Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at dawn because they had
scarcely lain down, and March crept out into the square for a last breath
of its morning air before breakfast. He was now eager to be gone; he had
broken with habit, and he wished to put all traces of the past out of
sight. But this was curiously like all other early mornings in his
consciousness, and he could not alienate himself from the wonted
environment. He stood talking on every-day terms of idle speculation with
the familiar policeman, about a stray parrot in the top of one of the
trees, where it screamed and clawed at the dead branch to which it clung.
Then he went carelessly indoors again as if he were secure of reading the
reporter's story of it in that next day's paper which he should not see.

The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted through the breakfast,
which was like other breakfasts in the place they would be leaving in
summer shrouds just as they always left it at the end of June. The
illusion was even heightened by the fact that their son was to be in the
apartment all summer, and it would not be so much shut up as usual. The
heavy trunks had been sent to the ship by express the afternoon before,
and they had only themselves and their stateroom baggage to transport to
Hoboken; they came down to a carriage sent from a neighboring
livery-stable, and exchanged good-mornings with a driver they knew by
name.

March had often fancied it a chief advantage of living in New York that
you could drive to the steamer and start for Europe as if you were
starting for Albany; he was in the enjoyment of this advantage now, but
somehow it was not the consolation he had expected. He knew, of course,
that if they had been coming from Boston, for instance, to sail in the
Norumbia, they would probably have gone on board the night before, and
sweltered through its heat among the strange smells and noises of the