A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

By William Dean Howells

PART 1

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

The following story was the first fruit of my New York life when I beganto live it after my quarter of a century in Cambridge and Boston, endingin 1889; and I used my own transition to the commercial metropolis inframing the experience which was wholly that of my supposititiousliterary adventurer. He was a character whom, with his wife, I haveemployed in some six or eight other stories, and whom I made as much thehero and heroine of 'Their Wedding Journey' as the slight fable wouldbear. In venturing out of my adoptive New England, where I had foundmyself at home with many imaginary friends, I found it natural to ask thecompany of these familiar acquaintances, but their company was not to behad at once for the asking. When I began speaking of them as Basil andIsabel, in the fashion of 'Their Wedding Journey, ' they would not respondwith the effect of early middle age which I desired in them. Theyremained wilfully, not to say woodenly, the young bridal pair of thatromance, without the promise of novel functioning. It was not till Itried addressing them as March and Mrs. March that they stirred under myhand with fresh impulse, and set about the work assigned them as peoplein something more than their second youth. 

The scene into which I had invited them to figure filled the largestcanvas I had yet allowed myself; and, though 'A Hazard of New Fortuneswas not the first story I had written with the printer at my heels, itwas the first which took its own time to prescribe its own dimensions. Ihad the general design well in mind when I began to write it, but as itadvanced it compelled into its course incidents, interests, individualities, which I had not known lay near, and it specialized andamplified at points which I had not always meant to touch, though Ishould not like to intimate anything mystical in the fact. It became, tomy thinking, the most vital of my fictions, through my quickened interestin the life about me, at a moment of great psychological import. We hadpassed through a period of strong emotioning in the direction of thehumaner economics, if I may phrase it so; the rich seemed not so much todespise the poor, the poor did not so hopelessly repine. The solution ofthe riddle of the painful earth through the dreams of Henry George, through the dreams of Edward Bellamy, through the dreams of all thegenerous visionaries of the past, seemed not impossibly far off. Thatshedding of blood which is for the remission of sins had been symbolizedby the bombs and scaffolds of Chicago, and the hearts of those who feltthe wrongs bound up with our rights, the slavery implicated in ourliberty, were thrilling with griefs and hopes hitherto strange to theaverage American breast. Opportunely for me there was a great street-carstrike in New York, and the story began to find its way to issues noblerand larger than those of the love-affairs common to fiction. I was in myfifty-second year when I took it up, and in the prime, such as it was, ofmy powers. The scene which I had chosen appealed prodigiously to me, andthe action passed as nearly without my conscious agency as I ever allowmyself to think such things happen. 

The opening chapters were written in a fine, old fashioned apartmenthouse which had once been a family house, and in an uppermost room ofwhich I could look from my work across the trees of the little park inStuyvesant Square to the towers of St. George's Church. Then later in thespring of 1889 the unfinished novel was carried to a country house on theBelmont border of Cambridge. There I must have written very rapidly tohave pressed it to conclusion before the summer ended. It came, indeed, so easily from the pen that I had the misgiving which I always have ofthings which do not cost me great trouble. 

There is nothing in the book with which I amused myself more than thehouse-hunting of the Marches when they were placing themselves in NewYork; and if the contemporary reader should turn for instruction to thepages in which their experience is detailed I assure him that he maytrust their fidelity and accuracy in the article of New York housing asit was early in the last decade of the last century: I mean, the housingof people of such moderate means as the Marches. In my zeal for truth Idid not distinguish between reality and actuality in this or othermatters--that is, one was as precious to me as the other. But the typeshere portrayed are as true as ever they were, though the world in whichthey were finding their habitat is wonderfully, almost incrediblydifferent. Yet it is not wholly different, for a young literary pair nowadventuring in New York might easily parallel the experience of theMarches with their own, if not for so little money; many phases of NewYork housing are better, but all are dearer. Other aspects of thematerial city have undergone a transformation much more wonderful. I findthat in my book its population is once modestly spoken of as twomillions, but now in twenty years it is twice as great, and the grandeuras well as grandiosity of its forms is doubly apparent. The transitionalpublic that then moped about in mildly tinkling horse-cars is now hurriedback and forth in clanging trolleys, in honking and whirring motors; theElevated road which was the last word of speed is undermined by theSubway, shooting its swift shuttles through the subterranean woof of thecity's haste. From these feet let the witness infer our whole massiveHercules, a bulk that sprawls and stretches beyond the rivers through thetunnels piercing their beds and that towers into the skies withinnumerable tops--a Hercules blent of Briareus and Cerberus, but not sobad a monster as it seemed then to threaten becoming. 

Certain hopes of truer and better conditions on which my heart was fixedtwenty years ago are not less dear, and they are by no means touched withdespair, though they have not yet found the fulfilment which I would thenhave prophesied for them. Events have not wholly played them false;events have not halted, though they have marched with a slowness thatmight affect a younger observer as marking time. They who were thenmindful of the poor have not forgotten them, and what is better the poorhave not often forgotten themselves in violences such as offered me thematerial of tragedy and pathos in my story. In my quality of artist Icould not regret these, and I gratefully realize that they offered me theopportunity of a more strenuous action, a more impressive catastrophethan I could have achieved without them. They tended to give the wholefable dignity and doubtless made for its success as a book. As a serialit had crept a sluggish course before a public apparently so unmindful ofit that no rumor of its acceptance or rejection reached the writer duringthe half year of its publication; but it rose in book form from thatfailure and stood upon its feet and went its way to greater favor thanany book of his had yet enjoyed. I hope that my recognition of the factwill not seem like boasting, but that the reader will regard it as aspecial confidence from the author and will let it go no farther. 

KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909. 

PART FIRST

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

I. 

"Now, you think this thing over, March, and let me know the last of nextweek, " said Fulkerson. He got up from the chair which he had been sittingastride, with his face to its back, and tilting toward March on itshind-legs, and came and rapped upon his table with his thin bamboo stick. "What you want to do is to get out of the insurance business, anyway. Youacknowledge that yourself. You never liked it, and now it makes you sick;in other words, it's killing you. You ain't an insurance man by nature. You're a natural-born literary man, and you've been going against thegrain. Now, I offer you a chance to go with the grain. I don't say you'regoing to make your everlasting fortune, but I'll give you a livingsalary, and if the thing succeeds you'll share in its success. We'll allshare in its success. That's the beauty of it. I tell you, March, this isthe greatest idea that has been struck since"--Fulkerson stopped andsearched his mind for a fit image--"since the creation of man. "

He put his leg up over the corner of March's table and gave himself asharp cut on the thigh, and leaned forward to get the full effect of hiswords upon his listener. 

March had his hands clasped together behind his head, and he took one ofthem down long enough to put his inkstand and mucilage-bottle out ofFulkerson's way. After many years' experiment of a mustache and whiskers, he now wore his grizzled beard full, but cropped close; it gave him acertain grimness, corrected by the gentleness of his eyes. 

"Some people don't think much of the creation of man nowadays. Why stopat that? Why not say since the morning stars sang together?"

"No, sir; no, sir! I don't want to claim too much, and I draw the line atthe creation of man. I'm satisfied with that. But if you want to ring themorning stars into the prospectus all right; I won't go back on you. "

"But I don't understand why you've set your mind on me, " March said. "Ihaven't had, any magazine experience, you know that; and I haven'tseriously attempted to do anything in literature since I was married. Igave up smoking and the Muse together. I suppose I could still manage acigar, but I don't believe I could--"

"Muse worth a cent. " Fulkerson took the thought out of his mouth and putit into his own words. "I know. Well, I don't want you to. I don't careif you never write a line for the thing, though you needn't rejectanything of yours, if it happens to be good, on that account. And I don'twant much experience in my editor; rather not have it. You told me, didn't you, that you used to do some newspaper work before you settleddown?"

"Yes; I thought my lines were permanently cast in those places once. Itwas more an accident than anything else that I got into the insurancebusiness. I suppose I secretly hoped that if I made my living bysomething utterly different, I could come more freshly to literatureproper in my leisure. "

"I see; and you found the insurance business too many, for you. Well, anyway, you've always had a hankering for the inkpots; and the fact thatyou first gave me the idea of this thing shows that you've done more orless thinking about magazines. "

"Yes--less. "

"Well, all right. Now don't you be troubled. I know what I want, generally, speaking, and in this particular instance I want you. I mightget a man of more experience, but I should probably get a man of moreprejudice and self-conceit along with him, and a man with a following ofthe literary hangers-on that are sure to get round an editor sooner orlater. I want to start fair, and I've found out in the syndicate businessall the men that are worth having. But they know me, and they don't knowyou, and that's where we shall have the pull on them. They won't be ableto work the thing. Don't you be anxious about the experience. I've gotexperience enough of my own to run a dozen editors. What I want is aneditor who has taste, and you've got it; and conscience, and you've gotit; and horse sense, and you've got that. And I like you because you're aWestern man, and I'm another. I do cotton to a Western man when I findhim off East here, holding his own with the best of 'em, and showing 'emthat he's just as much civilized as they are. We both know what it is tohave our bright home in the setting sun; heigh?"

"I think we Western men who've come East are apt to take ourselves alittle too objectively and to feel ourselves rather more representativethan we need, " March remarked. 

Fulkerson was delighted. "You've hit it! We do! We are!"

"And as for holding my own, I'm not very proud of what I've done in thatway; it's been very little to hold. But I know what you mean, Fulkerson, and I've felt the same thing myself; it warmed me toward you when wefirst met. I can't help suffusing a little to any man when I hear that hewas born on the other side of the Alleghanies. It's perfectly stupid. Idespise the same thing when I see it in Boston people. "

Fulkerson pulled first one of his blond whiskers and then the other, andtwisted the end of each into a point, which he left to untwine itself. Hefixed March with his little eyes, which had a curious innocence in theircunning, and tapped the desk immediately in front of him. "What I likeabout you is that you're broad in your sympathies. The first time I sawyou, that night on the Quebec boat, I said to myself: 'There's a man Iwant to know. There's a human being. ' I was a little afraid of Mrs. Marchand the children, but I felt at home with you--thoroughlydomesticated--before I passed a word with you; and when you spoke first, and opened up with a joke over that fellow's tableful of light literatureand Indian moccasins and birch-bark toy canoes and stereoscopic views, Iknew that we were brothers-spiritual twins. I recognized the Westernstyle of fun, and I thought, when you said you were from Boston, that itwas some of the same. But I see now that its being a cold fact, as far asthe last fifteen or twenty years count, is just so much gain. You knowboth sections, and you can make this thing go, from ocean to ocean. "

"We might ring that into the prospectus, too, " March suggested, with asmile. "You might call the thing 'From Sea to Sea. ' By-the-way, what areyou going to call it?"

"I haven't decided yet; that's one of the things I wanted to talk withyou about. I had thought of 'The Syndicate'; but it sounds kind of dry, and doesn't seem to cover the ground exactly. I should like somethingthat would express the co-operative character of the thing, but I don'tknow as I can get it. "

"Might call it 'The Mutual'. "

"They'd think it was an insurance paper. No, that won't do. But Mutualcomes pretty near the idea. If we could get something like that, it wouldpique curiosity; and then if we could get paragraphs afloat explainingthat the contributors were to be paid according to the sales, it would bea first-rate ad. "

He bent a wide, anxious, inquiring smile upon March, who suggested, lazily: "You might call it 'The Round-Robin'. That would express thecentral idea of irresponsibility. As I understand, everybody is to sharethe profits and be exempt from the losses. Or, if I'm wrong, and thereverse is true, you might call it 'The Army of Martyrs'. Come, thatsounds attractive, Fulkerson! Or what do you think of 'The Fifth Wheel'?That would forestall the criticism that there are too many literaryperiodicals already. Or, if you want to put forward the idea of completeindependence, you could call it 'The Free Lance'; or--"

"Or 'The Hog on Ice'--either stand up or fall down, you know, " Fulkersonbroke in coarsely. "But we'll leave the name of the magazine till we getthe editor. I see the poison's beginning to work in you, March; and if Ihad time I'd leave the result to time. But I haven't. I've got to knowinside of the next week. To come down to business with you, March, Isha'n't start this thing unless I can get you to take hold of it. "

He seemed to expect some acknowledgment, and March said, "Well, that'svery nice of you, Fulkerson. "

"No, sir; no, sir! I've always liked you and wanted you ever since we metthat first night. I had this thing inchoately in my mind then, when I wastelling you about the newspaper syndicate business--beautiful vision of alot of literary fellows breaking loose from the bondage of publishers andplaying it alone--"

"You might call it 'The Lone Hand'; that would be attractive, " Marchinterrupted. "The whole West would know what you meant. "

Fulkerson was talking seriously, and March was listening seriously; butthey both broke off and laughed. Fulkerson got down off the table andmade some turns about the room. It was growing late; the October sun hadleft the top of the tall windows; it was still clear day, but it wouldsoon be twilight; they had been talking a long time. Fulkerson came andstood with his little feet wide apart, and bent his little lean, squareface on March. "See here! How much do you get out of this thing here, anyway?"

"The insurance business?" March hesitated a moment and then said, with acertain effort of reserve, "At present about three thousand. " He lookedup at Fulkerson with a glance, as if he had a mind to enlarge upon thefact, and then dropped his eyes without saying more. 

Whether Fulkerson had not thought it so much or not, he said: "Well, I'llgive you thirty-five hundred. Come! And your chances in the success. "

"We won't count the chances in the success. And I don't believethirty-five hundred would go any further in New York than three thousandin Boston. "

"But you don't live on three thousand here?"

"No; my wife has a little property. "

"Well, she won't lose the income if you go to New York. I suppose you payten or twelve hundred a year for your house here. You can get plenty offlats in New York for the same money; and I understand you can get allsorts of provisions for less than you pay now--three or four cents on thepound. Come!"

This was by no means the first talk they had had about the matter; everythree or four months during the past two years the syndicate man haddropped in upon March to air the scheme and to get his impressions of it. This had happened so often that it had come to be a sort of joke betweenthem. But now Fulkerson clearly meant business, and March had a struggleto maintain himself in a firm poise of refusal. 

"I dare say it wouldn't--or it needn't-cost so very much more, but Idon't want to go to New York; or my wife doesn't. It's the same thing. "

"A good deal samer, " Fulkerson admitted. 

March did not quite like his candor, and he went on with dignity. "It'svery natural she shouldn't. She has always lived in Boston; she'sattached to the place. Now, if you were going to start 'The Fifth Wheel'in Boston--"

Fulkerson slowly and sadly shook his head, but decidedly. "Wouldn't do. You might as well say St. Louis or Cincinnati. There's only one city thatbelongs to the whole country, and that's New York. "

"Yes, I know, " sighed March; "and Boston belongs to the Bostonians, butthey like you to make yourself at home while you're visiting. "

"If you'll agree to make phrases like that, right along, and get theminto 'The Round-Robin' somehow, I'll say four thousand, " said Fulkerson. "You think it over now, March. You talk it over with Mrs. March; I knowyou will, anyway; and I might as well make a virtue of advising you to doit. Tell her I advised you to do it, and you let me know before nextSaturday what you've decided. "

March shut down the rolling top of his desk in the corner of the room, and walked Fulkerson out before him. It was so late that the last of thechore-women who washed down the marble halls and stairs of the greatbuilding had wrung out her floor-cloth and departed, leaving spotlessstone and a clean, damp smell in the darkening corridors behind her. 

"Couldn't offer you such swell quarters in New York, March, " Fulkersonsaid, as he went tack-tacking down the steps with his small boot-heels. "But I've got my eye on a little house round in West Eleventh Street thatI'm going to fit up for my bachelor's hall in the third story, and adaptfor 'The Lone Hand' in the first and second, if this thing goes through;and I guess we'll be pretty comfortable. It's right on the Sand Strip--nomalaria of any kind. "

"I don't know that I'm going to share its salubrity with you yet, " Marchsighed, in an obvious travail which gave Fulkerson hopes. 

"Oh yes, you are, " he coaxed. "Now, you talk it over with your wife. Yougive her a fair, unprejudiced chance at the thing on its merits, and I'mvery much mistaken in Mrs. March if she doesn't tell you to go in andwin. We're bound to win!"

They stood on the outside steps of the vast edifice beetling like agranite crag above them, with the stone groups of an allegory oflife-insurance foreshortened in the bas-relief overhead. March absentlylifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange after so many years'familiarity, and so was the well-known street in its Saturday-eveningsolitude. He asked himself, with prophetic homesickness, if it were anomen of what was to be. But he only said, musingly: "A fortnightly. Youknow that didn't work in England. The fortnightly is published once amonth now. "

"It works in France, " Fulkerson retorted. "The 'Revue des Deux Mondes' isstill published twice a month. I guess we can make it work inAmerica--with illustrations. "

"Going to have illustrations?"

"My dear boy! What are you giving me? Do I look like the sort of lunaticwho would start a thing in the twilight of the nineteenth century withoutillustrations? Come off!"

"Ah, that complicates it! I don't know anything about art. " March's lookof discouragement confessed the hold the scheme had taken upon him. 

"I don't want you to!" Fulkerson retorted. "Don't you suppose I shallhave an art man?"

"And will they--the artists--work at a reduced rate, too, like thewriters, with the hopes of a share in the success?"

"Of course they will! And if I want any particular man, for a card, I'llpay him big money besides. But I can get plenty of first-rate sketches onmy own terms. You'll see! They'll pour in!"

"Look here, Fulkerson, " said March, "you'd better call this fortnightlyof yours 'The Madness o f the Half-Moon'; or 'Bedlam Broke Loose'wouldn't be bad! Why do you throw away all your hard earnings on such acrazy venture? Don't do it!" The kindness which March had always felt, inspite of his wife's first misgivings and reservations, for the merry, hopeful, slangy, energetic little creature trembled in his voice. Theyhad both formed a friendship for Fulkerson during the week they weretogether in Quebec. When he was not working the newspapers there, he wentabout with them over the familiar ground they were showing theirchildren, and was simply grateful for the chance, as well as veryentertaining about it all. The children liked him, too; when they got theclew to his intention, and found that he was not quite serious in many ofthe things he said, they thought he was great fun. They were always gladwhen their father brought him home on the occasion of Fulkerson's visitsto Boston; and Mrs. March, though of a charier hospitality, welcomedFulkerson with a grateful sense of his admiration for her husband. He hada way of treating March with deference, as an older and abler man, and ofqualifying the freedom he used toward every one with an implication thatMarch tolerated it voluntarily, which she thought very sweet and evenrefined. 

