Produced by David Widger
By William Dean Howells
At the first station where the train stopped, a young German bowedhimself into the compartment with the Marches, and so visibly resisted animpulse to smoke that March begged him to light his cigarette. In thetalk which this friendly overture led to between them he explained thathe was a railway architect, employed by the government on that line ofroad, and was travelling officially. March spoke of Nuremberg; he ownedthe sort of surfeit he had suffered from its excessive mediaevalism, andthe young man said it was part of the new imperial patriotism to cherishthe Gothic throughout Germany; no other sort of architecture waspermitted in Nuremberg. But they would find enough classicism at Ansbach,he promised them, and he entered with sympathetic intelligence into theirwish to see this former capital when March told him they were going tostop there, in hopes of something typical of the old disjointed Germanyof the petty principalities, the little paternal despotisms now extinct.
As they talked on, partly in German and partly in English, their purposein visiting Ansbach appeared to the Marches more meditated than it was.In fact it was somewhat accidental; Ansbach was near Nuremberg; it wasnot much out of the way to Holland. They took more and more credit tothemselves for a reasoned and definite motive, in the light of theircompanion's enthusiasm for the place, and its charm began for them withthe drive from the station through streets whose sentiment was bothItalian and French, and where there was a yellowish cast in the gray ofthe architecture which was almost Mantuan. They rested theirsensibilities, so bruised and fretted by Gothic angles and points,against the smooth surfaces of the prevailing classicistic facades of thehouses as they passed, and when they arrived at their hotel, an oldmansion of Versailles type, fronting on a long irregular square plantedwith pollard sycamores, they said that it might as well have been Lucca.
The archway and stairway of the hotel were draped with the Bavariancolors, and they were obscurely flattered to learn that Prince Leopold,the brother of the Prince-Regent of the kingdom, had taken rooms there,on his way to the manoeuvres at Nuremberg, and was momently expected withhis suite. They realized that they were not of the princely party,however, when they were told that he had sole possession of thedining-room, and they went out to another hotel, and had their supper inkeeping delightfully native. People seemed to come there to write theirletters and make up their accounts, as well as to eat their suppers; theycalled for stationery like characters in old comedy, and the clatter ofcrockery and the scratching of pens went on together; and fortune offeredthe Marches a delicate reparation for their exclusion from their ownhotel in the cold popular reception of the prince which they got backjust in time to witness. A very small group of people, mostly women andboys, had gathered to see him arrive, but there was no cheering or anysign of public interest. Perhaps he personally merited none; he looked adull, sad man, with his plain, stubbed features; and after he had mountedto his apartment, the officers of his staff stood quite across thelanding, and barred the passage of the Americans, ignoring even Mrs.March's presence, as they talked together.
"Well, my dear," said her husband, "here you have it at last. This iswhat you've been living for, ever since we came to Germany. It's a greatmoment."
"Yes. W