Under the influence of his romances our travelers began to find the

whole scene hackneyed; and they were glad to part from him a little

sooner than they had bargained to do. They strolled about the anomalous

village on foot, and once more marveled at the paucity of travel and the

enormity of the local preparation. Surely the hotels are nowhere else

in the world so large! Could there ever have been visitors enough at

Niagara to fill them? They were built so big for some good reason,

no doubt; but it is no more apparent than why all these magnificent

equipages are waiting about the empty streets for the people who never

come to hire them.

“It seems to me that I don't see so many strangers here as I used,”

Basil had suggested to their driver.

“Oh, they haven't commenced coming yet,” he replied, with hardy

cheerfulness, and pretended that they were plenty enough in July and

August.

They went to dine at the modest restaurant of a colored man, who

advertised a table d'hote dinner on a board at his door; and they put

their misgivings to him, which seemed to grieve him, and he contended

that Niagara was as prosperous and as much resorted to as ever. In fact,

they observed that their regret for the supposed decline of the Falls as

a summer resort was nowhere popular in the village, and they desisted in

their offers of sympathy, after their rebuff from the restaurateur.

Basil got his family away to the station after dinner, and left them

there, while he walked down the village street, for a closer inspection

of the hotels. At the door of the largest a pair of children sported in

the solitude, as fearlessly as the birds on Selkirk's island; looking

into the hotel, he saw a few porters and call-boys seated in statuesque

repose against the wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless inactivity

behind the register; some deserted ladies flitted through the door of

the parlor at the side. He recalled the evening of his former visit,

when he and Isabel had met the Ellisons in that parlor, and it seemed,

in the retrospect, a scene of the wildest gayety. He turned for

consolation into the barber's shop, where he found himself the only

customer, and no busy sound of “Next” greeted his ear. But the barber,

like all the rest, said that Niagara was not unusually empty; and he

came out feeling bewildered and defrauded. Surely the agent of the boats

which descend the Rapids of the St. Lawrence must be frank, if Basil

went to him and pretended that he was going to buy a ticket. But a

glance at the agent's sign showed Basil that the agent, with his brave

jollity of manner and his impressive “Good-morning,” had passed away

from the deceits of travel, and that he was now inherited by his widow,

who in turn was absent, and temporarily represented by their son.

The boy, in supplying Basil with an advertisement of the line, made

a specious show of haste, as if there were a long queue of tourists

waiting behind him to be served with tickets. Perhaps there was, indeed,

a spectral line there, but Basil was the only tourist present in the

flesh, and he shivered in his isolation, and fled with the advertisement

in his hand. Isabel met him at the door of the station with a frightened

face.

“Basil,” she cried, “I have found out what the trouble is! Where are the

brides?”

He took her outstretched hands in his, and passing one of them through

his arm walked with her apart from the children, who were examining at

the news-man's booth the moccasins and the birchbark bric-a-brac of the

Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagara spar imported from

Devonshire.

“My dear,” he said, “there are no brides; everybody was married twelve

years ago, and the brides are middle-aged mothers of families now, and

don't come to Niagara if they are wise.”

“Yes,” she desolately asserted, “that is so! Something has been hanging

over me ever since we came, and suddenly I realized that it was the

absence of the brides. But--but--down at the hotels--Didn't you see

anything bridal there? When the omnibuses arrived, was there no burst of

minstrelsy? Was there--”

She could not go on, but sank nervelessly into the nearest seat.

“Perhaps,” said Basil, dreamily regarding the contest of Tom and Bella

for a newly-purchased paper of sour cherries, and helplessly forecasting

in his remoter mind the probable consequences, “there were both brides

and minstrelsy at the hotel, if I had only had the eyes to see and the

ears to hear. In this world, my dear, we are always of our own time,

and we live amid contemporary things. I daresay there were middle-aged

people at Niagara when we were here before, but we did not meet them,

nor they us. I daresay that the place is now swarming with bridal

couples, and it is because they are invisible and inaudible to us

that it seems such a howling wilderness. But the hotel clerks and the

restaurateurs and the hackmen know them, and that is the reason why

they receive with surprise and even offense our sympathy for their

loneliness. Do you suppose, Isabel, that if you were to lay your head

on my shoulder, in a bridal manner, it would do anything to bring us en

rapport with that lost bridal world again?”

Isabel caught away her hand. “Basil,” she cried, “it would be

disgusting! I wouldn't do it for the world--not even for that world. I

saw one middle-aged couple on Goat Island, while you were down at the

Cave of the Winds, or somewhere, with the children. They were sitting on

some steps, he a step below her, and he seemed to want to put his head

on her knee; but I gazed at him sternly, and he didn't dare. We should

look like them, if we yielded to any outburst of affection. Don't you

think we should look like them?”

“I don't know,” said Basil. “You are certainly a little wrinkled, my

dear.”

“And you are very fat, Basil.”

They glanced at each other with a flash of resentment, and then they

both laughed. “We couldn't look young if we quarreled a week,” he said.

“We had better content ourselves with feeling young, as I hope we shall

do if we live to be ninety. It will be the loss of others if they don't

see our bloom upon us. Shall I get you a paper of cherries, Isabel? The

children seem to be enjoying them.”

Isabel sprang upon her offspring with a cry of despair. “Oh, what shall

I do? Now we shall not have a wink of sleep with them to-night. Where

is that nux?” She hunted for the medicine in her bag, and the children

submitted; for they had eaten all the cherries, and they took their

medicine without a murmur. “I wonder at your letting them eat the sour

things, Basil,” said their mother, when the children had run off to the

newsstand again.

“I wonder that you left me to see what they were doing,” promptly

retorted their father.

“It was your nonsense about the brides,” said Isabel; “and I think

this has been a lesson to us. Don't let them get anything else to eat,

dearest.”

“They are safe; they have no more money. They are frugally confining

themselves to the admiration of the Japanese bows and arrows yonder. Why

have our Indians taken to making Japanese bows and arrows?”

Isabel despised the small pleasantry. “Then you saw nobody at the

hotel?” she asked.

“Not even the Ellisons,” said Basil.

“Ah, yes,” said Isabel; “that was where we met them. How long ago it

seems! And poor little Kitty! I wonder what has become of them? But I'm

glad they're not here. That's what makes you realize your age: meeting

the same people in the same place a great while after, and seeing how

old--they've grown. I don't think I could bear to see Kitty Ellison

again. I'm glad she didn't come to visit us in Boston, though, after

what happened, she couldn't, poor thing! I wonder if she's ever

regretted her breaking with him in the way she did. It's a very painful

thing to think of,--such an inconclusive conclusion; it always seemed as

if they ought to meet again, somewhere.”

“I don't believe she ever wished it.”

“A man can't tell what a woman wishes.”

“Well, neither can a woman,” returned Basil, lightly.

His wife remained serious. “It was a very fine point,--a very little

thing to reject a man for. I felt that when I first read her letter

about it.”

Basil yawned. “I don't believe I ever knew just what the point was.”

“Oh yes, you did; but you forget everything. You know that they met two

Boston ladies just after they were engaged, and she believed that he did

n't introduce her because he was ashamed of her countrified appearance

before them.”

“It was a pretty fine point,” said Basil, and he laughed provokingly.

“He might not have meant to ignore her,” answered Isabel thoughtfully;

“he might have chosen not to introduce her because he felt too proud of

her to subject her to any possible misappreciation from them. You might

have looked at it in that way.”

“Why didn't you look at it in that way? You advised her against giving

him another chance. Why did you?”

“Why?” repeated Isabel, absently. “Oh, a woman doesn't judge a man by

what he does, but by what he is! I knew that if she dismissed him it

was because she never really had trusted or could trust his love; and I

thought she had better not make another trial.”

“Well, very possibly you were right. At any rate, you have the

consolation of knowing that it's too late to help it now.”

“Yes, it's too late,” said Isabel; and her thoughts went back to her

meeting with the young girl whom she had liked so much, and whose after

history had interested her so painfully. It seemed to her a hard world

that could come to nothing better than that for the girl whom she had

seen in her first glimpse of it that night. Where was she now? What

had become of her? If she had married that man, would she have been any

happier? Marriage was not the poetic dream of perfect union that a girl

imagines it; she herself had found that out. It was a state of trial, of

probation; it was an ordeal, not an ecstasy. If she and Basil had broken

each other's hearts and parted, would not the fragments of their lives

have been on a much finer, much higher plane? Had not the commonplace,

every-day experiences of marriage vulgarized them both? To be sure,

there were the children; but if they had never had the children, she

would never have missed them; and if Basil had, for example, died just

before they were married--She started from this wicked reverie, and ran

towards her husband, whose broad, honest back, with no visible neck or

shirt-collar, was turned towards her, as he stood, with his head thrown

up, studying a time-table on the wall; she passed her arm convulsively

through his, and pulled him away.

“It's time to be getting our bags out to the train, Basil! Come, Bella!

Tom, we're going!”

The children reluctantly turned from the newsman's trumpery, and they

all went out to the track, and took seats on the benches under the

colonnade. While they waited; the train for Buffalo drew in, and they

remained watching it till it started. In the last car that passed them,

when it was fairly under way, a face looked full at Isabel from one

of the windows. In that moment of astonishment she forgot to observe

whether it was sad or glad; she only saw, or believed she saw, the light

of recognition dawn into its eyes, and then it was gone.

“Basil!” she cried, “stop the train! That was Kitty Ellison!”

“Oh no, it wasn't,” said Basil, easily. “It looked like her; but it

looked at least ten years older.”

“Why, of course it was! We're all ten years older,” returned his wife in

such indignation at his stupidity that she neglected to insist upon his

stopping the train, which was rapidly diminishing in the perspective.

