Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage, and went to visit the palace of the prince-bishops who had so well known how to make the heavenly take the image and superscription of the worldly; and they were jointly indignant to find it shut against the public in preparation for the imperialities and royalties coming to occupy it.  They were in time for the noon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that the way the retiring squad kicked their legs out in the high martial step of the German soldiers was a perfect expression of the insolent militarism of their empire, and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven that one was an American and a republican.  She softened a little toward their system when it proved that the garden of the palace was still open, and yet more when she sank down upon a bench between two marble groups representing the Rape of Proserpine and the Rape of Europa.  They stood each in a gravelled plot, thickly overrun by a growth of ivy, and the vine climbed the white naked limbs of the nymphs, who were present on a pretence of gathering flowers, but really to pose at the spectators, and clad them to the waist and shoulders with an effect of modesty never meant by the sculptor, but not displeasing.  There was an old fountain near, its stone rim and centre of rock-work green with immemorial mould, and its basin quivering between its water-plants under the soft fall of spray.  At a waft of fitful breeze some leaves of early autumn fell from the trees overhead upon the elderly pair where they sat, and a little company of sparrows came and hopped about their feet.  Though the square without was so all astir with festive expectation, there were few people in the garden; three or four peasant women in densely fluted white skirts and red aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Europa and at the Proserpine.

It was a precious moment in which the charm of the city’s past seemed to culminate, and they were loath to break it by speech.

“Why didn’t we have something like all this on our first wedding journey?” she sighed at last.  “To think of our battening from Boston to Niagara and back!  And how hard we tried to make something of Rochester and Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec!”

“Niagara wasn’t so bad,” he said, “and I will never go back on Quebec.”

“Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic, and Carlsbad and Nuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg!  Perhaps this is meant as a compensation for our lost youth.  But I can’t enjoy it as I could when I was young.  It’s wasted on my sere and yellow leaf.  I wish Burnamy and Miss Triscoe were here; I should like to try this garden on them.”

“They wouldn’t care for it,” he replied, and upon a daring impulse he added, “Kenby and Mrs. Adding might.”  If she took this suggestion in good part, he could tell her that Kenby was in Wurzburg.

“Don’t speak of them!  They’re in just that besotted early middle-age when life has settled into a self-satisfied present, with no past and no future; the most philistine, the most bourgeois, moment of existence.  Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation of all this goes.”  She rose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed him away in the impulsive fashion of her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balustraded terrace in the background which had tempted her.