thing to you. If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March. I don't know but I'd
rather you'd satisfy yourself--"

"I will not see Mrs. March. Do you think I would go back of you in that
way? I am satisfied now."

XXXIX.

Instead of Burnamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now breakfasted with the
Marches at the Posthof, and the boy was with March throughout the day a
good deal. He rectified his impressions of life in Carlsbad by March's
greater wisdom and experience, and did his best to anticipate his
opinions and conform to his conclusions. This was not easy, for sometimes
he could not conceal from himself, that March's opinions were whimsical,
and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not always conceal from March
that he was matching them with Kenby's on some points, and suffering from
their divergence. He came to join the sage in his early visit to the
springs, and they walked up and down talking; and they went off together
on long strolls in which Rose was proud to bear him company. He was
patient of the absences from which he was often answered, and he learned
to distinguish between the earnest and the irony of which March's replies
seemed to be mixed. He examined him upon many features of German
civilization, but chiefly upon the treatment of women in it; and upon
this his philosopher was less satisfactory than he could have wished him
to be. He tried to excuse his trifling as an escape from the painful
stress of questions which he found so afflicting himself; but in the
matter of the woman-and-dog teams, this was not easy. March owned that
the notion of their being yokemates was shocking; but he urged that it
was a stage of evolution, and a distinct advance upon the time when women
dragged the carts without the help of the dogs; and that the time might
not be far distant when the dogs would drag the carts without the help of
the women.

Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he was
troubled by his friend's apparent acceptance of unjust things on their
picturesque side. Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of
the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his
mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by
the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were
reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch
the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades. "Ah,
delightful!" March took