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+Project Gutenberg's A Hazard Of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+Title: A Hazard Of New Fortunes
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: February 13, 2002 [EBook #4600]
+Last Updated: May 31, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+
+
+
+FIRST PART
+
+
+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 of 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 themselves
+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 a stray 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 he
+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 Worcester 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--we'll 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 left 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.
+
+In their search they were obliged, as March complained, to the
+acquisition of useless information in a degree unequalled in their
+experience. They came to excel in the sad knowledge of the line at which
+respectability distinguishes itself from shabbiness. Flattering
+advertisements took them to numbers of huge apartment-houses chiefly
+distinguishable from tenement-houses by the absence of fire-escapes on
+their facades, till Mrs. March refused to stop at any door where there
+were more than six bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes on either hand.
+Before the middle of the afternoon she decided against ratchets
+altogether, and confined herself to knobs, neatly set in the door-trim.
+Her husband was still sunk in the superstition that you can live anywhere
+you like in New York, and he would have paused at some places where her
+quicker eye caught the fatal sign of "Modes" in the ground-floor windows.
+She found that there was an east and west line beyond which they could
+not go if they wished to keep their self-respect, and that within the
+region to which they had restricted themselves there was a choice of
+streets. At first all the New York streets looked to them ill-paved,
+dirty, and repulsive; the general infamy imparted itself in their casual
+impression to streets in no wise guilty. But they began to notice that
+some streets were quiet and clean, and, though never so quiet and clean
+as Boston streets, that they wore an air of encouraging reform, and
+suggested a future of greater and greater domesticity. Whole blocks of
+these downtown cross-streets seemed to have been redeemed from decay, and
+even in the midst of squalor a dwelling here and there had been seized,
+painted a dull red as to its brick-work, and a glossy black as to its
+wood-work, and with a bright brass bell-pull and door-knob and a large
+brass plate for its key-hole escutcheon, had been endowed with an effect
+of purity and pride which removed its shabby neighborhood far from it.
+Some of these houses were quite small, and imaginably within their means;
+but, as March said, some body seemed always to be living there himself,
+and the fact that none of them was to rent kept Mrs. March true to her
+ideal of a flat. Nothing prevented its realization so much as its
+difference from the New York ideal of a flat, which was inflexibly seven
+rooms and a bath. One or two rooms might be at the front, the rest
+crooked and cornered backward through increasing and then decreasing
+darkness till they reached a light bedroom or kitchen at the rear. It
+might be the one or the other, but it was always the seventh room with
+the bath; or if, as sometimes happened, it was the eighth, it was so
+after having counted the bath as one; in this case the janitor said you
+always counted the bath as one. If the flats were advertised as having
+"all light rooms," he explained that any room with a window giving into
+the open air of a court or shaft was counted a light room.
+
+The Marches tried to make out why it was that these flats were so much
+more repulsive than the apartments which everyone lived in abroad; but
+they could only do so upon the supposition that in their European days
+they were too young, too happy, too full of the future, to notice whether
+rooms were inside or outside, light or dark, big or little, high or low.
+"Now we're imprisoned in the present," he said, "and we have to make the
+worst of it."
+
+In their despair he had an inspiration, which she declared worthy of him:
+it was to take two small flats, of four or five rooms and a bath, and
+live in both. They tried this in a great many places, but they never
+could get two flats of the kind on the same floor where there was steam
+heat and an elevator. At one place they almost did it. They had resigned
+themselves to the humility of the neighborhood, to the prevalence of
+modistes and livery-stablemen (they seem to consort much in New York), to
+the garbage in the gutters and the litter of paper in the streets, to the
+faltering slats in the surrounding window-shutters and the crumbled
+brownstone steps and sills, when it turned out that one of the apartments
+had been taken between two visits they made. Then the only combination
+left open to them was of a ground-floor flat to the right and a
+third-floor flat to the left.
+
+Still they kept this inspiration in reserve for use at the first
+opportunity. In the mean time there were several flats which they thought
+they could almost make do: notably one where they could get an extra
+servant's room in the basement four flights down, and another where they
+could get it in the roof five flights up. At the first the janitor was
+respectful and enthusiastic; at the second he had an effect of ironical
+pessimism. When they trembled on the verge of taking his apartment, he
+pointed out a spot in the kalsomining of the parlor ceiling, and
+gratuitously said, Now such a thing as that he should not agree to put in
+shape unless they took the apartment for a term of years. The apartment
+was unfurnished, and they recurred to the fact that they wanted a
+furnished apartment, and made their escape. This saved them in several
+other extremities; but short of extremity they could not keep their
+different requirements in mind, and were always about to decide without
+regard to some one of them.
+
+They went to several places twice without intending: once to that
+old-fashioned house with the pleasant colored janitor, and wandered all
+over the apartment again with a haunting sense of familiarity, and then
+recognized the janitor and laughed; and to that house with the pathetic
+widow and the pretty daughter who wished to take them to board. They
+stayed to excuse their blunder, and easily came by the fact that the
+mother had taken the house that the girl might have a home while she was
+in New York studying art, and they hoped to pay their way by taking
+boarders. Her daughter was at her class now, the mother concluded; and
+they encouraged her to believe that it could only be a few days till the
+rest of her scheme was realized.
+
+"I dare say we could be perfectly comfortable there," March suggested
+when they had got away. "Now if we were truly humane we would modify our
+desires to meet their needs and end this sickening search, wouldn't we?"
+
+"Yes, but we're not truly humane," his wife answered, "or at least not in
+that sense. You know you hate boarding; and if we went there I should
+have them on my sympathies the whole time."
+
+"I see. And then you would take it out of me."
+
+"Then I should take it out of you. And if you are going to be so weak,
+Basil, and let every little thing work upon you in that way, you'd better
+not come to New York. You'll see enough misery here."
+
+"Well, don't take that superior tone with me, as if I were a child that
+had its mind set on an undesirable toy, Isabel."
+
+"Ah, don't you suppose it's because you are such a child in some respects
+that I like you, dear?" she demanded, without relenting.
+
+"But I don't find so much misery in New York. I don't suppose there's any
+more suffering here to the population than there is in the country. And
+they're so gay about it all. I think the outward aspect of the place and
+the hilarity of the sky and air must get into the people's blood. The
+weather is simply unapproachable; and I don't care if it is the ugliest
+place in the world, as you say. I suppose it is. It shrieks and yells
+with ugliness here and there but it never loses its spirits. That widow
+is from the country. When she's been a year in New York she'll be as
+gay--as gay as an L road." He celebrated a satisfaction they both had in
+the L roads. "They kill the streets and avenues, but at least they
+partially hide them, and that is some comfort; and they do triumph over
+their prostrate forms with a savage exultation that is intoxicating.
+Those bends in the L that you get in the corner of Washington Square, or
+just below the Cooper Institute--they're the gayest things in the world.
+Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incomparably picturesque! And the
+whole city is so," said March, "or else the L would never have got built
+here. New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay; but, prince or
+pauper, it's gay always."
+
+"Yes, gay is the word," she admitted, with a sigh. "But frantic. I can't
+get used to it. They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York."
+
+"Well, I don't know that I've ever found much advantage in remembering
+it."
+
+"Don't say such a thing, dearest."
+
+He could see that she had got to the end of her nervous strength for the
+present, and he proposed that they should take the Elevated road as far
+as it would carry them into the country, and shake off their nightmare of
+flat-hunting for an hour or two; but her conscience would not let her.
+She convicted him of levity equal to that of the New-Yorkers in proposing
+such a thing; and they dragged through the day. She was too tired to care
+for dinner, and in the night she had a dream from which she woke herself
+with a cry that roused him, too. It was something about the children at
+first, whom they had talked of wistfully before falling asleep, and then
+it was of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a series of sections
+growing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the monstrous
+articulate was quite luminous again. She shuddered at the vague
+description she was able to give; but he asked, "Did it offer to bite
+you?"
+
+"No. That was the most frightful thing about it; it had no mouth."
+
+March laughed. "Why, my dear, it was nothing but a harmless New York
+flat--seven rooms and a bath."
+
+"I really believe it was," she consented, recognizing an architectural
+resemblance, and she fell asleep again, and woke renewed for the work
+before them.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but it still had interest; and
+they varied their day by taking a coupe, by renouncing advertisements,
+and by reverting to agents. Some of these induced them to consider the
+idea of furnished houses; and Mrs. March learned tolerance for Fulkerson
+by accepting permits to visit flats and houses which had none of the
+qualifications she desired in either, and were as far beyond her means as
+they were out of the region to which she had geographically restricted
+herself. They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand dollar
+apartments, and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothing
+to do with the rent; the higher the rent was, the more critical they were
+of the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of the richly decorated
+rooms. They never knew whether they had deceived the janitor or not; as
+they came in a coupe, they hoped they had.
+
+They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in the
+perspective than an L road. The fire-escapes, with their light iron
+balconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; the
+roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women's heads
+seemed to show at every window. In the basements, over which flights of
+high stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers' shops
+abounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to bacon and
+sausages, and cobblers' and tinners' shops, and the like, in proportion
+to the small needs of a poor neighborhood. Ash barrels lined the
+sidewalks, and garbage heaps filled the gutters; teams of all trades
+stood idly about; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the
+street, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the
+children and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women; the burly
+blue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner; a drunkard
+zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him. It was not the abode of the
+extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world,
+transmitting itself from generation to generation, and establishing
+conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does to
+those of some incurable disease, like leprosy.
+
+The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic
+view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of
+tenement-houses; when they would have contented themselves with saying
+that it was as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence, and with
+wondering why nobody came to paint it; they would have thought they were
+sufficiently serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure to
+appreciate it, and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it here
+under their noses. It was to the nose that the street made one of its
+strongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of the coupe. "Why
+does he take us through such a disgusting street?" she demanded, with an
+exasperation of which her husband divined the origin.
+
+"This driver may be a philanthropist in disguise," he answered, with
+dreamy irony, "and may want us to think about the people who are not
+merely carried through this street in a coupe, but have to spend their
+whole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopes of driving out of it,
+except in a hearse. I must say they don't seem to mind it. I haven't seen
+a jollier crowd anywhere in New York. They seem to have forgotten death a
+little more completely than any of their fellow-citizens, Isabel. And I
+wonder what they think of us, making this gorgeous progress through their
+midst. I suppose they think we're rich, and hate us--if they hate rich
+people; they don't look as if they hated anybody. Should we be as patient
+as they are with their discomfort? I don't believe there's steam heat or
+an elevator in the whole block. Seven rooms and a bath would be more than
+the largest and genteelest family would know what to do with. They
+wouldn't know what to do with the bath, anyway."
+
+His monologue seemed to interest his wife apart from the satirical point
+it had for themselves. "You ought to get Mr. Fulkerson to let you work
+some of these New York sights up for Every Other Week, Basil; you could
+do them very nicely."
+
+"Yes; I've thought of that. But don't let's leave the personal ground.
+Doesn't it make you feel rather small and otherwise unworthy when you see
+the kind of street these fellow-beings of yours live in, and then think
+how particular you are about locality and the number of bellpulls? I
+don't see even ratchets and speaking-tubes at these doors." He craned his
+neck out of the window for a better look, and the children of discomfort
+cheered him, out of sheer good feeling and high spirits. "I didn't know I
+was so popular. Perhaps it's a recognition of my humane sentiments."
+
+"Oh, it's very easy to have humane sentiments, and to satirize ourselves
+for wanting eight rooms and a bath in a good neighborhood, when we see
+how these wretched creatures live," said his wife. "But if we shared all
+we have with them, and then settled down among them, what good would it
+do?"
+
+"Not the least in the world. It might help us for the moment, but it
+wouldn't keep the wolf from their doors for a week; and then they would
+go on just as before, only they wouldn't be on such good terms with the
+wolf. The only way for them is to keep up an unbroken intimacy with the
+wolf; then they can manage him somehow. I don't know how, and I'm afraid
+I don't want to. Wouldn't you like to have this fellow drive us round
+among the halls of pride somewhere for a little while? Fifth Avenue or
+Madison, up-town?"
+
+"No; we've no time to waste. I've got a place near Third Avenue, on a
+nice cross street, and I want him to take us there." It proved that she
+had several addresses near together, and it seemed best to dismiss their
+coupe and do the rest of their afternoon's work on foot. It came to
+nothing; she was not humbled in the least by what she had seen in the
+tenement-house street; she yielded no point in her ideal of a flat, and
+the flats persistently refused to lend themselves to it. She lost all
+patience with them.
+
+"Oh, I don't say the flats are in the right of it," said her husband,
+when she denounced their stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a Christian
+home. "But I'm not so sure that we are, either. I've been thinking about
+that home business ever since my sensibilities were dragged--in a
+coupe--through that tenement-house street. Of course, no child born and
+brought up in such a place as that could have any conception of home. But
+that's because those poor people can't give character to their
+habitations. They have to take what they can get. But people like
+us--that is, of our means--do give character to the average flat. It's
+made to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so it's made for
+social show, not for family life at all. Think of a baby in a flat! It's
+a contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of motherhood. The
+flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social life. It's made
+to give artificial people a society basis on a little money--too much
+money, of course, for what they get. So the cost of the building is put
+into marble halls and idiotic decoration of all kinds. I don't object to
+the conveniences, but none of these flats has a living-room. They have
+drawing-rooms to foster social pretence, and they have dining-rooms and
+bedrooms; but they have no room where the family can all come together
+and feel the sweetness of being a family. The bedrooms are black-holes
+mostly, with a sinful waste of space in each. If it were not for the
+marble halls, and the decorations, and the foolishly expensive finish,
+the houses could be built round a court, and the flats could be shaped
+something like a Pompeiian house, with small sleeping-closets--only lit
+from the outside--and the rest of the floor thrown into two or three
+large cheerful halls, where all the family life could go on, and society
+could be transacted unpretentiously. Why, those tenements are better and
+humaner than those flats! There the whole family lives in the kitchen,
+and has its consciousness of being; but the flat abolishes the family
+consciousness. It's confinement without coziness; it's cluttered without
+being snug. You couldn't keep a self-respecting cat in a flat; you
+couldn't go down cellar to get cider. No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as we
+know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible in the
+Franco-American flat, not because it's humble, but because it's false."
+
+"Well, then," said Mrs. March, "let's look at houses."
+
+He had been denouncing the flat in the abstract, and he had not expected
+this concrete result. But he said, "We will look at houses, then."
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+Nothing mystifies a man more than a woman's aberrations from some point
+at which he supposes her fixed as a star. In these unfurnished houses,
+without steam or elevator, March followed his wife about with patient
+wonder. She rather liked the worst of them best: but she made him go down
+into the cellars and look at the furnaces; she exacted from him a rigid
+inquest of the plumbing. She followed him into one of the cellars by the
+fitful glare of successively lighted matches, and they enjoyed a moment
+in which the anomaly of their presence there on that errand, so remote
+from all the facts of their long-established life in Boston, realized
+itself for them.
+
+"Think how easily we might have been murdered and nobody been any the
+wiser!" she said when they were comfortably outdoors again.
+
+"Yes, or made way with ourselves in an access of emotional insanity,
+supposed to have been induced by unavailing flat-hunting," he suggested.
+She fell in with the notion. "I'm beginning to feel crazy. But I don't
+want you to lose your head, Basil. And I don't want you to sentimentalize
+any of the things you see in New York. I think you were disposed to do it
+in that street we drove through. I don't believe there's any real
+suffering--not real suffering--among those people; that is, it would be
+suffering from our point of view, but they've been used to it all their
+lives, and they don't feel their discomfort so much."
+
+"Of course, I understand that, and I don't propose to sentimentalize
+them. I think when people get used to a bad state of things they had
+better stick to it; in fact, they don't usually like a better state so
+well, and I shall keep that firmly in mind."
+
+She laughed with him, and they walked along the L bestridden avenue,
+exhilarated by their escape from murder and suicide in that cellar,
+toward the nearest cross town track, which they meant to take home to
+their hotel. "Now to-night we will go to the theatre," she said, "and get
+this whole house business out of our minds, and be perfectly fresh for a
+new start in the morning." Suddenly she clutched his arm. "Why, did you
+see that man?" and she signed with her head toward a decently dressed
+person who walked beside them, next the gutter, stooping over as if to
+examine it, and half halting at times.
+
+"No. What?"
+
+"Why, I saw him pick up a dirty bit of cracker from the pavement and cram
+it into his mouth and eat it down as if he were famished. And look! he's
+actually hunting for more in those garbage heaps!"
+
+This was what the decent-looking man with the hard hands and broken nails
+of a workman was doing-like a hungry dog. They kept up with him, in the
+fascination of the sight, to the next corner, where he turned down the
+side street still searching the gutter.
+
+They walked on a few paces. Then March said, "I must go after him," and
+left his wife standing.
+
+"Are you in want--hungry?" he asked the man.
+
+The man said he could not speak English, Monsieur.
+
+March asked his question in French.
+
+The man shrugged a pitiful, desperate shrug, "Mais, Monsieur--"
+
+March put a coin in his hand, and then suddenly the man's face twisted
+up; he caught the hand of this alms-giver in both of his and clung to it.
+"Monsieur! Monsieur!" he gasped, and the tears rained down his face.
+
+His benefactor pulled himself away, shocked and ashamed, as one is by
+such a chance, and got back to his wife, and the man lapsed back into the
+mystery of misery out of which he had emerged.
+
+March felt it laid upon him to console his wife for what had happened.
+"Of course, we might live here for years and not see another case like
+that; and, of course, there are twenty places where he could have gone
+for help if he had known where to find them."
+
+"Ah, but it's the possibility of his needing the help so badly as that,"
+she answered. "That's what I can't bear, and I shall not come to a place
+where such things are possible, and we may as well stop our house-hunting
+here at once."
+
+"Yes? And what part of Christendom will you live in? Such things are
+possible everywhere in our conditions."
+
+"Then we must change the conditions--"
+
+"Oh no; we must go to the theatre and forget them. We can stop at
+Brentano's for our tickets as we pass through Union Square."
+
+"I am not going to the theatre, Basil. I am going home to Boston
+to-night. You can stay and find a flat."
+
+He convinced her of the absurdity of her position, and even of its
+selfishness; but she said that her mind was quite made up irrespective of
+what had happened, that she had been away from the children long enough;
+that she ought to be at home to finish up the work of leaving it. The
+word brought a sigh. "Ah, I don't know why we should see nothing but sad
+and ugly things now. When we were young--"
+
+"Younger," he put in. "We're still young."
+
+"That's what we pretend, but we know better. But I was thinking how
+pretty and pleasant things used to be turning up all the time on our
+travels in the old days. Why, when we were in New York here on our
+wedding journey the place didn't seem half so dirty as it does now, and
+none of these dismal things happened."
+
+"It was a good deal dirtier," he answered; "and I fancy worse in every
+way--hungrier, raggeder, more wretchedly housed. But that wasn't the
+period of life for us to notice it. Don't you remember, when we started
+to Niagara the last time, how everybody seemed middle-aged and
+commonplace; and when we got there there were no evident brides; nothing
+but elderly married people?"
+
+"At least they weren't starving," she rebelled.
+
+"No, you don't starve in parlor-cars and first-class hotels; but if you
+step out of them you run your chance of seeing those who do, if you're
+getting on pretty well in the forties. If it's the unhappy who see
+unhappiness, think what misery must be revealed to people who pass their
+lives in the really squalid tenement-house streets--I don't mean
+picturesque avenues like that we passed through."
+
+"But we are not unhappy," she protested, bringing the talk back to the
+personal base again, as women must to get any good out of talk. "We're
+really no unhappier than we were when we were young."
+
+"We're more serious."
+
+"Well, I hate it; and I wish you wouldn't be so serious, if that's what
+it brings us to."
+
+"I will be trivial from this on," said March. "Shall we go to the Hole in
+the Ground to-night?"
+
+"I am going to Boston."
+
+"It's much the same thing. How do you like that for triviality? It's a
+little blasphemous, I'll allow."
+
+"It's very silly," she said.
+
+At the hotel they found a letter from the agent who had sent them the
+permit to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment. He wrote that she had
+heard they were pleased with her apartment, and that she thought she
+could make the terms to suit. She had taken her passage for Europe, and
+was very anxious to let the flat before she sailed. She would call that
+evening at seven.
+
+"Mrs. Grosvenor Green!" said Mrs. March. "Which of the ten thousand flats
+is it, Basil?"
+
+"The gimcrackery," he answered. "In the Xenophon, you know."
+
+"Well, she may save herself the trouble. I shall not see her. Or yes--I
+must. I couldn't go away without seeing what sort of creature could have
+planned that fly-away flat. She must be a perfect--"
+
+"Parachute," March suggested.
+
+"No! anybody so light as that couldn't come down."
+
+"Well, toy balloon."
+
+"Toy balloon will do for the present," Mrs. March admitted. "But I feel
+that naught but herself can be her parallel for volatility."
+
+When Mrs. Grosvenor-Green's card came up they both descended to the hotel
+parlor, which March said looked like the saloon of a Moorish day-boat;
+not that he knew of any such craft, but the decorations were so Saracenic
+and the architecture so Hudson Riverish. They found there on the grand
+central divan a large lady whose vast smoothness, placidity, and
+plumpness set at defiance all their preconceptions of Mrs. Grosvenor
+Green, so that Mrs. March distinctly paused with her card in her hand
+before venturing even tentatively to address her. Then she was astonished
+at the low, calm voice in which Mrs. Green acknowledged herself, and
+slowly proceeded to apologize for calling. It was not quite true that she
+had taken her passage for Europe, but she hoped soon to do so, and she
+confessed that in the mean time she was anxious to let her flat. She was
+a little worn out with the care of housekeeping--Mrs. March breathed, "Oh
+yes!" in the sigh with which ladies recognize one another's
+martyrdom--and Mrs. Green had business abroad, and she was going to
+pursue her art studies in Paris; she drew in Mr. Ilcomb's class now, but
+the instruction was so much better in Paris; and as the superintendent
+seemed to think the price was the only objection, she had ventured to
+call.
+
+"Then we didn't deceive him in the least," thought Mrs. March, while she
+answered, sweetly: "No; we were only afraid that it would be too small
+for our family. We require a good many rooms." She could not forego the
+opportunity of saying, "My husband is coming to New York to take charge
+of a literary periodical, and he will have to have a room to write in,"
+which made Mrs. Green bow to March, and made March look sheepish. "But we
+did think the apartment very charming", (It was architecturally charming,
+she protested to her conscience), "and we should have been so glad if we
+could have got into it." She followed this with some account of their
+house-hunting, amid soft murmurs of sympathy from Mrs. Green, who said
+that she had been through all that, and that if she could have shown her
+apartment to them she felt sure that she could have explained it so that
+they would have seen its capabilities better, Mrs. March assented to
+this, and Mrs. Green added that if they found nothing exactly suitable
+she would be glad to have them look at it again; and then Mrs. March said
+that she was going back to Boston herself, but she was leaving Mr. March
+to continue the search; and she had no doubt he would be only too glad to
+see the apartment by daylight. "But if you take it, Basil," she warned
+him, when they were alone, "I shall simply renounce you. I wouldn't live
+in that junk-shop if you gave it to me. But who would have thought she
+was that kind of looking person? Though of course I might have known if I
+had stopped to think once. It's because the place doesn't express her at
+all that it's so unlike her. It couldn't be like anybody, or anything
+that flies in the air, or creeps upon the earth, or swims in the waters
+under the earth. I wonder where in the world she's from; she's no
+New-Yorker; even we can see that; and she's not quite a country person,
+either; she seems like a person from some large town, where she's been an
+aesthetic authority. And she can't find good enough art instruction in
+New York, and has to go to Paris for it! Well, it's pathetic, after all,
+Basil. I can't help feeling sorry for a person who mistakes herself to
+that extent."
+
+"I can't help feeling sorry for the husband of a person who mistakes
+herself to that extent. What is Mr. Grosvenor Green going to do in Paris
+while she's working her way into the Salon?"
+
+"Well, you keep away from her apartment, Basil; that's all I've got to
+say to you. And yet I do like some things about her."
+
+"I like everything about her but her apartment," said March.
+
+"I like her going to be out of the country," said his wife. "We shouldn't
+be overlooked. And the place was prettily shaped, you can't deny it. And
+there was an elevator and steam heat. And the location is very
+convenient. And there was a hall-boy to bring up cards. The halls and
+stairs were kept very clean and nice. But it wouldn't do. I could put you
+a folding bed in the room where you wrote, and we could even have one in
+the parlor."
+
+"Behind a portiere? I couldn't stand any more portieres!"
+
+"And we could squeeze the two girls into one room, or perhaps only bring
+Margaret, and put out the whole of the wash. Basil!" she almost shrieked,
+"it isn't to be thought of!"
+
+He retorted, "I'm not thinking of it, my dear."
+
+Fulkerson came in just before they started for Mrs. March's train, to
+find out what had become of them, he said, and to see whether they had
+got anything to live in yet.
+
+"Not a thing," she said. "And I'm just going back to Boston, and leaving
+Mr. March here to do anything he pleases about it. He has 'carte
+blanche.'"
+
+"But freedom brings responsibility, you know, Fulkerson, and it's the
+same as if I'd no choice. I'm staying behind because I'm left, not
+because I expect to do anything."
+
+"Is that so?" asked Fulkerson. "Well, we must see what can be done. I
+supposed you would be all settled by this time, or I should have humped
+myself to find you something. None of those places I gave you amounts to
+anything?"
+
+"As much as forty thousand others we've looked at," said Mrs. March.
+"Yes, one of them does amount to something. It comes so near being what
+we want that I've given Mr. March particular instructions not to go near
+it."
+
+She told him about Mrs. Grosvenor Green and her flats, and at the end he
+said:
+
+"Well, well, we must look out for that. I'll keep an eye on him, Mrs.
+March, and see that he doesn't do anything rash, and I won't leave him
+till he's found just the right thing. It exists, of course; it must in a
+city of eighteen hundred thousand people, and the only question is where
+to find it. You leave him to me, Mrs. March; I'll watch out for him."
+
+Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the station when he found they
+were not driving, but she bade him a peremptory good-bye at the hotel
+door.
+
+"He's very nice, Basil, and his way with you is perfectly charming. It's
+very sweet to see how really fond of you he is. But I didn't want him
+stringing along with us up to Forty-second Street and spoiling our last
+moments together."
+
+At Third Avenue they took the Elevated for which she confessed an
+infatuation. She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the
+world, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say
+that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it. She now said
+that the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and that
+the fleeing intimacy you formed with people in second and third floor
+interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had a
+domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effect
+of good society with all its security and exclusiveness. He said it was
+better than the theatre, of which it reminded him, to see those people
+through their windows: a family party of work-folk at a late tea, some of
+the men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying
+her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a
+table; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together. What
+suggestion! what drama? what infinite interest! At the Forty-second
+Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the track
+to the branch road for the Central Depot, and looked up and down the long
+stretch of the Elevated to north and south. The track that found and lost
+itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable
+lights; the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points
+and blots of gas far and near; the architectural shapes of houses and
+churches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble
+in them, and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with
+vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam-formed an incomparable
+perspective. They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, which
+in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles; and
+they were just to the Arachne roof spun in iron over the cross street on
+which they ran to the depot; but for the present they were mostly
+inarticulate before it. They had another moment of rich silence when they
+paused in the gallery that leads from the Elevated station to the
+waiting-rooms in the Central Depot and looked down upon the great night
+trains lying on the tracks dim under the rain of gas-lights that starred
+without dispersing the vast darkness of the place. What forces, what
+fates, slept in these bulks which would soon be hurling themselves north
+and south and west through the night! Now they waited there like fabled
+monsters of Arab story ready for the magician's touch, tractable,
+reckless, will-less--organized lifelessness full of a strange semblance
+of life.
+
+The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrill of patriotic pride
+in the fact that the whole world perhaps could not afford just the like.
+Then they hurried down to the ticket-offices, and he got her a lower
+berth in the Boston sleeper, and went with her to the car. They made the
+most of the fact that her berth was in the very middle of the car; and
+she promised to write as soon as she reached home. She promised also
+that, having seen the limitations of New York in respect to flats, she
+would not be hard on him if he took something not quite ideal. Only he
+must remember that it was not to be above Twentieth Street nor below
+Washington Square; it must not be higher than the third floor; it must
+have an elevator, steam heat, hail-boys, and a pleasant janitor. These
+were essentials; if he could not get them, then they must do without. But
+he must get them.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to
+their ideals from their husbands than from themselves. Early in their
+married life she had taken charge of him in all matters which she
+considered practical. She did not include the business of bread-winning
+in these; that was an affair that might safely be left to his
+absent-minded, dreamy inefficiency, and she did not interfere with him
+there. But in such things as rehanging the pictures, deciding on a summer
+boarding-place, taking a seaside cottage, repapering rooms, choosing
+seats at the theatre, seeing what the children ate when she was not at
+table, shutting the cat out at night, keeping run of calls and
+invitations, and seeing if the furnace was dampered, he had failed her so
+often that she felt she could not leave him the slightest discretion in
+regard to a flat. Her total distrust of his judgment in the matters cited
+and others like them consisted with the greatest admiration of his mind
+and respect for his character. She often said that if he would only bring
+these to bear in such exigencies he would be simply perfect; but she had
+long given up his ever doing so. She subjected him, therefore, to an iron
+code, but after proclaiming it she was apt to abandon him to the native
+lawlessness of his temperament. She expected him in this event to do as
+he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with considerable comfort in
+holding him accountable. He learned to expect this, and after suffering
+keenly from her disappointment with whatever he did he waited patiently
+till she forgot her grievance and began to extract what consolation lurks
+in the irreparable. She would almost admit at moments that what he had
+done was a very good thing, but she reserved the right to return in full
+force to her original condemnation of it; and she accumulated each act of
+independent volition in witness and warning against him. Their mass
+oppressed but never deterred him. He expected to do the wrong thing when
+left to his own devices, and he did it without any apparent recollection
+of his former misdeeds and their consequences. There was a good deal of
+comedy in it all, and some tragedy.
+
+He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbands of his kind will
+imagine, on going back to his hotel alone. It was, perhaps, a revulsion
+from the pain of parting; and he toyed with the idea of Mrs. Grosvenor
+Green's apartment, which, in its preposterous unsuitability, had a
+strange attraction. He felt that he could take it with less risk than
+anything else they had seen, but he said he would look at all the other
+places in town first. He really spent the greater part of the next day in
+hunting up the owner of an apartment that had neither steam heat nor an
+elevator, but was otherwise perfect, and trying to get him to take less
+than the agent asked. By a curious psychical operation he was able, in
+the transaction, to work himself into quite a passionate desire for the
+apartment, while he held the Grosvenor Green apartment in the background
+of his mind as something that he could return to as altogether more
+suitable. He conducted some simultaneous negotiation for a furnished
+house, which enhanced still more the desirability of the Grosvenor Green
+apartment. Toward evening he went off at a tangent far up-town, so as to
+be able to tell his wife how utterly preposterous the best there would be
+as compared even with this ridiculous Grosvenor Green gimcrackery. It is
+hard to report the processes of his sophistication; perhaps this, again,
+may best be left to the marital imagination.
+
+He rang at the last of these up-town apartments as it was falling dusk,
+and it was long before the janitor appeared. Then the man was very surly,
+and said if he looked at the flat now he would say it was too dark, like
+all the rest. His reluctance irritated March in proportion to his
+insincerity in proposing to look at it at all. He knew he did not mean to
+take it under any circumstances; that he was going to use his inspection
+of it in dishonest justification of his disobedience to his wife; but he
+put on an air of offended dignity. "If you don't wish to show the
+apartment," he said, "I don't care to see it."
+
+The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt dreaded the stairs. He
+scratched a match on his thigh, and led the way up. March was sorry for
+him, and he put his fingers on a quarter in his waistcoat-pocket to give
+him at parting. At the same time, he had to trump up an objection to the
+flat. This was easy, for it was advertised as containing ten rooms, and
+he found the number eked out with the bath-room and two large closets.
+"It's light enough," said March, "but I don't see how you make out ten
+rooms."
+
+"There's ten rooms," said the man, deigning no proof.
+
+March took his fingers off the quarter, and went down-stairs and out of
+the door without another word. It would be wrong, it would be impossible,
+to give the man anything after such insolence. He reflected, with shame,
+that it was also cheaper to punish than forgive him.
+
+He returned to his hotel prepared for any desperate measure, and
+convinced now that the Grosvenor Green apartment was not merely the only
+thing left for him, but was, on its own merits, the best thing in New
+York.
+
+Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading-room, and it gave March the
+curious thrill with which a man closes with temptation when he said:
+"Look here! Why don't you take that woman's flat in the Xenophon? She's
+been at the agents again, and they've been at me. She likes your look--or
+Mrs. March's--and I guess you can have it at a pretty heavy discount from
+the original price. I'm authorized to say you can have it for one
+seventy-five a month, and I don't believe it would be safe for you to
+offer one fifty."
+
+March shook his head, and dropped a mask of virtuous rejection over his
+corrupt acquiescence. "It's too small for us--we couldn't squeeze into
+it."
+
+"Why, look here!" Fulkerson persisted. "How many rooms do you people
+want?"
+
+"I've got to have a place to work--"
+
+"Of course! And you've got to have it at the Fifth Wheel office."
+
+"I hadn't thought of that," March began. "I suppose I could do my work at
+the office, as there's not much writing--"
+
+"Why, of course you can't do your work at home. You just come round with
+me now, and look at that again."
+
+"No; I can't do it."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I--I've got to dine."
+
+"All right," said Fulkerson. "Dine with me. I want to take you round to a
+little Italian place that I know."
+
+One may trace the successive steps of March's descent in this simple
+matter with the same edification that would attend the study of the
+self-delusions and obfuscations of a man tempted to crime. The process is
+probably not at all different, and to the philosophical mind the kind of
+result is unimportant; the process is everything.
+
+Fulkerson led him down one block and half across another to the steps of
+a small dwelling-house, transformed, like many others, into a restaurant
+of the Latin ideal, with little or no structural change from the pattern
+of the lower middle-class New York home. There were the corroded
+brownstone steps, the mean little front door, and the cramped entry with
+its narrow stairs by which ladies could go up to a dining-room appointed
+for them on the second floor; the parlors on the first were set about
+with tables, where men smoked cigarettes between the courses, and a
+single waiter ran swiftly to and fro with plates and dishes, and,
+exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cook beyond a slide in the back
+parlor. He rushed at the new-comers, brushed the soiled table-cloth
+before them with a towel on his arm, covered its worst stains with a
+napkin, and brought them, in their order, the vermicelli soup, the fried
+fish, the cheese-strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast fowl
+and salad, and the wizened pear and coffee which form the dinner at such
+places.
+
+"Ah, this is nice!" said Fulkerson, after the laying of the charitable
+napkin, and he began to recognize acquaintances, some of whom he
+described to March as young literary men and artists with whom they
+should probably have to do; others were simply frequenters of the place,
+and were of all nationalities and religions apparently--at least, several
+were Hebrews and Cubans. "You get a pretty good slice of New York here,"
+he said, "all except the frosting on top. That you won't find much at
+Maroni's, though you will occasionally. I don't mean the ladies ever, of
+course." The ladies present seemed harmless and reputable-looking people
+enough, but certainly they were not of the first fashion, and, except in
+a few instances, not Americans. "It's like cutting straight down through
+a fruitcake," Fulkerson went on, "or a mince-pie, when you don't know who
+made the pie; you get a little of everything." He ordered a small flask
+of Chianti with the dinner, and it came in its pretty wicker jacket.
+March smiled upon it with tender reminiscence, and Fulkerson laughed.
+"Lights you up a little. I brought old Dryfoos here one day, and he
+thought it was sweet-oil; that's the kind of bottle they used to have it
+in at the country drug-stores."
+
+"Yes, I remember now; but I'd totally forgotten it," said March. "How far
+back that goes! Who's Dryfoos?"
+
+"Dryfoos?" Fulkerson, still smiling, tore off a piece of the half-yard of
+French loaf which had been supplied them, with two pale, thin disks of
+butter, and fed it into himself. "Old Dryfoos? Well, of course! I call
+him old, but he ain't so very. About fifty, or along there."
+
+"No," said March, "that isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be."
+
+"Well, I suppose you've got to know about him, anyway," said Fulkerson,
+thoughtfully. "And I've been wondering just how I should tell you. Can't
+always make out exactly how much of a Bostonian you really are! Ever been
+out in the natural-gas country?"
+
+"No," said March. "I've had a good deal of curiosity about it, but I've
+never been able to get away except in summer, and then we always
+preferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara and back through
+Canada, the route we took on our wedding journey. The children like it as
+much as we do."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Fulkerson. "Well, the natural-gas country is worth
+seeing. I don't mean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in Northern Ohio
+and Indiana around Moffitt--that's the place in the heart of the gas
+region that they've been booming so. Yes, you ought to see that country.
+If you haven't been West for a good many years, you haven't got any idea
+how old the country looks. You remember how the fields used to be all
+full of stumps?"
+
+"I should think so."
+
+"Well, you won't see any stumps now. All that country out around Moffitt
+is just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as old as England. You
+know how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented a
+stump-extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen. Now they
+just touch 'em off with a little dynamite, and they've got a cellar dug
+and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it.
+Only they haven't got any use for kindling in that country--all gas. I
+rode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-planting
+time, and every once in a while I'd come to a place with a piece of
+ragged old stove-pipe stickin' up out of the ground, and blazing away
+like forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it any
+more than if it was spring violets. Horses didn't notice it, either.
+Well, they've always known about the gas out there; they say there are
+places in the woods where it's been burning ever since the country was
+settled.
+
+"But when you come in sight of Moffitt--my, oh, my! Well, you come in
+smell of it about as soon. That gas out there ain't odorless, like the
+Pittsburg gas, and so it's perfectly safe; but the smell isn't bad--about
+as bad as the finest kind of benzine. Well, the first thing that strikes
+you when you come to Moffitt is the notion that there has been a good
+warm, growing rain, and the town's come up overnight. That's in the
+suburbs, the annexes, and additions. But it ain't shabby--no shanty-farm
+business; nice brick and frame houses, some of 'em Queen Anne style, and
+all of 'em looking as if they had come to stay. And when you drive up
+from the depot you think everybody's moving. Everything seems to be piled
+into the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up everywhere.
+You know the kind of street Main Street always used to be in our
+section--half plank-road and turnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a lot
+of stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story higher
+than the back, and here and there a decent building with the gable end to
+the public; and a court-house and jail and two taverns and three or four
+churches. Well, they're all there in Moffitt yet, but architecture has
+struck it hard, and they've got a lot of new buildings that needn't be
+ashamed of themselves anywhere; the new court-house is as big as St.
+Peter's, and the Grand Opera-house is in the highest style of the art.
+You can't buy a lot on that street for much less than you can buy a lot
+in New York--or you couldn't when the boom was on; I saw the place just
+when the boom was in its prime. I went out there to work the newspapers
+in the syndicate business, and I got one of their men to write me a real
+bright, snappy account of the gas; and they just took me in their arms
+and showed me everything. Well, it was wonderful, and it was beautiful,
+too! To see a whole community stirred up like that was--just like a big
+boy, all hope and high spirits, and no discount on the remotest future;
+nothing but perpetual boom to the end of time--I tell you it warmed your
+blood. Why, there were some things about it that made you think what a
+nice kind of world this would be if people ever took hold together,
+instead of each fellow fighting it out on his own hook, and devil take
+the hindmost. They made up their minds at Moffitt that if they wanted
+their town to grow they'd got to keep their gas public property. So they
+extended their corporation line so as to take in pretty much the whole
+gas region round there; and then the city took possession of every well
+that was put down, and held it for the common good. Anybody that's a mind
+to come to Moffitt and start any kind of manufacture can have all the gas
+he wants free; and for fifteen dollars a year you can have all the gas
+you want to heat and light your private house. The people hold on to it
+for themselves, and, as I say, it's a grand sight to see a whole
+community hanging together and working for the good of all, instead of
+splitting up into as many different cut-throats as there are able-bodied
+citizens. See that fellow?" Fulkerson broke off, and indicated with a
+twirl of his head a short, dark, foreign-looking man going out of the
+door. "They say that fellow's a Socialist. I think it's a shame they're
+allowed to come here. If they don't like the way we manage our affairs
+let 'em stay at home," Fulkerson continued. "They do a lot of mischief,
+shooting off their mouths round here. I believe in free speech and all
+that; but I'd like to see these fellows shut up in jail and left to jaw
+one another to death. We don't want any of their poison."
+
+March did not notice the vanishing Socialist. He was watching, with a
+teasing sense of familiarity, a tall, shabbily dressed, elderly man, who
+had just come in. He had the aquiline profile uncommon among Germans, and
+yet March recognized him at once as German. His long, soft beard and
+mustache had once been fair, and they kept some tone of their yellow in
+the gray to which they had turned. His eyes were full, and his lips and
+chin shaped the beard to the noble outline which shows in the beards the
+Italian masters liked to paint for their Last Suppers. His carriage was
+erect and soldierly, and March presently saw that he had lost his left
+hand. He took his place at a table where the overworked waiter found time
+to cut up his meat and put everything in easy reach of his right hand.
+
+"Well," Fulkerson resumed, "they took me round everywhere in Moffitt, and
+showed me their big wells--lit 'em up for a private view, and let me hear
+them purr with the soft accents of a mass-meeting of locomotives. Why,
+when they let one of these wells loose in a meadow that they'd piped it
+into temporarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from the mouth of
+the pipe and blew it over half an acre of ground. They say when they let
+one of their big wells burn away all winter before they had learned how
+to control it, that well kept up a little summer all around it; the grass
+stayed green, and the flowers bloomed all through the winter. I don't
+know whether it's so or not. But I can believe anything of natural gas.
+My! but it was beautiful when they turned on the full force of that well
+and shot a roman candle into the gas--that's the way they light it--and a
+plume of fire about twenty feet wide and seventy-five feet high, all red
+and yellow and violet, jumped into the sky, and that big roar shook the
+ground under your feet! You felt like saying:
+
+"'Don't trouble yourself; I'm perfectly convinced. I believe in Moffitt.'
+We-e-e-ll!" drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath, "that's where I met
+old Dryfoos."
+
+"Oh yes!--Dryfoos," said March. He observed that the waiter had brought
+the old one-handed German a towering glass of beer.
+
+"Yes," Fulkerson laughed. "We've got round to Dryfoos again. I thought I
+could cut a long story short, but I seem to be cutting a short story
+long. If you're not in a hurry, though--"
+
+"Not in the least. Go on as long as you like."
+
+"I met him there in the office of a real-estate man--speculator, of
+course; everybody was, in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, and
+public-spirited as all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me about
+him. Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, about three or four
+miles out of Moffitt, and he'd lived there pretty much all his life;
+father was one of the first settlers. Everybody knew he had the right
+stuff in him, but he was slower than molasses in January, like those
+Pennsylvania Dutch. He'd got together the largest and handsomest farm
+anywhere around there; and he was making money on it, just like he was in
+some business somewhere; he was a very intelligent man; he took the
+papers and kept himself posted; but he was awfully old-fashioned in his
+ideas. He hung on to the doctrines as well as the dollars of the dads; it
+was a real thing with him. Well, when the boom began to come he hated it
+awfully, and he fought it. He used to write communications to the weekly
+newspaper in Moffitt--they've got three dailies there now--and throw cold
+water on the boom. He couldn't catch on no way. It made him sick to hear
+the clack that went on about the gas the whole while, and that stirred up
+the neighborhood and got into his family. Whenever he'd hear of a man
+that had been offered a big price for his land and was going to sell out
+and move into town, he'd go and labor with him and try to talk him out of
+it, and tell him how long his fifteen or twenty thousand would last him
+to live on, and shake the Standard Oil Company before him, and try to
+make him believe it wouldn't be five years before the Standard owned the
+whole region.
+
+"Of course, he couldn't do anything with them. When a man's offered a big
+price for his farm, he don't care whether it's by a secret emissary from
+the Standard Oil or not; he's going to sell and get the better of the
+other fellow if he can. Dryfoos couldn't keep the boom out of his own
+family even. His wife was with him. She thought whatever he said and did
+was just as right as if it had been thundered down from Sinai. But the
+young folks were sceptical, especially the girls that had been away to
+school. The boy that had been kept at home because he couldn't be spared
+from helping his father manage the farm was more like him, but they
+contrived to stir the boy up--with the hot end of the boom, too. So when
+a fellow came along one day and offered old Dryfoos a cool hundred
+thousand for his farm, it was all up with Dryfoos. He'd 'a' liked to 'a'
+kept the offer to himself and not done anything about it, but his vanity
+wouldn't let him do that; and when he let it out in his family the girls
+outvoted him. They just made him sell.
+
+"He wouldn't sell all. He kept about eighty acres that was off in some
+piece by itself, but the three hundred that had the old brick house on
+it, and the big barn--that went, and Dryfoos bought him a place in
+Moffitt and moved into town to live on the interest of his money. Just
+what he had scolded and ridiculed everybody else for doing. Well, they
+say that at first he seemed like he would go crazy. He hadn't anything to
+do. He took a fancy to that land-agent, and he used to go and set in his
+office and ask him what he should do. 'I hain't got any horses, I hain't
+got any cows, I hain't got any pigs, I hain't got any chickens. I hain't
+got anything to do from sun-up to sun-down.' The fellow said the tears
+used to run down the old fellow's cheeks, and if he hadn't been so busy
+himself he believed he should 'a' cried, too. But most o' people thought
+old Dryfoos was down in the mouth because he hadn't asked more for his
+farm, when he wanted to buy it back and found they held it at a hundred
+and fifty thousand. People couldn't believe he was just homesick and
+heartsick for the old place. Well, perhaps he was sorry he hadn't asked
+more; that's human nature, too.
+
+"After a while something happened. That land-agent used to tell Dryfoos
+to get out to Europe with his money and see life a little, or go and live
+in Washington, where he could be somebody; but Dryfoos wouldn't, and he
+kept listening to the talk there, and all of a sudden he caught on. He
+came into that fellow's one day with a plan for cutting up the eighty
+acres he'd kept into town lots; and he'd got it all plotted out so-well,
+and had so many practical ideas about it, that the fellow was astonished.
+He went right in with him, as far as Dryfoos would let him, and glad of
+the chance; and they were working the thing for all it was worth when I
+struck Moffitt. Old Dryfoos wanted me to go out and see the Dryfoos &
+Hendry Addition--guess he thought maybe I'd write it up; and he drove me
+out there himself. Well, it was funny to see a town made: streets driven
+through; two rows of shadetrees, hard and soft, planted; cellars dug and
+houses put up--regular Queen Anne style, too, with stained glass--all at
+once. Dryfoos apologized for the streets because they were hand-made;
+said they expected their street-making machine Tuesday, and then they
+intended to push things."
+
+Fulkerson enjoyed the effect of his picture on March for a moment, and
+then went on: "He was mighty intelligent, too, and he questioned me up
+about my business as sharp as I ever was questioned; seemed to kind of
+strike his fancy; I guess he wanted to find out if there was any money in
+it. He was making money, hand over hand, then; and he never stopped
+speculating and improving till he'd scraped together three or four
+hundred thousand dollars, they said a million, but they like round
+numbers at Moffitt, and I guess half a million would lay over it
+comfortably and leave a few thousands to spare, probably. Then he came on
+to New York."
+
+Fulkerson struck a match against the ribbed side of the porcelain cup
+that held the matches in the centre of the table, and lit a cigarette,
+which he began to smoke, throwing his head back with a leisurely effect,
+as if he had got to the end of at least as much of his story as he meant
+to tell without prompting.
+
+March asked him the desired question. "What in the world for?"
+
+Fulkerson took out his cigarette and said, with a smile: "To spend his
+money, and get his daughters into the old Knickerbocker society. Maybe he
+thought they were all the same kind of Dutch."
+
+"And has he succeeded?"
+
+"Well, they're not social leaders yet. But it's only a question of
+time--generation or two--especially if time's money, and if 'Every Other
+Week' is the success it's bound to be."
+
+"You don't mean to say, Fulkerson," said March, with a half-doubting,
+half-daunted laugh, "that he's your Angel?"
+
+"That's what I mean to say," returned Fulkerson. "I ran onto him in
+Broadway one day last summer. If you ever saw anybody in your life;
+you're sure to meet him in Broadway again, sooner or later. That's the
+philosophy of the bunco business; country people from the same
+neighborhood are sure to run up against each other the first time they
+come to New York. I put out my hand, and I said, 'Isn't this Mr. Dryfoos
+from Moffitt?' He didn't seem to have any use for my hand; he let me keep
+it, and he squared those old lips of his till his imperial stuck straight
+out. Ever see Bernhardt in 'L'Etrangere'? Well, the American husband is
+old Dryfoos all over; no mustache; and hay-colored chin-whiskers cut
+slanting froze the corners of his mouth. He cocked his little gray eyes
+at me, and says he: 'Yes, young man; my name is Dryfoos, and I'm from
+Moffitt. But I don't want no present of Longfellow's Works, illustrated;
+and I don't want to taste no fine teas; but I know a policeman that does;
+and if you're the son of my old friend Squire Strohfeldt, you'd better
+get out.' 'Well, then,' said I, 'how would you like to go into the
+newspaper syndicate business?' He gave another look at me, and then he
+burst out laughing, and he grabbed my hand, and he just froze to it. I
+never saw anybody so glad.
+
+"Well, the long and the short of it was that I asked him round here to
+Maroni's to dinner; and before we broke up for the night we had settled
+the financial side of the plan that's brought you to New York."
+
+"I can see," said Fulkerson, who had kept his eyes fast on March's face,
+"that you don't more than half like the idea of Dryfoos. It ought to give
+you more confidence in the thing than you ever had. You needn't be
+afraid," he added, with some feeling, "that I talked Dryfoos into the
+thing for my own advantage."
+
+"Oh, my dear Fulkerson!" March protested, all the more fervently because
+he was really a little guilty.
+
+"Well, of course not! I didn't mean you were. But I just happened to tell
+him what I wanted to go into when I could see my way to it, and he caught
+on of his own accord. The fact is," said Fulkerson, "I guess I'd better
+make a clean breast of it, now I'm at it, Dryfoos wanted to get something
+for that boy of his to do. He's in railroads himself, and he's in mines
+and other things, and he keeps busy, and he can't bear to have his boy
+hanging round the house doing nothing, like as if he was a girl. I told
+him that the great object of a rich man was to get his son into just that
+fix, but he couldn't seem to see it, and the boy hated it himself. He's
+got a good head, and he wanted to study for the ministry when they were
+all living together out on the farm; but his father had the old-fashioned
+ideas about that. You know they used to think that any sort of stuff was
+good enough to make a preacher out of; but they wanted the good timber
+for business; and so the old man wouldn't let him. You'll see the fellow;
+you'll like him; he's no fool, I can tell you; and he's going to be our
+publisher, nominally at first and actually when I've taught him the ropes
+a little."
