derstanding of the case, Mrs. March
now submitted farther, and even suffered some patronage from her, which
in another mood she would have met with a decided snub.

As they drew in among the broad vine-webbed slopes of the Wurzburg,
hills, the stranger said she was going to change there, and take a train
on to Berlin. Mrs. March wondered whether she would be able to keep up
the comedy to the last; and she had to own that she carried it off very
easily when the friends whom she was expecting did not meet her on the
arrival of their train. She refused March's offers of help, and remained
quietly seated while he got out their wraps and bags. She returned with a
hardy smile the cold leave Mrs. March took of her; and when a porter came
to the door, and forced his way by the Marches, to ask with anxious
servility if she, were the Baroness von-----, she bade the man get them.
a 'traeger', and then come back for her. She waved them a complacent
adieu before they mixed with the crowd and lost sight of her.

"Well, my dear," said March, addressing the snobbishness in his wife
which he knew to be so wholly impersonal, "you've mingled with one
highhote, anyway. I must say she didn't look it, any more than the Duke
and Duchess of Orleans, and yet she's only a baroness. Think of our being
three hours in the same compartment, and she doing all she could to
impress us and our getting no good of it! I hoped you were feeling her
quality, so that we should have it in the family, anyway, and always know
what it was like. But so far, the highhotes have all been terribly
disappointing."

He teased on as they followed the traeger with their baggage out of the
station; and in the omnibus on the way to their hotel, he recurred to the
loss they had suffered in the baroness's failure to dramatize her
nobility effectually. "After all, perhaps she was as much disappointed in
us. I don't suppose we looked any more like democrats than she looked
like an aristocrat."

"But there's a great difference," Mrs. March returned at last. "It isn't
at all a parallel case. We were not real democrats, and she was a real
aristocrat."

"To be sure. There is that way of looking at it. That's rather novel; I
wish I had thought of that myself. She was certainly more to blame than
we were."

LII.

The square in front of the station was planted with flag-poles wreathed
in evergreens; a triumphal arch was nearly finished, and a colossal
allegory in imitat