He declared it was only a fancied resemblance; she contended that this

was in the neighborhood of Eriecreek, and it must be Kitty; and thus one

of their most inveterate disagreements began.

Their own train drew into the depot, and they disputed upon the fact in

question till they entered on the passage of the Suspension Bridge. Then

Basil rose and called the children to his side. On the left hand, far

up the river, the great Fall shows, with its mists at its foot and its

rainbow on its brow, as silent and still as if it were vastly painted

there; and below the bridge on the right, leap the Rapids in the narrow

gorge, like seas on a rocky shore. “Look on both sides, now,” he said to

the children. “Isabel you must see this!”

Isabel had been preparing for the passage of this bridge ever since she

left Boston. “Never!” she exclaimed. She instantly closed her eyes, and

hid her face in her handkerchief. Thanks to this precaution of hers, the

train crossed the bridge in perfect safety.

PG EDITORS BOOKMARKS:

All luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest

All the loveliness that exists outside of you, dearest is little

Amusing world, if you do not refuse to be amused

At heart every man is a smuggler

Beautiful with the radiance of loving and being loved

Bewildering labyrinth of error

Biggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelest

Brown-stone fronts

Civilly protested and consented

Coldly and inaccessibly vigilant

Collective silence which passes for sociality

Deadly summer day

Dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty

Dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad

Evil which will not let a man forgive his victim

Feeblest-minded are sure to lead the talk

Feeling of contempt for his unambitious destination

Feeling rather ashamed,--for he had laughed too

Glad; which considering, they ceased to be

Guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction

Happiness built upon and hedged about with misery

Happiness is so unreasonable

Headache darkens the universe while it lasts

Heart that forgives but does not forget

Helplessness accounts for many heroic facts in the world

Helplessness begets a sense of irresponsibility

I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife's acquaintance

I want to be sorry upon the easiest possible terms

I'm not afraid--I'm awfully demoralized

Indulge safely in the pleasures of autobiography

It's the same as a promise, your not saying you wouldn't

It had come as all such calamities come, from nothing

Jesting mood in the face of all embarrassments

Long life of holidays which is happy marriage

Married the whole mystifying world of womankind

Muddy draught which impudently affected to be coffee

Never could have an emotion without desiring to analyze it

Nothing so apt to end in mutual dislike,--except gratitude

Nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it's a young mother

Oblivion of sleep

Only so much clothing as the law compelled

Parkman

Patronizing spirit of travellers in a foreign country

Rejoice in everything that I haven't done

Seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed

Self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity

So hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do

So old a world and groping still

The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances

There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure

They can only do harm by an expression of sympathy

Tragical character of heat

Used to having his decisions reached without his knowledge

Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness

Voice of the common imbecility and incoherence

Weariness of buying

Willingness to find poetry in things around them

*****

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

By William Dean Howells

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

The following story was the first fruit of my New York life when I began

to live it after my quarter of a century in Cambridge and Boston, ending

in 1889; and I used my own transition to the commercial metropolis

in framing the experience which was wholly that of my supposititious

literary adventurer. He was a character whom, with his wife, I have

employed in some six or eight other stories, and whom I made as much the

hero and heroine of 'Their Wedding Journey' as the slight fable would

bear. In venturing out of my adoptive New England, where I had found

myself at home with many imaginary friends, I found it natural to ask

the company of these familiar acquaintances, but their company was not

to be had at once for the asking. When I began speaking of them as Basil

and Isabel, in the fashion of 'Their Wedding Journey,' they would not

respond with the effect of early middle age which I desired in them.

They remained wilfully, not to say woodenly, the young bridal pair of

that romance, without the promise of novel functioning. It was not till

I tried addressing them as March and Mrs. March that they stirred under

my hand with fresh impulse, and set about the work assigned them as

people in something more than their second youth.

The scene into which I had invited them to figure filled the largest

canvas I had yet allowed myself; and, though 'A Hazard of New Fortunes'

was not the first story I had written with the printer at my heels, it

was the first which took its own time to prescribe its own dimensions. I

had the general design well in mind when I began to write it, but as

it advanced it compelled into its course incidents, interests,

individualities, which I had not known lay near, and it specialized

and amplified at points which I had not always meant to touch, though I

should not like to intimate anything mystical in the fact. It became,

to my thinking, the most vital of my fictions, through my quickened

interest in the life about me, at a moment of great psychological

import. We had passed through a period of strong emotioning in the

direction of the humaner economics, if I may phrase it so; the rich

seemed not so much to despise the poor, the poor did not so hopelessly

repine. The solution of the riddle of the painful earth through the

dreams of Henry George, through the dreams of Edward Bellamy, through

the dreams of all the generous visionaries of the past, seemed not

impossibly far off. That shedding of blood which is for the remission of

sins had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of Chicago, and

the hearts of those who felt the wrongs bound up with our rights, the

slavery implicated in our liberty, were thrilling with griefs and hopes

hitherto strange to the average American breast. Opportunely for me

there was a great street-car strike in New York, and the story began to

find its way to issues nobler and larger than those of the love-affairs

common to fiction. I was in my fifty-second year when I took it up, and

in the prime, such as it was, of my powers. The scene which I had chosen

appealed prodigiously to me, and the action passed as nearly without my

conscious agency as I ever allow myself to think such things happen.

The opening chapters were written in a fine, old fashioned apartment

house which had once been a family house, and in an uppermost room of

which I could look from my work across the trees of the little park in

Stuyvesant Square to the towers of St. George's Church. Then later in

the spring of 1889 the unfinished novel was carried to a country house

on the Belmont border of Cambridge. There I must have written very

rapidly to have 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 of things which do not cost me great trouble.

There is nothing in the book with which I amused myself more than the

house-hunting of the Marches when they were placing themselves in New

York; and if the contemporary reader should turn for instruction to the

pages in which their experience is detailed I assure him that he may

trust their fidelity and accuracy in the article of New York housing as

it was early in the last decade of the last century: I mean, the housing

of people of such moderate means as the Marches. In my zeal for truth

I did not distinguish between reality and actuality in this or other

matters--that is, one was as precious to me as the other. But the types

here portrayed are as true as ever they were, though the world in

which they were finding their habitat is wonderfully, almost incredibly

different. Yet it is not wholly different, for a young literary pair

now adventuring in New York might easily parallel the experience of the

Marches with their own, if not for so little money; many phases of

New York housing are better, but all are dearer. Other aspects of the

material city have undergone a transformation much more wonderful. I

find that in my book its population is once modestly spoken of as two

millions, but now in twenty years it is twice as great, and the grandeur

as well as grandiosity of its forms is doubly apparent. The transitional

public that then moped about in mildly tinkling horse-cars is now

hurried back and forth in clanging trolleys, in honking and whirring

motors; the Elevated road which was the last word of speed is undermined

by the Subway, shooting its swift shuttles through the subterranean woof

of the city's haste. From these feet let the witness infer our whole

massive Hercules, a bulk that sprawls and stretches beyond the rivers

through the tunnels piercing their beds and that towers into the skies

with innumerable tops--a Hercules blent of Briareus and Cerberus, but

not so bad a monster as it seemed then to threaten becoming.

Certain hopes of truer and better conditions on which my heart was fixed

twenty years ago are not less dear, and they are by no means touched

with despair, though they have not yet found the fulfilment which I

would then have prophesied for them. Events have not wholly played them

false; events have not halted, though they have marched with a slowness

that might affect a younger observer as marking time. They who were then

mindful of the poor have not forgotten them, and what is better the poor

have not often forgotten themselves in violences such as offered me the

material of tragedy and pathos in my story. In my quality of artist I

could not regret these, and I gratefully realize that they offered

me the opportunity of a more strenuous action, a more impressive

catastrophe than I could have achieved without them. They tended to give

the whole fable dignity and doubtless made for its success as a book.

As a serial it had crept a sluggish course before a public apparently so

unmindful of it that no rumor of its acceptance or rejection reached the

writer during the half year of its publication; but it rose in book form

from that failure and stood upon its feet and went its way to greater

favor than any book of his had yet enjoyed. I hope that my recognition

of the fact will not seem like boasting, but that the reader will

regard it as a special confidence from the author and will let it go no

farther.

KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.

PART FIRST

I.

“Now, you think this thing over, March, and let me know the last of

next week,” said Fulkerson. He got up from the chair which he had been

sitting astride, with his face to its back, and tilting toward March on

its hind-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. You acknowledge 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 the grain. Now, I offer you a chance to go with the grain. I

don't say you're going to make your everlasting fortune, but I'll give

you a living salary, and if the thing succeeds you'll share in its

success. We'll all share in its success. That's the beauty of it. I

tell you, March, this is the greatest idea that has been struck

since”--Fulkerson stopped and searched 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 a

sharp cut on the thigh, and leaned forward to get the full effect of his

words upon his listener.

March had his hands clasped together behind his head, and he took one

of them down long enough to put his inkstand and mucilage-bottle out

of Fulkerson's way. After many years' experiment of a mustache and

whiskers, he now wore his grizzled beard full, but cropped close; it

gave him a certain grimness, corrected by the gentleness of his eyes.

“Some people don't think much of the creation of man nowadays. Why stop

at 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

at the creation of man. I'm satisfied with that. But if you want to

ring the morning 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.

“I haven't had, any magazine experience, you know that; and I haven't

seriously attempted to do anything in literature since I was married. I

gave up smoking and the Muse together. I suppose I could still manage a

cigar, but I don't believe I could--”

“Muse worth a cent.” Fulkerson took the thought out of his mouth and put

it into his own words. “I know. Well, I don't want you to. I don't

care if you never write a line for the thing, though you needn't reject

anything of yours, if it happens to be good, on that account. And I

don't want 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

settled down?”

