Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 2Howells, William Dean
General
Their Silver Wedding Journey — Volume 2
Howells, William Dean
Americans -- Europe -- Fiction; Transatlantic voyages -- Fiction
Produced by David Widger
THEIR SILVER WEDDING JOURNEY
By William Dean Howells
PART II.
XXVI.
They found Burnamy expecting them at the station in Carlsbad, and she
scolded him like a mother for taking the trouble to meet them, while she
kept back for the present any sign of knowing that he had staid over a
day with the Triscoes in Leipsic. He was as affectionately glad to see
her and her husband as she could have wished, but she would have liked it
better if he had owned up at once about Leipsic. He did not, and it
seemed to her that he was holding her at arm's-length in his answers
about his employer. He would not say how he liked his work, or how he
liked Mr. Stoller; he merely said that they were at Pupp's together, and
that he had got in a good day's work already; and since he would say no
more, she contented herself with that.
The long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wound
down the hill-side like those of an Italian mountain town, between gay
stuccoed houses, of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; and
the impression of a Latin country was heightened at a turn of the road
which brought into view a colossal crucifix planted against a curtain of
dark green foliage on the brow of one of the wooded heights that
surrounded Carlsbad. When they reached the level of the Tepl, the
hill-fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridges
within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the only
vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world.
Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines,
with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their black velvet
derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowing
robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks in
Astrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of western
Europeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were English,
French or Italians. Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were
imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have
been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have
passed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationality
away in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves
heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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