“It isn’t so bad, being elderly,” he said.  “By that time we have accumulated enough past to sit down and really enjoy its associations.  We have got all sorts of perspectives and points of view.  We know where we are at.”

“I don’t mind being elderly.  The world’s just as amusing as ever, and lots of disagreeable things have dropped out.  It’s the getting more than elderly; it’s the getting old; and then—­”

They shrank a little closer together, and walked on in silence till he said, “Perhaps there’s something else, something better—­somewhere.”

They had reached the balustraded terrace, and were pausing for pleasure in the garden tops below, with the flowery spaces, and the statued fountains all coming together.  She put her hand on one of the fat little urchin-groups on the stone coping.  “I don’t want cherubs, when I can have these putti.  And those old prince-bishops didn’t, either!”

“I don’t suppose they kept a New England conscience,” he said, with a vague smile.  “It would be difficult in the presence of the rococo.”

They left the garden through the beautiful gate which the old court ironsmith Oegg hammered out in lovely forms of leaves and flowers, and shaped laterally upward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand, in gracious Louis Quinze curves; and they looked back at it in the kind of despair which any perfection inspires.  They said how feminine it was, how exotic, how expressive of a luxurious ideal of life which art had purified and left eternally charming.  They remembered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it; and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under a rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity.  The vast superb palace of the prince bishops, which was now to house a whole troop of sovereigns, imperial, royal, grand ducal and ducal, swelled aloft in superb amplitude; but it did not realize their historic pride so effectively as this exquisite work of the court ironsmith.  It related itself in its aerial beauty to that of the Tiepolo frescoes which the travellers knew were swimming and soaring on the ceilings within, and from which it seemed to accent their exclusion with a delicate irony, March said.  “Or iron-mongery,” he corrected himself upon reflection.

LIV.

He had forgotten Kenby in these aesthetic interests, but he remembered him again when he called a carriage, and ordered it driven to their hotel.  It was the hour of the German mid-day table d’hote, and they would be sure to meet him there.  The question now was how March should own his presence in time to prevent his wife from showing her ignorance of it to Kenby himself, and he was still turning the question hopelessly over in his mind when the sight of the hotel seemed to remind her of a fact which she announced.