“Something like that.  I call it a very poetical idea,” she said with a sort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush.

“It isn’t so bad,” he admitted.  “How young we were, in those days!”

“Too young to know what a good time we were having,” she said, relaxing her doubt for the retrospect.  “I don’t feel as if I really saw Europe, then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple.  I would like to go, just to make sure that I had been.”  He was smiling again in the way he had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded, “What is it?”

“Nothing.  I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people who actually hadn’t been before—­carry them all through Europe, and let them see it in the old, simple-hearted American way.”

She shook her head.  “You couldn’t!  They’ve all been!”

“All but about sixty or seventy millions,” said March.

“Well, those are just the millions you don’t know, and couldn’t imagine.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“And even if you could imagine them, you couldn’t make them interesting.  All the interesting ones have been, anyway.”

“Some of the uninteresting ones too.  I used, to meet some of that sort over there.  I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with those that hadn’t been.”

“Then why not do it?  I know you could get something out of it.”

“It might be a good thing,” he mused, “to take a couple who had passed their whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go; and had a perfect famine for Europe all the time.  I could have them spend their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking up their accommodations.  I could have them sail, in imagination, and discover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions of it from travels and novels against a background of purely American experience.  We needn’t go abroad to manage that.  I think it would be rather nice.”

“I don’t think it would be nice in the least,” said Mrs. March, “and if you don’t want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all.”

“Well, then, let’s talk about our Silver Wedding Journey.”

“I see.  You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it.”

She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really silent.  He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to good-humor.  He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken and look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she refused.  When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she consented to go.

III.

He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took a hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fancied some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken.  To be sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the afternoon of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that invisible thread of association which drew him.