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ould rather not blossom back into. In America, life is yet a joke with us, even when it is grotesque and shameful, as it so often is; for we think we can make it right when we choose. But there is no joking in Germany, between the first and second childhoods, unless behind closed doors. Even there, people do not joke above their breath about kings and emperors. If they joke about them in print, they take out their laugh in jail, for the press laws are severely enforced, and the prisons are full of able editors, serious as well as comic. Lese-majesty is a crime that searches sinners out in every walk of life, and it is said that in family jars a husband sometimes has the last word of his wife by accusing her of blaspheming the sovereign, and so having her silenced for three months at least behind penitential bars. "Think," said March, "how simply I could adjust any differences of opinion between us in Dusseldorf." "Don't!" his wife implored with a burst of feeling which surprised him. "I want to go home!" They had been talking over their day, and planning their journey to Holland for the morrow, when it came to this outburst from her in the last half-hour before bed which they sat prolonging beside their stove. "What! And not go to Holland? What is to become of my after-cure?" "Oh, it's too late for that, now. We've used up the month running about, and tiring ourselves to death. I should like to rest a week--to get into my berth on the Norumbia and rest!" "I guess the September gales would have something to say about that." "I would risk the September gales." LXXII. In the morning March came home from his bankers gay with the day's provisional sunshine in his heart, and joyously expectant of his wife's pleasure in the letters he was bringing. There was one from each of their children, and there was one from Fulkerson, which March opened and read on the street, so as to intercept any unpleasant news there might be in them; there were two letters for Mrs. March which he knew without opening were from Miss Triscoe and Mrs. Adding respectively; Mrs. Adding's, from the postmarks, seemed to have been following them about for some time. "They're all right at home," he said. "Do see what those people have been doing." "I believe," she said, taking a knife from the breakfast tray beside her bed to cut the envelopes, "that you've really cared more about them all along than I have." "No, I've only
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