“I don’t know,” she returned.  “I think we reduce ourselves to the bare bones too much.  I wish we didn’t always recognize the facts as we do.  Sometimes I should like to blink them.  I should like to think I was devouter than I am, and younger and prettier.”

“Better not; you couldn’t keep it up.  Honesty is the best policy even in such things.”

“No; I don’t like it, Basil.  I should rather wait till the last day for some of my motives to come to the top.  I know they’re always mixed, but do let me give them the benefit of a doubt sometimes.”

“Well, well, have it your own way, my dear.  But I prefer not to lay up so many disagreeable surprises for myself at that time.”

She would not consent.  “I know I am a good deal younger than I was.  I feel quite in the mood of that morning when we walked down Broadway on our wedding journey.  Don’t you?”

“Oh yes.  But I know I’m not younger; I’m only prettier.”

She laughed for pleasure in his joke, and also for unconscious joy in the gay New York weather, in which there was no ‘arriere pensee’ of the east wind.  They had crossed Broadway, and were walking over to Washington Square, in the region of which they now hoped to place themselves.  The ‘primo tenore’ statue of Garibaldi had already taken possession of the place in the name of Latin progress, and they met Italian faces, French faces, Spanish faces, as they strolled over the asphalt walks, under the thinning shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores.  They met the familiar picturesque raggedness of Southern Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow it existed for their appreciation, and that it found adequate compensation for poverty in this.  March thought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathy in sitting down on one of the iron benches with his wife and letting a little Neapolitan put a superfluous shine on his boots, while their desultory comment wandered with equal esteem to the old-fashioned American respectability which keeps the north side of the square in vast mansions of red brick, and the international shabbiness which has invaded the southern border, and broken it up into lodging-houses, shops, beer-gardens, and studios.

They noticed the sign of an apartment to let on the north side, and as soon as the little bootblack could be bought off they went over to look at it.  The janitor met them at the door and examined them.  Then he said, as if still in doubt, “It has ten rooms, and the rent is twenty-eight hundred dollars.”

“It wouldn’t do, then,” March replied, and left him to divide the responsibility between the paucity of the rooms and the enormity of the rent as he best might.  But their self-love had received a wound, and they questioned each other what it was in their appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much.

“Of course, we don’t look like New-Yorkers,” sighed Mrs. March, “and we’ve walked through the Square.  That might be as if we had walked along the Park Street mall in the Common before we came out on Beacon.  Do you suppose he could have seen you getting your boots blacked in that way?”