g him
back early, which he found himself very willing to do, after an exchange
of ideas with Mr. Leffers. The young man began to talk about his wife, in
her providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the sort of man he
was, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of man he was, there
was no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the reading-room.

XLVII.

The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinner
the next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs.
March, who said, as soon as they were gone, "I believe I would rather
meet people of our own age after this. I used to think that you could
keep young by being with young people; but I don't, now. There world is
very different from ours. Our world doesn't really exist any more, but as
long as we keep away from theirs we needn't realize it. Young people,"
she went on, "are more practical-minded than we used to be; they're quite
as sentimental; but I don't think they care so much for the higher
things. They're not so much brought up on poetry as we were," she
pursued. "That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow in our
time; but now she didn't know of his poem on Nuremberg; she was
intelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its quaintness
was not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred." Her tone entreated
him to find more meaning in her words than she had put into them. "They
couldn't have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and that grassy,
flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that pile-up of
the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with their Gothic
facades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow,
aguish-looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of those
overhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before the
churches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round them!"

"I see what you mean. But do you think it's as sacred to us as it would
have been twenty-five years ago? I had an irreverent feeling now and then
that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg."

"Oh, yes; so had I. We're that modern, if we're not so young as we were."

"We were very simple, in those days."

"Well, if we were simple, we knew it!"

"Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking at
it."

"We had a good time."

"Too good. Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it had