In what was their own explicitly, as well as what was tacitly theirs, they were not so restricted as we were at home, and especially the children seemed made fondly and lovingly free of all public things.
The Marches met troops of them in the forest, as they strolled slowly back by the winding Dussel to the gardened avenue leading to the park, and they found them everywhere gay and joyful.

But their elders seemed subdued, and were silent.

The strangers heard no sound of laughter in the streets of Dusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the part of a very old couple, whose meeting they witnessed and who grinned and cackled at each other like two children as they shook hands.

Perhaps they were indeed children of that sad second childhood which one would rather not blossom back into.
In America, life is yet a joke with us, even when it is grotesque and shameful, as it so often is; for we think we can make it right when we choose.

But there is no joking in Germany, between the first and second childhoods, unless behind closed doors.