“And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what will you say?” she cut in eagerly.

“I’ll say I don’t like the subject.  What am I in Carlsbad for?  I came for the cure, and I’m spending time and money on it.  I might as well go and take my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to listen to Kenby.”

“I know it’s bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people,” said Mrs. March.  “I don’t believe he’ll want to talk with you; but if—­”

“Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel?  I’m not going to have them round in my bread-trough!”

“She isn’t.  She’s at one of the hotels on the hill.”

“Very well, let her stay there, then.  They can manage their love-affairs in their own way.  The only one I care the least for is the boy.”

“Yes, it is forlorn for him.  But he likes Mr. Kenby, and—­No, it’s horrid, and you can’t make it anything else!”

“Well, I’m not trying to.”  He turned his face away.  “I must get my nap, now.”  After she thought he must have fallen asleep, he said, “The first thing you know, those old Eltwins will be coming round and telling us that they’re going to get divorced.”  Then he really slept.

XXXII.

The mid-day dinner at Pupp’s was the time to see the Carlsbad world, and the Marches had the habit of sitting long at table to watch it.

There was one family in whom they fancied a sort of literary quality, as if they had come out of some pleasant German story, but they never knew anything about them.  The father by his dress must have been a Protestant clergyman; the mother had been a beauty and was still very handsome; the daughter was good-looking, and of a good-breeding which was both girlish and ladylike.  They commended themselves by always taking the table d’hote dinner, as the Marches did, and eating through from the soup and the rank fresh-water fish to the sweet, upon the same principle:  the husband ate all the compote and gave the others his dessert, which was not good for him.  A young girl of a different fascination remained as much a mystery.  She was small and of an extreme tenuity, which became more bewildering as she advanced through her meal, especially at supper, which she made of a long cucumber pickle, a Frankfort sausage of twice the pickle’s length, and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she held a shivering little hound; she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly maid, and had every effect of being a gracious Fraulein.  A curious contrast to her Teutonic voracity was the temperance of a young Latin swell, imaginably from Trieste, who sat long over his small coffee and cigarette, and tranquilly mused upon the pages of an Italian newspaper.  At another table there was a very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing draperies of white, who commanded a sallow family of South-Americans, and loudly harangued them in South-American Spanish; she flared out in a picture which nowhere lacked strong effects; and in her background lurked a mysterious black face and figure, ironically subservient to the old man, the mild boy, and the pretty young girl in the middle distance of the family group.