hat
he was a railway architect, employed by the government on that line of
road, and was travelling officially. March spoke of Nuremberg; he owned
the sort of surfeit he had suffered from its excessive mediaevalism, and
the young man said it was part of the new imperial patriotism to
cherish the Gothic throughout Germany; no other sort of architecture
was permitted in Nuremberg. But they would find enough classicism at
Ansbach, he promised them, and he entered with sympathetic intelligence
into their wish to see this former capital when March told him they were
going to stop there, in hopes of something typical of the old disjointed
Germany of the petty principalities, the little paternal despotisms now
extinct.

As they talked on, partly in German and partly in English, their purpose
in visiting Ansbach appeared to the Marches more meditated than it was.
In fact it was somewhat accidental; Ansbach was near Nuremberg; it was
not much out of the way to Holland. They took more and more credit to
themselves for a reasoned and definite motive, in the light of their
companion's enthusiasm for the place, and its charm began for them with
the drive from the station through streets whose sentiment was both
Italian and French, and where there was a yellowish cast in the gray
of the architecture which was almost Mantuan. They rested their
sensibilities, so bruised and fretted by Gothic angles and points,
against the smooth surfaces of the prevailing classicistic facades of
the houses as they passed, and when they arrived at their hotel, an old
mansion of Versailles type, fronting on a long irregular square planted
with pollard sycamores, they said that it might as well have been Lucca.

The archway and stairway of the hotel were draped with the Bavarian
colors, and they were obscurely flattered to learn that Prince Leopold,
the brother of the Prince-Regent of the kingdom, had taken rooms there,
on his way to the manoeuvres at Nuremberg, and was momently expected
with his suite. They realized that they were not of the princely
party, however, when they were told that he had sole possession of the
dining-room, and they went out to another hotel, and had their supper in
keeping delightfully native. People seemed to come there to write their
letters and make up their accounts, as well as to eat their suppers;
they called for stationery like characters in old comedy, and the
clatter of crockery and the scratching of pens went on toge