“I see what you mean.  But do you think it’s as sacred to us as it would have been twenty-five years ago?  I had an irreverent feeling now and then that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg.”

“Oh, yes; so had I. We’re that modern, if we’re not so young as we were.”

“We were very simple, in those days.”

“Well, if we were simple, we knew it!”

“Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking at it.”

“We had a good time.”

“Too good.  Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it had not been so good.  We might have our cake now if we hadn’t eaten it.”

“It would be mouldy, though.”

“I wonder,” he said, recurring to the Lefferses; “how we really struck them.”

“Well, I don’t believe they thought we ought to be travelling about alone, quite, at our age.”

“Oh, not so bad as that!” After a moment he said, “I dare say they don’t go round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did.”

“Indeed they do!  They had an awful quarrel just before they got to Nuremberg:  about his wanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool by express that she wanted to keep with them.  But she said it had been a lesson, and they were never going to quarrel again.”  The elders looked at each other in the light of experience, and laughed.  “Well,” she ended, “that’s one thing we’re through with.  I suppose we’ve come to feel more alike than we used to.”

“Or not to feel at all.  How did they settle it about the baggage?”

“Oh!  He insisted on her keeping it with her.”  March laughed again, but this time he laughed alone, and after a while she said:  “Well, they gave just the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean American philistinism.  I don’t mind their thinking us queer; they must have thought Nuremberg was queer.”

“Yes.  We oldsters are always queer to the young.  We’re either ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we’re ridiculously stiff and grim; they never expect to be like us, and wouldn’t, for the world.  The worst of it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don’t, at the bottom of our hearts, believe we’re like that, when we meet.  I suppose that arrogant old ass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard.”

“I wonder,” said Mrs. March, “if she’s told him yet,” and March perceived that she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic introspection; but he had no difficulty in following her.

“She’s had time enough.  But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her.”

“Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back in that way.  I know she is dead in love with him; but she could only have accepted him conditionally.”

“Conditionally to his making it all right with Stoller?”

“Stoller?  No!  To her father’s liking it.”

“Ah, that’s quite as hard.  What makes you think she accepted him at all?”