid I had torn my
+dress! I certainly heard something rip."
+
+It was one of the skirts of Burnamy's coat, which he had caught into his
+hand and held in place till he could escape to the men's dressing-room,
+where he had it pinned up so skillfully that the damage was not suspected
+by the ladies. He had banged his knee abominably too; but they did not
+suspect that either, as he limped home on the air beside them, first to
+Miss Triscoe's pension, and then to Mrs. March's hotel.
+
+It was quite eleven o'clock, which at Carlsbad is as late as three in the
+morning anywhere else, when she let herself into her room. She decided
+not to tell her husband, then; and even at breakfast, which they had at
+the Posthof, she had not got to her confession, though she had told him
+everything else about the ball, when the young officer with whom she had
+danced passed between the tables near her. He caught her eye and bowed
+with a smile of so much meaning that March asked, "Who's your pretty
+young friend?"
+
+"Oh, that!" she answered carelessly. "That was one of the officers at the
+ball," and she laughed.
+
+"You seem to be in the joke, too," he said. "What is it?"
+
+"Oh, something. I'll tell you some time. Or perhaps you'll find out."
+
+"I'm afraid you won't let me wait."
+
+"No, I won't," and now she told him. She had expected teasing, ridicule,
+sarcasm, anything but the psychological interest mixed with a sort of
+retrospective tenderness which he showed. "I wish I could have seen you;
+I always thought you danced well." He added: "It seems that you need a
+chaperon too."
+
+The next morning, after March and General Triscoe had started off upon
+one of the hill climbs, the young people made her go with them for a walk
+up the Tepl, as far as the cafe of the Freundschaftsaal. In the grounds
+an artist in silhouettes was cutting out the likenesses of people who
+supposed themselves to have profiles, and they begged Mrs. March to sit
+for hers. It was so good that she insisted on Miss Triscoe's sitting in
+turn, and then Burnamy. Then he had the inspiration to propose that they
+should all three sit together, and it appeared that such a group was
+within the scope of the silhouettist's art; he posed them in his little
+bower, and while he was mounting the picture they took turns, at five
+kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes played by his Edison
+phonograph.
+
+Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moral fibre; but she
+tried to draw the line at letting Burnamy keep the group. "Why not?" he
+pleaded.
+
+"You oughtn't to ask," she returned. "You've no business to have Miss
+Triscoe's picture, if you must know."
+
+"But you're there to chaperon us!" he persisted.
+
+He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she said, "You need a
+chaperon who doesn't lose her head, in a silhouette." But it seemed
+useless to hold out after that, and she heard herself asking, "Shall we
+let him keep it, Miss Triscoe?"
+
+Burnamy went off to his work with Stoller, carrying the silhouette with
+him, and she kept on with Miss Triscoe to her hotel. In turning from the
+gate after she parted with the girl she found herself confronted with
+Mrs. Adding and Rose. The ladies exclaimed at each other in an
+astonishment from which they had to recover before they could begin to
+talk, but from the first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Adding had
+something to say. The more freely to say it she asked Mrs. March into her
+hotel, which was in the same street with the pension of the Triscoes, and
+she let her boy go off about the exploration of Carlsbad; he promised to
+be back in an hour.
+
+"Well, now what scrape are you in?" March asked when his wife came home,
+and began to put off her things, with signs of excitement which he could
+not fail to note. He was lying down after a long tramp, and he seemed
+very comfortable.
+
+His question suggested something of anterior import, and she told him
+about the silhouettes, and the advantage the young people had taken of
+their power over her through their knowledge of her foolish behavior at
+the ball.
+
+He said, lazily: "They seem to be working you for all you're worth. Is
+that it?"
+
+"No; there is something worse. Something's happened which throws all that
+quite in the shade. Mrs. Adding is here."
+
+"Mrs. Adding?" he repeated, with a dimness for names which she would not
+allow was growing on him.
+
+"Don't be stupid, dear! Mrs. Adding, who sat opposite Mr. Kenby on the
+Norumbia. The mother of the nice boy."
+
+"Oh, yes! Well, that's good!"
+
+"No, it isn't! Don't say such a thing--till you know!" she cried, with a
+certain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomed seriousness in the
+fact. He sat up as if better to confront the mystery. "I have been at her
+hotel, and she has been telling me that she's just come from Berlin, and
+that Mr. Kenby's been there, and--Now I won't have you making a joke of
+it, or breaking out about it, as if it were not a thing to be looked for;
+though of course with the others on our hands you're not to blame for not
+thinking of it. But you can see yourself that she's young and
+good-looking. She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were not
+for him, I don't believe she would hesitate--"
+
+"For heaven's sake, what are you driving at?" March broke in, and she
+answered him as vehemently:
+
+"He's asked her to marry him!"
+
+"Kenby? Mrs. Adding?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Well, now, Isabel, this won't do! They ought to be ashamed of
+themselves. With that morbid, sensitive boy! It's shocking--"
+
+"Will you listen? Or do you want me to stop?" He arrested himself at her
+threat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence time
+to sink in, "She refused him, of course!"
+
+"Oh, all right, then!"
+
+"You take it in such a way that I've a great mind not to tell you
+anything more about it."
+
+"I know you have," he said, stretching himself out again; "but you'll do
+it, all the same. You'd have been awfully disappointed if I had been calm
+and collected."
+
+"She refused him," she began again, "although she respects him, because
+she feels that she ought to devote herself to her son. Of course she's
+very young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a man
+twice her age, and she's not thirty-five yet. I don't think she ever
+cared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something about
+him."
+
+"I never heard of him. I--"
+
+Mrs. March made a "tchck!" that would have recalled the most consequent
+of men from the most logical and coherent interpretation to the true
+intent of her words. He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely:
+"Well, I won't do it. If she's refused him, that's the end of it; she
+needn't know anything about him, and she has no right to."
+
+"Now I think differently," said Mrs. March, with an inductive air. "Of
+course she has to know about him, now." She stopped, and March turned his
+head and looked expectantly at her. "He said he would not consider her
+answer final, but would hope to see her again and--She's afraid he may
+follow her--What are you looking at me so for?"
+
+"Is he coming here?"
+
+"Am I to blame if he is? He said he was going to write to her."
+
+March burst into a laugh. "Well, they haven't been beating about the
+bush! When I think how Miss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from the
+first moment she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she was
+running from him, and he imagines that he has been boldly following her,
+without the least hope from her, I can't help admiring the simple
+directness of these elders."
+
+"And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what will you say?" she cut in
+eagerly.
+
+"I'll say I don't like the subject. What am I in Carlsbad for? I came for
+the cure, and I'm spending time and money on it. I might as well go and
+take my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to listen to
+Kenby."
+
+"I know it's bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people,"
+said Mrs. March. "I don't believe he'll want to talk with you; but if--"
+
+"Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel? I'm not going to have them round in my
+bread-trough!"
+
+"She isn't. She's at one of the hotels on the hill."
+
+"Very well, let her stay there, then. They can manage their love-affairs
+in their own way. The only one I care the least for is the boy."
+
+"Yes, it is forlorn for him. But he likes Mr. Kenby, and--No, it's
+horrid, and you can't make it anything else!"
+
+"Well, I'm not trying to." He turned his face away. "I must get my nap,
+now." After she thought he must have fallen asleep, he said, "The first
+thing you know, those old Eltwins will be coming round and telling us
+that they're going to get divorced." Then he really slept.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.
+
+The mid-day dinner at Pupp's was the time to see the Carlsbad world, and
+the Marches had the habit of sitting long at table to watch it.
+
+There was one family in whom they fancied a sort of literary quality, as
+if they had come out of some pleasant German story, but they never knew
+anything about them. The father by his dress must have been a Protestant
+clergyman; the mother had been a beauty and was still very handsome; the
+daughter was good-looking, and of a good-breeding which was both girlish
+and ladylike. They commended themselves by always taking the table d'hote
+dinner, as the Marches did, and eating through from the soup and the rank
+fresh-water fish to the sweet, upon the same principle: the husband ate
+all the compote and gave the others his dessert, which was not good for
+him. A young girl of a different fascination remained as much a mystery.
+She was small and of an extreme tenuity, which became more bewildering as
+she advanced through her meal, especially at supper, which she made of a
+long cucumber pickle, a Frankfort sausage of twice the pickle's length,
+and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she held a shivering little
+hound; she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly maid, and had every
+effect of being a gracious Fraulein. A curious contrast to her Teutonic
+voracity was the temperance of a young Latin swell, imaginably from
+Trieste, who sat long over his small coffee and cigarette, and tranquilly
+mused upon the pages of an Italian newspaper. At another table there was
+a very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing draperies of white, who
+commanded a sallow family of South-Americans, and loudly harangued them
+in South-American Spanish; she flared out in a picture which nowhere
+lacked strong effects; and in her background lurked a mysterious black
+face and figure, ironically subservient to the old man, the mild boy, and
+the pretty young girl in the middle distance of the family group.
+
+Amidst the shows of a hardened worldliness there were touching glimpses
+of domesticity and heart: a young bride fed her husband soup from her own
+plate with her spoon, unabashed by the publicity; a mother and her two
+pretty daughters hung about a handsome officer, who must have been newly
+betrothed to one of the girls; and, the whole family showed a helpless
+fondness for him, which he did not despise, though he held it in check;
+the girls dressed alike, and seemed to have for their whole change of
+costume a difference from time to time in the color of their sleeves. The
+Marches believed they had seen the growth of the romance which had
+eventuated so happily; and they saw other romances which did not in any
+wise eventuate. Carlsbad was evidently one of the great marriage marts of
+middle Europe, where mothers brought their daughters to be admired, and
+everywhere the flower of life was blooming for the hand of love. It blew
+by on all the promenades in dresses and hats as pretty as they could be
+bought or imagined; but it was chiefly at Pupp's that it flourished. For
+the most part it seemed to flourish in vain, and to be destined to be put
+by for another season to dream, bulblike, of the coming summer in the
+quiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian homes.
+
+Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than the spectators knew; but
+for their own pleasure they would not have had their pang for it less;
+and March objected to having a more explicit demand upon his sympathy.
+"We could have managed," he said, at the close of their dinner, as he
+looked compassionately round upon the parterre of young girls, "we could
+have managed with Burnamy and Miss Triscoe; but to have Mrs. Adding and
+Kenby launched upon us is too much. Of course I like Kenby, and if the
+widow alone were concerned I would give him my blessing: a wife more or a
+widow less is not going to disturb the equilibrium of the universe;
+but--" He stopped, and then he went on: "Men and women are well enough.
+They complement each other very agreeably, and they have very good times
+together. But why should they get in love?--It is sure to make them
+uncomfortable to themselves and annoying to others." He broke off, and
+stared about him. "My dear, this is really charming--almost as charming
+as the Posthof." The crowd spread from the open vestibule of the hotel
+and the shelter of its branching pavilion roofs until it was dimmed in
+the obscurity of the low grove across the way in an ultimate depth where
+the musicians were giving the afternoon concert. Between its two
+stationary divisions moved a current of promenaders, with some such
+effect as if the colors of a lovely garden should have liquefied and
+flowed in mingled rose and lilac, pink and yellow, and white and orange,
+and all the middle tints of modern millinery. Above on one side were the
+agreeable bulks of architecture, in the buff and gray of Carlsbad; and
+far beyond on the other were the upland slopes, with villas and long
+curves of country roads, belted in with miles of wall. "It would be about
+as offensive to have a love-interest that one personally knew about
+intruded here," he said, "as to have a two-spanner carriage driven
+through this crowd. It ought to be forbidden by the municipality."
+
+Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with her eyes, and she
+answered: "See that handsome young Greek priest! Isn't he an
+archimandrite? The portier said he was."
+
+"Then let him pass for an archimandrite. Now," he recurred to his
+grievance again, dreamily, "I have got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, and
+poison his mind against Burnamy, and I shall have to instil a few drops
+of venomous suspicion against Kenby into the heart of poor little Rose
+Adding. Oh;" he broke out, "they will spoil everything. They'll be with
+us morning, noon, and night," and he went on to work the joke of repining
+at his lot. The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers' pretence of
+being interested in something besides themselves, which they were no more
+capable of than so many lunatics. How could they care for pretty girls
+playing tennis on an upland level, in the waning afternoon? Or a cartful
+of peasant women stopping to cross themselves at a way-side shrine? Or a
+whistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some wayside
+raspberries to touch his hat and say good-morning? Or those preposterous
+maidens sprinkling linen on the grass from watering-pots while the skies
+were full of rain? Or that blacksmith shop where Peter the Great made a
+horseshoe. Or the monument of the young warrior-poet Koerner, with a
+gentle-looking girl and her mother reading and knitting on a bench before
+it? These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what could lovers really
+care for them? A peasant girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fast
+asleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog, lay in his harness near
+her with one drowsy eye half open for her and the other for the contents
+of their cart; a boy chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyond
+the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all the neighbors; the negro
+door-keeper at the Golden Shield who ought to have spoken our Southern
+English, but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweet afternoon
+stillness in the woods; the good German mothers crocheting at the Posthof
+concerts. Burnamy as a young poet might hate felt the precious quality of
+these things, if his senses had not been holden by Miss Triscoe; and she
+might have felt it if only he had done so. But as it was it would be lost
+upon their preoccupation; with Mrs. Adding and Kenby it would be
+hopeless.
+
+A day or two after Mrs: March had met Mrs. Adding, she went with her
+husband to revere a certain magnificent blackamoor whom he had discovered
+at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg,
+where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and looked, in the
+black of his skin and the white of his flowing costume, like a colossal
+figure carved in ebony and ivory. They took a roundabout way through a
+street entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is a
+pension if it is not n hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimental
+prettiness; with each a little garden before it, and a bower with an iron
+table in it for breakfasting and supping out-doors; and he said that they
+would be the very places for bridal couples who wished to spend the
+honey-moon in getting well of the wedding surfeit. She denounced him for
+saying such a thing as that, and for his inconsistency in complaining of
+lovers while he was willing to think of young married people. He
+contended that there was a great difference in the sort of demand that
+young married people made upon the interest of witnesses, and that they
+were at least on their way to sanity; and before they agreed, they had
+come to the hotel with the blackamoor at the door. While they lingered,
+sharing the splendid creature's hospitable pleasure in the spectacle he
+formed, they were aware of a carriage with liveried coachman and footman
+at the steps of the hotel; the liveries were very quiet and
+distinguished, and they learned that the equipage was waiting for the
+Prince of Coburg, or the Princess of Montenegro, or Prince Henry of
+Prussia; there were differing opinions among the twenty or thirty
+bystanders. Mrs. March said she did not care which it was; and she was
+patient of the denouement, which began to postpone itself with delicate
+delays. After repeated agitations at the door among portiers,
+proprietors, and waiters, whose fluttered spirits imparted their thrill
+to the spectators, while the coachman and footman remained
+sculpturesquely impassive in their places, the carriage moved aside and
+let an energetic American lady and her family drive up to the steps. The
+hotel people paid her a tempered devotion, but she marred the effect by
+rushing out and sitting on a balcony to wait for the delaying royalties.
+There began to be more promises of their early appearance; a footman got
+down and placed himself at the carriage door; the coachman stiffened
+himself on his box; then he relaxed; the footman drooped, and even
+wandered aside. There came a moment when at some signal the carriage
+drove quite away from the portal and waited near the gate of the
+stableyard; it drove back, and the spectators redoubled their attention.
+Nothing happened, and some of them dropped off. At last an indescribable
+significance expressed itself in the official group at the door; a man in
+a high hat and dresscoat hurried out; a footman hurried to meet him; they
+spoke inaudibly together. The footman mounted to his place; the coachman
+gathered up his reins and drove rapidly out of the hotel-yard, down the
+street, round the corner, out of sight. The man in the tall hat and
+dress-coat went in; the official group at the threshold dissolved; the
+statue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evidently the Hoheit of
+Coburg, or Montenegro, or Prussia, was not going to take the air.
+
+"My dear, this is humiliating."
+
+"Not at all! I wouldn't have missed it for anything. Think how near we
+came to seeing them!"
+
+"I shouldn't feel so shabby if we had seen them. But to hang round here
+in this plebeian abeyance, and then to be defeated and defrauded at last!
+I wonder how long this sort of thing is going on?"
+
+"What thing?"
+
+"This base subjection of the imagination to the Tom Foolery of the Ages."
+
+"I don't know what you mean. I'm sure it's very natural to want to see a
+Prince."
+
+"Only too natural. It's so deeply founded in nature that after denying
+royalty by word and deed for a hundred years, we Americans are hungrier
+for it than anybody else. Perhaps we may come back to it!"
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+They looked up at the Austrian flag on the tower of the hotel, languidly
+curling and uncurling in the bland evening air, as it had over a thousand
+years of stupid and selfish monarchy, while all the generous republics of
+the Middle Ages had perished, and the commonwealths of later times had
+passed like fever dreams. That dull, inglorious empire had antedated or
+outlived Venice and Genoa, Florence and Siena, the England of Cromwell,
+the Holland of the Stadtholders, and the France of many revolutions, and
+all the fleeting democracies which sprang from these.
+
+March began to ask himself how his curiosity differed from that of the
+Europeans about him; then he became aware that these had detached
+themselves, and left him exposed to the presence of a fellow countryman.
+It was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turned upon March with hilarious
+recognition. "Hello! Most of the Americans in Carlsbad seem to be hanging
+round here for a sight of these kings. Well, we don't have a great many
+of 'em, and it's natural we shouldn't want to miss any. But now, you
+Eastern fellows, you go to Europe every summer, and yet you don't seem to
+get enough of 'em. Think it's human nature, or did it get so ground into
+us in the old times that we can't get it out, no difference what we say?"
+
+"That's very much what I've been asking myself," said March. "Perhaps
+it's any kind of show. We'd wait nearly as long for the President to come
+out, wouldn't we?"
+
+"I reckon we would. But we wouldn't for his nephew, or his second
+cousin."
+
+"Well, they wouldn't be in the way of the succession."
+
+"I guess you're right." The Iowan seemed better satisfied with March's
+philosophy than March felt himself, and he could not forbear adding:
+
+"But I don't, deny that we should wait for the President because he's a
+kind of king too. I don't know that we shall ever get over wanting to see
+kings of some kind. Or at least my wife won't. May I present you to Mrs.
+March?"
+
+"Happy to meet you, Mrs. March," said the Iowan. "Introduce you to Mrs.
+Otterson. I'm the fool in my family, and I know just how you feel about a
+chance like this. I don't mean that you're--"
+
+They all laughed at the hopeless case, and Mrs. March said, with one of
+her unexpected likings: "I understand, Mr. Otterson. And I would rather
+be our kind of fool than the kind that pretends not to care for the sight
+of a king."
+
+"Like you and me, Mrs. Otterson," said March.
+
+"Indeed, indeed," said the lady, "I'd like to see a king too, if it
+didn't take all night. Good-evening," she said, turning her husband about
+with her, as if she suspected a purpose of patronage in Mrs. March, and
+was not going to have it.
+
+Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly: "The trouble
+with me is that when I do get a chance to talk English, there's such a
+flow of language it carries me away, and I don't know just where I'm
+landing."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII.
+
+There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbad that summer. One
+day the Duchess of Orleans drove over from Marienbad, attended by the
+Duke on his bicycle. After luncheon, they reappeared for a moment before
+mounting to her carriage with their Secretaries: two young French
+gentlemen whose dress and bearing better satisfied Mrs. March's exacting
+passion for an aristocratic air in their order. The Duke was fat and
+fair, as a Bourbon should be, and the Duchess fatter, though not so fair,
+as became a Hapsburg, but they were both more plebeian-looking than their
+retainers, who were slender as well as young, and as perfectly appointed
+as English tailors could imagine them.
+
+"It wouldn't do for the very highest sort of Highhotes," March declared,
+"to look their own consequence personally; they have to leave that, like
+everything else, to their inferiors."
+
+By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March's the German Hoheit had now become
+Highhote, which was so much more descriptive that they had permanently
+adopted it, and found comfort to their republican pride in the mockery
+which it poured upon the feudal structure of society. They applied it
+with a certain compunction, however, to the King of Servia, who came a
+few days after the Duke and Duchess: he was such a young King, and of
+such a little country. They watched for him from the windows of the
+reading-room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the three sides
+of the square before the hotel, and the two plain public carriages which
+brought the King and his suite drew tamely up at the portal, where the
+proprietor and some civic dignitaries received him. His moderated
+approach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which Americans
+are used, allowed Mrs. March to make sure of the pale, slight,
+insignificant, amiable-looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign she
+was ambuscading. Then no appeal to her principles could keep her from
+peeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda, where the King
+graciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and the proprietor,
+and vanished into the elevator. She was destined to see him so often
+afterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her dining and
+supping by that of the simple potentate, who had his meals in one of the
+public rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in sack-coats like
+himself, after the informal manner of the place.
+
+Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourning
+abroad, in the interval of a successful rebellion, was at the opera one
+night with some of his faithful followers. Burnamy had offered Mrs.
+March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and her husband with him,
+places in a box; but after she eagerly accepted, it seemed that he wished
+her to advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her father
+to join them.
+
+"Why not?" she returned, with an arching of the eyebrows.
+
+"Why," he said, "perhaps I had better make a clean breast of it."
+
+"Perhaps you had," she said, and they both laughed, though he laughed
+with a knot between his eyes.
+
+"The fact is, you know, this isn't my treat, exactly. It's Mr.
+Stoller's." At the surprise in her face he hurried on. "He's got back his
+first letter in the paper, and he's so much pleased with the way he reads
+in print, that he wants to celebrate."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, non-committally.
+
+Burnamy laughed again. "But he's bashful, and he isn't sure that you
+would all take it in the right way. He wants you as friends of mine; and
+he hasn't quite the courage to ask you himself."
+
+This seemed to Mrs. March so far from bad that she said: "That's very
+nice of him. Then he's satisfied with--with your help? I'm glad of that."
+
+"Thank you. He's met the Triscoes, and he thought it would be pleasant to
+you if they went, too."
+
+"Oh, certainly."
+
+"He thought," Burnamy went on, with the air of feeling his way, "that we
+might all go to the opera, and then--then go for a little supper
+afterwards at Schwarzkopf's."
+
+He named the only place in Carlsbad where you can sup so late as ten
+o'clock; as the opera begins at six, and is over at half past eight, none
+but the wildest roisterers frequent the place.
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs. March. "I don't know how a late supper would agree with
+my husband's cure. I should have to ask him."
+
+"We could make it very hygienic," Burnamy explained.
+
+In repeating his invitation she blamed Burnamy's uncandor so much that
+March took his part, as perhaps she intended, and said, "Oh, nonsense,"
+and that he should like to go in for the whole thing; and General Triscoe
+accepted as promptly for himself and his daughter. That made six people,
+Burnamy counted up, and he feigned a decent regret that there was not
+room for Mrs. Adding and her son; he would have liked to ask them.
+
+Mrs. March did not enjoy it so much as coming with her husband alone when
+they took two florin seats in the orchestra for the comedy. The comedy
+always began half an hour earlier than the opera, and they had a
+five-o'clock supper at the Theatre-Cafe before they went, and they got to
+sleep by nine o'clock; now they would be up till half past ten at least,
+and that orgy at Schwarzkopf's might not be at all good for him. But
+still she liked being there; and Miss Triscoe made her take the best
+seat; Burnamy and Stoller made the older men take the other seats beside
+the ladies, while they sat behind, or stood up, when they, wished to see,
+as people do in the back of a box. Stoller was not much at ease in
+evening dress, but he bore himself with a dignity which was not perhaps
+so gloomy as it looked; Mrs. March thought him handsome in his way, and
+required Miss Triscoe to admire him. As for Burnamy's beauty it was not
+necessary to insist upon that; he had the distinction of slender youth;
+and she liked to think that no Highhote there was of a more patrician
+presence than this yet unprinted contributor to 'Every Other Week'. He
+and Stoller seemed on perfect terms; or else in his joy he was able to
+hide the uneasiness which she had fancied in him from the first time she
+saw them together, and which had never been quite absent from his manner
+in Stoller's presence. Her husband always denied that it existed, or if
+it did that it was anything but Burnamy's effort to get on common ground
+with an inferior whom fortune had put over him.
+
+The young fellow talked with Stoller, and tried to bring him into the
+range of the general conversation. He leaned over the ladies, from time
+to time, and pointed out the notables whom he saw in the house; she was
+glad, for his sake, that he did not lean less over her than over Miss
+Triscoe. He explained certain military figures in the boxes opposite, and
+certain ladies of rank who did not look their rank; Miss Triscoe, to Mrs.
+March's thinking, looked their united ranks, and more; her dress was very
+simple, but of a touch which saved it from being insipidly girlish; her
+beauty was dazzling.
+
+"Do you see that old fellow in the corner chair just behind the
+orchestra?" asked Burnamy. "He's ninety-six years old, and he comes to
+the theatre every night, and falls asleep as soon as the curtain rises,
+and sleeps through till the end of the act."
+
+"How dear!" said the girl, leaning forward to fix the nonagenarian with
+her glasses, while many other glasses converged upon her. "Oh, wouldn't
+you like to know him, Mr. March?"
+
+"I should consider it a liberal education. They have brought these things
+to a perfect system in Europe. There is nothing to make life pass
+smoothly like inflexible constancy to an entirely simple custom. My
+dear," he added to his wife, "I wish we'd seen this sage before. He'd
+have helped us through a good many hours of unintelligible comedy. I'm
+always coming as Burnamy's guest, after this."
+
+The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his triumph, and casting an eye
+about the theatre to cap it, he caught sight of that other potentate. He
+whispered joyfully, "Ah! We've got two kings here to-night," and he
+indicated in a box of their tier just across from that where the King of
+Servia sat, the well-known face of the King of New York.
+
+"He isn't bad-looking," said March, handing his glass to General Triscoe.
+"I've not seen many kings in exile; a matter of a few Carlist princes and
+ex-sovereign dukes, and the good Henry V. of France, once, when I was
+staying a month in Venice; but I don't think they any of them looked the
+part better. I suppose he has his dream of recurring power like the
+rest."
+
+"Dream!" said General Triscoe with the glass at his eyes. "He's dead sure
+of it."
+
+"Oh, you don't really mean that!"
+
+"I don't know why I should have changed my mind."
+
+"Then it's as if we were in the presence of Charles II. just before he
+was called back to England, or Napoleon in the last moments of Elba. It's
+better than that. The thing is almost unique; it's a new situation in
+history. Here's a sovereign who has no recognized function, no legal
+status, no objective existence. He has no sort of public being, except in
+the affection of his subjects. It took an upheaval little short of an
+earthquake to unseat him. His rule, as we understand it, was bad for all
+classes; the poor suffered more than the rich; the people have now had
+three years of self-government; and yet this wonderful man has such a
+hold upon the masses that he is going home to win the cause of oppression
+at the head of the oppressed. When he's in power again, he will be as
+subjective as ever, with the power of civic life and death, and an
+idolatrous following perfectly ruthless in the execution of his will."
+
+"We've only begun," said the general. "This kind of king is municipal,
+now; but he's going to be national. And then, good-by, Republic!"
+
+"The only thing like it," March resumed, too incredulous of the evil
+future to deny himself the aesthetic pleasure of the parallel, "is the
+rise of the Medici in Florence, but even the Medici were not mere
+manipulators of pulls; they had some sort of public office, with some
+sort of legislated tenure of it. The King of New York is sovereign by
+force of will alone, and he will reign in the voluntary submission of the
+majority. Is our national dictator to be of the same nature and quality?"
+
+"It would be the scientific evolution, wouldn't it?"
+
+The ladies listened with the perfunctory attention which women pay to any
+sort of inquiry which is not personal. Stoller had scarcely spoken yet;
+he now startled them all by demanding, with a sort of vindictive force,
+"Why shouldn't he have the power, if they're willing to let him?"
+
+"Yes," said General Triscoe, with a tilt of his head towards March.
+"That's what we must ask ourselves more and more."
+
+March leaned back in his chair, and looked up over his shoulder at
+Stoller. "Well, I don't know. Do you think it's quite right for a man to
+use an unjust power, even if others are willing that he should?"
+
+Stoller stopped with an air of bewilderment as if surprised on the point
+of saying that he thought just this. He asked instead, "What's wrong
+about it?"
+
+"Well, that's one of those things that have to be felt, I suppose. But if
+a man came to you, and offered to be your slave for a certain
+consideration--say a comfortable house, and a steady job, that wasn't too
+hard--should you feel it morally right to accept the offer? I don't say
+think it right, for there might be a kind of logic for it."
+
+Stoller seemed about to answer; he hesitated; and before he had made any
+response, the curtain rose.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV.
+
+There are few prettier things than Carlsbad by night from one of the many
+bridges which span the Tepl in its course through the town. If it is a
+starry night, the torrent glides swiftly away with an inverted firmament
+in its bosom, to which the lamps along its shores and in the houses on
+either side contribute a planetary splendor of their own. By nine o'clock
+everything is hushed; not a wheel is heard at that dead hour; the few
+feet shuffling stealthily through the Alte Wiese whisper a caution of
+silence to those issuing with a less guarded tread from the opera; the
+little bowers that overhang the stream are as dark and mute as the
+restaurants across the way which serve meals in them by day; the whole
+place is as forsaken as other cities at midnight. People get quickly home
+to bed, or if they have a mind to snatch a belated joy, they slip into
+the Theater-Cafe, where the sleepy Frauleins serve them, in an exemplary
+drowse, with plates of cold ham and bottles of the gently gaseous waters
+of Giesshubl. Few are of the bold badness which delights in a supper at
+Schwarzkopf's, and even these are glad of the drawn curtains which hide
+their orgy from the chance passer.
+
+The invalids of Burnamy's party kept together, strengthening themselves
+in a mutual purpose not to be tempted to eat anything which was not
+strictly 'kurgemass'. Mrs. March played upon the interest which each of
+them felt in his own case so artfully that she kept them talking of their
+cure, and left Burnamy and Miss Triscoe to a moment on the bridge, by
+which they profited, while the others strolled on, to lean against the
+parapet and watch the lights in the skies and the water, and be alone
+together. The stream shone above and below, and found its way out of and
+into the darkness under the successive bridges; the town climbed into the
+night with lamp-lit windows here and there, till the woods of the
+hill-sides darkened down to meet it, and fold it in an embrace from which
+some white edifice showed palely in the farthest gloom.
+
+He tried to make her think they could see that great iron crucifix which
+watches over it day and night from its piny cliff. He had a fancy for a
+poem, very impressionistic, which should convey the notion of the
+crucifix's vigil. He submitted it to her; and they remained talking till
+the others had got out of sight and hearing; and she was letting him keep
+the hand on her arm which he had put there to hold her from falling over
+the parapet, when they were both startled by approaching steps, and a
+voice calling, "Look here! Who's running this supper party, anyway?"
+
+His wife had detached March from her group for the mission, as soon as
+she felt that the young people were abusing her kindness. They answered
+him with hysterical laughter, and Burnamy said, "Why, it's Mr. Stoller's
+treat, you know."
+
+At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequiously met the party on the
+threshold and bowed them into a pretty inner room, with a table set for
+their supper, Stoller had gained courage to play the host openly. He
+appointed General Triscoe to the chief seat; he would have put his
+daughter next to him, if the girl had not insisted upon Mrs. March's
+having the place, and going herself to sit next to March, whom she said
+she had not been able to speak a word to the whole evening. But she did
+not talk a great deal to him; he smiled to find how soon he dropped out
+of the conversation, and Burnamy, from his greater remoteness across the
+table, dropped into it. He really preferred the study of Stoller, whose
+instinct of a greater worldly quality in the Triscoes interested him; he
+could see him listening now to what General Triscoe was saying to Mrs.
+March, and now to what Burnamy was saying to Miss Triscoe; his strong,
+selfish face, as he turned it on the young people, expressed a mingled
+grudge and greed that was very curious.
+
+Stoller's courage, which had come and gone at moments throughout, rose at
+the end, and while they lingered at the table well on to the hour of ten,
+he said, in the sort of helpless offence he had with Burnamy, "What's the
+reason we can't all go out tomorrow to that old castle you was talking
+about?"
+
+"To Engelhaus? I don't know any reason, as far as I'm concerned,"
+answered Burnamy; but he refused the initiative offered him, and Stoller
+was obliged to ask March:
+
+"You heard about it?"
+
+"Yes." General Triscoe was listening, and March added for him, "It was
+the hold of an old robber baron; Gustavus Adolphus knocked it down, and
+it's very picturesque, I believe."
+
+"It sounds promising," said the general. "Where is it?"
+
+"Isn't to-morrow our mineral bath?" Mrs. March interposed between her
+husband and temptation.
+
+"No; the day after. Why, it's about ten or twelve miles out on the old
+postroad that Napoleon took for Prague."
+
+"Napoleon knew a good road when he saw it," said the general, and he
+alone of the company lighted a cigar. He was decidedly in favor of the
+excursion, and he arranged for it with Stoller, whom he had the effect of
+using for his pleasure as if he were doing him a favor. They were six,
+and two carriages would take them: a two-spanner for four, and a
+one-spanner for two; they could start directly after dinners and get home
+in time for supper.
+
+Stoller asserted himself to say: "That's all right, then. I want you to
+be my guests, and I'll see about the carriages." He turned to Burnamy:
+"Will you order them?"
+
+"Oh," said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, "the portier will
+get them."
+
+"I don't understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept. Surely,
+he can't like that man!" said Mrs. March to her husband in their own
+room.
+
+"Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential. The general seems to me, capable
+of letting even an enemy serve his turn. Why didn't you speak, if you
+didn't want to go?"
+
+"Why didn't you?"
+
+"I wanted to go."
+
+"And I knew it wouldn't do to let Miss Triscoe go alone; I could see that
+she wished to go."
+
+"Do you think Burnamy did?"
+
+"He seemed rather indifferent. And yet he must have realized that he
+would be with Miss Triscoe the whole afternoon."
+
+
+
+
+XXXV.
+
+If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the one-spanner, and the
+others followed in the two-spanner, it was not from want of politeness on
+the part of the young people in offering to give up their places to each
+of their elders in turn. It would have been grotesque for either March or
+Stoller to drive with the girl; for her father it was apparently no
+question, after a glance at the more rigid uprightness of the seat in the
+one-spanner; and he accepted the place beside Mrs. March on the back seat
+of the two-spanner without demur. He asked her leave to smoke, and then
+he scarcely spoke to her. But he talked to the two men in front of him
+almost incessantly, haranguing them upon the inferiority of our
+conditions and the futility of our hopes as a people, with the effect of
+bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could have got on with
+Triscoe's contempt for the worthlessness of our working-classes, but did
+not know what to do with his scorn of the vulgarity and venality of their
+employers. He accused some of Stoller's most honored and envied
+capitalists of being the source of our worst corruptions, and guiltier
+than the voting-cattle whom they bought and sold.
+
+"I think we can get rid of the whole trouble if we go at it the right
+way," Stoller said, diverging for the sake of the point he wished to
+bring in. "I believe in having the government run on business principles.
+They've got it here in Carlsbad, already, just the right sort of thing,
+and it works. I been lookin' into it, and I got this young man,
+yonder"--he twisted his hand in the direction of the one-spanner! "to
+help me put it in shape. I believe it's going to make our folks think,
+the best ones among them. Here!" He drew a newspaper out of his pocket,
+folded to show two columns in their full length, and handed it to
+Triscoe, who took it with no great eagerness, and began to run his eye
+over it. "You tell me what you think of that. I've put it out for a kind
+of a feeler. I got some money in that paper, and I just thought I'd let
+our people see how a city can be managed on business principles."
+
+He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought while
+he read, and keep him up to the work, and he ignored the Marches so
+entirely that they began in self-defence to talk with each other.
+
+Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the
+breezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields of
+harvest. They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the serried
+stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew straight as
+stalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened under a sky of
+unwonted cloudlessness. Narrow strips of wheat and rye, which the men
+were cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices were binding,
+alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and breadths of
+beets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed land. In the
+meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy rowen, the girls
+lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving themselves the lighter
+labor of ordering the load. From the upturned earth, where there ought to
+have been troops of strutting crows, a few sombre ravens rose. But they
+could not rob the scene of its gayety; it smiled in the sunshine with
+colors which vividly followed the slope of the land till they were dimmed
+in the forests on the far-off mountains. Nearer and farther, the cottages
+and villages shone in the valleys, or glimmered through the veils of the
+distant haze. Over all breathed the keen pure air of the hills, with a
+sentiment of changeless eld, which charmed March, back to his boyhood,
+where he lost the sense of his wife's presence, and answered her vaguely.
+She talked contentedly on in the monologue to which the wives of
+absent-minded men learn to resign themselves. They were both roused from
+their vagary by the voice of General Triscoe. He was handing back the
+folded newspaper to Stoller, and saying, with a queer look at him over
+his glasses, "I should like to see what your contemporaries have to say
+to all that."
+
+"Well, sir," Stoller returned, "maybe I'll have the chance to show you.
+They got my instructions over there to send everything to me."
+
+Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape.
+They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape,
+after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, who
+were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the
+two-spanner behind. They were talking of the hero and heroine of a novel
+they had both read, and he was saying, "I suppose you think he was justly
+punished."
+
+"Punished?" she repeated. "Why, they got married, after all!"
+
+"Yes, but you could see that they were not going to be happy."
+
+"Then it seems to me that she was punished; too."
+
+"Well, yes; you might say that. The author couldn't help that."
+
+Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:
+
+"I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero. The girl was
+very exacting."
+
+"Why," said Burnamy, "I supposed that women hated anything like deception
+in men too much to tolerate it at all. Of course, in this case, he didn't
+deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn't that worse?"
+
+"Yes, that was worse. She could have forgiven him for deceiving her."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"He might have had to do that. She wouldn't have minded his fibbing
+outright, so much, for then it wouldn't have seemed to come from his
+nature. But if he just let her believe what wasn't true, and didn't say a
+word to prevent her, of course it was worse. It showed something weak,
+something cowardly in him."
+
+Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh. "I suppose it did. But don't you
+think it's rather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds of courage?"
+
+"Yes, it is," she assented. "That is why I say she was too exacting. But
+a man oughn't to defend him."
+
+Burnamy's laugh had more pleasure in it, now. "Another woman might?"
+
+"No. She might excuse him."
+
+He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was rather far behind, and
+he spoke to their driver bidding him go slowly till it caught up with
+them. By the time it did so, they were so close to it that they could
+distinguish the lines of its wandering and broken walls. Ever since they
+had climbed from the wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to the
+open plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater detail. The
+detached mound of rock on which it stood rose like an island in the midst
+of the plain, and commanded the highways in every direction.
+
+"I believe," Burnamy broke out, with a bitterness apparently relevant to
+the ruin alone, "that if you hadn't required any quarterings of nobility
+from him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron. He's a
+robber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn't have any scruple in levying
+tribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair
+and his crossbowmen were not on a strike. But they would be on a strike,
+probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-union
+crossbowmen."
+
+If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as the
+civility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than he
+meant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, "I don't see how you can
+have anything to do with him, if you feel so about him."
+
+"Oh," Burnamy replied in kind, "he buys my poverty and not my will. And
+perhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more."
+
+"Have you been doing something very wicked?"
+
+"What should you have to say to me, if I had?" he bantered.
+
+"Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you," she mocked back.
+
+They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a village
+street up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned. A church at
+its base looked out upon an irregular square.
+
+A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide a
+darkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind him.
+He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village's claims
+upon the visitors' interest; he mastered, after a moment, their wishes in
+respect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it; at the top, he
+said, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would admit them.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI.
+
+The, path to the castle slanted upward across the shoulder of the hill,
+to a certain point, and there some rude stone steps mounted more
+directly. Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden,
+bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the clean
+bitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf; but Nature spreads no
+such lavish feast in wood or field in the Old World as she spoils us with
+in the New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to be all her
+store, and man must make the most of them. Miss Triscoe seemed to find
+flowers enough in the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together for her.
+She took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might have both hands
+for her skirt, and so did him two favors.
+
+A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns the ruin opened a gate
+for the party at the top, and levied a tax of thirty kreutzers each upon
+them, for its maintenance. The castle, by his story, had descended from
+robber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked it to pieces in the
+sixteenth century; three hundred years later, the present owner restored
+it; and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed with
+brick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin satisfyingly
+permanent. The walls were not of great extent, but such as they were they
+enclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground, and a cistern
+which once enabled the barons and their retainers to water their wine in
+time of siege.
+
+From that height they could overlook the neighboring highways in every
+direction, and could bring a merchant train to, with a shaft from a
+crossbow, or a shot from an arquebuse, at pleasure. With General
+Triscoe's leave, March praised the strategic strength of the unique
+position, which he found expressive of the past, and yet suggestive of
+the present. It was more a difference in method than anything else that
+distinguished the levy of customs by the authorities then and now. What
+was the essential difference, between taking tribute of travellers
+passing on horseback, and collecting dues from travellers arriving by
+steamer? They did not pay voluntarily in either case; but it might be
+proof of progress that they no longer fought the customs officials.
+
+"Then you believe in free trade," said Stoller, severely.
+
+"No. I am just inquiring which is the best way of enforcing the tariff
+laws."
+
+"I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night," said Miss Triscoe, "that
+people are kept on the docks now for hours, and ladies cry at the way
+their things are tumbled over by the inspectors."
+
+"It's shocking," said Mrs. March, magisterially.
+
+"It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal times," her husband
+resumed. "But I'm glad the travellers make no resistance. I'm opposed to
+private war as much as I am to free trade."
+
+"It all comes round to the same thing at last," said General Triscoe.
+"Your precious humanity--"
+
+"Oh, I don't claim it exclusively," March protested.
+
+"Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road.
+He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on his
+course, and coming back to where he started."
+
+Stoller said, "I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here,
+that they will come to America and set up, if they can't stand the
+duties."
+
+"Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway," March consented.
+
+If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer. He followed
+with his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated
+themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of the
+ruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin,
+upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot. The land fell away
+from the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fields
+and in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into
+the distance. "I don't suppose," Burnamy said, "that life ever does much
+better than this, do you? I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and
+saying 'Unberufen.' I might knock on your bouquet; that's wood."
+
+"It would spoil the flowers," she said, looking down at them in her belt.
+She looked up and their eyes met.
+
+"I wonder," he said, presently, "what makes us always have a feeling of
+dread when we are happy?"
+
+"Do you have that, too?" she asked.
+
+"Yes. Perhaps it's because we know that change must come, and it must be
+for the worse."
+
+"That must be it. I never thought of it before, though."
+
+"If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological
+weather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss
+or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tears
+beforehand--it may come to that."
+
+"I hope it won't. I'd rather not know when I was to be happy; it would
+spoil the pleasure; and wouldn't be any compensation when it was the
+other way."
+
+A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller
+looking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquiline
+profile into relief. "Oh! Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?" he called gayly up
+to him.
+
+"I guess we've seen about all there is," he answered. "Hadn't we better
+be going?" He probably did not mean to be mandatory.
+
+"All right," said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe again
+without further notice of him.
+
+They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the weird
+sacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and to
+account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt,
+and this one built only a few years before. Then he locked the doors
+after them, and ran forward to open against their coming the chapel of
+the village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortified
+themselves for it at the village cafe.
+
+They were served by a little hunch-back maid; and she told them who lived
+in the chief house of the village. It was uncommonly pretty; where all
+the houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as the
+dwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the great man of the place.
+March admired the cat which rubbed against her skirt while she stood and
+talked, and she took his praises modestly for the cat; but they wrought
+upon the envy, of her brother so that he ran off to the garden, and came
+back with two fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held up, with an arm
+across each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the spectators.
+
+"Oh, give him something!" Mrs. March entreated. "He's such a dear."
+
+"No, no! I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat outdone,"
+he refused; and then he was about to yield.
+
+"Hold on!" said Stoller, assuming the host. "I got the change."
+
+He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March had meant her husband to
+reward his naivete with half a florin at least; but he seemed to feel
+that he had now ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himself
+in charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel; he made Miss
+Triscoe let him carry her jacket when she found it warm.
+
+The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who
+designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy in
+the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details.
+Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then
+the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the three
+side-altars. The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German
+version of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic at the time; the
+carving is coarse, and the color harsh and unsoftened by years, though it
+is broken and obliterated in places.
+
+The sacristan said that the chapel was never used for anything but
+funeral services, and he led the way out into the cemetery, where he
+wished to display the sepultural devices. The graves here were planted
+with flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies; but a space
+fenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown with
+weeds and brambles: This space, he said, was for suicides; but to March
+it was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in consecrated
+ground where the stones had photographs of the dead on porcelain let into
+them. One was the picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been the
+wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed to her in the
+inscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of irony, the
+magnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house of the
+village. He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest the
+attention of the strangers, and he led them with less apparent
+hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the
+figure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject much
+celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to his
+party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and March
+tried to make him understand that they appreciated it. He knew that his
+wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great favor in
+showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of grief in the
+poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile of those who
+had taken their own lives and were parted in death from the more patient
+sufferers who had waited for God to take them. With a curious, unpainful
+self-analysis he noted that the older members of the party, who in the
+course of nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from its
+shows; but the young girl and the young man had not borne to look on
+them, and had quickly escaped from the place, somewhere outside the gate.
+Was it the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with death which
+nature brings to life at last, or was it merely the effect, or defect, of
+ossified sensibilities, of toughened nerves?
+
+"That is all?" he asked of the spectral sacristan.
+
+"That is all," the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin
+commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something
+handsome.
+
+"No, no," said Stoller, detecting his gesture. "Your money a'n't good."
+
+He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded
+them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so patient.
+In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have frankly
+said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and whispered
+a sad "Danke."
+
+Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they
+were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.
+
+"Oh, have I lost my glove in there?" said Mrs. March, looking at her
+hands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to.
+
+"Let me go and find it for you," Burnamy entreated.
+
+"Well," she consented, and she added, "If the sacristan has found it,
+give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow."
+
+As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, and
+her heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence: some
+men would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand. He
+came back directly, saying, "No, he didn't find it."
+
+She laughed, and held both gloves up. "No wonder! I had it all the time.
+Thank you ever so much."
+
+"How are we going to ride back?" asked Stoller.
+
+Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably. No one else
+spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, "Oh, I think the way
+we came, is best."
+
+"Did that absurd creature," she apostrophized her husband as soon as she
+got him alone after their arrival at Pupp's, "think I was going to let
+him drive back with Agatha?"
+
+"I wonder," said March, "if that's what Burnamy calls her now?"
+
+"I shall despise him if it isn't."
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII.
+
+Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supper which they had eaten
+in a silence natural with two men who have been off on a picnic together.
+He did not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in, and the young
+man did not sit down after putting his letters before him. He said, with
+an effort of forcing himself to speak at once, "I have looked through the
+papers, and there is something that I think you ought to see."
+
+"What do you mean?" said Stoller.
+
+Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certain
+articles were strongly circumscribed in ink. The papers varied, but their
+editorials did not, in purport at least. Some were grave and some were
+gay; one indignantly denounced; another affected an ironical
+bewilderment; the third simply had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller. They
+all, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad as
+the praise of municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with him
+gleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on the accession of the
+Honorable Jacob to their ranks.
+
+Stoller read the articles, one after another, with parted lips and
+gathering drops of perspiration on his upper lip, while Burnamy waited on
+foot. He flung the papers all down at last. "Why, they're a pack of
+fools! They don't know what they're talking about! I want city government
+carried on on business principles, by the people, for the people. I don't
+care what they say! I know I'm right, and I'm going ahead on this line if
+it takes all--" The note of defiance died out of his voice at the sight
+of Burnamy's pale face. "What's the matter with you?"
+
+"There's nothing the matter with me."
+
+"Do you mean to tell me it is"--he could not bring himself to use the
+word--"what they say?"
+
+"I suppose," said Burnamy, with a dry mouth, "it's what you may call
+municipal socialism."
+
+Stoller jumped from his seat. "And you knew it when you let me do it?"
+
+"I supposed you knew what you were about."
+
+"It's a lie!" Stoller advanced upon him, wildly, and Burnamy took a step
+backward.
+
+"Look out!" shouted Burnamy. "You never asked me anything about it. You
+told me what you wanted done, and I did it. How could I believe you were
+such an ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you were talking
+about?" He added, in cynical contempt, "But you needn't worry. You can
+make it right with the managers by spending a little more money than you
+expected to spend."
+
+Stoller started as if the word money reminded him of something. "I can
+take care of myself, young man. How much do I owe you?"
+
+"Nothing!" said Burnamy, with an effort for grandeur which failed him.
+
+The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffee at the Posthof, he
+came dragging himself toward them with such a haggard air that Mrs. March
+called, before he reached their table, "Why, Mr. Burnamy, what's the
+matter?"
+
+He smiled miserably. "Oh, I haven't slept very well. May I have my coffee
+with you? I want to tell you something; I want you to make me. But I
+can't speak till the coffee comes. Fraulein!" he besought a waitress
+going off with a tray near them. "Tell Lili, please, to bring me some
+coffee--only coffee."
+
+He tried to make some talk about the weather, which was rainy, and the
+Marches helped him, but the poor endeavor lagged wretchedly in the
+interval between the ordering and the coming of the coffee. "Ah, thank
+you, Lili," he said, with a humility which confirmed Mrs. March in her
+instant belief that he had been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and been
+rejected. After gulping his coffee, he turned to her: "I want to say
+good-by. I'm going away."
+
+"From Carlsbad?" asked Mrs. March with a keen distress.
+
+The water came into his eyes. "Don't, don't be good to me, Mrs. March! I
+can't stand it. But you won't, when you know."
+
+He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressing himself more
+and more to the intelligence of March, who let him go on without
+question, and laid a restraining hand upon his wife when he saw her about
+to prompt him. At the end, "That's all," he said, huskily, and then he
+seemed to be waiting for March's comment. He made none, and the young
+fellow was forced to ask, "Well, what do you think, Mr. March?"
+
+"What do you think yourself?"
+
+"I think, I behaved badly," said Burnamy, and a movement of protest from
+Mrs. March nerved him to add: "I could make out that it was not my
+business to tell him what he was doing; but I guess it was; I guess I
+ought to have stopped him, or given him a chance to stop himself. I
+suppose I might have done it, if he had treated me decently when I turned
+up a day late, here; or hadn't acted toward me as if I were a hand in his
+buggy-works that had come in an hour after the whistle sounded."
+
+He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone in Mrs. March's eyes;
+but her husband only looked the more serious.
+
+He asked gently, "Do you offer that fact as an explanation, or as a
+justification."
+
+Burnamy laughed forlornly. "It certainly wouldn't justify me. You might
+say that it made the case all the worse for me." March forbore to say,
+and Burnamy went on. "But I didn't suppose they would be onto him so
+quick, or perhaps at all. I thought--if I thought anything--that it would
+amuse some of the fellows in the office, who know about those things." He
+paused, and in March's continued silence he went on. "The chance was one
+in a hundred that anybody else would know where he had brought up."
+
+"But you let him take that chance," March suggested.
+
+"Yes, I let him take it. Oh, you know how mixed all these things are!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Of course I didn't think it out at the time. But I don't deny that I had
+a satisfaction in the notion of the hornets' nest he was poking his thick
+head into. It makes me sick, now, to think I had. I oughtn't to have let
+him; he was perfectly innocent in it. After the letter went, I wanted to
+tell him, but I couldn't; and then I took the chances too. I don't
+believe he could have ever got forward in politics; he's too honest--or
+he isn't dishonest in the right way. But that doesn't let me out. I don't
+defend myself! I did wrong; I behaved badly. But I've suffered for it.
+
+"I've had a foreboding all the time that it would come to the worst, and
+felt like a murderer with his victim when I've been alone with Stoller.
+When I could get away from him I could shake it off, and even believe
+that it hadn't happened. You can't think what a nightmare it's been!
+Well, I've ruined Stoller politically, but I've ruined myself, too. I've
+spoiled my own life; I've done what I can never explain to--to the people
+I want to have believe in me; I've got to steal away like the thief I am.
+Good-by!" He jumped to his feet, and put out his hand to March, and then
+to Mrs. March.
+
+"Why, you're not going away now!" she cried, in a daze.
+
+"Yes, I am. I shall leave Carlsbad on the eleven-o'clock train. I don't
+think I shall see you again." He clung to her hand. "If you see General
+Triscoe--I wish you'd tell them I couldn't--that I had to--that I was
+called away suddenly--Good-by!" He pressed her hand and dropped it, and
+mixed with the crowd. Then he came suddenly back, with a final appeal to
+March: "Should you--do you think I ought to see Stoller, and--and tell
+him I don't think I used him fairly?"
+
+"You ought to know--" March began.
+
+But before he could say more, Burnamy said, "You're right," and was off
+again.
+
+"Oh, how hard you were with him, my dear!" Mrs. March lamented.
+
+"I wish," he said, "if our boy ever went wrong that some one would be as
+true to him as I was to that poor fellow. He condemned himself; and he
+was right; he has behaved very badly."
+
+"You always overdo things so, when you act righteously!"
+
+"Now, Isabel!"
+
+"Oh, yes, I know what you will say. But I should have tempered justice
+with mercy."
+
+Her nerves tingled with pity for Burnamy, but in her heart she was glad
+that her husband had had strength to side with him against himself, and
+she was proud of the forbearance with which he had done it. In their
+earlier married life she would have confidently taken the initiative on
+all moral questions. She still believed that she was better fitted for
+their decision by her Puritan tradition and her New England birth, but
+once in a great crisis when it seemed a question of their living, she had
+weakened before it, and he, with no such advantages, had somehow met the
+issue with courage and conscience. She could not believe he did so by
+inspiration, but she had since let him take the brunt of all such issues
+and the responsibility. He made no reply, and she said: "I suppose you'll
+admit now there was always something peculiar in the poor boy's manner to
+Stoller."
+
+He would confess no more than that there ought to have been. "I don't see
+how he could stagger through with that load on his conscience. I'm not
+sure I like his being able to do so."
+
+She was silent in the misgiving which she shared with him, but she said:
+"I wonder how far it has gone with him and Miss Triscoe?"
+
+"Well, from his wanting you to give his message to the general in the
+plural--"
+
+"Don't laugh! It's wicked to laugh! It's heartless!" she cried,
+hysterically. "What will he do, poor fellow?"
+
+"I've an idea that he will light on his feet, somehow. But, at any rate,
+he's doing the right thing in going to own up to Stoller."
+
+"Oh, Stoller! I care nothing for Stoller! Don't speak to me of Stoller!"
+
+Burnamy fond the Bird of Prey, as he no longer had the heart to call him,
+walking up and down in his room like an eagle caught in a trap. He
+erected his crest fiercely enough, though, when the young fellow came in
+at his loudly shouted, "Herein!"
+
+"What do you want?" he demanded, brutally.
+
+This simplified Burnamy's task, while it made it more loathsome. He
+answered not much less brutally, "I want to tell you that I think I used
+you badly, that I let you betray yourself, that I feel myself to blame."
+He could have added, "Curse you!" without change of tone.
+
+Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lower teeth like a dog's
+when he snarls. "You want to get back!"
+
+"No," said Burnamy, mildly, and with increasing sadness as he spoke. "I
+don't want to get back. Nothing would induce me. I'm going away on the
+first train."
+
+"Well, you're not!" shouted Stoller. "You've lied me into this--"
+
+"Look out!" Burnamy turned white.
+
+"Didn't you lie me into it, if you let me fool myself, as you say?"
+Stoller pursued, and Burnamy felt himself weaken through his wrath.
+"Well, then, you got to lie me out of it. I been going over the damn
+thing, all night--and you can do it for me. I know you can do it," he
+gave way in a plea that was almost a whimper. "Look here! You see if you
+can't. I'll make it all right with you. I'll pay you whatever you think
+is right--whatever you say."
+
+"Oh!" said Burnamy, in otherwise unutterable disgust.
+
+"You kin," Stoller went on, breaking down more and more into his adopted
+Hoosier, in the stress of his anxiety. "I know you kin, Mr. Burnamy." He
+pushed the paper containing his letter into Burnamy's hands, and pointed
+out a succession of marked passages. "There! And here! And this place!
+Don't you see how you could make out that it meant something else, or was
+just ironical?" He went on to prove how the text might be given the
+complexion he wished, and Burnamy saw that he had really thought it not
+impossibly out. "I can't put it in writing as well as you; but I've done
+all the work, and all you've got to do is to give it some of them turns
+of yours. I'll cable the fellows in our office to say I've been
+misrepresented, and that my correction is coming. We'll get it into shape
+here together, and then I'll cable that. I don't care for the money. And
+I'll get our counting-room to see this scoundrel"--he picked up the paper
+that had had fun with him--"and fix him all right, so that he'll ask for
+a suspension of public opinion, and--You see, don't you?"
+
+The thing did appeal to Burnamy. If it could be done, it would enable him
+to make Stoller the reparation he longed to make him more than anything
+else in the world. But he heard himself saying, very gently, almost
+tenderly, "It might be done, Mr. Stoller. But I couldn't do it. It
+wouldn't be honest--for me."
+
+"Yah!" yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper into a wad and flung it
+into Burnamy's face. "Honest, you damn humbug! You let me in for this,
+when you knew I didn't mean it, and now you won't help me out because it
+a'n't honest! Get out of my room, and get out quick before I--"
+
+He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightened himself, with "If you
+dare!" He knew that he was right in refusing; but he knew that Stoller
+was right, too, and that he had not meant the logic of what he had said
+in his letter, and of what Burnamy had let him imply. He braved Stoller's
+onset, and he left his presence untouched, but feeling as little a moral
+hero as he well could.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII.
+
+General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day's
+pleasure, and in the self-reproach of a pessimist who has lost his point
+of view for a time, and has to work back to it. He began at the belated
+breakfast with his daughter when she said, after kissing him gayly, in
+the small two-seated bower where they breakfasted at their hotel when
+they did not go to the Posthof, "Didn't you have a nice time, yesterday,
+papa?"
+
+She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at him across the little
+iron table, as she lifted the pot to pour out his coffee.
+
+"What do you call a nice time?" he temporized, not quite able to resist
+her gayety.
+
+"Well, the kind of time I had."
+
+"Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass? I took cold in that
+old church, and the tea at that restaurant must have been brewed in a
+brass kettle. I suffered all night from it. And that ass from Illinois--"
+
+"Oh, poor papa! I couldn't go with Mr. Stoller alone, but I might have
+gone in the two-spanner with him and let you have Mr. or Mrs. March in
+the one-spanner."
+
+"I don't know. Their interest in each other isn't so interesting to other
+people as they seem to think."
+
+"Do you feel that way really, papa? Don't you like their being so much in
+love still?"
+
+"At their time of life? Thank you it's bad enough in young people."
+
+The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupied in pouring out
+her father's coffee.
+
+He tasted it, and then he drank pretty well all of it; but he said, as he
+put his cup down, "I don't know what they make this stuff of. I wish I
+had a cup of good, honest American coffee."
+
+"Oh, there's nothing like American food!" said his daughter, with so much
+conciliation that he looked up sharply.
+
+But whatever he might have been going to say was at least postponed by
+the approach of a serving-maid, who brought a note to his daughter. She
+blushed a little at sight of it, and then tore it open and read:
+
+"I am going away from Carlsbad, for a fault of my own which forbids me to
+look you in the face. If you wish to know the worst of me, ask Mrs.
+March. I have no heart to tell you."
+
+Agatha read these mystifying words of Burnamy's several times over in a
+silent absorption with them which left her father to look after himself,
+and he had poured out a second cup of coffee with his own hand, and was
+reaching for the bread beside her before she came slowly back to a sense
+of his presence.
+
+"Oh, excuse me, papa," she said, and she gave him the butter. "Here's a
+very strange letter from Mr. Burnamy, which I think you'd better see."
+She held the note across the table to him, and watched his face as he
+read it.
+
+After he had read it twice, he turned the sheet over, as people do with
+letters that puzzle them, in the vain hope of something explanatory on
+the back. Then he looked up and asked: "What do you suppose he's been
+doing?"
+
+"I don't believe he's been doing anything. It's something that Mr.
+Stoller's been doing to him."
+
+"I shouldn't infer that from his own words. What makes you think the
+trouble is with Stoller?"
+
+"He said--he said yesterday--something about being glad to be through
+with him, because he disliked him so much he was always afraid of
+wronging him. And that proves that now Mr. Stoller has made him believe
+that he's done wrong, and has worked upon him till he does believe it."
+
+"It proves nothing of the kind," said the general, recurring to the note.
+After reading it again, he looked keenly at her: "Am I to understand that
+you have given him the right to suppose you would want to know the
+worst--or the best of him?"
+
+The girl's eyes fell, and she pushed her knife against her plate. She
+began: "No--"
+
+"Then confound his impudence!" the general broke out. "What business has
+he to write to you at all about this?"
+
+"Because he couldn't go away without it!" she returned; and she met her
+father's eye courageously. "He had a right to think we were his friends;
+and if he has done wrong, or is in disgrace any way, isn't it manly of
+him to wish to tell us first himself?"
+
+Her father could not say that it was not. But he could and did say, very
+sceptically: "Stuff! Now, see here, Agatha: what are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to see Mrs. March, and then--"
+
+"You mustn't do anything of the kind, my dear," said her father, gently.
+"You've no right to give yourself away to that romantic old goose." He
+put up his hand to interrupt her protest. "This thing has got to be gone
+to the bottom of. But you're not to do it. I will see March myself. We
+must consider your dignity in this matter--and mine. And you may as well
+understand that I'm not going to have any nonsense. It's got to be
+managed so that it can't be supposed we're anxious about it, one way or
+the other, or that he was authorized to write to you in this way--"
+
+"No, no! He oughtn't to have done so. He was to blame. He couldn't have
+written to you, though, papa--"
+
+"Well, I don't know why. But that's no reason why we should let it be
+understood that he has written to you. I will see March; and I will
+manage to see his wife, too. I shall probably find them in the
+reading-room at Pupp's, and--"
+
+The Marches were in fact just coming in from their breakfast at the
+Posthof, and he met them at the door of Pupp's, where they all sat down
+on one of the iron settees of the piazza, and began to ask one another
+questions of their minds about the pleasure of the day before, and to
+beat about the bush where Burnamy lurked in their common consciousness.
+
+Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting him. "You knew," she
+said, "that Mr. Burnamy had left us?"
+
+"Left! Why?" asked the general.
+
+She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this she found it best to
+trust her husband's poverty of invention. She looked at him, and he
+answered for her with a promptness that made her quake at first, but
+finally seemed the only thing, if not the best thing: "He's had some
+trouble with Stoller." He went on to tell the general just what the
+trouble was.
+
+At the end the general grunted as from an uncertain mind. "You think he's
+behaved badly."
+
+"I think he's behaved foolishly--youthfully. But I can understand how
+strongly he was tempted. He could say that he was not authorized to stop
+Stoller in his mad career."
+
+At this Mrs. March put her hand through her husband's arm.
+
+"I'm not so sure about that," said the general.
+
+March added: "Since I saw him this morning, I've heard something that
+disposes me to look at his performance in a friendlier light. It's
+something that Stoller told me himself; to heighten my sense of Burnamy's
+wickedness. He seems to have felt that I ought to know what a serpent I
+was cherishing in my bosom," and he gave Triscoe the facts of Burnamy's
+injurious refusal to help Stoller put a false complexion on the opinions
+he had allowed him ignorantly to express.
+
+The general grunted again. "Of course he had to refuse, and he has
+behaved like a gentleman so far. But that doesn't justify him in having
+let Stoller get himself into the scrape."
+
+"No," said March. "It's a tough nut for the casuist to try his tooth on.
+And I must say I feel sorry for Stoller."
+
+Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm. "I don't, one bit. He was
+thoroughly selfish from first to last. He has got just what he deserved."
+
+"Ah, very likely," said her husband. "The question is about Burnamy's
+part in giving him his deserts; he had to leave him to them, of course."
+
+The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter of his eye-glasses,
+and left the subject as of no concern to him. "I believe," he said,
+rising, "I'll have a look at some of your papers," and he went into the
+reading-room.
+
+"Now," said Mrs. March, "he will go home and poison that poor girl's
+mind. And, you will have yourself to thank for prejudicing him against
+Burnamy."
+
+"Then why didn't you do it yourself, my dear?" he teased; but he was
+really too sorry for the whole affair, which he nevertheless enjoyed as
+an ethical problem.
+
+The general looked so little at the papers that before March went off for
+his morning walk he saw him come out of the reading-room and take his way
+down the Alte Wiese. He went directly back to his daughter, and reported
+Burnamy's behavior with entire exactness. He dwelt upon his making the
+best of a bad business in refusing to help Stoller out of it,
+dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it was a bad
+business.
+
+"Now, you know all about it," he said at the end, "and I leave the whole
+thing to you. If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March. I don't know but I'd
+rather you'd satisfy yourself--"
+
+"I will not see Mrs. March. Do you think I would go back of you in that
+way? I am satisfied now."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX.
