Mrs. March would not take his arm when they came out.  “Now, that is what I never can get used to in you, Basil, and I’ve tried to palliate it for twenty-seven years.  You know you won’t look up that poor woman’s son!  Why did you let her think you would?”

“How could I tell her I wouldn’t?  Perhaps I shall.”

“No, no!  You never will.  I know you’re good and kind, and that’s why I can’t understand your being so cruel.  When we get back, how will you ever find time to go over to Jersey City?”

He could not tell, but at last he said:  “I’ll tell you what!  You must keep me up to it.  You know how much you enjoy making me do my duty, and this will be such a pleasure!”

She laughed forlornly, but after a moment she took his arm; and he began, from the example of this good mother, to philosophize the continuous simplicity and sanity of the people of Ansbach under all their civic changes.  Saints and soldiers, knights and barons, margraves, princes, kings, emperors, had come and gone, and left their single-hearted, friendly subjectfolk pretty much what they found them.  The people had suffered and survived through a thousand wars, and apparently prospered on under all governments and misgovernments.  When the court was most French, most artificial, most vicious, the citizen life must have remained immutably German, dull, and kind.  After all, he said, humanity seemed everywhere to be pretty safe, and pretty much the same.

“Yes, that is all very well,” she returned, “and you can theorize interestingly enough; but I’m afraid that poor mother, there, had no more reality for you than those people in the past.  You appreciate her as a type, and you don’t care for her as a human being.  You’re nothing but a dreamer, after all.  I don’t blame you,” she went on.  “It’s your temperament, and you can’t change, now.”

“I may change for the worse,” he threatened.  “I think I have, already.  I don’t believe I could stand up to Dryfoos, now, as I did for poor old Lindau, when I risked your bread and butter for his.  I look back in wonder and admiration at myself.  I’ve steadily lost touch with life since then.  I’m a trifler, a dilettante, and an amateur of the right and the good as I used to be when I was young.  Oh, I have the grace to be troubled at times, now, and once I never was.  It never occurred to me then that the world wasn’t made to interest me, or at the best to instruct me, but it does, now, at times.”

She always came to his defence when he accused himself; it was the best ground he could take with her.  “I think you behaved very well with Burnamy.  You did your duty then.”

“Did I?  I’m not so sure.  At any rate, it’s the last time I shall do it.  I’ve served my term.  I think I should tell him that he was all right in that business with Stoller, if I were to meet him, now.”

“Isn’t it strange,” she said, provisionally, “that we don’t come upon a trace of him anywhere in Ansbach?”