"Why didn't we have something like all this on our first wedding
journey?" she sighed at last. "To think of our battening from Boston to
Niagara and back! And how hard we tried to make something of Rochester
and Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec!"
"Niagara wasn't so bad," he said, "and I will never go back on Quebec."
"Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic, and Carlsbad and
Nuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg! Perhaps this is meant as a
compensation for our lost youth. But I can't enjoy it as I could when I
was young. It's wasted on my sere and yellow leaf. I wish Burnamy and
Miss Triscoe were here; I should like to try this garden on them."
"They wouldn't care for it," he replied, and upon a daring impulse he
added, "Kenby and Mrs. Adding might." If she took this suggestion in good
part, he could tell her that Kenby was in Wurzburg.
"Don't speak of them! They're in just that besotted early middle-age when
life has settled into a self-satisfied present, with no past and no
future; the most philistine, the most bourgeois, moment of existence.
Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation of all this goes." She
rose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed him away in the impulsive
fashion of her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balustraded
terrace in the background which had tempted her.
Pages:
1408
1409
1410
1411
1412
1413
1414
1415
1416
1417
1418
1419
1420
1421
1422
1423
1424
1425
1426
1427
1428
1429
1430
1431
1432