+
+Instead of Burnamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now breakfasted with the
+Marches at the Posthof, and the boy was with March throughout the day a
+good deal. He rectified his impressions of life in Carlsbad by March's
+greater wisdom and experience, and did his best to anticipate his
+opinions and conform to his conclusions. This was not easy, for sometimes
+he could not conceal from himself, that March's opinions were whimsical,
+and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not always conceal from March
+that he was matching them with Kenby's on some points, and suffering from
+their divergence. He came to join the sage in his early visit to the
+springs, and they walked up and down talking; and they went off together
+on long strolls in which Rose was proud to bear him company. He was
+patient of the absences from which he was often answered, and he learned
+to distinguish between the earnest and the irony of which March's replies
+seemed to be mixed. He examined him upon many features of German
+civilization, but chiefly upon the treatment of women in it; and upon
+this his philosopher was less satisfactory than he could have wished him
+to be. He tried to excuse his trifling as an escape from the painful
+stress of questions which he found so afflicting himself; but in the
+matter of the woman-and-dog teams, this was not easy. March owned that
+the notion of their being yokemates was shocking; but he urged that it
+was a stage of evolution, and a distinct advance upon the time when women
+dragged the carts without the help of the dogs; and that the time might
+not be far distant when the dogs would drag the carts without the help of
+the women.
+
+Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he was
+troubled by his friend's apparent acceptance of unjust things on their
+picturesque side. Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of
+the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his
+mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by
+the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were
+reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch
+the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades. "Ah,
+delightful!" March took off his hat as if to salute the pleasant sight.
+
+"But don't you think, Mr. March," the boy ventured, "that the man had
+better be cutting the wheat, and letting the women watch the cows?"
+
+"Well, I don't know. There are more of them; and he wouldn't be half so
+graceful as they are, with that flow of their garments, and the sway of
+their aching backs." The boy smiled sadly, and March put his hand on his
+shoulder as they walked on. "You find a lot of things in Europe that need
+putting right, don't you, Rose?"
+
+"Yes; I know it's silly."
+
+"Well, I'm not sure. But I'm afraid it's useless. You see, these old
+customs go such a way back, and are so grounded in conditions. We think
+they might be changed, if those who rule could be got to see how cruel
+and ugly they are; but probably they couldn't. I'm afraid that the
+Emperor of Austria himself couldn't change them, in his sovereign
+plenitude of power. The Emperor is only an old custom too, and he's as
+much grounded in the conditions as any." This was the serious way Rose
+felt that March ought always to talk; and he was too much grieved to
+laugh when he went on. "The women have so much of the hard work to do,
+over here, because the emperors need the men for their armies. They
+couldn't let their men cut wheat unless it was for their officers'
+horses, in the field of some peasant whom it would ruin."
+
+If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to work these paradoxes for
+the boy's confusion. She said the child adored him, and it was a
+sacrilege to play with his veneration. She always interfered to save him,
+but with so little logic though so much justice that Rose suffered a
+humiliation from her championship, and was obliged from a sense of
+self-respect to side with the mocker. She understood this, and
+magnanimously urged it as another reason why her husband should not
+trifle with Rose's ideal of him; to make his mother laugh at him was
+wicked.
+
+"Oh, I'm not his only ideal," March protested. "He adores Kenby too, and
+every now and then he brings me to book with a text from Kenby's gospel."
+
+Mrs. March caught her breath. "Kenby! Do you really think, then, that
+she--"
+
+"Oh, hold on, now! It isn't a question of Mrs. Adding; and I don't say
+Rose had an eye on poor old Kenby as a step-father. I merely want you to
+understand that I'm the object of a divided worship, and that when I'm
+off duty as an ideal I don't see why I shouldn't have the fun of making
+Mrs. Adding laugh. You can't pretend she isn't wrapped up in the boy.
+You've said that yourself."
+
+"Yes, she's wrapped up in him; she'd give her life for him; but she is so
+light. I didn't suppose she was so light; but it's borne in upon me more
+and more."
+
+They were constantly seeing Rose and his mother, in the sort of abeyance
+the Triscoes had fallen into. One afternoon the Addings came to Mrs.
+March's room to look from her windows at a parade of bicyclers' clubs
+from the neighboring towns. The spectacle prospered through its first
+half-hour, with the charm which German sentiment and ingenuity, are able
+to lend even a bicycle parade. The wheelmen and wheelwomen filed by on
+machines wreathed with flowers and ribbons, and decked with streaming
+banners. Here and there one sat under a moving arch of blossoms, or in a
+bower of leaves and petals, and they were all gay with their club
+costumes and insignia. In the height of the display a sudden mountain
+shower gathered and broke upon them. They braved it till it became a
+drenching down-pour; then they leaped from their machines and fled to any
+shelter they could find, under trees and in doorways. The men used their
+greater agility to get the best places, and kept them; the women made no
+appeal for them by word or look, but took the rain in the open as if they
+expected nothing else.
+
+Rose watched the scene with a silent intensity which March interpreted.
+"There's your chance, Rose. Why don't you go down and rebuke those
+fellows?"
+
+Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and Mrs. March promptly
+attacked her husband in his behalf. "Why don't you go and rebuke them
+yourself?"
+
+"Well, for one thing, there isn't any conversation in my phrase-book
+Between an indignant American Herr and a Party of German Wheelmen who
+have taken Shelter from the Rain and are keeping the Wheelwomen out in
+the Wet." Mrs. Adding shrieked her delight, and he was flattered into
+going on. "For another thing, I think it's very well for you ladies to
+realize from an object-lesson of this sort what spoiled children of our
+civilization you are. It ought to make you grateful for your privileges."
+
+"There is something in that," Mrs. Adding joyfully consented.
+
+"Oh, there is no civilization but ours," said Mrs. March, in a burst of
+vindictive patriotism. "I am more and more convinced of it the longer I
+stay in Europe."
+
+"Perhaps that's why we like to stay so long in Europe; it strengthens us
+in the conviction that America is the only civilized country in the
+world," said March.
+
+The shower passed as quickly as it had gathered, and the band which it
+had silenced for a moment burst forth again in the music which fills the
+Carlsbad day from dawn till dusk. Just now, it began to play a pot pourri
+of American airs; at the end some unseen Americans under the trees below
+clapped and cheered.
+
+"That was opportune of the band," said March. "It must have been a
+telepathic impulse from our patriotism in the director. But a pot pourri
+of American airs is like that tablet dedicating the American Park up here
+on the Schlossberg, which is signed by six Jews and one Irishman. The
+only thing in this medley that's the least characteristic or original is
+Dixie; and I'm glad the South has brought us back into the Union."
+
+"You don't know one note from another, my dear," said his wife.
+
+"I know the 'Washington Post.'"
+
+"And don't you call that American?"
+
+"Yes, if Sousa is an American name; I should have thought it was
+Portuguese."
+
+"Now that sounds a little too much like General Triscoe's pessimism,"
+said Mrs. March; and she added: "But whether we have any national
+melodies or not, we don't poke women out in the rain and keep them
+soaking!"
+
+"No, we certainly don't," he assented, with such a well-studied effect of
+yielding to superior logic that Mrs. Adding screamed for joy.
+
+The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, "I hope Rose isn't
+acting on my suggestion?"
+
+"I hate to have you tease him, dearest," his wife interposed.
+
+"Oh, no," the mother said, laughing still, but with a note of tenderness
+in her laugh, which dropped at last to a sigh. "He's too much afraid of
+lese-majesty, for that. But I dare say he couldn't stand the sight. He's
+queer."
+
+"He's beautiful!" said Mrs. March.
+
+"He's good," the mother admitted. "As good as the day's long. He's never
+given me a moment's trouble--but he troubles me. If you can understand!"
+
+"Oh, I do understand!" Mrs. March returned. "By his innocence, you mean.
+That is the worst of children. Their innocence breaks our hearts and
+makes us feel ourselves such dreadful old things."
+
+"His innocence, yes," pursued Mrs. Adding, "and his ideals." She began to
+laugh again. "He may have gone off for a season of meditation and prayer
+over the misbehavior of these bicyclers. His mind is turning that way a
+good deal lately. It's only fair to tell you, Mr. March, that he seems to
+be giving up his notion of being an editor. You mustn't be disappointed."
+
+"I shall be sorry," said the editor. "But now that you mention it, I
+think I have noticed that Rose seems rather more indifferent to
+periodical literature. I supposed he might simply have exhausted his
+questions--or my answers."
+
+"No; it goes deeper than that. I think it's Europe that's turned his mind
+in the direction of reform. At any rate he thinks now he will be a
+reformer."
+
+"Really! What kind of one? Not religious, I hope?"
+
+"No. His reform has a religious basis, but its objects are social. I
+don't make it out, exactly; but I shall, as soon as Rose does. He tells
+me everything, and sometimes I don't feel equal to it, spiritually or
+even intellectually."
+
+"Don't laugh at him, Mrs. Adding!" Mrs. March entreated.
+
+"Oh, he doesn't mind my laughing," said the mother, gayly. Rose came
+shyly back into the room, and she said, "Well, did you rebuke those bad
+bicyclers?" and she laughed again.
+
+"They're only a custom, too, Rose,", said March, tenderly. "Like the man
+resting while the women worked, and the Emperor, and all the rest of it."
+
+"Oh, yes, I know," the boy returned.
+
+"They ride modern machines, but they live in the tenth century. That's
+what we're always forgetting when we come to Europe and see these
+barbarians enjoying all our up-to-date improvements."
+
+"There, doesn't that console you?" asked his mother, and she took him away
+with her, laughing back from the door. "I don't believe it does, a bit!"
+
+"I don't believe she understands the child," said Mrs. March. "She is
+very light, don't you think? I don't know, after all, whether it wouldn't
+be a good thing for her to marry Kenby. She is very easygoing, and she
+will be sure to marry somebody."
+
+She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, and he said, "You might put
+these ideas to her."
+
+
+
+
+XL.
+
+With the passage of the days and weeks, the strange faces which had
+familiarized themselves at the springs disappeared; even some of those
+which had become the faces of acquaintance began to go. In the
+diminishing crowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen; the
+sad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemed never to have quite got
+his bearings after his error with General Triscoe, seldom showed itself.
+The Triscoes themselves kept out of the Marches' way, or they fancied so;
+Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their daily encounter.
+
+It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-August, but at Carlsbad
+the sun was so late getting up over the hills that as people went to
+their breakfasts at the cafes up the valley of the Tepl they found him
+looking very obliquely into it at eight o'clock in the morning. The
+yellow leaves were thicker about the feet of the trees, and the grass was
+silvery gray with the belated dews. The breakfasters were fewer than they
+had been, and there were more little barefooted boys and girls with cups
+of red raspberries which they offered to the passers with cries of
+"Himbeeren! Himbeeren!" plaintive as the notes of birds left songless by
+the receding summer.
+
+March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and Mrs. Adding bought
+recklessly of it, and ate it under his eyes with their coffee and bread,
+pouring over it pots of clotted cream that the 'schone' Lili brought
+them. Rose pretended an indifference to it, which his mother betrayed was
+a sacrifice in behalf of March's inability.
+
+Lili's delays in coming to be paid had been such that the Marches now
+tried to pay her when she brought their breakfast, but they sometimes
+forgot, and then they caught her whenever she came near them. In this
+event she liked to coquet with their impatience; she would lean against
+their table, and say: "Oh, no. You stay a little. It is so nice." One day
+after such an entreaty, she said, "The queen is here, this morning."
+
+Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes. "The queen!"
+
+"Yes; the young lady. Mr. Burnamy was saying she was a queen. She is
+there with her father." She nodded in the direction of a distant corner,
+and the Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and the general. "She is
+not seeming so gayly as she was being."
+
+March smiled. "We are none of us so gayly as we were being, Lili. The
+summer is going."
+
+"But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?" the girl asked, resting
+her tray on the corner of the table.
+
+"No, I'm afraid he won't," March returned sadly.
+
+"He was very good. He was paying the proprietor for the dishes that
+Augusta did break when she was falling down. He was paying before he went
+away, when he was knowing that the proprietor would make Augusta to pay."
+
+"Ah!" said March, and his wife said, "That was like him!" and she eagerly
+explained to Mrs. Adding how good and great Burnamy had been in this
+characteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to add some
+pathetic facts about Augusta's poverty and gratitude. "I think Miss
+Triscoe ought to know it. There goes the wretch, now!" she broke off.
+"Don't look at him!" She set her husband the example of averting his face
+from the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middle aisle of the
+grove, and looking to the right and left for a vacant table. "Ugh! I hope
+he won't be able to find a single place."
+
+Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, while Rose watched March's
+face with grave sympathy. "He certainly doesn't deserve one. Don't let us
+keep you from offering Miss Triscoe any consolation you can." They got
+up, and the boy gathered up the gloves, umbrella, and handkerchief which
+the ladies let drop from their laps.
+
+"Have you been telling?" March asked his wife.
+
+"Have I told you anything?" she demanded of Mrs. Adding in turn.
+"Anything that you didn't as good as know, already?"
+
+"Not a syllable!" Mrs. Adding replied in high delight. "Come, Rose!"
+
+"Well, I suppose there's no use saying anything," said March, after she
+left them.
+
+"She had guessed everything, without my telling her," said his wife.
+
+"About Stoller?"
+
+"Well-no. I did tell her that part, but that was nothing. It was about
+Burnamy and Agatha that she knew. She saw it from the first."
+
+"I should have thought she would have enough to do to look after poor old
+Kenby."
+
+"I'm not sure, after all, that she cares for him. If she doesn't, she
+oughtn't to let him write to her. Aren't you going over to speak to the
+Triscoes?"
+
+"No, certainly not. I'm going back to the hotel. There ought to be some
+steamer letters this morning. Here we are, worrying about these strangers
+all the time, and we never give a thought to our own children on the
+other side of the ocean."
+
+"I worry about them, too," said the mother, fondly. "Though there is
+nothing to worry about," she added.
+
+"It's our duty to worry," he insisted.
+
+At the hotel the portier gave them four letters. There was one from each
+of their children: one very buoyant, not to say boisterous, from the
+daughter, celebrating her happiness in her husband, and the loveliness of
+Chicago as a summer city ("You would think she was born out there!"
+sighed her mother); and one from the son, boasting his well-being in
+spite of the heat they were having ("And just think how cool it is here!"
+his mother upbraided herself), and the prosperity of 'Every Other Week'.
+There was a line from Fulkerson, praising the boy's editorial instinct,
+and ironically proposing March's resignation in his favor.
+
+"I do believe we could stay all winter, just as well as not," said Mrs.
+March, proudly. "What does 'Burnamy say?"
+
+"How do you know it's from him?"
+
+"Because you've been keeping your hand on it! Give it here."
+
+"When I've read it."
+
+The letter was dated at Ansbach, in Germany, and dealt, except for some
+messages of affection to Mrs. March, with a scheme for a paper which
+Burnamy wished to write on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought he could use
+it in 'Every Other Week'. He had come upon a book about that hapless
+foundling in Nuremberg, and after looking up all his traces there he had
+gone on to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his death so pathetically.
+Burnamy said he could not give any notion of the enchantment of
+Nuremberg; but he besought March, if he was going to the Tyrol for his
+after-cure, not to fail staying a day or so in the wonderful place. He
+thought March would enjoy Ansbach too, in its way.
+
+"And, not a word--not a syllable--about Miss Triscoe!" cried Mrs. March.
+"Shall you take his paper?"
+
+"It would be serving him right, if I refused it, wouldn't it?"
+
+They never knew what it cost Burnamy to keep her name out of his letter,
+or by what an effort of the will he forbade himself even to tell of his
+parting interview with Stoller. He had recovered from his remorse for
+letting Stoller give himself away; he was still sorry for that, but he no
+longer suffered; yet he had not reached the psychological moment when he
+could celebrate his final virtue in the matter. He was glad he had been
+able to hold out against the temptation to retrieve himself by another
+wrong; but he was humbly glad, and he felt that until happier chance
+brought him and his friends together he must leave them to their merciful
+conjectures. He was young, and he took the chance, with an aching heart.
+If he had been older, he might not have taken it.
+
+
+
+
+XLI.
+
+The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently, in late August, in the
+good weather which is pretty sure to fall then, if ever in the Austrian
+summer. For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had been building a
+scaffolding for the illumination in the woods on a height overlooking the
+town, and making unobtrusive preparations at points within it.
+
+The day was important as the last of March's cure, and its pleasures
+began for him by a renewal of his acquaintance in its first kindliness
+with the Eltwins. He had met them so seldom that at one time he thought
+they must have gone away, but now after his first cup he saw the quiet,
+sad old pair, sitting together on a bench in the Stadt Park, and he asked
+leave to sit down with them till it was time for the next. Eltwin said
+that this was their last day, too; and explained that his wife always
+came with him to the springs, while he took the waters.
+
+"Well," he apologized, "we're all that's left, and I suppose we like to
+keep together." He paused, and at the look in March's face he suddenly
+went on. "I haven't been well for three or four years; but I always
+fought against coming out here, when the doctors wanted me to. I said I
+couldn't leave home; and, I don't suppose I ever should. But my home left
+me."
+
+As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, and March saw her steal
+her withered hand into his.
+
+"We'd had a large family, but they'd all died off, with one thing or
+another, and here in the spring we lost our last daughter. Seemed
+perfectly well, and all at once she died; heart-failure, they called it.
+It broke me up, and mother, here, got at me to go. And so we're here."
+His voice trembled; and his eyes softened; then they flashed up, and
+March heard him add, in a tone that astonished him less when he looked
+round and saw General Triscoe advancing toward them, "I don't know what
+it is always makes me want to kick that man."
+
+The general lifted his hat to their group, and hoped that Mrs. Eltwin was
+well, and Major Eltwin better. He did not notice their replies, but said
+to March, "The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp's readingroom, to go
+with them to the Posthof for breakfast."
+
+"Aren't you going, too?" asked March.
+
+"No, thank you," said the general, as if it were much finer not; "I shall
+breakfast at our pension." He strolled off with the air of a man who has
+done more than his duty.
+
+"I don't suppose I ought to feel that way," said Eltwin, with a remorse
+which March suspected a reproachful pressure of his wife's hand had
+prompted in him. "I reckon he means well."
+
+"Well, I don't know," March said, with a candor he could not wholly
+excuse.
+
+On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wife for her interest in
+the romantic woes of her lovers, in a world where there was such real
+pathos as these poor old people's; but in the company of Miss Triscoe he
+could not give himself this pleasure. He tried to amuse her on the way
+from Pupp's, with the doubt he always felt in passing the Cafe
+Sans-Souci, whether he should live to reach the Posthof where he meant to
+breakfast. She said, "Poor Mr. March!" and laughed inattentively; when he
+went on to philosophize the commonness of the sparse company always
+observable at the Sans-Souci as a just effect of its Laodicean situation
+between Pupp's and the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and his wife
+frowned at him.
+
+The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms
+for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the
+rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a
+poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the
+various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like
+sere foliage as it moved.
+
+At the Posthof the 'schone' Lili alone was as gay, as in the prime of
+July. She played archly about the guests she welcomed to a table in a
+sunny spot in the gallery. "You are tired of Carlsbad?" she said
+caressingly to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before her.
+
+"Not of the Posthof," said the girl, listlessly.
+
+"Posthof, and very little Lili?" She showed, with one forefinger on
+another, how very little she was.
+
+Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to Mrs. March, with
+abrupt seriousness, "Augusta was finding a handkerchief under the table,
+and she was washing it and ironing it before she did bring it. I have
+scolded her, and I have made her give it to me."
+
+She took from under her apron a man's handkerchief, which she offered to
+Mrs. March. It bore, as she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B.
+But, "Whose can it be?" they asked each other.
+
+"Why, Burnamy's," said March; and Lili's eyes danced. "Give it here!"
+
+His wife caught it farther away. "No, I'm going to see whose it is,
+first; if it's his, I'll send it to him myself."
+
+She tried to put it into the pocket which was not in her dress by sliding
+it down her lap; then she handed it to the girl, who took it with a
+careless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.
+
+Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once in
+Carlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off and
+was holding them in her lap. They fell to the ground when she now rose
+from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up. Miss Triscoe was too
+quick for her.
+
+"Oh, let me carry them for you!" she entreated, and after a tender
+struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearing
+them through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist. She was not the
+kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not the
+kind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and let
+March go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in the
+Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath.
+
+Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited
+the girl's advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting it
+in every case, with Miss Triscoe's eager approval. In the Stadt Park they
+sat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite feints of
+recovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased effusion.
+
+When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been
+sitting, they seemed to be followed. They looked round and saw no one
+more alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim in
+spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hat
+brims are. He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, "Something left
+lying," passed on.
+
+They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at their
+skirts to see if there was anything amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe
+perceived her hands empty of Mrs. March's sandals and of Burnamy's
+handkerchief.
+
+"Oh, I put it in one of the toes!" she lamented, and she fled back to
+their bench, alarming in her course the fears of a gendarme for the
+public security, and putting a baby in its nurse's arms into such doubts
+of its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry. She laughed
+breathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March. "That comes of having no pocket;
+I didn't suppose I could forget your sandals, Mrs. March! Wasn't it
+absurd?"
+
+"It's one of those things," Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards,
+"that they can always laugh over together."
+
+"They? And what about Burnamy's behavior to Stoller?"
+
+"Oh, I don't call that anything but what will come right. Of course he
+can make it up to him somehow. And I regard his refusal to do wrong when
+Stoller wanted him to as quite wiping out the first offence."
+
+"Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behind you. My only hope is
+that when we leave here tomorrow, her pessimistic papa's poison will
+neutralize yours somehow."
+
+
+
+
+XLII.
+
+One of the pleasantest incidents of March's sojourn in Carlsbad was his
+introduction to the manager of the municipal theatre by a common friend
+who explained the editor in such terms to the manager that he conceived
+of him as a brother artist. This led to much bowing and smiling from the
+manager when the Marches met him in the street, or in their frequent
+visits to the theatre, with which March felt that it might well have
+ended, and still been far beyond his desert. He had not thought of going
+to the opera on the Emperor's birthnight, but after dinner a box came
+from the manager, and Mrs. March agreed with him that they could not in
+decency accept so great a favor. At the same time she argued that they
+could not in decency refuse it, and that to show their sense of the
+pleasure done them, they must adorn their box with all the beauty and
+distinction possible; in other words, she said they must ask Miss Triscoe
+and her father.
+
+"And why not Major Eltwin and his wife? Or Mrs. Adding and Rose?"
+
+She begged him, simply in his own interest, not to be foolish; and they
+went early, so as to be in their box when their guests came. The foyer of
+the theatre was banked with flowers, and against a curtain of evergreens
+stood a high-pedestalled bust of the paternal Caesar, with whose
+side-whiskers a laurel crown comported itself as well as it could. At the
+foot of the grand staircase leading to the boxes the manager stood in
+evening dress, receiving his friends and their felicitations upon the
+honor which the theatre was sure to do itself on an occasion so august.
+The Marches were so cordial in their prophecies that the manager yielded
+to an artist's impulse and begged his fellow-artist to do him the
+pleasure of coming behind the scenes between the acts of the opera; he
+bowed a heart-felt regret to Mrs. March that he could not make the
+invitation include her, and hoped that she would not be too lonely while
+her husband was gone.
+
+She explained that they had asked friends, and she should not be alone,
+and then he entreated March to bring any gentleman who was his guest with
+him. On the way up to their box, she pressed his arm as she used in their
+young married days, and asked him if it was not perfect. "I wish we were
+going to have it all to ourselves; no one else can appreciate the whole
+situation. Do you think we have made a mistake in having the Triscoes?"
+
+"We!" he retorted. "Oh, that's good! I'm going to shirk him, when it
+comes to going behind the scenes."
+
+"No, no, dearest," she entreated. "Snubbing will only make it worse. We
+must stand it to the bitter end, now."
+
+The curtain rose upon another laurelled bust of the Emperor, with a
+chorus of men formed on either side, who broke into the grave and noble
+strains of the Austrian Hymn, while every one stood. Then the curtain
+fell again, and in the interval before the opera could begin, General
+Triscoe and his daughter came in.
+
+Mrs. March took the splendor in which the girl appeared as a tribute to
+her hospitality. She had hitherto been a little disappointed of the open
+homage to American girlhood which her readings of international romance
+had taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patriotic vanity feasted
+full. Fat highhotes of her own sex levelled their lorgnettes at Miss
+Triscoe all around the horseshoe, with critical glances which fell
+blunted from her complexion and costume; the house was brilliant with the
+military uniforms, which we have not yet to mingle with our unrivalled
+millinery, and the ardent gaze of the young officers dwelt on the perfect
+mould of her girlish arms and neck, and the winning lines of her face.
+The girl's eyes shone with a joyful excitement, and her little head,
+defined by its dark hair, trembled as she slowly turned it from side to
+side, after she removed the airy scarf which had covered it. Her father,
+in evening dress, looked the Third Emperor complaisant to a civil
+occasion, and took a chair in the front of the box without resistance;
+and the ladies disputed which should yield the best place to the other,
+till Miss Triscoe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for the first act at
+least.
+
+The piece had to be cut a good deal to give people time for the
+illuminations afterwards; but as it was it gave scope to the actress who,
+'als Gast' from a Viennese theatre, was the chief figure in it. She
+merited the distinction by the art which still lingered, deeply embedded
+in her massive balk, but never wholly obscured.
+
+"That is grand, isn't it?" said March, following one of the tremendous
+strokes by which she overcame her physical disadvantages. "It's fine to
+see how her art can undo, for one splendid instant, the work of all those
+steins of beer, those illimitable licks of sausage, those boundless
+fields of cabbage. But it's rather pathetic."
+
+"It's disgusting," said his wife; and at this General Triscoe, who had
+been watching the actress through his lorgnette, said, as if his
+contrary-mindedness were irresistibly invoked:
+
+"Well, I don't know. It's amusing. Do you suppose we shall see her when
+we go behind, March?"
+
+He still professed a desire to do so when the curtain fell, and they
+hurried to the rear door of the theatre. It was slightly ajar, and they
+pulled it wide open, with the eagerness of their age and nation, and
+began to mount the stairs leading up from it between rows of painted
+dancing-girls, who had come out for a breath of air, and who pressed
+themselves against the walls to make room for the intruders. With their
+rouged faces, and the stare of their glassy eyes intensified by the
+coloring of their brows and lashes, they were like painted statues, as
+they stood there with their crimsoned lips parted in astonished smiles.
+
+"This is rather weird," said March, faltering at the sight. "I wonder if
+we might ask these young ladies where to go?" General Triscoe made no
+answer, and was apparently no more prepared than himself to accost the
+files of danseuses, when they were themselves accosted by an angry voice
+from the head of the stairs with a demand for their business. The voice
+belonged to a gendarme, who descended toward them and seemed as deeply
+scandalized at their appearance as they could have been at that of the
+young ladies.
+
+March explained, in his ineffective German, with every effect of
+improbability, that they were there by appointment of the manager, and
+wished to find his room.
+
+The gendarme would not or could not make anything out of it. He pressed
+down upon them, and laying a rude hand on a shoulder of either, began to
+force them back to the door. The mild nature of the editor might have
+yielded to his violence, but the martial spirit of General Triscoe was
+roused. He shrugged the gendarme's hand from his shoulder, and with a
+voice as furious as his own required him, in English, to say what the
+devil he meant. The gendarme rejoined with equal heat in German; the
+general's tone rose in anger; the dancing-girls emitted some little
+shrieks of alarm, and fled noisily up the stairs. From time to time March
+interposed with a word of the German which had mostly deserted him in his
+hour of need; but if it had been a flow of intelligible expostulation, it
+would have had no effect upon the disputants. They grew more outrageous,
+till the manager himself, appeared at the head of the stairs, and
+extended an arresting hand over the hubbub. As soon as the situation
+clarified itself he hurried down to his visitors with a polite roar of
+apology and rescued them from the gendarme, and led them up to his room
+and forced them into arm-chairs with a rapidity of reparation which did
+not exhaust itself till he had entreated them with every circumstance of
+civility to excuse an incident so mortifying to him. But with all his
+haste he lost so much time in this that he had little left to show them
+through the theatre, and their presentation to the prima donna was
+reduced to the obeisances with which they met and parted as she went upon
+the stage at the lifting of the curtain. In the lack of a common language
+this was perhaps as well as a longer interview; and nothing could have
+been more honorable than their dismissal at the hands of the gendarme who
+had received them so stormily. He opened the door for them, and stood
+with his fingers to his cap saluting, in the effect of being a whole file
+of grenadiers.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII.
+
+At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of the box where he had been
+sitting with the ladies during the absence of the gentlemen. He had
+knocked at the door almost as soon as they disappeared, and if he did not
+fully share the consternation which his presence caused, he looked so
+frightened that Mrs. March reserved the censure which the sight of him
+inspired, and in default of other inspiration treated his coming simply
+as a surprise. She shook hands with him, and then she asked him to sit
+down, and listened to his explanation that he had come back to Carlsbad
+to write up the birthnight festivities, on an order from the Paris-New
+York Chronicle; that he had seen them in the box and had ventured to took
+in. He was pale, and so discomposed that the heart of justice was
+softened more and more in Mrs. March's breast, and she left him to the
+talk that sprang up, by an admirable effect of tact in the young lady,
+between him and Miss Triscoe.
+
+After all, she decided, there was nothing criminal in his being in
+Carlsbad, and possibly in the last analysis there was nothing so very
+wicked in his being in her box. One might say that it was not very nice
+of him after he had gone away under such a cloud; but on the other hand
+it was nice, though in a different way, if he longed so much to see Miss
+Triscoe that he could not help coming. It was altogether in his favor
+that he was so agitated, though he was momently becoming less agitated;
+the young people were beginning to laugh at the notion of Mr. March and
+General Triscoe going behind the scenes. Burnamy said he envied them the
+chance; and added, not very relevantly, that he had come from Baireuth,
+where he had seen the last of the Wagner performances. He said he was
+going back to Baireuth, but not to Ansbach again, where he had finished
+looking up that Kaspar Hauser business. He seemed to think Mrs. March
+would know about it, and she could not help saying; Oh, yes, Mr. March
+was so much interested. She wondered if she ought to tell him about his
+handkerchief; but she remembered in time that she had left it in Miss
+Triscoe's keeping. She wondered if the girl realized how handsome he was.
+He was extremely handsome, in his black evening dress, with his Tuxedo,
+and the pallor of his face repeated in his expanse of shirt front.
+
+At the bell for the rising of the curtain he rose too, and took their
+offered hands. In offering hers Mrs. March asked if he would not stay and
+speak with Mr. March and the general; and now for the first time he
+recognized anything clandestine in his visit. He laughed nervously, and
+said, "No, thank you!" and shut himself out.
+
+"We must tell them," said Mrs. March, rather interrogatively, and she was
+glad that the girl answered with a note of indignation.
+
+"Why, certainly, Mrs. March."
+
+They could not tell them at once, for the second act had begun when March
+and the general came back; and after the opera was over and they got out
+into the crowded street there was no chance, for the general was obliged
+to offer his arm to Mrs. March, while her husband followed with his
+daughter.
+
+The facades of the theatre and of the hotels were outlined with thickly
+set little lamps, which beaded the arches of the bridges spanning the
+Tepl, and lighted the casements and portals of the shops. High above all,
+against the curtain of black woodland on the mountain where its skeleton
+had been growing for days, glittered the colossal effigy of the
+doubleheaded eagle of Austria, crowned with the tiara of the Holy Roman
+Empire; in the reflected splendor of its myriad lamps the pale Christ
+looked down from the mountain opposite upon the surging multitudes in the
+streets and on the bridges.
+
+They were most amiable multitudes, March thought, and they responded
+docilely to the entreaties of the policemen who stood on the steps of the
+bridges, and divided their encountering currents with patient appeals of
+"Bitte schon! Bitte schon!" He laughed to think of a New York cop saying
+"Please prettily! Please prettily!" to a New York crowd which he wished
+to have go this way or that, and then he burned with shame to think how
+far our manners were from civilization, wherever our heads and hearts
+might be, when he heard a voice at his elbow:
+
+"A punch with a club would start some of these fellows along quicker."
+
+It was Stoller, and March turned from him to lose his disgust in the
+sudden terror of perceiving that Miss Triscoe was no longer at his side.
+Neither could he see his wife and General Triscoe, and he began to push
+frantically about in the crowd looking for the girl. He had an
+interminable five or ten minutes in his vain search, and he was going to
+call out to her by name, when Burnamy saved him from the hopeless
+absurdity by elbowing his way to him with Miss. Triscoe on his arm.
+
+"Here she is, Mr. March," he said, as if there were nothing strange in
+his having been there to find her; in fact he had followed them all from
+the theatre, and at the moment he saw the party separated, and Miss
+Triscoe carried off helpless in the human stream, had plunged in and
+rescued her. Before March could formulate any question in his
+bewilderment, Burnamy was gone again; the girl offered no explanation for
+him, and March had not yet decided to ask any when he caught sight of his
+wife and General Triscoe standing tiptoe in a doorway and craning their
+necks upward and forward to scan the crowd in search of him and his
+charge. Then he looked round at her and opened his lips to express the
+astonishment that filled him, when he was aware of an ominous shining of
+her eyes and trembling of her hand on his arm.
+
+She pressed his arm nervously, and he understood her to beg him to
+forbear at once all question of her and all comment on Burnamy's presence
+to her father.
+
+It would not have been just the time for either. Not only Mrs. March was
+with the general, but Mrs. Adding also; she had called to them from that
+place, where she was safe with Rose when she saw them eddying about in
+the crowd. The general was still, expressing a gratitude which became
+more pressing the more it was disclaimed; he said casually at sight of
+his daughter, "Ah; you've found us, have you?" and went on talking to
+Mrs. Adding, who nodded to them laughingly, and asked, "Did you see me
+beckoning?"
+
+"Look here, my dear!" March said to his wife as soon as they parted from
+the rest, the general gallantly promising that his daughter and he would
+see Mrs. Adding safe to her hotel, and were making their way slowly home
+alone. "Did you know that Burnamy was in Carlsbad?"
+
+"He's going away on the twelve-o'clock train tonight," she answered,
+firmly.
+
+"What has that got to do with it? Where did you see him?"
+
+"In the box, while you were behind the scenes."
+
+She told him all about it, and he listened in silent endeavor for the
+ground of censure from which a sense of his own guilt forced him. She
+asked suddenly, "Where did you see him?" and he told her in turn.
+
+He added severely, "Her father ought to know. Why didn't you tell him?"
+
+"Why didn't you?" she retorted with great reason.
+
+"Because I didn't think he was just in the humor for it." He began to
+laugh as he sketched their encounter with the gendarme, but she did not
+seem to think it amusing; and he became serious again. "Besides, I was
+afraid she was going to blubber, any way."
+
+"She wouldn't have blubbered, as you call it. I don't know why you need
+be so disgusting! It would have given her just the moral support she
+needed. Now she will have to tell him herself, and he will blame us. You
+ought to have spoken; you could have done it easily and naturally when
+you came up with her. You will have yourself to thank for all the trouble
+that comes of it, now, my dear."
+
+He shouted in admiration of her skill in shifting the blame on him. "All
+right! I should have had to stand it, even if you hadn't behaved with
+angelic wisdom."
+
+"Why," she said, after reflection, "I don't see what either of us has
+done. We didn't get Burnamy to come here, or connive at his presence in
+any way."
+
+"Oh! Make Triscoe believe that! He knows you've done all you could to
+help the affair on."
+
+"Well, what if I have? He began making up to Mrs. Adding himself as soon
+as he saw her, to-night. She looked very pretty."
+
+"Well, thank Heaven! we're off to-morrow morning, and I hope we've seen
+the last of them. They've done what they could to spoil my cure, but I'm
+not going to have them spoil my aftercure."
+
+
+
+
+XLIV.
+
+Mrs. March had decided not to go to the Posthof for breakfast, where they
+had already taken a lavish leave of the 'schone' Lili, with a sense of
+being promptly superseded in her affections. They found a place in the
+red-table-cloth end of the pavilion at Pupp's, and were served by the
+pretty girl with the rose-bud mouth whom they had known only as
+Ein-und-Zwanzig, and whose promise of "Komm' gleich, bitte schon!" was
+like a bird's note. Never had the coffee been so good, the bread so
+aerially light, the Westphalian ham so tenderly pink. A young married
+couple whom they knew came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and sat
+down with them, like their own youth, for a moment.
+
+"If you had told them we were going, dear," said Mrs. March, when the
+couple were themselves gone, "we should have been as old as ever. Don't
+let us tell anybody, this morning, that we're going. I couldn't bear it."
+
+They had been obliged to take the secretary of the hotel into their
+confidence, in the process of paying their bill. He put on his high hat
+and came out to see them off. The portier was already there, standing at
+the step of the lordly two-spanner which they had ordered for the long
+drive to the station. The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offer
+them a fellow-republican's good wishes for their journey; Herr Pupp
+himself appeared at the last moment to hope for their return another
+summer. Mrs. March bent a last look of interest upon the proprietor as
+their two-spanner whirled away.
+
+"They say that he is going to be made a count."
+
+"Well, I don't object," said March. "A man who can feed fourteen thousand
+people, mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an archduke."
+
+At the station something happened which touched them even more than these
+last attentions of the hotel. They were in their compartment, and were in
+the act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting their
+bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March's name called.
+
+They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with
+excitement and his eyes glowing. "I was afraid I shouldn't get here in
+time," he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.
+
+"Why Rose! From your mother?"
+
+"From me," he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor,
+when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace. "I want to
+kiss you," she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to them
+from the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for her
+handkerchief. "I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetest
+child!"
+
+"He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I'm sorry to
+leave behind," March assented. "He's the only unmarried one that wasn't
+in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some
+rather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I'm not
+sure that I should have been safe even from Rose. Carlsbad has been an
+interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now that
+it will begin again."
+
+"Yes," said his wife, "now we can have each other all to ourselves."
+
+"Yes. It's been very different from our first wedding journey in that. It
+isn't that we're not so young now as we were, but that we don't seem so
+much our own property. We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we
+seem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come in
+and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk. The disadvantage of living
+along is that we get too much into the hands of other people."
+
+"Yes, it is. I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too."
+
+"I don't know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we had
+died young--or younger," he suggested.
+
+"No, I don't know that it is," she assented. She added, from an absence
+where he was sufficiently able to locate her meaning, "I hope she'll
+write and tell me what her father says and does when she tells him that
+he was there."
+
+There were many things, in the weather, the landscape, their sole
+occupancy of an unsmoking compartment, while all the smoking compartments
+round overflowed with smokers, which conspired to offer them a pleasing
+illusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect that they almost held
+each other's hands. In later life there are such moments when the
+youthful emotions come back, as certain birds do in winter, and the
+elderly heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it were young. But it
+is best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs. March joined her husband in
+mocking it, when he made her observe how fit it was that their silver
+wedding journey should be resumed as part of his after-cure. If he had
+found the fountain of youth in the warm, flat, faintly nauseous water of
+the Felsenquelle, he was not going to call himself twenty-eight again
+till his second month of the Carlsbad regimen was out, and he had got
+back to salad and fruit.
+
+At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it that
+they could form a life-long friendship for the old English-speaking
+waiter who served them, and would not suffer them to hurry themselves.
+The hills had already fallen away, and they ran along through a cheerful
+country, with tracts of forest under white clouds blowing about in a blue
+sky, and gayly flinging their shadows down upon the brown ploughed land,
+and upon the yellow oat-fields, where women were cutting the leisurely
+harvest with sickles, and where once a great girl with swarthy bare arms
+unbent herself from her toil, and rose, a statue of rude vigor and
+beauty, to watch them go by. Hedges of evergreen enclosed the yellow
+oat-fields, where slow wagons paused to gather the sheaves of the week
+before, and then loitered away with them. Flocks of geese waddled in
+sculpturesque relief against the close-cropt pastures, herded by little
+girls with flaxen pigtails, whose eyes, blue as corn-flowers, followed
+the flying train. There were stretches of wild thyme purpling long barren
+acreages, and growing up the railroad banks almost to the rails
+themselves. From the meadows the rowen, tossed in long loose windrows,
+sent into their car a sad autumnal fragrance which mingled with the
+tobacco smoke, when two fat smokers emerged into the narrow corridor
+outside their compartments and tried to pass each other. Their vast
+stomachs beat together in a vain encounter.
+
+"Zu enge!" said one, and "Ja, zu enge!" said the other, and they laughed
+innocently in each other's' faces, with a joy in their recognition of the
+corridor's narrowness as great as if it had been a stroke of the finest
+wit.
+
+All the way the land was lovely, and as they drew near Nuremberg it grew
+enchanting, with a fairy quaintness. The scenery was Alpine, but the
+scale was toy-like, as befitted the region, and the mimic peaks and
+valleys with green brooks gushing between them, and strange rock forms
+recurring in endless caprice, seemed the home of children's story. All
+the gnomes and elves might have dwelt there in peaceful fellowship with
+the peasants who ploughed the little fields, and gathered the garlanded
+hops, and lived in the farmsteads and village houses with those high
+timber-laced gables.
+
+"We ought to have come here long ago with the children, when they were
+children," said March.
+
+"No," his wife returned; "it would have been too much for them. Nobody
+but grown people could bear it."
+
+The spell which began here was not really broken by anything that
+afterwards happened in Nuremberg, though the old toy-capital was
+trolley-wired through all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a hotel
+lighted by electricity and heated by steam, and equipped with an elevator
+which was so modern that it came down with them as well as went up. All
+the things that assumed to be of recent structure or invention were as
+nothing against the dense past, which overwhelmed them with the sense of
+a world elsewhere outlived. In Nuremberg it is not the quaint or the
+picturesque that is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact and the
+commonplace. Here, more than anywhere else, you are steeped in the gothic
+spirit which expresses itself in a Teutonic dialect of homely sweetness,
+of endearing caprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive grace and
+beauty almost never. It is the architectural speech of a strenuous,
+gross, kindly, honest people's fancy; such as it is it was inexhaustible,
+and such as it is it was bewitching for the travellers.
+
+They could hardly wait till they had supper before plunging into the
+ancient town, and they took the first tram-car at a venture. It was a
+sort of transfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a little inside.
+of the city gate to a trolley-car. The conductor with their fare demanded
+their destination; March frankly owned that they did not know where they
+wanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductor chose; and the
+conductor, after reflection, decided to put them down at the public
+garden, which, as one of the newest things in the city, would make the
+most favorable impression upon strangers. It was in fact so like all
+other city gardens, with the foliage of its trimly planted alleys, that
+it sheltered them effectually from the picturesqueness of Nuremberg, and
+they had a long, peaceful hour on one of its benches, where they rested
+from their journey, and repented their hasty attempt to appropriate the
+charm of the city.
+
+The next morning it rained, according to a custom which the elevator-boy
+(flown with the insolent recollection of a sunny summer in Milan) said
+was invariable in Nuremberg; but after the one-o'clock table d'hote they
+took a noble two-spanner carriage, and drove all round the city.
+Everywhere the ancient moat, thickly turfed and planted with trees and
+shrubs, stretched a girdle of garden between their course and the wall
+beautifully old, with knots of dead ivy clinging to its crevices, or
+broad meshes of the shining foliage mantling its blackened masonry. A
+tile-roofed open gallery ran along the top, where so many centuries of
+sentries had paced, and arched the massive gates with heavily moulded
+piers, where so countlessly the fierce burgher troops had sallied forth
+against their besiegers, and so often the leaguer hosts had dashed
+themselves in assault. The blood shed in forgotten battles would have
+flooded the moat where now the grass and flowers grew, or here and there
+a peaceful stretch of water stagnated.
+
+The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, where the Hapsburg Kaisers
+dwelt when they visited their faithful imperial city. From its ramparts
+the incredible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best shows itself, and if one
+has any love for the distinctive quality of Teutonic architecture it is
+here that more than anywhere else one may feast it. The prospect of tower
+and spire and gable is of such a mediaeval richness, of such an abounding
+fulness, that all incidents are lost in it. The multitudinous roofs of
+red-brown tiles, blinking browsily from their low dormers, press upon one
+another in endless succession; they cluster together on a rise of ground
+and sink away where the street falls, but they nowhere disperse or
+scatter, and they end abruptly at the other rim of the city, beyond which
+looms the green country, merging in the remoter blue of misty uplands.
+
+A pretty young girl waited at the door of the tower for the visitors to
+gather in sufficient number, and then led them through the terrible
+museum, discanting in the same gay voice and with the same smiling air on
+all the murderous engines and implements of torture. First in German and
+then in English she explained the fearful uses of the Iron Maiden, she
+winningly illustrated the action of the racks and wheels on which men had
+been stretched and broken, and she sweetly vaunted a sword which had
+beheaded eight hundred persons. When she took the established fee from
+March she suggested, with a demure glance, "And what more you please for
+saying it in English."
+
+"Can you say it in Russian?" demanded a young man, whose eyes he had seen
+dwelling on her from the beginning. She laughed archly, and responded
+with some Slavic words, and then delivered her train of sight-seers over
+to the custodian who was to show them through the halls and chambers of
+the Burg. These were undergoing the repairs which the monuments of the
+past are perpetually suffering in the present, and there was some special
+painting and varnishing for the reception of the Kaiser, who was coming
+to Nuremberg for the military manoeuvres then at hand. But if they had
+been in the unmolested discomfort of their unlivable magnificence, their
+splendor was such as might well reconcile the witness to the superior
+comfort of a private station in our snugger day. The Marches came out
+owning that the youth which might once have found the romantic glories of
+the place enough was gone from them. But so much of it was left to her
+that she wished to make him stop and look at the flirtation which had
+blossomed out between that pretty young girl and the Russian, whom they
+had scarcely missed from their party in the Burg. He had apparently never
+parted from the girl, and now as they sat together on the threshold of
+the gloomy tower, he most have been teaching her more Slavic words, for
+they were both laughing as if they understood each other perfectly.
+
+In his security from having the affair in any wise on his hands, March
+would have willingly lingered, to see how her education got on; but it
+began to rain, The rain did not disturb the lovers, but it obliged the
+elderly spectators to take refuge in their carriage; and they drove off
+to find the famous Little Goose Man. This is what every one does at
+Nuremberg; it would be difficult to say why. When they found the Little
+Goose Man, he was only a mediaeval fancy in bronze, who stood on his
+pedestal in the market-place and contributed from the bill of the goose
+under his arm a small stream to the rainfall drenching the wet wares of
+the wet market-women round the fountain, and soaking their cauliflowers
+and lettuce, their grapes and pears, their carrots and turnips, to the
+watery flavor of all fruits and vegetables in Germany.
+
+The air was very raw and chill; but after supper the clouds cleared away,
+and a pleasant evening tempted the travellers out. The portier dissembled
+any slight which their eagerness for the only amusement he could think of
+inspired, and directed them to a popular theatre which was giving a
+summer season at low prices to the lower classes, and which they
+surprised, after some search, trying to hide itself in a sort of back
+square. They got the best places at a price which ought to have been
+mortifyingly cheap, and found themselves, with a thousand other harmless
+bourgeois folk, in a sort of spacious, agreeable barn, of a decoration by
+no means ugly, and of a certain artless comfort. Each seat fronted a
+shelf at the back of the seat before it, where the spectator could put
+his hat; there was a smaller shelf for his stein of the beer passed
+constantly throughout the evening; and there was a buffet where he could
+stay himself with cold ham and other robust German refreshments.
+
+It was "The Wedding Journey to Nuremberg" upon which they had oddly
+chanced, and they accepted as a national tribute the character of an
+American girl in it. She was an American girl of the advanced pattern,
+and she came and went at a picnic on the arm of a head waiter. She seemed
+to have no office in the drama except to illustrate a German conception
+of American girlhood, but even in this simple function she seemed rather
+to puzzle the German audience; perhaps because of the occasional English
+words which she used.
+
+To the astonishment of her compatriots, when they came out of the theatre
+it was not raining; the night was as brilliantly starlit as a night could
+be in Germany, and they sauntered home richly content through the narrow
+streets and through the beautiful old Damenthor, beyond which their hotel
+lay. How pretty, they said, to call that charming port the Ladies' Gate!
+They promised each other to find out why, and they never did so, but
+satisfied themselves by assigning it to the exclusive use of the slim
+maidens and massive matrons of the old Nuremberg patriciate, whom they
+imagined trailing their silken splendors under its arch in perpetual
+procession.
+
+
+
+
+XLV.
+
+The life of the Nuremberg patriciate, now extinct in the control of the
+city which it builded so strenuously and maintained so heroically, is
+still insistent in all its art. This expresses their pride at once and
+their simplicity with a childish literality. At its best it is never so
+good as the good Italian art, whose influence is always present in its
+best. The coloring of the great canvases is Venetian, but there is no
+such democracy of greatness as in the painting at Venice; in decoration
+the art of Nuremberg is at best quaint, and at the worst puerile.
+Wherever it had obeyed an academic intention it seemed to March poor and
+coarse, as in the bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence. The
+water spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in streams
+that cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in the base
+of the church there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting in
+its simple-hearted truth. The long ages have made it even more affecting
+than the sculptor imagined it; they have blurred the faces and figures in
+passing till their features are scarcely distinguishable; and the
+sleeping apostles seem to have dreamed themselves back into the
+mother-marble. It is of the same tradition and impulse with that supreme
+glory of the native sculpture, the ineffable tabernacle of Adam Krafft,
+which climbs a column of the church within, a miracle of richly carven
+story; and no doubt if there were a Nuremberg sculptor doing great things
+today, his work would be of kindred inspiration.
+
+The descendants of the old patrician who ordered the tabernacle at rather
+a hard bargain from the artist still worship on the floor below, and the
+descendants of his neighbor patricians have their seats in the pews
+about, and their names cut in the proprietary plates on the pew-tops. The
+vergeress who showed the Marches through the church was devout in the
+praise of these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers. "So simple, and yet
+so noble!" she said. She was a very romantic vergeress, and she told them
+at unsparing length the legend of the tabernacle, how the artist fell
+asleep in despair of winning his patron's daughter, and saw in a vision
+the master-work with the lily-like droop at top, which gained him her
+hand. They did not realize till too late that it was all out of a novel
+of Georg Ebers's, but added to the regular fee for the church a gift
+worthy of an inedited legend.
+
+Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm rarely imparted by the
+Nuremberg manner. They missed there the constant, sweet civility of
+Carlsbad, and found themselves falling flat in their endeavors for a
+little cordiality. They indeed inspired with some kindness the old woman
+who showed them through that cemetery where Albert Durer and Hans Sachs
+and many other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumental brasses
+of such beauty:
+
+   "That kings to have the like, might wish to die."
+
+But this must have been because they abandoned themselves so willingly to
+the fascination of the bronze skull on the tomb of a fourteenth-century
+patrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw hinged to the
+upper. She proudly clapped it up and down for their astonishment, and
+waited, with a toothless smile, to let them discover the bead of a nail
+artfully figured in the skull; then she gave a shrill cackle of joy, and
+gleefully explained that the wife of this patrician had killed him by
+driving a nail into his temple, and had been fitly beheaded for the
+murder.
+
+She cared so much for nothing else in the cemetery, but she consented to
+let them wonder at the richness of the sculpture in the level tombs, with
+their escutcheons and memorial tablets, overrun by the long grass and the
+matted ivy; she even consented to share their indignation at the
+destruction of some of the brasses and the theft of others. She suffered
+more reluctantly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figured in
+sculpture at one corner of the cemetery, where the anguish of the Christ
+had long since faded into the stone from which it had been evoked, and
+the thieves were no longer distinguishable in their penitence or
+impenitence; but she parted friends with them when she saw how much they
+seemed taken with the votive chapel of the noble Holzschuh family, where
+a line of wooden shoes puns upon the name in the frieze, like the line of
+dogs which chase one another, with bones in their mouths, around the
+Canossa palace at Verona. A sense of the beautiful house by the Adige was
+part of the pleasing confusion which possessed them in Nuremberg whenever
+they came upon the expression of the gothic spirit common both to the
+German and northern Italian art. They knew that it was an effect which
+had passed from Germany into Italy, but in the liberal air of the older
+land it had come to so much more beauty that now, when they found it in
+its home, it seemed something fetched from over the Alps and coarsened in
+the attempt to naturalize it to an alien air.
+
+In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian painters from the German
+pictures they had inspired; in the great hall of the Rathhaus the noble
+Processional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph of
+Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar. There was to
+be a banquet in the hall, under the mighty fresco, to welcome the German
+Emperor, coming the next week, and the Rathhaus was full of work-people
+furbishing it up against his arrival, and making it difficult for the
+custodian who had it in charge to show it properly to strangers. She was
+of the same enthusiastic sisterhood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence and
+the guardian of the old cemetery, and by a mighty effort she prevailed
+over the workmen so far as to lead her charges out through the corridor
+where the literal conscience of the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the roof
+to an exact image of a tournament as it was in Nuremberg four hundred
+years ago. In this relief, thronged with men and horses, the gala-life of
+the past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed himself after
+enjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality which seems the
+final effect of the German gothicism in sculpture.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI.
+
+On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England ideal
+of the day by ceasing from sight-seeing. She could not have understood
+the sermon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the lingering
+conscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon. Then
+she found nothing of the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic
+lands. The people were resting from their week-day labors, but they were
+not playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran uses,
+were locked against tourist curiosity.
+
+It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in this
+ancient city, where the past was so much alive in the perpetual
+picturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were
+fain to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness of the streets
+to the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily visited the
+evening of their arrival.
+
+On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whom March asked some
+question of their way. He answered in English, and in the parley that
+followed they discovered that they were all Americans. The stranger
+proved to be an American of the sort commonest in Germany, and he said he
+had returned to his native country to get rid of the ague which he had
+taken on Staten Island. He had been seventeen years in New York, and now
+a talk of Tammany and its chances in the next election, of pulls and
+deals, of bosses and heelers, grew up between the civic step-brothers,
+and joined them is a common interest. The German-American said he was
+bookkeeper in some glass-works which had been closed by our tariff, and
+he confessed that he did not mean to return to us, though he spoke of
+German affairs with the impartiality of an outsider. He said that the
+Socialist party was increasing faster than any other, and that this
+tacitly meant the suppression of rank and the abolition of monarchy. He
+warned March against the appearance of industrial prosperity in Germany;
+beggary was severely repressed, and if poverty was better clad than with
+us, it was as hungry and as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York. The
+working classes were kindly and peaceable; they only knifed each other
+quietly on Sunday evenings after having too much beer.
+
+Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marches for good-by; and as
+he walked down the aisle of trees in which they had been fitting
+together, he seemed to be retreating farther and farther from such
+Americanism as they had in common. He had reverted to an entirely German
+effect of dress and figure; his walk was slow and Teutonic; he must be a
+type of thousands who have returned to the fatherland without wishing to
+own themselves its children again, and yet out of heart with the only
+country left them.
+
+"He was rather pathetic, my dear," said March, in the discomfort he knew
+his wife must be feeling as well as himself. "How odd to have the lid
+lifted here, and see the same old problems seething and bubbling in the
+witch's caldron we call civilization as we left simmering away at home!
+And how hard to have our tariff reach out and snatch the bread from the
+mouths of those poor glass-workers!"
+
+"I thought that was hard," she sighed. "It must have been his bread,
+too."
+
+"Let's hope it was not his cake, anyway. I suppose," he added, dreamily,
+"that what we used to like in Italy was the absence of all the modern
+activities. The Italians didn't repel us by assuming to be of our epoch
+in the presence of their monuments; they knew how to behave as pensive
+memories. I wonder if they're still as charming."
+
+"Oh, no," she returned, "nothing is as charming as it used to be. And now
+we need the charm more than ever."
+
+He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understanding they had lived into
+that only one of them was to be desperate at a time, and that they were
+to take turns in cheering each other up. "Well, perhaps we don't deserve
+it. And I'm not sure that we need it so much as we did when we were
+young. We've got tougher; we can stand the cold facts better now. They
+made me shiver once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable thrill.
+Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, if it insisted upon being
+as charming as it used to be, how could we ever bear to die? We've got
+that to consider." He yielded to the temptation of his paradox, but he
+did not fail altogether of the purpose with which he began, and they took
+the trolley back to their hotel cheerful in the intrepid fancy that they
+had confronted fate when they had only had the hardihood to face a
+phrase.
+
+They agreed that now he ought really to find out something about the
+contemporary life of Nuremberg, and the next morning he went out before
+breakfast, and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the hope
+of intimate impressions. The peasant women, serving portions of milk from
+house to house out of the cans in the little wagons which they drew
+themselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect of
+tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the sucking-pigs jolted
+over the pavements in handcarts; a certain majesty from the long
+procession of yellow mail-wagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarian
+blue, trooping by in the cold small rain, impassibly dripping from their
+glazed hat-brims upon their uniforms. But he could not feel that these
+things were any of them very poignantly significant; and he covered his
+retreat from the actualities of Nuremberg by visiting the chief
+book-store and buying more photographs of the architecture than he
+wanted, and more local histories than he should ever read. He made a last
+effort for the contemporaneous life by asking the English-speaking clerk
+if there were any literary men of distinction living in Nuremberg, and
+the clerk said there was not one.
+
+He went home to breakfast wondering if he should be able to make his
+meagre facts serve with his wife; but he found her far from any wish to
+listen to them. She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a table
+near her own, who were so absorbed in each other that they were proof
+against an interest that must otherwise have pierced them through. The
+bridegroom, as he would have called himself, was a pretty little Bavarian
+lieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride was as pretty and as
+little, but delicately blond. Nature had admirably mated them, and if art
+had helped to bring them together through the genius of the bride's
+mother, who was breakfasting with them, it had wrought almost as fitly.
+Mrs. March queried impartially who they were, where they met, and how,
+and just when they were going to be married; and March consented, in his
+personal immunity from their romance, to let it go on under his eyes
+without protest. But later, when they met the lovers in the street,
+walking arm in arm, with the bride's mother behind them gloating upon
+their bliss, he said the woman ought, at her time of life, to be ashamed
+of such folly. She must know that this affair, by nine chances out of
+ten, could not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tiresome as
+most other marriages, and yet she was abandoning herself with those
+ignorant young people to the illusion that it was the finest and sweetest
+thing in life.
+
+"Well, isn't it?" his wife asked.
+
+"Yes, that's the worst of it. It shows how poverty-stricken life really
+is. We want somehow to believe that each pair of lovers will find the
+good we have missed, and be as happy as we expected to be."
+
+"I think we have been happy enough, and that we've had as much good as
+was wholesome for us," she returned, hurt.
+
+"You're always so concrete! I meant us in the abstract. But if you will
+be personal, I'll say that you've been as happy as you deserve, and got
+more good than you had any right to."
+
+She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they
+were walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensibly
+following.
+
+He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to the
+old cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging
+in eternal accusation of his murderess. "It's rather hard on her, that he
+should be having the last word, that way," he said. "She was a woman, no
+matter what mistakes she had committed."
+
+"That's what I call 'banale'," said Mrs. March.
+
+"It is, rather," he confessed. "It makes me feel as if I must go to see
+the house of Durer, after all."
+
+"Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later."
+
+It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, because
+everybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to
+Durer's house, which they found in a remote part of the town near a
+stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by the
+interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time they
+reached it. The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and without
+being squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardly
+have been different in Durer's time. His dwelling, in no way impressive
+outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a
+narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped
+bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the
+cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house. It was cavernous and
+cold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid in
+the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German
+fashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple,
+neighborly existence there. It in no wise suggested the calling of an
+artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer's time to take
+themselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life of a
+prosperous citizen, and it expressed the period.
+
+The Marches wrote their names in the visitors' book, and paid the
+visitor's fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for a
+reproduction of one of Durer's pictures; and then they came away, by no
+means dissatisfied with his house. By its association with his sojourns
+in Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that it
+was really no worse than Ariosto's house at Ferrara, or Petrarch's at
+Arqua, or Michelangelo's at Florence. "But what I admire," he said, "is
+our futility in going to see it. We expected to surprise some quality of
+the man left lying about in the house because he lived and died in it;
+and because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked him so hard
+to save his widow from coming to want."
+
+"Who said she did that?"
+
+"A friend of his who hated her. But he had to allow that she was a
+God-fearing woman, and had a New England conscience."
+
+"Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going."
+
+"Yes; but I don't like her laying her plans to survive him; though women
+always do that."
+
+They were going away the next day, and they sat down that evening to a
+final supper in such good-humor with themselves that they were willing to
+include a young couple who came to take places at their table, though
+they would rather have been alone. They lifted their eyes for their
+expected salutation, and recognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the
+Norumbia.
+
+The ladies fell upon each other as if they had been mother and daughter;
+March and the young man shook hands, in the feeling of passengers
+mutually endeared by the memories of a pleasant voyage. They arrived at
+the fact that Mr. Leffers had received letters in England from his
+partners which allowed him to prolong his wedding journey in a tour of
+the continent, while their wives were still exclaiming at their encounter
+in the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all sat down to have, as
+the bride said, a real Norumbia time.
+
+She was one of those young wives who talk always with their eyes
+submissively on their husbands, no matter whom they are speaking to; but
+she was already unconsciously ruling him in her abeyance. No doubt she
+was ruling him for his good; she had a livelier, mind than he, and she
+knew more, as the American wives of young American business men always
+do, and she was planning wisely for their travels. She recognized her
+merit in this devotion with an artless candor, which was typical rather
+than personal. March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little stroll,
+and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who did not let them
+go without making her husband promise to wrap up well, and not get his
+feet wet. She made March promise not to take him far, and to bring him
+back early, which he found himself very willing to do, after an exchange
+of ideas with Mr. Leffers. The young man began to talk about his wife, in
+her providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the sort of man he
+was, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of man he was, there
+was no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the reading-room.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII.
+
+The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinner
+the next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs.
+March, who said, as soon as they were gone, "I believe I would rather
+meet people of our own age after this. I used to think that you could
+keep young by being with young people; but I don't, now. There world is
+very different from ours. Our world doesn't really exist any more, but as
+long as we keep away from theirs we needn't realize it. Young people,"
+she went on, "are more practical-minded than we used to be; they're quite
+as sentimental; but I don't think they care so much for the higher
+things. They're not so much brought up on poetry as we were," she
+pursued. "That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow in our
+time; but now she didn't know of his poem on Nuremberg; she was
+intelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its quaintness
+was not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred." Her tone entreated
+him to find more meaning in her words than she had put into them. "They
+couldn't have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and that grassy,
+flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that pile-up of
+the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with their Gothic
+facades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow,
+aguish-looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of those
+overhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before the
+churches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round them!"
+
+"I see what you mean. But do you think it's as sacred to us as it would
+have been twenty-five years ago? I had an irreverent feeling now and then
+that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg."
+
+"Oh, yes; so had I. We're that modern, if we're not so young as we were."
+
+"We were very simple, in those days."
+
+"Well, if we were simple, we knew it!"
+
+"Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking at
+it."
+
+"We had a good time."
+
+"Too good. Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it had
+not been so good. We might have our cake now if we hadn't eaten it."
+
+"It would be mouldy, though."
+
+"I wonder," he said, recurring to the Lefferses; "how we really struck
+them."
+
+"Well, I don't believe they thought we ought to be travelling about
+alone, quite, at our age."
+
+"Oh, not so bad as that!" After a moment he said, "I dare say they don't
+go round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did."
+
+"Indeed they do! They had an awful quarrel just before they got to
+Nuremberg: about his wanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool by
+express that she wanted to keep with them. But she said it had been a
+lesson, and they were never going to quarrel again." The elders looked at
+each other in the light of experience, and laughed. "Well," she ended,
+"that's one thing we're through with. I suppose we've come to feel more
+alike than we used to."
+
+"Or not to feel at all. How did they settle it about the baggage?"
+
+"Oh! He insisted on her keeping it with her." March laughed again, but
+this time he laughed alone, and after a while she said: "Well, they gave
+just the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean American
+philistinism. I don't mind their thinking us queer; they must have
+thought Nuremberg was queer."
+
+"Yes. We oldsters are always queer to the young. We're either
+ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we're ridiculously stiff and grim;
+they never expect to be like us, and wouldn't, for the world. The worst
+of it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don't, at the
+bottom of our hearts, believe we're like that, when we meet. I suppose
+that arrogant old ass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard."
+
+"I wonder," said Mrs. March, "if she's told him yet," and March perceived
+that she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic introspection;
+but he had no difficulty in following her.
+
+"She's had time enough. But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her."
+
+"Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back in
+that way. I know she is dead in love with him; but she could only have
+accepted him conditionally."
+
+"Conditionally to his making it all right with Stoller?"
+
+"Stoller? No! To her father's liking it."
+
+"Ah, that's quite as hard. What makes you think she accepted him at all?"
+
+"What do you think she was crying about?"
+
+"Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionally shed tears of pity. If
+she accepted him conditionally she would have to tell her father about
+it." Mrs. March gave him a glance of silent contempt, and he hastened to
+atone for his stupidity. "Perhaps she's told him on the instalment plan.