"Ah, now you're talking like a man and a brother, " said Fulkerson. "Why, March, old man, do you suppose I'd come on here and try to talk you intothis thing if I wasn't morally, if I wasn't perfectly, sure of success?There isn't any if or and about it. I know my ground, every inch; and Idon't stand alone on it, " he added, with a significance which did notescape March. "When you've made up your mind I can give you the proof;but I'm not at liberty now to say anything more. I tell you it's going tobe a triumphal march from the word go, with coffee and lemonade for theprocession along the whole line. All you've got to do is to fall in. " Hestretched out his hand to March. "You let me know as soon as you can. "

March deferred taking his hand till he could ask, "Where are you going?"

"Parker House. Take the eleven for New York to-night. "

"I thought I might walk your way. " March looked at his watch. "But Ishouldn't have time. Goodbye!"

He now let Fulkerson have his hand, and they exchanged a cordialpressure. Fulkerson started away at a quick, light pace. Half a block offhe stopped, turned round, and, seeing March still standing where he hadleft him, he called back, joyously, "I've got the name!"

"What?"

"Every Other Week. "

"It isn't bad. "

"Ta-ta!"

II. 

All the way up to the South End March mentally prolonged his talk withFulkerson, and at his door in Nankeen Square he closed the parley with aplump refusal to go to New York on any terms. His daughter Bella waslying in wait for him in the hall, and she threw her arms round his neckwith the exuberance of her fourteen years and with something of thehistrionic intention of her sex. He pressed on, with her clinging abouthim, to the library, and, in the glow of his decision against Fulkerson, kissed his wife, where she sat by the study lamp reading the Transcriptthrough her first pair of eye-glasses: it was agreed in the family thatshe looked distinguished in them, or, at any rate, cultivated. She tookthem off to give him a glance of question, and their son Tom looked upfrom his book for a moment; he was in his last year at the high school, and was preparing for Harvard. 

"I didn't get away from the office till half-past five, " March explainedto his wife's glance, "and then I walked. I suppose dinner's waiting. I'msorry, but I won't do it any more. "

At table he tried to be gay with Bella, who babbled at him with a volublepertness which her brother had often advised her parents to check in her, unless they wanted her to be universally despised. 

"Papa!" she shouted at last, "you're not listening!" As soon as possiblehis wife told the children they might be excused. Then she asked, "Whatis it, Basil?"

"What is what?" he retorted, with a specious brightness that did notavail. 

"What is on your mind?"

"How do you know there's anything?"

"Your kissing me so when you came in, for one thing. "

"Don't I always kiss you when I come in?"

"Not now. I suppose it isn't necessary any more. 'Cela va sans baiser. '"

"Yes, I guess it's so; we get along without the symbolism now. " Hestopped, but she knew that he had not finished. 

"Is it about your business? Have they done anything more?"

"No; I'm still in the dark. I don't know whether they mean to supplantme, or whether they ever did. But I wasn't thinking about that. Fulkersonhas been to see me again. "

"Fulkerson?" She brightened at the name, and March smiled, too. "Whydidn't you bring him to dinner?"

"I wanted to talk with you. Then you do like him?"

"What has that got to do with it, Basil?"

"Nothing! nothing! That is, he was boring away about that scheme of hisagain. He's got it into definite shape at last. "

"What shape?"

March outlined it for her, and his wife seized its main features with theintuitive sense of affairs which makes women such good business-men whenthey will let it. 

"It sounds perfectly crazy, " she said, finally. "But it mayn't be. Theonly thing I didn't like about Mr. Fulkerson was his always wanting tochance things. But what have you got to do with it?"

"What have I got to do with it?" March toyed with the delay the questiongave him; then he said, with a sort of deprecatory laugh: "It seems thatFulkerson has had his eye on me ever since we met that night on theQuebec boat. I opened up pretty freely to him, as you do to a man younever expect to see again, and when I found he was in that newspapersyndicate business I told him about my early literary ambitions--"

"You can't say that I ever discouraged them, Basil, " his wife put in. "Ishould have been willing, any time, to give up everything for them. "

"Well, he says that I first suggested this brilliant idea to him. PerhapsI did; I don't remember. When he told me about his supplying literatureto newspapers for simultaneous publication, he says I asked: 'Why notapply the principle of co-operation to a magazine, and run it in theinterest of the contributors?' and that set him to thinking, and hethought out his plan of a periodical which should pay authors and artistsa low price outright for their work and give them a chance of the profitsin the way of a percentage. After all, it isn't so very different fromthe chances an author takes when he publishes a book. And Fulkersonthinks that the novelty of the thing would pique public curiosity, if itdidn't arouse public sympathy. And the long and short of it is, Isabel, that he wants me to help edit it. "

"To edit it?" His wife caught her breath, and she took a little time torealize the fact, while she stared hard at her husband to make sure hewas not joking. 

"Yes. He says he owes it all to me; that I invented the idea--thegerm--the microbe. "

His wife had now realized the fact, at least in a degree that excludedtrifling with it. "That is very honorable of Mr. Fulkerson; and if heowes it to you, it was the least he could do. " Having recognized herhusband's claim to the honor done him, she began to kindle with a senseof the honor itself and the value of the opportunity. "It's a very highcompliment to you, Basil--a very high compliment. And you could give upthis wretched insurance business that you've always hated so, and that'smaking you so unhappy now that you think they're going to take it fromyou. Give it up and take Mr. Fulkerson's offer! It's a perfectinterposition, coming just at this time! Why, do it! Mercy!" she suddenlyarrested herself, "he wouldn't expect you to get along on the possibleprofits?" Her face expressed the awfulness of the notion. 

March smiled reassuringly, and waited to give himself the pleasure of thesensation he meant to give her. "If I'll make striking phrases for it andedit it, too, he'll give me four thousand dollars. "

He leaned back in his chair, and stuck his hands deep into his pockets, and watched his wife's face, luminous with the emotions that flashedthrough her mind-doubt, joy, anxiety. 

"Basil! You don't mean it! Why, take it! Take it instantly! Oh, what athing to happen! Oh, what luck! But you deserve it, if you firstsuggested it. What an escape, what a triumph over all those hatefulinsurance people! Oh, Basil, I'm afraid he'll change his mind! You oughtto have accepted on the spot. You might have known I would approve, andyou could so easily have taken it back if I didn't. Telegraph him now!Run right out with the despatch--Or we can send Tom!"

In these imperatives of Mrs. March's there was always much of theconditional. She meant that he should do what she said, if it wereentirely right; and she never meant to be considered as having urged him. 

"And suppose his enterprise went wrong?" her husband suggested. 

"It won't go wrong. Hasn't he made a success of his syndicate?"

"He says so--yes. "

"Very well, then, it stands to reason that he'll succeed in this, too. Hewouldn't undertake it if he didn't know it would succeed; he must havecapital. "

"It will take a great deal to get such a thing going; and even if he'sgot an Angel behind him--"

She caught at the word--"An Angel?"

"It's what the theatrical people call a financial backer. He dropped ahint of something of that kind. "

"Of course, he's got an Angel, " said his wife, promptly adopting theword. "And even if he hadn't, still, Basil, I should be willing to haveyou risk it. The risk isn't so great, is it? We shouldn't be ruined if itfailed altogether. With our stocks we have two thousand a year, anyway, and we could pinch through on that till you got into some other businessafterward, especially if we'd saved something out of your salary while itlasted. Basil, I want you to try it! I know it will give you a new leaseof life to have a congenial occupation. " March laughed, but his wifepersisted. "I'm all for your trying it, Basil; indeed I am. If it's anexperiment, you can give it up. "

"It can give me up, too. "

"Oh, nonsense! I guess there's not much fear of that. Now, I want you totelegraph Mr. Fulkerson, so that he'll find the despatch waiting for himwhen he gets to New York. I'll take the whole responsibility, Basil, andI'll risk all the consequences. "

III. 

March's face had sobered more and more as she followed one hopeful burstwith another, and now it expressed a positive pain. But he forced a smileand said: "There's a little condition attached. Where did you suppose itwas to be published?"

"Why, in Boston, of course. Where else should it be published?"

She looked at him for the intention of his question so searchingly thathe quite gave up the attempt to be gay about it. "No, " he said, gravely, "it's to be published in New York. "

She fell back in her chair. "In New York?" She leaned forward over thetable toward him, as if to make sure that she heard aright, and said, with all the keen reproach that he could have expected: "In New York, Basil! Oh, how could you have let me go on?"

He had a sufficiently rueful face in owning: "I oughtn't to have done it, but I got started wrong. I couldn't help putting the best foot, forwardat first--or as long as the whole thing was in the air. I didn't knowthat you would take so much to the general enterprise, or else I shouldhave mentioned the New York condition at once; but, of course, that putsan end to it. "

"Oh, of course, " she assented, sadly. "We COULDN'T go to New York. "

"No, I know that, " he said; and with this a perverse desire to tempt herto the impossibility awoke in him, though he was really quite cold aboutthe affair himself now. "Fulkerson thought we could get a nice flat inNew York for about what the interest and taxes came to here, andprovisions are cheaper. But I should rather not experiment at my time oflife. If I could have been caught younger, I might have been inured toNew York, but I don't believe I could stand it now. "

"How I hate to have you talk that way, Basil! You are young enough to tryanything--anywhere; but you know I don't like New York. I don't approveof it. It's so big, and so hideous! Of course I shouldn't mind that; butI've always lived in Boston, and the children were born and have alltheir friendships and associations here. " She added, with thehelplessness that discredited her good sense and did her injustice, "Ihave just got them both into the Friday afternoon class at Papanti's, andyou know how difficult that is. "

March could not fail to take advantage of an occasion like this. "Well, that alone ought to settle it. Under the circumstances, it would beflying in the face of Providence to leave Boston. The mere fact of abrilliant opening like that offered me on 'The Microbe, ' and the halcyonfuture which Fulkerson promises if we'll come to New York, is as dust inthe balance against the advantages of the Friday afternoon class. "

"Basil, " she appealed, solemnly, "have I ever interfered with yourcareer?"

"I never had any for you to interfere with, my dear. "

"Basil! Haven't I always had faith in you? And don't you suppose that ifI thought it would really be for your advancement I would go to New Yorkor anywhere with you?"

"No, my dear, I don't, " he teased. "If it would be for my salvation, yes, perhaps; but not short of that; and I should have to prove by a cloud ofwitnesses that it would. I don't blame you. I wasn't born in Boston, butI understand how you feel. And really, my dear, " he added, without irony, "I never seriously thought of asking you to go to New York. I was dazzledby Fulkerson's offer, I'll own that; but his choice of me as editorsapped my confidence in him. "

"I don't like to hear you say that, Basil, " she entreated. 

"Well, of course there were mitigating circumstances. I could see thatFulkerson meant to keep the whip-hand himself, and that was reassuring. And, besides, if the Reciprocity Life should happen not to want myservices any longer, it wouldn't be quite like giving up a certainty;though, as a matter of business, I let Fulkerson get that impression; Ifelt rather sneaking to do it. But if the worst comes to the worst, I canlook about for something to do in Boston; and, anyhow, people don'tstarve on two thousand a year, though it's convenient to have five. Thefact is, I'm too old to change so radically. If you don't like my sayingthat, then you are, Isabel, and so are the children. I've no right totake them from the home we've made, and to change the whole course oftheir lives, unless I can assure them of something, and I can't assurethem of anything. Boston is big enough for us, and it's certainlyprettier than New York. I always feel a little proud of hailing fromBoston; my pleasure in the place mounts the farther I get away from it. But I do appreciate it, my dear; I've no more desire to leave it than youhave. You may be sure that if you don't want to take the children out ofthe Friday afternoon class, I don't want to leave my library here, andall the ways I've got set in. We'll keep on. Very likely the companywon't supplant me, and if it does, and Watkins gets the place, he'll giveme a subordinate position of some sort. Cheer up, Isabel! I have putSatan and his angel, Fulkerson, behind me, and it's all right. Let's goin to the children. "

He came round the table to Isabel, where she sat in a growingdistraction, and lifted her by the waist from her chair. 

She sighed deeply. "Shall we tell the children about it?"

"No. What's the use, now?"

"There wouldn't be any, " she assented. When they entered the family room, where the boy and girl sat on either side of the lamp working out thelessons for Monday which they had left over from the day before, sheasked, "Children, how would you like to live in New York?"

Bella made haste to get in her word first. "And give up the Fridayafternoon class?" she wailed. 

Tom growled from his book, without lifting his eyes: "I shouldn't want togo to Columbia. They haven't got any dormitories, and you have to boardround anywhere. Are you going to New York?" He now deigned to look up athis father. 

"No, Tom. You and Bella have decided me against it. Your perspectiveshows the affair in its true proportions. I had an offer to go to NewYork, but I've refused it. "

IV

March's irony fell harmless from the children's preoccupation with theirown affairs, but he knew that his wife felt it, and this added to thebitterness which prompted it. He blamed her for letting her provincialnarrowness prevent his accepting Fulkerson's offer quite as much as if hehad otherwise entirely wished to accept it. His world, like most worlds, had been superficially a disappointment. He was no richer than at thebeginning, though in marrying he had given up some tastes, somepreferences, some aspirations, in the hope of indulging them later, withlarger means and larger leisure. His wife had not urged him to do it; infact, her pride, as she said, was in his fitness for the life he hadrenounced; but she had acquiesced, and they had been very happy together. That is to say, they made up their quarrels or ignored them. 

They often accused each other of being selfish and indifferent, but sheknew that he would always sacrifice himself for her and the children; andhe, on his part, with many gibes and mockeries, wholly trusted in her. They had grown practically tolerant of each other's disagreeable traits;and the danger that really threatened them was that they should grow toowell satisfied with themselves, if not with each other. They were notsentimental, they were rather matter-of-fact in their motives; but theyhad both a sort of humorous fondness for sentimentality. They liked toplay with the romantic, from the safe vantage-ground of their realpracticality, and to divine the poetry of the commonplace. Their peculiarpoint of view separated them from most other people, with whom theirmeans of self-comparison were not so good since their marriage as before. Then they had travelled and seen much of the world, and they had formedtastes which they had not always been able to indulge, but of which theyfelt that the possession reflected distinction on them. It enabled themto look down upon those who were without such tastes; but they were notill-natured, and so they did not look down so much with contempt as withamusement. In their unfashionable neighborhood they had the fame of beingnot exclusive precisely, but very much wrapped up in themselves and theirchildren. 

Mrs. March was reputed to be very cultivated, and Mr. March even more so, among the simpler folk around them. Their house had some good pictures, which her aunt had brought home from Europe in more affluent days, and itabounded in books on which he spent more than he ought. They hadbeautified it in every way, and had unconsciously taken credit to themselves for it. They felt, with a glow almost of virtue, how perfectly itfitted their lives and their children's, and they believed that somehowit expressed their characters--that it was like them. They went out verylittle; she remained shut up in its refinement, working the good of herown; and he went to his business, and hurried back to forget it, anddream his dream of intellectual achievement in the flattering atmosphereof her sympathy. He could not conceal from himself that his divided lifewas somewhat like Charles Lamb's, and there were times when, as he hadexpressed to Fulkerson, he believed that its division was favorable tothe freshness of his interest in literature. It certainly kept it a highprivilege, a sacred refuge. Now and then he wrote something, and got itprinted after long delays, and when they met on the St. LawrenceFulkerson had some of March's verses in his pocket-book, which he had cutout of astray newspaper and carried about for years, because they pleasedhis fancy so much; they formed an immediate bond of union between the menwhen their authorship was traced and owned, and this gave a pretty colorof romance to their acquaintance. But, for the most part, March wassatisfied to read. He was proud of reading critically, and he kept in thecurrent of literary interests and controversies. It all seemed to him, and to his wife at second-hand, very meritorious; he could not helpcontrasting his life and its inner elegance with that of other men whohad no such resources. He thought that he was not arrogant about it, because he did full justice to the good qualities of those other people;he congratulated himself upon the democratic instincts which enabled himto do this; and neither he nor his wife supposed that they were selfishpersons. On the contrary, they were very sympathetic; there was no goodcause that they did not wish well; they had a generous scorn of all kindsof narrow-heartedness; if it had ever come into their way to sacrificethemselves for others, they thought they would have done so, but theynever asked why it had not come in their way. They were very gentle andkind, even when most elusive; and they taught their children to loatheall manner of social cruelty. March was of so watchful a conscience insome respects that he denied himself the pensive pleasure of lapsing intothe melancholy of unfulfilled aspirations; but he did not see that, if hehad abandoned them, it had been for what he held dearer; generally hefelt as if he had turned from them with a high, altruistic aim. Thepractical expression of his life was that it was enough to provide wellfor his family; to have cultivated tastes, and to gratify them to theextent of his means; to be rather distinguished, even in thesimplification of his desires. He believed, and his wife believed, thatif the time ever came when he really wished to make a sacrifice to thefulfilment of the aspirations so long postponed, she would be ready tojoin with heart and hand. 

When he went to her room from his library, where she left him the wholeevening with the children, he found her before the glass thoughtfullyremoving the first dismantling pin from her back hair. 

"I can't help feeling, " she grieved into the mirror, "that it's I whokeep you from accepting that offer. I know it is! I could go West withyou, or into a new country--anywhere; but New York terrifies me. I don'tlike New York, I never did; it disheartens and distracts me; I can't findmyself in it; I shouldn't know how to shop. I know I'm foolish and narrowand provincial, " she went on, "but I could never have any inner quiet inNew York; I couldn't live in the spirit there. I suppose people do. Itcan't be that all these millions--'

"Oh, not so bad as that!" March interposed, laughing. "There aren't quitetwo. "

"I thought there were four or five. Well, no matter. You see what I am, Basil. I'm terribly limited. I couldn't make my sympathies go round twomillion people; I should be wretched. I suppose I'm standing in the wayof your highest interest, but I can't help it. We took each other forbetter or worse, and you must try to bear with me--" She broke off andbegan to cry. 

"Stop it!" shouted March. "I tell you I never cared anything forFulkerson's scheme or entertained it seriously, and I shouldn't if he'dproposed to carry it out in Boston. " This was not quite true, but in theretrospect it seemed sufficiently so for the purposes of argument. "Don'tsay another word about it. The thing's over now, and I don't want tothink of it any more. We couldn't change its nature if we talked allnight. But I want you to understand that it isn't your limitations thatare in the way. It's mine. I shouldn't have the courage to take such aplace; I don't think I'm fit for it, and that's the long and short ofit. "

"Oh, you don't know how it hurts me to have you say that, Basil. "

The next morning, as they sat together at breakfast, without thechildren, whom they let lie late on Sunday, Mrs. March said to herhusband, silent over his fish-balls and baked beans: "We will go to NewYork. I've decided it. "

"Well, it takes two to decide that, " March retorted. "We are not going toNew York. "

"Yes, we are. I've thought it out. Now, listen. "

"Oh, I'm willing to listen, " he consented, airily. 

