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.
Pages:
1353
1354
1355
1356
1357
1358
1359
1360
1361
1362
1363
1364
1365
1366
1367
1368
1369
1370
1371
1372
1373
1374
1375
1376
1377