“She has only one fault,” he assented.  “She’s a ship.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “and I shall want to look at the Norumbia before I decide.”

Then he saw that it was only a question which steamer they should take, and not whether they should take any.  He explained, at first gently and afterwards savagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quite enough for him, and that the vessel was not built that he would be willing to cross the Atlantic in.

When a man has gone so far as that he has committed himself to the opposite course in almost so many words; and March was neither surprised nor abashed when he discovered himself, before they reached home, offering his wife many reasons why they should go to Europe.  She answered to all, No, he had made her realize the horror of it so much that she was glad to give it up.  She gave it up, with the best feeling; all that she would ask of him was that he should never mention Europe to her again.  She could imagine how much he disliked to go, if such a ship as the Colmannia did not make him want to go.

At the bottom of his heart he knew that he had not used her very well.  He had kindled her fancy with those notions of a Sabbatical year and a Silver Wedding Journey, and when she was willing to renounce both he had persisted in taking her to see the ship, only to tell her afterwards that he would not go abroad on any account.  It was by a psychological juggle which some men will understand that he allowed himself the next day to get the sailings of the Norumbia from the steamship office; he also got a plan of the ship showing the most available staterooms, so that they might be able to choose between her and the Colmannia from all the facts.

IV.

From this time their decision to go was none the less explicit because so perfectly tacit.

They began to amass maps and guides.  She got a Baedeker for Austria and he got a Bradshaw for the continent, which was never of the least use there, but was for the present a mine of unavailable information.  He got a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his German.  He used to read German, when he was a boy, with a young enthusiasm for its romantic poetry, and now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine, he held imaginary conversations with a barber, a bootmaker, and a banker, and tried to taste the joy which he had not known in the language of those poets for a whole generation.  He perceived, of course, that unless the barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him in terms which the author of the phrase-book directed them to use, he should not get on with them beyond his first question; but he did not allow this to spoil his pleasure in it.  In fact, it was with a tender emotion that he realized how little the world, which had changed in everything else so greatly, had changed in its ideal of a phrase-book.