"You've always wanted to get out of the insurance business, and now withthat fear of being turned out which you have you mustn't neglect thisoffer. I suppose it has its risks, but it's a risk keeping on as we are;and perhaps you will make a great success of it. I do want you to try, Basil. If I could once feel that you had fairly seen what you could do inliterature, I should die happy. "

"Not immediately after, I hope, " he suggested, taking the second cup ofcoffee she had been pouring out for him. "And Boston?"

"We needn't make a complete break. We can keep this place for thepresent, anyway; we could let it for the winter, and come back in thesummer next year. It would be change enough from New York. "

"Fulkerson and I hadn't got as far as to talk of a vacation. "

"No matter. The children and I could come. And if you didn't like NewYork, or the enterprise failed, you could get into something in Bostonagain; and we have enough to live on till you did. Yes, Basil, I'mgoing. "

"I can see by the way your chin trembles that nothing could stop you. Youmay go to New York if you wish, Isabel, but I shall stay here. "

"Be serious, Basil. I'm in earnest. "

"Serious? If I were any more serious I should shed tears. Come, my dear, I know what you mean, and if I had my heart set on this thing--Fulkersonalways calls it 'this thing' I would cheerfully accept any sacrifice youcould make to it. But I'd rather not offer you up on a shrine I don'tfeel any particular faith in. I'm very comfortable where I am; that is, Iknow just where the pinch comes, and if it comes harder, why, I've gotused to bearing that kind of pinch. I'm too old to change pinches. "

"Now, that does decide me. "

"It decides me, too. "

"I will take all the responsibility, Basil, " she pleaded. 

"Oh yes; but you'll hand it back to me as soon as you've carried yourpoint with it. There's nothing mean about you, Isabel, whereresponsibility is concerned. No; if I do this thing--Fulkerson again? Ican't get away from 'this thing'; it's ominous--I must do it because Iwant to do it, and not because you wish that you wanted me to do it. Iunderstand your position, Isabel, and that you're really acting from agenerous impulse, but there's nothing so precarious at our time of lifeas a generous impulse. When we were younger we could stand it; we couldgive way to it and take the consequences. But now we can't bear it. Wemust act from cold reason even in the ardor of self-sacrifice. "

"Oh, as if you did that!" his wife retorted. 

"Is that any cause why you shouldn't?" She could not say that it was, andhe went on triumphantly:

"No, I won't take you away from the only safe place on the planet andplunge you into the most perilous, and then have you say in yourrevulsion of feeling that you were all against it from the first, and yougave way because you saw I had my heart set on it. " He supposed he wastreating the matter humorously, but in this sort of banter betweenhusband and wife there is always much more than the joking. March hadseen some pretty feminine inconsistencies and trepidations which oncecharmed him in his wife hardening into traits of middle-age which werevery like those of less interesting older women. The sight moved him witha kind of pathos, but he felt the result hindering and vexatious. 

She now retorted that if he did not choose to take her at her word beneed not, but that whatever he did she should have nothing to reproachherself with; and, at least, he could not say that she had trapped himinto anything. 

"What do you mean by trapping?" he demanded. 

"I don't know what you call it, " she answered; "but when you get me tocommit myself to a thing by leaving out the most essential point, I callit trapping. "

"I wonder you stop at trapping, if you think I got you to favorFulkerson's scheme and then sprung New York on you. I don't suppose youdo, though. But I guess we won't talk about it any more. "

He went out for a long walk, and she went to her room. They lunchedsilently together in the presence of their children, who knew that theyhad been quarrelling, but were easily indifferent to the fact, aschildren get to be in such cases; nature defends their youth, and theunhappiness which they behold does not infect them. In the evening, afterthe boy and girl had gone to bed, the father and mother resumed theirtalk. He would have liked to take it up at the point from which itwandered into hostilities, for he felt it lamentable that a matter whichso seriously concerned them should be confused in the fumes of senselessanger; and he was willing to make a tacit acknowledgment of his own errorby recurring to the question, but she would not be content with this, andhe had to concede explicitly to her weakness that she really meant itwhen she had asked him to accept Fulkerson's offer. He said he knew that;and he began soberly to talk over their prospects in the event of theirgoing to New York. 

"Oh, I see you are going!" she twitted. 

"I'm going to stay, " he answered, "and let them turn me out of my agencyhere, " and in this bitterness their talk ended. 

V. 

His wife made no attempt to renew their talk before March went to hisbusiness in the morning, and they parted in dry offence. Their experiencewas that these things always came right of themselves at last, and theyusually let them. He knew that she had really tried to consent to a thingthat was repugnant to her, and in his heart he gave her more credit forthe effort than he had allowed her openly. She knew that she had made itwith the reservation he accused her of, and that he had a right to feelsore at what she could not help. But he left her to brood over hisingratitude, and she suffered him to go heavy and unfriended to meet thechances of the day. He said to himself that if she had assented cordiallyto the conditions of Fulkerson's offer, he would have had the courage totake all the other risks himself, and would have had the satisfaction ofresigning his place. As it was, he must wait till he was removed; and hefigured with bitter pleasure the pain she would feel when he came homesome day and told her he had been supplanted, after it was too late toclose with Fulkerson. 

He found a letter on his desk from the secretary, "Dictated, " intypewriting, which briefly informed him that Mr. Hubbell, the Inspectorof Agencies, would be in Boston on Wednesday, and would call at hisoffice during the forenoon. The letter was not different in tone frommany that he had formerly received; but the visit announced was out ofthe usual order, and March believed he read his fate in it. During theeighteen years of his connection with it--first as a subordinate in theBoston office, and finally as its general agent there--he had seen a goodmany changes in the Reciprocity; presidents, vice-presidents, actuaries, and general agents had come and gone, but there had always seemed to be arecognition of his efficiency, or at least sufficiency, and there hadnever been any manner of trouble, no question of accounts, no apparentdissatisfaction with his management, until latterly, when there had begunto come from headquarters some suggestions of enterprise in certain ways, which gave him his first suspicions of his clerk Watkins's willingness tosucceed him; they embodied some of Watkins's ideas. The things proposedseemed to March undignified, and even vulgar; he had never thoughthimself wanting in energy, though probably he had left the business totake its own course in the old lines more than he realized. Things hadalways gone so smoothly that he had sometimes fancied a peculiar regardfor him in the management, which he had the weakness to attribute to anappreciation of what he occasionally did in literature, though in sanermoments he felt how impossible this was. Beyond a reference from Mr. Hubbell to some piece of March's which had happened to meet his eye, noone in the management ever gave a sign of consciousness that theirservice was adorned by an obscure literary man; and Mr. Hubbell himselfhad the effect of regarding the excursions of March's pen as a sort ofjoke, and of winking at them; as he might have winked if once in a way hehad found him a little the gayer for dining. 

March wore through the day gloomily, but he had it on his conscience notto show any resentment toward Watkins, whom he suspected of wishing tosupplant him, and even of working to do so. Through this self-denial hereached a better mind concerning his wife. He determined not to make hersuffer needlessly, if the worst came to the worst; she would sufferenough, at the best, and till the worst came he would spare her, and notsay anything about the letter he had got. 

But when they met, her first glance divined that something had happened, and her first question frustrated his generous intention. He had to tellher about the letter. She would not allow that it had any significance, but she wished him to make an end of his anxieties and forestall whateverit might portend by resigning his place at once. She said she was quiteready to go to New York; she had been thinking it all over, and now shereally wanted to go. He answered, soberly, that he had thought it over, too; and he did not wish to leave Boston, where he had lived so long, ortry a new way of life if he could help it. He insisted that he was quiteselfish in this; in their concessions their quarrel vanished; they agreedthat whatever happened would be for the best; and the next day he went tohis office fortified for any event. 

His destiny, if tragical, presented itself with an aspect which he mighthave found comic if it had been another's destiny. Mr. Hubbell broughtMarch's removal, softened in the guise of a promotion. The management atNew York, it appeared, had acted upon a suggestion of Mr. Hubbell's, andnow authorized him to offer March the editorship of the monthly paperpublished in the interest of the company; his office would include theauthorship of circulars and leaflets in behalf of life-insurance, andwould give play to the literary talent which Mr. Hubbell had brought tothe attention of the management; his salary would be nearly as much as atpresent, but the work would not take his whole time, and in a place likeNew York he could get a great deal of outside writing, which they wouldnot object to his doing. 

Mr. Hubbell seemed so sure of his acceptance of a place in every waycongenial to a man of literary tastes that March was afterward sorry hedismissed the proposition with obvious irony, and had needlessly hurtHubbell's feelings; but Mrs. March had no such regrets. She was onlyafraid that he had not made his rejection contemptuous enough. "And now, "she said, "telegraph Mr. Fulkerson, and we will go at once. "

"I suppose I could still get Watkins's former place, " March suggested. 

"Never!" she retorted. "Telegraph instantly!"

They were only afraid now that Fulkerson might have changed his mind, andthey had a wretched day in which they heard nothing from him. It endedwith his answering March's telegram in person. They were so glad of hiscoming, and so touched by his satisfaction with his bargain, that theylaid all the facts of the case before him. He entered fully into March'ssense of the joke latent in Mr. Hubbell's proposition, and he tried tomake Mrs. March believe that he shared her resentment of the indignityoffered her husband. 

March made a show of willingness to release him in view of the changedsituation, saying that he held him to nothing. Fulkerson laughed, andasked him how soon he thought he could come on to New York. He refused toreopen the question of March's fitness with him; he said they, had goneinto that thoroughly, but he recurred to it with Mrs. March, andconfirmed her belief in his good sense on all points. She had been fromthe first moment defiantly confident of her husband's ability, but tillshe had talked the matter over with Fulkerson she was secretly not sureof it; or, at least, she was not sure that March was not right indistrusting himself. When she clearly understood, now, what Fulkersonintended, she had no longer a doubt. He explained how the enterprisediffered from others, and how he needed for its direction a man whocombined general business experience and business ideas with a love forthe thing and a natural aptness for it. He did not want a young man, andyet he wanted youth--its freshness, its zest--such as March would feel ina thing he could put his whole heart into. He would not run in ruts, likean old fellow who had got hackneyed; he would not have any hobbies; hewould not have any friends or any enemies. Besides, he would have to meetpeople, and March was a man that people took to; she knew that herself;he had a kind of charm. The editorial management was going to be kept inthe background, as far as the public was concerned; the public was tosuppose that the thing ran itself. Fulkerson did not care for a greatliterary reputation in his editor--he implied that March had a verypretty little one. At the same time the relations between thecontributors and the management were to be much more, intimate thanusual. Fulkerson felt his personal disqualification for working the thingsocially, and he counted upon Mr. March for that; that was to say, hecounted upon Mrs. March. 

She protested he must not count upon her; but it by no means disabledFulkerson's judgment in her view that March really seemed more thananything else a fancy of his. He had been a fancy of hers; and the sortof affectionate respect with which Fulkerson spoke of him laid foreversome doubt she had of the fineness of Fulkerson's manners and reconciledher to the graphic slanginess of his speech. 

The affair was now irretrievable, but she gave her approval to it assuperbly as if it were submitted in its inception. Only, Mr. Fulkersonmust not suppose she should ever like New York. She would not deceive himon that point. She never should like it. She did not conceal, either, that she did not like taking the children out of the Friday afternoonclass; and she did not believe that Tom would ever be reconciled to goingto Columbia. She took courage from Fulkerson's suggestion that it waspossible for Tom to come to Harvard even from New York; and she heapedhim with questions concerning the domiciliation of the family in thatcity. He tried to know something about the matter, and he succeeded inseeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him. 

VI. 

In the uprooting and transplanting of their home that followed, Mrs. March often trembled before distant problems and possible contingencies, but she was never troubled by present difficulties. She kept up withtireless energy; and in the moments of dejection and misgiving whichharassed her husband she remained dauntless, and put heart into him whenhe had lost it altogether. 

She arranged to leave the children in the house with the servants, whileshe went on with March to look up a dwelling of some sort in New York. Itmade him sick to think of it; and, when it came to the point, he wouldrather have given up the whole enterprise. She had to nerve him to it, torepresent more than once that now they had no choice but to make thisexperiment. Every detail of parting was anguish to him. He gotconsolation out of the notion of letting the house furnished for thewinter; that implied their return to it, but it cost him pangs of thekeenest misery to advertise it; and, when a tenant was actually found, itwas all he could do to give him the lease. He tried his wife's love andpatience as a man must to whom the future is easy in the mass butterrible as it translates itself piecemeal into the present. Heexperienced remorse in the presence of inanimate things he was going toleave as if they had sensibly reproached him, and an anticipativehomesickness that seemed to stop his heart. Again and again his wife hadto make him reflect that his depression was not prophetic. She convincedhim of what he already knew, and persuaded him against his knowledge thathe could be keeping an eye out for something to take hold of in Boston ifthey could not stand New York. She ended by telling him that it was toobad to make her comfort him in a trial that was really so much more atrial to her. She had to support him in a last access of despair on theirway to the Albany depot the morning they started to New York; but whenthe final details had been dealt with, the tickets bought, the trunkschecked, and the handbags hung up in their car, and the future had masseditself again at a safe distance and was seven hours and two hundred milesaway, his spirits began to rise and hers to sink. He would have beenwilling to celebrate the taste, the domestic refinement, of the ladies'waiting-room in the depot, where they had spent a quarter of an hourbefore the train started. He said he did not believe there was anotherstation in the world where mahogany rocking-chairs were provided; thatthe dull-red warmth of the walls was as cozy as an evening lamp, and thathe always hoped to see a fire kindled on that vast hearth and under thataesthetic mantel, but he supposed now he never should. He said it was allvery different from that tunnel, the old Albany depot, where they hadwaited the morning they went to New York when they were starting on theirwedding journey. 

"The morning, Basil!" cried his wife. "We went at night; and we weregoing to take the boat, but it stormed so!" She gave him a glance of suchreproach that he could not answer anything, and now she asked him whetherhe supposed their cook and second girl would be contented with one ofthose dark holes where they put girls to sleep in New York flats, andwhat she should do if Margaret, especially, left her. He ventured tosuggest that Margaret would probably like the city; but, if she left, there were plenty of other girls to be had in New York. She replied thatthere were none she could trust, and that she knew Margaret would notstay. He asked her why she took her, then--why she did not give her up atonce; and she answered that it would be inhuman to give her up just inthe edge of the winter. She had promised to keep her; and Margaret waspleased with the notion of going to New York, where she had a cousin. 

"Then perhaps she'll be pleased with the notion of staying, " he said. 

"Oh, much you know about it!" she retorted; and, in view of thehypothetical difficulty and his want of sympathy, she fell into a gloom, from which she roused herself at last by declaring that, if there wasnothing else in the flat they took, there should be a light kitchen and abright, sunny bedroom for Margaret. He expressed the belief that theycould easily find such a flat as that, and she denounced his fataloptimism, which buoyed him up in the absence of an undertaking and lethim drop into the depths of despair in its presence. 

He owned this defect of temperament, but he said that it compensated theopposite in her character. "I suppose that's one of the chief uses ofmarriage; people supplement one another, and form a pretty fair sort ofhuman being together. The only drawback to the theory is that unmarriedpeople seem each as complete and whole as a married pair. "

She refused to be amused; she turned her face to the window and put herhandkerchief up under her veil. 

It was not till the dining-car was attached to their train that they wereboth able to escape for an hour into the care-free mood of their earliertravels, when they were so easily taken out of themselves. The time hadbeen when they could have found enough in the conjectural fortunes andcharacters of their fellow-passengers to occupy them. This phase of theiryouth had lasted long, and the world was still full of novelty andinterest for them; but it required all the charm of the dining-car now tolay the anxieties that beset them. It was so potent for the moment, however, that they could take an objective view at their sitting cozilydown there together, as if they had only themselves in the world. Theywondered what the children were doing, the children who possessed them sointensely when present, and now, by a fantastic operation of absence, seemed almost non-existents. They tried to be homesick for them, butfailed; they recognized with comfortable self-abhorrence that this wasterrible, but owned a fascination in being alone; at the same time, theycould not imagine how people felt who never had any children. Theycontrasted the luxury of dining that way, with every advantage except aband of music, and the old way of rushing out to snatch a fearful joy atthe lunch-counters of the Worcesier and Springfield and New Havenstations. They had not gone often to New York since their weddingjourney, but they had gone often enough to have noted the change from thelunch-counter to the lunch-basket brought in the train, from which youcould subsist with more ease and dignity, but seemed destined to asuperabundance of pickles, whatever you ordered. 

They thought well of themselves now that they could be both critical andtolerant of flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another intheir dinner, and they lingered over their coffee and watched the autumnlandscape through the windows. 

"Not quite so loud a pattern of calico this year, " he said, withpatronizing forbearance toward the painted woodlands whirling by. "Do yousee how the foreground next the train rushes from us and the backgroundkeeps ahead of us, while the middle distance seems stationary? I don'tthink I ever noticed that effect before. There ought to be somethingliterary in it: retreating past and advancing future and deceitfullypermanent present--something like that?"

His wife brushed some crumbs from her lap before rising. "Yes. Youmustn't waste any of these ideas now. "

"Oh no; it would be money out of Fulkerson's pocket. "

VII. 

They went to a quiet hotel far down-town, and took a small apartmentwhich they thought they could easily afford for the day or two they needspend in looking up a furnished flat. They were used to staying at thishotel when they came on for a little outing in New York, after some rigidwinter in Boston, at the time of the spring exhibitions. They wereremembered there from year to year; the colored call-boys, who neverseemed to get any older, smiled upon them, and the clerk called March byname even before he registered. He asked if Mrs. March were with him, andsaid then he supposed they would want their usual quarters; and in amoment they were domesticated in a far interior that seemed to have beenwaiting for them in a clean, quiet, patient disoccupation ever since theyleft it two years before. The little parlor, with its gilt paper andebonized furniture, was the lightest of the rooms, but it was not verylight at noonday without the gas, which the bell-boy now flared up forthem. The uproar of the city came to it in a soothing murmur, and theytook possession of its peace and comfort with open celebration. Afterall, they agreed, there was no place in the world so delightful as ahotel apartment like that; the boasted charms of home were nothing to it;and then the magic of its being always there, ready for any one, everyone, just as if it were for some one alone: it was like the experience ofan Arabian Nights hero come true for all the race. 

