Americans are hungrier for royalty than anybody else
    Effort to get on common ground with an inferior
    He buys my poverty and not my will
    Honest selfishness
    Intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate
    Less intrusive than if he had not been there
    Monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men resign
    Only one of them was to be desperate at a time
    Reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last
    Voting-cattle whom they bought and sold
    We don’t seem so much our own property
    We get too much into the hands of other people

THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY

PART III.

XLVIII.

At the first station where the train stopped, a young German bowed himself into the compartment with the Marches, and so visibly resisted an impulse to smoke that March begged him to light his cigarette.  In the talk which this friendly overture led to between them he explained that he was a railway architect, employed by the government on that line of road, and was travelling officially.  March spoke of Nuremberg; he owned the sort of surfeit he had suffered from its excessive mediaevalism, and the young man said it was part of the new imperial patriotism to cherish the Gothic throughout Germany; no other sort of architecture was permitted in Nuremberg.  But they would find enough classicism at Ansbach, he promised them, and he entered with sympathetic intelligence into their wish to see this former capital when March told him they were going to stop there, in hopes of something typical of the old disjointed Germany of the petty principalities, the little paternal despotisms now extinct.

As they talked on, partly in German and partly in English, their purpose in visiting Ansbach appeared to the Marches more meditated than it was.  In fact it was somewhat accidental; Ansbach was near Nuremberg; it was not much out of the way to Holland.  They took more and more credit to themselves for a reasoned and definite motive, in the light of their companion’s enthusiasm for the place, and its charm began for them with the drive from the station through streets whose sentiment was both Italian and French, and where there was a yellowish cast in the gray of the architecture which was almost Mantuan.  They rested their sensibilities, so bruised and fretted by Gothic angles and points, against the smooth surfaces of the prevailing classicistic facades of the houses as they passed, and when they arrived at their hotel, an old mansion of Versailles type, fronting on a long irregular square planted with pollard sycamores, they said that it might as well have been Lucca.