They all came to the train when the Marches started up to London, and stood waving to them as they pulled out of the station.  “Well, I can’t see but that’s all right,” he said as he sank back in his seat with a sigh of relief.  “I never supposed we should get out of their marriage half so well, and I don’t feel that you quite made the match either, my dear.”

She was forced to agree with him that the Kenbys seemed happy together, and that there was nothing to fear for Rose in their happiness.  He would be as tenderly cared for by Kenby as he could have been by his mother, and far more judiciously.  She owned that she had trembled for him till she had seen them all together; and now she should never tremble again.

“Well?” March prompted, at a certain inconclusiveness in her tone rather than her words.

“Well, you can see that it, isn’t ideal.”

“Why isn’t it ideal?  I suppose you think that the marriage of Burnamy and Agatha Triscoe will be ideal, with their ignorances and inexperiences and illusions.”

“Yes!  It’s the illusions:  no marriage can be perfect without them, and at their age the Kenbys can’t have them.”

“Kenby is a solid mass of illusion.  And I believe that people can go and get as many new illusions as they want, whenever they’ve lost their old ones.”

“Yes, but the new illusions won’t wear so well; and in marriage you want illusions that will last.  No; you needn’t talk to me.  It’s all very well, but it isn’t ideal.”

March laughed.  “Ideal!  What is ideal?”

“Going home!” she said with such passion that he had not the heart to point out that they were merely returning to their old duties, cares and pains, with the worn-out illusion that these would be altogether different when they took them up again.

LXXIII.

In fulfilment of another ideal Mrs. March took straightway to her berth when she got on board the Cupania, and to her husband’s admiration she remained there till the day before they reached New York.  Her theory was that the complete rest would do more than anything else to calm her shaken nerves; and she did not admit into her calculations the chances of adverse weather which March would not suggest as probable in the last week in September.  The event justified her unconscious faith.  The ship’s run was of unparalled swiftness, even for the Cupania, and of unparalled smoothness.  For days the sea was as sleek as oil; the racks were never on the tables once; the voyage was of the sort which those who make it no more believe in at the time than those whom they afterwards weary in boasting of it.