"Oh, why can't we always stay here, just we two!" Mrs. March sighed toher husband, as he came out of his room rubbing his face red with thetowel, while she studied a new arrangement of her bonnet and handbag onthe mantel. 

"And ignore the past? I'm willing. I've no doubt that the children couldget on perfectly well without us, and could find some lot in the schemeof Providence that would really be just as well for them. "

"Yes; or could contrive somehow never to have existed. I should insistupon that. If they are, don't you see that we couldn't wish them not tobe?"

"Oh yes; I see your point; it's simply incontrovertible. "

She laughed and said: "Well, at any rate, if we can't find a flat to suitus we can all crowd into these three rooms somehow, for the winter, andthen browse about for meals. By the week we could get them much cheaper;and we could save on the eating, as they do in Europe. Or on somethingelse. "

"Something else, probably, " said March. "But we won't take this apartmenttill the ideal furnished flat winks out altogether. We shall not have anytrouble. We can easily find some one who is going South for the winterand will be glad to give up their flat 'to the right party' at a nominalrent. That's my notion. That's what the Evanses did one winter when theycame on here in February. All but the nominality of the rent. "

"Yes, and we could pay a very good rent and still save something onletting our house. You can settle yourselves in a hundred different waysin New York, that is one merit of the place. But if everything elsefails, we can come back to this. I want you to take the refusal of it, Basil. And we'll commence looking this very evening as soon as we've haddinner. I cut a lot of things out of the Herald as we came on. See here!"

She took a long strip of paper out of her hand-bag with minuteadvertisements pinned transversely upon it, and forming the effect ofsome glittering nondescript vertebrate. 

"Looks something like the sea-serpent, " said March, drying his hands onthe towel, while he glanced up and down the list. "But we sha'n't haveany trouble. I've no doubt there are half a dozen things there that willdo. You haven't gone up-town? Because we must be near the 'Every OtherWeek' office. "

"No; but I wish Mr. Fulkerson hadn't called it that! It always makes onethink of 'jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam to-day, ' in'Through the Looking-Glass. ' They're all in this region. "

They were still at their table, beside a low window, where some sort ofnever-blooming shrub symmetrically balanced itself in a large pot, with aleaf to the right and a leaf to the left and a spear up the middle, whenFulkerson came stepping square-footedly over the thick dining-roomcarpet. He wagged in the air a gay hand of salutation at sight of them, and of repression when they offered to rise to meet him; then, with anapparent simultaneity of action he gave a hand to each, pulled up a chairfrom the next table, put his hat and stick on the floor beside it, andseated himself. 

"Well, you've burned your ships behind you, sure enough, " he said, beaming his satisfaction upon them from eyes and teeth. 

"The ships are burned, " said March, "though I'm not sure we alone did it. But here we are, looking for shelter, and a little anxious about thedisposition of the natives. "

"Oh, they're an awful peaceable lot, " said Fulkerson. "I've been roundamong the caciques a little, and I think I've got two or three placesthat will just suit you, Mrs. March. How did you leave the children?"

"Oh, how kind of you! Very well, and very proud to be left in charge ofthe smoking wrecks. "

Fulkerson naturally paid no attention to what she said, being butsecondarily interested in the children at the best. "Here are some thingsright in this neighborhood, within gunshot of the office, and if you wantyou can go and look at them to-night; the agents gave me houses where thepeople would be in. "

"We will go and look at them instantly, " said Mrs. March. "Or, as soon asyou've had coffee with us. "

"Never do, " Fulkerson replied. He gathered up his hat and stick. "Justrushed in to say Hello, and got to run right away again. I tell you, March, things are humming. I'm after those fellows with a sharp stick allthe while to keep them from loafing on my house, and at the same time I'mjust bubbling over with ideas about 'The Lone Hand--wish we could call itthat!--that I want to talk up with you. "

"Well, come to breakfast, " said Mrs. March, cordially. 

"No; the ideas will keep till you've secured your lodge in this vastwilderness. Good-bye. "

"You're as nice as you can be, Mr. Fulkerson, " she said, "to keep us inmind when you have so much to occupy you. "

"I wouldn't have anything to occupy me if I hadn't kept you in mind, Mrs. March, " said Fulkerson, going off upon as good a speech as he couldapparently hope to make. 

"Why, Basil, " said Mrs. March, when he was gone, "he's charming! But nowwe mustn't lose an instant. Let's see where the places are. " She ran overthe half-dozen agents' permits. "Capital-first-rate-the very thing-everyone. Well, I consider ourselves settled! We can go back to the childrento-morrow if we like, though I rather think I should like to stay overanother day and get a little rested for the final pulling up that's gotto come. But this simplifies everything enormously, and Mr. Fulkerson isas thoughtful and as sweet as he can be. I know you will get on well withhim. He has such a good heart. And his attitude toward you, Basil, isbeautiful always--so respectful; or not that so much as appreciative. Yes, appreciative--that's the word; I must always keep that in mind. "

"It's quite important to do so, " said March. 

"Yes, " she assented, seriously, "and we must not forget just what kind offlat we are going to look for. The 'sine qua nons' are an elevator andsteam heat, not above the third floor, to begin with. Then we must eachhave a room, and you must have your study and I must have my parlor; andthe two girls must each have a room. With the kitchen and dining room, how many does that make?"

"Ten. "

"I thought eight. Well, no matter. You can work in the parlor, and runinto your bedroom when anybody comes; and I can sit in mine, and thegirls must put up with one, if it's large and sunny, though I've alwaysgiven them two at home. And the kitchen must be sunny, so they can sit init. And the rooms must all have outside light. And the rent must not beover eight hundred for the winter. We only get a thousand for our wholehouse, and we must save something out of that, so as to cover theexpenses of moving. Now, do you think you can remember all that?"

"Not the half of it, " said March. "But you can; or if you forget a thirdof it, I can come in with my partial half and more than make it up. "

She had brought her bonnet and sacque down-stairs with her, and wastransferring them from the hatrack to her person while she talked. Thefriendly door-boy let them into the street, and the clear October eveningair brightened her so that as she tucked her hand under her husband's armand began to pull him along she said, "If we find something rightaway--and we're just as likely to get the right flat soon as late; it'sall a lottery--well go to the theatre somewhere. "

She had a moment's panic about having left the agents' permits on thetable, and after remembering that she had put them into her littleshopping-bag, where she kept her money (each note crushed into a roundwad), and had heft it on the hat-rack, where it would certainly bestolen, she found it on her wrist. She did not think that very funny; butafter a first impulse to inculpate her husband, she let him laugh, whilethey stopped under a lamp and she held the permits half a yard away toread the numbers on them. 

"Where are your glasses, Isabel?"

"On the mantel in our room, of course. "

"Then you ought to have brought a pair of tongs. "

"I wouldn't get off second-hand jokes, Basil, " she said; and "Why, here!"she cried, whirling round to the door before which they had halted, "thisis the very number. Well, I do believe it's a sign!"

One of those colored men who soften the trade of janitor in many of thesmaller apartment-houses in New York by the sweetness of their race letthe Marches in, or, rather, welcomed them to the possession of thepremises by the bow with which he acknowledged their permit. It was alarge, old mansion cut up into five or six dwellings, but it had keptsome traits of its former dignity, which pleased people of theirsympathetic tastes. The dark-mahogany trim, of sufficiently ugly design, gave a rich gloom to the hallway, which was wide and paved with marble;the carpeted stairs curved aloft through a generous space. 

"There is no elevator?" Mrs. March asked of the janitor. 

He answered, "No, ma'am; only two flights up, " so winningly that shesaid, "Oh!" in courteous apology, and whispered to her husband, as she followedlightly up, "We'll take it, Basil, if it's like the rest. "

"If it's like him, you mean. "

"I don't wonder they wanted to own them, " she hurriedly philosophized. "If I had such a creature, nothing but death should part us, and I shouldno more think of giving him his freedom!"

"No; we couldn't afford it, " returned her husband. 

The apartment which the janitor unlocked for them, and lit up from thosechandeliers and brackets of gilt brass in the form of vine bunches, leaves, and tendrils in which the early gas-fitter realized most of hisconceptions of beauty, had rather more of the ugliness than the dignityof the hall. But the rooms were large, and they grouped themselves in areminiscence of the time when they were part of a dwelling that had itscharm, its pathos, its impressiveness. Where they were cut up intosmaller spaces, it had been done with the frankness with which a proudold family of fallen fortunes practises its economies. The roughpine-floors showed a black border of tack-heads where carpets had beenlifted and put down for generations; the white paint was yellow with age;the apartment had light at the front and at the back, and two or threerooms had glimpses of the day through small windows let into theircorners; another one seemed lifting an appealing eye to heaven through aglass circle in its ceiling; the rest must darkle in perpetual twilight. Yet something pleased in it all, and Mrs. March had gone far to adapt thedifferent rooms to the members of her family, when she suddenly thought(and for her to think was to say), "Why, but there's no steam heat!"

"No, ma'am, " the janitor admitted; "but dere's grates in most o' derooms, and dere's furnace heat in de halls. "

"That's true, " she admitted, and, having placed her family in theapartments, it was hard to get them out again. "Could we manage?" shereferred to her husband. 

"Why, I shouldn't care for the steam heat if--What is the rent?" he brokeoff to ask the janitor. 

"Nine hundred, sir. "

March concluded to his wife, "If it were furnished. "

"Why, of course! What could I have been thinking of? We're looking for afurnished flat, " she explained to the janitor, "and this was so pleasantand homelike that I never thought whether it was furnished or not. "

She smiled upon the janitor, and he entered into the joke and chuckled soamiably at her flattering oversight on the way down-stairs that she said, as she pinched her husband's arm, "Now, if you don't give him a quarterI'll never speak to you again, Basil!"

"I would have given half a dollar willingly to get you beyond hisglamour, " said March, when they were safely on the pavement outside. "If it hadn't been for my strength of character, you'd have taken anunfurnished flat without heat and with no elevator, at nine hundred ayear, when you had just sworn me to steam heat, an elevator, furniture, and eight hundred. "

"Yes! How could I have lost my head so completely?" she said, with alenient amusement in her aberration which she was not always able to feelin her husband's. 

"The next time a colored janitor opens the door to us, I'll tell him theapartment doesn't suit at the threshold. It's the only way to manage you, Isabel. "

"It's true. I am in love with the whole race. I never saw one of themthat didn't have perfectly angelic manners. I think we shall all be blackin heaven--that is, black-souled. "

"That isn't the usual theory, " said March. 

"Well, perhaps not, " she assented. "Where are we going now? Oh yes, tothe Xenophon!"

She pulled him gayly along again, and after they had walked a block downand half a block over they stood before the apartment-house of that name, which was cut on the gas-lamps on either side of the heavily spiked, aesthetic-hinged black door. The titter of an electric-bell brought alarge, fat Buttons, with a stage effect of being dressed to look small, who said he would call the janitor, and they waited in the dimlysplendid, copper-colored interior, admiring the whorls and waves intowhich the wallpaint was combed, till the janitor came in his gold-bandedcap, like a Continental porker. When they said they would like to seeMrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment, he owned his inability to cope with theaffair, and said he must send for the superintendent; he was either inthe Herodotus or the Thucydides, and would be there in a minute. TheButtons brought him--a Yankee of browbeating presence in plainclothes--almost before they had time to exchange a frightened whisper inrecognition of the fact that there could be no doubt of the steam heatand elevator in this case. Half stifled in the one, they mounted in theother eight stories, while they tried to keep their self-respect underthe gaze of the superintendent, which they felt was classing andassessing them with unfriendly accuracy. They could not, and theyfaltered abashed at the threshold of Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment, while the superintendent lit the gas in the gangway that he called aprivate hall, and in the drawing-room and the succession of chambersstretching rearward to the kitchen. Everything had, been done by thearchitect to save space, and everything, to waste it by Mrs. GrosvenorGreen. She had conformed to a law for the necessity of turning round ineach room, and had folding-beds in the chambers, but there hersubordination had ended, and wherever you might have turned round she hadput a gimcrack so that you would knock it over if you did turn. The placewas rather pretty and even imposing at first glance, and it took severaljoint ballots for March and his wife to make sure that with the kitchenthere were only six rooms. At every door hung a portiere from large ringson a brass rod; every shelf and dressing-case and mantel was litteredwith gimcracks, and the corners of the tiny rooms were curtained off, andbehind these portieres swarmed more gimcracks. The front of the uprightpiano had what March called a short-skirted portiere on it, and the topwas covered with vases, with dragon candlesticks and with Jap fans, whichalso expanded themselves bat wise on the walls between the etchings andthe water colors. The floors were covered with filling, and then rugs andthen skins; the easy-chairs all had tidies, Armenian and Turkish andPersian; the lounges and sofas had embroidered cushions hidden undertidies. 

The radiator was concealed by a Jap screen, and over the top of this someArab scarfs were flung. There was a superabundance of clocks. China pugsguarded the hearth; a brass sunflower smiled from the top of eitherandiron, and a brass peacock spread its tail before them inside a highfiligree fender; on one side was a coalhod in 'repousse' brass, and onthe other a wrought iron wood-basket. Some red Japanese bird-kites werestuck about in the necks of spelter vases, a crimson Jap umbrella hungopened beneath the chandelier, and each globe had a shade of yellow silk. 

March, when he had recovered his self-command a little in the presence ofthe agglomeration, comforted himself by calling the bric-a-bracJamescracks, as if this was their full name. 

The disrespect he was able to show the whole apartment by means of thisjoke strengthened him to say boldly to the superintendent that it wasaltogether too small; then he asked carelessly what the rent was. 

"Two hundred and fifty. "

The Marches gave a start, and looked at each other. 

"Don't you think we could make it do?" she asked him, and he could seethat she had mentally saved five hundred dollars as the differencebetween the rent of their house and that of this flat. "It has some verypretty features, and we could manage to squeeze in, couldn't we?"

"You won't find another furnished flat like it for no two-fifty a monthin the whole city, " the superintendent put in. 

They exchanged glances again, and March said, carelessly, "It's toosmall. "

"There's a vacant flat in the Herodotus for eighteen hundred a year, andone in the Thucydides for fifteen, " the superintendent suggested, clicking his keys together as they sank down in the elevator; "sevenrooms and bath. "

"Thank you, " said March; "we're looking for a furnished flat. "

They felt that the superintendent parted from them with repressedsarcasm. 

"Oh, Basil, do you think we really made him think it was the smallnessand not the dearness?"

"No, but we saved our self-respect in the attempt; and that's a greatdeal. "

"Of course, I wouldn't have taken it, anyway, with only six rooms, and sohigh up. But what prices! Now, we must be very circumspect about the nextplace. "

It was a janitress, large, fat, with her arms wound up in her apron, whoreceived them there. Mrs. March gave her a succinct but perfect statementof their needs. She failed to grasp the nature of them, or feigned to doso. She shook her head, and said that her son would show them the flat. There was a radiator visible in the narrow hall, and Isabel tacitlycompromised on steam heat without an elevator, as the flat was only oneflight up. When the son appeared from below with a small kerosenehand-lamp, it appeared that the flat was unfurnished, but there was nostopping him till he had shown it in all its impossibility. When they gotsafely away from it and into the street March said: "Well, have you hadenough for to-night, Isabel? Shall we go to the theatre now?"

"Not on any account. I want to see the whole list of flats that Mr. Fulkerson thought would be the very thing for us. " She laughed, but witha certain bitterness. 

"You'll be calling him my Mr. Fulkerson next, Isabel. "

"Oh no!"

The fourth address was a furnished flat without a kitchen, in a housewith a general restaurant. The fifth was a furnished house. At the sixtha pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted to take a family toboard, and would give them a private table at a rate which the Marcheswould have thought low in Boston. 

Mrs. March came away tingling with compassion for their evident anxiety, and this pity naturally soured into a sense of injury. "Well, I must sayI have completely lost confidence in Mr. Fulkerson's judgment. Anythingmore utterly different from what I told him we wanted I couldn't imagine. If he doesn't manage any better about his business than he has done aboutthis, it will be a perfect failure. "

"Well, well, let's hope he'll be more circumspect about that, " herhusband returned, with ironical propitiation. "But I don't think it'sFulkerson's fault altogether. Perhaps it's the house-agents'. They're avery illusory generation. There seems to be something in the humanhabitation that corrupts the natures of those who deal in it, to buy orsell it, to hire or let it. You go to an agent and tell him what kind ofa house you want. He has no such house, and he sends you to look atsomething altogether different, upon the well-ascertained principle thatif you can't get what you want you will take what you can get. You don'tsuppose the 'party' that took our house in Boston was looking for anysuch house? He was looking for a totally different kind of house inanother part of the town. "

"I don't believe that!" his wife broke in. 

"Well, no matter. But see what a scandalous rent you asked for it. "

"We didn't get much more than half; and, besides, the agent told me toask fourteen hundred. "

"Oh, I'm not blaming you, Isabel. I'm only analyzing the house-agent andexonerating Fulkerson. "

"Well, I don't believe he told them just what we wanted; and, at anyrate, I'm done with agents. Tomorrow I'm going entirely byadvertisements. "

VIII. 

Mrs. March took the vertebrate with her to the Vienna Coffee-House, wherethey went to breakfast next morning. She made March buy her the Heraldand the World, and she added to its spiny convolutions from them. Sheread the new advertisements aloud with ardor and with faith to believethat the apartments described in them were every one truthfullyrepresented, and that any one of them was richly responsive to theirneeds. "Elegant, light, large, single and outside flats" were offeredwith "all improvements--bath, ice-box, etc. "--for twenty-five to thirtydollars a month. The cheapness was amazing. The Wagram, the Esmeralda, the Jacinth, advertised them for forty dollars and sixty dollars, "withsteam heat and elevator, " rent free till November. Others, attractivefrom their air of conscientious scruple, announced "first-class flats;good order; reasonable rents. " The Helena asked the reader if she hadseen the "cabinet finish, hard-wood floors, and frescoed ceilings" of itsfifty-dollar flats; the Asteroid affirmed that such apartments, with "sixlight rooms and bath, porcelain wash-tubs, electric bells, and hall-boy, "as it offered for seventy-five dollars were unapproached by competition. There was a sameness in the jargon which tended to confusion. Mrs. Marchgot several flats on her list which promised neither steam heat norelevators; she forgot herself so far as to include two or three as remotefrom the down-town region of her choice as Harlem. But after she hadrejected these the nondescript vertebrate was still voluminous enough tosustain her buoyant hopes. 

