single-hearted,
friendly subjectfolk pretty much what they found them. The people had
suffered and survived through a thousand wars, and apparently prospered
on under all governments and misgovernments. When the court was most
French, most artificial, most vicious, the citizen life must have
remained immutably German, dull, and kind. After all, he said, humanity
seemed everywhere to be pretty safe, and pretty much the same.

"Yes, that is all very well," she returned, "and you can theorize
interestingly enough; but I'm afraid that poor mother, there, had no more
reality for you than those people in the past. You appreciate her as a
type, and you don't care for her as a human being. You're nothing but a
dreamer, after all. I don't blame you," she went on. "It's your
temperament, and you can't change, now."

"I may change for the worse," he threatened. "I think I have, already. I
don't believe I could stand up to Dryfoos, now, as I did for poor old
Lindau, when I risked your bread and butter for his. I look back in
wonder and admiration at myself. I've steadily lost touch with life since
then. I'm a trifler, a dilettante, and an amateur of the right and the
good as I used to be when I was young. Oh, I have the grace to be
troubled at times, now, and once I never was. It never occurred to me
then that the world wasn't made to interest me, or at the best to
instruct me, but it does, now, at times."

She always came to his defence when he accused himself; it was the best
ground he could take with her. "I think you behaved very well with
Burnamy. You did your duty then."

"Did I? I'm not so sure. At any rate, it's the last time I shall do it.
I've served my term. I think I should tell him that he was all right in
that business with Stoller, if I were to meet him, now."

"Isn't it strange," she said, provisionally, "that we don't come upon a
trace of him anywhere in Ansbach?"

"Ah, you've been hoping he would turn up!"

"Yes. I don't deny it. I feel very unhappy about him."

"I don't. He's too much like me. He would have been quite capable of
promising that poor woman to look up her son in Jersey City. When I think
of that, I have no patience with Burnamy."

"I am going to ask the landlord about him, now he's got rid of his
highhotes," said Mrs. March.

XLIX.

They went home to their hotel for their midday dinner, and to the comfort
of having it nearly all to themselves. Prince Leopold had risen early,
lik