PART II.

XXVI.

They found Burnamy expecting them at the station in Carlsbad, and she

scolded him like a mother for taking the trouble to meet them, while she

kept back for the present any sign of knowing that he had staid over a

day with the Triscoes in Leipsic. He was as affectionately glad to see

her and her husband as she could have wished, but she would have liked it

better if he had owned up at once about Leipsic. He did not, and it

seemed to her that he was holding her at arm's-length in his answers

about his employer. He would not say how he liked his work, or how he

liked Mr. Stoller; he merely said that they were at Pupp's together, and

that he had got in a good day's work already; and since he would say no

more, she contented herself with that.

The long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wound

down the hill-side like those of an Italian mountain town, between gay

stuccoed houses, of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; and

the impression of a Latin country was heightened at a turn of the road

which brought into view a colossal crucifix planted against a curtain of

dark green foliage on the brow of one of the wooded heights that

surrounded Carlsbad. When they reached the level of the Tepl, the

hill-fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridges

within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the only

vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world.

Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines,

with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their black velvet

derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowing

robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks in

Astrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of western

Europeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were English,

French or Italians. Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were

imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have

been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have

passed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationality

away in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves

heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet.

The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going and

coming between the rows of pollard locusts on one side and the bright

walls of the houses on the other. Under the trees were tables, served by

pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants across the

way. On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops full of silver,

glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and all the idle

frippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris, and they

suggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no place else

in the world, as the crowd which might have been that of other cities at

certain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in its habitual effect.

"Do you like it?" asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs. March

saw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all. She was ready

to bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his interest had

got them the only rooms left in the house. This satisfied in her the

passion for size which is at the bottom of every American heart, and

which perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the peoples. We

pride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we are not

ungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger than ours, we

are magnanimously happy in them. Pupp's, in its altogether different way,

was larger than any hotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and when Burnamy

told her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a day in the

height of the season, she was personally proud of it.

She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel, while the secretary led

March off to look at the rooms reserved for them, and Burnamy hospitably

turned the revolving octagonal case in the centre of the rotunda where

the names of the guests were put up. They were of all nations, but there

were so many New Yorkers whose names ended in berg, and thal, and stern,

and baum that she seemed to be gazing upon a cyclorama of the signs on

Broadway. A large man of unmistakable American make, but with so little

that was of New England or New York in his presence that she might not at

once have thought him American, lounged toward them with a quill

toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He had a jealous blue eye, into

which he seemed trying to put a friendly light; his straight mouth

stretched into an involuntary smile above his tawny chin-beard, and he

wore his soft hat so far back from his high forehead (it showed to the

crown when he took his hat off) that he had the effect of being

uncovered.

At his approach Burnamy turned, and with a flush said: "Oh! Let me

introduce Mr. Stoller, Mrs. March."

Stoller took his toothpick out of his mouth and bowed; then he seemed to

remember, and took off his hat. "You see Jews enough, here to make you

feel at home?" he asked; and he added: "Well, we got some of 'em in

Chicago, too, I guess. This young man"--he twisted his head toward

Burnamy--"found you easy enough?"

"It was very good of him to meet us," Mrs. March began. "We didn't

expect--"

"Oh, that's all right," said Stoller, putting his toothpick back, and his

hat on. "We'd got through for the day; my doctor won't let me work all I

want to, here. Your husband's going to take the cure, they tell me. Well,

he wants to go to a good doctor, first. You can't go and drink these

waters hit or miss. I found that out before I came."

"Oh, no!" said Mrs. March, and she wished to explain how they had been

advised; but he said to Burnamy:

"I sha'n't want you again till ten to-morrow morning. Don't let me

interrupt you," he added patronizingly to Mrs. March. He put his hand up

toward his hat, and sauntered away out of the door.

Burnamy did not speak; and she only asked at last, to relieve the

silence, "Is Mr. Stoller an American?"

"Why, I suppose so," he answered, with an uneasy laugh. "His people were

German emigrants who settled in Southern Indiana. That makes him as much

American as any of us, doesn't it?"

Burnamy spoke with his mind on his French-Canadian grandfather, who had

come down through Detroit, when their name was Bonami; but Mrs. March

answered from her eight generations of New England ancestry. "Oh, for the

West, yes, perhaps," and they neither of them said anything more about

Stoller.

In their room, where she found March waiting for her amidst their

arriving baggage, she was so full of her pent-up opinions of Burnamy's

patron that she, would scarcely speak of the view from their windows of

the wooded hills up and down the Tepl. "Yes, yes; very nice, and I know I

shall enjoy it ever so much. But I don't know what you will think of that

poor young Burnamy!"

"Why, what's happened to him?"

"Happened? Stoller's happened."

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

"Well, if you had been going to pick out that type of man, you'd have

rejected him, because you'd have said he was too pat. He's like an actor

made up for a Western millionaire. Do you remember that American in

'L'Etranger' which Bernhardt did in Boston when she first came? He, looks

exactly like that, and he has the worst manners. He stood talking to me

with his hat on, and a toothpick in his mouth; and he made me feel as if

he had bought me, along with Burnamy, and had paid too much. If you don't

give him a setting down, Basil, I shall never speak to you; that's all.

I'm sure Burnamy is in some trouble with him; he's got some sort of hold

upon him; what it could be in such a short time, I can't imagine; but if

ever a man seemed to be, in a man's power, he does, in his!

"Now," said March, "your pronouns have got so far beyond me that I think

we'd better let it all go till after supper; perhaps I shall see Stoller

myself by that time."

She had been deeply stirred by her encounter with Stoller, but she

entered with impartial intensity into the fact that the elevator at

Pupp's had the characteristic of always coming up and never going down

with passengers. It was locked into its closet with a solid door, and

there was no bell to summon it, or any place to take it except on the

ground-floor; but the stairs by which she could descend were abundant and

stately; and on one landing there was the lithograph of one of the

largest and ugliest hotels in New York; how ugly it was, she said she

should never have known if she had not seen it there.

The dining-room was divided into the grand saloon, where they supped amid

rococo sculptures and frescoes, and the glazed veranda opening by vast

windows on a spread of tables without, which were already filling up for

the evening concert. Around them at the different tables there were

groups of faces and figures fascinating in their strangeness, with that

distinction which abashes our American level in the presence of European

inequality.

"How simple and unimpressive we are, Basil," she said, "beside all these

people! I used to feel it in Europe when I was young, and now I'm certain

that we must seem like two faded-in old village photographs. We don't

even look intellectual! I hope we look good."

"I know I do," said March. The waiter went for their supper, and they

joined in guessing the different nationalities in the room. A French

party was easy enough; a Spanish mother and daughter were not difficult,

though whether they were not South-American remained uncertain; two

elderly maiden ladies were unmistakably of central Massachusetts, and

were obviously of a book-club culture that had left no leaf unturned;

some Triestines gave themselves away by their Venetian accent; but a

large group at a farther table were unassignable in the strange language

which they clattered loudly together, with bursts of laughter. They were

a family party of old and young, they were having a good time, with a

freedom which she called baronial; the ladies wore white satin, or black

lace, but the men were in sack-coats; she chose to attribute them, for no

reason but their outlandishness, to Transylvania. March pretended to

prefer a table full of Germans, who were unmistakably bourgeois, and yet

of intellectual effect. He chose as his favorite a middle-aged man of

learned aspect, and they both decided to think of him as the Herr

Professor, but they did not imagine how perfectly the title fitted him

till he drew a long comb from his waistcoat pocket and combed his hair

and beard with it above the table.

The wine wrought with the Transylvanians, and they all jargoned together

at once, and laughed at the jokes passing among them. One old gentleman

had a peculiar fascination from the infantile innocence of his gums when

he threw his head back to laugh, and showed an upper jaw toothless except

for two incisors, standing guard over the chasm between. Suddenly he

choked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up before

him, and--

"Noblesse oblige," said March, with the tone of irony which he reserved

for his wife's preoccupations with aristocracies of all sorts. "I think I

prefer my Hair Professor, bourgeois, as he is."

The ladies attributively of central Massachusetts had risen from their

table, and were making for the door without having paid for their supper.

The head waiter ran after them; with a real delicacy for their mistake he

explained that though in most places the meals were charged in the bill,

it was the custom in Carlsbad to pay for them at the table; one could see

that he was making their error a pleasant adventure to them which they

could laugh over together, and write home about without a pang.

"And I," said Mrs. March, shamelessly abandoning the party of the

aristocracy, "prefer the manners of the lower classes."

"Oh, yes," he admitted. "The only manners we have at home are black ones.

But you mustn't lose courage. Perhaps the nobility are not always so

baronial."

"I don't know whether we have manners at home," she said, "and I don't

believe I care. At least we have decencies."

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

XXVII.

Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy from duty for the day, he

was not so full of resources in himself, and he had not so general an

acquaintance in the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellow make

up to him in the reading-room, that night. He laid down a New York paper

ten days old in despair of having left any American news in it, and

pushed several continental Anglo-American papers aside with his elbow, as

he gave a contemptuous glance at the foreign journals, in Bohemian,

Hungarian, German, French, and Italian, which littered the large table.

"I wonder," he said, "how long it'll take'em, over here, to catch on to

our way of having pictures?"

Burnamy had come to his newspaper work since illustrated journalism was

established, and he had never had any shock from it at home, but so

sensitive is youth to environment that, after four days in Europe, the

New York paper Stoller had laid down was already hideous to him. From the

politic side of his nature, however, he temporized with Stoller's

preference. "I suppose it will be some time yet."

"I wish," said Stoller, with a savage disregard of expressed sequences

and relevancies, "I could ha' got some pictures to send home with that

letter this afternoon: something to show how they do things here, and be

a kind of object-lesson." This term had come up in a recent campaign when

some employers, by shutting down their works, were showing their

employees what would happen if the employees voted their political

opinions into effect, and Stoller had then mastered its meaning and was

fond of using it. "I'd like 'em to see the woods around here, that the

city owns, and the springs, and the donkey-carts, and the theatre, and

everything, and give 'em some practical ideas."

Burnamy made an uneasy movement.

"I'd 'a' liked to put 'em alongside of some of our improvements, and show

how a town can be carried on when it's managed on business principles."

"Why didn't you think of it?"

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

They had not met the evening before on the best of terms. Stoller had

expected Burnamy twenty-four hours earlier, and had shown his displeasure

with him for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might have spent at

Carlsbad; and Burnamy had been unsatisfactory in accounting for the

delay. But he had taken hold so promptly and so intelligently that by

working far into the night, and through the whole forenoon, he had got

Stoller's crude mass of notes into shape, and had sent off in time for

the first steamer the letter which was to appear over the proprietor's

name in his paper. It was a sort of rough but very full study of the

Carlsbad city government, the methods of taxation, the municipal

ownership of the springs and the lands, and the public control in

everything. It condemned the aristocratic constitution of the

municipality, but it charged heavily in favor of the purity, beneficence,

and wisdom of the administration, under which there was no poverty and no

idleness, and which was managed like any large business.

Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure, once or twice, and

Burnamy suffered it submissively until now. But now, at the change in

Burnamy's tone, he changed his manner a little.

"Seen your friends since supper?" he asked.

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

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

"Yes; he owns it, too."

The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller's respect, and he asked

more deferentially, "Makin' a good thing out of it?"

"A living, I suppose. Some of the high-class weeklies feel the

competition of the ten-cent monthlies. But 'Every Other Week' is about

the best thing we've got in the literary way, and I guess it's holding

its own."

"Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad," Stoller said, with a

return to the sourness of his earlier mood. "I don't know as I care much

for his looks; I seen him when he came in with you. No snap to him." He

clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and started

up with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and physical;

as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking at Burnamy,

"You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest."

Stoller's father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to the

West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race and

class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana town

where their son was born, and throve in it from the start. He could

remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese

and pickle the pigs' feet, which they took turns in selling at as great a

price as they could extort from the townspeople. She was a good and

tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in

mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to

fight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and

mobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time till

they wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through the

exhaustion of their invention. No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky,

rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf;

and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed upon

him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans. He hated his native

speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with his father

and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who proposed to

parley with him in it on such terms as "Nix come arouce in de Dytchman's

house." He disused it so thoroughly that after his father took him out of

school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he could not get back

to it. He regarded his father's business as part of his national

disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away from it, and

informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and wagon-maker.

When it came to his setting up for himself in the business he had chosen,

he had no help from his father, who had gone on adding dollar to dollar

till he was one of the richest men in the place.

Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had

many of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of

asking him to their houses when they were young people, any more than

when they were children. He was long deeply in love with an American girl

whom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry an

American. He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who had

been at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home as

fragilely and nasally American as anybody. She made him a good, sickly,

fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with no

visible taint of their German origin.

In the mean time Jacob's father had died and left his money to his son,

with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who would

gladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if she

could. He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she lived;

and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household trying so

hard to be American. She could not help her native accent, but she kept

silence when her son's wife had company; and when her eldest

granddaughter began very early to have American callers, she went out of

the room; they would not have noticed her if she had staid.

Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to his

financial importance in the community. He first commended himself to the

Better Element by crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which were

now the largest business interest of the place; and he rose on a wave of

municipal reform to such a height of favor with the respectable classes

that he was elected on a citizens' ticket to the Legislature. In the

reaction which followed he was barely defeated for Congress, and was

talked of as a dark horse who might be put up for the governorship some

day; but those who knew him best predicted that he would not get far in

politics, where his bull-headed business ways would bring him to ruin

sooner or later; they said, "You can't swing a bolt like you can a

strike."

When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors by going to live in

Chicago, though he kept his works in the place where he and they had

grown up together. His wife died shortly after, and within four years he

lost his three eldest children; his son, it was said, had begun to go

wrong first. But the rumor of his increasing wealth drifted back from

Chicago; he was heard of in different enterprises and speculations; at

last it was said that he had bought a newspaper, and then his boyhood

friends decided that Jake was going into politics again.

In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of the great city he came to

understand better that to be an American in all respects was not the

best. His mounting sense of importance began to be retroactive in the

direction of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the little town near

Wurzburg which his people had come from, and found that he had relatives

still living there, some of whom had become people of substance; and

about the time his health gave way from life-long gluttony, and he was

ordered to Carlsbad, he had pretty much made up his mind to take his

younger daughters and put them in school for a year or two in Wurzburg,

for a little discipline if not education. He had now left them there, to

learn the language, which he had forgotten with such heart-burning and

shame, and music, for which they had some taste.

The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their father

with open threats of running away; and in his heart he did not altogether

blame them. He came away from Wurzburg raging at the disrespect for his

money and his standing in business which had brought him a more galling

humiliation there than anything he had suffered in his boyhood at Des

Vaches. It intensified him in his dear-bought Americanism to the point of

wishing to commit lese majesty in the teeth of some local dignitaries who

had snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle to shame in

his person; there was something like the bird of his step-country in

Stoller's pale eyes and huge beak.

XXVIII.

March sat with a company of other patients in the anteroom of the doctor,

and when it came his turn to be prodded and kneaded, he was ashamed at

being told he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded. The doctor wrote

out a careful dietary for him, with a prescription of a certain number of

glasses of water at a certain spring and a certain number of baths, and a

rule for the walks he was to take before and after eating; then the

doctor patted him on the shoulder and pushed him caressingly out of his

inner office. It was too late to begin his treatment that day, but he

went with his wife to buy a cup, with a strap for hanging it over his

shoulder, and he put it on so as to be an invalid with the others at

once; he came near forgetting the small napkin of Turkish towelling which

they stuffed into their cups, but happily the shopman called him back in

time to sell it to him.

At five the next morning he rose, and on his way to the street exchanged

with the servants cleaning the hotel stairs the first of the gloomy

'Guten Morgens' which usher in the day at Carlsbad. They cannot be so

finally hopeless as they sound; they are probably expressive only of the

popular despair of getting through with them before night; but March

heard the salutations sorrowfully groaned out on every hand as he joined

the straggling current of invalids which swelled on the way past the

silent shops and cafes in the Alte Wiese, till it filled the street, and

poured its thousands upon the promenade before the classic colonnade of

the Muhlbrunn. On the other bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings its

steaming waters by irregular impulses into the air under a pavilion of

iron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the source of most resort. There is

an instrumental concert somewhere in Carlsbad from early rising till

bedtime; and now at the Muhlbrunn there was an orchestra already playing;

and under the pillared porch, as well as before it, the multitude

shuffled up and down, draining their cups by slow sips, and then taking

each his place in the interminable line moving on to replenish them at

the spring.

A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some vice of their climate is

said peculiarly to fit for the healing effects of Carlsbad, most took his

eye in their long gabardines of rusty black and their derby hats of plush

or velvet, with their corkscrew curls coming down before their ears. They

were old and young, they were grizzled and red and black, but they seemed

all well-to-do; and what impresses one first and last at Carlsbad is that

its waters are mainly for the healing of the rich. After the Polish Jews,

the Greek priests of Russian race were the most striking figures. There

were types of Latin ecclesiastics, who were striking in their way too;

and the uniforms of certain Austrian officers and soldiers brightened the

picture. Here and there a southern face, Italian or Spanish or Levantine,

looked passionately out of the mass of dull German visages; for at

Carlsbad the Germans, more than any other gentile nation, are to the

fore. Their misfits, their absence of style, imparted the prevalent

effect; though now and then among the women a Hungarian, or Pole, or

Parisian, or American, relieved the eye which seeks beauty and grace

rather than the domestic virtues. There were certain faces, types of

discomfort and disease, which appealed from the beginning to the end. A

young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid South-American, were of a

lasting fascination to March.

What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficulty

of assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his years

of having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their long

disuse in his homogeneous American world. The Americans themselves fused

with the European races who were often so hard to make out; his

fellow-citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave them

away; he thought the women's voices the worst.

At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady mechanical action

dipped the cups into the steaming source, and passed them impersonally up

to their owners. With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often a

half-hour before one's turn came, and at all a strict etiquette forbade

any attempt to anticipate it. The water was merely warm and flat, and

after the first repulsion one could forget it. March formed a childish

habit of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with a

gulp which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by going

sometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group of

Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park beyond

the Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close sward

the yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight. He

liked to sit there and look at the city beyond the Tepl, where it climbed

the wooded heights in terraces till it lost its houses in the skirts and

folds of the forest. Most mornings it rained, quietly, absent-mindedly,

and this, with the chili in the air, deepened a pleasant illusion of

Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream; but there were sunny

mornings when the mountains shone softly through a lustrous mist, and the

air was almost warm.

Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy's employer,

whom he had sometimes noted in the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his

turn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience. Stoller explained

that though you could have the water brought to you at your hotel, he

chose to go to the spring for the sake of the air; it was something you

had got to live through; before he had that young Burnamy to help him he

did not know what to do with his time, but now, every minute he was not

eating or sleeping he was working; his cure did not oblige him to walk

much. He examined March, with a certain mixture of respect and contempt,

upon the nature of the literary life, and how it differed from the life

of a journalist. He asked if he thought Burnamy would amount to anything

as a literary man; he so far assented to March's faith in him as to say,

"He's smart." He told of leaving his daughters in school at Wurzburg; and

upon the whole he moved March with a sense of his pathetic loneliness

without moving his liking, as he passed lumberingly on, dangling his cup.

March gave his own cup to the little maid at his spring, and while she

gave it to a second, who dipped it and handed it to a third for its

return to him, he heard an unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-,

morning to them all in English. "Are you going to teach them United

States?" he asked of a face with which he knew such an appeal would not

fail.

"Well," the man admitted, "I try to teach them that much. They like it.

You are an American? I am glad of it. I have 'most lost the use of my

lungs, here. I'm a great talker, and I talk to my wife till she's about

dead; then I'm out of it for the rest of the day; I can't speak German."

His manner was the free, friendly manner of the West. He must be that

sort of untravelled American whom March had so seldom met, but he was

afraid to ask him if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest it should

prove the third or fourth. "Are you taking the cure?" he asked instead.

"Oh, no. My wife is. She'll be along directly; I come down here and drink

the waters to encourage her; doctor said to. That gets me in for the

diet, too. I've e't more cooked fruit since I been here than I ever did

in my life before. Prunes? My Lord, I'm full o' prunes! Well, it does me

good to see an American, to know him. I couldn't 'a' told you, it you

hadn't have spoken."

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

your looks."

"Yes, we can't always tell ourselves from these Dutch. But they know us,

and they don't want us, except just for one thing, and that's our money.

I tell you, the Americans are the chumps over here. Soon's they got all

our money, or think they have, they say, 'Here, you Americans, this is my

country; you get off;' and we got to get. Ever been over before?"

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

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

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

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

just with?"

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

"Not the buggy man?"

"I believe he makes buggies."

"Well, you do meet everybody here." The Iowan was silent for a moment, as

if, hushed by the weighty thought. "I wish my wife could have seen him. I

just want her to see the man that made our buggy. I don't know what's

keeping her, this morning," he added, apologetically. "Look at that

fellow, will you, tryin' to get away from those women!" A young officer

was doing his best to take leave of two ladies, who seemed to be mother

and daughter; they detained him by their united arts, and clung to him

with caressing words and looks. He was red in the face with his polite

struggles when he broke from them at last. "How they do hang on to a man,

over here!" the Iowa man continued. "And the Americans are as bad as any.