+She may have begun by confessing that Burnamy had been in Carlsbad. Poor
+old fellow, I wish we were going to find him in Ansbach! He could make
+things very smooth for us."
+
+"Well, you needn't flatter yourself that you'll find him in Ansbach. I'm
+sure I don't know where he is."
+
+"You might write to Miss Triscoe and ask."
+
+"I think I shall wait for Miss Triscoe to write to me," she said, with
+dignity.
+
+"Yes, she certainly owes you that much, after all your suffering for her.
+I've asked the banker in Nuremberg to forward our letters to the poste
+restante in Ansbach. Isn't it good to see the crows again, after those
+ravens around Carlsbad?"
+
+She joined him in looking at the mild autumnal landscape through the open
+window. The afternoon was fair and warm, and in the level fields bodies
+of soldiers were at work with picks and spades, getting the ground ready
+for the military manoeuvres; they disturbed among the stubble foraging
+parties of crows, which rose from time to time with cries of indignant
+protest. She said, with a smile for the crows, "Yes. And I'm thankful
+that I've got nothing on my conscience, whatever happens," she added in
+dismissal of the subject of Burnamy.
+
+"I'm thankful too, my dear. I'd much rather have things on my own. I'm
+more used to that, and I believe I feel less remorse than when you're to
+blame."
+
+They might have been carried near this point by those telepathic
+influences which have as yet been so imperfectly studied. It was only
+that morning, after the lapse of a week since Burnamy's furtive
+reappearance in Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her father about it,
+and she had at that moment a longing for support and counsel that might
+well have made its mystical appeal to Mrs. March.
+
+She spoke at last because she could put it off no longer, rather than
+because the right time had come. She began as they sat at breakfast.
+"Papa, there is something that I have got to tell you. It is something
+that you ought to know; but I have put off telling you because--"
+
+She hesitated for the reason, and "Well!" said her father, looking up at
+her from his second cup of coffee. "What is it?"
+
+Then she answered, "Mr. Burnamy has been here."
+
+"In Carlsbad? When was he here?"
+
+"The night of the Emperor's birthday. He came into the box when you were
+behind the scenes with Mr. March; afterwards I met him in the crowd."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I thought you ought to know. Mrs. March said I ought to tell you."
+
+"Did she say you ought to wait a week?" He gave way to an irascibility
+which he tried to check, and to ask with indifference, "Why did he come
+back?"
+
+"He was going to write about it for that paper in Paris." The girl had
+the effect of gathering her courage up for a bold plunge. She looked
+steadily at her father, and added: "He said he came back because he
+couldn't help it. He--wished to speak with me, He said he knew he had no
+right to suppose I cared anything about what had happened with him and
+Mr. Stoller. He wanted to come back and tell me--that."
+
+Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently she was going to leave
+the word to him, now. He hesitated to take it, but he asked at last with
+a mildness that seemed to surprise her, "Have you heard anything from him
+since?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"I don't know. I told him I could not say what he wished; that I must
+tell you about it."
+
+The case was less simple than it would once have been for General
+Triscoe. There was still his affection for his daughter, his wish for her
+happiness, but this had always been subordinate to his sense of his own
+interest and comfort, and a question had recently arisen which put his
+paternal love and duty in a new light. He was no more explicit with
+himself than other men are, and the most which could ever be said of him
+without injustice was that in his dependence upon her he would rather
+have kept his daughter to himself if she could not have been very
+prosperously married. On the other hand, if he disliked the man for whom
+she now hardly hid her liking, he was not just then ready to go to
+extremes concerning him.
+
+"He was very anxious," she went on, "that you should know just how it
+was. He thinks everything of your judgment and--and--opinion." The
+general made a consenting noise in his throat. "He said that he did not
+wish me to 'whitewash' him to you. He didn't think he had done right; he
+didn't excuse himself, or ask you to excuse him unless you could from the
+stand-point of a gentleman."
+
+The general made a less consenting noise in his throat, and asked, "How
+do you look at it, yourself, Agatha?"
+
+"I don't believe I quite understand it; but Mrs. March--"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. March!" the general snorted.
+
+"--says that Mr. March does not think so badly of it as Mr. Burnamy
+does."
+
+"I doubt it. At any rate, I understood March quite differently."
+
+"She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly afterwards when Mr.
+Stoller wanted him to help him put a false complexion on it; that it was
+all the more difficult for him to do right then, because of his remorse
+for what he had done before." As she spoke on she had become more eager.
+
+"There's something in that," the general admitted, with a candor that he
+made the most of both to himself and to her. "But I should like to know
+what Stoller had to say of it all. Is there anything," he inquired, "any
+reason why I need be more explicit about it, just now?"
+
+"N--no. Only, I thought--He thinks so much of your opinion that--if--"
+
+"Oh, he can very well afford to wait. If he values my opinion so highly
+he can give me time to make up my mind."
+
+"Of course--"
+
+"And I'm not responsible," the general continued, significantly, "for the
+delay altogether. If you had told me this before--Now, I don't know
+whether Stoller is still in town."
+
+He was not behaving openly with her; but she had not behaved openly with
+him. She owned that to herself, and she got what comfort she could from
+his making the affair a question of what Burnamy had done to Stoller
+rather than of what Burnamy had said to her, and what she had answered
+him. If she was not perfectly clear as to what she wanted to do, or
+wished to have happen, there was now time and place in which she could
+delay and make sure. The accepted theory of such matters is that people
+know their minds from the beginning, and that they do not change them.
+But experience seems to contradict this theory, or else people often act
+contrary to their convictions and impulses. If the statistics were
+accessible, it might be found that many potential engagements hovered in
+a doubtful air, and before they touched the earth in actual promise were
+dissipated by the play of meteorological chances.
+
+When General Triscoe put down his napkin in rising he said that he would
+step round to Pupp's and see if Stoller were still there. But on the way
+he stepped up to Mrs. Adding's hotel on the hill, and he came back, after
+an interval which he seemed not to have found long, to report rather
+casually that Stoller had left Carlsbad the day before. By this time the
+fact seemed not to concern Agatha herself very vitally.
+
+He asked if the Marches had left any address with her, and she answered
+that they had not. They were going to spend a few days in Nuremberg, and
+then push on to Holland for Mr. March's after-cure. There was no
+relevance in his question unless it intimated his belief that she was in
+confidential correspondence with Mrs. March, and she met this by saying
+that she was going to write her in care of their bankers; she asked
+whether he wished to send any word.
+
+"No. I understand," he intimated, "that there is nothing at all in the
+nature of a--a--an understanding, then, with--"
+
+"No, nothing."
+
+"Hm!" The general waited a moment. Then he ventured, "Do you care to
+say--do you wish me to know--how he took it?"
+
+The tears came into the girl's eyes, but she governed herself to say,
+"He--he was disappointed."
+
+"He had no right to be disappointed."
+
+It was a question, and she answered: "He thought he had. He said--that he
+wouldn't--trouble me any more."
+
+The general did not ask at once, "And you don't know where he is now--you
+haven't heard anything from him since?"
+
+Agatha flashed through her tears, "Papa!"
+
+"Oh! I beg your pardon. I think you told me."
+
+
+
+
+PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else
+    Effort to get on common ground with an inferior
+    He buys my poverty and not my will
+    Honest selfishness
+    Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate
+    Less intrusive than if he had not been there
+    Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign
+    Only one of them was to be desperate at a time
+    Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last
+    Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold
+    We don't seem so much our own property
+    We get too much into the hands of other people
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Their Silver Wedding Journey, Part II.
+by William Dean Howells
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THEIR SILVER WEDDING ***
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+
+
+
+THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+PART II.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.
+
+They found Burnamy expecting them at the station in Carlsbad, and she
+scolded him like a mother for taking the trouble to meet them, while she
+kept back for the present any sign of knowing that he had staid over a
+day with the Triscoes in Leipsic.  He was as affectionately glad to see
+her and her husband as she could have wished, but she would have liked it
+better if he had owned up at once about Leipsic.  He did not, and it
+seemed to her that he was holding her at arm's-length in his answers
+about his employer.  He would not say how he liked his work, or how he
+liked Mr. Stoller; he merely said that they were at Pupp's together, and
+that he had got in a good day's work already; and since he would say no
+more, she contented herself with that.
+
+The long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wound
+down the hill-side like those of an Italian mountain town, between gay
+stuccoed houses, of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; and
+the impression of a Latin country was heightened at a turn of the road
+which brought into view a colossal crucifix planted against a curtain of
+dark green foliage on the brow of one of the wooded heights that
+surrounded Carlsbad.  When they reached the level of the Tepl, the hill-
+fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridges
+within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the only
+vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world.
+Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines,
+with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their black velvet
+derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowing
+robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks in
+Astrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of western
+Europeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were English,
+French or Italians.  Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were
+imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have
+been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have
+passed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationality
+away in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves
+heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet.
+
+The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going and
+coming between the rows of pollard locusts on one side and the bright
+walls of the houses on the other.  Under the trees were tables, served by
+pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants across the
+way.  On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops full of
+silver, glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and all the
+idle frippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris, and they
+suggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no place else
+in the world, as the crowd which might have been that of other cities at
+certain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in its habitual effect.
+
+"Do you like it?" asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs. March
+saw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all.  She was ready
+to bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his interest had
+got them the only rooms left in the house.  This satisfied in her the
+passion for size which is at the bottom of every American heart, and
+which perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the peoples.
+We pride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we are not
+ungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger than ours, we
+are magnanimously happy in them.  Pupp's, in its altogether different
+way, was larger than any hotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and when
+Burnamy told her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a day in
+the height of the season, she was personally proud of it.
+
+She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel, while the secretary led
+March off to look at the rooms reserved for them, and Burnamy hospitably
+turned the revolving octagonal case in the centre of the rotunda where
+the names of the guests were put up.  They were of all nations, but there
+were so many New Yorkers whose names ended in berg, and thal, and stern,
+and baum that she seemed to be gazing upon a cyclorama of the signs on
+Broadway.  A large man of unmistakable American make, but with so little
+that was of New England or New York in his presence that she might not at
+once have thought him American, lounged toward them with a quill
+toothpick in the corner of his mouth.  He had a jealous blue eye, into
+which he seemed trying to put a friendly light; his straight mouth
+stretched into an involuntary smile above his tawny chin-beard, and he
+wore his soft hat so far back from his high forehead (it showed to the
+crown when he took his hat off) that he had the effect of being
+uncovered.
+
+At his approach Burnamy turned, and with a flush said: "Oh! Let me
+introduce Mr. Stoller, Mrs. March."
+
+Stoller took his toothpick out of his mouth and bowed; then he seemed to
+remember, and took off his hat.  "You see Jews enough, here to make you
+feel at home?" he asked; and he added: "Well, we got some of 'em in
+Chicago, too, I guess.  This young man"--he twisted his head toward
+Burnamy" found you easy enough?"
+
+"It was very good of him to meet us," Mrs. March began.  "We didn't
+expect--"
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Stoller, putting his toothpick back, and his
+hat on.  "We'd got through for the day; my doctor won't let me work all I
+want to, here.  Your husband's going to take the cure, they tell me.
+Well, he wants to go to a good doctor, first.  You can't go and drink
+these waters hit or miss.  I found that out before I came."
+
+"Oh, no!"  said Mrs. March, and she wished to explain how they had been
+advised; but he said to Burnamy:
+
+"I sha'n't want you again till ten to-morrow morning.  Don't let me
+interrupt you," he added patronizingly to Mrs. March.  He put his hand up
+toward his hat, and sauntered away out of the door.
+
+Burnamy did not speak; and she only asked at last, to relieve the
+silence, "Is Mr. Stoller an American?"
+
+"Why, I suppose so," he answered, with an uneasy laugh.  "His people were
+German emigrants who settled in Southern Indiana.  That makes him as much
+American as any of us, doesn't it?"
+
+Burnamy spoke with his mind on his French-Canadian grandfather, who had
+come down through Detroit, when their name was Bonami; but Mrs. March
+answered from her eight generations of New England ancestry.  "Oh, for
+the West, yes, perhaps," and they neither of them said anything more
+about Stoller.
+
+In their room, where she found March waiting for her amidst their
+arriving baggage, she was so full of her pent-up opinions of Burnamy's
+patron that she, would scarcely speak of the view from their windows of
+the wooded hills up and down the Tepl.  "Yes, yes; very nice, and I know
+I shall enjoy it ever so much.  But I don't know what you will think of
+that poor young Burnamy!"
+
+"Why, what's happened to him?"
+
+"Happened?  Stoller's happened."
+
+"Oh, have you seen him, already?  Well?"
+
+"Well, if you had been going to pick out that type of man, you'd have
+rejected him, because you'd have said he was too pat.  He's like an actor
+made up for a Western millionaire.  Do you remember that American in
+'L'Etranger' which Bernhardt did in Boston when she first came?  He,
+looks exactly like that, and he has the worst manners.  He stood talking
+to me with his hat on, and a toothpick in his mouth; and he made me feel
+as if he had bought me, along with Burnamy, and had paid too much.  If
+you don't give him a setting down, Basil, I shall never speak to you;
+that's all.  I'm sure Burnamy is in some trouble with him; he's got some
+sort of hold upon him; what it could be in such a short time, I can't
+imagine; but if ever a man seemed to be, in a man's power, he does, in
+his!
+
+"Now," said March, "your pronouns have got so far beyond me that I think
+we'd better let it all go till after supper; perhaps I shall see Stoller
+myself by that time."
+
+She had been deeply stirred by her encounter with Stoller, but she
+entered with impartial intensity into the fact that the elevator at
+Pupp's had the characteristic of always coming up and never going down
+with passengers.  It was locked into its closet with a solid door, and
+there was no bell to summon it, or any place to take it except on the
+ground-floor; but the stairs by which she could descend were abundant and
+stately; and on one landing there was the lithograph of one of the
+largest and ugliest hotels in New York; how ugly it was, she said she
+should never have known if she had not seen it there.
+
+The dining-room was divided into the grand saloon, where they supped amid
+rococo sculptures and frescoes, and the glazed veranda opening by vast
+windows on a spread of tables without, which were already filling up for
+the evening concert.  Around them at the different tables there were
+groups of faces and figures fascinating in their strangeness, with that
+distinction which abashes our American level in the presence of European
+inequality.
+
+"How simple and unimpressive we are, Basil," she said, "beside all these
+people!  I used to feel it in Europe when I was young, and now I'm
+certain that we must seem like two faded-in old village photographs.  We
+don't even look intellectual!  I hope we look good."
+
+"I know I do," said March.  The waiter went for their supper, and they
+joined in guessing the different nationalities in the room.  A French
+party was easy enough; a Spanish mother and daughter were not difficult,
+though whether they were not South-American remained uncertain; two
+elderly maiden ladies were unmistakably of central Massachusetts, and
+were obviously of a book-club culture that had left no leaf unturned;
+some Triestines gave themselves away by their Venetian accent; but a
+large group at a farther table were unassignable in the strange language
+which they clattered loudly together, with bursts of laughter.  They were
+a family party of old and young, they were having a good time, with a
+freedom which she called baronial; the ladies wore white satin, or black
+lace, but the men were in sack-coats; she chose to attribute them, for no
+reason but their outlandishness, to Transylvania.  March pretended to
+prefer a table full of Germans, who were unmistakably bourgeois, and yet
+of intellectual effect.  He chose as his favorite a middle-aged man of
+learned aspect, and they both decided to think of him as the Herr
+Professor, but they did not imagine how perfectly the title fitted him
+till he drew a long comb from his waistcoat pocket and combed his hair
+and beard with it above the table.
+
+The wine wrought with the Transylvanians, and they all jargoned together
+at once, and laughed at the jokes passing among them.  One old gentleman
+had a peculiar fascination from the infantile innocence of his gums when
+he threw his head back to laugh, and showed an upper jaw toothless except
+for two incisors, standing guard over the chasm between.  Suddenly he
+choked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up before
+him, and--
+
+"Noblesse oblige," said March, with the tone of irony which he reserved
+for his wife's preoccupations with aristocracies of all sorts.  "I think
+I prefer my Hair Professor, bourgeois, as he is."
+
+The ladies attributively of central Massachusetts had risen from their
+table, and were making for the door without having paid for their supper.
+The head waiter ran after them; with a real delicacy for their mistake he
+explained that though in most places the meals were charged in the bill,
+it was the custom in Carlsbad to pay for them at the table; one could see
+that he was making their error a pleasant adventure to them which they
+could laugh over together, and write home about without a pang.
+
+"And I," said Mrs. March, shamelessly abandoning the party of the
+aristocracy, "prefer the manners of the lower classes."
+
+"Oh, yes," he admitted.  "The only manners we have at home are black
+ones.  But you mustn't lose courage.  Perhaps the nobility are not always
+so baronial."
+
+"I don't know whether we have manners at home," she said, "and I don't
+believe I care.  At least we have decencies."
+
+"Don't be a jingo," said her husband.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy from duty for the day, he
+was not so full of resources in himself, and he had not so general an
+acquaintance in the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellow make
+up to him in the reading-room, that night.  He laid down a New York paper
+ten days old in despair of having left any American news in it, and
+pushed several continental Anglo-American papers aside with his elbow, as
+he gave a contemptuous glance at the foreign journals, in Bohemian,
+Hungarian, German, French, and Italian, which littered the large table.
+
+I wonder," he said, "how long it'll take'em, over here, to catch on to
+our way of having pictures?"
+
+Burnamy had come to his newspaper work since illustrated journalism was
+established, and he had never had any shock from it at home, but so
+sensitive is youth to environment that, after four days in Europe, the
+New York paper Stoller had laid down was already hideous to him.  From
+the politic side of his nature, however, he temporized with Stoller's
+preference.  "I suppose it will be some time yet."
+
+"I wish," said Stoller, with a savage disregard of expressed sequences
+and relevancies, "I could ha' got some pictures to send home with that
+letter this afternoon: something to show how they do things here, and be
+a kind of object-lesson."  This term had come up in a recent campaign
+when some employers, by shutting down their works, were showing their
+employees what would happen if the employees voted their political
+opinions into effect, and Stoller had then mastered its meaning and was
+fond of using it.  "I'd like 'em to see the woods around here, that the
+city owns, and the springs, and the donkey-carts, and the theatre, and
+everything, and give 'em some practical ideas."
+
+Burnamy made an uneasy movement.
+
+"I'd 'a' liked to put 'em alongside of some of our improvements, and show
+how a town can be carried on when it's managed on business principles.
+"Why didn't you think of it?"
+
+"Really, I don't know," said Burnamy, with a touch of impatience.
+
+They had not met the evening before on the best of terms.  Stoller had
+expected Burnamy twenty-four hours earlier, and had shown his displeasure
+with him for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might have spent at
+Carlsbad; and Burnamy had been unsatisfactory in accounting for the
+delay.  But he had taken hold so promptly and so intelligently that by
+working far into the night, and through the whole forenoon, he had got
+Stoller's crude mass of notes into shape, and had sent off in time for
+the first steamer the letter which was to appear over the proprietor's
+name in his paper.  It was a sort of rough but very full study of the
+Carlsbad city government, the methods of taxation, the municipal
+ownership of the springs and the lands, and the public control in
+everything.  It condemned the aristocratic constitution of the
+municipality, but it charged heavily in favor of the purity, beneficence,
+and wisdom of the administration, under which there was no poverty and no
+idleness, and which was managed like any large business.
+
+Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure, once or twice, and
+Burnamy suffered it submissively until now.  But now, at the change in
+Burnamy's tone, he changed his manner a little.
+
+"Seen your friends since supper?" he asked.
+
+"Only a moment.  They are rather tired, and they've gone to bed."
+
+That the fellow that edits that book you write for?"
+
+"Yes; he owns it, too."
+
+The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller's respect, and he asked
+more deferentially, "Makin' a good thing out of it?"
+
+"A living, I suppose.  Some of the high-class weeklies feel the
+competition of the ten-cent monthlies.  But 'Every Other Week' is about
+the best thing we've got in the literary way, and I guess it's holding
+its own."
+
+"Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad," Stoller said, with a
+return to the sourness of his earlier mood.  "I don't know as I care much
+for his looks; I seen him when he came in with you.  No snap to him."
+He clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and
+started up with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and
+physical; as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking
+at Burnamy, "You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest."
+
+Stoller's father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to the
+West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race and
+class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana town
+where their son was born, and throve in it from the start.  He could
+remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese
+and pickle the pigs' feet, which they took turns in selling at as great a
+price as they could extort from the townspeople.  She was a good and
+tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in
+mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to
+fight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and
+mobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time till
+they wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through the
+exhaustion of their invention.  No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky,
+rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf;
+and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed upon
+him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans.  He hated his
+native speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with his
+father and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who
+proposed to parley with him in it on such terms as "Nix come arouce in de
+Dytchman's house."  He disused it so thoroughly that after his father
+took him out of school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he
+could not get back to it.  He regarded his father's business as part of
+his national disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away
+from it, and informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and
+wagon-maker.  When it came to his setting up for himself in the business
+he had chosen, he had no help from his father, who had gone on adding
+dollar to dollar till he was one of the richest men in the place.
+
+Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had
+many of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of
+asking him to their houses when they were young people, any more than
+when they were children.  He was long deeply in love with an American
+girl whom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry
+an American.  He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who
+had been at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home as
+fragilely and nasally American as anybody.  She made him a good, sickly,
+fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with no
+visible taint of their German origin.
+
+In the mean time Jacob's father had died and left his money to his son,
+with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who would
+gladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if she
+could.  He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she
+lived; and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household
+trying so hard to be American.  She could not help her native accent, but
+she kept silence when her son's wife had company; and when her eldest
+granddaughter began very early to have American callers, she went out of
+the room; they would not have noticed her if she had staid.
+
+Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to his
+financial importance in the community.  He first commended himself to the
+Better Element by crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which were
+now the largest business interest of the place; and he rose on a wave of
+municipal reform to such a height of favor with the respectable classes
+that he was elected on a citizens' ticket to the Legislature.  In the
+reaction which followed he was barely defeated for Congress, and was
+talked of as a dark horse who might be put up for the governorship some
+day; but those who knew him best predicted that he would not get far in
+politics, where his bull-headed business ways would bring him to ruin
+sooner or later; they said, "You can't swing a bolt like you can a
+strike."
+
+When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors by going to live in
+Chicago, though he kept his works in the place where he and they had
+grown up together.  His wife died shortly after, and within four years he
+lost his three eldest children; his son, it was said, had begun to go
+wrong first.  But the rumor of his increasing wealth drifted back from
+Chicago; he was heard of in different enterprises and speculations; at
+last it was said that he had bought a newspaper, and then his boyhood
+friends decided that Jake was going into politics again.
+
+In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of the great city he came to
+understand better that to be an American in all respects was not the
+best.  His mounting sense of importance began to be retroactive in the
+direction of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the little town near
+Wurzburg which his people had come from, and found that he had relatives
+still living there, some of whom had become people of substance; and
+about the time his health gave way from life-long gluttony, and he was
+ordered to Carlsbad, he had pretty much made up his mind to take his
+younger daughters and put them in school for a year or two in Wurzburg,
+for a little discipline if not education.  He had now left them there, to
+learn the language, which he had forgotten with such heart-burning and
+shame, and music, for which they had some taste.
+
+The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their father
+with open threats of running away; and in his heart he did not altogether
+blame them.  He came away from Wurzburg raging at the disrespect for his
+money and his standing in business which had brought him a more galling
+humiliation there than anything he had suffered in his boyhood at Des
+Vaches.  It intensified him in his dear-bought Americanism to the point
+of wishing to commit lese majesty in the teeth of some local dignitaries
+who had snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle to shame
+in his person; there was something like the bird of his step-country in
+Stoller's pale eyes and huge beak.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.
+
+March sat with a company of other patients in the anteroom of the doctor,
+and when it came his turn to be prodded and kneaded, he was ashamed at
+being told he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded.  The doctor wrote
+out a careful dietary for him, with a prescription of a certain number of
+glasses of water at a certain spring and a certain number of baths, and a
+rule for the walks he was to take before and after eating; then the
+doctor patted him on the shoulder and pushed him caressingly out of his
+inner office.  It was too late to begin his treatment that day, but he
+went with his wife to buy a cup, with a strap for hanging it over his
+shoulder, and he put it on so as to be an invalid with the others at
+once; he came near forgetting the small napkin of Turkish towelling which
+they stuffed into their cups, but happily the shopman called him back in
+time to sell it to him.
+
+At five the next morning he rose, and on his way to the street exchanged
+with the servants cleaning the hotel stairs the first of the gloomy
+'Guten Morgens' which usher in the day at Carlsbad.  They cannot be so
+finally hopeless as they sound; they are probably expressive only of the
+popular despair of getting through with them before night; but March
+heard the salutations sorrowfully groaned out on every hand as he joined
+the straggling current of invalids which swelled on the way past the
+silent shops and cafes in the Alte Wiese, till it filled the street, and
+poured its thousands upon the promenade before the classic colonnade of
+the Muhlbrunn.  On the other bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings its
+steaming waters by irregular impulses into the air under a pavilion of
+iron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the source of most resort.  There is
+an instrumental concert somewhere in Carlsbad from early rising till
+bedtime; and now at the Muhlbrunn there was an orchestra already playing;
+and under the pillared porch, as well as before it, the multitude
+shuffled up and down, draining their cups by slow sips, and then taking
+each his place in the interminable line moving on to replenish them at
+the spring.
+
+A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some vice of their climate is
+said peculiarly to fit for the healing effects of Carlsbad, most took his
+eye in their long gabardines of rusty black and their derby hats of plush
+or velvet, with their corkscrew curls coming down before their ears.
+They were old and young, they were grizzled and red and black, but they
+seemed all well-to-do; and what impresses one first and last at Carlsbad
+is that its waters are mainly for the healing of the rich.  After the
+Polish Jews, the Greek priests of Russian race were the most striking
+figures.  There were types of Latin ecclesiastics, who were striking in
+their way too; and the uniforms of certain Austrian officers and soldiers
+brightened the picture.  Here and there a southern face, Italian or
+Spanish or Levantine, looked passionately out of the mass of dull German
+visages; for at Carlsbad the Germans, more than any other gentile nation,
+are to the fore.  Their misfits, their absence of style, imparted the
+prevalent effect; though now and then among the women a Hungarian, or
+Pole, or Parisian, or American, relieved the eye which seeks beauty and
+grace rather than the domestic virtues.  There were certain faces, types
+of discomfort and disease, which appealed from the beginning to the end.
+A young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid South-American, were of a
+lasting fascination to March.
+
+What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficulty
+of assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his years
+of having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their long
+disuse in his homogeneous American world.  The Americans themselves fused
+with the European races who were often so hard to make out; his fellow-
+citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave them away;
+he thought the women's voices the worst.
+
+At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady mechanical action
+dipped the cups into the steaming source, and passed them impersonally up
+to their owners.  With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often a half-
+hour before one's turn carne, and at all a strict etiquette forbade any
+attempt to anticipate it.  The water was merely warm and flat, and after
+the first repulsion one could forget it.  March formed a childish habit
+of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with a gulp
+which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by going
+sometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group of
+Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park beyond
+the Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close sward
+the yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight.  He
+liked to sit there and look at the city beyond the Tepl, where it climbed
+the wooded heights in terraces till it lost its houses in the skirts and
+folds of the forest.  Most mornings it rained, quietly, absent-mindedly,
+and this, with the chili in the air, deepened a pleasant illusion of
+Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream; but there were sunny
+mornings when the mountains shone softly through a lustrous mist, and the
+air was almost warm.
+
+Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy's employer,
+whom he had sometimes noted in the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his
+turn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience.  Stoller explained
+that though you could have the water brought to you at your hotel, he
+chose to go to the spring for the sake of the air; it was something you
+had got to live through; before he had that young Burnamy to help him he
+did not know what to do with his time, but now, every minute he was not
+eating or sleeping he was working; his cure did not oblige him to walk
+much.  He examined March, with a certain mixture of respect and contempt,
+upon the nature of the literary life, and how it differed from the life
+of a journalist.  He asked if he thought Burnamy would amount to anything
+as a literary man; he so far assented to March's faith in him as to say,
+"He's smart."  He told of leaving his daughters in school at Wurzburg;
+and upon the whole he moved March with a sense of his pathetic loneliness
+without moving his liking, as he passed lumberingly on, dangling his cup.
+
+March gave his own cup to the little maid at his spring, and while she
+gave it to a second, who dipped it and handed it to a third for its
+return to him, he heard an unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-,
+morning to them all in English.  "Are you going to teach them United
+States?" he asked of a face with which he knew such an appeal would not
+fail.
+
+"Well," the man admitted, "I try to teach them that much.  They like it.
+You are an American?  I am glad of it.  I have 'most lost the use of my
+lungs, here.  I'm a great talker, and I talk to my wife till she's about
+dead; then I'm out of it for the rest of the day; I can't speak German."
+
+His manner was the free, friendly manner of the West.  He must be that
+sort of untravelled American whom March had so seldom met, but he was
+afraid to ask him if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest it should
+prove the third or fourth.  "Are you taking the cure?" he asked instead.
+
+"Oh, no.  My wife is.  She'll be along directly; I come down here and
+drink the waters to encourage her; doctor said to.  That gets me in for
+the diet, too.  I've e't more cooked fruit since I been here than I ever
+did in my life before.  Prunes?  My Lord, I'm full o' prunes!  Well, it
+does me good to see an American, to know him.  I couldn't 'a' told you,
+it you hadn't have spoken."
+
+"Well," said March, "I shouldn't have been so sure of you, either, by
+your looks."
+
+"Yes, we can't always tell ourselves from these Dutch.  But they know us,
+and they don't want us, except just for one thing, and that's our money.
+I tell you, the Americans are the chumps over here.  Soon's they got all
+our money, or think they have, they say, "Here, you Americans, this is my
+country; you get off; and we got to get.  Ever been over before?"
+
+"A great while ago; so long that I can hardly believe it."
+
+It's my first time.  My name's Otterson: I'm from out in Iowa."
+
+March gave him his name, and added that he was from New York.
+
+"Yes.  I thought you was Eastern.  But that wasn't an Eastern man you was
+just with?"
+
+"No; he's from Chicago.  He's a Mr. Stoller."
+
+"Not the buggy man?"
+
+"I believe he makes buggies."
+
+"Well, you do meet everybody here."  The Iowan was silent for a moment,
+as if, hushed by the weighty thought.  "I wish my wife could have seen
+him.  I just want her to see the man that made our buggy.  I don't know
+what's keeping her, this morning," he added, apologetically.  "Look at
+that fellow, will you, tryin' to get away from those women!"  A young
+officer was doing his best to take leave of two ladies, who seemed to be
+mother and daughter; they detained him by their united arts, and clung to
+him with caressing words and looks.  He was red in the face with his
+polite struggles when he broke from them at last.  "How they do hang on
+to a man, over here!"  the Iowa man continued.  "And the Americans are as
+bad as any.  Why, there's one ratty little Englishman up at our place,
+and our girls just swarm after him; their mothers are worse.  Well, it's
+so, Jenny," he said to the lady who had joined them and whom March turned
+round to see when he spoke to her.  "If I wanted a foreigner I should go
+in for a man.  And these officers!  Put their mustaches up at night in
+curl-papers, they tell me.  Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr. March.
+Well, had your first glass, yet, Jenny?  I'm just going for my second
+tumbler."
+
+He took his wife back to the spring, and began to tell her about Stoller;
+she made no sign of caring for him; and March felt inculpated.  She
+relented a little toward him as they drank together; when he said he must
+be going to breakfast with his wife, she asked where he breakfasted, and
+said, "Why, we go to the Posthof, too."  He answered that then they
+should be sure some time to meet there; he did not venture further; he
+reflected that Mrs. March had her reluctances too; she distrusted people
+who had amused or interested him before she met them.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.
+
+Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he had found most of the other
+agreeable things in Carlsbad, which he brought to their knowledge one by
+one, with such forethought that March said he hoped he should be cared
+for in his declining years as an editor rather than as a father; there
+was no tenderness like a young contributor's.
+
+Many people from the hotels on the hill found at Pupp's just the time and
+space between their last cup of water and their first cup of coffee which
+are prescribed at Carlsbad; but the Marches were aware somehow from the
+beginning that Pupp's had not the hold upon the world at breakfast which
+it had at the mid-day dinner, or at supper on the evenings when the
+concert was there.  Still it was amusing, and they were patient of
+Burnamy's delay till he could get a morning off from Stoller and go with
+them to the Posthof.  He met Mrs. March in the reading-room, where March
+was to join them on his way from the springs with his bag of bread.  The
+earlier usage of buying the delicate pink slices of Westphalia ham, which
+form the chief motive of a Carlsbad breakfast, at a certain shop in the
+town, and carrying them to the caf‚ with you, is no longer of such
+binding force as the custom of getting your bread at the Swiss bakery.
+You choose it yourself at the counter, which begins to be crowded by half
+past seven, and when you have collected the prescribed loaves into the
+basket of metallic filigree given you by one of the baker's maids, she
+puts it into a tissue-paper bag of a gay red color, and you join the
+other invalids streaming away from the bakery, their paper bags making a
+festive rustling as they go.
+
+Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely meadow-lands, a good mile
+up the brawling Tepl, before they join on the right side of the torrent,
+where the Posthof lurks nestled under trees whose boughs let the sun and
+rain impartially through upon its army of little tables.  By this time
+the slow omnibus plying between Carlsbad and some villages in the valley
+beyond has crossed from the left bank to the right, and keeps on past
+half a dozen other cafes, where patients whose prescriptions marshal them
+beyond the Posthof drop off by the dozens and scores.
+
+The road on the left bank of the Tepl is wild and overhung at points with
+wooded steeps, when it leaves the town; but on the right it is bordered
+with shops and restaurants a great part of its length.  In leafy nooks
+between these, uphill walks begin their climb of the mountains, from the
+foot of votive shrines set round with tablets commemorating in German,
+French, Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of high-well-borns of
+all those races and languages.  Booths glittering with the lapidary's
+work in the cheaper gems, or full of the ingenious figures of the toy-
+makers, alternate with the shrines and the cafes on the way to the
+Posthof, and with their shoulders against the overhanging cliff, spread
+for the passing crowd a lure of Viennese jewelry in garnets, opals,
+amethysts, and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings as carrot-eating
+rabbits, worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and peacocks that strut
+about the feet of the passers and expand their iridescent tails in mimic
+pride.
+
+Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they felt
+the far-reflected charm of the crucifixes of the white-hot Italian
+highways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had a
+mechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the children, ending
+in a pang for the fact that they were children no longer.  He waited
+politely while Mrs. March made up her mind that she would not buy any
+laces of the motherly old women who showed them under pent-roofs on way-
+side tables; and he waited patiently at the gate of the flower-gardens
+beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of sweetpease from the
+businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful joy in her because she
+knew no English, and gave him a chance of speaking his German.
+
+"You'll find," he said, as they crossed the road again, "that it's well
+to trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass.  I should still be lagging
+along in my thirties if it hadn't been for fooling, and here I am well on
+in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever."
+
+They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the caf‚ at last, and
+a turn of the path brought them to the prospect of its tables, under the
+trees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters take
+refuge at other tables when it rains; it rains nearly always, and the
+trunks of the trees are as green with damp as if painted; but that
+morning the sun was shining.  At the verge of the open space a group of
+pretty serving-maids, each with her name on a silver band pinned upon her
+breast, met them and bade them a 'Guten Morgen' of almost cheerful note,
+but gave way, to an eager little smiling blonde, who came pushing down
+the path at sight of Burnamy, and claimed him for her own.
+
+"Ah, Lili!  We want an extra good table, this morning.  These are some
+American Excellencies, and you must do your best for them."
+
+"Oh, yes," the girl answered in English, after a radiant salutation of
+the Marches; " I get you one.
+
+"You are a little more formerly, to-day, and I didn't had one already."
+
+She ran among the tables along the edge of the western edge of the
+gallery, and was far beyond hearing his protest that he was not earlier
+than usual when she beckoned him to the table she had found.  She had
+crowded it in between two belonging to other girls, and by the time her
+breakfasters came up she was ready for their order, with the pouting
+pretence that the girls always tried to rob her of the best places.
+Burnamy explained proudly, when she went, that none of the other girls
+ever got an advantage of her; she had more custom than any three of them,
+and she had hired a man to help her carry her orders.  The girls were all
+from the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived at home in the
+winter on their summer tips; their wages were nothing, or less, for
+sometimes they paid for their places.
+
+"What a mass of information!" said March.  "How did you come by it?"
+
+"Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe."
+
+"It's not a bad habit, if one doesn't carry it too far.  How did Lili
+learn her English?"
+
+"She takes lessons in the winter.  She's a perfect little electric motor.
+I don't believe any Yankee girl could equal her."
+
+"She would expect to marry a millionaire if she did.  What astonishes one
+over here is to see how contentedly people prosper along on their own
+level.  And the women do twice the work of the men without expecting to
+equal them in any other way.  At Pupp's, if we go to one end of the out-
+door restaurant, it takes three men to wait on us: one to bring our
+coffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat, and another to make
+out our bill, and I have to tip all three of them.  If we go to the other
+end, one girl serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make it less
+than the least I give any three of the men waiters."
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of that," said his wife.
+
+"I'm not.  I'm simply proud of your sex, my dear."
+
+"Women do nearly everything, here," said Burnamy, impartially.  "They
+built that big new Kaiserbad building: mixed the mortar, carried the
+hods, and laid the stone."
+
+"That makes me prouder of the sex than ever.  But come, Mr. Burnamy!
+Isn't there anybody of polite interest that you know of in this crowd?"
+
+"Well, I can't say," Burnamy hesitated.
+
+The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove and the galleries; the
+tables were already filled, and men were bringing other tables on their
+heads, and making places for them, with entreaties for pardon everywhere;
+the proprietor was anxiously directing them; the pretty serving-girls
+were running to and from the kitchen in a building apart with shrill,
+sweet promises of haste.  The morning sun fell broken through the leaves
+on the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and dappled the figures of the
+men with harlequin patches of light and shade.  A tall woman, with a sort
+of sharpened beauty, and an artificial permanency of tint in her cheeks
+and yellow hair, came trailing herself up the sun-shot path, and found,
+with hardy insistence upon the publicity, places for the surly-looking,
+down-faced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle;
+the dog was like the black poodle out of Faust.  Burnamy had heard her
+history; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on it, which he
+called Europa, not after the old fable, but because it seemed to him that
+she expressed Europe, on one side of its civilization, and had an
+authorized place in its order, as she would not have had in ours.  She
+was where she was by a toleration of certain social facts which
+corresponds in Europe to our reverence for the vested interests.  In her
+history there, had been officers and bankers; even foreign dignitaries;
+now there was this sullen young fellow .  .  .  .  Burnamy had wondered
+if it would do to offer his poem to March, but the presence of the
+original abashed him, and in his mind he had torn the poem up, with a
+heartache for its aptness.
+
+"I don't believe," he said, "that I recognize-any celebrities here."
+
+"I'm sorry," said March.  "Mrs. March would have been glad of some
+Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some mere
+well-borns.  But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness."
+
+"I'm satisfied with the picturesqueness," said his wife.  " Don't worry
+about me, Mr. Burnamy.  "Why can't we have this sort of thing at home?"
+
+"We're getting something like it in the roof-gardens," said March."
+We couldn't have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us.
+At this time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the life
+out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table.  At nine
+A. M.  the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this.  So
+we have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and the
+mosquito-line into the night air.  I haven't seen a fly since I came to
+Europe.  I really miss them; it makes me homesick."
+
+"There are plenty in Italy," his wife suggested.
+
+"We must get down there before we go home."
+
+"But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in Germany?
+Why did no traveller ever put it in his book?  When your stewardess said
+so on the steamer, I remember that you regarded it as a bluff."  He
+turned to Burnamy, who was listening with the deference of a contributor:
+"Isn't Lili rather long?  I mean for such a very prompt person.  Oh, no!"
+
+But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted "Fraulein!" to Lili; with her
+hireling at her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between the
+tables.  She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, "In a
+minute!" and vanished in the crowd.
+
+"Does that mean anything in particular?  There's really no hurry."
+
+"Oh, I think she'll come now," said Burnamy.  March protested that he had
+only been amused at Lili's delay; but his wife scolded him for his
+impatience; she begged Burnamy's pardon, and repeated civilities passed
+between them.  She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies
+were pretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the
+mothers were mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the
+fathers too closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats
+behind their newspapers, with noises that made her quail.  There was no
+one so effective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good deal
+on show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glinting
+from their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, they
+moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced women.
+
+"They all wear corsets," Burnamy explained.
+
+"How much you know already!" said Mrs. March.  "I can see that Europe
+won't be lost on you in anything.  Oh, who's that?"  A lady whose costume
+expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove
+with a graceful tilt.  Burnamy was silent.  "She must be an American.  Do
+you know who she is?"
+
+"Yes."  He hesitated, a little to name a woman whose tragedy had once
+filled the newspapers.
+
+Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination which such tragedies
+inspire.  "What grace!  Is she beautiful?"
+
+"Very."  Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge, but somehow Mrs. March
+did not like his knowing who she was, and how beautiful.  She asked March
+to look, but he refused.
+
+"Those things are too squalid," he said, and she liked him for saying it;
+she hoped it would not be lost upon Burnamy.
+
+One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the burden
+off her tray on the stone floor before her; some of the dishes broke, and
+the breakfast was lost.  Tears came into the girl's eyes and rolled down
+her hot cheeks.  "There!  That is what I call tragedy," said March.
+"She'll have to pay for those things."
+
+"Oh, give her the money, dearest!"
+
+"How can I?"
+
+The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili and her hireling
+behind her came bearing down upon them with their three substantial
+breakfasts on two well-laden trays.  She forestalled Burnamy's reproaches
+for her delay, laughing and bridling, while she set down the dishes of
+ham and tongue and egg, and the little pots of coffee and frothed milk.
+
+"I could not so soon I wanted, because I was to serve an American
+princess."
+
+Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of those noble
+international marriages which fill our women with vainglory for such of
+their compatriots as make them.
+
+"Oh, come now, Lili!" said Burnamy.  "We have queens in America, but
+nothing so low as princesses.  This was a queen, wasn't it?"
+
+She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmed her.  "All people
+say it is princess," she insisted.
+
+"Well, if she's a princess we must look her up after breakfast," said
+Burnamy.  "Where is she sitting?"
+
+She pointed at a corner so far off on the other side that no one could be
+distinguished, and then was gone, with a smile flashed over her shoulder,
+and her hireling trying to keep up with her.
+
+"We're all very proud of Lili's having a hired man," said Burnamy.
+"We think it reflects credit on her customers."
+
+March had begun his breakfast with-the voracious appetite of an early-
+rising invalid.  "What coffee!"
+
+He drew a long sigh after the first draught.
+
+"It's said to be made of burnt figs," said Burnamy, from the
+inexhaustible advantage of his few days' priority in Carlsbad.
+
+"Then let's have burnt figs introduced at home as soon as possible.  But
+why burnt figs?  That seems one of those doubts which are much more
+difficult than faith."
+
+It's not only burnt figs," said Burnamy, with amiable superiority, "if it
+is burnt figs, but it's made after a formula invented by a consensus of
+physicians, and enforced by the municipality.  Every caf‚ in Carlsbad
+makes the same kind of coffee and charges the same price."
+
+"You are leaving us very little to find out for ourselves," sighed March.
+
+"Oh, I know a lot more things.  Are you fond of fishing?"
+
+"Not very."
+
+"You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl, but they send an
+official with you who keeps count, and when you have had your sport, the
+trout belong to the municipality just as they did before you caught
+them."
+
+"I don't see why that isn't a good notion: the last thing I should want
+to do would be to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I was personally
+acquainted with.  Well, I'm never going away from Carlsbad.  I don't
+wonder people get their doctors to tell them to come back."
+
+Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller had got together
+about the place, and had given him to put in shape.  It was run in the
+interest of people who had got out of order, so that they would keep
+coming to get themselves in order again; you could hardly buy an
+unwholesome meal in the town; all the cooking was 'kurgemass'.  He won
+such favor with his facts that he could not stop in time: he said to
+March, "But if you ever should have a fancy for a fish of your personal
+acquaintance, there's a restaurant up the Tepl, where they let you pick
+out your trout in the water; then they catch him and broil him for you,
+and you know what you are eating."
+
+"Is it a municipal restaurant?"
+
+"Semi-municipal," said Burnamy, laughing.
+
+We'll take Mrs. March," said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamy felt
+the limitations of a woman's sense of humor, which always define
+themselves for men so unexpectedly.
+
+He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her what
+he knew about distinctions and dignities that he now saw among the
+breakfasters.  The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were set
+together in such labyrinths that any one who left the central aisle was
+lost in them.  The serving-girls ran more swiftly to and fro, responding
+with a more nervous shrillness to the calls of "Fraulein! Fraulein!" that
+followed them.  The proprietor, in his bare head, stood like one
+paralyzed by his prosperity, which sent up all round him the clash of
+knives and crockery, and the confusion of tongues.  It was more than an
+hour before Burnamy caught Lili's eye, and three times she promised to
+come and be paid before she came.  Then she said, "It is so nice, when
+you stay a little," and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who had
+broken the dishes in her fall near them, she almost wept with tenderness;
+she almost winked with wickedness when he asked if the American princess
+was still in her place.
+
+"Do go and see who it can be!" Mrs. March entreated.  "We'll wait here,"
+and he obeyed.  "I am not sure that I like him," she said, as soon as he
+was out of hearing.  "I don't know but he's coarse, after all.  Do you
+approve of his knowing so many people's 'taches' already?"
+
+"Would it be any better later?" he asked in tern.  "He seemed to find you
+interested."
+
+"It's very different with us; we're not young," she urged, only half
+seriously.
+
+Her husband laughed.  "I see you want me to defend him.  Oh, hello!"
+he cried, and she saw Burnamy coming toward them with a young lady, who
+was nodding to them from as far as she could see them.  "This is the easy
+kind of thing that makes you Blush for the author if you find it in a
+novel."
+
+
+
+
+XXX.
+
+Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to kiss her.  "Do you
+know I felt it must be you, all the time!  When did you come?  Where is
+your father?  What hotel are you staying at?"
+
+It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking hands with March, that it was
+last night, and her father was finishing his breakfast, and it was one of
+the hotels on the hill.  On the way back to her father it appeared that
+he wished to consult March's doctor; not that there was anything the
+matter.
+
+The general himself was not much softened by the reunion with his fellow-
+Americans; he confided to them that his coffee was poisonous; but he
+seemed, standing up with the Paris-New York Chronicle folded in his hand,
+to have drunk it all.  Was March going off on his forenoon tramp?  He
+believed that was part of the treatment, which was probably all humbug,,
+though he thought of trying it, now he was there.  He was told the walks
+were fine; he looked at Burnamy as if he had been praising them, and
+Burnamy said he had been wondering if March would not like to try a
+mountain path back to his hotel; he said, not so sincerely, that he
+thought Mrs. March would like it.
+
+"I shall like your account of it," she answered.  "But I'll walk back on
+a level, if you please."
+
+"Oh, yes," Miss Triscoe pleaded, "come with us!"
+
+She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with her father so
+gracefully that Mrs. March herself could scarcely have told just where
+the girl's real purpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident, or
+just how she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the pleasure of
+seeing Mrs. March back to her hotel.
+
+March went with the young people across the meadow behind the Posthof and
+up into the forest, which began at the base of the mountain.  At first
+they tried to keep him in the range of their talk; but he fell behind
+more and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was less and
+less possible to include him in it.  When it began to concern their
+common appreciation of the Marches, they even tried to get out of his
+hearing.
+
+"They're so young in their thoughts," said Burnamy, "and they seem as
+much interested in everything as they could have been thirty years ago.
+They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it is
+now; don't you think?  I mean, in the eighteen-sixties."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can see that."
+
+"I don't know why we shouldn't be born older in each generation than
+people were in the last.  Perhaps we are," he suggested.
+
+"I don't know how you mean," said the girl, keeping vigorously up with
+him; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not have
+his hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it.
+
+"I don't believe I can quite make it out myself.  But fancy a man that
+began to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the past
+experience of the whole race--"
+
+"He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn't he?"
+
+"Rather monstrous, yes," he owned, with a laugh.  "But that's where the
+psychological interest would come in."
+
+As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it.
+"I suppose you've been writing all sorts of things since you came here."
+
+"Well, it hasn't been such a great while as it's seemed, and I've had Mr.
+Stoller's psychological interests to look after."
+
+"Oh, yes!  Do you like him?"
+
+"I don't know.  He's a lump of honest selfishness.  He isn't bad.  You
+know where to have him.  He's simple, too."
+
+"You mean, like Mr. March?"
+
+"I didn't mean that; but why not?  They're not of the same generation,
+but Stoller isn't modern."
+
+"I'm very curious to see him," said the girl.
+
+"Do you want me to introduce him?"
+
+"You can introduce him to papa."
+
+They stopped and looked across the curve of the mounting path, down on
+March, who had sunk on a way-side seat, and was mopping his forehead.  He
+saw them, and called up: "Don't wait for me.  I'll join you, gradually."
+
+"I don't want to lose you," Burnamy called back, but he kept on with Miss
+Triscoe.  "I want to get the Hirschensprung in," he explained.  "It's the
+cliff where a hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet to get away
+from an emperor who was after him."
+
+"Oh, yes.  They have them everywhere."
+
+"Do they?  Well, anyway, there's a noble view up there."
+
+There was no view on the way up.  The Germans' notion of a woodland is
+everywhere that of a dense forest such as their barbarous tribes
+primevally herded in.  It means the close-set stems of trees, with their
+tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely that you may
+walk dry through it almost as long as a German shower lasts.  When the
+sun shines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here
+and there with the gold that trickles through.  There is nothing of the
+accident of an American wood in these forests, which have been watched
+and weeded by man ever since they burst the soil.  They remain nurseries,
+but they have the charm which no human care can alienate.  The smell of
+their bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth about
+their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his
+country-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life in
+cities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests and
+dimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of
+exemption from care.  There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation;
+no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him
+good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and
+was less intrusive than if he had not been there.
+
+March thought of the impassioned existence of these young people playing
+the inevitable comedy of hide and seek which the youth of the race has
+played from the beginning of time.  The other invalids who haunted the
+forest, and passed up and down before him in fulfilment of their several
+prescriptions, had a thin unreality in spite of the physical bulk that
+prevailed among them, and they heightened the relief that the forest-
+spirit brought him from the strenuous contact of that young drama.  He
+had been almost painfully aware that the persons in it had met, however
+little they knew it, with an eagerness intensified by their brief
+separation, and he fancied it was the girl who had unconsciously operated
+their reunion in response to the young man's longing, her will making
+itself electrically felt through space by that sort of wireless
+telegraphy which love has long employed, and science has just begun to
+imagine.
+
+He would have been willing that they should get home alone, but he knew
+that his wife would require an account of them from him, and though he
+could have invented something of the kind, if it came to the worst, he
+was aware that it would not do for him to arrive without them.  The
+thought goaded him from his seat, and he joined the upward procession of
+his fellow-sick, as it met another procession straggling downward; the
+ways branched in all directions, with people on them everywhere, bent
+upon building up in a month the health which they would spend the rest of
+the year in demolishing.
+
+He came upon his charges unexpectedly at a turn of the path, and Miss
+Triscoe told him that he ought to have been with them for the view from
+the Hirschensprung.  It was magnificent, she said, and she made Burnamy
+corroborate her praise of it, and agree with her that it was worth the
+climb a thousand times; he modestly accepted the credit she appeared
+willing to give him, of inventing the Hirschensprung.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.
+
+Between his work for Stoller and what sometimes seemed the
+obstructiveness of General Triscoe, Burnamy was not very much with Miss
+Triscoe.  He was not devout, but he went every Sunday to the pretty
+English church on the hill, where he contributed beyond his means to the
+support of the English clergy on the Continent, for the sake of looking
+at her back hair during the service, and losing himself in the graceful
+lines which defined, the girl's figure from the slant of her flowery hat
+to the point where the pewtop crossed her elastic waist.  One happy
+morning the general did not come to church, and he had the fortune to
+walk home with her to her pension, where she lingered with him a moment,
+and almost made him believe she might be going to ask him to come in.
+
+The next evening, when he was sauntering down the row of glittering shops
+beside the Tepl, with Mrs. March, they overtook the general and his
+daughter at a place where the girl was admiring some stork-scissors in
+the window; she said she wished she were still little, so that she could
+get them.  They walked home with the Triscoes, and then he hurried Mrs.
+March back to the shop.  The man had already put up his shutters, and was
+just closing his door, but Burnamy pushed in, and asked to look at the
+stork-scissors they had seen in the window.  The gas was out, and the
+shopman lighted a very dim candle, to show them.
+
+"I knew you wanted to get them for her, after what she said, Mrs. March,"
+he laughed, nervously, "and you must let me lend you the money."
+
+"Why, of course!" she answered, joyfully humoring his feint.  "Shall I
+put my card in for the man to send home to her with them?"
+
+"Well--no.  No.  Not your card--exactly.  Or, yes!  Yes, you must, I
+suppose."
+
+They made the hushing street gay with their laughter; the next evening
+Miss Triscoe came upon the Marches and Burnamy where they sat after
+supper listening to the concert at Pupp's, and thanked Mrs. March for the
+scissors.  Then she and Burnamy had their laugh again, and Miss Triscoe
+joined them, to her father's frowning mystification.  He stared round for
+a table; they were all taken, and he could not refuse the interest
+Burnamy made with the waiters to bring them one and crowd it in.  He had
+to ask him to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down and heard the concert
+through beside Miss Triscoe.
+
+"What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of stork-scissors?" March
+demanded, when his wife and he were alone.
+
+"Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest," she began, in a tone which he
+felt to be wheedling, and she told the story of the scissors.
+
+"Look here, my dear!  Didn't you promise to let this love-affair alone?"
+
+"That was on the ship.  And besides, what would you have done, I should
+like to know?  Would you have refused to let him buy them for her?"
+She added, carelessly, "He wants us to go to the Kurhaus ball with him."
+
+"Oh, does he!"
+
+"Yes.  He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if we
+will chaperon them.  And I promised that you would."
+
+"That I would?"
+
+"It will do just as well if you go.  And it will be very amusing; you can
+see something of Carlsbad society."
+
+"But I'm not going!" he declared.  "It would interfere with my cure.  The
+sitting up late would be bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and I
+should eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do all sorts of
+unwholesome things."
+
+"Nonsense!  The refreshments will be 'kurgemass', of course."
+
+"You can go yourself," he said.
+
+A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty as it is before
+twenty, but still it has claims upon the imagination, and the novel
+circumstance of a ball in the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for Mrs.
+March.  It was the annual reunion which is given by municipal authority
+in the large hall above the bathrooms; it is frequented with safety and
+pleasure by curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it began to have
+for Mrs. March the charm of duty; she believed that she could finally
+have made March go in her place, but she felt that she ought really to go
+in his, and save him from the late hours and the late supper.
+
+"Very well, then," she said at last, "I will go."
+
+It appeared that any civil person might go to the reunion who chose to
+pay two florins and a half.  There must have been some sort of
+restriction, and the ladies of Burnamy's party went with a good deal of
+amused curiosity to see what the distinctions were; but they saw none
+unless it was the advantages which the military had.  The long hall over
+the bathrooms shaped itself into a space for the dancing at one end, and
+all the rest of it was filled with tables, which at half past eight were
+crowded with people, eating, drinking, and smoking.  The military enjoyed
+the monopoly of a table next the rail dividing the dancing from the
+dining space.  There the tight-laced Herr Hauptmanns and Herr Lieutenants
+sat at their sausage and beer and cigars in the intervals of the waltzes,
+and strengthened themselves for a foray among the gracious Fraus and
+Frauleins on the benches lining three sides of the dancing-space.  From
+the gallery above many civilian spectators looked down upon the gayety,
+and the dress-coats of a few citizens figured among the uniforms.
+
+As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fashion found their way to
+the dancing-floor, and toward ten o'clock it became rather crowded.  A
+party of American girls showed their Paris dresses in the transatlantic
+versions of the waltz.  At first they danced with the young men who came
+with them; but after a while they yielded to the custom of the place, and
+danced with any of the officers who asked them.
+
+"I know it's the custom," said Mrs. March to Miss Triscoe, who was at her
+side in one of the waltzes she had decided to sit out, so as not to be
+dancing all the time with Burnamy, "but I never can like it without an
+introduction."
+
+"No," said the girl, with the air of putting temptation decidedly away,
+"I don't believe papa would, either."
+
+A young officer came up, and drooped in mute supplication before her.
+She glanced at Mrs. March, who turned her face away; and she excused
+herself with the pretence that she had promised the dance, and by good
+fortune, Burnamy, who had been unscrupulously waltzing with a lady he did
+not know, came up at the moment.  She rose and put her hand on his arm,
+and they both bowed to the officer before they whirled away.  The officer
+looked after them with amiable admiration; then he turned to Mrs. March
+with a light of banter in his friendly eyes, and was unmistakably asking
+her to dance.  She liked his ironical daring, she liked it so much that
+she forgot her objection to partners without introductions; she forgot
+her fifty-odd years; she forgot that she was a mother of grown children
+and even a mother-in-law; she remembered only the step of her out-dated
+waltz.
+
+It seemed to be modern enough for the cheerful young officer, and they
+were suddenly revolving with the rest. . .  A tide of long-forgotten
+girlhood welled up in her heart, and she laughed as she floated off on it
+past the astonished eyes of Miss Triscoe and Burnamy.  She saw them
+falter, as if they had lost their step in their astonishment; then they
+seemed both to vanish, and her partner had released her, and was helping
+Miss Triscoe up from the floor; Burnamy was brushing the dust from his
+knees, and the citizen who had bowled them over was boisterously
+apologizing and incessantly bowing.
+
+"Oh, are you hurt?" Mrs. March implored.  "I'm sure you must be killed;
+and I did it!  I don't know, what I was thinking of!"
+
+The girl laughed.  "I'm not hurt a bit!"
+
+They had one impulse to escape from the place, and from the sympathy and
+congratulation.  In the dressing-room she declared again that she was all
+right.  "How beautifully you waltz, Mrs. March!" she said, and she
+laughed again, and would not agree with her that she had been ridiculous.
+"But I'm glad those American girls didn't see me.  And I can't be too
+thankful papa didn't come!"
+
+Mrs. March's heart sank at the thought of what General Triscoe would
+think of her.  "You must tell him I did it.  I can never lift up my
+head!"
+
+"No, I shall not.  No one did it," said the girl, magnanimously.  She
+looked down sidelong at her draperies.  "I was so afraid I had torn my
+dress! I certainly heard something rip."
+
+It was one of the skirts of Burnamy's coat, which he had caught into his
+hand and held in place till he could escape to the men's dressing-room,
+where he had it pinned up so skillfully that the damage was not suspected
+by the ladies.  He had banged his knee abominably too; but they did not
+suspect that either, as he limped home on the air beside them, first to
+Miss Triscoe's pension, and then to Mrs. March's hotel.
+
+It was quite eleven o'clock, which at Carlsbad is as late as three in the
+morning anywhere else, when she let herself into her room.  She decided
+not to tell her husband, then; and even at breakfast, which they had at
+the Posthof, she had not got to her confession, though she had told him
+everything else about the ball, when the young officer with whom she had
+danced passed between the tables near her.  He caught her eye and bowed
+with a smile of so much meaning that March asked, "Who's your pretty
+young friend?"
+
+"Oh, that!"  she answered carelessly.  "That was one of the officers at
+the ball," and she laughed.
+
+"You seem to be in the joke, too," he said.  "What is it?"
+
+"Oh, something.  I'll tell you some time.  Or perhaps you'll find out."
+
+"I'm afraid you won't let me wait."
+
+"No, I won't," and now she told him.  She had expected teasing, ridicule,
+sarcasm, anything but the psychological interest mixed with a sort of
+retrospective tenderness which he showed.  "I wish I could have seen you;
+I always thought you danced well."  He added: "It seems that you need a
+chaperon too."
+
+The next morning, after March and General Triscoe had started off upon
+one of the hill climbs, the young people made her go with them for a walk
+up the Tepl, as far as the caf‚ of the Freundschaftsaal.  In the grounds
+an artist in silhouettes was cutting out the likenesses of people who
+supposed themselves to have profiles, and they begged Mrs. March to sit
+for hers.  It was so good that she insisted on Miss Triscoe's sitting in
+turn, and then Burnamy.  Then he had the inspiration to propose that they
+should all three sit together, and it appeared that such a group was
+within the scope of the silhouettist's art; he posed them in his little
+bower, and while he was mounting the picture they took turns, at five
+kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes played by his Edison
+phonograph.
+
+Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moral fibre; but she
+tried to draw the line at letting Burnamy keep the group.  "Why not?" he
+pleaded.
+
+"You oughtn't to ask," she returned.  "You've no business to have Miss
+Triscoe's picture, if you must know."
+
+"But you're there to chaperon us!" he persisted.
+
+He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she said, "You need a
+chaperon who doesn't lose her head, in a silhouette."  But it seemed
+useless to hold out after that, and she heard herself asking, "Shall we
+let him keep it, Miss Triscoe?"
+
+Burnamy went off to his work with Stoller, carrying the silhouette with
+him, and she kept on with Miss Triscoe to her hotel.  In turning from the
+gate after she parted with the girl she found herself confronted with
+Mrs. Adding and Rose.  The ladies exclaimed at each other in an
+astonishment from which they had to recover before they could begin to
+talk, but from the first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Adding had
+something to say.  The more freely to say it she asked Mrs. March into
+her hotel, which was in the same street with the pension of the Triscoes,
+and she let her boy go off about the exploration of Carlsbad; he promised
+to be back in an hour.
+
+"Well, now what scrape are you in?" March asked when his wife came home,
+and began to put off her things, with signs of excitement which he could
+not fail to note.  He was lying down after a long tramp, and he seemed
+very comfortable.
+
+His question suggested something of anterior import, and she told him
+about the silhouettes, and the advantage the young people had taken of
+their power over her through their knowledge of her foolish behavior at
+the ball.
+
+He said, lazily: "They seem to be working you for all you're worth.  Is
+that it?"
+
+"No; there is something worse.  Something's happened which throws all
+that quite in the shade.  Mrs. Adding is here."
+
+"Mrs. Adding?" he repeated, with a dimness for names which she would not
+allow was growing on him.
+
+"Don't be stupid, dear!  Mrs. Adding, who sat opposite Mr. Kenby on the
+Norumbia.  The mother of the nice boy."
+
+"Oh, yes! Well, that's good!"
+
+"No, it isn't!  Don't say such a thing--till you know!" she cried, with a
+certain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomed seriousness in the
+fact.  He sat up as if better to confront the mystery.  "I have been at
+her hotel, and she has been telling me that she's just come from Berlin,
+and that Mr. Kenby's been there, and-- Now I won't have you making a joke
+of it, or breaking out about it, as if it were not a thing to be looked
+for; though of course with the others on our hands you're not to blame
+for not thinking of it.  But you can see yourself that she's young and
+good-looking.  She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were not
+for him, I don't believe she would hesitate--"
+
+"For heaven's sake, what are you driving at?" March broke in, and she
+answered him as vehemently:
+
+"He's asked her to marry him!"
+
+"Kenby?  Mrs. Adding?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Well, now, Isabel, this won't do!  They ought to be ashamed of
+themselves.  With that morbid, sensitive boy! It's shocking--"
+
+"Will you listen?  Or do you want me to stop?"  He arrested himself at
+her threat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence
+time to sink in, "She refused him, of course!"
+
+"Oh, all right, then!"
+
+"You take it in such a way that I've a great mind not to tell you
+anything more about it."
+
+"I know you have," he said, stretching himself out again; "but you'll do
+it, all the same.  You'd have been awfully disappointed if I had been
+calm and collected."
+
+"She refused him," she began again, "although she respects him, because
+she feels that she ought to devote herself to her son.  Of course she's
+very young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a man
+twice her age, and she's not thirty-five yet.  I don't think she ever
+cared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something about
+him."
+
+"I never heard of him.  I--"
+
+Mrs. March made a "tchck!" that would have recalled the most consequent
+of men from the most logical and coherent interpretation to the true
+intent of her words.  He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely:
+"Well, I won't do it.  If she's refused him, that's the end of it; she
+needn't know anything about him, and she has no right to."
+
+"Now I think differently," said Mrs. March, with an inductive air.
+"Of course she has to know about him, now."  She stopped, and March
+turned his head and looked expectantly at her.  "He said he would not
+consider her answer final, but would hope to see her again and-- She's
+afraid he may follow her-- What are you looking at me so for?"
+
+"Is he coming here?"
+
+"Am I to blame if he is?  He said he was going to write to her."
