ng
them away.

"It would hide them, at any rate," he answered. "They would sink back
into the great mass of our vulgarity, and not be noticed. We behave like
a parcel of peasants with our women. We think that if no harm is meant
or thought, we may risk any sort of appearance, and we do things that
are scandalously improper simply because they are innocent. That may
be all very well at home, but people who prefer that sort of thing
had better stay there, where our peasant manners won't make them
conspicuous."

As their train ran northward out of Wurzburg that afternoon, Mrs. March
recurred to the general's closing words. "That was a slap at Mrs. Adding
for letting Kenby go off with her."

She took up the history of the past twenty-four hours, from the time
March had left her with Miss Triscoe when he went with her father and
the Addings and Kenby to see that church. She had had no chance to bring
up these arrears until now, and she atoned to herself for the delay by
making the history very full, and going back and adding touches at any
point where she thought she had scanted it. After all, it consisted
mainly of fragmentary intimations from Miss Triscoe and of half-uttered
questions which her own art now built into a coherent statement.

March could not find that the general had much resented Burnamy's
clandestine visit to Carlsbad when his daughter told him of it, or that
he had done more than make her promise that she would not keep up the
acquaintance upon any terms unknown to him.

"Probably," Mrs. March said, "as long as he had any hopes of Mrs.
Adding, he was a little too self-conscious to be very up and down about
Burnamy."

"Then you think he was really serious about her?"

"Now my dear! He was so serious that I suppose he was never so
completely taken aback in his life as when he met Kenby in Wurzburg and
saw how she received him. Of course, that put an end to the fight."

"The fight?"

"Yes--that Mrs. Adding and Agatha were keeping up to prevent his
offering himself."

"Oh! And how do you know that they were keeping up the fight together?"

"How do I? Didn't you see yourself what friends they were? Did you tell
him what Stoller had, said about Burnamy?"

"I had no chance. I don't know that I should have done it, anyway. It
wasn't my affair."

"Well, then, I think you might. It would have been everything for that
poor child; it would have completely justified her in her own eyes."

"Perhaps yo