Why, there's one ratty little Englishman up at our place, and our girls

just swarm after him; their mothers are worse. Well, it's so, Jenny," he

said to the lady who had joined them and whom March turned round to see

when he spoke to her. "If I wanted a foreigner I should go in for a man.

And these officers! Put their mustaches up at night in curl-papers, they

tell me. Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr. March. Well, had your first

glass, yet, Jenny? I'm just going for my second tumbler."

He took his wife back to the spring, and began to tell her about Stoller;

she made no sign of caring for him; and March felt inculpated. She

relented a little toward him as they drank together; when he said he must

be going to breakfast with his wife, she asked where he breakfasted, and

said, "Why, we go to the Posthof, too." He answered that then they should

be sure some time to meet there; he did not venture further; he reflected

that Mrs. March had her reluctances too; she distrusted people who had

amused or interested him before she met them.

XXIX.

Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he had found most of the other

agreeable things in Carlsbad, which he brought to their knowledge one by

one, with such forethought that March said he hoped he should be cared

for in his declining years as an editor rather than as a father; there

was no tenderness like a young contributor's.

Many people from the hotels on the hill found at Pupp's just the time and

space between their last cup of water and their first cup of coffee which

are prescribed at Carlsbad; but the Marches were aware somehow from the

beginning that Pupp's had not the hold upon the world at breakfast which

it had at the mid-day dinner, or at supper on the evenings when the

concert was there. Still it was amusing, and they were patient of

Burnamy's delay till he could get a morning off from Stoller and go with

them to the Posthof. He met Mrs. March in the reading-room, where March

was to join them on his way from the springs with his bag of bread. The

earlier usage of buying the delicate pink slices of Westphalia ham, which

form the chief motive of a Carlsbad breakfast, at a certain shop in the

town, and carrying them to the cafe with you, is no longer of such

binding force as the custom of getting your bread at the Swiss bakery.

You choose it yourself at the counter, which begins to be crowded by half

past seven, and when you have collected the prescribed loaves into the

basket of metallic filigree given you by one of the baker's maids, she

puts it into a tissue-paper bag of a gay red color, and you join the

other invalids streaming away from the bakery, their paper bags making a

festive rustling as they go.

Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely meadow-lands, a good mile

up the brawling Tepl, before they join on the right side of the torrent,

where the Posthof lurks nestled under trees whose boughs let the sun and

rain impartially through upon its army of little tables. By this time the

slow omnibus plying between Carlsbad and some villages in the valley

beyond has crossed from the left bank to the right, and keeps on past

half a dozen other cafes, where patients whose prescriptions marshal them

beyond the Posthof drop off by the dozens and scores.

The road on the left bank of the Tepl is wild and overhung at points with

wooded steeps, when it leaves the town; but on the right it is bordered

with shops and restaurants a great part of its length. In leafy nooks

between these, uphill walks begin their climb of the mountains, from the

foot of votive shrines set round with tablets commemorating in German,

French, Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of high-well-borns of

all those races and languages. Booths glittering with the lapidary's work

in the cheaper gems, or full of the ingenious figures of the toy-makers,

alternate with the shrines and the cafes on the way to the Posthof, and

with their shoulders against the overhanging cliff, spread for the

passing crowd a lure of Viennese jewelry in garnets, opals, amethysts,

and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings as carrot-eating rabbits,

worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and peacocks that strut about the

feet of the passers and expand their iridescent tails in mimic pride.

Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they felt

the far-reflected charm of the crucifixes of the white-hot Italian

highways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had a

mechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the children, ending

in a pang for the fact that they were children no longer. He waited

politely while Mrs. March made up her mind that she would not buy any

laces of the motherly old women who showed them under pent-roofs on

way-side tables; and he waited patiently at the gate of the

flower-gardens beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of sweetpease

from the businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful joy in her

because she knew no English, and gave him a chance of speaking his

German.

"You'll find," he said, as they crossed the road again, "that it's well

to trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass. I should still be lagging

along in my thirties if it hadn't been for fooling, and here I am well on

in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever."

They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the cafe at last, and

a turn of the path brought them to the prospect of its tables, under the

trees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters take

refuge at other tables when it rains; it rains nearly always, and the

trunks of the trees are as green with damp as if painted; but that

morning the sun was shining. At the verge of the open space a group of

pretty serving-maids, each with her name on a silver band pinned upon her

breast, met them and bade them a 'Guten Morgen' of almost cheerful note,

but gave way, to an eager little smiling blonde, who came pushing down

the path at sight of Burnamy, and claimed him for her own.

"Ah, Lili! We want an extra good table, this morning. These are some

American Excellencies, and you must do your best for them."

"Oh, yes," the girl answered in English, after a radiant salutation of

the Marches; "I get you one."

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

She ran among the tables along the edge of the western edge of the

gallery, and was far beyond hearing his protest that he was not earlier

than usual when she beckoned him to the table she had found. She had

crowded it in between two belonging to other girls, and by the time her

breakfasters came up she was ready for their order, with the pouting

pretence that the girls always tried to rob her of the best places.

Burnamy explained proudly, when she went, that none of the other girls

ever got an advantage of her; she had more custom than any three of them,

and she had hired a man to help her carry her orders. The girls were all

from the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived at home in the

winter on their summer tips; their wages were nothing, or less, for

sometimes they paid for their places.

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

"Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe."

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

learn her English?"

"She takes lessons in the winter. She's a perfect little electric motor.

I don't believe any Yankee girl could equal her."

"She would expect to marry a millionaire if she did. What astonishes one

over here is to see how contentedly people prosper along on their own

level. And the women do twice the work of the men without expecting to

equal them in any other way. At Pupp's, if we go to one end of the

out-door restaurant, it takes three men to wait on us: one to bring our

coffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat, and another to make

out our bill, and I have to tip all three of them. If we go to the other

end, one girl serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make it less

than the least I give any three of the men waiters."

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

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

"Women do nearly everything, here," said Burnamy, impartially. "They

built that big new Kaiserbad building: mixed the mortar, carried the

hods, and laid the stone."

"That makes me prouder of the sex than ever. But come, Mr. Burnamy! Isn't

there anybody of polite interest that you know of in this crowd?"

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

The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove and the galleries; the

tables were already filled, and men were bringing other tables on their

heads, and making places for them, with entreaties for pardon everywhere;

the proprietor was anxiously directing them; the pretty serving-girls

were running to and from the kitchen in a building apart with shrill,

sweet promises of haste. The morning sun fell broken through the leaves

on the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and dappled the figures of the

men with harlequin patches of light and shade. A tall woman, with a sort

of sharpened beauty, and an artificial permanency of tint in her cheeks

and yellow hair, came trailing herself up the sun-shot path, and found,

with hardy insistence upon the publicity, places for the surly-looking,

down-faced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle;

the dog was like the black poodle out of Faust. Burnamy had heard her

history; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on it, which he

called Europa, not after the old fable, but because it seemed to him that

she expressed Europe, on one side of its civilization, and had an

authorized place in its order, as she would not have had in ours. She was

where she was by a toleration of certain social facts which corresponds

in Europe to our reverence for the vested interests. In her history

there, had been officers and bankers; even foreign dignitaries; now there

was this sullen young fellow . . . . Burnamy had wondered if it would do

to offer his poem to March, but the presence of the original abashed him,

and in his mind he had torn the poem up, with a heartache for its

aptness.

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

"I'm sorry," said March. "Mrs. March would have been glad of some

Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some mere

well-borns. But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness."

"I'm satisfied with the picturesqueness," said his wife. "Don't worry

about me, Mr. Burnamy."

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

"We're getting something like it in the roof-gardens," said March. "We

couldn't have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us. At

this time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the life

out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table. At nine

A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this. So we

have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and the

mosquito-line into the night air. I haven't seen a fly since I came to

Europe. I really miss them; it makes me homesick."

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

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

"But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in Germany? Why

did no traveller ever put it in his book? When your stewardess said so on

the steamer, I remember that you regarded it as a bluff." He turned to

Burnamy, who was listening with the deference of a contributor: "Isn't

Lili rather long? I mean for such a very prompt person. Oh, no!"

But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted "Fraulein!" to Lili; with her

hireling at her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between the

tables. She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, "In a

minute!" and vanished in the crowd.

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

"Oh, I think she'll come now," said Burnamy. March protested that he had

only been amused at Lili's delay; but his wife scolded him for his

impatience; she begged Burnamy's pardon, and repeated civilities passed

between them. She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies were

pretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the mothers

were mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the fathers

too closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats behind

their newspapers, with noises that made her quail. There was no one so

effective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good deal on

show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glinting

from their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, they

moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced women.

"They all wear corsets," Burnamy explained.

"How much you know already!" said Mrs. March. "I can see that Europe

won't be lost on you in anything. Oh, who's that?" A lady whose costume

expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove

with a graceful tilt. Burnamy was silent. "She must be an American. Do

you know who she is?"

"Yes." He hesitated, a little to name a woman whose tragedy had once

filled the newspapers.

Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination which such tragedies

inspire. "What grace! Is she beautiful?"

"Very." Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge, but somehow Mrs. March

did not like his knowing who she was, and how beautiful. She asked March

to look, but he refused.

"Those things are too squalid," he said, and she liked him for saying it;

she hoped it would not be lost upon Burnamy.

One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the burden

off her tray on the stone floor before her; some of the dishes broke, and

the breakfast was lost. Tears came into the girl's eyes and rolled down

her hot cheeks. "There! That is what I call tragedy," said March. "She'll

have to pay for those things."

"Oh, give her the money, dearest!"

"How can I?"

The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili and her hireling

behind her came bearing down upon them with their three substantial

breakfasts on two well-laden trays. She forestalled Burnamy's reproaches

for her delay, laughing and bridling, while she set down the dishes of

ham and tongue and egg, and the little pots of coffee and frothed milk.

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

princess."

Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of those noble

international marriages which fill our women with vainglory for such of

their compatriots as make them.

"Oh, come now, Lili!" said Burnamy. "We have queens in America, but

nothing so low as princesses. This was a queen, wasn't it?"

She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmed her. "All people say

it is princess," she insisted.

"Well, if she's a princess we must look her up after breakfast," said

Burnamy. "Where is she sitting?"

She pointed at a corner so far off on the other side that no one could be

distinguished, and then was gone, with a smile flashed over her shoulder,

and her hireling trying to keep up with her.

"We're all very proud of Lili's having a hired man," said Burnamy. "We

think it reflects credit on her customers."

March had begun his breakfast with-the voracious appetite of an

early-rising invalid. "What coffee!"

He drew a long sigh after the first draught.