+
+March burst into a laugh.  "Well, they haven't been beating about the
+bush!  When I think how Miss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from the
+first moment she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she was
+running from him, and he imagines that he has been boldly following her,
+without the least hope from her, I can't help admiring the simple
+directness of these elders."
+
+"And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what will you say?" she cut in
+eagerly.
+
+"I'll say I don't like the subject.  What am I in Carlsbad for?  I came
+for the cure, and I'm spending time and money on it.  I might as well go
+and take my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to listen to
+Kenby."
+
+"I know it's bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people,"
+said Mrs. March.  "I don't believe he'll want to talk with you; but if--"
+
+"Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel?  I'm not going to have them round in my
+bread-trough!"
+
+"She isn't.  She's at one of the hotels on the hill."
+
+"Very well, let her stay there, then.  They can manage their love-affairs
+in their own way.  The only one I care the least for is the boy."
+
+"Yes, it is forlorn for him.  But he likes Mr. Kenby, and--  No, it's
+horrid, and you can't make it anything else!"
+
+"Well, I'm not trying to."  He turned his face away.  "I must get my nap,
+now."  After she thought he must have fallen asleep, he said, "The first
+thing you know, those old Eltwins will be coming round and telling us
+that they're going to get divorced."  Then he really slept.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.
+
+The mid-day dinner at Pupp's was the time to see the Carlsbad world, and
+the Marches had the habit of sitting long at table to watch it.
+
+There was one family in whom they fancied a sort of literary quality, as
+if they had come out of some pleasant German story, but they never knew
+anything about them.  The father by his dress must have been a Protestant
+clergyman; the mother had been a beauty and was still very handsome; the
+daughter was good-looking, and of a good-breeding which was both girlish
+and ladylike.  They commended themselves by always taking the table
+d'hote dinner, as the Marches did, and eating through from the soup and
+the rank fresh-water fish to the sweet, upon the same principle: the
+husband ate all the compote and gave the others his dessert, which was
+not good for him.  A young girl of a different fascination remained as
+much a mystery.  She was small and of an extreme tenuity, which became
+more bewildering as she advanced through her meal, especially at supper,
+which she made of a long cucumber pickle, a Frankfort sausage of twice
+the pickle's length, and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she held a
+shivering little hound; she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly
+maid, and had every effect of being a gracious Fraulein.  A curious
+contrast to her Teutonic voracity was the temperance of a young Latin
+swell, imaginably from Trieste, who sat long over his small coffee and
+cigarette, and tranquilly mused upon the pages of an Italian newspaper.
+At another table there was a very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing
+draperies of white, who commanded a sallow family of South-Americans, and
+loudly harangued them in South-American Spanish; she flared out in a
+picture which nowhere lacked strong effects; and in her background lurked
+a mysterious black face and figure, ironically subservient to the old
+man, the mild boy, and the pretty young girl in the middle distance of
+the family group.
+
+Amidst the shows of a hardened worldliness there were touching glimpses
+of domesticity and heart: a young bride fed her husband soup from her own
+plate with her spoon, unabashed by the publicity; a mother and her two
+pretty daughters hung about a handsome officer, who must have been newly
+betrothed to one of the girls; and, the whole family showed a helpless
+fondness for him, which he did not despise, though he held it in check;
+the girls dressed alike, and seemed to have for their whole change of
+costume a difference from time to time in the color of their sleeves.
+The Marches believed they had seen the growth of the romance which had
+eventuated so happily; and they saw other romances which did not in any
+wise eventuate.  Carlsbad was evidently one of the great marriage marts
+of middle Europe, where mothers brought their daughters to be admired,
+and everywhere the flower of life was blooming for the hand of love.
+It blew by on all the promenades in dresses and hats as pretty as they
+could be bought or imagined; but it was chiefly at Pupp's that it
+flourished.  For the most part it seemed to flourish in vain, and to be
+destined to be put by for another season to dream, bulblike, of the
+coming summer in the quiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian homes.
+
+Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than the spectators knew; but
+for their own pleasure they would not have had their pang for it less;
+and March objected to having a more explicit demand upon his sympathy.
+"We could have managed," he said, at the close of their dinner, as he
+looked compassionately round upon the parterre of young girls, "we could
+have managed with Burnamy and Miss Triscoe; but to have Mrs. Adding and
+Kenby launched upon us is too much.  Of course I like Kenby, and if the
+widow alone were concerned I would give him my blessing: a wife more or a
+widow less is not going to disturb the equilibrium of the universe;
+but--"  He stopped, and then he went on: "Men and women are well enough.
+They complement each other very agreeably, and they have very good times
+together.  But why should they get in love?-- It is sure to make them
+uncomfortable to themselves and annoying to others."  He broke off, and
+stared about him.  "My dear, this is really charming--almost as charming
+as the Posthof."  The crowd spread from the open vestibule of the hotel
+and the shelter of its branching pavilion roofs until it was dimmed in
+the obscurity of the low grove across the way in an ultimate depth where
+the musicians were giving the afternoon concert.  Between its two
+stationary divisions moved a current of promenaders, with some such
+effect as if the colors of a lovely garden should have liquefied and
+flowed in mingled rose and lilac, pink and yellow, and white and orange,
+and all the middle tints of modern millinery.  Above on one side were the
+agreeable bulks of architecture, in the buff and gray of Carlsbad; and
+far beyond on the other were the upland slopes, with villas and long
+curves of country roads, belted in with miles of wall.  "It would be
+about as offensive to have a love-interest that one personally knew about
+intruded here," he said, "as to have a two-spanner carriage driven
+through this crowd.  It ought to be forbidden by the municipality."
+
+Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with her eyes, and she
+answered: "See that handsome young Greek priest!  Isn't he an
+archimandrite?  The portier said he was."
+
+"Then let him pass for an archimandrite.  Now," he recurred to his
+grievance again, dreamily, "I have got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, and
+poison his mind against Burnamy, and I shall have to instil a few drops
+of venomous suspicion against Kenby into the heart of poor little Rose
+Adding.  Oh;" he broke out, "they will spoil everything.  They'll be with
+us morning, noon, and night," and he went on to work the joke of repining
+at his lot.  The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers' pretence of
+being interested in something besides themselves, which they were no more
+capable of than so many lunatics.  How could they care for pretty girls
+playing tennis on an upland level, in the waning afternoon?  Or a cartful
+of peasant women stopping to cross themselves at a way-side shrine?  Or a
+whistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some wayside
+raspberries to touch his hat and say good-morning?  Or those preposterous
+maidens sprinkling linen on the grass from watering-pots while the skies
+were full of rain?  Or that blacksmith shop where Peter the Great made a
+horseshoe.  Or the monument of the young warrior-poet Koerner, with a
+gentle-looking girl and her mother reading and knitting on a bench before
+it?  These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what could lovers really
+care for them?  A peasant girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fast
+asleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog, lay in his harness near
+her with one drowsy eye half open for her and the other for the contents
+of their cart; a boy chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyond
+the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all the neighbors; the negro
+door-keeper at the Golden Shield who ought to have spoken our Southern
+English, but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweet afternoon
+stillness in the woods; the good German mothers crocheting at the Posthof
+concerts.  Burnamy as a young poet might hate felt the precious quality
+of these things, if his senses had not been holden by Miss Triscoe; and
+she might have felt it if only he had done so.  But as it was it would be
+lost upon their preoccupation; with Mrs. Adding and Kenby it would be
+hopeless.
+
+A day or two after Mrs: March had met Mrs. Adding, she went with her
+husband to revere a certain magnificent blackamoor whom be had discovered
+at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg,
+where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and looked, in the
+black of his skin and the white of his flowing costume, like a colossal
+figure carved in ebony and ivory.  They took a roundabout way through a
+street entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is a
+pension if it is not n hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimental
+prettiness; with each a little garden before it, and a bower with an iron
+table in it for breakfasting and supping out-doors; and he said that they
+would be the very places for bridal couples who wished to spend the
+honey-moon in getting well of the wedding surfeit.  She denounced him for
+saying such a thing as that, and for his inconsistency in complaining of
+lovers while he was willing to think of young married people.  He
+contended that there was a great difference in the sort of demand that
+young married people made upon the interest of witnesses, and that they
+were at least on their way to sanity; and before they agreed, they had
+come to the hotel with the blackamoor at the door.  While they lingered,
+sharing the splendid creature's hospitable pleasure in the spectacle he
+formed, they were aware of a carriage with liveried coachman and footman
+at the steps of the hotel; the liveries were very quiet and
+distinguished, and they learned that the equipage was waiting for the
+Prince of Coburg, or the Princess of Montenegro, or Prince Henry of
+Prussia; there were differing opinions among the twenty or thirty
+bystanders.  Mrs. March said she did not care which it was; and she was
+patient of the denouement, which began to postpone itself with delicate
+delays.  After repeated agitations at the door among portiers,
+proprietors, and waiters, whose fluttered spirits imparted their thrill
+to the spectators, while the coachman and footman remained
+sculpturesquely impassive in their places, the carriage moved aside and
+let an energetic American lady and her family drive up to the steps.  The
+hotel people paid her a tempered devotion, but she marred the effect by
+rushing out and sitting on a balcony to wait for the delaying royalties.
+There began to be more promises of their early appearance; a footman got
+down and placed himself at the carriage door; the coachman stiffened
+himself on his box; then he relaxed; the footman drooped, and even
+wandered aside.  There came a moment when at some signal the carriage
+drove quite away from the portal and waited near the gate of the
+stableyard; it drove back, and the spectators redoubled their attention.
+Nothing happened, and some of them dropped off.  At last an indescribable
+significance expressed itself in the official group at the door; a man in
+a high hat and dresscoat hurried out; a footman hurried to meet him; they
+spoke inaudibly together.  The footman mounted to his place; the coachman
+gathered up his reins and drove rapidly out of the hotel-yard, down the
+street, round the corner, out of sight.  The man in the tall hat and
+dress-coat went in; the official group at the threshold dissolved; the
+statue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evidently the Hoheit of
+Coburg, or Montenegro, or Prussia, was not going to take the air.
+
+"My dear, this is humiliating."
+
+"Not at all!  I wouldn't have missed it for anything.  Think how near we
+came to seeing them!"
+
+"I shouldn't feel so shabby if we had seen them.  But to hang round here
+in this plebeian abeyance, and then to be defeated and defrauded at last!
+I wonder how long this sort of thing is going on?"
+
+"What thing?"
+
+"This base subjection of the imagination to the Tom Foolery of the Ages."
+
+"I don't know what you mean.  I'm sure it's very natural to want to see a
+Prince."
+
+"Only too natural.  It's so deeply founded in nature that after denying
+royalty by word and deed for a hundred years, we Americans are hungrier
+for it than anybody else.  Perhaps we may come back to it!"
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+They looked up at the Austrian flag on the tower of the hotel, languidly
+curling and uncurling in the bland evening air, as it had over a thousand
+years of stupid and selfish monarchy, while all the generous republics of
+the Middle Ages had perished, and the commonwealths of later times had
+passed like fever dreams.  That dull, inglorious empire had antedated or
+outlived Venice and Genoa, Florence and Siena, the England of Cromwell,
+the Holland of the Stadtholders, and the France of many revolutions, and
+all the fleeting democracies which sprang from these.
+
+March began to ask himself how his curiosity differed from that of the
+Europeans about him; then he became aware that these had detached
+themselves, and left him exposed to the presence of a fellow countryman.
+It was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turned upon March with hilarious
+recognition.  "Hello!  Most of the Americans in Carlsbad seem to be
+hanging round here for a sight of these kings.  Well, we don't have a
+great many of 'em, and it's natural we shouldn't want to miss any.  But
+now, you Eastern fellows, you go to Europe every summer, and yet you
+don't seem to get enough of 'em.  Think it's human nature, or did it get
+so ground into us in the old times that we can't get it out, no
+difference what we say?"
+
+"That's very much what I've been asking myself," said March.  "Perhaps
+it's any kind of show.  We'd wait nearly as long for the President to
+come out, wouldn't we?"
+
+"I reckon we would.  But we wouldn't for his nephew, or his second
+cousin."
+
+"Well, they wouldn't be in the way of the succession."
+
+"I guess you're right."  The Iowan seemed better satisfied with March's
+philosophy than March felt himself, and he could not forbear adding:
+
+"But I don't, deny that we should wait for the President because he's a
+kind of king too.  I don't know that we shall ever get over wanting to
+see kings of some kind.  Or at least my wife won't.  May I present you to
+Mrs. March?"
+
+"Happy to meet you, Mrs. March," said the Iowan.  "Introduce you to Mrs.
+Otterson.  I'm the fool in my family, and I know just how you feel about
+a chance like this.  I don't mean that you're--"
+
+They all laughed at the hopeless case, and Mrs. March said, with one of
+her unexpected likings: "I understand, Mr. Otterson.  And I would rather
+be our kind of fool than the kind that pretends not to care for the sight
+of a king."
+
+"Like you and me, Mrs. Otterson," said March.
+
+"Indeed, indeed," said the lady, "I'd like to see a king too, if it
+didn't take all night.  Good-evening," she said, turning her husband
+about with her, as if she suspected a purpose of patronage in Mrs. March,
+and was not going to have it.
+
+Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly: "The trouble
+with me is that when I do get a chance to talk English, there's such a
+flow of language it carries me away, and I don't know just where I'm
+landing."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII.
+
+There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbad that summer.  One
+day the Duchess of Orleans drove over from Marienbad, attended by the
+Duke on his bicycle.  After luncheon, they reappeared for a moment before
+mounting to her carriage with their Secretaries: two young French
+gentlemen whose dress and bearing better satisfied Mrs. March's exacting
+passion for an aristocratic air in their order.  The Duke was fat and
+fair, as a Bourbon should be, and the Duchess fatter, though not so fair,
+as became a Hapsburg, but they were both more plebeian-looking than their
+retainers, who were slender as well as young, and as perfectly appointed
+as English tailors could imagine them.
+
+"It wouldn't do for the very highest sort of Highhotes," March declared,
+"to look their own consequence personally; they have to leave that, like
+everything else, to their inferiors."
+
+By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March's the German Hoheit had now become
+Highhote, which was so much more descriptive that they had permanently
+adopted it, and found comfort to their republican pride in the mockery
+which it poured upon the feudal structure of society.  They applied it
+with a certain compunction, however, to the King of Servia, who came a
+few days after the Duke and Duchess: he was such a young King, and of
+such a little country.  They watched for him from the windows of the
+reading-room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the three sides
+of the square before the hotel, and the two plain public carriages which
+brought the King and his suite drew tamely up at the portal, where the
+proprietor and some civic dignitaries received him.  His moderated
+approach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which Americans
+are used, allowed Mrs. March to make sure of the pale, slight,
+insignificant, amiable-looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign she
+was ambuscading.  Then no appeal to her principles could keep her from
+peeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda, where the King
+graciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and the proprietor,
+and vanished into the elevator.  She was destined to see him so often
+afterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her dining and
+supping by that of the simple potentate, who had his meals in one of the
+public rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in sack-coats like
+himself, after the informal manner of the place.
+
+Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourning
+abroad, in the interval of a successful rebellion, was at the opera one
+night with some of his faithful followers.  Burnamy had offered Mrs.
+March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and her husband with him,
+places in a box; but after she eagerly accepted, it seemed that he wished
+her to advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her father
+to join them.
+
+"Why not?" she returned, with an arching of the eyebrows.
+
+"Why," he said, "perhaps I had better make a clean breast of it."
+
+"Perhaps you had," she said, and they both laughed, though he laughed
+with a knot between his eyes.
+
+"The fact is, you know, this isn't my treat, exactly.  It's Mr.
+Stoller's."  At the surprise in her face he hurried on.  "He's got back
+his first letter in the paper, and he's so much pleased with the way he
+reads in print, that he wants to celebrate."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, non-committally.
+
+Burnamy laughed again.  "But he's bashful, and he isn't sure that you
+would all take it in the right way.  He wants you as friends of mine; and
+he hasn't quite the courage to ask you himself."
+
+This seemed to Mrs. March so far from bad that she said: "That's very
+nice of him.  Then he's satisfied with--with your help?  I'm glad of
+that."
+
+"Thank you.  He's met the Triscoes, and he thought it would be pleasant
+to you if they went, too."
+
+"Oh, certainly."
+
+"He thought," Burnamy went on, with the air of feeling his way, "that we
+might all go to the opera, and then--then go for a little supper
+afterwards at Schwarzkopf's."
+
+He named the only place in Carlsbad where yon can sup so late as ten
+o'clock; as the opera begins at six, and is over at half past eight, none
+but the wildest roisterers frequent the place.
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs. March.  "I don't know how a late supper would agree with
+my husband's cure.  I should have to ask him."
+
+"We could make it very hygienic," Burnamy explained.
+
+In repeating his invitation she blamed Burnamy's uncandor so much that
+March took his part, as perhaps she intended, and said, "Oh, nonsense,"
+and that he should like to go in for the whole thing; and General Triscoe
+accepted as promptly for himself and his daughter.  That made six people,
+Burnamy counted up, and he feigned a decent regret that there was not
+room for Mrs. Adding and her son; he would have liked to ask them.
+
+Mrs. March did not enjoy it so much as coming with her husband alone when
+they took two florin seats in the orchestra for the comedy.  The comedy
+always began half an hour earlier than the opera, and they had a five-
+o'clock supper at the Theatre-Caf‚ before they went, and they got to
+sleep by nine o'clock; now they would be up till half past ten at least,
+and that orgy at Schwarzkopf's might not be at all good for him.  But
+still she liked being there; and Miss Triscoe made her take the best
+seat; Burnamy and Stoller made the older men take the other seats beside
+the ladies, while they sat behind, or stood up, when they, wished to see,
+as people do in the back of a box.  Stoller was not much at ease in
+evening dress, but he bore himself with a dignity which was not perhaps
+so gloomy as it looked; Mrs. March thought him handsome in his way, and
+required Miss Triscoe to admire him.  As for Burnamy's beauty it was not
+necessary to insist upon that; he had the distinction of slender youth;
+and she liked to think that no Highhote there was of a more patrician
+presence than this yet unprinted contributor to 'Every Other Week'.
+He and Stoller seemed on perfect terms; or else in his joy he was able to
+hide the uneasiness which she had fancied in him from the first time she
+saw them together, and which had never been quite absent from his manner
+in Stoller's presence.  Her husband always denied that it existed, or if
+it did that it was anything but Burnamy's effort to get on common ground
+with an inferior whom fortune had put over him.
+
+The young fellow talked with Stoller, and tried to bring him into the
+range of the general conversation.  He leaned over the ladies, from time
+to time, and pointed out the notables whom he saw in the house; she was
+glad, for his sake, that he did not lean less over her than over Miss
+Triscoe.  He explained certain military figures in the boxes opposite,
+and certain ladies of rank who did not look their rank; Miss Triscoe, to
+Mrs. March's thinking, looked their united ranks, and more; her dress was
+very simple, but of a touch which saved it from being insipidly girlish;
+her beauty was dazzling.
+
+"Do you see that old fellow in the corner chair just behind the
+orchestra?"  asked Burnamy.  "He's ninety-six years old, and he comes to
+the theatre every night, and falls asleep as soon as the curtain rises,
+and sleeps through till the end of the act."
+
+"How dear!" said the girl, leaning forward to fix the nonagenarian with
+her glasses, while many other glasses converged upon her.  "Oh, wouldn't
+you like to know him, Mr. March?"
+
+"I should consider it a liberal education.  They have brought these
+things to a perfect system in Europe.  There is nothing to make life pass
+smoothly like inflexible constancy to an entirely simple custom.  My
+dear," he added to his wife, "I wish we'd seen this sage before.  He'd
+have helped us through a good many hours of unintelligible comedy.  I'm
+always coming as Burnamy's guest, after this."
+
+The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his triumph, and casting an eye
+about the theatre to cap it, he caught sight of that other potentate.
+He whispered joyfully, "Ah!  We've got two kings here to-night," and he
+indicated in a box of their tier just across from that where the King of
+Servia sat, the well-known face of the King of New York.
+
+"He isn't bad-looking," said March, handing his glass to General Triscoe.
+"I've not seen many kings in exile; a matter of a few Carlist princes and
+ex-sovereign dukes, and the good Henry V. of France, once, when I was
+staying a month in Venice; but I don't think they any of them looked the
+part better.  I suppose he has his dream of recurring power like the
+rest."
+
+"Dream! " said General Triscoe with the glass at his eyes.  "He's dead
+sure of it."
+
+"Oh, you don't really mean that!"
+
+"I don't know why I should have changed my mind."
+
+"Then it's as if we were in the presence of Charles II. just before he
+was called back to England, or Napoleon in the last moments of Elba.
+It's better than that.  The thing is almost unique; it's a new situation
+in history.  Here's a sovereign who has no recognized function, no legal
+status, no objective existence.  He has no sort of public being, except
+in the affection of his subjects.  It took an upheaval little short of an
+earthquake to unseat him.  His rule, as we understand it, was bad for all
+classes; the poor suffered more than the rich; the people have now had
+three years of self-government; and yet this wonderful man has such a
+hold upon the masses that he is going home to win the cause of oppression
+at the head of the oppressed.  When he's in power again, he will be as
+subjective as ever, with the power of civic life and death, and an
+idolatrous following perfectly ruthless in the execution of his will."
+
+"We've only begun," said the general.  "This kind of king is municipal,
+now; but he's going to be national.  And then, good-by, Republic!"
+
+"The only thing like it," March resumed, too incredulous of the evil
+future to deny himself the aesthetic pleasure of the parallel, "is the
+rise of the Medici in Florence, but even the Medici were not mere
+manipulators of pulls; they had some sort of public office, with some
+sort of legislated tenure of it.  The King of New York is sovereign by
+force of will alone, and he will reign in the voluntary submission of the
+majority.  Is our national dictator to be of the same nature and
+quality?"
+
+"It would be the scientific evolution, wouldn't it?"
+
+The ladies listened with the perfunctory attention which women pay to any
+sort of inquiry which is not personal.  Stoller had scarcely spoken yet;
+he now startled them all by demanding, with a sort of vindictive force,
+"Why shouldn't he have the power, if they're willing to let him?"
+
+"Yes," said General Triscoe, with a tilt of his head towards March.
+"That's what we must ask ourselves more and more."
+
+March leaned back in his chair, and looked up over his shoulder at
+Stoller.  "Well, I don't know.  Do you think it's quite right for a man
+to use an unjust power, even if others are willing that he should?"
+
+Stoller stopped with an air of bewilderment as if surprised on the point
+of saying that he thought just this.  He asked instead, "What's wrong
+about it?"
+
+"Well, that's one of those things that have to be felt, I suppose.  But
+if a man came to you, and offered to be your slave for a certain
+consideration--say a comfortable house, and a steady job, that wasn't too
+hard--should you feel it morally right to accept the offer?  I don't say
+think it right, for there might be a kind of logic for it."
+
+Stoller seemed about to answer; he hesitated; and before he had made any
+response, the curtain rose.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV.
+
+There are few prettier things than Carlsbad by night from one of the many
+bridges which span the Tepl in its course through the town.  If it is a
+starry night, the torrent glides swiftly away with an inverted firmament
+in its bosom, to which the lamps along its shores and in the houses on
+either side contribute a planetary splendor of their own.  By nine
+o'clock everything is hushed; not a wheel is heard at that dead hour;
+the few feet shuffling stealthily through the Alte Wiese whisper a
+caution of silence to those issuing with a less guarded tread from the
+opera; the little bowers that overhang the stream are as dark and mute as
+the restaurants across the way which serve meals in them by day; the
+whole place is as forsaken as other cities at midnight.  People get
+quickly home to bed, or if they have a mind to snatch a belated joy, they
+slip into the Theater-Caf‚, where the sleepy Frauleins serve them, in an
+exemplary drowse, with plates of cold ham and bottles of the gently
+gaseous waters of Giesshubl.  Few are of the bold badness which delights
+in a supper at Schwarzkopf's, and even these are glad of the drawn
+curtains which hide their orgy from the chance passer.
+
+The invalids of Burnamy's party kept together, strengthening themselves
+in a mutual purpose not to be tempted to eat anything which was not
+strictly 'kurgemass'.  Mrs. March played upon the interest which each of
+them felt in his own case so artfully that she kept them talking of their
+cure, and left Burnamy and Miss Triscoe to a moment on the bridge, by
+which they profited, while the others strolled on, to lean against the
+parapet and watch the lights in the skies and the water, and be alone
+together.  The stream shone above and below, and found its way out of and
+into the darkness under the successive bridges; the town climbed into the
+night with lamp-lit windows here and there, till the woods of the hill-
+sides darkened down to meet it, and fold it in an embrace from which some
+white edifice showed palely in the farthest gloom.
+
+He tried to make her think they could see that great iron crucifix which
+watches over it day and night from its piny cliff.  He had a fancy for a
+poem, very impressionistic, which should convey the notion of the
+crucifix's vigil.  He submitted it to her; and they remained talking till
+the others had got out of sight and hearing; and she was letting him keep
+the hand on her arm which he had put there to hold her from falling over
+the parapet, when they were both startled by approaching steps, and a
+voice calling, "Look here!  Who's running this supper party, anyway?"
+
+His wife had detached March from her group for the mission, as soon as
+she felt that the young people were abusing her kindness.  They answered
+him with hysterical laughter, and Burnamy said, "Why, it's Mr. Stoller's
+treat, you know."
+
+At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequiously met the party on the
+threshold and bowed them into a pretty inner room, with a table set for
+their supper, Stoller had gained courage to play the host openly.  He
+appointed General Triscoe to the chief seat; he would have put his
+daughter next to him, if the girl had not insisted upon Mrs. March's
+having the place, and going herself to sit next to March, whom she said
+she had not been able to speak a word to the whole evening.  But she did
+not talk a great deal to him; he smiled to find how soon he dropped out
+of the conversation, and Burnamy, from his greater remoteness across the
+table, dropped into it.  He really preferred the study of Stoller, whose
+instinct of a greater worldly quality in the Triscoes interested him;
+he could see him listening now to what General Triscoe was saying to Mrs.
+March, and now to what Burnamy was saying to Miss Triscoe; his strong,
+selfish face, as he turned it on the young people, expressed a mingled
+grudge and greed that was very curious.
+
+Stoller's courage, which had come and gone at moments throughout, rose at
+the end, and while they lingered at the table well on to the hour of ten,
+he said, in the sort of helpless offence he had with Burnamy, "What's the
+reason we can't all go out tomorrow to that old castle you was talking
+about?"
+
+"To Engelhaus?  I don't know any reason, as far as I'm concerned,"
+answered Burnamy; but he refused the initiative offered him, and Stoller
+was obliged to ask March:
+
+"You heard about it?"
+
+"Yes."  General Triscoe was listening, and March added for him, "It was
+the hold of an old robber baron; Gustavus Adolphus knocked it down, and
+it's very picturesque, I believe."
+
+"It sounds promising," said the general.  "Where is it?"
+
+"Isn't to-morrow our mineral bath?"  Mrs. March interposed between her
+husband and temptation.
+
+"No; the day after.  Why, it's about ten or twelve miles out on the old
+postroad that Napoleon took for Prague."
+
+"Napoleon knew a good road when he saw it," said the general, and he
+alone of the company lighted a cigar.  He was decidedly in favor of the
+excursion, and he arranged for it with Stoller, whom he had the effect of
+using for his pleasure as if he were doing him a favor.  They were six,
+and two carriages would take them: a two-spanner for four, and a one-
+spanner for two; they could start directly after dinners and get home in
+time for supper.
+
+Stoller asserted himself to say: "That's all right, then.  I want you to
+be my guests, and I'll see about the carriages."  He turned to Burnamy:
+"Will you order them?"
+
+"Oh," said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, "the portier will
+get them."
+
+"I don't understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept.
+Surely, he can't like that man!" said Mrs. March to her husband in their
+own room.
+
+"Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential.  The general seems to me,
+capable of letting even an enemy serve his turn.  Why didn't you speak,
+if you didn't want to go?"
+
+"Why didn't you?"
+
+"I wanted to go."
+
+"And I knew it wouldn't do to let Miss Triscoe go alone; I could see that
+she wished to go."
+
+"Do you think Burnamy did?"
+
+"He seemed rather indifferent.  And yet he must have realized that he
+would be with Miss Triscoe the whole afternoon."
+
+
+
+
+XXXV.
+
+If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the one-spanner, and the
+others followed in the two-spanner, it was not from want of politeness on
+the part of the young people in offering to give up their places to each
+of their elders in turn.  It would have been grotesque for either March
+or Stoller to drive with the girl; for her father it was apparently no
+question, after a glance at the more rigid uprightness of the seat in the
+one-spanner; and he accepted the place beside Mrs. March on the back seat
+of the two-spanner without demur.  He asked her leave to smoke, and then
+he scarcely spoke to her.  But he talked to the two men in front of him
+almost incessantly, haranguing them upon the inferiority of our
+conditions and the futility of our hopes as a people, with the effect of
+bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could have got on with
+Triscoe's contempt for the worthlessness of our working-classes, but did
+not know what to do with his scorn of the vulgarity and venality of their
+employers.  He accused some of Stoller's most honored and envied
+capitalists of being the source of our worst corruptions, and guiltier
+than the voting-cattle whom they bought and sold.
+
+"I think we can get rid of the whole trouble if we go at it the right
+way," Stoller said, diverging for the sake of the point he wished to
+bring in.  "I believe in having the government run on business
+principles.  They've got it here in Carlsbad, already, just the right
+sort of thing, and it works.  I been lookin' into it, and I got this
+young man, yonder"--he twisted his hand in the direction of the one-
+spanner! "to help me put it in shape.  I believe it's going to make our
+folks think, the best ones among them.  Here!"  He drew a newspaper out
+of his pocket, folded to show two columns in their full length, and
+handed it to Triscoe, who took it with no great eagerness, and began to
+run his eye over it.  "You tell me what you think of that.  I've put it
+out for a kind of a feeler.  I got some money in that paper, and I just
+thought I'd let our people see how a city can be managed on business
+principles."
+
+He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought while
+he read, and keep him up to the work, and he ignored the Marches so
+entirely that they began in self-defence to talk with each other.
+
+Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the
+breezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields of
+harvest.  They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the
+serried stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew
+straight as stalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened
+under a sky of unwonted cloudlessness.  Narrow strips of wheat and rye,
+which the men were cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices
+were binding, alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and
+breadths of beets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed
+land.  In the meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy
+rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving
+themselves the lighter labor of ordering the load.  From the upturned
+earth, where there ought to have been troops of strutting crows, a few
+sombre ravens rose.  But they could not rob the scene of its gayety; it
+smiled in the sunshine with colors which vividly followed the slope of
+the land till they were dimmed in the forests on the far-off mountains.
+Nearer and farther, the cottages and villages shone in the valleys, or
+glimmered through the veils of the distant haze.  Over all breathed the
+keen pure air of the hills, with a sentiment of changeless eld, which
+charmed March, back to his boyhood, where he lost the sense of his wife's
+presence, and answered her vaguely.  She talked contentedly on in the
+monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men learn to resign
+themselves.  They were both roused from their vagary by the voice of
+General Triscoe.  He was handing back the folded newspaper to Stoller,
+and saying, with a queer look at him over his glasses, "I should like to
+see what your contemporaries have to say to all that."
+
+"Well, sir," Stoller returned, "maybe I'll have the chance to show you.
+They got my instructions over there to send everything to me."
+
+Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape.
+They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape,
+after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, who
+were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the
+two-spanner behind.  They were talking of the hero and heroine of a novel
+they had both read, and he was saying, "I suppose you think he was justly
+punished."
+
+"Punished?" she repeated.  "Why, they got married, after all!"
+
+"Yes, but you could see that they were not going to be happy."
+
+"Then it seems to me that she was punished; too."
+
+"Well, yes; you might say that.  The author couldn't help that."
+
+Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:
+
+"I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero.  The girl was
+very exacting."
+
+"Why," said Burnamy, "I supposed that women hated anything like deception
+in men too much to tolerate it at all.  Of course, in this case, he
+didn't deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn't that worse?"
+
+"Yes, that was worse.  She could have forgiven him for deceiving her."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"He might have had to do that.  She wouldn't have minded his fibbing
+outright, so much, for then it wouldn't have seemed to come from his
+nature.  But if he just let her believe what wasn't true, and didn't say
+a word to prevent her, of course it was worse.  It showed something weak,
+something cowardly in him."
+
+Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh.  "I suppose it did.  But don't you
+think it's rather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds of courage?"
+
+"Yes, it is," she assented.  "That is why I say she was too exacting.
+But a man oughn't to defend him."
+
+Burnamy's laugh had more pleasure in it, now.  "Another woman might?"
+
+"No.  She might excuse him."
+
+He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was rather far behind, and
+he spoke to their driver bidding him go slowly till it caught up with
+them.  By the time it did so, they were so close to it that they could
+distinguish the lines of its wandering and broken walls.  Ever since they
+had climbed from the wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to the
+open plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater detail.  The
+detached mound of rock on which it stood rose like an island in the midst
+of the plain, and commanded the highways in every direction.
+
+"I believe," Burnamy broke out, with a bitterness apparently relevant to
+the ruin alone, "that if you hadn't required any quarterings of nobility
+from him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron.  He's a
+robber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn't have any scruple in levying
+tribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair
+and his crossbowmen were not on a strike.  But they would be on a strike,
+probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-union
+crossbowmen."
+
+If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as the
+civility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than he
+meant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, "I don't see how you can
+have anything to do with him, if you feel so about him."
+
+"Oh," Burnamy replied in kind, "he buys my poverty and not my will.  And
+perhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more."
+
+"Have you been doing something very wicked?"
+
+"What should you have to say to me, if I had?" he bantered.
+
+"Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you," she mocked back.
+
+They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a village
+street up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned.  A church at
+its base looked out upon an irregular square.
+
+A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide a
+darkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind him.
+He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village's claims
+upon the visitors' interest; he mastered, after a moment, their wishes in
+respect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it; at the top, he
+said, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would admit them.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI.
+
+The, path to the castle slanted upward across the shoulder of the hill,
+to a certain point, and there some rude stone steps mounted more
+directly.  Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden,
+bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the clean
+bitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf; but Nature spreads no
+such lavish feast in wood or field in the Old World as she spoils us with
+in the New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to be all her
+store, and man must make the most of them.  Miss Triscoe seemed to find
+flowers enough in the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together for her.
+She took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might have both hands
+for her skirt, and so did him two favors.
+
+A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns the ruin opened a gate
+for the party at the top, and levied a tax of thirty kreutzers each upon
+them, for its maintenance.  The castle, by his story, had descended from
+robber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked it to pieces in the
+sixteenth century; three hundred years later, the present owner restored
+it; and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed with
+brick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin satisfyingly
+permanent.  The walls were not of great extent, but such as they were
+they enclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground, and a
+cistern which once enabled the barons and their retainers to water their
+wine in time of siege.
+
+From that height they could overlook the neighboring highways in every
+direction, and could bring a merchant train to, with a shaft from a
+crossbow, or a shot from an arquebuse, at pleasure.  With General
+Triscoe's leave, March praised the strategic strength of the unique
+position, which he found expressive of the past, and yet suggestive of
+the present.  It was more a difference in method than anything else that
+distinguished the levy of customs by the authorities then and now.  What
+was the essential difference, between taking tribute of travellers
+passing on horseback, and collecting dues from travellers arriving by
+steamer?  They did not pay voluntarily in either case; but it might be
+proof of progress that they no longer fought the customs officials.
+
+"Then you believe in free trade," said Stoller, severely.
+
+"No.  I am just inquiring which is the best way of enforcing the tariff
+laws."
+
+"I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night," said Miss Triscoe, "that
+people are kept on the docks now for hours, and ladies cry at the way
+their things are tumbled over by the inspectors."
+
+"It's shocking," said Mrs. March, magisterially.
+
+"It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal times," her husband
+resumed.  "But I'm glad the travellers make no resistance.  I'm opposed
+to private war as much as I am to free trade."
+
+"It all comes round to the same thing at last," said General Triscoe.
+"Your precious humanity--"
+
+"Oh, I don't claim it exclusively," March protested.
+
+"Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road.
+He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on his
+course, and coming back to where he started."
+
+Stoller said, "I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here,
+that they will come to America and set up, if they can't stand the
+duties."
+
+"Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway," March consented.
+
+If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer.  He followed
+with his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated
+themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of the
+ruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin,
+upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot.  The land fell away
+from the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fields
+and in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into
+the distance.  "I don't suppose," Burnamy said, "that life ever does much
+better than this, do you?  I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and
+saying 'Unberufen.'  I might knock on your bouquet; that's wood."
+
+"It would spoil the flowers," she said, looking down at them in her belt.
+She looked up and their eyes met.
+
+"I wonder," he said, presently, "what makes us always have a feeling of
+dread when we are happy?"
+
+"Do you have that, too?" she asked.
+
+"Yes.  Perhaps it's because we know that change must come, and it must be
+for the worse."
+
+"That must be it.  I never thought of it before, though."
+
+"If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological
+weather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss
+or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tears
+beforehand--it may come to that."
+
+"I hope it won't.  I'd rather not know when I was to be happy; it would
+spoil the pleasure; and wouldn't be any compensation when it was the
+other way."
+
+A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller
+looking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquiline
+profile into relief.  "Oh!  Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?" he called gayly up
+to him.
+
+"I guess we've seen about all there is," he answered.  "Hadn't we better
+be going?" He probably did not mean to be mandatory.
+
+"All right," said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe again
+without further notice of him.
+
+They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the weird
+sacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and to
+account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt,
+and this one built only a few years before.  Then he locked the doors
+after them, and ran forward to open against their coming the chapel of
+the village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortified
+themselves for it at the village cafe.
+
+They were served by a little hunch-back maid; and she told them who lived
+in the chief house of the village.  It was uncommonly pretty; where all
+the houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as the
+dwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the great man of the place.
+March admired the cat which rubbed against her skirt while she stood and
+talked, and she took his praises modestly for the cat; but they wrought
+upon the envy, of her brother so that he ran off to the garden, and came
+back with two fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held up, with an arm
+across each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the spectators.
+
+"Oh, give him something!  "Mrs. March entreated.  "He's such a dear."
+
+"No, no! I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat outdone,"
+he refused; and then he was about to yield.
+
+"Hold on!"  said Stoller, assuming the host.  "I got the change."
+
+He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March had meant her husband to
+reward his naivete with half a florin at least; but he seemed to feel
+that he had now ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himself
+in charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel; he made Miss
+Triscoe let him carry her jacket when she found it warm.
+
+The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who
+designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy in
+the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details.
+Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then
+the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the three
+side-altars.  The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German
+version of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic at the time; the
+carving is coarse, and the color harsh and unsoftened by years, though it
+is broken and obliterated in places.
+
+The sacristan said that the chapel was never used for anything but
+funeral services, and he led the way out into the cemetery, where he
+wished to display the sepultural devices.  The graves here were planted
+with flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies; but a space
+fenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown with
+weeds and brambles: This space, he said, was for suicides; but to March
+it was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in consecrated
+ground where the stones had photographs of the dead on porcelain let into
+them.  One was the picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been the
+wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed to her in the
+inscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of irony, the
+magnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house of the
+village.  He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest the
+attention of the strangers, and be led them with less apparent
+hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the
+figure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping.  It is a subject much
+celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to his
+party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and March
+tried to make him understand that they appreciated it.  He knew that his
+wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great favor in
+showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of grief in the
+poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile of those who
+had taken their own lives and were parted in death from the more patient
+sufferers who had waited for God to take them.  With a curious, unpainful
+self-analysis he noted that the older members of the party, who in the
+course of nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from its
+shows; but the young girl and the young man had not borne to look on
+them, and had quickly escaped from the place, somewhere outside the gate.
+Was it the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with death which
+nature brings to life at last, or was it merely the effect, or defect, of
+ossified sensibilities, of toughened nerves?
+
+"That is all?" he asked of the spectral sacristan.
+
+"That is all," the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin
+commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something
+handsome.
+
+"No, no," said Stoller, detecting his gesture.  "Your money a'n't good."
+
+He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded
+them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so patient.
+In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have frankly
+said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and whispered
+a sad "Danke."
+
+Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they
+were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.
+
+"Oh, have I lost my glove in there?" said Mrs. March, looking at her
+hands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to.
+
+"Let me go and find it for you," Burnamy entreated.
+
+"Well," she consented, and she added, "If the sacristan has found it,
+give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow."
+
+As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, and
+her heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence: some
+men would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand.  He
+came back directly, saying, "No, he didn't find it."
+
+She laughed, and held both gloves up.  "No wonder!  I had it all the
+time.  Thank you ever so much."
+
+"How are we going to ride back?" asked Stoller.
+
+Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably.  No one
+else spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, "Oh, I think the
+way we came, is best."
+
+"Did that absurd creature," she apostrophized her husband as soon as she
+got him alone after their arrival at Pupp's, "think I was going to let
+him drive back with Agatha?"
+
+"I wonder," said March, "if that's what Burnamy calls her now?"
+
+"I shall despise him if it isn't."
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII.
+
+Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supper which they had eaten
+in a silence natural with two men who have been off on a picnic together.
+He did not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in, and the young
+man did not sit down after putting his letters before him.  He said, with
+an effort of forcing himself to speak at once, "I have looked through the
+papers, and there is something that I think you ought to see."
+
+"What do you mean?" said Stoller.
+
+Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certain
+articles were strongly circumscribed in ink.  The papers varied, but
+their editorials did not, in purport at least.  Some were grave and some
+were gay; one indignantly denounced; another affected an ironical
+bewilderment; the third simply had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller.
+They all, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad
+as the praise of municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with
+him gleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on the accession of the
+Honorable Jacob to their ranks.
+
+Stoller read the articles, one after another, with parted lips and
+gathering drops of perspiration on his upper lip, while Burnamy waited on
+foot.  He flung the papers all down at last.  "Why, they're a pack of
+fools!  They don't know what they're talking about!  I want city
+government carried on on business principles, by the people, for the
+people.  I don't care what they say!  I know I'm right, and I'm going
+ahead on this line if it takes all--" The note of defiance died out of
+his voice at the sight of Burnamy's pale face.  "What's the matter with
+you?"
+
+"There's nothing the matter with me."
+
+"Do you mean to tell me it is"--he could not bring himself to use the
+word--"what they say?"
+
+"I suppose," said Burnamy, with a dry mouth, "it's what you may call
+municipal socialism."
+
+Stoller jumped from his seat.  "And you knew it when you let me do it?"
+
+"I supposed you knew what you were about."
+
+"It's a lie!"  Stoller advanced upon him, wildly, and Burnamy took a step
+backward.
+
+"Look out!" shouted Burnamy.  "You never asked me anything about it.
+You told me what you wanted done, and I did it.  How could I believe you
+were such an ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you were
+talking about?"  He added, in cynical contempt, "But you needn't worry.
+You can make it right with the managers by spending a little more money
+than you expected to spend."
+
+Stoller started as if the word money reminded him of something.  "I can
+take care of myself, young man.  How much do I owe you?"
+
+"Nothing!" said Burnamy, with an effort for grandeur which failed him.
+
+The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffee at the Posthof, he
+came dragging himself toward them with such a haggard air that Mrs. March
+called, before he reached their table, "Why, Mr. Burnamy, what's the
+matter?"
+
+He smiled miserably.  "Oh, I haven't slept very well.  May I have my
+coffee with you?  I want to tell you something; I want you to make me.
+But I can't speak till the coffee comes.  Fraulein!" he besought a
+waitress going off with a tray near them.  "Tell Lili, please, to bring
+me some coffee--only coffee."
+
+He tried to make some talk about the weather, which was rainy, and the
+Marches helped him, but the poor endeavor lagged wretchedly in the
+interval between the ordering and the coming of the coffee.  "Ah, thank
+you, Lili," he said, with a humility which confirmed Mrs. March in her
+instant belief that he had been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and been
+rejected.  After gulping his coffee, he turned to her: "I want to say
+good-by.  I'm going away."
+
+"From Carlsbad?" asked Mrs. March with a keen distress.
+
+The water came into his eyes.  "Don't, don't be good to me, Mrs. March!
+I can't stand it.  But you won't, when you know."
+
+He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressing himself more
+and more to the intelligence of March, who let him go on without
+question, and laid a restraining hand upon his wife when he saw her about
+to prompt him.  At the end, "That's all," he said, huskily, and then he
+seemed to be waiting for March's comment.  He made none, and the young
+fellow was forced to ask, "Well, what do you think, Mr. March?"
+
+"What do you think yourself?"
+
+"I think, I behaved badly," said Burnamy, and a movement of protest from
+Mrs. March nerved him to add: "I could make out that it was not my
+business to tell him what he was doing; but I guess it was; I guess I
+ought to have stopped him, or given him a chance to stop himself.  I
+suppose I might have done it, if he had treated me decently when I turned
+up a day late, here; or hadn't acted toward me as if I were a hand in his
+buggy-works that had come in an hour after the whistle sounded."
+
+He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone in Mrs. March's eyes;
+but her husband only looked the more serious.
+
+He asked gently, "Do you offer that fact as an explanation, or as a
+justification."
+
+Burnamy laughed forlornly.  "It certainly wouldn't justify me.  You might
+say that it made the case all the worse for me."  March forbore to say,
+and Burnamy went on.  "But I didn't suppose they would be onto him so
+quick, or perhaps at all.  I thought--if I thought anything--that it
+would amuse some of the fellows in the office, who know about those
+things."  He paused, and in March's continued silence he went on.  "The
+chance was one in a hundred that anybody else would know where he had
+brought up."
+
+"But you let him take that chance," March suggested.
+
+"Yes, I let him take it.  Oh, you know how mixed all these things are!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Of course I didn't think it out at the time.  But I don't deny that I had
+a satisfaction in the notion of the hornets' nest he was poking his thick
+head into.  It makes me sick, now, to think I had.  I oughtn't to have
+let him; he was perfectly innocent in it.  After the letter went,
+I wanted to tell him, but I couldn't; and then I took the chances too.
+I don't believe be could have ever got forward in politics; he's too
+honest--or he isn't dishonest in the right way.  But that doesn't let me
+out.  I don't defend myself!  I did wrong; I behaved badly.  But I've
+suffered for it.
+
+I've had a foreboding all the time that it would come to the worst, and
+felt like a murderer with his victim when I've been alone with Stoller.
+When I could get away from him I could shake it off, and even believe
+that it hadn't happened.  You can't think what a nightmare it's been!
+Well, I've ruined Stoller politically, but I've ruined myself, too.  I've
+spoiled my own life; I've done what I can never explain to--to the people
+I want to have believe in me; I've got to steal away like the thief I am.
+Good-by!"  He jumped to his feet, and put out his hand to March, and then
+to Mrs. March.
+
+"Why, you're not going away now!" she cried, in a daze.
+
+"Yes, I am.  I shall leave Carlsbad on the eleven-o'clock train.  I don't
+think I shall see you again."  He clung to her hand.  "If you see General
+Triscoe--I wish you'd tell them I couldn't--that I had to--that I was
+called away suddenly--Good-by!"  He pressed her hand and dropped it, and
+mixed with the crowd.  Then he came suddenly back, with a final appeal to
+March: "Should you--do you think I ought to see Stoller, and--and tell
+him I don't think I used him fairly?"
+
+"You ought to know--" March began.
+
+But before he could say more, Burnamy said, "You're right," and was off
+again.
+
+"Oh, how hard you were with him, my dear!"  Mrs. March lamented.
+
+"I wish," he said, "if our boy ever went wrong that some one would be as
+true to him as I was to that poor fellow.  He condemned himself; and he
+was right; he has behaved very badly."
+
+"You always overdo things so, when you act righteously!"
+
+"Now, Isabel!"
+
+"Oh, yes, I know what you will say.  But I should have tempered justice
+with mercy."
+
+Her nerves tingled with pity for Burnamy, but in her heart she was glad
+that her husband had had strength to side with him against himself, and
+she was proud of the forbearance with which he had done it.  In their
+earlier married life she would have confidently taken the initiative on
+all moral questions.  She still believed that she was better fitted for
+their decision by her Puritan tradition and her New England birth, but
+once in a great crisis when it seemed a question of their living, she had
+weakened before it, and he, with no such advantages, had somehow met the
+issue with courage and conscience.  She could not believe he did so by
+inspiration, but she had since let him take the brunt of all such issues
+and the responsibility.  He made no reply, and she said: "I suppose
+you'll admit now there was always something peculiar in the poor boy's
+manner to Stoller."
+
+He would confess no more than that there ought to have been.  "I don't
+see how he could stagger through with that load on his conscience.
+I'm not sure I like his being able to do so."
+
+She was silent in the misgiving which she shared with him, but she said:
+"I wonder how far it has gone with him and Miss Triscoe?"
+
+"Well, from his wanting you to give his message to the general in the
+plural--"
+
+"Don't laugh!  It"s wicked to laugh!  It's heartless!" she cried,
+hysterically.  "What will he do, poor fellow?"
+
+"I've an idea that he will light on his feet, somehow.  But, at any rate,
+he's doing the right thing in going to own up to Stoller."
+
+"Oh, Stoller!  I care nothing for Stoller!  Don't speak to me of
+Stoller!"
+
+Burnamy fond the Bird of Prey, as he no longer had the heart to call him,
+walking up and down in his room like an eagle caught in a trap.  He
+erected his crest fiercely enough, though, when the young fellow came in
+at his loudly shouted, "Herein!"
+
+"What do you want?" he demanded, brutally.
+
+This simplified Burnamy's task, while it made it more loathsome.  He
+answered not much less brutally, "I want to tell you that I think I used
+you badly, that I let you betray yourself, that I feel myself to blame."
+He could have added, "Curse you!" without change of tone.
+
+Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lower teeth like a dog's
+when he snarls.  "You want to get back!"
+
+"No," said Burnamy, mildly, and with increasing sadness as he spoke.
+"I don't want to get back.  Nothing would induce me.  I'm going away on
+the first train."
+
+"Well, you're not!"  shouted Stoller.  "You've lied me into this--"
+
+"Look out!"  Burnamy turned white.
+
+"Didn't you lie me into it, if you let me fool myself, as you say?"
+Stoller pursued, and Burnamy felt himself weaken through his wrath.
+"Well, then, you got to lie me out of it.  I been going over the damn
+thing, all night--and you can do it for me.  I know you can do it," he
+gave way in a plea that was almost a whimper.  "Look here!  You see if
+you can't.  I'll make it all right with you.  I'll pay you whatever you
+think is right--whatever you say."
+
+"Oh!" said Burnamy, in otherwise unutterable disgust.
+
+"You kin," Stoller went on, breaking down more and more into his adopted
+Hoosier, in the stress of his anxiety.  "I know you kin, Mr. Burnamy."
+He pushed the paper containing his letter into Burnamy's hands, and
+pointed out a succession of marked passages.  "There!  And here!  And
+this place!  Don't you see how you could make out that it meant something
+else, or was just ironical?"  He went on to prove how the text might be
+given the complexion he wished, and Burnamy saw that he had really
+thought it not impossibly out.  "I can't put it in writing as well as
+you; but I've done all the work, and all you've got to do is to give it
+some of them turns of yours.  I'll cable the fellows in our office to say
+I've been misrepresented, and that my correction is coming.  We'll get it
+into shape here together, and then I'll cable that.  I don't care for the
+money.  And I'll get our counting-room to see this scoundrel"--he picked
+up the paper that had had fun with him--"and fix him all right, so that
+he'll ask for a suspension of public opinion, and-- You see, don't you?"
+
+The thing did appeal to Burnamy.  If it could be done, it would enable
+him to make Stoller the reparation he longed to make him more than
+anything else in the world.  But he heard himself saying, very gently,
+almost tenderly, "It might be done, Mr. Stoller.  But I couldn't do it.
+It wouldn't be honest--for me."
+
+"Yah!" yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper into a wad and flung it
+into Burnamy's face.  "Honest, you damn humbug!  You let me in for this,
+when you knew I didn't mean it, and now you won't help me out because it
+a'n't honest! Get out of my room, and get out quick before I--"
+
+He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightened himself, with "If you
+dare!  "He knew that he was right in refusing; but he knew that Stoller
+was right, too, and that he had not meant the logic of what he had said
+in his letter, and of what Burnamy had let him imply.  He braved
+Stoller's onset, and he left his presence untouched, but feeling as
+little a moral hero as he well could.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII.
+
+General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day's
+pleasure, and in the self-reproach of a pessimist who has lost his point
+of view for a time, and has to work back to it.  He began at the belated
+breakfast with his daughter when she said, after kissing him gayly, in
+the small two-seated bower where they breakfasted at their hotel when
+they did not go to the Posthof, "Didn't you have a nice time, yesterday,
+papa?"
+
+She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at him across the little
+iron table, as she lifted the pot to pour out his coffee.
+
+"What do you call a nice time?" he temporized, not quite able to resist
+her gayety.
+
+"Well, the kind of time I had."
+
+"Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass?  I took cold in that
+old church, and the tea at that restaurant must have been brewed in a
+brass kettle.  I suffered all night from it.  And that ass from
+Illinois--"
+
+"Oh, poor papa!  I couldn't go with Mr. Stoller alone, but I might have
+gone in the two-spanner with him and let you have Mr. or Mrs. March in
+the one-spanner."
+
+"I don't know.  Their interest in each other isn't so interesting to
+other people as they seem to think."
+
+"Do you feel that way really, papa?  Don't you like their being so much
+in love still?"
+
+"At their time of life?  Thank you it's bad enough in young people."
+
+The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupied in pouring out
+her father's coffee.
+
+He tasted it, and then he drank pretty well all of it; but he said, as he
+put his cup down, "I don't know what they make this stuff of.  I wish I
+had a cup of good, honest American coffee."
+
+"Oh, there's nothing like American food!" said his daughter, with so much
+conciliation that he looked up sharply.
+
+But whatever he might have been going to say was at least postponed by
+the approach of a serving-maid, who brought a note to his daughter.  She
+blushed a little at sight of it, and then tore it open and read:
+
+"I am going away from Carlsbad, for a fault of my own which forbids me to
+look you in the face.  If you wish to know the worst of me, ask Mrs.
+March.  I have no heart to tell you."
+
+Agatha read these mystifying words of Burnamy's several times over in a
+silent absorption with them which left her father to look after himself,
+and he had poured out a second cup of coffee with his own hand, and was
+reaching for the bread beside her before she came slowly back to a sense
+of his presence.
+
+"Oh, excuse me, papa," she said, and she gave him the butter.  "Here's a
+very strange letter from Mr. Burnamy, which I think you'd better see."
+She held the note across the table to him, and watched his face as he
+read it.
+
+After he had read it twice, he turned the sheet over, as people do with
+letters that puzzle them, in the vain hope of something explanatory on
+the back.  Then he looked up and asked: "What do you suppose he's been
+doing?"
+
+"I don't believe he's been doing anything.  It's something that Mr.
+Stoller's been doing to him."
+
+"I shouldn't infer that from his own words.  What makes you think the
+trouble is with Stoller?"
+
+"He said--he said yesterday--something about being glad to be through
+with him, because he disliked him so much he was always afraid of
+wronging him.  And that proves that now Mr. Stoller has made him believe
+that he's done wrong, and has worked upon him till he does believe it."
+
+"It proves nothing of the kind," said the general, recurring to the note.
+After reading it again, he looked keenly at her: "Am I to understand that
+you have given him the right to suppose you would want to know the worst
+--or the best of him?"
+
+The girl's eyes fell, and she pushed her knife against her plate.  She
+began: "No--"
+
+"Then confound his impudence!"  the general broke out.  "What business
+has he to write to you at all about this?"
+
+"Because he couldn't go away without it!" she returned; and she met her
+father's eye courageously.  "He had a right to think we were his friends;
+and if he has done wrong, or is in disgrace any way, isn't it manly of
+him to wish to tell us first himself?"
+
+Her father could not say that it was not.  But he could and did say, very
+sceptically: "Stuff!  Now, see here, Agatha: what are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to see Mrs. March, and then--"
+
+"You mustn't do anything of the kind, my dear," said her father, gently.
+"You've no right to give yourself away to that romantic old goose."  He
+put up his hand to interrupt her protest.  "This thing has got to be gone
+to the bottom of.  But you're not to do it.  I will see March myself.  We
+must consider your dignity in this matter--and mine.  And you may as well
+understand that I'm not going to have any nonsense.  It's got to be
+managed so that it can't be supposed we're anxious about it, one way or
+the other, or that he was authorized to write to you in this way--"
+
+"No, no!  He oughtn't to have done so.  He was to blame.  He couldn't
+have written to you, though, papa--"
+
+"Well, I don't know why.  But that's no reason why we should let it be
+understood that he has written to you.  I will see March; and I will
+manage to see his wife, too.  I shall probably find them in the reading-
+room at Pupp's, and--"
+
+"The Marches were in fact just coming in from their breakfast at the
+Posthof, and he met them at the door of Pupp's, where they all sat down
+on one of the iron settees of the piazza, and began to ask one another
+questions of their minds about the pleasure of the day before, and to
+beat about the bush where Burnamy lurked in their common consciousness.
+
+Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting him.  "You knew," she
+said, "that Mr. Burnamy had left us?"
+
+"Left! Why?" asked the general.
+
+She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this she found it best to
+trust her husband's poverty of invention.  She looked at him, and he
+answered for her with a promptness that made her quake at first, but
+finally seemed the only thing, if not the best thing: "He's had some
+trouble with Stoller."  He went on to tell the general just what the
+trouble was.
+
+At the end the general grunted as from an uncertain mind.  "You think
+he's behaved badly."
+
+"I think he's behaved foolishly--youthfully.  But I can understand how
+strongly he was tempted.  He could say that he was not authorized to stop
+Stoller in his mad career."
+
+At this Mrs. March put her hand through her husband's arm.
+
+"I'm not so sure about that," said the general.
+
+March added: "Since I saw him this morning, I've heard something that
+disposes me to look at his performance in a friendlier light.  It's
+something that Stoller told me himself; to heighten my sense of Burnamy's
+wickedness.  He seems to have felt that I ought to know what a serpent I
+was cherishing in my bosom," and he gave Triscoe the facts of Burnamy's
+injurious refusal to help Stoller put a false complexion on the opinions
+he had allowed him ignorantly to express.
+
+The general grunted again.  "Of course he had to refuse, and he has
+behaved like a gentleman so far.  But that doesn't justify him in having
+let Stoller get himself into the scrape."
+
+"No," said March.  "It's a tough nut for the casuist to try his tooth on.
+And I must say I feel sorry for Stoller."
+
+Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm.  "I don't, one bit.  He was
+thoroughly selfish from first to last.  He has got just what he
+deserved."
+
+"Ah, very likely," said her husband.  "The question is about Burnamy's
+part in giving him his deserts; he had to leave him to them, of course."
+
+The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter of his eye-glasses,
+and left the subject as of no concern to him.  "I believe," he said,
+rising, "I'll have a look at some of your papers," and he went into the
+reading-room.
+
+"Now," said Mrs. March, "he will go home and poison that poor girl's
+mind.  And, you will have yourself to thank for prejudicing him against
+Burnamy."
+
+"Then why didn't you do it yourself, my dear?" he teased; but he was
+really too sorry for the whole affair, which he nevertheless enjoyed as
+an ethical problem.
+
+The general looked so little at the papers that before March went off for
+his morning walk he saw him come out of the reading-room and take his way
+down the Alte Wiese.  He went directly back to his daughter, and reported
+Burnamy's behavior with entire exactness.  He dwelt upon his making the
+best of a bad business in refusing to help Stoller out of it,
+dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it was a bad
+business.
+
+"Now, you know all about it," he said at the end, "and I leave the whole
+thing to you.  If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March.  I don't know but
+I'd rather you'd satisfy yourself--"
+
+"I will not see Mrs. March.  Do you think I would go back of you in that
+way?  I am satisfied now."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX.
+
+Instead of Burnamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now breakfasted with the
+Marches at the Posthof, and the boy was with March throughout the day a
+good deal.  He rectified his impressions of life in Carlsbad by March's
+greater wisdom and experience, and did his best to anticipate his
+opinions and conform to his conclusions.  This was not easy, for
+sometimes he could not conceal from himself, that March's opinions were
+whimsical, and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not always conceal
+from March that he was matching them with Kenby's on some points, and
+suffering from their divergence.  He came to join the sage in his early
+visit to the springs, and they walked up and down talking; and they went
+off together on long strolls in which Rose was proud to bear him company.
+He was patient of the absences from which he was often answered, and he
+learned to distinguish between the earnest and the irony of which March's
+replies seemed to be mixed.  He examined him upon many features of German
+civilization, but chiefly upon the treatment of women in it; and upon
+this his philosopher was less satisfactory than he could have wished him
+to be.  He tried to excuse his trifling as an escape from the painful
+stress of questions which he found so afflicting himself; but in the
+matter of the woman-and-dog teams, this was not easy.  March owned that
+the notion of their being yokemates was shocking; but he urged that it
+was a stage of evolution, and a distinct advance upon the time when women
+dragged the carts without the help of the dogs; and that the time might
+not be far distant when the dogs would drag the carts without the help of
+the women.
+
+Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he was
+troubled by his friend's apparent acceptance of unjust things on their
+picturesque side.  Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of
+the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his
+mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by
+the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were
+reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch
+the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades.  "Ah,
+delightful! " March took off his hat as if to salute the pleasant sight.
+
+"But don't you think, Mr. March," the boy ventured, "that the man had
+better be cutting the wheat, and letting the women watch the cows?"
+
+"Well, I don't know.  There are more of them; and he wouldn't be half so
+graceful as they are, with that flow of their garments, and the sway of
+their aching backs."  The boy smiled sadly, and March put his hand on his
+shoulder as they walked on.  "You find a lot of things in Europe that
+need putting right, don't you, Rose?"
+
+"Yes; I know it's silly."
+
+"Well, I'm not sure.  But I'm afraid it's useless.  You see, these old
+customs go such a way back, and are so grounded in conditions.  We think
+they might be changed, if those who rule could be got to see how cruel
+and ugly they are; but probably they couldn't.  I'm afraid that the
+Emperor of Austria himself couldn't change them, in his sovereign
+plenitude of power.  The Emperor is only an old custom too, and he's as
+much grounded in the conditions as any."  This was the serious way Rose
+felt that March ought always to talk; and he was too much grieved to
+laugh when he went on.  "The women have so much of the hard work to do,
+over here, because the emperors need the men for their armies.  They
+couldn't let their men cut wheat unless it was for their officers'
+horses, in the field of some peasant whom it would ruin."
+
+If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to work these paradoxes for
+the boy's confusion.  She said the child adored him, and it was a
+sacrilege to play with his veneration.  She always interfered to save
+him, but with so little logic though so much justice that Rose suffered a
+humiliation from her championship, and was obliged from a sense of self-
+respect to side with the mocker.  She understood this, and magnanimously
+urged it as another reason why her husband should not trifle with Rose's
+ideal of him; to make his mother laugh at him was wicked.
+
+"Oh, I'm not his only ideal," March protested.  "He adores Kenby too, and
+every now and then he brings me to book with a text from Kenby's gospel."
+
+Mrs. March caught her breath.  "Kenby! Do you really think, then, that
+she--"
+
+"Oh, hold on, now! It isn't a question of Mrs. Adding; and I don't say
+Rose had an eye on poor old Kenby as a step-father.  I merely want you to
+understand that I'm the object of a divided worship, and that when I'm
+off duty as an ideal I don't see why I shouldn't have the fun of making
+Mrs. Adding laugh.  You can't pretend she isn't wrapped up in the boy.
+You've said that yourself."
+
+"Yes, she's wrapped up in him; she'd give her life for him; but she is so
+light.  I didn't suppose she was so light; but it's borne in upon me more
+and more."
+
+They were constantly seeing Rose and his mother, in the sort of abeyance
+the Triscoes had fallen into.  One afternoon the Addings came to Mrs.
+March's room to look from her windows at a parade of bicyclers' clubs
+from the neighboring towns.  The spectacle prospered through its first
+half-hour, with the charm which German sentiment and ingenuity, are able
+to lend even a bicycle parade.  The wheelmen and wheelwomen filed by on
+machines wreathed with flowers and ribbons, and decked with streaming
+banners.  Here and there one sat under a moving arch of blossoms, or in a
+bower of leaves and petals, and they were all gay with their club
+costumes and insignia.  In the height of the display a sudden mountain
+shower gathered and broke upon them.  They braved it till it became a
+drenching down-pour; then they leaped from their machines and fled to any
+shelter they could find, under trees and in doorways.  The men used their
+greater agility to get the best places, and kept them; the women made no
+appeal for them by word or look, but took the rain in the open as if they
+expected nothing else.
+
+Rose watched the scene with a silent intensity which March interpreted.
+"There's your chance, Rose.  Why don't you go down and rebuke those
+fellows?"
