As she did not give the reasons, he found a natural difficulty in accepting them, and there was something in the situation which appealed strongly to his contrary-mindedness.

Partly from this, partly from his sense of injury in being obliged so soon to adjust himself to new conditions, and partly from his comfortable feeling of security from an engagement to which his assent had been forced, he said, "I hope you're not making a mistake." "Oh, no," she answered, and she attested her conviction by a burst of sobbing that lasted well on the way to the first stop of the train.
LXIX.
It would have been always twice as easy to go direct from Berlin to the Hague through Hanover; but the Marches decided to go by Frankfort and the Rhine, because they wished to revisit the famous river, which they remembered from their youth, and because they wished to stop at Dusseldorf, where Heinrich Heine was born.

Without this Mrs.March, who kept her husband up to his early passion for the poet with a feeling that she was defending him from age in it, said that their silver wedding journey would not be complete; and he began himself to think that it would be interesting.
They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they woke early as people do in sleeping-cars everywhere.

March dressed and went out for a cup of the same coffee of which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secret in Europe as well as America, and for a glimpse of the twilight landscape.
One gray little town, towered and steepled and red-roofed within its mediaeval walls, looked as if it would have been warmer in something more.

There was a heavy dew, if not a light frost, over all, and in places a pale fog began to lift from the low hills.