The morning had been bright and warm, and it was just that the afternoon should be dim and cold, with a pale sun looking through a September mist, which seemed to deepen the seclusion and silence of the forest reaches; for the park was really a forest of the German sort, as parks are apt to be in Germany.  But it was beautiful, and they strayed through it, and sometimes sat down on the benches in its damp shadows, and said how much seemed to be done in Germany for the people’s comfort and pleasure.  In what was their own explicitly, as well as what was tacitly theirs, they were not so restricted as we were at home, and especially the children seemed made fondly and lovingly free of all public things.  The Marches met troops of them in the forest, as they strolled slowly back by the winding Dussel to the gardened avenue leading to the park, and they found them everywhere gay and joyful.  But their elders seemed subdued, and were silent.  The strangers heard no sound of laughter in the streets of Dusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the part of a very old couple, whose meeting they witnessed and who grinned and cackled at each other like two children as they shook hands.  Perhaps they were indeed children of that sad second childhood which one would rather not blossom back into.

In America, life is yet a joke with us, even when it is grotesque and shameful, as it so often is; for we think we can make it right when we choose.  But there is no joking in Germany, between the first and second childhoods, unless behind closed doors.  Even there, people do not joke above their breath about kings and emperors.  If they joke about them in print, they take out their laugh in jail, for the press laws are severely enforced, and the prisons are full of able editors, serious as well as comic.  Lese-majesty is a crime that searches sinners out in every walk of life, and it is said that in family jars a husband sometimes has the last word of his wife by accusing her of blaspheming the sovereign, and so having her silenced for three months at least behind penitential bars.

“Think,” said March, “how simply I could adjust any differences of opinion between us in Dusseldorf.”

“Don’t!” his wife implored with a burst of feeling which surprised him.  “I want to go home!”

They had been talking over their day, and planning their journey to Holland for the morrow, when it came to this outburst from her in the last half-hour before bed which they sat prolonging beside their stove.

“What!  And not go to Holland?  What is to become of my after-cure?”

“Oh, it’s too late for that, now.  We’ve used up the month running about, and tiring ourselves to death.  I should like to rest a week—­to get into my berth on the Norumbia and rest!”

“I guess the September gales would have something to say about that.”

“I would risk the September gales.”

LXXII.