wives of young American business men always
do, and she was planning wisely for their travels. She recognized her
merit in this devotion with an artless candor, which was typical rather
than personal. March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little
stroll, and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who did not
let them go without making her husband promise to wrap up well, and not
get his feet wet. She made March promise not to take him far, and to
bring him back early, which he found himself very willing to do, after
an exchange of ideas with Mr. Leffers. The young man began to talk about
his wife, in her providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the
sort of man he was, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of
man he was, there was no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the
reading-room.

XLVII.

The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinner
the next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside
Mrs. March, who said, as soon as they were gone, "I believe I would
rather meet people of our own age after this. I used to think that you
could keep young by being with young people; but I don't, now. There
world is very different from ours. Our world doesn't really exist any
more, but as long as we keep away from theirs we needn't realize it.
Young people," she went on, "are more practical-minded than we used to
be; they're quite as sentimental; but I don't think they care so much
for the higher things. They're not so much brought up on poetry as we
were," she pursued. "That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow
in our time; but now she didn't know of his poem on Nuremberg; she
was intelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its
quaintness was not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred." Her tone
entreated him to find more meaning in her words than she had put into
them. "They couldn't have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and
that grassy, flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that
pile-up of the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with
their Gothic facades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow,
aguish-looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of
those overhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before
the churches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round
them!"

"I see what you mean. But do you think it's as sacred to us