“Yes; I thought my lines were permanently cast in those places once. It

was more an accident than anything else that I got into the insurance

business. I suppose I secretly hoped that if I made my living by

something utterly different, I could come more freshly to literature

proper 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 that

you first gave me the idea of this thing shows that you've done more or

less 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 might

get a man of more experience, but I should probably get a man of more

prejudice and self-conceit along with him, and a man with a following of

the literary hangers-on that are sure to get round an editor sooner

or later. I want to start fair, and I've found out in the syndicate

business all the men that are worth having. But they know me, and they

don't know you, and that's where we shall have the pull on them.

They won't be able to work the thing. Don't you be anxious about the

experience. I've got experience enough of my own to run a dozen

editors. What I want is an editor who has taste, and you've got it; and

conscience, and you've got it; and horse sense, and you've got that. And

I like you because you're a Western man, and I'm another. I do cotton

to a Western man when I find him off East here, holding his own with the

best of 'em, and showing 'em that he's just as much civilized as they

are. We both know what it is to have our bright home in the setting sun;

heigh?”

“I think we Western men who've come East are apt to take ourselves a

little too objectively and to feel ourselves rather more representative

than 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 that

way; 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 we

first met. I can't help suffusing a little to any man when I hear that

he was born on the other side of the Alleghanies. It's perfectly stupid.

I despise the same thing when I see it in Boston people.”

Fulkerson pulled first one of his blond whiskers and then the other, and

twisted the end of each into a point, which he left to untwine itself.

He fixed March with his little eyes, which had a curious innocence in

their cunning, and tapped the desk immediately in front of him. “What I

like about you is that you're broad in your sympathies. The first time I

saw you, that night on the Quebec boat, I said to myself: 'There's a man

I want to know. There's a human being.' I was a little afraid of

Mrs. March and the children, but I felt at home with you--thoroughly

domesticated--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 literature and Indian moccasins and birch-bark toy canoes and

stereoscopic views, I knew that we were brothers--spiritual twins. I

recognized the Western style of fun, and I thought, when you said you

were from Boston, that it was some of the same. But I see now that its

being a cold fact, as far as the last fifteen or twenty years count, is

just so much gain. You know both sections, and you can make this thing

go, from ocean to ocean.”

“We might ring that into the prospectus, too,” March suggested, with a

smile. “You might call the thing 'From Sea to Sea.' By-the-way, what are

you going to call it?”

“I haven't decided yet; that's one of the things I wanted to talk with

you 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 something

that would express the co-operative character of the thing, but I don't

know as I can get it.”

“Might call it 'The Mutual'.”

“They'd think it was an insurance paper. No, that won't do. But Mutual

comes pretty near the idea. If we could get something like that, it

would pique curiosity; and then if we could get paragraphs afloat

explaining that the contributors were to be paid according to the sales,

it would be a 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 the

central idea of irresponsibility. As I understand, everybody is to share

the profits and be exempt from the losses. Or, if I'm wrong, and the

reverse is true, you might call it 'The Army of Martyrs'. Come, that

sounds attractive, Fulkerson! Or what do you think of 'The Fifth Wheel'?

That would forestall the criticism that there are too many literary

periodicals already. Or, if you want to put forward the idea of complete

independence, you could call it 'The Free Lance'; or--”

“Or 'The Hog on Ice'--either stand up or fall down, you know,” Fulkerson

broke in coarsely. “But we'll leave the name of the magazine till we get

the editor. I see the poison's beginning to work in you, March; and if

I had time I'd leave the result to time. But I haven't. I've got to know

inside of the next week. To come down to business with you, March, I

sha'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's

very nice of you, Fulkerson.”

“No, sir; no, sir! I've always liked you and wanted you ever since we

met that first night. I had this thing inchoately in my mind then, when

I was telling you about the newspaper syndicate business--beautiful

vision of a lot of literary fellows breaking loose from the bondage of

publishers and playing it alone--”

“You might call it 'The Lone Hand'; that would be attractive,” March

interrupted. “The whole West would know what you meant.”

Fulkerson was talking seriously, and March was listening seriously; but

they both broke off and laughed. Fulkerson got down off the table and

made some turns about the room. It was growing late; the October sun had

left the top of the tall windows; it was still clear day, but it would

soon be twilight; they had been talking a long time. Fulkerson came and

stood with his little feet wide apart, and bent his little lean, square

face 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 a

certain effort of reserve, “At present about three thousand.” He looked

up at Fulkerson with a glance, as if he had a mind to enlarge upon the

fact, and then dropped his eyes without saying more.

Whether Fulkerson had not thought it so much or not, he said: “Well,

I'll give you thirty-five hundred. Come! And your chances in the

success.”

“We won't count the chances in the success. And I don't believe

thirty-five hundred would go any further in New York than three thousand

in 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

pay ten or twelve hundred a year for your house here. You can get plenty

of flats in New York for the same money; and I understand you can get

all sorts of provisions for less than you pay now--three or four cents

on the pound. Come!”

This was by no means the first talk they had had about the matter; every

three or four months during the past two years the syndicate man had

dropped 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

between them. But now Fulkerson clearly meant business, and March had a

struggle to maintain himself in a firm poise of refusal.

“I dare say it wouldn't--or it needn't--cost so very much more, but I

don'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's very natural she shouldn't. She has always lived in Boston; she's

attached 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

that belongs to the whole country, and that's New York.”

“Yes, I know,” sighed March; “and Boston belongs to the Bostonians, but

they like you to make yourself at home while you're visiting.”

“If you'll agree to make phrases like that, right along, and get them

into '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 know

you will, anyway; and I might as well make a virtue of advising you to

do it. Tell her I advised you to do it, and you let me know before next

Saturday 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

the chore-women who washed down the marble halls and stairs of the great

building had wrung out her floor-cloth and departed, leaving spotless

stone and a clean, damp smell in the darkening corridors behind her.

“Couldn't offer you such swell quarters in New York, March,” Fulkerson

said, 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

that I'm going to fit up for my bachelor's hall in the third story, and

adapt for '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--no malaria of any kind.”

“I don't know that I'm going to share its salubrity with you yet,” March

sighed, in an obvious travail which gave Fulkerson hopes.

“Oh yes, you are,” he coaxed. “Now, you talk it over with your wife. You

give her a fair, unprejudiced chance at the thing on its merits, and I'm

very much mistaken in Mrs. March if she doesn't tell you to go in and

win. We're bound to win!”

They stood on the outside steps of the vast edifice beetling like

a granite crag above them, with the stone groups of an allegory of

life-insurance foreshortened in the bas-relief overhead. March absently

lifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange after so many years'

familiarity, and so was the well-known street in its Saturday-evening

solitude. He asked himself, with prophetic homesickness, if it were an

omen of what was to be. But he only said, musingly: “A fortnightly. You

know that didn't work in England. The fortnightly is published once a

month now.”

“It works in France,” Fulkerson retorted. “The 'Revue des Deux Mondes'

is still published twice a month. I guess we can make it work in

America--with illustrations.”

“Going to have illustrations?”

“My dear boy! What are you giving me? Do I look like the sort of lunatic

who would start a thing in the twilight of the nineteenth century

without illustrations? Come off!”

“Ah, that complicates it! I don't know anything about art.” March's look

of discouragement confessed the hold the scheme had taken upon him.

“I don't want you to!” Fulkerson retorted. “Don't you suppose I shall

have an art man?”

“And will they--the artists--work at a reduced rate, too, like the

writers, with the hopes of a share in the success?”

“Of course they will! And if I want any particular man, for a card, I'll

pay him big money besides. But I can get plenty of first-rate sketches

on my own terms. You'll see! They'll pour in!”

“Look here, Fulkerson,” said March, “you'd better call this fortnightly

of 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 a

crazy venture? Don't do it!” The kindness which March had always felt,

in spite of his wife's first misgivings and reservations, for the merry,

hopeful, slangy, energetic little creature trembled in his voice. They

had both formed a friendship for Fulkerson during the week they were

together in Quebec. When he was not working the newspapers there, he

went about with them over the familiar ground they were showing their

children, and was simply grateful for the chance, as well as very

entertaining about it all. The children liked him, too; when they got

the clew to his intention, and found that he was not quite serious in

many of the things he said, they thought he was great fun. They were

always glad when their father brought him home on the occasion of

Fulkerson's visits to Boston; and Mrs. March, though of a charier

hospitality, welcomed Fulkerson with a grateful sense of his admiration

for her husband. He had a way of treating March with deference, as an

older and abler man, and of qualifying the freedom he used toward every

one with an implication that March tolerated it voluntarily, which she

thought very sweet and even refined.

“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 into

this 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

I don't stand alone on it,” he added, with a significance which did not

escape 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

to be a triumphal march from the word go, with coffee and lemonade for

the procession along the whole line. All you've got to do is to fall

in.” He stretched 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 I

shouldn't have time. Goodbye!”

He now let Fulkerson have his hand, and they exchanged a cordial

pressure. Fulkerson started away at a quick, light pace. Half a block

off he stopped, turned round, and, seeing March still standing where he

had left 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 with

Fulkerson, and at his door in Nankeen Square he closed the parley with

a plump refusal to go to New York on any terms. His daughter Bella was

lying in wait for him in the hall, and she threw her arms round his

neck with the exuberance of her fourteen years and with something of the

histrionic intention of her sex. He pressed on, with her clinging about

him, to the library, and, in the glow of his decision against Fulkerson,

kissed his wife, where she sat by the study lamp reading the Transcript

through her first pair of eye-glasses: it was agreed in the family that

she looked distinguished in them, or, at any rate, cultivated. She took

them off to give him a glance of question, and their son Tom looked up

from 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 explained

to his wife's glance, “and then I walked. I suppose dinner's waiting.