+
+Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and Mrs. March promptly
+attacked her husband in his behalf.  "Why don't you go and rebuke them
+yourself?"
+
+Well, for one thing, there isn't any conversation in my phrase-book
+Between an indignant American Herr and a Party of German Wheelmen who
+have taken Shelter from the Rain and are keeping the Wheelwomen out in
+the Wet."  Mrs. Adding shrieked her delight, and he was flattered into
+going on.  "For another thing, I think it's very well for you ladies to
+realize from an object-lesson of this sort what spoiled children of our
+civilization you are.  It ought to make you grateful for your
+privileges."
+
+"There is something in that," Mrs. Adding joyfully consented.
+
+"Oh, there is no civilization but ours," said Mrs. March, in a burst of
+vindictive patriotism.  "I am more and more convinced of it the longer I
+stay in Europe."
+
+"Perhaps that's why we like to stay so long in Europe; it strengthens us
+in the conviction that America is the only civilized country in the
+world," said March.
+
+The shower passed as quickly as it had gathered, and the band which it
+had silenced for a moment burst forth again in the music which fills the
+Carlsbad day from dawn till dusk.  Just now, it began to play a pot
+pourri of American airs; at the end some unseen Americans under the trees
+below clapped and cheered.
+
+"That was opportune of the band," said March.  "It must have been a
+telepathic impulse from our patriotism in the director.  But a pot pourri
+of American airs is like that tablet dedicating the American Park up here
+on the Schlossberg, which is signed by six Jews and one Irishman.  The
+only thing in this medley that's the least characteristic or original is
+Dixie; and I'm glad the South has brought us back into the Union."
+
+"You don't know one note from another, my dear," said his wife.
+
+"I know the 'Washington Post.'"
+
+"And don't you call that American?"
+
+"Yes, if Sousa is an American name; I should have thought it was
+Portuguese."
+
+"Now that sounds a little too much like General Triscoe's pessimism,"
+said Mrs. March; and she added: "But whether we have any national
+melodies or not, we don't poke women out in the rain and keep them
+soaking!"
+
+"No, we certainly don't," he assented, with such a well-studied effect of
+yielding to superior logic that Mrs. Adding screamed for joy.
+
+The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, "I hope Rose isn't
+acting on my suggestion?"
+
+"I hate to have you tease him, dearest," his wife interposed.
+
+"Oh, no," the mother said, laughing still, but with a note of tenderness
+in her laugh, which dropped at last to a sigh.  "He's too much afraid of
+lese-majesty, for that.  But I dare say he couldn't stand the sight.
+He's queer."
+
+"He's beautiful!" said Mrs. March.
+
+"He's good," the mother admitted.  "As good as the day's long.  He's
+never given me a moment's trouble--but he troubles me.  If you can
+understand!"
+
+"Oh, I do understand!" Mrs. March returned.  "By his innocence, you mean.
+That is the worst of children.  Their innocence breaks our hearts and
+makes us feel ourselves such dreadful old things."
+
+"His innocence, yes," pursued Mrs. Adding, "and his ideals."  She began
+to laugh again.  "He may have gone off for a season of meditation and
+prayer over the misbehavior of these bicyclers.  His mind is turning that
+way a good deal lately.  It's only fair to tell you, Mr. March, that he
+seems to be giving up his notion of being an editor.  You mustn't be
+disappointed."
+
+"I shall be sorry," said the editor.  "But now that you mention it, I
+think I have noticed that Rose seems rather more indifferent to
+periodical literature.  I supposed he might simply have exhausted his
+questions--or my answers."
+
+"No; it goes deeper than that.  I think it's Europe that's turned his
+mind in the direction of reform.  At any rate he thinks now he will be a
+reformer."
+
+"Really!  What kind of one?  Not religious, I hope?"
+
+"No.  His reform has a religious basis, but its objects are social.
+I don't make it out, exactly; but I shall, as soon as Rose does.  He
+tells me everything, and sometimes I don't feel equal to it, spiritually
+or even intellectually."
+
+"Don't laugh at him, Mrs. Adding!" Mrs. March entreated.
+
+"Oh, he doesn't mind my laughing," said the mother, gayly.  Rose came
+shyly back into the room, and she said, "Well, did you rebuke those bad
+bicyclers?" and she laughed again.
+
+"They're only a custom, too, Rose,", said March, tenderly.  "Like the man
+resting while the women worked, and the Emperor, and all the rest of it."
+
+"Oh, yes, I know," the boy returned.
+
+"They ride modern machines, but they live in the tenth century.  That's
+what we're always forgetting when we come to Europe and see these
+barbarians enjoying all our up-to-date improvements."
+
+There, doesn't that console you?" asked his mother, and she took him away
+with her, laughing back from the door.  "I don't believe it does,
+a bit!"
+
+"I don't believe she understands the child," said Mrs. March.  "She is
+very light, don't you think?"  I don't know, after all, whether it
+wouldn't be a good thing for her to marry Kenby.  She is very easygoing,
+and she will be sure to marry somebody."
+
+She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, and he said, "You might put
+these ideas to her."
+
+
+
+
+XL.
+
+With the passage of the days and weeks, the strange faces which had
+familiarized themselves at the springs disappeared; even some of those
+which had become the faces of acquaintance began to go.  In the
+diminishing crowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen; the
+sad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemed never to have quite got
+his bearings after his error with General Triscoe, seldom showed itself.
+The Triscoes themselves kept out of the Marches' way, or they fancied so;
+Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their daily encounter.
+
+It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-August, but at Carlsbad
+the sun was so late getting up over the hills that as people went to
+their breakfasts at the cafes up the valley of the Tepl they found him
+looking very obliquely into it at eight o'clock in the morning.  The
+yellow leaves were thicker about the feet of the trees, and the grass was
+silvery gray with the belated dews.  The breakfasters were fewer than
+they had been, and there were more little barefooted boys and girls with
+cups of red raspberries which they offered to the passers with cries of
+"Himbeeren! Himbeeren!" plaintive as the notes of birds left songless by
+the receding summer.
+
+March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and Mrs. Adding bought
+recklessly of it, and ate it under his eyes with their coffee and bread,
+pouring over it pots of clotted cream that the 'schone' Lili brought
+them.  Rose pretended an indifference to it, which his mother betrayed
+was a sacrifice in behalf of March's inability.
+
+Lili's delays in coming to be paid had been such that the Marches now
+tried to pay her when she brought their breakfast, but they sometimes
+forgot, and then they caught her whenever she came near them.  In this
+event she liked to coquet with their impatience; she would lean against
+their table, and say: "Oh, no.  You stay a little.  It is so nice."  One
+day after such an entreaty, she said, "The queen is here, this morning."
+
+Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes.  "The queen!"
+
+"Yes; the young lady.  Mr. Burnamy was saying she was a queen.  She is
+there with her father."  She nodded in the direction of a distant corner,
+and the Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and the general.  "She
+is not seeming so gayly as she was being."
+
+March smiled.  "We are none of us so gayly as we were being, Lili.  The
+summer is going."
+
+"But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?" the girl asked, resting
+her tray on the corner of the table.
+
+"No, I'm afraid he won't," March returned sadly.
+
+"He was very good.  He was paying the proprietor for the dishes that
+Augusta did break when she was falling down.  He was paying before he
+went away, when he was knowing that the proprietor would make Augusta to
+pay."
+
+"Ah!"  said March, and his wife said, "That was like him!" and she
+eagerly explained to Mrs. Adding how good and great Burnamy had been in
+this characteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to add some
+pathetic facts about Augusta's poverty and gratitude.  "I think Miss
+Triscoe ought to know it.  There goes the wretch, now!" she broke off.
+"Don't look at him!"  She set her husband the example of averting his
+face from the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middle aisle of the
+grove, and looking to the right and left for a vacant table.  "Ugh! I
+hope he won't be able to find a single place."
+
+Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, while Rose watched March's
+face with grave sympathy.  "He certainly doesn't deserve one.  Don't let
+us keep you from offering Miss Triscoe any consolation you can."  They
+got up, and the boy gathered up the gloves, umbrella, and handkerchief
+which the ladies let drop from their laps.
+
+"Have you been telling?" March asked his wife.
+
+"Have I told you anything?" she demanded of Mrs. Adding in turn.
+"Anything that you didn't as good as know, already?"
+
+"Not a syllable!"  Mrs. Adding replied in high delight.  "Come, Rose!"
+
+"Well, I suppose there's no use saying anything," said March, after she
+left them.
+
+"She had guessed everything, without my telling her," said his wife.
+
+"About Stoller?"
+
+"Well-no.  I did tell her that part, but that was nothing.  It was about
+Burnamy and Agatha that she knew.  She saw it from the first."
+
+"I should have thought she would have enough to do to look after poor old
+Kenby."
+
+"I'm not sure, after all, that she cares for him.  If she doesn't, she
+oughtn't to let him write to her.  Aren't you going over to speak to the
+Triscoes?"
+
+"No, certainly not.  I'm going back to the hotel.  There ought to be some
+steamer letters this morning.  Here we are, worrying about these
+strangers all the time, and we never give a thought to our own children
+on the other side of the ocean."
+
+"I worry about them, too," said the mother, fondly.  "Though there is
+nothing to worry about," she added.
+
+"It's our duty to worry," he insisted.
+
+At the hotel the portier gave them four letters.  There was one from each
+of their children: one very buoyant, not to say boisterous, from the
+daughter, celebrating her happiness in her husband, and the loveliness of
+Chicago as a summer city ("You would think she was born out there!"
+sighed her mother); and one from the son, boasting his well-being in
+spite of the heat they were having ("And just think how cool it is here!"
+his mother upbraided herself), and the prosperity of 'Every Other Week'.
+There was a line from Fulkerson, praising the boy's editorial instinct,
+and ironically proposing March's resignation in his favor.
+
+"I do believe we could stay all winter, just as well as not," said Mrs.
+March, proudly.  "What does 'Burnamy say?"
+
+"How do you know it's from him?"
+
+"Because you've been keeping your hand on it!  Give it here."
+
+"When I've read it."
+
+The letter was dated at Ansbach, in Germany, and dealt, except for some
+messages of affection to Mrs. March, with a scheme for a paper which
+Burnamy wished to write on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought he could use
+it in 'Every Other Week'.  He had come upon a book about that hapless
+foundling in Nuremberg, and after looking up all his traces there he had
+gone on to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his death so pathetically.
+Burnamy said he could not give any notion of the enchantment of
+Nuremberg; but he besought March, if he was going to the Tyrol for his
+after-cure, not to fail staying a day or so in the wonderful place.  He
+thought March would enjoy Ansbach too, in its way.
+
+"And, not a word--not a syllable--about Miss Triscoe!" cried Mrs. March.
+"Shall you take his paper?"
+
+"It would be serving him right, if I refused it, wouldn't it?"
+
+They never knew what it cost Burnamy to keep her name out of his letter,
+or by what an effort of the will he forbade himself even to tell of his
+parting interview with Stoller.  He had recovered from his remorse for
+letting Stoller give himself away; he was still sorry for that, but he no
+longer suffered; yet he had not reached the psychological moment when he
+could celebrate his final virtue in the matter.  He was glad he had been
+able to hold out against the temptation to retrieve himself by another
+wrong; but he was humbly glad, and he felt that until happier chance
+brought him and his friends together he must leave them to their merciful
+conjectures.  He was young, and he took the chance, with an aching heart.
+If he had been older, he might not have taken it.
+
+
+
+
+XLI.
+
+The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently, in late August, in the
+good weather which is pretty sure to fall then, if ever in the Austrian
+summer.  For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had been building a
+scaffolding for the illumination in the woods on a height overlooking the
+town, and making unobtrusive preparations at points within it.
+
+The day was important as the last of March's cure, and its pleasures
+began for him by a renewal of his acquaintance in its first kindliness
+with the Eltwins.  He had met them so seldom that at one time he thought
+they must have gone away, but now after his first cup he saw the quiet,
+sad old pair, sitting,together on a bench in the Stadt Park, and he asked
+leave to sit down with them till it was time for the next.  Eltwin said
+that this was their last day, too; and explained that his wife always
+came with him to the springs, while he took the waters.
+
+"Well," he apologized, "we're all that's left, and I suppose we like to
+keep together."  He paused, and at the look in March's face he suddenly
+went on.  "I haven't been well for three or four years; but I always
+fought against coming out here, when the doctors wanted me to.  I said I
+couldn't leave home; and, I don't suppose I ever should.  But my home
+left me."
+
+As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, and March saw her steal
+her withered hand into his.
+
+"We'd had a large family, but they'd all died off, with one thing or
+another, and here in the spring we lost our last daughter.  Seemed
+perfectly well, and all at once she died; heart-failure, they called it.
+It broke me up, and mother, here, got at me to go.  And so we're here."
+His voice trembled; and his eyes softened; then they flashed up, and
+March heard him add, in a tone that astonished him less when he looked
+round and saw General Triscoe advancing toward them, "I don't know what
+it is always makes me want to kick that man."
+
+The general lifted his hat to their group, and hoped that Mrs. Eltwin was
+well, and Major Eltwin better.  He did not notice their replies, but said
+to March, "The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp's readingroom, to go
+with them to the Posthof for breakfast."
+
+"Aren't you going, too?" asked March.
+
+"No, thank you," said the general, as if it were much finer not;
+"I shall breakfast at our pension."  He strolled off with the air of a
+man who has done more than his duty.
+
+"I don't suppose I ought to feel that way," said Eltwin, with a remorse
+which March suspected a reproachful pressure of his wife's hand had
+prompted in him.  "I reckon he means well."
+
+"Well, I don't know," March said, with a candor he could not wholly
+excuse.
+
+On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wife for her interest in
+the romantic woes of her lovers, in a world where there was such real
+pathos as these poor old people's; but in the company of Miss Triscoe he
+could not give himself this pleasure.  He tried to amuse her on the way
+from Pupp's, with the doubt he always felt in passing the Cafe Sans-
+Souci, whether he should live to reach the Posthof where he meant to
+breakfast.  She said, "Poor Mr. March!"  and laughed inattentively; when
+he went on to philosophize the commonness of the sparse company always
+observable at the Sans-Souci as a just effect of its Laodicean situation
+between Pupp's and the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and his wife
+frowned at him.
+
+The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms
+for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the
+rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a
+poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the
+various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like
+sere foliage as it moved.
+
+At the Posthof the 'schone' Lili alone was as gay, as in the prime of
+July.  She played archly about the guests she welcomed to a table in a
+sunny spot in the gallery.  "You are tired of Carlsbad?" she said
+caressingly to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before her.
+
+"Not of the Posthof," said the girl, listlessly.
+
+"Posthof, and very little Lili?" She showed, with one forefinger on
+another, how very little she was.
+
+Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to Mrs. March, with
+abrupt seriousness, "Augusta was finding a handkerchief under the table,
+and she was washing it and ironing it before she did bring it.  I have
+scolded her, and I have made her give it to me."
+
+She took from under her apron a man's handkerchief, which she offered to
+Mrs. March.  It bore, as she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B.
+But, "Whose can it be?" they asked each other.
+
+"Why, Burnamy's," said March; and Lili's eyes danced.  "Give it here!"
+
+His wife caught it farther away.  "No, I'm going to see whose it is,
+first; if it's his, I'll send it to him myself."
+
+She tried to put it into the pocket which was not in her dress by sliding
+it down her lap; then she handed it to the girl, who took it with a
+careless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.
+
+Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once in
+Carlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off and
+was holding them in her lap.  They fell to the ground when she now rose
+from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up.  Miss Triscoe was too
+quick for her.
+
+"Oh, let me carry them for you!" she entreated, and after a tender
+struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearing
+them through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist.  She was not the
+kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not the
+kind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and let
+March go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in the
+Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath.
+
+Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited
+the girl's advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting it
+in every case, with Miss Triscoe's eager approval.  In the Stadt Park
+they sat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite feints
+of recovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased
+effusion.
+
+When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been
+sitting, they seemed to be followed.  They looked round and saw no one
+more alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim in
+spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hat
+brims are.  He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, "Something
+left lying," passed on.
+
+They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at their
+skirts to see if there was anything amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe
+perceived her hands empty of Mrs. March's sandals and of Burnamy's
+handkerchief.
+
+"Oh, I put it in one of the toes!" she lamented, and she fled back to
+their bench, alarming in her course the fears of a gendarme for the
+public security, and putting a baby in its nurse's arms into such doubts
+of its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry.  She laughed
+breathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March.  "That comes of having no
+pocket; I didn't suppose I could forget your sandals, Mrs. March!  Wasn't
+it absurd?"
+
+"It's one of those things," Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards,
+"that they can always laugh over together."
+
+"They?  And what about Burnamy's behavior to Stoller?"
+
+"Oh, I don't call that anything but what will come right.  Of course he
+can make it up to him somehow.  And I regard his refusal to do wrong when
+Stoller wanted him to as quite wiping out the first offence."
+
+"Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behind you.  My only hope is
+that when we leave here tomorrow, her pessimistic papa's poison will
+neutralize yours somehow."
+
+
+
+
+XLII.
+
+One of the pleasantest incidents of March's sojourn in Carlsbad was his
+introduction to the manager of the municipal theatre by a common friend
+who explained the editor in such terms to the manager that he conceived
+of him as a brother artist.  This led to much bowing and smiling from the
+manager when the Marches met him in the street, or in their frequent
+visits to the theatre, with which March felt that it might well have
+ended, and still been far beyond his desert.  He had not thought of going
+to the opera on the Emperor's birthnight, but after dinner a box came
+from the manager, and Mrs. March agreed with him that they could not in
+decency accept so great a favor.  At the same time she argued that they
+could not in decency refuse it, and that to show their sense of the
+pleasure done them, they must adorn their box with all the beauty and
+distinction possible; in other words, she said they must ask Miss Triscoe
+and her father.
+
+"And why not Major Eltwin and his wife?  Or Mrs. Adding and Rose?"
+
+She begged him, simply in his own interest, not to be foolish; and they
+went early, so as to be in their box when their guests came.  The foyer
+of the theatre was banked with flowers, and against a curtain of
+evergreens stood a high-pedestalled bust of the paternal Caesar, with
+whose side-whiskers a laurel crown comported itself as well as it could.
+At the foot of the grand staircase leading to the boxes the manager stood
+in evening dress, receiving his friends and their felicitations upon the
+honor which the theatre was sure to do itself on an occasion so august.
+The Marches were so cordial in their prophecies that the manager yielded
+to an artist's impulse and begged his fellow-artist to do him the
+pleasure of coming behind the scenes between the acts of the opera; he
+bowed a heart-felt regret to Mrs. March that he could not make the
+invitation include her, and hoped that she would not be too lonely while
+her husband was gone.
+
+She explained that they had asked friends, and she should not be alone,
+and then he entreated March to bring any gentleman who was his guest with
+him.  On the way up to their box, she pressed his arm as she used in
+their young married days, and asked him if it was not perfect.  "I wish
+we were going to have it all to ourselves; no one else can appreciate the
+whole situation.  Do you think we have made a mistake in having the
+Triscoes?"
+
+"We!"  be retorted.  "Oh, that's good! I'm going to shirk him, when it
+comes to going behind the scenes."
+
+"No, no, dearest," she entreated.  "Snubbing will only make it worse.  We
+must stand it to the bitter end, now."
+
+The curtain rose upon another laurelled bust of the Emperor, with a
+chorus of men formed on either side, who broke into the grave and noble
+strains of the Austrian Hymn, while every one stood.  Then the curtain
+fell again, and in the interval before the opera could begin, General
+Triscoe and his daughter came in.
+
+Mrs. March took the splendor in which the girl appeared as a tribute to
+her hospitality.  She had hitherto been a little disappointed of the open
+homage to American girlhood which her readings of international romance
+had taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patriotic vanity feasted
+full.  Fat highhotes of her own sex levelled their lorgnettes at Miss
+Triscoe  all around the horseshoe, with critical glances which fell
+blunted from her complexion and costume; the house was brilliant with the
+military uniforms, which we have not yet to mingle with our unrivalled
+millinery, and the ardent gaze of the young officers dwelt on the perfect
+mould of her girlish arms and neck, and the winning lines of her face.
+The girl's eyes shone with a joyful excitement, and her little head,
+defined by its dark hair, trembled as she slowly turned it from side to
+side, after she removed the airy scarf which had covered it.  Her father,
+in evening dress, looked the Third Emperor complaisant to a civil
+occasion, and took a chair in the front of the box without resistance;
+and the ladies disputed which should yield the best place to the other,
+till Miss Triscoe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for the first act at
+least.
+
+The piece had to be cut a good deal to give people time for the
+illuminations afterwards; but as it was it gave scope to the actress who,
+'als Gast' from a Viennese theatre, was the chief figure in it.  She
+merited the distinction by the art which still lingered, deeply embedded
+in her massive balk, but never wholly obscured.
+
+"That is grand, isn't it?" said March, following one of the tremendous
+strokes by which she overcame her physical disadvantages.  "It's fine to
+see how her art can undo, for one splendid instant, the work of all those
+steins of beer, those illimitable licks of sausage, those boundless
+fields of cabbage.  But it's rather pathetic."
+
+"It's disgusting," said his wife; and at this General Triscoe, who had
+been watching the actress through his lorgnette, said, as if his
+contrary-mindedness were irresistibly invoked:
+
+"Well, I don't know.  It's amusing.  Do you suppose we shall see her when
+we go behind, March?"
+
+He still professed a desire to do so when the curtain fell, and they
+hurried to the rear door of the theatre.  It was slightly ajar, and they
+pulled it wide open, with the eagerness of their age and nation, and
+began to mount the stairs leading up from it between rows of painted
+dancing-girls, who had come out for a breath of air, and who pressed
+themselves against the walls to make room for the intruders.  With their
+rouged faces, and the stare of their glassy eyes intensified by the
+coloring of their brows and lashes, they were like painted statues, as
+they stood there with their crimsoned lips parted in astonished smiles.
+
+"This is rather weird," said March, faltering at the sight.  "I wonder if
+we might ask these young ladies where to go?"  General Triscoe made no
+answer, and was apparently no more prepared than himself to accost the
+files of danseuses, when they were themselves accosted by an angry voice
+from the head of the stairs with a demand for their business.  The voice
+belonged to a gendarme, who descended toward them and seemed as deeply
+scandalized at their appearance as they could have been at that of the
+young ladies.
+
+March explained, in his ineffective German, with every effect of
+improbability, that they were there by appointment of the manager, and
+wished to find his room.
+
+The gendarme would not or could not make anything out of it.  He pressed
+down upon them, and laying a rude hand on a shoulder of either, began to
+force them back to the door.  The mild nature of the editor might have
+yielded to his violence, but the martial spirit of General Triscoe was
+roused.  He shrugged the gendarme's hand from his shoulder, and with a
+voice as furious as his own required him, in English, to say what the
+devil he meant.  The gendarme rejoined with equal heat in German; the
+general's tone rose in anger; the dancing-girls emitted some little
+shrieks of alarm, and fled noisily up the stairs.  From time to time
+March interposed with a word of the German which had mostly deserted him
+in his hour of need; but if it had been a flow of intelligible
+expostulation, it would have had no effect upon the disputants.  They
+grew more outrageous, till the manager himself, appeared at the head of
+the stairs, and extended an arresting hand over the hubbub.  As soon as
+the situation clarified itself he hurried down to his visitors with a
+polite roar of apology and rescued them from the gendarme, and led them
+up to his room and forced them into arm-chairs with a rapidity of
+reparation which did not exhaust itself till he had entreated them with
+every circumstance of civility to excuse an incident so mortifying to
+him.  But with all his haste he lost so much time in this that he had
+little left to show them through the theatre, and their presentation to
+the prima donna was reduced to the obeisances with which they met and
+parted as she went upon the stage at the lifting of the curtain.  In the
+lack of a common language this was perhaps as well as a longer interview;
+and nothing could have been more honorable than their dismissal at the
+hands of the gendarme who had received them so stormily.  He opened the
+door for them, and stood with his fingers to his cap saluting, in the
+effect of being a whole file of grenadiers.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII.
+
+At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of the box where he had been
+sitting with the ladies during the absence of the gentlemen.  He had
+knocked at the door almost as soon as they disappeared, and if he did not
+fully share the consternation which his presence caused, he looked so
+frightened that Mrs. March reserved the censure which the sight of him
+inspired, and in default of other inspiration treated his coming simply
+as a surprise.  She shook hands with him, and then she asked him to sit
+down, and listened to his explanation that he had come back to Carlsbad
+to write up the birthnight festivities, on an order from the Paris-New
+York Chronicle; that he had seen them in the box and had ventured to took
+in.  He was pale, and so discomposed that the heart of justice was
+softened more and more in Mrs. March's breast, and she left him to the
+talk that sprang up, by an admirable effect of tact in the young lady,
+between him and Miss Triscoe.
+
+After all, she decided, there was nothing criminal in his being in
+Carlsbad, and possibly in the last analysis there was nothing so very
+wicked in his being in her box.  One might say that it was not very nice
+of him after he had gone away under such a cloud; but on the other hand
+it was nice, though in a different way, if he longed so much to see Miss
+Triscoe that he could not help coming.  It was altogether in his favor
+that he was so agitated, though he was momently becoming less agitated;
+the young people were beginning to laugh at the notion of Mr. March and
+General Triscoe going behind the scenes.  Burnamy said he envied them the
+chance; and added, not very relevantly, that he had come from Baireuth,
+where he had seen the last of the Wagner performances.  He said he was
+going back to Baireuth, but not to Ansbach again, where he had finished
+looking up that Kaspar Hauser business.  He seemed to think Mrs. March
+would know about it, and she could not help saying; Oh, yes, Mr. March
+was so much interested.  She wondered if she ought to tell him about his
+handkerchief; but she remembered in time that she had left it in Miss
+Triscoe's keeping.  She wondered if the girl realized how handsome he
+was.  He was extremely handsome, in his black evening dress, with his
+Tuxedo, and the pallor of his face repeated in his expanse of shirt
+front.
+
+At the bell for the rising of the curtain he rose too, and took their
+offered hands.  In offering hers Mrs. March asked if he would not stay
+and speak with Mr. March and the general; and now for the first time he
+recognized anything clandestine in his visit.  He laughed nervously, and
+said, "No, thank you!" and shut himself out.
+
+"We must tell them," said Mrs. March, rather interrogatively, and she was
+glad that the girl answered with a note of indignation.
+
+"Why, certainly, Mrs. March."
+
+They could not tell them at once, for the second act had begun when March
+and the general came back; and after the opera was over and they got out
+into the crowded street there was no chance, for the general was obliged
+to offer his arm to Mrs. March, while her husband followed with his
+daughter.
+
+The facades of the theatre and of the hotels were outlined with thickly
+set little lamps, which beaded the arches of the bridges spanning the
+Tepl, and lighted the casements and portals of the shops.  High above
+all, against the curtain of black woodland on the mountain where its
+skeleton had been growing for days, glittered the colossal effigy of the
+doubleheaded eagle of Austria, crowned with the tiara of the Holy Roman
+Empire; in the reflected splendor of its myriad lamps the pale Christ
+looked down from the mountain opposite upon the surging multitudes in the
+streets and on the bridges.
+
+They were most amiable multitudes, March thought, and they responded
+docilely to the entreaties of the policemen who stood on the steps of the
+bridges, and divided their encountering currents with patient appeals of
+"Bitte schon!  Bitte schon!"  He laughed to think of a New York cop
+saying "Please prettily!  Please prettily!"  to a New York crowd which he
+wished to have go this way or that, and then he burned with shame to
+think how far our manners were from civilization, wherever our heads and
+hearts might be, when he heard a voice at his elbow:
+
+"A punch with a club would start some of these fellows along quicker."
+
+It was Stoller, and March turned from him to lose his disgust in the
+sudden terror of perceiving that Miss Triscoe was no longer at his side.
+Neither could he see his wife and General Triscoe, and he began to push
+frantically about in the crowd looking for the girl.  He had an
+interminable five or ten minutes in his vain search, and he was going to
+call out to her by name, when Burnamy saved him from the hopeless
+absurdity by elbowing his way to him with Miss. Triscoe on his arm.
+
+"Here she is, Mr. March," he said, as if there were nothing strange in
+his having been there to find her; in fact he had followed them all from
+the theatre, and at the moment he saw the party separated, and Miss
+Triscoe carried off helpless in the human stream, had plunged in and
+rescued her.  Before March could formulate any question in his
+bewilderment, Burnamy was gone again; the girl offered no explanation for
+him, and March had not yet decided to ask any when he caught sight of his
+wife and General Triscoe standing tiptoe in a doorway and craning their
+necks upward and forward to scan the crowd in search of him and his
+charge.  Then he looked round at her and opened his lips to express the
+astonishment that filled him, when be was aware of an ominous shining of
+her eyes and trembling of her hand on his arm.
+
+She pressed his arm nervously, and he understood her to beg him to
+forbear at once all question of her and all comment on Burnamy's presence
+to her father.
+
+It would not have been just the time for either.  Not only Mrs. March was
+with the general, but Mrs. Adding also; she had called to them from that
+place, where she was safe with Rose when she saw them eddying about in
+the crowd.  The general was still, expressing a gratitude which became
+more pressing the more it was disclaimed; he said casually at sight of
+his daughter, "Ah; you've found us, have you?" and went on talking to
+Mrs. Adding, who nodded to them laughingly, and asked, "Did you see me
+beckoning?"
+
+"Look here, my dear!" March said to his wife as soon as they parted from
+the rest, the general gallantly promising that his daughter and he would
+see Mrs. Adding safe to her hotel, and were making their way slowly home
+alone.  "Did you know that Burnamy was in Carlsbad?"
+
+"He's going away on the twelve-o'clock train tonight," she answered,
+firmly.
+
+"What has that got to do with it?  Where did you see him?"
+
+"In the box, while you were behind the scenes."
+
+She told him all about it, and he listened in silent endeavor for the
+ground of censure from which a sense of his own guilt forced him.  She
+asked suddenly, "Where did you see him?" and he told her in turn.
+
+He added severely, "Her father ought to know.  Why didn't you tell him?"
+
+"Why didn't you?" she retorted with great reason.
+
+"Because I didn't think he was just in the humor for it."  He began to
+laugh as he sketched their encounter with the gendarme, but she did not
+seem to think it amusing; and he became serious again.  "Besides, I was
+afraid she was going to blubber, any way."
+
+"She wouldn't have blubbered, as you call it.  I don't know why you need
+be so disgusting!  It would have given her just the moral support she
+needed.  Now she will have to tell him herself, and he will blame us.
+You ought to have spoken; you could have done it easily and naturally
+when you came up with her.  You will have yourself to thank for all the
+trouble that comes of it, now, my dear."
+
+He shouted in admiration of her skill in shifting the blame on him.
+"All right!  I should have had to stand it, even if you hadn't behaved
+with angelic wisdom."
+
+"Why," she said, after reflection, "I don't see what either of us has
+done.  We didn't get Burnamy to come here, or connive at his presence in
+any way."
+
+"Oh! Make Triscoe believe that!  He knows you've done all you could to
+help the affair on."
+
+"Well, what if I have?  He began making up to Mrs. Adding himself as soon
+as he saw her, to-night.  She looked very pretty."
+
+"Well, thank Heaven! we're off to-morrow morning, and I hope we've seen
+the last of them.  They've done what they could to spoil my cure, but I'm
+not going to have them spoil my aftercure."
+
+
+
+
+XLIV.
+
+Mrs. March had decided not to go to the Posthof for breakfast, where they
+had already taken a lavish leave of the 'schone' Lili, with a sense of
+being promptly superseded in her affections.  They found a place in the
+red-table-cloth end of the pavilion at Pupp's, and were served by the
+pretty girl with the rose-bud mouth whom they had known only as Ein-und-
+Zwanzig, and whose promise of "Komm' gleich, bitte schon!" was like a
+bird's note.  Never had the coffee been so good, the bread so aerially
+light, the Westphalian ham so tenderly pink.  A young married couple whom
+they knew came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and sat down with
+them, like their own youth, for a moment.
+
+"If you had told them we were going, dear," said Mrs. March, when the
+couple were themselves gone, "we should have been as old as ever.  Don't
+let us tell anybody, this morning, that we're going.  I couldn't bear
+it."
+
+They had been obliged to take the secretary of the hotel into their
+confidence, in the process of paying their bill.  He put on his high hat
+and came out to see them off.  The portier was already there, standing at
+the step of the lordly two-spanner which they had ordered for the long
+drive to the station.  The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offer
+them a fellow-republican's good wishes for their journey; Herr Pupp
+himself appeared at the last moment to hope for their return another
+summer.  Mrs. March bent a last look of interest upon the proprietor as
+their two-spanner whirled away.
+
+"They say that he is going to be made a count."
+
+"Well, I don't object," said March.  "A man who can feed fourteen
+thousand people, mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an archduke."
+
+At the station something happened which touched them even more than these
+last attentions of the hotel.  They were in their compartment, and were
+in the act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting their
+bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March's name called.
+
+They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with
+excitement and his eyes glowing.  "I was afraid I shouldn't get here in
+time," he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.
+
+"Why Rose! From your mother?"
+
+"From me," he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor,
+when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace.  "I want to
+kiss you," she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to them
+from the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for her
+handkerchief.  "I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetest
+child! "
+
+"He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I'm sorry to
+leave behind," March assented.  "He's the only unmarried one that wasn't
+in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some
+rather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I'm not
+sure that I should have been safe even from Rose.  Carlsbad has been an
+interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now that
+it will begin again."
+
+"Yes," said his wife, "now we can have each other all to ourselves."
+
+"Yes.  It's been very different from our first wedding journey in that.
+It isn't that we're not so young now as we were, but that we don't seem
+so much our own property.  We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we
+seem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come in
+and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk.  The disadvantage of
+living along is that we get too much into the hands of other people."
+
+"Yes, it is.  I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too."
+
+"I don't know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we had
+died young--or younger," he suggested.
+
+"No, I don't know that it is," she assented.  She added, from an absence
+where he was sufficiently able to locate her meaning, "I hope she'll
+write and tell me what her father says and does when she tells him that
+he was there."
+
+There were many things, in the weather, the landscape, their sole
+occupancy of an unsmoking compartment, while all the smoking compartments
+round overflowed with smokers, which conspired to offer them a pleasing
+illusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect that they almost held
+each other's hands.  In later life there are such moments when the
+youthful emotions come back, as certain birds do in winter, and the
+elderly heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it were young.  But it
+is best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs. March joined her husband in
+mocking it, when he made her observe how fit it was that their silver
+wedding journey should be resumed as part of his after-cure.  If he had
+found the fountain of youth in the warm, flat, faintly nauseous water of
+the Felsenquelle, he was not going to call himself twenty-eight again
+till his second month of the Carlsbad regimen was out, and he had got
+back to salad and fruit.
+
+At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it that
+they could form a life-long friendship for the old English-speaking
+waiter who served them, and would not suffer them to hurry themselves.
+The hills had already fallen away, and they ran along through a cheerful
+country, with tracts of forest under white clouds blowing about in a blue
+sky, and gayly flinging their shadows down upon the brown ploughed land,
+and upon the yellow oat-fields, where women were cutting the leisurely
+harvest with sickles, and where once a great girl with swarthy bare arms
+unbent herself from her toil, and rose, a statue of rude vigor and
+beauty, to watch them go by.  Hedges of evergreen enclosed the yellow
+oat-fields, where slow wagons paused to gather the sheaves of the week
+before, and then loitered away with them.  Flocks of geese waddled in
+sculpturesque relief against the close-cropt pastures, herded by little
+girls with flaxen pigtails, whose eyes, blue as corn-flowers, followed
+the flying train.  There were stretches of wild thyme purpling long
+barren acreages, and growing up the railroad banks almost to the rails
+themselves.  From the meadows the rowen, tossed in long loose windrows,
+sent into their car a sad autumnal fragrance which mingled with the
+tobacco smoke, when two fat smokers emerged into the narrow corridor
+outside their compartments and tried to pass each other.  Their vast
+stomachs beat together in a vain encounter.
+
+"Zu enge!" said one, and "Ja, zu enge!" said the other, and they laughed
+innocently in each other's' faces, with a joy in their recognition of the
+corridor's narrowness as great as if it had been a stroke of the finest
+wit.
+
+All the way the land was lovely, and as they drew near Nuremberg it grew
+enchanting, with a fairy quaintness.  The scenery was Alpine, but the
+scale was toy-like, as befitted the region, and the mimic peaks and
+valleys with green brooks gushing between them, and strange rock forms
+recurring in endless caprice, seemed the home of children's story.  All
+the gnomes and elves might have dwelt there in peaceful fellowship with
+the peasants who ploughed the little fields, and gathered the garlanded
+hops, and lived in the farmsteads and village houses with those high
+timber-laced gables.
+
+"We ought to have come here long ago with the children, when they were
+children," said March.
+
+"No," his wife returned; "it would have been too much for them.  Nobody
+but grown people could bear it."
+
+The spell which began here was not really broken by anything that
+afterwards happened in Nuremberg, though the old toy-capital was trolley-
+wired through all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a hotel lighted
+by electricity and heated by steam, and equipped with an elevator which
+was so modern that it came down with them as well as went up.  All the
+things that assumed to be of recent structure or invention were as
+nothing against the dense past, which overwhelmed them with the sense of
+a world elsewhere outlived.  In Nuremberg it is not the quaint or the
+picturesque that is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact and the
+commonplace.  Here, more than anywhere else, you are steeped in the
+gothic spirit which expresses itself in a Teutonic dialect of homely
+sweetness, of endearing caprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive
+grace and beauty almost never.  It is the architectural speech of a
+strenuous, gross, kindly, honest people's fancy; such as it is it was
+inexhaustible, and such as it is it was bewitching for the travellers.
+
+They could hardly wait till they had supper before plunging into the
+ancient town, and they took the first tram-car at a venture.  It was a
+sort of transfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a little inside.
+of the city gate to a trolley-car.  The conductor with their fare
+demanded their destination; March frankly owned that they did not know
+where they wanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductor chose;
+and the conductor, after reflection, decided to put them down at the
+public garden, which, as one of the newest things in the city, would make
+the most favorable impression upon strangers.  It was in fact so like all
+other city gardens, with the foliage of its trimly planted alleys, that
+it sheltered them effectually from the picturesqueness of Nuremberg, and
+they had a long, peaceful hour on one of its benches, where they rested
+from their journey, and repented their hasty attempt to appropriate the
+charm of the city.
+
+The next morning it rained, according to a custom which the elevator-boy
+(flown with the insolent recollection of a sunny summer in Milan) said
+was invariable in Nuremberg; but after the one-o'clock table d'hote they
+took a noble two-spanner carriage, and drove all round the city.
+Everywhere the ancient moat, thickly turfed and planted with trees and
+shrubs, stretched a girdle of garden between their course and the wall
+beautifully old, with knots of dead ivy clinging to its crevices, or
+broad meshes of the shining foliage mantling its blackened masonry.  A
+tile-roofed open gallery ran along the top, where so many centuries of
+sentries had paced, and arched the massive gates with heavily moulded
+piers, where so countlessly the fierce burgher troops had sallied forth
+against their besiegers, and so often the leaguer hosts had dashed
+themselves in assault.  The blood shed in forgotten battles would have
+flooded the moat where now the grass and flowers grew, or here and there
+a peaceful stretch of water stagnated.
+
+The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, where the Hapsburg Kaisers
+dwelt when they visited their faithful imperial city.  From its ramparts
+the incredible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best shows itself, and if one
+has any love for the distinctive quality of Teutonic architecture it is
+here that more than anywhere else one may feast it.  The prospect of
+tower and spire and gable is of such a mediaeval richness, of such an
+abounding fulness, that all incidents are lost in it.  The multitudinous
+roofs of red-brown tiles, blinking browsily from their low dormers, press
+upon one another in endless succession; they cluster together on a rise
+of ground and sink away where the street falls, but they nowhere disperse
+or scatter, and they end abruptly at the other rim of the city, beyond
+which looms the green country, merging in the remoter blue of misty
+uplands.
+
+A pretty young girl waited at the door of the tower for the visitors to
+gather in sufficient number, and then led them through the terrible
+museum, discanting in the same gay voice and with the same smiling air on
+all the murderous engines and implements of torture.  First in German and
+then in English she explained the fearful uses of the Iron Maiden, she
+winningly illustrated the action of the racks and wheels on which men had
+been stretched and broken, and she sweetly vaunted a sword which had
+beheaded eight hundred persons.  When she took the established fee from
+March she suggested, with a demure glance, "And what more you please for
+saying it in English."
+
+"Can you say it in Russian?" demanded a young man, whose eyes he had seen
+dwelling on her from the beginning.  She laughed archly, and responded
+with some Slavic words, and then delivered her train of sight-seers over
+to the custodian who was to show them through the halls and chambers of
+the Burg.  These were undergoing the repairs which the monuments of the
+past are perpetually suffering in the present, and there was some special
+painting and varnishing for the reception of the Kaiser, who was coming
+to Nuremberg for the military manoeuvres then at hand.  But if they had
+been in the unmolested discomfort of their unlivable magnificence, their
+splendor was such as might well reconcile the witness to the superior
+comfort of a private station in our snugger day.  The Marches came out
+owning that the youth which might once have found the romantic glories of
+the place enough was gone from them.  But so much of it was left to her
+that she wished to make him stop and look at the flirtation which had
+blossomed out between that pretty young girl and the Russian, whom they
+had scarcely missed from their party in the Burg. He had apparently never
+parted from the girl, and now as they sat together on the threshold of
+the gloomy tower, he most have been teaching her more Slavic words, for
+they were both laughing as if they understood each other perfectly.
+
+In his security from having the affair in any wise on his hands, March
+would have willingly lingered, to see how her education got on; but it
+began to rain, The rain did not disturb the lovers, but it obliged the
+elderly spectators to take refuge in their carriage; and they drove off
+to find the famous Little Goose Man.  This is what every one does at
+Nuremberg; it would be difficult to say why.  When they found the Little
+Goose Man, he was only a mediaeval fancy in bronze, who stood on his
+pedestal in the market-place and contributed from the bill of the goose
+under his arm a small stream to the rainfall drenching the wet wares of
+the wet market-women round the fountain, and soaking their cauliflowers
+and lettuce, their grapes and pears, their carrots and turnips, to the
+watery flavor of all fruits and vegetables in Germany.
+
+The air was very raw and chill; but after supper the clouds cleared away,
+and a pleasant evening tempted the travellers out.  The portier
+dissembled any slight which their eagerness for the only amusement he
+could think of inspired, and directed them to a popular theatre which was
+giving a summer season at low prices to the lower classes, and which they
+surprised, after some ,search, trying to hide itself in a sort of back
+square.  They got the best places at a price which ought to have been
+mortifyingly cheap, and found themselves, with a thousand other harmless
+bourgeois folk, in a sort of spacious, agreeable barn, of a decoration by
+no means ugly, and of a certain artless comfort.  Each seat fronted a
+shelf at the back of the seat before it, where the spectator could put
+his hat; there was a smaller shelf for his stein of the beer passed
+constantly throughout the evening; and there was a buffet where he could
+stay himself with cold ham and other robust German refreshments.
+
+It was "The Wedding Journey to Nuremberg" upon which they had oddly
+chanced, and they accepted as a national tribute the character of an
+American girl in it.  She was an American girl of the advanced pattern,
+and she came and went at a picnic on the arm of a head waiter.  She
+seemed to have no office in the drama except to illustrate a German
+conception of American girlhood, but even in this simple function she
+seemed rather to puzzle the German audience; perhaps because of the
+occasional English words which she used.
+
+To the astonishment of her compatriots, when they came out of the theatre
+it was not raining; the night was as brilliantly starlit as a night could
+be in Germany, and they sauntered home richly content through the narrow
+streets and through the beautiful old Damenthor, beyond which their hotel
+lay.  How pretty, they said, to call that charming port the Ladies' Gate!
+They promised each other to find out why, and they never did so, but
+satisfied themselves by assigning it to the exclusive use of the slim
+maidens and massive matrons of the old Nuremberg patriciate, whom they
+imagined trailing their silken splendors under its arch in perpetual
+procession.
+
+
+
+
+XLV.
+
+The life of the Nuremberg patriciate, now extinct in the control of the
+city which it builded so strenuously and maintained so heroically, is
+still insistent in all its art.  This expresses their pride at once and
+their simplicity with a childish literality.  At its best it is never so
+good as the good Italian art, whose influence is always present in its
+best.  The coloring of the great canvases is Venetian, but there is no
+such democracy of greatness as in the painting at Venice; in decoration
+the art of Nuremberg is at best quaint, and at the worst puerile.
+Wherever it had obeyed an academic intention it seemed to March poor and
+coarse, as in the bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence.  The
+water spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in streams
+that cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in the base
+of the church there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting in
+its simple-hearted truth.  The long ages have made it even more affecting
+than the sculptor imagined it; they have blurred the faces and figures in
+passing till their features are scarcely distinguishable; and the
+sleeping apostles seem to have dreamed themselves back into the mother-
+marble.  It is of the same tradition and impulse with that supreme glory
+of the native sculpture, the ineffable tabernacle of Adam Krafft, which
+climbs a column of the church within, a miracle of richly carven story;
+and no doubt if there were a Nuremberg sculptor doing great things today,
+his work would be of kindred inspiration.
+
+The descendants of the old patrician who ordered the tabernacle at rather
+a hard bargain from the artist still worship on the floor below, and the
+descendants of his neighbor patricians have their seats in the pews
+about, and their names cut in the proprietary plates on the pew-tops.
+The vergeress who showed the Marches through the church was devout in the
+praise of these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers.  "So simple, and
+yet so noble!" she said.  She was a very romantic vergeress, and she told
+them at unsparing length the legend of the tabernacle, how the artist
+fell asleep in despair of winning his patron's daughter, and saw in a
+vision the master-work with the lily-like droop at top, which gained him
+her hand.  They did not realize till too late that it was all out of a
+novel of Georg Ebers's, but added to the regular fee for the church a
+gift worthy of an inedited legend.
+
+Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm rarely imparted by the
+Nuremberg manner.  They missed there the constant, sweet civility of
+Carlsbad, and found themselves falling flat in their endeavors for a
+little cordiality.  They indeed inspired with some kindness the old woman
+who showed them through that cemetery where Albert Durer and Hans Sachs
+and many other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumental brasses
+of such beauty:
+
+     "That kings to have the like, might wish to die."
+
+But this must have been because they abandoned themselves so willingly to
+the fascination of the bronze skull on the tomb of a fourteenth-century
+patrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw hinged to the
+upper.  She proudly clapped it up and down for their astonishment, and
+waited, with a toothless smile, to let them discover the bead of a nail
+artfully figured in the skull; then she gave a shrill cackle of joy, and
+gleefully explained that the wife of this patrician had killed him by
+driving a nail into his temple, and had been fitly beheaded for the
+murder.
+
+She cared so much for nothing else in the cemetery, but she consented to
+let them wonder at the richness of the sculpture in the level tombs, with
+their escutcheons and memorial tablets, overrun by the long grass and the
+matted ivy; she even consented to share their indignation at the
+destruction of some of the brasses and the theft of others.  She suffered
+more reluctantly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figured in
+sculpture at one corner of the cemetery, where the anguish of the Christ
+had long since faded into the stone from which it had been evoked, and
+the thieves were no longer distinguishable in their penitence or
+impenitence; but she parted friends with them when she saw how much they
+seemed taken with the votive chapel of the noble Holzschuh family, where
+a line of wooden shoes puns upon the name in the frieze, like the line of
+dogs which chase one another, with bones in their mouths, around the
+Canossa palace at Verona.  A sense of the beautiful house by the Adige
+was part of the pleasing confusion which possessed them in Nuremberg
+whenever they came upon the expression of the gothic spirit common both
+to the German and northern Italian art.  They knew that it was an effect
+which had passed from Germany into Italy, but in the liberal air of the
+older land it had come to so much more beauty that now, when they found
+it in its home, it seemed something fetched from over the Alps and
+coarsened in the attempt to naturalize it to an alien air.
+
+In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian painters from the German
+pictures they had inspired; in the great hall of the Rathhaus the noble
+Processional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph of
+Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar.  There was to
+be a banquet in the hall, under the mighty fresco, to welcome the German
+Emperor, coming the next week, and the Rathhaus was full of work-people
+furbishing it up against his arrival, and making it difficult for the
+custodian who had it in charge to show it properly to strangers.  She was
+of the same enthusiastic sisterhood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence and
+the guardian of the old cemetery, and by a mighty effort she prevailed
+over the workmen so far as to lead her charges out through the corridor
+where the literal conscience of the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the roof
+to an exact image of a tournament as it was in Nuremberg four hundred
+years ago.  In this relief, thronged with men and horses, the gala-life
+of the past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed himself
+after enjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality which
+seems the final effect of the German gothicism in sculpture.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI.
+
+On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England ideal
+of the day by ceasing from sight-seeing.  She could not have understood
+the sermon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the lingering
+conscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon.  Then
+she found nothing of the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic
+lands.  The people were resting from their week-day labors, but they were
+not playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran uses,
+were locked against tourist curiosity.
+
+It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in this
+ancient city, where the past was so much alive in the perpetual
+picturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were
+fain to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness of the streets
+to the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily visited the
+evening of their arrival.
+
+On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whom March asked some
+question of their way.  He answered in English, and in the parley that
+followed they discovered that they were all Americans.  The stranger
+proved to be an American of the sort commonest in Germany, and he said he
+had returned to his native country to get rid of the ague which he had
+taken on Staten Island.  He had been seventeen years in New York, and now
+a talk of Tammany and its chances in the next election, of pulls and
+deals, of bosses and heelers, grew up between the civic step-brothers,
+and joined them is a common interest.  The German-American said he was
+bookkeeper in some glass-works which had been closed by our tariff, and
+he confessed that he did not mean to return to us, though he spoke of
+German affairs with the impartiality of an outsider.  He said that the
+Socialist party was increasing faster than any other, and that this
+tacitly meant the suppression of rank and the abolition of monarchy.  He
+warned March against the appearance of industrial prosperity in Germany;
+beggary was severely repressed, and if poverty was better clad than with
+us, it was as hungry and as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York.  The
+working classes were kindly and peaceable; they only knifed each other
+quietly on Sunday evenings after having too much beer.
+
+Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marches for good-by; and as
+he walked down the aisle of trees in which they had been fitting
+together, he seemed to be retreating farther and farther from such
+Americanism as they had in common.  He had reverted to an entirely German
+effect of dress and figure; his walk was slow and Teutonic; he must be a
+type of thousands who have returned to the fatherland without wishing to
+own themselves its children again, and yet out of heart with the only
+country left them.
+
+"He was rather pathetic, my dear," said March, in the discomfort he knew
+his wife must be feeling as well as himself.  "How odd to have the lid
+lifted here, and see the same old problems seething and bubbling in the
+witch's caldron we call civilization as we left simmering away at home!
+And how hard to have our tariff reach out and snatch the bread from the
+mouths of those poor glass-workers!"
+
+"I thought that was hard," she sighed.  "It must have been his bread,
+too."
+
+"Let's hope it was not his cake, anyway.  I suppose," he added, dreamily,
+"that what we used to like in Italy was the absence of all the modern
+activities.  The Italians didn't repel us by assuming to be of our epoch
+in the presence of their monuments; they knew how to behave as pensive
+memories.  I wonder if they're still as charming."
+
+"Oh, no," she returned, "nothing is as charming as it used to be.  And
+now we need the charm more than ever."
+
+He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understanding they had lived into
+that only one of them was to be desperate at a time, and that they were
+to take turns in cheering each other up.  "Well, perhaps we don't deserve
+it.  And I'm not sure that we need it so much as we did when we were
+young.  We've got tougher; we can stand the cold facts better now.  They
+made me shiver once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable thrill.
+Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, if it insisted upon being
+as charming as it used to be, how could we ever bear to die?  We've got
+that to consider."  He yielded to the temptation of his paradox, but he
+did not fail altogether of the purpose with which he began, and they took
+the trolley back to their hotel cheerful in the intrepid fancy that they
+had confronted fate when they had only had the hardihood to face a
+phrase.
+
+They agreed that now he ought really to find out something about the
+contemporary life of Nuremberg, and the next morning he went out before
+breakfast, and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the hope
+of intimate impressions.  The peasant women, serving portions of milk
+from house to house out of the cans in the little wagons which they drew
+themselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect of
+tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the sucking-pigs jolted
+over the pavements in handcarts; a certain majesty from the long
+procession of yellow mail-wagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarian
+blue, trooping by in the cold small rain, impassibly dripping from their
+glazed hat-brims upon their uniforms.  But he could not feel that these
+things were any of them very poignantly significant; and he covered his
+retreat from the actualities of Nuremberg by visiting the chief book-
+store and buying more photographs of the architecture than he wanted, and
+more local histories than be should ever read.  He made a last effort for
+the contemporaneous life by asking the English-speaking clerk if there
+were any literary men of distinction living in Nuremberg, and the clerk
+said there was not one.
+
+He went home to breakfast wondering if be should be able to make his
+meagre facts serve with his wife; but he found her far from any wish to
+listen to them.  She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a table
+near her own, who were so absorbed in each other that they were proof
+against an interest that must otherwise have pierced them through.  The
+bridegroom, as he would have called himself, was a pretty little Bavarian
+lieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride was as pretty and as
+little, but delicately blond.  Nature had admirably mated them, and if
+art had helped to bring them together through the genius of the bride's
+mother, who was breakfasting with them, it had wrought almost as fitly.
+Mrs. March queried impartially who they were, where they met, and how,
+and just when they were going to be married; and March consented, in his
+personal immunity from their romance, to let it go on under his eyes
+without protest.  But later, when they met the lovers in the street,
+walking arm in arm, with the bride's mother behind them gloating upon
+their bliss, he said the woman ought, at her time of life, to be ashamed
+of such folly.  She must know that this affair, by nine chances out of
+ten, could not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tiresome as
+most other marriages, and yet she was abandoning herself with those
+ignorant young people to the illusion that it was the finest and sweetest
+thing in life.
+
+"Well, isn't it?" his wife asked.
+
+"Yes, that's the worst of it.  It shows how poverty-stricken life really
+is.  We want somehow to believe that each pair of lovers will find the
+good we have missed, and be as happy as we expected to be."
+
+"I think we have been happy enough, and that we've had as much good as
+was wholesome for us," she returned, hurt.
+
+"You're always so concrete!  I meant us in the abstract.  But if you will
+be personal, I'll say that you've been as happy as you deserve, and got
+more good than you had any right to."
+
+She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they
+were walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensibly
+following.
+
+He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to the
+old cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging
+in eternal accusation of his murderess.  "It's rather hard on her, that
+he should be having the last word, that way," he said.  "She was a woman,
+no matter what mistakes she had committed."
+
+"That's what I call 'banale'," said Mrs. March.
+
+"It is, rather," he confessed.  "It makes me feel as if I must go to see
+the house of Durer, after all."
+
+"Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later."
+
+It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, because
+everybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to
+Durer's house, which they found in a remote part of the town near a
+stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by the
+interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time they
+reached it.  The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and without
+being squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardly
+have been different in Durer's time.  His dwelling, in no way impressive
+outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a
+narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped
+bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the
+cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house.  It was cavernous and
+cold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid in
+the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German
+fashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple,
+neighborly existence there.  It in no wise suggested the calling of an
+artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer's time to take
+themselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life of a
+prosperous citizen, and it expressed the period.
+
+The Marches wrote their names in the visitors' book, and paid the
+visitor's fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for a
+reproduction of one of Durer's pictures; and then they came away, by no
+means dissatisfied with his house.  By its association with his sojourns
+in Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that it
+was really no worse than Ariosto's house at Ferrara, or Petrarch's at
+Arqua, or Michelangelo's at Florence.  "But what I admire," he said, "is
+our futility in going to see it.  We expected to surprise some quality of
+the man left lying about in the house because he lived and died in it;
+and because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked him so hard
+to save his widow from coming to want."
+
+"Who said she did that?"
+
+"A friend of his who hated her.  But he had to allow that she was a God-
+fearing woman, and had a New England conscience."
+
+"Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going."
+
+"Yes; but I don't like her laying her plans to survive him; though women
+always do that."
+
+They were going away the next day, and they sat down that evening to a
+final supper in such good-humor with themselves that they were willing to
+include a young couple who came to take places at their table, though
+they would rather have been alone.  They lifted their eyes for their
+expected salutation, and recognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the
+Norumbia.
+
+The ladies fell upon each other as if they had been mother and daughter;
+March and the young man shook hands, in the feeling of passengers
+mutually endeared by the memories of a pleasant voyage.  They arrived at
+the fact that Mr. Leffers had received letters in England from his
+partners which allowed him to prolong his wedding journey in a tour of
+the continent, while their wives were still exclaiming at their encounter
+in the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all sat down to have, as
+the bride said, a real Norumbia time.
+
+She was one of those young wives who talk always with their eyes
+submissively on their husbands, no matter whom they are speaking to;
+but she was already unconsciously ruling him in her abeyance.  No doubt
+she was ruling him for his good; she had a livelier, mind than he, and
+she knew more, as the American wives of young American business men
+always do, and she was planning wisely for their travels.  She recognized
+her merit in this devotion with an artless candor, which was typical
+rather than personal.  March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little
+stroll, and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who did not
+let them go without making her husband promise to wrap up well, and not
+get his feet wet.  She made March promise not to take him far, and to
+bring him back early, which he found himself very willing to do, after an
+exchange of ideas with Mr. Leffers.  The young man began to talk about
+his wife, in her providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the
+sort of man he was, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of
+man he was, there was no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the
+reading-room.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII.
+
+The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinner
+the next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs.
+March, who said, as soon as they were gone, "I believe I would rather
+meet people of our own age after this.  I used to think that you could
+keep young by being with young people; but I don't, now.  There world is
+very different from ours.  Our world doesn't really exist any more, but
+as long as we keep away from theirs we needn't realize it.  Young
+people," she went on, "are more practical-minded than we used to be;
+they're quite as sentimental; but I don't think they care so much for the
+higher things.  They're not so much brought up on poetry as we were," she
+pursued.  "That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow in our
+time; but now she didn't know of his poem on Nuremberg; she was
+intelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its quaintness
+was not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred."  Her tone entreated
+him to find more meaning in her words than she had put into them.  "They
+couldn't have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and that grassy,
+flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that pile-up of
+the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with their Gothic
+facades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow, aguish-
+looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of those
+overhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before the
+churches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round them!"
+
+"I see what you mean.  But do you think it's as sacred to us as it would
+have been twenty-five years ago?  I had an irreverent feeling now and
+then that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg."
+
+"Oh, yes; so had I.  We're that modern, if we're not so young as we
+were."
+
+"We were very simple, in those days."
+
+"Well, if we were simple, we knew it!"
+
+"Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking at
+it."
+
+"We had a good time."
+
+"Too good.  Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it
+had not been so good.  We might have our cake now if we hadn't eaten it."
+
+"It would be mouldy, though."
+
+"I wonder," he said, recurring to the Lefferses; "how we really struck
+them."
+
+"Well, I don't believe they thought we ought to be travelling about
+alone, quite, at our age."
+
+"Oh, not so bad as that!  "After a moment he said, "I dare say they don't
+go round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did."
+
+"Indeed they do!  They had an awful quarrel just before they got to
+Nuremberg: about his wanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool by
+express that she wanted to keep with them.  But she said it had been a
+lesson, and they were never going to quarrel again."  The elders looked
+at each other in the light of experience, and laughed.  "Well," she
+ended, "that's one thing we're through with.  I suppose we've come to
+feel more alike than we used to."
+
+"Or not to feel at all.  How did they settle it about the baggage?"
+
+"Oh!  He insisted on her keeping it with her."  March laughed again, but
+this time he laughed alone, and after a while she said: "Well, they gave
+just the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean American
+philistinism.  I don't mind their thinking us queer; they must have
+thought Nuremberg was queer."
+
+"Yes.  We oldsters are always queer to the young.  We're either
+ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we're ridiculously stiff and grim;
+they never expect to be like us, and wouldn't, for the world.  The worst
+of it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don't, at the
+bottom of our hearts, believe we're like that, when we meet.  I suppose
+that arrogant old ass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard."
+
+"I wonder," said Mrs. March, "if she's told him yet," and March perceived
+that she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic introspection;
+but he had no difficulty in following her.
+
+"She's had time enough.  But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her."
+
+"Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back in
+that way.  I know she is dead in love with him; but she could only have
+accepted him conditionally."
+
+"Conditionally to his making it all right with Stoller?"
+
+"Stoller?  No!  To her father's liking it."
+
+"Ah, that's quite as hard.  What makes you think she accepted him at
+all?"
+
+"What do you think she was crying about?"
+
+"Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionally shed tears of pity.  If
+she accepted him conditionally she would have to tell her father about
+it."  Mrs. March gave him a glance of silent contempt, and he hastened to
+atone for his stupidity.  "Perhaps she's told him on the instalment plan.
+She may have begun by confessing that Burnamy had been in Carlsbad.  Poor
+old fellow, I wish we were going to find him in Ansbach! He could make
+things very smooth for us."
+
+"Well, you needn't flatter yourself that you'll find him in Ansbach.  I'm
+sure I don't know where he is."
+
+"You might write to Miss Triscoe and ask."
+
+"I think I shall wait for Miss Triscoe to write to me," she said, with
+dignity.
+
+"Yes, she certainly owes you that much, after all your suffering for her.
+I've asked the banker in Nuremberg to forward our letters to the poste
+restante in Ansbach.  Isn't it good to see the crows again, after those
+ravens around Carlsbad?"
+
+She joined him in looking at the mild autumnal landscape through the open
+window.  The afternoon was fair and warm, and in the level fields bodies
+of soldiers were at work with picks and spades, getting the ground ready
+for the military manoeuvres; they disturbed among the stubble foraging
+parties of crows, which rose from time to time with cries of indignant
+protest.  She said, with a smile for the crows, "Yes.  And I'm thankful
+that I've got nothing on my conscience, whatever happens," she added in
+dismissal of the subject of Burnamy.
+
+"I'm thankful too, my dear.  I'd much rather have things on my own.  I'm
+more used to that, and I believe I feel less remorse than when you're to
+blame."
+
+They might have been carried near this point by those telepathic
+influences which have as yet been so imperfectly studied.  It was only
+that morning, after the lapse of a week since Burnamy's furtive
+reappearance in Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her father about it,
+and she had at that moment a longing for support and counsel that might
+well have made its mystical appeal to Mrs. March.
+
+She spoke at last because she could put it off no longer, rather than
+because the right time had come.  She began as they sat at breakfast.
+"Papa, there is something that I have got to tell yon.  It is something
+that you ought to know; but I have put off telling you because--"
+
+She hesitated for the reason, and "Well!" said her father, looking up at
+her from his second cup of coffee.  "What is it?"
+
+Then she answered, " Mr. Burnamy has been here."
+
+"In Carlsbad?  When was he here?"
+
+"The night of the Emperor's birthday.  He came into the box when you were
+behind the scenes with Mr. March; afterwards I met him in the crowd."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I thought you ought to know.  Mrs. March said I ought to tell you."
+
+"Did she say you ought to wait a week?"  He gave way to an irascibility
+which he tried to check, and to ask with indifference, "Why did he come
+back?"
+
+"He was going to write about it for that paper in Paris."  The girl had
+the effect of gathering her courage up for a bold plunge.  She looked
+steadily at her father, and added: "He said he came back because he
+couldn't help it.  He--wished to speak with me, He said he knew he had no
+right to suppose I cared anything about what had happened with him and
+Mr. Stoller.  He wanted to come back and tell me--that."
+
+Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently she was going to leave
+the word to him, now.  He hesitated to take it, but he asked at last with
+a mildness that seemed to surprise her, "Have you heard anything from him
+since?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"I don't know.  I told him I could not say what he wished; that I must
+tell you about it."
+
+The case was less simple than it would once have been for General
+Triscoe.  There was still his affection for his daughter, his wish for
+her happiness, but this had always been subordinate to his sense of his
+own interest and comfort, and a question had recently arisen which put
+his paternal love and duty in a new light.  He was no more explicit with
+himself than other men are, and the most which could ever be said of him
+without injustice was that in his dependence upon her he would rather
+have kept his daughter to himself if she could not have been very
+prosperously married.  On the other hand, if he disliked the man for whom
+she now hardly hid her liking, he was not just then ready to go to
+extremes concerning him.
+
+"He was very anxious," she went on, "that you should know just how it
+was.  He thinks everything of your judgment and--and--opinion."  The
+general made a consenting noise in his throat.  "He said that he did not
+wish me to 'whitewash' him to you.  He didn't think he had done right; he
+didn't excuse himself, or ask you to excuse him unless you could from the
+stand-point of a gentleman."
+
+The general made a less consenting noise in his throat, and asked, "How
+do you look at it, yourself, Agatha?"