"It's said to be made of burnt figs," said Burnamy, from the

inexhaustible advantage of his few days' priority in Carlsbad.

"Then let's have burnt figs introduced at home as soon as possible. But

why burnt figs? That seems one of those doubts which are much more

difficult than faith."

"It's not only burnt figs," said Burnamy, with amiable superiority, "if it

is burnt figs, but it's made after a formula invented by a consensus of

physicians, and enforced by the municipality. Every cafe in Carlsbad

makes the same kind of coffee and charges the same price."

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

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

"Not very."

"You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl, but they send an

official with you who keeps count, and when you have had your sport, the

trout belong to the municipality just as they did before you caught

them."

"I don't see why that isn't a good notion: the last thing I should want

to do would be to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I was personally

acquainted with. Well, I'm never going away from Carlsbad. I don't wonder

people get their doctors to tell them to come back."

Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller had got together

about the place, and had given him to put in shape. It was run in the

interest of people who had got out of order, so that they would keep

coming to get themselves in order again; you could hardly buy an

unwholesome meal in the town; all the cooking was 'kurgemass'. He won

such favor with his facts that he could not stop in time: he said to

March, "But if you ever should have a fancy for a fish of your personal

acquaintance, there's a restaurant up the Tepl, where they let you pick

out your trout in the water; then they catch him and broil him for you,

and you know what you are eating."

"Is it a municipal restaurant?"

"Semi-municipal," said Burnamy, laughing.

"We'll take Mrs. March," said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamy

felt the limitations of a woman's sense of humor, which always define

themselves for men so unexpectedly.

He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her what

he knew about distinctions and dignities that he now saw among the

breakfasters. The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were set

together in such labyrinths that any one who left the central aisle was

lost in them. The serving-girls ran more swiftly to and fro, responding

with a more nervous shrillness to the calls of "Fraulein! Fraulein!" that

followed them. The proprietor, in his bare head, stood like one paralyzed

by his prosperity, which sent up all round him the clash of knives and

crockery, and the confusion of tongues. It was more than an hour before

Burnamy caught Lili's eye, and three times she promised to come and be

paid before she came. Then she said, "It is so nice, when you stay a

little," and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who had broken the

dishes in her fall near them, she almost wept with tenderness; she almost

winked with wickedness when he asked if the American princess was still

in her place.

"Do go and see who it can be!" Mrs. March entreated. "We'll wait here,"

and he obeyed. "I am not sure that I like him," she said, as soon as he

was out of hearing. "I don't know but he's coarse, after all. Do you

approve of his knowing so many people's 'taches' already?"

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

interested."

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

seriously.

Her husband laughed. "I see you want me to defend him. Oh, hello!" he

cried, and she saw Burnamy coming toward them with a young lady, who was

nodding to them from as far as she could see them. "This is the easy kind

of thing that makes you Blush for the author if you find it in a novel."

XXX.

Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to kiss her. "Do you know

I felt it must be you, all the time! When did you come? Where is your

father? What hotel are you staying at?"

It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking hands with March, that it was

last night, and her father was finishing his breakfast, and it was one of

the hotels on the hill. On the way back to her father it appeared that he

wished to consult March's doctor; not that there was anything the matter.

The general himself was not much softened by the reunion with his

fellow-Americans; he confided to them that his coffee was poisonous; but

he seemed, standing up with the Paris-New York Chronicle folded in his

hand, to have drunk it all. Was March going off on his forenoon tramp? He

believed that was part of the treatment, which was probably all humbug,

though he thought of trying it, now he was there. He was told the walks

were fine; he looked at Burnamy as if he had been praising them, and

Burnamy said he had been wondering if March would not like to try a

mountain path back to his hotel; he said, not so sincerely, that he

thought Mrs. March would like it.

"I shall like your account of it," she answered. "But I'll walk back on a

level, if you please."

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

She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with her father so

gracefully that Mrs. March herself could scarcely have told just where

the girl's real purpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident, or

just how she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the pleasure of

seeing Mrs. March back to her hotel.

March went with the young people across the meadow behind the Posthof and

up into the forest, which began at the base of the mountain. At first

they tried to keep him in the range of their talk; but he fell behind

more and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was less and

less possible to include him in it. When it began to concern their common

appreciation of the Marches, they even tried to get out of his hearing.

"They're so young in their thoughts," said Burnamy, "and they seem as

much interested in everything as they could have been thirty years ago.

They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it is

now; don't you think? I mean, in the eighteen-sixties."

"Oh, yes, I can see that."

"I don't know why we shouldn't be born older in each generation than

people were in the last. Perhaps we are," he suggested.

"I don't know how you mean," said the girl, keeping vigorously up with

him; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not have

his hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it.

"I don't believe I can quite make it out myself. But fancy a man that

began to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the past

experience of the whole race--"

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

"Rather monstrous, yes," he owned, with a laugh. "But that's where the

psychological interest would come in."

As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it. "I

suppose you've been writing all sorts of things since you came here."

"Well, it hasn't been such a great while as it's seemed, and I've had Mr.

Stoller's psychological interests to look after."

"Oh, yes! Do you like him?"

"I don't know. He's a lump of honest selfishness. He isn't bad. You know

where to have him. He's simple, too."

"You mean, like Mr. March?"

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

Stoller isn't modern."

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

"Do you want me to introduce him?"

"You can introduce him to papa."

They stopped and looked across the curve of the mounting path, down on

March, who had sunk on a way-side seat, and was mopping his forehead. He

saw them, and called up: "Don't wait for me. I'll join you, gradually."

"I don't want to lose you," Burnamy called back, but he kept on with Miss

Triscoe. "I want to get the Hirschensprung in," he explained. "It's the

cliff where a hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet to get away

from an emperor who was after him."

"Oh, yes. They have them everywhere."

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

There was no view on the way up. The Germans' notion of a woodland is

everywhere that of a dense forest such as their barbarous tribes

primevally herded in. It means the close-set stems of trees, with their

tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely that you may

walk dry through it almost as long as a German shower lasts. When the sun

shines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here and

there with the gold that trickles through. There is nothing of the

accident of an American wood in these forests, which have been watched

and weeded by man ever since they burst the soil. They remain nurseries,

but they have the charm which no human care can alienate. The smell of

their bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth about

their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his

country-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life in

cities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests and

dimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of

exemption from care. There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation;

no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him

good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and

was less intrusive than if he had not been there.

March thought of the impassioned existence of these young people playing

the inevitable comedy of hide and seek which the youth of the race has

played from the beginning of time. The other invalids who haunted the

forest, and passed up and down before him in fulfilment of their several

prescriptions, had a thin unreality in spite of the physical bulk that

prevailed among them, and they heightened the relief that the

forest-spirit brought him from the strenuous contact of that young drama.

He had been almost painfully aware that the persons in it had met,

however little they knew it, with an eagerness intensified by their brief

separation, and he fancied it was the girl who had unconsciously operated

their reunion in response to the young man's longing, her will making

itself electrically felt through space by that sort of wireless

telegraphy which love has long employed, and science has just begun to

imagine.

He would have been willing that they should get home alone, but he knew

that his wife would require an account of them from him, and though he

could have invented something of the kind, if it came to the worst, he

was aware that it would not do for him to arrive without them. The

thought goaded him from his seat, and he joined the upward procession of

his fellow-sick, as it met another procession straggling downward; the

ways branched in all directions, with people on them everywhere, bent

upon building up in a month the health which they would spend the rest of

the year in demolishing.

He came upon his charges unexpectedly at a turn of the path, and Miss

Triscoe told him that he ought to have been with them for the view from

the Hirschensprung. It was magnificent, she said, and she made Burnamy

corroborate her praise of it, and agree with her that it was worth the

climb a thousand times; he modestly accepted the credit she appeared

willing to give him, of inventing the Hirschensprung.

XXXI.

Between his work for Stoller and what sometimes seemed the

obstructiveness of General Triscoe, Burnamy was not very much with Miss

Triscoe. He was not devout, but he went every Sunday to the pretty

English church on the hill, where he contributed beyond his means to the

support of the English clergy on the Continent, for the sake of looking

at her back hair during the service, and losing himself in the graceful

lines which defined, the girl's figure from the slant of her flowery hat

to the point where the pewtop crossed her elastic waist. One happy

morning the general did not come to church, and he had the fortune to

walk home with her to her pension, where she lingered with him a moment,

and almost made him believe she might be going to ask him to come in.

The next evening, when he was sauntering down the row of glittering shops

beside the Tepl, with Mrs. March, they overtook the general and his

daughter at a place where the girl was admiring some stork-scissors in

the window; she said she wished she were still little, so that she could

get them. They walked home with the Triscoes, and then he hurried Mrs.

March back to the shop. The man had already put up his shutters, and was

just closing his door, but Burnamy pushed in, and asked to look at the

stork-scissors they had seen in the window. The gas was out, and the

shopman lighted a very dim candle, to show them.

"I knew you wanted to get them for her, after what she said, Mrs. March,"

he laughed, nervously, "and you must let me lend you the money."

"Why, of course!" she answered, joyfully humoring his feint. "Shall I put

my card in for the man to send home to her with them?"

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

suppose."

They made the hushing street gay with their laughter; the next evening

Miss Triscoe came upon the Marches and Burnamy where they sat after

supper listening to the concert at Pupp's, and thanked Mrs. March for the

scissors. Then she and Burnamy had their laugh again, and Miss Triscoe

joined them, to her father's frowning mystification. He stared round for

a table; they were all taken, and he could not refuse the interest

Burnamy made with the waiters to bring them one and crowd it in. He had

to ask him to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down and heard the concert

through beside Miss Triscoe.

"What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of stork-scissors?" March

demanded, when his wife and he were alone.

"Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest," she began, in a tone which he

felt to be wheedling, and she told the story of the scissors.

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

"That was on the ship. And besides, what would you have done, I should

like to know? Would you have refused to let him buy them for her?" She

added, carelessly, "He wants us to go to the Kurhaus ball with him."

"Oh, does he!"

"Yes. He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if we

will chaperon them. And I promised that you would."

"That I would?"

"It will do just as well if you go. And it will be very amusing; you can

see something of Carlsbad society."

"But I'm not going!" he declared. "It would interfere with my cure. The

sitting up late would be bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and I

should eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do all sorts of

unwholesome things."

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

"You can go yourself," he said.

A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty as it is before

twenty, but still it has claims upon the imagination, and the novel

circumstance of a ball in the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for Mrs.

March. It was the annual reunion which is given by municipal authority in

the large hall above the bathrooms; it is frequented with safety and

pleasure by curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it began to have

for Mrs. March the charm of duty; she believed that she could finally

have made March go in her place, but she felt that she ought really to go

in his, and save him from the late hours and the late supper.

