s 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 identification 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 s