ion, 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."

"Well, then, let's talk about our Silver Wedding Journey."

"I see. You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it."

She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really
silent. He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to
good-humor. He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken and
look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she
refused. When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she
consented to go.

III.

He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took
a hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fancied
some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next
Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken. To
be sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the
afternoon of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that
invisible thread of association which drew him.

The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the
outward voyage, and was looking her best. She was tipped and edged
with shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and
white-painted as only a ship knows how to be. A little uniformed steward
ran before the visitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors
into typical state-rooms on the different decks; and then let them
verify their first impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and
the luxury of the ladies' parlor and music-room. March made his wife
observe that the tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so
carelessly scattered about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the
floor against rough weather; and he amused himself with the heavy German
browns and greens and coppers in the decorations, which he said must
have been studied in color from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the
effect of those large march-panes in the roof. She laughed with him at
the tastelessness of the race which they were destined to marvel at more
and more; but she made him own that the stewardesses whom the