struggles when he broke from them at last. "How they do hang on to a man,
over here!" the Iowa man continued. "And the Americans are as bad as any.
Why, there's one ratty little Englishman up at our place, and our girls
just swarm after him; their mothers are worse. Well, it's so, Jenny," he
said to the lady who had joined them and whom March turned round to see
when he spoke to her. "If I wanted a foreigner I should go in for a man.
And these officers! Put their mustaches up at night in curl-papers, they
tell me. Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr. March. Well, had your first
glass, yet, Jenny? I'm just going for my second tumbler."

He took his wife back to the spring, and began to tell her about Stoller;
she made no sign of caring for him; and March felt inculpated. She
relented a little toward him as they drank together; when he said he must
be going to breakfast with his wife, she asked where he breakfasted, and
said, "Why, we go to the Posthof, too." He answered that then they should
be sure some time to meet there; he did not venture further; he reflected
that Mrs. March had her reluctances too; she distrusted people who had
amused or interested him before she met them.




XXIX.

Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he had found most of the other
agreeable things in Carlsbad, which he brought to their knowledge one by
one, with such forethought that March said he hoped he should be cared
for in his declining years as an editor rather than as a father; there
was no tenderness like a young contributor's.