the train began
to move. She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been pretty, but
she bore herself with a kind of authority in spite of her thread gloves,
her dowdy gray travelling-dress, and a hat of lower middle-class English
tastelessness. She took the only seat vacant, a backward-riding place
beside a sleeping passenger who looked like a commercial traveller, but
she seemed ill at ease in it, and March offered her his seat. She
accepted it very promptly, and thanked him for it in the English of a
German, and Mrs. March now classed her as a governess who had been
teaching in England and had acquired the national feeling for dress. But
in this character she found her interesting, and even a little pathetic,
and she made her some overtures of talk which the other met eagerly
enough. They were now running among low hills, not so picturesque as
those between Eger and Nuremberg, but of much the same toylike quaintness
in the villages dropped here and there in their valleys. One small town,
completely walled, with its gray houses and red roofs, showed through the
green of its trees and gardens so like a colored print in a child's
story-book that Mrs. March cried out for joy in it, and then accounted
for her rapture by explaining to the stranger that they were Americans
and had never been in Germany before. The lady was not visibly affected
by the fact, she said casually that she had often been in that little
town, which she named; her uncle had a castle in the country back of it,
and she came with her husband for the shooting in the autumn. By a
natural transition she spoke of her children, for whom she had an English
governess; she said she had never been in England, but had learnt the
language from a governess in her own childhood; and through it all Mrs.
March perceived that she was trying to impress them with her consequence.
To humor her pose, she said they had been looking up the scene of Kaspar
Hauser's death at Ansbach; and at this the stranger launched into such
intimate particulars concerning him, and was so familiar at first hands
with the facts of his life, that Mrs. March let her run on, too much
amused with her pretensions to betray any doubt of her. She wondered if
March were enjoying it all as much, and from time to time she tried to
catch his eye, while the lady talked constantly and rather loudly,
helping herself out with words from them both when her English failed
her. In the safety of her perfect un