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Title: Their Silver Wedding Journey V2



Author: William Dean Howells



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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