I'm sorry, but I won't do it any more.”

At table he tried to be gay with Bella, who babbled at him with a

voluble pertness 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 possible

his wife told the children they might be excused. Then she asked, “What

is it, Basil?”

“What is what?” he retorted, with a specious brightness that did not

avail.

“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.” He

stopped, 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 supplant

me, or whether they ever did. But I wasn't thinking about that.

Fulkerson has been to see me again.”

“Fulkerson?” She brightened at the name, and March smiled, too. “Why

didn'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 his

again. He's got it into definite shape at last.”

“What shape?”

March outlined it for her, and his wife seized its main features with

the intuitive sense of affairs which makes women such good business-men

when they will let it.

“It sounds perfectly crazy,” she said, finally. “But it mayn't be. The

only thing I didn't like about Mr. Fulkerson was his always wanting to

chance things. But what have you got to do with it?”

“What have I got to do with it?” March toyed with the delay the question

gave him; then he said, with a sort of deprecatory laugh: “It seems

that Fulkerson has had his eye on me ever since we met that night on the

Quebec boat. I opened up pretty freely to him, as you do to a man you

never expect to see again, and when I found he was in that newspaper

syndicate business I told him about my early literary ambitions--”

“You can't say that I ever discouraged them, Basil,” his wife put in. “I

should have been willing, any time, to give up everything for them.”

“Well, he says that I first suggested this brilliant idea to him.

Perhaps I did; I don't remember. When he told me about his supplying

literature to newspapers for simultaneous publication, he says I asked:

'Why not apply the principle of co-operation to a magazine, and run it

in the interest of the contributors?' and that set him to thinking, and

he thought out his plan of a periodical which should pay authors and

artists a low price outright for their work and give them a chance of

the profits in the way of a percentage. After all, it isn't so very

different from the chances an author takes when he publishes a book.

And Fulkerson thinks that the novelty of the thing would pique public

curiosity, if it didn'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 to

realize the fact, while she stared hard at her husband to make sure he

was not joking.

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

germ--the microbe.”

His wife had now realized the fact, at least in a degree that excluded

trifling with it. “That is very honorable of Mr. Fulkerson; and if he

owes it to you, it was the least he could do.” Having recognized her

husband's claim to the honor done him, she began to kindle with a sense

of the honor itself and the value of the opportunity. “It's a very high

compliment to you, Basil--a very high compliment. And you could give up

this wretched insurance business that you've always hated so, and that's

making you so unhappy now that you think they're going to take it

from you. Give it up and take Mr. Fulkerson's offer! It's a perfect

interposition, coming just at this time! Why, do it! Mercy!” she

suddenly arrested herself, “he wouldn't expect you to get along on the

possible profits?” Her face expressed the awfulness of the notion.

March smiled reassuringly, and waited to give himself the pleasure of

the sensation he meant to give her. “If I'll make striking phrases for

it and edit 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 flashed

through her mind-doubt, joy, anxiety.

“Basil! You don't mean it! Why, take it! Take it instantly! Oh, what

a thing to happen! Oh, what luck! But you deserve it, if you first

suggested it. What an escape, what a triumph over all those hateful

insurance people! Oh, Basil, I'm afraid he'll change his mind! You ought

to have accepted on the spot. You might have known I would approve, and

you 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 the

conditional. She meant that he should do what she said, if it were

entirely 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.

He wouldn't undertake it if he didn't know it would succeed; he must

have capital.”

“It will take a great deal to get such a thing going; and even if he's

got an Angel behind him--”

She caught at the word--“An Angel?”

“It's what the theatrical people call a financial backer. He dropped a

hint of something of that kind.”

“Of course, he's got an Angel,” said his wife, promptly adopting the

word. “And even if he hadn't, still, Basil, I should be willing to have

you risk it. The risk isn't so great, is it? We shouldn't be ruined

if it failed altogether. With our stocks we have two thousand a year,

anyway, and we could pinch through on that till you got into some other

business afterward, especially if we'd saved something out of your

salary while it lasted. Basil, I want you to try it! I know it will give

you a new lease of life to have a congenial occupation.” March laughed,

but his wife persisted. “I'm all for your trying it, Basil; indeed I am.

If it's an experiment, 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 to

telegraph Mr. Fulkerson, so that he'll find the despatch waiting for him

when he gets to New York. I'll take the whole responsibility, Basil, and

I'll risk all the consequences.”

III.

March's face had sobered more and more as she followed one hopeful burst

with another, and now it expressed a positive pain. But he forced a

smile and said: “There's a little condition attached. Where did you

suppose it was 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 that

he 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 the

table 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,

forward at first--or as long as the whole thing was in the air. I didn't

know that you would take so much to the general enterprise, or else I

should have mentioned the New York condition at once; but, of course,

that puts an 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 her

to the impossibility awoke in him, though he was really quite cold about

the affair himself now. “Fulkerson thought we could get a nice flat

in New York for about what the interest and taxes came to here, and

provisions are cheaper. But I should rather not experiment at my time of

life. If I could have been caught younger, I might have been inured to

New 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

try anything--anywhere; but you know I don't like New York. I don't

approve of it. It's so big, and so hideous! Of course I shouldn't mind

that; but I've always lived in Boston, and the children were born and

have all their friendships and associations here.” She added, with the

helplessness that discredited her good sense and did her injustice, “I

have just got them both into the Friday afternoon class at Papanti's,

and you 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 be

flying in the face of Providence to leave Boston. The mere fact of a

brilliant opening like that offered me on 'The Microbe,' and the halcyon

future which Fulkerson promises if we'll come to New York, is as dust in

the balance against the advantages of the Friday afternoon class.”

“Basil,” she appealed, solemnly, “have I ever interfered with your

career?”

“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 if

I thought it would really be for your advancement I would go to New York

or 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 of witnesses that it would. I don't blame you. I wasn't born in

Boston, but I 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 dazzled by Fulkerson's offer, I'll own that; but his choice

of me as editor sapped 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 that

Fulkerson meant to keep the whip-hand himself, and that was reassuring.

And, besides, if the Reciprocity Life should happen not to want my

services any longer, it wouldn't be quite like giving up a certainty;

though, as a matter of business, I let Fulkerson get that impression;

I felt rather sneaking to do it. But if the worst comes to the worst, I

can look about for something to do in Boston; and, anyhow, people don't

starve on two thousand a year, though it's convenient to have five. The

fact is, I'm too old to change so radically. If you don't like my saying

that, then you are, Isabel, and so are the children. I've no right to

take them from the home we've made, and to change the whole course of

their lives, unless I can assure them of something, and I can't assure

them of anything. Boston is big enough for us, and it's certainly

prettier than New York. I always feel a little proud of hailing from

Boston; 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

you have. You may be sure that if you don't want to take the children

out of the Friday afternoon class, I don't want to leave my library

here, and all the ways I've got set in. We'll keep on. Very likely the

company won't supplant me, and if it does, and Watkins gets the place,

he'll give me a subordinate position of some sort. Cheer up, Isabel! I

have put Satan and his angel, Fulkerson, behind me, and it's all right.

Let's go in to the children.”

He came round the table to Isabel, where she sat in a growing

distraction, 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

the lessons for Monday which they had left over from the day before, she

asked, “Children, how would you like to live in New York?”

Bella made haste to get in her word first. “And give up the Friday

afternoon class?” she wailed.

Tom growled from his book, without lifting his eyes: “I shouldn't want

to go to Columbia. They haven't got any dormitories, and you have to

board round anywhere. Are you going to New York?” He now deigned to look

up at his father.

“No, Tom. You and Bella have decided me against it. Your perspective

shows the affair in its true proportions. I had an offer to go to New

York, but I've refused it.”

IV

March's irony fell harmless from the children's preoccupation with their

own affairs, but he knew that his wife felt it, and this added to the

bitterness which prompted it. He blamed her for letting her provincial

narrowness prevent his accepting Fulkerson's offer quite as much as

if he had otherwise entirely wished to accept it. His world, like most

worlds, had been superficially a disappointment. He was no richer than

at the beginning, though in marrying he had given up some tastes, some

preferences, some aspirations, in the hope of indulging them later, with

larger means and larger leisure. His wife had not urged him to do it;

in fact, her pride, as she said, was in his fitness for the life he

had renounced; 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 she

knew that he would always sacrifice himself for her and the children;

and he, 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 too well satisfied with themselves, if not with each other. They

were not sentimental, they were rather matter-of-fact in their motives;

but they had both a sort of humorous fondness for sentimentality. They

liked to play with the romantic, from the safe vantage-ground of their

real practicality, and to divine the poetry of the commonplace. Their

peculiar point of view separated them from most other people, with whom

their means 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 formed tastes which they had not always been able to indulge, but

of which they felt that the possession reflected distinction on them. It

enabled them to look down upon those who were without such tastes; but

they were not ill-natured, and so they did not look down so much with

contempt as with amusement. In their unfashionable neighborhood they had

the fame of being not exclusive precisely, but very much wrapped up in

themselves and their children.

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 it abounded in books on which he spent more than he ought.

They had beautified it in every way, and had unconsciously taken credit

to them selves for it. They felt, with a glow almost of virtue, how

perfectly it fitted their lives and their children's, and they believed

that somehow it expressed their characters--that it was like them. They

went out very little; she remained shut up in its refinement, working

the good of her own; and he went to his business, and hurried back

to forget it, and dream his dream of intellectual achievement in the

flattering atmosphere of her sympathy. He could not conceal from himself

that his divided life was somewhat like Charles Lamb's, and there were

times when, as he had expressed to Fulkerson, he believed that its

division was favorable to the freshness of his interest in literature.

