to Mr.
Stoller. I didn't say so at the time, because you seemed to feel it
enough yourself. But I did like your owning up to it," and here Mrs.
March thought it time to trot out her borrowed battle-horse again. "My
husband always says that if a person owns up to an error, fully
and faithfully, as you've always done, they make it the same in its
consequences to them as if it had never been done."

"Does Mr. March say that?" asked Burnamy with a relenting smile.

"Indeed he does!"

Burnamy hesitated; then he asked, gloomily again:

"And what about the consequences to the other fellow?"

"A woman," said Mrs. March, "has no concern with them. And besides,
I think you've done all you could to save Mr. Stoller from the
consequences."

"I haven't done anything."

"No matter. You would if you could. I wonder," she broke off, to prevent
his persistence at a point where her nerves were beginning to give way,
"what can be keeping Mr. March?"

Nothing much more important, it appeared later, than the pleasure of
sauntering through the streets on the way to the house of Schiller, and
looking at the pretty children going to school, with books under their
arms. It was the day for the schools to open after the long summer
vacation, and there was a freshness of expectation in the shining faces
which, if it could not light up his own graybeard visage, could at least
touch his heart:

When he reached the Schiller house he found that it was really not
the Schiller house, but the Schiller flat, of three or four rooms, one
flight up, whose windows look out upon the street named after the poet.
The whole place is bare and clean; in one corner of the large room
fronting the street stands Schiller's writing-table, with his chair
before it; with the foot extending toward this there stands, in another
corner, the narrow bed on which he died; some withered wreaths on the
pillow frame a picture of his deathmask, which at first glance is like
his dead face lying there. It is all rather tasteless, and all rather
touching, and the place with its meagre appointments, as compared with
the rich Goethe house, suggests that personal competition with Goethe in
which Schiller is always falling into the second place. Whether it will
be finally so with him in literature it is too early to ask of time, and
upon other points eternity will not be interrogated. "The great, Goethe
and the good Schiller," they remain; and yet, March reasoned, there was
s