The waiter, who remembered them from year to year, had put them at awindow giving a pretty good section of Broadway, and before they set outon their search they had a moment of reminiscence. They recalled theBroadway of five, of ten, of twenty years ago, swelling and roaring witha tide of gayly painted omnibuses and of picturesque traffic that thehorsecars have now banished from it. The grind of their wheels and theclash of their harsh bells imperfectly fill the silence that theomnibuses have left, and the eye misses the tumultuous perspective offormer times. 

They went out and stood for a moment before Grace Church, and looked downthe stately thoroughfare, and found it no longer impressive, no longercharacteristic. It is still Broadway in name, but now it is like anyother street. You do not now take your life in your hand when you attemptto cross it; the Broadway policeman who supported the elbow of timorousbeauty in the hollow of his cotton-gloved palm and guided its littlefearful boots over the crossing, while he arrested the billowy omnibuseson either side with an imperious glance, is gone, and all that certainprocessional, barbaric gayety of the place is gone. 

"Palmyra, Baalbec, Timour of the Desert, " said March, voicing theircommon feeling of the change. 

They turned and went into the beautiful church, and found themselves intime for the matin service. Rapt far from New York, if not from earth, inthe dim richness of the painted light, the hallowed music took them withsolemn ecstasy; the aerial, aspiring Gothic forms seemed to lift themheavenward. They came out, reluctant, into the dazzle and bustle of thestreet, with a feeling that they were too good for it, which theyconfessed to each other with whimsical consciousness. 

"But no matter how consecrated we feel now, " he said, "we mustn't forgetthat we went into the church for precisely the same reason that we wentto the Vienna Cafe for breakfast--to gratify an aesthetic sense, to renewthe faded pleasure of travel for a moment, to get back into the Europe ofour youth. It was a purely Pagan impulse, Isabel, and we'd better ownit. "

"I don't know, " she returned. "I think we reduce ourselves to the barebones too much. I wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do. Sometimes I should like to blink them. I should like to think I wasdevouter than I am, and younger and prettier. "

"Better not; you couldn't keep it up. Honesty is the best policy even insuch things. "

"No; I don't like it, Basil. I should rather wait till the last day forsome of my motives to come to the top. I know they're always mixed, butdo let me give them the benefit of a doubt sometimes. "

"Well, well, have it your own way, my dear. But I prefer not to lay up somany disagreeable surprises for myself at that time. "

She would not consent. "I know I am a good deal younger than I was. Ifeel quite in the mood of that morning when we walked down Broadway onour wedding journey. Don't you?"

"Oh yes. But I know I'm not younger; I'm only prettier. "

She laughed for pleasure in his joke, and also for unconscious joy in thegay New York weather, in which there was no 'arriere pensee' of the eastwind. They had crossed Broadway, and were walking over to WashingtonSquare, in the region of which they now hoped to place themselves. The'primo tenore' statue of Garibaldi had already taken possession of theplace in the name of Latin progress, and they met Italian faces, Frenchfaces, Spanish faces, as they strolled over the asphalt walks, under thethinning shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores. They met the familiarpicturesque raggedness of Southern Europe with the old kindly illusionthat somehow it existed for their appreciation, and that it foundadequate compensation for poverty in this. March thought he sufficientlyexpressed his tacit sympathy in sitting down on one of the iron bencheswith his wife and letting a little Neapolitan put a superfluous shine onhis boots, while their desultory comment wandered with equal esteem tothe old-fashioned American respectability which keeps the north side ofthe square in vast mansions of red brick, and the internationalshabbiness which has invaded the southern border, and broken it up intolodging-houses, shops, beer-gardens, and studios. 

They noticed the sign of an apartment to let on the north side, and assoon as the little bootblack could be bought off they went over to lookat it. The janitor met them at the door and examined them. Then he said, as if still in doubt, "It has ten rooms, and the rent is twenty-eighthundred dollars. "

"It wouldn't do, then, " March replied, and left him to divide theresponsibility between the paucity of the rooms and the enormity of therent as he best might. But their self-love had received a wound, and theyquestioned each other what it was in their appearance made him doubttheir ability to pay so much. 

"Of course, we don't look like New-Yorkers, " sighed Mrs. March, "andwe've walked through the Square. That might be as if we had walked alongthe Park Street mall in the Common before we came out on Beacon. Do yousuppose he could have seen you getting your boots blacked in that way?"

"It's useless to ask, " said March. "But I never can recover from thisblow. "

"Oh, pshaw! You know you hate such things as badly as I do. It was veryimpertinent of him. "

"Let us go back and 'ecraser l'infame' by paying him a year's rent inadvance and taking immediate possession. Nothing else can soothe mywounded feelings. You were not having your boots blacked: why shouldn'the have supposed you were a New-Yorker, and I a country cousin?"

"They always know. Don't you remember Mrs. Williams's going to a FifthAvenue milliner in a Worth dress, and the woman's asking her instantlywhat hotel she should send her hat to?"

"Yes; these things drive one to despair. I don't wonder the bodies of somany genteel strangers are found in the waters around New York. Shall wetry the south side, my dear? or had we better go back to our rooms andrest awhile?"

Mrs. March had out the vertebrate, and was consulting one of itsglittering ribs and glancing up from it at a house before which theystood. "Yes, it's the number; but do they call this being ready Octoberfirst?" The little area in front of the basement was heaped with amixture of mortar, bricks, laths, and shavings from the interior; thebrownstone steps to the front door were similarly bestrewn; the doorwayshowed the half-open, rough pine carpenter's sketch of an unfinishedhouse; the sashless windows of every story showed the activity of workmenwithin; the clatter of hammers and the hiss of saws came out to them fromevery opening. 

"They may call it October first, " said March, "because it's too late tocontradict them. But they'd better not call it December first in mypresence; I'll let them say January first, at a pinch. "

"We will go in and look at it, anyway, " said his wife; and he admiredhow, when she was once within, she began provisionally to settle thefamily in each of the several floors with the female instinct fordomiciliation which never failed her. She had the help of the landlord, who was present to urge forward the workmen apparently; he lent a hopefulfancy to the solution of all her questions. To get her from under hisinfluence March had to represent that the place was damp from undriedplastering, and that if she stayed she would probably be down with thatNew York pneumonia which visiting Bostonians are always dying of. Oncesafely on the pavement outside, she realized that the apartment was notonly unfinished, but unfurnished, and had neither steam heat norelevator. "But I thought we had better look at everything, " sheexplained. 

"Yes, but not take everything. If I hadn't pulled you away from there bymain force you'd have not only died of New York pneumonia on the spot, but you'd have had us all settled there before we knew what we wereabout. "

"Well, that's what I can't help, Basil. It's the only way I can realizewhether it will do for us. I have to dramatize the whole thing. "

She got a deal of pleasure as well as excitement out of this, and he hadto own that the process of setting up housekeeping in so many differentplaces was not only entertaining, but tended, through association withtheir first beginnings in housekeeping, to restore the image of theirearly married days and to make them young again. 

It went on all day, and continued far into the night, until it was toolate to go to the theatre, too late to do anything but tumble into bedand simultaneously fall asleep. They groaned over their reiterateddisappointments, but they could not deny that the interest was unfailing, and that they got a great deal of fun out of it all. Nothing could abateMrs. March's faith in her advertisements. One of them sent her to a flatof ten rooms which promised to be the solution of all their difficulties;it proved to be over a livery-stable, a liquor store, and a milliner'sshop, none of the first fashion. Another led them far into old GreenwichVillage to an apartment-house, which she refused to enter behind a smallgirl with a loaf of bread under one arm and a quart can of milk under theother. 

In their search they were obliged, as March complained, to theacquisition of useless information in a degree unequalled in theirexperience. They came to excel in the sad knowledge of the line at whichrespectability distinguishes itself from shabbiness. Flatteringadvertisements took them to numbers of huge apartment-houses chieflydistinguishable from tenement-houses by the absence of fire-escapes ontheir facades, till Mrs. March refused to stop at any door where therewere more than six bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes on either hand. Before the middle of the afternoon she decided against ratchetsaltogether, and confined herself to knobs, neatly set in the door-trim. Her husband was still sunk in the superstition that you can live anywhereyou like in New York, and he would have paused at some places where herquicker eye caught the fatal sign of "Modes" in the ground-floor windows. She found that there was an east and west line beyond which they couldnot go if they wished to keep their self-respect, and that within theregion to which they had restricted themselves there was a choice ofstreets. At first all the New York streets looked to them ill-paved, dirty, and repulsive; the general infamy imparted itself in their casualimpression to streets in no wise guilty. But they began to notice thatsome streets were quiet and clean, and, though never so quiet and cleanas Boston streets, that they wore an air of encouraging reform, andsuggested a future of greater and greater domesticity. Whole blocks ofthese downtown cross-streets seemed to have been redeemed from decay, andeven in the midst of squalor a dwelling here and there had been seized, painted a dull red as to its brick-work, and a glossy black as to itswood-work, and with a bright brass bell-pull and door-knob and a largebrass plate for its key-hole escutcheon, had been endowed with an effectof purity and pride which removed its shabby neighborhood far from it. Some of these houses were quite small, and imaginably within their means;but, as March said, some body seemed always to be living there himself, and the fact that none of them was to rent kept Mrs. March true to herideal of a fiat. Nothing prevented its realization so much as itsdifference from the New York ideal of a flat, which was inflexibly sevenrooms and a bath. One or two rooms might be at the front, the restcrooked and cornered backward through in creasing and then decreasingdarkness till they reached a light bedroom or kitchen at the rear. Itmight be the one or the other, but it was always the seventh room withthe bath; or if, as sometimes happened, it was the eighth, it was soafter having counted the bath as one; in this case the janitor said youalways counted the bath as one. If the flats were advertised as having"all light rooms, " he explained that any room with a window giving intothe open air of a court or shaft was counted a light room. 

The Marches tried to make out why it was that these flats were go muchmore repulsive than the apartments which everyone lived in abroad; butthey could only do so upon the supposition that in their European daysthey were too young, too happy, too full of the future, to notice whetherrooms were inside or outside, light or dark, big or little, high or low. "Now we're imprisoned in the present, " he said, "and we have to make theworst of it. "

In their despair he had an inspiration, which she declared worthy of him:it was to take two small flats, of four or five rooms and a bath, andlive in both. They tried this in a great many places, but they nevercould get two flats of the kind on the same floor where there was steamheat and an elevator. At one place they almost did it. They had resignedthemselves to the humility of the neighborhood, to the prevalence ofmodistes and livery-stablemen (they seem to consort much in New York), tothe garbage in the gutters and the litter of paper in the streets, to thefaltering slats in the surrounding window-shutters and the crumbledbrownstone steps and sills, when it turned out that one of the apartmentshad been taken between two visits they made. Then the only combinationleft open to them was of a ground-floor flat to the right and athird-floor flat to the left. 

Still they kept this inspiration in reserve for use at the firstopportunity. In the mean time there were several flats which they thoughtthey could almost make do: notably one where they could get an extraservant's room in the basement four flights down, and another where theycould get it in the roof five flights up. At the first the janitor wasrespectful and enthusiastic; at the second he had an effect of ironicalpessimism. When they trembled on the verge of taking his apartment, hepointed out a spot in the kalsomining of the parlor ceiling, andgratuitously said, Now such a thing as that he should not agree to put inshape unless they took the apartment for a term of years. The apartmentwas unfurnished, and they recurred to the fact that they wanted afurnished apartment, and made their escape. This saved them in severalother extremities; but short of extremity they could not keep theirdifferent requirements in mind, and were always about to decide withoutregard to some one of them. 

They went to several places twice without intending: once to thatold-fashioned house with the pleasant colored janitor, and wandered allover the apartment again with a haunting sense of familiarity, and thenrecognized the janitor and laughed; and to that house with the patheticwidow and the pretty daughter who wished to take them to board. Theystayed to excuse their blunder, and easily came by the fact that themother had taken the house that the girl might have a home while she wasin New York studying art, and they hoped to pay their way by takingboarders. Her daughter was at her class now, the mother concluded; andthey encouraged her to believe that it could only be a few days till therest of her scheme was realized. 

"I dare say we could be perfectly comfortable there, " March suggestedwhen they had got away. "Now if we were truly humane we would modify ourdesires to meet their needs and end this sickening search, wouldn't we?"

"Yes, but we're not truly humane, " his wife answered, "or at least not inthat sense. You know you hate boarding; and if we went there I shouldhave them on my sympathies the whole time. "

"I see. And then you would take it out of me. "

"Then I should take it out of you. And if you are going to be so weak, Basil, and let every little thing work upon you in that way, you'd betternot come to New York. You'll see enough misery here. "

"Well, don't take that superior tone with me, as if I were a child thathad its mind set on an undesirable toy, Isabel. "

"Ah, don't you suppose it's because you are such a child in some respectsthat I like you, dear?" she demanded, without relenting. 

"But I don't find so much misery in New York. I don't suppose there's anymore suffering here to the population than there is in the country. Andthey're so gay about it all. I think the outward aspect of the place andthe hilarity of the sky and air must get into the people's blood. Theweather is simply unapproachable; and I don't care if it is the ugliestplace in the world, as you say. I suppose it is. It shrieks and yellswith ugliness here and there but it never loses its spirits. That widowis from the country. When she's been a year in New York she'll be asgay--as gay as an L road. " He celebrated a satisfaction they both had inthe L roads. "They kill the streets and avenues, but at least theypartially hide them, and that is some comfort; and they do triumph overtheir prostrate forms with a savage exultation that is intoxicating. Those bends in the L that you get in the corner of Washington Square, orjust below the Cooper Institute--they're the gayest things in the world. Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incomparably picturesque! And thewhole city is so, " said March, "or else the L would never have got builthere. New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay; but, prince orpauper, it's gay always. "

"Yes, gay is the word, " she admitted, with a sigh. "But frantic. I can'tget used to it. They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York. "

"Well, I don't know that I've ever found much advantage in rememberingit. "

"Don't say such a thing, dearest. "

He could see that she had got to the end of her nervous strength for thepresent, and he proposed that they should take the Elevated road as faras it would carry them into the country, and shake off their nightmare offlat-hunting for an hour or two; but her conscience would not let her. She convicted him of levity equal to that of the New-Yorkers in proposingsuch a thing; and they dragged through the day. She was too tired to carefor dinner, and in the night she had a dream from which she woke herselfwith a cry that roused him, too. It was something about the children atfirst, whom they had talked of wistfully before falling asleep, and thenit was of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a series of sectionsgrowing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the monstrousarticulate was quite luminous again. She shuddered at the vaguedescription she was able to give; but he asked, "Did it offer to biteyou?"

"No. That was the most frightful thing about it; it had no mouth. "

March laughed. "Why, my dear, it was nothing but a harmless New Yorkflat--seven rooms and a bath. "

"I really believe it was, " she consented, recognizing an architecturalresemblance, and she fell asleep again, and woke renewed for the workbefore them. 

IX. 

Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but it still had interest; andthey varied their day by taking a coupe, by renouncing advertisements, and by reverting to agents. Some of these induced them to consider theidea of furnished houses; and Mrs. March learned tolerance for Fulkersonby accepting permits to visit flats and houses which had none of thequalifications she desired in either, and were as far beyond her means asthey were out of the region to which she had geographically restrictedherself. They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand dollarapartments, and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothingto do with the rent; the higher the rent was, the more critical they wereof the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of the richly decoratedrooms. They never knew whether they had deceived the janitor or not; asthey came in a coupe, they hoped they had. 

They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in theperspective than an L road. The fire-escapes, with their light ironbalconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; theroadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women's headsseemed to show at every window. In the basements, over which flights ofhigh stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers' shopsabounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to bacon andsausages, and cobblers' and tinners' shops, and the like, in proportionto the small needs of a poor neighborhood. Ash barrels lined thesidewalks, and garbage heaps filled the gutters; teams of all tradesstood idly about; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through thestreet, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of thechildren and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women; the burlyblue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner; a drunkardzigzagged down the sidewalk toward him. It was not the abode of theextremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world, transmitting itself from generation to generation, and establishingconditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does tothose of some incurable disease, like leprosy. 

The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aestheticview of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street oftenement-houses; when they would have contented themselves with sayingthat it was as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence, and withwondering why nobody came to paint it; they would have thought they weresufficiently serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure toappreciate it, and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it hereunder their noses. It was to the nose that the street made one of itsstrongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of the coupe. "Whydoes he take us through such a disgusting street?" she demanded, with anexasperation of which her husband divined the origin. 

"This driver may be a philanthropist in disguise, " he answered, withdreamy irony, "and may want us to think about the people who are notmerely carried through this street in a coupe, but have to spend theirwhole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopes of driving out of it, except in a hearse. I must say they don't seem to mind it. I haven't seena jollier crowd anywhere in New York. They seem to have forgotten death alittle more completely than any of their fellow-citizens, Isabel. And Iwonder what they think of us, making this gorgeous progress through theirmidst. I suppose they think we're rich, and hate us--if they hate richpeople; they don't look as if they hated anybody. Should we be as patientas they are with their discomfort? I don't believe there's steam heat oran elevator in the whole block. Seven rooms and a bath would be more thanthe largest and genteelest family would know what to do with. Theywouldn't know what to do with the bath, anyway. "

His monologue seemed to interest his wife apart from the satirical pointit had for themselves. "You ought to get Mr. Fulkerson to let you worksome of these New York sights up for Every Other Week, Basil; you coulddo them very nicely. "

"Yes; I've thought of that. But don't let's leave the personal ground. Doesn't it make you feel rather small and otherwise unworthy when you seethe kind of street these fellow-beings of yours live in, and then thinkhow particular you are about locality and the number of bellpulls? Idon't see even ratchets and speaking-tubes at these doors. " He craned hisneck out of the window for a better look, and the children of discomfortcheered him, out of sheer good feeling and high spirits. "I didn't know Iwas so popular. Perhaps it's a recognition of my humane sentiments. "

"Oh, it's very easy to have humane sentiments, and to satirize ourselvesfor wanting eight rooms and a bath in a good neighborhood, when we seehow these wretched creatures live, " said his wife. "But if we shared allwe have with them, and then settled down among them, what good would itdo?"

"Not the least in the world. It might help us for the moment, but itwouldn't keep the wolf from their doors for a week; and then they wouldgo on just as before, only they wouldn't be on such good terms with thewolf. The only way for them is to keep up an unbroken intimacy with thewolf; then they can manage him somehow. I don't know how, and I'm afraidI don't want to. Wouldn't you like to have this fellow drive us roundamong the halls of pride somewhere for a little while? Fifth Avenue orMadison, up-town?"

