housand wars, and
apparently prospered on under all governments and misgovernments. When
the court was most French, most artificial, most vicious, the citizen
life must have remained immutably German, dull, and kind. After all, he
said, humanity seemed everywhere to be pretty safe, and pretty much the
same.

"Yes, that is all very well," she returned, "and you can theorize
interestingly enough; but I'm afraid that poor mother, there, had no
more reality for you than those people in the past. You appreciate her
as a type, and you don't care for her as a human being. You're nothing
but a dreamer, after all. I don't blame you," she went on. "It's your
temperament, and you can't change, now."

"I may change for the worse," he threatened. "I think I have, already.
I don't believe I could stand up to Dryfoos, now, as I did for poor
old Lindau, when I risked your bread and butter for his. I look back
in wonder and admiration at myself. I've steadily lost touch with life
since then. I'm a trifler, a dilettante, and an amateur of the right and
the good as I used to be when I was young. Oh, I have the grace to be
troubled at times, now, and once I never was. It never occurred to
me then that the world wasn't made to interest me, or at the best to
instruct me, but it does, now, at times."

She always came to his defence when he accused himself; it was the
best ground he could take with her. "I think you behaved very well with
Burnamy. You did your duty then."

"Did I? I'm not so sure. At any rate, it's the last time I shall do it.
I've served my term. I think I should tell him that he was all right in
that business with Stoller, if I were to meet him, now."

"Isn't it strange," she said, provisionally, "that we don't come upon a
trace of him anywhere in Ansbach?"

"Ah, you've been hoping he would turn up!"

"Yes. I don't deny it. I feel very unhappy about him."

"I don't. He's too much like me. He would have been quite capable of
promising that poor woman to look up her son in Jersey City. When I
think of that, I have no patience with Burnamy."

"I am going to ask the landlord about him, now he's got rid of his
highhotes," said Mrs. March.

XLIX.

They went home to their hotel for their midday dinner, and to the
comfort of having it nearly all to themselves. Prince Leopold had risen
early, like all the hard-working potentates of the continent, and got
away to the manoeuvres somewhere at six o'clock; the decorat