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

It appeared that any civil person might go to the reunion who chose to

pay two florins and a half. There must have been some sort of

restriction, and the ladies of Burnamy's party went with a good deal of

amused curiosity to see what the distinctions were; but they saw none

unless it was the advantages which the military had. The long hall over

the bathrooms shaped itself into a space for the dancing at one end, and

all the rest of it was filled with tables, which at half past eight were

crowded with people, eating, drinking, and smoking. The military enjoyed

the monopoly of a table next the rail dividing the dancing from the

dining space. There the tight-laced Herr Hauptmanns and Herr Lieutenants

sat at their sausage and beer and cigars in the intervals of the waltzes,

and strengthened themselves for a foray among the gracious Fraus and

Frauleins on the benches lining three sides of the dancing-space. From

the gallery above many civilian spectators looked down upon the gayety,

and the dress-coats of a few citizens figured among the uniforms.

As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fashion found their way to

the dancing-floor, and toward ten o'clock it became rather crowded. A

party of American girls showed their Paris dresses in the transatlantic

versions of the waltz. At first they danced with the young men who came

with them; but after a while they yielded to the custom of the place, and

danced with any of the officers who asked them.

"I know it's the custom," said Mrs. March to Miss Triscoe, who was at her

side in one of the waltzes she had decided to sit out, so as not to be

dancing all the time with Burnamy, "but I never can like it without an

introduction."

"No," said the girl, with the air of putting temptation decidedly away,

"I don't believe papa would, either."

A young officer came up, and drooped in mute supplication before her. She

glanced at Mrs. March, who turned her face away; and she excused herself

with the pretence that she had promised the dance, and by good fortune,

Burnamy, who had been unscrupulously waltzing with a lady he did not

know, came up at the moment. She rose and put her hand on his arm, and

they both bowed to the officer before they whirled away. The officer

looked after them with amiable admiration; then he turned to Mrs. March

with a light of banter in his friendly eyes, and was unmistakably asking

her to dance. She liked his ironical daring, she liked it so much that

she forgot her objection to partners without introductions; she forgot

her fifty-odd years; she forgot that she was a mother of grown children

and even a mother-in-law; she remembered only the step of her out-dated

waltz.

It seemed to be modern enough for the cheerful young officer, and they

were suddenly revolving with the rest. . . A tide of long-forgotten

girlhood welled up in her heart, and she laughed as she floated off on it

past the astonished eyes of Miss Triscoe and Burnamy. She saw them

falter, as if they had lost their step in their astonishment; then they

seemed both to vanish, and her partner had released her, and was helping

Miss Triscoe up from the floor; Burnamy was brushing the dust from his

knees, and the citizen who had bowled them over was boisterously

apologizing and incessantly bowing.

"Oh, are you hurt?" Mrs. March implored. "I'm sure you must be killed;

and I did it! I don't know, what I was thinking of!"

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

They had one impulse to escape from the place, and from the sympathy and

congratulation. In the dressing-room she declared again that she was all

right. "How beautifully you waltz, Mrs. March!" she said, and she laughed

again, and would not agree with her that she had been ridiculous. "But

I'm glad those American girls didn't see me. And I can't be too thankful

papa didn't come!"

Mrs. March's heart sank at the thought of what General Triscoe would

think of her. "You must tell him I did it. I can never lift up my head!"

"No, I shall not. No one did it," said the girl, magnanimously. She

looked down sidelong at her draperies. "I was so afraid I had torn my

dress! I certainly heard something rip."

It was one of the skirts of Burnamy's coat, which he had caught into his

hand and held in place till he could escape to the men's dressing-room,

where he had it pinned up so skillfully that the damage was not suspected

by the ladies. He had banged his knee abominably too; but they did not

suspect that either, as he limped home on the air beside them, first to

Miss Triscoe's pension, and then to Mrs. March's hotel.

It was quite eleven o'clock, which at Carlsbad is as late as three in the

morning anywhere else, when she let herself into her room. She decided

not to tell her husband, then; and even at breakfast, which they had at

the Posthof, she had not got to her confession, though she had told him

everything else about the ball, when the young officer with whom she had

danced passed between the tables near her. He caught her eye and bowed

with a smile of so much meaning that March asked, "Who's your pretty

young friend?"

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

ball," and she laughed.

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

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

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

"No, I won't," and now she told him. She had expected teasing, ridicule,

sarcasm, anything but the psychological interest mixed with a sort of

retrospective tenderness which he showed. "I wish I could have seen you;

I always thought you danced well." He added: "It seems that you need a

chaperon too."

The next morning, after March and General Triscoe had started off upon

one of the hill climbs, the young people made her go with them for a walk

up the Tepl, as far as the cafe of the Freundschaftsaal. In the grounds

an artist in silhouettes was cutting out the likenesses of people who

supposed themselves to have profiles, and they begged Mrs. March to sit

for hers. It was so good that she insisted on Miss Triscoe's sitting in

turn, and then Burnamy. Then he had the inspiration to propose that they

should all three sit together, and it appeared that such a group was

within the scope of the silhouettist's art; he posed them in his little

bower, and while he was mounting the picture they took turns, at five

kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes played by his Edison

phonograph.

Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moral fibre; but she

tried to draw the line at letting Burnamy keep the group. "Why not?" he

pleaded.

"You oughtn't to ask," she returned. "You've no business to have Miss

Triscoe's picture, if you must know."

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

He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she said, "You need a

chaperon who doesn't lose her head, in a silhouette." But it seemed

useless to hold out after that, and she heard herself asking, "Shall we

let him keep it, Miss Triscoe?"

Burnamy went off to his work with Stoller, carrying the silhouette with

him, and she kept on with Miss Triscoe to her hotel. In turning from the

gate after she parted with the girl she found herself confronted with

Mrs. Adding and Rose. The ladies exclaimed at each other in an

astonishment from which they had to recover before they could begin to

talk, but from the first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Adding had

something to say. The more freely to say it she asked Mrs. March into her

hotel, which was in the same street with the pension of the Triscoes, and

she let her boy go off about the exploration of Carlsbad; he promised to

be back in an hour.

"Well, now what scrape are you in?" March asked when his wife came home,

and began to put off her things, with signs of excitement which he could

not fail to note. He was lying down after a long tramp, and he seemed

very comfortable.

His question suggested something of anterior import, and she told him

about the silhouettes, and the advantage the young people had taken of

their power over her through their knowledge of her foolish behavior at

the ball.

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

that it?"

"No; there is something worse. Something's happened which throws all that

quite in the shade. Mrs. Adding is here."

"Mrs. Adding?" he repeated, with a dimness for names which she would not

allow was growing on him.

"Don't be stupid, dear! Mrs. Adding, who sat opposite Mr. Kenby on the

Norumbia. The mother of the nice boy."

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

"No, it isn't! Don't say such a thing--till you know!" she cried, with a

certain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomed seriousness in the

fact. He sat up as if better to confront the mystery. "I have been at her

hotel, and she has been telling me that she's just come from Berlin, and

that Mr. Kenby's been there, and--Now I won't have you making a joke of

it, or breaking out about it, as if it were not a thing to be looked for;

though of course with the others on our hands you're not to blame for not

thinking of it. But you can see yourself that she's young and

good-looking. She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were not

for him, I don't believe she would hesitate--"

"For heaven's sake, what are you driving at?" March broke in, and she

answered him as vehemently:

"He's asked her to marry him!"

"Kenby? Mrs. Adding?"

"Yes!"

"Well, now, Isabel, this won't do! They ought to be ashamed of

themselves. With that morbid, sensitive boy! It's shocking--"

"Will you listen? Or do you want me to stop?" He arrested himself at her

threat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence time

to sink in, "She refused him, of course!"

"Oh, all right, then!"

"You take it in such a way that I've a great mind not to tell you

anything more about it."

"I know you have," he said, stretching himself out again; "but you'll do

it, all the same. You'd have been awfully disappointed if I had been calm

and collected."

"She refused him," she began again, "although she respects him, because

she feels that she ought to devote herself to her son. Of course she's

very young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a man

twice her age, and she's not thirty-five yet. I don't think she ever

cared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something about

him."

"I never heard of him. I--"

Mrs. March made a "tchck!" that would have recalled the most consequent

of men from the most logical and coherent interpretation to the true

intent of her words. He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely:

"Well, I won't do it. If she's refused him, that's the end of it; she

needn't know anything about him, and she has no right to."

"Now I think differently," said Mrs. March, with an inductive air. "Of

course she has to know about him, now." She stopped, and March turned his

head and looked expectantly at her. "He said he would not consider her

answer final, but would hope to see her again and--She's afraid he may

follow her--What are you looking at me so for?"

"Is he coming here?"

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

March burst into a laugh. "Well, they haven't been beating about the

bush! When I think how Miss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from the

first moment she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she was

running from him, and he imagines that he has been boldly following her,

without the least hope from her, I can't help admiring the simple

directness of these elders."

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

eagerly.

"I'll say I don't like the subject. What am I in Carlsbad for? I came for

the cure, and I'm spending time and money on it. I might as well go and

take my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to listen to

Kenby."

"I know it's bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people,"

said Mrs. March. "I don't believe he'll want to talk with you; but if--"

"Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel? I'm not going to have them round in my

bread-trough!"

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

"Very well, let her stay there, then. They can manage their love-affairs

in their own way. The only one I care the least for is the boy."

"Yes, it is forlorn for him. But he likes Mr. Kenby, and--No, it's

horrid, and you can't make it anything else!"

"Well, I'm not trying to." He turned his face away. "I must get my nap,

now." After she thought he must have fallen asleep, he said, "The first

thing you know, those old Eltwins will be coming round and telling us

that they're going to get divorced." Then he really slept.

XXXII.

The mid-day dinner at Pupp's was the time to see the Carlsbad world, and

the Marches had the habit of sitting long at table to watch it.

There was one family in whom they fancied a sort of literary quality, as

if they had come out of some pleasant German story, but they never knew

anything about them. The father by his dress must have been a Protestant

clergyman; the mother had been a beauty and was still very handsome; the

daughter was good-looking, and of a good-breeding which was both girlish

and ladylike. They commended themselves by always taking the table d'hote

dinner, as the Marches did, and eating through from the soup and the rank

fresh-water fish to the sweet, upon the same principle: the husband ate

all the compote and gave the others his dessert, which was not good for

him. A young girl of a different fascination remained as much a mystery.