+
+"I don't believe I quite understand it; but Mrs. March--"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. March!" the general snorted.
+
+"--says that Mr. March does not think so badly of it as Mr. Burnamy
+does."
+
+"I doubt it.  At any rate, I understood March quite differently."
+
+"She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly afterwards when Mr.
+Stoller wanted him to help him put a false complexion on it; that it was
+all the more difficult for him to do right then, because of his remorse
+for what he had done before."  As she spoke on she had become more eager.
+
+"There's something in that," the general admitted, with a candor that he
+made the most of both to himself and to her.  "But I should like to know
+what Stoller had to say of it all.  Is there anything," he inquired, "any
+reason why I need be more explicit about it, just now?"
+
+"N--no.  Only, I thought-- He thinks so much of your opinion that--if--"
+
+"Oh, he can very well afford to wait.  If he values my opinion so highly
+he can give me time to make up my mind."
+
+"Of course--"
+
+"And I'm not responsible," the general continued, significantly, "for the
+delay altogether.  If you had told me this before-- Now, I don't know
+whether Stoller is still in town."
+
+He was not behaving openly with her; but she had not behaved openly with
+him.  She owned that to herself, and she got what comfort she could from
+his making the affair a question of what Burnamy had done to Stoller
+rather than of what Burnamy had said to her, and what she had answered
+him.  If she was not perfectly clear as to what she wanted to do, or
+wished to have happen, there was now time and place in which she could
+delay and make sure.  The accepted theory of such matters is that people
+know their minds from the beginning, and that they do not change them.
+But experience seems to contradict this theory, or else people often act
+contrary to their convictions and impulses.  If the statistics were
+accessible, it might be found that many potential engagements hovered in
+a doubtful air, and before they touched the earth in actual promise were
+dissipated by the play of meteorological chances.
+
+When General Triscoe put down his napkin in rising he said that he would
+step round to Pupp's and see if Stoller were still there.  But on the way
+he stepped up to Mrs. Adding's hotel on the hill, and he came back, after
+an interval which he seemed not to have found long, to report rather
+casually that Stoller had left Carlsbad the day before.  By this time the
+fact seemed not to concern Agatha herself very vitally.
+
+He asked if the Marches had left any address with her, and she answered
+that they had not.  They were going to spend a few days in Nuremberg, and
+then push on to Holland for Mr. March's after-cure.  There was no
+relevance in his question unless it intimated his belief that she was in
+confidential correspondence with Mrs. March, and she met this by saying
+that she was going to write her in care of their bankers; she asked
+whether he wished to send any word.
+
+"No.  I understand," he intimated, "that there is nothing at all in the
+nature of a--a--an understanding, then, with--"
+
+"No, nothing."
+
+"Hm!" The general waited a moment.  Then he ventured, "Do you care to
+say--do you wish me to know--how he took it?"
+
+The tears came into the girl's eyes, but she governed herself to say,
+"He--he was disappointed."
+
+"He had no right to be disappointed."
+
+It was a question, and she answered: "He thought he had.  He said--that
+he wouldn't--trouble me any more."
+
+The general did not ask at once, "And you don't know where he is now--you
+haven't heard anything from him since?"
+
+Agatha flashed through her tears, "Papa!"
+
+"Oh! I beg your pardon.  I think you told me."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else . . . . . . . . .
+Effort to get on common ground with an inferior. . . . . . . . . . . .
+He buys my poverty and not my will . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Honest selfishness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Less intrusive than if he had not been there . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men  resign. . . . . . .
+Only one of them was to be desperate at a time . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last. . . . .
+Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+We don't seem so much our own property . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+We get too much into the hands of other people . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Their Silver Wedding Journey V2,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Silver Wedding Journey, by Howells, v2
+#19 in our series by William Dean Howells
+
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+Title: Their Silver Wedding Journey, v2
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3372]
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+[The actual date this file first posted = 03/23/01]
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+Edition: 11
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Silver Wedding Journey, by Howells, v2
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+
+
+THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY
+
+
+PART II.
+
+XXVI.
+
+They found Burnamy expecting them at the station in Carlsbad, and she
+scolded him like a mother for taking the trouble to meet them, while she
+kept back for the present any sign of knowing that he had staid over a
+day with the Triscoes in Leipsic.  He was as affectionately glad to see
+her and her husband as she could have wished, but she would have liked it
+better if he had owned up at once about Leipsic.  He did not, and it
+seemed to her that he was holding her at arm's-length in his answers
+about his employer.  He would not say how he liked his work, or how he
+liked Mr. Stoller; he merely said that they were at Pupp's together, and
+that he had got in a good day's work already; and since he would say no
+more, she contented herself with that.
+
+The long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wound
+down the hill-side like those of an Italian mountain town, between gay
+stuccoed houses, of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; and
+the impression of a Latin country was heightened at a turn of the road
+which brought into view a colossal crucifix planted against a curtain of
+dark green foliage on the brow of one of the wooded heights that
+surrounded Carlsbad.  When they reached the level of the Tepl, the hill-
+fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridges
+within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the only
+vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world.
+Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines,
+with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their black velvet
+derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowing
+robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks in
+Astrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of western
+Europeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were English,
+French or Italians.  Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were
+imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have
+been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have
+passed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationality
+away in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves
+heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet.
+
+The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going and
+coming between the rows of pollard locusts on one side and the bright
+walls of the houses on the other.  Under the trees were tables, served by
+pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants across the
+way.  On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops full of
+silver, glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and all the
+idle frippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris, and they
+suggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no place else
+in the world, as the crowd which might have been that of other cities at
+certain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in its habitual effect.
+
+"Do you like it?" asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs. March
+saw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all.  She was ready
+to bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his interest had
+got them the only rooms left in the house.  This satisfied in her the
+passion for size which is at the bottom of every American heart, and
+which perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the peoples.
+We pride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we are not
+ungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger than ours, we
+are magnanimously happy in them.  Pupp's, in its altogether different
+way, was larger than any hotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and when
+Burnamy told her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a day in
+the height of the season, she was personally proud of it.
+
+She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel, while the secretary led
+March off to look at the rooms reserved for them, and Burnamy hospitably
+turned the revolving octagonal case in the centre of the rotunda where
+the names of the guests were put up.  They were of all nations, but there
+were so many New Yorkers whose names ended in berg, and thal, and stern,
+and baum that she seemed to be gazing upon a cyclorama of the signs on
+Broadway.  A large man of unmistakable American make, but with so little
+that was of New England or New York in his presence that she might not at
+once have thought him American, lounged toward them with a quill
+toothpick in the corner of his mouth.  He had a jealous blue eye, into
+which he seemed trying to put a friendly light; his straight mouth
+stretched into an involuntary smile above his tawny chin-beard, and he
+wore his soft hat so far back from his high forehead (it showed to the
+crown when he took his hat off) that he had the effect of being
+uncovered.
+
+At his approach Burnamy turned, and with a flush said: "Oh! Let me
+introduce Mr. Stoller, Mrs. March."
+
+Stoller took his toothpick out of his mouth and bowed; then he seemed to
+remember, and took off his hat.  "You see Jews enough, here to make you
+feel at home?" he asked; and he added: "Well, we got some of 'em in
+Chicago, too, I guess.  This young man"--he twisted his head toward
+Burnamy" found you easy enough?"
+
+"It was very good of him to meet us," Mrs. March began.  "We didn't
+expect--"
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Stoller, putting his toothpick back, and his
+hat on.  "We'd got through for the day; my doctor won't let me work all I
+want to, here.  Your husband's going to take the cure, they tell me.
+Well, he wants to go to a good doctor, first.  You can't go and drink
+these waters hit or miss.  I found that out before I came."
+
+"Oh, no!"  said Mrs. March, and she wished to explain how they had been
+advised; but he said to Burnamy:
+
+"I sha'n't want you again till ten to-morrow morning.  Don't let me
+interrupt you," he added patronizingly to Mrs. March.  He put his hand up
+toward his hat, and sauntered away out of the door.
+
+Burnamy did not speak; and she only asked at last, to relieve the
+silence, "Is Mr. Stoller an American?"
+
+"Why, I suppose so," he answered, with an uneasy laugh.  "His people were
+German emigrants who settled in Southern Indiana.  That makes him as much
+American as any of us, doesn't it?"
+
+Burnamy spoke with his mind on his French-Canadian grandfather, who had
+come down through Detroit, when their name was Bonami; but Mrs. March
+answered from her eight generations of New England ancestry.  "Oh, for
+the West, yes, perhaps," and they neither of them said anything more
+about Stoller.
+
+In their room, where she found March waiting for her amidst their
+arriving baggage, she was so full of her pent-up opinions of Burnamy's
+patron that she, would scarcely speak of the view from their windows of
+the wooded hills up and down the Tepl.  "Yes, yes; very nice, and I know
+I shall enjoy it ever so much.  But I don't know what you will think of
+that poor young Burnamy!"
+
+"Why, what's happened to him?"
+
+"Happened?  Stoller's happened."
+
+"Oh, have you seen him, already?  Well?"
+
+"Well, if you had been going to pick out that type of man, you'd have
+rejected him, because you'd have said he was too pat.  He's like an actor
+made up for a Western millionaire.  Do you remember that American in
+'L'Etranger' which Bernhardt did in Boston when she first came?  He,
+looks exactly like that, and he has the worst manners.  He stood talking
+to me with his hat on, and a toothpick in his mouth; and he made me feel
+as if he had bought me, along with Burnamy, and had paid too much.  If
+you don't give him a setting down, Basil, I shall never speak to you;
+that's all.  I'm sure Burnamy is in some trouble with him; he's got some
+sort of hold upon him; what it could be in such a short time, I can't
+imagine; but if ever a man seemed to be, in a man's power, he does, in
+his!
+
+"Now," said March, "your pronouns have got so far beyond me that I think
+we'd better let it all go till after supper; perhaps I shall see Stoller
+myself by that time."
+
+She had been deeply stirred by her encounter with Stoller, but she
+entered with impartial intensity into the fact that the elevator at
+Pupp's had the characteristic of always coming up and never going down
+with passengers.  It was locked into its closet with a solid door, and
+there was no bell to summon it, or any place to take it except on the
+ground-floor; but the stairs by which she could descend were abundant and
+stately; and on one landing there was the lithograph of one of the
+largest and ugliest hotels in New York; how ugly it was, she said she
+should never have known if she had not seen it there.
+
+The dining-room was divided into the grand saloon, where they supped amid
+rococo sculptures and frescoes, and the glazed veranda opening by vast
+windows on a spread of tables without, which were already filling up for
+the evening concert.  Around them at the different tables there were
+groups of faces and figures fascinating in their strangeness, with that
+distinction which abashes our American level in the presence of European
+inequality.
+
+"How simple and unimpressive we are, Basil," she said, "beside all these
+people!  I used to feel it in Europe when I was young, and now I'm
+certain that we must seem like two faded-in old village photographs.  We
+don't even look intellectual!  I hope we look good."
+
+"I know I do," said March.  The waiter went for their supper, and they
+joined in guessing the different nationalities in the room.  A French
+party was easy enough; a Spanish mother and daughter were not difficult,
+though whether they were not South-American remained uncertain; two
+elderly maiden ladies were unmistakably of central Massachusetts, and
+were obviously of a book-club culture that had left no leaf unturned;
+some Triestines gave themselves away by their Venetian accent; but a
+large group at a farther table were unassignable in the strange language
+which they clattered loudly together, with bursts of laughter.  They were
+a family party of old and young, they were having a good time, with a
+freedom which she called baronial; the ladies wore white satin, or black
+lace, but the men were in sack-coats; she chose to attribute them, for no
+reason but their outlandishness, to Transylvania.  March pretended to
+prefer a table full of Germans, who were unmistakably bourgeois, and yet
+of intellectual effect.  He chose as his favorite a middle-aged man of
+learned aspect, and they both decided to think of him as the Herr
+Professor, but they did not imagine how perfectly the title fitted him
+till he drew a long comb from his waistcoat pocket and combed his hair
+and beard with it above the table.
+
+The wine wrought with the Transylvanians, and they all jargoned together
+at once, and laughed at the jokes passing among them.  One old gentleman
+had a peculiar fascination from the infantile innocence of his gums when
+he threw his head back to laugh, and showed an upper jaw toothless except
+for two incisors, standing guard over the chasm between.  Suddenly he
+choked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up before
+him, and--
+
+"Noblesse oblige," said March, with the tone of irony which he reserved
+for his wife's preoccupations with aristocracies of all sorts.  "I think
+I prefer my Hair Professor, bourgeois, as he is."
+
+The ladies attributively of central Massachusetts had risen from their
+table, and were making for the door without having paid for their supper.
+The head waiter ran after them; with a real delicacy for their mistake he
+explained that though in most places the meals were charged in the bill,
+it was the custom in Carlsbad to pay for them at the table; one could see
+that he was making their error a pleasant adventure to them which they
+could laugh over together, and write home about without a pang.
+
+"And I," said Mrs. March, shamelessly abandoning the party of the
+aristocracy, "prefer the manners of the lower classes."
+
+"Oh, yes," he admitted.  "The only manners we have at home are black
+ones.  But you mustn't lose courage.  Perhaps the nobility are not always
+so baronial."
+
+"I don't know whether we have manners at home," she said, "and I don't
+believe I care.  At least we have decencies."
+
+"Don't be a jingo," said her husband.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.
+
+Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy from duty for the day, he
+was not so full of resources in himself, and he had not so general an
+acquaintance in the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellow make
+up to him in the reading-room, that night.  He laid down a New York paper
+ten days old in despair of having left any American news in it, and
+pushed several continental Anglo-American papers aside with his elbow, as
+he gave a contemptuous glance at the foreign journals, in Bohemian,
+Hungarian, German, French, and Italian, which littered the large table.
+
+"I wonder," he said, "how long it'll take'em, over here, to catch on to
+our way of having pictures?"
+
+Burnamy had come to his newspaper work since illustrated journalism was
+established, and he had never had any shock from it at home, but so
+sensitive is youth to environment that, after four days in Europe, the
+New York paper Stoller had laid down was already hideous to him.  From
+the politic side of his nature, however, he temporized with Stoller's
+preference.  "I suppose it will be some time yet."
+
+"I wish," said Stoller, with a savage disregard of expressed sequences
+and relevancies, "I could ha' got some pictures to send home with that
+letter this afternoon: something to show how they do things here, and be
+a kind of object-lesson."  This term had come up in a recent campaign
+when some employers, by shutting down their works, were showing their
+employees what would happen if the employees voted their political
+opinions into effect, and Stoller had then mastered its meaning and was
+fond of using it.  "I'd like 'em to see the woods around here, that the
+city owns, and the springs, and the donkey-carts, and the theatre, and
+everything, and give 'em some practical ideas."
+
+Burnamy made an uneasy movement.
+
+"I'd 'a' liked to put 'em alongside of some of our improvements, and show
+how a town can be carried on when it's managed on business principles.
+"Why didn't you think of it?"
+
+"Really, I don't know," said Burnamy, with a touch of impatience.
+
+They had not met the evening before on the best of terms.  Stoller had
+expected Burnamy twenty-four hours earlier, and had shown his displeasure
+with him for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might have spent at
+Carlsbad; and Burnamy had been unsatisfactory in accounting for the
+delay.  But he had taken hold so promptly and so intelligently that by
+working far into the night, and through the whole forenoon, he had got
+Stoller's crude mass of notes into shape, and had sent off in time for
+the first steamer the letter which was to appear over the proprietor's
+name in his paper.  It was a sort of rough but very full study of the
+Carlsbad city government, the methods of taxation, the municipal
+ownership of the springs and the lands, and the public control in
+everything.  It condemned the aristocratic constitution of the
+municipality, but it charged heavily in favor of the purity, beneficence,
+and wisdom of the administration, under which there was no poverty and no
+idleness, and which was managed like any large business.
+
+Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure, once or twice, and
+Burnamy suffered it submissively until now.  But now, at the change in
+Burnamy's tone, he changed his manner a little.
+
+"Seen your friends since supper?" he asked.
+
+"Only a moment.  They are rather tired, and they've gone to bed."
+
+That the fellow that edits that book you write for?"
+
+"Yes; he owns it, too."
+
+The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller's respect, and he asked
+more deferentially, "Makin' a good thing out of it?"
+
+"A living, I suppose.  Some of the high-class weeklies feel the
+competition of the ten-cent monthlies.  But 'Every Other Week' is about
+the best thing we've got in the literary way, and I guess it's holding
+its own."
+
+"Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad," Stoller said, with a
+return to the sourness of his earlier mood.  "I don't know as I care much
+for his looks; I seen him when he came in with you.  No snap to him."
+He clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and
+started up with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and
+physical; as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking
+at Burnamy, "You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest."
+
+Stoller's father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to the
+West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race and
+class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana town
+where their son was born, and throve in it from the start.  He could
+remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese
+and pickle the pigs' feet, which they took turns in selling at as great a
+price as they could extort from the townspeople.  She was a good and
+tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in
+mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to
+fight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and
+mobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time till
+they wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through the
+exhaustion of their invention.  No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky,
+rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf;
+and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed upon
+him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans.  He hated his
+native speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with his
+father and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who
+proposed to parley with him in it on such terms as "Nix come arouce in de
+Dytchman's house."  He disused it so thoroughly that after his father
+took him out of school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he
+could not get back to it.  He regarded his father's business as part of
+his national disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away
+from it, and informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and
+wagon-maker.  When it came to his setting up for himself in the business
+he had chosen, he had no help from his father, who had gone on adding
+dollar to dollar till he was one of the richest men in the place.
+
+Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had
+many of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of
+asking him to their houses when they were young people, any more than
+when they were children.  He was long deeply in love with an American
+girl whom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry
+an American.  He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who
+had been at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home as
+fragilely and nasally American as anybody.  She made him a good, sickly,
+fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with no
+visible taint of their German origin.
+
+In the mean time Jacob's father had died and left his money to his son,
+with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who would
+gladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if she
+could.  He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she
+lived; and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household
+trying so hard to be American.  She could not help her native accent, but
+she kept silence when her son's wife had company; and when her eldest
+granddaughter began very early to have American callers, she went out of
+the room; they would not have noticed her if she had staid.
+
+Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to his
+financial importance in the community.  He first commended himself to the
+Better Element by crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which were
+now the largest business interest of the place; and he rose on a wave of
+municipal reform to such a height of favor with the respectable classes
+that he was elected on a citizens' ticket to the Legislature.  In the
+reaction which followed he was barely defeated for Congress, and was
+talked of as a dark horse who might be put up for the governorship some
+day; but those who knew him best predicted that he would not get far in
+politics, where his bull-headed business ways would bring him to ruin
+sooner or later; they said, "You can't swing a bolt like you can a
+strike."
+
+When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors by going to live in
+Chicago, though he kept his works in the place where he and they had
+grown up together.  His wife died shortly after, and within four years he
+lost his three eldest children; his son, it was said, had begun to go
+wrong first.  But the rumor of his increasing wealth drifted back from
+Chicago; he was heard of in different enterprises and speculations; at
+last it was said that he had bought a newspaper, and then his boyhood
+friends decided that Jake was going into politics again.
+
+In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of the great city he came to
+understand better that to be an American in all respects was not the
+best.  His mounting sense of importance began to be retroactive in the
+direction of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the little town near
+Wurzburg which his people had come from, and found that he had relatives
+still living there, some of whom had become people of substance; and
+about the time his health gave way from life-long gluttony, and he was
+ordered to Carlsbad, he had pretty much made up his mind to take his
+younger daughters and put them in school for a year or two in Wurzburg,
+for a little discipline if not education.  He had now left them there, to
+learn the language, which he had forgotten with such heart-burning and
+shame, and music, for which they had some taste.
+
+The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their father
+with open threats of running away; and in his heart he did not altogether
+blame them.  He came away from Wurzburg raging at the disrespect for his
+money and his standing in business which had brought him a more galling
+humiliation there than anything he had suffered in his boyhood at Des
+Vaches.  It intensified him in his dear-bought Americanism to the point
+of wishing to commit lese majesty in the teeth of some local dignitaries
+who had snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle to shame
+in his person; there was something like the bird of his step-country in
+Stoller's pale eyes and huge beak.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.
+
+March sat with a company of other patients in the anteroom of the doctor,
+and when it came his turn to be prodded and kneaded, he was ashamed at
+being told he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded.  The doctor wrote
+out a careful dietary for him, with a prescription of a certain number of
+glasses of water at a certain spring and a certain number of baths, and a
+rule for the walks he was to take before and after eating; then the
+doctor patted him on the shoulder and pushed him caressingly out of his
+inner office.  It was too late to begin his treatment that day, but he
+went with his wife to buy a cup, with a strap for hanging it over his
+shoulder, and he put it on so as to be an invalid with the others at
+once; he came near forgetting the small napkin of Turkish towelling which
+they stuffed into their cups, but happily the shopman called him back in
+time to sell it to him.
+
+At five the next morning he rose, and on his way to the street exchanged
+with the servants cleaning the hotel stairs the first of the gloomy
+'Guten Morgens' which usher in the day at Carlsbad.  They cannot be so
+finally hopeless as they sound; they are probably expressive only of the
+popular despair of getting through with them before night; but March
+heard the salutations sorrowfully groaned out on every hand as he joined
+the straggling current of invalids which swelled on the way past the
+silent shops and cafes in the Alte Wiese, till it filled the street, and
+poured its thousands upon the promenade before the classic colonnade of
+the Muhlbrunn.  On the other bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings its
+steaming waters by irregular impulses into the air under a pavilion of
+iron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the source of most resort.  There is
+an instrumental concert somewhere in Carlsbad from early rising till
+bedtime; and now at the Muhlbrunn there was an orchestra already playing;
+and under the pillared porch, as well as before it, the multitude
+shuffled up and down, draining their cups by slow sips, and then taking
+each his place in the interminable line moving on to replenish them at
+the spring.
+
+A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some vice of their climate is
+said peculiarly to fit for the healing effects of Carlsbad, most took his
+eye in their long gabardines of rusty black and their derby hats of plush
+or velvet, with their corkscrew curls coming down before their ears.
+They were old and young, they were grizzled and red and black, but they
+seemed all well-to-do; and what impresses one first and last at Carlsbad
+is that its waters are mainly for the healing of the rich.  After the
+Polish Jews, the Greek priests of Russian race were the most striking
+figures.  There were types of Latin ecclesiastics, who were striking in
+their way too; and the uniforms of certain Austrian officers and soldiers
+brightened the picture.  Here and there a southern face, Italian or
+Spanish or Levantine, looked passionately out of the mass of dull German
+visages; for at Carlsbad the Germans, more than any other gentile nation,
+are to the fore.  Their misfits, their absence of style, imparted the
+prevalent effect; though now and then among the women a Hungarian, or
+Pole, or Parisian, or American, relieved the eye which seeks beauty and
+grace rather than the domestic virtues.  There were certain faces, types
+of discomfort and disease, which appealed from the beginning to the end.
+A young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid South-American, were of a
+lasting fascination to March.
+
+What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficulty
+of assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his years
+of having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their long
+disuse in his homogeneous American world.  The Americans themselves fused
+with the European races who were often so hard to make out; his fellow-
+citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave them away;
+he thought the women's voices the worst.
+
+At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady mechanical action
+dipped the cups into the steaming source, and passed them impersonally up
+to their owners.  With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often a half-
+hour before one's turn carne, and at all a strict etiquette forbade any
+attempt to anticipate it.  The water was merely warm and flat, and after
+the first repulsion one could forget it.  March formed a childish habit
+of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with a gulp
+which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by going
+sometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group of
+Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park beyond
+the Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close sward
+the yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight.  He
+liked to sit there and look at the city beyond the Tepl, where it climbed
+the wooded heights in terraces till it lost its houses in the skirts and
+folds of the forest.  Most mornings it rained, quietly, absent-mindedly,
+and this, with the chili in the air, deepened a pleasant illusion of
+Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream; but there were sunny
+mornings when the mountains shone softly through a lustrous mist, and the
+air was almost warm.
+
+Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy's employer,
+whom he had sometimes noted in the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his
+turn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience.  Stoller explained
+that though you could have the water brought to you at your hotel, he
+chose to go to the spring for the sake of the air; it was something you
+had got to live through; before he had that young Burnamy to help him he
+did not know what to do with his time, but now, every minute he was not
+eating or sleeping he was working; his cure did not oblige him to walk
+much.  He examined March, with a certain mixture of respect and contempt,
+upon the nature of the literary life, and how it differed from the life
+of a journalist.  He asked if he thought Burnamy would amount to anything
+as a literary man; he so far assented to March's faith in him as to say,
+"He's smart."  He told of leaving his daughters in school at Wurzburg;
+and upon the whole he moved March with a sense of his pathetic loneliness
+without moving his liking, as he passed lumberingly on, dangling his cup.
+
+March gave his own cup to the little maid at his spring, and while she
+gave it to a second, who dipped it and handed it to a third for its
+return to him, he heard an unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-,
+morning to them all in English.  "Are you going to teach them United
+States?" he asked of a face with which he knew such an appeal would not
+fail.
+
+"Well," the man admitted, "I try to teach them that much.  They like it.
+You are an American?  I am glad of it.  I have 'most lost the use of my
+lungs, here.  I'm a great talker, and I talk to my wife till she's about
+dead; then I'm out of it for the rest of the day; I can't speak German."
+
+His manner was the free, friendly manner of the West.  He must be that
+sort of untravelled American whom March had so seldom met, but he was
+afraid to ask him if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest it should
+prove the third or fourth.  "Are you taking the cure?" he asked instead.
+
+"Oh, no.  My wife is.  She'll be along directly; I come down here and
+drink the waters to encourage her; doctor said to.  That gets me in for
+the diet, too.  I've e't more cooked fruit since I been here than I ever
+did in my life before.  Prunes?  My Lord, I'm full o' prunes!  Well, it
+does me good to see an American, to know him.  I couldn't 'a' told you,
+it you hadn't have spoken."
+
+"Well," said March, "I shouldn't have been so sure of you, either, by
+your looks."
+
+"Yes, we can't always tell ourselves from these Dutch.  But they know us,
+and they don't want us, except just for one thing, and that's our money.
+I tell you, the Americans are the chumps over here.  Soon's they got all
+our money, or think they have, they say, "Here, you Americans, this is my
+country; you get off; and we got to get.  Ever been over before?"
+
+"A great while ago; so long that I can hardly believe it."
+
+"It's my first time.  My name's Otterson: I'm from out in Iowa."
+
+March gave him his name, and added that he was from New York.
+
+"Yes.  I thought you was Eastern.  But that wasn't an Eastern man you was
+just with?"
+
+"No; he's from Chicago.  He's a Mr. Stoller."
+
+"Not the buggy man?"
+
+"I believe he makes buggies."
+
+"Well, you do meet everybody here."  The Iowan was silent for a moment,
+as if, hushed by the weighty thought.  "I wish my wife could have seen
+him.  I just want her to see the man that made our buggy.  I don't know
+what's keeping her, this morning," he added, apologetically.  "Look at
+that fellow, will you, tryin' to get away from those women!"  A young
+officer was doing his best to take leave of two ladies, who seemed to be
+mother and daughter; they detained him by their united arts, and clung to
+him with caressing words and looks.  He was red in the face with his
+polite struggles when he broke from them at last.  "How they do hang on
+to a man, over here!"  the Iowa man continued.  "And the Americans are as
+bad as any.  Why, there's one ratty little Englishman up at our place,
+and our girls just swarm after him; their mothers are worse.  Well, it's
+so, Jenny," he said to the lady who had joined them and whom March turned
+round to see when he spoke to her.  "If I wanted a foreigner I should go
+in for a man.  And these officers!  Put their mustaches up at night in
+curl-papers, they tell me.  Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr. March.
+Well, had your first glass, yet, Jenny?  I'm just going for my second
+tumbler."
+
+He took his wife back to the spring, and began to tell her about Stoller;
+she made no sign of caring for him; and March felt inculpated.  She
+relented a little toward him as they drank together; when he said he must
+be going to breakfast with his wife, she asked where he breakfasted, and
+said, "Why, we go to the Posthof, too."  He answered that then they
+should be sure some time to meet there; he did not venture further; he
+reflected that Mrs. March had her reluctances too; she distrusted people
+who had amused or interested him before she met them.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.
+
+Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he had found most of the other
+agreeable things in Carlsbad, which he brought to their knowledge one by
+one, with such forethought that March said he hoped he should be cared
+for in his declining years as an editor rather than as a father; there
+was no tenderness like a young contributor's.
+
+Many people from the hotels on the hill found at Pupp's just the time and
+space between their last cup of water and their first cup of coffee which
+are prescribed at Carlsbad; but the Marches were aware somehow from the
+beginning that Pupp's had not the hold upon the world at breakfast which
+it had at the mid-day dinner, or at supper on the evenings when the
+concert was there.  Still it was amusing, and they were patient of
+Burnamy's delay till he could get a morning off from Stoller and go with
+them to the Posthof.  He met Mrs. March in the reading-room, where March
+was to join them on his way from the springs with his bag of bread.  The
+earlier usage of buying the delicate pink slices of Westphalia ham, which
+form the chief motive of a Carlsbad breakfast, at a certain shop in the
+town, and carrying them to the cafe with you, is no longer of such
+binding force as the custom of getting your bread at the Swiss bakery.
+You choose it yourself at the counter, which begins to be crowded by half
+past seven, and when you have collected the prescribed loaves into the
+basket of metallic filigree given you by one of the baker's maids, she
+puts it into a tissue-paper bag of a gay red color, and you join the
+other invalids streaming away from the bakery, their paper bags making a
+festive rustling as they go.
+
+Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely meadow-lands, a good mile
+up the brawling Tepl, before they join on the right side of the torrent,
+where the Posthof lurks nestled under trees whose boughs let the sun and
+rain impartially through upon its army of little tables.  By this time
+the slow omnibus plying between Carlsbad and some villages in the valley
+beyond has crossed from the left bank to the right, and keeps on past
+half a dozen other cafes, where patients whose prescriptions marshal them
+beyond the Posthof drop off by the dozens and scores.
+
+The road on the left bank of the Tepl is wild and overhung at points with
+wooded steeps, when it leaves the town; but on the right it is bordered
+with shops and restaurants a great part of its length.  In leafy nooks
+between these, uphill walks begin their climb of the mountains, from the
+foot of votive shrines set round with tablets commemorating in German,
+French, Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of high-well-borns of
+all those races and languages.  Booths glittering with the lapidary's
+work in the cheaper gems, or full of the ingenious figures of the toy-
+makers, alternate with the shrines and the cafes on the way to the
+Posthof, and with their shoulders against the overhanging cliff, spread
+for the passing crowd a lure of Viennese jewelry in garnets, opals,
+amethysts, and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings as carrot-eating
+rabbits, worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and peacocks that strut
+about the feet of the passers and expand their iridescent tails in mimic
+pride.
+
+Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they felt
+the far-reflected charm of the crucifixes of the white-hot Italian
+highways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had a
+mechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the children, ending
+in a pang for the fact that they were children no longer.  He waited
+politely while Mrs. March made up her mind that she would not buy any
+laces of the motherly old women who showed them under pent-roofs on way-
+side tables; and he waited patiently at the gate of the flower-gardens
+beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of sweetpease from the
+businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful joy in her because she
+knew no English, and gave him a chance of speaking his German.
+
+"You'll find," he said, as they crossed the road again, "that it's well
+to trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass.  I should still be lagging
+along in my thirties if it hadn't been for fooling, and here I am well on
+in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever."
+
+They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the cafe at last, and
+a turn of the path brought them to the prospect of its tables, under the
+trees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters take
+refuge at other tables when it rains; it rains nearly always, and the
+trunks of the trees are as green with damp as if painted; but that
+morning the sun was shining.  At the verge of the open space a group of
+pretty serving-maids, each with her name on a silver band pinned upon her
+breast, met them and bade them a 'Guten Morgen' of almost cheerful note,
+but gave way, to an eager little smiling blonde, who came pushing down
+the path at sight of Burnamy, and claimed him for her own.
+
+"Ah, Lili!  We want an extra good table, this morning.  These are some
+American Excellencies, and you must do your best for them."
+
+"Oh, yes," the girl answered in English, after a radiant salutation of
+the Marches; "I get you one."
+
+"You are a little more formerly, to-day, and I didn't had one already."
+
+She ran among the tables along the edge of the western edge of the
+gallery, and was far beyond hearing his protest that he was not earlier
+than usual when she beckoned him to the table she had found.  She had
+crowded it in between two belonging to other girls, and by the time her
+breakfasters came up she was ready for their order, with the pouting
+pretence that the girls always tried to rob her of the best places.
+Burnamy explained proudly, when she went, that none of the other girls
+ever got an advantage of her; she had more custom than any three of them,
+and she had hired a man to help her carry her orders.  The girls were all
+from the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived at home in the
+winter on their summer tips; their wages were nothing, or less, for
+sometimes they paid for their places.
+
+"What a mass of information!" said March.  "How did you come by it?"
+
+"Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe."
+
+"It's not a bad habit, if one doesn't carry it too far.  How did Lili
+learn her English?"
+
+"She takes lessons in the winter.  She's a perfect little electric motor.
+I don't believe any Yankee girl could equal her."
+
+"She would expect to marry a millionaire if she did.  What astonishes one
+over here is to see how contentedly people prosper along on their own
+level.  And the women do twice the work of the men without expecting to
+equal them in any other way.  At Pupp's, if we go to one end of the out-
+door restaurant, it takes three men to wait on us: one to bring our
+coffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat, and another to make
+out our bill, and I have to tip all three of them.  If we go to the other
+end, one girl serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make it less
+than the least I give any three of the men waiters."
+
+"You ought to be ashamed of that," said his wife.
+
+"I'm not.  I'm simply proud of your sex, my dear."
+
+"Women do nearly everything, here," said Burnamy, impartially.  "They
+built that big new Kaiserbad building: mixed the mortar, carried the
+hods, and laid the stone."
+
+"That makes me prouder of the sex than ever.  But come, Mr. Burnamy!
+Isn't there anybody of polite interest that you know of in this crowd?"
+
+"Well, I can't say," Burnamy hesitated.
+
+The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove and the galleries; the
+tables were already filled, and men were bringing other tables on their
+heads, and making places for them, with entreaties for pardon everywhere;
+the proprietor was anxiously directing them; the pretty serving-girls
+were running to and from the kitchen in a building apart with shrill,
+sweet promises of haste.  The morning sun fell broken through the leaves
+on the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and dappled the figures of the
+men with harlequin patches of light and shade.  A tall woman, with a sort
+of sharpened beauty, and an artificial permanency of tint in her cheeks
+and yellow hair, came trailing herself up the sun-shot path, and found,
+with hardy insistence upon the publicity, places for the surly-looking,
+down-faced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle;
+the dog was like the black poodle out of Faust.  Burnamy had heard her
+history; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on it, which he
+called Europa, not after the old fable, but because it seemed to him that
+she expressed Europe, on one side of its civilization, and had an
+authorized place in its order, as she would not have had in ours.  She
+was where she was by a toleration of certain social facts which
+corresponds in Europe to our reverence for the vested interests.  In her
+history there, had been officers and bankers; even foreign dignitaries;
+now there was this sullen young fellow .  .  .  .  Burnamy had wondered
+if it would do to offer his poem to March, but the presence of the
+original abashed him, and in his mind he had torn the poem up, with a
+heartache for its aptness.
+
+"I don't believe," he said, "that I recognize-any celebrities here."
+
+"I'm sorry," said March.  "Mrs. March would have been glad of some
+Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some mere
+well-borns.  But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness."
+
+"I'm satisfied with the picturesqueness," said his wife.  "Don't worry
+about me, Mr. Burnamy.  "Why can't we have this sort of thing at home?"
+
+"We're getting something like it in the roof-gardens," said March."
+We couldn't have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us.
+At this time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the life
+out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table.  At nine
+A. M.  the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this.  So
+we have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and the
+mosquito-line into the night air.  I haven't seen a fly since I came to
+Europe.  I really miss them; it makes me homesick."
+
+"There are plenty in Italy," his wife suggested.
+
+"We must get down there before we go home."
+
+"But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in Germany?
+Why did no traveller ever put it in his book?  When your stewardess said
+so on the steamer, I remember that you regarded it as a bluff."  He
+turned to Burnamy, who was listening with the deference of a contributor:
+"Isn't Lili rather long?  I mean for such a very prompt person.  Oh, no!"
+
+But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted "Fraulein!" to Lili; with her
+hireling at her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between the
+tables.  She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, "In a
+minute!" and vanished in the crowd.
+
+"Does that mean anything in particular?  There's really no hurry."
+
+"Oh, I think she'll come now," said Burnamy.  March protested that he had
+only been amused at Lili's delay; but his wife scolded him for his
+impatience; she begged Burnamy's pardon, and repeated civilities passed
+between them.  She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies
+were pretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the
+mothers were mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the
+fathers too closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats
+behind their newspapers, with noises that made her quail.  There was no
+one so effective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good deal
+on show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glinting
+from their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, they
+moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced women.
+
+"They all wear corsets," Burnamy explained.
+
+"How much you know already!" said Mrs. March.  "I can see that Europe
+won't be lost on you in anything.  Oh, who's that?"  A lady whose costume
+expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove
+with a graceful tilt.  Burnamy was silent.  "She must be an American.  Do
+you know who she is?"
+
+"Yes."  He hesitated, a little to name a woman whose tragedy had once
+filled the newspapers.
+
+Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination which such tragedies
+inspire.  "What grace!  Is she beautiful?"
+
+"Very."  Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge, but somehow Mrs. March
+did not like his knowing who she was, and how beautiful.  She asked March
+to look, but he refused.
+
+"Those things are too squalid," he said, and she liked him for saying it;
+she hoped it would not be lost upon Burnamy.
+
+One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the burden
+off her tray on the stone floor before her; some of the dishes broke, and
+the breakfast was lost.  Tears came into the girl's eyes and rolled down
+her hot cheeks.  "There!  That is what I call tragedy," said March.
+"She'll have to pay for those things."
+
+"Oh, give her the money, dearest!"
+
+"How can I?"
+
+The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili and her hireling
+behind her came bearing down upon them with their three substantial
+breakfasts on two well-laden trays.  She forestalled Burnamy's reproaches
+for her delay, laughing and bridling, while she set down the dishes of
+ham and tongue and egg, and the little pots of coffee and frothed milk.
+
+"I could not so soon I wanted, because I was to serve an American
+princess."
+
+Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of those noble
+international marriages which fill our women with vainglory for such of
+their compatriots as make them.
+
+"Oh, come now, Lili!" said Burnamy.  "We have queens in America, but
+nothing so low as princesses.  This was a queen, wasn't it?"
+
+She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmed her.  "All people
+say it is princess," she insisted.
+
+"Well, if she's a princess we must look her up after breakfast," said
+Burnamy.  "Where is she sitting?"
+
+She pointed at a corner so far off on the other side that no one could be
+distinguished, and then was gone, with a smile flashed over her shoulder,
+and her hireling trying to keep up with her.
+
+"We're all very proud of Lili's having a hired man," said Burnamy.
+"We think it reflects credit on her customers."
+
+March had begun his breakfast with-the voracious appetite of an early-
+rising invalid.  "What coffee!"
+
+He drew a long sigh after the first draught.
+
+"It's said to be made of burnt figs," said Burnamy, from the
+inexhaustible advantage of his few days' priority in Carlsbad.
+
+"Then let's have burnt figs introduced at home as soon as possible.  But
+why burnt figs?  That seems one of those doubts which are much more
+difficult than faith."
+
+It's not only burnt figs," said Burnamy, with amiable superiority, "if it
+is burnt figs, but it's made after a formula invented by a consensus of
+physicians, and enforced by the municipality.  Every cafe in Carlsbad
+makes the same kind of coffee and charges the same price."
+
+"You are leaving us very little to find out for ourselves," sighed March.
+
+"Oh, I know a lot more things.  Are you fond of fishing?"
+
+"Not very."
+
+"You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl, but they send an
+official with you who keeps count, and when you have had your sport, the
+trout belong to the municipality just as they did before you caught
+them."
+
+"I don't see why that isn't a good notion: the last thing I should want
+to do would be to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I was personally
+acquainted with.  Well, I'm never going away from Carlsbad.  I don't
+wonder people get their doctors to tell them to come back."
+
+Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller had got together
+about the place, and had given him to put in shape.  It was run in the
+interest of people who had got out of order, so that they would keep
+coming to get themselves in order again; you could hardly buy an
+unwholesome meal in the town; all the cooking was 'kurgemass'.  He won
+such favor with his facts that he could not stop in time: he said to
+March, "But if you ever should have a fancy for a fish of your personal
+acquaintance, there's a restaurant up the Tepl, where they let you pick
+out your trout in the water; then they catch him and broil him for you,
+and you know what you are eating."
+
+"Is it a municipal restaurant?"
+
+"Semi-municipal," said Burnamy, laughing.
+
+"We'll take Mrs. March," said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamy felt
+the limitations of a woman's sense of humor, which always define
+themselves for men so unexpectedly.
+
+He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her what
+he knew about distinctions and dignities that he now saw among the
+breakfasters.  The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were set
+together in such labyrinths that any one who left the central aisle was
+lost in them.  The serving-girls ran more swiftly to and fro, responding
+with a more nervous shrillness to the calls of "Fraulein! Fraulein!" that
+followed them.  The proprietor, in his bare head, stood like one
+paralyzed by his prosperity, which sent up all round him the clash of
+knives and crockery, and the confusion of tongues.  It was more than an
+hour before Burnamy caught Lili's eye, and three times she promised to
+come and be paid before she came.  Then she said, "It is so nice, when
+you stay a little," and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who had
+broken the dishes in her fall near them, she almost wept with tenderness;
+she almost winked with wickedness when he asked if the American princess
+was still in her place.
+
+"Do go and see who it can be!" Mrs. March entreated.  "We'll wait here,"
+and he obeyed.  "I am not sure that I like him," she said, as soon as he
+was out of hearing.  "I don't know but he's coarse, after all.  Do you
+approve of his knowing so many people's 'taches' already?"
+
+"Would it be any better later?" he asked in tern.  "He seemed to find you
+interested."
+
+"It's very different with us; we're not young," she urged, only half
+seriously.
+
+Her husband laughed.  "I see you want me to defend him.  Oh, hello!"
+he cried, and she saw Burnamy coming toward them with a young lady, who
+was nodding to them from as far as she could see them.  "This is the easy
+kind of thing that makes you Blush for the author if you find it in a
+novel."
+
+
+
+
+XXX.
+
+Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to kiss her.  "Do you
+know I felt it must be you, all the time!  When did you come?  Where is
+your father?  What hotel are you staying at?"
+
+It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking hands with March, that it was
+last night, and her father was finishing his breakfast, and it was one of
+the hotels on the hill.  On the way back to her father it appeared that
+he wished to consult March's doctor; not that there was anything the
+matter.
+
+The general himself was not much softened by the reunion with his fellow-
+Americans; he confided to them that his coffee was poisonous; but he
+seemed, standing up with the Paris-New York Chronicle folded in his hand,
+to have drunk it all.  Was March going off on his forenoon tramp?  He
+believed that was part of the treatment, which was probably all humbug,
+though he thought of trying it, now he was there.  He was told the walks
+were fine; he looked at Burnamy as if he had been praising them, and
+Burnamy said he had been wondering if March would not like to try a
+mountain path back to his hotel; he said, not so sincerely, that he
+thought Mrs. March would like it.
+
+"I shall like your account of it," she answered.  "But I'll walk back on
+a level, if you please."
+
+"Oh, yes," Miss Triscoe pleaded, "come with us!"
+
+She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with her father so
+gracefully that Mrs. March herself could scarcely have told just where
+the girl's real purpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident, or
+just how she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the pleasure of
+seeing Mrs. March back to her hotel.
+
+March went with the young people across the meadow behind the Posthof and
+up into the forest, which began at the base of the mountain.  At first
+they tried to keep him in the range of their talk; but he fell behind
+more and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was less and
+less possible to include him in it.  When it began to concern their
+common appreciation of the Marches, they even tried to get out of his
+hearing.
+
+"They're so young in their thoughts," said Burnamy, "and they seem as
+much interested in everything as they could have been thirty years ago.
+They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it is
+now; don't you think?  I mean, in the eighteen-sixties."
+
+"Oh, yes, I can see that."
+
+"I don't know why we shouldn't be born older in each generation than
+people were in the last.  Perhaps we are," he suggested.
+
+"I don't know how you mean," said the girl, keeping vigorously up with
+him; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not have
+his hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it.
+
+"I don't believe I can quite make it out myself.  But fancy a man that
+began to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the past
+experience of the whole race--"
+
+"He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn't he?"
+
+"Rather monstrous, yes," he owned, with a laugh.  "But that's where the
+psychological interest would come in."
+
+As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it.
+"I suppose you've been writing all sorts of things since you came here."
+
+"Well, it hasn't been such a great while as it's seemed, and I've had Mr.
+Stoller's psychological interests to look after."
+
+"Oh, yes!  Do you like him?"
+
+"I don't know.  He's a lump of honest selfishness.  He isn't bad.  You
+know where to have him.  He's simple, too."
+
+"You mean, like Mr. March?"
+
+"I didn't mean that; but why not?  They're not of the same generation,
+but Stoller isn't modern."
+
+"I'm very curious to see him," said the girl.
+
+"Do you want me to introduce him?"
+
+"You can introduce him to papa."
+
+They stopped and looked across the curve of the mounting path, down on
+March, who had sunk on a way-side seat, and was mopping his forehead.  He
+saw them, and called up: "Don't wait for me.  I'll join you, gradually."
+
+"I don't want to lose you," Burnamy called back, but he kept on with Miss
+Triscoe.  "I want to get the Hirschensprung in," he explained.  "It's the
+cliff where a hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet to get away
+from an emperor who was after him."
+
+"Oh, yes.  They have them everywhere."
+
+"Do they?  Well, anyway, there's a noble view up there."
+
+There was no view on the way up.  The Germans' notion of a woodland is
+everywhere that of a dense forest such as their barbarous tribes
+primevally herded in.  It means the close-set stems of trees, with their
+tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely that you may
+walk dry through it almost as long as a German shower lasts.  When the
+sun shines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here
+and there with the gold that trickles through.  There is nothing of the
+accident of an American wood in these forests, which have been watched
+and weeded by man ever since they burst the soil.  They remain nurseries,
+but they have the charm which no human care can alienate.  The smell of
+their bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth about
+their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his
+country-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life in
+cities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests and
+dimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of
+exemption from care.  There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation;
+no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him
+good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and
+was less intrusive than if he had not been there.
+
+March thought of the impassioned existence of these young people playing
+the inevitable comedy of hide and seek which the youth of the race has
+played from the beginning of time.  The other invalids who haunted the
+forest, and passed up and down before him in fulfilment of their several
+prescriptions, had a thin unreality in spite of the physical bulk that
+prevailed among them, and they heightened the relief that the forest-
+spirit brought him from the strenuous contact of that young drama.  He
+had been almost painfully aware that the persons in it had met, however
+little they knew it, with an eagerness intensified by their brief
+separation, and he fancied it was the girl who had unconsciously operated
+their reunion in response to the young man's longing, her will making
+itself electrically felt through space by that sort of wireless
+telegraphy which love has long employed, and science has just begun to
+imagine.
+
+He would have been willing that they should get home alone, but he knew
+that his wife would require an account of them from him, and though he
+could have invented something of the kind, if it came to the worst, he
+was aware that it would not do for him to arrive without them.  The
+thought goaded him from his seat, and he joined the upward procession of
+his fellow-sick, as it met another procession straggling downward; the
+ways branched in all directions, with people on them everywhere, bent
+upon building up in a month the health which they would spend the rest of
+the year in demolishing.
+
+He came upon his charges unexpectedly at a turn of the path, and Miss
+Triscoe told him that he ought to have been with them for the view from
+the Hirschensprung.  It was magnificent, she said, and she made Burnamy
+corroborate her praise of it, and agree with her that it was worth the
+climb a thousand times; he modestly accepted the credit she appeared
+willing to give him, of inventing the Hirschensprung.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.
+
+Between his work for Stoller and what sometimes seemed the
+obstructiveness of General Triscoe, Burnamy was not very much with Miss
+Triscoe.  He was not devout, but he went every Sunday to the pretty
+English church on the hill, where he contributed beyond his means to the
+support of the English clergy on the Continent, for the sake of looking
+at her back hair during the service, and losing himself in the graceful
+lines which defined, the girl's figure from the slant of her flowery hat
+to the point where the pewtop crossed her elastic waist.  One happy
+morning the general did not come to church, and he had the fortune to
+walk home with her to her pension, where she lingered with him a moment,
+and almost made him believe she might be going to ask him to come in.
+
+The next evening, when he was sauntering down the row of glittering shops
+beside the Tepl, with Mrs. March, they overtook the general and his
+daughter at a place where the girl was admiring some stork-scissors in
+the window; she said she wished she were still little, so that she could
+get them.  They walked home with the Triscoes, and then he hurried Mrs.
+March back to the shop.  The man had already put up his shutters, and was
+just closing his door, but Burnamy pushed in, and asked to look at the
+stork-scissors they had seen in the window.  The gas was out, and the
+shopman lighted a very dim candle, to show them.
+
+"I knew you wanted to get them for her, after what she said, Mrs. March,"
+he laughed, nervously, "and you must let me lend you the money."
+
+"Why, of course!" she answered, joyfully humoring his feint.  "Shall I
+put my card in for the man to send home to her with them?"
+
+"Well--no.  No.  Not your card--exactly.  Or, yes!  Yes, you must, I
+suppose."
+
+They made the hushing street gay with their laughter; the next evening
+Miss Triscoe came upon the Marches and Burnamy where they sat after
+supper listening to the concert at Pupp's, and thanked Mrs. March for the
+scissors.  Then she and Burnamy had their laugh again, and Miss Triscoe
+joined them, to her father's frowning mystification.  He stared round for
+a table; they were all taken, and he could not refuse the interest
+Burnamy made with the waiters to bring them one and crowd it in.  He had
+to ask him to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down and heard the concert
+through beside Miss Triscoe.
+
+"What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of stork-scissors?" March
+demanded, when his wife and he were alone.
+
+"Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest," she began, in a tone which he
+felt to be wheedling, and she told the story of the scissors.
+
+"Look here, my dear!  Didn't you promise to let this love-affair alone?"
+
+"That was on the ship.  And besides, what would you have done, I should
+like to know?  Would you have refused to let him buy them for her?"
+She added, carelessly, "He wants us to go to the Kurhaus ball with him."
+
+"Oh, does he!"
+
+"Yes.  He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if we
+will chaperon them.  And I promised that you would."
+
+"That I would?"
+
+"It will do just as well if you go.  And it will be very amusing; you can
+see something of Carlsbad society."
+
+"But I'm not going!" he declared.  "It would interfere with my cure.  The
+sitting up late would be bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and I
+should eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do all sorts of
+unwholesome things."
+
+"Nonsense!  The refreshments will be 'kurgemass', of course."
+
+"You can go yourself," he said.
+
+A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty as it is before
+twenty, but still it has claims upon the imagination, and the novel
+circumstance of a ball in the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for Mrs.
+March.  It was the annual reunion which is given by municipal authority
+in the large hall above the bathrooms; it is frequented with safety and
+pleasure by curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it began to have
+for Mrs. March the charm of duty; she believed that she could finally
+have made March go in her place, but she felt that she ought really to go
+in his, and save him from the late hours and the late supper.
+
+"Very well, then," she said at last, "I will go."
+
+It appeared that any civil person might go to the reunion who chose to
+pay two florins and a half.  There must have been some sort of
+restriction, and the ladies of Burnamy's party went with a good deal of
+amused curiosity to see what the distinctions were; but they saw none
+unless it was the advantages which the military had.  The long hall over
+the bathrooms shaped itself into a space for the dancing at one end, and
+all the rest of it was filled with tables, which at half past eight were
+crowded with people, eating, drinking, and smoking.  The military enjoyed
+the monopoly of a table next the rail dividing the dancing from the
+dining space.  There the tight-laced Herr Hauptmanns and Herr Lieutenants
+sat at their sausage and beer and cigars in the intervals of the waltzes,
+and strengthened themselves for a foray among the gracious Fraus and
+Frauleins on the benches lining three sides of the dancing-space.  From
+the gallery above many civilian spectators looked down upon the gayety,
+and the dress-coats of a few citizens figured among the uniforms.
+
+As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fashion found their way to
+the dancing-floor, and toward ten o'clock it became rather crowded.  A
+party of American girls showed their Paris dresses in the transatlantic
+versions of the waltz.  At first they danced with the young men who came
+with them; but after a while they yielded to the custom of the place, and
+danced with any of the officers who asked them.
+
+"I know it's the custom," said Mrs. March to Miss Triscoe, who was at her
+side in one of the waltzes she had decided to sit out, so as not to be
+dancing all the time with Burnamy, "but I never can like it without an
+introduction."
+
+"No," said the girl, with the air of putting temptation decidedly away,
+"I don't believe papa would, either."
+
+A young officer came up, and drooped in mute supplication before her.
+She glanced at Mrs. March, who turned her face away; and she excused
+herself with the pretence that she had promised the dance, and by good
+fortune, Burnamy, who had been unscrupulously waltzing with a lady he did
+not know, came up at the moment.  She rose and put her hand on his arm,
+and they both bowed to the officer before they whirled away.  The officer
+looked after them with amiable admiration; then he turned to Mrs. March
+with a light of banter in his friendly eyes, and was unmistakably asking
+her to dance.  She liked his ironical daring, she liked it so much that
+she forgot her objection to partners without introductions; she forgot
+her fifty-odd years; she forgot that she was a mother of grown children
+and even a mother-in-law; she remembered only the step of her out-dated
+waltz.
+
+It seemed to be modern enough for the cheerful young officer, and they
+were suddenly revolving with the rest. . .  A tide of long-forgotten
+girlhood welled up in her heart, and she laughed as she floated off on it
+past the astonished eyes of Miss Triscoe and Burnamy.  She saw them
+falter, as if they had lost their step in their astonishment; then they
+seemed both to vanish, and her partner had released her, and was helping
+Miss Triscoe up from the floor; Burnamy was brushing the dust from his
+knees, and the citizen who had bowled them over was boisterously
+apologizing and incessantly bowing.
+
+"Oh, are you hurt?" Mrs. March implored.  "I'm sure you must be killed;
+and I did it!  I don't know, what I was thinking of!"
+
+The girl laughed.  "I'm not hurt a bit!"
+
+They had one impulse to escape from the place, and from the sympathy and
+congratulation.  In the dressing-room she declared again that she was all
+right.  "How beautifully you waltz, Mrs. March!" she said, and she
+laughed again, and would not agree with her that she had been ridiculous.
+"But I'm glad those American girls didn't see me.  And I can't be too
+thankful papa didn't come!"
+
+Mrs. March's heart sank at the thought of what General Triscoe would
+think of her.  "You must tell him I did it.  I can never lift up my
+head!"
+
+"No, I shall not.  No one did it," said the girl, magnanimously.  She
+looked down sidelong at her draperies.  "I was so afraid I had torn my
+dress! I certainly heard something rip."
+
+It was one of the skirts of Burnamy's coat, which he had caught into his
+hand and held in place till he could escape to the men's dressing-room,
+where he had it pinned up so skillfully that the damage was not suspected
+by the ladies.  He had banged his knee abominably too; but they did not
+suspect that either, as he limped home on the air beside them, first to
+Miss Triscoe's pension, and then to Mrs. March's hotel.
+
+It was quite eleven o'clock, which at Carlsbad is as late as three in the
+morning anywhere else, when she let herself into her room.  She decided
+not to tell her husband, then; and even at breakfast, which they had at
+the Posthof, she had not got to her confession, though she had told him
+everything else about the ball, when the young officer with whom she had
+danced passed between the tables near her.  He caught her eye and bowed
+with a smile of so much meaning that March asked, "Who's your pretty
+young friend?"
+
+"Oh, that!"  she answered carelessly.  "That was one of the officers at
+the ball," and she laughed.
+
+"You seem to be in the joke, too," he said.  "What is it?"
+
+"Oh, something.  I'll tell you some time.  Or perhaps you'll find out."
+
+"I'm afraid you won't let me wait."
+
+"No, I won't," and now she told him.  She had expected teasing, ridicule,
+sarcasm, anything but the psychological interest mixed with a sort of
+retrospective tenderness which he showed.  "I wish I could have seen you;
+I always thought you danced well."  He added: "It seems that you need a
+chaperon too."
+
+The next morning, after March and General Triscoe had started off upon
+one of the hill climbs, the young people made her go with them for a walk
+up the Tepl, as far as the cafe of the Freundschaftsaal.  In the grounds
+an artist in silhouettes was cutting out the likenesses of people who
+supposed themselves to have profiles, and they begged Mrs. March to sit
+for hers.  It was so good that she insisted on Miss Triscoe's sitting in
+turn, and then Burnamy.  Then he had the inspiration to propose that they
+should all three sit together, and it appeared that such a group was
+within the scope of the silhouettist's art; he posed them in his little
+bower, and while he was mounting the picture they took turns, at five
+kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes played by his Edison
+phonograph.
+
+Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moral fibre; but she
+tried to draw the line at letting Burnamy keep the group.  "Why not?" he
+pleaded.
+
+"You oughtn't to ask," she returned.  "You've no business to have Miss
+Triscoe's picture, if you must know."
+
+"But you're there to chaperon us!" he persisted.
+
+He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she said, "You need a
+chaperon who doesn't lose her head, in a silhouette."  But it seemed
+useless to hold out after that, and she heard herself asking, "Shall we
+let him keep it, Miss Triscoe?"
+
+Burnamy went off to his work with Stoller, carrying the silhouette with
+him, and she kept on with Miss Triscoe to her hotel.  In turning from the
+gate after she parted with the girl she found herself confronted with
+Mrs. Adding and Rose.  The ladies exclaimed at each other in an
+astonishment from which they had to recover before they could begin to
+talk, but from the first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Adding had
+something to say.  The more freely to say it she asked Mrs. March into
+her hotel, which was in the same street with the pension of the Triscoes,
+and she let her boy go off about the exploration of Carlsbad; he promised
+to be back in an hour.
+
+"Well, now what scrape are you in?" March asked when his wife came home,
+and began to put off her things, with signs of excitement which he could
+not fail to note.  He was lying down after a long tramp, and he seemed
+very comfortable.
+
+His question suggested something of anterior import, and she told him
+about the silhouettes, and the advantage the young people had taken of
+their power over her through their knowledge of her foolish behavior at
+the ball.
+
+He said, lazily: "They seem to be working you for all you're worth.  Is
+that it?"
+
+"No; there is something worse.  Something's happened which throws all
+that quite in the shade.  Mrs. Adding is here."
+
+"Mrs. Adding?" he repeated, with a dimness for names which she would not
+allow was growing on him.
+
+"Don't be stupid, dear!  Mrs. Adding, who sat opposite Mr. Kenby on the
+Norumbia.  The mother of the nice boy."
+
+"Oh, yes! Well, that's good!"
+
+"No, it isn't!  Don't say such a thing--till you know!" she cried, with a
+certain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomed seriousness in the
+fact.  He sat up as if better to confront the mystery.  "I have been at
+her hotel, and she has been telling me that she's just come from Berlin,
+and that Mr. Kenby's been there, and--Now I won't have you making a joke
+of it, or breaking out about it, as if it were not a thing to be looked
+for; though of course with the others on our hands you're not to blame
+for not thinking of it.  But you can see yourself that she's young and
+good-looking.  She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were not
+for him, I don't believe she would hesitate--"
+
+"For heaven's sake, what are you driving at?" March broke in, and she
+answered him as vehemently:
+
+"He's asked her to marry him!"
+
+"Kenby?  Mrs. Adding?"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Well, now, Isabel, this won't do!  They ought to be ashamed of
+themselves.  With that morbid, sensitive boy! It's shocking--"
+
+"Will you listen?  Or do you want me to stop?"  He arrested himself at
+her threat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence
+time to sink in, "She refused him, of course!"
+
+"Oh, all right, then!"
+
+"You take it in such a way that I've a great mind not to tell you
+anything more about it."
+
+"I know you have," he said, stretching himself out again; "but you'll do
+it, all the same.  You'd have been awfully disappointed if I had been
+calm and collected."
+
+"She refused him," she began again, "although she respects him, because
+she feels that she ought to devote herself to her son.  Of course she's
+very young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a man
+twice her age, and she's not thirty-five yet.  I don't think she ever
+cared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something about
+him."
+
+"I never heard of him.  I--"
+
+Mrs. March made a "tchck!" that would have recalled the most consequent
+of men from the most logical and coherent interpretation to the true
+intent of her words.  He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely:
+"Well, I won't do it.  If she's refused him, that's the end of it; she
+needn't know anything about him, and she has no right to."
+
+"Now I think differently," said Mrs. March, with an inductive air.
+"Of course she has to know about him, now."  She stopped, and March
+turned his head and looked expectantly at her.  "He said he would not
+consider her answer final, but would hope to see her again and--She's
+afraid he may follow her--What are you looking at me so for?"
+
+"Is he coming here?"
+
+"Am I to blame if he is?  He said he was going to write to her."
+
+March burst into a laugh.  "Well, they haven't been beating about the
+bush!  When I think how Miss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from the
+first moment she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she was
+running from him, and he imagines that he has been boldly following her,
+without the least hope from her, I can't help admiring the simple
+directness of these elders."
+
+"And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what will you say?" she cut in
+eagerly.
+
+"I'll say I don't like the subject.  What am I in Carlsbad for?  I came
+for the cure, and I'm spending time and money on it.  I might as well go
+and take my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to listen to
+Kenby."
+
+"I know it's bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people,"
+said Mrs. March.  "I don't believe he'll want to talk with you; but if--"
+
+"Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel?  I'm not going to have them round in my
+bread-trough!"
+
+"She isn't.  She's at one of the hotels on the hill."
+
+"Very well, let her stay there, then.  They can manage their love-affairs
+in their own way.  The only one I care the least for is the boy."
+
+"Yes, it is forlorn for him.  But he likes Mr. Kenby, and--No, it's
+horrid, and you can't make it anything else!"
+
+"Well, I'm not trying to."  He turned his face away.  "I must get my nap,
+now."  After she thought he must have fallen asleep, he said, "The first
+thing you know, those old Eltwins will be coming round and telling us
+that they're going to get divorced."  Then he really slept.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.
+
+The mid-day dinner at Pupp's was the time to see the Carlsbad world, and
+the Marches had the habit of sitting long at table to watch it.
+
+There was one family in whom they fancied a sort of literary quality, as
+if they had come out of some pleasant German story, but they never knew
+anything about them.  The father by his dress must have been a Protestant
+clergyman; the mother had been a beauty and was still very handsome; the
+daughter was good-looking, and of a good-breeding which was both girlish
+and ladylike.  They commended themselves by always taking the table
+d'hote dinner, as the Marches did, and eating through from the soup and
+the rank fresh-water fish to the sweet, upon the same principle: the
+husband ate all the compote and gave the others his dessert, which was
+not good for him.  A young girl of a different fascination remained as
+much a mystery.  She was small and of an extreme tenuity, which became
+more bewildering as she advanced through her meal, especially at supper,
+which she made of a long cucumber pickle, a Frankfort sausage of twice
+the pickle's length, and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she held a
+shivering little hound; she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly
+maid, and had every effect of being a gracious Fraulein.  A curious
+contrast to her Teutonic voracity was the temperance of a young Latin
+swell, imaginably from Trieste, who sat long over his small coffee and
+cigarette, and tranquilly mused upon the pages of an Italian newspaper.
+At another table there was a very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing
+draperies of white, who commanded a sallow family of South-Americans, and
+loudly harangued them in South-American Spanish; she flared out in a
+picture which nowhere lacked strong effects; and in her background lurked
+a mysterious black face and figure, ironically subservient to the old
+man, the mild boy, and the pretty young girl in the middle distance of
+the family group.
+
+Amidst the shows of a hardened worldliness there were touching glimpses
+of domesticity and heart: a young bride fed her husband soup from her own
+plate with her spoon, unabashed by the publicity; a mother and her two
+pretty daughters hung about a handsome officer, who must have been newly
+betrothed to one of the girls; and, the whole family showed a helpless
+fondness for him, which he did not despise, though he held it in check;
+the girls dressed alike, and seemed to have for their whole change of
+costume a difference from time to time in the color of their sleeves.
+The Marches believed they had seen the growth of the romance which had
+eventuated so happily; and they saw other romances which did not in any
+wise eventuate.  Carlsbad was evidently one of the great marriage marts
+of middle Europe, where mothers brought their daughters to be admired,
+and everywhere the flower of life was blooming for the hand of love.
