"Look here, my dear! Didn't you promise to let this love-affair alone?"
"That was on the ship. And besides, what would you have done, I should like to know? Would you have refused to let him buy them for her?" She added, carelessly, "He wants us to go to the Kurhaus ball with him."
"Oh, does he!"
"Yes. He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if we will chaperon them. And I promised that you would."
"That I would?"
"It will do just as well if you go. And it will be very amusing; you can see something of Carlsbad society."
"But I'm not going!" he declared. "It would interfere with my cure. The sitting up late would be bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and I should eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do all sorts of unwholesome things."
"Nonsense! The refreshments will be 'kurgemass', of course."
"You can go yourself," he said.
A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty as it is before twenty, but still it has claims upon the imagination, and the novel circumstance of a ball in the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for Mrs. March. It was the annual reunion which is given by municipal authority in the large hall above the bathrooms; it is frequented with safety and pleasure by curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it began to have for Mrs. March the charm of duty; she believed that she could finally have made March go in her place, but she felt that she ought really to go in his, and save him from the late hours and the late supper.