hout wishing to
own themselves its children again, and yet out of heart with the only
country left them.

"He was rather pathetic, my dear," said March, in the discomfort he knew
his wife must be feeling as well as himself. "How odd to have the lid
lifted here, and see the same old problems seething and bubbling in the
witch's caldron we call civilization as we left simmering away at home!
And how hard to have our tariff reach out and snatch the bread from the
mouths of those poor glass-workers!"

"I thought that was hard," she sighed. "It must have been his bread,
too."

"Let's hope it was not his cake, anyway. I suppose," he added, dreamily,
"that what we used to like in Italy was the absence of all the modern
activities. The Italians didn't repel us by assuming to be of our epoch
in the presence of their monuments; they knew how to behave as pensive
memories. I wonder if they're still as charming."

"Oh, no," she returned, "nothing is as charming as it used to be. And now
we need the charm more than ever."

He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understanding they had lived into
that only one of them was to be desperate at a time, and that they were
to take turns in cheering each other up. "Well, perhaps we don't deserve
it. And I'm not sure that we need it so much as we did when we were
young. We've got tougher; we can stand the cold facts better now. They
made me shiver once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable thrill.
Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, if it insisted upon being
as charming as it used to be, how could we ever bear to die? We've got
that to consider." He yielded to the temptation of his paradox, but he
did not fail altogether of the purpose with which he began, and they took
the trolley back to their hotel cheerful in the intrepid fancy that they
had confronted fate when they had only had the hardihood to face a
phrase.

They agreed that now he ought really to find out something about the
contemporary life of Nuremberg, and the next morning he went out before
breakfast, and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the hope
of intimate impressions. The peasant women, serving portions of milk from
house to house out of the cans in the little wagons which they drew
themselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect of
tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the sucking-pigs jolted
over the pavements in handcarts; a certain majesty from the