+It blew by on all the promenades in dresses and hats as pretty as they
+could be bought or imagined; but it was chiefly at Pupp's that it
+flourished.  For the most part it seemed to flourish in vain, and to be
+destined to be put by for another season to dream, bulblike, of the
+coming summer in the quiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian homes.
+
+Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than the spectators knew; but
+for their own pleasure they would not have had their pang for it less;
+and March objected to having a more explicit demand upon his sympathy.
+"We could have managed," he said, at the close of their dinner, as he
+looked compassionately round upon the parterre of young girls, "we could
+have managed with Burnamy and Miss Triscoe; but to have Mrs. Adding and
+Kenby launched upon us is too much.  Of course I like Kenby, and if the
+widow alone were concerned I would give him my blessing: a wife more or a
+widow less is not going to disturb the equilibrium of the universe;
+but--"  He stopped, and then he went on: "Men and women are well enough.
+They complement each other very agreeably, and they have very good times
+together.  But why should they get in love?--It is sure to make them
+uncomfortable to themselves and annoying to others."  He broke off, and
+stared about him.  "My dear, this is really charming--almost as charming
+as the Posthof."  The crowd spread from the open vestibule of the hotel
+and the shelter of its branching pavilion roofs until it was dimmed in
+the obscurity of the low grove across the way in an ultimate depth where
+the musicians were giving the afternoon concert.  Between its two
+stationary divisions moved a current of promenaders, with some such
+effect as if the colors of a lovely garden should have liquefied and
+flowed in mingled rose and lilac, pink and yellow, and white and orange,
+and all the middle tints of modern millinery.  Above on one side were the
+agreeable bulks of architecture, in the buff and gray of Carlsbad; and
+far beyond on the other were the upland slopes, with villas and long
+curves of country roads, belted in with miles of wall.  "It would be
+about as offensive to have a love-interest that one personally knew about
+intruded here," he said, "as to have a two-spanner carriage driven
+through this crowd.  It ought to be forbidden by the municipality."
+
+Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with her eyes, and she
+answered: "See that handsome young Greek priest!  Isn't he an
+archimandrite?  The portier said he was."
+
+"Then let him pass for an archimandrite.  Now," he recurred to his
+grievance again, dreamily, "I have got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, and
+poison his mind against Burnamy, and I shall have to instil a few drops
+of venomous suspicion against Kenby into the heart of poor little Rose
+Adding.  Oh;" he broke out, "they will spoil everything.  They'll be with
+us morning, noon, and night," and he went on to work the joke of repining
+at his lot.  The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers' pretence of
+being interested in something besides themselves, which they were no more
+capable of than so many lunatics.  How could they care for pretty girls
+playing tennis on an upland level, in the waning afternoon?  Or a cartful
+of peasant women stopping to cross themselves at a way-side shrine?  Or a
+whistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some wayside
+raspberries to touch his hat and say good-morning?  Or those preposterous
+maidens sprinkling linen on the grass from watering-pots while the skies
+were full of rain?  Or that blacksmith shop where Peter the Great made a
+horseshoe.  Or the monument of the young warrior-poet Koerner, with a
+gentle-looking girl and her mother reading and knitting on a bench before
+it?  These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what could lovers really
+care for them?  A peasant girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fast
+asleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog, lay in his harness near
+her with one drowsy eye half open for her and the other for the contents
+of their cart; a boy chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyond
+the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all the neighbors; the negro
+door-keeper at the Golden Shield who ought to have spoken our Southern
+English, but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweet afternoon
+stillness in the woods; the good German mothers crocheting at the Posthof
+concerts.  Burnamy as a young poet might hate felt the precious quality
+of these things, if his senses had not been holden by Miss Triscoe; and
+she might have felt it if only he had done so.  But as it was it would be
+lost upon their preoccupation; with Mrs. Adding and Kenby it would be
+hopeless.
+
+A day or two after Mrs: March had met Mrs. Adding, she went with her
+husband to revere a certain magnificent blackamoor whom be had discovered
+at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg,
+where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and looked, in the
+black of his skin and the white of his flowing costume, like a colossal
+figure carved in ebony and ivory.  They took a roundabout way through a
+street entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is a
+pension if it is not n hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimental
+prettiness; with each a little garden before it, and a bower with an iron
+table in it for breakfasting and supping out-doors; and he said that they
+would be the very places for bridal couples who wished to spend the
+honey-moon in getting well of the wedding surfeit.  She denounced him for
+saying such a thing as that, and for his inconsistency in complaining of
+lovers while he was willing to think of young married people.  He
+contended that there was a great difference in the sort of demand that
+young married people made upon the interest of witnesses, and that they
+were at least on their way to sanity; and before they agreed, they had
+come to the hotel with the blackamoor at the door.  While they lingered,
+sharing the splendid creature's hospitable pleasure in the spectacle he
+formed, they were aware of a carriage with liveried coachman and footman
+at the steps of the hotel; the liveries were very quiet and
+distinguished, and they learned that the equipage was waiting for the
+Prince of Coburg, or the Princess of Montenegro, or Prince Henry of
+Prussia; there were differing opinions among the twenty or thirty
+bystanders.  Mrs. March said she did not care which it was; and she was
+patient of the denouement, which began to postpone itself with delicate
+delays.  After repeated agitations at the door among portiers,
+proprietors, and waiters, whose fluttered spirits imparted their thrill
+to the spectators, while the coachman and footman remained
+sculpturesquely impassive in their places, the carriage moved aside and
+let an energetic American lady and her family drive up to the steps.  The
+hotel people paid her a tempered devotion, but she marred the effect by
+rushing out and sitting on a balcony to wait for the delaying royalties.
+There began to be more promises of their early appearance; a footman got
+down and placed himself at the carriage door; the coachman stiffened
+himself on his box; then he relaxed; the footman drooped, and even
+wandered aside.  There came a moment when at some signal the carriage
+drove quite away from the portal and waited near the gate of the
+stableyard; it drove back, and the spectators redoubled their attention.
+Nothing happened, and some of them dropped off.  At last an indescribable
+significance expressed itself in the official group at the door; a man in
+a high hat and dresscoat hurried out; a footman hurried to meet him; they
+spoke inaudibly together.  The footman mounted to his place; the coachman
+gathered up his reins and drove rapidly out of the hotel-yard, down the
+street, round the corner, out of sight.  The man in the tall hat and
+dress-coat went in; the official group at the threshold dissolved; the
+statue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evidently the Hoheit of
+Coburg, or Montenegro, or Prussia, was not going to take the air.
+
+"My dear, this is humiliating."
+
+"Not at all!  I wouldn't have missed it for anything.  Think how near we
+came to seeing them!"
+
+"I shouldn't feel so shabby if we had seen them.  But to hang round here
+in this plebeian abeyance, and then to be defeated and defrauded at last!
+I wonder how long this sort of thing is going on?"
+
+"What thing?"
+
+"This base subjection of the imagination to the Tom Foolery of the Ages."
+
+"I don't know what you mean.  I'm sure it's very natural to want to see a
+Prince."
+
+"Only too natural.  It's so deeply founded in nature that after denying
+royalty by word and deed for a hundred years, we Americans are hungrier
+for it than anybody else.  Perhaps we may come back to it!"
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+They looked up at the Austrian flag on the tower of the hotel, languidly
+curling and uncurling in the bland evening air, as it had over a thousand
+years of stupid and selfish monarchy, while all the generous republics of
+the Middle Ages had perished, and the commonwealths of later times had
+passed like fever dreams.  That dull, inglorious empire had antedated or
+outlived Venice and Genoa, Florence and Siena, the England of Cromwell,
+the Holland of the Stadtholders, and the France of many revolutions, and
+all the fleeting democracies which sprang from these.
+
+March began to ask himself how his curiosity differed from that of the
+Europeans about him; then he became aware that these had detached
+themselves, and left him exposed to the presence of a fellow countryman.
+It was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turned upon March with hilarious
+recognition.  "Hello!  Most of the Americans in Carlsbad seem to be
+hanging round here for a sight of these kings.  Well, we don't have a
+great many of 'em, and it's natural we shouldn't want to miss any.  But
+now, you Eastern fellows, you go to Europe every summer, and yet you
+don't seem to get enough of 'em.  Think it's human nature, or did it get
+so ground into us in the old times that we can't get it out, no
+difference what we say?"
+
+"That's very much what I've been asking myself," said March.  "Perhaps
+it's any kind of show.  We'd wait nearly as long for the President to
+come out, wouldn't we?"
+
+"I reckon we would.  But we wouldn't for his nephew, or his second
+cousin."
+
+"Well, they wouldn't be in the way of the succession."
+
+"I guess you're right."  The Iowan seemed better satisfied with March's
+philosophy than March felt himself, and he could not forbear adding:
+
+"But I don't, deny that we should wait for the President because he's a
+kind of king too.  I don't know that we shall ever get over wanting to
+see kings of some kind.  Or at least my wife won't.  May I present you to
+Mrs. March?"
+
+"Happy to meet you, Mrs. March," said the Iowan.  "Introduce you to Mrs.
+Otterson.  I'm the fool in my family, and I know just how you feel about
+a chance like this.  I don't mean that you're--"
+
+They all laughed at the hopeless case, and Mrs. March said, with one of
+her unexpected likings: "I understand, Mr. Otterson.  And I would rather
+be our kind of fool than the kind that pretends not to care for the sight
+of a king."
+
+"Like you and me, Mrs. Otterson," said March.
+
+"Indeed, indeed," said the lady, "I'd like to see a king too, if it
+didn't take all night.  Good-evening," she said, turning her husband
+about with her, as if she suspected a purpose of patronage in Mrs. March,
+and was not going to have it.
+
+Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly: "The trouble
+with me is that when I do get a chance to talk English, there's such a
+flow of language it carries me away, and I don't know just where I'm
+landing."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII.
+
+There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbad that summer.  One
+day the Duchess of Orleans drove over from Marienbad, attended by the
+Duke on his bicycle.  After luncheon, they reappeared for a moment before
+mounting to her carriage with their Secretaries: two young French
+gentlemen whose dress and bearing better satisfied Mrs. March's exacting
+passion for an aristocratic air in their order.  The Duke was fat and
+fair, as a Bourbon should be, and the Duchess fatter, though not so fair,
+as became a Hapsburg, but they were both more plebeian-looking than their
+retainers, who were slender as well as young, and as perfectly appointed
+as English tailors could imagine them.
+
+"It wouldn't do for the very highest sort of Highhotes," March declared,
+"to look their own consequence personally; they have to leave that, like
+everything else, to their inferiors."
+
+By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March's the German Hoheit had now become
+Highhote, which was so much more descriptive that they had permanently
+adopted it, and found comfort to their republican pride in the mockery
+which it poured upon the feudal structure of society.  They applied it
+with a certain compunction, however, to the King of Servia, who came a
+few days after the Duke and Duchess: he was such a young King, and of
+such a little country.  They watched for him from the windows of the
+reading-room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the three sides
+of the square before the hotel, and the two plain public carriages which
+brought the King and his suite drew tamely up at the portal, where the
+proprietor and some civic dignitaries received him.  His moderated
+approach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which Americans
+are used, allowed Mrs. March to make sure of the pale, slight,
+insignificant, amiable-looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign she
+was ambuscading.  Then no appeal to her principles could keep her from
+peeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda, where the King
+graciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and the proprietor,
+and vanished into the elevator.  She was destined to see him so often
+afterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her dining and
+supping by that of the simple potentate, who had his meals in one of the
+public rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in sack-coats like
+himself, after the informal manner of the place.
+
+Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourning
+abroad, in the interval of a successful rebellion, was at the opera one
+night with some of his faithful followers.  Burnamy had offered Mrs.
+March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and her husband with him,
+places in a box; but after she eagerly accepted, it seemed that he wished
+her to advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her father
+to join them.
+
+"Why not?" she returned, with an arching of the eyebrows.
+
+"Why," he said, "perhaps I had better make a clean breast of it."
+
+"Perhaps you had," she said, and they both laughed, though he laughed
+with a knot between his eyes.
+
+"The fact is, you know, this isn't my treat, exactly.  It's Mr.
+Stoller's."  At the surprise in her face he hurried on.  "He's got back
+his first letter in the paper, and he's so much pleased with the way he
+reads in print, that he wants to celebrate."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, non-committally.
+
+Burnamy laughed again.  "But he's bashful, and he isn't sure that you
+would all take it in the right way.  He wants you as friends of mine; and
+he hasn't quite the courage to ask you himself."
+
+This seemed to Mrs. March so far from bad that she said: "That's very
+nice of him.  Then he's satisfied with--with your help?  I'm glad of
+that."
+
+"Thank you.  He's met the Triscoes, and he thought it would be pleasant
+to you if they went, too."
+
+"Oh, certainly."
+
+"He thought," Burnamy went on, with the air of feeling his way, "that we
+might all go to the opera, and then--then go for a little supper
+afterwards at Schwarzkopf's."
+
+He named the only place in Carlsbad where yon can sup so late as ten
+o'clock; as the opera begins at six, and is over at half past eight, none
+but the wildest roisterers frequent the place.
+
+"Oh!" said Mrs. March.  "I don't know how a late supper would agree with
+my husband's cure.  I should have to ask him."
+
+"We could make it very hygienic," Burnamy explained.
+
+In repeating his invitation she blamed Burnamy's uncandor so much that
+March took his part, as perhaps she intended, and said, "Oh, nonsense,"
+and that he should like to go in for the whole thing; and General Triscoe
+accepted as promptly for himself and his daughter.  That made six people,
+Burnamy counted up, and he feigned a decent regret that there was not
+room for Mrs. Adding and her son; he would have liked to ask them.
+
+Mrs. March did not enjoy it so much as coming with her husband alone when
+they took two florin seats in the orchestra for the comedy.  The comedy
+always began half an hour earlier than the opera, and they had a five-
+o'clock supper at the Theatre-Cafe before they went, and they got to
+sleep by nine o'clock; now they would be up till half past ten at least,
+and that orgy at Schwarzkopf's might not be at all good for him.  But
+still she liked being there; and Miss Triscoe made her take the best
+seat; Burnamy and Stoller made the older men take the other seats beside
+the ladies, while they sat behind, or stood up, when they, wished to see,
+as people do in the back of a box.  Stoller was not much at ease in
+evening dress, but he bore himself with a dignity which was not perhaps
+so gloomy as it looked; Mrs. March thought him handsome in his way, and
+required Miss Triscoe to admire him.  As for Burnamy's beauty it was not
+necessary to insist upon that; he had the distinction of slender youth;
+and she liked to think that no Highhote there was of a more patrician
+presence than this yet unprinted contributor to 'Every Other Week'.
+He and Stoller seemed on perfect terms; or else in his joy he was able to
+hide the uneasiness which she had fancied in him from the first time she
+saw them together, and which had never been quite absent from his manner
+in Stoller's presence.  Her husband always denied that it existed, or if
+it did that it was anything but Burnamy's effort to get on common ground
+with an inferior whom fortune had put over him.
+
+The young fellow talked with Stoller, and tried to bring him into the
+range of the general conversation.  He leaned over the ladies, from time
+to time, and pointed out the notables whom he saw in the house; she was
+glad, for his sake, that he did not lean less over her than over Miss
+Triscoe.  He explained certain military figures in the boxes opposite,
+and certain ladies of rank who did not look their rank; Miss Triscoe, to
+Mrs. March's thinking, looked their united ranks, and more; her dress was
+very simple, but of a touch which saved it from being insipidly girlish;
+her beauty was dazzling.
+
+"Do you see that old fellow in the corner chair just behind the
+orchestra?"  asked Burnamy.  "He's ninety-six years old, and he comes to
+the theatre every night, and falls asleep as soon as the curtain rises,
+and sleeps through till the end of the act."
+
+"How dear!" said the girl, leaning forward to fix the nonagenarian with
+her glasses, while many other glasses converged upon her.  "Oh, wouldn't
+you like to know him, Mr. March?"
+
+"I should consider it a liberal education.  They have brought these
+things to a perfect system in Europe.  There is nothing to make life pass
+smoothly like inflexible constancy to an entirely simple custom.  My
+dear," he added to his wife, "I wish we'd seen this sage before.  He'd
+have helped us through a good many hours of unintelligible comedy.  I'm
+always coming as Burnamy's guest, after this."
+
+The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his triumph, and casting an eye
+about the theatre to cap it, he caught sight of that other potentate.
+He whispered joyfully, "Ah!  We've got two kings here to-night," and he
+indicated in a box of their tier just across from that where the King of
+Servia sat, the well-known face of the King of New York.
+
+"He isn't bad-looking," said March, handing his glass to General Triscoe.
+"I've not seen many kings in exile; a matter of a few Carlist princes and
+ex-sovereign dukes, and the good Henry V. of France, once, when I was
+staying a month in Venice; but I don't think they any of them looked the
+part better.  I suppose he has his dream of recurring power like the
+rest."
+
+"Dream!" said General Triscoe with the glass at his eyes.  "He's dead
+sure of it."
+
+"Oh, you don't really mean that!"
+
+"I don't know why I should have changed my mind."
+
+"Then it's as if we were in the presence of Charles II. just before he
+was called back to England, or Napoleon in the last moments of Elba.
+It's better than that.  The thing is almost unique; it's a new situation
+in history.  Here's a sovereign who has no recognized function, no legal
+status, no objective existence.  He has no sort of public being, except
+in the affection of his subjects.  It took an upheaval little short of an
+earthquake to unseat him.  His rule, as we understand it, was bad for all
+classes; the poor suffered more than the rich; the people have now had
+three years of self-government; and yet this wonderful man has such a
+hold upon the masses that he is going home to win the cause of oppression
+at the head of the oppressed.  When he's in power again, he will be as
+subjective as ever, with the power of civic life and death, and an
+idolatrous following perfectly ruthless in the execution of his will."
+
+"We've only begun," said the general.  "This kind of king is municipal,
+now; but he's going to be national.  And then, good-by, Republic!"
+
+"The only thing like it," March resumed, too incredulous of the evil
+future to deny himself the aesthetic pleasure of the parallel, "is the
+rise of the Medici in Florence, but even the Medici were not mere
+manipulators of pulls; they had some sort of public office, with some
+sort of legislated tenure of it.  The King of New York is sovereign by
+force of will alone, and he will reign in the voluntary submission of the
+majority.  Is our national dictator to be of the same nature and
+quality?"
+
+"It would be the scientific evolution, wouldn't it?"
+
+The ladies listened with the perfunctory attention which women pay to any
+sort of inquiry which is not personal.  Stoller had scarcely spoken yet;
+he now startled them all by demanding, with a sort of vindictive force,
+"Why shouldn't he have the power, if they're willing to let him?"
+
+"Yes," said General Triscoe, with a tilt of his head towards March.
+"That's what we must ask ourselves more and more."
+
+March leaned back in his chair, and looked up over his shoulder at
+Stoller.  "Well, I don't know.  Do you think it's quite right for a man
+to use an unjust power, even if others are willing that he should?"
+
+Stoller stopped with an air of bewilderment as if surprised on the point
+of saying that he thought just this.  He asked instead, "What's wrong
+about it?"
+
+"Well, that's one of those things that have to be felt, I suppose.  But
+if a man came to you, and offered to be your slave for a certain
+consideration--say a comfortable house, and a steady job, that wasn't too
+hard--should you feel it morally right to accept the offer?  I don't say
+think it right, for there might be a kind of logic for it."
+
+Stoller seemed about to answer; he hesitated; and before he had made any
+response, the curtain rose.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV.
+
+There are few prettier things than Carlsbad by night from one of the many
+bridges which span the Tepl in its course through the town.  If it is a
+starry night, the torrent glides swiftly away with an inverted firmament
+in its bosom, to which the lamps along its shores and in the houses on
+either side contribute a planetary splendor of their own.  By nine
+o'clock everything is hushed; not a wheel is heard at that dead hour;
+the few feet shuffling stealthily through the Alte Wiese whisper a
+caution of silence to those issuing with a less guarded tread from the
+opera; the little bowers that overhang the stream are as dark and mute as
+the restaurants across the way which serve meals in them by day; the
+whole place is as forsaken as other cities at midnight.  People get
+quickly home to bed, or if they have a mind to snatch a belated joy, they
+slip into the Theater-Cafe, where the sleepy Frauleins serve them, in an
+exemplary drowse, with plates of cold ham and bottles of the gently
+gaseous waters of Giesshubl.  Few are of the bold badness which delights
+in a supper at Schwarzkopf's, and even these are glad of the drawn
+curtains which hide their orgy from the chance passer.
+
+The invalids of Burnamy's party kept together, strengthening themselves
+in a mutual purpose not to be tempted to eat anything which was not
+strictly 'kurgemass'.  Mrs. March played upon the interest which each of
+them felt in his own case so artfully that she kept them talking of their
+cure, and left Burnamy and Miss Triscoe to a moment on the bridge, by
+which they profited, while the others strolled on, to lean against the
+parapet and watch the lights in the skies and the water, and be alone
+together.  The stream shone above and below, and found its way out of and
+into the darkness under the successive bridges; the town climbed into the
+night with lamp-lit windows here and there, till the woods of the hill-
+sides darkened down to meet it, and fold it in an embrace from which some
+white edifice showed palely in the farthest gloom.
+
+He tried to make her think they could see that great iron crucifix which
+watches over it day and night from its piny cliff.  He had a fancy for a
+poem, very impressionistic, which should convey the notion of the
+crucifix's vigil.  He submitted it to her; and they remained talking till
+the others had got out of sight and hearing; and she was letting him keep
+the hand on her arm which he had put there to hold her from falling over
+the parapet, when they were both startled by approaching steps, and a
+voice calling, "Look here!  Who's running this supper party, anyway?"
+
+His wife had detached March from her group for the mission, as soon as
+she felt that the young people were abusing her kindness.  They answered
+him with hysterical laughter, and Burnamy said, "Why, it's Mr. Stoller's
+treat, you know."
+
+At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequiously met the party on the
+threshold and bowed them into a pretty inner room, with a table set for
+their supper, Stoller had gained courage to play the host openly.  He
+appointed General Triscoe to the chief seat; he would have put his
+daughter next to him, if the girl had not insisted upon Mrs. March's
+having the place, and going herself to sit next to March, whom she said
+she had not been able to speak a word to the whole evening.  But she did
+not talk a great deal to him; he smiled to find how soon he dropped out
+of the conversation, and Burnamy, from his greater remoteness across the
+table, dropped into it.  He really preferred the study of Stoller, whose
+instinct of a greater worldly quality in the Triscoes interested him;
+he could see him listening now to what General Triscoe was saying to Mrs.
+March, and now to what Burnamy was saying to Miss Triscoe; his strong,
+selfish face, as he turned it on the young people, expressed a mingled
+grudge and greed that was very curious.
+
+Stoller's courage, which had come and gone at moments throughout, rose at
+the end, and while they lingered at the table well on to the hour of ten,
+he said, in the sort of helpless offence he had with Burnamy, "What's the
+reason we can't all go out tomorrow to that old castle you was talking
+about?"
+
+"To Engelhaus?  I don't know any reason, as far as I'm concerned,"
+answered Burnamy; but he refused the initiative offered him, and Stoller
+was obliged to ask March:
+
+"You heard about it?"
+
+"Yes."  General Triscoe was listening, and March added for him, "It was
+the hold of an old robber baron; Gustavus Adolphus knocked it down, and
+it's very picturesque, I believe."
+
+"It sounds promising," said the general.  "Where is it?"
+
+"Isn't to-morrow our mineral bath?"  Mrs. March interposed between her
+husband and temptation.
+
+"No; the day after.  Why, it's about ten or twelve miles out on the old
+postroad that Napoleon took for Prague."
+
+"Napoleon knew a good road when he saw it," said the general, and he
+alone of the company lighted a cigar.  He was decidedly in favor of the
+excursion, and he arranged for it with Stoller, whom he had the effect of
+using for his pleasure as if he were doing him a favor.  They were six,
+and two carriages would take them: a two-spanner for four, and a one-
+spanner for two; they could start directly after dinners and get home in
+time for supper.
+
+Stoller asserted himself to say: "That's all right, then.  I want you to
+be my guests, and I'll see about the carriages."  He turned to Burnamy:
+"Will you order them?"
+
+"Oh," said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, "the portier will
+get them."
+
+"I don't understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept.
+Surely, he can't like that man!" said Mrs. March to her husband in their
+own room.
+
+"Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential.  The general seems to me,
+capable of letting even an enemy serve his turn.  Why didn't you speak,
+if you didn't want to go?"
+
+"Why didn't you?"
+
+"I wanted to go."
+
+"And I knew it wouldn't do to let Miss Triscoe go alone; I could see that
+she wished to go."
+
+"Do you think Burnamy did?"
+
+"He seemed rather indifferent.  And yet he must have realized that he
+would be with Miss Triscoe the whole afternoon."
+
+
+
+
+XXXV.
+
+If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the one-spanner, and the
+others followed in the two-spanner, it was not from want of politeness on
+the part of the young people in offering to give up their places to each
+of their elders in turn.  It would have been grotesque for either March
+or Stoller to drive with the girl; for her father it was apparently no
+question, after a glance at the more rigid uprightness of the seat in the
+one-spanner; and he accepted the place beside Mrs. March on the back seat
+of the two-spanner without demur.  He asked her leave to smoke, and then
+he scarcely spoke to her.  But he talked to the two men in front of him
+almost incessantly, haranguing them upon the inferiority of our
+conditions and the futility of our hopes as a people, with the effect of
+bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could have got on with
+Triscoe's contempt for the worthlessness of our working-classes, but did
+not know what to do with his scorn of the vulgarity and venality of their
+employers.  He accused some of Stoller's most honored and envied
+capitalists of being the source of our worst corruptions, and guiltier
+than the voting-cattle whom they bought and sold.
+
+"I think we can get rid of the whole trouble if we go at it the right
+way," Stoller said, diverging for the sake of the point he wished to
+bring in.  "I believe in having the government run on business
+principles.  They've got it here in Carlsbad, already, just the right
+sort of thing, and it works.  I been lookin' into it, and I got this
+young man, yonder"--he twisted his hand in the direction of the one-
+spanner! "to help me put it in shape.  I believe it's going to make our
+folks think, the best ones among them.  Here!"  He drew a newspaper out
+of his pocket, folded to show two columns in their full length, and
+handed it to Triscoe, who took it with no great eagerness, and began to
+run his eye over it.  "You tell me what you think of that.  I've put it
+out for a kind of a feeler.  I got some money in that paper, and I just
+thought I'd let our people see how a city can be managed on business
+principles."
+
+He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought while
+he read, and keep him up to the work, and he ignored the Marches so
+entirely that they began in self-defence to talk with each other.
+
+Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the
+breezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields of
+harvest.  They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the
+serried stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew
+straight as stalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened
+under a sky of unwonted cloudlessness.  Narrow strips of wheat and rye,
+which the men were cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices
+were binding, alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and
+breadths of beets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed
+land.  In the meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy
+rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving
+themselves the lighter labor of ordering the load.  From the upturned
+earth, where there ought to have been troops of strutting crows, a few
+sombre ravens rose.  But they could not rob the scene of its gayety; it
+smiled in the sunshine with colors which vividly followed the slope of
+the land till they were dimmed in the forests on the far-off mountains.
+Nearer and farther, the cottages and villages shone in the valleys, or
+glimmered through the veils of the distant haze.  Over all breathed the
+keen pure air of the hills, with a sentiment of changeless eld, which
+charmed March, back to his boyhood, where he lost the sense of his wife's
+presence, and answered her vaguely.  She talked contentedly on in the
+monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men learn to resign
+themselves.  They were both roused from their vagary by the voice of
+General Triscoe.  He was handing back the folded newspaper to Stoller,
+and saying, with a queer look at him over his glasses, "I should like to
+see what your contemporaries have to say to all that."
+
+"Well, sir," Stoller returned, "maybe I'll have the chance to show you.
+They got my instructions over there to send everything to me."
+
+Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape.
+They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape,
+after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, who
+were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the
+two-spanner behind.  They were talking of the hero and heroine of a novel
+they had both read, and he was saying, "I suppose you think he was justly
+punished."
+
+"Punished?" she repeated.  "Why, they got married, after all!"
+
+"Yes, but you could see that they were not going to be happy."
+
+"Then it seems to me that she was punished; too."
+
+"Well, yes; you might say that.  The author couldn't help that."
+
+Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:
+
+"I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero.  The girl was
+very exacting."
+
+"Why," said Burnamy, "I supposed that women hated anything like deception
+in men too much to tolerate it at all.  Of course, in this case, he
+didn't deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn't that worse?"
+
+"Yes, that was worse.  She could have forgiven him for deceiving her."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"He might have had to do that.  She wouldn't have minded his fibbing
+outright, so much, for then it wouldn't have seemed to come from his
+nature.  But if he just let her believe what wasn't true, and didn't say
+a word to prevent her, of course it was worse.  It showed something weak,
+something cowardly in him."
+
+Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh.  "I suppose it did.  But don't you
+think it's rather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds of courage?"
+
+"Yes, it is," she assented.  "That is why I say she was too exacting.
+But a man oughn't to defend him."
+
+Burnamy's laugh had more pleasure in it, now.  "Another woman might?"
+
+"No.  She might excuse him."
+
+He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was rather far behind, and
+he spoke to their driver bidding him go slowly till it caught up with
+them.  By the time it did so, they were so close to it that they could
+distinguish the lines of its wandering and broken walls.  Ever since they
+had climbed from the wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to the
+open plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater detail.  The
+detached mound of rock on which it stood rose like an island in the midst
+of the plain, and commanded the highways in every direction.
+
+"I believe," Burnamy broke out, with a bitterness apparently relevant to
+the ruin alone, "that if you hadn't required any quarterings of nobility
+from him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron.  He's a
+robber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn't have any scruple in levying
+tribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair
+and his crossbowmen were not on a strike.  But they would be on a strike,
+probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-union
+crossbowmen."
+
+If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as the
+civility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than he
+meant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, "I don't see how you can
+have anything to do with him, if you feel so about him."
+
+"Oh," Burnamy replied in kind, "he buys my poverty and not my will.  And
+perhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more."
+
+"Have you been doing something very wicked?"
+
+"What should you have to say to me, if I had?" he bantered.
+
+"Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you," she mocked back.
+
+They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a village
+street up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned.  A church at
+its base looked out upon an irregular square.
+
+A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide a
+darkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind him.
+He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village's claims
+upon the visitors' interest; he mastered, after a moment, their wishes in
+respect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it; at the top, he
+said, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would admit them.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI.
+
+The, path to the castle slanted upward across the shoulder of the hill,
+to a certain point, and there some rude stone steps mounted more
+directly.  Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden,
+bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the clean
+bitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf; but Nature spreads no
+such lavish feast in wood or field in the Old World as she spoils us with
+in the New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to be all her
+store, and man must make the most of them.  Miss Triscoe seemed to find
+flowers enough in the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together for her.
+She took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might have both hands
+for her skirt, and so did him two favors.
+
+A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns the ruin opened a gate
+for the party at the top, and levied a tax of thirty kreutzers each upon
+them, for its maintenance.  The castle, by his story, had descended from
+robber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked it to pieces in the
+sixteenth century; three hundred years later, the present owner restored
+it; and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed with
+brick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin satisfyingly
+permanent.  The walls were not of great extent, but such as they were
+they enclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground, and a
+cistern which once enabled the barons and their retainers to water their
+wine in time of siege.
+
+From that height they could overlook the neighboring highways in every
+direction, and could bring a merchant train to, with a shaft from a
+crossbow, or a shot from an arquebuse, at pleasure.  With General
+Triscoe's leave, March praised the strategic strength of the unique
+position, which he found expressive of the past, and yet suggestive of
+the present.  It was more a difference in method than anything else that
+distinguished the levy of customs by the authorities then and now.  What
+was the essential difference, between taking tribute of travellers
+passing on horseback, and collecting dues from travellers arriving by
+steamer?  They did not pay voluntarily in either case; but it might be
+proof of progress that they no longer fought the customs officials.
+
+"Then you believe in free trade," said Stoller, severely.
+
+"No.  I am just inquiring which is the best way of enforcing the tariff
+laws."
+
+"I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night," said Miss Triscoe, "that
+people are kept on the docks now for hours, and ladies cry at the way
+their things are tumbled over by the inspectors."
+
+"It's shocking," said Mrs. March, magisterially.
+
+"It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal times," her husband
+resumed.  "But I'm glad the travellers make no resistance.  I'm opposed
+to private war as much as I am to free trade."
+
+"It all comes round to the same thing at last," said General Triscoe.
+"Your precious humanity--"
+
+"Oh, I don't claim it exclusively," March protested.
+
+"Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road.
+He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on his
+course, and coming back to where he started."
+
+Stoller said, "I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here,
+that they will come to America and set up, if they can't stand the
+duties."
+
+"Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway," March consented.
+
+If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer.  He followed
+with his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated
+themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of the
+ruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin,
+upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot.  The land fell away
+from the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fields
+and in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into
+the distance.  "I don't suppose," Burnamy said, "that life ever does much
+better than this, do you?  I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and
+saying 'Unberufen.'  I might knock on your bouquet; that's wood."
+
+"It would spoil the flowers," she said, looking down at them in her belt.
+She looked up and their eyes met.
+
+"I wonder," he said, presently, "what makes us always have a feeling of
+dread when we are happy?"
+
+"Do you have that, too?" she asked.
+
+"Yes.  Perhaps it's because we know that change must come, and it must be
+for the worse."
+
+"That must be it.  I never thought of it before, though."
+
+"If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological
+weather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss
+or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tears
+beforehand--it may come to that."
+
+"I hope it won't.  I'd rather not know when I was to be happy; it would
+spoil the pleasure; and wouldn't be any compensation when it was the
+other way."
+
+A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller
+looking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquiline
+profile into relief.  "Oh!  Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?" he called gayly up
+to him.
+
+"I guess we've seen about all there is," he answered.  "Hadn't we better
+be going?" He probably did not mean to be mandatory.
+
+"All right," said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe again
+without further notice of him.
+
+They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the weird
+sacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and to
+account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt,
+and this one built only a few years before.  Then he locked the doors
+after them, and ran forward to open against their coming the chapel of
+the village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortified
+themselves for it at the village cafe.
+
+They were served by a little hunch-back maid; and she told them who lived
+in the chief house of the village.  It was uncommonly pretty; where all
+the houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as the
+dwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the great man of the place.
+March admired the cat which rubbed against her skirt while she stood and
+talked, and she took his praises modestly for the cat; but they wrought
+upon the envy, of her brother so that he ran off to the garden, and came
+back with two fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held up, with an arm
+across each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the spectators.
+
+"Oh, give him something!  "Mrs. March entreated.  "He's such a dear."
+
+"No, no! I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat outdone,"
+he refused; and then he was about to yield.
+
+"Hold on!"  said Stoller, assuming the host.  "I got the change."
+
+He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March had meant her husband to
+reward his naivete with half a florin at least; but he seemed to feel
+that he had now ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himself
+in charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel; he made Miss
+Triscoe let him carry her jacket when she found it warm.
+
+The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who
+designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy in
+the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details.
+Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then
+the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the three
+side-altars.  The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German
+version of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic at the time; the
+carving is coarse, and the color harsh and unsoftened by years, though it
+is broken and obliterated in places.
+
+The sacristan said that the chapel was never used for anything but
+funeral services, and he led the way out into the cemetery, where he
+wished to display the sepultural devices.  The graves here were planted
+with flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies; but a space
+fenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown with
+weeds and brambles: This space, he said, was for suicides; but to March
+it was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in consecrated
+ground where the stones had photographs of the dead on porcelain let into
+them.  One was the picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been the
+wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed to her in the
+inscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of irony, the
+magnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house of the
+village.  He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest the
+attention of the strangers, and be led them with less apparent
+hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the
+figure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping.  It is a subject much
+celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to his
+party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and March
+tried to make him understand that they appreciated it.  He knew that his
+wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great favor in
+showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of grief in the
+poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile of those who
+had taken their own lives and were parted in death from the more patient
+sufferers who had waited for God to take them.  With a curious, unpainful
+self-analysis he noted that the older members of the party, who in the
+course of nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from its
+shows; but the young girl and the young man had not borne to look on
+them, and had quickly escaped from the place, somewhere outside the gate.
+Was it the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with death which
+nature brings to life at last, or was it merely the effect, or defect, of
+ossified sensibilities, of toughened nerves?
+
+"That is all?" he asked of the spectral sacristan.
+
+"That is all," the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin
+commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something
+handsome.
+
+"No, no," said Stoller, detecting his gesture.  "Your money a'n't good."
+
+He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded
+them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so patient.
+In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have frankly
+said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and whispered
+a sad "Danke."
+
+Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they
+were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.
+
+"Oh, have I lost my glove in there?" said Mrs. March, looking at her
+hands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to.
+
+"Let me go and find it for you," Burnamy entreated.
+
+"Well," she consented, and she added, "If the sacristan has found it,
+give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow."
+
+As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, and
+her heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence: some
+men would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand.  He
+came back directly, saying, "No, he didn't find it."
+
+She laughed, and held both gloves up.  "No wonder!  I had it all the
+time.  Thank you ever so much."
+
+"How are we going to ride back?" asked Stoller.
+
+Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably.  No one
+else spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, "Oh, I think the
+way we came, is best."
+
+"Did that absurd creature," she apostrophized her husband as soon as she
+got him alone after their arrival at Pupp's, "think I was going to let
+him drive back with Agatha?"
+
+"I wonder," said March, "if that's what Burnamy calls her now?"
+
+"I shall despise him if it isn't."
+
+
+
+
+XXXVII.
+
+Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supper which they had eaten
+in a silence natural with two men who have been off on a picnic together.
+He did not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in, and the young
+man did not sit down after putting his letters before him.  He said, with
+an effort of forcing himself to speak at once, "I have looked through the
+papers, and there is something that I think you ought to see."
+
+"What do you mean?" said Stoller.
+
+Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certain
+articles were strongly circumscribed in ink.  The papers varied, but
+their editorials did not, in purport at least.  Some were grave and some
+were gay; one indignantly denounced; another affected an ironical
+bewilderment; the third simply had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller.
+They all, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad
+as the praise of municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with
+him gleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on the accession of the
+Honorable Jacob to their ranks.
+
+Stoller read the articles, one after another, with parted lips and
+gathering drops of perspiration on his upper lip, while Burnamy waited on
+foot.  He flung the papers all down at last.  "Why, they're a pack of
+fools!  They don't know what they're talking about!  I want city
+government carried on on business principles, by the people, for the
+people.  I don't care what they say!  I know I'm right, and I'm going
+ahead on this line if it takes all--" The note of defiance died out of
+his voice at the sight of Burnamy's pale face.  "What's the matter with
+you?"
+
+"There's nothing the matter with me."
+
+"Do you mean to tell me it is"--he could not bring himself to use the
+word--"what they say?"
+
+"I suppose," said Burnamy, with a dry mouth, "it's what you may call
+municipal socialism."
+
+Stoller jumped from his seat.  "And you knew it when you let me do it?"
+
+"I supposed you knew what you were about."
+
+"It's a lie!"  Stoller advanced upon him, wildly, and Burnamy took a step
+backward.
+
+"Look out!" shouted Burnamy.  "You never asked me anything about it.
+You told me what you wanted done, and I did it.  How could I believe you
+were such an ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you were
+talking about?"  He added, in cynical contempt, "But you needn't worry.
+You can make it right with the managers by spending a little more money
+than you expected to spend."
+
+Stoller started as if the word money reminded him of something.  "I can
+take care of myself, young man.  How much do I owe you?"
+
+"Nothing!" said Burnamy, with an effort for grandeur which failed him.
+
+The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffee at the Posthof, he
+came dragging himself toward them with such a haggard air that Mrs. March
+called, before he reached their table, "Why, Mr. Burnamy, what's the
+matter?"
+
+He smiled miserably.  "Oh, I haven't slept very well.  May I have my
+coffee with you?  I want to tell you something; I want you to make me.
+But I can't speak till the coffee comes.  Fraulein!" he besought a
+waitress going off with a tray near them.  "Tell Lili, please, to bring
+me some coffee--only coffee."
+
+He tried to make some talk about the weather, which was rainy, and the
+Marches helped him, but the poor endeavor lagged wretchedly in the
+interval between the ordering and the coming of the coffee.  "Ah, thank
+you, Lili," he said, with a humility which confirmed Mrs. March in her
+instant belief that he had been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and been
+rejected.  After gulping his coffee, he turned to her: "I want to say
+good-by.  I'm going away."
+
+"From Carlsbad?" asked Mrs. March with a keen distress.
+
+The water came into his eyes.  "Don't, don't be good to me, Mrs. March!
+I can't stand it.  But you won't, when you know."
+
+He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressing himself more
+and more to the intelligence of March, who let him go on without
+question, and laid a restraining hand upon his wife when he saw her about
+to prompt him.  At the end, "That's all," he said, huskily, and then he
+seemed to be waiting for March's comment.  He made none, and the young
+fellow was forced to ask, "Well, what do you think, Mr. March?"
+
+"What do you think yourself?"
+
+"I think, I behaved badly," said Burnamy, and a movement of protest from
+Mrs. March nerved him to add: "I could make out that it was not my
+business to tell him what he was doing; but I guess it was; I guess I
+ought to have stopped him, or given him a chance to stop himself.  I
+suppose I might have done it, if he had treated me decently when I turned
+up a day late, here; or hadn't acted toward me as if I were a hand in his
+buggy-works that had come in an hour after the whistle sounded."
+
+He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone in Mrs. March's eyes;
+but her husband only looked the more serious.
+
+He asked gently, "Do you offer that fact as an explanation, or as a
+justification."
+
+Burnamy laughed forlornly.  "It certainly wouldn't justify me.  You might
+say that it made the case all the worse for me."  March forbore to say,
+and Burnamy went on.  "But I didn't suppose they would be onto him so
+quick, or perhaps at all.  I thought--if I thought anything--that it
+would amuse some of the fellows in the office, who know about those
+things."  He paused, and in March's continued silence he went on.  "The
+chance was one in a hundred that anybody else would know where he had
+brought up."
+
+"But you let him take that chance," March suggested.
+
+"Yes, I let him take it.  Oh, you know how mixed all these things are!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Of course I didn't think it out at the time.  But I don't deny that I had
+a satisfaction in the notion of the hornets' nest he was poking his thick
+head into.  It makes me sick, now, to think I had.  I oughtn't to have
+let him; he was perfectly innocent in it.  After the letter went,
+I wanted to tell him, but I couldn't; and then I took the chances too.
+I don't believe be could have ever got forward in politics; he's too
+honest--or he isn't dishonest in the right way.  But that doesn't let me
+out.  I don't defend myself!  I did wrong; I behaved badly.  But I've
+suffered for it.
+
+I've had a foreboding all the time that it would come to the worst, and
+felt like a murderer with his victim when I've been alone with Stoller.
+When I could get away from him I could shake it off, and even believe
+that it hadn't happened.  You can't think what a nightmare it's been!
+Well, I've ruined Stoller politically, but I've ruined myself, too.  I've
+spoiled my own life; I've done what I can never explain to--to the people
+I want to have believe in me; I've got to steal away like the thief I am.
+Good-by!"  He jumped to his feet, and put out his hand to March, and then
+to Mrs. March.
+
+"Why, you're not going away now!" she cried, in a daze.
+
+"Yes, I am.  I shall leave Carlsbad on the eleven-o'clock train.  I don't
+think I shall see you again."  He clung to her hand.  "If you see General
+Triscoe--I wish you'd tell them I couldn't--that I had to--that I was
+called away suddenly--Good-by!"  He pressed her hand and dropped it, and
+mixed with the crowd.  Then he came suddenly back, with a final appeal to
+March: "Should you--do you think I ought to see Stoller, and--and tell
+him I don't think I used him fairly?"
+
+"You ought to know--" March began.
+
+But before he could say more, Burnamy said, "You're right," and was off
+again.
+
+"Oh, how hard you were with him, my dear!"  Mrs. March lamented.
+
+"I wish," he said, "if our boy ever went wrong that some one would be as
+true to him as I was to that poor fellow.  He condemned himself; and he
+was right; he has behaved very badly."
+
+"You always overdo things so, when you act righteously!"
+
+"Now, Isabel!"
+
+"Oh, yes, I know what you will say.  But I should have tempered justice
+with mercy."
+
+Her nerves tingled with pity for Burnamy, but in her heart she was glad
+that her husband had had strength to side with him against himself, and
+she was proud of the forbearance with which he had done it.  In their
+earlier married life she would have confidently taken the initiative on
+all moral questions.  She still believed that she was better fitted for
+their decision by her Puritan tradition and her New England birth, but
+once in a great crisis when it seemed a question of their living, she had
+weakened before it, and he, with no such advantages, had somehow met the
+issue with courage and conscience.  She could not believe he did so by
+inspiration, but she had since let him take the brunt of all such issues
+and the responsibility.  He made no reply, and she said: "I suppose
+you'll admit now there was always something peculiar in the poor boy's
+manner to Stoller."
+
+He would confess no more than that there ought to have been.  "I don't
+see how he could stagger through with that load on his conscience.
+I'm not sure I like his being able to do so."
+
+She was silent in the misgiving which she shared with him, but she said:
+"I wonder how far it has gone with him and Miss Triscoe?"
+
+"Well, from his wanting you to give his message to the general in the
+plural--"
+
+"Don't laugh!  It's wicked to laugh!  It's heartless!" she cried,
+hysterically.  "What will he do, poor fellow?"
+
+"I've an idea that he will light on his feet, somehow.  But, at any rate,
+he's doing the right thing in going to own up to Stoller."
+
+"Oh, Stoller!  I care nothing for Stoller!  Don't speak to me of
+Stoller!"
+
+Burnamy fond the Bird of Prey, as he no longer had the heart to call him,
+walking up and down in his room like an eagle caught in a trap.  He
+erected his crest fiercely enough, though, when the young fellow came in
+at his loudly shouted, "Herein!"
+
+"What do you want?" he demanded, brutally.
+
+This simplified Burnamy's task, while it made it more loathsome.  He
+answered not much less brutally, "I want to tell you that I think I used
+you badly, that I let you betray yourself, that I feel myself to blame."
+He could have added, "Curse you!" without change of tone.
+
+Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lower teeth like a dog's
+when he snarls.  "You want to get back!"
+
+"No," said Burnamy, mildly, and with increasing sadness as he spoke.
+"I don't want to get back.  Nothing would induce me.  I'm going away on
+the first train."
+
+"Well, you're not!"  shouted Stoller.  "You've lied me into this--"
+
+"Look out!"  Burnamy turned white.
+
+"Didn't you lie me into it, if you let me fool myself, as you say?"
+Stoller pursued, and Burnamy felt himself weaken through his wrath.
+"Well, then, you got to lie me out of it.  I been going over the damn
+thing, all night--and you can do it for me.  I know you can do it," he
+gave way in a plea that was almost a whimper.  "Look here!  You see if
+you can't.  I'll make it all right with you.  I'll pay you whatever you
+think is right--whatever you say."
+
+"Oh!" said Burnamy, in otherwise unutterable disgust.
+
+"You kin," Stoller went on, breaking down more and more into his adopted
+Hoosier, in the stress of his anxiety.  "I know you kin, Mr. Burnamy."
+He pushed the paper containing his letter into Burnamy's hands, and
+pointed out a succession of marked passages.  "There!  And here!  And
+this place!  Don't you see how you could make out that it meant something
+else, or was just ironical?"  He went on to prove how the text might be
+given the complexion he wished, and Burnamy saw that he had really
+thought it not impossibly out.  "I can't put it in writing as well as
+you; but I've done all the work, and all you've got to do is to give it
+some of them turns of yours.  I'll cable the fellows in our office to say
+I've been misrepresented, and that my correction is coming.  We'll get it
+into shape here together, and then I'll cable that.  I don't care for the
+money.  And I'll get our counting-room to see this scoundrel"--he picked
+up the paper that had had fun with him--"and fix him all right, so that
+he'll ask for a suspension of public opinion, and--You see, don't you?"
+
+The thing did appeal to Burnamy.  If it could be done, it would enable
+him to make Stoller the reparation he longed to make him more than
+anything else in the world.  But he heard himself saying, very gently,
+almost tenderly, "It might be done, Mr. Stoller.  But I couldn't do it.
+It wouldn't be honest--for me."
+
+"Yah!" yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper into a wad and flung it
+into Burnamy's face.  "Honest, you damn humbug!  You let me in for this,
+when you knew I didn't mean it, and now you won't help me out because it
+a'n't honest! Get out of my room, and get out quick before I--"
+
+He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightened himself, with "If you
+dare!  "He knew that he was right in refusing; but he knew that Stoller
+was right, too, and that he had not meant the logic of what he had said
+in his letter, and of what Burnamy had let him imply.  He braved
+Stoller's onset, and he left his presence untouched, but feeling as
+little a moral hero as he well could.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVIII.
+
+General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day's
+pleasure, and in the self-reproach of a pessimist who has lost his point
+of view for a time, and has to work back to it.  He began at the belated
+breakfast with his daughter when she said, after kissing him gayly, in
+the small two-seated bower where they breakfasted at their hotel when
+they did not go to the Posthof, "Didn't you have a nice time, yesterday,
+papa?"
+
+She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at him across the little
+iron table, as she lifted the pot to pour out his coffee.
+
+"What do you call a nice time?" he temporized, not quite able to resist
+her gayety.
+
+"Well, the kind of time I had."
+
+"Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass?  I took cold in that
+old church, and the tea at that restaurant must have been brewed in a
+brass kettle.  I suffered all night from it.  And that ass from
+Illinois--"
+
+"Oh, poor papa!  I couldn't go with Mr. Stoller alone, but I might have
+gone in the two-spanner with him and let you have Mr. or Mrs. March in
+the one-spanner."
+
+"I don't know.  Their interest in each other isn't so interesting to
+other people as they seem to think."
+
+"Do you feel that way really, papa?  Don't you like their being so much
+in love still?"
+
+"At their time of life?  Thank you it's bad enough in young people."
+
+The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupied in pouring out
+her father's coffee.
+
+He tasted it, and then he drank pretty well all of it; but he said, as he
+put his cup down, "I don't know what they make this stuff of.  I wish I
+had a cup of good, honest American coffee."
+
+"Oh, there's nothing like American food!" said his daughter, with so much
+conciliation that he looked up sharply.
+
+But whatever he might have been going to say was at least postponed by
+the approach of a serving-maid, who brought a note to his daughter.  She
+blushed a little at sight of it, and then tore it open and read:
+
+"I am going away from Carlsbad, for a fault of my own which forbids me to
+look you in the face.  If you wish to know the worst of me, ask Mrs.
+March.  I have no heart to tell you."
+
+Agatha read these mystifying words of Burnamy's several times over in a
+silent absorption with them which left her father to look after himself,
+and he had poured out a second cup of coffee with his own hand, and was
+reaching for the bread beside her before she came slowly back to a sense
+of his presence.
+
+"Oh, excuse me, papa," she said, and she gave him the butter.  "Here's a
+very strange letter from Mr. Burnamy, which I think you'd better see."
+She held the note across the table to him, and watched his face as he
+read it.
+
+After he had read it twice, he turned the sheet over, as people do with
+letters that puzzle them, in the vain hope of something explanatory on
+the back.  Then he looked up and asked: "What do you suppose he's been
+doing?"
+
+"I don't believe he's been doing anything.  It's something that Mr.
+Stoller's been doing to him."
+
+"I shouldn't infer that from his own words.  What makes you think the
+trouble is with Stoller?"
+
+"He said--he said yesterday--something about being glad to be through
+with him, because he disliked him so much he was always afraid of
+wronging him.  And that proves that now Mr. Stoller has made him believe
+that he's done wrong, and has worked upon him till he does believe it."
+
+"It proves nothing of the kind," said the general, recurring to the note.
+After reading it again, he looked keenly at her: "Am I to understand that
+you have given him the right to suppose you would want to know the worst
+--or the best of him?"
+
+The girl's eyes fell, and she pushed her knife against her plate.  She
+began: "No--"
+
+"Then confound his impudence!"  the general broke out.  "What business
+has he to write to you at all about this?"
+
+"Because he couldn't go away without it!" she returned; and she met her
+father's eye courageously.  "He had a right to think we were his friends;
+and if he has done wrong, or is in disgrace any way, isn't it manly of
+him to wish to tell us first himself?"
+
+Her father could not say that it was not.  But he could and did say, very
+sceptically: "Stuff!  Now, see here, Agatha: what are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm going to see Mrs. March, and then--"
+
+"You mustn't do anything of the kind, my dear," said her father, gently.
+"You've no right to give yourself away to that romantic old goose."  He
+put up his hand to interrupt her protest.  "This thing has got to be gone
+to the bottom of.  But you're not to do it.  I will see March myself.  We
+must consider your dignity in this matter--and mine.  And you may as well
+understand that I'm not going to have any nonsense.  It's got to be
+managed so that it can't be supposed we're anxious about it, one way or
+the other, or that he was authorized to write to you in this way--"
+
+"No, no!  He oughtn't to have done so.  He was to blame.  He couldn't
+have written to you, though, papa--"
+
+"Well, I don't know why.  But that's no reason why we should let it be
+understood that he has written to you.  I will see March; and I will
+manage to see his wife, too.  I shall probably find them in the reading-
+room at Pupp's, and--"
+
+The Marches were in fact just coming in from their breakfast at the
+Posthof, and he met them at the door of Pupp's, where they all sat down
+on one of the iron settees of the piazza, and began to ask one another
+questions of their minds about the pleasure of the day before, and to
+beat about the bush where Burnamy lurked in their common consciousness.
+
+Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting him.  "You knew," she
+said, "that Mr. Burnamy had left us?"
+
+"Left! Why?" asked the general.
+
+She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this she found it best to
+trust her husband's poverty of invention.  She looked at him, and he
+answered for her with a promptness that made her quake at first, but
+finally seemed the only thing, if not the best thing: "He's had some
+trouble with Stoller."  He went on to tell the general just what the
+trouble was.
+
+At the end the general grunted as from an uncertain mind.  "You think
+he's behaved badly."
+
+"I think he's behaved foolishly--youthfully.  But I can understand how
+strongly he was tempted.  He could say that he was not authorized to stop
+Stoller in his mad career."
+
+At this Mrs. March put her hand through her husband's arm.
+
+"I'm not so sure about that," said the general.
+
+March added: "Since I saw him this morning, I've heard something that
+disposes me to look at his performance in a friendlier light.  It's
+something that Stoller told me himself; to heighten my sense of Burnamy's
+wickedness.  He seems to have felt that I ought to know what a serpent I
+was cherishing in my bosom," and he gave Triscoe the facts of Burnamy's
+injurious refusal to help Stoller put a false complexion on the opinions
+he had allowed him ignorantly to express.
+
+The general grunted again.  "Of course he had to refuse, and he has
+behaved like a gentleman so far.  But that doesn't justify him in having
+let Stoller get himself into the scrape."
+
+"No," said March.  "It's a tough nut for the casuist to try his tooth on.
+And I must say I feel sorry for Stoller."
+
+Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm.  "I don't, one bit.  He was
+thoroughly selfish from first to last.  He has got just what he
+deserved."
+
+"Ah, very likely," said her husband.  "The question is about Burnamy's
+part in giving him his deserts; he had to leave him to them, of course."
+
+The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter of his eye-glasses,
+and left the subject as of no concern to him.  "I believe," he said,
+rising, "I'll have a look at some of your papers," and he went into the
+reading-room.
+
+"Now," said Mrs. March, "he will go home and poison that poor girl's
+mind.  And, you will have yourself to thank for prejudicing him against
+Burnamy."
+
+"Then why didn't you do it yourself, my dear?" he teased; but he was
+really too sorry for the whole affair, which he nevertheless enjoyed as
+an ethical problem.
+
+The general looked so little at the papers that before March went off for
+his morning walk he saw him come out of the reading-room and take his way
+down the Alte Wiese.  He went directly back to his daughter, and reported
+Burnamy's behavior with entire exactness.  He dwelt upon his making the
+best of a bad business in refusing to help Stoller out of it,
+dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it was a bad
+business.
+
+"Now, you know all about it," he said at the end, "and I leave the whole
+thing to you.  If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March.  I don't know but
+I'd rather you'd satisfy yourself--"
+
+"I will not see Mrs. March.  Do you think I would go back of you in that
+way?  I am satisfied now."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIX.
+
+Instead of Burnamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now breakfasted with the
+Marches at the Posthof, and the boy was with March throughout the day a
+good deal.  He rectified his impressions of life in Carlsbad by March's
+greater wisdom and experience, and did his best to anticipate his
+opinions and conform to his conclusions.  This was not easy, for
+sometimes he could not conceal from himself, that March's opinions were
+whimsical, and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not always conceal
+from March that he was matching them with Kenby's on some points, and
+suffering from their divergence.  He came to join the sage in his early
+visit to the springs, and they walked up and down talking; and they went
+off together on long strolls in which Rose was proud to bear him company.
+He was patient of the absences from which he was often answered, and he
+learned to distinguish between the earnest and the irony of which March's
+replies seemed to be mixed.  He examined him upon many features of German
+civilization, but chiefly upon the treatment of women in it; and upon
+this his philosopher was less satisfactory than he could have wished him
+to be.  He tried to excuse his trifling as an escape from the painful
+stress of questions which he found so afflicting himself; but in the
+matter of the woman-and-dog teams, this was not easy.  March owned that
+the notion of their being yokemates was shocking; but he urged that it
+was a stage of evolution, and a distinct advance upon the time when women
+dragged the carts without the help of the dogs; and that the time might
+not be far distant when the dogs would drag the carts without the help of
+the women.
+
+Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he was
+troubled by his friend's apparent acceptance of unjust things on their
+picturesque side.  Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of
+the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his
+mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by
+the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were
+reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch
+the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades.  "Ah,
+delightful!"  March took off his hat as if to salute the pleasant sight.
+
+"But don't you think, Mr. March," the boy ventured, "that the man had
+better be cutting the wheat, and letting the women watch the cows?"
+
+"Well, I don't know.  There are more of them; and he wouldn't be half so
+graceful as they are, with that flow of their garments, and the sway of
+their aching backs."  The boy smiled sadly, and March put his hand on his
+shoulder as they walked on.  "You find a lot of things in Europe that
+need putting right, don't you, Rose?"
+
+"Yes; I know it's silly."
+
+"Well, I'm not sure.  But I'm afraid it's useless.  You see, these old
+customs go such a way back, and are so grounded in conditions.  We think
+they might be changed, if those who rule could be got to see how cruel
+and ugly they are; but probably they couldn't.  I'm afraid that the
+Emperor of Austria himself couldn't change them, in his sovereign
+plenitude of power.  The Emperor is only an old custom too, and he's as
+much grounded in the conditions as any."  This was the serious way Rose
+felt that March ought always to talk; and he was too much grieved to
+laugh when he went on.  "The women have so much of the hard work to do,
+over here, because the emperors need the men for their armies.  They
+couldn't let their men cut wheat unless it was for their officers'
+horses, in the field of some peasant whom it would ruin."
+
+If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to work these paradoxes for
+the boy's confusion.  She said the child adored him, and it was a
+sacrilege to play with his veneration.  She always interfered to save
+him, but with so little logic though so much justice that Rose suffered a
+humiliation from her championship, and was obliged from a sense of self-
+respect to side with the mocker.  She understood this, and magnanimously
+urged it as another reason why her husband should not trifle with Rose's
+ideal of him; to make his mother laugh at him was wicked.
+
+"Oh, I'm not his only ideal," March protested.  "He adores Kenby too, and
+every now and then he brings me to book with a text from Kenby's gospel."
+
+Mrs. March caught her breath.  "Kenby! Do you really think, then, that
+she--"
+
+"Oh, hold on, now! It isn't a question of Mrs. Adding; and I don't say
+Rose had an eye on poor old Kenby as a step-father.  I merely want you to
+understand that I'm the object of a divided worship, and that when I'm
+off duty as an ideal I don't see why I shouldn't have the fun of making
+Mrs. Adding laugh.  You can't pretend she isn't wrapped up in the boy.
+You've said that yourself."
+
+"Yes, she's wrapped up in him; she'd give her life for him; but she is so
+light.  I didn't suppose she was so light; but it's borne in upon me more
+and more."
+
+They were constantly seeing Rose and his mother, in the sort of abeyance
+the Triscoes had fallen into.  One afternoon the Addings came to Mrs.
+March's room to look from her windows at a parade of bicyclers' clubs
+from the neighboring towns.  The spectacle prospered through its first
+half-hour, with the charm which German sentiment and ingenuity, are able
+to lend even a bicycle parade.  The wheelmen and wheelwomen filed by on
+machines wreathed with flowers and ribbons, and decked with streaming
+banners.  Here and there one sat under a moving arch of blossoms, or in a
+bower of leaves and petals, and they were all gay with their club
+costumes and insignia.  In the height of the display a sudden mountain
+shower gathered and broke upon them.  They braved it till it became a
+drenching down-pour; then they leaped from their machines and fled to any
+shelter they could find, under trees and in doorways.  The men used their
+greater agility to get the best places, and kept them; the women made no
+appeal for them by word or look, but took the rain in the open as if they
+expected nothing else.
+
+Rose watched the scene with a silent intensity which March interpreted.
+"There's your chance, Rose.  Why don't you go down and rebuke those
+fellows?"
+
+Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and Mrs. March promptly
+attacked her husband in his behalf.  "Why don't you go and rebuke them
+yourself?"
+
+Well, for one thing, there isn't any conversation in my phrase-book
+Between an indignant American Herr and a Party of German Wheelmen who
+have taken Shelter from the Rain and are keeping the Wheelwomen out in
+the Wet."  Mrs. Adding shrieked her delight, and he was flattered into
+going on.  "For another thing, I think it's very well for you ladies to
+realize from an object-lesson of this sort what spoiled children of our
+civilization you are.  It ought to make you grateful for your
+privileges."
+
+"There is something in that," Mrs. Adding joyfully consented.
+
+"Oh, there is no civilization but ours," said Mrs. March, in a burst of
+vindictive patriotism.  "I am more and more convinced of it the longer I
+stay in Europe."
+
+"Perhaps that's why we like to stay so long in Europe; it strengthens us
+in the conviction that America is the only civilized country in the
+world," said March.
+
+The shower passed as quickly as it had gathered, and the band which it
+had silenced for a moment burst forth again in the music which fills the
+Carlsbad day from dawn till dusk.  Just now, it began to play a pot
+pourri of American airs; at the end some unseen Americans under the trees
+below clapped and cheered.
+
+"That was opportune of the band," said March.  "It must have been a
+telepathic impulse from our patriotism in the director.  But a pot pourri
+of American airs is like that tablet dedicating the American Park up here
+on the Schlossberg, which is signed by six Jews and one Irishman.  The
+only thing in this medley that's the least characteristic or original is
+Dixie; and I'm glad the South has brought us back into the Union."
+
+"You don't know one note from another, my dear," said his wife.
+
+"I know the 'Washington Post.'"
+
+"And don't you call that American?"
+
+"Yes, if Sousa is an American name; I should have thought it was
+Portuguese."
+
+"Now that sounds a little too much like General Triscoe's pessimism,"
+said Mrs. March; and she added: "But whether we have any national
+melodies or not, we don't poke women out in the rain and keep them
+soaking!"
+
+"No, we certainly don't," he assented, with such a well-studied effect of
+yielding to superior logic that Mrs. Adding screamed for joy.
+
+The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, "I hope Rose isn't
+acting on my suggestion?"
+
+"I hate to have you tease him, dearest," his wife interposed.
+
+"Oh, no," the mother said, laughing still, but with a note of tenderness
+in her laugh, which dropped at last to a sigh.  "He's too much afraid of
+lese-majesty, for that.  But I dare say he couldn't stand the sight.
+He's queer."
+
+"He's beautiful!" said Mrs. March.
+
+"He's good," the mother admitted.  "As good as the day's long.  He's
+never given me a moment's trouble--but he troubles me.  If you can
+understand!"
+
+"Oh, I do understand!" Mrs. March returned.  "By his innocence, you mean.
+That is the worst of children.  Their innocence breaks our hearts and
+makes us feel ourselves such dreadful old things."
+
+"His innocence, yes," pursued Mrs. Adding, "and his ideals."  She began
+to laugh again.  "He may have gone off for a season of meditation and
+prayer over the misbehavior of these bicyclers.  His mind is turning that
+way a good deal lately.  It's only fair to tell you, Mr. March, that he
+seems to be giving up his notion of being an editor.  You mustn't be
+disappointed."
+
+"I shall be sorry," said the editor.  "But now that you mention it, I
+think I have noticed that Rose seems rather more indifferent to
+periodical literature.  I supposed he might simply have exhausted his
+questions--or my answers."
+
+"No; it goes deeper than that.  I think it's Europe that's turned his
+mind in the direction of reform.  At any rate he thinks now he will be a
+reformer."
