It was still
so cold that when they reached the Romer, and he stopped in a broad blaze
of the only means of heating that they have in Frankfort in the summer,
the travellers were loath to leave it for the chill interior, where the
German emperors were elected for so many centuries. As soon as an emperor
was chosen, in the great hall effigied round with the portraits of his
predecessors, he hurried out in the balcony, ostensibly to show himself
to the people, but really, March contended, to warm up a little in the
sun. The balcony was undergoing repairs that day, and the travellers
could not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest of
the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till they
were half-torpid with the cold. Then she abandoned to him the joint duty
of viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she basked
in the sun till he came to her. He returned shivering, after a
half-hour's absence, and pretended that she had missed the greatest thing
in the world, but as he could never be got to say just what she had lost,
and under the closest cross-examination could not prove that this
cathedral was memorably different from hundreds of other
fourteenth-century cathedrals, she remained in a lasting content with the
easier part she had chosen.
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