e himself, hawked, held his napkin up before
him, and--

"Noblesse oblige," said March, with the tone of irony which he reserved
for his wife's preoccupations with aristocracies of all sorts. "I think I
prefer my Hair Professor, bourgeois, as he is."

The ladies attributively of central Massachusetts had risen from their
table, and were making for the door without having paid for their supper.
The head waiter ran after them; with a real delicacy for their mistake he
explained that though in most places the meals were charged in the bill,
it was the custom in Carlsbad to pay for them at the table; one could see
that he was making their error a pleasant adventure to them which they
could laugh over together, and write home about without a pang.

"And I," said Mrs. March, shamelessly abandoning the party of the
aristocracy, "prefer the manners of the lower classes."

"Oh, yes," he admitted. "The only manners we have at home are black ones.
But you mustn't lose courage. Perhaps the nobility are not always so
baronial."

"I don't know whether we have manners at home," she said, "and I don't
believe I care. At least we have decencies."

"Don't be a jingo," said her husband.

XXVII.

Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy from duty for the day, he
was not so full of resources in himself, and he had not so general an
acquaintance in the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellow make
up to him in the reading-room, that night. He laid down a New York paper
ten days old in despair of having left any American news in it, and
pushed several continental Anglo-American papers aside with his elbow, as
he gave a contemptuous glance at the foreign journals, in Bohemian,
Hungarian, German, French, and Italian, which littered the large table.

"I wonder," he said, "how long it'll take'em, over here, to catch on to
our way of having pictures?"

Burnamy had come to his newspaper work since illustrated journalism was
established, and he had never had any shock from it at home, but so
sensitive is youth to environment that, after four days in Europe, the
New York paper Stoller had laid down was already hideous to him. From the
politic side of his nature, however, he temporized with Stoller's
preference. "I suppose it will be some time yet."

"I wish," said Stoller, with a savage disregard of expressed sequences
and relevancies, "I could ha' got some pictures to send home with that
letter this afternoon: somethin