+
+"Really!  What kind of one?  Not religious, I hope?"
+
+"No.  His reform has a religious basis, but its objects are social.
+I don't make it out, exactly; but I shall, as soon as Rose does.  He
+tells me everything, and sometimes I don't feel equal to it, spiritually
+or even intellectually."
+
+"Don't laugh at him, Mrs. Adding!" Mrs. March entreated.
+
+"Oh, he doesn't mind my laughing," said the mother, gayly.  Rose came
+shyly back into the room, and she said, "Well, did you rebuke those bad
+bicyclers?" and she laughed again.
+
+"They're only a custom, too, Rose,", said March, tenderly.  "Like the man
+resting while the women worked, and the Emperor, and all the rest of it."
+
+"Oh, yes, I know," the boy returned.
+
+"They ride modern machines, but they live in the tenth century.  That's
+what we're always forgetting when we come to Europe and see these
+barbarians enjoying all our up-to-date improvements."
+
+There, doesn't that console you?" asked his mother, and she took him away
+with her, laughing back from the door.  "I don't believe it does,
+a bit!"
+
+"I don't believe she understands the child," said Mrs. March.  "She is
+very light, don't you think?  I don't know, after all, whether it
+wouldn't be a good thing for her to marry Kenby.  She is very easygoing,
+and she will be sure to marry somebody."
+
+She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, and he said, "You might put
+these ideas to her."
+
+
+
+
+XL.
+
+With the passage of the days and weeks, the strange faces which had
+familiarized themselves at the springs disappeared; even some of those
+which had become the faces of acquaintance began to go.  In the
+diminishing crowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen; the
+sad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemed never to have quite got
+his bearings after his error with General Triscoe, seldom showed itself.
+The Triscoes themselves kept out of the Marches' way, or they fancied so;
+Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their daily encounter.
+
+It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-August, but at Carlsbad
+the sun was so late getting up over the hills that as people went to
+their breakfasts at the cafes up the valley of the Tepl they found him
+looking very obliquely into it at eight o'clock in the morning.  The
+yellow leaves were thicker about the feet of the trees, and the grass was
+silvery gray with the belated dews.  The breakfasters were fewer than
+they had been, and there were more little barefooted boys and girls with
+cups of red raspberries which they offered to the passers with cries of
+"Himbeeren! Himbeeren!" plaintive as the notes of birds left songless by
+the receding summer.
+
+March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and Mrs. Adding bought
+recklessly of it, and ate it under his eyes with their coffee and bread,
+pouring over it pots of clotted cream that the 'schone' Lili brought
+them.  Rose pretended an indifference to it, which his mother betrayed
+was a sacrifice in behalf of March's inability.
+
+Lili's delays in coming to be paid had been such that the Marches now
+tried to pay her when she brought their breakfast, but they sometimes
+forgot, and then they caught her whenever she came near them.  In this
+event she liked to coquet with their impatience; she would lean against
+their table, and say: "Oh, no.  You stay a little.  It is so nice."  One
+day after such an entreaty, she said, "The queen is here, this morning."
+
+Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes.  "The queen!"
+
+"Yes; the young lady.  Mr. Burnamy was saying she was a queen.  She is
+there with her father."  She nodded in the direction of a distant corner,
+and the Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and the general.  "She
+is not seeming so gayly as she was being."
+
+March smiled.  "We are none of us so gayly as we were being, Lili.  The
+summer is going."
+
+"But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?" the girl asked, resting
+her tray on the corner of the table.
+
+"No, I'm afraid he won't," March returned sadly.
+
+"He was very good.  He was paying the proprietor for the dishes that
+Augusta did break when she was falling down.  He was paying before he
+went away, when he was knowing that the proprietor would make Augusta to
+pay."
+
+"Ah!"  said March, and his wife said, "That was like him!" and she
+eagerly explained to Mrs. Adding how good and great Burnamy had been in
+this characteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to add some
+pathetic facts about Augusta's poverty and gratitude.  "I think Miss
+Triscoe ought to know it.  There goes the wretch, now!" she broke off.
+"Don't look at him!"  She set her husband the example of averting his
+face from the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middle aisle of the
+grove, and looking to the right and left for a vacant table.  "Ugh! I
+hope he won't be able to find a single place."
+
+Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, while Rose watched March's
+face with grave sympathy.  "He certainly doesn't deserve one.  Don't let
+us keep you from offering Miss Triscoe any consolation you can."  They
+got up, and the boy gathered up the gloves, umbrella, and handkerchief
+which the ladies let drop from their laps.
+
+"Have you been telling?" March asked his wife.
+
+"Have I told you anything?" she demanded of Mrs. Adding in turn.
+"Anything that you didn't as good as know, already?"
+
+"Not a syllable!"  Mrs. Adding replied in high delight.  "Come, Rose!"
+
+"Well, I suppose there's no use saying anything," said March, after she
+left them.
+
+"She had guessed everything, without my telling her," said his wife.
+
+"About Stoller?"
+
+"Well-no.  I did tell her that part, but that was nothing.  It was about
+Burnamy and Agatha that she knew.  She saw it from the first."
+
+"I should have thought she would have enough to do to look after poor old
+Kenby."
+
+"I'm not sure, after all, that she cares for him.  If she doesn't, she
+oughtn't to let him write to her.  Aren't you going over to speak to the
+Triscoes?"
+
+"No, certainly not.  I'm going back to the hotel.  There ought to be some
+steamer letters this morning.  Here we are, worrying about these
+strangers all the time, and we never give a thought to our own children
+on the other side of the ocean."
+
+"I worry about them, too," said the mother, fondly.  "Though there is
+nothing to worry about," she added.
+
+"It's our duty to worry," he insisted.
+
+At the hotel the portier gave them four letters.  There was one from each
+of their children: one very buoyant, not to say boisterous, from the
+daughter, celebrating her happiness in her husband, and the loveliness of
+Chicago as a summer city ("You would think she was born out there!"
+sighed her mother); and one from the son, boasting his well-being in
+spite of the heat they were having ("And just think how cool it is here!"
+his mother upbraided herself), and the prosperity of 'Every Other Week'.
+There was a line from Fulkerson, praising the boy's editorial instinct,
+and ironically proposing March's resignation in his favor.
+
+"I do believe we could stay all winter, just as well as not," said Mrs.
+March, proudly.  "What does 'Burnamy say?"
+
+"How do you know it's from him?"
+
+"Because you've been keeping your hand on it!  Give it here."
+
+"When I've read it."
+
+The letter was dated at Ansbach, in Germany, and dealt, except for some
+messages of affection to Mrs. March, with a scheme for a paper which
+Burnamy wished to write on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought he could use
+it in 'Every Other Week'.  He had come upon a book about that hapless
+foundling in Nuremberg, and after looking up all his traces there he had
+gone on to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his death so pathetically.
+Burnamy said he could not give any notion of the enchantment of
+Nuremberg; but he besought March, if he was going to the Tyrol for his
+after-cure, not to fail staying a day or so in the wonderful place.  He
+thought March would enjoy Ansbach too, in its way.
+
+"And, not a word--not a syllable--about Miss Triscoe!" cried Mrs. March.
+"Shall you take his paper?"
+
+"It would be serving him right, if I refused it, wouldn't it?"
+
+They never knew what it cost Burnamy to keep her name out of his letter,
+or by what an effort of the will he forbade himself even to tell of his
+parting interview with Stoller.  He had recovered from his remorse for
+letting Stoller give himself away; he was still sorry for that, but he no
+longer suffered; yet he had not reached the psychological moment when he
+could celebrate his final virtue in the matter.  He was glad he had been
+able to hold out against the temptation to retrieve himself by another
+wrong; but he was humbly glad, and he felt that until happier chance
+brought him and his friends together he must leave them to their merciful
+conjectures.  He was young, and he took the chance, with an aching heart.
+If he had been older, he might not have taken it.
+
+
+
+
+XLI.
+
+The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently, in late August, in the
+good weather which is pretty sure to fall then, if ever in the Austrian
+summer.  For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had been building a
+scaffolding for the illumination in the woods on a height overlooking the
+town, and making unobtrusive preparations at points within it.
+
+The day was important as the last of March's cure, and its pleasures
+began for him by a renewal of his acquaintance in its first kindliness
+with the Eltwins.  He had met them so seldom that at one time he thought
+they must have gone away, but now after his first cup he saw the quiet,
+sad old pair, sitting together on a bench in the Stadt Park, and he asked
+leave to sit down with them till it was time for the next.  Eltwin said
+that this was their last day, too; and explained that his wife always
+came with him to the springs, while he took the waters.
+
+"Well," he apologized, "we're all that's left, and I suppose we like to
+keep together."  He paused, and at the look in March's face he suddenly
+went on.  "I haven't been well for three or four years; but I always
+fought against coming out here, when the doctors wanted me to.  I said I
+couldn't leave home; and, I don't suppose I ever should.  But my home
+left me."
+
+As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, and March saw her steal
+her withered hand into his.
+
+"We'd had a large family, but they'd all died off, with one thing or
+another, and here in the spring we lost our last daughter.  Seemed
+perfectly well, and all at once she died; heart-failure, they called it.
+It broke me up, and mother, here, got at me to go.  And so we're here."
+His voice trembled; and his eyes softened; then they flashed up, and
+March heard him add, in a tone that astonished him less when he looked
+round and saw General Triscoe advancing toward them, "I don't know what
+it is always makes me want to kick that man."
+
+The general lifted his hat to their group, and hoped that Mrs. Eltwin was
+well, and Major Eltwin better.  He did not notice their replies, but said
+to March, "The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp's readingroom, to go
+with them to the Posthof for breakfast."
+
+"Aren't you going, too?" asked March.
+
+"No, thank you," said the general, as if it were much finer not;
+"I shall breakfast at our pension."  He strolled off with the air of a
+man who has done more than his duty.
+
+"I don't suppose I ought to feel that way," said Eltwin, with a remorse
+which March suspected a reproachful pressure of his wife's hand had
+prompted in him.  "I reckon he means well."
+
+"Well, I don't know," March said, with a candor he could not wholly
+excuse.
+
+On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wife for her interest in
+the romantic woes of her lovers, in a world where there was such real
+pathos as these poor old people's; but in the company of Miss Triscoe he
+could not give himself this pleasure.  He tried to amuse her on the way
+from Pupp's, with the doubt he always felt in passing the Cafe Sans-
+Souci, whether he should live to reach the Posthof where he meant to
+breakfast.  She said, "Poor Mr. March!"  and laughed inattentively; when
+he went on to philosophize the commonness of the sparse company always
+observable at the Sans-Souci as a just effect of its Laodicean situation
+between Pupp's and the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and his wife
+frowned at him.
+
+The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms
+for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the
+rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a
+poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the
+various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like
+sere foliage as it moved.
+
+At the Posthof the 'schone' Lili alone was as gay, as in the prime of
+July.  She played archly about the guests she welcomed to a table in a
+sunny spot in the gallery.  "You are tired of Carlsbad?" she said
+caressingly to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before her.
+
+"Not of the Posthof," said the girl, listlessly.
+
+"Posthof, and very little Lili?" She showed, with one forefinger on
+another, how very little she was.
+
+Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to Mrs. March, with
+abrupt seriousness, "Augusta was finding a handkerchief under the table,
+and she was washing it and ironing it before she did bring it.  I have
+scolded her, and I have made her give it to me."
+
+She took from under her apron a man's handkerchief, which she offered to
+Mrs. March.  It bore, as she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B.
+But, "Whose can it be?" they asked each other.
+
+"Why, Burnamy's," said March; and Lili's eyes danced.  "Give it here!"
+
+His wife caught it farther away.  "No, I'm going to see whose it is,
+first; if it's his, I'll send it to him myself."
+
+She tried to put it into the pocket which was not in her dress by sliding
+it down her lap; then she handed it to the girl, who took it with a
+careless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.
+
+Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once in
+Carlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off and
+was holding them in her lap.  They fell to the ground when she now rose
+from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up.  Miss Triscoe was too
+quick for her.
+
+"Oh, let me carry them for you!" she entreated, and after a tender
+struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearing
+them through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist.  She was not the
+kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not the
+kind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and let
+March go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in the
+Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath.
+
+Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited
+the girl's advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting it
+in every case, with Miss Triscoe's eager approval.  In the Stadt Park
+they sat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite feints
+of recovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased
+effusion.
+
+When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been
+sitting, they seemed to be followed.  They looked round and saw no one
+more alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim in
+spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hat
+brims are.  He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, "Something
+left lying," passed on.
+
+They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at their
+skirts to see if there was anything amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe
+perceived her hands empty of Mrs. March's sandals and of Burnamy's
+handkerchief.
+
+"Oh, I put it in one of the toes!" she lamented, and she fled back to
+their bench, alarming in her course the fears of a gendarme for the
+public security, and putting a baby in its nurse's arms into such doubts
+of its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry.  She laughed
+breathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March.  "That comes of having no
+pocket; I didn't suppose I could forget your sandals, Mrs. March!  Wasn't
+it absurd?"
+
+"It's one of those things," Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards,
+"that they can always laugh over together."
+
+"They?  And what about Burnamy's behavior to Stoller?"
+
+"Oh, I don't call that anything but what will come right.  Of course he
+can make it up to him somehow.  And I regard his refusal to do wrong when
+Stoller wanted him to as quite wiping out the first offence."
+
+"Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behind you.  My only hope is
+that when we leave here tomorrow, her pessimistic papa's poison will
+neutralize yours somehow."
+
+
+
+
+XLII.
+
+One of the pleasantest incidents of March's sojourn in Carlsbad was his
+introduction to the manager of the municipal theatre by a common friend
+who explained the editor in such terms to the manager that he conceived
+of him as a brother artist.  This led to much bowing and smiling from the
+manager when the Marches met him in the street, or in their frequent
+visits to the theatre, with which March felt that it might well have
+ended, and still been far beyond his desert.  He had not thought of going
+to the opera on the Emperor's birthnight, but after dinner a box came
+from the manager, and Mrs. March agreed with him that they could not in
+decency accept so great a favor.  At the same time she argued that they
+could not in decency refuse it, and that to show their sense of the
+pleasure done them, they must adorn their box with all the beauty and
+distinction possible; in other words, she said they must ask Miss Triscoe
+and her father.
+
+"And why not Major Eltwin and his wife?  Or Mrs. Adding and Rose?"
+
+She begged him, simply in his own interest, not to be foolish; and they
+went early, so as to be in their box when their guests came.  The foyer
+of the theatre was banked with flowers, and against a curtain of
+evergreens stood a high-pedestalled bust of the paternal Caesar, with
+whose side-whiskers a laurel crown comported itself as well as it could.
+At the foot of the grand staircase leading to the boxes the manager stood
+in evening dress, receiving his friends and their felicitations upon the
+honor which the theatre was sure to do itself on an occasion so august.
+The Marches were so cordial in their prophecies that the manager yielded
+to an artist's impulse and begged his fellow-artist to do him the
+pleasure of coming behind the scenes between the acts of the opera; he
+bowed a heart-felt regret to Mrs. March that he could not make the
+invitation include her, and hoped that she would not be too lonely while
+her husband was gone.
+
+She explained that they had asked friends, and she should not be alone,
+and then he entreated March to bring any gentleman who was his guest with
+him.  On the way up to their box, she pressed his arm as she used in
+their young married days, and asked him if it was not perfect.  "I wish
+we were going to have it all to ourselves; no one else can appreciate the
+whole situation.  Do you think we have made a mistake in having the
+Triscoes?"
+
+"We!"  be retorted.  "Oh, that's good! I'm going to shirk him, when it
+comes to going behind the scenes."
+
+"No, no, dearest," she entreated.  "Snubbing will only make it worse.  We
+must stand it to the bitter end, now."
+
+The curtain rose upon another laurelled bust of the Emperor, with a
+chorus of men formed on either side, who broke into the grave and noble
+strains of the Austrian Hymn, while every one stood.  Then the curtain
+fell again, and in the interval before the opera could begin, General
+Triscoe and his daughter came in.
+
+Mrs. March took the splendor in which the girl appeared as a tribute to
+her hospitality.  She had hitherto been a little disappointed of the open
+homage to American girlhood which her readings of international romance
+had taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patriotic vanity feasted
+full.  Fat highhotes of her own sex levelled their lorgnettes at Miss
+Triscoe  all around the horseshoe, with critical glances which fell
+blunted from her complexion and costume; the house was brilliant with the
+military uniforms, which we have not yet to mingle with our unrivalled
+millinery, and the ardent gaze of the young officers dwelt on the perfect
+mould of her girlish arms and neck, and the winning lines of her face.
+The girl's eyes shone with a joyful excitement, and her little head,
+defined by its dark hair, trembled as she slowly turned it from side to
+side, after she removed the airy scarf which had covered it.  Her father,
+in evening dress, looked the Third Emperor complaisant to a civil
+occasion, and took a chair in the front of the box without resistance;
+and the ladies disputed which should yield the best place to the other,
+till Miss Triscoe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for the first act at
+least.
+
+The piece had to be cut a good deal to give people time for the
+illuminations afterwards; but as it was it gave scope to the actress who,
+'als Gast' from a Viennese theatre, was the chief figure in it.  She
+merited the distinction by the art which still lingered, deeply embedded
+in her massive balk, but never wholly obscured.
+
+"That is grand, isn't it?" said March, following one of the tremendous
+strokes by which she overcame her physical disadvantages.  "It's fine to
+see how her art can undo, for one splendid instant, the work of all those
+steins of beer, those illimitable licks of sausage, those boundless
+fields of cabbage.  But it's rather pathetic."
+
+"It's disgusting," said his wife; and at this General Triscoe, who had
+been watching the actress through his lorgnette, said, as if his
+contrary-mindedness were irresistibly invoked:
+
+"Well, I don't know.  It's amusing.  Do you suppose we shall see her when
+we go behind, March?"
+
+He still professed a desire to do so when the curtain fell, and they
+hurried to the rear door of the theatre.  It was slightly ajar, and they
+pulled it wide open, with the eagerness of their age and nation, and
+began to mount the stairs leading up from it between rows of painted
+dancing-girls, who had come out for a breath of air, and who pressed
+themselves against the walls to make room for the intruders.  With their
+rouged faces, and the stare of their glassy eyes intensified by the
+coloring of their brows and lashes, they were like painted statues, as
+they stood there with their crimsoned lips parted in astonished smiles.
+
+"This is rather weird," said March, faltering at the sight.  "I wonder if
+we might ask these young ladies where to go?"  General Triscoe made no
+answer, and was apparently no more prepared than himself to accost the
+files of danseuses, when they were themselves accosted by an angry voice
+from the head of the stairs with a demand for their business.  The voice
+belonged to a gendarme, who descended toward them and seemed as deeply
+scandalized at their appearance as they could have been at that of the
+young ladies.
+
+March explained, in his ineffective German, with every effect of
+improbability, that they were there by appointment of the manager, and
+wished to find his room.
+
+The gendarme would not or could not make anything out of it.  He pressed
+down upon them, and laying a rude hand on a shoulder of either, began to
+force them back to the door.  The mild nature of the editor might have
+yielded to his violence, but the martial spirit of General Triscoe was
+roused.  He shrugged the gendarme's hand from his shoulder, and with a
+voice as furious as his own required him, in English, to say what the
+devil he meant.  The gendarme rejoined with equal heat in German; the
+general's tone rose in anger; the dancing-girls emitted some little
+shrieks of alarm, and fled noisily up the stairs.  From time to time
+March interposed with a word of the German which had mostly deserted him
+in his hour of need; but if it had been a flow of intelligible
+expostulation, it would have had no effect upon the disputants.  They
+grew more outrageous, till the manager himself, appeared at the head of
+the stairs, and extended an arresting hand over the hubbub.  As soon as
+the situation clarified itself he hurried down to his visitors with a
+polite roar of apology and rescued them from the gendarme, and led them
+up to his room and forced them into arm-chairs with a rapidity of
+reparation which did not exhaust itself till he had entreated them with
+every circumstance of civility to excuse an incident so mortifying to
+him.  But with all his haste he lost so much time in this that he had
+little left to show them through the theatre, and their presentation to
+the prima donna was reduced to the obeisances with which they met and
+parted as she went upon the stage at the lifting of the curtain.  In the
+lack of a common language this was perhaps as well as a longer interview;
+and nothing could have been more honorable than their dismissal at the
+hands of the gendarme who had received them so stormily.  He opened the
+door for them, and stood with his fingers to his cap saluting, in the
+effect of being a whole file of grenadiers.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII.
+
+At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of the box where he had been
+sitting with the ladies during the absence of the gentlemen.  He had
+knocked at the door almost as soon as they disappeared, and if he did not
+fully share the consternation which his presence caused, he looked so
+frightened that Mrs. March reserved the censure which the sight of him
+inspired, and in default of other inspiration treated his coming simply
+as a surprise.  She shook hands with him, and then she asked him to sit
+down, and listened to his explanation that he had come back to Carlsbad
+to write up the birthnight festivities, on an order from the Paris-New
+York Chronicle; that he had seen them in the box and had ventured to took
+in.  He was pale, and so discomposed that the heart of justice was
+softened more and more in Mrs. March's breast, and she left him to the
+talk that sprang up, by an admirable effect of tact in the young lady,
+between him and Miss Triscoe.
+
+After all, she decided, there was nothing criminal in his being in
+Carlsbad, and possibly in the last analysis there was nothing so very
+wicked in his being in her box.  One might say that it was not very nice
+of him after he had gone away under such a cloud; but on the other hand
+it was nice, though in a different way, if he longed so much to see Miss
+Triscoe that he could not help coming.  It was altogether in his favor
+that he was so agitated, though he was momently becoming less agitated;
+the young people were beginning to laugh at the notion of Mr. March and
+General Triscoe going behind the scenes.  Burnamy said he envied them the
+chance; and added, not very relevantly, that he had come from Baireuth,
+where he had seen the last of the Wagner performances.  He said he was
+going back to Baireuth, but not to Ansbach again, where he had finished
+looking up that Kaspar Hauser business.  He seemed to think Mrs. March
+would know about it, and she could not help saying; Oh, yes, Mr. March
+was so much interested.  She wondered if she ought to tell him about his
+handkerchief; but she remembered in time that she had left it in Miss
+Triscoe's keeping.  She wondered if the girl realized how handsome he
+was.  He was extremely handsome, in his black evening dress, with his
+Tuxedo, and the pallor of his face repeated in his expanse of shirt
+front.
+
+At the bell for the rising of the curtain he rose too, and took their
+offered hands.  In offering hers Mrs. March asked if he would not stay
+and speak with Mr. March and the general; and now for the first time he
+recognized anything clandestine in his visit.  He laughed nervously, and
+said, "No, thank you!" and shut himself out.
+
+"We must tell them," said Mrs. March, rather interrogatively, and she was
+glad that the girl answered with a note of indignation.
+
+"Why, certainly, Mrs. March."
+
+They could not tell them at once, for the second act had begun when March
+and the general came back; and after the opera was over and they got out
+into the crowded street there was no chance, for the general was obliged
+to offer his arm to Mrs. March, while her husband followed with his
+daughter.
+
+The facades of the theatre and of the hotels were outlined with thickly
+set little lamps, which beaded the arches of the bridges spanning the
+Tepl, and lighted the casements and portals of the shops.  High above
+all, against the curtain of black woodland on the mountain where its
+skeleton had been growing for days, glittered the colossal effigy of the
+doubleheaded eagle of Austria, crowned with the tiara of the Holy Roman
+Empire; in the reflected splendor of its myriad lamps the pale Christ
+looked down from the mountain opposite upon the surging multitudes in the
+streets and on the bridges.
+
+They were most amiable multitudes, March thought, and they responded
+docilely to the entreaties of the policemen who stood on the steps of the
+bridges, and divided their encountering currents with patient appeals of
+"Bitte schon!  Bitte schon!"  He laughed to think of a New York cop
+saying "Please prettily!  Please prettily!"  to a New York crowd which he
+wished to have go this way or that, and then he burned with shame to
+think how far our manners were from civilization, wherever our heads and
+hearts might be, when he heard a voice at his elbow:
+
+"A punch with a club would start some of these fellows along quicker."
+
+It was Stoller, and March turned from him to lose his disgust in the
+sudden terror of perceiving that Miss Triscoe was no longer at his side.
+Neither could he see his wife and General Triscoe, and he began to push
+frantically about in the crowd looking for the girl.  He had an
+interminable five or ten minutes in his vain search, and he was going to
+call out to her by name, when Burnamy saved him from the hopeless
+absurdity by elbowing his way to him with Miss. Triscoe on his arm.
+
+"Here she is, Mr. March," he said, as if there were nothing strange in
+his having been there to find her; in fact he had followed them all from
+the theatre, and at the moment he saw the party separated, and Miss
+Triscoe carried off helpless in the human stream, had plunged in and
+rescued her.  Before March could formulate any question in his
+bewilderment, Burnamy was gone again; the girl offered no explanation for
+him, and March had not yet decided to ask any when he caught sight of his
+wife and General Triscoe standing tiptoe in a doorway and craning their
+necks upward and forward to scan the crowd in search of him and his
+charge.  Then he looked round at her and opened his lips to express the
+astonishment that filled him, when be was aware of an ominous shining of
+her eyes and trembling of her hand on his arm.
+
+She pressed his arm nervously, and he understood her to beg him to
+forbear at once all question of her and all comment on Burnamy's presence
+to her father.
+
+It would not have been just the time for either.  Not only Mrs. March was
+with the general, but Mrs. Adding also; she had called to them from that
+place, where she was safe with Rose when she saw them eddying about in
+the crowd.  The general was still, expressing a gratitude which became
+more pressing the more it was disclaimed; he said casually at sight of
+his daughter, "Ah; you've found us, have you?" and went on talking to
+Mrs. Adding, who nodded to them laughingly, and asked, "Did you see me
+beckoning?"
+
+"Look here, my dear!" March said to his wife as soon as they parted from
+the rest, the general gallantly promising that his daughter and he would
+see Mrs. Adding safe to her hotel, and were making their way slowly home
+alone.  "Did you know that Burnamy was in Carlsbad?"
+
+"He's going away on the twelve-o'clock train tonight," she answered,
+firmly.
+
+"What has that got to do with it?  Where did you see him?"
+
+"In the box, while you were behind the scenes."
+
+She told him all about it, and he listened in silent endeavor for the
+ground of censure from which a sense of his own guilt forced him.  She
+asked suddenly, "Where did you see him?" and he told her in turn.
+
+He added severely, "Her father ought to know.  Why didn't you tell him?"
+
+"Why didn't you?" she retorted with great reason.
+
+"Because I didn't think he was just in the humor for it."  He began to
+laugh as he sketched their encounter with the gendarme, but she did not
+seem to think it amusing; and he became serious again.  "Besides, I was
+afraid she was going to blubber, any way."
+
+"She wouldn't have blubbered, as you call it.  I don't know why you need
+be so disgusting!  It would have given her just the moral support she
+needed.  Now she will have to tell him herself, and he will blame us.
+You ought to have spoken; you could have done it easily and naturally
+when you came up with her.  You will have yourself to thank for all the
+trouble that comes of it, now, my dear."
+
+He shouted in admiration of her skill in shifting the blame on him.
+"All right!  I should have had to stand it, even if you hadn't behaved
+with angelic wisdom."
+
+"Why," she said, after reflection, "I don't see what either of us has
+done.  We didn't get Burnamy to come here, or connive at his presence in
+any way."
+
+"Oh! Make Triscoe believe that!  He knows you've done all you could to
+help the affair on."
+
+"Well, what if I have?  He began making up to Mrs. Adding himself as soon
+as he saw her, to-night.  She looked very pretty."
+
+"Well, thank Heaven! we're off to-morrow morning, and I hope we've seen
+the last of them.  They've done what they could to spoil my cure, but I'm
+not going to have them spoil my aftercure."
+
+
+
+
+XLIV.
+
+Mrs. March had decided not to go to the Posthof for breakfast, where they
+had already taken a lavish leave of the 'schone' Lili, with a sense of
+being promptly superseded in her affections.  They found a place in the
+red-table-cloth end of the pavilion at Pupp's, and were served by the
+pretty girl with the rose-bud mouth whom they had known only as Ein-und-
+Zwanzig, and whose promise of "Komm' gleich, bitte schon!" was like a
+bird's note.  Never had the coffee been so good, the bread so aerially
+light, the Westphalian ham so tenderly pink.  A young married couple whom
+they knew came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and sat down with
+them, like their own youth, for a moment.
+
+"If you had told them we were going, dear," said Mrs. March, when the
+couple were themselves gone, "we should have been as old as ever.  Don't
+let us tell anybody, this morning, that we're going.  I couldn't bear
+it."
+
+They had been obliged to take the secretary of the hotel into their
+confidence, in the process of paying their bill.  He put on his high hat
+and came out to see them off.  The portier was already there, standing at
+the step of the lordly two-spanner which they had ordered for the long
+drive to the station.  The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offer
+them a fellow-republican's good wishes for their journey; Herr Pupp
+himself appeared at the last moment to hope for their return another
+summer.  Mrs. March bent a last look of interest upon the proprietor as
+their two-spanner whirled away.
+
+"They say that he is going to be made a count."
+
+"Well, I don't object," said March.  "A man who can feed fourteen
+thousand people, mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an archduke."
+
+At the station something happened which touched them even more than these
+last attentions of the hotel.  They were in their compartment, and were
+in the act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting their
+bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March's name called.
+
+They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with
+excitement and his eyes glowing.  "I was afraid I shouldn't get here in
+time," he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.
+
+"Why Rose! From your mother?"
+
+"From me," he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor,
+when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace.  "I want to
+kiss you," she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to them
+from the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for her
+handkerchief.  "I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetest
+child!"
+
+"He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I'm sorry to
+leave behind," March assented.  "He's the only unmarried one that wasn't
+in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some
+rather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I'm not
+sure that I should have been safe even from Rose.  Carlsbad has been an
+interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now that
+it will begin again."
+
+"Yes," said his wife, "now we can have each other all to ourselves."
+
+"Yes.  It's been very different from our first wedding journey in that.
+It isn't that we're not so young now as we were, but that we don't seem
+so much our own property.  We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we
+seem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come in
+and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk.  The disadvantage of
+living along is that we get too much into the hands of other people."
+
+"Yes, it is.  I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too."
+
+"I don't know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we had
+died young--or younger," he suggested.
+
+"No, I don't know that it is," she assented.  She added, from an absence
+where he was sufficiently able to locate her meaning, "I hope she'll
+write and tell me what her father says and does when she tells him that
+he was there."
+
+There were many things, in the weather, the landscape, their sole
+occupancy of an unsmoking compartment, while all the smoking compartments
+round overflowed with smokers, which conspired to offer them a pleasing
+illusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect that they almost held
+each other's hands.  In later life there are such moments when the
+youthful emotions come back, as certain birds do in winter, and the
+elderly heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it were young.  But it
+is best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs. March joined her husband in
+mocking it, when he made her observe how fit it was that their silver
+wedding journey should be resumed as part of his after-cure.  If he had
+found the fountain of youth in the warm, flat, faintly nauseous water of
+the Felsenquelle, he was not going to call himself twenty-eight again
+till his second month of the Carlsbad regimen was out, and he had got
+back to salad and fruit.
+
+At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it that
+they could form a life-long friendship for the old English-speaking
+waiter who served them, and would not suffer them to hurry themselves.
+The hills had already fallen away, and they ran along through a cheerful
+country, with tracts of forest under white clouds blowing about in a blue
+sky, and gayly flinging their shadows down upon the brown ploughed land,
+and upon the yellow oat-fields, where women were cutting the leisurely
+harvest with sickles, and where once a great girl with swarthy bare arms
+unbent herself from her toil, and rose, a statue of rude vigor and
+beauty, to watch them go by.  Hedges of evergreen enclosed the yellow
+oat-fields, where slow wagons paused to gather the sheaves of the week
+before, and then loitered away with them.  Flocks of geese waddled in
+sculpturesque relief against the close-cropt pastures, herded by little
+girls with flaxen pigtails, whose eyes, blue as corn-flowers, followed
+the flying train.  There were stretches of wild thyme purpling long
+barren acreages, and growing up the railroad banks almost to the rails
+themselves.  From the meadows the rowen, tossed in long loose windrows,
+sent into their car a sad autumnal fragrance which mingled with the
+tobacco smoke, when two fat smokers emerged into the narrow corridor
+outside their compartments and tried to pass each other.  Their vast
+stomachs beat together in a vain encounter.
+
+"Zu enge!" said one, and "Ja, zu enge!" said the other, and they laughed
+innocently in each other's' faces, with a joy in their recognition of the
+corridor's narrowness as great as if it had been a stroke of the finest
+wit.
+
+All the way the land was lovely, and as they drew near Nuremberg it grew
+enchanting, with a fairy quaintness.  The scenery was Alpine, but the
+scale was toy-like, as befitted the region, and the mimic peaks and
+valleys with green brooks gushing between them, and strange rock forms
+recurring in endless caprice, seemed the home of children's story.  All
+the gnomes and elves might have dwelt there in peaceful fellowship with
+the peasants who ploughed the little fields, and gathered the garlanded
+hops, and lived in the farmsteads and village houses with those high
+timber-laced gables.
+
+"We ought to have come here long ago with the children, when they were
+children," said March.
+
+"No," his wife returned; "it would have been too much for them.  Nobody
+but grown people could bear it."
+
+The spell which began here was not really broken by anything that
+afterwards happened in Nuremberg, though the old toy-capital was trolley-
+wired through all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a hotel lighted
+by electricity and heated by steam, and equipped with an elevator which
+was so modern that it came down with them as well as went up.  All the
+things that assumed to be of recent structure or invention were as
+nothing against the dense past, which overwhelmed them with the sense of
+a world elsewhere outlived.  In Nuremberg it is not the quaint or the
+picturesque that is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact and the
+commonplace.  Here, more than anywhere else, you are steeped in the
+gothic spirit which expresses itself in a Teutonic dialect of homely
+sweetness, of endearing caprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive
+grace and beauty almost never.  It is the architectural speech of a
+strenuous, gross, kindly, honest people's fancy; such as it is it was
+inexhaustible, and such as it is it was bewitching for the travellers.
+
+They could hardly wait till they had supper before plunging into the
+ancient town, and they took the first tram-car at a venture.  It was a
+sort of transfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a little inside.
+of the city gate to a trolley-car.  The conductor with their fare
+demanded their destination; March frankly owned that they did not know
+where they wanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductor chose;
+and the conductor, after reflection, decided to put them down at the
+public garden, which, as one of the newest things in the city, would make
+the most favorable impression upon strangers.  It was in fact so like all
+other city gardens, with the foliage of its trimly planted alleys, that
+it sheltered them effectually from the picturesqueness of Nuremberg, and
+they had a long, peaceful hour on one of its benches, where they rested
+from their journey, and repented their hasty attempt to appropriate the
+charm of the city.
+
+The next morning it rained, according to a custom which the elevator-boy
+(flown with the insolent recollection of a sunny summer in Milan) said
+was invariable in Nuremberg; but after the one-o'clock table d'hote they
+took a noble two-spanner carriage, and drove all round the city.
+Everywhere the ancient moat, thickly turfed and planted with trees and
+shrubs, stretched a girdle of garden between their course and the wall
+beautifully old, with knots of dead ivy clinging to its crevices, or
+broad meshes of the shining foliage mantling its blackened masonry.  A
+tile-roofed open gallery ran along the top, where so many centuries of
+sentries had paced, and arched the massive gates with heavily moulded
+piers, where so countlessly the fierce burgher troops had sallied forth
+against their besiegers, and so often the leaguer hosts had dashed
+themselves in assault.  The blood shed in forgotten battles would have
+flooded the moat where now the grass and flowers grew, or here and there
+a peaceful stretch of water stagnated.
+
+The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, where the Hapsburg Kaisers
+dwelt when they visited their faithful imperial city.  From its ramparts
+the incredible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best shows itself, and if one
+has any love for the distinctive quality of Teutonic architecture it is
+here that more than anywhere else one may feast it.  The prospect of
+tower and spire and gable is of such a mediaeval richness, of such an
+abounding fulness, that all incidents are lost in it.  The multitudinous
+roofs of red-brown tiles, blinking browsily from their low dormers, press
+upon one another in endless succession; they cluster together on a rise
+of ground and sink away where the street falls, but they nowhere disperse
+or scatter, and they end abruptly at the other rim of the city, beyond
+which looms the green country, merging in the remoter blue of misty
+uplands.
+
+A pretty young girl waited at the door of the tower for the visitors to
+gather in sufficient number, and then led them through the terrible
+museum, discanting in the same gay voice and with the same smiling air on
+all the murderous engines and implements of torture.  First in German and
+then in English she explained the fearful uses of the Iron Maiden, she
+winningly illustrated the action of the racks and wheels on which men had
+been stretched and broken, and she sweetly vaunted a sword which had
+beheaded eight hundred persons.  When she took the established fee from
+March she suggested, with a demure glance, "And what more you please for
+saying it in English."
+
+"Can you say it in Russian?" demanded a young man, whose eyes he had seen
+dwelling on her from the beginning.  She laughed archly, and responded
+with some Slavic words, and then delivered her train of sight-seers over
+to the custodian who was to show them through the halls and chambers of
+the Burg.  These were undergoing the repairs which the monuments of the
+past are perpetually suffering in the present, and there was some special
+painting and varnishing for the reception of the Kaiser, who was coming
+to Nuremberg for the military manoeuvres then at hand.  But if they had
+been in the unmolested discomfort of their unlivable magnificence, their
+splendor was such as might well reconcile the witness to the superior
+comfort of a private station in our snugger day.  The Marches came out
+owning that the youth which might once have found the romantic glories of
+the place enough was gone from them.  But so much of it was left to her
+that she wished to make him stop and look at the flirtation which had
+blossomed out between that pretty young girl and the Russian, whom they
+had scarcely missed from their party in the Burg. He had apparently never
+parted from the girl, and now as they sat together on the threshold of
+the gloomy tower, he most have been teaching her more Slavic words, for
+they were both laughing as if they understood each other perfectly.
+
+In his security from having the affair in any wise on his hands, March
+would have willingly lingered, to see how her education got on; but it
+began to rain, The rain did not disturb the lovers, but it obliged the
+elderly spectators to take refuge in their carriage; and they drove off
+to find the famous Little Goose Man.  This is what every one does at
+Nuremberg; it would be difficult to say why.  When they found the Little
+Goose Man, he was only a mediaeval fancy in bronze, who stood on his
+pedestal in the market-place and contributed from the bill of the goose
+under his arm a small stream to the rainfall drenching the wet wares of
+the wet market-women round the fountain, and soaking their cauliflowers
+and lettuce, their grapes and pears, their carrots and turnips, to the
+watery flavor of all fruits and vegetables in Germany.
+
+The air was very raw and chill; but after supper the clouds cleared away,
+and a pleasant evening tempted the travellers out.  The portier
+dissembled any slight which their eagerness for the only amusement he
+could think of inspired, and directed them to a popular theatre which was
+giving a summer season at low prices to the lower classes, and which they
+surprised, after some search, trying to hide itself in a sort of back
+square.  They got the best places at a price which ought to have been
+mortifyingly cheap, and found themselves, with a thousand other harmless
+bourgeois folk, in a sort of spacious, agreeable barn, of a decoration by
+no means ugly, and of a certain artless comfort.  Each seat fronted a
+shelf at the back of the seat before it, where the spectator could put
+his hat; there was a smaller shelf for his stein of the beer passed
+constantly throughout the evening; and there was a buffet where he could
+stay himself with cold ham and other robust German refreshments.
+
+It was "The Wedding Journey to Nuremberg" upon which they had oddly
+chanced, and they accepted as a national tribute the character of an
+American girl in it.  She was an American girl of the advanced pattern,
+and she came and went at a picnic on the arm of a head waiter.  She
+seemed to have no office in the drama except to illustrate a German
+conception of American girlhood, but even in this simple function she
+seemed rather to puzzle the German audience; perhaps because of the
+occasional English words which she used.
+
+To the astonishment of her compatriots, when they came out of the theatre
+it was not raining; the night was as brilliantly starlit as a night could
+be in Germany, and they sauntered home richly content through the narrow
+streets and through the beautiful old Damenthor, beyond which their hotel
+lay.  How pretty, they said, to call that charming port the Ladies' Gate!
+They promised each other to find out why, and they never did so, but
+satisfied themselves by assigning it to the exclusive use of the slim
+maidens and massive matrons of the old Nuremberg patriciate, whom they
+imagined trailing their silken splendors under its arch in perpetual
+procession.
+
+
+
+
+XLV.
+
+The life of the Nuremberg patriciate, now extinct in the control of the
+city which it builded so strenuously and maintained so heroically, is
+still insistent in all its art.  This expresses their pride at once and
+their simplicity with a childish literality.  At its best it is never so
+good as the good Italian art, whose influence is always present in its
+best.  The coloring of the great canvases is Venetian, but there is no
+such democracy of greatness as in the painting at Venice; in decoration
+the art of Nuremberg is at best quaint, and at the worst puerile.
+Wherever it had obeyed an academic intention it seemed to March poor and
+coarse, as in the bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence.  The
+water spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in streams
+that cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in the base
+of the church there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting in
+its simple-hearted truth.  The long ages have made it even more affecting
+than the sculptor imagined it; they have blurred the faces and figures in
+passing till their features are scarcely distinguishable; and the
+sleeping apostles seem to have dreamed themselves back into the mother-
+marble.  It is of the same tradition and impulse with that supreme glory
+of the native sculpture, the ineffable tabernacle of Adam Krafft, which
+climbs a column of the church within, a miracle of richly carven story;
+and no doubt if there were a Nuremberg sculptor doing great things today,
+his work would be of kindred inspiration.
+
+The descendants of the old patrician who ordered the tabernacle at rather
+a hard bargain from the artist still worship on the floor below, and the
+descendants of his neighbor patricians have their seats in the pews
+about, and their names cut in the proprietary plates on the pew-tops.
+The vergeress who showed the Marches through the church was devout in the
+praise of these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers.  "So simple, and
+yet so noble!" she said.  She was a very romantic vergeress, and she told
+them at unsparing length the legend of the tabernacle, how the artist
+fell asleep in despair of winning his patron's daughter, and saw in a
+vision the master-work with the lily-like droop at top, which gained him
+her hand.  They did not realize till too late that it was all out of a
+novel of Georg Ebers's, but added to the regular fee for the church a
+gift worthy of an inedited legend.
+
+Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm rarely imparted by the
+Nuremberg manner.  They missed there the constant, sweet civility of
+Carlsbad, and found themselves falling flat in their endeavors for a
+little cordiality.  They indeed inspired with some kindness the old woman
+who showed them through that cemetery where Albert Durer and Hans Sachs
+and many other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumental brasses
+of such beauty:
+
+     "That kings to have the like, might wish to die."
+
+But this must have been because they abandoned themselves so willingly to
+the fascination of the bronze skull on the tomb of a fourteenth-century
+patrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw hinged to the
+upper.  She proudly clapped it up and down for their astonishment, and
+waited, with a toothless smile, to let them discover the bead of a nail
+artfully figured in the skull; then she gave a shrill cackle of joy, and
+gleefully explained that the wife of this patrician had killed him by
+driving a nail into his temple, and had been fitly beheaded for the
+murder.
+
+She cared so much for nothing else in the cemetery, but she consented to
+let them wonder at the richness of the sculpture in the level tombs, with
+their escutcheons and memorial tablets, overrun by the long grass and the
+matted ivy; she even consented to share their indignation at the
+destruction of some of the brasses and the theft of others.  She suffered
+more reluctantly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figured in
+sculpture at one corner of the cemetery, where the anguish of the Christ
+had long since faded into the stone from which it had been evoked, and
+the thieves were no longer distinguishable in their penitence or
+impenitence; but she parted friends with them when she saw how much they
+seemed taken with the votive chapel of the noble Holzschuh family, where
+a line of wooden shoes puns upon the name in the frieze, like the line of
+dogs which chase one another, with bones in their mouths, around the
+Canossa palace at Verona.  A sense of the beautiful house by the Adige
+was part of the pleasing confusion which possessed them in Nuremberg
+whenever they came upon the expression of the gothic spirit common both
+to the German and northern Italian art.  They knew that it was an effect
+which had passed from Germany into Italy, but in the liberal air of the
+older land it had come to so much more beauty that now, when they found
+it in its home, it seemed something fetched from over the Alps and
+coarsened in the attempt to naturalize it to an alien air.
+
+In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian painters from the German
+pictures they had inspired; in the great hall of the Rathhaus the noble
+Processional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph of
+Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar.  There was to
+be a banquet in the hall, under the mighty fresco, to welcome the German
+Emperor, coming the next week, and the Rathhaus was full of work-people
+furbishing it up against his arrival, and making it difficult for the
+custodian who had it in charge to show it properly to strangers.  She was
+of the same enthusiastic sisterhood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence and
+the guardian of the old cemetery, and by a mighty effort she prevailed
+over the workmen so far as to lead her charges out through the corridor
+where the literal conscience of the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the roof
+to an exact image of a tournament as it was in Nuremberg four hundred
+years ago.  In this relief, thronged with men and horses, the gala-life
+of the past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed himself
+after enjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality which
+seems the final effect of the German gothicism in sculpture.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI.
+
+On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England ideal
+of the day by ceasing from sight-seeing.  She could not have understood
+the sermon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the lingering
+conscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon.  Then
+she found nothing of the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic
+lands.  The people were resting from their week-day labors, but they were
+not playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran uses,
+were locked against tourist curiosity.
+
+It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in this
+ancient city, where the past was so much alive in the perpetual
+picturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were
+fain to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness of the streets
+to the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily visited the
+evening of their arrival.
+
+On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whom March asked some
+question of their way.  He answered in English, and in the parley that
+followed they discovered that they were all Americans.  The stranger
+proved to be an American of the sort commonest in Germany, and he said he
+had returned to his native country to get rid of the ague which he had
+taken on Staten Island.  He had been seventeen years in New York, and now
+a talk of Tammany and its chances in the next election, of pulls and
+deals, of bosses and heelers, grew up between the civic step-brothers,
+and joined them is a common interest.  The German-American said he was
+bookkeeper in some glass-works which had been closed by our tariff, and
+he confessed that he did not mean to return to us, though he spoke of
+German affairs with the impartiality of an outsider.  He said that the
+Socialist party was increasing faster than any other, and that this
+tacitly meant the suppression of rank and the abolition of monarchy.  He
+warned March against the appearance of industrial prosperity in Germany;
+beggary was severely repressed, and if poverty was better clad than with
+us, it was as hungry and as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York.  The
+working classes were kindly and peaceable; they only knifed each other
+quietly on Sunday evenings after having too much beer.
+
+Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marches for good-by; and as
+he walked down the aisle of trees in which they had been fitting
+together, he seemed to be retreating farther and farther from such
+Americanism as they had in common.  He had reverted to an entirely German
+effect of dress and figure; his walk was slow and Teutonic; he must be a
+type of thousands who have returned to the fatherland without wishing to
+own themselves its children again, and yet out of heart with the only
+country left them.
+
+"He was rather pathetic, my dear," said March, in the discomfort he knew
+his wife must be feeling as well as himself.  "How odd to have the lid
+lifted here, and see the same old problems seething and bubbling in the
+witch's caldron we call civilization as we left simmering away at home!
+And how hard to have our tariff reach out and snatch the bread from the
+mouths of those poor glass-workers!"
+
+"I thought that was hard," she sighed.  "It must have been his bread,
+too."
+
+"Let's hope it was not his cake, anyway.  I suppose," he added, dreamily,
+"that what we used to like in Italy was the absence of all the modern
+activities.  The Italians didn't repel us by assuming to be of our epoch
+in the presence of their monuments; they knew how to behave as pensive
+memories.  I wonder if they're still as charming."
+
+"Oh, no," she returned, "nothing is as charming as it used to be.  And
+now we need the charm more than ever."
+
+He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understanding they had lived into
+that only one of them was to be desperate at a time, and that they were
+to take turns in cheering each other up.  "Well, perhaps we don't deserve
+it.  And I'm not sure that we need it so much as we did when we were
+young.  We've got tougher; we can stand the cold facts better now.  They
+made me shiver once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable thrill.
+Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, if it insisted upon being
+as charming as it used to be, how could we ever bear to die?  We've got
+that to consider."  He yielded to the temptation of his paradox, but he
+did not fail altogether of the purpose with which he began, and they took
+the trolley back to their hotel cheerful in the intrepid fancy that they
+had confronted fate when they had only had the hardihood to face a
+phrase.
+
+They agreed that now he ought really to find out something about the
+contemporary life of Nuremberg, and the next morning he went out before
+breakfast, and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the hope
+of intimate impressions.  The peasant women, serving portions of milk
+from house to house out of the cans in the little wagons which they drew
+themselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect of
+tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the sucking-pigs jolted
+over the pavements in handcarts; a certain majesty from the long
+procession of yellow mail-wagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarian
+blue, trooping by in the cold small rain, impassibly dripping from their
+glazed hat-brims upon their uniforms.  But he could not feel that these
+things were any of them very poignantly significant; and he covered his
+retreat from the actualities of Nuremberg by visiting the chief book-
+store and buying more photographs of the architecture than he wanted, and
+more local histories than be should ever read.  He made a last effort for
+the contemporaneous life by asking the English-speaking clerk if there
+were any literary men of distinction living in Nuremberg, and the clerk
+said there was not one.
+
+He went home to breakfast wondering if be should be able to make his
+meagre facts serve with his wife; but he found her far from any wish to
+listen to them.  She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a table
+near her own, who were so absorbed in each other that they were proof
+against an interest that must otherwise have pierced them through.  The
+bridegroom, as he would have called himself, was a pretty little Bavarian
+lieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride was as pretty and as
+little, but delicately blond.  Nature had admirably mated them, and if
+art had helped to bring them together through the genius of the bride's
+mother, who was breakfasting with them, it had wrought almost as fitly.
+Mrs. March queried impartially who they were, where they met, and how,
+and just when they were going to be married; and March consented, in his
+personal immunity from their romance, to let it go on under his eyes
+without protest.  But later, when they met the lovers in the street,
+walking arm in arm, with the bride's mother behind them gloating upon
+their bliss, he said the woman ought, at her time of life, to be ashamed
+of such folly.  She must know that this affair, by nine chances out of
+ten, could not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tiresome as
+most other marriages, and yet she was abandoning herself with those
+ignorant young people to the illusion that it was the finest and sweetest
+thing in life.
+
+"Well, isn't it?" his wife asked.
+
+"Yes, that's the worst of it.  It shows how poverty-stricken life really
+is.  We want somehow to believe that each pair of lovers will find the
+good we have missed, and be as happy as we expected to be."
+
+"I think we have been happy enough, and that we've had as much good as
+was wholesome for us," she returned, hurt.
+
+"You're always so concrete!  I meant us in the abstract.  But if you will
+be personal, I'll say that you've been as happy as you deserve, and got
+more good than you had any right to."
+
+She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they
+were walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensibly
+following.
+
+He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to the
+old cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging
+in eternal accusation of his murderess.  "It's rather hard on her, that
+he should be having the last word, that way," he said.  "She was a woman,
+no matter what mistakes she had committed."
+
+"That's what I call 'banale'," said Mrs. March.
+
+"It is, rather," he confessed.  "It makes me feel as if I must go to see
+the house of Durer, after all."
+
+"Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later."
+
+It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, because
+everybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to
+Durer's house, which they found in a remote part of the town near a
+stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by the
+interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time they
+reached it.  The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and without
+being squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardly
+have been different in Durer's time.  His dwelling, in no way impressive
+outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a
+narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped
+bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the
+cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house.  It was cavernous and
+cold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid in
+the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German
+fashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple,
+neighborly existence there.  It in no wise suggested the calling of an
+artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer's time to take
+themselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life of a
+prosperous citizen, and it expressed the period.
+
+The Marches wrote their names in the visitors' book, and paid the
+visitor's fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for a
+reproduction of one of Durer's pictures; and then they came away, by no
+means dissatisfied with his house.  By its association with his sojourns
+in Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that it
+was really no worse than Ariosto's house at Ferrara, or Petrarch's at
+Arqua, or Michelangelo's at Florence.  "But what I admire," he said, "is
+our futility in going to see it.  We expected to surprise some quality of
+the man left lying about in the house because he lived and died in it;
+and because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked him so hard
+to save his widow from coming to want."
+
+"Who said she did that?"
+
+"A friend of his who hated her.  But he had to allow that she was a God-
+fearing woman, and had a New England conscience."
+
+"Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going."
+
+"Yes; but I don't like her laying her plans to survive him; though women
+always do that."
+
+They were going away the next day, and they sat down that evening to a
+final supper in such good-humor with themselves that they were willing to
+include a young couple who came to take places at their table, though
+they would rather have been alone.  They lifted their eyes for their
+expected salutation, and recognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the
+Norumbia.
+
+The ladies fell upon each other as if they had been mother and daughter;
+March and the young man shook hands, in the feeling of passengers
+mutually endeared by the memories of a pleasant voyage.  They arrived at
+the fact that Mr. Leffers had received letters in England from his
+partners which allowed him to prolong his wedding journey in a tour of
+the continent, while their wives were still exclaiming at their encounter
+in the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all sat down to have, as
+the bride said, a real Norumbia time.
+
+She was one of those young wives who talk always with their eyes
+submissively on their husbands, no matter whom they are speaking to;
+but she was already unconsciously ruling him in her abeyance.  No doubt
+she was ruling him for his good; she had a livelier, mind than he, and
+she knew more, as the American wives of young American business men
+always do, and she was planning wisely for their travels.  She recognized
+her merit in this devotion with an artless candor, which was typical
+rather than personal.  March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little
+stroll, and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who did not
+let them go without making her husband promise to wrap up well, and not
+get his feet wet.  She made March promise not to take him far, and to
+bring him back early, which he found himself very willing to do, after an
+exchange of ideas with Mr. Leffers.  The young man began to talk about
+his wife, in her providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the
+sort of man he was, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of
+man he was, there was no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the
+reading-room.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII.
+
+The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinner
+the next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs.
+March, who said, as soon as they were gone, "I believe I would rather
+meet people of our own age after this.  I used to think that you could
+keep young by being with young people; but I don't, now.  There world is
+very different from ours.  Our world doesn't really exist any more, but
+as long as we keep away from theirs we needn't realize it.  Young
+people," she went on, "are more practical-minded than we used to be;
+they're quite as sentimental; but I don't think they care so much for the
+higher things.  They're not so much brought up on poetry as we were," she
+pursued.  "That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow in our
+time; but now she didn't know of his poem on Nuremberg; she was
+intelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its quaintness
+was not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred."  Her tone entreated
+him to find more meaning in her words than she had put into them.  "They
+couldn't have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and that grassy,
+flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that pile-up of
+the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with their Gothic
+facades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow, aguish-
+looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of those
+overhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before the
+churches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round them!"
+
+"I see what you mean.  But do you think it's as sacred to us as it would
+have been twenty-five years ago?  I had an irreverent feeling now and
+then that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg."
+
+"Oh, yes; so had I.  We're that modern, if we're not so young as we
+were."
+
+"We were very simple, in those days."
+
+"Well, if we were simple, we knew it!"
+
+"Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking at
+it."
+
+"We had a good time."
+
+"Too good.  Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it
+had not been so good.  We might have our cake now if we hadn't eaten it."
+
+"It would be mouldy, though."
+
+"I wonder," he said, recurring to the Lefferses; "how we really struck
+them."
+
+"Well, I don't believe they thought we ought to be travelling about
+alone, quite, at our age."
+
+"Oh, not so bad as that!  "After a moment he said, "I dare say they don't
+go round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did."
+
+"Indeed they do!  They had an awful quarrel just before they got to
+Nuremberg: about his wanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool by
+express that she wanted to keep with them.  But she said it had been a
+lesson, and they were never going to quarrel again."  The elders looked
+at each other in the light of experience, and laughed.  "Well," she
+ended, "that's one thing we're through with.  I suppose we've come to
+feel more alike than we used to."
+
+"Or not to feel at all.  How did they settle it about the baggage?"
+
+"Oh!  He insisted on her keeping it with her."  March laughed again, but
+this time he laughed alone, and after a while she said: "Well, they gave
+just the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean American
+philistinism.  I don't mind their thinking us queer; they must have
+thought Nuremberg was queer."
+
+"Yes.  We oldsters are always queer to the young.  We're either
+ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we're ridiculously stiff and grim;
+they never expect to be like us, and wouldn't, for the world.  The worst
+of it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don't, at the
+bottom of our hearts, believe we're like that, when we meet.  I suppose
+that arrogant old ass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard."
+
+"I wonder," said Mrs. March, "if she's told him yet," and March perceived
+that she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic introspection;
+but he had no difficulty in following her.
+
+"She's had time enough.  But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her."
+
+"Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back in
+that way.  I know she is dead in love with him; but she could only have
+accepted him conditionally."
+
+"Conditionally to his making it all right with Stoller?"
+
+"Stoller?  No!  To her father's liking it."
+
+"Ah, that's quite as hard.  What makes you think she accepted him at
+all?"
+
+"What do you think she was crying about?"
+
+"Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionally shed tears of pity.  If
+she accepted him conditionally she would have to tell her father about
+it."  Mrs. March gave him a glance of silent contempt, and he hastened to
+atone for his stupidity.  "Perhaps she's told him on the instalment plan.
+She may have begun by confessing that Burnamy had been in Carlsbad.  Poor
+old fellow, I wish we were going to find him in Ansbach! He could make
+things very smooth for us."
+
+"Well, you needn't flatter yourself that you'll find him in Ansbach.  I'm
+sure I don't know where he is."
+
+"You might write to Miss Triscoe and ask."
+
+"I think I shall wait for Miss Triscoe to write to me," she said, with
+dignity.
+
+"Yes, she certainly owes you that much, after all your suffering for her.
+I've asked the banker in Nuremberg to forward our letters to the poste
+restante in Ansbach.  Isn't it good to see the crows again, after those
+ravens around Carlsbad?"
+
+She joined him in looking at the mild autumnal landscape through the open
+window.  The afternoon was fair and warm, and in the level fields bodies
+of soldiers were at work with picks and spades, getting the ground ready
+for the military manoeuvres; they disturbed among the stubble foraging
+parties of crows, which rose from time to time with cries of indignant
+protest.  She said, with a smile for the crows, "Yes.  And I'm thankful
+that I've got nothing on my conscience, whatever happens," she added in
+dismissal of the subject of Burnamy.
+
+"I'm thankful too, my dear.  I'd much rather have things on my own.  I'm
+more used to that, and I believe I feel less remorse than when you're to
+blame."
+
+They might have been carried near this point by those telepathic
+influences which have as yet been so imperfectly studied.  It was only
+that morning, after the lapse of a week since Burnamy's furtive
+reappearance in Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her father about it,
+and she had at that moment a longing for support and counsel that might
+well have made its mystical appeal to Mrs. March.
+
+She spoke at last because she could put it off no longer, rather than
+because the right time had come.  She began as they sat at breakfast.
+"Papa, there is something that I have got to tell yon.  It is something
+that you ought to know; but I have put off telling you because--"
+
+She hesitated for the reason, and "Well!" said her father, looking up at
+her from his second cup of coffee.  "What is it?"
+
+Then she answered, "Mr. Burnamy has been here."
+
+"In Carlsbad?  When was he here?"
+
+"The night of the Emperor's birthday.  He came into the box when you were
+behind the scenes with Mr. March; afterwards I met him in the crowd."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I thought you ought to know.  Mrs. March said I ought to tell you."
+
+"Did she say you ought to wait a week?"  He gave way to an irascibility
+which he tried to check, and to ask with indifference, "Why did he come
+back?"
+
+"He was going to write about it for that paper in Paris."  The girl had
+the effect of gathering her courage up for a bold plunge.  She looked
+steadily at her father, and added: "He said he came back because he
+couldn't help it.  He--wished to speak with me, He said he knew he had no
+right to suppose I cared anything about what had happened with him and
+Mr. Stoller.  He wanted to come back and tell me--that."
+
+Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently she was going to leave
+the word to him, now.  He hesitated to take it, but he asked at last with
+a mildness that seemed to surprise her, "Have you heard anything from him
+since?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Where is he?"
+
+"I don't know.  I told him I could not say what he wished; that I must
+tell you about it."
+
+The case was less simple than it would once have been for General
+Triscoe.  There was still his affection for his daughter, his wish for
+her happiness, but this had always been subordinate to his sense of his
+own interest and comfort, and a question had recently arisen which put
+his paternal love and duty in a new light.  He was no more explicit with
+himself than other men are, and the most which could ever be said of him
+without injustice was that in his dependence upon her he would rather
+have kept his daughter to himself if she could not have been very
+prosperously married.  On the other hand, if he disliked the man for whom
+she now hardly hid her liking, he was not just then ready to go to
+extremes concerning him.
+
+"He was very anxious," she went on, "that you should know just how it
+was.  He thinks everything of your judgment and--and--opinion."  The
+general made a consenting noise in his throat.  "He said that he did not
+wish me to 'whitewash' him to you.  He didn't think he had done right; he
+didn't excuse himself, or ask you to excuse him unless you could from the
+stand-point of a gentleman."
+
+The general made a less consenting noise in his throat, and asked, "How
+do you look at it, yourself, Agatha?"
+
+"I don't believe I quite understand it; but Mrs. March--"
+
+"Oh, Mrs. March!" the general snorted.
+
+"--says that Mr. March does not think so badly of it as Mr. Burnamy
+does."
+
+"I doubt it.  At any rate, I understood March quite differently."
+
+"She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly afterwards when Mr.
+Stoller wanted him to help him put a false complexion on it; that it was
+all the more difficult for him to do right then, because of his remorse
+for what he had done before."  As she spoke on she had become more eager.
+
+"There's something in that," the general admitted, with a candor that he
+made the most of both to himself and to her.  "But I should like to know
+what Stoller had to say of it all.  Is there anything," he inquired, "any
+reason why I need be more explicit about it, just now?"
+
+"N--no.  Only, I thought--He thinks so much of your opinion that--if--"
+
+"Oh, he can very well afford to wait.  If he values my opinion so highly
+he can give me time to make up my mind."
+
+"Of course--"
+
+"And I'm not responsible," the general continued, significantly, "for the
+delay altogether.  If you had told me this before--Now, I don't know
+whether Stoller is still in town."
+
+He was not behaving openly with her; but she had not behaved openly with
+him.  She owned that to herself, and she got what comfort she could from
+his making the affair a question of what Burnamy had done to Stoller
+rather than of what Burnamy had said to her, and what she had answered
+him.  If she was not perfectly clear as to what she wanted to do, or
+wished to have happen, there was now time and place in which she could
+delay and make sure.  The accepted theory of such matters is that people
+know their minds from the beginning, and that they do not change them.
+But experience seems to contradict this theory, or else people often act
+contrary to their convictions and impulses.  If the statistics were
+accessible, it might be found that many potential engagements hovered in
+a doubtful air, and before they touched the earth in actual promise were
+dissipated by the play of meteorological chances.
+
+When General Triscoe put down his napkin in rising he said that he would
+step round to Pupp's and see if Stoller were still there.  But on the way
+he stepped up to Mrs. Adding's hotel on the hill, and he came back, after
+an interval which he seemed not to have found long, to report rather
+casually that Stoller had left Carlsbad the day before.  By this time the
+fact seemed not to concern Agatha herself very vitally.
+
+He asked if the Marches had left any address with her, and she answered
+that they had not.  They were going to spend a few days in Nuremberg, and
+then push on to Holland for Mr. March's after-cure.  There was no
+relevance in his question unless it intimated his belief that she was in
+confidential correspondence with Mrs. March, and she met this by saying
+that she was going to write her in care of their bankers; she asked
+whether he wished to send any word.
+
+"No.  I understand," he intimated, "that there is nothing at all in the
+nature of a--a--an understanding, then, with--"
+
+"No, nothing."
+
+"Hm!" The general waited a moment.  Then he ventured, "Do you care to
+say--do you wish me to know--how he took it?"
+
+The tears came into the girl's eyes, but she governed herself to say,
+"He--he was disappointed."
+
+"He had no right to be disappointed."
+
+It was a question, and she answered: "He thought he had.  He said--that
+he wouldn't--trouble me any more."
+
+The general did not ask at once, "And you don't know where he is now--you
+haven't heard anything from him since?"
+
+Agatha flashed through her tears, "Papa!"
+
+"Oh! I beg your pardon.  I think you told me."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else
+Effort to get on common ground with an inferior
+He buys my poverty and not my will
+Honest selfishness
+Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate
+Less intrusive than if he had not been there
+Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign
+Only one of them was to be desperate at a time
+Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last
+Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold
+We don't seem so much our own property
+We get too much into the hands of other people
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Their Silver Wedding Journey, v2
+by William Dean Howells
+
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