She was small and of an extreme tenuity, which became more bewildering as

she advanced through her meal, especially at supper, which she made of a

long cucumber pickle, a Frankfort sausage of twice the pickle's length,

and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she held a shivering little

hound; she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly maid, and had every

effect of being a gracious Fraulein. A curious contrast to her Teutonic

voracity was the temperance of a young Latin swell, imaginably from

Trieste, who sat long over his small coffee and cigarette, and tranquilly

mused upon the pages of an Italian newspaper. At another table there was

a very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing draperies of white, who

commanded a sallow family of South-Americans, and loudly harangued them

in South-American Spanish; she flared out in a picture which nowhere

lacked strong effects; and in her background lurked a mysterious black

face and figure, ironically subservient to the old man, the mild boy, and

the pretty young girl in the middle distance of the family group.

Amidst the shows of a hardened worldliness there were touching glimpses

of domesticity and heart: a young bride fed her husband soup from her own

plate with her spoon, unabashed by the publicity; a mother and her two

pretty daughters hung about a handsome officer, who must have been newly

betrothed to one of the girls; and, the whole family showed a helpless

fondness for him, which he did not despise, though he held it in check;

the girls dressed alike, and seemed to have for their whole change of

costume a difference from time to time in the color of their sleeves. The

Marches believed they had seen the growth of the romance which had

eventuated so happily; and they saw other romances which did not in any

wise eventuate. Carlsbad was evidently one of the great marriage marts of

middle Europe, where mothers brought their daughters to be admired, and

everywhere the flower of life was blooming for the hand of love. It blew

by on all the promenades in dresses and hats as pretty as they could be

bought or imagined; but it was chiefly at Pupp's that it flourished. For

the most part it seemed to flourish in vain, and to be destined to be put

by for another season to dream, bulblike, of the coming summer in the

quiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian homes.

Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than the spectators knew; but

for their own pleasure they would not have had their pang for it less;

and March objected to having a more explicit demand upon his sympathy.

"We could have managed," he said, at the close of their dinner, as he

looked compassionately round upon the parterre of young girls, "we could

have managed with Burnamy and Miss Triscoe; but to have Mrs. Adding and

Kenby launched upon us is too much. Of course I like Kenby, and if the

widow alone were concerned I would give him my blessing: a wife more or a

widow less is not going to disturb the equilibrium of the universe;

but--" He stopped, and then he went on: "Men and women are well enough.

They complement each other very agreeably, and they have very good times

together. But why should they get in love?--It is sure to make them

uncomfortable to themselves and annoying to others." He broke off, and

stared about him. "My dear, this is really charming--almost as charming

as the Posthof." The crowd spread from the open vestibule of the hotel

and the shelter of its branching pavilion roofs until it was dimmed in

the obscurity of the low grove across the way in an ultimate depth where

the musicians were giving the afternoon concert. Between its two

stationary divisions moved a current of promenaders, with some such

effect as if the colors of a lovely garden should have liquefied and

flowed in mingled rose and lilac, pink and yellow, and white and orange,

and all the middle tints of modern millinery. Above on one side were the

agreeable bulks of architecture, in the buff and gray of Carlsbad; and

far beyond on the other were the upland slopes, with villas and long

curves of country roads, belted in with miles of wall. "It would be about

as offensive to have a love-interest that one personally knew about

intruded here," he said, "as to have a two-spanner carriage driven

through this crowd. It ought to be forbidden by the municipality."

Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with her eyes, and she

answered: "See that handsome young Greek priest! Isn't he an

archimandrite? The portier said he was."

"Then let him pass for an archimandrite. Now," he recurred to his

grievance again, dreamily, "I have got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, and

poison his mind against Burnamy, and I shall have to instil a few drops

of venomous suspicion against Kenby into the heart of poor little Rose

Adding. Oh;" he broke out, "they will spoil everything. They'll be with

us morning, noon, and night," and he went on to work the joke of repining

at his lot. The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers' pretence of

being interested in something besides themselves, which they were no more

capable of than so many lunatics. How could they care for pretty girls

playing tennis on an upland level, in the waning afternoon? Or a cartful

of peasant women stopping to cross themselves at a way-side shrine? Or a

whistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some wayside

raspberries to touch his hat and say good-morning? Or those preposterous

maidens sprinkling linen on the grass from watering-pots while the skies

were full of rain? Or that blacksmith shop where Peter the Great made a

horseshoe. Or the monument of the young warrior-poet Koerner, with a

gentle-looking girl and her mother reading and knitting on a bench before

it? These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what could lovers really

care for them? A peasant girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fast

asleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog, lay in his harness near

her with one drowsy eye half open for her and the other for the contents

of their cart; a boy chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyond

the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all the neighbors; the negro

door-keeper at the Golden Shield who ought to have spoken our Southern

English, but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweet afternoon

stillness in the woods; the good German mothers crocheting at the Posthof

concerts. Burnamy as a young poet might hate felt the precious quality of

these things, if his senses had not been holden by Miss Triscoe; and she

might have felt it if only he had done so. But as it was it would be lost

upon their preoccupation; with Mrs. Adding and Kenby it would be

hopeless.

A day or two after Mrs. March had met Mrs. Adding, she went with her

husband to revere a certain magnificent blackamoor whom he had discovered

at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg,

where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and looked, in the

black of his skin and the white of his flowing costume, like a colossal

figure carved in ebony and ivory. They took a roundabout way through a

street entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is a

pension if it is not an hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimental

prettiness; with each a little garden before it, and a bower with an iron

table in it for breakfasting and supping out-doors; and he said that they

would be the very places for bridal couples who wished to spend the

honey-moon in getting well of the wedding surfeit. She denounced him for

saying such a thing as that, and for his inconsistency in complaining of

lovers while he was willing to think of young married people. He

contended that there was a great difference in the sort of demand that

young married people made upon the interest of witnesses, and that they

were at least on their way to sanity; and before they agreed, they had

come to the hotel with the blackamoor at the door. While they lingered,

sharing the splendid creature's hospitable pleasure in the spectacle he

formed, they were aware of a carriage with liveried coachman and footman

at the steps of the hotel; the liveries were very quiet and

distinguished, and they learned that the equipage was waiting for the

Prince of Coburg, or the Princess of Montenegro, or Prince Henry of

Prussia; there were differing opinions among the twenty or thirty

bystanders. Mrs. March said she did not care which it was; and she was

patient of the denouement, which began to postpone itself with delicate

delays. After repeated agitations at the door among portiers,

proprietors, and waiters, whose fluttered spirits imparted their thrill

to the spectators, while the coachman and footman remained

sculpturesquely impassive in their places, the carriage moved aside and

let an energetic American lady and her family drive up to the steps. The

hotel people paid her a tempered devotion, but she marred the effect by

rushing out and sitting on a balcony to wait for the delaying royalties.

There began to be more promises of their early appearance; a footman got

down and placed himself at the carriage door; the coachman stiffened

himself on his box; then he relaxed; the footman drooped, and even

wandered aside. There came a moment when at some signal the carriage

drove quite away from the portal and waited near the gate of the

stableyard; it drove back, and the spectators redoubled their attention.

Nothing happened, and some of them dropped off. At last an indescribable

significance expressed itself in the official group at the door; a man in

a high hat and dresscoat hurried out; a footman hurried to meet him; they

spoke inaudibly together. The footman mounted to his place; the coachman

gathered up his reins and drove rapidly out of the hotel-yard, down the

street, round the corner, out of sight. The man in the tall hat and

dress-coat went in; the official group at the threshold dissolved; the

statue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evidently the Hoheit of

Coburg, or Montenegro, or Prussia, was not going to take the air.

"My dear, this is humiliating."

"Not at all! I wouldn't have missed it for anything. Think how near we

came to seeing them!"

"I shouldn't feel so shabby if we had seen them. But to hang round here

in this plebeian abeyance, and then to be defeated and defrauded at last!

I wonder how long this sort of thing is going on?"

"What thing?"

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

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

Prince."

"Only too natural. It's so deeply founded in nature that after denying

royalty by word and deed for a hundred years, we Americans are hungrier

for it than anybody else. Perhaps we may come back to it!"

"Nonsense!"

They looked up at the Austrian flag on the tower of the hotel, languidly

curling and uncurling in the bland evening air, as it had over a thousand

years of stupid and selfish monarchy, while all the generous republics of

the Middle Ages had perished, and the commonwealths of later times had

passed like fever dreams. That dull, inglorious empire had antedated or

outlived Venice and Genoa, Florence and Siena, the England of Cromwell,

the Holland of the Stadtholders, and the France of many revolutions, and

all the fleeting democracies which sprang from these.

March began to ask himself how his curiosity differed from that of the

Europeans about him; then he became aware that these had detached

themselves, and left him exposed to the presence of a fellow countryman.

It was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turned upon March with hilarious

recognition. "Hello! Most of the Americans in Carlsbad seem to be hanging

round here for a sight of these kings. Well, we don't have a great many

of 'em, and it's natural we shouldn't want to miss any. But now, you

Eastern fellows, you go to Europe every summer, and yet you don't seem to

get enough of 'em. Think it's human nature, or did it get so ground into

us in the old times that we can't get it out, no difference what we say?"

"That's very much what I've been asking myself," said March. "Perhaps

it's any kind of show. We'd wait nearly as long for the President to come

out, wouldn't we?"

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

cousin."

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

"I guess you're right." The Iowan seemed better satisfied with March's

philosophy than March felt himself, and he could not forbear adding:

"But I don't, deny that we should wait for the President because he's a

kind of king too. I don't know that we shall ever get over wanting to see

kings of some kind. Or at least my wife won't. May I present you to Mrs.

March?"

"Happy to meet you, Mrs. March," said the Iowan. "Introduce you to Mrs.

Otterson. I'm the fool in my family, and I know just how you feel about a

chance like this. I don't mean that you're--"

They all laughed at the hopeless case, and Mrs. March said, with one of

her unexpected likings: "I understand, Mr. Otterson. And I would rather

be our kind of fool than the kind that pretends not to care for the sight

of a king."

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

"Indeed, indeed," said the lady, "I'd like to see a king too, if it

didn't take all night. Good-evening," she said, turning her husband about

with her, as if she suspected a purpose of patronage in Mrs. March, and

was not going to have it.

Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly: "The trouble

with me is that when I do get a chance to talk English, there's such a

flow of language it carries me away, and I don't know just where I'm

landing."

XXXIII.

There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbad that summer. One

day the Duchess of Orleans drove over from Marienbad, attended by the

Duke on his bicycle. After luncheon, they reappeared for a moment before

mounting to her carriage with their Secretaries: two young French

gentlemen whose dress and bearing better satisfied Mrs. March's exacting

passion for an aristocratic air in their order. The Duke was fat and

fair, as a Bourbon should be, and the Duchess fatter, though not so fair,

as became a Hapsburg, but they were both more plebeian-looking than their

retainers, who were slender as well as young, and as perfectly appointed

as English tailors could imagine them.

"It wouldn't do for the very highest sort of Highhotes," March declared,

"to look their own consequence personally; they have to leave that, like

everything else, to their inferiors."

