“I don’t know how you mean,” said the girl, keeping vigorously up with him; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not have his hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it.

“I don’t believe I can quite make it out myself.  But fancy a man that began to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the past experience of the whole race—­”

“He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn’t he?”

“Rather monstrous, yes,” he owned, with a laugh.  “But that’s where the psychological interest would come in.”

As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it.  “I suppose you’ve been writing all sorts of things since you came here.”

“Well, it hasn’t been such a great while as it’s seemed, and I’ve had Mr. Stoller’s psychological interests to look after.”

“Oh, yes!  Do you like him?”

“I don’t know.  He’s a lump of honest selfishness.  He isn’t bad.  You know where to have him.  He’s simple, too.”

“You mean, like Mr. March?”

“I didn’t mean that; but why not?  They’re not of the same generation, but Stoller isn’t modern.”

“I’m very curious to see him,” said the girl.

“Do you want me to introduce him?”

“You can introduce him to papa.”

They stopped and looked across the curve of the mounting path, down on March, who had sunk on a way-side seat, and was mopping his forehead.  He saw them, and called up:  “Don’t wait for me.  I’ll join you, gradually.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” Burnamy called back, but he kept on with Miss Triscoe.  “I want to get the Hirschensprung in,” he explained.  “It’s the cliff where a hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet to get away from an emperor who was after him.”

“Oh, yes.  They have them everywhere.”

“Do they?  Well, anyway, there’s a noble view up there.”

There was no view on the way up.  The Germans’ notion of a woodland is everywhere that of a dense forest such as their barbarous tribes primevally herded in.  It means the close-set stems of trees, with their tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely that you may walk dry through it almost as long as a German shower lasts.  When the sun shines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here and there with the gold that trickles through.  There is nothing of the accident of an American wood in these forests, which have been watched and weeded by man ever since they burst the soil.  They remain nurseries, but they have the charm which no human care can alienate.  The smell of their bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth about their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his country-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life in cities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests and dimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of exemption from care.  There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation; no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and was less intrusive than if he had not been there.