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+Fulkerson stopped and looked at March, whom he saw lapsing into a serious
+silence. Doubtless he divined his uneasiness with the facts that had been
+given him to digest. He pulled out his watch and glanced at it. "See
+here, how would you like to go up to Forty-sixth street with me, and drop
+in on old Dryfoos? Now's your chance. He's going West tomorrow, and won't
+be back for a month or so. They'll all be glad to see you, and you'll
+understand things better when you've seen him and his family. I can't
+explain."
+
+March reflected a moment. Then he said, with a wisdom that surprised him,
+for he would have liked to yield to the impulse of his curiosity:
+"Perhaps we'd better wait till Mrs. March comes down, and let things take
+the usual course. The Dryfoos ladies will want to call on her as the
+last-comer, and if I treated myself 'en garcon' now, and paid the first
+visit, it might complicate matters."
+
+"Well, perhaps you're right," said Fulkerson. "I don't know much about
+these things, and I don't believe Ma Dryfoos does, either." He was on his
+legs lighting another cigarette. "I suppose the girls are getting
+themselves up in etiquette, though. Well, then, let's have a look at the
+'Every Other Week' building, and then, if you like your quarters there,
+you can go round and close for Mrs. Green's flat."
+
+March's dormant allegiance to his wife's wishes had been roused by his
+decision in favor of good social usage. "I don't think I shall take the
+flat," he said.
+
+"Well, don't reject it without giving it another look, anyway. Come on!"
+
+He helped March on with his light overcoat, and the little stir they made
+for their departure caught the notice of the old German; he looked up
+from his beer at them. March was more than ever impressed with something
+familiar in his face. In compensation for his prudence in regard to the
+Dryfooses he now indulged an impulse. He stepped across to where the old
+man sat, with his bald head shining like ivory under the gas-jet, and his
+fine patriarchal length of bearded mask taking picturesque lights and
+shadows, and put out his hand to him.
+
+"Lindau! Isn't this Mr. Lindau?"
+
+The old man lifted himself slowly to his feet with mechanical politeness,
+and cautiously took March's hand. "Yes, my name is Lindau," he said,
+slowly, while he scanned March's face. Then he broke into a long cry.
+"Ah-h-h-h-h, my dear poy! my gong friendt! my-my--Idt is Passil Marge,
+not zo? Ah, ha, ha, ha! How gladt I am to zee you! Why, I am gladt! And
+you rememberdt me? You remember Schiller, and Goethe, and Uhland? And
+Indianapolis? You still lif in Indianapolis? It sheers my hardt to zee
+you. But you are lidtle oldt, too? Tventy-five years makes a difference.
+Ah, I am gladt! Dell me, idt is Passil Marge, not zo?"
+
+He looked anxiously into March's face, with a gentle smile of mixed hope
+and doubt, and March said: "As sure as it's Berthold Lindau, and I guess
+it's you. And you remember the old times? You were as much of a boy as I
+was, Lindau. Are you living in New York? Do you recollect how you tried
+to teach me to fence? I don't know how to this day, Lindau. How good you
+were, and how patient! Do you remember how we used to sit up in the
+little parlor back of your printing-office, and read Die Rauber and Die
+Theilung der Erde and Die Glocke? And Mrs. Lindau? Is she with--"
+
+"Deadt--deadt long ago. Right after I got home from the war--tventy years
+ago. But tell me, you are married? Children? Yes! Goodt! And how oldt are
+you now?"
+
+"It makes me seventeen to see you, Lindau, but I've got a son nearly as
+old."
+
+"Ah, ha, ha! Goodt! And where do you lif?"
+
+"Well, I'm just coming to live in New York," March said, looking over at
+Fulkerson, who had been watching his interview with the perfunctory smile
+of sympathy that people put on at the meeting of old friends. "I want to
+introduce you to my friend Mr. Fulkerson. He and I are going into a
+literary enterprise here."
+
+"Ah! zo?" said the old man, with polite interest. He took Fulkerson's
+proffered hand, and they all stood talking a few moments together.
+
+Then Fulkerson said, with another look at his watch, "Well, March, we're
+keeping Mr. Lindau from his dinner."
+
+"Dinner!" cried the old man. "Idt's better than breadt and meadt to see
+Mr. Marge!"
+
+"I must be going, anyway," said March. "But I must see you again soon,
+Lindau. Where do you live? I want a long talk."
+
+"And I. You will find me here at dinner-time." said the old man. "It is
+the best place"; and March fancied him reluctant to give another address.
+
+To cover his consciousness he answered, gayly: "Then, it's 'auf
+wiedersehen' with us. Well!"
+
+"Also!" The old man took his hand, and made a mechanical movement with
+his mutilated arm, as if he would have taken it in a double clasp. He
+laughed at himself. "I wanted to gif you the other handt, too, but I gafe
+it to your gountry a goodt while ago."
+
+"To my country?" asked March, with a sense of pain, and yet lightly, as
+if it were a joke of the old man's. "Your country, too, Lindau?"
+
+The old man turned very grave, and said, almost coldly, "What gountry
+hass a poor man got, Mr. Marge?"
+
+"Well, you ought to have a share in the one you helped to save for us
+rich men, Lindau," March returned, still humoring the joke.
+
+The old man smiled sadly, but made no answer as he sat down again.
+
+"Seems to be a little soured," said Fulkerson, as they went down the
+steps. He was one of those Americans whose habitual conception of life is
+unalloyed prosperity. When any experience or observation of his went
+counter to it he suffered--something like physical pain. He eagerly
+shrugged away the impression left upon his buoyancy by Lindau, and added
+to March's continued silence, "What did I tell you about meeting every
+man in New York that you ever knew before?"
+
+"I never expected to meat Lindau in the world again," said March, more to
+himself than to Fulkerson. "I had an impression that he had been killed
+in the war. I almost wish he had been."
+
+"Oh, hello, now!" cried Fulkerson.
+
+March laughed, but went on soberly: "He was a man predestined to
+adversity, though. When I first knew him out in Indianapolis he was
+starving along with a sick wife and a sick newspaper. It was before the
+Germans had come over to the Republicans generally, but Lindau was
+fighting the anti-slavery battle just as naturally at Indianapolis in
+1858 as he fought behind the barricades at Berlin in 1848. And yet he was
+always such a gentle soul! And so generous! He taught me German for the
+love of it; he wouldn't spoil his pleasure by taking a cent from me; he
+seemed to get enough out of my being young and enthusiastic, and out of
+prophesying great things for me. I wonder what the poor old fellow is
+doing here, with that one hand of his?"
+
+"Not amassing a very 'handsome pittance,' I guess, as Artemus Ward would
+say," said Fulkerson, getting back some of his lightness. "There are lots
+of two-handed fellows in New York that are not doing much better, I
+guess. Maybe he gets some writing on the German papers."
+
+"I hope so. He's one of the most accomplished men! He used to be a
+splendid musician--pianist--and knows eight or ten languages."
+
+"Well, it's astonishing," said Fulkerson, "how much lumber those Germans
+can carry around in their heads all their lives, and never work it up
+into anything. It's a pity they couldn't do the acquiring, and let out
+the use of their learning to a few bright Americans. We could make things
+hum, if we could arrange 'em that way."
+
+He talked on, unheeded by March, who went along half-consciously
+tormented by his lightness in the pensive memories the meeting with
+Lindau had called up. Was this all that sweet, unselfish nature could
+come to? What a homeless old age at that meagre Italian table d'hote,
+with that tall glass of beer for a half-hour's oblivion! That shabby
+dress, that pathetic mutilation! He must have a pension, twelve dollars a
+month, or eighteen, from a grateful country. But what else did he eke out
+with?
+
+"Well, here we are," said Fulkerson, cheerily. He ran up the steps before
+March, and opened the carpenter's temporary valve in the door frame, and
+led the way into a darkness smelling sweetly of unpainted wood-work and
+newly dried plaster; their feet slipped on shavings and grated on sand.
+He scratched a match, and found a candle, and then walked about up and
+down stairs, and lectured on the advantages of the place. He had fitted
+up bachelor apartments for himself in the house, and said that he was
+going to have a flat to let on the top floor. "I didn't offer it to you
+because I supposed you'd be too proud to live over your shop; and it's
+too small, anyway; only five rooms."
+
+"Yes, that's too small," said March, shirking the other point.
+
+"Well, then, here's the room I intend for your office," said Fulkerson,
+showing him into a large back parlor one flight up. "You'll have it quiet
+from the street noises here, and you can be at home or not, as you
+please. There'll be a boy on the stairs to find out. Now, you see, this
+makes the Grosvenor Green flat practicable, if you want it."
+
+March felt the forces of fate closing about him and pushing him to a
+decision. He feebly fought them off till he could have another look at
+the flat. Then, baked and subdued still more by the unexpected presence
+of Mrs. Grosvenor Green herself, who was occupying it so as to be able to
+show it effectively, he took it. He was aware more than ever of its
+absurdities; he knew that his wife would never cease to hate it; but he
+had suffered one of those eclipses of the imagination to which men of his
+temperament are subject, and into which he could see no future for his
+desires. He felt a comfort in irretrievably committing himself, and
+exchanging the burden of indecision for the burden of responsibility.
+
+"I don't know," said Fulkerson, as they walked back to his hotel
+together, "but you might fix it up with that lone widow and her pretty
+daughter to take part of their house here." He seemed to be reminded of
+it by the fact of passing the house, and March looked up at its dark
+front. He could not have told exactly why he felt a pang of remorse at
+the sight, and doubtless it was more regret for having taken the
+Grosvenor Green flat than for not having taken the widow's rooms. Still,
+he could not forget her wistfulness when his wife and he were looking at
+them, and her disappointment when they decided against them. He had
+toyed, in his after-talk to Mrs. March, with a sort of hypothetical
+obligation they had to modify their plans so as to meet the widow's want
+of just such a family as theirs; they had both said what a blessing it
+would be to her, and what a pity they could not do it; but they had
+decided very distinctly that they could not. Now it seemed to him that
+they might; and he asked himself whether he had not actually departed as
+much from their ideal as if he had taken board with the widow. Suddenly
+it seemed to him that his wife asked him this, too.
+
+"I reckon," said Fulkerson, "that she could have arranged to give you
+your meals in your rooms, and it would have come to about the same thing
+as housekeeping."
+
+"No sort of boarding can be the same as house-keeping," said March. "I
+want my little girl to have the run of a kitchen, and I want the whole
+family to have the moral effect of housekeeping. It's demoralizing to
+board, in every way; it isn't a home, if anybody else takes the care of
+it off your hands."
+
+"Well, I suppose so," Fulkerson assented; but March's words had a hollow
+ring to himself, and in his own mind he began to retaliate his
+dissatisfaction upon Fulkerson.
+
+He parted from him on the usual terms outwardly, but he felt obscurely
+abused by Fulkerson in regard to the Dryfooses, father and son. He did
+not know but Fulkerson had taken an advantage of him in allowing him to
+commit himself to their enterprise without fully and frankly telling him
+who and what his backer was; he perceived that with young Dryfoos as the
+publisher and Fulkerson as the general director of the paper there might
+be very little play for his own ideas of its conduct. Perhaps it was the
+hurt to his vanity involved by the recognition of this fact that made him
+forget how little choice he really had in the matter, and how, since he
+had not accepted the offer to edit the insurance paper, nothing remained
+for him but to close with Fulkerson. In this moment of suspicion and
+resentment he accused Fulkerson of hastening his decision in regard to
+the Grosvenor Green apartment; he now refused to consider it a decision,
+and said to himself that if he felt disposed to do so he would send Mrs.
+Green a note reversing it in the morning. But he put it all off till
+morning with his clothes, when he went to bed, he put off even thinking
+what his wife would say; he cast Fulkerson and his constructive treachery
+out of his mind, too, and invited into it some pensive reveries of the
+past, when he still stood at the parting of the ways, and could take this
+path or that. In his middle life this was not possible; he must follow
+the path chosen long ago, wherever, it led. He was not master of
+himself, as he once seemed, but the servant of those he loved; if he
+could do what he liked, perhaps he might renounce this whole New York
+enterprise, and go off somewhere out of the reach of care; but he could
+not do what he liked, that was very clear. In the pathos of this
+conviction he dwelt compassionately upon the thought of poor old Lindau;
+he resolved to make him accept a handsome sum of money--more than he
+could spare, something that he would feel the loss of--in payment of the
+lessons in German and fencing given so long ago. At the usual rate for
+such lessons, his debt, with interest for twenty-odd years, would run
+very far into the hundreds. Too far, he perceived, for his wife's joyous
+approval; he determined not to add the interest; or he believed that
+Lindau would refuse the interest; he put a fine speech in his mouth,
+making him do so; and after that he got Lindau employment on 'Every Other
+Week,' and took care of him till he died.
+
+Through all his melancholy and munificence he was aware of sordid
+anxieties for having taken the Grosvenor Green apartment. These began to
+assume visible, tangible shapes as he drowsed, and to became personal
+entities, from which he woke, with little starts, to a realization of
+their true nature, and then suddenly fell fast asleep.
+
+In the accomplishment of the events which his reverie played with, there
+was much that retroactively stamped it with prophecy, but much also that
+was better than he forboded. He found that with regard to the Grosvenor
+Green apartment he had not allowed for his wife's willingness to get any
+sort of roof over her head again after the removal from their old home,
+or for the alleviations that grow up through mere custom. The practical
+workings of the apartment were not so bad; it had its good points, and
+after the first sensation of oppression in it they began to feel the
+convenience of its arrangement. They were at that time of life when
+people first turn to their children's opinion with deference, and, in the
+loss of keenness in their own likes and dislikes, consult the young
+preferences which are still so sensitive. It went far to reconcile Mrs.
+March to the apartment that her children were pleased with its novelty;
+when this wore off for them, she had herself begun to find it much more
+easily manageable than a house. After she had put away several barrels of
+gimcracks, and folded up screens and rugs and skins, and carried them all
+off to the little dark store-room which the flat developed, she perceived
+at once a roominess and coziness in it unsuspected before. Then, when
+people began to call, she had a pleasure, a superiority, in saying that
+it was a furnished apartment, and in disclaiming all responsibility for
+the upholstery and decoration. If March was by, she always explained that
+it was Mr. March's fancy, and amiably laughed it off with her callers as
+a mannish eccentricity. Nobody really seemed to think it otherwise than
+pretty; and this again was a triumph for Mrs. March, because it showed
+how inferior the New York taste was to the Boston taste in such matters.
+
+March submitted silently to his punishment, and laughed with her before
+company at his own eccentricity. She had been so preoccupied with the
+adjustment of the family to its new quarters and circumstances that the
+time passed for laying his misgivings, if they were misgivings, about
+Fulkerson before her, and when an occasion came for expressing them they
+had themselves passed in the anxieties of getting forward the first
+number of 'Every Other Week.' He kept these from her, too, and the
+business that brought them to New York had apparently dropped into
+abeyance before the questions of domestic economy that presented and
+absented themselves. March knew his wife to be a woman of good mind and
+in perfect sympathy with him, but he understood the limitations of her
+perspective; and if he was not too wise, he was too experienced to
+intrude upon it any affairs of his till her own were reduced to the right
+order and proportion. It would have been folly to talk to her of
+Fulkerson's conjecturable uncandor while she was in doubt whether her
+cook would like the kitchen, or her two servants would consent to room
+together; and till it was decided what school Tom should go to, and
+whether Bella should have lessons at home or not, the relation which
+March was to bear to the Dryfooses, as owner and publisher, was not to be
+discussed with his wife. He might drag it in, but he was aware that with
+her mind distracted by more immediate interests he could not get from her
+that judgment, that reasoned divination, which he relied upon so much.
+She would try, she would do her best, but the result would be a view
+clouded and discolored by the effort she must make.
+
+He put the whole matter by, and gave himself to the details of the work
+before him. In this he found not only escape, but reassurance, for it
+became more and more apparent that whatever was nominally the structure
+of the business, a man of his qualifications and his instincts could not
+have an insignificant place in it. He had also the consolation of liking
+his work, and of getting an instant grasp of it that grew constantly
+firmer and closer. The joy of knowing that he had not made a mistake was
+great. In giving rein to ambitions long forborne he seemed to get back to
+the youth when he had indulged them first; and after half a lifetime
+passed in pursuits alien to his nature, he was feeling the serene
+happiness of being mated through his work to his early love. From the
+outside the spectacle might have had its pathos, and it is not easy to
+justify such an experiment as he had made at his time of life, except
+upon the ground where he rested from its consideration--the ground of
+necessity.
+
+His work was more in his thoughts than himself, however; and as the time
+for the publication of the first number of his periodical came nearer,
+his cares all centred upon it. Without fixing any date, Fulkerson had
+announced it, and pushed his announcements with the shameless vigor of a
+born advertiser. He worked his interest with the press to the utmost, and
+paragraphs of a variety that did credit to his ingenuity were afloat
+everywhere. Some of them were speciously unfavorable in tone; they
+criticised and even ridiculed the principles on which the new departure
+in literary journalism was based. Others defended it; others yet denied
+that this rumored principle was really the principle. All contributed to
+make talk. All proceeded from the same fertile invention.
+
+March observed with a degree of mortification that the talk was very
+little of it in the New York press; there the references to the novel
+enterprise were slight and cold. But Fulkerson said: "Don't mind that,
+old man. It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this;
+New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would
+be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or
+break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of the
+readers are outside of New York, and the rural districts are what we have
+got to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write, and talk
+about what they've written. Don't you worry."
+
+The rumor of Fulkerson's connection with the enterprise accompanied many
+of the paragraphs, and he was able to stay March's thirst for employment
+by turning over to him from day to day heaps of the manuscripts which
+began to pour in from his old syndicate writers, as well as from
+adventurous volunteers all over the country. With these in hand March
+began practically to plan the first number, and to concrete a general
+scheme from the material and the experience they furnished. They had
+intended to issue the first number with the new year, and if it had been
+an affair of literature alone, it would have been very easy; but it was
+the art leg they limped on, as Fulkerson phrased it. They had not merely
+to deal with the question of specific illustrations for this article or
+that, but to decide the whole character of their illustrations, and first
+of all to get a design for a cover which should both ensnare the heedless
+and captivate the fastidious. These things did not come properly within
+March's province--that had been clearly understood--and for a while
+Fulkerson tried to run the art leg himself. The phrase was again his, but
+it was simpler to make the phrase than to run the leg. The difficult
+generation, at once stiff-backed and slippery, with which he had to do in
+this endeavor, reduced even so buoyant an optimist to despair, and after
+wasting some valuable weeks in trying to work the artists himself, he
+determined to get an artist to work them. But what artist? It could not
+be a man with fixed reputation and a following: he would be too costly,
+and would have too many enemies among his brethren, even if he would
+consent to undertake the job. Fulkerson had a man in mind, an artist,
+too, who would have been the very thing if he had been the thing at all.
+He had talent enough, and his sort of talent would reach round the whole
+situation, but, as Fulkerson said, he was as many kinds of an ass as he
+was kinds of an artist.
+
+
+PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    Anticipative homesickness
+    Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of
+    Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much
+    As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting
+    Considerable comfort in holding him accountable
+    Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable
+    Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another
+    Handsome pittance
+    He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices
+    Hypothetical difficulty
+    Never-blooming shrub
+    Poverty as hopeless as any in the world
+    Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him
+    Servant of those he loved
+    Sigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdom
+    Sorry he hadn't asked more; that's human nature
+    That isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be
+    Tried to be homesick for them, but failed
+    Turn to their children's opinion with deference
+    Wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do
+
+
+
+
+SECOND PART
+
+
+I.
+
+The evening when March closed with Mrs. Green's reduced offer, and
+decided to take her apartment, the widow whose lodgings he had rejected
+sat with her daughter in an upper room at the back of her house. In the
+shaded glow of the drop-light she was sewing, and the girl was drawing at
+the same table. From time to time, as they talked, the girl lifted her
+head and tilted it a little on one side so as to get some desired effect
+of her work.
+
+"It's a mercy the cold weather holds off," said the mother. "We should
+have to light the furnace, unless we wanted to scare everybody away with
+a cold house; and I don't know who would take care of it, or what would
+become of us, every way."
+
+"They seem to have been scared away from a house that wasn't cold," said
+the girl. "Perhaps they might like a cold one. But it's too early for
+cold yet. It's only just in the beginning of November."
+
+"The Messenger says they've had a sprinkling of snow."
+
+"Oh yes, at St. Barnaby! I don't know when they don't have sprinklings of
+snow there. I'm awfully glad we haven't got that winter before us."
+
+The widow sighed as mothers do who feel the contrast their experience
+opposes to the hopeful recklessness of such talk as this. "We may have a
+worse winter here," she said, darkly.
+
+"Then I couldn't stand it," said the girl, "and I should go in for
+lighting out to Florida double-quick."
+
+"And how would you get to Florida?" demanded her mother, severely.
+
+"Oh, by the usual conveyance Pullman vestibuled train, I suppose. What
+makes you so blue, mamma?" The girl was all the time sketching away,
+rubbing out, lifting her head for the effect, and then bending it over
+her work again without looking at her mother.
+
+"I am not blue, Alma. But I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of
+yours."
+
+"Why? What harm does it do?"
+
+"Harm?" echoed the mother.
+
+Pending the effort she must make in saying, the girl cut in: "Yes, harm.
+You've kept your despair dusted off and ready for use at an instant's
+notice ever since we came, and what good has it done? I'm going to keep
+on hoping to the bitter end. That's what papa did."
+
+It was what the Rev. Archibald Leighton had done with all the
+consumptive's buoyancy. The morning he died he told them that now he had
+turned the point and was really going to get well. The cheerfulness was
+not only in his disease, but in his temperament. Its excess was always a
+little against him in his church work, and Mrs. Leighton was right enough
+in feeling that if it had not been for the ballast of her instinctive
+despondency he would have made shipwreck of such small chances of
+prosperity as befell him in life. It was not from him that his daughter
+got her talent, though he had left her his temperament intact of his
+widow's legal thirds. He was one of those men of whom the country people
+say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him. Mrs.
+Leighton had long eked out their income by taking a summer boarder or
+two, as a great favor, into her family; and when the greater need came,
+she frankly gave up her house to the summer-folks (as they call them in
+the country), and managed it for their comfort from the small quarter of
+it in which she shut herself up with her daughter.
+
+The notion of shutting up is an exigency of the rounded period. The fact
+is, of course, that Alma Leighton was not shut up in any sense whatever.
+She was the pervading light, if not force, of the house. She was a good
+cook, and she managed the kitchen with the help of an Irish girl, while
+her mother looked after the rest of the housekeeping. But she was not
+systematic; she had inspiration but not discipline, and her mother
+mourned more over the days when Alma left the whole dinner to the Irish
+girl than she rejoiced in those when one of Alma's great thoughts took
+form in a chicken-pie of incomparable savor or in a matchless pudding.
+The off-days came when her artistic nature was expressing itself in
+charcoal, for she drew to the admiration of all among the lady boarders
+who could not draw. The others had their reserves; they readily conceded
+that Alma had genius, but they were sure she needed instruction. On the
+other hand, they were not so radical as to agree with the old painter who
+came every summer to paint the elms of the St. Barnaby meadows. He
+contended that she needed to be a man in order to amount to anything; but
+in this theory he was opposed by an authority, of his own sex, whom the
+lady sketchers believed to speak with more impartiality in a matter
+concerning them as much as Alma Leighton. He said that instruction would
+do, and he was not only younger and handsomer, but he was fresher from
+the schools than old Harrington, who, even the lady sketchers could see,
+painted in an obsolescent manner. His name was Beaton--Angus Beaton; but
+he was not Scotch, or not more Scotch than Mary Queen of Scots was. His
+father was a Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York, and it
+had taken only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces of native
+and ancestral manner in him. He wore his black beard cut shorter than his
+mustache, and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders well thrown
+back and with a lateral curve of his person when he talked about art,
+which would alone have carried conviction even if he had not had a thick,
+dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and had not
+spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect
+of epigrammatic and sententious French. One of the ladies said that you
+always thought of him as having spoken French after it was over, and
+accused herself of wrong in not being able to feel afraid of him. None of
+the ladies was afraid of him, though they could not believe that he was
+really so deferential to their work as he seemed; and they knew, when he
+would not criticise Mr. Harrington's work, that he was just acting from
+principle.
+
+They may or may not have known the deference with which he treated Alma's
+work; but the girl herself felt that his abrupt, impersonal comment
+recognized her as a real sister in art. He told her she ought to come to
+New York, and draw in the League, or get into some painter's private
+class; and it was the sense of duty thus appealed to which finally
+resulted in the hazardous experiment she and her mother were now making.
+There were no logical breaks in the chain of their reasoning from past
+success with boarders in St. Barnaby to future success with boarders in
+New York. Of course the outlay was much greater. The rent of the
+furnished house they had taken was such that if they failed their
+experiment would be little less than ruinous.
+
+But they were not going to fail; that was what Alma contended, with a
+hardy courage that her mother sometimes felt almost invited failure, if
+it did not deserve it. She was one of those people who believe that if
+you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen. She acted on this
+superstition as if it were a religion.
+
+"If it had not been for my despair, as you call it, Alma," she answered,
+"I don't know where we should have been now."
+
+"I suppose we should have been in St. Barnaby," said the girl. "And if
+it's worse to be in New York, you see what your despair's done, mamma.
+But what's the use? You meant well, and I don't blame you. You can't
+expect even despair to come out always just the way you want it. Perhaps
+you've used too much of it." The girl laughed, and Mrs. Leighton laughed,
+too. Like every one else, she was not merely a prevailing mood, as people
+are apt to be in books, but was an irregularly spheroidal character, with
+surfaces that caught the different lights of circumstance and reflected
+them. Alma got up and took a pose before the mirror, which she then
+transferred to her sketch. The room was pinned about with other sketches,
+which showed with fantastic indistinctness in the shaded gaslight. Alma
+held up the drawing. "How do you like it?"
+
+Mrs. Leighton bent forward over her sewing to look at it. "You've got the
+man's face rather weak."
+
+"Yes, that's so. Either I see all the hidden weakness that's in men's
+natures, and bring it to the surface in their figures, or else I put my
+own weakness into them. Either way, it's a drawback to their presenting a
+truly manly appearance. As long as I have one of the miserable objects
+before me, I can draw him; but as soon as his back's turned I get to
+putting ladies into men's clothes. I should think you'd be scandalized,
+mamma, if you were a really feminine person. It must be your despair that
+helps you to bear up. But what's the matter with the young lady in young
+lady's clothes? Any dust on her?"
+
+"What expressions!" said Mrs. Leighton. "Really, Alma, for a refined girl
+you are the most unrefined!"
+
+"Go on--about the girl in the picture!" said Alma, slightly knocking her
+mother on the shoulder, as she stood over her.
+
+"I don't see anything to her. What's she doing?"
+
+"Oh, just being made love to, I suppose."
+
+"She's perfectly insipid!"
+
+"You're awfully articulate, mamma! Now, if Mr. Wetmore were to criticise
+that picture he'd draw a circle round it in the air, and look at it
+through that, and tilt his head first on one side and then on the other,
+and then look at you, as if you were a figure in it, and then collapse
+awhile, and moan a little and gasp, 'Isn't your young lady a little
+too-too--' and then he'd try to get the word out of you, and groan and
+suffer some more; and you'd say, 'She is, rather,' and that would give
+him courage, and he'd say, 'I don't mean that she's so very--' 'Of course
+not.' 'You understand?' 'Perfectly. I see it myself, now.' 'Well,
+then'---and he'd take your pencil and begin to draw--'I should give her a
+little more--Ah?' 'Yes, I see the difference.'--'You see the difference?'
+And he'd go off to some one else, and you'd know that you'd been doing
+the wishy-washiest thing in the world, though he hadn't spoken a word of
+criticism, and couldn't. But he wouldn't have noticed the expression at
+all; he'd have shown you where your drawing was bad. He doesn't care for
+what he calls the literature of a thing; he says that will take care of
+itself if the drawing's good. He doesn't like my doing these chic things;
+but I'm going to keep it up, for I think it's the nearest way to
+illustrating."
+
+She took her sketch and pinned it up on the door.
+
+"And has Mr. Beaton been about, yet?" asked her mother.
+
+"No," said the girl, with her back still turned; and she added, "I
+believe he's in New York; Mr. Wetmore's seen him."
+
+"It's a little strange he doesn't call."
+
+"It would be if he were not an artist. But artists never do anything like
+other people. He was on his good behavior while he was with us, and he's
+a great deal more conventional than most of them; but even he can't keep
+it up. That's what makes me really think that women can never amount to
+anything in art. They keep all their appointments, and fulfil all their
+duties just as if they didn't know anything about art. Well, most of them
+don't. We've got that new model to-day."
+
+"What new model?"
+
+"The one Mr. Wetmore was telling us about--the old German; he's splendid.
+He's got the most beautiful head; just like the old masters' things. He
+used to be Humphrey Williams's model for his Biblical-pieces; but since
+he's dead, the old man hardly gets anything to do. Mr. Wetmore says there
+isn't anybody in the Bible that Williams didn't paint him as. He's the
+Law and the Prophets in all his Old Testament pictures, and he's Joseph,
+Peter, Judas Iscariot, and the Scribes and Pharisees in the New."
+
+"It's a good thing people don't know how artists work, or some of the
+most sacred pictures would have no influence," said Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"Why, of course not!" cried the girl. "And the influence is the last
+thing a painter thinks of--or supposes he thinks of. What he knows he's
+anxious about is the drawing and the color. But people will never
+understand how simple artists are. When I reflect what a complex and
+sophisticated being I am, I'm afraid I can never come to anything in art.
+Or I should be if I hadn't genius."
+
+"Do you think Mr. Beaton is very simple?" asked Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"Mr. Wetmore doesn't think he's very much of an artist. He thinks he
+talks too well. They believe that if a man can express himself clearly he
+can't paint."
+
+"And what do you believe?"
+
+"Oh, I can express myself, too."
+
+The mother seemed to be satisfied with this evasion. After a while she
+said, "I presume he will call when he gets settled."
+
+The girl made no answer to this. "One of the girls says that old model is
+an educated man. He was in the war, and lost a hand. Doesn't it seem a
+pity for such a man to have to sit to a class of affected geese like us
+as a model? I declare it makes me sick. And we shall keep him a week, and
+pay him six or seven dollars for the use of his grand old head, and then
+what will he do? The last time he was regularly employed was when Mr.
+Mace was working at his Damascus Massacre. Then he wanted so many Arab
+sheiks and Christian elders that he kept old Mr. Lindau steadily employed
+for six months. Now he has to pick up odd jobs where he can."
+
+"I suppose he has his pension," said Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"No; one of the girls"--that was the way Alma always described her
+fellow-students--"says he has no pension. He didn't apply for it for a
+long time, and then there was a hitch about it, and it was
+somethinged--vetoed, I believe she said."
+
+"Who vetoed it?" asked Mrs. Leighton, with some curiosity about the
+process, which she held in reserve.
+
+"I don't know--whoever vetoes things. I wonder what Mr. Wetmore does think
+of us--his class. We must seem perfectly crazy. There isn't one of us
+really knows what she's doing it for, or what she expects to happen when
+she's done it. I suppose every one thinks she has genius. I know the
+Nebraska widow does, for she says that unless you have genius it isn't
+the least use. Everybody's puzzled to know what she does with her baby
+when she's at work--whether she gives it soothing syrup. I wonder how Mr.
+Wetmore can keep from laughing in our faces. I know he does behind our
+backs."
+
+Mrs. Leighton's mind wandered back to another point. "Then if he says Mr.
+Beaton can't paint, I presume he doesn't respect him very much."
+
+"Oh, he never said he couldn't paint. But I know he thinks so. He says
+he's an excellent critic."
+
+"Alma," her mother said, with the effect of breaking off, "what do you
+suppose is the reason he hasn't been near us?"
+
+"Why, I don't know, mamma, except that it would have been natural for
+another person to come, and he's an artist at least, artist enough for
+that."
+
+"That doesn't account for it altogether. He was very nice at St. Barnaby,
+and seemed so interested in you--your work."
+
+"Plenty of people were nice at St. Barnaby. That rich Mrs. Horn couldn't
+contain her joy when she heard we were coming to New York, but she hasn't
+poured in upon us a great deal since we got here."
+
+"But that's different. She's very fashionable, and she's taken up with
+her own set. But Mr. Beaton's one of our kind."
+
+"Thank you. Papa wasn't quite a tombstone-cutter, mamma."
+
+"That makes it all the harder to bear. He can't be ashamed of us. Perhaps
+he doesn't know where we are."
+
+"Do you wish to send him your card, mamma?" The girl flushed and towered
+in scorn of the idea.
+
+"Why, no, Alma," returned her mother.
+
+"Well, then," said Alma.
+
+But Mrs. Leighton was not so easily quelled. She had got her mind on Mr.
+Beaton, and she could not detach it at once. Besides, she was one of
+those women (they are commoner than the same sort of men) whom it does
+not pain to take out their most intimate thoughts and examine them in the
+light of other people's opinions. "But I don't see how he can behave so.
+He must know that--"
+
+"That what, mamma?" demanded the girl.
+
+"That he influenced us a great deal in coming--"
+
+"He didn't. If he dared to presume to think such a thing--"
+
+"Now, Alma," said her mother, with the clinging persistence of such
+natures, "you know he did. And it's no use for you to pretend that we
+didn't count upon him in--in every way. You may not have noticed his
+attentions, and I don't say you did, but others certainly did; and I must
+say that I didn't expect he would drop us so."
+
+"Drop us!" cried Alma, in a fury. "Oh!"
+
+"Yes, drop us, Alma. He must know where we are. Of course, Mr. Wetmore's
+spoken to him about you, and it's a shame that he hasn't been near us. I
+should have thought common gratitude, common decency, would have brought
+him after--after all we did for him."
+
+"We did nothing for him--nothing! He paid his board, and that ended it."
+
+"No, it didn't, Alma. You know what he used to say--about its being like
+home, and all that; and I must say that after his attentions to you, and
+all the things you told me he said, I expected something very dif--"
+
+A sharp peal of the door-bell thrilled through the house, and as if the
+pull of the bell-wire had twitched her to her feet, Mrs. Leighton sprang
+up and grappled with her daughter in their common terror.
+
+They both glared at the clock and made sure that it was five minutes
+after nine. Then they abandoned themselves some moments to the
+unrestricted play of their apprehensions.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+"Why, Alma," whispered the mother, "who in the world can it be at this
+time of night? You don't suppose he--"
+
+"Well, I'm not going to the door, anyhow, mother, I don't care who it is;
+and, of course, he wouldn't be such a goose as to come at this hour." She
+put on a look of miserable trepidation, and shrank back from the door,
+while the hum of the bell died away, in the hall.
+
+"What shall we do?" asked Mrs. Leighton, helplessly.
+
+"Let him go away--whoever they are," said Alma.
+
+Another and more peremptory ring forbade them refuge in this simple
+expedient.
+
+"Oh, dear! what shall we do? Perhaps it's a despatch."
+
+The conjecture moved Alma to no more than a rigid stare. "I shall not
+go," she said. A third ring more insistent than the others followed, and
+she said: "You go ahead, mamma, and I'll come behind to scream if it's
+anybody. We can look through the side-lights at the door first."
+
+Mrs. Leighton fearfully led the way from the back chamber where they had
+been sitting, and slowly descended the stairs. Alma came behind and
+turned up the hall gas-jet with a sudden flash that made them both jump a
+little. The gas inside rendered it more difficult to tell who was on the
+threshold, but Mrs. Leighton decided from a timorous peep through the
+scrims that it was a lady and gentleman. Something in this distribution
+of sex emboldened her; she took her life in her hand, and opened the
+door.
+
+The lady spoke. "Does Mrs. Leighton live heah?" she said, in a rich,
+throaty voice; and she feigned a reference to the agent's permit she held
+in her hand.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Leighton; she mechanically occupied the doorway, while
+Alma already quivered behind her with impatience of her impoliteness.
+
+"Oh," said the lady, who began to appear more and more a young lady, "Ah
+didn't know but Ah had mistaken the hoase. Ah suppose it's rather late to
+see the apawtments, and Ah most ask you to pawdon us." She put this
+tentatively, with a delicately growing recognition of Mrs. Leighton as
+the lady of the house, and a humorous intelligence of the situation in
+the glance she threw Alma over her mother's shoulder. "Ah'm afraid we
+most have frightened you."
+
+"Oh, not at all," said Alma; and at the same time her mother said, "Will
+you walk in, please?"
+
+The gentleman promptly removed his hat and made the Leightons an
+inclusive bow. "You awe very kind, madam, and I am sorry for the trouble
+we awe giving you." He was tall and severe-looking, with a gray,
+trooperish mustache and iron-gray hair, and, as Alma decided, iron-gray
+eyes. His daughter was short, plump, and fresh-colored, with an effect of
+liveliness that did not all express itself in her broad-vowelled, rather
+formal speech, with its odd valuations of some of the auxiliary verbs,
+and its total elision of the canine letter.
+
+"We awe from the Soath," she said, "and we arrived this mawning, but we
+got this cyahd from the brokah just befo' dinnah, and so we awe rathah
+late."
+
+"Not at all; it's only nine o'clock," said Mrs. Leighton. She looked up
+from the card the young lady had given her, and explained, "We haven't
+got in our servants yet, and we had to answer the bell ourselves, and--"
+
+"You were frightened, of coase," said the young lady, caressingly.
+
+The gentleman said they ought not to have come so late, and he offered
+some formal apologies.
+
+"We should have been just as much scared any time after five o'clock,"
+Alma said to the sympathetic intelligence in the girl's face.
+
+She laughed out. "Of coase! Ah would have my hawt in my moath all day
+long, too, if Ah was living in a big hoase alone."
+
+A moment of stiffness followed; Mrs. Leighton would have liked to
+withdraw from the intimacy of the situation, but she did not know how. It
+was very well for these people to assume to be what they pretended; but,
+she reflected too late, she had no proof of it except the agent's permit.
+They were all standing in the hall together, and she prolonged the
+awkward pause while she examined the permit. "You are Mr. Woodburn?" she
+asked, in a way that Alma felt implied he might not be.
+
+"Yes, madam; from Charlottesboag, Virginia," he answered, with the slight
+umbrage a man shows when the strange cashier turns his check over and
+questions him before cashing it.
+
+Alma writhed internally, but outwardly remained subordinate; she examined
+the other girl's dress, and decided in a superficial consciousness that
+she had made her own bonnet.
+
+"I shall be glad to show you my rooms," said Mrs. Leighton, with an
+irrelevant sigh. "You must excuse their being not just as I should wish
+them. We're hardly settled yet."
+
+"Don't speak of it, madam," said the gentleman, "if you can overlook the
+trouble we awe giving you at such an unseasonable houah."
+
+"Ah'm a hoasekeepah mahself," Miss Woodburn joined in, "and Ah know ho'
+to accyoant fo' everything."
+
+Mrs. Leighton led the way up-stairs, and the young lady decided upon the
+large front room and small side room on the third story. She said she
+could take the small one, and the other was so large that her father
+could both sleep and work in it. She seemed not ashamed to ask if Mrs.
+Leighton's price was inflexible, but gave way laughing when her father
+refused to have any bargaining, with a haughty self-respect which he
+softened to deference for Mrs. Leighton. His impulsiveness opened the way
+for some confidence from her, and before the affair was arranged she was
+enjoying in her quality of clerical widow the balm of the Virginians'
+reverent sympathy. They said they were church people themselves.
+
+"Ah don't know what yo' mothah means by yo' hoase not being in oddah,"
+the young lady said to Alma as they went down-stairs together. "Ah'm a
+great hoasekeepah mahself, and Ah mean what Ah say."
+
+They had all turned mechanically into the room where the Leightons were
+sitting when the Woodburns rang: Mr. Woodburn consented to sit down, and
+he remained listening to Mrs. Leighton while his daughter bustled up to
+the sketches pinned round the room and questioned Alma about them.
+
+"Ah suppose you awe going to be a great awtust?" she said, in friendly
+banter, when Alma owned to having done the things. "Ah've a great notion
+to take a few lessons mahself. Who's yo' teachah?"
+
+Alma said she was drawing in Mr. Wetmore's class, and Miss Woodburn said:
+"Well, it's just beautiful, Miss Leighton; it's grand. Ah suppose it's
+raght expensive, now? Mah goodness! we have to cyoant the coast so much
+nowadays; it seems to me we do nothing but cyoant it. Ah'd like to hah
+something once without askin' the price."
+
+"Well, if you didn't ask it," said Alma, "I don't believe Mr. Wetmore
+would ever know what the price of his lessons was. He has to think, when
+you ask him."
+
+"Why, he most be chomming," said Miss Woodburn. "Perhaps Ah maght get the
+lessons for nothing from him. Well, Ah believe in my soul Ah'll trah. Now
+ho' did you begin? and ho' do you expect to get anything oat of it?" She
+turned on Alma eyes brimming with a shrewd mixture of fun and earnest,
+and Alma made note of the fact that she had an early nineteenth-century
+face, round, arch, a little coquettish, but extremely sensible and
+unspoiled-looking, such as used to be painted a good deal in miniature at
+that period; a tendency of her brown hair to twine and twist at the
+temples helped the effect; a high comb would have completed it, Alma
+felt, if she had her bonnet off. It was almost a Yankee country-girl
+type; but perhaps it appeared so to Alma because it was, like that, pure
+Anglo-Saxon. Alma herself, with her dull, dark skin, slender in figure,
+slow in speech, with aristocratic forms in her long hands, and the oval
+of her fine face pointed to a long chin, felt herself much more Southern
+in style than this blooming, bubbling, bustling Virginian.
+
+"I don't know," she answered, slowly.
+
+"Going to take po'traits," suggested Miss Woodburn, "or just paint the
+ahdeal?" A demure burlesque lurked in her tone.
+
+"I suppose I don't expect to paint at all," said Alma. "I'm going to
+illustrate books--if anybody will let me."
+
+"Ah should think they'd just joamp at you," said Miss Woodburn. "Ah'll
+tell you what let's do, Miss Leighton: you make some pictures, and Ah'll
+wrahte a book fo' them. Ah've got to do something. Ali maght as well
+wrahte a book. You know we Southerners have all had to go to woak. But Ah
+don't mand it. I tell papa I shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo'
+if it wasn't fo' the inconvenience."
+
+"Yes, it's inconvenient," said Alma; "but you forget it when you're at
+work, don't you think?"
+
+"Mah, yes! Perhaps that's one reason why poo' people have to woak so
+hawd--to keep their mands off their poverty."
+
+The girls both tittered, and turned from talking in a low tone with their
+backs toward their elders, and faced them.
+
+"Well, Madison," said Mr. Woodburn, "it is time we should go. I bid you
+good-night, madam," he bowed to Mrs. Leighton. "Good-night," he bowed
+again to Alma.
+
+His daughter took leave of them in formal phrase, but with a jolly
+cordiality of manner that deformalized it. "We shall be roand raght soon
+in the mawning, then," she threatened at the door.
+
+"We shall be all ready for you," Alma called after her down the steps.
+
+"Well, Alma?" her mother asked, when the door closed upon them.
+
+"She doesn't know any more about art," said Alma, "than--nothing at all.
+But she's jolly and good-hearted. She praised everything that was bad in
+my sketches, and said she was going to take lessons herself. When a
+person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it, you know
+where they belong artistically."
+
+Mrs. Leighton shook her head with a sigh. "I wish I knew where they
+belonged financially. We shall have to get in two girls at once. I shall
+have to go out the first thing in the morning, and then our troubles will
+begin."
+
+"Well, didn't you want them to begin? I will stay home and help you get
+ready. Our prosperity couldn't begin without the troubles, if you mean
+boarders, and boarders mean servants. I shall be very glad to be
+afflicted with a cook for a while myself."
+
+"Yes; but we don't know anything about these people, or whether they will
+be able to pay us. Did she talk as if they were well off?"
+
+"She talked as if they were poor; poo' she called it."
+
+"Yes, how queerly she pronounced," said Mrs. Leighton. "Well, I ought to
+have told them that I required the first week in advance."
+
+"Mamma! If that's the way you're going to act!"
+
+"Oh, of course, I couldn't, after he wouldn't let her bargain for the
+rooms. I didn't like that."
+
+"I did. And you can see that they were perfect ladies; or at least one of
+them." Alma laughed at herself, but her mother did not notice.
+
+"Their being ladies won't help if they've got no money. It'll make it
+all the worse."
+
+"Very well, then; we have no money, either. We're a match for them any
+day there. We can show them that two can play at that game."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Arnus Beaton's studio looked at first glance like many other painters'
+studios. A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light; casts
+of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil and
+water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table, with paint
+and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly on
+it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk trailing from it;
+a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with its head on one
+side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress dropped before it;
+dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor; canvases faced to
+the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with costumes: these features
+one might notice anywhere. But, besides, there was a bookcase with an
+unusual number of books in it, and there was an open colonial
+writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and scutcheoned, with foreign
+periodicals--French and English--littering its leaf, and some pages of
+manuscript scattered among them. Above all, there was a sculptor's
+revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling, with an
+eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay and on the head of
+the old man who sat on the platform beside it.
+
+Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to
+advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they have
+more than one. But they are apparently immensely interested as well as
+distracted by them. When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed, up to
+a certain point, with any one who said literature was his proper
+expression; but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point, he
+would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist, and
+supremely a colorist. At the certain point in either art he was apt to
+break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other. In
+these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings, very striking,
+very original, very chic, very everything but habitable. It was in this
+way that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he had at first
+approached rather slightingly as a mere decorative accessory of
+architecture. But it had grown in his respect till he maintained that the
+accessory business ought to be all the other way: that temples should be
+raised to enshrine statues, not statues made to ornament temples; that
+was putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance. This was when he
+had carried a plastic study so far that the sculptors who saw it said
+that Beaton might have been an architect, but would certainly never be a
+sculptor. At the same time he did some hurried, nervous things that had a
+popular charm, and that sold in plaster reproductions, to the profit of
+another. Beaton justly despised the popular charm in these, as well as in
+the paintings he sold from time to time; he said it was flat burglary to
+have taken money for them, and he would have been living almost wholly
+upon the bounty of the old tombstone-cutter in Syracuse if it had not
+been for the syndicate letters which he supplied to Fulkerson for ten
+dollars a week.
+
+They were very well done, but he hated doing them after the first two or
+three, and had to be punched up for them by Fulkerson, who did not cease
+to prize them, and who never failed to punch him up. Beaton being what he
+was, Fulkerson was his creditor as well as patron; and Fulkerson being
+what he was, had an enthusiastic patience with the elusive, facile,
+adaptable, unpractical nature of Beaton. He was very proud of his
+art-letters, as he called them; but then Fulkerson was proud of
+everything he secured for his syndicate. The fact that he had secured it
+gave it value; he felt as if he had written it himself.
+
+One art trod upon another's heels with Beaton. The day before he had
+rushed upon canvas the conception of a picture which he said to himself
+was glorious, and to others (at the table d'hote of Maroni) was not bad.
+He had worked at it in a fury till the light failed him, and he execrated
+the dying day. But he lit his lamp and transferred the process of his
+thinking from the canvas to the opening of the syndicate letter which he
+knew Fulkerson would be coming for in the morning. He remained talking so
+long after dinner in the same strain as he had painted and written in
+that he could not finish his letter that night. The next morning, while
+he was making his tea for breakfast, the postman brought him a letter
+from his father enclosing a little check, and begging him with tender,
+almost deferential, urgence to come as lightly upon him as possible, for
+just now his expenses were very heavy. It brought tears of shame into
+Beaton's eyes--the fine, smouldering, floating eyes that many ladies
+admired, under the thick bang--and he said to himself that if he were
+half a man he would go home and go to work cutting gravestones in his
+father's shop. But he would wait, at least, to finish his picture; and as
+a sop to his conscience, to stay its immediate ravening, he resolved to
+finish that syndicate letter first, and borrow enough money from
+Fulkerson to be able to send his father's check back; or, if not that,
+then to return the sum of it partly in Fulkerson's check. While he still
+teemed with both of these good intentions the old man from whom he was
+modelling his head of Judas came, and Beaton saw that he must get through
+with him before he finished either the picture or the letter; he would
+have to pay him for the time, anyway. He utilized the remorse with which
+he was tingling to give his Judas an expression which he found novel in
+the treatment of that character--a look of such touching, appealing
+self-abhorrence that Beaton's artistic joy in it amounted to rapture;
+between the breathless moments when he worked in dead silence for an
+effect that was trying to escape him, he sang and whistled fragments of
+comic opera.
+
+In one of the hushes there came a blow on the outside of the door that
+made Beaton jump, and swear with a modified profanity that merged itself
+in apostrophic prayer. He knew it must be Fulkerson, and after roaring
+"Come in!" he said to the model, "That'll do this morning, Lindau."
+
+Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust and compared it by
+fleeting glances with the old man as he got stiffly up and suffered
+Beaton to help him on with his thin, shabby overcoat.
+
+"Can you come to-morrow, Lindau?"
+
+"No, not to-morrow, Mr. Peaton. I haf to zit for the young ladties."
+
+"Oh!" said Beaton. "Wetmore's class? Is Miss Leighton doing you?"
+
+"I don't know their namess," Lindau began, when Fulkerson said:
+
+"Hope you haven't forgotten mine, Mr. Lindau? I met you with Mr. March at
+Maroni's one night." Fulkerson offered him a universally shakable hand.
+
+"Oh yes! I am gladt to zee you again, Mr. Vulkerson. And Mr. Marge--he
+don't zeem to gome any more?"
+
+"Up to his eyes in work. Been moving on from Boston and getting settled,
+and starting in on our enterprise. Beaton here hasn't got a very
+flattering likeness of you, hey? Well, good-morning," he said, for Lindau
+appeared not to have heard him and was escaping with a bow through the
+door.
+
+Beaton lit a cigarette which he pinched nervously between his lips before
+he spoke. "You've come for that letter, I suppose, Fulkerson? It isn't
+done."
+
+Fulkerson turned from staring at the bust to which he had mounted. "What
+you fretting about that letter for? I don't want your letter."
+
+Beaton stopped biting his cigarette and looked at him. "Don't want my
+letter? Oh, very good!" he bristled up. He took his cigarette from his
+lips, and blew the smoke through his nostrils, and then looked at
+Fulkerson.
+
+"No; I don't want your letter; I want you."
+
+Beacon disdained to ask an explanation, but he internally lowered his
+crest, while he continued to look at Fulkerson without changing his
+defiant countenance. This suited Fulkerson well enough, and he went on
+with relish, "I'm going out of the syndicate business, old man, and I'm
+on a new thing." He put his leg over the back of a chair and rested his
+foot on its seat, and, with one hand in his pocket, he laid the scheme of
+'Every Other Week' before Beaton with the help of the other. The artist
+went about the room, meanwhile, with an effect of indifference which by
+no means offended Fulkerson. He took some water into his mouth from a
+tumbler, which he blew in a fine mist over the head of Judas before
+swathing it in a dirty cotton cloth; he washed his brushes and set his
+palette; he put up on his easel the picture he had blocked on the day
+before, and stared at it with a gloomy face; then he gathered the sheets
+of his unfinished letter together and slid them into a drawer of his
+writing-desk. By the time he had finished and turned again to Fulkerson,
+Fulkerson was saying: "I did think we could have the first number out by
+New-Year's; but it will take longer than that--a month longer; but I'm
+not sorry, for the holidays kill everything; and by February, or the
+middle of February, people will get their breath again and begin to look
+round and ask what's new. Then we'll reply in the language of Shakespeare
+and Milton, 'Every Other Week; and don't you forget it.'" He took down
+his leg and asked, "Got a pipe of 'baccy anywhere?"
