“Oh, that's all right,” said Stoller, putting his toothpick back, and his hat on. “We'd got through for the day; my doctor won't let me work all I want to, here. Your husband's going to take the cure, they tell me. Well, he wants to go to a good doctor, first. You can't go and drink these waters hit or miss. I found that out before I came.”
“Oh, no!” said Mrs. March, and she wished to explain how they had been advised; but he said to Burnamy:
“I sha'n't want you again till ten to-morrow morning. Don't let me interrupt you,” he added patronizingly to Mrs. March. He put his hand up toward his hat, and sauntered away out of the door.
Burnamy did not speak; and she only asked at last, to relieve the silence, “Is Mr. Stoller an American?”
“Why, I suppose so,” he answered, with an uneasy laugh. “His people were German emigrants who settled in Southern Indiana. That makes him as much American as any of us, doesn't it?”
Burnamy spoke with his mind on his French-Canadian grandfather, who had come down through Detroit, when their name was Bonami; but Mrs. March answered from her eight generations of New England ancestry. “Oh, for the West, yes, perhaps,” and they neither of them said anything more about Stoller.
In their room, where she found March waiting for her amidst their arriving baggage, she was so full of her pent-up opinions of Burnamy's patron that she, would scarcely speak of the view from their windows of the wooded hills up and down the Tepl. “Yes, yes; very nice, and I know I shall enjoy it ever so much. But I don't know what you will think of that poor young Burnamy!”
“Why, what's happened to him?”
“Happened? Stoller's happened.”
“Oh, have you seen him, already? Well?”