ther; and
fortune offered the Marches a delicate reparation for their exclusion
from their own hotel in the cold popular reception of the prince which
they got back just in time to witness. A very small group of people,
mostly women and boys, had gathered to see him arrive, but there was no
cheering or any sign of public interest. Perhaps he personally merited
none; he looked a dull, sad man, with his plain, stubbed features; and
after he had mounted to his apartment, the officers of his staff stood
quite across the landing, and barred the passage of the Americans,
ignoring even Mrs. March's presence, as they talked together.

"Well, my dear," said her husband, "here you have it at last. This is
what you've been living for, ever since we came to Germany. It's a great
moment."

"Yes. What are you going to do?"

"Who? I? Oh, nothing! This is your affair; it's for you to act."

If she had been young, she might have withered them with a glance; she
doubted now if her dim eyes would have any such power; but she advanced
steadily upon them, and then the officers seemed aware of her, and stood
aside.

March always insisted that they stood aside apologetically, but she
held as firmly that they stood aside impertinently, or at least
indifferently, and that the insult to her American womanhood was
perfectly ideal. It is true that nothing of the kind happened again
during their stay at the hotel; the prince's officers were afterwards
about in the corridors and on the stairs, but they offered no shadow of
obstruction to her going and coming, and the landlord himself was not so
preoccupied with his highhotes but he had time to express his grief that
she had been obliged to go out for supper.

They satisfied the passion for the little obsolete capital which had
been growing upon them by strolling past the old Resident at an hour so
favorable for a first impression. It loomed in the gathering dusk even
vaster than it was, and it was really vast enough for the pride of a
King of France, much more a Margrave of Ansbach. Time had blackened and
blotched its coarse limestone walls to one complexion with the statues
swelling and strutting in the figure of Roman legionaries before it, and
standing out against the evening sky along its balustraded roof, and
had softened to the right tint the stretch of half a dozen houses with
mansard roofs and renaissance facades obsequiously in keeping with
the Versailles ideal of a Resident. In the