"No; we've no time to waste. I've got a place near Third Avenue, on anice cross street, and I want him to take us there. " It proved that shehad several addresses near together, and it seemed best to dismiss theircoupe and do the rest of their afternoon's work on foot. It came tonothing; she was not humbled in the least by what she had seen in thetenement-house street; she yielded no point in her ideal of a flat, andthe flats persistently refused to lend themselves to it. She lost allpatience with them. 

"Oh, I don't say the flats are in the right of it, " said her husband, when she denounced their stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a Christianhome. "But I'm not so sure that we are, either. I've been thinking aboutthat home business ever since my sensibilities were dragged--in acoupe--through that tenement-house street. Of course, no child born andbrought up in such a place as that could have any conception of home. Butthat's because those poor people can't give character to theirhabitations. They have to take what they can get. But people likeus--that is, of our means--do give character to the average flat. It'smade to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so it's made forsocial show, not for family life at all. Think of a baby in a flat! It'sa contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of motherhood. Theflat means society life; that is, the pretence of social life. It's madeto give artificial people a society basis on a little money--too muchmoney, of course, for what they get. So the cost of the building is putinto marble halls and idiotic decoration of all kinds. I don't object tothe conveniences, but none of these flats has a living-room. They havedrawing-rooms to foster social pretence, and they have dining-rooms andbedrooms; but they have no room where the family can all come togetherand feel the sweetness of being a family. The bedrooms are black-holesmostly, with a sinful waste of space in each. If it were not for themarble halls, and the decorations, and the foolishly expensive finish, the houses could be built round a court, and the flats could be shapedsomething like a Pompeiian house, with small sleeping-closets--only litfrom the outside--and the rest of the floor thrown into two or threelarge cheerful halls, where all the family life could go on, and societycould be transacted unpretentiously. Why, those tenements are better andhumaner than those flats! There the whole family lives in the kitchen, and has its consciousness of being; but the flat abolishes the familyconsciousness. It's confinement without coziness; it's cluttered withoutbeing snug. You couldn't keep a self-respecting cat in a flat; youcouldn't go down cellar to get cider. No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as weknow it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible in theFranco-American flat, not because it's humble, but because it's false. "

"Well, then, " said Mrs. March, "let's look at houses. "

He had been denouncing the flat in the abstract, and he had not expectedthis concrete result. But he said, "We will look at houses, then. "

X. 

Nothing mystifies a man more than a woman's aberrations from some pointat which he, supposes her fixed as a star. In these unfurnished houses, without steam or elevator, March followed his wife about with patientwonder. She rather liked the worst of them best: but she made him go downinto the cellars and look at the furnaces; she exacted from him a rigidinquest of the plumbing. She followed him into one of the cellars by thefitful glare of successively lighted matches, and they enjoyed a momentin which the anomaly of their presence there on that errand, so remotefrom all the facts of their long-established life in Boston, realizeditself for them. 

"Think how easily we might have been murdered and nobody been any thewiser!" she said when they were comfortably outdoors again. 

"Yes, or made way with ourselves in an access of emotional insanity, supposed to have been induced by unavailing flat-hunting, " he suggested. She fell in with the notion. "I'm beginning to feel crazy. But I don'twant you to lose your head, Basil. And I don't want you to sentimentalizeany of the things you see in New York. I think you were disposed to do itin that street we drove through. I don't believe there's any realsuffering--not real suffering--among those people; that is, it would besuffering from our point of view, but they've been used to it all theirlives, and they don't feel their' discomfort so much. "

"Of course, I understand that, and I don't propose to sentimentalizethem. I think when people get used to a bad state of things they hadbetter stick to it; in fact, they don't usually like a better state sowell, and I shall keep that firmly in mind. "

She laughed with him, and they walked along the L bestridden avenue, exhilarated by their escape from murder and suicide in that cellar, toward the nearest cross town track, which they meant to take home totheir hotel. "Now to-night we will go to the theatre, " she said, "and getthis whole house business out of our minds, and be perfectly fresh for anew start in the morning. " Suddenly she clutched his arm. "Why, did yousee that man?" and she signed with her head toward a decently dressedperson who walked beside them, next the gutter, stooping over as if toexamine it, and half halting at times. 

"No. What?"

"Why, I saw him pick up a dirty bit of cracker from the pavement and cramit into his mouth and eat it down as if he were famished. And look! he'sactually hunting for more in those garbage heaps!"

This was what the decent-looking man with the hard hands and broken nailsof a workman was doing-like a hungry dog. They kept up with him, in thefascination of the sight, to the next corner, where he turned down theside street still searching the gutter. 

They walked on a few paces. Then March said, "I must go after him, " andleft his wife standing. 

"Are you in want--hungry?" he asked the man. 

The man said he could not speak English, Monsieur. 

March asked his question in French. 

The man shrugged a pitiful, desperate shrug, "Mais, Monsieur--"

March put a coin in his hand, and then suddenly the man's face twistedup; he caught the hand of this alms-giver in both of his and clung to it. "Monsieur! Monsieur!" he gasped, and the tears rained down his face. 

His benefactor pulled himself away, shocked and ashamed, as one is bysuch a chance, and got back to his wife, and the man lapsed back into themystery of misery out of which he had emerged. 

March felt it laid upon him to console his wife for what had happened. "Of course, we might live here for years and not see another case likethat; and, of course, there are twenty places where he could have gonefor help if he had known where to find them. "

"Ah, but it's the possibility of his needing the help so badly as that, "she answered. "That's what I can't bear, and I shall not come to a placewhere such things are possible, and we may as well stop our house-huntinghere at once. "

"Yes? And what part of Christendom will you live in? Such things arepossible everywhere in our conditions. "

"Then we must change the conditions--"

"Oh no; we must go to the theatre and forget them. We can stop atBrentano's for our tickets as we pass through Union Square. "

"I am not going to the theatre, Basil. I am going home to Bostonto-night. You can stay and find a flat. "

He convinced her of the absurdity of her position, and even of itsselfishness; but she said that her mind was quite made up irrespective ofwhat had happened, that she had been away from the children long enough;that she ought to be at home to finish up the work of leaving it. Theword brought a sigh. "Ah, I don't know why we should see nothing but sadand ugly things now. When we were young--"

"Younger, " he put in. "We're still young. "

"That's what we pretend, but we know better. But I was thinking howpretty and pleasant things used to be turning up all the time on ourtravels in the old days. Why, when we were in New York here on ourwedding journey the place didn't seem half so dirty as it does now, andnone of these dismal things happened. "

"It was a good deal dirtier, " he answered; "and I fancy worse in everyway-hungrier, raggeder, more wretchedly housed. But that wasn't theperiod of life for us to notice it. Don't you remember, when we startedto Niagara the last time, how everybody seemed middle-aged andcommonplace; and when we got there there were no evident brides; nothingbut elderly married people?"

"At least they weren't starving, " she rebelled. 

"No, you don't starve in parlor-cars and first-class hotels; but if youstep out of them you run your chance of seeing those who do, if you'regetting on pretty well in the forties. If it's the unhappy who seeunhappiness, think what misery must be revealed to people who pass theirlives in the really squalid tenement-house streets--I don't meanpicturesque avenues like that we passed through. "

"But we are not unhappy, " she protested, bringing the talk back to thepersonal base again, as women must to get any good out of talk. "We'rereally no unhappier than we were when we were young. "

"We're more serious. "

"Well, I hate it; and I wish you wouldn't be so serious, if that's whatit brings us to. "

"I will be trivial from this on, " said March. "Shall we go to the Hole inthe Ground to-night?"

"I am going to Boston. "

"It's much the same thing. How do you like that for triviality? It's alittle blasphemous, I'll allow. "

"It's very silly, " she said. 

At the hotel they found a letter from the agent who had sent them thepermit to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment. He wrote that she hadheard they were pleased with her apartment, and that she thought shecould make the terms to suit. She had taken her passage for Europe, andwas very anxious to let the flat before she sailed. She would call thatevening at seven. 

"Mrs. Grosvenor Green!" said Mrs. March. "Which of the ten thousand flatsis it, Basil?"

"The gimcrackery, " he answered. "In the Xenophon, you know. "

"Well, she may save herself the trouble. I shall not see her. Or yes--Imust. I couldn't go away without seeing what sort of creature could haveplanned that fly-away flat. She must be a perfect--"

"Parachute, " March suggested. 

"No! anybody so light as that couldn't come down. "

"Well, toy balloon. "

"Toy balloon will do for the present, " Mrs. March admitted. "But I feelthat naught but herself can be her parallel for volatility. "

When Mrs. Grosvenor-Green's card came up they both descended to the hotelparlor, which March said looked like the saloon of a Moorish day-boat;not that he knew of any such craft, but the decorations were so Saracenicand the architecture so Hudson Riverish. They found there on the grandcentral divan a large lady whose vast smoothness, placidity, andplumpness set at defiance all their preconceptions of Mrs. GrosvenorGreen, so that Mrs. March distinctly paused with her card in her handbefore venturing even tentatively to address her. Then she was astonishedat the low, calm voice in which Mrs. Green acknowledged herself, andslowly proceeded to apologize for calling. It was not quite true that shehad taken her passage for Europe, but she hoped soon to do so, and sheconfessed that in the mean time she was anxious to let her flat. She wasa little worn out with the care of housekeeping--Mrs. March breathed, "Ohyes!" in the sigh with which ladies recognize one another'smartyrdom--and Mrs. Green had business abroad, and she was going topursue her art studies in Paris; she drew in Mr. Ilcomb's class now, butthe instruction was so much better in Paris; and as the superintendentseemed to think the price was the only objection, she had ventured tocall. 

"Then we didn't deceive him in the least, " thought Mrs. March, while sheanswered, sweetly: "No; we were only afraid that it would be too smallfor our family. We require a good many rooms. " She could not forego theopportunity of saying, "My husband is coming to New York to take chargeof a literary periodical, and he will have to have a room to write in, "which made Mrs. Green bow to March, and made March look sheepish. "But wedid think the apartment very charming", (It was architecturally charming, she protested to her conscience), "and we should have been so glad if wecould have got into it. " She followed this with some account of theirhouse-hunting, amid soft murmurs of sympathy from Mrs. Green, who saidthat she had been through all that, and that if she could have shown herapartment to them she felt sure that she could have explained it so thatthey would have seen its capabilities better, Mrs. March assented tothis, and Mrs. Green added that if they found nothing exactly suitableshe would be glad to have them look at it again; and then Mrs. March saidthat she was going back to Boston herself, but she was leaving Mr. Marchto continue the search; and she had no doubt he would be only too glad tosee the apartment by daylight. "But if you take it, Basil, " she warnedhim, when they were alone, "I shall simply renounce you. I wouldn't livein that junk-shop if you gave it to me. But who would have thought shewas that kind of looking person? Though of course I might have known if Ihad stopped to think once. It's because the place doesn't express her atall that it's so unlike her. It couldn't be like anybody, or anythingthat flies in the air, or creeps upon the earth, or swims in the watersunder the earth. I wonder where in the world she's from; she's noNew-Yorker; even we can see that; and she's not quite a country person, either; she seems like a person from some large town, where she's been anaesthetic authority. And she can't find good enough art instruction inNew York, and has to go to Paris for it! Well, it's pathetic, after all, Basil. I can't help feeling sorry for a person who mistakes herself tothat extent. "

"I can't help feeling sorry for the husband of a person who mistakesherself to that extent. What is Mr. Grosvenor Green going to do in Pariswhile she's working her way into the Salon?"

"Well, you keep away from her apartment, Basil; that's all I've got tosay to you. And yet I do like some things about her. "

"I like everything about her but her apartment, " said March. 

"I like her going to be out of the country, " said his wife. "We shouldn'tbe overlooked. And the place was prettily shaped, you can't deny it. Andthere was an elevator and steam heat. And the location is veryconvenient. And there was a hall-boy to bring up cards. The halls andstairs were kept very clean and nice. But it wouldn't do. I could put youa folding bed in the room where you wrote, and we could even have one inthe parlor"

"Behind a portiere? I couldn't stand any more portieres!"

"And we could squeeze the two girls into one room, or perhaps only bringMargaret, and put out the whole of the wash. Basil!" she almost shrieked, "it isn't to be thought of!"

He retorted, "I'm not thinking of it, my dear. "

Fulkerson came in just before they started for Mrs. March's train, tofind out what had become of them, he said, and to see whether they hadgot anything to live in yet. 

"Not a thing, " she said. "And I'm just going back to Boston, and leavingMr. March here to do anything he pleases about it. He has 'carteblanche. '"

"But freedom brings responsibility, you know, Fulkerson, and it's thesame as if I'd no choice. I'm staying behind because I'm left, notbecause I expect to do anything. "

"Is that so?" asked Fulkerson. "Well, we must see what can be done. Isupposed you would be all settled by this time, or I should have humpedmyself to find you something. None of those places I gave you amounts toanything?"

"As much as forty thousand others we've looked at, " said Mrs. March. "Yes, one of them does amount to something. It comes so near being whatwe want that I've given Mr. March particular instructions not to go nearit. "

She told him about Mrs. Grosvenor Green and her flats, and at the end hesaid:

"Well, well, we must look out for that. I'll keep an eye on him, Mrs. March, and see that he doesn't do anything rash, and I won't leave himtill he's found just the right thing. It exists, of course; it must in acity of eighteen hundred thousand people, and the only question is whereto find it. You leave him to me, Mrs. March; I'll watch out for him. "

Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the station when he found theywere not driving, but she bade him a peremptory good-bye at the hoteldoor. 

"He's very nice, Basil, and his way with you is perfectly charming. It'svery sweet to see how really fond of you he is. But I didn't want himstringing along with us up to Forty-second Street and spoiling our lastmoments together. "

At Third Avenue they took the Elevated for which she confessed aninfatuation. She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in theworld, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to saythat nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it. She now saidthat the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and thatthe fleeing intimacy you formed with people in second and third floorinteriors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had adomestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effectof good society with all its security and exclusiveness. He said it wasbetter than the theatre, of which it reminded him, to see those peoplethrough their windows: a family party of work-folk at a late tea, some ofthe men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother layingher child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon atable; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together. Whatsuggestion! what drama? what infinite interest! At the Forty-secondStreet station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the trackto the branch road for the Central Depot, and looked up and down the longstretch of the Elevated to north and south. The track that found and lostitself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerablelights; the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish pointsand blots of gas far and near; the architectural shapes of houses andchurches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoblein them, and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations withvivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam-formed an incomparableperspective. They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, whichin a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles; andthey were just to the Arachne roof spun in iron over the cross street onwhich they ran to the depot; but for the present they were mostlyinarticulate before it. They had another moment of rich silence when theypaused in the gallery that leads from the Elevated station to thewaiting-rooms in the Central Depot and looked down upon the great nighttrains lying on the tracks dim under the rain of gas-lights that starredwithout dispersing the vast darkness of the place. What forces, whatfates, slept in these bulks which would soon be hurling themselves northand south and west through the night! Now they waited there like fabledmonsters of Arab story ready for the magician's touch, tractable, reckless, will-less--organized lifelessness full of a strange semblanceof life. 

The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrill of patriotic pridein the fact that the whole world perhaps could not afford just the like. Then they hurried down to the ticket-offices, and he got her a lowerberth in the Boston sleeper, and went with her to the car. They made themost of the fact that her berth was in the very middle of the car; andshe promised to write as soon as she reached home. She promised alsothat, having seen the limitations of New York in respect to flats, shewould not be hard on him if he took something not quite ideal. Only hemust remember that it was not to be above Twentieth Street nor belowWashington Square; it must not be higher than the third floor; it musthave an elevator, steam heat, hail-boys, and a pleasant janitor. Thesewere essentials; if he could not get them, then they must do without. Buthe must get them. 

XI. 

Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence totheir ideals from their husbands than from themselves. Early in theirmarried life she had taken charge of him in all matters which sheconsidered practical. She did not include the business of bread-winningin these; that was an affair that might safely be left to hisabsent-minded, dreamy inefficiency, and she did not interfere with himthere. But in such things as rehanging the pictures, deciding on a summerboarding-place, taking a seaside cottage, repapering rooms, choosingseats at the theatre, seeing what the children ate when she was not attable, shutting the cat out at night, keeping run of calls andinvitations, and seeing if the furnace was dampered, he had failed her sooften that she felt she could not leave him the slightest discretion inregard to a flat. Her total distrust of his judgment in the matters citedand others like them consisted with the greatest admiration of his mindand respect for his character. She often said that if he would only bringthese to bear in such exigencies he would be simply perfect; but she hadlong given up his ever doing so. She subjected him, therefore, to an ironcode, but after proclaiming it she was apt to abandon him to the nativelawlessness of his temperament. She expected him in this event to do ashe pleased, and she resigned herself to it with considerable comfort inholding him accountable. He learned to expect this, and after sufferingkeenly from her disappointment with whatever he did he waited patientlytill she forgot her grievance and began to extract what consolation lurksin the irreparable. She would almost admit at moments that what he haddone was a very good thing, but she reserved the right to return in fullforce to her original condemnation of it; and she accumulated each act ofindependent volition in witness and warning against him. Their massoppressed but never deterred him. He expected to do the wrong thing whenleft to his own devices, and he did it without any apparent recollectionof his former misdeeds and their consequences. There was a good deal ofcomedy in it all, and some tragedy. 

He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbands of his kind willimagine, on going back to his hotel alone. It was, perhaps, a revulsionfrom the pain of parting; and he toyed with the idea of Mrs. GrosvenorGreen's apartment, which, in its preposterous unsuitability, had astrange attraction. He felt that he could take it with less risk thananything else they had seen, but he said he would look at all the otherplaces in town first. He really spent the greater part of the next day inhunting up the owner of an apartment that had neither steam heat nor anelevator, but was otherwise perfect, and trying to get him to take lessthan the agent asked. By a curious psychical operation he was able, inthe transaction, to work himself into quite a passionate desire for theapartment, while he held the Grosvenor Green apartment in the backgroundof his mind as something that he could return to as altogether moresuitable. He conducted some simultaneous negotiation for a furnishedhouse, which enhanced still more the desirability of the Grosvenor Greenapartment. Toward evening he went off at a tangent far up-town, so as tobe able to tell his wife how utterly preposterous the best there would beas compared even with this ridiculous Grosvenor Green gimcrackery. It ishard to report the processes of his sophistication; perhaps this, again, may best be left to the marital imagination. 

