“That’s what I call ’banale’,” said Mrs. March.

“It is, rather,” he confessed.  “It makes me feel as if I must go to see the house of Durer, after all.”

“Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later.”

It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, because everybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to Durer’s house, which they found in a remote part of the town near a stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by the interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time they reached it.  The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and without being squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardly have been different in Durer’s time.  His dwelling, in no way impressive outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house.  It was cavernous and cold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid in the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German fashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple, neighborly existence there.  It in no wise suggested the calling of an artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer’s time to take themselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life of a prosperous citizen, and it expressed the period.

The Marches wrote their names in the visitors’ book, and paid the visitor’s fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for a reproduction of one of Durer’s pictures; and then they came away, by no means dissatisfied with his house.  By its association with his sojourns in Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that it was really no worse than Ariosto’s house at Ferrara, or Petrarch’s at Arqua, or Michelangelo’s at Florence.  “But what I admire,” he said, “is our futility in going to see it.  We expected to surprise some quality of the man left lying about in the house because he lived and died in it; and because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked him so hard to save his widow from coming to want.”

“Who said she did that?”

“A friend of his who hated her.  But he had to allow that she was a God-fearing woman, and had a New England conscience.”

“Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going.”

“Yes; but I don’t like her laying her plans to survive him; though women always do that.”

They were going away the next day, and they sat down that evening to a final supper in such good-humor with themselves that they were willing to include a young couple who came to take places at their table, though they would rather have been alone.  They lifted their eyes for their expected salutation, and recognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the Norumbia.