+
+Beaton nodded at a clay stem sticking out of a Japanese vase of bronze on
+his mantel. "There's yours," he said; and Fulkerson said, "Thanks," and
+filled the pipe and sat down and began to smoke tranquilly.
+
+Beaton saw that he would have to speak now. "And what do you want with
+me?"
+
+"You? Oh yes," Fulkerson humorously dramatized a return to himself from a
+pensive absence. "Want you for the art department."
+
+Beaton shook his head. "I'm not your man, Fulkerson," he said,
+compassionately. "You want a more practical hand, one that's in touch
+with what's going. I'm getting further and further away from this century
+and its claptrap. I don't believe in your enterprise; I don't respect it,
+and I won't have anything to do with it. It would--choke me, that kind of
+thing."
+
+"That's all right," said Fulkerson. He esteemed a man who was not going
+to let himself go cheap. "Or if it isn't, we can make it. You and March
+will pull together first-rate. I don't care how much ideal you put into
+the thing; the more the better. I can look after the other end of the
+schooner myself."
+
+"You don't understand me," said Beaton. "I'm not trying to get a rise out
+of you. I'm in earnest. What you want is some man who can have patience
+with mediocrity putting on the style of genius, and with genius turning
+mediocrity on his hands. I haven't any luck with men; I don't get on with
+them; I'm not popular." Beaton recognized the fact with the satisfaction
+which it somehow always brings to human pride.
+
+"So much the better!" Fulkerson was ready for him at this point. "I don't
+want you to work the old-established racket the reputations. When I want
+them I'll go to them with a pocketful of rocks--knock-down argument. But
+my idea is to deal with the volunteer material. Look at the way the
+periodicals are carried on now! Names! names! names! In a country that's
+just boiling over with literary and artistic ability of every kind the
+new fellows have no chance. The editors all engage their material. I
+don't believe there are fifty volunteer contributions printed in a year
+in all the New York magazines. It's all wrong; it's suicidal. 'Every
+Other Week' is going back to the good old anonymous system, the only fair
+system. It's worked well in literature, and it will work well in art."
+
+"It won't work well in art," said Beaton. "There you have a totally
+different set of conditions. What you'll get by inviting volunteer
+illustrations will be a lot of amateur trash. And how are you going to
+submit your literature for illustration? It can't be done. At any rate, I
+won't undertake to do it."
+
+"We'll get up a School of Illustration," said Fulkerson, with cynical
+security. "You can read the things and explain 'em, and your pupils can
+make their sketches under your eye. They wouldn't be much further out
+than most illustrations are if they never knew what they were
+illustrating. You might select from what comes in and make up a sort of
+pictorial variations to the literature without any particular reference
+to it. Well, I understand you to accept?"
+
+"No, you don't."
+
+"That is, to consent to help us with your advice and criticism. That's
+all I want. It won't commit you to anything; and you can be as anonymous
+as anybody." At the door Fulkerson added: "By-the-way, the new man--the
+fellow that's taken my old syndicate business--will want you to keep on;
+but I guess he's going to try to beat you down on the price of the
+letters. He's going in for retrenchment. I brought along a check for this
+one; I'm to pay for that." He offered Beaton an envelope.
+
+"I can't take it, Fulkerson. The letter's paid for already." Fulkerson
+stepped forward and laid the envelope on the table among the tubes of
+paint.
+
+"It isn't the letter merely. I thought you wouldn't object to a little
+advance on your 'Every Other Week' work till you kind of got started."
+
+Beaton remained inflexible. "It can't be done, Fulkerson. Don't I tell
+you I can't sell myself out to a thing I don't believe in? Can't you
+understand that?"
+
+"Oh yes; I can understand that first-rate. I don't want to buy you; I
+want to borrow you. It's all right. See? Come round when you can; I'd
+like to introduce you to old March. That's going to be our address." He
+put a card on the table beside the envelope, and Beaton allowed him to go
+without making him take the check back. He had remembered his father's
+plea; that unnerved him, and he promised himself again to return his
+father's poor little check and to work on that picture and give it to
+Fulkerson for the check he had left and for his back debts. He resolved
+to go to work on the picture at once; he had set his palette for it; but
+first he looked at Fulkerson's check. It was for only fifty dollars, and
+the canny Scotch blood in Beaton rebelled; he could not let this picture
+go for any such money; he felt a little like a man whose generosity has
+been trifled with. The conflict of emotions broke him up, and he could
+not work.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The day wasted away in Beaton's hands; at half-past four o'clock he went
+out to tea at the house of a lady who was At Home that afternoon from
+four till seven. By this time Beaton was in possession of one of those
+other selves of which we each have several about us, and was again the
+laconic, staccato, rather worldlified young artist whose moments of a
+controlled utterance and a certain distinction of manner had commended
+him to Mrs. Horn's fancy in the summer at St. Barnaby.
+
+Mrs. Horn's rooms were large, and they never seemed very full, though
+this perhaps was because people were always so quiet. The ladies, who
+outnumbered the men ten to one, as they always do at a New York tea, were
+dressed in sympathy with the low tone every one spoke in, and with the
+subdued light which gave a crepuscular uncertainty to the few objects,
+the dim pictures, the unexcited upholstery, of the rooms. One breathed
+free of bric-a-brac there, and the new-comer breathed softly as one does
+on going into church after service has begun. This might be a suggestion
+from the voiceless behavior of the man-servant who let you in, but it was
+also because Mrs. Horn's At Home was a ceremony, a decorum, and not
+festival. At far greater houses there was more gayety, at richer houses
+there was more freedom; the suppression at Mrs. Horn's was a personal,
+not a social, effect; it was an efflux of her character, demure,
+silentious, vague, but very correct.
+
+Beaton easily found his way to her around the grouped skirts and among
+the detached figures, and received a pressure of welcome from the hand
+which she momentarily relaxed from the tea-pot. She sat behind a table
+put crosswise of a remote corner, and offered tea to people whom a niece
+of hers received provisionally or sped finally in the outer room. They
+did not usually take tea, and when they did they did not usually drink
+it; but Beaton was feverishly glad of his cup; he took rum and lemon in
+it, and stood talking at Mrs. Horn's side till the next arrival should
+displace him: he talked in his French manner.
+
+"I have been hoping to see you," she said. "I wanted to ask you about the
+Leightons. Did they really come?"
+
+"I believe so. They are in town--yes. I haven't seen them."
+
+"Then you don't know how they're getting on--that pretty creature, with
+her cleverness, and poor Mrs. Leighton? I was afraid they were venturing
+on a rash experiment. Do you know where they are?"
+
+"In West Eleventh Street somewhere. Miss Leighton is in Mr. Wetmore's
+class."
+
+"I must look them up. Do you know their number?"
+
+"Not at the moment. I can find out."
+
+"Do," said Mrs. Horn. "What courage they must have, to plunge into New
+York as they've done! I really didn't think they would. I wonder if
+they've succeeded in getting anybody into their house yet?"
+
+"I don't know," said Beaton.
+
+"I discouraged their coming all I could," she sighed, "and I suppose you
+did, too. But it's quite useless trying to make people in a place like
+St. Barnaby understand how it is in town."
+
+"Yes," said Beaton. He stirred his tea, while inwardly he tried to
+believe that he had really discouraged the Leightons from coming to New
+York. Perhaps the vexation of his failure made him call Mrs. Horn in his
+heart a fraud.
+
+"Yes," she went on, "it is very, very hard. And when they won't
+understand, and rush on their doom, you feel that they are going to hold
+you respons--"
+
+Mrs. Horn's eyes wandered from Beaton; her voice faltered in the faded
+interest of her remark, and then rose with renewed vigor in greeting a
+lady who came up and stretched her glove across the tea-cups.
+
+Beaton got himself away and out of the house with a much briefer adieu to
+the niece than he had meant to make. The patronizing compassion of Mrs.
+Horn for the Leightons filled him with indignation toward her, toward
+himself. There was no reason why he should not have ignored them as he
+had done; but there was a feeling. It was his nature to be careless, and
+he had been spoiled into recklessness; he neglected everybody, and only
+remembered them when it suited his whim or his convenience; but he
+fiercely resented the inattentions of others toward himself. He had no
+scruple about breaking an engagement or failing to keep an appointment;
+he made promises without thinking of their fulfilment, and not because he
+was a faithless person, but because he was imaginative, and expected at
+the time to do what he said, but was fickle, and so did not. As most of
+his shortcomings were of a society sort, no great harm was done to
+anybody else. He had contracted somewhat the circle of his acquaintance
+by what some people called his rudeness, but most people treated it as
+his oddity, and were patient with it. One lady said she valued his coming
+when he said he would come because it had the charm of the unexpected.
+"Only it shows that it isn't always the unexpected that happens," she
+explained.
+
+It did not occur to him that his behavior was immoral; he did not realize
+that it was creating a reputation if not a character for him. While we
+are still young we do not realize that our actions have this effect. It
+seems to us that people will judge us from what we think and feel. Later
+we find out that this is impossible; perhaps we find it out too late;
+some of us never find it out at all.
+
+In spite of his shame about the Leightons, Beaton had no present
+intention of looking them up or sending Mrs. Horn their address. As a
+matter of fact, he never did send it; but he happened to meet Mr. Wetmore
+and his wife at the restaurant where he dined, and he got it of the
+painter for himself. He did not ask him how Miss Leighton was getting on;
+but Wetmore launched out, with Alma for a tacit text, on the futility of
+women generally going in for art. "Even when they have talent they've got
+too much against them. Where a girl doesn't seem very strong, like Miss
+Leighton, no amount of chic is going to help."
+
+His wife disputed him on behalf of her sex, as women always do.
+
+"No, Dolly," he persisted; "she'd better be home milking the cows and
+leading the horse to water."
+
+"Do you think she'd better be up till two in the morning at balls and
+going all day to receptions and luncheons?"
+
+"Oh, guess it isn't a question of that, even if she weren't drawing. You
+knew them at home," he said to Beaton.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I remember. Her mother said you suggested me. Well, the girl has some
+notion of it; there's no doubt about that. But--she's a woman. The
+trouble with these talented girls is that they're all woman. If they
+weren't, there wouldn't be much chance for the men, Beaton. But we've got
+Providence on our own side from the start. I'm able to watch all their
+inspirations with perfect composure. I know just how soon it's going to
+end in nervous breakdown. Somebody ought to marry them all and put them
+out of their misery."
+
+"And what will you do with your students who are married already?" his
+wife said. She felt that she had let him go on long enough.
+
+"Oh, they ought to get divorced."
+
+"You ought to be ashamed to take their money if that's what you think of
+them."
+
+"My dear, I have a wife to support."
+
+Beaton intervened with a question. "Do you mean that Miss Leighton isn't
+standing it very well?"
+
+"How do I know? She isn't the kind that bends; she's the kind that
+breaks."
+
+After a little silence Mrs. Wetmore asked, "Won't you come home with us,
+Mr. Beaton?"
+
+"Thank you; no. I have an engagement."
+
+"I don't see why that should prevent you," said Wetmore. "But you always
+were a punctilious cuss. Well!"
+
+Beaton lingered over his cigar; but no one else whom he knew came in, and
+he yielded to the threefold impulse of conscience, of curiosity, of
+inclination, in going to call at the Leightons'. He asked for the ladies,
+and the maid showed him into the parlor, where he found Mrs. Leighton and
+Miss Woodburn.
+
+The widow met him with a welcome neatly marked by resentment; she meant
+him to feel that his not coming sooner had been noticed. Miss Woodburn
+bubbled and gurgled on, and did what she could to mitigate his
+punishment, but she did not feel authorized to stay it, till Mrs.
+Leighton, by studied avoidance of her daughter's name, obliged Beaton to
+ask for her. Then Miss Woodburn caught up her work, and said, "Ah'll go
+and tell her, Mrs. Leighton." At the top of the stairs she found Alma,
+and Alma tried to make it seem as if she had not been standing there.
+"Mah goodness, chald! there's the handsomest young man asking for you
+down there you evah saw. Alh told you' mothah Ah would come up fo' you."
+
+"What--who is it?"
+
+"Don't you know? But ho' could you? He's got the most beautiful eyes,
+and he wea's his hai' in a bang, and he talks English like it was
+something else, and his name's Mr. Beaton."
+
+"Did he--ask for me?" said Alma, with a dreamy tone. She put her hand on
+the stairs rail, and a little shiver ran over her.
+
+"Didn't I tell you? Of coase he did! And you ought to go raght down if
+you want to save the poo' fellah's lahfe; you' mothah's just freezin' him
+to death."
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+"She is?" cried Alma. "Tchk!" She flew downstairs, and flitted swiftly
+into the room, and fluttered up to Beaton, and gave him a crushing
+hand-shake.
+
+"How very kind of you to come and see us, Mr. Beaton! When did you come
+to New York? Don't you find it warm here? We've only just lighted the
+furnace, but with this mild weather it seems too early. Mamma does keep
+it so hot!" She rushed about opening doors and shutting registers, and
+then came back and sat facing him from the sofa with a mask of radiant
+cordiality. "How have you been since we saw you?"
+
+"Very well," said Beaton. "I hope you're well, Miss Leighton?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly! I think New York agrees with us both wonderfully. I never
+knew such air. And to think of our not having snow yet! I should think
+everybody would want to come here! Why don't you come, Mr. Beaton?"
+
+Beaton lifted his eyes and looked at her. "I--I live in New York," he
+faltered.
+
+"In New York City!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Surely, Alma," said her mother, "you remember Mr. Beaton's telling us he
+lived in New York."
+
+"But I thought you came from Rochester; or was it Syracuse? I always get
+those places mixed up."
+
+"Probably I told you my father lived at Syracuse. I've been in New York
+ever since I came home from Paris," said Beaton, with the confusion of a
+man who feels himself played upon by a woman.
+
+"From Paris!" Alma echoed, leaning forward, with her smiling mask tight
+on. "Wasn't it Munich where you studied?"
+
+"I was at Munich, too. I met Wetmore there."
+
+"Oh, do you know Mr. Wetmore?"
+
+"Why, Alma," her mother interposed again, "it was Mr. Beaton who told you
+of Mr. Wetmore."
+
+"Was it? Why, yes, to be sure. It was Mrs. Horn who suggested Mr. Ilcomb.
+I remember now. I can't thank you enough for having sent me to Mr.
+Wetmore, Mr. Beaton. Isn't he delightful? Oh yes, I'm a perfect
+Wetmorian, I can assure you. The whole class is the same way."
+
+"I just met him and Mrs. Wetmore at dinner," said Beaton, attempting the
+recovery of something that he had lost through the girl's shining ease
+and steely sprightliness. She seemed to him so smooth and hard, with a
+repellent elasticity from which he was flung off. "I hope you're not
+working too hard, Miss Leighton?"
+
+"Oh no! I enjoy every minute of it, and grow stronger on it. Do I look
+very much wasted away?" She looked him full in the face, brilliantly
+smiling, and intentionally beautiful.
+
+"No," he said, with a slow sadness; "I never saw you looking better."
+
+"Poor Mr. Beaton!" she said, in recognition of his doleful tune. "It
+seems to be quite a blow."
+
+"Oh no--"
+
+"I remember all the good advice you used to give me about not working too
+hard, and probably it's that that's saved my life--that and the
+house-hunting. Has mamma told you of our adventures in getting settled?
+
+"Some time we must. It was such fun! And didn't you think we were
+fortunate to get such a pretty house? You must see both our parlors." She
+jumped up, and her mother followed her with a bewildered look as she ran
+into the back parlor and flashed up the gas.
+
+"Come in here, Mr. Beaton. I want to show you the great feature of the
+house." She opened the low windows that gave upon a glazed veranda
+stretching across the end of the room. "Just think of this in New York!
+You can't see it very well at night, but when the southern sun pours in
+here all the afternoon--"
+
+"Yes, I can imagine it," he said. He glanced up at the bird-cage hanging
+from the roof. "I suppose Gypsy enjoys it."
+
+"You remember Gypsy?" she said; and she made a cooing, kissing little
+noise up at the bird, who responded drowsily. "Poor old Gypsum! Well, he
+sha'n't be disturbed. Yes, it's Gyp's delight, and Colonel Woodburn likes
+to write here in the morning. Think of us having a real live author in
+the house! And Miss Woodburn: I'm so glad you've seen her! They're
+Southern people."
+
+"Yes, that was obvious in her case."
+
+"From her accent? Isn't it fascinating? I didn't believe I could ever
+endure Southerners, but we're like one family with the Woodburns. I
+should think you'd want to paint Miss Woodburn. Don't you think her
+coloring is delicious? And such a quaint kind of eighteenth-century type
+of beauty! But she's perfectly lovely every way, and everything she says
+is so funny. The Southerners seem to be such great talkers; better than
+we are, don't you think?"
+
+"I don't know," said Beaton, in pensive discouragement. He was sensible
+of being manipulated, operated, but he was helpless to escape from the
+performer or to fathom her motives. His pensiveness passed into gloom,
+and was degenerating into sulky resentment when he went away, after
+several failures to get back to the old ground he had held in relation to
+Alma. He retrieved something of it with Mrs. Leighton; but Alma glittered
+upon him to the last with a keen impenetrable candor, a child-like
+singleness of glance, covering unfathomable reserve.
+
+"Well, Alma," said her mother, when the door had closed upon him.
+
+"Well, mother." Then, after a moment, she said, with a rush: "Did you
+think I was going to let him suppose we were piqued at his not coming?
+Did you suppose I was going to let him patronize us, or think that we
+were in the least dependent on his favor or friendship?"
+
+Her mother did not attempt to answer her. She merely said, "I shouldn't
+think he would come any more."
+
+"Well, we have got on so far without him; perhaps we can live through the
+rest of the winter."
+
+"I couldn't help feeling sorry for him. He was quite stupefied. I could
+see that he didn't know what to make of you."
+
+"He's not required to make anything of me," said Alma.
+
+"Do you think he really believed you had forgotten all those things?"
+
+"Impossible to say, mamma."
+
+"Well, I don't think it was quite right, Alma."
+
+"I'll leave him to you the next time. Miss Woodburn said you were
+freezing him to death when I came down."
+
+"That was quite different. But, there won't be any next time, I'm
+afraid," sighed Mrs. Leighton.
+
+Beaton went home feeling sure there would not. He tried to read when he
+got to his room; but Alma's looks, tones, gestures, whirred through and
+through the woof of the story like shuttles; he could not keep them out,
+and he fell asleep at last, not because he forgot them, but because he
+forgave them. He was able to say to himself that he had been justly cut
+off from kindness which he knew how to value in losing it. He did not
+expect ever to right himself in Alma's esteem, but he hoped some day to
+let her know that he had understood. It seemed to him that it would be a
+good thing if she should find it out after his death. He imagined her
+being touched by it under those circumstances.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had done himself injustice.
+When he uncovered his Judas and looked at it, he could not believe that
+the man who was capable of such work deserved the punishment Miss
+Leighton had inflicted upon him. He still forgave her, but in the
+presence of a thing like that he could not help respecting himself; he
+believed that if she could see it she would be sorry that she had cut
+herself off from his acquaintance. He carried this strain of conviction
+all through his syndicate letter, which he now took out of his desk and
+finished, with an increasing security of his opinions and a mounting
+severity in his judgments. He retaliated upon the general condition of
+art among us the pangs of wounded vanity, which Alma had made him feel,
+and he folded up his manuscript and put it in his pocket, almost healed
+of his humiliation. He had been able to escape from its sting so entirely
+while he was writing that the notion of making his life more and more
+literary commended itself to him. As it was now evident that the future
+was to be one of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an oblivion tinged
+with bitterness, he formlessly reasoned in favor of reconsidering his
+resolution against Fulkerson's offer. One must call it reasoning, but it
+was rather that swift internal dramatization which constantly goes on in
+persons of excitable sensibilities, and which now seemed to sweep Beaton
+physically along toward the 'Every Other Week' office, and carried his
+mind with lightning celerity on to a time when he should have given that
+journal such quality and authority in matters of art as had never been
+enjoyed by any in America before. With the prosperity which he made
+attend his work he changed the character of the enterprise, and with
+Fulkerson's enthusiastic support he gave the public an art journal of as
+high grade as 'Les Lettres et les Arts', and very much that sort of
+thing. All this involved now the unavailing regret of Alma Leighton, and
+now his reconciliation with her: they were married in Grace Church,
+because Beaton had once seen a marriage there, and had intended to paint
+a picture of it some time.
+
+Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his responding with due
+dryness to Fulkerson's cheery "Hello, old man!" when he found himself in
+the building fitted up for the 'Every Other Week' office. Fulkerson's
+room was back of the smaller one occupied by the bookkeeper; they had
+been respectively the reception-room and dining-room of the little place
+in its dwelling-house days, and they had been simply and tastefully
+treated in their transformation into business purposes. The narrow old
+trim of the doors and windows had been kept, and the quaintly ugly marble
+mantels. The architect had said, Better let them stay they expressed
+epoch, if not character.
+
+"Well, have you come round to go to work? Just hang up your coat on the
+floor anywhere," Fulkerson went on.
+
+"I've come to bring you that letter," said Beaton, all the more haughtily
+because he found that Fulkerson was not alone when he welcomed him in
+these free and easy terms. There was a quiet-looking man, rather stout,
+and a little above the middle height, with a full, close-cropped
+iron-gray beard, seated beyond the table where Fulkerson tilted himself
+back, with his knees set against it; and leaning against the mantel there
+was a young man with a singularly gentle face, in which the look of
+goodness qualified and transfigured a certain simplicity. His large blue
+eyes were somewhat prominent; and his rather narrow face was drawn
+forward in a nose a little too long perhaps, if it had not been for the
+full chin deeply cut below the lip, and jutting firmly forward.
+
+"Introduce you to Mr. March, our editor, Mr. Beaton," Fulkerson said,
+rolling his head in the direction of the elder man; and then nodding it
+toward the younger, he said, "Mr. Dryfoos, Mr. Beaton." Beaton shook
+hands with March, and then with Mr. Dryfoos, and Fulkerson went on,
+gayly: "We were just talking of you, Beaton--well, you know the old
+saying. Mr. March, as I told you, is our editor, and Mr. Dryfoos has
+charge of the publishing department--he's the counting-room incarnate,
+the source of power, the fountain of corruption, the element that
+prevents journalism being the high and holy thing that it would be if
+there were no money in it." Mr. Dryfoos turned his large, mild eyes upon
+Beaton, and laughed with the uneasy concession which people make to a
+character when they do not quite approve of the character's language.
+"What Mr. March and I are trying to do is to carry on this thing so that
+there won't be any money in it--or very little; and we're planning to
+give the public a better article for the price than it's ever had before.
+Now here's a dummy we've had made up for 'Every Other Week', and as we've
+decided to adopt it, we would naturally like your opinion of it, so's to
+know what opinion to have of you." He reached forward and pushed toward
+Beaton a volume a little above the size of the ordinary duodecimo book;
+its ivory-white pebbled paper cover was prettily illustrated with a
+water-colored design irregularly washed over the greater part of its
+surface: quite across the page at top, and narrowing from right to left
+as it descended. In the triangular space left blank the title of the
+periodical and the publisher's imprint were tastefully lettered so as to
+be partly covered by the background of color.
+
+"It's like some of those Tartarin books of Daudet's," said Beacon,
+looking at it with more interest than he suffered to be seen. "But it's a
+book, not a magazine." He opened its pages of thick, mellow white paper,
+with uncut leaves, the first few pages experimentally printed in the type
+intended to be used, and illustrated with some sketches drawn into and
+over the text, for the sake of the effect.
+
+"A Daniel--a Daniel come to judgment! Sit down, Dan'el, and take it
+easy." Fulkerson pushed a chair toward Beaton, who dropped into it.
+"You're right, Dan'el; it's a book, to all practical intents and
+purposes. And what we propose to do with the American public is to give
+it twenty-four books like this a year--a complete library--for the absurd
+sum of six dollars. We don't intend to sell 'em--it's no name for the
+transaction--but to give 'em. And what we want to get out of you--beg,
+borrow, buy, or steal from you is an opinion whether we shall make the
+American public this princely present in paper covers like this, or in
+some sort of flexible boards, so they can set them on the shelf and say
+no more about it. Now, Dan'el, come to judgment, as our respected friend
+Shylock remarked."
+
+Beacon had got done looking at the dummy, and he dropped it on the table
+before Fulkerson, who pushed it away, apparently to free himself from
+partiality. "I don't know anything about the business side, and I can't
+tell about the effect of either style on the sales; but you'll spoil the
+whole character of the cover if you use anything thicker than that
+thickish paper."
+
+"All right; very good; first-rate. The ayes have it. Paper it is. I don't
+mind telling you that we had decided for that paper before you came in.
+Mr. March wanted it, because he felt in his bones just the way you do
+about it, and Mr. Dryfoos wanted it, because he's the counting-room
+incarnate, and it's cheaper; and I wanted it, because I always like to
+go with the majority. Now what do you think of that little design
+itself?"
+
+"The sketch?" Beaton pulled the book toward him again and looked at it
+again. "Rather decorative. Drawing's not remarkable. Graceful; rather
+nice." He pushed the book away again, and Fulkerson pulled it to his aide
+of the table.
+
+"Well, that's a piece of that amateur trash you despise so much. I went
+to a painter I know-by-the-way, he was guilty of suggesting you for this
+thing, but I told him I was ahead of him--and I got him to submit my idea
+to one of his class, and that's the result. Well, now, there ain't
+anything in this world that sells a book like a pretty cover, and we're
+going to have a pretty cover for 'Every Other Week' every time. We've cut
+loose from the old traditional quarto literary newspaper size, and we've
+cut loose from the old two-column big page magazine size; we're going to
+have a duodecimo page, clear black print, and paper that'll make your
+mouth water; and we're going to have a fresh illustration for the cover
+of each number, and we ain't agoing to give the public any rest at all.
+Sometimes we're going to have a delicate little landscape like this, and
+sometimes we're going to have an indelicate little figure, or as much so
+as the law will allow."
+
+The young man leaning against the mantelpiece blushed a sort of protest.
+
+March smiled and said, dryly, "Those are the numbers that Mr. Fulkerson
+is going to edit himself."
+
+"Exactly. And Mr. Beaton, here, is going to supply the floating females,
+gracefully airing themselves against a sunset or something of that kind."
+Beaton frowned in embarrassment, while Fulkerson went on philosophically;
+"It's astonishing how you fellows can keep it up at this stage of the
+proceedings; you can paint things that your harshest critic would be
+ashamed to describe accurately; you're as free as the theatre. But that's
+neither here nor there. What I'm after is the fact that we're going to
+have variety in our title-pages, and we are going to have novelty in the
+illustrations of the body of the book. March, here, if he had his own
+way, wouldn't have any illustrations at all."
+
+"Not because I don't like them, Mr. Beacon," March interposed, "but
+because I like them too much. I find that I look at the pictures in an
+illustrated article, but I don't read the article very much, and I fancy
+that's the case with most other people. You've got to doing them so
+prettily that you take our eyes off the literature, if you don't take our
+minds off."
+
+"Like the society beauties on the stage: people go in for the beauty so
+much that they don't know what the play is. But the box-office gets there
+all the same, and that's what Mr. Dryfoos wants." Fulkerson looked up
+gayly at Mr. Dryfoos, who smiled deprecatingly.
+
+"It was different," March went on, "when the illustrations used to be
+bad. Then the text had some chance."
+
+"Old legitimate drama days, when ugliness and genius combined to storm
+the galleries," said Fulkerson.
+
+"We can still make them bad enough," said Beaton, ignoring Fulkerson in
+his remark to March.
+
+Fulkerson took the reply upon himself. "Well, you needn't make 'em so bad
+as the old-style cuts; but you can make them unobtrusive, modestly
+retiring. We've got hold of a process something like that those French
+fellows gave Daudet thirty-five thousand dollars to write a novel to use
+with; kind of thing that begins at one side; or one corner, and spreads
+in a sort of dim religious style over the print till you can't tell which
+is which. Then we've got a notion that where the pictures don't behave
+quite so sociably, they can be dropped into the text, like a little
+casual remark, don't you know, or a comment that has some connection, or
+maybe none at all, with what's going on in the story. Something like
+this." Fulkerson took away one knee from the table long enough to open
+the drawer, and pull from it a book that he shoved toward Beacon. "That's
+a Spanish book I happened to see at Brentano's, and I froze to it on
+account of the pictures. I guess they're pretty good."
+
+"Do you expect to get such drawings in this country?" asked Beaton, after
+a glance at the book. "Such character--such drama? You won't."
+
+"Well, I'm not so sure," said Fulkerson, "come to get our amateurs warmed
+up to the work. But what I want is to get the physical effect, so to
+speak--get that sized picture into our page, and set the fashion of it. I
+shouldn't care if the illustration was sometimes confined to an initial
+letter and a tail-piece."
+
+"Couldn't be done here. We haven't the touch. We're good in some things,
+but this isn't in our way," said Beaton, stubbornly. "I can't think of a
+man who could do it; that is, among those that would."
+
+"Well, think of some woman, then," said Fulkerson, easily. "I've got a
+notion that the women could help us out on this thing, come to get 'em
+interested. There ain't anything so popular as female fiction; why not
+try female art?"
+
+"The females themselves have been supposed to have been trying it for a
+good while," March suggested; and Mr. Dryfoos laughed nervously; Beaton
+remained solemnly silent.
+
+"Yes, I know," Fulkerson assented. "But I don't mean that kind exactly.
+What we want to do is to work the 'ewig Weibliche' in this concern. We
+want to make a magazine that will go for the women's fancy every time. I
+don't mean with recipes for cooking and fashions and personal gossip
+about authors and society, but real high-tone literature that will show
+women triumphing in all the stories, or else suffering tremendously.
+We've got to recognize that women form three-fourths of the reading
+public in this country, and go for their tastes and their sensibilities
+and their sex-piety along the whole line. They do like to think that
+women can do things better than men; and if we can let it leak out and
+get around in the papers that the managers of 'Every Other Week' couldn't
+stir a peg in the line of the illustrations they wanted till they got a
+lot of God-gifted girls to help them, it 'll make the fortune of the
+thing. See?"
+
+He looked sunnily round at the other men, and March said: "You ought to
+be in charge of a Siamese white elephant, Fulkerson. It's a disgrace to
+be connected with you."
+
+"It seems to me," said Beaton, "that you'd better get a God-gifted girl
+for your art editor."
+
+Fulkerson leaned alertly forward, and touched him on the shoulder, with a
+compassionate smile. "My dear boy, they haven't got the genius of
+organization. It takes a very masculine man for that--a man who combines
+the most subtle and refined sympathies with the most forceful purposes
+and the most ferruginous will-power. Which his name is Angus Beaton, and
+here he sets!"
+
+The others laughed with Fulkerson at his gross burlesque of flattery, and
+Beaton frowned sheepishly. "I suppose you understand this man's style,"
+he growled toward March.
+
+"He does, my son," said Fulkerson. "He knows that I cannot tell a lie."
+He pulled out his watch, and then got suddenly upon his feet.
+
+"It's quarter of twelve, and I've got an appointment." Beaton rose too,
+and Fulkerson put the two books in his lax hands. "Take these along,
+Michelangelo Da Vinci, my friend, and put your multitudinous mind on them
+for about an hour, and let us hear from you to-morrow. We hang upon your
+decision."
+
+"There's no deciding to be done," said Beaton. "You can't combine the two
+styles. They'd kill each other."
+
+"A Dan'el, a Dan'el come to judgment! I knew you could help us out! Take
+'em along, and tell us which will go the furthest with the 'ewig
+Weibliche.' Dryfoos, I want a word with you." He led the way into the
+front room, flirting an airy farewell to Beaton with his hand as he went.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+March and Beaton remained alone together for a moment, and March said: "I
+hope you will think it worth while to take hold with us, Mr. Beaton. Mr.
+Fulkerson puts it in his own way, of course; but we really want to make a
+nice thing of the magazine." He had that timidity of the elder in the
+presence of the younger man which the younger, preoccupied with his own
+timidity in the presence of the elder, cannot imagine. Besides, March was
+aware of the gulf that divided him as a literary man from Beaton as an
+artist, and he only ventured to feel his way toward sympathy with him.
+"We want to make it good; we want to make it high. Fulkerson is right
+about aiming to please the women, but of course he caricatures the way of
+going about it."
+
+For answer, Beaton flung out, "I can't go in for a thing I don't
+understand the plan of."
+
+March took it for granted that he had wounded some exposed sensibility
+of Beaton's. He continued still more deferentially: "Mr. Fulkerson's
+notion--I must say the notion is his, evolved from his syndicate
+experience--is that we shall do best in fiction to confine ourselves to
+short stories, and make each number complete in itself. He found that the
+most successful things he could furnish his newspapers were short
+stories; we Americans are supposed to excel in writing them; and most
+people begin with them in fiction; and it's Mr. Fulkerson's idea to work
+unknown talent, as he says, and so he thinks he can not only get them
+easily, but can gradually form a school of short-story writers. I can't
+say I follow him altogether, but I respect his experience. We shall not
+despise translations of short stories, but otherwise the matter will all
+be original, and, of course, it won't all be short stories. We shall use
+sketches of travel, and essays, and little dramatic studies, and bits of
+biography and history; but all very light, and always short enough to be
+completed in a single number. Mr. Fulkerson believes in pictures, and
+most of the things would be capable of illustration."
+
+"I see," said Beaton.
+
+"I don't know but this is the whole affair," said March, beginning to
+stiffen a little at the young man's reticence.
+
+"I understand. Thank you for taking the trouble to explain.
+Good-morning." Beaton bowed himself off, without offering to shake hands.
+
+Fulkerson came in after a while from the outer office, and Mr. Dryfoos
+followed him. "Well, what do you think of our art editor?"
+
+"Is he our art editor?" asked March. "I wasn't quite certain when he
+left."
+
+"Did he take the books?"
+
+"Yes, he took the books."
+
+"I guess he's all right, then." Fulkerson added, in concession to the
+umbrage he detected in March.
+
+"Beaton has his times of being the greatest ass in the solar system, but
+he usually takes it out in personal conduct. When it comes to work, he's
+a regular horse."
+
+"He appears to have compromised for the present by being a perfect mule,"
+said March.
+
+"Well, he's in a transition state," Fulkerson allowed. "He's the man for
+us. He really understands what we want. You'll see; he'll catch on. That
+lurid glare of his will wear off in the course of time. He's really a
+good fellow when you take him off his guard; and he's full of ideas. He's
+spread out over a good deal of ground at present, and so he's pretty
+thin; but come to gather him up into a lump, there's a good deal of
+substance to him. Yes, there is. He's a first-rate critic, and he's a
+nice fellow with the other artists. They laugh at his universality, but
+they all like him. He's the best kind of a teacher when he condescends to
+it; and he's just the man to deal with our volunteer work. Yes, sir, he's
+a prize. Well, I must go now."
+
+Fulkerson went out of the street door, and then came quickly back.
+"By-the-bye, March, I saw that old dynamiter of yours round at Beaton's
+room yesterday."
+
+"What old dynamiter of mine?"
+
+"That old one-handed Dutchman--friend of your youth--the one we saw at
+Maroni's--"
+
+"Oh-Lindau!" said March, with a vague pang of self reproach for having
+thought of Lindau so little after the first flood of his tender feeling
+toward him was past.
+
+"Yes, our versatile friend was modelling him as Judas Iscariot. Lindau
+makes a first-rate Judas, and Beaton has got a big thing in that head if
+he works the religious people right. But what I was thinking of was
+this--it struck me just as I was going out of the door: Didn't you tell
+me Lindau knew forty or fifty, different languages?"
+
+"Four or five, yes."
+
+"Well, we won't quarrel about the number. The question is, Why not work
+him in the field of foreign literature? You can't go over all their
+reviews and magazines, and he could do the smelling for you, if you could
+trust his nose. Would he know a good thing?"
+
+"I think he would," said March, on whom the scope of Fulkerson's
+suggestion gradually opened. "He used to have good taste, and he must
+know the ground. Why, it's a capital idea, Fulkerson! Lindau wrote very
+fair English, and he could translate, with a little revision."
+
+"And he would probably work cheap. Well, hadn't you better see him about
+it? I guess it 'll be quite a windfall for him."
+
+"Yes, it will. I'll look him up. Thank you for the suggestion,
+Fulkerson."
+
+"Oh, don't mention it! I don't mind doing 'Every Other Week' a good turn
+now and then when it comes in my way." Fulkerson went out again, and this
+time March was finally left with Mr. Dryfoos.
+
+"Mrs. March was very sorry not to be at home when your sisters called the
+other day. She wished me to ask if they had any afternoon in particular.
+There was none on your mother's card."
+
+"No, sir," said the young man, with a flush of embarrassment that seemed
+habitual with him. "She has no day. She's at home almost every day. She
+hardly ever goes out."
+
+"Might we come some evening?" March asked. "We should be very glad to do
+that, if she would excuse the informality. Then I could come with Mrs.
+March."
+
+"Mother isn't very formal," said the young man. "She would be very glad
+to see you."
+
+"Then we'll come some night this week, if you will let us. When do you
+expect your father back?"
+
+"Not much before Christmas. He's trying to settle up some things at
+Moffitt."
+
+"And what do you think of our art editor?" asked March, with a smile, for
+the change of subject.
+
+"Oh, I don't know much about such things," said the young man, with
+another of his embarrassed flushes. "Mr. Fulkerson seems to feel sure
+that he is the one for us."
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson seemed to think that I was the one for you, too," said
+March; and he laughed. "That's what makes me doubt his infallibility. But
+he couldn't do worse with Mr. Beaton."
+
+Mr. Dryfoos reddened and looked down, as if unable or unwilling to cope
+with the difficulty of making a polite protest against March's
+self-depreciation. He said, after a moment: "It's new business to all of
+us except Mr. Fulkerson. But I think it will succeed. I think we can do
+some good in it."
+
+March asked rather absently, "Some good?" Then he added: "Oh yes; I think
+we can. What do you mean by good? Improve the public taste? Elevate the
+standard of literature? Give young authors and artists a chance?"
+
+This was the only good that had ever been in March's mind, except the
+good that was to come in a material way from his success, to himself and
+to his family.
+
+"I don't know," said the young man; and he looked down in a shamefaced
+fashion. He lifted his head and looked into March's face. "I suppose I
+was thinking that some time we might help along. If we were to have those
+sketches of yours about life in every part of New York--"
+
+March's authorial vanity was tickled. "Fulkerson has been talking to you
+about them? He seemed to think they would be a card. He believes that
+there's no subject so fascinating to the general average of people
+throughout the country as life in New York City; and he liked my notion
+of doing these things." March hoped that Dryfoos would answer that
+Fulkerson was perfectly enthusiastic about his notion; but he did not
+need this stimulus, and, at any rate, he went on without it. "The fact
+is, it's something that struck my fancy the moment I came here; I found
+myself intensely interested in the place, and I began to make notes,
+consciously and unconsciously, at once. Yes, I believe I can get
+something quite attractive out of it. I don't in the least know what it
+will be yet, except that it will be very desultory; and I couldn't at all
+say when I can get at it. If we postpone the first number till February I
+might get a little paper into that. Yes, I think it might be a good thing
+for us," March said, with modest self-appreciation.
+
+"If you can make the comfortable people understand how the uncomfortable
+people live, it will be a very good thing, Mr. March. Sometimes it seems
+to me that the only trouble is that we don't know one another well
+enough; and that the first thing is to do this." The young fellow spoke
+with the seriousness in which the beauty of his face resided. Whenever he
+laughed his face looked weak, even silly. It seemed to be a sense of this
+that made him hang his head or turn it away at such times.
+
+"That's true," said March, from the surface only. "And then, those phases
+of low life are immensely picturesque. Of course, we must try to get the
+contrasts of luxury for the sake of the full effect. That won't be so
+easy. You can't penetrate to the dinner-party of a millionaire under the
+wing of a detective as you could to a carouse in Mulberry Street, or to
+his children's nursery with a philanthropist as you can to a street-boy's
+lodging-house." March laughed, and again the young man turned his head
+away. "Still, something can be done in that way by tact and patience."
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+That evening March went with his wife to return the call of the Dryfoos
+ladies. On their way up-town in the Elevated he told her of his talk with
+young Dryfoos. "I confess I was a little ashamed before him afterward for
+having looked at the matter so entirely from the aesthetic point of view.
+But of course, you know, if I went to work at those things with an
+ethical intention explicitly in mind, I should spoil them."
+
+"Of course," said his wife. She had always heard him say something of
+this kind about such things.
+
+He went on: "But I suppose that's just the point that such a nature as
+young Dryfoos's can't get hold of, or keep hold of. We're a queer lot,
+down there, Isabel--perfect menagerie. If it hadn't been that Fulkerson
+got us together, and really seems to know what he did it for, I should
+say he was the oddest stick among us. But when I think of myself and my
+own crankiness for the literary department; and young Dryfoos, who ought
+really to be in the pulpit, or a monastery, or something, for publisher;
+and that young Beaton, who probably hasn't a moral fibre in his
+composition, for the art man, I don't know but we could give Fulkerson
+odds and still beat him in oddity."
+
+His wife heaved a deep sigh of apprehension, of renunciation, of
+monition. "Well, I'm glad you can feel so light about it, Basil."
+
+"Light? I feel gay! With Fulkerson at the helm, I tell you the rocks and
+the lee shore had better keep out of the way." He laughed with pleasure
+in his metaphor. "Just when you think Fulkerson has taken leave of his
+senses he says or does something that shows he is on the most intimate
+and inalienable terms with them all the time. You know how I've been
+worrying over those foreign periodicals, and trying to get some
+translations from them for the first number? Well, Fulkerson has brought
+his centipedal mind to bear on the subject, and he's suggested that old
+German friend of mine I was telling you of--the one I met in the
+restaurant--the friend of my youth."
+
+"Do you think he could do it?" asked Mrs. March, sceptically.
+
+"He's a perfect Babel of strange tongues; and he's the very man for the
+work, and I was ashamed I hadn't thought of him myself, for I suspect he
+needs the work."
+
+"Well, be careful how you get mixed up with him, then, Basil," said his
+wife, who had the natural misgiving concerning the friends of her
+husband's youth that all wives have. "You know the Germans are so
+unscrupulously dependent. You don't know anything about him now."
+
+"I'm not afraid of Lindau," said March. "He was the best and kindest man
+I ever saw, the most high-minded, the most generous. He lost a hand in
+the war that helped to save us and keep us possible, and that stump of
+his is character enough for me."
+
+"Oh, you don't think I could have meant anything against him!" said Mrs.
+March, with the tender fervor that every woman who lived in the time of
+the war must feel for those who suffered in it. "All that I meant was
+that I hoped you would not get mixed up with him too much. You're so apt
+to be carried away by your impulses."
+
+"They didn't carry me very far away in the direction of poor old Lindau,
+I'm ashamed to think," said March. "I meant all sorts of fine things by
+him after I met him; and then I forgot him, and I had to be reminded of
+him by Fulkerson."
+
+She did not answer him, and he fell into a remorseful reverie, in which
+he rehabilitated Lindau anew, and provided handsomely for his old age. He
+got him buried with military honors, and had a shaft raised over him,
+with a medallion likeness by Beaton and an epitaph by himself, by the
+time they reached Forty-second Street; there was no time to write
+Lindau's life, however briefly, before the train stopped.
+
+They had to walk up four blocks and then half a block across before they
+came to the indistinctive brownstone house where the Dryfooses lived. It
+was larger than some in the same block, but the next neighborhood of a
+huge apartment-house dwarfed it again. March thought he recognized the
+very flat in which he had disciplined the surly janitor, but he did not
+tell his wife; he made her notice the transition character of the street,
+which had been mostly built up in apartment-houses, with here and there a
+single dwelling dropped far down beneath and beside them, to that
+jag-toothed effect on the sky-line so often observable in such New York
+streets. "I don't know exactly what the old gentleman bought here for,"
+he said, as they waited on the steps after ringing, "unless he expects to
+turn it into flats by-and-by. Otherwise, I don't believe he'll get his
+money back."
+
+An Irish serving-man, with a certain surprise that delayed him, said the
+ladies were at home, and let the Marches in, and then carried their cards
+up-stairs. The drawing-room, where he said they could sit down while he
+went on this errand, was delicately decorated in white and gold, and
+furnished with a sort of extravagant good taste; there was nothing to
+object to in the satin furniture, the pale, soft, rich carpet, the
+pictures, and the bronze and china bric-a-brac, except that their
+costliness was too evident; everything in the room meant money too
+plainly, and too much of it. The Marches recognized this in the hoarse
+whispers which people cannot get their voices above when they try to talk
+away the interval of waiting in such circumstances; they conjectured from
+what they had heard of the Dryfooses that this tasteful luxury in no wise
+expressed their civilization. "Though when you come to that," said March,
+"I don't know that Mrs. Green's gimcrackery expresses ours."
+
+"Well, Basil, I didn't take the gimcrackery. That was your--"
+
+The rustle of skirts on the stairs without arrested Mrs. March in the
+well-merited punishment which she never failed to inflict upon her
+husband when the question of the gimcrackery--they always called it
+that--came up. She rose at the entrance of a bright-looking,
+pretty-looking, mature, youngish lady, in black silk of a neutral
+implication, who put out her hand to her, and said, with a very cheery,
+very ladylike accent, "Mrs. March?" and then added to both of them, while
+she shook hands with March, and before they could get the name out of
+their months: "No, not Miss Dryfoos! Neither of them; nor Mrs. Dryfoos.
+Mrs. Mandel. The ladies will be down in a moment. Won't you throw off
+your sacque, Mrs. March? I'm afraid it's rather warm here, coming from
+the outside."
+
+"I will throw it back, if you'll allow me," said Mrs. March, with a sort
+of provisionality, as if, pending some uncertainty as to Mrs. Mandel's
+quality and authority, she did not feel herself justified in going
+further.
+
+But if she did not know about Mrs. Mandel, Mrs. Mandel seemed to know
+about her. "Oh, well, do!" she said, with a sort of recognition of the
+propriety of her caution. "I hope you are feeling a little at home in New
+York. We heard so much of your trouble in getting a flat, from Mr.
+Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, a true Bostonian doesn't give up quite so soon," said Mrs. March.
+
+"But I will say New York doesn't seem so far away, now we're here."
+
+"I'm sure you'll like it. Every one does." Mrs. Mandel added to March,
+"It's very sharp out, isn't it?"
+
+"Rather sharp. But after our Boston winters I don't know but I ought to
+repudiate the word."
+
+"Ah, wait till you have been here through March!" said Mrs. Mandel. She
+began with him, but skillfully transferred the close of her remark, and
+the little smile of menace that went with it, to his wife.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, "or April, either: Talk about our east winds!"
+
+"Oh, I'm sure they can't be worse than our winds," Mrs. Mandel returned,
+caressingly.
+
+"If we escape New York pneumonia," March laughed, "it will only be to
+fall a prey to New York malaria as soon as the frost is out of the
+ground."
+
+"Oh, but you know," said Mrs. Mandel, "I think our malaria has really
+been slandered a little. It's more a matter of drainage--of plumbing. I
+don't believe it would be possible for malaria to get into this house,
+we've had it gone over so thoroughly."
+
+Mrs. March said, while she tried to divine Mrs. Mandel's position from
+this statement, "It's certainly the first duty."
+
+"If Mrs. March could have had her way, we should have had the drainage of
+our whole ward put in order," said her husband, "before we ventured to
+take a furnished apartment for the winter."
+
+Mrs. Mandel looked discreetly at Mrs. March for permission to laugh at
+this, but at the same moment both ladies became preoccupied with a second
+rustling on the stairs.
+
+Two tall, well-dressed young girls came in, and Mrs. Mandel introduced,
+"Miss Dryfoos, Mrs. March; and Miss Mela Dryfoos, Mr. March," she added,
+and the girls shook hands in their several ways with the Marches.
+
+Miss Dryfoos had keen black eyes, and her hair was intensely black. Her
+face, but for the slight inward curve of the nose, was regular, and the
+smallness of her nose and of her mouth did not weaken her face, but gave
+it a curious effect of fierceness, of challenge. She had a large black
+fan in her hand, which she waved in talking, with a slow, watchful
+nervousness. Her sister was blonde, and had a profile like her brother's;
+but her chin was not so salient, and the weak look of the mouth was not
+corrected by the spirituality or the fervor of his eyes, though hers were
+of the same mottled blue. She dropped into the low seat beside Mrs.
+Mandel, and intertwined her fingers with those of the hand which Mrs.
+Mandel let her have. She smiled upon the Marches, while Miss Dryfoos
+watched them intensely, with her eyes first on one and then on the other,
+as if she did not mean to let any expression of theirs escape her.
+
+"My mother will be down in a minute," she said to Mrs. March.
+
+"I hope we're not disturbing her. It is so good of you to let us come in
+the evening," Mrs. March replied.
+
+"Oh, not at all," said the girl. "We receive in the evening."
+
+"When we do receive," Miss Mela put in. "We don't always get the chance
+to." She began a laugh, which she checked at a smile from Mrs. Mandel,
+which no one could have seen to be reproving.
+
+Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan, and looked up defiantly at Mrs.
+March. "I suppose you have hardly got settled. We were afraid we would
+disturb you when we called."
+
+"Oh no! We were very sorry to miss your visit. We are quite settled in
+our new quarters. Of course, it's all very different from Boston."
+
+"I hope it's more of a sociable place there," Miss Mela broke in again.
+"I never saw such an unsociable place as New York. We've been in this
+house three months, and I don't believe that if we stayed three years any
+of the neighbors would call."
+
+"I fancy proximity doesn't count for much in New York," March suggested.
+
+Mrs. Mandel said: "That's what I tell Miss Mela. But she is a very social
+nature, and can't reconcile herself to the fact."
+
+"No, I can't," the girl pouted. "I think it was twice as much fun in
+Moffitt. I wish I was there now."
+
+"Yes," said March, "I think there's a great deal more enjoyment in those
+smaller places. There's not so much going on in the way of public
+amusements, and so people make more of one another. There are not so many
+concerts, theatres, operas--"
+
+"Oh, they've got a splendid opera-house in Moffitt. It's just grand,"
+said Miss Mela.
+
+"Have you been to the opera here, this winter?" Mrs. March asked of the
+elder girl.
+
+She was glaring with a frown at her sister, and detached her eyes from
+her with an effort. "What did you say?" she demanded, with an absent
+bluntness. "Oh yes. Yes! We went once. Father took a box at the
+Metropolitan."
+
+"Then you got a good dose of Wagner, I suppose?" said March.
+
+"What?" asked the girl.
