nterpreter and the porters took their fees with a professional
effect of dissatisfaction, and he went to wait with his wife amidst the
smoking and eating and drinking in the restaurant. They burst through
with the rest when the doors were opened to the train, and followed a
glimpse of the porter with their hand-bags, as he ran down the platform,
still bent upon escaping them, and brought him to bay at last in a car
where he had got very good seats for them, and sank into their places,
hot and humiliated by their needless tumult.

As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect, and renewed a
youthful joy in some of the long-estranged facts. The road was rougher
than the roads at home; but for much less money they had the comfort,
without the unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-class
carriage. Mrs. March had expected to be used with the severity on the
imperial railroads which she had failed to experience from the military
on the Hamburg sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the whole
management toward her. Her fellow-travellers were not lavish of their
rights, as Americans are; what they got, that they kept; and in the run
from Hamburg to Leipsic she had several occasions to observe that no
German, however young or robust, dreams of offering a better place, if
he has one, to a lady in grace to her sex or age; if they got into a
carriage too late to secure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to
the end of that stage. But if they appealed to their fellow-travellers
for information about changes, or stops, or any of the little facts that
they wished to make sure of, they were enlightened past possibility of
error. At the point where they might have gone wrong the explanations
were renewed with a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had
not been forgotten. She said she could not see how any people could be
both so selfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of
saying something offensive:

"You women are so pampered in America that you are astonished when you
are treated in Europe like the mere human beings you are."

She answered with unexpected reasonableness:

"Yes, there's something in that; but when the Germans have taught us
how despicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as human
beings?"

This was at ten o'clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and
at last, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him. The
darkness had n