“You are leaving us very little to find out for ourselves,” sighed March.

“Oh, I know a lot more things.  Are you fond of fishing?”

“Not very.”

“You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl, but they send an official with you who keeps count, and when you have had your sport, the trout belong to the municipality just as they did before you caught them.”

“I don’t see why that isn’t a good notion:  the last thing I should want to do would be to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I was personally acquainted with.  Well, I’m never going away from Carlsbad.  I don’t wonder people get their doctors to tell them to come back.”

Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller had got together about the place, and had given him to put in shape.  It was run in the interest of people who had got out of order, so that they would keep coming to get themselves in order again; you could hardly buy an unwholesome meal in the town; all the cooking was ‘kurgemass’.  He won such favor with his facts that he could not stop in time:  he said to March, “But if you ever should have a fancy for a fish of your personal acquaintance, there’s a restaurant up the Tepl, where they let you pick out your trout in the water; then they catch him and broil him for you, and you know what you are eating.”

“Is it a municipal restaurant?”

“Semi-municipal,” said Burnamy, laughing.

“We’ll take Mrs. March,” said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamy felt the limitations of a woman’s sense of humor, which always define themselves for men so unexpectedly.

He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her what he knew about distinctions and dignities that he now saw among the breakfasters.  The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were set together in such labyrinths that any one who left the central aisle was lost in them.  The serving-girls ran more swiftly to and fro, responding with a more nervous shrillness to the calls of “Fraulein!  Fraulein!” that followed them.  The proprietor, in his bare head, stood like one paralyzed by his prosperity, which sent up all round him the clash of knives and crockery, and the confusion of tongues.  It was more than an hour before Burnamy caught Lili’s eye, and three times she promised to come and be paid before she came.  Then she said, “It is so nice, when you stay a little,” and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who had broken the dishes in her fall near them, she almost wept with tenderness; she almost winked with wickedness when he asked if the American princess was still in her place.

“Do go and see who it can be!” Mrs. March entreated.  “We’ll wait here,” and he obeyed.  “I am not sure that I like him,” she said, as soon as he was out of hearing.  “I don’t know but he’s coarse, after all.  Do you approve of his knowing so many people’s ‘taches’ already?”

“Would it be any better later?” he asked in tern.  “He seemed to find you interested.”