+
+"I don't think Miss Dryfoos is very fond of Wagner's music," Mrs. Mandel
+said. "I believe you are all great Wagnerites in Boston?"
+
+"I'm a very bad Bostonian, Mrs. Mandel. I suspect myself of preferring
+Verdi," March answered.
+
+Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan again, and said, "I like 'Trovatore'
+the best."
+
+"It's an opera I never get tired of," said March, and Mrs. March and Mrs.
+Mandel exchanged a smile of compassion for his simplicity. He detected
+it, and added: "But I dare say I shall come down with the Wagner fever in
+time. I've been exposed to some malignant cases of it."
+
+"That night we were there," said Miss Mela, "they had to turn the gas
+down all through one part of it, and the papers said the ladies were
+awful mad because they couldn't show their diamonds. I don't wonder, if
+they all had to pay as much for their boxes as we did. We had to pay
+sixty dollars." She looked at the Marches for their sensation at this
+expense.
+
+March said: "Well, I think I shall take my box by the month, then. It
+must come cheaper, wholesale."
+
+"Oh no, it don't," said the girl, glad to inform him. "The people that
+own their boxes, and that had to give fifteen or twenty thousand dollars
+apiece for them, have to pay sixty dollars a night whenever there's a
+performance, whether they go or not."
+
+"Then I should go every night," March said.
+
+"Most of the ladies were low neck--"
+
+March interposed, "Well, I shouldn't go low-neck."
+
+The girl broke into a fondly approving laugh at his drolling. "Oh, I
+guess you love to train! Us girls wanted to go low neck, too; but father
+said we shouldn't, and mother said if we did she wouldn't come to the
+front of the box once. Well, she didn't, anyway. We might just as well
+'a' gone low neck. She stayed back the whole time, and when they had that
+dance--the ballet, you know--she just shut her eyes. Well, Conrad didn't
+like that part much, either; but us girls and Mrs. Mandel, we brazened it
+out right in the front of the box. We were about the only ones there that
+went high neck. Conrad had to wear a swallow-tail; but father hadn't any,
+and he had to patch out with a white cravat. You couldn't see what he had
+on in the back o' the box, anyway."
+
+Mrs. March looked at Miss Dryfoos, who was waving her fan more and more
+slowly up and down, and who, when she felt herself looked at, returned
+Mrs. March's smile, which she meant to be ingratiating and perhaps
+sympathetic, with a flash that made her start, and then ran her fierce
+eyes over March's face. "Here comes mother," she said, with a sort of
+breathlessness, as if speaking her thought aloud, and through the open
+door the Marches could see the old lady on the stairs.
+
+She paused half-way down, and turning, called up: "Coonrod! Coonrod! You
+bring my shawl down with you."
+
+Her daughter Mela called out to her, "Now, mother, Christine 'll give it
+to you for not sending Mike."
+
+"Well, I don't know where he is, Mely, child," the mother answered back.
+"He ain't never around when he's wanted, and when he ain't, it seems like
+a body couldn't git shet of him, nohow."
+
+"Well, you ought to ring for him!" cried Miss Mela, enjoying the joke.
+
+Her mother came in with a slow step; her head shook slightly as she
+looked about the room, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps from a touch of
+palsy. In either case the fact had a pathos which Mrs. March confessed in
+the affection with which she took her hard, dry, large, old hand when she
+was introduced to her, and in the sincerity which she put into the hope
+that she was well.
+
+"I'm just middlin'," Mrs. Dryfoos replied. "I ain't never so well,
+nowadays. I tell fawther I don't believe it agrees with me very well
+here, but he says I'll git used to it. He's away now, out at Moffitt,"
+she said to March, and wavered on foot a moment before she sank into a
+chair. She was a tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl, and her gray
+hair had a memory of blondeness in it like Lindau's, March noticed. She
+wore a simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she held a handkerchief
+folded square, as it had come from the laundress. Something like the
+Sabbath quiet of a little wooden meeting-house in thick Western woods
+expressed itself to him from her presence.
+
+"Laws, mother!" said Miss Mela; "what you got that old thing on for? If
+I'd 'a' known you'd 'a' come down in that!"
+
+"Coonrod said it was all right, Mely," said her mother.
+
+Miss Mela explained to the Marches: "Mother was raised among the
+Dunkards, and she thinks it's wicked to wear anything but a gray silk
+even for dress-up."
+
+"You hain't never heared o' the Dunkards, I reckon," the old woman said
+to Mrs. March. "Some folks calls 'em the Beardy Men, because they don't
+never shave; and they wash feet like they do in the Testament. My uncle
+was one. He raised me."
+
+"I guess pretty much everybody's a Beardy Man nowadays, if he ain't a
+Dunkard!"
+
+Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally, but March was saying to
+his wife: "It's a Pennsylvania German sect, I believe--something like the
+Quakers. I used to see them when I was a boy."
+
+"Aren't they something like the Mennists?" asked Mrs. Mandel.
+
+"They're good people," said the old woman, "and the world 'd be a heap
+better off if there was more like 'em."
+
+Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her shoulders before he shook
+hands with the visitors. "I am glad you found your way here," he said to
+them.
+
+Christine, who had been bending forward over her fan, now lifted herself
+up with a sigh and leaned back in her chair.
+
+"I'm sorry my father isn't here," said the young man to Mrs. March. "He's
+never met you yet?"
+
+"No; and I should like to see him. We hear a great deal about your
+father, you know, from Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Oh, I hope you don't believe everything Mr. Fulkerson says about
+people," Mela cried. "He's the greatest person for carrying on when he
+gets going I ever saw. It makes Christine just as mad when him and mother
+gets to talking about religion; she says she knows he don't care anything
+more about it than the man in the moon. I reckon he don't try it on much
+with father."
+
+"Your fawther ain't ever been a perfessor," her mother interposed; "but
+he's always been a good church-goin' man."
+
+"Not since we come to New York," retorted the girl.
+
+"He's been all broke up since he come to New York," said the old woman,
+with an aggrieved look.
+
+Mrs. Mandel attempted a diversion. "Have you heard any of our great New
+York preachers yet, Mrs. March?"
+
+"No, I haven't," Mrs. March admitted; and she tried to imply by her
+candid tone that she intended to begin hearing them the very next Sunday.
+
+"There are a great many things here," said Conrad, "to take your thoughts
+off the preaching that you hear in most of the churches. I think the city
+itself is preaching the best sermon all the time."
+
+"I don't know that I understand you," said March.
+
+Mela answered for him. "Oh, Conrad has got a lot of notions that nobody
+can understand. You ought to see the church he goes to when he does go.
+I'd about as lief go to a Catholic church myself; I don't see a bit o'
+difference. He's the greatest crony with one of their preachers; he
+dresses just like a priest, and he says he is a priest." She laughed for
+enjoyment of the fact, and her brother cast down his eyes.
+
+Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it the personal tone which
+the talk was always assuming. "Have you been to the fall exhibition?" she
+asked Christine; and the girl drew herself up out of the abstraction she
+seemed sunk in.
+
+"The exhibition?" She looked at Mrs. Mandel.
+
+"The pictures of the Academy, you know," Mrs. Mandel explained. "Where I
+wanted you to go the day you had your dress tried on."
+
+"No; we haven't been yet. Is it good?" She had turned to Mrs. March
+again.
+
+"I believe the fall exhibitions are never so good as the spring ones. But
+there are some good pictures."
+
+"I don't believe I care much about pictures," said Christine. "I don't
+understand them."
+
+"Ah, that's no excuse for not caring about them," said March, lightly.
+"The painters themselves don't, half the time."
+
+The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiant and appealing,
+insolent and anxious, which he had noticed before, especially when she
+stole it toward himself and his wife during her sister's babble. In the
+light of Fulkerson's history of the family, its origin and its ambition,
+he interpreted it to mean a sense of her sister's folly and an ignorant
+will to override his opinion of anything incongruous in themselves and
+their surroundings. He said to himself that she was deathly proud--too
+proud to try to palliate anything, but capable of anything that would put
+others under her feet. Her eyes seemed hopelessly to question his wife's
+social quality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest, the
+inexperienced girl's doubt whether to treat them with much or little
+respect. He lost himself in fancies about her and her ideals, necessarily
+sordid, of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphs and
+disappointments before her. Her sister would accept both with a lightness
+that would keep no trace of either; but in her they would sink lastingly
+deep. He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. Dryfoos saying to him, in
+her hoarse voice:
+
+"I think it's a shame, some of the pictur's a body sees in the winders.
+They say there's a law ag'inst them things; and if there is, I don't
+understand why the police don't take up them that paints 'em. I hear
+tell, since I been here, that there's women that goes to have pictur's
+took from them that way by men painters." The point seemed aimed at
+March, as if he were personally responsible for the scandal, and it fell
+with a silencing effect for the moment. Nobody seemed willing to take it
+up, and Mrs. Dryfoos went on, with an old woman's severity: "I say they
+ought to be all tarred and feathered and rode on a rail. They'd be
+drummed out of town in Moffitt."
+
+Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh: "I should think they would! And
+they wouldn't anybody go low neck to the opera-house there, either--not
+low neck the way they do here, anyway."
+
+"And that pack of worthless hussies," her mother resumed, "that come out
+on the stage, and begun to kick."
+
+"Laws, mother!" the girl shouted, "I thought you said you had your eyes
+shut!"
+
+All but these two simpler creatures were abashed at the indecorum of
+suggesting in words the commonplaces of the theatre and of art.
+
+"Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believe my eyes. I don't know what
+they're doin' in all their churches, to let such things go on," said the
+old woman. "It's a sin and a shame, I think. Don't you, Coonrod?"
+
+A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he was about to deliver.
+
+"If it's going to be company, Coonrod," said his mother, making an effort
+to rise, "I reckon I better go up-stairs."
+
+"It's Mr. Fulkerson, I guess," said Conrad. "He thought he might come";
+and at the mention of this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoos sank contentedly
+back in her chair, and a relaxation of their painful tension seemed to
+pass through the whole company. Conrad went to the door himself (the
+serving-man tentatively, appeared some minutes later) and let in
+Fulkerson's cheerful voice before his cheerful person.
+
+"Ah, how dye do, Conrad? Brought our friend, Mr. Beaton, with me," those
+within heard him say; and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats,
+they saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set square and his arms
+akimbo.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+"Ah! hello! hello!" Fulkerson said, in recognition of the Marches.
+"Regular gathering of the clans. How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos? How do you
+do, Mrs. Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks? How
+you wuz?" He shook hands gayly all round, and took a chair next the old
+lady, whose hand he kept in his own, and left Conrad to introduce Beaton.
+But he would not let the shadow of Beaton's solemnity fall upon the
+company. He began to joke with Mrs. Dryfoos, and to match rheumatisms
+with her, and he included all the ladies in the range of appropriate
+pleasantries. "I've brought Mr. Beaton along to-night, and I want you to
+make him feel at home, like you do me, Mrs. Dryfoos. He hasn't got any
+rheumatism to speak of; but his parents live in Syracuse, and he's a kind
+of an orphan, and we've just adopted him down at the office. When you
+going to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs. Mandel, for a champagne
+lunch? I will have some hydro-Mela, and Christine it, heigh? How's that
+for a little starter? We dropped in at your place a moment, Mrs. March,
+and gave the young folks a few pointers about their studies. My goodness!
+it does me good to see a boy like that of yours; business, from the word
+go; and your girl just scoops my youthful affections. She's a beauty, and
+I guess she's good, too. Well, well, what a world it is! Miss Christine,
+won't you show Mr. Beaton that seal ring of yours? He knows about such
+things, and I brought him here to see it as much as anything. It's an
+intaglio I brought from the other side," he explained to Mrs. March, "and
+I guess you'll like to look at it. Tried to give it to the Dryfoos
+family, and when I couldn't, I sold it to 'em. Bound to see it on Miss
+Christine's hand somehow! Hold on! Let him see it where it belongs,
+first!"
+
+He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and let
+her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the ring on
+it. Then he left her to hear the painter's words about it, which he
+continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a
+gas-jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.
+
+"Well, Mely, child," Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her
+mother's habitual address, "and how are you getting along? Mrs. Mandel
+hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly? Well, that's right. You
+know you'd be roaming all over the pasture if she didn't."
+
+The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him
+on his own ground of privileged character. He brought them all together
+in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had
+inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both
+the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society, and that two
+young men had been devoted to them.
+
+"Oh, I think he's just as lovely as he can live!" said Mela, as she stood
+a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the others
+had left them after the departure of their guests.
+
+"Who?" asked Christine, deeply. As she glanced down at her ring, her eyes
+burned with a softened fire.
+
+She had allowed Beaton to change it himself from the finger where she had
+worn it to the finger on which he said she ought to wear it. She did not
+know whether it was right to let him, but she was glad she had done it.
+
+"Who? Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie! Not that old stuckup Mr. Beaton of
+yours!"
+
+"He is proud," assented Christine, with a throb of exultation.
+
+Beaton and Fulkerson went to the Elevated station with the Marches; but
+the painter said he was going to walk home, and Fulkerson let him go
+alone.
+
+"One way is enough for me," he explained. "When I walk up, I don't walk
+down. Bye-bye, my son!" He began talking about Beaton to the Marches as
+they climbed the station stairs together. "That fellow puzzles me. I
+don't know anybody that I have such a desire to kick, and at the same
+time that I want to flatter up so much. Affect you that way?" he asked of
+March.
+
+"Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes."
+
+"And how is it with you, Mrs. March?"
+
+"Oh, I want to flatter him up."
+
+"No; really? Why? Hold on! I've got the change."
+
+Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket-office window; and made them
+his guests, with the inexorable American hospitality, for the ride
+down-town. "Three!" he said to the ticket-seller; and, when he had walked
+them before him out on the platform and dropped his tickets into the urn,
+he persisted in his inquiry, "Why?"
+
+"Why, because you always want to flatter conceited people, don't you?"
+Mrs. March answered, with a laugh.
+
+"Do you? Yes, I guess you do. You think Beaton is conceited?"
+
+"Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"I guess you're partly right," said Fulkerson, with a sigh, so
+unaccountable in its connection that they all laughed.
+
+"An ideal 'busted'?" March suggested.
+
+"No, not that, exactly," said Fulkerson. "But I had a notion maybe Beaton
+wasn't conceited all the time."
+
+"Oh!" Mrs. March exulted, "nobody could be so conceited all the time as
+Mr. Beaton is most of the time. He must have moments of the direst
+modesty, when he'd be quite flattery-proof."
+
+"Yes, that's what I mean. I guess that's what makes me want to kick him.
+He's left compliments on my hands that no decent man would."
+
+"Oh! that's tragical," said March.
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson," Mrs. March began, with change of subject in her voice,
+"who is Mrs. Mandel?"
+
+"Who? What do you think of her?" he rejoined. "I'll tell you about her
+when we get in the cars. Look at that thing! Ain't it beautiful?"
+
+They leaned over the track and looked up at the next station, where the
+train, just starting, throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white
+moonlight.
+
+"The most beautiful thing in New York--the one always and certainly
+beautiful thing here," said March; and his wife sighed, "Yes, yes." She
+clung to him, and remained rapt by the sight till the train drew near,
+and then pulled him back in a panic.
+
+"Well, there ain't really much to tell about her," Fulkerson resumed when
+they were seated in the car. "She's an invention of mine."
+
+"Of yours?" cried Mrs. March.
+
+"Of course!" exclaimed her husband.
+
+"Yes--at least in her present capacity. She sent me a story for the
+syndicate, back in July some time, along about the time I first met old
+Dryfoos here. It was a little too long for my purpose, and I thought I
+could explain better how I wanted it cut in a call than I could in a
+letter. She gave a Brooklyn address, and I went to see her. I found her,"
+said Fulkerson, with a vague defiance, "a perfect lady. She was living
+with an aunt over there; and she had seen better days, when she was a
+girl, and worse ones afterward. I don't mean to say her husband was a bad
+fellow; I guess he was pretty good; he was her music-teacher; she met him
+in Germany, and they got married there, and got through her property
+before they came over here. Well, she didn't strike me like a person that
+could make much headway in literature. Her story was well enough, but it
+hadn't much sand in it; kind of-well, academic, you know. I told her so,
+and she understood, and cried a little; but she did the best she could
+with the thing, and I took it and syndicated it. She kind of stuck in my
+mind, and the first time I went to see the Dryfooses they were stopping
+at a sort of family hotel then till they could find a house--" Fulkerson
+broke off altogether, and said, "I don't know as I know just how the
+Dryfooses struck you, Mrs. March?"
+
+"Can't you imagine?" she answered, with a kindly, smile.
+
+"Yes; but I don't believe I could guess how they would have struck you
+last summer when I first saw them. My! oh my! there was the native earth
+for you. Mely is a pretty wild colt now, but you ought to have seen her
+before she was broken to harness.
+
+"And Christine? Ever see that black leopard they got up there in the
+Central Park? That was Christine. Well, I saw what they wanted. They all
+saw it--nobody is a fool in all directions, and the Dryfooses are in
+their right senses a good deal of the time. Well, to cut a long story
+short, I got Mrs. Mandel to take 'em in hand--the old lady as well as the
+girls. She was a born lady, and always lived like one till she saw
+Mandel; and that something academic that killed her for a writer was just
+the very thing for them. She knows the world well enough to know just how
+much polish they can take on, and she don't try to put on a bit more.
+See?"
+
+"Yes, I can see," said Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, she took hold at once, as ready as a hospital-trained nurse; and
+there ain't anything readier on this planet. She runs the whole concern,
+socially and economically, takes all the care of housekeeping off the old
+lady's hands, and goes round with the girls. By-the-bye, I'm going to
+take my meals at your widow's, March, and Conrad's going to have his
+lunch there. I'm sick of browsing about."
+
+"Mr. March's widow?" said his wife, looking at him with provisional
+severity.
+
+"I have no widow, Isabel," he said, "and never expect to have, till I
+leave you in the enjoyment of my life-insurance. I suppose Fulkerson
+means the lady with the daughter who wanted to take us to board."
+
+"Oh yes. How are they getting on, I do wonder?" Mrs. March asked of
+Fulkerson.
+
+"Well, they've got one family to board; but it's a small one. I guess
+they'll pull through. They didn't want to take any day boarders at first,
+the widow said; I guess they have had to come to it."
+
+"Poor things!" sighed Mrs. March. "I hope they'll go back to the
+country."
+
+"Well, I don't know. When you've once tasted New York--You wouldn't go
+back to Boston, would you?"
+
+"Instantly."
+
+Fulkerson laughed out a tolerant incredulity.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room, and sat down
+before the dull fire in his grate to think. It struck him there was a
+dull fire in his heart a great deal like it; and he worked out a fanciful
+analogy with the coals, still alive, and the ashes creeping over them,
+and the dead clay and cinders. He felt sick of himself, sick of his life
+and of all his works. He was angry with Fulkerson for having got him into
+that art department of his, for having bought him up; and he was bitter
+at fate because he had been obliged to use the money to pay some pressing
+debts, and had not been able to return the check his father had sent him.
+He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassion for him; and he
+set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his own
+baseness. This was the kind of world it was; but he washed his hands of
+it. The fault was in human nature, and he reflected with pride that he
+had at least not invented human nature; he had not sunk so low as that
+yet. The notion amused him; he thought he might get a Satanic epigram out
+of it some way. But in the mean time that girl, that wild animal, she
+kept visibly, tangibly before him; if he put out his hand he might touch
+hers, he might pass his arm round her waist. In Paris, in a set he knew
+there, what an effect she would be with that look of hers, and that
+beauty, all out of drawing! They would recognize the flame quality in
+her. He imagined a joke about her being a fiery spirit, or nymph, naiad,
+whatever, from one of her native gas-wells. He began to sketch on a bit
+of paper from the table at his elbow vague lines that veiled and revealed
+a level, dismal landscape, and a vast flame against an empty sky, and a
+shape out of the flame that took on a likeness and floated detached from
+it. The sketch ran up the left side of the sheet and stretched across it.
+Beaton laughed out. Pretty good to let Fulkerson have that for the cover
+of his first number! In black and red it would be effective; it would
+catch the eye from the news-stands. He made a motion to throw it on the
+fire, but held it back and slid it into the table-drawer, and smoked on.
+He saw the dummy with the other sketch in the open drawer which he had
+brought away from Fulkerson's in the morning and slipped in there, and he
+took it out and looked at it. He made some criticisms in line with his
+pencil on it, correcting the drawing here and there, and then he
+respected it a little more, though he still smiled at the feminine
+quality--a young lady quality.
+
+In spite of his experience the night he called upon the Leightons, Beaton
+could not believe that Alma no longer cared for him. She played at having
+forgotten him admirably, but he knew that a few months before she had
+been very mindful of him. He knew he had neglected them since they came
+to New York, where he had led them to expect interest, if not attention;
+but he was used to neglecting people, and he was somewhat less used to
+being punished for it--punished and forgiven. He felt that Alma had
+punished him so thoroughly that she ought to have been satisfied with her
+work and to have forgiven him in her heart afterward. He bore no
+resentment after the first tingling moments were past; he rather admired
+her for it; and he would have been ready to go back half an hour later
+and accept pardon and be on the footing of last summer again. Even now he
+debated with himself whether it was too late to call; but, decidedly, a
+quarter to ten seemed late. The next day he determined never to call upon
+the Leightons again; but he had no reason for this; it merely came into a
+transitory scheme of conduct, of retirement from the society of women
+altogether; and after dinner he went round to see them.
+
+He asked for the ladies, and they all three received him, Alma not
+without a surprise that intimated itself to him, and her mother with no
+appreciable relenting; Miss Woodburn, with the needlework which she found
+easier to be voluble over than a book, expressed in her welcome a
+neutrality both cordial to Beaton and loyal to Alma.
+
+"Is it snowing outdo's?" she asked, briskly, after the greetings were
+transacted. "Mah goodness!" she said, in answer to his apparent surprise
+at the question. "Ah mahght as well have stayed in the Soath, for all the
+winter Ah have seen in New York yet."
+
+"We don't often have snow much before New-Year's," said Beaton.
+
+"Miss Woodburn is wild for a real Northern winter," Mrs. Leighton
+explained.
+
+"The othah naght Ah woke up and looked oat of the window and saw all the
+roofs covered with snow, and it turned oat to be nothing but moonlaght.
+Ah was never so disappointed in mah lahfe," said Miss Woodburn.
+
+"If you'll come to St. Barnaby next summer, you shall have all the winter
+you want," said Alma.
+
+"I can't let you slander St. Barnaby in that way," said Beaton, with the
+air of wishing to be understood as meaning more than he said.
+
+"Yes?" returned Alma, coolly. "I didn't know you were so fond of the
+climate."
+
+"I never think of it as a climate. It's a landscape. It doesn't matter
+whether it's hot or cold."
+
+"With the thermometer twenty below, you'd find that it mattered," Alma
+persisted.
+
+"Is that the way you feel about St. Barnaby, too, Mrs. Leighton?" Beaton
+asked, with affected desolation.
+
+"I shall be glad enough to go back in the summer," Mrs. Leighton
+conceded.
+
+"And I should be glad to go now," said Beaton, looking at Alma. He had
+the dummy of 'Every Other Week' in his hand, and he saw Alma's eyes
+wandering toward it whenever he glanced at her. "I should be glad to go
+anywhere to get out of a job I've undertaken," he continued, to Mrs.
+Leighton. "They're going to start some sort of a new illustrated
+magazine, and they've got me in for their art department. I'm not fit for
+it; I'd like to run away. Don't you want to advise me a little, Mrs.
+Leighton? You know how much I value your taste, and I'd like to have you
+look at the design for the cover of the first number: they're going to
+have a different one for every number. I don't know whether you'll agree
+with me, but I think this is rather nice."
+
+He faced the dummy round, and then laid it on the table before Mrs.
+Leighton, pushing some of her work aside to make room for it and standing
+over her while she bent forward to look at it.
+
+Alma kept her place, away from the table.
+
+"Mah goodness! Ho' exciting!" said Miss Woodburn. "May anybody look?"
+
+"Everybody," said Beaton.
+
+"Well, isn't it perfectly choming!" Miss Woodburn exclaimed. "Come and
+look at this, Miss Leighton," she called to Alma, who reluctantly
+approached.
+
+"What lines are these?" Mrs. Leighton asked, pointing to Beaton's pencil
+scratches.
+
+"They're suggestions of modifications," he replied.
+
+"I don't think they improve it much. What do you think, Alma?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said the girl, constraining her voice to an effect of
+indifference and glancing carelessly down at the sketch. "The design
+might be improved; but I don't think those suggestions would do it."
+
+"They're mine," said Beaton, fixing his eyes upon her with a beautiful
+sad dreaminess that he knew he could put into them; he spoke with a
+dreamy remoteness of tone--his wind-harp stop, Wetmore called it.
+
+"I supposed so," said Alma, calmly.
+
+"Oh, mah goodness!" cried Miss Woodburn. "Is that the way you awtusts
+talk to each othah? Well, Ah'm glad Ah'm not an awtust--unless I could do
+all the talking."
+
+"Artists cannot tell a fib," Alma said, "or even act one," and she
+laughed in Beaton's upturned face.
+
+He did not unbend his dreamy gaze. "You're quite right. The suggestions
+are stupid."
+
+Alma turned to Miss Woodburn: "You hear? Even when we speak of our own
+work."
+
+"Ah nevah hoad anything lahke it!"
+
+"And the design itself?" Beaton persisted.
+
+"Oh, I'm not an art editor," Alma answered, with a laugh of exultant
+evasion.
+
+A tall, dark, grave-looking man of fifty, with a swarthy face and
+iron-gray mustache and imperial and goatee, entered the room. Beaton knew
+the type; he had been through Virginia sketching for one of the
+illustrated papers, and he had seen such men in Richmond. Miss Woodburn
+hardly needed to say, "May Ah introduce you to mah fathaw, Co'nel
+Woodburn, Mr. Beaton?"
+
+The men shook hands, and Colonel Woodburn said, in that soft, gentle,
+slow Southern voice without our Northern contractions: "I am very glad to
+meet you, sir; happy to make yo' acquaintance. Do not move, madam," he
+said to Mrs. Leighton, who made a deprecatory motion to let him pass to
+the chair beyond her; "I can find my way." He bowed a bulk that did not
+lend itself readily to the devotion, and picked up the ball of yarn she
+had let drop out of her lap in half rising. "Yo' worsteds, madam."
+
+"Yarn, yarn, Colonel Woodburn!" Alma shouted. "You're quite incorrigible.
+A spade is a spade!"
+
+"But sometimes it is a trump, my dear young lady," said the Colonel, with
+unabated gallantry; "and when yo' mothah uses yarn, it is worsteds. But I
+respect worsteds even under the name of yarn: our ladies--my own mothah
+and sistahs--had to knit the socks we wore--all we could get in the woe."
+
+"Yes, and aftah the woe," his daughter put in. "The knitting has not
+stopped yet in some places. Have you been much in the Soath, Mr. Beaton?"
+
+Beaton explained just how much.
+
+"Well, sir," said the Colonel, "then you have seen a country making
+gigantic struggles to retrieve its losses, sir. The South is advancing
+with enormous strides, sir."
+
+"Too fast for some of us to keep up," said Miss Woodburn, in an audible
+aside. "The pace in Charlottesboag is pofectly killing, and we had to
+drop oat into a slow place like New York."
+
+"The progress in the South is material now," said the Colonel; "and those
+of us whose interests are in another direction find ourselves--isolated
+--isolated, sir. The intellectual centres are still in the No'th, sir;
+the great cities draw the mental activity of the country to them, sir.
+Necessarily New York is the metropolis."
+
+"Oh, everything comes here," said Beaton, impatient of the elder's
+ponderosity. Another sort of man would have sympathized with the
+Southerner's willingness to talk of himself, and led him on to speak of
+his plans and ideals. But the sort of man that Beaton was could not do
+this; he put up the dummy into the wrapper he had let drop on the floor
+beside him, and tied it round with string while Colonel Woodburn was
+talking. He got to his feet with the words he spoke and offered Mrs.
+Leighton his hand.
+
+"Must you go?" she asked, in surprise.
+
+"I am on my way to a reception," he said. She had noticed that he was in
+evening dress; and now she felt the vague hurt that people invited
+nowhere feel in the presence of those who are going somewhere. She did
+not feel it for herself, but for her daughter; and she knew Alma would
+not have let her feel it if she could have prevented it. But Alma had
+left the room for a moment, and she tacitly indulged this sense of injury
+in her behalf.
+
+"Please say good-night to Miss Leighton for me," Beaton continued. He
+bowed to Miss Woodburn, "Goodnight, Miss Woodburn," and to her father,
+bluntly, "Goodnight."
+
+"Good-night, sir," said the Colonel, with a sort of severe suavity.
+
+"Oh, isn't he choming!" Miss Woodburn whispered to Mrs. Leighton when
+Beaton left the room.
+
+Alma spoke to him in the hall without. "You knew that was my design, Mr.
+Beaton. Why did you bring it?"
+
+"Why?" He looked at her in gloomy hesitation.
+
+Then he said: "You know why. I wished to talk it over with you, to serve
+you, please you, get back your good opinion. But I've done neither the
+one nor the other; I've made a mess of the whole thing."
+
+Alma interrupted him. "Has it been accepted?"
+
+"It will be accepted, if you will let it."
+
+"Let it?" she laughed. "I shall be delighted." She saw him swayed a
+little toward her. "It's a matter of business, isn't it?"
+
+"Purely. Good-night."
+
+When Alma returned to the room, Colonel Woodburn was saying to Mrs.
+Leighton: "I do not contend that it is impossible, madam, but it is very
+difficult in a thoroughly commercialized society, like yours, to have the
+feelings of a gentleman. How can a business man, whose prosperity, whose
+earthly salvation, necessarily lies in the adversity of some one else, be
+delicate and chivalrous, or even honest? If we could have had time to
+perfect our system at the South, to eliminate what was evil and develop
+what was good in it, we should have had a perfect system. But the virus
+of commercialism was in us, too; it forbade us to make the best of a
+divine institution, and tempted us to make the worst. Now the curse is on
+the whole country; the dollar is the measure of every value, the stamp of
+every success. What does not sell is a failure; and what sells succeeds."
+
+"The hobby is oat, mah deah," said Miss Woodburn, in an audible aside to
+Alma.
+
+"Were you speaking of me, Colonel Woodburn?" Alma asked.
+
+"Surely not, my dear young lady."
+
+"But he's been saying that awtusts are just as greedy aboat money as
+anybody," said his daughter.
+
+"The law of commercialism is on everything in a commercial society," the
+Colonel explained, softening the tone in which his convictions were
+presented. "The final reward of art is money, and not the pleasure of
+creating."
+
+"Perhaps they would be willing to take it all oat in that if othah people
+would let them pay their bills in the pleasure of creating," his daughter
+teased.
+
+"They are helpless, like all the rest," said her father, with the same
+deference to her as to other women. "I do not blame them."
+
+"Oh, mah goodness! Didn't you say, sir, that Mr. Beaton had bad manners?"
+
+Alma relieved a confusion which he seemed to feel in reference to her.
+"Bad manners? He has no manners! That is, when he's himself. He has
+pretty good ones when he's somebody else."
+
+Miss Woodburn began, "Oh, mah--" and then stopped herself. Alma's mother
+looked at her with distressed question, but the girl seemed perfectly
+cool and contented; and she gave her mind provisionally to a point
+suggested by Colonel Woodburn's talk.
+
+"Still, I can't believe it was right to hold people in slavery, to whip
+them and sell them. It never did seem right to me," she added, in apology
+for her extreme sentiments to the gentleness of her adversary.
+
+"I quite agree with you, madam," said the Colonel. "Those were the abuses
+of the institution. But if we had not been vitiated on the one hand and
+threatened on the other by the spirit of commercialism from the
+North--and from Europe, too--those abuses could have been eliminated, and
+the institution developed in the direction of the mild patriarchalism of
+the divine intention." The Colonel hitched his chair, which figured a
+hobby careering upon its hind legs, a little toward Mrs. Leighton and the
+girls approached their heads and began to whisper; they fell
+deferentially silent when the Colonel paused in his argument, and went on
+again when he went on.
+
+At last they heard Mrs. Leighton saying, "And have you heard from the
+publishers about your book yet?"
+
+Then Miss Woodburn cut in, before her father could answer: "The coase of
+commercialism is on that, too. They are trahing to fahnd oat whethah it
+will pay."
+
+"And they are right--quite right," said the Colonel. "There is no longer
+any other criterion; and even a work that attacks the system must be
+submitted to the tests of the system."
+
+"The system won't accept destruction on any othah tomes," said Miss
+Woodburn, demurely.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+At the reception, where two men in livery stood aside to let him pass up
+the outside steps of the house, and two more helped him off with his
+overcoat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room,
+the Syracuse stone-cutter's son met the niece of Mrs. Horn, and began at
+once to tell her about his evening at the Dryfooses'. He was in very good
+spirits, for so far as he could have been elated or depressed by his
+parting with Alma Leighton he had been elated; she had not treated his
+impudence with the contempt that he felt it deserved; she must still be
+fond of him; and the warm sense of this, by operation of an obscure but
+well-recognized law of the masculine being, disposed him to be rather
+fond of Miss Vance. She was a slender girl, whose semi-aesthetic dress
+flowed about her with an accentuation of her long forms, and redeemed
+them from censure by the very frankness with which it confessed them;
+nobody could have said that Margaret Vance was too tall. Her pretty
+little head, which she had an effect of choosing to have little in the
+same spirit of judicious defiance, had a good deal of reading in it; she
+was proud to know literary and artistic fashions as well as society
+fashions. She liked being singled out by an exterior distinction so
+obvious as Beaton's, and she listened with sympathetic interest to his
+account of those people. He gave their natural history reality by drawing
+upon his own; he reconstructed their plebeian past from the experiences
+of his childhood and his youth of the pre-Parisian period; and he had a
+pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance of the world.
+
+"What different kinds of people you meet!" said the girl at last, with an
+envious sigh. Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination, if
+not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common
+people, and made them seem so very much more worth while than the people
+one met.
+
+She said something like this to Beaton. He answered: "You can meet the
+people I'm talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble. It's
+what they came to New York for. I fancy it's the great ambition of their
+lives to be met."
+
+"Oh yes," said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked
+up and said, intellectually: "Don't you think it's a great pity? How much
+better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!"
+
+"Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them," said Beaton.
+"I don't suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?"
+
+"No," said Miss Vance, amused. "Not that I shouldn't like to go."
+
+"What a daring spirit! You ought to be on the staff of 'Every Other
+Week,'" said Beaton.
+
+"The staff--'Every Other Week'? What is it?"
+
+"The missing link; the long-felt want of a tie between the Arts and the
+Dollars." Beaton gave her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketch of
+the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of the new enterprise.
+
+Miss Vance understood too little about business of any kind to know how
+it differed from other enterprises of its sort. She thought it was
+delightful; she thought Beaton must be glad to be part of it, though he
+had represented himself so bored, so injured, by Fulkerson's insisting
+upon having him. "And is it a secret? Is it a thing not to be spoken of?"
+
+"'Tutt' altro'! Fulkerson will be enraptured to have it spoken of in
+society. He would pay any reasonable bill for the advertisement."
+
+"What a delightful creature! Tell him it shall all be spent in charity."
+
+"He would like that. He would get two paragraphs out of the fact, and
+your name would go into the 'Literary Notes' of all the newspapers."
+
+"Oh, but I shouldn't want my name used!" cried the girl, half horrified
+into fancying the situation real.
+
+"Then you'd better not say anything about 'Every Other Week'. Fulkerson
+is preternaturally unscrupulous."
+
+March began to think so too, at times. He was perpetually suggesting
+changes in the make-up of the first number, with a view to its greater
+vividness of effect. One day he came and said: "This thing isn't going to
+have any sort of get up and howl about it, unless you have a paper in the
+first number going for Bevans's novels. Better get Maxwell to do it."
+
+"Why, I thought you liked Bevans's novels?"
+
+"So I did; but where the good of 'Every Other Week' is concerned I am a
+Roman father. The popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell is the man
+to do it. There hasn't been a new magazine started for the last three
+years that hasn't had an article from Maxwell in its first number cutting
+Bevans all to pieces. If people don't see it, they'll think 'Every Other
+Week' is some old thing."
+
+March did not know whether Fulkerson was joking or not. He suggested,
+"Perhaps they'll think it's an old thing if they do see it."
+
+"Well, get somebody else, then; or else get Maxwell to write under an
+assumed name. Or--I forgot! He'll be anonymous under our system, anyway.
+Now there ain't a more popular racket for us to work in that first number
+than a good, swinging attack on Bevans. People read his books and quarrel
+over 'em, and the critics are all against him, and a regular flaying,
+with salt and vinegar rubbed in afterward, will tell more with people who
+like good old-fashioned fiction than anything else. I like Bevans's
+things, but, dad burn it! when it comes to that first number, I'd offer
+up anybody."
+
+"What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulkerson!" said March, with a
+laugh.
+
+Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous about the attack on the
+novelist. "Say!" he called out, gayly, "what should you think of a paper
+defending the late lamented system of slavery'?"
+
+"What do you mean, Fulkerson?" asked March, with a puzzled smile.
+
+Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk, and pushed himself back, but
+kept his balance to the eye by canting his hat sharply forward. "There's
+an old cock over there at the widow's that's written a book to prove that
+slavery was and is the only solution of the labor problem. He's a
+Southerner."
+
+"I should imagine," March assented.
+
+"He's got it on the brain that if the South could have been let alone by
+the commercial spirit and the pseudophilanthropy of the North, it would
+have worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition for the laborer,
+in which he would have been insured against want, and protected in all
+his personal rights by the state. He read the introduction to me last
+night. I didn't catch on to all the points--his daughter's an awfully
+pretty girl, and I was carrying that fact in my mind all the time, too,
+you know--but that's about the gist of it."
+
+"Seems to regard it as a lost opportunity?" said March.
+
+"Exactly! What a mighty catchy title, Neigh? Look well on the
+title-page."
+
+"Well written?"
+
+"I reckon so; I don't know. The Colonel read it mighty eloquently."
+
+"It mightn't be such bad business," said March, in a muse. "Could you get
+me a sight of it without committing yourself?"
+
+"If the Colonel hasn't sent it off to another publisher this morning. He
+just got it back with thanks yesterday. He likes to keep it travelling."
+
+"Well, try it. I've a notion it might be a curious thing."
+
+"Look here, March," said Fulkerson, with the effect of taking a fresh
+hold; "I wish you could let me have one of those New York things of yours
+for the first number. After all, that's going to be the great card."
+
+"I couldn't, Fulkerson; I couldn't, really. I want to philosophize the
+material, and I'm too new to it all yet. I don't want to do merely
+superficial sketches."
+
+"Of course! Of course! I understand that. Well, I don't want to hurry
+you. Seen that old fellow of yours yet? I think we ought to have that
+translation in the first number; don't you? We want to give 'em a notion
+of what we're going to do in that line."
+
+"Yes," said March; "and I was going out to look up Lindau this morning.
+I've inquired at Maroni's, and he hasn't been there for several days.
+I've some idea perhaps he's sick. But they gave me his address, and I'm
+going to see."
+
+"Well, that's right. We want the first number to be the keynote in every
+way."
+
+March shook his head. "You can't make it so. The first number is bound to
+be a failure always, as far as the representative character goes. It's
+invariably the case. Look at the first numbers of all the things you've
+seen started. They're experimental, almost amateurish, and necessarily
+so, not only because the men that are making them up are comparatively
+inexperienced like ourselves, but because the material sent them to deal
+with is more or less consciously tentative. People send their adventurous
+things to a new periodical because the whole thing is an adventure. I've
+noticed that quality in all the volunteer contributions; it's in the
+articles that have been done to order even. No; I've about made up my
+mind that if we can get one good striking paper into the first number
+that will take people's minds off the others, we shall be doing all we
+can possibly hope for. I should like," March added, less seriously, "to
+make up three numbers ahead, and publish the third one first."
+
+Fulkerson dropped forward and struck his fist on the desk. "It's a
+first-rate idea. Why not do it?"
+
+March laughed. "Fulkerson, I don't believe there's any quackish thing you
+wouldn't do in this cause. From time to time I'm thoroughly ashamed of
+being connected with such a charlatan."
+
+Fulkerson struck his hat sharply backward. "Ah, dad burn it! To give that
+thing the right kind of start I'd walk up and down Broadway between two
+boards, with the title-page of 'Every Other Week' facsimiled on one and my
+name and address on the--"
+
+He jumped to his feet and shouted, "March, I'll do it!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"I'll hire a lot of fellows to make mud-turtles of themselves, and I'll
+have a lot of big facsimiles of the title-page, and I'll paint the town
+red!"
+
+March looked aghast at him. "Oh, come, now, Fulkerson!"
+
+"I mean it. I was in London when a new man had taken hold of the old
+Cornhill, and they were trying to boom it, and they had a procession of
+these mudturtles that reached from Charing Cross to Temple Bar. 'Cornhill
+Magazine'. Sixpence. Not a dull page in it.' I said to myself then that it
+was the livest thing I ever saw. I respected the man that did that thing
+from the bottom of my heart. I wonder I ever forgot it. But it shows what
+a shaky thing the human mind is at its best."
+
+"You infamous mountebank!", said March, with great amusement at
+Fulkerson's access; "you call that congeries of advertising instinct of
+yours the human mind at its best? Come, don't be so diffident, Fulkerson.
+Well, I'm off to find Lindau, and when I come back I hope Mr. Dryfoos
+will have you under control. I don't suppose you'll be quite sane again
+till after the first number is out. Perhaps public opinion will sober you
+then."
+
+"Confound it, March! How do you think they will take it? I swear I'm
+getting so nervous I don't know half the time which end of me is up. I
+believe if we don't get that thing out by the first of February it 'll be
+the death of me."
+
+"Couldn't wait till Washington's Birthday? I was thinking it would give
+the day a kind of distinction, and strike the public imagination, if--"
+
+"No, I'll be dogged if I could!" Fulkerson lapsed more and more into the
+parlance of his early life in this season of strong excitement. "I
+believe if Beaton lags any on the art leg I'll kill him."
+
+"Well, I shouldn't mind your killing Beaton," said March, tranquilly, as
+he went out.
+
+He went over to Third Avenue and took the Elevated down to Chatham
+Square. He found the variety of people in the car as unfailingly
+entertaining as ever. He rather preferred the East Side to the West Side
+lines, because they offered more nationalities, conditions, and
+characters to his inspection. They draw not only from the up-town
+American region, but from all the vast hive of populations swarming
+between them and the East River. He had found that, according to the
+hour, American husbands going to and from business, and American wives
+going to and from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road, and that
+the most picturesque admixture to these familiar aspects of human nature
+were the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American Hebrews, who
+otherwise contributed to the effect of well-clad comfort and
+citizen-self-satisfaction of the crowd. Now and then he had found himself
+in a car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the
+line, where he had read how they are worked and fed and housed like
+beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect, he
+had occasion for pensive question within himself as to what notion these
+poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life
+under its conditions; and whether they found them practically very
+different from those of the immemorial brigandage and enforced complicity
+with rapine under which they had been born. But, after all, this was an
+infrequent effect, however massive, of travel on the West Side, whereas
+the East offered him continual entertainment in like sort. The sort was
+never quite so squalid. For short distances the lowest poverty, the
+hardest pressed labor, must walk; but March never entered a car without
+encountering some interesting shape of shabby adversity, which was almost
+always adversity of foreign birth. New York is still popularly supposed
+to be in the control of the Irish, but March noticed in these East Side
+travels of his what must strike every observer returning to the city
+after a prolonged absence: the numerical subordination of the dominant
+race. If they do not outvote them, the people of Germanic, of Slavonic,
+of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock outnumber the prepotent Celts; and March
+seldom found his speculation centred upon one of these. The small eyes,
+the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted
+skulls, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of
+Italians; the blonde dulness of Germans; the cold quiet of
+Scandinavians--fire under ice--were aspects that he identified, and that
+gave him abundant suggestion for the personal histories he constructed,
+and for the more public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with the
+future economy of our heterogeneous commonwealth. It must be owned that
+he did not take much trouble about this; what these poor people were
+thinking, hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering; just where and how they
+lived; who and what they individually were--these were the matters of his
+waking dreams as he stared hard at them, while the train raced farther
+into the gay ugliness--the shapeless, graceful, reckless picturesqueness
+of the Bowery.
+
+There were certain signs, certain facades, certain audacities of the
+prevailing hideousness that always amused him in that uproar to the eye
+which the strident forms and colors made. He was interested in the
+insolence with which the railway had drawn its erasing line across the
+Corinthian front of an old theatre, almost grazing its fluted pillars,
+and flouting its dishonored pediment. The colossal effigies of the fat
+women and the tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums; the vistas
+of shabby cross streets; the survival of an old hip-roofed house here and
+there at their angles; the Swiss chalet, histrionic decorativeness of the
+stations in prospect or retrospect; the vagaries of the lines that
+narrowed together or stretched apart according to the width of the
+avenue, but always in wanton disregard of the life that dwelt, and bought
+and sold, and rejoiced or sorrowed, and clattered or crawled, around,
+below, above--were features of the frantic panorama that perpetually
+touched his sense of humor and moved his sympathy. Accident and then
+exigency seemed the forces at work to this extraordinary effect; the play
+of energies as free and planless as those that force the forest from the
+soil to the sky; and then the fierce struggle for survival, with the
+stronger life persisting over the deformity, the mutilation, the
+destruction, the decay of the weaker. The whole at moments seemed to him
+lawless, godless; the absence of intelligent, comprehensive purpose in
+the huge disorder, and the violent struggle to subordinate the result to
+the greater good, penetrated with its dumb appeal the consciousness of a
+man who had always been too self-enwrapped to perceive the chaos to which
+the individual selfishness must always lead.
+
+But there was still nothing definite, nothing better than a vague
+discomfort, however poignant, in his half recognition of such facts; and
+he descended the station stairs at Chatham Square with a sense of the
+neglected opportunities of painters in that locality. He said to himself
+that if one of those fellows were to see in Naples that turmoil of cars,
+trucks, and teams of every sort, intershot with foot-passengers going and
+coming to and from the crowded pavements, under the web of the railroad
+tracks overhead, and amid the spectacular approach of the streets that
+open into the square, he would have it down in his sketch-book at once.
+He decided simultaneously that his own local studies must be illustrated,
+and that he must come with the artist and show him just which bits to do,
+not knowing that the two arts can never approach the same material from
+the same point. He thought he would particularly like his illustrator to
+render the Dickensy, cockneyish quality of the shabby-genteel
+ballad-seller of whom he stopped to ask his way to the street where
+Lindau lived, and whom he instantly perceived to be, with his stock in
+trade, the sufficient object of an entire study by himself. He had his
+ballads strung singly upon a cord against the house wall, and held down
+in piles on the pavement with stones and blocks of wood. Their control in
+this way intimated a volatility which was not perceptible in their
+sentiment. They were mostly tragical or doleful: some of them dealt with
+the wrongs of the working-man; others appealed to a gay experience of the
+high seas; but vastly the greater part to memories and associations of an
+Irish origin; some still uttered the poetry of plantation life in the
+artless accents of the end--man. Where they trusted themselves, with
+syntax that yielded promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, to the
+ordinary American speech, it was to strike directly for the affections,
+to celebrate the domestic ties, and, above all, to embalm the memories of
+angel and martyr mothers whose dissipated sons deplored their sufferings
+too late. March thought this not at all a bad thing in them; he smiled in
+patronage of their simple pathos; he paid the tribute of a laugh when the
+poet turned, as he sometimes did, from his conception of angel and martyr
+motherhood, and portrayed the mother in her more familiar phases of
+virtue and duty, with the retributive shingle or slipper in her hand. He
+bought a pocketful of this literature, popular in a sense which the most
+successful book can never be, and enlisted the ballad vendor so deeply in
+the effort to direct him to Lindau's dwelling by the best way that he
+neglected another customer, till a sarcasm on his absent-mindedness stung
+hint to retort, "I'm a-trying to answer a gentleman a civil question;
+that's where the absent-minded comes in."
+
+It seemed for some reason to be a day of leisure with the Chinese
+dwellers in Mott Street, which March had been advised to take first. They
+stood about the tops of basement stairs, and walked two and two along the
+dirty pavement, with their little hands tucked into their sleeves across
+their breasts, aloof in immaculate cleanliness from the filth around
+them, and scrutinizing the scene with that cynical sneer of faint
+surprise to which all aspects of our civilization seem to move their
+superiority. Their numbers gave character to the street, and rendered not
+them, but what was foreign to them, strange there; so that March had a
+sense of missionary quality in the old Catholic church, built long before
+their incursion was dreamed of. It seemed to have come to them there, and
+he fancied in the statued saint that looked down from its facade
+something not so much tolerant as tolerated, something propitiatory,
+almost deprecatory. It was a fancy, of course; the street was
+sufficiently peopled with Christian children, at any rate, swarming and
+shrieking at their games; and presently a Christian mother appeared,
+pushed along by two policemen on a handcart, with a gelatinous tremor
+over the paving and a gelatinous jouncing at the curbstones. She lay with
+her face to the sky, sending up an inarticulate lamentation; but the
+indifference of the officers forbade the notion of tragedy in her case.
+She was perhaps a local celebrity; the children left off their games, and
+ran gayly trooping after her; even the young fellow and young girl
+exchanging playful blows in a robust flirtation at the corner of a liquor
+store suspended their scuffle with a pleased interest as she passed.
+March understood the unwillingness of the poor to leave the worst
+conditions in the city for comfort and plenty in the country when he
+reflected upon this dramatic incident, one of many no doubt which daily
+occur to entertain them in such streets. A small town could rarely offer
+anything comparable to it, and the country never. He said that if life
+appeared so hopeless to him as it must to the dwellers in that
+neighborhood he should not himself be willing to quit its distractions,
+its alleviations, for the vague promise of unknown good in the distance
+somewhere.
+
+But what charm could such a man as Lindau find in such a place? It could
+not be that he lived there because he was too poor to live elsewhere:
+with a shutting of the heart, March refused to believe this as he looked
+round on the abounding evidences of misery, and guiltily remembered his
+neglect of his old friend. Lindau could probably find as cheap a lodging
+in some decenter part of the town; and, in fact, there was some
+amelioration of the prevailing squalor in the quieter street which he
+turned into from Mott.
+
+A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened the door for him when he
+pulled, with a shiver of foreboding, the bell-knob, from which a yard of
+rusty crape dangled. But it was not Lindau who was dead, for the woman
+said he was at home, and sent March stumbling up the four or five dark
+flights of stairs that led to his tenement. It was quite at the top of
+the house, and when March obeyed the German-English "Komm!" that followed
+his knock, he found himself in a kitchen where a meagre breakfast was
+scattered in stale fragments on the table before the stove. The place was
+bare and cold; a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gave it a convivial air.
+On the left from this kitchen was a room with a bed in it, which seemed
+also to be a cobbler's shop: on the right, through a door that stood
+ajar, came the German-English voice again, saying this time, "Hier!"
