lete."

"What do you mean?"

"It's given us a representative variety of German cities. First we had
Hamburg, you know, a great modern commercial centre."

"Yes! Go on!"

"Then we had Leipsic, the academic."

"Yes!"

"Then Carlsbad, the supreme type of a German health resort; then
Nuremberg, the mediaeval; then Anspach, the extinct princely capital;
then Wurzburg, the ecclesiastical rococo; then Weimar, for the literature
of a great epoch; then imperial Berlin; then Frankfort, the memory of the
old free city; then Dusseldorf, the centre of the most poignant personal
interest in the world--I don't see how we could have done better, if we'd
planned it all, and not acted from successive impulses."

"It's been grand; it's been perfect! As German-Silver Wedding Journey
it's perfect--it seems as if it had been ordered! But I will never let
you give up Holland! No, we will go this afternoon, and when I get to
Schevleningen, I'll go to bed, and stay there, till you've completed your
after-cure."

"Do you think that will be wildly gay for the convalescent?"

She suddenly began to cry. "Oh, dearest, what shall we do? I feel
perfectly broken down. I'm afraid I'm going to be sick--and away from
home! How could you ever let me overdo, so?" She put her handkerchief to
her eyes, and turned her face into the sofa pillow.

This was rather hard upon him, whom her vivid energy and inextinguishable
interest had not permitted a moment's respite from pleasure since they
left Carlsbad. But he had been married, too long not to understand that
her blame of him was only a form of self-reproach for her own
self-forgetfulness. She had not remembered that she was no longer young
till she had come to what he saw was a nervous collapse. The fact had its
pathos and its poetry which no one could have felt more keenly than he.
If it also had its inconvenience and its danger he realized these too.

"Isabel," he said, "we are going home."

"Very well, then it will be your doing."

"Quite. Do you think you could stand it as far as Cologne? We get the
sleeping-car there, and you can lie down the rest of the way to Ostend."

"This afternoon? Why I'm perfectly strong; it's merely my nerves that are
gone." She sat up, and wiped her eyes. "But Basil! If you're doing this
for me--"

"I'm doing it for myself," said March, as he went out of the room.

She stood the journey perfectly well, and in the passage to Dover she
suffered so little from t