II.

The Marches had no longer the gross appetite for novelty which urges
youth to a surfeit of strange scenes, experiences, ideas; and makes
travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues, an inexhaustible delight.
But there is no doubt that the chief pleasure of their life in New York
was from its quality of foreignness: the flavor of olives, which, once
tasted, can never be forgotten. The olives may not be of the first
excellence; they may be a little stale, and small and poor, to begin
with, but they are still olives, and the fond palate craves them. The
sort which grew in New York, on lower Sixth Avenue and in the region of
Jefferson Market and on the soft exposures south of Washington Square,
were none the less acceptable because they were of the commonest Italian
variety.

The Marches spent a good deal of time and money in a grocery of that
nationality, where they found all the patriotic comestibles and potables,
and renewed their faded Italian with the friendly family in charge.
Italian table d'hotes formed the adventure of the week, on the day when
Mrs. March let her domestics go out, and went herself to dine abroad with
her husband and children; and they became adepts in the restaurants where
they were served, and which they varied almost from dinner to dinner. The
perfect decorum of these places, and their immunity from offence in any,
emboldened the Marches to experiment in Spanish restaurants, where red
pepper and beans insisted in every dinner, and where once they chanced
upon a night of 'olla podrida', with such appeals to March's memory of a
boyish ambition to taste the dish that he became poetic and then pensive
over its cabbage and carrots, peas and bacon. For a rare combination of