But as it was it would be lost upon their preoccupation; with Mrs.Adding and Kenby it would be hopeless.
A day or two after Mrs.March had met Mrs.Adding, she went with her husband to revere a certain magnificent blackamoor whom he had discovered at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg, where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and looked, in the black of his skin and the white of his flowing costume, like a colossal figure carved in ebony and ivory.

They took a roundabout way through a street entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is a pension if it is not a hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimental prettiness; with each a little garden before it, and a bower with an iron table in it for breakfasting and supping out-doors; and he said that they would be the very places for bridal couples who wished to spend the honey-moon in getting well of the wedding surfeit.

She denounced him for saying such a thing as that, and for his inconsistency in complaining of lovers while he was willing to think of young married people.

He contended that there was a great difference in the sort of demand that young married people made upon the interest of witnesses, and that they were at least on their way to sanity; and before they agreed, they had come to the hotel with the blackamoor at the door.
While they lingered, sharing the splendid creature's hospitable pleasure in the spectacle he formed, they were aware of a carriage with liveried coachman and footman at the steps of the hotel; the liveries were very quiet and distinguished, and they learned that the equipage was waiting for the Prince of Coburg, or the Princess of Montenegro, or Prince Henry of Prussia; there were differing opinions among the twenty or thirty bystanders.

Mrs.March said she did not care which it was; and she was patient of the denouement, which began to postpone itself with delicate delays.