window down when the guard came, without asking their leave. Then the
climate proved much colder, and Mrs. March cowered under her shawls
the rest of the way, and would not be entreated to look at the pleasant
level landscape near, or the hills far off. He proposed to put up the
window as peremptorily as it had been put down, but she stayed him with
a hoarse whisper, "She may be another Baroness!" At first he did not
know what she meant, then he remembered the lady whose claims to rank
her presence had so poorly enforced on the way to Wurzburg, and he
perceived that his wife was practising a wise forbearance with their
fellow-passengers, and giving her a chance to turn out any sort of
highhote she chose. She failed to profit by the opportunity; she
remained simply a selfish, disagreeable woman, of no more perceptible
distinction than their other fellow-passenger, a little commercial
traveller from Vienna (they resolved from his appearance and the
lettering on his valise that he was no other), who slept with a sort of
passionate intensity all the way to Mayence.

LXX.

The Main widened and swam fuller as they approached the Rhine, and
flooded the low-lying fields in-places with a pleasant effect under
a wet sunset. When they reached the station in Mayence they drove
interminably to the hotel they had chosen on the river-shore, through a
city handsomer and cleaner than any American city they could think of,
and great part of the way by a street of dwellings nobler, Mrs. March
owned, than even Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was planted, like
that, with double rows of trees, but lacked its green lawns; and at
times the sign of Weinhandlung at a corner, betrayed that there was no
such restriction against shops as keeps the Boston street so sacred.
Otherwise they had to confess once more that any inferior city of
Germany is of a more proper and dignified presence than the most
parse-proud metropolis in America. To be sure, they said, the German
towns had generally a thousand years' start; but all the same the fact
galled them.

It was very bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before their
hotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit
to Mayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into something
tangible. There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream with
its boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were the
spires and towers and roofs of the tow