Their Silver Wedding Journey | Page 4

the consciousness of people
who actually hadn't been before--carry them all through Europe, and let
them see it in the old, simple-hearted American way."
She shook her head. "You couldn't! They've all been!"
"All but about sixty or seventy millions," said March.
"Well, those are just the millions you don't know, and couldn't
imagine."
"I'm not so sure of that."
"And even if you could imagine them, you couldn't make them
interesting. All the interesting ones have been, anyway."
"Some of the uninteresting ones too. I used, to meet some of that sort
over there. I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with those
that hadn't been."
"Then why not do it? I know you could get something out of it."
"It might be a good thing," he mused, "to take a couple who had passed
their whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go;
and had a perfect famine for Europe all the time. I could have them
spend their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and
looking up their accommodations. I could have them sail, in
imagination, and discover an imaginary Europe, and give their

grotesque misconceptions of it from travels and novels against a
background of purely American experience. We needn't go abroad to
manage that. I think it would be rather nice."
"I don't think it would be nice in the least," said Mrs. March, "and if
you don't want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all."
"Well, then, let's talk about our Silver Wedding Journey."
"I see. You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it."
She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really
silent. He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to
good-humor. He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken
and look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she
refused. When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she
consented to go.

III.
He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often
took a hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had
fancied some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose
the next Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken.
To be sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the
afternoon of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that
invisible thread of association which drew him.
The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the
outward voyage, and was looking her best. She was tipped and edged
with shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and
white-painted as only a ship knows how to be. A little uniformed
steward ran before the visitors, and showed them through the dim white
corridors into typical state-rooms on the different decks; and then let
them verify their first impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon,
and the luxury of the ladies' parlor and music-room. March made his
wife observe that the tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so
carelessly scattered about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the
floor against rough weather; and he amused himself with the heavy
German browns and greens and coppers in the decorations, which he
said must have been studied in color from sausage, beer, and spinach,
to the effect of those large march-panes in the roof. She laughed with
him at the tastelessness of the race which they were destined to marvel

at more and more; but she made him own that the stewardesses whom
they saw were charmingly like serving-maids in the 'Fliegende Blatter';
when they went ashore she challenged his silence for some assent to
her own conclusion that the Colmannia was perfect.
"She has only one fault," he assented. "She's a ship."
"Yes," said his wife, "and I shall want to look at the Norumbia before I
decide."
Then he saw that it was only a question which steamer they should take,
and not whether they should take any. He explained, at first gently and
afterwards savagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quite enough
for him, and that the vessel was not built that he would be willing to
cross the Atlantic in.
When a man has gone so far as that he has committed himself to the
opposite course in almost so many words; and March was neither
surprised nor abashed when he discovered himself, before they reached
home, offering his wife many reasons why they should go to Europe.
She answered to all, No, he had