an caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of western
Europeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were English,
French or Italians. Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were
imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have
been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have
passed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationality
away in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves
heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet.

The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going and
coming between the rows of pollard locusts on one side and the bright
walls of the houses on the other. Under the trees were tables, served by
pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants across the
way. On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops full of silver,
glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and all the idle
frippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris, and they
suggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no place else
in the world, as the crowd which might have been that of other cities at
certain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in its habitual effect.

"Do you like it?" asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs. March
saw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all. She was ready
to bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his interest had
got them the only rooms left in the house. This satisfied in her the
passion for size which is at the bottom of every American heart, and
which perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the peoples. We
pride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we are not
ungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger than ours, we
are magnanimously happy in them. Pupp's, in its altogether different way,
was larger than any hotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and when Burnamy
told her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a day in the
height of the season, she was personally proud of it.

She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel, while the secretary led
March off to look at the rooms reserved for them, and Burnamy hospitably
turned the revolving octagonal case in the centre of the rotunda where
the names of the guests were put up. They were of all nations, but there
were so many New Yorkers whose names ended in berg, and thal, and ster