As a moralist March was flattered to be hoist with his own petard, but as a husband he was not going to come down at once.  “I thought probably you had told her that.  You had it pat from having just been over it with me.  When has she heard from him?”

“Why, that’s the strangest thing about it.  She hasn’t heard at all.  She doesn’t know where he is.  She thought we must know.  She was terribly broken up.”

“How did she show it?”

“She didn’t show it.  Either you want to tease, or you’ve forgotten how such things are with young people—­or at least girls.”

“Yes, it’s all a long time ago with me, and I never was a girl.  Besides, the frank and direct behavior of Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been very obliterating to my early impressions of love-making.”

“It certainly hasn’t been ideal,” said Mrs. March with a sigh.

“Why hasn’t it been ideal?” he asked.  “Kenby is tremendously in love with her; and I believe she’s had a fancy for him from the beginning.  If it hadn’t been for Rose she would have accepted him at once; and now he’s essential to them both in their helplessness.  As for Papa Triscoe and his Europeanized scruples, if they have any reality at all they’re the residuum of his personal resentment, and Kenby and Mrs. Adding have nothing to do with their unreality.  His being in love with her is no reason why he shouldn’t be helpful to her when she needs him, and every reason why he should.  I call it a poem, such as very few people have the luck to live out together.”

Mrs. March listened with mounting fervor, and when he stopped, she cried out, “Well, my dear, I do believe you are right!  It is ideal, as you say; it’s a perfect poem.  And I shall always say—­”

She stopped at the mocking light which she caught in his look, and perceived that he had been amusing himself with her perennial enthusiasm for all sorts of love-affairs.  But she averred that she did not care; what he had said was true, and she should always hold him to it.

They were again in the wedding-journey sentiment in which they had left Carlsbad, when they found themselves alone together after their escape from the pressure of others’ interests.  The tide of travel was towards Frankfort, where the grand parade was to take place some days later.  They were going to Weimar, which was so few hours out of their way that they simply must not miss it; and all the way to the old literary capital they were alone in their compartment, with not even a stranger, much less a friend to molest them.  The flying landscape without was of their own early autumnal mood, and when the vineyards of Wurzburg ceased to purple it, the heavy after-math of hay and clover, which men, women, and children were loading on heavy wains, and driving from the meadows everywhere, offered a pastoral and pleasing change.  It was always the German landscape; sometimes flat and fertile, sometimes hilly and poor; often clothed with dense woods, but always charming, with castled tops in ruin or repair, and with levels where Gothic villages drowsed within their walls, and dreamed of the mediaeval past, silent, without apparent life, except for some little goose-girl driving her flock before her as she sallied out into the nineteenth century in search of fresh pasturage.