“Some of the uninteresting ones too.  I used, to meet some of that sort over there.  I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with those that hadn’t been.”

“Then why not do it?  I know you could get something out of it.”

“It might be a good thing,” he mused, “to take a couple who had passed their whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go; and had a perfect famine for Europe all the time.  I could have them spend their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking up their accommodations.  I could have them sail, in imagination, and discover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions of it from travels and novels against a background of purely American experience.  We needn’t go abroad to manage that.  I think it would be rather nice.”

“I don’t think it would be nice in the least,” said Mrs. March, “and if you don’t want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all.”

“Well, then, let’s talk about our Silver Wedding Journey.”

“I see.  You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it.”

She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really silent.  He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to good-humor.  He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken and look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she refused.  When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she consented to go.

III.

He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took a hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fancied some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken.  To be sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the afternoon of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that invisible thread of association which drew him.

The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the outward voyage, and was looking her best.  She was tipped and edged with shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and white-painted as only a ship knows how to be.  A little uniformed steward ran before the visitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors into typical state-rooms on the different decks; and then let them verify their first impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and the luxury of the ladies’ parlor and music-room.  March made his wife observe that the tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so carelessly scattered about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the floor against rough weather; and he amused himself with the heavy German browns and greens and coppers in the decorations, which he said must have been studied in color from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the effect of those large march-panes in the roof.  She laughed with him at the tastelessness of the race which they were destined to marvel at more and more; but she made him own that the stewardesses whom they saw were charmingly like serving-maids in the ‘Fliegende Blatter’; when they went ashore she challenged his silence for some assent to her own conclusion that the Colmannia was perfect.