He asked leave of the strangers in his German, and they consented in theirs; but he could not master the secret of the window-catch, and the elder lady said in English, “Let me show you,” and came to his help.

The occasion for explaining that they were Americans and accustomed to different car windows was so tempting that Mrs. March could not forbear, and the other ladies were affected as deeply as she could wish.  Perhaps they were the more affected because it presently appeared that they had cousins in New York whom she knew of, and that they were acquainted with an American family that had passed the winter in Berlin.  Life likes to do these things handsomely, and it easily turned out that this was a family of intimate friendship with the Marches; the names, familiarly spoken, abolished all strangeness between the travellers; and they entered into a comparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences, from which it seemed that the objects and interests of cultivated people in Berlin were quite the same as those of cultivated people in New York.  Each of the parties to the discovery disclaimed any superiority for their respective civilizations; they wished rather to ascribe a greater charm and virtue to the alien conditions; and they acquired such merit with one another that when the German ladies got out of the train at Franzensbad, the mother offered Mrs. March an ingenious folding footstool which she had admired.  In fact, she left her with it clasped to her breast, and bowing speechless toward the giver in a vain wish to express her gratitude.

“That was very pretty of her, my dear,” said March.  “You couldn’t have done that.”

“No,” she confessed; “I shouldn’t have had the courage.  The courage of my emotions,” she added, thoughtfully.

“Ah, that’s the difference!  A Berliner could do it, and a Bostonian couldn’t.  Do you think it so much better to have the courage of your convictions?”

“I don’t know.  It seems to me that I’m less and less certain of everything that I used to be sure of.”

He laughed, and then he said, “I was thinking how, on our wedding journey, long ago, that Gray Sister at the Hotel Dieu in Quebec offered you a rose.”

“Well?”

“That was to your pretty youth.  Now the gracious stranger gives you a folding stool.”

“To rest my poor old feet.  Well, I would rather have it than a rose, now.”

“You bent toward her at just the slant you had when you took the flower that time; I noticed it.  I didn’t see that you looked so very different.  To be sure the roses in your cheeks have turned into rosettes; but rosettes are very nice, and they’re much more permanent; I prefer them; they will keep in any climate.”

She suffered his mockery with an appreciative sigh.  “Yes, our age caricatures our youth, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t think it gets much fun out of it,” he assented.

“No; but it can’t help it.  I used to rebel against it when it first began.  I did enjoy being young.”