They found Mrs. Adding with the Triscoes, and March saw nothing that was not merely friendly, or at the most fatherly, in the general’s behavior toward her.  If Mrs. Adding or Miss Triscoe saw more, they hid it in a guise of sisterly affection for each other.  At the most the general showed a gayety which one would not have expected of him under any conditions, and which the fact that he and Rose had kept each other awake a good deal the night before seemed so little adapted to call out.  He joked with Rose about their room and their beds, and put on a comradery with him that was not a perfect fit, and that suffered by contrast with the pleasure of the boy and Kenby in meeting.  There was a certain question in the attitude of Mrs. Adding till March helped Kenby to account for his presence; then she relaxed in an effect of security so tacit that words overstate it, and began to make fun of Rose.

March could not find that Miss Triscoe looked unhappy, as his wife had said; he thought simply that she had grown plainer; but when he reported this, she lost her patience with him.  In a girl, she said, plainness was unhappiness; and she wished to know when he would ever learn to look an inch below the surface:  She was sure that Agatha Triscoe had not heard from Burnamy since the Emperor’s birthday; that she was at swords’-points with her father, and so desperate that she did not care what became of her.

He had left Kenby with the others, and now, after his wife had talked herself tired of them all, he proposed going out again to look about the city, where there was nothing for the moment to remind them of the presence of their friends or even of their existence.  She answered that she was worrying about all those people, and trying to work out their problem for them.  He asked why she did not let them work it out themselves as they would have to do, after all her worry, and she said that where her sympathy had been excited she could not stop worrying, whether it did any good or not, and she could not respect any one who could drop things so completely out of his mind as he could; she had never been able to respect that in him.

“I know, my dear,” he assented.  “But I don’t think it’s a question of moral responsibility; it’s a question of mental structure, isn’t it?  Your consciousness isn’t built in thought-tight compartments, and one emotion goes all through it, and sinks you; but I simply close the doors and shut the emotion in, and keep on.”

The fancy pleased him so much that he worked it out in all its implications, and could not, after their long experience of each other, realize that she was not enjoying the joke too, till she said she saw that he merely wished to tease.  Then, too late, he tried to share her worry; but she protested that she was not worrying at all; that she cared nothing about those people:  that she was nervous, she was tired; and she wished he would leave her, and go out alone.