He reminded March of
the state he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said it had gone from
bad to worse with him. At Weimar he had taken to his bed and merely
escaped from it with his life. Then they had tried Schevleningen for a
week, where, he said in a tone of some injury, they had rather thought
they might find them, the Marches. The air had been poison to him, and
they had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth; but the
doctor in London had thought not, and urged their going home. "All Europe
is damp, you know, and dark as a pocket in winter," he ended.
There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decided that he must wait
to see his wife if he wished to know anything, when the general, who had
been silent, twisted his head towards him, and said without regard to the
context, "It was complicated, at Weimar, by that young man in the most
devilish way. Did my daughter write to Mrs. March about--Well it came to
nothing, after all; and I don't understand how, to this day. I doubt if
they do. It was some sort of quarrel, I suppose. I wasn't consulted in
the matter either way. It appears that parents are not consulted in these
trifling affairs, nowadays." He had married his daughter's mother in open
defiance of her father; but in the glare of his daughter's wilfulness
this fact had whitened into pious obedience.
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