He rang at the last of these up-town apartments as it was falling dusk, and it was long before the janitor appeared. Then the man was very surly, and said if he looked at the flat now he would say it was too dark, likeall the rest. His reluctance irritated March in proportion to hisinsincerity in proposing to look at it at all. He knew he did not mean totake it under any circumstances; that he was going to use his inspectionof it in dishonest justification of his disobedience to his wife; but heput on an air of offended dignity. "If you don't wish to show theapartment, " he said, "I don't care to see it. "

The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt dreaded the stairs. Hescratched a match on his thigh, and led the way up. March was sorry forhim, and he put his fingers on a quarter in his waistcoat-pocket to givehim at parting. At the same time, he had to trump up an objection to theflat. This was easy, for it was advertised as containing ten rooms, andhe found the number eked out with the bath-room and two large closets. "It's light enough, " said March, "but I don't see how you make out tenrooms"

"There's ten rooms, " said the man, deigning no proof. 

March took his fingers off the quarter, and went down-stairs and out ofthe door without another word. It would be wrong, it would be impossible, to give the man anything after such insolence. He reflected, with shame, that it was also cheaper to punish than forgive him. 

He returned to his hotel prepared for any desperate measure, andconvinced now that the Grosvenor Green apartment was not merely the onlything left for him, but was, on its own merits, the best thing in NewYork. 

Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading-room, and it gave March thecurious thrill with which a man closes with temptation when he said:"Look here! Why don't you take that woman's flat in the Xenophon? She'sbeen at the agents again, and they've been at me. She likes your look--orMrs. March's--and I guess you can have it at a pretty heavy discount fromthe original price. I'm authorized to say you can have it for oneseventy-five a month, and I don't believe it would be safe for you tooffer one fifty. "

March shook his head, and dropped a mask of virtuous rejection over hiscorrupt acquiescence. "It's too small for us--we couldn't squeeze intoit. "

"Why, look here!" Fulkerson persisted. "How many rooms do you peoplewant?"

"I've got to have a place to work--"

"Of course! And you've got to have it at the Fifth Wheel office. "

"I hadn't thought of that, " March began. "I suppose I could do my work atthe office, as there's not much writing--"

"Why, of course you can't do your work at home. You just come round withme now, and look at that again. "

"No; I can't do it. "

"Why?"

"I--I've got to dine. "

"All right, " said Fulkerson. "Dine with me. I want to take you round to alittle Italian place that I know. "

One may trace the successive steps of March's descent in this simplematter with the same edification that would attend the study of theself-delusions and obfuscations of a man tempted to crime. The process isprobably not at all different, and to the philosophical mind the kind ofresult is unimportant; the process is everything. 

Fulkerson led him down one block and half across another to the steps ofa small dwelling-house, transformed, like many others, into a restaurantof the Latin ideal, with little or no structural change from the patternof the lower middle-class New York home. There were the corrodedbrownstone steps, the mean little front door, and the cramped entry withits narrow stairs by which ladies could go up to a dining-room appointedfor them on the second floor; the parlors on the first were set aboutwith tables, where men smoked cigarettes between the courses, and asingle waiter ran swiftly to and fro with plates and dishes, and, exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cook beyond a slide in the backparlor. He rushed at the new-comers, brushed the soiled table-clothbefore them with a towel on his arm, covered its worst stains with anapkin, and brought them, in their order, the vermicelli soup, the friedfish, the cheese-strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast fowland salad, and the wizened pear and coffee which form the dinner at suchplaces. 

"Ah, this is nice!" said Fulkerson, after the laying of the charitablenapkin, and he began to recognize acquaintances, some of whom hedescribed to March as young literary men and artists with whom theyshould probably have to do; others were simply frequenters of the place, and were of all nationalities and religions apparently--at least, severalwere Hebrews and Cubans. "You get a pretty good slice of New York here, "he said, "all except the frosting on top. That you won't find much atMaroni's, though you will occasionally. I don't mean the ladies ever, ofcourse. " The ladies present seemed harmless and reputable-looking peopleenough, but certainly they were not of the first fashion, and, except ina few instances, not Americans. "It's like cutting straight down througha fruitcake, " Fulkerson went on, "or a mince-pie, when you don't know whomade the pie; you get a little of everything. " He ordered a small flaskof Chianti with the dinner, and it came in its pretty wicker jacket. March smiled upon it with tender reminiscence, and Fulkerson laughed. "Lights you up a little. I brought old Dryfoos here one day, and hethought it was sweet-oil; that's the kind of bottle they used to have itin at the country drug-stores. "

"Yes, I remember now; but I'd totally forgotten it, " said March. "How farback that goes! Who's Dryfoos?"

"Dryfoos?" Fulkerson, still smiling, tore off a piece of the half-yard ofFrench loaf which had been supplied them, with two pale, thin disks ofbutter, and fed it into himself. "Old Dryfoos? Well, of course! I callhim old, but he ain't so very. About fifty, or along there. "

"No, " said March, "that isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be. "

"Well, I suppose you've got to know about him, anyway, " said Fulkerson, thoughtfully. "And I've been wondering just how I should tell you. Can'talways make out exactly how much of a Bostonian you really are! Ever beenout in the natural-gas country?"

"No, " said March. "I've had a good deal of curiosity about it, but I'venever been able to get away except in summer, and then we alwayspreferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara and back throughCanada, the route we took on our wedding journey. The children like it asmuch as we do. "

"Yes, yes, " said Fulkerson. "Well, the natural-gas country is worthseeing. I don't mean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in Northern Ohioand Indiana around Moffitt--that's the place in the heart of the gasregion that they've been booming so. Yes, you ought to see that country. If you haven't been West for a good many years, you haven't got any ideahow old the country looks. You remember how the fields used to be allfull of stumps?"

"I should think so. "

"Well, you won't see any stumps now. All that country out around Moffittis just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as old as England. Youknow how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented astump-extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen. Now theyjust touch 'em off with a little dynamite, and they've got a cellar dugand filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it. Only they haven't got any use for kindling in that country--all gas. Irode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-plantingtime, and every once in a while I'd come to a place with a piece ofragged old stove-pipe stickin' up out of the ground, and blazing awaylike forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it anymore than if it was spring violets. Horses didn't notice it, either. Well, they've always known about the gas out there; they say there areplaces in the woods where it's been burning ever since the country wassettled. 

"But when you come in sight of Moffitt--my, oh, my! Well, you come insmell of it about as soon. That gas out there ain't odorless, like thePittsburg gas, and so it's perfectly safe; but the smell isn't bad--aboutas bad as the finest kind of benzine. Well, the first thing that strikesyou when you come to Moffitt is the notion that there has been a goodwarm, growing rain, and the town's come up overnight. That's in thesuburbs, the annexes, and additions. But it ain't shabby--no shanty-farmbusiness; nice brick and frame houses, some of 'em Queen Anne style, andall of 'em looking as if they had come to stay. And when you drive upfrom the depot you think everybody's moving. Everything seems to be piledinto the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up everywhere. You know the kind of street Main Street always used to be in oursection--half plank-road and turnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a lotof stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story higherthan the back, and here and there a decent building with the gable end tothe public; and a court-house and jail and two taverns and three or fourchurches. Well, they're all there in Moffitt yet, but architecture hasstruck it hard, and they've got a lot of new buildings that needn't beashamed of themselves anywhere; the new court-house is as big as St. Peter's, and the Grand Opera-house is in the highest style of the art. You can't buy a lot on that street for much less than you can buy a lotin New York--or you couldn't when the boom was on; I saw the place justwhen the boom was in its prime. I went out there to work the newspapersin the syndicate business, and I got one of their men to write me a realbright, snappy account of the gas; and they just took me in their armsand showed me everything. Well, it was wonderful, and it was beautiful, too! To see a whole community stirred up like that was--just like a bigboy, all hope and high spirits, and no discount on the remotest future;nothing but perpetual boom to the end of time--I tell you it warmed yourblood. Why, there were some things about it that made you think what anice kind of world this would be if people ever took hold together, instead of each fellow fighting it out on his own hook, and devil takethe hindmost. They made up their minds at Moffitt that if they wantedtheir town to grow they'd got to keep their gas public property. So theyextended their corporation line so as to take in pretty much the wholegas region round there; and then the city took possession of every wellthat was put down, and held it for the common good. Anybody that's a mindto come to Moffitt and start any kind of manufacture can have all the gashe wants free; and for fifteen dollars a year you can have all the gasyou want to heat and light your private house. The people hold on to itfor themselves, and, as I say, it's a grand sight to see a wholecommunity hanging together and working for the good of all, instead ofsplitting up into as many different cut-throats as there are able-bodiedcitizens. See that fellow?" Fulkerson broke off, and indicated with atwirl of his head a short, dark, foreign-looking man going out of thedoor. "They say that fellow's a Socialist. I think it's a shame they'reallowed to come here. If they don't like the way we manage our affairslet 'em stay at home, " Fulkerson continued. "They do a lot of mischief, shooting off their mouths round here. I believe in free speech and allthat; but I'd like to see these fellows shut up in jail and left to jawone another to death. We don't want any of their poison. "

March did not notice the vanishing Socialist. He was watching, with ateasing sense of familiarity, a tall, shabbily dressed, elderly man, whohad just come in. He had the aquiline profile uncommon among Germans, andyet March recognized him at once as German. His long, soft beard andmustache had once been fair, and they kept some tone of their yellow inthe gray to which they had turned. His eyes were full, and his lips andchin shaped the beard to the noble outline which shows in the beards theItalian masters liked to paint for their Last Suppers. His carriage waserect and soldierly, and March presently saw that he had lost his lefthand. He took his place at a table where the overworked waiter found timeto cut up his meat and put everything in easy reach of his right hand. 

"Well, " Fulkerson resumed, "they took me round everywhere in Moffitt, andshowed me their big wells--lit 'em up for a private view, and let me hearthem purr with the soft accents of a mass-meeting of locomotives. Why, when they let one of these wells loose in a meadow that they'd piped itinto temporarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from the mouth ofthe pipe and blew it over half an acre of ground. They say when they letone of their big wells burn away all winter before they had learned howto control it, that well kept up a little summer all around it; the grassstayed green, and the flowers bloomed all through the winter. I don'tknow whether it's so or not. But I can believe anything of natural gas. My! but it was beautiful when they turned on the full force of that welland shot a roman candle into the gas--that's the way they light it--and aplume of fire about twenty feet wide and seventy-five feet high, all redand yellow and violet, jumped into the sky, and that big roar shook theground under your feet! You felt like saying:

"'Don't trouble yourself; I'm perfectly convinced. I believe in Moffitt. 'We-e-e-ll!" drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath, "that's where I metold Dryfoos. "

"Oh yes!--Dryfoos, " said March. He observed that the waiter had broughtthe old one-handed German a towering glass of beer. 

"Yes, " Fulkerson laughed. "We've got round to Dryfoos again. I thought Icould cut a long story short, but I seem to be cutting a short storylong. If you're not in a hurry, though--"

"Not in the least. Go on as long as you like. "

"I met him there in the office of a real-estate man--speculator, ofcourse; everybody was, in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, andpublic-spirited as all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me abouthim. Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, about three or fourmiles out of Moffitt, and he'd lived there pretty much all his life;father was one of the first settlers. Everybody knew he had the rightstuff in him, but he was slower than molasses in January, like thosePennsylvania Dutch. He'd got together the largest and handsomest farmanywhere around there; and he was making money on it, just like he was insome business somewhere; he was a very intelligent man; he took thepapers and kept himself posted; but he was awfully old-fashioned in hisideas. He hung on to the doctrines as well as the dollars of the dads; itwas a real thing with him. Well, when the boom began to come he hated itawfully, and he fought it. He used to write communications to the weeklynewspaper in Moffitt--they've got three dailies there now--and throw coldwater on the boom. He couldn't catch on no way. It made him sick to hearthe clack that went on about the gas the whole while, and that stirred upthe neighborhood and got into his family. Whenever he'd hear of a manthat had been offered a big price for his land and was going to sell outand move into town, he'd go and labor with him and try to talk him out ofit, and tell him how long his fifteen or twenty thousand would last himto live on, and shake the Standard Oil Company before him, and try tomake him believe it wouldn't be five years before the Standard owned thewhole region. 

"Of course, he couldn't do anything with them. When a man's offered a bigprice for his farm, he don't care whether it's by a secret emissary fromthe Standard Oil or not; he's going to sell and get the better of theother fellow if he can. Dryfoos couldn't keep the boom out of has ownfamily even. His wife was with him. She thought whatever he said and didwas just as right as if it had been thundered down from Sinai. But theyoung folks were sceptical, especially the girls that had been away toschool. The boy that had been kept at home because he couldn't be sparedfrom helping his father manage the farm was more like him, but theycontrived to stir the boy up--with the hot end of the boom, too. So whena fellow came along one day and offered old Dryfoos a cool hundredthousand for his farm, it was all up with Dryfoos. He'd 'a' liked to 'a'kept the offer to himself and not done anything about it, but his vanitywouldn't let him do that; and when he let it out in his family the girlsoutvoted him. They just made him sell. 

"He wouldn't sell all. He kept about eighty acres that was off in somepiece by itself, but the three hundred that had the old brick house onit, and the big barn--that went, and Dryfoos bought him a place inMoffitt and moved into town to live on the interest of his money. JustWhat he had scolded and ridiculed everybody else for doing. Well, theysay that at first he seemed like he would go crazy. He hadn't anything todo. He took a fancy to that land-agent, and he used to go and set in hisoffice and ask him what he should do. 'I hain't got any horses, I hain'tgot any cows, I hain't got any pigs, I hain't got any chickens. I hain'tgot anything to do from sun-up to sun-down. ' The fellow said the tearsused to run down the old fellow's cheeks, and if he hadn't been so busyhimself he believed he should 'a' cried, too. But most o' people thoughtold Dryfoos was down in the mouth because he hadn't asked more for hisfarm, when he wanted to buy it back and found they held it at a hundredand fifty thousand. People couldn't believe he was just homesick andheartsick for the old place. Well, perhaps he was sorry he hadn't askedmore; that's human nature, too. 

"After a while something happened. That land-agent used to tell Dryfoosto get out to Europe with his money and see life a little, or go and livein Washington, where he could be somebody; but Dryfoos wouldn't, and hekept listening to the talk there, and all of a sudden he caught on. Hecame into that fellow's one day with a plan for cutting up the eightyacres he'd kept into town lots; and he'd got it all plotted out so-well, and had so many practical ideas about it, that the fellow was astonished. He went right in with him, as far as Dryfoos would let him, and glad ofthe chance; and they were working the thing for all it was worth when Istruck Moffitt. Old Dryfoos wanted me to go out and see the Dryfoos &Hendry Addition--guess he thought maybe I'd write it up; and he drove meout there himself. Well, it was funny to see a town made: streets driventhrough; two rows of shadetrees, hard and soft, planted; cellars dug andhouses put up-regular Queen Anne style, too, with stained glass-all atonce. Dryfoos apologized for the streets because they were hand-made;said they expected their street-making machine Tuesday, and then theyintended to push things. "

Fulkerson enjoyed the effect of his picture on March for a moment, andthen went on: "He was mighty intelligent, too, and he questioned me upabout my business as sharp as I ever was questioned; seemed to kind ofstrike his fancy; I guess he wanted to find out if there was any money init. He was making money, hand over hand, then; and he never stoppedspeculating and improving till he'd scraped together three or fourhundred thousand dollars, they said a million, but they like roundnumbers at Moffitt, and I guess half a million would lay over itcomfortably and leave a few thousands to spare, probably. Then he came onto New York. "

Fulkerson struck a match against the ribbed side of the porcelain cupthat held the matches in the centre of the table, and lit a cigarette, which he began to smoke, throwing his head back with a leisurely effect, as if he had got to the end of at least as much of his story as he meantto tell without prompting. 

March asked him the desired question. "What in the world for?"

Fulkerson took out his cigarette and said, with a smile: "To spend hismoney, and get his daughters into the old Knickerbocker society. Maybe hethought they were all the same kind of Dutch. "

"And has he succeeded?"

"Well, they're not social leaders yet. But it's only a question oftime--generation or two--especially if time's money, and if Every OtherWeek is the success it's bound to be. "

"You don't mean to say, Fulkerson, " said March, with a half-doubting, half-daunted laugh, "that he's your Angel?"

"That's what I mean to say, " returned Fulkerson. "I ran onto him inBroadway one day last summer. If you ever saw anybody in your life;you're sure to meet him in Broadway again, sooner or later. That's thephilosophy of the bunco business; country people from the sameneighborhood are sure to run up against each other the first time theycome to New York. I put out my hand, and I said, 'Isn't this Mr. Dryfoosfrom Moffitt?' He didn't seem to have any use for my hand; he let me keepit, and he squared those old lips of his till his imperial stuck straightout. Ever see Bernhardt in 'L'Etrangere'? Well, the American husband isold Dryfoos all over; no mustache; and hay-colored chin-whiskers cutslanting froze the corners of his mouth. He cocked his little gray eyesat me, and says he: 'Yes, young man; my name is Dryfoos, and I'm fromMoffitt. But I don't want no present of Longfellow's Works, illustrated;and I don't want to taste no fine teas; but I know a policeman that does;and if you're the son of my old friend Squire Strohfeldt, you'd betterget out. ' 'Well, then, ' said I, 'how would you like to go into thenewspaper syndicate business?' He gave another look at me, and then heburst out laughing, and he grabbed my hand, and he just froze to it. Inever saw anybody so glad. 

"Well, the long and the short of it was that I asked him round here toMaroni's to dinner; and before we broke up for the night we had settledthe financial side of the plan that's brought you to New York. "

"I can see, " said Fulkerson, who had kept his eyes fast on March's face, "that you don't more than half like the idea of Dryfoos. It ought to giveyou more confidence in the thing than you ever had. You needn't beafraid, " he added, with some feeling, "that I talked Dryfoos into thething for my own advantage. "

"Oh, my dear Fulkerson!" March protested, all the more fervently becausehe was really a little guilty. 

"Well, of course not! I didn't mean you were. But I just happened to tellhim what I wanted to go into when I could see my way to it, and he caughton of his own accord. The fact is, " said Fulkerson, "I guess I'd bettermake a clean breast of it, now I'm at it, Dryfoos wanted to get somethingfor that boy of his to do. He's in railroads himself, and he's in minesand other things, and he keeps busy, and he can't bear to have his boyhanging round the house doing nothing, like as if he was a girl. I toldhim that the great object of a rich man was to get his son into just thatfix, but he couldn't seem to see it, and the boy hated it himself. He'sgot a good head, and he wanted to study for the ministry when they wereall living together out on the farm; but his father had the old-fashionedideas about that. You know they used to think that any sort of stuff wasgood enough to make a preacher out of; but they wanted the good timberfor business; and so the old man wouldn't let him. You'll see the fellow;you'll like him; he's no fool, I can tell you; and he's going to be ourpublisher, nominally at first and actually when I've taught him the ropesa little. "

XII. 