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+March pushed the door open into a room like that on the left, but with a
+writing-desk instead of a cobbler's bench, and a bed, where Lindau sat
+propped up; with a coat over his shoulders and a skull-cap on his head,
+reading a book, from which he lifted his eyes to stare blankly over his
+spectacles at March. His hairy old breast showed through the night-shirt,
+which gaped apart; the stump of his left arm lay upon the book to keep it
+open.
+
+"Ah, my tear yo'ng friendt! Passil! Marge! Iss it you?" he called out,
+joyously, the next moment.
+
+"Why, are you sick, Lindau?" March anxiously scanned his face in taking
+his hand.
+
+Lindau laughed. "No; I'm all righdt. Only a lidtle lazy, and a lidtle
+eggonomigal. Idt's jeaper to stay in pedt sometimes as to geep a fire
+a-goin' all the time. Don't wandt to gome too hardt on the 'brafer Mann',
+you know:
+
+     "Braver Mann, er schafft mir zu essen."
+
+You remember? Heine? You readt Heine still? Who is your favorite boet
+now, Passil? You write some boetry yourself yet? No? Well, I am gladt to
+zee you. Brush those baperss off of that jair. Well, idt is goodt for
+zore eyess. How didt you findt where I lif?
+
+"They told me at Maroni's," said March. He tried to keep his eyes on
+Lindau's face, and not see the discomfort of the room, but he was aware
+of the shabby and frowsy bedding, the odor of stale smoke, and the pipes
+and tobacco shreds mixed with the books and manuscripts strewn over the
+leaf of the writing-desk. He laid down on the mass the pile of foreign
+magazines he had brought under his arm. "They gave me another address
+first."
+
+"Yes. I have chust gome here," said Lindau. "Idt is not very coy, Neigh?"
+
+"It might be gayer," March admitted, with a smile. "Still," he added,
+soberly, "a good many people seem to live in this part of the town.
+Apparently they die here, too, Lindau. There is crape on your outside
+door. I didn't know but it was for you."
+
+"Nodt this time," said Lindau, in the same humor. "Berhaps some other
+time. We geep the ondertakers bratty puzy down here."
+
+"Well," said March, "undertakers must live, even if the rest of us have
+to die to let them." Lindau laughed, and March went on: "But I'm glad it
+isn't your funeral, Lindau. And you say you're not sick, and so I don't
+see why we shouldn't come to business."
+
+"Pusiness?" Lindau lifted his eyebrows. "You gome on pusiness?"
+
+"And pleasure combined," said March, and he went on to explain the
+service he desired at Lindau's hands.
+
+The old man listened with serious attention, and with assenting nods that
+culminated in a spoken expression of his willingness to undertake the
+translations. March waited with a sort of mechanical expectation of his
+gratitude for the work put in his way, but nothing of the kind came from
+Lindau, and March was left to say, "Well, everything is understood, then;
+and I don't know that I need add that if you ever want any little advance
+on the work--"
+
+"I will ask you," said Lindau, quietly, "and I thank you for that. But I
+can wait; I ton't needt any money just at bresent." As if he saw some
+appeal for greater frankness in March's eye, he went on: "I tidn't gome
+here begause I was too boor to lif anywhere else, and I ton't stay in
+pedt begause I couldn't haf a fire to geep warm if I wanted it. I'm nodt
+zo padt off as Marmontel when he went to Paris. I'm a lidtle loaxurious,
+that is all. If I stay in pedt it's zo I can fling money away on
+somethings else. Heigh?"
+
+"But what are you living here for, Lindau?" March smiled at the irony
+lurking in Lindau's words.
+
+"Well, you zee, I foundt I was begoming a lidtle too moch of an
+aristograt. I hadt a room oap in Creenvidge Willage, among dose pig pugs
+over on the West Side, and I foundt"--Liudau's voice lost its jesting
+quality, and his face darkened--"that I was beginning to forget the
+boor!"
+
+"I should have thought," said March, with impartial interest, "that you
+might have seen poverty enough, now and then, in Greenwich Village to
+remind you of its existence."
+
+"Nodt like here," said Lindau. "Andt you must zee it all the dtime--zee
+it, hear it, smell it, dtaste it--or you forget it. That is what I gome
+here for. I was begoming a ploated aristograt. I thought I was nodt like
+these beople down here, when I gome down once to look aroundt; I thought
+I must be somethings else, and zo I zaid I better take myself in time,
+and I gome here among my brothers--the becears and the thiefs!" A noise
+made itself heard in the next room, as if the door were furtively opened,
+and a faint sound of tiptoeing and of hands clawing on a table.
+
+"Thiefs!" Lindau repeated, with a shout. "Lidtle thiefs, that gabture
+your breakfast. Ah! ha! ha!" A wild scurrying of feet, joyous cries and
+tittering, and a slamming door followed upon his explosion, and he
+resumed in the silence: "Idt is the children cot pack from school. They
+gome and steal what I leaf there on my daple. Idt's one of our lidtle
+chokes; we onderstand one another; that's all righdt. Once the gobbler in
+the other room there he used to chase 'em; he couldn't onderstand their
+lidtle tricks. Now dot goppler's teadt, and he ton't chase 'em any more.
+He was a Bohemian. Gindt of grazy, I cuess."
+
+"Well, it's a sociable existence," March suggested. "But perhaps if you
+let them have the things without stealing--"
+
+"Oh no, no! Most nodt mage them too gonceitedt. They mostn't go and feel
+themselfs petter than those boor millionairss that hadt to steal their
+money."
+
+March smiled indulgently at his old friend's violence. "Oh, there are
+fagots and fagots, you know, Lindau; perhaps not all the millionaires are
+so guilty."
+
+"Let us speak German!" cried Lindau, in his own tongue, pushing his book
+aside, and thrusting his skullcap back from his forehead. "How much money
+can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing some other man?"
+
+"Well, if you'll let me answer in English," said March, "I should say
+about five thousand dollars a year. I name that figure because it's my
+experience that I never could earn more; but the experience of other men
+may be different, and if they tell me they can earn ten, or twenty, or
+fifty thousand a year, I'm not prepared to say they can't do it."
+
+Lindau hardly waited for his answer. "Not the most gifted man that ever
+lived, in the practice of any art or science, and paid at the highest
+rate that exceptional genius could justly demand from those who have
+worked for their money, could ever earn a million dollars. It is the
+landlords and the merchant princes, the railroad kings and the coal
+barons (the oppressors to whom you instinctively give the titles of
+tyrants)--it is these that make the millions, but no man earns them. What
+artist, what physician, what scientist, what poet was ever a
+millionaire?"
+
+"I can only think of the poet Rogers," said March, amused by Lindau's
+tirade. "But he was as exceptional as the other Rogers, the martyr, who
+died with warm feet." Lindau had apparently not understood his joke, and
+he went on, with the American ease of mind about everything: "But you
+must allow, Lindau, that some of those fellows don't do so badly with
+their guilty gains. Some of them give work to armies of poor people--"
+
+Lindau furiously interrupted: "Yes, when they have gathered their
+millions together from the hunger and cold and nakedness and ruin and
+despair of hundreds of thousands of other men, they 'give work' to the
+poor! They give work! They allow their helpless brothers to earn enough
+to keep life in them! They give work! Who is it gives toil, and where
+will your rich men be when once the poor shall refuse to give toil? Why,
+you have come to give me work!"
+
+March laughed outright. "Well, I'm not a millionaire, anyway, Lindau, and
+I hope you won't make an example of me by refusing to give toil. I dare
+say the millionaires deserve it, but I'd rather they wouldn't suffer in
+my person."
+
+"No," returned the old man, mildly relaxing the fierce glare he had bent
+upon March. "No man deserves to suffer at the hands of another. I lose
+myself when I think of the injustice in the world. But I must not forget
+that I am like the worst of them."
+
+"You might go up Fifth Avenue and live among the rich awhile, when you're
+in danger of that," suggested March. "At any rate," he added, by an
+impulse which he knew he could not justify to his wife, "I wish you'd
+come some day and lunch with their emissary. I've been telling Mrs. March
+about you, and I want her and the children to see you. Come over with
+these things and report." He put his hand on the magazines as he rose.
+
+"I will come," said Lindau, gently.
+
+"Shall I give you your book?" asked March.
+
+"No; I gidt oap bretty soon."
+
+"And--and--can you dress yourself?"
+
+"I vhistle, and one of those lidtle fellowss comess. We haf to dake gare
+of one another in a blace like this. Idt iss nodt like the worldt," said
+Lindau, gloomily.
+
+March thought he ought to cheer him up. "Oh, it isn't such a bad world,
+Lindau! After all, the average of millionaires is small in it." He added,
+"And I don't believe there's an American living that could look at that
+arm of yours and not wish to lend you a hand for the one you gave us
+all." March felt this to be a fine turn, and his voice trembled slightly
+in saying it.
+
+Lindau smiled grimly. "You think zo? I wouldn't moch like to drost 'em.
+I've driedt idt too often." He began to speak German again fiercely:
+"Besides, they owe me nothing. Do you think I knowingly gave my hand to
+save this oligarchy of traders and tricksters, this aristocracy of
+railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine-slave drivers and mill-serf
+owners? No; I gave it to the slave; the slave--ha! ha! ha!--whom I helped
+to unshackle to the common liberty of hunger and cold. And you think I
+would be the beneficiary of such a state of things?"
+
+"I'm sorry to hear you talk so, Lindau," said March; "very sorry." He
+stopped with a look of pain, and rose to go. Lindau suddenly broke into a
+laugh and into English.
+
+"Oh, well, it is only dalk, Passil, and it toes me goodt. My parg is
+worse than my pidte, I cuess. I pring these things roundt bretty soon.
+Good-bye, Passil, my tear poy. Auf wiedersehen!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+March went away thinking of what Lindau had said, but not for the
+impersonal significance of his words so much as for the light they cast
+upon Lindau himself. He thought the words violent enough, but in
+connection with what he remembered of the cheery, poetic, hopeful
+idealist, they were even more curious than lamentable. In his own life of
+comfortable reverie he had never heard any one talk so before, but he had
+read something of the kind now and then in blatant labor newspapers which
+he had accidentally fallen in with, and once at a strikers' meeting he
+had heard rich people denounced with the same frenzy. He had made his own
+reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric, and the obvious
+buncombe of the motive, and he had not taken the matter seriously.
+
+He could not doubt Lindau's sincerity, and he wondered how he came to
+that way of thinking. From his experience of himself he accounted for a
+prevailing literary quality in it; he decided it to be from Lindau's
+reading and feeling rather than his reflection. That was the notion he
+formed of some things he had met with in Ruskin to much the same effect;
+he regarded them with amusement as the chimeras of a rhetorician run away
+with by his phrases.
+
+But as to Lindau, the chief thing in his mind was a conception of the
+droll irony of a situation in which so fervid a hater of millionaires
+should be working, indirectly at least, for the prosperity of a man like
+Dryfoos, who, as March understood, had got his money together out of
+every gambler's chance in speculation, and all a schemer's thrift from
+the error and need of others. The situation was not more incongruous,
+however, than all the rest of the 'Every Other Week' affair. It seemed to
+him that there were no crazy fortuities that had not tended to its
+existence, and as time went on, and the day drew near for the issue of
+the first number, the sense of this intensified till the whole lost at
+moments the quality of a waking fact, and came to be rather a fantastic
+fiction of sleep.
+
+Yet the heterogeneous forces did co-operate to a reality which March
+could not deny, at least in their presence, and the first number was
+representative of all their nebulous intentions in a tangible form. As a
+result, it was so respectable that March began to respect these
+intentions, began to respect himself for combining and embodying them in
+the volume which appealed to him with a novel fascination, when the first
+advance copy was laid upon his desk. Every detail of it was tiresomely
+familiar already, but the whole had a fresh interest now. He now saw how
+extremely fit and effective Miss Leighton's decorative design for the
+cover was, printed in black and brick-red on the delicate gray tone of
+the paper. It was at once attractive and refined, and he credited Beaton
+with quite all he merited in working it over to the actual shape. The
+touch and the taste of the art editor were present throughout the number.
+As Fulkerson said, Beaton had caught on with the delicacy of a
+humming-bird and the tenacity of a bulldog to the virtues of their
+illustrative process, and had worked it for all it was worth. There were
+seven papers in the number, and a poem on the last page of the cover, and
+he had found some graphic comment for each. It was a larger proportion
+than would afterward be allowed, but for once in a way it was allowed.
+Fulkerson said they could not expect to get their money back on that
+first number, anyway. Seven of the illustrations were Beaton's; two or
+three he got from practised hands; the rest were the work of unknown
+people which he had suggested, and then related and adapted with
+unfailing ingenuity to the different papers. He handled the illustrations
+with such sympathy as not to destroy their individual quality, and that
+indefinable charm which comes from good amateur work in whatever art. He
+rescued them from their weaknesses and errors, while he left in them the
+evidence of the pleasure with which a clever young man, or a sensitive
+girl, or a refined woman had done them. Inevitably from his manipulation,
+however, the art of the number acquired homogeneity, and there was
+nothing casual in its appearance. The result, March eagerly owned, was
+better than the literary result, and he foresaw that the number would be
+sold and praised chiefly for its pictures. Yet he was not ashamed of the
+literature, and he indulged his admiration of it the more freely because
+he had not only not written it, but in a way had not edited it. To be
+sure, he had chosen all the material, but he had not voluntarily put it
+all together for that number; it had largely put itself together, as
+every number of every magazine does, and as it seems more and more to do,
+in the experience of every editor. There had to be, of course, a story,
+and then a sketch of travel. There was a literary essay and a social
+essay; there was a dramatic trifle, very gay, very light; there was a
+dashing criticism on the new pictures, the new plays, the new books, the
+new fashions; and then there was the translation of a bit of vivid
+Russian realism, which the editor owed to Lindau's exploration of the
+foreign periodicals left with him; Lindau was himself a romanticist of
+the Victor Hugo sort, but he said this fragment of Dostoyevski was good
+of its kind. The poem was a bit of society verse, with a backward look
+into simpler and wholesomer experiences.
+
+Fulkerson was extremely proud of the number; but he said it was too
+good--too good from every point of view. The cover was too good, and the
+paper was too good, and that device of rough edges, which got over the
+objection to uncut leaves while it secured their aesthetic effect, was a
+thing that he trembled for, though he rejoiced in it as a stroke of the
+highest genius. It had come from Beaton at the last moment, as a
+compromise, when the problem of the vulgar croppiness of cut leaves and
+the unpopularity of uncut leaves seemed to have no solution but suicide.
+Fulkerson was still morally crawling round on his hands and knees, as he
+said, in abject gratitude at Beaton's feet, though he had his qualms, his
+questions; and he declared that Beaton was the most inspired ass since
+Balaam's. "We're all asses, of course," he admitted, in semi-apology to
+March; "but we're no such asses as Beaton." He said that if the tasteful
+decorativeness of the thing did not kill it with the public outright, its
+literary excellence would give it the finishing stroke. Perhaps that
+might be overlooked in the impression of novelty which a first number
+would give, but it must never happen again. He implored March to promise
+that it should never happen again; he said their only hope was in the
+immediate cheapening of the whole affair. It was bad enough to give the
+public too much quantity for their money, but to throw in such quality as
+that was simply ruinous; it must be stopped. These were the expressions
+of his intimate moods; every front that he presented to the public wore a
+glow of lofty, of devout exultation. His pride in the number gushed out
+in fresh bursts of rhetoric to every one whom he could get to talk with
+him about it. He worked the personal kindliness of the press to the
+utmost. He did not mind making himself ridiculous or becoming a joke in
+the good cause, as he called it. He joined in the applause when a
+humorist at the club feigned to drop dead from his chair at Fulkerson's
+introduction of the topic, and he went on talking that first number into
+the surviving spectators. He stood treat upon all occasions, and he
+lunched attaches of the press at all hours. He especially befriended the
+correspondents of the newspapers of other cities, for, as he explained to
+March, those fellows could give him any amount of advertising simply as
+literary gossip. Many of the fellows were ladies who could not be so
+summarily asked out to lunch, but Fulkerson's ingenuity was equal to
+every exigency, and he contrived somehow to make each of these feel that
+she had been possessed of exclusive information. There was a moment when
+March conjectured a willingness in Fulkerson to work Mrs. March into the
+advertising department, by means of a tea to these ladies and their
+friends which she should administer in his apartment, but he did not
+encourage Fulkerson to be explicit, and the moment passed. Afterward,
+when he told his wife about it, he was astonished to find that she would
+not have minded doing it for Fulkerson, and he experienced another proof
+of the bluntness of the feminine instincts in some directions, and of the
+personal favor which Fulkerson seemed to enjoy with the whole sex. This
+alone was enough to account for the willingness of these correspondents
+to write about the first number, but March accused him of sending it to
+their addresses with boxes of Jacqueminot roses and Huyler candy.
+
+Fulkerson let him enjoy his joke. He said that he would do that or
+anything else for the good cause, short of marrying the whole circle of
+female correspondents.
+
+March was inclined to hope that if the first number had been made too
+good for the country at large, the more enlightened taste of metropolitan
+journalism would invite a compensating favor for it in New York. But
+first Fulkerson and then the event proved him wrong. In spite of the
+quality of the magazine, and in spite of the kindness which so many
+newspaper men felt for Fulkerson, the notices in the New York papers
+seemed grudging and provisional to the ardor of the editor. A merit in
+the work was acknowledged, and certain defects in it for which March had
+trembled were ignored; but the critics astonished him by selecting for
+censure points which he was either proud of or had never noticed; which
+being now brought to his notice he still could not feel were faults. He
+owned to Fulkerson that if they had said so and so against it, he could
+have agreed with them, but that to say thus and so was preposterous; and
+that if the advertising had not been adjusted with such generous
+recognition of the claims of the different papers, he should have known
+the counting-room was at the bottom of it. As it was, he could only
+attribute it to perversity or stupidity. It was certainly stupid to
+condemn a magazine novelty like 'Every Other Week' for being novel; and
+to augur that if it failed, it would fail through its departure from the
+lines on which all the other prosperous magazines had been built, was in
+the last degree perverse, and it looked malicious. The fact that it was
+neither exactly a book nor a magazine ought to be for it and not against
+it, since it would invade no other field; it would prosper on no ground
+but its own.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+The more March thought of the injustice of the New York press (which had
+not, however, attacked the literary quality of the number) the more
+bitterly he resented it; and his wife's indignation superheated his own.
+'Every Other Week' had become a very personal affair with the whole
+family; the children shared their parents' disgust; Belle was outspoken
+in, her denunciations of a venal press. Mrs. March saw nothing but ruin
+ahead, and began tacitly to plan a retreat to Boston, and an
+establishment retrenched to the basis of two thousand a year. She shed
+some secret tears in anticipation of the privations which this must
+involve; but when Fulkerson came to see March rather late the night of
+the publication day, she nobly told him that if the worst came to the
+worst she could only have the kindliest feeling toward him, and should
+not regard him as in the slightest degree responsible.
+
+"Oh, hold on, hold on!" he protested. "You don't think we've made a
+failure, do you?"
+
+"Why, of course," she faltered, while March remained gloomily silent.
+
+"Well, I guess we'll wait for the official count, first. Even New York
+hasn't gone against us, and I guess there's a majority coming down to
+Harlem River that could sweep everything before it, anyway."
+
+"What do you mean, Fulkerson?" March demanded, sternly.
+
+"Oh, nothing! Only, the 'News Company' has ordered ten thousand now; and
+you know we had to give them the first twenty on commission."
+
+"What do you mean?" March repeated; his wife held her breath.
+
+"I mean that the first number is a booming success already, and that it's
+going to a hundred thousand before it stops. That unanimity and variety
+of censure in the morning papers, combined with the attractiveness of the
+thing itself, has cleared every stand in the city, and now if the favor
+of the country press doesn't turn the tide against us, our fortune's
+made." The Marches remained dumb. "Why, look here! Didn't I tell you
+those criticisms would be the making of us, when they first began to turn
+you blue this morning, March?"
+
+"He came home to lunch perfectly sick," said Mrs. March; "and I wouldn't
+let him go back again."
+
+"Didn't I tell you so?" Fulkerson persisted.
+
+March could not remember that he had, or that he had been anything but
+incoherently and hysterically jocose over the papers, but he said, "Yes,
+yes--I think so."
+
+"I knew it from the start," said Fulkerson. "The only other person who
+took those criticisms in the right spirit was Mother Dryfoos--I've just
+been bolstering up the Dryfoos family. She had them read to her by Mrs.
+Mandel, and she understood them to be all the most flattering prophecies
+of success. Well, I didn't read between the lines to that extent, quite;
+but I saw that they were going to help us, if there was anything in us,
+more than anything that could have been done. And there was something in
+us! I tell you, March, that seven-shooting self-cocking donkey of a
+Beaton has given us the greatest start! He's caught on like a mouse. He's
+made the thing awfully chic; it's jimmy; there's lots of dog about it.
+He's managed that process so that the illustrations look as expensive as
+first-class wood-cuts, and they're cheaper than chromos. He's put style
+into the whole thing."
+
+"Oh yes," said March, with eager meekness, "it's Beaton that's done it."
+
+Fulkerson read jealousy of Beaton in Mrs. March's face. "Beaton has given
+us the start because his work appeals to the eye. There's no denying that
+the pictures have sold this first number; but I expect the literature of
+this first number to sell the pictures of the second. I've been reading
+it all over, nearly, since I found how the cat was jumping; I was anxious
+about it, and I tell you, old man, it's good. Yes, sir! I was afraid
+maybe you had got it too good, with that Boston refinement of yours; but
+I reckon you haven't. I'll risk it. I don't see how you got so much
+variety into so few things, and all of them palpitant, all of 'em on the
+keen jump with actuality."
+
+The mixture of American slang with the jargon of European criticism in
+Fulkerson's talk made March smile, but his wife did not seem to notice it
+in her exultation. "That is just what I say," she broke in. "It's
+perfectly wonderful. I never was anxious about it a moment, except, as
+you say, Mr. Fulkerson, I was afraid it might be too good."
+
+They went on in an antiphony of praise till March said: "Really, I don't
+see what's left me but to strike for higher wages. I perceive that I'm
+indispensable."
+
+"Why, old man, you're coming in on the divvy, you know," said Fulkerson.
+
+They both laughed, and when Fulkerson was gone, Mrs. March asked her
+husband what a divvy was.
+
+"It's a chicken before it's hatched."
+
+"No! Truly?"
+
+He explained, and she began to spend the divvy.
+
+At Mrs. Leighton's Fulkerson gave Alma all the honor of the success; he
+told her mother that the girl's design for the cover had sold every
+number, and Mrs. Leighton believed him.
+
+"Well, Ah think Ah maght have some of the glory," Miss Woodburn pouted.
+"Where am Ah comin' in?"
+
+"You're coming in on the cover of the next number," said Fulkerson.
+"We're going to have your face there; Miss Leighton's going to sketch it
+in." He said this reckless of the fact that he had already shown them the
+design of the second number, which was Beaton's weird bit of gas-country
+landscape.
+
+"Ah don't see why you don't wrahte the fiction for your magazine, Mr.
+Fulkerson," said the girl.
+
+This served to remind Fulkerson of something. He turned to her father.
+"I'll tell you what, Colonel Woodburn, I want Mr. March to see some
+chapters of that book of yours. I've been talking to him about it."
+
+"I do not think it would add to the popularity of your periodical, sir,"
+said the Colonel, with a stately pleasure in being asked. "My views of a
+civilization based upon responsible slavery would hardly be acceptable to
+your commercialized society."
+
+"Well, not as a practical thing, of course," Fulkerson admitted. "But as
+something retrospective, speculative, I believe it would make a hit.
+There's so much going on now about social questions; I guess people would
+like to read it."
+
+"I do not know that my work is intended to amuse people," said the
+Colonel, with some state.
+
+"Mah goodness! Ah only wish it WAS, then," said his daughter; and she
+added: "Yes, Mr. Fulkerson, the Colonel will be very glad to submit
+po'tions of his woak to yo' edito'. We want to have some of the honaw.
+Perhaps we can say we helped to stop yo' magazine, if we didn't help to
+stawt it."
+
+They all laughed at her boldness, and Fulkerson said: "It'll take a good
+deal more than that to stop 'Every Other Week'. The Colonel's whole book
+couldn't do it." Then he looked unhappy, for Colonel Woodburn did not
+seem to enjoy his reassuring words; but Miss Woodburn came to his rescue.
+"You maght illustrate it with the po'trait of the awthoris daughtaw, if
+it's too late for the covah."
+
+"Going to have that in every number, Miss Woodburn!" he cried.
+
+"Oh, mah goodness!" she said, with mock humility.
+
+Alma sat looking at her piquant head, black, unconsciously outlined
+against the lamp, as she sat working by the table. "Just keep still a
+moment!"
+
+She got her sketch-block and pencils, and began to draw; Fulkerson tilted
+himself forward and looked over her shoulder; he smiled outwardly;
+inwardly he was divided between admiration of Miss Woodburn's arch beauty
+and appreciation of the skill which reproduced it; at the same time he
+was trying to remember whether March had authorized him to go so far as
+to ask for a sight of Colonel Woodburn's manuscript. He felt that he had
+trenched upon March's province, and he framed one apology to the editor
+for bringing him the manuscript, and another to the author for bringing
+it back.
+
+"Most Ah hold raght still like it was a photograph?" asked Miss Woodburn.
+"Can Ah toak?"
+
+"Talk all you want," said Alma, squinting her eyes. "And you needn't be
+either adamantine, nor yet--wooden."
+
+"Oh, ho' very good of you! Well, if Ah can toak--go on, Mr. Fulkerson!"
+
+"Me talk? I can't breathe till this thing is done!" sighed Fulkerson; at
+that point of his mental drama the Colonel was behaving rustily about the
+return of his manuscript, and he felt that he was looking his last on
+Miss Woodburn's profile.
+
+"Is she getting it raght?" asked the girl.
+
+"I don't know which is which," said Fulkerson.
+
+"Oh, Ah hope Ah shall! Ah don't want to go round feelin' like a sheet of
+papah half the time."
+
+"You could rattle on, just the same," suggested Alma.
+
+"Oh, now! Jost listen to that, Mr. Fulkerson. Do you call that any way to
+toak to people?"
+
+"You might know which you were by the color," Fulkerson began, and then
+he broke off from the personal consideration with a business inspiration,
+and smacked himself on the knee, "We could print it in color!"
+
+Mrs. Leighton gathered up her sewing and held it with both hands in her
+lap, while she came round, and looked critically at the sketch and the
+model over her glasses. "It's very good, Alma," she said.
+
+Colonel Woodburn remained restively on his side of the table. "Of course,
+Mr. Fulkerson, you were jesting, sir, when you spoke of printing a sketch
+of my daughter."
+
+"Why, I don't know--If you object--?
+
+"I do, sir--decidedly," said the Colonel.
+
+"Then that settles it, of course,--I only meant--"
+
+"Indeed it doesn't!" cried the girl. "Who's to know who it's from? Ah'm
+jost set on havin' it printed! Ah'm going to appear as the head of
+Slavery--in opposition to the head of Liberty."
+
+"There'll be a revolution inside of forty-eight hours, and we'll have the
+Colonel's system going wherever a copy of 'Every Other Week' circulates,"
+said Fulkerson.
+
+"This sketch belongs to me," Alma interposed. "I'm not going to let it be
+printed."
+
+"Oh, mah goodness!" said Miss Woodburn, laughing good-humoredly. "That's
+becose you were brought up to hate slavery."
+
+"I should like Mr. Beaton to see it," said Mrs. Leighton, in a sort of
+absent tone. She added, to Fulkerson: "I rather expected he might be in
+to-night."
+
+"Well, if he comes we'll leave it to Beaton," Fulkerson said, with relief
+in the solution, and an anxious glance at the Colonel, across the table,
+to see how he took that form of the joke. Miss Woodburn intercepted his
+glance and laughed, and Fulkerson laughed, too, but rather forlornly.
+
+Alma set her lips primly and turned her head first on one side and then
+on the other to look at the sketch. "I don't think we'll leave it to Mr.
+Beaton, even if he comes."
+
+"We left the other design for the cover to Beaton," Fulkerson insinuated.
+"I guess you needn't be afraid of him."
+
+"Is it a question of my being afraid?" Alma asked; she seemed coolly
+intent on her drawing.
+
+"Miss Leighton thinks he ought to be afraid of her," Miss Woodburn
+explained.
+
+"It's a question of his courage, then?" said Alma.
+
+"Well, I don't think there are many young ladies that Beaton's afraid
+of," said Fulkerson, giving himself the respite of this purely random
+remark, while he interrogated the faces of Mrs. Leighton and Colonel
+Woodburn for some light upon the tendency of their daughters' words.
+
+He was not helped by Mrs. Leighton's saying, with a certain anxiety, "I
+don't know what you mean, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, you're as much in the dark as I am myself, then," said Fulkerson.
+"I suppose I meant that Beaton is rather--a--favorite, you know. The
+women like him."
+
+Mrs. Leighton sighed, and Colonel Woodburn rose and left the room.
+
+In the silence that followed, Fulkerson looked from one lady to the other
+with dismay. "I seem to have put my foot in it, somehow," he suggested,
+and Miss Woodburn gave a cry of laughter.
+
+"Poo' Mr. Fulkerson! Poo' Mr. Fulkerson! Papa thoat you wanted him to
+go."
+
+"Wanted him to go?" repeated Fulkerson.
+
+"We always mention Mr. Beaton when we want to get rid of papa."
+
+"Well, it seems to me that I have noticed that he didn't take much
+interest in Beaton, as a general topic. But I don't know that I ever saw
+it drive him out of the room before!"
+
+"Well, he isn't always so bad," said Miss Woodburn. "But it was a case of
+hate at first sight, and it seems to be growin' on papa."
+
+"Well, I can understand that," said Fulkerson. "The impulse to destroy
+Beaton is something that everybody has to struggle against at the start."
+
+"I must say, Mr. Fulkerson," said Mrs. Leighton, in the tremor through
+which she nerved herself to differ openly with any one she liked, "I
+never had to struggle with anything of the kind, in regard to Mr. Beaton.
+He has always been most respectful and--and--considerate, with me,
+whatever he has been with others."
+
+"Well, of course, Mrs. Leighton!" Fulkerson came back in a soothing tone.
+"But you see you're the rule that proves the exception. I was speaking of
+the way men felt about Beaton. It's different with ladies; I just said
+so."
+
+"Is it always different?" Alma asked, lifting her head and her hand from
+her drawing, and staring at it absently.
+
+Fulkerson pushed both his hands through his whiskers. "Look here! Look
+here!" he said. "Won't somebody start some other subject? We haven't had
+the weather up yet, have we? Or the opera? What is the matter with a few
+remarks about politics?"
+
+"Why, Ah thoat you lahked to toak about the staff of yo' magazine," said
+Miss Woodburn.
+
+"Oh, I do!" said Fulkerson. "But not always about the same member of it.
+He gets monotonous, when he doesn't get complicated. I've just come round
+from the Marches'," he added, to Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"I suppose they've got thoroughly settled in their apartment by this
+time." Mrs. Leighton said something like this whenever the Marches were
+mentioned. At the bottom of her heart she had not forgiven them for not
+taking her rooms; she had liked their looks so much; and she was always
+hoping that they were uncomfortable or dissatisfied; she could not help
+wanting them punished a little.
+
+"Well, yes; as much as they ever will be," Fulkerson answered. "The
+Boston style is pretty different, you know; and the Marches are
+old-fashioned folks, and I reckon they never went in much for bric-a-brac.
+They've put away nine or ten barrels of dragon candlesticks, but they
+keep finding new ones."
+
+"Their landlady has just joined our class," said Alma. "Isn't her name
+Green? She happened to see my copy of 'Every Other Week', and said she
+knew the editor; and told me."
+
+"Well, it's a little world," said Fulkerson. "You seem to be touching
+elbows with everybody. Just think of your having had our head translator
+for a model."
+
+"Ah think that your whole publication revolves aroand the Leighton
+family," said Miss Woodburn.
+
+"That's pretty much so," Fulkerson admitted. "Anyhow, the publisher seems
+disposed to do so."
+
+"Are you the publisher? I thought it was Mr. Dryfoos," said Alma.
+
+"It is."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+The tone and the word gave Fulkerson a discomfort which he promptly
+confessed. "Missed again."
+
+The girls laughed, and he regained something of his lost spirits, and
+smiled upon their gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it.
+
+Miss Woodburn asked, "And is Mr. Dryfoos senio' anything like ouah Mr.
+Dryfoos?"
+
+"Not the least."
+
+"But he's jost as exemplary?"
+
+"Yes; in his way."
+
+"Well, Ah wish Ah could see all those pinks of puffection togethah,
+once."
+
+"Why, look here! I've been thinking I'd celebrate a little, when the old
+gentleman gets back. Have a little supper--something of that kind. How
+would you like to let me have your parlors for it, Mrs. Leighton? You
+ladies could stand on the stairs, and have a peep at us, in the bunch."
+
+"Oh, mah! What a privilege! And will Miss Alma be there, with the othah
+contributors? Ah shall jost expah of envy!"
+
+"She won't be there in person," said Fulkerson, "but she'll be
+represented by the head of the art department."
+
+"Mah goodness! And who'll the head of the publishing department
+represent?"
+
+"He can represent you," said Alma.
+
+"Well, Ah want to be represented, someho'."
+
+"We'll have the banquet the night before you appear on the cover of our
+fourth number," said Fulkerson.
+
+"Ah thoat that was doubly fo'bidden," said Miss Woodburn. "By the stern
+parent and the envious awtust."
+
+"We'll get Beaton to get round them, somehow. I guess we can trust him to
+manage that."
+
+Mrs. Leighton sighed her resentment of the implication.
+
+"I always feel that Mr. Beaton doesn't do himself justice," she began.
+
+Fulkerson could not forego the chance of a joke. "Well, maybe he would
+rather temper justice with mercy in a case like his." This made both the
+younger ladies laugh. "I judge this is my chance to get off with my
+life," he added, and he rose as he spoke. "Mrs. Leighton, I am about the
+only man of my sex who doesn't thirst for Beaton's blood most of the
+time. But I know him and I don't. He's more kinds of a good fellow than
+people generally understand. He doesn't wear his heart upon his
+sleeve--not his ulster sleeve, anyway. You can always count me on your
+side when it's a question of finding Beaton not guilty if he'll leave the
+State."
+
+Alma set her drawing against the wall, in rising to say goodnight to
+Fulkerson. He bent over on his stick to look at it. "Well, it's
+beautiful," he sighed, with unconscious sincerity.
+
+Alma made him a courtesy of mock modesty. "Thanks to Miss Woodburn!"
+
+"Oh no! All she had to do was simply to stay put."
+
+"Don't you think Ah might have improved it if Ah had looked better?" the
+girl asked, gravely.
+
+"Oh, you couldn't!" said Fulkerson, and he went off triumphant in their
+applause and their cries of "Which? which?"
+
+Mrs. Leighton sank deep into an accusing gloom when at last she found
+herself alone with her daughter. "I don't know what you are thinking
+about, Alma Leighton. If you don't like Mr. Beaton--"
+
+"I don't."
+
+"You don't? You know better than that. You know that, you did care for
+him."
+
+"Oh! that's a very different thing. That's a thing that can be got over."
+
+"Got over!" repeated Mrs. Leighton, aghast.
+
+"Of course, it can! Don't be romantic, mamma. People get over dozens of
+such fancies. They even marry for love two or three times."
+
+"Never!" cried her mother, doing her best to feel shocked; and at last
+looking it.
+
+Her looking it had no effect upon Alma. "You can easily get over caring
+for people; but you can't get over liking them--if you like them because
+they are sweet and good. That's what lasts. I was a simple goose, and he
+imposed upon me because he was a sophisticated goose. Now the case is
+reversed."
+
+"He does care for you, now. You can see it. Why do you encourage him to
+come here?"
+
+"I don't," said Alma. "I will tell him to keep away if you like. But
+whether he comes or goes, it will be the same."
+
+"Not to him, Alma! He is in love with you!"
+
+"He has never said so."
+
+"And you would really let him say so, when you intend to refuse him?"
+
+"I can't very well refuse him till he does say so."
+
+This was undeniable. Mrs. Leighton could only demand, in an awful tone,
+"May I ask why--if you cared for him; and I know you care for him still
+you will refuse him?"
+
+Alma laughed. "Because--because I'm wedded to my Art, and I'm not going
+to commit bigamy, whatever I do."
+
+"Alma!"
+
+"Well, then, because I don't like him--that is, I don't believe in him,
+and don't trust him. He's fascinating, but he's false and he's fickle. He
+can't help it, I dare say."
+
+"And you are perfectly hard. Is it possible that you were actually
+pleased to have Mr. Fulkerson tease you about Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"Oh, good-night, now, mamma! This is becoming personal."
+
+
+PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    Artists never do anything like other people
+    Ballast of her instinctive despondency
+    Clinging persistence of such natures
+    Dividend: It's a chicken before it's hatched
+    Gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it
+    Hopeful recklessness
+    How much can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing
+    I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of yours
+    If you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen
+    It must be your despair that helps you to bear up
+    Marry for love two or three times
+    No man deserves to suffer at the hands of another
+    Patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius
+    Person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it
+    Say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him
+    Shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo'--its inconvenience
+    Timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man
+
+
+
+
+THIRD PART
+
+
+I.
+
+The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial success of 'Every Other
+Week' expanded in Fulkerson's fancy into a series. Instead of the
+publishing and editorial force, with certain of the more representative
+artists and authors sitting down to a modest supper in Mrs. Leighton's
+parlors, he conceived of a dinner at Delmonico's, with the principal
+literary and artistic, people throughout the country as guests, and an
+inexhaustible hospitality to reporters and correspondents, from whom
+paragraphs, prophetic and historic, would flow weeks before and after the
+first of the series. He said the thing was a new departure in magazines;
+it amounted to something in literature as radical as the American
+Revolution in politics: it was the idea of self government in the arts;
+and it was this idea that had never yet been fully developed in regard to
+it. That was what must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and the
+speeches must be reported. Then it would go like wildfire. He asked March
+whether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he was
+sure, would come; he was a literary man. They ought to invite Mr. Evarts,
+and the Cardinal and the leading Protestant divines. His ambition stopped
+at nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there he had to wait the
+return of the elder Dryfoos from the West, and Dryfoos was still delayed
+at Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was afraid he would
+stay there till his own enthusiasm escaped in other activities, other
+plans.
+
+Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall under a superstitious
+subjection to another man; but March could not help seeing that in this
+possible measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson's fetish. He did not revere him,
+March decided, because it was not in Fulkerson's nature to revere
+anything; he could like and dislike, but he could not respect.
+Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; and besides the homage
+which those who have not pay to those who have, Fulkerson rendered
+Dryfoos the tribute of a feeling which March could only define as a sort
+of bewilderment. As well as March could make out, this feeling was evoked
+by the spectacle of Dryfoos's unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was fond of
+dazzling himself with. It perfectly consisted with a keen sense of
+whatever was sordid and selfish in a man on whom his career must have had
+its inevitable effect. He liked to philosophize the case with March, to
+recall Dryfoos as he was when he first met him still somewhat in the sap,
+at Moffitt, and to study the processes by which he imagined him to have
+dried into the hardened speculator, without even the pretence to any
+advantage but his own in his ventures. He was aware of painting the
+character too vividly, and he warned March not to accept it exactly in
+those tints, but to subdue them and shade it for himself. He said that
+where his advantage was not concerned, there was ever so much good in
+Dryfoos, and that if in some things he had grown inflexible, he had
+expanded in others to the full measure of the vast scale on which he did
+business. It had seemed a little odd to March that a man should put money
+into such an enterprise as 'Every Other Week' and go off about other
+affairs, not only without any sign of anxiety, but without any sort of
+interest. But Fulkerson said that was the splendid side of Dryfoos. He
+had a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to the strain of any such
+uncertainty. He had faced the music once for all, when he asked Fulkerson
+what the thing would cost in the different degrees of potential failure;
+and then he had gone off, leaving everything to Fulkerson and the younger
+Dryfoos, with the instruction simply to go ahead and not bother him about
+it. Fulkerson called that pretty tall for an old fellow who used to
+bewail the want of pigs and chickens to occupy his mind. He alleged it as
+another proof of the versatility of the American mind, and of the
+grandeur of institutions and opportunities that let every man grow to his
+full size, so that any man in America could run the concern if necessary.
+He believed that old Dryfoos could step into Bismarck's shoes and run the
+German Empire at ten days' notice, or about as long as it would take him
+to go from New York to Berlin. But Bismarck would not know anything about
+Dryfoos's plans till Dryfoos got ready to show his hand. Fulkerson
+himself did not pretend to say what the old man had been up to since he
+went West. He was at Moffitt first, and then he was at Chicago, and then
+he had gone out to Denver to look after some mines he had out there, and
+a railroad or two; and now he was at Moffitt again. He was supposed to be
+closing up his affairs there, but nobody could say.
+
+Fulkerson told March the morning after Dryfoos returned that he had not
+only not pulled out at Moffitt, but had gone in deeper, ten times deeper
+than ever. He was in a royal good-humor, Fulkerson reported, and was
+going to drop into the office on his way up from the Street (March
+understood Wall Street) that afternoon. He was tickled to death with
+'Every Other Week' so far as it had gone, and was anxious to pay his
+respects to the editor.
+
+March accounted for some rhetoric in this, but let it flatter him, and
+prepared himself for a meeting about which he could see that Fulkerson
+was only less nervous than he had shown himself about the public
+reception of the first number. It gave March a disagreeable feeling of
+being owned and of being about to be inspected by his proprietor; but he
+fell back upon such independence as he could find in the thought of those
+two thousand dollars of income beyond the caprice of his owner, and
+maintained an outward serenity.
+
+He was a little ashamed afterward of the resolution it had cost him to do
+so. It was not a question of Dryfoos's physical presence: that was rather
+effective than otherwise, and carried a suggestion of moneyed
+indifference to convention in the gray business suit of provincial cut,
+and the low, wide-brimmed hat of flexible black felt. He had a stick with
+an old-fashioned top of buckhorn worn smooth and bright by the palm of
+his hand, which had not lost its character in fat, and which had a
+history of former work in its enlarged knuckles, though it was now as
+soft as March's, and must once have been small even for a man of Mr.
+Dryfoos's stature; he was below the average size. But what struck March
+was the fact that Dryfoos seemed furtively conscious of being a country
+person, and of being aware that in their meeting he was to be tried by
+other tests than those which would have availed him as a shrewd
+speculator. He evidently had some curiosity about March, as the first of
+his kind whom he had encountered; some such curiosity as the country
+school trustee feels and tries to hide in the presence of the new
+schoolmaster. But the whole affair was, of course, on a higher plane; on
+one side Dryfoos was much more a man of the world than March was, and he
+probably divined this at once, and rested himself upon the fact in a
+measure. It seemed to be his preference that his son should introduce
+them, for he came upstairs with Conrad, and they had fairly made
+acquaintance before Fulkerson joined them.
+
+Conrad offered to leave them at once, but his father made him stay. "I
+reckon Mr. March and I haven't got anything so private to talk about that
+we want to keep it from the other partners. Well, Mr. March, are you
+getting used to New York yet? It takes a little time."
+
+"Oh yes. But not so much time as most places. Everybody belongs more or
+less in New York; nobody has to belong here altogether."
+
+"Yes, that is so. You can try it, and go away if you don't like it a good
+deal easier than you could from a smaller place. Wouldn't make so much
+talk, would it?" He glanced at March with a jocose light in his shrewd
+eyes. "That is the way I feel about it all the time: just visiting. Now,
+it wouldn't be that way in Boston, I reckon?"
+
+"You couldn't keep on visiting there your whole life," said March.
+
+Dryfoos laughed, showing his lower teeth in a way that was at once simple
+and fierce. "Mr. Fulkerson didn't hardly know as he could get you to
+leave. I suppose you got used to it there. I never been in your city."
+
+"I had got used to it; but it was hardly my city, except by marriage. My
+wife's a Bostonian."
+
+"She's been a little homesick here, then," said Dryfoos, with a smile of
+the same quality as his laugh.
+
+"Less than I expected," said March. "Of course, she was very much
+attached to our old home."
+
+"I guess my wife won't ever get used to New York," said Dryfoos, and he
+drew in his lower lip with a sharp sigh. "But my girls like it; they're
+young. You never been out our way yet, Mr. March? Out West?"
+
+"Well, only for the purpose of being born, and brought up. I used to live
+in Crawfordsville, and then Indianapolis."
+
+"Indianapolis is bound to be a great place," said Dryfoos. "I remember
+now, Mr. Fulkerson told me you was from our State." He went on to brag of
+the West, as if March were an Easterner and had to be convinced. "You
+ought to see all that country. It's a great country."
+
+"Oh yes," said March, "I understand that." He expected the praise of the
+great West to lead up to some comment on 'Every Other Week'; and there
+was abundant suggestion of that topic in the manuscripts, proofs of
+letter-press and illustrations, with advance copies of the latest number
+strewn over his table.
+
+But Dryfoos apparently kept himself from looking at these things. He
+rolled his head about on his shoulders to take in the character of the
+room, and said to his son, "You didn't change the woodwork, after all."
+
+"No; the architect thought we had better let it be, unless we meant to
+change the whole place. He liked its being old-fashioned."
+
+"I hope you feel comfortable here, Mr. March," the old man said, bringing
+his eyes to bear upon him again after their tour of inspection.
+
+"Too comfortable for a working-man," said March, and he thought that this
+remark must bring them to some talk about his work, but the proprietor
+only smiled again.
+
+"I guess I sha'n't lose much on this house," he returned, as if musing
+aloud. "This down-town property is coming up. Business is getting in on
+all these side streets. I thought I paid a pretty good price for it,
+too." He went on to talk of real estate, and March began to feel a
+certain resentment at his continued avoidance of the only topic in which
+they could really have a common interest. "You live down this way
+somewhere, don't you?" the old man concluded.
+
+"Yes. I wished to be near my work." March was vexed with himself for
+having recurred to it; but afterward he was not sure but Dryfoos shared
+his own diffidence in the matter, and was waiting for him to bring it
+openly into the talk. At times he seemed wary and masterful, and then
+March felt that he was being examined and tested; at others so simple
+that March might well have fancied that he needed encouragement, and
+desired it. He talked of his wife and daughters in a way that invited
+March to say friendly things of his family, which appeared to give the
+old man first an undue pleasure and then a final distrust. At moments he
+turned, with an effect of finding relief in it, to his son and spoke to
+him across March of matters which he was unacquainted with; he did not
+seem aware that this was rude, but the young man must have felt it so; he
+always brought the conversation back, and once at some cost to himself
+when his father made it personal.
+
+"I want to make a regular New York business man out of that fellow," he
+said to March, pointing at Conrad with his stick. "You s'pose I'm ever
+going to do it?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," said March, trying to fall in with the joke. "Do
+you mean nothing but a business man?"
+
+The old man laughed at whatever latent meaning he fancied in this, and
+said: "You think he would be a little too much for me there? Well, I've
+seen enough of 'em to know it don't always take a large pattern of a man
+to do a large business. But I want him to get the business training, and
+then if he wants to go into something else he knows what the world is,
+anyway. Heigh?"
+
+"Oh yes!" March assented, with some compassion for the young man
+reddening patiently under his father's comment.
+
+Dryfoos went on as if his son were not in hearing. "Now that boy wanted
+to be a preacher. What does a preacher know about the world he preaches
+against when he's been brought up a preacher? He don't know so much as a
+bad little boy in his Sunday-school; he knows about as much as a girl. I
+always told him, You be a man first, and then you be a preacher, if you
+want to. Heigh?"
+
+"Precisely." March began to feel some compassion for himself in being
+witness of the young fellow's discomfort under his father's homily.
+
+"When we first come to New York, I told him, Now here's your chance to
+see the world on a big scale. You know already what work and saving and
+steady habits and sense will bring a man, to; you don't want to go round
+among the rich; you want to go among the poor, and see what laziness and
+drink and dishonesty and foolishness will bring men to. And I guess he
+knows, about as well as anybody; and if he ever goes to preaching he'll
+know what he's preaching about." The old man smiled his fierce, simple
+smile, and in his sharp eyes March fancied contempt of the ambition he
+had balked in his son. The present scene must have been one of many
+between them, ending in meek submission on the part of the young man,
+whom his father, perhaps without realizing his cruelty, treated as a
+child. March took it hard that he should be made to suffer in the
+presence of a co-ordinate power like himself, and began to dislike the
+old man out of proportion to his offence, which might have been mere want
+of taste, or an effect of mere embarrassment before him. But evidently,
+whatever rebellion his daughters had carried through against him, he had
+kept his dominion over this gentle spirit unbroken. March did not choose
+to make any response, but to let him continue, if he would, entirely upon
+his own impulse.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+A silence followed, of rather painful length. It was broken by the cheery
+voice of Fulkerson, sent before him to herald Fulkerson's cheery person.
+"Well, I suppose you've got the glorious success of 'Every Other Week'
+down pretty cold in your talk by this time. I should have been up sooner
+to join you, but I was nipping a man for the last page of the cover. I
+guess we'll have to let the Muse have that for an advertisement instead
+of a poem the next time, March. Well, the old gentleman given you boys
+your scolding?" The person of Fulkerson had got into the room long before
+he reached this question, and had planted itself astride a chair.
+Fulkerson looked over the chairback, now at March, and now at the elder
+Dryfoos as he spoke.
+
+March answered him. "I guess we must have been waiting for you,
+Fulkerson. At any rate, we hadn't got to the scolding yet."
+
+"Why, I didn't suppose Mr. Dryfoos could 'a' held in so long. I
+understood he was awful mad at the way the thing started off, and wanted
+to give you a piece of his mind, when he got at you. I inferred as much
+from a remark that he made." March and Dryfoos looked foolish, as men do
+when made the subject of this sort of merry misrepresentation.
+
+"I reckon my scolding will keep awhile yet," said the old man, dryly.
+
+"Well, then, I guess it's a good chance to give Mr. Dryfoos an idea of
+what we've really done--just while we're resting, as Artemus Ward says.
+Heigh, March?"
+
+"I will let you blow the trumpet, Fulkerson. I think it belongs strictly
+to the advertising department," said March. He now distinctly resented
+the old man's failure to say anything to him of the magazine; he made his
+inference that it was from a suspicion of his readiness to presume upon a
+recognition of his share in the success, and he was determined to second
+no sort of appeal for it.
