“Fulkerson said it; but it was a figurative expression.”

“And I suppose the Silver Wedding Journey was a figurative expression too!”

“It was a notion that tempted me; I thought you would enjoy it.  Don’t you suppose I should be glad too, if we could go over, and find ourselves just as we were when we first met there?”

“No; I don’t believe now that you care anything about it.”

“Well, it couldn’t be done, anyway; so that doesn’t matter.”

“It could be done, if you were a mind to think so.  And it would be the greatest inspiration to you.  You are always longing for some chance to do original work, to get away from your editing, but you’ve let the time slip by without really trying to do anything; I don’t call those little studies of yours in the magazine anything; and now you won’t take the chance that’s almost forcing itself upon you.  You could write an original book of the nicest kind; mix up travel and fiction; get some love in.”

“Oh, that’s the stalest kind of thing!”

“Well, but you could see it from a perfectly new point of view.  You could look at it as a sort of dispassionate witness, and treat it humorously—­of course it is ridiculous—­and do something entirely fresh.”

“It wouldn’t work.  It would be carrying water on both shoulders.  The fiction would kill the travel, the travel would kill the fiction; the love and the humor wouldn’t mingle any more than oil and vinegar.”

“Well, and what is better than a salad?”

“But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing to put it on.”  She was silent, and he yielded to another fancy.  “We might imagine coming upon our former selves over there, and travelling round with them—­a wedding journey ’en partie carree’.”

“Something like that.  I call it a very poetical idea,” she said with a sort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush.

“It isn’t so bad,” he admitted.  “How young we were, in those days!”

“Too young to know what a good time we were having,” she said, relaxing her doubt for the retrospect.  “I don’t feel as if I really saw Europe, then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple.  I would like to go, just to make sure that I had been.”  He was smiling again in the way he had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded, “What is it?”

“Nothing.  I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people who actually hadn’t been before—­carry them all through Europe, and let them see it in the old, simple-hearted American way.”

She shook her head.  “You couldn’t!  They’ve all been!”

“All but about sixty or seventy millions,” said March.

“Well, those are just the millions you don’t know, and couldn’t imagine.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“And even if you could imagine them, you couldn’t make them interesting.  All the interesting ones have been, anyway.”