As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect, and renewed a youthful joy in some of the long-estranged facts.  The road was rougher than the roads at home; but for much less money they had the comfort, without the unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-class carriage.  Mrs. March had expected to be used with the severity on the imperial railroads which she had failed to experience from the military on the Hamburg sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the whole management toward her.  Her fellow-travellers were not lavish of their rights, as Americans are; what they got, that they kept; and in the run from Hamburg to Leipsic she had several occasions to observe that no German, however young or robust, dreams of offering a better place, if he has one, to a lady in grace to her sex or age; if they got into a carriage too late to secure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to the end of that stage.  But if they appealed to their fellow-travellers for information about changes, or stops, or any of the little facts that they wished to make sure of, they were enlightened past possibility of error.  At the point where they might have gone wrong the explanations were renewed with a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had not been forgotten.  She said she could not see how any people could be both so selfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of saying something offensive: 

“You women are so pampered in America that you are astonished when you are treated in Europe like the mere human beings you are.”

She answered with unexpected reasonableness: 

“Yes, there’s something in that; but when the Germans have taught us how despicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as human beings?”

This was at ten o’clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and at last, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him.  The darkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impression of its few simple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense:  long levels, densely wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests, and checkered with fields of grain and grass, soaking under the thin rain that from time to time varied the thin sunshine.

The villages and peasants’ cottages were notably few; but there was here and there a classic or a gothic villa, which, at one point, an English-speaking young lady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain as the seat of some country gentleman; the land was in large holdings, and this accounted for the sparsity of villages and cottages.