+
+"The advertising department is the heart and soul of every business,"
+said Fulkerson, hardily, "and I like to keep my hand in with a little
+practise on the trumpet in private. I don't believe Mr. Dryfoos has got
+any idea of the extent of this thing. He's been out among those
+Rackensackens, where we were all born, and he's read the notices in their
+seven by nine dailies, and he's seen the thing selling on the cars, and
+he thinks he appreciates what's been done. But I should just like to take
+him round in this little old metropolis awhile, and show him 'Every Other
+Week' on the centre tables of the millionaires--the Vanderbilts and the
+Astors--and in the homes of culture and refinement everywhere, and let
+him judge for himself. It's the talk of the clubs and the dinner-tables;
+children cry for it; it's the Castoria of literature and the Pearline of
+art, the 'Won't-be-happy-till-he-gets-it of every enlightened man,
+woman, and child in this vast city. I knew we could capture the country;
+but, my goodness! I didn't expect to have New York fall into our hands at
+a blow. But that's just exactly what New York has done. 'Every Other Week'
+supplies the long-felt want that's been grinding round in New York and
+keeping it awake nights ever since the war. It's the culmination of all
+the high and ennobling ideals of the past."
+
+"How much," asked Dryfoos, "do you expect to get out of it the first
+year, if it keeps the start it's got?"
+
+"Comes right down to business, every time!" said Fulkerson, referring the
+characteristic to March with a delighted glance. "Well, sir, if
+everything works right, and we get rain enough to fill up the springs,
+and it isn't a grasshopper year, I expect to clear above all expenses
+something in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars."
+
+"Humph! And you are all going to work a year--editor, manager, publisher,
+artists, writers, printers, and the rest of 'em--to clear twenty-five
+thousand dollars?--I made that much in half a day in Moffitt once. I see
+it made in half a minute in Wall Street, sometimes." The old man
+presented this aspect of the case with a good-natured contempt, which
+included Fulkerson and his enthusiasm in an obvious liking.
+
+His son suggested, "But when we make that money here, no one loses it."
+
+"Can you prove that?" His father turned sharply upon him. "Whatever is
+won is lost. It's all a game; it don't make any difference what you bet
+on. Business is business, and a business man takes his risks with his
+eyes open."
+
+"Ah, but the glory!" Fulkerson insinuated with impudent persiflage. "I
+hadn't got to the glory yet, because it's hard to estimate it; but put
+the glory at the lowest figure, Mr. Dryfoos, and add it to the
+twenty-five thousand, and you've got an annual income from 'Every Other
+Week' of dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double-track,
+from this office to the moon. I don't mention any of the sister planets
+because I like to keep within bounds."
+
+Dryfoos showed his lower teeth for pleasure in Fulkerson's fooling, and
+said, "That's what I like about you, Mr. Fulkerson--you always keep
+within bounds."
+
+"Well, I ain't a shrinking Boston violet, like March, here. More
+sunflower in my style of diffidence; but I am modest, I don't deny it,"
+said Fulkerson. "And I do hate to have a thing overstated."
+
+"And the glory--you do really think there's something in the glory that
+pays?"
+
+"Not a doubt of it! I shouldn't care for the paltry return in money,"
+said Fulkerson, with a burlesque of generous disdain, "if it wasn't for
+the glory along with it."
+
+"And how should you feel about the glory, if there was no money along
+with it?"
+
+"Well, sir, I'm happy to say we haven't come to that yet."
+
+"Now, Conrad, here," said the old man, with a sort of pathetic rancor,
+"would rather have the glory alone. I believe he don't even care much for
+your kind of glory, either, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+Fulkerson ran his little eyes curiously over Conrad's face and then
+March's, as if searching for a trace there of something gone before which
+would enable him to reach Dryfoos's whole meaning. He apparently resolved
+to launch himself upon conjecture. "Oh, well, we know how Conrad feels
+about the things of this world, anyway. I should like to take 'em on the
+plane of another sphere, too, sometimes; but I noticed a good while ago
+that this was the world I was born into, and so I made up my mind that I
+would do pretty much what I saw the rest of the folks doing here below.
+And I can't see but what Conrad runs the thing on business principles in
+his department, and I guess you'll find it so if you look into it. I
+consider that we're a whole team and big dog under the wagon with you to
+draw on for supplies, and March, here, at the head of the literary
+business, and Conrad in the counting-room, and me to do the heavy lying
+in the advertising part. Oh, and Beaton, of course, in the art. I 'most
+forgot Beaton--Hamlet with Hamlet left out."
+
+Dryfoos looked across at his son. "Wasn't that the fellow's name that was
+there last night?"
+
+"Yes," said Conrad.
+
+The old man rose. "Well, I reckon I got to be going. You ready to go
+up-town, Conrad?"
+
+"Well, not quite yet, father."
+
+The old man shook hands with March, and went downstairs, followed by his
+son.
+
+Fulkerson remained.
+
+"He didn't jump at the chance you gave him to compliment us all round,
+Fulkerson," said March, with a smile not wholly of pleasure.
+
+Fulkerson asked, with as little joy in the grin he had on, "Didn't he say
+anything to you before I came in?"
+
+"Not a word."
+
+"Dogged if I know what to make of it," sighed Fulkerson, "but I guess
+he's been having a talk with Conrad that's soured on him. I reckon maybe
+he came back expecting to find that boy reconciled to the glory of this
+world, and Conrad's showed himself just as set against it as ever."
+
+"It might have been that," March admitted, pensively. "I fancied
+something of the kind myself from words the old man let drop."
+
+Fulkerson made him explain, and then he said:
+
+"That's it, then; and it's all right. Conrad 'll come round in time; and
+all we've got to do is to have patience with the old man till he does. I
+know he likes you." Fulkerson affirmed this only interrogatively, and
+looked so anxiously to March for corroboration that March laughed.
+
+"He dissembled his love," he said; but afterward, in describing to his
+wife his interview with Mr. Dryfoos, he was less amused with this fact.
+
+When she saw that he was a little cast down by it, she began to encourage
+him. "He's just a common, ignorant man, and probably didn't know how to
+express himself. You may be perfectly sure that he's delighted with the
+success of the magazine, and that he understands as well as you do that
+he owes it all to you."
+
+"Ah, I'm not so sure. I don't believe a man's any better for having made
+money so easily and rapidly as Dryfoos has done, and I doubt if he's any
+wiser. I don't know just the point he's reached in his evolution from
+grub to beetle, but I do know that so far as it's gone the process must
+have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions. I guess he's
+come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that
+intellectual ability is among them--what we call intellectual ability. He
+must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous
+instincts, and I don't see why it shouldn't have reached his mental
+make-up. He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned
+into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity. That's
+the way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos's experience, and I am not very
+proud when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and
+ambition of most Americans. I rather think they came pretty near being
+mine, once."
+
+"No, dear, they never did," his wife protested.
+
+"Well, they're not likely to be in the future. The Dryfoos feature of
+'Every Other Week' is thoroughly distasteful to me."
+
+"Why, but he hasn't really got anything to do with it, has he, beyond
+furnishing the money?"
+
+"That's the impression that Fulkerson has allowed us to get. But the man
+that holds the purse holds the reins. He may let us guide the horse, but
+when he likes he can drive. If we don't like his driving, then we can get
+down."
+
+Mrs. March was less interested in this figure of speech than in the
+personal aspects involved. "Then you think Mr. Fulkerson has deceived
+you?"
+
+"Oh no!" said her husband, laughing. "But I think he has deceived
+himself, perhaps."
+
+"How?" she pursued.
+
+"He may have thought he was using Dryfoos, when Dryfoos was using him,
+and he may have supposed he was not afraid of him when he was very much
+so. His courage hadn't been put to the test, and courage is a matter of
+proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can't tell whether
+you've got it till you try."
+
+"Nonsense! Do you mean that he would ever sacrifice you to Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"I hope he may not be tempted. But I'd rather be taking the chances with
+Fulkerson alone than with Fulkerson and Dryfoos to back him. Dryfoos
+seems, somehow, to take the poetry and the pleasure out of the thing."
+
+Mrs. March was a long time silent. Then she began, "Well, my dear, I
+never wanted to come to New York--"
+
+"Neither did I," March promptly put in.
+
+"But now that we're here," she went on, "I'm not going to have you
+letting every little thing discourage you. I don't see what there was in
+Mr. Dryfoos's manner to give you any anxiety. He's just a common, stupid,
+inarticulate country person, and he didn't know how to express himself,
+as I said in the beginning, and that's the reason he didn't say
+anything."
+
+"Well, I don't deny you're right about it."
+
+"It's dreadful," his wife continued, "to be mixed up with such a man and
+his family, but I don't believe he'll ever meddle with your management,
+and, till he does, all you need do is to have as little to do with him as
+possible, and go quietly on your own way."
+
+"Oh, I shall go on quietly enough," said March. "I hope I sha'n't begin
+going stealthily."
+
+"Well, my dear," said Mrs. March, "just let me know when you're tempted
+to do that. If ever you sacrifice the smallest grain of your honesty or
+your self-respect to Mr. Dryfoos, or anybody else, I will simply renounce
+you."
+
+"In view of that I'm rather glad the management of 'Every Other Week'
+involves tastes and not convictions," said March.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+That night Dryfoos was wakened from his after-dinner nap by the sound of
+gay talk and nervous giggling in the drawing-room. The talk, which was
+Christine's, and the giggling, which was Mela's, were intershot with the
+heavier tones of a man's voice; and Dryfoos lay awhile on the leathern
+lounge in his library, trying to make out whether he knew the voice. His
+wife sat in a deep chair before the fire, with her eyes on his face,
+waiting for him to wake.
+
+"Who is that out there?" he asked, without opening his eyes.
+
+"Indeed, indeed, I don't know, Jacob," his wife answered. "I reckon it's
+just some visitor of the girls'."
+
+"Was I snoring?"
+
+"Not a bit. You was sleeping as quiet! I did hate to have 'em wake you,
+and I was just goin' out to shoo them. They've been playin' something,
+and that made them laugh."
+
+"I didn't know but I had snored," said the old man, sitting up.
+
+"No," said his wife. Then she asked, wistfully, "Was you out at the old
+place, Jacob?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Did it look natural?"
+
+"Yes; mostly. They're sinking the wells down in the woods pasture."
+
+"And--the children's graves?"
+
+"They haven't touched that part. But I reckon we got to have 'em moved to
+the cemetery. I bought a lot."
+
+The old woman began softly to weep. "It does seem too hard that they
+can't be let to rest in peace, pore little things. I wanted you and me to
+lay there, too, when our time come, Jacob. Just there, back o' the
+beehives and under them shoomakes--my, I can see the very place! And I
+don't believe I'll ever feel at home anywheres else. I woon't know where
+I am when the trumpet sounds. I have to think before I can tell where the
+east is in New York; and what if I should git faced the wrong way when I
+raise? Jacob, I wonder you could sell it!" Her head shook, and the
+firelight shone on her tears as she searched the folds of her dress for
+her pocket.
+
+A peal of laughter came from the drawing-room, and then the sound of
+chords struck on the piano.
+
+"Hush! Don't you cry, 'Liz'beth!" said Dryfoos. "Here; take my
+handkerchief. I've got a nice lot in the cemetery, and I'm goin' to have
+a monument, with two lambs on it--like the one you always liked so much.
+It ain't the fashion, any more, to have family buryin' grounds; they're
+collectin' 'em into the cemeteries, all round."
+
+"I reckon I got to bear it," said his wife, muffling her face in his
+handkerchief. "And I suppose the Lord kin find me, wherever I am. But I
+always did want to lay just there. You mind how we used to go out and set
+there, after milkin', and watch the sun go down, and talk about where
+their angels was, and try to figger it out?"
+
+"I remember, 'Liz'beth."
+
+The man's voice in the drawing-room sang a snatch of French song,
+insolent, mocking, salient; and then Christine's attempted the same
+strain, and another cry of laughter from Mela followed.
+
+"Well, I always did expect to lay there. But I reckon it's all right. It
+won't be a great while, now, anyway. Jacob, I don't believe I'm a-goin'
+to live very long. I know it don't agree with me here."
+
+"Oh, I guess it does, 'Liz'beth. You're just a little pulled down with
+the weather. It's coming spring, and you feel it; but the doctor says
+you're all right. I stopped in, on the way up, and he says so."
+
+"I reckon he don't know everything," the old woman persisted: "I've been
+runnin' down ever since we left Moffitt, and I didn't feel any too well
+there, even. It's a very strange thing, Jacob, that the richer you git,
+the less you ain't able to stay where you want to, dead or alive."
+
+"It's for the children we do it," said Dryfoos. "We got to give them
+their chance in the world."
+
+"Oh, the world! They ought to bear the yoke in their youth, like we done.
+I know it's what Coonrod would like to do."
+
+Dryfoos got upon his feet. "If Coonrod 'll mind his own business, and do
+what I want him to, he'll have yoke enough to bear." He moved from his
+wife, without further effort to comfort her, and pottered heavily out
+into the dining-room. Beyond its obscurity stretched the glitter of the
+deep drawing-room. His feet, in their broad, flat slippers, made no sound
+on the dense carpet, and he came unseen upon the little group there near
+the piano. Mela perched upon the stool with her back to the keys, and
+Beaton bent over Christine, who sat with a banjo in her lap, letting him
+take her hands and put them in the right place on the instrument. Her
+face was radiant with happiness, and Mela was watching her with foolish,
+unselfish pleasure in her bliss.
+
+There was nothing wrong in the affair to a man of Dryfoos's traditions
+and perceptions, and if it had been at home in the farm sitting-room, or
+even in his parlor at Moffitt, he would not have minded a young man's
+placing his daughter's hands on a banjo, or even holding them there; it
+would have seemed a proper, attention from him if he was courting her.
+But here, in such a house as this, with the daughter of a man who had
+made as much money as he had, he did not know but it was a liberty. He
+felt the angry doubt of it which beset him in regard to so many
+experiences of his changed life; he wanted to show his sense of it, if it
+was a liberty, but he did not know how, and he did not know that it was
+so. Besides, he could not help a touch of the pleasure in Christine's
+happiness which Mela showed; and he would have gone back to the library,
+if he could, without being discovered.
+
+But Beaton had seen him, and Dryfoos, with a nonchalant nod to the young
+man, came forward. "What you got there, Christine?"
+
+"A banjo," said the girl, blushing in her father's presence.
+
+Mela gurgled. "Mr. Beaton is learnun' her the first position."
+
+Beaton was not embarrassed. He was in evening dress, and his face,
+pointed with its brown beard, showed extremely handsome above the expanse
+of his broad, white shirt-front. He gave back as nonchalant a nod as he
+had got, and, without further greeting to Dryfoos, he said to Christine:
+"No, no. You must keep your hand and arm so." He held them in position.
+"There! Now strike with your right hand. See?"
+
+"I don't believe I can ever learn," said the girl, with a fond upward
+look at him.
+
+"Oh yes, you can," said Beaton.
+
+They both ignored Dryfoos in the little play of protests which followed,
+and he said, half jocosely, half suspiciously, "And is the banjo the
+fashion, now?" He remembered it as the emblem of low-down show business,
+and associated it with end-men and blackened faces and grotesque
+shirt-collars.
+
+"It's all the rage," Mela shouted, in answer for all. "Everybody plays
+it. Mr. Beaton borrowed this from a lady friend of his."
+
+"Humph! Pity I got you a piano, then," said Dryfoos. "A banjo would have
+been cheaper."
+
+Beaton so far admitted him to the conversation as to seem reminded of the
+piano by his mentioning it. He said to Mela, "Oh, won't you just strike
+those chords?" and as Mela wheeled about and beat the keys he took the
+banjo from Christine and sat down with it. "This way!" He strummed it,
+and murmured the tune Dryfoos had heard him singing from the library,
+while he kept his beautiful eyes floating on Christine's. "You try that,
+now; it's very simple."
+
+"Where is Mrs. Mandel?" Dryfoos demanded, trying to assert himself.
+
+Neither of the girls seemed to have heard him at first in the chatter
+they broke into over what Beaton proposed. Then Mela said, absently, "Oh,
+she had to go out to see one of her friends that's sick," and she struck
+the piano keys. "Come; try it, Chris!"
+
+Dryfoos turned about unheeded and went back to the library. He would have
+liked to put Beaton out of his house, and in his heart he burned against
+him as a contumacious hand; he would have liked to discharge him from the
+art department of 'Every Other Week' at once. But he was aware of not
+having treated Beaton with much ceremony, and if the young man had
+returned his behavior in kind, with an electrical response to his own
+feeling, had he any right to complain? After all, there was no harm in
+his teaching Christine the banjo.
+
+His wife still sat looking into the fire. "I can't see," she said, "as
+we've got a bit more comfort of our lives, Jacob, because we've got such
+piles and piles of money. I wisht to gracious we was back on the farm
+this minute. I wisht you had held out ag'inst the childern about sellin'
+it; 'twould 'a' bin the best thing fur 'em, I say. I believe in my soul
+they'll git spoiled here in New York. I kin see a change in 'em
+a'ready--in the girls."
+
+Dryfoos stretched himself on the lounge again. "I can't see as Coonrod is
+much comfort, either. Why ain't he here with his sisters? What does all
+that work of his on the East Side amount to? It seems as if he done it to
+cross me, as much as anything." Dryfoos complained to his wife on the
+basis of mere affectional habit, which in married life often survives the
+sense of intellectual equality. He did not expect her to reason with him,
+but there was help in her listening, and though she could only soothe his
+fretfulness with soft answers which were often wide of the purpose, he
+still went to her for solace. "Here, I've gone into this newspaper
+business, or whatever it is, on his account, and he don't seem any more
+satisfied than ever. I can see he hain't got his heart in it."
+
+"The pore boy tries; I know he does, Jacob; and he wants to please you.
+But he give up a good deal when he give up bein' a preacher; I s'pose we
+ought to remember that."
+
+"A preacher!" sneered Dryfoos. "I reckon bein' a preacher wouldn't
+satisfy him now. He had the impudence to tell me this afternoon that he
+would like to be a priest; and he threw it up to me that he never could
+be because I'd kept him from studyin'."
+
+"He don't mean a Catholic priest--not a Roman one, Jacob," the old woman
+explained, wistfully. "He's told me all about it. They ain't the kind o'
+Catholics we been used to; some sort of 'Piscopalians; and they do a heap
+o' good amongst the poor folks over there. He says we ain't got any idea
+how folks lives in them tenement houses, hundreds of 'em in one house,
+and whole families in a room; and it burns in his heart to help 'em like
+them Fathers, as he calls 'em, that gives their lives to it. He can't be
+a Father, he says, because he can't git the eddication now; but he can be
+a Brother; and I can't find a word to say ag'inst it, when it gits to
+talkin', Jacob."
+
+"I ain't saying anything against his priests, 'Liz'beth," said Dryfoos.
+"They're all well enough in their way; they've given up their lives to
+it, and it's a matter of business with them, like any other. But what I'm
+talking about now is Coonrod. I don't object to his doin' all the charity
+he wants to, and the Lord knows I've never been stingy with him about it.
+He might have all the money he wants, to give round any way he pleases."
+
+"That's what I told him once, but he says money ain't the thing--or not
+the only thing you got to give to them poor folks. You got to give your
+time and your knowledge and your love--I don't know what all you got to
+give yourself, if you expect to help 'em. That's what Coonrod says."
+
+"Well, I can tell him that charity begins at home," said Dryfoos, sitting
+up in his impatience. "And he'd better give himself to us a little--to
+his old father and mother. And his sisters. What's he doin' goin' off
+there to his meetings, and I don't know what all, an' leavin' them here
+alone?"
+
+"Why, ain't Mr. Beaton with 'em?" asked the old woman. "I thought I
+heared his voice."
+
+"Mr. Beaton! Of course he is! And who's Mr. Beaton, anyway?"
+
+"Why, ain't he one of the men in Coonrod's office? I thought I heared--"
+
+"Yes, he is! But who is he? What's he doing round here? Is he makin' up
+to Christine?"
+
+"I reckon he is. From Mely's talk, she's about crazy over the fellow.
+Don't you like him, Jacob?"
+
+"I don't know him, or what he is. He hasn't got any manners. Who brought
+him here? How'd he come to come, in the first place?"
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson brung him, I believe," said the old woman, patiently.
+
+"Fulkerson!" Dryfoos snorted. "Where's Mrs. Mandel, I should like to
+know? He brought her, too. Does she go traipsin' off this way every
+evening?"
+
+"No, she seems to be here pretty regular most o' the time. I don't know
+how we could ever git along without her, Jacob; she seems to know just
+what to do, and the girls would be ten times as outbreakin' without her.
+I hope you ain't thinkin' o' turnin' her off, Jacob?"
+
+Dryfoos did not think it necessary to answer such a question. "It's all
+Fulkerson, Fulkerson, Fulkerson. It seems to me that Fulkerson about runs
+this family. He brought Mrs. Mandel, and he brought that Beaton, and he
+brought that Boston fellow! I guess I give him a dose, though; and I'll
+learn Fulkerson that he can't have everything his own way. I don't want
+anybody to help me spend my money. I made it, and I can manage it. I
+guess Mr. Fulkerson can bear a little watching now. He's been travelling
+pretty free, and he's got the notion he's driving, maybe. I'm a-going to
+look after that book a little myself."
+
+"You'll kill yourself, Jacob," said his wife, "tryin' to do so many
+things. And what is it all fur? I don't see as we're better off, any, for
+all the money. It's just as much care as it used to be when we was all
+there on the farm together. I wisht we could go back, Ja--"
+
+"We can't go back!" shouted the old man, fiercely. "There's no farm any
+more to go back to. The fields is full of gas-wells and oil-wells and
+hell-holes generally; the house is tore down, and the barn's goin'--"
+
+"The barn!" gasped the old woman. "Oh, my!"
+
+"If I was to give all I'm worth this minute, we couldn't go back to the
+farm, any more than them girls in there could go back and be little
+children. I don't say we're any better off, for the money. I've got more
+of it now than I ever had; and there's no end to the luck; it pours in.
+But I feel like I was tied hand and foot. I don't know which way to move;
+I don't know what's best to do about anything. The money don't seem to
+buy anything but more and more care and trouble. We got a big house that
+we ain't at home in; and we got a lot of hired girls round under our feet
+that hinder and don't help. Our children don't mind us, and we got no
+friends or neighbors. But it had to be. I couldn't help but sell the
+farm, and we can't go back to it, for it ain't there. So don't you say
+anything more about it, 'Liz'beth."
+
+"Pore Jacob!" said his wife. "Well, I woon't, dear."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+It was clear to Beaton that Dryfoos distrusted him; and the fact
+heightened his pleasure in Christine's liking for him. He was as sure of
+this as he was of the other, though he was not so sure of any reason for
+his pleasure in it. She had her charm; the charm of wildness to which a
+certain wildness in himself responded; and there were times when his
+fancy contrived a common future for them, which would have a prosperity
+forced from the old fellow's love of the girl. Beaton liked the idea of
+this compulsion better than he liked the idea of the money; there was
+something a little repulsive in that; he imagined himself rejecting it;
+he almost wished he was enough in love with the girl to marry her without
+it; that would be fine. He was taken with her in a certain measure, in a
+certain way; the question was in what measure, in what way.
+
+It was partly to escape from this question that he hurried down-town, and
+decided to spend with the Leightons the hour remaining on his hands
+before it was time to go to the reception for which he was dressed. It
+seemed to him important that he should see Alma Leighton. After all, it
+was her charm that was most abiding with him; perhaps it was to be final.
+He found himself very happy in his present relations with her. She had
+dropped that barrier of pretences and ironical surprise. It seemed to him
+that they had gone back to the old ground of common artistic interest
+which he had found so pleasant the summer before. Apparently she and her
+mother had both forgiven his neglect of them in the first months of their
+stay in New York; he was sure that Mrs. Leighton liked him as well as
+ever, and, if there was still something a little provisional in Alma's
+manner at times, it was something that piqued more than it discouraged;
+it made him curious, not anxious.
+
+He found the young ladies with Fulkerson when he rang. He seemed to be
+amusing them both, and they were both amused beyond the merit of so small
+a pleasantry, Beaton thought, when Fulkerson said: "Introduce myself, Mr.
+Beaton: Mr. Fulkerson of 'Every Other Week.' Think I've met you at our
+place." The girls laughed, and Alma explained that her mother was not
+very well, and would be sorry not to see him. Then she turned, as he
+felt, perversely, and went on talking with Fulkerson and left him to Miss
+Woodburn.
+
+She finally recognized his disappointment: "Ah don't often get a chance
+at you, Mr. Beaton, and Ah'm just goin' to toak yo' to death. Yo' have
+been Soath yo'self, and yo' know ho' we do toak."
+
+"I've survived to say yes," Beaton admitted.
+
+"Oh, now, do you think we toak so much mo' than you do in the No'th?" the
+young lady deprecated.
+
+"I don't know. I only know you can't talk too much for me. I should like
+to hear you say Soath and house and about for the rest of my life."
+
+"That's what Ah call raght personal, Mr. Beaton. Now Ah'm goin' to be
+personal, too." Miss Woodburn flung out over her lap the square of cloth
+she was embroidering, and asked him: "Don't you think that's beautiful?
+Now, as an awtust--a great awtust?"
+
+"As a great awtust, yes," said Beaton, mimicking her accent. "If I were
+less than great I might have something to say about the arrangement of
+colors. You're as bold and original as Nature."
+
+"Really? Oh, now, do tell me yo' favo'ite colo', Mr. Beaton."
+
+"My favorite color? Bless my soul, why should I prefer any? Is blue good,
+or red wicked? Do people have favorite colors?" Beaton found himself
+suddenly interested.
+
+"Of co'se they do," answered the girl. "Don't awtusts?"
+
+"I never heard of one that had--consciously."
+
+"Is it possible? I supposed they all had. Now mah favo'ite colo' is
+gawnet. Don't you think it's a pretty colo'?"
+
+"It depends upon how it's used. Do you mean in neckties?" Beaton stole a
+glance at the one Fulkerson was wearing.
+
+Miss Woodburn laughed with her face bowed upon her wrist. "Ah do think
+you gentlemen in the No'th awe ten tahms as lahvely as the ladies."
+
+"Strange," said Beaton. "In the South--Soath, excuse me! I made the
+observation that the ladies were ten times as lively as the gentlemen.
+What is that you're working?"
+
+"This?" Miss Woodburn gave it another flirt, and looked at it with a
+glance of dawning recognition. "Oh, this is a table-covah. Wouldn't you
+lahke to see where it's to go?"
+
+"Why, certainly."
+
+"Well, if you'll be raght good I'll let yo' give me some professional
+advass about putting something in the co'ners or not, when you have seen
+it on the table."
+
+She rose and led the way into the other room. Beaton knew she wanted to
+talk with him about something else; but he waited patiently to let her
+play her comedy out. She spread the cover on the table, and he advised
+her, as he saw she wished, against putting anything in the corners; just
+run a line of her stitch around the edge, he said.
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson and Ah, why, we've been having a regular faght aboat it,"
+she commented. "But we both agreed, fahnally, to leave it to you; Mr.
+Fulkerson said you'd be sure to be raght. Ah'm so glad you took mah
+sahde. But he's a great admahrer of yours, Mr. Beaton," she concluded,
+demurely, suggestively.
+
+"Is he? Well, I'm a great admirer of Fulkerson," said Beaton, with a
+capricious willingness to humor her wish to talk about Fulkerson. "He's a
+capital fellow; generous, magnanimous, with quite an ideal of friendship
+and an eye single to the main chance all the time. He would advertise
+'Every Other Week' on his family vault."
+
+Miss Woodburn laughed, and said she should tell him what Beaton had said.
+
+"Do. But he's used to defamation from me, and he'll think you're joking."
+
+"Ah suppose," said Miss Woodburn, "that he's quahte the tahpe of a New
+York business man." She added, as if it followed logically, "He's so
+different from what I thought a New York business man would be."
+
+"It's your Virginia tradition to despise business," said Beaton, rudely.
+
+Miss Woodburn laughed again. "Despahse it? Mah goodness! we want to get
+into it and woak it fo' all it's wo'th,' as Mr. Fulkerson says. That
+tradition is all past. You don't know what the Soath is now. Ah suppose
+mah fathaw despahses business, but he's a tradition himself, as Ah tell
+him." Beaton would have enjoyed joining the young lady in anything she
+might be going to say in derogation of her father, but he restrained
+himself, and she went on more and more as if she wished to account for
+her father's habitual hauteur with Beaton, if not to excuse it. "Ah tell
+him he don't understand the rising generation. He was brought up in the
+old school, and he thinks we're all just lahke he was when he was young,
+with all those ahdeals of chivalry and family; but, mah goodness! it's
+money that cyoants no'adays in the Soath, just lahke it does everywhere
+else. Ah suppose, if we could have slavery back in the fawm mah fathaw
+thinks it could have been brought up to, when the commercial spirit
+wouldn't let it alone, it would be the best thing; but we can't have it
+back, and Ah tell him we had better have the commercial spirit as the
+next best thing."
+
+Miss Woodburn went on, with sufficient loyalty and piety, to expose the
+difference of her own and her father's ideals, but with what Beaton
+thought less reference to his own unsympathetic attention than to a
+knowledge finally of the personnel and materiel of 'Every Other Week.'
+and Mr. Fulkerson's relation to the enterprise. "You most excuse my
+asking so many questions, Mr. Beaton. You know it's all mah doing that we
+awe heah in New York. Ah just told mah fathaw that if he was evah goin'
+to do anything with his wrahtings, he had got to come No'th, and Ah made
+him come. Ah believe he'd have stayed in the Soath all his lahfe. And now
+Mr. Fulkerson wants him to let his editor see some of his wrahtings, and
+Ah wanted to know something aboat the magazine. We awe a great deal
+excited aboat it in this hoase, you know, Mr. Beaton," she concluded,
+with a look that now transferred the interest from Fulkerson to Alma. She
+led the way back to the room where they were sitting, and went up to
+triumph over Fulkerson with Beaton's decision about the table-cover.
+
+Alma was left with Beaton near the piano, and he began to talk about the
+Dryfooses as he sat down on the piano-stool. He said he had been giving
+Miss Dryfoos a lesson on the banjo; he had borrowed the banjo of Miss
+Vance. Then he struck the chord he had been trying to teach Christine,
+and played over the air he had sung.
+
+"How do you like that?" he asked, whirling round.
+
+"It seems rather a disrespectful little tune, somehow," said Alma,
+placidly.
+
+Beaton rested his elbow on the corner of the piano and gazed dreamily at
+her. "Your perceptions are wonderful. It is disrespectful. I played it,
+up there, because I felt disrespectful to them."
+
+"Do you claim that as a merit?"
+
+"No, I state it as a fact. How can you respect such people?"
+
+"You might respect yourself, then," said the girl. "Or perhaps that
+wouldn't be so easy, either."
+
+"No, it wouldn't. I like to have you say these things to me," said
+Beaton, impartially.
+
+"Well, I like to say them," Alma returned.
+
+"They do me good."
+
+"Oh, I don't know that that was my motive."
+
+"There is no one like you--no one," said Beaton, as if apostrophizing her
+in her absence. "To come from that house, with its assertions of
+money--you can hear it chink; you can smell the foul old banknotes; it
+stifles you--into an atmosphere like this, is like coming into another
+world."
+
+"Thank you," said Alma. "I'm glad there isn't that unpleasant odor here;
+but I wish there was a little more of the chinking."
+
+"No, no! Don't say that!" he implored. "I like to think that there is one
+soul uncontaminated by the sense of money in this big, brutal, sordid
+city."
+
+"You mean two," said Alma, with modesty. "But if you stifle at the
+Dryfooses', why do you go there?"
+
+"Why do I go?" he mused. "Don't you believe in knowing all the natures,
+the types, you can? Those girls are a strange study: the young one is a
+simple, earthly creature, as common as an oat-field and the other a sort
+of sylvan life: fierce, flashing, feline--"
+
+Alma burst out into a laugh. "What apt alliteration! And do they like
+being studied? I should think the sylvan life might--scratch."
+
+"No," said Beaton, with melancholy absence, "it only-purrs."
+
+The girl felt a rising indignation. "Well, then, Mr. Beaton, I should
+hope it would scratch, and bite, too. I think you've no business to go
+about studying people, as you do. It's abominable."
+
+"Go on," said the young man. "That Puritan conscience of yours! It
+appeals to the old Covenanter strain in me--like a voice of
+pre-existence. Go on--"
+
+"Oh, if I went on I should merely say it was not only abominable, but
+contemptible."
+
+"You could be my guardian angel, Alma," said the young man, making his
+eyes more and more slumbrous and dreamy.
+
+"Stuff! I hope I have a soul above buttons!"
+
+He smiled, as she rose, and followed her across the room. "Good-night;
+Mr. Beaton," she said.
+
+Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson came in from the other room. "What! You're
+not going, Beaton?"
+
+"Yes; I'm going to a reception. I stopped in on my way."
+
+"To kill time," Alma explained.
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, gallantly, "this is the last place I should like
+to do it. But I guess I'd better be going, too. It has sometimes occurred
+to me that there is such a thing as staying too late. But with Brother
+Beaton, here, just starting in for an evening's amusement, it does seem a
+little early yet. Can't you urge me to stay, somebody?"
+
+The two girls laughed, and Miss Woodburn said:
+
+"Mr. Beaton is such a butterfly of fashion! Ah wish Ah was on mah way to
+a pawty. Ah feel quahte envious."
+
+"But he didn't say it to make you," Alma explained, with meek softness.
+
+"Well, we can't all be swells. Where is your party, anyway, Beaton?"
+asked Fulkerson. "How do you manage to get your invitations to those
+things? I suppose a fellow has to keep hinting round pretty lively,
+Neigh?"
+
+Beaton took these mockeries serenely, and shook hands with Miss Woodburn,
+with the effect of having already shaken hands with Alma. She stood with
+hers clasped behind her.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Beaton went away with the smile on his face which he had kept in
+listening to Fulkerson, and carried it with him to the reception. He
+believed that Alma was vexed with him for more personal reasons than she
+had implied; it flattered him that she should have resented what he told
+her of the Dryfooses. She had scolded him in their behalf apparently; but
+really because he had made her jealous by his interest, of whatever kind,
+in some one else. What followed, had followed naturally. Unless she had
+been quite a simpleton she could not have met his provisional love-making
+on any other terms; and the reason why Beaton chiefly liked Alma Leighton
+was that she was not a simpleton. Even up in the country, when she was
+overawed by his acquaintance, at first, she was not very deeply overawed,
+and at times she was not overawed at all. At such times she astonished
+him by taking his most solemn histrionics with flippant incredulity, and
+even burlesquing them. But he could see, all the same, that he had caught
+her fancy, and he admired the skill with which she punished his neglect
+when they met in New York. He had really come very near forgetting the
+Leightons; the intangible obligations of mutual kindness which hold some
+men so fast, hung loosely upon him; it would not have hurt him to break
+from them altogether; but when he recognized them at last, he found that
+it strengthened them indefinitely to have Alma ignore them so completely.
+If she had been sentimental, or softly reproachful, that would have been
+the end; he could not have stood it; he would have had to drop her. But
+when she met him on his own ground, and obliged him to be sentimental,
+the game was in her hands. Beaton laughed, now, when he thought of that,
+and he said to himself that the girl had grown immensely since she had
+come to New York; nothing seemed to have been lost upon her; she must
+have kept her eyes uncommonly wide open. He noticed that especially in
+their talks over her work; she had profited by everything she had seen
+and heard; she had all of Wetmore's ideas pat; it amused Beaton to see
+how she seized every useful word that he dropped, too, and turned him to
+technical account whenever she could. He liked that; she had a great deal
+of talent; there was no question of that; if she were a man there could
+be no question of her future. He began to construct a future for her; it
+included provision for himself, too; it was a common future, in which
+their lives and work were united.
+
+He was full of the glow of its prosperity when he met Margaret Vance at
+the reception.
+
+The house was one where people might chat a long time together without
+publicly committing themselves to an interest in each other except such as
+grew out of each other's ideas. Miss Vance was there because she united
+in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the fashionable
+people and of the aesthetic people who met there on common ground. It was
+almost the only house in New York where this happened often, and it did
+not happen very often there. It was a literary house, primarily, with
+artistic qualifications, and the frequenters of it were mostly authors
+and artists; Wetmore, who was always trying to fit everything with a
+phrase, said it was the unfrequenters who were fashionable. There was
+great ease there, and simplicity; and if there was not distinction, it
+was not for want of distinguished people, but because there seems to be
+some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level,
+that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface
+the deeply underlying nobody. The effect for some temperaments, for
+consciousness, for egotism, is admirable; for curiosity, for hero
+worship, it is rather baffling. It is the spirit of the street
+transferred to the drawing-room; indiscriminating, levelling, but
+doubtless finally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity of the place,
+if not consenting to the grandeur of reputations or presences.
+
+Beaton now denied that this house represented a salon at all, in the old
+sense; and he held that the salon was impossible, even undesirable, with
+us, when Miss Vance sighed for it. At any rate, he said that this turmoil
+of coming and going, this bubble and babble, this cackling and hissing of
+conversation was not the expression of any such civilization as had
+created the salon. Here, he owned, were the elements of intellectual
+delightfulness, but he said their assemblage in such quantity alone
+denied the salon; there was too much of a good thing. The French word
+implied a long evening of general talk among the guests, crowned with a
+little chicken at supper, ending at cock-crow. Here was tea, with milk or
+with lemon--baths of it and claret-cup for the hardier spirits throughout
+the evening. It was very nice, very pleasant, but it was not the little
+chicken--not the salon. In fact, he affirmed, the salon descended from
+above, out of the great world, and included the aesthetic world in it.
+But our great world--the rich people, were stupid, with no wish to be
+otherwise; they were not even curious about authors and artists. Beaton
+fancied himself speaking impartially, and so he allowed himself to speak
+bitterly; he said that in no other city in the world, except Vienna,
+perhaps, were such people so little a part of society.
+
+"It isn't altogether the rich people's fault," said Margaret; and she
+spoke impartially, too. "I don't believe that the literary men and the
+artists would like a salon that descended to them. Madame Geoffrin, you
+know, was very plebeian; her husband was a business man of some sort."
+
+"He would have been a howling swell in New York," said Beaton, still
+impartially.
+
+Wetmore came up to their corner, with a scroll of bread and butter in one
+hand and a cup of tea in the other. Large and fat, and clean-shaven, he
+looked like a monk in evening dress.
+
+"We were talking about salons," said Margaret.
+
+"Why don't you open a salon yourself?" asked Wetmore, breathing thickly
+from the anxiety of getting through the crowd without spilling his tea.
+
+"Like poor Lady Barberina Lemon?" said the girl, with a laugh. "What a
+good story! That idea of a woman who couldn't be interested in any of the
+arts because she was socially and traditionally the material of them! We
+can, never reach that height of nonchalance in this country."
+
+"Not if we tried seriously?" suggested the painter. "I've an idea that if
+the Americans ever gave their minds to that sort of thing, they could
+take the palm--or the cake, as Beaton here would say--just as they do in
+everything else. When we do have an aristocracy, it will be an
+aristocracy that will go ahead of anything the world has ever seen. Why
+don't somebody make a beginning, and go in openly for an ancestry, and a
+lower middle class, and an hereditary legislature, and all the rest?
+We've got liveries, and crests, and palaces, and caste feeling. We're all
+right as far as we've gone, and we've got the money to go any length."
+
+"Like your natural-gas man, Mr. Beaton," said the girl, with a smiling
+glance round at him.
+
+"Ah!" said Wetmore, stirring his tea, "has Beaton got a natural-gas man?"
+
+"My natural-gas man," said Beaton, ignoring Wetmore's question, "doesn't
+know how to live in his palace yet, and I doubt if he has any caste
+feeling. I fancy his family believe themselves victims of it. They
+say--one of the young ladies does--that she never saw such an unsociable
+place as New York; nobody calls."
+
+"That's good!" said Wetmore. "I suppose they're all ready for company,
+too: good cook, furniture, servants, carriages?"
+
+"Galore," said Beaton.
+
+"Well, that's too bad. There's a chance for you, Miss Vance. Doesn't your
+philanthropy embrace the socially destitute as well as the financially?
+Just think of a family like that, without a friend, in a great city! I
+should think common charity had a duty there--not to mention the
+uncommon."
+
+He distinguished that kind as Margaret's by a glance of ironical
+deference. She had a repute for good works which was out of proportion to
+the works, as it always is, but she was really active in that way, under
+the vague obligation, which we now all feel, to be helpful. She was of
+the church which seems to have found a reversion to the imposing ritual
+of the past the way back to the early ideals of Christian brotherhood.
+
+"Oh, they seem to have Mr. Beaton," Margaret answered, and Beaton felt
+obscurely flattered by her reference to his patronage of the Dryfooses.
+
+He explained to Wetmore: "They have me because they partly own me.
+Dryfoos is Fulkerson's financial backer in 'Every Other Week'."
+
+"Is that so? Well, that's interesting, too. Aren't you rather astonished,
+Miss Vance, to see what a petty thing Beaton is making of that magazine
+of his?"
+
+"Oh," said Margaret, "it's so very nice, every way; it makes you feel as
+if you did have a country, after all. It's as chic--that detestable
+little word!--as those new French books."
+
+"Beaton modelled it on them. But you mustn't suppose he does everything
+about 'Every Other Week'; he'd like you to. Beaton, you haven't come up
+to that cover of your first number, since. That was the design of one of
+my pupils, Miss Vance--a little girl that Beaton discovered down in New
+Hampshire last summer."
+
+"Oh yes. And have you great hopes of her, Mr. Wetmore?"
+
+"She seems to have more love of it and knack for it than any one of her
+sex I've seen yet. It really looks like a case of art for art's sake, at
+times. But you can't tell. They're liable to get married at any moment,
+you know. Look here, Beaton, when your natural-gas man gets to the
+picture-buying stage in his development, just remember your old friends,
+will you? You know, Miss Vance, those new fellows have their regular
+stages. They never know what to do with their money, but they find out
+that people buy pictures, at one point. They shut your things up in their
+houses where nobody comes, and after a while they overeat
+themselves--they don't know what else to do--and die of apoplexy, and
+leave your pictures to a gallery, and then they see the light. It's slow,
+but it's pretty sure. Well, I see Beaton isn't going to move on, as he
+ought to do; and so I must. He always was an unconventional creature."
+
+Wetmore went away, but Beaton remained, and he outstayed several other
+people who came up to speak to Miss Vance. She was interested in
+everybody, and she liked the talk of these clever literary, artistic,
+clerical, even theatrical people, and she liked the sort of court with
+which they recognized her fashion as well as her cleverness; it was very
+pleasant to be treated intellectually as if she were one of themselves,
+and socially as if she was not habitually the same, but a sort of guest
+in Bohemia, a distinguished stranger. If it was Arcadia rather than
+Bohemia, still she felt her quality of distinguished stranger. The
+flattery of it touched her fancy, and not her vanity; she had very little
+vanity. Beaton's devotion made the same sort of appeal; it was not so
+much that she liked him as she liked being the object of his admiration.
+She was a girl of genuine sympathies, intellectual rather than
+sentimental. In fact, she was an intellectual person, whom qualities of
+the heart saved from being disagreeable, as they saved her on the other
+hand from being worldly or cruel in her fashionableness. She had read a
+great many books, and had ideas about them, quite courageous and original
+ideas; she knew about pictures--she had been in Wetmore's class; she was
+fond of music; she was willing to understand even politics; in Boston she
+might have been agnostic, but in New York she was sincerely religious;
+she was very accomplished; and perhaps it was her goodness that prevented
+her feeling what was not best in Beaton.
+
+"Do you think," she said, after the retreat of one of the comers and
+goers left her alone with him again, "that those young ladies would like
+me to call on them?"
+
+"Those young ladies?" Beaton echoed. "Miss Leighton and--"
+
+"No; I have been there with my aunt's cards already."
+
+"Oh yes," said Beaton, as if he had known of it; he admired the pluck and
+pride with which Alma had refrained from ever mentioning the fact to him,
+and had kept her mother from mentioning it, which must have been
+difficult.
+
+"I mean the Miss Dryfooses. It seems really barbarous, if nobody goes
+near them. We do all kinds of things, and help all kinds of people in
+some ways, but we let strangers remain strangers unless they know how to
+make their way among us."
+
+"The Dryfooses certainly wouldn't know how to make their way among you,"
+said Beaton, with a sort of dreamy absence in his tone.
+
+Miss Vance went on, speaking out the process of reasoning in her mind,
+rather than any conclusions she had reached. "We defend ourselves by
+trying to believe that they must have friends of their own, or that they
+would think us patronizing, and wouldn't like being made the objects of
+social charity; but they needn't really suppose anything of the kind."
+
+"I don't imagine they would," said Beaton. "I think they'd be only too
+happy to have you come. But you wouldn't know what to do with each other,
+indeed, Miss Vance."
+
+"Perhaps we shall like each other," said the girl, bravely, "and then we
+shall know. What Church are they of?"
+
+"I don't believe they're of any," said Beaton. "The mother was brought up
+a Dunkard."
+
+"A Dunkard?"
+
+Beaton told what he knew of the primitive sect, with its early Christian
+polity, its literal interpretation of Christ's ethics, and its quaint
+ceremonial of foot-washing; he made something picturesque of that. "The
+father is a Mammon-worshipper, pure and simple. I suppose the young
+ladies go to church, but I don't know where. They haven't tried to
+convert me."
+
+"I'll tell them not to despair--after I've converted them," said Miss
+Vance. "Will you let me use you as a 'point d'appui', Mr. Beaton?"
+
+"Any way you like. If you're really going to see them, perhaps I'd better
+make a confession. I left your banjo with them, after I got it put in
+order."
+
+"How very nice! Then we have a common interest already."
+
+"Do you mean the banjo, or--"
+
+"The banjo, decidedly. Which of them plays?"
+
+"Neither. But the eldest heard that the banjo was 'all the rage,' as the
+youngest says. Perhaps you can persuade them that good works are the
+rage, too."
+
+Beaton had no very lively belief that Margaret would go to see the
+Dryfooses; he did so few of the things he proposed that he went upon the
+theory that others must be as faithless. Still, he had a cruel amusement
+in figuring the possible encounter between Margaret Vance, with her
+intellectual elegance, her eager sympathies and generous ideals, and
+those girls with their rude past, their false and distorted perspective,
+their sordid and hungry selfishness, and their faith in the omnipotence
+of their father's wealth wounded by their experience of its present
+social impotence. At the bottom of his heart he sympathized with them
+rather than with her; he was more like them.
+
+People had ceased coming, and some of them were going. Miss Vance said
+she must go, too, and she was about to rise, when the host came up with
+March; Beaton turned away.
+
+"Miss Vance, I want to introduce Mr. March, the editor of 'Every Other
+Week.' You oughtn't to be restricted to the art department. We literary
+fellows think that arm of the service gets too much of the glory
+nowadays." His banter was for Beaton, but he was already beyond ear-shot,
+and the host went on:
+
+"Mr. March can talk with you about your favorite Boston. He's just turned
+his back on it."
+
+"Oh, I hope not!" said Miss Vance. "I can't imagine anybody voluntarily
+leaving Boston."
+
+"I don't say he's so bad as that," said the host, committing March to
+her. "He came to New York because he couldn't help it--like the rest of
+us. I never know whether that's a compliment to New York or not."
+
+They talked Boston a little while, without finding that they had common
+acquaintance there; Miss Vance must have concluded that society was much
+larger in Boston than she had supposed from her visits there, or else
+that March did not know many people in it. But she was not a girl to care
+much for the inferences that might be drawn from such conclusions; she
+rather prided herself upon despising them; and she gave herself to the
+pleasure of being talked to as if she were of March's own age. In the
+glow of her sympathetic beauty and elegance he talked his best, and tried
+to amuse her with his jokes, which he had the art of tingeing with a
+little seriousness on one side. He made her laugh; and he flattered her
+by making her think; in her turn she charmed him so much by enjoying what
+he said that he began to brag of his wife, as a good husband always does
+when another woman charms him; and she asked, Oh was Mrs. March there;
+and would he introduce her?
+
+She asked Mrs. March for her address, and whether she had a day; and she
+said she would come to see her, if she would let her. Mrs. March could
+not be so enthusiastic about her as March was, but as they walked home
+together they talked the girl over, and agreed about her beauty and her
+amiability. Mrs. March said she seemed very unspoiled for a person who
+must have been so much spoiled. They tried to analyze her charm, and they
+succeeded in formulating it as a combination of intellectual
+fashionableness and worldly innocence. "I think," said Mrs. March, "that
+city girls, brought up as she must have been, are often the most innocent
+of all. They never imagine the wickedness of the world, and if they marry
+happily they go through life as innocent as children. Everything combines
+to keep them so; the very hollowness of society shields them. They are
+the loveliest of the human race. But perhaps the rest have to pay too
+much for them."
+
+"For such an exquisite creature as Miss Vance," said March, "we couldn't
+pay too much."
+
+A wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air at the street-crossing in
+front of them. A girl's voice called out: "Run, run, Jen! The copper is
+after you." A woman's figure rushed stumbling across the way and into the
+shadow of the houses, pursued by a burly policeman.
+
+"Ah, but if that's part of the price?"
+
+They went along fallen from the gay spirit of their talk into a silence
+which he broke with a sigh. "Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl we
+left yonder really belong to the same system of things? How impossible
+each makes the other seem!"
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Mrs. Horn believed in the world and in society and its unwritten
+constitution devoutly, and she tolerated her niece's benevolent
+activities as she tolerated her aesthetic sympathies because these
+things, however oddly, were tolerated--even encouraged--by society; and
+they gave Margaret a charm. They made her originality interesting. Mrs.
+Horn did not intend that they should ever go so far as to make her
+troublesome; and it was with a sense of this abeyant authority of her
+aunt's that the girl asked her approval of her proposed call upon the
+Dryfooses. She explained as well as she could the social destitution of
+these opulent people, and she had of course to name Beaton as the source
+of her knowledge concerning them.
+
+"Did Mr. Beaton suggest your calling on them?"
+
+"No; he rather discouraged it."
+
+"And why do you think you ought to go in this particular instance? New
+York is full of people who don't know anybody."
+
+Margaret laughed. "I suppose it's like any other charity: you reach the
+cases you know of. The others you say you can't help, and you try to
+ignore them."
+
+"It's very romantic," said Mrs. Horn. "I hope you've counted the cost;
+all the possible consequences."
+
+Margaret knew that her aunt had in mind their common experience with the
+Leightons, whom, to give their common conscience peace, she had called
+upon with her aunt's cards and excuses, and an invitation for her
+Thursdays, somewhat too late to make the visit seem a welcome to New
+York. She was so coldly received, not so much for herself as in her
+quality of envoy, that her aunt experienced all the comfort which
+vicarious penance brings. She did not perhaps consider sufficiently her
+niece's guiltlessness in the expiation. Margaret was not with her at St.
+Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there, and never saw the
+Leightons till she went to call upon them. She never complained: the
+strain of asceticism, which mysteriously exists in us all, and makes us
+put peas, boiled or unboiled, in our shoes, gave her patience with the
+snub which the Leightons presented her for her aunt. But now she said,
+with this in mind: "Nothing seems simpler than to get rid of people if
+you don't want them. You merely have to let them alone."
+
+"It isn't so pleasant, letting them alone," said Mrs. Horn.
+
+"Or having them let you alone," said Margaret; for neither Mrs. Leighton
+nor Alma had ever come to enjoy the belated hospitality of Mrs. Horn's
+Thursdays.
