the Romer not only because it was full of
fascinating bargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but because
there was scarcely any shade at all in it. They read from their Baedeker
that until the end of the last century no Jew was suffered to enter the
marketplace, and they rejoiced to find from all appearances that the Jews
had been making up for their unjust exclusion ever since. They were
almost as numerous there as the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere else in
Frankfort. These, both of the English and American branches of the race,
prevailed in the hotel diningroom, where the Marches had a mid-day dinner
so good that it almost made amends for the steam-heating and
electric-lighting.

As soon as possible after dinner they took the train for Mayence, and ran
Rhinewards through a pretty country into what seemed a milder climate. It
grew so much milder, apparently, that a lady in their compartment to whom
March offered his forward-looking seat, ordered the window down when the
guard came, without asking their leave. Then the climate proved much
colder, and Mrs. March cowered under her shawls the rest of the way, and
would not be entreated to look at the pleasant level landscape near, or
the hills far off. He proposed to put up the window as peremptorily as it
had been put down, but she stayed him with a hoarse whisper, "She may be
another Baroness!" At first he did not know what she meant, then he
remembered the lady whose claims to rank her presence had so poorly
enforced on the way to Wurzburg, and he perceived that his wife was
practising a wise forbearance with their fellow-passengers, and giving
her a chance to turn out any sort of highhote she chose. She failed to
profit by the opportunity; she remained simply a selfish, disagreeable
woman, of no more perceptible distinction than their other
fellow-passenger, a little commercial traveller from Vienna (they
resolved from his appearance and the lettering on his valise that he was
no other), who slept with a sort of passionate intensity all the way to
Mayence.

LXX.

The Main widened and swam fuller as they approached the Rhine, and
flooded the low-lying fields in-places with a pleasant effect under a wet
sunset. When they reached the station in Mayence they drove interminably
to the hotel they had chosen on the river-shore, through a city handsomer
and cleaner than any American city they could think of, and great part of
the way by a street of dwellings nob