It certainly kept it a high privilege, a sacred refuge. Now and then he

wrote something, and got it printed after long delays, and when they

met on the St. Lawrence Fulkerson had some of March's verses in his

pocket-book, which he had cut out of astray newspaper and carried

about for years, because they pleased his fancy so much; they formed an

immediate bond of union between the men when their authorship was

traced and owned, and this gave a pretty color of romance to their

acquaintance. But, for the most part, March was satisfied to read. He

was proud of reading critically, and he kept in the current of literary

interests and controversies. It all seemed to him, and to his wife at

second-hand, very meritorious; he could not help contrasting his life

and its inner elegance with that of other men who had 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 him to do this; and

neither he nor his wife supposed that they were selfish persons. On the

contrary, they were very sympathetic; there was no good cause that

they did not wish well; they had a generous scorn of all kinds of

narrow-heartedness; if it had ever come into their way to sacrifice

themselves for others, they thought they would have done so, but they

never asked why it had not come in their way. They were very gentle and

kind, even when most elusive; and they taught their children to loathe

all manner of social cruelty. March was of so watchful a conscience in

some respects that he denied himself the pensive pleasure of lapsing

into the melancholy of unfulfilled aspirations; but he did not see that,

if he had abandoned them, it had been for what he held dearer; generally

he felt as if he had turned from them with a high, altruistic aim. The

practical expression of his life was that it was enough to provide well

for his family; to have cultivated tastes, and to gratify them to

the extent of his means; to be rather distinguished, even in the

simplification of his desires. He believed, and his wife believed, that

if the time ever came when he really wished to make a sacrifice to the

fulfilment of the aspirations so long postponed, she would be ready to

join with heart and hand.

When he went to her room from his library, where she left him the whole

evening with the children, he found her before the glass thoughtfully

removing the first dismantling pin from her back hair.

“I can't help feeling,” she grieved into the mirror, “that it's I who

keep you from accepting that offer. I know it is! I could go West with

you, or into a new country--anywhere; but New York terrifies me. I don't

like New York, I never did; it disheartens and distracts me; I can't

find myself in it; I shouldn't know how to shop. I know I'm foolish and

narrow and provincial,” she went on, “but I could never have any inner

quiet in New York; I couldn't live in the spirit there. I suppose people

do. It can't be that all these millions--'

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

quite two.”

“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 two

million people; I should be wretched. I suppose I'm standing in the way

of your highest interest, but I can't help it. We took each other for

better or worse, and you must try to bear with me--” She broke off and

began to cry.

“Stop it!” shouted March. “I tell you I never cared anything for

Fulkerson's scheme or entertained it seriously, and I shouldn't if he'd

proposed to carry it out in Boston.” This was not quite true, but in

the retrospect it seemed sufficiently so for the purposes of argument.

“Don't say another word about it. The thing's over now, and I don't want

to think of it any more. We couldn't change its nature if we talked all

night. But I want you to understand that it isn't your limitations that

are in the way. It's mine. I shouldn't have the courage to take such a

place; I don't think I'm fit for it, and that's the long and short of

it.”

“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 the

children, whom they let lie late on Sunday, Mrs. March said to her

husband, silent over his fish-balls and baked beans: “We will go to New

York. I've decided it.”

“Well, it takes two to decide that,” March retorted. “We are not going

to New 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 with

that fear of being turned out which you have you mustn't neglect this

offer. 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

in literature, I should die happy.”

“Not immediately after, I hope,” he suggested, taking the second cup of

coffee she had been pouring out for him. “And Boston?”

“We needn't make a complete break. We can keep this place for the

present, anyway; we could let it for the winter, and come back in the

summer 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 New

York, or the enterprise failed, you could get into something in Boston

again; and we have enough to live on till you did. Yes, Basil, I'm

going.”

“I can see by the way your chin trembles that nothing could stop you.

You may 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--Fulkerson

always calls it 'this thing' I would cheerfully accept any sacrifice you

could make to it. But I'd rather not offer you up on a shrine I don't

feel any particular faith in. I'm very comfortable where I am; that is,

I know just where the pinch comes, and if it comes harder, why, I've got

used 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

your point with it. There's nothing mean about you, Isabel, where

responsibility is concerned. No; if I do this thing--Fulkerson again? I

can't get away from 'this thing'; it's ominous--I must do it because I

want to do it, and not because you wish that you wanted me to do it. I

understand your position, Isabel, and that you're really acting from a

generous impulse, but there's nothing so precarious at our time of life

as a generous impulse. When we were younger we could stand it; we could

give way to it and take the consequences. But now we can't bear it. We

must 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,

and he went on triumphantly:

“No, I won't take you away from the only safe place on the planet

and plunge you into the most perilous, and then have you say in your

revulsion of feeling that you were all against it from the first, and

you gave way because you saw I had my heart set on it.” He supposed he

was treating the matter humorously, but in this sort of banter between

husband and wife there is always much more than the joking. March had

seen some pretty feminine inconsistencies and trepidations which once

charmed him in his wife hardening into traits of middle-age which were

very like those of less interesting older women. The sight moved him

with a 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 be

need not, but that whatever he did she should have nothing to reproach

herself with; and, at least, he could not say that she had trapped him

into anything.

“What do you mean by trapping?” he demanded.

“I don't know what you call it,” she answered; “but when you get me to

commit myself to a thing by leaving out the most essential point, I call

it trapping.”

“I wonder you stop at trapping, if you think I got you to favor

Fulkerson's scheme and then sprung New York on you. I don't suppose you

do, 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 lunched

silently together in the presence of their children, who knew that

they had been quarrelling, but were easily indifferent to the fact, as

children get to be in such cases; nature defends their youth, and the

unhappiness which they behold does not infect them. In the evening,

after the boy and girl had gone to bed, the father and mother resumed

their talk. He would have liked to take it up at the point from which it

wandered into hostilities, for he felt it lamentable that a matter which

so seriously concerned them should be confused in the fumes of senseless

anger; and he was willing to make a tacit acknowledgment of his own

error by recurring to the question, but she would not be content with

this, and he had to concede explicitly to her weakness that she really

meant it when 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 their going 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 agency

here,” and in this bitterness their talk ended.

V.

His wife made no attempt to renew their talk before March went to

his business in the morning, and they parted in dry offence. Their

experience was that these things always came right of themselves at

last, and they usually let them. He knew that she had really tried to

consent to a thing that was repugnant to her, and in his heart he gave

her more credit for the effort than he had allowed her openly. She knew

that she had made it with the reservation he accused her of, and that he

had a right to feel sore at what she could not help. But he left her

to brood over his ingratitude, and she suffered him to go heavy and

unfriended to meet the chances of the day. He said to himself that if

she had assented cordially to the conditions of Fulkerson's offer, he

would have had the courage to take all the other risks himself, and

would have had the satisfaction of resigning his place. As it was, he

must wait till he was removed; and he figured with bitter pleasure the

pain she would feel when he came home some day and told her he had been

supplanted, after it was too late to close with Fulkerson.

He found a letter on his desk from the secretary, “Dictated,” in

typewriting, which briefly informed him that Mr. Hubbell, the Inspector

of Agencies, would be in Boston on Wednesday, and would call at his

office during the forenoon. The letter was not different in tone from

many that he had formerly received; but the visit announced was out of

the usual order, and March believed he read his fate in it. During the

eighteen years of his connection with it--first as a subordinate in the

Boston office, and finally as its general agent there--he had seen

a good many changes in the Reciprocity; presidents, vice-presidents,

actuaries, and general agents had come and gone, but there had always

seemed to be a recognition of his efficiency, or at least sufficiency,

and there had never been any manner of trouble, no question of accounts,

no apparent dissatisfaction with his management, until latterly, when

there had begun to come from headquarters some suggestions of enterprise

in certain ways, which gave him his first suspicions of his clerk

Watkins's willingness to succeed him; they embodied some of Watkins's

ideas. The things proposed seemed to March undignified, and even vulgar;

he had never thought himself wanting in energy, though probably he had

left the business to take its own course in the old lines more than

he realized. Things had always gone so smoothly that he had sometimes

fancied a peculiar regard for him in the management, which he had the

weakness to attribute to an appreciation of what he occasionally did

in literature, though in saner moments 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, no one in the management ever gave a sign of

consciousness that their service was adorned by an obscure literary man;

and Mr. Hubbell himself had the effect of regarding the excursions of

March's pen as a sort of joke, and of winking at them; as he might have

winked if once in a way he had found him a little the gayer for dining.

March wore through the day gloomily, but he had it on his conscience not

to show any resentment toward Watkins, whom he suspected of wishing to

supplant him, and even of working to do so. Through this self-denial he

reached a better mind concerning his wife. He determined not to make

her suffer needlessly, if the worst came to the worst; she would suffer

enough, at the best, and till the worst came he would spare her, and not

say 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 tell

her 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

whatever it might portend by resigning his place at once. She said she

was quite ready to go to New York; she had been thinking it all over,

and now she really 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, or try a new way of life if he could help it. He insisted

that he was quite selfish in this; in their concessions their quarrel

vanished; they agreed that whatever happened would be for the best; and

the next day he went to his office fortified for any event.

His destiny, if tragical, presented itself with an aspect which he might

have found comic if it had been another's destiny. Mr. Hubbell brought

March's removal, softened in the guise of a promotion. The management at

New York, it appeared, had acted upon a suggestion of Mr. Hubbell's, and

now authorized him to offer March the editorship of the monthly paper

published in the interest of the company; his office would include the

authorship of circulars and leaflets in behalf of life-insurance, and

would give play to the literary talent which Mr. Hubbell had brought to

the attention of the management; his salary would be nearly as much as

at present, but the work would not take his whole time, and in a place

like New York he could get a great deal of outside writing, which they

would not object to his doing.