+
+"Yes, or having them let you alone," Mrs. Horn courageously consented.
+"And all that I ask you, Margaret, is to be sure that you really want to
+know these people."
+
+"I don't," said the girl, seriously, "in the usual way."
+
+"Then the question is whether you do in the unusual way. They will build
+a great deal upon you," said Mrs. Horn, realizing how much the Leightons
+must have built upon her, and how much out of proportion to her desert
+they must now dislike her; for she seemed to have had them on her mind
+from the time they came, and had always meant to recognize any reasonable
+claim they had upon her.
+
+"It seems very odd, very sad," Margaret returned, "that you never could
+act unselfishly in society affairs. If I wished to go and see those girls
+just to do them a pleasure, and perhaps because if they're strange and
+lonely, I might do them good, even--it would be impossible."
+
+"Quite," said her aunt. "Such a thing would be quixotic. Society doesn't
+rest upon any such basis. It can't; it would go to pieces, if people
+acted from unselfish motives."
+
+"Then it's a painted savage!" said the girl. "All its favors are really
+bargains. It's gifts are for gifts back again."
+
+"Yes, that is true," said Mrs. Horn, with no more sense of wrong in the
+fact than the political economist has in the fact that wages are the
+measure of necessity and not of merit. "You get what you pay for. It's a
+matter of business." She satisfied herself with this formula, which she
+did not invent, as fully as if it were a reason; but she did not dislike
+her niece's revolt against it. That was part of Margaret's originality,
+which pleased her aunt in proportion to her own conventionality; she was
+really a timid person, and she liked the show of courage which Margaret's
+magnanimity often reflected upon her. She had through her a repute, with
+people who did not know her well, for intellectual and moral qualities;
+she was supposed to be literary and charitable; she almost had opinions
+and ideals, but really fell short of their possession. She thought that
+she set bounds to the girl's originality because she recognized them.
+Margaret understood this better than her aunt, and knew that she had
+consulted her about going to see the Dryfooses out of deference, and with
+no expectation of luminous instruction. She was used to being a law to
+herself, but she knew what she might and might not do, so that she was
+rather a by-law. She was the kind of girl that might have fancies for
+artists and poets, but might end by marrying a prosperous broker, and
+leavening a vast lump of moneyed and fashionable life with her culture,
+generosity, and good-will. The intellectual interests were first with
+her, but she might be equal to sacrificing them; she had the best heart,
+but she might know how to harden it; if she was eccentric, her social
+orbit was defined; comets themselves traverse space on fixed lines. She
+was like every one else, a congeries of contradictions and
+inconsistencies, but obedient to the general expectation of what a girl
+of her position must and must not finally be. Provisionally, she was very
+much what she liked to be.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Margaret Vance tried to give herself some reason for going to call upon
+the Dryfooses, but she could find none better than the wish to do a kind
+thing. This seemed queerer and less and less sufficient as she examined
+it, and she even admitted a little curiosity as a harmless element in her
+motive, without being very well satisfied with it. She tried to add a
+slight sense of social duty, and then she decided to have no motive at
+all, but simply to pay her visit as she would to any other eligible
+strangers she saw fit to call upon. She perceived that she must be very
+careful not to let them see that any other impulse had governed her; she
+determined, if possible, to let them patronize her; to be very modest and
+sincere and diffident, and, above all, not to play a part. This was easy,
+compared with the choice of a manner that should convey to them the fact
+that she was not playing a part. When the hesitating Irish serving-man
+had acknowledged that the ladies were at home, and had taken her card to
+them, she sat waiting for them in the drawing-room. Her study of its
+appointments, with their impersonal costliness, gave her no suggestion
+how to proceed; the two sisters were upon her before she had really
+decided, and she rose to meet them with the conviction that she was going
+to play a part for want of some chosen means of not doing so. She found
+herself, before she knew it, making her banjo a property in the little
+comedy, and professing so much pleasure in the fact that Miss Dryfoos was
+taking it up; she had herself been so much interested by it. Anything,
+she said, was a relief from the piano; and then, between the guitar and
+the banjo, one must really choose the banjo, unless one wanted to devote
+one's whole natural life to the violin. Of course, there was the
+mandolin; but Margaret asked if they did not feel that the bit of shell
+you struck it with interposed a distance between you and the real soul of
+the instrument; and then it did have such a faint, mosquitoy little tone!
+She made much of the question, which they left her to debate alone while
+they gazed solemnly at her till she characterized the tone of the
+mandolin, when Mela broke into a large, coarse laugh.
+
+"Well, that's just what it does sound like," she explained defiantly to
+her sister. "I always feel like it was going to settle somewhere, and I
+want to hit myself a slap before it begins to bite. I don't see what ever
+brought such a thing into fashion."
+
+Margaret had not expected to be so powerfully seconded, and she asked,
+after gathering herself together, "And you are both learning the banjo?"
+"My, no!" said Mela, "I've gone through enough with the piano. Christine
+is learnun' it."
+
+"I'm so glad you are making my banjo useful at the outset, Miss Dryfoos."
+Both girls stared at her, but found it hard to cope with the fact that
+this was the lady friend whose banjo Beaton had lent them. "Mr. Beaton
+mentioned that he had left it here. I hope you'll keep it as long as you
+find it useful."
+
+At this amiable speech even Christine could not help thanking her. "Of
+course," she said, "I expect to get another, right off. Mr. Beaton is
+going to choose it for me."
+
+"You are very fortunate. If you haven't a teacher yet I should so like to
+recommend mine."
+
+Mela broke out in her laugh again. "Oh, I guess Christine's pretty well
+suited with the one she's got," she said, with insinuation. Her sister
+gave her a frowning glance, and Margaret did not tempt her to explain.
+
+"Then that's much better," she said. "I have a kind of superstition in
+such matters; I don't like to make a second choice. In a shop I like to
+take the first thing of the kind I'm looking for, and even if I choose
+further I come back to the original."
+
+"How funny!" said Mela. "Well, now, I'm just the other way. I always take
+the last thing, after I've picked over all the rest. My luck always seems
+to be at the bottom of the heap. Now, Christine, she's more like you. I
+believe she could walk right up blindfolded and put her hand on the thing
+she wants every time."
+
+"I'm like father," said Christine, softened a little by the celebration
+of her peculiarity. "He says the reason so many people don't get what
+they want is that they don't want it bad enough. Now, when I want a
+thing, it seems to me that I want it all through."
+
+"Well, that's just like father, too," said Mela. "That's the way he done
+when he got that eighty-acre piece next to Moffitt that he kept when he
+sold the farm, and that's got some of the best gas-wells on it now that
+there is anywhere." She addressed the explanation to her sister, to the
+exclusion of Margaret, who, nevertheless, listened with a smiling face
+and a resolutely polite air of being a party to the conversation. Mela
+rewarded her amiability by saying to her, finally, "You've never been in
+the natural-gas country, have you?"
+
+"Oh no! And I should so much like to see it!" said Margaret, with a
+fervor that was partly voluntary.
+
+"Would you? Well, we're kind of sick of it, but I suppose it would strike
+a stranger."
+
+"I never got tired of looking at the big wells when they lit them up,"
+said Christine. "It seems as if the world was on fire."
+
+"Yes, and when you see the surface-gas burnun' down in the woods, like it
+used to by our spring-house--so still, and never spreadun' any, just like
+a bed of some kind of wild flowers when you ketch sight of it a piece
+off."
+
+They began to tell of the wonders of their strange land in an antiphony
+of reminiscences and descriptions; they unconsciously imputed a merit to
+themselves from the number and violence of the wells on their father's
+property; they bragged of the high civilization of Moffitt, which they
+compared to its advantage with that of New York. They became excited by
+Margaret's interest in natural gas, and forgot to be suspicious and
+envious.
+
+She said, as she rose, "Oh, how much I should like to see it all!" Then
+she made a little pause, and added:
+
+"I'm so sorry my aunt's Thursdays are over; she never has them after
+Lent, but we're to have some people Tuesday evening at a little concert
+which a musical friend is going to give with some other artists. There
+won't be any banjos, I'm afraid, but there'll be some very good singing,
+and my aunt would be so glad if you could come with your mother."
+
+She put down her aunt's card on the table near her, while Mela gurgled,
+as if it were the best joke: "Oh, my! Mother never goes anywhere; you
+couldn't get her out for love or money." But she was herself overwhelmed
+with a simple joy at Margaret's politeness, and showed it in a sensuous
+way, like a child, as if she had been tickled. She came closer to
+Margaret and seemed about to fawn physically upon her.
+
+"Ain't she just as lovely as she can live?" she demanded of her sister
+when Margaret was gone.
+
+"I don't know," said Christine. "I guess she wanted to know who Mr.
+Beaton had been lending her banjo to."
+
+"Pshaw! Do you suppose she's in love with him?" asked Mela, and then she
+broke into her hoarse laugh at the look her sister gave her. "Well, don't
+eat me, Christine! I wonder who she is, anyway? I'm goun' to git it out
+of Mr. Beaton the next time he calls. I guess she's somebody. Mrs. Mandel
+can tell. I wish that old friend of hers would hurry up and git well--or
+something. But I guess we appeared about as well as she did. I could see
+she was afraid of you, Christine. I reckon it's gittun' around a little
+about father; and when it does I don't believe we shall want for callers.
+Say, are you goun'? To that concert of theirs?"
+
+"I don't know. Not till I know who they are first."
+
+"Well, we've got to hump ourselves if we're goun' to find out before
+Tuesday."
+
+As she went home Margaret felt wrought in her that most incredible of the
+miracles, which, nevertheless, any one may make his experience. She felt
+kindly to these girls because she had tried to make them happy, and she
+hoped that in the interest she had shown there had been none of the
+poison of flattery. She was aware that this was a risk she ran in such an
+attempt to do good. If she had escaped this effect she was willing to
+leave the rest with Providence.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The notion that a girl of Margaret Vance's traditions would naturally
+form of girls like Christine and Mela Dryfoos would be that they were
+abashed in the presence of the new conditions of their lives, and that
+they must receive the advance she had made them with a certain grateful
+humility. However they received it, she had made it upon principle, from
+a romantic conception of duty; but this was the way she imagined they
+would receive it, because she thought that she would have done so if she
+had been as ignorant and unbred as they. Her error was in arguing their
+attitude from her own temperament, and endowing them, for the purposes of
+argument, with her perspective. They had not the means, intellectual or
+moral, of feeling as she fancied. If they had remained at home on the
+farm where they were born, Christine would have grown up that embodiment
+of impassioned suspicion which we find oftenest in the narrowest spheres,
+and Mela would always have been a good-natured simpleton; but they would
+never have doubted their equality with the wisest and the finest. As it
+was, they had not learned enough at school to doubt it, and the splendor
+of their father's success in making money had blinded them forever to any
+possible difference against them. They had no question of themselves in
+the social abeyance to which they had been left in New York. They had
+been surprised, mystified; it was not what they had expected; there must
+be some mistake.
+
+They were the victims of an accident, which would be repaired as soon as
+the fact of their father's wealth had got around. They had been steadfast
+in their faith, through all their disappointment, that they were not only
+better than most people by virtue of his money, but as good as any; and
+they took Margaret's visit, so far as they investigated its motive, for
+a sign that at last it was beginning to get around; of course, a thing
+could not get around in New York so quick as it could in a small place.
+They were confirmed in their belief by the sensation of Mrs. Mandel when
+she returned to duty that afternoon, and they consulted her about going
+to Mrs. Horn's musicale. If she had felt any doubt at the name for there
+were Horns and Horns--the address on the card put the matter beyond
+question; and she tried to make her charges understand what a precious
+chance had befallen them. She did not succeed; they had not the premises,
+the experience, for a sufficient impression; and she undid her work in
+part by the effort to explain that Mrs. Horn's standing was independent
+of money; that though she was positively rich, she was comparatively
+poor. Christine inferred that Miss Vance had called because she wished to
+be the first to get in with them since it had begun to get around. This
+view commended itself to Mela, too, but without warping her from her
+opinion that Miss Vance was all the same too sweet for anything. She had
+not so vivid a consciousness of her father's money as Christine had; but
+she reposed perhaps all the more confidently upon its power. She was far
+from thinking meanly of any one who thought highly of her for it; that
+seemed so natural a result as to be amiable, even admirable; she was
+willing that any such person should get all the good there was in such an
+attitude toward her.
+
+They discussed the matter that night at dinner before their father and
+mother, who mostly sat silent at their meals; the father frowning
+absently over his plate, with his head close to it, and making play into
+his mouth with the back of his knife (he had got so far toward the use of
+his fork as to despise those who still ate from the edge of their
+knives), and the mother partly missing hers at times in the nervous
+tremor that shook her face from side to side.
+
+After a while the subject of Mela's hoarse babble and of Christine's
+high-pitched, thin, sharp forays of assertion and denial in the field
+which her sister's voice seemed to cover, made its way into the old man's
+consciousness, and he perceived that they were talking with Mrs. Mandel
+about it, and that his wife was from time to time offering an irrelevant
+and mistaken comment. He agreed with Christine, and silently took her
+view of the affair some time before he made any sign of having listened.
+There had been a time in his life when other things besides his money
+seemed admirable to him. He had once respected himself for the
+hard-headed, practical common sense which first gave him standing among
+his country neighbors; which made him supervisor, school trustee, justice
+of the peace, county commissioner, secretary of the Moffitt County
+Agricultural Society. In those days he had served the public with
+disinterested zeal and proud ability; he used to write to the Lake Shore
+Farmer on agricultural topics; he took part in opposing, through the
+Moffitt papers, the legislative waste of the people's money; on the
+question of selling a local canal to the railroad company, which killed
+that fine old State work, and let the dry ditch grow up to grass; he
+might have gone to the Legislature, but he contented himself with
+defeating the Moffitt member who had voted for the job. If he opposed
+some measures for the general good, like high schools and school
+libraries, it was because he lacked perspective, in his intense
+individualism, and suspected all expense of being spendthrift. He
+believed in good district schools, and he had a fondness, crude but
+genuine, for some kinds of reading--history, and forensics of an
+elementary sort.
+
+With his good head for figures he doubted doctors and despised preachers;
+he thought lawyers were all rascals, but he respected them for their
+ability; he was not himself litigious, but he enjoyed the intellectual
+encounters of a difficult lawsuit, and he often attended a sitting of the
+fall term of court, when he went to town, for the pleasure of hearing the
+speeches. He was a good citizen, and a good husband. As a good father, he
+was rather severe with his children, and used to whip them, especially
+the gentle Conrad, who somehow crossed him most, till the twins died.
+After that he never struck any of them; and from the sight of a blow
+dealt a horse he turned as if sick. It was a long time before he lifted
+himself up from his sorrow, and then the will of the man seemed to have
+been breached through his affections. He let the girls do as they
+pleased--the twins had been girls; he let them go away to school, and got
+them a piano. It was they who made him sell the farm. If Conrad had only
+had their spirit he could have made him keep it, he felt; and he resented
+the want of support he might have found in a less yielding spirit than
+his son's.
+
+His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunity of making
+money quickly and abundantly, which offered itself to him after he sold
+his farm. He awoke to it slowly, from a desolation in which he tasted the
+last bitter of homesickness, the utter misery of idleness and
+listlessness. When he broke down and cried for the hard-working,
+wholesome life he had lost, he was near the end of this season of
+despair, but he was also near the end of what was best in himself. He
+devolved upon a meaner ideal than that of conservative good citizenship,
+which had been his chief moral experience: the money he had already made
+without effort and without merit bred its unholy self-love in him; he
+began to honor money, especially money that had been won suddenly and in
+large sums; for money that had been earned painfully, slowly, and in
+little amounts, he had only pity and contempt. The poison of that
+ambition to go somewhere and be somebody which the local speculators had
+instilled into him began to work in the vanity which had succeeded his
+somewhat scornful self-respect; he rejected Europe as the proper field
+for his expansion; he rejected Washington; he preferred New York, whither
+the men who have made money and do not yet know that money has made them,
+all instinctively turn. He came where he could watch his money breed more
+money, and bring greater increase of its kind in an hour of luck than the
+toil of hundreds of men could earn in a year. He called it speculation,
+stocks, the Street; and his pride, his faith in himself, mounted with his
+luck. He expected, when he had sated his greed, to begin to spend, and he
+had formulated an intention to build a great house, to add another to the
+palaces of the country-bred millionaires who have come to adorn the great
+city. In the mean time he made little account of the things that occupied
+his children, except to fret at the ungrateful indifference of his son to
+the interests that could alone make a man of him. He did not know whether
+his daughters were in society or not; with people coming and going in the
+house he would have supposed they must be so, no matter who the people
+were; in some vague way he felt that he had hired society in Mrs. Mandel,
+at so much a year. He never met a superior himself except now and then a
+man of twenty or thirty millions to his one or two, and then he felt his
+soul creep within him, without a sense of social inferiority; it was a
+question of financial inferiority; and though Dryfoos's soul bowed itself
+and crawled, it was with a gambler's admiration of wonderful luck. Other
+men said these many-millioned millionaires were smart, and got their
+money by sharp practices to which lesser men could not attain; but
+Dryfoos believed that he could compass the same ends, by the same means,
+with the same chances; he respected their money, not them.
+
+When he now heard Mrs. Mandel and his daughters talking of that person,
+whoever she was, that Mrs. Mandel seemed to think had honored his girls
+by coming to see them, his curiosity was pricked as much as his pride was
+galled.
+
+"Well, anyway," said Mela, "I don't care whether Christine's goon' or
+not; I am. And you got to go with me, Mrs. Mandel."
+
+"Well, there's a little difficulty," said Mrs. Mandel, with her unfailing
+dignity and politeness. "I haven't been asked, you know."
+
+"Then what are we goun' to do?" demanded Mela, almost crossly. She was
+physically too amiable, she felt too well corporeally, ever to be quite
+cross. "She might 'a' knowed--well known--we couldn't 'a' come alone, in
+New York. I don't see why we couldn't. I don't call it much of an
+invitation."
+
+"I suppose she thought you could come with your mother," Mrs. Mandel
+suggested.
+
+"She didn't say anything about mother: Did she, Christine? Or, yes, she
+did, too. And I told her she couldn't git mother out. Don't you
+remember?"
+
+"I didn't pay much attention," said Christine. "I wasn't certain we
+wanted to go."
+
+"I reckon you wasn't goun' to let her see that we cared much," said Mela,
+half reproachful, half proud of this attitude of Christine. "Well, I
+don't see but what we got to stay at home." She laughed at this lame
+conclusion of the matter.
+
+"Perhaps Mr. Conrad--you could very properly take him without an express
+invitation--" Mrs. Mandel began.
+
+Conrad looked up in alarm and protest. "I--I don't think I could go that
+evening--"
+
+"What's the reason?" his father broke in, harshly. "You're not such a
+sheep that you're afraid to go into company with your sisters? Or are you
+too good to go with them?"
+
+"If it's to be anything like that night when them hussies come out and
+danced that way," said Mrs. Dryfoos, "I don't blame Coonrod for not
+wantun' to go. I never saw the beat of it."
+
+Mela sent a yelling laugh across the table to her mother. "Well, I wish
+Miss Vance could 'a' heard that! Why, mother, did you think it like the
+ballet?"
+
+"Well, I didn't know, Mely, child," said the old woman. "I didn't know
+what it was like. I hain't never been to one, and you can't be too
+keerful where you go, in a place like New York."
+
+"What's the reason you can't go?" Dryfoos ignored the passage between his
+wife and daughter in making this demand of his son, with a sour face.
+
+"I have an engagement that night--it's one of our meetings."
+
+"I reckon you can let your meeting go for one night," said Dryfoos. "It
+can't be so important as all that, that you must disappoint your
+sisters."
+
+"I don't like to disappoint those poor creatures. They depend so much
+upon the meetings--"
+
+"I reckon they can stand it for one night," said the old man. He added,
+"The poor ye have with you always."
+
+"That's so, Coonrod," said his mother. "It's the Saviour's own words."
+
+"Yes, mother. But they're not meant just as father used them."
+
+"How do you know how they were meant? Or how I used them?" cried the
+father. "Now you just make your plans to go with the girls, Tuesday
+night. They can't go alone, and Mrs. Mandel can't go with them."
+
+"Pshaw!" said Mela. "We don't want to take Conrad away from his meetun',
+do we, Chris?"
+
+"I don't know," said Christine, in her high, fine voice. "They could get
+along without him for one night, as father says."
+
+"Well, I'm not a-goun' to take him," said Mela. "Now, Mrs. Mandel, just
+think out some other way. Say! What's the reason we couldn't get somebody
+else to take us just as well? Ain't that rulable?"
+
+"It would be allowable--"
+
+"Allowable, I mean," Mela corrected herself.
+
+"But it might look a little significant, unless it was some old family
+friend."
+
+"Well, let's get Mr. Fulkerson to take us. He's the oldest family friend
+we got."
+
+"I won't go with Mr. Fulkerson," said Christine, serenely.
+
+"Why, I'm sure, Christine," her mother pleaded, "Mr. Fulkerson is a very
+good young man, and very nice appearun'."
+
+Mela shouted, "He's ten times as pleasant as that old Mr. Beaton of
+Christine's!"
+
+Christine made no effort to break the constraint that fell upon the table
+at this sally, but her father said: "Christine is right, Mela. It
+wouldn't do for you to go with any other young man. Conrad will go with
+you."
+
+"I'm not certain I want to go, yet," said Christine.
+
+"Well, settle that among yourselves. But if you want to go, your brother
+will go with you."
+
+"Of course, Coonrod 'll go, if his sisters wants him to," the old woman
+pleaded. "I reckon it ain't agoun' to be anything very bad; and if it is,
+Coonrod, why you can just git right up and come out."
+
+"It will be all right, mother. And I will go, of course."
+
+"There, now, I knowed you would, Coonrod. Now, fawther!" This appeal was
+to make the old man say something in recognition of Conrad's sacrifice.
+
+"You'll always find," he said, "that it's those of your own household
+that have the first claim on you."
+
+"That's so, Coonrod," urged his mother. "It's Bible truth. Your fawther
+ain't a perfesser, but he always did read his Bible. Search the
+Scriptures. That's what it means."
+
+"Laws!" cried Mely, "a body can see, easy enough from mother, where
+Conrad's wantun' to be a preacher comes from. I should 'a' thought she'd
+'a' wanted to been one herself."
+
+"Let your women keep silence in the churches," said the old woman,
+solemnly.
+
+"There you go again, mother! I guess if you was to say that to some of
+the lady ministers nowadays, you'd git yourself into trouble." Mela
+looked round for approval, and gurgled out a hoarse laugh.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The Dryfooses went late to Mrs. Horn's musicale, in spite of Mrs.
+Mandel's advice. Christine made the delay, both because she wished to
+show Miss Vance that she was (not) anxious, and because she had some
+vague notion of the distinction of arriving late at any sort of
+entertainment. Mrs. Mandel insisted upon the difference between this
+musicale and an ordinary reception; but Christine rather fancied
+disturbing a company that had got seated, and perhaps making people rise
+and stand, while she found her way to her place, as she had seen them do
+for a tardy comer at the theatre.
+
+Mela, whom she did not admit to her reasons or feelings always, followed
+her with the servile admiration she had for all that Christine did; and
+she took on trust as somehow successful the result of Christine's
+obstinacy, when they were allowed to stand against the wall at the back
+of the room through the whole of the long piece begun just before they
+came in. There had been no one to receive them; a few people, in the rear
+rows of chairs near them, turned their heads to glance at them, and then
+looked away again. Mela had her misgivings; but at the end of the piece
+Miss Vance came up to them at once, and then Mela knew that she had her
+eyes on them all the time, and that Christine must have been right.
+Christine said nothing about their coming late, and so Mela did not make
+any excuse, and Miss Vance seemed to expect none. She glanced with a sort
+of surprise at Conrad, when Christine introduced him; Mela did not know
+whether she liked their bringing him, till she shook hands with him, and
+said: "Oh, I am very glad indeed! Mr. Dryfoos and I have met before."
+Without explaining where or when, she led them to her aunt and presented
+them, and then said, "I'm going to put you with some friends of yours,"
+and quickly seated them next the Marches. Mela liked that well enough;
+she thought she might have some joking with Mr. March, for all his wife
+was so stiff; but the look which Christine wore seemed to forbid,
+provisionally at least, any such recreation. On her part, Christine was
+cool with the Marches. It went through her mind that they must have told
+Miss Vance they knew her; and perhaps they had boasted of her intimacy.
+She relaxed a little toward them when she saw Beaton leaning against the
+wall at the end of the row next Mrs. March. Then she conjectured that he
+might have told Miss Vance of her acquaintance with the Marches, and she
+bent forward and nodded to Mrs. March across Conrad, Mela, and Mr. March.
+She conceived of him as a sort of hand of her father's, but she was
+willing to take them at their apparent social valuation for the time. She
+leaned back in her chair, and did not look up at Beaton after the first
+furtive glance, though she felt his eyes on her.
+
+The music began again almost at once, before Mela had time to make Conrad
+tell her where Miss Vance had met him before. She would not have minded
+interrupting the music; but every one else seemed so attentive, even
+Christine, that she had not the courage. The concert went onto an end
+without realizing for her the ideal of pleasure which one ought to find.
+in society. She was not exacting, but it seemed to her there were very
+few young men, and when the music was over, and their opportunity came to
+be sociable, they were not very sociable. They were not introduced, for
+one thing; but it appeared to Mela that they might have got introduced,
+if they had any sense; she saw them looking at her, and she was glad she
+had dressed so much; she was dressed more than any other lady there, and
+either because she was the most dressed of any person there, or because
+it had got around who her father was, she felt that she had made an
+impression on the young men. In her satisfaction with this, and from her
+good nature, she was contented to be served with her refreshments after
+the concert by Mr. March, and to remain joking with him. She was at her
+ease; she let her hoarse voice out in her largest laugh; she accused him,
+to the admiration of those near, of getting her into a perfect gale. It
+appeared to her, in her own pleasure, her mission to illustrate to the
+rather subdued people about her what a good time really was, so that they
+could have it if they wanted it. Her joy was crowned when March modestly
+professed himself unworthy to monopolize her, and explained how selfish
+he felt in talking to a young lady when there were so many young men
+dying to do so.
+
+"Oh, pshaw, dyun', yes!" cried Mela, tasting the irony. "I guess I see
+them!"
+
+He asked if he might really introduce a friend of his to her, and she
+said, Well, yes, if he thought he could live to get to her; and March
+brought up a man whom he thought very young and Mela thought very old. He
+was a contributor to 'Every Other Week,' and so March knew him; he
+believed himself a student of human nature in behalf of literature, and
+he now set about studying Mela. He tempted her to express her opinion on
+all points, and he laughed so amiably at the boldness and humorous vigor
+of her ideas that she was delighted with him. She asked him if he was a
+New-Yorker by birth; and she told him she pitied him, when he said he had
+never been West. She professed herself perfectly sick of New York, and
+urged him to go to Moffitt if he wanted to see a real live town. He
+wondered if it would do to put her into literature just as she was, with
+all her slang and brag, but he decided that he would have to subdue her a
+great deal: he did not see how he could reconcile the facts of her
+conversation with the facts of her appearance: her beauty, her splendor
+of dress, her apparent right to be where she was. These things perplexed
+him; he was afraid the great American novel, if true, must be incredible.
+Mela said he ought to hear her sister go on about New York when they
+first came; but she reckoned that Christine was getting so she could put
+up with it a little better, now. She looked significantly across the room
+to the place where Christine was now talking with Beaton; and the student
+of human nature asked, Was she here? and, Would she introduce him? Mela
+said she would, the first chance she got; and she added, They would be
+much pleased to have him call. She felt herself to be having a beautiful
+time, and she got directly upon such intimate terms with the student of
+human nature that she laughed with him about some peculiarities of his,
+such as his going so far about to ask things he wanted to know from her;
+she said she never did believe in beating about the bush much. She had
+noticed the same thing in Miss Vance when she came to call that day; and
+when the young man owned that he came rather a good deal to Mrs. Horn's
+house, she asked him, Well, what sort of a girl was Miss Vance, anyway,
+and where did he suppose she had met her brother? The student of human
+nature could not say as to this, and as to Miss Vance he judged it safest
+to treat of the non-society side of her character, her activity in
+charity, her special devotion to the work among the poor on the East
+Side, which she personally engaged in.
+
+"Oh, that's where Conrad goes, too!" Mela interrupted. "I'll bet anything
+that's where she met him. I wisht I could tell Christine! But I suppose
+she would want to kill me, if I was to speak to her now."
+
+The student of human nature said, politely, "Oh, shall I take you to
+her?"
+
+Mela answered, "I guess you better not!" with a laugh so significant that
+he could not help his inferences concerning both Christine's absorption
+in the person she was talking with and the habitual violence of her
+temper. He made note of how Mela helplessly spoke of all her family by
+their names, as if he were already intimate with them; he fancied that if
+he could get that in skillfully, it would be a valuable color in his
+study; the English lord whom she should astonish with it began to form
+himself out of the dramatic nebulosity in his mind, and to whirl on a
+definite orbit in American society. But he was puzzled to decide whether
+Mela's willingness to take him into her confidence on short notice was
+typical or personal: the trait of a daughter of the natural-gas
+millionaire, or a foible of her own.
+
+Beaton talked with Christine the greater part of the evening that was
+left after the concert. He was very grave, and took the tone of a
+fatherly friend; he spoke guardedly of the people present, and moderated
+the severity of some of Christine's judgments of their looks and
+costumes. He did this out of a sort of unreasoned allegiance to Margaret,
+whom he was in the mood of wishing to please by being very kind and good,
+as she always was. He had the sense also of atoning by this behavior for
+some reckless things he had said before that to Christine; he put on a
+sad, reproving air with her, and gave her the feeling of being held in
+check.
+
+She chafed at it, and said, glancing at Margaret in talk with her
+brother, "I don't think Miss Vance is so very pretty, do you?"
+
+"I never think whether she's pretty or not," said Beaton, with dreamy,
+affectation. "She is merely perfect. Does she know your brother?"
+
+"So she says. I didn't suppose Conrad ever went anywhere, except to
+tenement-houses."
+
+"It might have been there," Beaton suggested. "She goes among friendless
+people everywhere."
+
+"Maybe that's the reason she came to see us!" said Christine.
+
+Beaton looked at her with his smouldering eyes, and felt the wish to say,
+"Yes, it was exactly that," but he only allowed himself to deny the
+possibility of any such motive in that case. He added: "I am so glad you
+know her, Miss Dryfoos. I never met Miss Vance without feeling myself
+better and truer, somehow; or the wish to be so."
+
+"And you think we might be improved, too?" Christine retorted. "Well, I
+must say you're not very flattering, Mr. Beaton, anyway."
+
+Beaton would have liked to answer her according to her cattishness, with
+a good clawing sarcasm that would leave its smart in her pride; but he
+was being good, and he could not change all at once. Besides, the girl's
+attitude under the social honor done her interested him. He was sure she
+had never been in such good company before, but he could see that she was
+not in the least affected by the experience. He had told her who this
+person and that was; and he saw she had understood that the names were of
+consequence; but she seemed to feel her equality with them all. Her
+serenity was not obviously akin to the savage stoicism in which Beaton
+hid his own consciousness of social inferiority; but having won his way
+in the world so far by his talent, his personal quality, he did not
+conceive the simple fact in her case. Christine was self-possessed
+because she felt that a knowledge of her father's fortune had got around,
+and she had the peace which money gives to ignorance; but Beaton
+attributed her poise to indifference to social values. This, while he
+inwardly sneered at it, avenged him upon his own too keen sense of them,
+and, together with his temporary allegiance to Margaret's goodness, kept
+him from retaliating Christine's vulgarity. He said, "I don't see how
+that could be," and left the question of flattery to settle itself.
+
+The people began to go away, following each other up to take leave of
+Mrs. Horn. Christine watched them with unconcern, and either because she
+would not be governed by the general movement, or because she liked being
+with Beaton, gave no sign of going. Mela was still talking to the student
+of human nature, sending out her laugh in deep gurgles amid the
+unimaginable confidences she was making him about herself, her family,
+the staff of 'Every Other Week,' Mrs. Mandel, and the kind of life they
+had all led before she came to them. He was not a blind devotee of art
+for art's sake, and though he felt that if one could portray Mela just as
+she was she would be the richest possible material, he was rather ashamed
+to know some of the things she told him; and he kept looking anxiously
+about for a chance of escape. The company had reduced itself to the
+Dryfoos groups and some friends of Mrs. Horn's who had the right to
+linger, when Margaret crossed the room with Conrad to Christine and
+Beaton.
+
+"I'm so glad, Miss Dryfoos, to find that I was not quite a stranger to
+you all when I ventured to call, the other day. Your brother and I are
+rather old acquaintances, though I never knew who he was before. I don't
+know just how to say we met where he is valued so much. I suppose I
+mustn't try to say how much," she added, with a look of deep regard at
+him.
+
+Conrad blushed and stood folding his arms tight over his breast, while
+his sister received Margaret's confession with the suspicion which was
+her first feeling in regard to any new thing. What she concluded was that
+this girl was trying to get in with them, for reasons of her own. She
+said: "Yes; it's the first I ever heard of his knowing you. He's so much
+taken up with his meetings, he didn't want to come to-night."
+
+Margaret drew in her lip before she answered, without apparent resentment
+of the awkwardness or ungraciousness, whichever she found it: "I don't
+wonder! You become so absorbed in such work that you think nothing else
+is worth while. But I'm glad Mr. Dryfoos could come with you; I'm so glad
+you could all come; I knew you would enjoy the music. Do sit down--"
+
+"No," said Christine, bluntly; "we must be going. Mela!" she called out,
+"come!"
+
+The last group about Mrs. Horn looked round, but Christine advanced upon
+them undismayed, and took the hand Mrs. Horn promptly gave her. "Well, I
+must bid you good-night."
+
+"Oh, good-night," murmured the elder lady. "So very kind of you to come."
+
+"I've had the best kind of a time," said Mela, cordially. "I hain't
+laughed so much, I don't know when."
+
+"Oh, I'm glad you enjoyed it," said Mrs. Horn, in the same polite murmur
+she had used with Christine; but she said nothing to either sister about
+any future meeting.
+
+They were apparently not troubled. Mela said over her shoulder to the
+student of human nature, "The next time I see you I'll give it to you for
+what you said about Moffitt."
+
+Margaret made some entreating paces after them, but she did not succeed
+in covering the retreat of the sisters against critical conjecture. She
+could only say to Conrad, as if recurring to the subject, "I hope we can
+get our friends to play for us some night. I know it isn't any real help,
+but such things take the poor creatures out of themselves for the time
+being, don't you think?"
+
+"Oh yes," he answered. "They're good in that way." He turned back
+hesitatingly to Mrs. Horn, and said, with a blush, "I thank you for a
+happy evening."
+
+"Oh, I am very glad," she replied, in her murmur.
+
+One of the old friends of the house arched her eyebrows in saying
+good-night, and offered the two young men remaining seats home in her
+carriage. Beaton gloomily refused, and she kept herself from asking the
+student of human nature, till she had got him into her carriage, "What is
+Moffitt, and what did you say about it?"
+
+"Now you see, Margaret," said Mrs. Horn, with bated triumph, when the
+people were all gone.
+
+"Yes, I see," the girl consented. "From one point of view, of course it's
+been a failure. I don't think we've given Miss Dryfoos a pleasure, but
+perhaps nobody could. And at least we've given her the opportunity of
+enjoying herself."
+
+"Such people," said Mrs. Horn, philosophically, "people with their money,
+must of course be received sooner or later. You can't keep them out.
+Only, I believe I would rather let some one else begin with them. The
+Leightons didn't come?"
+
+"I sent them cards. I couldn't call again."
+
+Mrs. Horn sighed a little. "I suppose Mr. Dryfoos is one of your
+fellow-philanthropists?"
+
+"He's one of the workers," said Margaret. "I met him several times at the
+Hall, but I only knew his first name. I think he's a great friend of
+Father Benedict; he seems devoted to the work. Don't you think he looks
+good?"
+
+"Very," said Mrs. Horn, with a color of censure in her assent. "The
+younger girl seemed more amiable than her sister. But what manners!"
+
+"Dreadful!" said Margaret, with knit brows, and a pursed mouth of
+humorous suffering. "But she appeared to feel very much at home."
+
+"Oh, as to that, neither of them was much abashed. Do you suppose Mr.
+Beaton gave the other one some hints for that quaint dress of hers? I
+don't imagine that black and lace is her own invention. She seems to have
+some sort of strange fascination for him."
+
+"She's very picturesque," Margaret explained. "And artists see points in
+people that the rest of us don't."
+
+"Could it be her money?" Mrs. Horn insinuated. "He must be very poor."
+
+"But he isn't base," retorted the girl, with a generous indignation that
+made her aunt smile.
+
+"Oh no; but if he fancies her so picturesque, it doesn't follow that he
+would object to her being rich."
+
+"It would with a man like Mr. Beaton!"
+
+"You are an idealist, Margaret. I suppose your Mr. March has some
+disinterested motive in paying court to Miss Mela--Pamela, I suppose, is
+her name. He talked to her longer than her literature would have lasted."
+
+"He seems a very kind person," said Margaret.
+
+"And Mr. Dryfoos pays his salary?"
+
+"I don't know anything about that. But that wouldn't make any difference
+with him."
+
+Mrs. Horn laughed out at this security; but she was not displeased by the
+nobleness which it came from. She liked Margaret to be high-minded, and
+was really not distressed by any good that was in her.
+
+The Marches walked home, both because it was not far, and because they
+must spare in carriage hire at any rate. As soon as they were out of the
+house, she applied a point of conscience to him.
+
+"I don't see how you could talk to that girl so long, Basil, and make her
+laugh so."
+
+"Why, there seemed no one else to do it, till I thought of Kendricks."
+
+"Yes, but I kept thinking, Now he's pleasant to her because he thinks
+it's to his interest. If she had no relation to 'Every Other Week,' he
+wouldn't waste his time on her."
+
+"Isabel," March complained, "I wish you wouldn't think of me in he, him,
+and his; I never personalize you in my thoughts: you remain always a
+vague unindividualized essence, not quite without form and void, but
+nounless and pronounless. I call that a much more beautiful mental
+attitude toward the object of one's affections. But if you must he and
+him and his me in your thoughts, I wish you'd have more kindly thoughts
+of me."
+
+"Do you deny that it's true, Basil?"
+
+"Do you believe that it's true, Isabel?"
+
+"No matter. But could you excuse it if it were?"
+
+"Ah, I see you'd have been capable of it in my place, and you're
+ashamed."
+
+"Yes," sighed the wife, "I'm afraid that I should. But tell me that you
+wouldn't, Basil!"
+
+"I can tell you that I wasn't. But I suppose that in a real exigency, I
+could truckle to the proprietary Dryfooses as well as you."
+
+"Oh no; you mustn't, dear! I'm a woman, and I'm dreadfully afraid. But
+you must always be a man, especially with that horrid old Mr. Dryfoos.
+Promise me that you'll never yield the least point to him in a matter of
+right and wrong!"
+
+"Not if he's right and I'm wrong?"
+
+"Don't trifle, dear! You know what I mean. Will you promise?"
+
+"I'll promise to submit the point to you, and let you do the yielding. As
+for me, I shall be adamant. Nothing I like better."
+
+"They're dreadful, even that poor, good young fellow, who's so different
+from all the rest; he's awful, too, because you feel that he's a martyr
+to them."
+
+"And I never did like martyrs a great deal," March interposed.
+
+"I wonder how they came to be there," Mrs. March pursued, unmindful of
+his joke.
+
+"That is exactly what seemed to be puzzling Miss Mela about us. She
+asked, and I explained as well as I could; and then she told me that Miss
+Vance had come to call on them and invited them; and first they didn't
+know how they could come till they thought of making Conrad bring them.
+But she didn't say why Miss Vance called on them. Mr. Dryfoos doesn't
+employ her on 'Every Other Week.' But I suppose she has her own vile
+little motive."
+
+"It can't be their money; it can't be!" sighed Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, I don't know. We all respect money."
+
+"Yes, but Miss Vance's position is so secure. She needn't pay court to
+those stupid, vulgar people."
+
+"Well, let's console ourselves with the belief that she would, if she
+needed. Such people as the Dryfooses are the raw material of good
+society. It isn't made up of refined or meritorious people--professors
+and litterateurs, ministers and musicians, and their families. All the
+fashionable people there to-night were like the Dryfooses a generation or
+two ago. I dare say the material works up faster now, and in a season or
+two you won't know the Dryfooses from the other plutocrats. THEY will--a
+little better than they do now; they'll see a difference, but nothing
+radical, nothing painful. People who get up in the world by service to
+others--through letters, or art, or science--may have their modest little
+misgivings as to their social value, but people that rise by
+money--especially if their gains are sudden--never have. And that's the
+kind of people that form our nobility; there's no use pretending that we
+haven't a nobility; we might as well pretend we haven't first-class cars
+in the presence of a vestibuled Pullman. Those girls had no more doubt of
+their right to be there than if they had been duchesses: we thought it
+was very nice of Miss Vance to come and ask us, but they didn't; they
+weren't afraid, or the least embarrassed; they were perfectly
+natural--like born aristocrats. And you may be sure that if the
+plutocracy that now owns the country ever sees fit to take on the outward
+signs of an aristocracy--titles, and arms, and ancestors--it won't falter
+from any inherent question of its worth. Money prizes and honors itself,
+and if there is anything it hasn't got, it believes it can buy it."
+
+"Well, Basil," said his wife, "I hope you won't get infected with Lindau's
+ideas of rich people. Some of them are very good and kind."
+
+"Who denies that? Not even Lindau himself. It's all right. And the great
+thing is that the evening's enjoyment is over. I've got my society smile
+off, and I'm radiantly happy. Go on with your little pessimistic
+diatribes, Isabel; you can't spoil my pleasure."
+
+"I could see," said Mela, as she and Christine drove home together, "that
+she was as jealous as she could be, all the time you was talkun' to Mr.
+Beaton. She pretended to be talkun' to Conrad, but she kep' her eye on
+you pretty close, I can tell you. I bet she just got us there to see how
+him and you would act together. And I reckon she was satisfied. He's dead
+gone on you, Chris."
+
+Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the flatteries with which
+Mela plied her in the hope of some return in kind, and not at all because
+she felt spitefully toward Miss Vance, or in anywise wished her ill. "Who
+was that fellow with you so long?" asked Christine. "I suppose you turned
+yourself inside out to him, like you always do."
+
+Mela was transported by the cruel ingratitude. "It's a lie! I didn't tell
+him a single thing."
+
+Conrad walked home, choosing to do so because he did not wish to hear his
+sisters' talk of the evening, and because there was a tumult in his
+spirit which he wished to let have its way. In his life with its single
+purpose, defeated by stronger wills than his own, and now struggling
+partially to fulfil itself in acts of devotion to others, the thought of
+women had entered scarcely more than in that of a child. His ideals were
+of a virginal vagueness; faces, voices, gestures had filled his fancy at
+times, but almost passionately; and the sensation that he now indulged
+was a kind of worship, ardent, but reverent and exalted. The brutal
+experiences of the world make us forget that there are such natures in
+it, and that they seem to come up out of the lowly earth as well as down
+from the high heaven. In the heart of this man well on toward thirty
+there had never been left the stain of a base thought; not that
+suggestion and conjecture had not visited him, but that he had not
+entertained them, or in any-wise made them his. In a Catholic age and
+country, he would have been one of those monks who are sainted after
+death for the angelic purity of their lives, and whose names are invoked
+by believers in moments of trial, like San Luigi Gonzaga. As he now
+walked along thinking, with a lover's beatified smile on his face, of how
+Margaret Vance had spoken and looked, he dramatized scenes in which he
+approved himself to her by acts of goodness and unselfishness, and died
+to please her for the sake of others. He made her praise him for them, to
+his face, when he disclaimed their merit, and after his death, when he
+could not. All the time he was poignantly sensible of her grace, her
+elegance, her style; they seemed to intoxicate him; some tones of her
+voice thrilled through his nerves, and some looks turned his brain with a
+delicious, swooning sense of her beauty; her refinement bewildered him.
+But all this did not admit the idea of possession, even of aspiration. At
+the most his worship only set her beyond the love of other men as far as
+beyond his own.
+
+
+PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    Affectional habit
+    Brag of his wife, as a good husband always does
+    But when we make that money here, no one loses it
+    Courage hadn't been put to the test
+    Family buryin' grounds
+    Homage which those who have not pay to those who have
+    Hurry up and git well--or something
+    Made money and do not yet know that money has made them
+    Society: All its favors are really bargains
+    Wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit
+    Without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child
+
+
+
+
+FOURTH PART
+
+
+I.
+
+Not long after Lent, Fulkerson set before Dryfoos one day his scheme for
+a dinner in celebration of the success of 'Every Other Week.' Dryfoos had
+never meddled in any manner with the conduct of the periodical; but
+Fulkerson easily saw that he was proud of his relation to it, and he
+proceeded upon the theory that he would be willing to have this relation
+known: On the days when he had been lucky in stocks, he was apt to drop
+in at the office on Eleventh Street, on his way up-town, and listen to
+Fulkerson's talk. He was on good enough terms with March, who revised his
+first impressions of the man, but they had not much to say to each other,
+and it seemed to March that Dryfoos was even a little afraid of him, as
+of a piece of mechanism he had acquired, but did not quite understand; he
+left the working of it to Fulkerson, who no doubt bragged of it
+sufficiently. The old man seemed to have as little to say to his son; he
+shut himself up with Fulkerson, where the others could hear the manager
+begin and go on with an unstinted flow of talk about 'Every Other Week;'
+for Fulkerson never talked of anything else if he could help it, and was
+always bringing the conversation back to it if it strayed:
+
+The day he spoke of the dinner he rose and called from his door: "March,
+I say, come down here a minute, will you? Conrad, I want you, too."
+
+The editor and the publisher found the manager and the proprietor seated
+on opposite sides of the table. "It's about those funeral baked meats,
+you know," Fulkerson explained, "and I was trying to give Mr. Dryfoos
+some idea of what we wanted to do. That is, what I wanted to do," he
+continued, turning from March to Dryfoos. "March, here, is opposed to it,
+of course. He'd like to publish 'Every Other Week' on the sly; keep it
+out of the papers, and off the newsstands; he's a modest Boston petunia,
+and he shrinks from publicity; but I am not that kind of herb myself, and
+I want all the publicity we can get--beg, borrow, or steal--for this
+thing. I say that you can't work the sacred rites of hospitality in a
+better cause, and what I propose is a little dinner for the purpose of
+recognizing the hit we've made with this thing. My idea was to strike you
+for the necessary funds, and do the thing on a handsome scale. The term
+little dinner is a mere figure of speech. A little dinner wouldn't make a
+big talk, and what we want is the big talk, at present, if we don't lay
+up a cent. My notion was that pretty soon after Lent, now, when everybody
+is feeling just right, we should begin to send out our paragraphs,
+affirmative, negative, and explanatory, and along about the first of May
+we should sit down about a hundred strong, the most distinguished people
+in the country, and solemnize our triumph. There it is in a nutshell. I
+might expand and I might expound, but that's the sum and substance of
+it."
+
+Fulkerson stopped, and ran his eyes eagerly over the faces of his three
+listeners, one after the other. March was a little surprised when Dryfoos
+turned to him, but that reference of the question seemed to give
+Fulkerson particular pleasure: "What do you think, Mr. March?"
+
+The editor leaned back in his chair. "I don't pretend to have Mr.
+Fulkerson's genius for advertising; but it seems to me a little early
+yet. We might celebrate later when we've got more to celebrate. At
+present we're a pleasing novelty, rather than a fixed fact."
+
+"Ah, you don't get the idea!" said Fulkerson. "What we want to do with
+this dinner is to fix the fact."
+
+"Am I going to come in anywhere?" the old man interrupted.
+
+"You're going to come in at the head of the procession! We are going to
+strike everything that is imaginative and romantic in the newspaper soul
+with you and your history and your fancy for going in for this thing. I
+can start you in a paragraph that will travel through all the newspapers,
+from Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida. We have had all sorts of
+rich men backing up literary enterprises, but the natural-gas man in
+literature is a new thing, and the combination of your picturesque past
+and your aesthetic present is something that will knock out the
+sympathies of the American public the first round. I feel," said
+Fulkerson, with a tremor of pathos in his voice, "that 'Every Other Week'
+is at a disadvantage before the public as long as it's supposed to be my
+enterprise, my idea. As far as I'm known at all, I'm known simply as a
+syndicate man, and nobody in the press believes that I've got the money
+to run the thing on a grand scale; a suspicion of insolvency must attach
+to it sooner or later, and the fellows on the press will work up that
+impression, sooner or later, if we don't give them something else to work
+up. Now, as soon as I begin to give it away to the correspondents that
+you're in it, with your untold millions--that, in fact, it was your idea
+from the start, that you originated it to give full play to the
+humanitarian tendencies of Conrad here, who's always had these theories
+of co-operation, and longed to realize them for the benefit of our
+struggling young writers and artists--"
+
+March had listened with growing amusement to the mingled burlesque and
+earnest of Fulkerson's self-sacrificing impudence, and with wonder as to
+how far Dryfoos was consenting to his preposterous proposition, when
+Conrad broke out: "Mr. Fulkerson, I could not allow you to do that. It
+would not be true; I did not wish to be here; and--and what I think--what
+I wish to do--that is something I will not let any one put me in a false
+position about. No!" The blood rushed into the young man's gentle face,
+and he met his father's glance with defiance.
+
+Dryfoos turned from him to Fulkerson without speaking, and Fulkerson
+said, caressingly: "Why, of course, Coonrod! I know how you feel, and I
+shouldn't let anything of that sort go out uncontradicted afterward. But
+there isn't anything in these times that would give us better standing
+with the public than some hint of the way you feel about such things. The
+public expects to be interested, and nothing would interest it more than
+to be told that the success of 'Every Other Week' sprang from the first
+application of the principle of Live and let Live to a literary
+enterprise. It would look particularly well, coming from you and your
+father, but if you object, we can leave that part out; though if you
+approve of the principle I don't see why you need object. The main thing
+is to let the public know that it owes this thing to the liberal and
+enlightened spirit of one of the foremost capitalists of the country; and
+that his purposes are not likely to be betrayed in the hands of his son,
+I should get a little cut made from a photograph of your father, and
+supply it gratis with the paragraphs."
+
+"I guess," said the old man, "we will get along without the cut."
+
+Fulkerson laughed. "Well, well! Have it your own way, But the sight of
+your face in the patent outsides of the country press would be worth half
+a dozen subscribers in every school district throughout the length and
+breadth of this fair land."
+
+"There was a fellow," Dryfoos explained, in an aside to March, "that was
+getting up a history of Moffitt, and he asked me to let him put a steel
+engraving of me in. He said a good many prominent citizens were going to
+have theirs in, and his price was a hundred and fifty dollars. I told him
+I couldn't let mine go for less than two hundred, and when he said he
+could give me a splendid plate for that money, I said I should want it
+cash. You never saw a fellow more astonished when he got it through him
+that I expected him to pay the two hundred."