By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March's the German Hoheit had now become

Highhote, which was so much more descriptive that they had permanently

adopted it, and found comfort to their republican pride in the mockery

which it poured upon the feudal structure of society. They applied it

with a certain compunction, however, to the King of Servia, who came a

few days after the Duke and Duchess: he was such a young King, and of

such a little country. They watched for him from the windows of the

reading-room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the three sides

of the square before the hotel, and the two plain public carriages which

brought the King and his suite drew tamely up at the portal, where the

proprietor and some civic dignitaries received him. His moderated

approach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which Americans

are used, allowed Mrs. March to make sure of the pale, slight,

insignificant, amiable-looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign she

was ambuscading. Then no appeal to her principles could keep her from

peeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda, where the King

graciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and the proprietor,

and vanished into the elevator. She was destined to see him so often

afterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her dining and

supping by that of the simple potentate, who had his meals in one of the

public rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in sack-coats like

himself, after the informal manner of the place.

Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourning

abroad, in the interval of a successful rebellion, was at the opera one

night with some of his faithful followers. Burnamy had offered Mrs.

March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and her husband with him,

places in a box; but after she eagerly accepted, it seemed that he wished

her to advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her father

to join them.

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

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

"Perhaps you had," she said, and they both laughed, though he laughed

with a knot between his eyes.

"The fact is, you know, this isn't my treat, exactly. It's Mr.

Stoller's." At the surprise in her face he hurried on. "He's got back his

first letter in the paper, and he's so much pleased with the way he reads

in print, that he wants to celebrate."

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

Burnamy laughed again. "But he's bashful, and he isn't sure that you

would all take it in the right way. He wants you as friends of mine; and

he hasn't quite the courage to ask you himself."

This seemed to Mrs. March so far from bad that she said: "That's very

nice of him. Then he's satisfied with--with your help? I'm glad of that."

"Thank you. He's met the Triscoes, and he thought it would be pleasant to

you if they went, too."

"Oh, certainly."

"He thought," Burnamy went on, with the air of feeling his way, "that we

might all go to the opera, and then--then go for a little supper

afterwards at Schwarzkopf's."

He named the only place in Carlsbad where you can sup so late as ten

o'clock; as the opera begins at six, and is over at half past eight, none

but the wildest roisterers frequent the place.

"Oh!" said Mrs. March. "I don't know how a late supper would agree with

my husband's cure. I should have to ask him."

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

In repeating his invitation she blamed Burnamy's uncandor so much that

March took his part, as perhaps she intended, and said, "Oh, nonsense,"

and that he should like to go in for the whole thing; and General Triscoe

accepted as promptly for himself and his daughter. That made six people,

Burnamy counted up, and he feigned a decent regret that there was not

room for Mrs. Adding and her son; he would have liked to ask them.

Mrs. March did not enjoy it so much as coming with her husband alone when

they took two florin seats in the orchestra for the comedy. The comedy

always began half an hour earlier than the opera, and they had a

five-o'clock supper at the Theatre-Cafe before they went, and they got to

sleep by nine o'clock; now they would be up till half past ten at least,

and that orgy at Schwarzkopf's might not be at all good for him. But

still she liked being there; and Miss Triscoe made her take the best

seat; Burnamy and Stoller made the older men take the other seats beside

the ladies, while they sat behind, or stood up, when they, wished to see,

as people do in the back of a box. Stoller was not much at ease in

evening dress, but he bore himself with a dignity which was not perhaps

so gloomy as it looked; Mrs. March thought him handsome in his way, and

required Miss Triscoe to admire him. As for Burnamy's beauty it was not

necessary to insist upon that; he had the distinction of slender youth;

and she liked to think that no Highhote there was of a more patrician

presence than this yet unprinted contributor to 'Every Other Week'. He

and Stoller seemed on perfect terms; or else in his joy he was able to

hide the uneasiness which she had fancied in him from the first time she

saw them together, and which had never been quite absent from his manner

in Stoller's presence. Her husband always denied that it existed, or if

it did that it was anything but Burnamy's effort to get on common ground

with an inferior whom fortune had put over him.

The young fellow talked with Stoller, and tried to bring him into the

range of the general conversation. He leaned over the ladies, from time

to time, and pointed out the notables whom he saw in the house; she was

glad, for his sake, that he did not lean less over her than over Miss

Triscoe. He explained certain military figures in the boxes opposite, and

certain ladies of rank who did not look their rank; Miss Triscoe, to Mrs.

March's thinking, looked their united ranks, and more; her dress was very

simple, but of a touch which saved it from being insipidly girlish; her

beauty was dazzling.

"Do you see that old fellow in the corner chair just behind the

orchestra?" asked Burnamy. "He's ninety-six years old, and he comes to

the theatre every night, and falls asleep as soon as the curtain rises,

and sleeps through till the end of the act."

"How dear!" said the girl, leaning forward to fix the nonagenarian with

her glasses, while many other glasses converged upon her. "Oh, wouldn't

you like to know him, Mr. March?"

"I should consider it a liberal education. They have brought these things

to a perfect system in Europe. There is nothing to make life pass

smoothly like inflexible constancy to an entirely simple custom. My

dear," he added to his wife, "I wish we'd seen this sage before. He'd

have helped us through a good many hours of unintelligible comedy. I'm

always coming as Burnamy's guest, after this."

The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his triumph, and casting an eye

about the theatre to cap it, he caught sight of that other potentate. He

whispered joyfully, "Ah! We've got two kings here to-night," and he

indicated in a box of their tier just across from that where the King of

Servia sat, the well-known face of the King of New York.

"He isn't bad-looking," said March, handing his glass to General Triscoe.

"I've not seen many kings in exile; a matter of a few Carlist princes and

ex-sovereign dukes, and the good Henry V. of France, once, when I was

staying a month in Venice; but I don't think they any of them looked the

part better. I suppose he has his dream of recurring power like the

rest."

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

of it."

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

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

"Then it's as if we were in the presence of Charles II. just before he

was called back to England, or Napoleon in the last moments of Elba. It's

better than that. The thing is almost unique; it's a new situation in

history. Here's a sovereign who has no recognized function, no legal

status, no objective existence. He has no sort of public being, except in

the affection of his subjects. It took an upheaval little short of an

earthquake to unseat him. His rule, as we understand it, was bad for all

classes; the poor suffered more than the rich; the people have now had

three years of self-government; and yet this wonderful man has such a

hold upon the masses that he is going home to win the cause of oppression

at the head of the oppressed. When he's in power again, he will be as

subjective as ever, with the power of civic life and death, and an

idolatrous following perfectly ruthless in the execution of his will."

"We've only begun," said the general. "This kind of king is municipal,

now; but he's going to be national. And then, good-by, Republic!"

"The only thing like it," March resumed, too incredulous of the evil

future to deny himself the aesthetic pleasure of the parallel, "is the

rise of the Medici in Florence, but even the Medici were not mere

manipulators of pulls; they had some sort of public office, with some

sort of legislated tenure of it. The King of New York is sovereign by

force of will alone, and he will reign in the voluntary submission of the

majority. Is our national dictator to be of the same nature and quality?"

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

The ladies listened with the perfunctory attention which women pay to any

sort of inquiry which is not personal. Stoller had scarcely spoken yet;

he now startled them all by demanding, with a sort of vindictive force,

"Why shouldn't he have the power, if they're willing to let him?"

"Yes," said General Triscoe, with a tilt of his head towards March.

"That's what we must ask ourselves more and more."

March leaned back in his chair, and looked up over his shoulder at

Stoller. "Well, I don't know. Do you think it's quite right for a man to

use an unjust power, even if others are willing that he should?"

Stoller stopped with an air of bewilderment as if surprised on the point

of saying that he thought just this. He asked instead, "What's wrong

about it?"

"Well, that's one of those things that have to be felt, I suppose. But if

a man came to you, and offered to be your slave for a certain

consideration--say a comfortable house, and a steady job, that wasn't too

hard--should you feel it morally right to accept the offer? I don't say

think it right, for there might be a kind of logic for it."

Stoller seemed about to answer; he hesitated; and before he had made any

response, the curtain rose.

XXXIV.

There are few prettier things than Carlsbad by night from one of the many

bridges which span the Tepl in its course through the town. If it is a

starry night, the torrent glides swiftly away with an inverted firmament

in its bosom, to which the lamps along its shores and in the houses on

either side contribute a planetary splendor of their own. By nine o'clock

everything is hushed; not a wheel is heard at that dead hour; the few

feet shuffling stealthily through the Alte Wiese whisper a caution of

silence to those issuing with a less guarded tread from the opera; the

little bowers that overhang the stream are as dark and mute as the

restaurants across the way which serve meals in them by day; the whole

place is as forsaken as other cities at midnight. People get quickly home

to bed, or if they have a mind to snatch a belated joy, they slip into

the Theater-Cafe, where the sleepy Frauleins serve them, in an exemplary

drowse, with plates of cold ham and bottles of the gently gaseous waters

of Giesshubl. Few are of the bold badness which delights in a supper at

Schwarzkopf's, and even these are glad of the drawn curtains which hide

their orgy from the chance passer.

The invalids of Burnamy's party kept together, strengthening themselves

in a mutual purpose not to be tempted to eat anything which was not

strictly 'kurgemass'. Mrs. March played upon the interest which each of

them felt in his own case so artfully that she kept them talking of their

cure, and left Burnamy and Miss Triscoe to a moment on the bridge, by

which they profited, while the others strolled on, to lean against the

parapet and watch the lights in the skies and the water, and be alone

together. The stream shone above and below, and found its way out of and

into the darkness under the successive bridges; the town climbed into the

night with lamp-lit windows here and there, till the woods of the

hill-sides darkened down to meet it, and fold it in an embrace from which

some white edifice showed palely in the farthest gloom.

He tried to make her think they could see that great iron crucifix which

watches over it day and night from its piny cliff. He had a fancy for a

poem, very impressionistic, which should convey the notion of the

crucifix's vigil. He submitted it to her; and they remained talking till

the others had got out of sight and hearing; and she was letting him keep

the hand on her arm which he had put there to hold her from falling over

the parapet, when they were both startled by approaching steps, and a

voice calling, "Look here! Who's running this supper party, anyway?"

His wife had detached March from her group for the mission, as soon as

she felt that the young people were abusing her kindness. They answered

him with hysterical laughter, and Burnamy said, "Why, it's Mr. Stoller's

treat, you know."

