Residenz out of sight.
The same hollow groans of Ho-o-o-ch greeted and followed them from the
spectators as had welcomed the Regent when he first arrived among his
fellow-townsmen, with the same effect of being the conventional cries of
a stage mob behind the scenes.

The Emperor was like most of his innumerable pictures, with a swarthy
face from which his blue eyes glanced pleasantly; he looked good-humored
if not good-natured; the Empress smiled amiably beneath her deeply
fringed white parasol, and they both bowed right and left in
acknowledgment of those hollow groans; but again it seemed, to March
that sovereignty, gave the popular curiosity, not to call it devotion, a
scantier return than it merited. He had perhaps been insensibly working
toward some such perception as now came to him that the great difference
between Europe and America was that in Europe life is histrionic
and dramatized, and that in America, except when it is trying to be
European, it is direct and sincere. He wondered whether the innate
conviction of equality, the deep, underlying sense of a common humanity
transcending all social and civic pretences, was what gave their
theatrical effect to the shows of deference from low to high, and of
condescension from high to low. If in such encounters of sovereigns and
subjects, the prince did not play his part so well as the people, it
might be that he had a harder part to play, and that to support
his dignity at all, to keep from being found out the sham that he
essentially was, he had to hurry across the stage amidst the distracting
thunders of the orchestra. If the star staid to be scrutinized by the
soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poor supernumeraries and
scene-shifters might see that he was a tallow candle like themselves.

In the censorious mood induced by the reflection that he had waited an
hour and a half for half a minute's glimpse of the imperial party, March
now decided not to go to the manoeuvres, where he might be subjected to
still greater humiliation and disappointment. He had certainly come to
Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, but Wurzburg had been richly repaying in
itself; and why should he stifle half an hour in an overcrowded train,
and struggle for three miles on foot against that harsh wind, to see a
multitude of men give proofs of their fitness to do manifold murder? He
was, in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and the only thing
that really troubled him was the qu