She then said that she was a German teacher of English, in Hamburg, and was going home to Potsdam for a visit.  She seemed like a German girl out of ‘The Initials’, and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried to invest herself with some romantic interest as an American.  She failed to move the girl’s fancy, even after she had bestowed on her an immense bunch of roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had sent to them just before they left their hotel.  She failed, later, on the same ground with the pleasant-looking English woman who got into their carriage at Magdeburg, and talked over the ‘London Illustrated News’ with an English-speaking Fraulein in her company; she readily accepted the fact of Mrs. March’s nationality, but found nothing wonderful in it, apparently; and when she left the train she left Mrs. March to recall with fond regret the old days in Italy when she first came abroad, and could make a whole carriage full of Italians break into ohs and ahs by saying that she was an American, and telling how far she had come across the sea.

“Yes,” March assented, “but that was a great while ago, and Americans were much rarer than they are now in Europe.  The Italians are so much more sympathetic than the Germans and English, and they saw that you wanted to impress them.  Heaven knows how little they cared!  And then, you were a very pretty young girl in those days; or at least I thought so.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “and now I’m a plain old woman.”

“Oh, not quite so bad as that.”

“Yes, I am!  Do you think they would have cared more if it had been Miss Triscoe?”

“Not so much as if it had been the pivotal girl.  They would have found her much more their ideal of the American woman; and even she would have had to have been here thirty years ago.”

She laughed a little ruefully.  “Well, at any rate, I should like to know how Miss Triscoe would have affected them.”

“I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is living here with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank.  I could imagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the way she clung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of the royalties to her friend.  There is romance for you!”

They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours’ journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up through the academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and silent except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their feline purr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul.  A sense of the past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and the head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to the endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms in the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found themselves in great comfort, with electric lights