Mr. Hubbell seemed so sure of his acceptance of a place in every way

congenial to a man of literary tastes that March was afterward sorry he

dismissed the proposition with obvious irony, and had needlessly hurt

Hubbell's feelings; but Mrs. March had no such regrets. She was only

afraid 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,

and they had a wretched day in which they heard nothing from him. It

ended with his answering March's telegram in person. They were so glad

of his coming, and so touched by his satisfaction with his bargain, that

they laid all the facts of the case before him. He entered fully into

March's sense of the joke latent in Mr. Hubbell's proposition, and he

tried to make Mrs. March believe that he shared her resentment of the

indignity offered her husband.

March made a show of willingness to release him in view of the changed

situation, saying that he held him to nothing. Fulkerson laughed, and

asked him how soon he thought he could come on to New York. He refused

to reopen the question of March's fitness with him; he said they, had

gone into that thoroughly, but he recurred to it with Mrs. March, and

confirmed her belief in his good sense on all points. She had been from

the first moment defiantly confident of her husband's ability, but till

she had talked the matter over with Fulkerson she was secretly not

sure of it; or, at least, she was not sure that March was not right in

distrusting himself. When she clearly understood, now, what Fulkerson

intended, she had no longer a doubt. He explained how the enterprise

differed from others, and how he needed for its direction a man who

combined general business experience and business ideas with a love for

the thing and a natural aptness for it. He did not want a young man, and

yet he wanted youth--its freshness, its zest--such as March would feel

in a thing he could put his whole heart into. He would not run in ruts,

like an old fellow who had got hackneyed; he would not have any hobbies;

he would not have any friends or any enemies. Besides, he would have

to meet people, 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 in the background, as far as the public was concerned; the

public was to suppose that the thing ran itself. Fulkerson did not care

for a great literary reputation in his editor--he implied that March

had a very pretty little one. At the same time the relations between

the contributors and the management were to be much more, intimate than

usual. Fulkerson felt his personal disqualification for working the

thing socially, and he counted upon Mr. March for that; that was to say,

he counted upon Mrs. March.

She protested he must not count upon her; but it by no means disabled

Fulkerson's judgment in her view that March really seemed more than

anything else a fancy of his. He had been a fancy of hers; and the sort

of affectionate respect with which Fulkerson spoke of him laid forever

some doubt she had of the fineness of Fulkerson's manners and reconciled

her to the graphic slanginess of his speech.

The affair was now irretrievable, but she gave her approval to it as

superbly as if it were submitted in its inception. Only, Mr. Fulkerson

must not suppose she should ever like New York. She would not deceive

him on that point. She never should like it. She did not conceal,

either, that she did not like taking the children out of the Friday

afternoon class; and she did not believe that Tom would ever be

reconciled to going to Columbia. She took courage from Fulkerson's

suggestion that it was possible for Tom to come to Harvard even from New

York; and she heaped him with questions concerning the domiciliation of

the family in that city. He tried to know something about the matter,

and he succeeded in seeming 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 with

tireless energy; and in the moments of dejection and misgiving which

harassed her husband she remained dauntless, and put heart into him when

he had lost it altogether.

She arranged to leave the children in the house with the servants, while

she went on with March to look up a dwelling of some sort in New York.

It made him sick to think of it; and, when it came to the point, he

would rather have given up the whole enterprise. She had to nerve him to

it, to represent more than once that now they had no choice but to make

this experiment. Every detail of parting was anguish to him. He got

consolation out of the notion of letting the house furnished for the

winter; that implied their return to it, but it cost him pangs of the

keenest misery to advertise it; and, when a tenant was actually found,

it was all he could do to give him the lease. He tried his wife's love

and patience as a man must to whom the future is easy in the mass

but terrible as it translates itself piecemeal into the present. He

experienced remorse in the presence of inanimate things he was going

to leave as if they had sensibly reproached him, and an anticipative

homesickness that seemed to stop his heart. Again and again his wife had

to make him reflect that his depression was not prophetic. She convinced

him of what he already knew, and persuaded him against his knowledge

that he could be keeping an eye out for something to take hold of in

Boston if they could not stand New York. She ended by telling him that

it was too bad to make her comfort him in a trial that was really so

much more a trial to her. She had to support him in a last access of

despair on their way to the Albany depot the morning they started to

New York; but when the final details had been dealt with, the tickets

bought, the trunks checked, and the handbags hung up in their car, and

the future had massed itself again at a safe distance and was seven

hours and two hundred miles away, his spirits began to rise and hers to

sink. He would have been willing to celebrate the taste, the domestic

refinement, of the ladies' waiting-room in the depot, where they had

spent a quarter of an hour before the train started. He said he did

not believe there was another station in the world where mahogany

rocking-chairs were provided; that the dull-red warmth of the walls

was as cozy as an evening lamp, and that he always hoped to see a fire

kindled on that vast hearth and under that aesthetic mantel, but he

supposed now he never should. He said it was all very different from

that tunnel, the old Albany depot, where they had waited the morning

they went to New York when they were starting on their wedding journey.

“The morning, Basil!” cried his wife. “We went at night; and we were

going to take the boat, but it stormed so!” She gave him a glance of

such reproach that he could not answer anything, and now she asked him

whether he supposed their cook and second girl would be contented with

one of those dark holes where they put girls to sleep in New York flats,

and what she should do if Margaret, especially, left her. He ventured

to suggest 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 that

there were none she could trust, and that she knew Margaret would not

stay. He asked her why she took her, then--why she did not give her up

at once; and she answered that it would be inhuman to give her up just

in the edge of the winter. She had promised to keep her; and Margaret

was pleased 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 the

hypothetical difficulty and his want of sympathy, she fell into a gloom,

from which she roused herself at last by declaring that, if there was

nothing else in the flat they took, there should be a light kitchen and

a bright, sunny bedroom for Margaret. He expressed the belief that

they could easily find such a flat as that, and she denounced his fatal

optimism, which buoyed him up in the absence of an undertaking and let

him drop into the depths of despair in its presence.

He owned this defect of temperament, but he said that it compensated the

opposite in her character. “I suppose that's one of the chief uses of

marriage; people supplement one another, and form a pretty fair sort of

human being together. The only drawback to the theory is that unmarried

people seem each as complete and whole as a married pair.”

She refused to be amused; she turned her face to the window and put her

handkerchief up under her veil.

It was not till the dining-car was attached to their train that they

were both able to escape for an hour into the care-free mood of their

earlier travels, when they were so easily taken out of themselves.

The time had been when they could have found enough in the conjectural

fortunes and characters of their fellow-passengers to occupy them. This

phase of their youth had lasted long, and the world was still full of

novelty and interest for them; but it required all the charm of the

dining-car now to lay the anxieties that beset them. It was so potent

for the moment, however, that they could take an objective view at their

sitting cozily down there together, as if they had only themselves in

the world. They wondered what the children were doing, the children

who possessed them so intensely when present, and now, by a fantastic

operation of absence, seemed almost non-existents. They tried to

be homesick for them, but failed; they recognized with comfortable

self-abhorrence that this was terrible, but owned a fascination in being

alone; at the same time, they could not imagine how people felt who

never had any children. They contrasted the luxury of dining that way,

with every advantage except a band of music, and the old way of rushing

out to snatch a fearful joy at the lunch-counters of the Worcesier and

Springfield and New Haven stations. They had not gone often to New York

since their wedding journey, but they had gone often enough to have

noted the change from the lunch-counter to the lunch-basket brought in

the train, from which you could subsist with more ease and dignity, but

seemed destined to a superabundance of pickles, whatever you ordered.

They thought well of themselves now that they could be both critical and

tolerant of flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another in

their dinner, and they lingered over their coffee and watched the autumn

landscape through the windows.

“Not quite so loud a pattern of calico this year,” he said, with

patronizing forbearance toward the painted woodlands whirling by.

“Do you see how the foreground next the train rushes from us and

the background keeps ahead of us, while the middle distance seems

stationary? I don't think I ever noticed that effect before. There ought

to be something literary in it: retreating past and advancing future and

deceitfully permanent present--something like that?”

His wife brushed some crumbs from her lap before rising. “Yes. You

mustn'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 apartment

which they thought they could easily afford for the day or two they need

spend in looking up a furnished flat. They were used to staying at this

hotel when they came on for a little outing in New York, after some

rigid winter in Boston, at the time of the spring exhibitions. They were

remembered there from year to year; the colored call-boys, who never

seemed to get any older, smiled upon them, and the clerk called March

by name even before he registered. He asked if Mrs. March were with him,

and said then he supposed they would want their usual quarters; and in a

moment they were domesticated in a far interior that seemed to have been

waiting for them in a clean, quiet, patient disoccupation ever since

they left it two years before. The little parlor, with its gilt paper

and ebonized furniture, was the lightest of the rooms, but it was not

very light at noonday without the gas, which the bell-boy now flared up

for them. The uproar of the city came to it in a soothing murmur, and

they took possession of its peace and comfort with open celebration.

After all, they agreed, there was no place in the world so delightful as

a hotel 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, every one, just as if it were for some one alone: it was like the

experience of an Arabian Nights hero come true for all the race.

“Oh, why can't we always stay here, just we two!” Mrs. March sighed to

her husband, as he came out of his room rubbing his face red with the

towel, while she studied a new arrangement of her bonnet and handbag on

the mantel.

“And ignore the past? I'm willing. I've no doubt that the children could

get on perfectly well without us, and could find some lot in the scheme

of Providence that would really be just as well for them.”