Fulkerson stopped and looked at March, whom he saw lapsing into a serioussilence. Doubtless he divined his uneasiness with the facts that had beengiven him to digest. He pulled out his watch and glanced at it. "Seehere, how would you like to go up to Forty-sixth street with me, and dropin on old Dryfoos? Now's your chance. He's going West tomorrow, and won'tbe back for a month or so. They'll all be glad to see you, and you'llunderstand things better when you've seen him and his family. I can'texplain. "

March reflected a moment. Then he said, with a wisdom that surprised him, for he would have liked to yield to the impulse of his curiosity:"Perhaps we'd better wait till Mrs. March comes down, and let things takethe usual course. The Dryfoos ladies will want to call on her as thelast-comer, and if I treated myself 'en garcon' now, and paid the firstvisit, it might complicate matters. "

"Well, perhaps you're right, " said Fulkerson. "I don't know much aboutthese things, and I don't believe Ma Dryfoos does, either. " He was on hislegs lighting another cigarette. "I suppose the girls are gettingthemselves up in etiquette, though. Well, then, let's have a look at the'Every Other Week' building, and then, if you like your quarters there, you can go round and close for Mrs. Green's flat. "

March's dormant allegiance to his wife's wishes had been roused by hisdecision in favor of good social usage. "I don't think I shall take theflat, " he said. 

"Well, don't reject it without giving it another look, anyway. Come on!"

He helped March on with his light overcoat, and the little stir they madefor their departure caught the notice of the old German; he looked upfrom his beer at them. March was more than ever impressed with somethingfamiliar in his face. In compensation for his prudence in regard to theDryfooses he now indulged an impulse. He stepped across to where the oldman sat, with his bald head shining like ivory under the gas-jet, and hisfine patriarchal length of bearded mask taking picturesque lights andshadows, and put out his hand to him. 

"Lindau! Isn't this Mr. Lindau?"

The old man lifted himself slowly to his feet with mechanical politeness, and cautiously took March's hand. "Yes, my name is Lindau, " he said, slowly, while he scanned March's face. Then he broke into a long cry. "Ah-h-h-h-h, my dear poy! my gong friendt! my-my--Idt is Passil Marge, not zo? Ah, ha, ha, ha! How gladt I am to zee you! Why, I am gladt! Andyou rememberdt me? You remember Schiller, and Goethe, and Uhland? AndIndianapolis? You still lif in Indianapolis? It sheers my hardt to zeeyou. But you are lidtle oldt, too? Tventy-five years makes a difference. Ah, I am gladt! Dell me, idt is Passil Marge, not zo?"

He looked anxiously into March's face, with a gentle smile of mixed hopeand doubt, and March said: "As sure as it's Berthold Lindau, and I guessit's you. And you remember the old times? You were as much of a boy as Iwas, Lindau. Are you living in New York? Do you recollect how you triedto teach me to fence? I don't know how to this day, Lindau. How good youwere, and how patient! Do you remember how we used to sit up in thelittle parlor back of your printing-office, and read Die Rauber and DieTheilung der Erde and Die Glocke? And Mrs. Lindau? Is she with--"

"Deadt--deadt long ago. Right after I got home from the war--tventy yearsago. But tell me, you are married? Children? Yes! Goodt! And how oldt areyou now?"

"It makes me seventeen to see you, Lindau, but I've got a son nearly asold. "

"Ah, ha, ha! Goodt! And where do you lif?"

"Well, I'm just coming to live in New York, " March said, looking over atFulkerson, who had been watching his interview with the perfunctory smileof sympathy that people put on at the meeting of old friends. "I want tointroduce you to my friend Mr. Fulkerson. He and I are going into aliterary enterprise here. "

"Ah! zo?" said the old man, with polite interest. He took Fulkerson'sproffered hand, and they all stood talking a few moments together. 

Then Fulkerson said, with another look at his watch, "Well, March, we'rekeeping Mr. Lindau from his dinner. "

"Dinner!" cried the old man. "Idt's better than breadt and meadt to seeMr. Marge!"

"I must be going, anyway, " said March. "But I must see you again soon, Lindau. Where do you live? I want a long talk. "

"And I. You will find me here at dinner-time. " said the old man. "It isthe best place"; and March fancied him reluctant to give another address. 

To cover his consciousness he answered, gayly: "Then, it's 'aufwiedersehen' with us. Well!"

"Also!" The old man took his hand, and made a mechanical movement withhis mutilated arm, as if he would have taken it in a double clasp. Helaughed at himself. "I wanted to gif you the other handt, too, but I gafeit to your gountry a goodt while ago. "

"To my country?" asked March, with a sense of pain, and yet lightly, asif it were a joke of the old man's. "Your country, too, Lindau?"

The old man turned very grave, and said, almost coldly, "What gountryhass a poor man got, Mr. Marge?"

"Well, you ought to have a share in the one you helped to save for usrich men, Lindau, " March returned, still humoring the joke. 

The old man smiled sadly, but made no answer as he sat down again. 

"Seems to be a little soured, " said Fulkerson, as they went down thesteps. He was one of those Americans whose habitual conception of life isunalloyed prosperity. When any experience or observation of his wentcounter to it he suffered--something like physical pain. He eagerlyshrugged away the impression left upon his buoyancy by Lindau, and addedto March's continued silence, "What did I tell you about meeting everyman in New York that you ever knew before?"

"I never expected to meat Lindau in the world again, " said March, more tohimself than to Fulkerson. "I had an impression that he had been killedin the war. I almost wish he had been. "

"Oh, hello, now!" cried Fulkerson. 

March laughed, but went on soberly: "He was a man predestined toadversity, though. When I first knew him out in Indianapolis he wasstarving along with a sick wife and a sick newspaper. It was before theGermans had come over to the Republicans generally, but Lindau wasfighting the anti-slavery battle just as naturally at Indianapolis in1858 as he fought behind the barricades at Berlin in 1848. And yet he wasalways such a gentle soul! And so generous! He taught me German for thelove of it; he wouldn't spoil his pleasure by taking a cent from me; heseemed to get enough out of my being young and enthusiastic, and out ofprophesying great things for me. I wonder what the poor old fellow isdoing here, with that one hand of his?"

"Not amassing a very 'handsome pittance, ' I guess, as Artemus Ward wouldsay, " said Fulkerson, getting back some of his lightness. "There are lotsof two-handed fellows in New York that are not doing much better, Iguess. Maybe he gets some writing on the German papers. "

"I hope so. He's one of the most accomplished men! He used to be asplendid musician--pianist--and knows eight or ten languages. "

"Well, it's astonishing, " said Fulkerson, "how much lumber those Germanscan carry around in their heads all their lives, and never work it upinto anything. It's a pity they couldn't do the acquiring, and let outthe use of their learning to a few bright Americans. We could make thingshum, if we could arrange 'em that way. "

He talked on, unheeded by March, who went along half-consciouslytormented by his lightness in the pensive memories the meeting withLindau had called up. Was this all that sweet, unselfish nature couldcome to? What a homeless old age at that meagre Italian table d'hote, with that tall glass of beer for a half-hour's oblivion! That shabbydress, that pathetic mutilation! He must have a pension, twelve dollars amonth, or eighteen, from a grateful country. But what else did he eke outwith?

"Well, here we are, " said Fulkerson, cheerily. He ran up the steps beforeMarch, and opened the carpenter's temporary valve in the door frame, andled the way into a darkness smelling sweetly of unpainted wood-work andnewly dried plaster; their feat slipped on shavings and grated on sand. He scratched a match, and found a candle, and then walked about up anddown stairs, and lectured on the advantages of the place. He had fittedup bachelor apartments for himself in the house, and said that he wasgoing to have a flat to let on the top floor. "I didn't offer it to youbecause I supposed you'd be too proud to live over your shop; and it'stoo small, anyway; only five rooms. "

"Yes, that's too small, " said March, shirking the other point. 

"Well, then, here's the room I intend for your office, " said Fulkerson, showing him into a large back parlor one flight up. "You'll have it quietfrom the street noises here, and you can be at home or not, as youplease. There'll be a boy on the stairs to find out. Now, you see, thismakes the Grosvenor Green flat practicable, if you want it. "

March felt the forces of fate closing about him and pushing him to adecision. He feebly fought them off till he could have another look atthe flat. Then, baked and subdued still more by the unexpected presenceof Mrs. Grosvenor Green herself, who was occupying it so as to be able toshow it effectively, he took it. He was aware more than ever of itsabsurdities; he knew that his wife would never cease to hate it; but hehad suffered one of those eclipses of the imagination to which men of histemperament are subject, and into which he could see no future for hisdesires. He felt a comfort in irretrievably committing himself, andexchanging the burden of indecision for the burden of responsibility. 

"I don't know, " said Fulkerson, as they walked back to his hoteltogether, "but you might fix it up with that lone widow and her prettydaughter to take part of their house here. " He seemed to be reminded ofit by the fact of passing the house, and March looked up at its darkfront. He could not have told exactly why he felt a pang of remorse atthe sight, and doubtless it was more regret for having taken theGrosvenor Green flat than for not having taken the widow's rooms. Still, he could not forget her wistfulness when his wife and he were looking atthem, and her disappointment when they decided against them. He hadtoyed, in, his after-talk to Mrs. March, with a sort of hypotheticalobligation they had to modify their plans so as to meet the widow's wantof just such a family as theirs; they had both said what a blessing itwould be to her, and what a pity they could not do it; but they haddecided very distinctly that they could not. Now it seemed to him thatthey might; and he asked himself whether he had not actually departed asmuch from their ideal as if he had taken board with the widow. Suddenlyit seemed to him that his wife asked him this, too. 

"I reckon, " said Fulkerson, "that she could have arranged to give youyour meals in your rooms, and it would have come to about the same thingas housekeeping. "

"No sort of boarding can be the same as house-keeping, " said March. "Iwant my little girl to have the run of a kitchen, and I want the wholefamily to have the moral effect of housekeeping. It's demoralizing toboard, in every way; it isn't a home, if anybody else takes the care ofit off your hands. "

"Well, I suppose so, " Fulkerson assented; but March's words had a hollowring to himself, and in his own mind he began to retaliate hisdissatisfaction upon Fulkerson. 

He parted from him on the usual terms outwardly, but he felt obscurelyabused by Fulkerson in regard to the Dryfooses, father and son. He didnot know but Fulkerson had taken an advantage of him in allowing him tocommit himself to their enterprise with out fully and frankly telling himwho and what his backer was; he perceived that with young Dryfoos as thepublisher and Fulkerson as the general director of the paper there mightbe very little play for his own ideas of its conduct. Perhaps it was thehurt to his vanity involved by the recognition of this fact that made himforget how little choice he really had in the matter, and how, since hehad not accepted the offer to edit the insurance paper, nothing remainedfor him but to close with Fulkerson. In this moment of suspicion andresentment he accused Fulkerson of hastening his decision in regard tothe Grosvenor Green apartment; he now refused to consider it a decision, and said to himself that if he felt disposed to do so he would send Mrs. Green a note reversing it in the morning. But he put it all off tillmorning with his clothes, when he went to bed, he put off even thinkingwhat his wife would say; he cast Fulkerson and his constructive treacheryout of his mind, too, and invited into it some pensive reveries of thepast, when he still stood at the parting of the ways, and could take thispath or that. In his middle life this was not possible; he must followthe path chosen long, ago, wherever, it led. He was not master ofhimself, as he once seemed, but the servant of those he loved; if hecould do what he liked, perhaps he might renounce this whole New Yorkenterprise, and go off somewhere out of the reach of care; but he couldnot do what he liked, that was very clear. In the pathos of thisconviction he dwelt compassionately upon the thought of poor old Lindau;he resolved to make him accept a handsome sum of money--more than hecould spare, something that he would feel the loss of--in payment of thelessons in German and fencing given so long ago. At the usual rate forsuch lessons, his debt, with interest for twenty-odd years, would runvery far into the hundreds. Too far, he perceived, for his wife's joyousapproval; he determined not to add the interest; or he believed thatLindau would refuse the interest; he put a fine speech in his mouth, making him do so; and after that he got Lindau employment on 'Every OtherWeek, ' and took care of him till he died. 

Through all his melancholy and munificence he was aware of sordidanxieties for having taken the Grosvenor Green apartment. These began toassume visible, tangible shapes as he drowsed, and to became personalentities, from which he woke, with little starts, to a realization oftheir true nature, and then suddenly fell fast asleep. 

In the accomplishment of the events which his reverie played with, therewas much that retroactively stamped it with prophecy, but much also thatwas better than he forboded. He found that with regard to the GrosvenorGreen apartment he had not allowed for his wife's willingness to get anysort of roof over her head again after the removal from their old home, or for the alleviations that grow up through mere custom. The practicalworkings of the apartment were not so bad; it had its good points, andafter the first sensation of oppression in it they began to feel theconvenience of its arrangement. They were at that time of life whenpeople first turn to their children's opinion with deference, and, in theloss of keenness in their own likes and dislikes, consult the youngpreferences which are still so sensitive. It went far to reconcile Mrs. March to the apartment that her children were pleased with its novelty;when this wore off for them, she had herself begun to find it much moreeasily manageable than a house. After she had put away several barrels ofgimcracks, and folded up screens and rugs and skins, and carried them alloff to the little dark store-room which the flat developed, she perceivedat once a roominess and coziness in it unsuspected before. Then, whenpeople began to call, she had a pleasure, a superiority, in saying thatit was a furnished apartment, and in disclaiming all responsibility forthe upholstery and decoration. If March was by, she always explained thatit was Mr. March's fancy, and amiably laughed it off with her callers asa mannish eccentricity. Nobody really seemed to think it otherwise thanpretty; and this again was a triumph for Mrs. March, because it showedhow inferior the New York taste was to the Boston taste in such matters. 

March submitted silently to his punishment, and laughed with her beforecompany at his own eccentricity. She had been so preoccupied with theadjustment of the family to its new quarters and circumstances that thetime passed for laying his misgivings, if they were misgivings, aboutFulkerson before her, and when an occasion came for expressing them theyhad themselves passed in the anxieties of getting forward the firstnumber of 'Every Other Week. ' He kept these from her, too, and thebusiness that brought them to New York had apparently dropped intoabeyance before the questions of domestic economy that presented andabsented themselves. March knew his wife to be a woman of good mind andin perfect sympathy with him, but he understood the limitations of herperspective; and if he was not too wise, he was too experienced tointrude upon it any affairs of his till her own were reduced to the rightorder and proportion. It would have been folly to talk to her ofFulkerson's conjecturable uncandor while she was in doubt whether hercook would like the kitchen, or her two servants would consent to roomtogether; and till it was decided what school Tom should go to, andwhether Bella should have lessons at home or not, the relation whichMarch was to bear to the Dryfooses, as owner and publisher, was not to bediscussed with his wife. He might drag it in, but he was aware that withher mind distracted by more immediate interests he could not get from herthat judgment, that reasoned divination, which he relied upon so much. She would try, she would do her best, but the result would be a viewclouded and discolored by the effort she must make. 

He put the whole matter by, and gave himself to the details of the workbefore him. In this he found not only escape, but reassurance, for itbecame more and more apparent that whatever was nominally the structureof the business, a man of his qualifications and his instincts could nothave an insignificant place in it. He had also the consolation of likinghis work, and of getting an instant grasp of it that grew constantlyfirmer and closer. The joy of knowing that he had not made a mistake wasgreat. In giving rein to ambitions long forborne he seemed to get back tothe youth when he had indulged them first; and after half a lifetimepassed in pursuits alien to his nature, he was feeling the serenehappiness of being mated through his work to his early love. From theoutside the spectacle might have had its pathos, and it is not easy tojustify such an experiment as he had made at his time of life, exceptupon the ground where he rested from its consideration--the ground ofnecessity. 

His work was more in his thoughts than himself, however; and as the timefor the publication of the first number of his periodical came nearer, his cares all centred upon it. Without fixing any date, Fulkerson hadannounced it, and pushed his announcements with the shameless vigor of aborn advertiser. He worked his interest with the press to the utmost, andparagraphs of a variety that did credit to his ingenuity were afloateverywhere. Some of them were speciously unfavorable in tone; theycriticised and even ridiculed the principles on which the new departurein literary journalism was based. Others defended it; others yet deniedthat this rumored principle was really the principle. All contributed tomake talk. All proceeded from the same fertile invention. 

March observed with a degree of mortification that the talk was verylittle of it in the New York press; there the references to the novelenterprise were slight and cold. But Fulkerson said: "Don't mind that, old man. It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this;New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it wouldbe different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make orbreak a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of thereaders are outside of New York, and the rural districts are what we havegot to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write, and talkabout what they've written. Don't you worry. "

The rumor of Fulkerson's connection with the enterprise accompanied manyof the paragraphs, and he was able to stay March's thirst for employmentby turning over to him from day to day heaps of the manuscripts whichbegan to pour in from his old syndicate writers, as well as fromadventurous volunteers all over the country. With these in hand Marchbegan practically to plan the first number, and to concrete a generalscheme from the material and the experience they furnished. They hadintended to issue the first number with the new year, and if it had beenan affair of literature alone, it would have been very easy; but it wasthe art leg they limped on, as Fulkerson phrased it. They had not merelyto deal with the question of specific illustrations for this article orthat, but to decide the whole character of their illustrations, and firstof all to get a design for a cover which should both ensnare the heedlessand captivate the fastidious. These things did not come properly withinMarch's province--that had been clearly understood--and for a whileFulkerson tried to run the art leg himself. The phrase was again his, butit was simpler to make the phrase than to run the leg. The difficultgeneration, at once stiff-backed and slippery, with which he had to do inthis endeavor, reduced even so buoyant an optimist to despair, and afterwasting some valuable weeks in trying to work the artists himself, hedetermined to get an artist to work them. But what artist? It could notbe a man with fixed reputation and a following: he would be too costly, and would have too many enemies among his brethren, even if he wouldconsent to undertake the job. Fulkerson had a man in mind, an artist, too, who would have been the very thing if he had been the thing at all. He had talent enough, and his sort of talent would reach round the wholesituation, but, as Fulkerson said, he was as many kinds of an ass as hewas kinds of an artist. 

PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

 Anticipative homesickness Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting Considerable comfort in holding him accountable Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another Handsome pittance He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices Hypothetical difficulty Never-blooming shrub Poverty as hopeless as any in the world Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him Servant of those he loved Sigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdom Sorry he hadn't asked more; that's human nature That isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be Tried to be homesick for them, but failed Turn to their children's opinion with deference Wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do