At the point where they might have gone wrong the explanations were renewed with a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had not been forgotten.

She said she could not see how any people could be both so selfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of saying something offensive: "You women are so pampered in America that you are astonished when you are treated in Europe like the mere human beings you are." She answered with unexpected reasonableness: "Yes, there's something in that; but when the Germans have taught us how despicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as human beings ?" This was at ten o'clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and at last, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him.

The darkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impression of its few simple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense: long levels, densely wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests, and checkered with fields of grain and grass, soaking under the thin rain that from time to time varied the thin sunshine.
The villages and peasants' cottages were notably few; but there was here and there a classic or a gothic villa, which, at one point, an English-speaking young lady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain as the seat of some country gentleman; the land was in large holdings, and this accounted for the sparsity of villages and cottages.
She then said that she was a German teacher of English, in Hamburg, and was going home to Potsdam for a visit.

She seemed like a German girl out of 'The Initials', and in return for this favor Mrs.March tried to invest herself with some romantic interest as an American.

She failed to move the girl's fancy, even after she had bestowed on her an immense bunch of roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had sent to them just before they left their hotel.