Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he was troubled by his friend’s apparent acceptance of unjust things on their picturesque side.  Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades.  “Ah, delightful!” March took off his hat as if to salute the pleasant sight.

“But don’t you think, Mr. March,” the boy ventured, “that the man had better be cutting the wheat, and letting the women watch the cows?”

“Well, I don’t know.  There are more of them; and he wouldn’t be half so graceful as they are, with that flow of their garments, and the sway of their aching backs.”  The boy smiled sadly, and March put his hand on his shoulder as they walked on.  “You find a lot of things in Europe that need putting right, don’t you, Rose?”

“Yes; I know it’s silly.”

“Well, I’m not sure.  But I’m afraid it’s useless.  You see, these old customs go such a way back, and are so grounded in conditions.  We think they might be changed, if those who rule could be got to see how cruel and ugly they are; but probably they couldn’t.  I’m afraid that the Emperor of Austria himself couldn’t change them, in his sovereign plenitude of power.  The Emperor is only an old custom too, and he’s as much grounded in the conditions as any.”  This was the serious way Rose felt that March ought always to talk; and he was too much grieved to laugh when he went on.  “The women have so much of the hard work to do, over here, because the emperors need the men for their armies.  They couldn’t let their men cut wheat unless it was for their officers’ horses, in the field of some peasant whom it would ruin.”

If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to work these paradoxes for the boy’s confusion.  She said the child adored him, and it was a sacrilege to play with his veneration.  She always interfered to save him, but with so little logic though so much justice that Rose suffered a humiliation from her championship, and was obliged from a sense of self-respect to side with the mocker.  She understood this, and magnanimously urged it as another reason why her husband should not trifle with Rose’s ideal of him; to make his mother laugh at him was wicked.

“Oh, I’m not his only ideal,” March protested.  “He adores Kenby too, and every now and then he brings me to book with a text from Kenby’s gospel.”

Mrs. March caught her breath.  “Kenby!  Do you really think, then, that she—­”

“Oh, hold on, now!  It isn’t a question of Mrs. Adding; and I don’t say Rose had an eye on poor old Kenby as a step-father.  I merely want you to understand that I’m the object of a divided worship, and that when I’m off duty as an ideal I don’t see why I shouldn’t have the fun of making Mrs. Adding laugh.  You can’t pretend she isn’t wrapped up in the boy.  You’ve said that yourself.”