rt.

"You're always so concrete! I meant us in the abstract. But if you will
be personal, I'll say that you've been as happy as you deserve, and got
more good than you had any right to."

She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they
were walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensibly
following.

He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to the
old cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging
in eternal accusation of his murderess. "It's rather hard on her, that he
should be having the last word, that way," he said. "She was a woman, no
matter what mistakes she had committed."

"That's what I call 'banale'," said Mrs. March.

"It is, rather," he confessed. "It makes me feel as if I must go to see
the house of Durer, after all."

"Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later."

It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, because
everybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to
Durer's house, which they found in a remote part of the town near a
stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by the
interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time they
reached it. The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and without
being squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardly
have been different in Durer's time. His dwelling, in no way impressive
outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a
narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped
bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the
cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house. It was cavernous and
cold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid in
the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German
fashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple,
neighborly existence there. It in no wise suggested the calling of an
artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer's time to take
themselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life of a
prosperous citizen, and it expressed the period.

The Marches wrote their names in the visitors' book, and paid the
visitor's fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for a
reproduction of one of Durer's pictures; and then they came away, by no
means dissatisfied with his house. By