第98章 PART FOURTH(6)

The Marches spent a good deal of time and money in a grocery of that nationality,where they found all the patriotic comestibles and potables,and renewed their faded Italian with the friendly family in charge.

Italian table d'hotes formed the adventure of the week,on the day when Mrs.March let her domestics go out,and went herself to dine abroad with her husband and children;and they became adepts in the restaurants where they were served,and which they varied almost from dinner to dinner.

The perfect decorum of these places,and their immunity from offence in any,emboldened the Marches to experiment in Spanish restaurants,where red pepper and beans insisted in every dinner,and where once they chanced upon a night of 'olla podrida',with such appeals to March's memory of a boyish ambition to taste the dish that he became poetic and then pensive over its cabbage and carrots,peas and bacon.For a rare combination of international motives they prized most the table d'hote of a French lady,who had taken a Spanish husband in a second marriage,and had a Cuban negro for her cook,with a cross-eyed Alsation for waiter,and a slim young South-American for cashier.March held that some thing of the catholic character of these relations expressed itself in the generous and tolerant variety of the dinner,which was singularly abundant for fifty cents,without wine.At one very neat French place he got a dinner at the same price with wine,but it was not so abundant;and March inquired in fruitless speculation why the table d'hote of the Italians,a notoriously frugal and abstemious people,should be usually more than you wanted at seventy-five cents and a dollar,and that of the French rather less at half a dollar.He could not see that the frequenters were greatly different at the different places;they were mostly Americans,of subdued manners and conjecturably subdued fortunes,with here and there a table full of foreigners.There was no noise and not much smoking anywhere;March liked going to that neat French place because there Madame sat enthroned and high behind a 'comptoir'at one side of the room,and every body saluted her in going out.It was there that a gentle-looking young couple used to dine,in whom the Marches became effectlessly interested,because they thought they looked like that when they were young.The wife had an aesthetic dress,and defined her pretty head by wearing her back-hair pulled up very tight under her bonnet;the husband had dreamy eyes set wide apart under a pure forehead.

"They are artists,August,I think,"March suggested to the waiter,when he had vainly asked about them."Oh,hartis,cedenly,"August consented;but Heaven knows whether they were,or what they were:March never learned.

This immunity from acquaintance,this touch-and go quality in their New York sojourn,this almost loss of individuality at times,after the intense identification of their Boston life,was a relief,though Mrs.

March had her misgivings,and questioned whether it were not perhaps too relaxing to the moral fibre.March refused to explore his conscience;he allowed that it might be so;but he said he liked now and then to feel his personality in that state of solution.They went and sat a good deal in the softening evenings among the infants and dotards of Latin extraction in Washington Square,safe from all who ever knew them,and enjoyed the advancing season,which thickened the foliage of the trees and flattered out of sight the church warden's Gothic of the University Building.The infants were sometimes cross,and cried in their weary mothers'or little sisters'arms;but they did not disturb the dotards,who slept,some with their heads fallen forward,and some with their heads fallen back;March arbitrarily distinguished those with the drooping faces as tipsy and ashamed to confront the public.

The small Italian children raced up and down the asphalt paths,playing American games of tag and hide and-whoop;larger boys passed ball,in training for potential championships.The Marches sat and mused,or quarrelled fitfully about where they should spend the summer,like sparrows,he once said,till the electric lights began to show distinctly among the leaves,and they looked round and found the infants and dotards gone and the benches filled with lovers.That was the signal for the Marches to go home.He said that the spectacle of so much courtship as the eye might take in there at a glance was not,perhaps,oppressive,but the thought that at the same hour the same thing was going on all over the country,wherever two young fools could get together,was more than he could bear;he did not deny that it was natural,and,in a measure.

authorized,but he declared that it was hackneyed ;and the fact that it must go on forever,as long as the race lasted,made him tired.