Their Silver Wedding Journey by William Dean Howells

Author:William Dean Howells
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620121788
Publisher: Duke Classics

XLIV

*

Mrs. March had decided not to go to the Posthof for breakfast, where they had already taken a lavish leave of the 'schone' Lili, with a sense of being promptly superseded in her affections. They found a place in the red-table-cloth end of the pavilion at Pupp's, and were served by the pretty girl with the rose-bud mouth whom they had known only as Ein-und-Zwanzig, and whose promise of "Komm' gleich, bitte schon!" was like a bird's note. Never had the coffee been so good, the bread so aerially light, the Westphalian ham so tenderly pink. A young married couple whom they knew came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and sat down with them, like their own youth, for a moment.

"If you had told them we were going, dear," said Mrs. March, when the couple were themselves gone, "we should have been as old as ever. Don't let us tell anybody, this morning, that we're going. I couldn't bear it."

They had been obliged to take the secretary of the hotel into their confidence, in the process of paying their bill. He put on his high hat and came out to see them off. The portier was already there, standing at the step of the lordly two-spanner which they had ordered for the long drive to the station. The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offer them a fellow-republican's good wishes for their journey; Herr Pupp himself appeared at the last moment to hope for their return another summer. Mrs. March bent a last look of interest upon the proprietor as their two-spanner whirled away.

"They say that he is going to be made a count."

"Well, I don't object," said March. "A man who can feed fourteen thousand people, mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an archduke."

At the station something happened which touched them even more than these last attentions of the hotel. They were in their compartment, and were in the act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting their bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March's name called.

They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with excitement and his eyes glowing. "I was afraid I shouldn't get here in time," he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.

"Why Rose! From your mother?"

"From me," he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor, when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace. "I want to kiss you," she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to them from the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for her handkerchief. "I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetest child!"

"He's about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I'm sorry to leave behind," March assented. "He's the only unmarried one that wasn't in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some rather

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