"But I'll walk back on a level, if you please." "Oh, yes," Miss Triscoe pleaded, "come with us!" She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with her father so gracefully that Mrs.March herself could scarcely have told just where the girl's real purpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident, or just how she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the pleasure of seeing Mrs.March back to her hotel.
March went with the young people across the meadow behind the Posthof and up into the forest, which began at the base of the mountain.

At first they tried to keep him in the range of their talk; but he fell behind more and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was less and less possible to include him in it.

When it began to concern their common appreciation of the Marches, they even tried to get out of his hearing.
"They're so young in their thoughts," said Burnamy, "and they seem as much interested in everything as they could have been thirty years ago.
They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it is now; don't you think?
I mean, in the eighteen-sixties." "Oh, yes, I can see that." "I don't know why we shouldn't be born older in each generation than people were in the last.

Perhaps we are," he suggested.
"I don't know how you mean," said the girl, keeping vigorously up with him; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not have his hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it.
"I don't believe I can quite make it out myself.

But fancy a man that began to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the past experience of the whole race--" "He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn't he ?" "Rather monstrous, yes," he owned, with a laugh.