“Yes; or could contrive somehow never to have existed. I should insist

upon that. If they are, don't you see that we couldn't wish them not to

be?”

“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

suit us we can all crowd into these three rooms somehow, for the winter,

and then 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

something else.”

“Something else, probably,” said March. “But we won't take this

apartment till the ideal furnished flat winks out altogether. We shall

not have any trouble. We can easily find some one who is going South for

the winter and will be glad to give up their flat 'to the right party'

at a nominal rent. That's my notion. That's what the Evanses did one

winter when they came on here in February. All but the nominality of the

rent.”

“Yes, and we could pay a very good rent and still save something on

letting our house. You can settle yourselves in a hundred different

ways in New York, that is one merit of the place. But if everything else

fails, 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

had dinner. 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 minute

advertisements pinned transversely upon it, and forming the effect of

some glittering nondescript vertebrate.

“Looks something like the sea-serpent,” said March, drying his hands on

the towel, while he glanced up and down the list. “But we sha'n't have

any trouble. I've no doubt there are half a dozen things there that will

do. You haven't gone up-town? Because we must be near the 'Every Other

Week' office.”

“No; but I wish Mr. Fulkerson hadn't called it that! It always makes

one think 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 of

never-blooming shrub symmetrically balanced itself in a large pot, with

a leaf to the right and a leaf to the left and a spear up the middle,

when Fulkerson came stepping square-footedly over the thick dining-room

carpet. 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

an apparent simultaneity of action he gave a hand to each, pulled up a

chair from the next table, put his hat and stick on the floor beside it,

and seated 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 the

disposition of the natives.”

“Oh, they're an awful peaceable lot,” said Fulkerson. “I've been round

among the caciques a little, and I think I've got two or three places

that 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 of

the smoking wrecks.”

Fulkerson naturally paid no attention to what she said, being but

secondarily interested in the children at the best. “Here are some

things right in this neighborhood, within gunshot of the office, and if

you want you can go and look at them to-night; the agents gave me houses

where the people would be in.”

“We will go and look at them instantly,” said Mrs. March. “Or, as soon

as you've had coffee with us.”

“Never do,” Fulkerson replied. He gathered up his hat and stick. “Just

rushed 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

all the while to keep them from loafing on my house, and at the same

time I'm just bubbling over with ideas about 'The Lone Hand--wish we

could call it that!--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 vast

wilderness. Good-bye.”

“You're as nice as you can be, Mr. Fulkerson,” she said, “to keep us in

mind 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 could

apparently hope to make.

“Why, Basil,” said Mrs. March, when he was gone, “he's charming! But

now we mustn't lose an instant. Let's see where the places are.” She

ran over the half-dozen agents' permits. “Capital-first-rate-the very

thing-every one. Well, I consider ourselves settled! We can go back to

the children to-morrow if we like, though I rather think I should like

to stay over another day and get a little rested for the final pulling

up that's got to come. But this simplifies everything enormously, and

Mr. Fulkerson is as thoughtful and as sweet as he can be. I know you

will get on well with him. He has such a good heart. And his attitude

toward you, Basil, is beautiful 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

of flat we are going to look for. The 'sine qua nons' are an elevator

and steam heat, not above the third floor, to begin with. Then we

must each have a room, and you must have your study and I must have my

parlor; and the 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 run

into your bedroom when anybody comes; and I can sit in mine, and the

girls must put up with one, if it's large and sunny, though I've always

given them two at home. And the kitchen must be sunny, so they can sit

in it. And the rooms must all have outside light. And the rent must not

be over eight hundred for the winter. We only get a thousand for our

whole house, and we must save something out of that, so as to cover the

expenses 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 third

of 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 was

transferring them from the hatrack to her person while she talked.

The friendly door-boy let them into the street, and the clear October

evening air brightened her so that as she tucked her hand under

her husband's arm and began to pull him along she said, “If we find

something right away--and we're just as likely to get the right flat

soon as late; it's all a lottery--well go to the theatre somewhere.”

She had a moment's panic about having left the agents' permits on the

table, and after remembering that she had put them into her little

shopping-bag, where she kept her money (each note crushed into a round

wad), and had heft it on the hat-rack, where it would certainly be

stolen, she found it on her wrist. She did not think that very funny;

but after a first impulse to inculpate her husband, she let him laugh,

while they stopped under a lamp and she held the permits half a yard

away to read 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, “this is 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 the

smaller apartment-houses in New York by the sweetness of their race

let the Marches in, or, rather, welcomed them to the possession of the

premises by the bow with which he acknowledged their permit. It was a

large, old mansion cut up into five or six dwellings, but it had

kept some traits of its former dignity, which pleased people of their

sympathetic 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 she

said,

“Oh!” in courteous apology, and whispered to her husband, as she

followed lightly 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

should no 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 those

chandeliers and brackets of gilt brass in the form of vine bunches,

leaves, and tendrils in which the early gas-fitter realized most of his

conceptions of beauty, had rather more of the ugliness than the dignity

of the hall. But the rooms were large, and they grouped themselves in a

reminiscence of the time when they were part of a dwelling that had

its charm, its pathos, its impressiveness. Where they were cut up into

smaller spaces, it had been done with the frankness with which a

proud old family of fallen fortunes practises its economies. The rough

pine-floors showed a black border of tack-heads where carpets had been

lifted 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

three rooms had glimpses of the day through small windows let into their

corners; another one seemed lifting an appealing eye to heaven through a

glass 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

the different 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' de

rooms, and dere's furnace heat in de halls.”

“That's true,” she admitted, and, having placed her family in the

apartments, it was hard to get them out again. “Could we manage?” she

referred to her husband.

“Why, I shouldn't care for the steam heat if--What is the rent?” he

broke off 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 a

furnished flat,” she explained to the janitor, “and this was so pleasant

and homelike that I never thought whether it was furnished or not.”

She smiled upon the janitor, and he entered into the joke and chuckled

so amiably 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

quarter I'll never speak to you again, Basil!”

“I would have given half a dollar willingly to get you beyond his

glamour,” said March, when they were safely on the pavement outside.

“If it hadn't been for my strength of character, you'd have taken an

unfurnished flat without heat and with no elevator, at nine hundred a

year, 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 a

lenient amusement in her aberration which she was not always able to

feel in her husband's.

“The next time a colored janitor opens the door to us, I'll tell him

the apartment 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 them

that didn't have perfectly angelic manners. I think we shall all be

black in 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, to

the Xenophon!”

She pulled him gayly along again, and after they had walked a block

down and 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 a large, fat Buttons, with a stage effect of being dressed to

look small, who said he would call the janitor, and they waited in the

dimly splendid, copper-colored interior, admiring the whorls and waves

into which the wallpaint was combed, till the janitor came in his

gold-banded cap, like a Continental porker. When they said they would

like to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment, he owned his inability to

cope with the affair, and said he must send for the superintendent; he

was either in the Herodotus or the Thucydides, and would be there in

a minute. The Buttons brought him--a Yankee of browbeating presence

in plain clothes--almost before they had time to exchange a frightened

whisper in recognition of the fact that there could be no doubt of the

steam heat and elevator in this case. Half stifled in the one, they

mounted in the other eight stories, while they tried to keep their

self-respect under the gaze of the superintendent, which they felt was

classing and assessing them with unfriendly accuracy. They could not,

and they faltered abashed at the threshold of Mrs. Grosvenor Green's

apartment, while the superintendent lit the gas in the gangway that he

called a private hall, and in the drawing-room and the succession of

chambers stretching rearward to the kitchen. Everything had, been done

by the architect to save space, and everything, to waste it by Mrs.

Grosvenor Green. She had conformed to a law for the necessity of turning

round in each room, and had folding-beds in the chambers, but there her

subordination had ended, and wherever you might have turned round she

had put a gimcrack so that you would knock it over if you did turn. The

place was rather pretty and even imposing at first glance, and it took

several joint ballots for March and his wife to make sure that with the

kitchen there were only six rooms. At every door hung a portiere from

large rings on a brass rod; every shelf and dressing-case and mantel

was littered with gimcracks, and the corners of the tiny rooms were

curtained off, and behind these portieres swarmed more gimcracks.

The front of the upright piano had what March called a short-skirted

portiere on it, and the top was covered with vases, with dragon

candlesticks and with Jap fans, which also expanded themselves bat wise

on the walls between the etchings and the water colors. The floors were

covered with filling, and then rugs and then skins; the easy-chairs all

had tidies, Armenian and Turkish and Persian; the lounges and sofas had

embroidered cushions hidden under tidies.

The radiator was concealed by a Jap screen, and over the top of this

some Arab scarfs were flung. There was a superabundance of clocks. China

pugs guarded the hearth; a brass sunflower smiled from the top of either

andiron, and a brass peacock spread its tail before them inside a high

filigree fender; on one side was a coalhod in 'repousse' brass, and on

the other a wrought iron wood-basket. Some red Japanese bird-kites were

stuck about in the necks of spelter vases, a crimson Jap umbrella hung

opened 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

of the agglomeration, comforted himself by calling the bric-a-brac

Jamescracks, as if this was their full name.

The disrespect he was able to show the whole apartment by means of this

joke strengthened him to say boldly to the superintendent that it was

altogether 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

see that she had mentally saved five hundred dollars as the difference

between the rent of their house and that of this flat. “It has some very

pretty 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 month

in the whole city,” the superintendent put in.

They exchanged glances again, and March said, carelessly, “It's too

small.”

“There's a vacant flat in the Herodotus for eighteen hundred a year,

and one in the Thucydides for fifteen,” the superintendent suggested,

clicking his keys together as they sank down in the elevator; “seven

rooms and bath.”

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

They felt that the superintendent parted from them with repressed

sarcasm.

