Though the square without was so all astir with festive expectation, there were few people in the garden; three or four peasant women in densely fluted white skirts and red aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Europa and at the Proserpine.
It was a precious moment in which the charm of the city's past seemed to culminate, and they were loath to break it by speech.
"Why didn't we have something like all this on our first wedding journey ?" she sighed at last.

"To think of our battening from Boston to Niagara and back! And how hard we tried to make something of Rochester and Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec!" "Niagara wasn't so bad," he said, "and I will never go back on Quebec." "Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic, and Carlsbad and Nuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg! Perhaps this is meant as a compensation for our lost youth.

But I can't enjoy it as I could when I was young.

It's wasted on my sere and yellow leaf.

I wish Burnamy and Miss Triscoe were here; I should like to try this garden on them." "They wouldn't care for it," he replied, and upon a daring impulse he added, "Kenby and Mrs.Adding might." If she took this suggestion in good part, he could tell her that Kenby was in Wurzburg.
"Don't speak of them! They're in just that besotted early middle-age when life has settled into a self-satisfied present, with no past and no future; the most philistine, the most bourgeois, moment of existence.
Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation of all this goes." She rose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed him away in the impulsive fashion of her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balustraded terrace in the background which had tempted her.
"It isn't so bad, being elderly," he said.