At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequiously met the party on the

threshold and bowed them into a pretty inner room, with a table set for

their supper, Stoller had gained courage to play the host openly. He

appointed General Triscoe to the chief seat; he would have put his

daughter next to him, if the girl had not insisted upon Mrs. March's

having the place, and going herself to sit next to March, whom she said

she had not been able to speak a word to the whole evening. But she did

not talk a great deal to him; he smiled to find how soon he dropped out

of the conversation, and Burnamy, from his greater remoteness across the

table, dropped into it. He really preferred the study of Stoller, whose

instinct of a greater worldly quality in the Triscoes interested him; he

could see him listening now to what General Triscoe was saying to Mrs.

March, and now to what Burnamy was saying to Miss Triscoe; his strong,

selfish face, as he turned it on the young people, expressed a mingled

grudge and greed that was very curious.

Stoller's courage, which had come and gone at moments throughout, rose at

the end, and while they lingered at the table well on to the hour of ten,

he said, in the sort of helpless offence he had with Burnamy, "What's the

reason we can't all go out tomorrow to that old castle you was talking

about?"

"To Engelhaus? I don't know any reason, as far as I'm concerned,"

answered Burnamy; but he refused the initiative offered him, and Stoller

was obliged to ask March:

"You heard about it?"

"Yes." General Triscoe was listening, and March added for him, "It was

the hold of an old robber baron; Gustavus Adolphus knocked it down, and

it's very picturesque, I believe."

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

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

husband and temptation.

"No; the day after. Why, it's about ten or twelve miles out on the old

postroad that Napoleon took for Prague."

"Napoleon knew a good road when he saw it," said the general, and he

alone of the company lighted a cigar. He was decidedly in favor of the

excursion, and he arranged for it with Stoller, whom he had the effect of

using for his pleasure as if he were doing him a favor. They were six,

and two carriages would take them: a two-spanner for four, and a

one-spanner for two; they could start directly after dinners and get home

in time for supper.

Stoller asserted himself to say: "That's all right, then. I want you to

be my guests, and I'll see about the carriages." He turned to Burnamy:

"Will you order them?"

"Oh," said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, "the portier will

get them."

"I don't understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept. Surely,

he can't like that man!" said Mrs. March to her husband in their own

room.

"Oh, I fancy that wouldn't be essential. The general seems to me, capable

of letting even an enemy serve his turn. Why didn't you speak, if you

didn't want to go?"

"Why didn't you?"

"I wanted to go."

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

she wished to go."

"Do you think Burnamy did?"

"He seemed rather indifferent. And yet he must have realized that he

would be with Miss Triscoe the whole afternoon."

XXXV.

If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the one-spanner, and the

others followed in the two-spanner, it was not from want of politeness on

the part of the young people in offering to give up their places to each

of their elders in turn. It would have been grotesque for either March or

Stoller to drive with the girl; for her father it was apparently no

question, after a glance at the more rigid uprightness of the seat in the

one-spanner; and he accepted the place beside Mrs. March on the back seat

of the two-spanner without demur. He asked her leave to smoke, and then

he scarcely spoke to her. But he talked to the two men in front of him

almost incessantly, haranguing them upon the inferiority of our

conditions and the futility of our hopes as a people, with the effect of

bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could have got on with

Triscoe's contempt for the worthlessness of our working-classes, but did

not know what to do with his scorn of the vulgarity and venality of their

employers. He accused some of Stoller's most honored and envied

capitalists of being the source of our worst corruptions, and guiltier

than the voting-cattle whom they bought and sold.

"I think we can get rid of the whole trouble if we go at it the right

way," Stoller said, diverging for the sake of the point he wished to

bring in. "I believe in having the government run on business principles.

They've got it here in Carlsbad, already, just the right sort of thing,

and it works. I been lookin' into it, and I got this young man,

yonder"--he twisted his hand in the direction of the one-spanner! "to

help me put it in shape. I believe it's going to make our folks think,

the best ones among them. Here!" He drew a newspaper out of his pocket,

folded to show two columns in their full length, and handed it to

Triscoe, who took it with no great eagerness, and began to run his eye

over it. "You tell me what you think of that. I've put it out for a kind

of a feeler. I got some money in that paper, and I just thought I'd let

our people see how a city can be managed on business principles."

He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought while

he read, and keep him up to the work, and he ignored the Marches so

entirely that they began in self-defence to talk with each other.

Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the

breezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields of

harvest. They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the serried

stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew straight as

stalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened under a sky of

unwonted cloudlessness. Narrow strips of wheat and rye, which the men

were cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices were binding,

alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and breadths of

beets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed land. In the

meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy rowen, the girls

lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving themselves the lighter

labor of ordering the load. From the upturned earth, where there ought to

have been troops of strutting crows, a few sombre ravens rose. But they

could not rob the scene of its gayety; it smiled in the sunshine with

colors which vividly followed the slope of the land till they were dimmed

in the forests on the far-off mountains. Nearer and farther, the cottages

and villages shone in the valleys, or glimmered through the veils of the

distant haze. Over all breathed the keen pure air of the hills, with a

sentiment of changeless eld, which charmed March, back to his boyhood,

where he lost the sense of his wife's presence, and answered her vaguely.

She talked contentedly on in the monologue to which the wives of

absent-minded men learn to resign themselves. They were both roused from

their vagary by the voice of General Triscoe. He was handing back the

folded newspaper to Stoller, and saying, with a queer look at him over

his glasses, "I should like to see what your contemporaries have to say

to all that."

"Well, sir," Stoller returned, "maybe I'll have the chance to show you.

They got my instructions over there to send everything to me."

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape.

They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape,

after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, who

were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the

two-spanner behind. They were talking of the hero and heroine of a novel

they had both read, and he was saying, "I suppose you think he was justly

punished."

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

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

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

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

Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:

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

very exacting."

"Why," said Burnamy, "I supposed that women hated anything like deception

in men too much to tolerate it at all. Of course, in this case, he didn't

deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn't that worse?"

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

"Oh!"

"He might have had to do that. She wouldn't have minded his fibbing

outright, so much, for then it wouldn't have seemed to come from his

nature. But if he just let her believe what wasn't true, and didn't say a

word to prevent her, of course it was worse. It showed something weak,

something cowardly in him."

Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh. "I suppose it did. But don't you

think it's rather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds of courage?"

"Yes, it is," she assented. "That is why I say she was too exacting. But

a man oughn't to defend him."

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

"No. She might excuse him."

He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was rather far behind, and

he spoke to their driver bidding him go slowly till it caught up with

them. By the time it did so, they were so close to it that they could

distinguish the lines of its wandering and broken walls. Ever since they

had climbed from the wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to the

open plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater detail. The

detached mound of rock on which it stood rose like an island in the midst

of the plain, and commanded the highways in every direction.

"I believe," Burnamy broke out, with a bitterness apparently relevant to

the ruin alone, "that if you hadn't required any quarterings of nobility

from him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron. He's a

robber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn't have any scruple in levying

tribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair

and his crossbowmen were not on a strike. But they would be on a strike,

probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-union

crossbowmen."

If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as the

civility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than he

meant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, "I don't see how you can

have anything to do with him, if you feel so about him."

"Oh," Burnamy replied in kind, "he buys my poverty and not my will. And

perhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more."

"Have you been doing something very wicked?"

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

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

They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a village

street up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned. A church at

its base looked out upon an irregular square.

A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide a

darkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind him.

He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village's claims

upon the visitors' interest; he mastered, after a moment, their wishes in

respect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it; at the top, he

said, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would admit them.

XXXVI.

The path to the castle slanted upward across the shoulder of the hill,

to a certain point, and there some rude stone steps mounted more

directly. Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden,

bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the clean

bitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf; but Nature spreads no

such lavish feast in wood or field in the Old World as she spoils us with

in the New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to be all her

store, and man must make the most of them. Miss Triscoe seemed to find

flowers enough in the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together for her.

She took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might have both hands

for her skirt, and so did him two favors.

A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns the ruin opened a gate

for the party at the top, and levied a tax of thirty kreutzers each upon

them, for its maintenance. The castle, by his story, had descended from

robber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked it to pieces in the

sixteenth century; three hundred years later, the present owner restored

it; and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed with

brick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin satisfyingly

permanent. The walls were not of great extent, but such as they were they

enclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground, and a cistern

which once enabled the barons and their retainers to water their wine in

time of siege.

From that height they could overlook the neighboring highways in every

direction, and could bring a merchant train to, with a shaft from a

crossbow, or a shot from an arquebuse, at pleasure. With General

Triscoe's leave, March praised the strategic strength of the unique

position, which he found expressive of the past, and yet suggestive of

the present. It was more a difference in method than anything else that

distinguished the levy of customs by the authorities then and now. What

was the essential difference, between taking tribute of travellers

passing on horseback, and collecting dues from travellers arriving by

steamer? They did not pay voluntarily in either case; but it might be

proof of progress that they no longer fought the customs officials.

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

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

laws."

"I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night," said Miss Triscoe, "that

people are kept on the docks now for hours, and ladies cry at the way

their things are tumbled over by the inspectors."

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

"It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal times," her husband

resumed. "But I'm glad the travellers make no resistance. I'm opposed to

private war as much as I am to free trade."

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

"Your precious humanity--"

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

"Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road.

He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on his

course, and coming back to where he started."

Stoller said, "I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here,

that they will come to America and set up, if they can't stand the

duties."

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

If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer. He followed

with his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated

themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of the

ruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin,

upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot. The land fell away

from the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fields

and in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into

the distance. "I don't suppose," Burnamy said, "that life ever does much

better than this, do you? I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and

saying 'Unberufen.' I might knock on your bouquet; that's wood."

"It would spoil the flowers," she said, looking down at them in her belt.

She looked up and their eyes met.

"I wonder," he said, presently, "what makes us always have a feeling of

dread when we are happy?"

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

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

for the worse."

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

"If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological

weather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss

or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tears

beforehand--it may come to that."

"I hope it won't. I'd rather not know when I was to be happy; it would

spoil the pleasure; and wouldn't be any compensation when it was the

other way."

A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller

looking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquiline

profile into relief. "Oh! Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?" he called gayly up

to him.

"I guess we've seen about all there is," he answered. "Hadn't we better

be going?" He probably did not mean to be mandatory.

"All right," said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe again

without further notice of him.

They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the weird

sacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and to

account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt,

and this one built only a few years before. Then he locked the doors

after them, and ran forward to open against their coming the chapel of

the village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortified

themselves for it at the village cafe.

They were served by a little hunch-back maid; and she told them who lived

in the chief house of the village. It was uncommonly pretty; where all

the houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as the

dwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the great man of the place.

March admired the cat which rubbed against her skirt while she stood and

talked, and she took his praises modestly for the cat; but they wrought

upon the envy, of her brother so that he ran off to the garden, and came

back with two fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held up, with an arm

across each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the spectators.

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

"No, no! I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat outdone,"

he refused; and then he was about to yield.