tification of their Boston life, was a relief, though Mrs.
March had her misgivings, and questioned whether it were not perhaps too
relaxing to the moral fibre. March refused to explore his conscience; he
allowed that it might be so; but he said he liked now and then to feel
his personality in that state of solution. They went and sat a good
deal in the softening evenings among the infants and dotards of Latin
extraction in Washington Square, safe from all who ever knew them, and
enjoyed the advancing season, which thickened the foliage of the trees
and flattered out of sight the church warden's Gothic of the University
Building. The infants were sometimes cross, and cried in their weary
mothers' or little sisters' arms; but they did not disturb the dotards,
who slept, some with their heads fallen forward, and some with their
heads fallen back; March arbitrarily distinguished those with the
drooping faces as tipsy and ashamed to confront the public. The small
Italian children raced up and down the asphalt paths, playing American
games of tag and hide and-whoop; larger boys passed ball, in training
for potential championships. The Marches sat and mused, or quarrelled
fitfully about where they should spend the summer, like sparrows, he
once said, till the electric lights began to show distinctly among the
leaves, and they looked round and found the infants and dotards gone and
the benches filled with lovers. That was the signal for the Marches
to go home. He said that the spectacle of so much courtship as the eye
might take in there at a glance was not, perhaps, oppressive, but the
thought that at the same hour the same thing was going on all over the
country, wherever two young fools could get together, was more than
he could bear; he did not deny that it was natural, and, in a
measureuthorized, but he declared that it was hackneyed; and the fact
that it must go on forever, as long as the race lasted, made him tired.

At home, generally, they found that the children had not missed them,
and were perfectly safe. It was one of the advantages of a flat that
they could leave the children there whenever they liked without anxiety.
They liked better staying there than wandering about in the evening with
their parents, whose excursions seemed to them somewhat aimless, and
their pleasures insipid. They studied, or read, or looked out of the
window at the street sights; and their mother always came back to them
with a pang for the