o war in his own person, and a rich
man might hire someone to go in his. Mrs. March felt that this rebellious
mind in Lindau really somehow outlawed him from sympathy, and
retroactively undid his past suffering for the country: she had always
particularly valued that provision of the law, because in forecasting all
the possible mischances that might befall her own son, she had been
comforted by the thought that if there ever was another war, and Tom were
drafted, his father could buy him a substitute. Compared with such
blasphemy as this, Lindau's declaration that there was not equality of
opportunity in America, and that fully one-half the people were debarred
their right to the pursuit of happiness by the hopeless conditions of
their lives, was flattering praise. She could not listen to such things
in silence, though, and it did not help matters when Lindau met her
arguments with facts and reasons which she felt she was merely not
sufficiently instructed to combat, and he was not quite gentlemanly to
urge. "I am afraid for the effect on the children," she said to her
husband. "Such perfectly distorted ideas--Tom will be ruined by them."

"Oh, let Tom find out where they're false," said March. "It will be good
exercise for his faculties of research. At any rate, those things are
getting said nowadays; he'll have to hear them sooner or later."

"Had he better hear them at home?" demanded his wife.

"Why, you know, as you're here to refute them, Isabel," he teased,
"perhaps it's the best place. But don't mind poor old Lindau, my dear. He
says himself that his parg is worse than his pidte, you know."

"Ah, it's too late now to mind him," she sighed. In a moment of rash good
feeling, or perhaps an exalted conception of duty, she had herself
proposed that Lindau should come every week and read German with Tom; and
it had become a question first how they could get him to take pay for it,
and then how they could get him to stop it. Mrs. March never ceased to
wonder at herself for having brought this about, for she had warned her
husband against making any engagement with Lindau which would bring him
regularly to the house: the Germans stuck so, and were so unscrupulously
dependent. Yet, the deed being done, she would not ignore the duty of
hospitality, and it was always she who made the old man stay to their
Sunday-evening tea when he lingered near the hour, reading Schiller and
Heine and Uhland with the boy, in the clean s