ed almost
from dinner to dinner. The perfect decorum of these places, and their
immunity from offence in any, emboldened the Marches to experiment
in Spanish restaurants, where red pepper and beans insisted in every
dinner, and where once they chanced upon a night of 'olla podrida', with
such appeals to March's memory of a boyish ambition to taste the dish
that he became poetic and then pensive over its cabbage and carrots,
peas and bacon. For a rare combination of international motives they
prized most the table d'hote of a French lady, who had taken a Spanish
husband in a second marriage, and had a Cuban negro for her cook, with
a cross-eyed Alsation for waiter, and a slim young South-American for
cashier. March held that some thing of the catholic character of these
relations expressed itself in the generous and tolerant variety of the
dinner, which was singularly abundant for fifty cents, without wine. At
one very neat French place he got a dinner at the same price with wine,
but it was not so abundant; and March inquired in fruitless speculation
why the table d'hote of the Italians, a notoriously frugal and
abstemious people, should be usually more than you wanted at
seventy-five cents and a dollar, and that of the French rather less
at half a dollar. He could not see that the frequenters were greatly
different at the different places; they were mostly Americans, of
subdued manners and conjecturably subdued fortunes, with here and there
a table full of foreigners. There was no noise and not much smoking
anywhere; March liked going to that neat French place because there
Madame sat enthroned and high behind a 'comptoir' at one side of the
room, and every body saluted her in going out. It was there that a
gentle-looking young couple used to dine, in whom the Marches became
effectlessly interested, because they thought they looked like that when
they were young. The wife had an aesthetic dress, and defined her pretty
head by wearing her back-hair pulled up very tight under her bonnet; the
husband had dreamy eyes set wide apart under a pure forehead. "They are
artists, August, I think," March suggested to the waiter, when he had
vainly asked about them. "Oh, hartis, cedenly," August consented; but
Heaven knows whether they were, or what they were: March never learned.

This immunity from acquaintance, this touch-and go quality in their
New York sojourn, this almost loss of individuality at times, after the
intense iden