as it would
have been twenty-five years ago? I had an irreverent feeling now and
then that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg."

"Oh, yes; so had I. We're that modern, if we're not so young as we
were."

"We were very simple, in those days."

"Well, if we were simple, we knew it!"

"Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking
at it."

"We had a good time."

"Too good. Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it
had not been so good. We might have our cake now if we hadn't eaten it."

"It would be mouldy, though."

"I wonder," he said, recurring to the Lefferses; "how we really struck
them."

"Well, I don't believe they thought we ought to be travelling about
alone, quite, at our age."

"Oh, not so bad as that!" After a moment he said, "I dare say they don't
go round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did."

"Indeed they do! They had an awful quarrel just before they got to
Nuremberg: about his wanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool
by express that she wanted to keep with them. But she said it had been
a lesson, and they were never going to quarrel again." The elders looked
at each other in the light of experience, and laughed. "Well," she
ended, "that's one thing we're through with. I suppose we've come to
feel more alike than we used to."

"Or not to feel at all. How did they settle it about the baggage?"

"Oh! He insisted on her keeping it with her." March laughed again, but
this time he laughed alone, and after a while she said: "Well, they
gave just the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean American
philistinism. I don't mind their thinking us queer; they must have
thought Nuremberg was queer."

"Yes. We oldsters are always queer to the young. We're either
ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we're ridiculously stiff and grim;
they never expect to be like us, and wouldn't, for the world. The worst
of it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don't, at the
bottom of our hearts, believe we're like that, when we meet. I suppose
that arrogant old ass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard."

"I wonder," said Mrs. March, "if she's told him yet," and March
perceived that she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic
introspection; but he had no difficulty in following her.

"She's had time enough. But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her."

"Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for