[The March Family Trilogy by William Dean Howells]@TWC D-Link bookThe March Family Trilogy PART II 17/211
He had now left them there, to learn the language, which he had forgotten with such heart-burning and shame, and music, for which they had some taste. The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their father with open threats of running away; and in his heart he did not altogether blame them.
He came away from Wurzburg raging at the disrespect for his money and his standing in business which had brought him a more galling humiliation there than anything he had suffered in his boyhood at Des Vaches.
It intensified him in his dear-bought Americanism to the point of wishing to commit lese majesty in the teeth of some local dignitaries who had snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle to shame in his person; there was something like the bird of his step-country in Stoller's pale eyes and huge beak. XXVIII. March sat with a company of other patients in the anteroom of the doctor, and when it came his turn to be prodded and kneaded, he was ashamed at being told he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded.
The doctor wrote out a careful dietary for him, with a prescription of a certain number of glasses of water at a certain spring and a certain number of baths, and a rule for the walks he was to take before and after eating; then the doctor patted him on the shoulder and pushed him caressingly out of his inner office.
It was too late to begin his treatment that day, but he went with his wife to buy a cup, with a strap for hanging it over his shoulder, and he put it on so as to be an invalid with the others at once; he came near forgetting the small napkin of Turkish towelling which they stuffed into their cups, but happily the shopman called him back in time to sell it to him. At five the next morning he rose, and on his way to the street exchanged with the servants cleaning the hotel stairs the first of the gloomy 'Guten Morgens' which usher in the day at Carlsbad.
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