“Oh, that’s the stalest kind of thing!”

“Well, but you could see it from a perfectly new point of view.  You could look at it as a sort of dispassionate witness, and treat it humorously—­of course it is ridiculous—­and do something entirely fresh.”

“It wouldn’t work.  It would be carrying water on both shoulders.  The fiction would kill the travel, the travel would kill the fiction; the love and the humor wouldn’t mingle any more than oil and vinegar.”

“Well, and what is better than a salad?”

“But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing to put it on.”  She was silent, and he yielded to another fancy.  “We might imagine coming upon our former selves over there, and travelling round with them—­a wedding journey ’en partie carree’.”

“Something like that.  I call it a very poetical idea,” she said with a sort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush.

“It isn’t so bad,” he admitted.  “How young we were, in those days!”

“Too young to know what a good time we were having,” she said, relaxing her doubt for the retrospect.  “I don’t feel as if I really saw Europe, then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple.  I would like to go, just to make sure that I had been.”  He was smiling again in the way he had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded, “What is it?”

“Nothing.  I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people who actually hadn’t been before—­carry them all through Europe, and let them see it in the old, simple-hearted American way.”

She shook her head.  “You couldn’t!  They’ve all been!”

“All but about sixty or seventy millions,” said March.

“Well, those are just the millions you don’t know, and couldn’t imagine.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“And even if you could imagine them, you couldn’t make them interesting.  All the interesting ones have been, anyway.”

“Some of the uninteresting ones too.  I used, to meet some of that sort over there.  I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with those that hadn’t been.”

“Then why not do it?  I know you could get something out of it.”

“It might be a good thing,” he mused, “to take a couple who had passed their whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go; and had a perfect famine for Europe all the time.  I could have them spend their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking up their accommodations.  I could have them sail, in imagination, and discover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions of it from travels and novels against a background of purely American experience.  We needn’t go abroad to manage that.  I think it would be rather nice.”

“I don’t think it would be nice in the least,” said Mrs. March, “and if you don’t want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all.”