“Oh, Basil, do you think we really made him think it was the smallness

and not the dearness?”

“No, but we saved our self-respect in the attempt; and that's a great

deal.”

“Of course, I wouldn't have taken it, anyway, with only six rooms, and

so high up. But what prices! Now, we must be very circumspect about the

next place.”

It was a janitress, large, fat, with her arms wound up in her apron,

who received them there. Mrs. March gave her a succinct but perfect

statement of their needs. She failed to grasp the nature of them, or

feigned to do so. 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 tacitly compromised on steam heat without an elevator, as the

flat was only one flight up. When the son appeared from below with a

small kerosene hand-lamp, it appeared that the flat was unfurnished, but

there was no stopping him till he had shown it in all its impossibility.

When they got safely away from it and into the street March said: “Well,

have you had enough 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 with

a 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 house

with a general restaurant. The fifth was a furnished house. At the sixth

a pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted to take a family to

board, and would give them a private table at a rate which the Marches

would 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 say

I have completely lost confidence in Mr. Fulkerson's judgment. Anything

more 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 about this, it will be a perfect failure.”

“Well, well, let's hope he'll be more circumspect about that,” her

husband returned, with ironical propitiation. “But I don't think it's

Fulkerson's fault altogether. Perhaps it's the house-agents'. They're

a very illusory generation. There seems to be something in the human

habitation that corrupts the natures of those who deal in it, to buy or

sell it, to hire or let it. You go to an agent and tell him what kind

of a house you want. He has no such house, and he sends you to look at

something altogether different, upon the well-ascertained principle that

if you can't get what you want you will take what you can get. You don't

suppose the 'party' that took our house in Boston was looking for any

such house? He was looking for a totally different kind of house in

another 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 to

ask fourteen hundred.”

“Oh, I'm not blaming you, Isabel. I'm only analyzing the house-agent and

exonerating Fulkerson.”

“Well, I don't believe he told them just what we wanted; and, at

any rate, I'm done with agents. Tomorrow I'm going entirely by

advertisements.”

VIII.

Mrs. March took the vertebrate with her to the Vienna Coffee-House,

where they went to breakfast next morning. She made March buy her the

Herald and the World, and she added to its spiny convolutions from

them. She read the new advertisements aloud with ardor and with faith to

believe that the apartments described in them were every one truthfully

represented, and that any one of them was richly responsive to their

needs. “Elegant, light, large, single and outside flats” were offered

with “all improvements--bath, ice-box, etc.”--for twenty-five to thirty

dollars a month. The cheapness was amazing. The Wagram, the Esmeralda,

the Jacinth, advertised them for forty dollars and sixty dollars, “with

steam heat and elevator,” rent free till November. Others, attractive

from their air of conscientious scruple, announced “first-class flats;

good order; reasonable rents.” The Helena asked the reader if she had

seen the “cabinet finish, hard-wood floors, and frescoed ceilings” of

its fifty-dollar flats; the Asteroid affirmed that such apartments,

with “six light 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. March got several flats on her list which promised

neither steam heat nor elevators; she forgot herself so far as to

include two or three as remote from the down-town region of her choice

as Harlem. But after she had rejected these the nondescript vertebrate

was still voluminous enough to sustain her buoyant hopes.

The waiter, who remembered them from year to year, had put them at a

window giving a pretty good section of Broadway, and before they set

out on their search they had a moment of reminiscence. They recalled the

Broadway of five, of ten, of twenty years ago, swelling and roaring with

a tide of gayly painted omnibuses and of picturesque traffic that the

horsecars have now banished from it. The grind of their wheels and

the clash of their harsh bells imperfectly fill the silence that the

omnibuses have left, and the eye misses the tumultuous perspective of

former times.

They went out and stood for a moment before Grace Church, and looked

down the stately thoroughfare, and found it no longer impressive, no

longer characteristic. It is still Broadway in name, but now it is like

any other street. You do not now take your life in your hand when you

attempt to cross it; the Broadway policeman who supported the elbow of

timorous beauty in the hollow of his cotton-gloved palm and guided its

little fearful boots over the crossing, while he arrested the billowy

omnibuses on either side with an imperious glance, is gone, and all that

certain processional, barbaric gayety of the place is gone.

“Palmyra, Baalbec, Timour of the Desert,” said March, voicing their

common feeling of the change.

They turned and went into the beautiful church, and found themselves in

time for the matin service. Rapt far from New York, if not from earth,

in the dim richness of the painted light, the hallowed music took them

with solemn ecstasy; the aerial, aspiring Gothic forms seemed to lift

them heavenward. They came out, reluctant, into the dazzle and bustle

of the street, with a feeling that they were too good for it, which they

confessed to each other with whimsical consciousness.

“But no matter how consecrated we feel now,” he said, “we mustn't forget

that we went into the church for precisely the same reason that we went

to the Vienna Cafe for breakfast--to gratify an aesthetic sense, to

renew the faded pleasure of travel for a moment, to get back into the

Europe of our youth. It was a purely Pagan impulse, Isabel, and we'd

better own it.”

“I don't know,” she returned. “I think we reduce ourselves to the bare

bones 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 was

devouter than I am, and younger and prettier.”

“Better not; you couldn't keep it up. Honesty is the best policy even in

such things.”

“No; I don't like it, Basil. I should rather wait till the last day for

some of my motives to come to the top. I know they're always mixed, but

do 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

so many disagreeable surprises for myself at that time.”

She would not consent. “I know I am a good deal younger than I was. I

feel quite in the mood of that morning when we walked down Broadway on

our 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

the gay New York weather, in which there was no 'arriere pensee' of

the east wind. They had crossed Broadway, and were walking over to

Washington Square, in the region of which they now hoped to place

themselves. The 'primo tenore' statue of Garibaldi had already taken

possession of the place in the name of Latin progress, and they met

Italian faces, French faces, Spanish faces, as they strolled over

the asphalt walks, under the thinning shadows of the autumn-stricken

sycamores. They met the familiar picturesque raggedness of Southern

Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow it existed for their

appreciation, and that it found adequate compensation for poverty in

this. March thought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathy in

sitting down on one of the iron benches with his wife and letting a

little Neapolitan put a superfluous shine on his boots, while their

desultory comment wandered with equal esteem to the old-fashioned

American respectability which keeps the north side of the square in

vast mansions of red brick, and the international shabbiness which

has invaded the southern border, and broken it up into lodging-houses,

shops, beer-gardens, and studios.

They noticed the sign of an apartment to let on the north side, and as

soon as the little bootblack could be bought off they went over to look

at 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-eight

hundred dollars.”

“It wouldn't do, then,” March replied, and left him to divide the

responsibility between the paucity of the rooms and the enormity of the

rent as he best might. But their self-love had received a wound, and

they questioned each other what it was in their appearance made him

doubt their ability to pay so much.

“Of course, we don't look like New-Yorkers,” sighed Mrs. March, “and

we've walked through the Square. That might be as if we had walked along

the Park Street mall in the Common before we came out on Beacon. Do you

suppose 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 this

blow.”

“Oh, pshaw! You know you hate such things as badly as I do. It was very

impertinent of him.”

“Let us go back and 'ecraser l'infame' by paying him a year's rent in

advance and taking immediate possession. Nothing else can soothe my

wounded feelings. You were not having your boots blacked: why shouldn't

he 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 Fifth

Avenue milliner in a Worth dress, and the woman's asking her instantly

what hotel she should send her hat to?”

“Yes; these things drive one to despair. I don't wonder the bodies of so

many genteel strangers are found in the waters around New York. Shall we

try the south side, my dear? or had we better go back to our rooms and

rest awhile?”

Mrs. March had out the vertebrate, and was consulting one of its

glittering ribs and glancing up from it at a house before which they

stood. “Yes, it's the number; but do they call this being ready October

first?” The little area in front of the basement was heaped with a

mixture of mortar, bricks, laths, and shavings from the interior; the

brownstone steps to the front door were similarly bestrewn; the doorway

showed the half-open, rough pine carpenter's sketch of an unfinished

house; the sashless windows of every story showed the activity of

workmen within; the clatter of hammers and the hiss of saws came out to

them from every opening.

“They may call it October first,” said March, “because it's too late

to contradict them. But they'd better not call it December first in my

presence; I'll let them say January first, at a pinch.”

“We will go in and look at it, anyway,” said his wife; and he admired

how, when she was once within, she began provisionally to settle the

family in each of the several floors with the female instinct for

domiciliation which never failed her. She had the help of the landlord,

who was present to urge forward the workmen apparently; he lent a

hopeful fancy to the solution of all her questions. To get her from

under his influence March had to represent that the place was damp from

undried plastering, and that if she stayed she would probably be down

with that New York pneumonia which visiting Bostonians are always dying

of. Once safely on the pavement outside, she realized that the apartment

was not only unfinished, but unfurnished, and had neither steam heat

nor elevator. “But I thought we had better look at everything,” she

explained.

“Yes, but not take everything. If I hadn't pulled you away from there by

main 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 were

about.”

“Well, that's what I can't help, Basil. It's the only way I can realize

whether 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 had

to own that the process of setting up housekeeping in so many different

places was not only entertaining, but tended, through association with

their first beginnings in housekeeping, to restore the image of their

early married days and to make them young again.

It went on all day, and continued far into the night, until it was too

late to go to the theatre, too late to do anything but tumble into

bed and simultaneously fall asleep. They groaned over their reiterated

disappointments, 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 abate Mrs. March's faith in her advertisements. One of them sent

her to a flat of 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's shop, none of the first fashion. Another led

them far into old Greenwich Village to an apartment-house, which she

refused to enter behind a small girl with a loaf of bread under one arm

and a quart can of milk under the other.