“It would hide them, at any rate,” he answered.  “They would sink back into the great mass of our vulgarity, and not be noticed.  We behave like a parcel of peasants with our women.  We think that if no harm is meant or thought, we may risk any sort of appearance, and we do things that are scandalously improper simply because they are innocent.  That may be all very well at home, but people who prefer that sort of thing had better stay there, where our peasant manners won’t make them conspicuous.”

As their train ran northward out of Wurzburg that afternoon, Mrs. March recurred to the general’s closing words.  “That was a slap at Mrs. Adding for letting Kenby go off with her.”

She took up the history of the past twenty-four hours, from the time March had left her with Miss Triscoe when he went with her father and the Addings and Kenby to see that church.  She had had no chance to bring up these arrears until now, and she atoned to herself for the delay by making the history very full, and going back and adding touches at any point where she thought she had scanted it.  After all, it consisted mainly of fragmentary intimations from Miss Triscoe and of half-uttered questions which her own art now built into a coherent statement.

March could not find that the general had much resented Burnamy’s clandestine visit to Carlsbad when his daughter told him of it, or that he had done more than make her promise that she would not keep up the acquaintance upon any terms unknown to him.

“Probably,” Mrs. March said, “as long as he had any hopes of Mrs. Adding, he was a little too self-conscious to be very up and down about Burnamy.”

“Then you think he was really serious about her?”

“Now my dear!  He was so serious that I suppose he was never so completely taken aback in his life as when he met Kenby in Wurzburg and saw how she received him.  Of course, that put an end to the fight.”

“The fight?”

“Yes—­that Mrs. Adding and Agatha were keeping up to prevent his offering himself.”

“Oh!  And how do you know that they were keeping up the fight together?”

“How do I?  Didn’t you see yourself what friends they were?  Did you tell him what Stoller had, said about Burnamy?”

“I had no chance.  I don’t know that I should have done it, anyway.  It wasn’t my affair.”

“Well, then, I think you might.  It would have been everything for that poor child; it would have completely justified her in her own eyes.”

“Perhaps your telling her will serve the same purpose.”

“Yes, I did tell her, and I am glad of it.  She had a right to know it.”

“Did she think Stoller’s willingness to overlook Burnamy’s performance had anything to do with its moral quality?”

Mrs. March was daunted for the moment, but she said, “I told her you thought that if a person owned to a fault they disowned it, and put it away from them just as if it had never been committed; and that if a person had taken their punishment for a wrong they had done, they had expiated it so far as anybody else was concerned.  And hasn’t poor Burnamy done both?”