+
+Fulkerson laughed in keen appreciation of the joke. "Well, sir, I guess
+'Every Other Week' will pay you that much. But if you won't sell at any
+price, all right; we must try to worry along without the light of your
+countenance on the posters, but we got to have it for the banquet."
+
+"I don't seem to feel very hungry, yet," said they old man, dryly.
+
+"Oh, 'l'appetit vient en mangeant', as our French friends say. You'll be
+hungry enough when you see the preliminary Little Neck clam. It's too
+late for oysters."
+
+"Doesn't that fact seem to point to a postponement till they get back,
+sometime in October," March suggested.
+
+"No, no!" said Fulkerson, "you don't catch on to the business end of this
+thing, my friends. You're proceeding on something like the old exploded
+idea that the demand creates the supply, when everybody knows, if he's
+watched the course of modern events, that it's just as apt to be the
+other way. I contend that we've got a real substantial success to
+celebrate now; but even if we hadn't, the celebration would do more than
+anything else to create the success, if we got it properly before the
+public. People will say: Those fellows are not fools; they wouldn't go
+and rejoice over their magazine unless they had got a big thing in it.
+And the state of feeling we should produce in the public mind would make
+a boom of perfectly unprecedented grandeur for E. O. W. Heigh?"
+
+He looked sunnily from one to the other in succession. The elder Dryfoos
+said, with his chin on the top of his stick, "I reckon those Little Neck
+clams will keep."
+
+"Well, just as you say," Fulkerson cheerfully assented. "I understand you
+to agree to the general principle of a little dinner?"
+
+"The smaller the better," said the old man.
+
+"Well, I say a little dinner because the idea of that seems to cover the
+case, even if we vary the plan a little. I had thought of a reception,
+maybe, that would include the lady contributors and artists, and the
+wives and daughters of the other contributors. That would give us the
+chance to ring in a lot of society correspondents and get the thing
+written up in first-class shape. By-the-way!" cried Fulkerson, slapping
+himself on the leg, "why not have the dinner and the reception both?"
+
+"I don't understand," said Dryfoos.
+
+"Why, have a select little dinner for ten or twenty choice spirits of the
+male persuasion, and then, about ten o'clock, throw open your palatial
+drawing-rooms and admit the females to champagne, salads, and ices. It is
+the very thing! Come!"
+
+"What do you think of it, Mr. March?" asked Dryfoos, on whose social
+inexperience Fulkerson's words projected no very intelligible image, and
+who perhaps hoped for some more light.
+
+"It's a beautiful vision," said March, "and if it will take more time to
+realize it I think I approve. I approve of anything that will delay Mr.
+Fulkerson's advertising orgie."
+
+"Then," Fulkerson pursued, "we could have the pleasure of Miss Christine
+and Miss Mela's company; and maybe Mrs. Dryfoos would look in on us in
+the course of the evening. There's no hurry, as Mr. March suggests, if we
+can give the thing this shape. I will cheerfully adopt the idea of my
+honorable colleague."
+
+March laughed at his impudence, but at heart he was ashamed of Fulkerson
+for proposing to make use of Dryfoos and his house in that way. He
+fancied something appealing in the look that the old man turned on him,
+and something indignant in Conrad's flush; but probably this was only his
+fancy. He reflected that neither of them could feel it as people of more
+worldly knowledge would, and he consoled himself with the fact that
+Fulkerson was really not such a charlatan as he seemed. But it went
+through his mind that this was a strange end for all Dryfoos's
+money-making to come to; and he philosophically accepted the fact of his
+own humble fortunes when he reflected how little his money could buy for
+such a man. It was an honorable use that Fulkerson was putting it to in
+'Every Other Week;' it might be far more creditably spent on such an
+enterprise than on horses, or wines, or women, the usual resources of the
+brute rich; and if it were to be lost, it might better be lost that way
+than in stocks. He kept a smiling face turned to Dryfoos while these
+irreverent considerations occupied him, and hardened his heart against
+father and son and their possible emotions.
+
+The old man rose to put an end to the interview. He only repeated, "I
+guess those clams will keep till fall."
+
+But Fulkerson was apparently satisfied with the progress he had made; and
+when he joined March for the stroll homeward after office hours, he was
+able to detach his mind from the subject, as if content to leave it.
+
+"This is about the best part of the year in New York," he said; In some
+of the areas the grass had sprouted, and the tender young foliage had
+loosened itself from the buds on a sidewalk tree here and there; the
+soft air was full of spring, and the delicate sky, far aloof, had the
+look it never wears at any other season. "It ain't a time of year to
+complain much of, anywhere; but I don't want anything better than the
+month of May in New York. Farther South it's too hot, and I've been in
+Boston in May when that east wind of yours made every nerve in my body
+get up and howl. I reckon the weather has a good deal to do with the
+local temperament. The reason a New York man takes life so easily with
+all his rush is that his climate don't worry him. But a Boston man must
+be rasped the whole while by the edge in his air. That accounts for his
+sharpness; and when he's lived through twenty-five or thirty Boston Mays,
+he gets to thinking that Providence has some particular use for him, or
+he wouldn't have survived, and that makes him conceited. See?"
+
+"I see," said March. "But I don't know how you're going to work that idea
+into an advertisement, exactly."
+
+"Oh, pahaw, now, March! You don't think I've got that on the brain all
+the time?"
+
+"You were gradually leading up to 'Every Other Week', somehow."
+
+"No, sir; I wasn't. I was just thinking what a different creature a
+Massachusetts man is from a Virginian. And yet I suppose they're both as
+pure English stock as you'll get anywhere in America. Marsh, I think
+Colonel Woodburn's paper is going to make a hit."
+
+"You've got there! When it knocks down the sale about one-half, I shall
+know it's made a hit."
+
+"I'm not afraid," said Fulkerson. "That thing is going to attract
+attention. It's well written--you can take the pomposity out of it, here
+and there and it's novel. Our people like a bold strike, and it's going
+to shake them up tremendously to have serfdom advocated on high moral
+grounds as the only solution of the labor problem. You see, in the first
+place, he goes for their sympathies by the way he portrays the actual
+relations of capital and labor; he shows how things have got to go from
+bad to worse, and then he trots out his little old hobby, and proves that
+if slavery had not been interfered with, it would have perfected itself
+in the interest of humanity. He makes a pretty strong plea for it."
+
+March threw back his head and laughed. "He's converted you! I swear,
+Fulkerson, if we had accepted and paid for an article advocating
+cannibalism as the only resource for getting rid of the superfluous poor,
+you'd begin to believe in it."
+
+Fulkerson smiled in approval of the joke, and only said: "I wish you
+could meet the colonel in the privacy of the domestic circle, March.
+You'd like him. He's a splendid old fellow; regular type. Talk about
+spring!
+
+"You ought to see the widow's little back yard these days. You know that
+glass gallery just beyond the dining-room? Those girls have got the
+pot-plants out of that, and a lot more, and they've turned the edges of
+that back yard, along the fence, into a regular bower; they've got sweet
+peas planted, and nasturtiums, and we shall be in a blaze of glory about
+the beginning of June. Fun to see 'em work in the garden, and the bird
+bossing the job in his cage under the cherry-tree. Have to keep the
+middle of the yard for the clothesline, but six days in the week it's a
+lawn, and I go over it with a mower myself. March, there ain't anything
+like a home, is there? Dear little cot of your own, heigh? I tell you,
+March, when I get to pushing that mower round, and the colonel is smoking
+his cigar in the gallery, and those girls are pottering over the flowers,
+one of these soft evenings after dinner, I feel like a human being. Yes,
+I do. I struck it rich when I concluded to take my meals at the widow's.
+For eight dollars a week I get good board, refined society, and all the
+advantages of a Christian home. By-the-way, you've never had much talk
+with Miss Woodburn, have you, March?"
+
+"Not so much as with Miss Woodburn's father."
+
+"Well, he is rather apt to scoop the conversation. I must draw his fire,
+sometime, when you and Mrs. March are around, and get you a chance with
+Miss Woodburn."
+
+"I should like that better, I believe," said March.
+
+"Well, I shouldn't wonder if you did. Curious, but Miss Woodburn isn't at
+all your idea of a Southern girl. She's got lots of go; she's never idle
+a minute; she keeps the old gentleman in first-class shape, and she don't
+believe a bit in the slavery solution of the labor problem; says she's
+glad it's gone, and if it's anything like the effects of it, she's glad
+it went before her time. No, sir, she's as full of snap as the liveliest
+kind of a Northern girl. None of that sunny Southern languor you read
+about."
+
+"I suppose the typical Southerner, like the typical anything else, is
+pretty difficult to find," said March. "But perhaps Miss Woodburn
+represents the new South. The modern conditions must be producing a
+modern type."
+
+"Well, that's what she and the colonel both say. They say there ain't
+anything left of that Walter Scott dignity and chivalry in the rising
+generation; takes too much time. You ought to see her sketch the
+old-school, high-and-mighty manners, as they survive among some of the
+antiques in Charlottesburg. If that thing could be put upon the stage it
+would be a killing success. Makes the old gentleman laugh in spite of
+himself. But he's as proud of her as Punch, anyway. Why don't you and
+Mrs. March come round oftener? Look here! How would it do to have a
+little excursion, somewhere, after the spring fairly gets in its work?"
+
+"Reporters present?"
+
+"No, no! Nothing of that kind; perfectly sincere and disinterested
+enjoyment."
+
+"Oh, a few handbills to be scattered around: 'Buy "Every Other Week",' 'Look
+out for the next number of "Every Other Week,"' "'Every Other Week' at all
+the news-stands.' Well, I'll talk it over with Mrs. March. I suppose
+there's no great hurry."
+
+March told his wife of the idyllic mood in which he had left Fulkerson at
+the widow's door, and she said he must be in love.
+
+"Why, of course! I wonder I didn't think of that. But Fulkerson is such
+an impartial admirer of the whole sex that you can't think of his liking
+one more than another. I don't know that he showed any unjust partiality,
+though, in his talk of 'those girls,' as he called them. And I always
+rather fancied that Mrs. Mandel--he's done so much for her, you know; and
+she is such a well-balanced, well-preserved person, and so lady-like and
+correct----"
+
+"Fulkerson had the word for her: academic. She's everything that
+instruction and discipline can make of a woman; but I shouldn't think
+they could make enough of her to be in love with."
+
+"Well, I don't know. The academic has its charm. There are moods in which
+I could imagine myself in love with an academic person. That regularity
+of line; that reasoned strictness of contour; that neatness of pose; that
+slightly conventional but harmonious grouping of the emotions and
+morals--you can see how it would have its charm, the Wedgwood in human
+nature? I wonder where Mrs. Mandel keeps her urn and her willow."
+
+"I should think she might have use for them in that family, poor thing!"
+said Mrs. March.
+
+"Ah, that reminds me," said her husband, "that we had another talk with
+the old gentleman, this afternoon, about Fulkerson's literary, artistic,
+and advertising orgie, and it's postponed till October."
+
+"The later the better, I should think," said Mrs. March, who did not
+really think about it at all, but whom the date fixed for it caused to
+think of the intervening time. "We have got to consider what we will do
+about the summer, before long, Basil."
+
+"Oh, not yet, not yet," he pleaded; with that man's willingness to abide
+in the present, which is so trying to a woman. "It's only the end of
+April."
+
+"It will be the end of June before we know. And these people wanting the
+Boston house another year complicates it. We can't spend the summer
+there, as we planned."
+
+"They oughtn't to have offered us an increased rent; they have taken an
+advantage of us."
+
+"I don't know that it matters," said Mrs. March. "I had decided not to go
+there."
+
+"Had you? This is a surprise."
+
+"Everything is a surprise to you, Basil, when it happens."
+
+"True; I keep the world fresh, that way."
+
+"It wouldn't have been any change to go from one city to another for the
+summer. We might as well have stayed in New York."
+
+"Yes, I wish we had stayed," said March, idly humoring a conception of
+the accomplished fact. "Mrs. Green would have let us have the gimcrackery
+very cheap for the summer months; and we could have made all sorts of
+nice little excursions and trips off and been twice as well as if we had
+spent the summer away."
+
+"Nonsense! You know we couldn't spend the summer in New York."
+
+"I know I could."
+
+"What stuff! You couldn't manage."
+
+"Oh yes, I could. I could take my meals at Fulkerson's widow's; or at
+Maroni's, with poor old Lindau: he's got to dining there again. Or, I
+could keep house, and he could dine with me here."
+
+There was a teasing look in March's eyes, and he broke into a laugh, at
+the firmness with which his wife said: "I think if there is to be any
+housekeeping, I will stay, too; and help to look after it. I would try
+not intrude upon you and your guest."
+
+"Oh, we should be only too glad to have you join us," said March, playing
+with fire.
+
+"Very well, then, I wish you would take him off to Maroni's, the next
+time he comes to dine here!" cried his wife.
+
+The experiment of making March's old friend free of his house had not
+given her all the pleasure that so kind a thing ought to have afforded so
+good a woman. She received Lindau at first with robust benevolence, and
+the high resolve not to let any of his little peculiarities alienate her
+from a sense of his claim upon her sympathy and gratitude, not only as a
+man who had been so generously fond of her husband in his youth, but a
+hero who had suffered for her country. Her theory was that his mutilation
+must not be ignored, but must be kept in mind as a monument of his
+sacrifice, and she fortified Bella with this conception, so that the
+child bravely sat next his maimed arm at table and helped him to dishes
+he could not reach, and cut up his meat for him. As for Mrs. March
+herself, the thought of his mutilation made her a little faint; she was
+not without a bewildered resentment of its presence as a sort of
+oppression. She did not like his drinking so much of March's beer,
+either; it was no harm, but it was somehow unworthy, out of character
+with a hero of the war. But what she really could not reconcile herself
+to was the violence of Lindau's sentiments concerning the whole political
+and social fabric. She did not feel sure that he should be allowed to say
+such things before the children, who had been nurtured in the faith of
+Bunker Hill and Appomattox, as the beginning and the end of all possible
+progress in human rights. As a woman she was naturally an aristocrat, but
+as an American she was theoretically a democrat; and it astounded, it
+alarmed her, to hear American democracy denounced as a shuffling evasion.
+She had never cared much for the United States Senate, but she doubted if
+she ought to sit by when it was railed at as a rich man's club. It
+shocked her to be told that the rich and poor were not equal before the
+law in a country where justice must be paid for at every step in fees and
+costs, or where a poor man must go to war in his own person, and a rich
+man might hire someone to go in his. Mrs. March felt that this rebellious
+mind in Lindau really somehow outlawed him from sympathy, and
+retroactively undid his past suffering for the country: she had always
+particularly valued that provision of the law, because in forecasting all
+the possible mischances that might befall her own son, she had been
+comforted by the thought that if there ever was another war, and Tom were
+drafted, his father could buy him a substitute. Compared with such
+blasphemy as this, Lindau's declaration that there was not equality of
+opportunity in America, and that fully one-half the people were debarred
+their right to the pursuit of happiness by the hopeless conditions of
+their lives, was flattering praise. She could not listen to such things
+in silence, though, and it did not help matters when Lindau met her
+arguments with facts and reasons which she felt she was merely not
+sufficiently instructed to combat, and he was not quite gentlemanly to
+urge. "I am afraid for the effect on the children," she said to her
+husband. "Such perfectly distorted ideas--Tom will be ruined by them."
+
+"Oh, let Tom find out where they're false," said March. "It will be good
+exercise for his faculties of research. At any rate, those things are
+getting said nowadays; he'll have to hear them sooner or later."
+
+"Had he better hear them at home?" demanded his wife.
+
+"Why, you know, as you're here to refute them, Isabel," he teased,
+"perhaps it's the best place. But don't mind poor old Lindau, my dear. He
+says himself that his parg is worse than his pidte, you know."
+
+"Ah, it's too late now to mind him," she sighed. In a moment of rash good
+feeling, or perhaps an exalted conception of duty, she had herself
+proposed that Lindau should come every week and read German with Tom; and
+it had become a question first how they could get him to take pay for it,
+and then how they could get him to stop it. Mrs. March never ceased to
+wonder at herself for having brought this about, for she had warned her
+husband against making any engagement with Lindau which would bring him
+regularly to the house: the Germans stuck so, and were so unscrupulously
+dependent. Yet, the deed being done, she would not ignore the duty of
+hospitality, and it was always she who made the old man stay to their
+Sunday-evening tea when he lingered near the hour, reading Schiller and
+Heine and Uhland with the boy, in the clean shirt with which he observed
+the day; Lindau's linen was not to be trusted during the week. She now
+concluded a season of mournful reflection by saying, "He will get you
+into trouble, somehow, Basil."
+
+"Well, I don't know how, exactly. I regard Lindau as a political
+economist of an unusual type; but I shall not let him array me against
+the constituted authorities. Short of that, I think I am safe."
+
+"Well, be careful, Basil; be careful. You know you are so rash."
+
+"I suppose I may continue to pity him? He is such a poor, lonely old
+fellow. Are you really sorry he's come into our lives, my dear?"
+
+"No, no; not that. I feel as you do about it; but I wish I felt easier
+about him--sure, that is, that we're not doing wrong to let him keep on
+talking so."
+
+"I suspect we couldn't help it," March returned, lightly. "It's one of
+what Lindau calls his 'brincibles' to say what he thinks."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The Marches had no longer the gross appetite for novelty which urges
+youth to a surfeit of strange scenes, experiences, ideas; and makes
+travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues, an inexhaustible delight.
+But there is no doubt that the chief pleasure of their life in New York
+was from its quality of foreignness: the flavor of olives, which, once
+tasted, can never be forgotten. The olives may not be of the first
+excellence; they may be a little stale, and small and poor, to begin
+with, but they are still olives, and the fond palate craves them. The
+sort which grew in New York, on lower Sixth Avenue and in the region of
+Jefferson Market and on the soft exposures south of Washington Square,
+were none the less acceptable because they were of the commonest Italian
+variety.
+
+The Marches spent a good deal of time and money in a grocery of that
+nationality, where they found all the patriotic comestibles and potables,
+and renewed their faded Italian with the friendly family in charge.
+Italian table d'hotes formed the adventure of the week, on the day when
+Mrs. March let her domestics go out, and went herself to dine abroad with
+her husband and children; and they became adepts in the restaurants where
+they were served, and which they varied almost from dinner to dinner. The
+perfect decorum of these places, and their immunity from offence in any,
+emboldened the Marches to experiment in Spanish restaurants, where red
+pepper and beans insisted in every dinner, and where once they chanced
+upon a night of 'olla podrida', with such appeals to March's memory of a
+boyish ambition to taste the dish that he became poetic and then pensive
+over its cabbage and carrots, peas and bacon. For a rare combination of
+international motives they prized most the table d'hote of a French lady,
+who had taken a Spanish husband in a second marriage, and had a Cuban
+negro for her cook, with a cross-eyed Alsation for waiter, and a slim
+young South-American for cashier. March held that something of the
+catholic character of these relations expressed itself in the generous
+and tolerant variety of the dinner, which was singularly abundant for
+fifty cents, without wine. At one very neat French place he got a dinner
+at the same price with wine, but it was not so abundant; and March
+inquired in fruitless speculation why the table d'hote of the Italians, a
+notoriously frugal and abstemious people, should be usually more than you
+wanted at seventy-five cents and a dollar, and that of the French rather
+less at half a dollar. He could not see that the frequenters were greatly
+different at the different places; they were mostly Americans, of subdued
+manners and conjecturably subdued fortunes, with here and there a table
+full of foreigners. There was no noise and not much smoking anywhere;
+March liked going to that neat French place because there Madame sat
+enthroned and high behind a 'comptoir' at one side of the room, and everybody
+saluted her in going out. It was there that a gentle-looking young
+couple used to dine, in whom the Marches became effectlessly interested,
+because they thought they looked like that when they were young. The wife
+had an aesthetic dress, and defined her pretty head by wearing her
+back-hair pulled up very tight under her bonnet; the husband had dreamy
+eyes set wide apart under a pure forehead. "They are artists, August, I
+think," March suggested to the waiter, when he had vainly asked about
+them. "Oh, hartis, cedenly," August consented; but Heaven knows whether
+they were, or what they were: March never learned.
+
+This immunity from acquaintance, this touch-and go quality in their New
+York sojourn, this almost loss of individuality at times, after the
+intense identification of their Boston life, was a relief, though Mrs.
+March had her misgivings, and questioned whether it were not perhaps too
+relaxing to the moral fibre. March refused to explore his conscience; he
+allowed that it might be so; but he said he liked now and then to feel
+his personality in that state of solution. They went and sat a good deal
+in the softening evenings among the infants and dotards of Latin
+extraction in Washington Square, safe from all who ever knew them, and
+enjoyed the advancing season, which thickened the foliage of the trees
+and flattered out of sight the church warden's Gothic of the University
+Building. The infants were sometimes cross, and cried in their weary
+mothers' or little sisters' arms; but they did not disturb the dotards,
+who slept, some with their heads fallen forward, and some with their
+heads fallen back; March arbitrarily distinguished those with the
+drooping faces as tipsy and ashamed to confront the public. The small
+Italian children raced up and down the asphalt paths, playing American
+games of tag and hide-and-whoop; larger boys passed ball, in training for
+potential championships. The Marches sat and mused, or quarrelled
+fitfully about where they should spend the summer, like sparrows, he once
+said, till the electric lights began to show distinctly among the leaves,
+and they looked round and found the infants and dotards gone and the
+benches filled with lovers. That was the signal for the Marches to go
+home. He said that the spectacle of so much courtship as the eye might
+take in there at a glance was not, perhaps, oppressive, but the thought
+that at the same hour the same thing was going on all over the country,
+wherever two young fools could get together, was more than he could bear;
+he did not deny that it was natural, and, in a measure authorized, but
+he declared that it was hackneyed; and the fact that it must go on
+forever, as long as the race lasted, made him tired.
+
+At home, generally, they found that the children had not missed them, and
+were perfectly safe. It was one of the advantages of a flat that they
+could leave the children there whenever they liked without anxiety. They
+liked better staying there than wandering about in the evening with their
+parents, whose excursions seemed to them somewhat aimless, and their
+pleasures insipid. They studied, or read, or looked out of the window at
+the street sights; and their mother always came back to them with a pang
+for their lonesomeness. Bella knew some little girls in the house, but in
+a ceremonious way; Tom had formed no friendships among the boys at school
+such as he had left in Boston; as nearly as he could explain, the New
+York fellows carried canes at an age when they would have had them broken
+for them by the other boys at Boston; and they were both sissyish and
+fast. It was probably prejudice; he never could say exactly what their
+demerits were, and neither he nor Bella was apparently so homesick as
+they pretended, though they answered inquirers, the one that New York was
+a hole, and the other that it was horrid, and that all they lived for was
+to get back to Boston. In the mean time they were thrown much upon each
+other for society, which March said was well for both of them; he did not
+mind their cultivating a little gloom and the sense of a common wrong; it
+made them better comrades, and it was providing them with amusing
+reminiscences for the future. They really enjoyed Bohemianizing in that
+harmless way: though Tom had his doubts of its respectability; he was
+very punctilious about his sister, and went round from his own school
+every day to fetch her home from hers. The whole family went to the
+theatre a good deal, and enjoyed themselves together in their desultory
+explorations of the city.
+
+They lived near Greenwich Village, and March liked strolling through its
+quaintness toward the waterside on a Sunday, when a hereditary
+Sabbatarianism kept his wife at home; he made her observe that it even
+kept her at home from church. He found a lingering quality of pure
+Americanism in the region, and he said the very bells called to worship
+in a nasal tone. He liked the streets of small brick houses, with here
+and there one painted red, and the mortar lines picked out in white, and
+with now and then a fine wooden portal of fluted pillars and a bowed
+transom. The rear of the tenement-houses showed him the picturesqueness
+of clothes-lines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence; and the new
+apartment-houses, breaking the old sky-line with their towering stories,
+implied a life as alien to the American manner as anything in continental
+Europe. In fact, foreign faces and foreign tongues prevailed in Greenwich
+Village, but no longer German or even Irish tongues or faces. The eyes
+and earrings of Italians twinkled in and out of the alleyways and
+basements, and they seemed to abound even in the streets, where long
+ranks of trucks drawn up in Sunday rest along the curbstones suggested
+the presence of a race of sturdier strength than theirs. March liked the
+swarthy, strange visages; he found nothing menacing for the future in
+them; for wickedness he had to satisfy himself as he could with the
+sneering, insolent, clean-shaven mug of some rare American of the b'hoy
+type, now almost as extinct in New York as the dodo or the volunteer
+fireman. When he had found his way, among the ash-barrels and the groups
+of decently dressed church-goers, to the docks, he experienced a
+sufficient excitement in the recent arrival of a French steamer, whose
+sheds were thronged with hacks and express-wagons, and in a tacit inquiry
+into the emotions of the passengers, fresh from the cleanliness of Paris,
+and now driving up through the filth of those streets.
+
+Some of the streets were filthier than others; there was at least a
+choice; there were boxes and barrels of kitchen offal on all the
+sidewalks, but not everywhere manure-heaps, and in some places the stench
+was mixed with the more savory smell of cooking. One Sunday morning,
+before the winter was quite gone, the sight of the frozen refuse melting
+in heaps, and particularly the loathsome edges of the rotting ice near
+the gutters, with the strata of waste-paper and straw litter, and
+egg-shells and orange peel, potato-skins and cigar-stumps, made him
+unhappy. He gave a whimsical shrug for the squalor of the neighboring
+houses, and said to himself rather than the boy who was with him: "It's
+curious, isn't it, how fond the poor people are of these unpleasant
+thoroughfares? You always find them living in the worst streets."
+
+"The burden of all the wrong in the world comes on the poor," said the
+boy. "Every sort of fraud and swindling hurts them the worst. The city
+wastes the money it's paid to clean the streets with, and the poor have
+to suffer, for they can't afford to pay twice, like the rich."
+
+March stopped short. "Hallo, Tom! Is that your wisdom?"
+
+"It's what Mr. Lindau says," answered the boy, doggedly, as if not
+pleased to have his ideas mocked at, even if they were second-hand.
+
+"And you didn't tell him that the poor lived in dirty streets because
+they liked them, and were too lazy and worthless to have them cleaned?"
+
+"No; I didn't."
+
+"I'm surprised. What do you think of Lindau, generally speaking, Tom?"
+
+"Well, sir, I don't like the way he talks about some things. I don't
+suppose this country is perfect, but I think it's about the best there
+is, and it don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time."
+
+"Sound, my son," said March, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder and
+beginning to walk on. "Well?"
+
+"Well, then, he says that it isn't the public frauds only that the poor
+have to pay for, but they have to pay for all the vices of the rich; that
+when a speculator fails, or a bank cashier defaults, or a firm suspends,
+or hard times come, it's the poor who have to give up necessaries where
+the rich give up luxuries."
+
+"Well, well! And then?"
+
+"Well, then I think the crank comes in, in Mr. Lindau. He says there's no
+need of failures or frauds or hard times. It's ridiculous. There always
+have been and there always will be. But if you tell him that, it seems to
+make him perfectly furious."
+
+March repeated the substance of this talk to his wife. "I'm glad to know
+that Tom can see through such ravings. He has lots of good common sense."
+
+It was the afternoon of the same Sunday, and they were sauntering up
+Fifth Avenue, and admiring the wide old double houses at the lower end;
+at one corner they got a distinct pleasure out of the gnarled elbows that
+a pollarded wistaria leaned upon the top of a garden wall--for its
+convenience in looking into the street, he said. The line of these
+comfortable dwellings, once so fashionable, was continually broken by the
+facades of shops; and March professed himself vulgarized by a want of
+style in the people they met in their walk to Twenty-third Street.
+
+"Take me somewhere to meet my fellow-exclusives, Isabel," he demanded. "I
+pine for the society of my peers."
+
+He hailed a passing omnibus, and made his wife get on the roof with him.
+"Think of our doing such a thing in Boston!" she sighed, with a little
+shiver of satisfaction in her immunity from recognition and comment.
+
+"You wouldn't be afraid to do it in London or Paris?"
+
+"No; we should be strangers there--just as we are in New York. I wonder
+how long one could be a stranger here."
+
+"Oh, indefinitely, in our way of living. The place is really vast, so
+much larger than it used to seem, and so heterogeneous."
+
+When they got down very far up-town, and began to walk back by Madison
+Avenue, they found themselves in a different population from that they
+dwelt among; not heterogeneous at all; very homogeneous, and almost
+purely American; the only qualification was American Hebrew. Such a
+well-dressed, well-satisfied, well-fed looking crowd poured down the
+broad sidewalks before the handsome, stupid houses that March could
+easily pretend he had got among his fellow-plutocrats at last. Still he
+expressed his doubts whether this Sunday afternoon parade, which seemed
+to be a thing of custom, represented the best form among the young people
+of that region; he wished he knew; he blamed himself for becoming of a
+fastidious conjecture; he could not deny the fashion and the richness and
+the indigeneity of the spectacle; the promenaders looked New-Yorky; they
+were the sort of people whom you would know for New-Yorkers
+elsewhere,--so well equipped and so perfectly kept at all points. Their
+silk hats shone, and their boots; their frocks had the right distension
+behind, and their bonnets perfect poise and distinction.
+
+The Marches talked of these and other facts of their appearance, and
+curiously questioned whether this were the best that a great material
+civilization could come to; it looked a little dull. The men's faces were
+shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull; the women's were pretty and
+knowing, and yet dull. It was, probably, the holiday expression of the
+vast, prosperous commercial class, with unlimited money, and no ideals
+that money could not realize; fashion and comfort were all that they
+desired to compass, and the culture that furnishes showily, that
+decorates and that tells; the culture, say, of plays and operas, rather
+than books.
+
+Perhaps the observers did the promenaders injustice; they might not have
+been as common-minded as they looked. "But," March said, "I understand
+now why the poor people don't come up here and live in this clean,
+handsome, respectable quarter of the town; they would be bored to death.
+On the whole, I think I should prefer Mott Street myself."
+
+In other walks the Marches tried to find some of the streets they had
+wandered through the first day of their wedding journey in New York, so
+long ago. They could not make sure of them; but once they ran down to the
+Battery, and easily made sure of that, though not in its old aspect. They
+recalled the hot morning, when they sauntered over the trodden weed that
+covered the sickly grass-plots there, and sentimentalized the sweltering
+paupers who had crept out of the squalid tenements about for a breath of
+air after a sleepless night. Now the paupers were gone, and where the old
+mansions that had fallen to their use once stood, there towered aloft and
+abroad those heights and masses of many-storied brick-work for which
+architecture has yet no proper form and aesthetics no name. The trees and
+shrubs, all in their young spring green, blew briskly over the guarded
+turf in the south wind that came up over the water; and in the well-paved
+alleys the ghosts of eighteenth-century fashion might have met each other
+in their old haunts, and exchanged stately congratulations upon its
+vastly bettered condition, and perhaps puzzled a little over the colossal
+lady on Bedloe's Island, with her lifted torch, and still more over the
+curving tracks and chalet-stations of the Elevated road. It is an outlook
+of unrivalled beauty across the bay, that smokes and flashes with the
+innumerable stacks and sails of commerce, to the hills beyond, where the
+moving forest of masts halts at the shore, and roots itself in the groves
+of the many villaged uplands. The Marches paid the charming prospects a
+willing duty, and rejoiced in it as generously as if it had been their
+own. Perhaps it was, they decided. He said people owned more things in
+common than they were apt to think; and they drew the consolations of
+proprietorship from the excellent management of Castle Garden, which they
+penetrated for a moment's glimpse of the huge rotunda, where the
+immigrants first set foot on our continent. It warmed their hearts, so
+easily moved to any cheap sympathy, to see the friendly care the nation
+took of these humble guests; they found it even pathetic to hear the
+proper authority calling out the names of such as had kin or acquaintance
+waiting there to meet them. No one appeared troubled or anxious; the
+officials had a conscientious civility; the government seemed to manage
+their welcome as well as a private company or corporation could have
+done. In fact, it was after the simple strangers had left the government
+care that March feared their woes might begin; and he would have liked
+the government to follow each of them to his home, wherever he meant to
+fix it within our borders. He made note of the looks of the licensed
+runners and touters waiting for the immigrants outside the government
+premises; he intended to work them up into a dramatic effect in some
+sketch, but they remained mere material in his memorandum-book, together
+with some quaint old houses on the Sixth Avenue road, which he had
+noticed on the way down. On the way up, these were superseded in his
+regard by some hip-roof structures on the Ninth Avenue, which he thought
+more Dutch-looking. The perspectives of the cross-streets toward the
+river were very lively, with their turmoil of trucks and cars and carts
+and hacks and foot passengers, ending in the chimneys and masts of
+shipping, and final gleams of dancing water. At a very noisy corner,
+clangorous with some sort of ironworking, he made his wife enjoy with him
+the quiet sarcasm of an inn that called itself the Home-like Hotel, and
+he speculated at fantastic length on the gentle associations of one who
+should have passed his youth under its roof.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+First and last, the Marches did a good deal of travel on the Elevated
+roads, which, he said, gave you such glimpses of material aspects in the
+city as some violent invasion of others' lives might afford in human
+nature. Once, when the impulse of adventure was very strong in them, they
+went quite the length of the West Side lines, and saw the city pushing
+its way by irregular advances into the country. Some spaces, probably
+held by the owners for that rise in value which the industry of others
+providentially gives to the land of the wise and good, it left vacant
+comparatively far down the road, and built up others at remoter points.
+It was a world of lofty apartment houses beyond the Park, springing up in
+isolated blocks, with stretches of invaded rusticity between, and here
+and there an old country-seat standing dusty in its budding vines with
+the ground before it in rocky upheaval for city foundations. But wherever
+it went or wherever it paused, New York gave its peculiar stamp; and the
+adventurers were amused to find One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street
+inchoately like Twenty-third Street and Fourteenth Street in its shops
+and shoppers. The butchers' shops and milliners' shops on the avenue
+might as well have been at Tenth as at One Hundredth Street.
+
+The adventurers were not often so adventurous. They recognized that in
+their willingness to let their fancy range for them, and to let
+speculation do the work of inquiry, they were no longer young. Their
+point of view was singularly unchanged, and their impressions of New York
+remained the same that they had been fifteen years before: huge, noisy,
+ugly, kindly, it seemed to them now as it seemed then. The main
+difference was that they saw it more now as a life, and then they only
+regarded it as a spectacle; and March could not release himself from a
+sense of complicity with it, no matter what whimsical, or alien, or
+critical attitude he took. A sense of the striving and the suffering
+deeply possessed him; and this grew the more intense as he gained some
+knowledge of the forces at work--forces of pity, of destruction, of
+perdition, of salvation. He wandered about on Sunday not only through the
+streets, but into this tabernacle and that, as the spirit moved him, and
+listened to those who dealt with Christianity as a system of economics as
+well as a religion. He could not get his wife to go with him; she
+listened to his report of what he heard, and trembled; it all seemed
+fantastic and menacing. She lamented the literary peace, the intellectual
+refinement of the life they had left behind them; and he owned it was
+very pretty, but he said it was not life--it was death-in-life. She liked
+to hear him talk in that strain of virtuous self-denunciation, but she
+asked him, "Which of your prophets are you going to follow?" and he
+answered: "All-all! And a fresh one every Sunday." And so they got their
+laugh out of it at last, but with some sadness at heart, and with a dim
+consciousness that they had got their laugh out of too many things in
+life.
+
+What really occupied and compassed his activities, in spite of his
+strenuous reveries of work beyond it, was his editorship. On its social
+side it had not fulfilled all the expectations which Fulkerson's radiant
+sketch of its duties and relations had caused him to form of it. Most of
+the contributions came from a distance; even the articles written in New
+York reached him through the post, and so far from having his valuable
+time, as they called it, consumed in interviews with his collaborators,
+he rarely saw any of them. The boy on the stairs, who was to fence him
+from importunate visitors, led a life of luxurious disoccupation, and
+whistled almost uninterruptedly. When any one came, March found himself
+embarrassed and a little anxious. The visitors were usually young men,
+terribly respectful, but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinions
+chasmally different from his; and he felt in their presence something
+like an anachronism, something like a fraud. He tried to freshen up his
+sympathies on them, to get at what they were really thinking and feeling,
+and it was some time before he could understand that they were not really
+thinking and feeling anything of their own concerning their art, but were
+necessarily, in their quality of young, inexperienced men, mere
+acceptants of older men's thoughts and feelings, whether they were
+tremendously conservative, as some were, or tremendously progressive, as
+others were. Certain of them called themselves realists, certain
+romanticists; but none of them seemed to know what realism was, or what
+romanticism; they apparently supposed the difference a difference of
+material. March had imagined himself taking home to lunch or dinner the
+aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked, whether he liked their work
+or not; but this was not an easy matter. Those who were at all
+interesting seemed to have engagements and preoccupations; after two or
+three experiments with the bashfuller sort--those who had come up to the
+metropolis with manuscripts in their hands, in the good old literary
+tradition--he wondered whether he was otherwise like them when he was
+young like them. He could not flatter himself that he was not; and yet he
+had a hope that the world had grown worse since his time, which his wife
+encouraged.
+
+Mrs. March was not eager to pursue the hospitalities which she had at
+first imagined essential to the literary prosperity of 'Every Other
+Week'; her family sufficed her; she would willingly have seen no one out
+of it but the strangers at the weekly table-d'hote dinner, or the
+audiences at the theatres. March's devotion to his work made him
+reluctant to delegate it to any one; and as the summer advanced, and the
+question of where to go grew more vexed, he showed a man's base
+willingness to shirk it for himself by not going anywhere. He asked his
+wife why she did not go somewhere with the children, and he joined her in
+a search for non-malarial regions on the map when she consented to
+entertain this notion. But when it came to the point she would not go; he
+offered to go with her then, and then she would not let him. She said she
+knew he would be anxious about his work; he protested that he could take
+it with him to any distance within a few hours, but she would not be
+persuaded. She would rather he stayed; the effect would be better with
+Mr. Fulkerson; they could make excursions, and they could all get off a
+week or two to the seashore near Boston--the only real seashore--in
+August. The excursions were practically confined to a single day at Coney
+Island; and once they got as far as Boston on the way to the seashore
+near Boston; that is, Mrs. March and the children went; an editorial
+exigency kept March at the last moment. The Boston streets seemed very
+queer and clean and empty to the children, and the buildings little; in
+the horse-cars the Boston faces seemed to arraign their mother with a
+down-drawn severity that made her feel very guilty. She knew that this
+was merely the Puritan mask, the cast of a dead civilization, which
+people of very amiable and tolerant minds were doomed to wear, and she
+sighed to think that less than a year of the heterogeneous gayety of New
+York should have made her afraid of it. The sky seemed cold and gray; the
+east wind, which she had always thought so delicious in summer, cut her
+to the heart. She took her children up to the South End, and in the
+pretty square where they used to live they stood before their alienated
+home, and looked up at its close-shuttered windows. The tenants must have
+been away, but Mrs. March had not the courage to ring and make sure,
+though she had always promised herself that she would go all over the
+house when she came back, and see how they had used it; she could pretend
+a desire for something she wished to take away. She knew she could not
+bear it now; and the children did not seem eager. She did not push on to
+the seaside; it would be forlorn there without their father; she was glad
+to go back to him in the immense, friendly homelessness of New York, and
+hold him answerable for the change, in her heart or her mind, which made
+its shapeless tumult a refuge and a consolation.
+
+She found that he had been giving the cook a holiday, and dining about
+hither and thither with Fulkerson. Once he had dined with him at the
+widow's (as they always called Mrs. Leighton), and then had spent the
+evening there, and smoked with Fulkerson and Colonel Woodburn on the
+gallery overlooking the back yard. They were all spending the summer in
+New York. The widow had got so good an offer for her house at St. Barnaby
+for the summer that she could not refuse it; and the Woodburns found New
+York a watering-place of exemplary coolness after the burning Augusts and
+Septembers of Charlottesburg.
+
+"You can stand it well enough in our climate, sir," the colonel
+explained, "till you come to the September heat, that sometimes runs well
+into October; and then you begin to lose your temper, sir. It's never
+quite so hot as it is in New York at times, but it's hot longer, sir." He
+alleged, as if something of the sort were necessary, the example of a
+famous Southwestern editor who spent all his summers in a New York hotel
+as the most luxurious retreat on the continent, consulting the weather
+forecasts, and running off on torrid days to the mountains or the sea,
+and then hurrying back at the promise of cooler weather. The colonel had
+not found it necessary to do this yet; and he had been reluctant to leave
+town, where he was working up a branch of the inquiry which had so long
+occupied him, in the libraries, and studying the great problem of labor
+and poverty as it continually presented itself to him in the streets. He
+said that he talked with all sorts of people, whom he found monstrously
+civil, if you took them in the right way; and he went everywhere in the
+city without fear and apparently without danger. March could not find out
+that he had ridden his hobby into the homes of want which he visited, or
+had proposed their enslavement to the inmates as a short and simple
+solution of the great question of their lives; he appeared to have
+contented himself with the collection of facts for the persuasion of the
+cultivated classes. It seemed to March a confirmation of this impression
+that the colonel should address his deductions from these facts so
+unsparingly to him; he listened with a respectful patience, for which
+Fulkerson afterward personally thanked him. Fulkerson said it was not
+often the colonel found such a good listener; generally nobody listened
+but Mrs. Leighton, who thought his ideas were shocking, but honored him
+for holding them so conscientiously. Fulkerson was glad that March, as
+the literary department, had treated the old gentleman so well, because
+there was an open feud between him and the art department. Beaton was
+outrageously rude, Fulkerson must say; though as for that, the old
+colonel seemed quite able to take care of himself, and gave Beaton an
+unqualified contempt in return for his unmannerliness. The worst of it
+was, it distressed the old lady so; she admired Beaton as much as she
+respected the colonel, and she admired Beaton, Fulkerson thought, rather
+more than Miss Leighton did; he asked March if he had noticed them
+together. March had noticed them, but without any very definite
+impression except that Beaton seemed to give the whole evening to the
+girl. Afterward he recollected that he had fancied her rather harassed by
+his devotion, and it was this point that he wished to present for his
+wife's opinion.
+
+"Girls often put on that air," she said. "It's one of their ways of
+teasing. But then, if the man was really very much in love, and she was
+only enough in love to be uncertain of herself, she might very well seem
+troubled. It would be a very serious question. Girls often don't know
+what to do in such a case."
+
+"Yes," said March, "I've often been glad that I was not a girl, on that
+account. But I guess that on general principles Beaton is not more in
+love than she is. I couldn't imagine that young man being more in love
+with anybody, unless it was himself. He might be more in love with
+himself than any one else was."
+
+"Well, he doesn't interest me a great deal, and I can't say Miss Leighton
+does, either. I think she can take care of herself. She has herself very
+well in hand."
+
+"Why so censorious?" pleaded March. "I don't defend her for having
+herself in hand; but is it a fault?"
+
+Mrs. March did not say. She asked, "And how does Mr. Fulkerson's affair
+get on?"
+
+"His affair? You really think it is one? Well, I've fancied so myself,
+and I've had an idea of some time asking him; Fulkerson strikes one as
+truly domesticable, conjugable at heart; but I've waited for him to
+speak."
+
+"I should think so."
+
+"Yes. He's never opened on the subject yet. Do you know, I think
+Fulkerson has his moments of delicacy."
+
+"Moments! He's all delicacy in regard to women."
+
+"Well, perhaps so. There is nothing in them to rouse his advertising
+instincts."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Dryfoos family stayed in town till August. Then the father went West
+again to look after his interests; and Mrs. Mandel took the two girls to
+one of the great hotels in Saratoga. Fulkerson said that he had never
+seen anything like Saratoga for fashion, and Mrs. Mandel remembered that
+in her own young ladyhood this was so for at least some weeks of the
+year. She had been too far withdrawn from fashion since her marriage to
+know whether it was still so or not. In this, as in so many other
+matters, the Dryfoos family helplessly relied upon Fulkerson, in spite of
+Dryfoos's angry determination that he should not run the family, and in
+spite of Christine's doubt of his omniscience; if he did not know
+everything, she was aware that he knew more than herself. She thought
+that they had a right to have him go with them to Saratoga, or at least
+go up and engage their rooms beforehand; but Fulkerson did not offer to
+do either, and she did not quite see her way to commanding his services.
+The young ladies took what Mela called splendid dresses with them; they
+sat in the park of tall, slim trees which the hotel's quadrangle
+enclosed, and listened to the music in the morning, or on the long piazza
+in the afternoon and looked at the driving in the street, or in the vast
+parlors by night, where all the other ladies were, and they felt that
+they were of the best there. But they knew nobody, and Mrs. Mandel was so
+particular that Mela was prevented from continuing the acquaintance even
+of the few young men who danced with her at the Saturday-night hops. They
+drove about, but they went to places without knowing why, except that the
+carriage man took them, and they had all the privileges of a proud
+exclusivism without desiring them. Once a motherly matron seemed to
+perceive their isolation, and made overtures to them, but then desisted,
+as if repelled by Christine's suspicion, or by Mela's too instant and
+hilarious good-fellowship, which expressed itself in hoarse laughter and
+in a flow of talk full of topical and syntactical freedom. From time to
+time she offered to bet Christine that if Mr. Fulkerson was only there
+they would have a good time; she wondered what they were all doing in New
+York, where she wished herself; she rallied her sister about Beaton, and
+asked her why she did not write and tell him to come up there.
+
+Mela knew that Christine had expected Beaton to follow them. Some banter
+had passed between them to this effect; he said he should take them in on
+his way home to Syracuse. Christine would not have hesitated to write to
+him and remind him of his promise; but she had learned to distrust her
+literature with Beaton since he had laughed at the spelling in a scrap of
+writing which dropped out of her music-book one night. She believed that
+he would not have laughed if he had known it was hers; but she felt that
+she could hide better the deficiencies which were not committed to paper;
+she could manage with him in talking; she was too ignorant of her
+ignorance to recognize the mistakes she made then. Through her own
+passion she perceived that she had some kind of fascination for him; she
+was graceful, and she thought it must be that; she did not understand
+that there was a kind of beauty in her small, irregular features that
+piqued and haunted his artistic sense, and a look in her black eyes
+beyond her intelligence and intention. Once he sketched her as they sat
+together, and flattered the portrait without getting what he wanted in
+it; he said he must try her some time in color; and he said things which,
+when she made Mela repeat them, could only mean that he admired her more
+than anybody else. He came fitfully, but he came often, and she rested
+content in a girl's indefiniteness concerning the affair; if her thought
+went beyond lovemaking to marriage, she believed that she could have him
+if she wanted him. Her father's money counted in this; she divined that
+Beaton was poor; but that made no difference; she would have enough for
+both; the money would have counted as an irresistible attraction if there
+had been no other.
+
+The affair had gone on in spite of the sidelong looks of restless dislike
+with which Dryfoos regarded it; but now when Beaton did not come to
+Saratoga it necessarily dropped, and Christine's content with it. She
+bore the trial as long as she could; she used pride and resentment
+against it; but at last she could not bear it, and with Mela's help she
+wrote a letter, bantering Beaton on his stay in New York, and playfully
+boasting of Saratoga. It seemed to them both that it was a very bright
+letter, and would be sure to bring him; they would have had no scruple
+about sending it but for the doubt they had whether they had got some of
+the words right. Mela offered to bet Christine anything she dared that
+they were right, and she said, Send it anyway; it was no difference if
+they were wrong. But Christine could not endure to think of that laugh of
+Beaton's, and there remained only Mrs. Mandel as authority on the
+spelling. Christine dreaded her authority on other points, but Mela said
+she knew she would not interfere, and she undertook to get round her.
+Mrs. Mandel pronounced the spelling bad, and the taste worse; she forbade
+them to send the letter; and Mela failed to get round her, though she
+threatened, if Mrs. Mandel would not tell her how to spell the wrong
+words, that she would send the letter as it was; then Mrs. Mandel said
+that if Mr. Beaton appeared in Saratoga she would instantly take them
+both home. When Mela reported this result, Christine accused her of
+having mismanaged the whole business; she quarrelled with her, and they
+called each other names. Christine declared that she would not stay in
+Saratoga, and that if Mrs. Mandel did not go back to New York with her
+she should go alone. They returned the first week in September; but by
+that time Beaton had gone to see his people in Syracuse.
+
+Conrad Dryfoos remained at home with his mother after his father went
+West. He had already taken such a vacation as he had been willing to
+allow himself, and had spent it on a charity farm near the city, where
+the fathers with whom he worked among the poor on the East Side in the
+winter had sent some of their wards for the summer. It was not possible
+to keep his recreation a secret at the office, and Fulkerson found a
+pleasure in figuring the jolly time Brother Conrad must have teaching
+farm work among those paupers and potential reprobates. He invented
+details of his experience among them, and March could not always help
+joining in the laugh at Conrad's humorless helplessness under Fulkerson's
+burlesque denunciation of a summer outing spent in such dissipation.
+
+They had time for a great deal of joking at the office during the season
+of leisure which penetrates in August to the very heart of business, and
+they all got on terms of greater intimacy if not greater friendliness
+than before. Fulkerson had not had so long to do with the advertising
+side of human nature without developing a vein of cynicism, of no great
+depth, perhaps, but broad, and underlying his whole point of view; he
+made light of Beaton's solemnity, as he made light of Conrad's humanity.
+The art editor, with abundant sarcasm, had no more humor than the
+publisher, and was an easy prey in the manager's hands; but when he had
+been led on by Fulkerson's flatteries to make some betrayal of egotism,
+he brooded over it till he had thought how to revenge himself in
+elaborate insult. For Beaton's talent Fulkerson never lost his
+admiration; but his joke was to encourage him to give himself airs of
+being the sole source of the magazine's prosperity. No bait of this sort
+was too obvious for Beaton to swallow; he could be caught with it as
+often as Fulkerson chose; though he was ordinarily suspicious as to the
+motives of people in saying things. With March he got on no better than
+at first. He seemed to be lying in wait for some encroachment of the
+literary department on the art department, and he met it now and then
+with anticipative reprisal. After these rebuffs, the editor delivered him
+over to the manager, who could turn Beaton's contrary-mindedness to
+account by asking the reverse of what he really wanted done. This was
+what Fulkerson said; the fact was that he did get on with Beaton and
+March contented himself with musing upon the contradictions of a
+character at once so vain and so offensive, so fickle and so sullen, so
+conscious and so simple.
+
+After the first jarring contact with Dryfoos, the editor ceased to feel
+the disagreeable fact of the old man's mastery of the financial
+situation. None of the chances which might have made it painful occurred;
+the control of the whole affair remained in Fulkerson's hands; before he
+went West again, Dryfoos had ceased to come about the office, as if,
+having once worn off the novelty of the sense of owning a literary
+periodical, he was no longer interested in it.
+
+Yet it was a relief, somehow, when he left town, which he did not do
+without coming to take a formal leave of the editor at his office. He
+seemed willing to leave March with a better impression than he had
+hitherto troubled himself to make; he even said some civil things about
+the magazine, as if its success pleased him; and he spoke openly to March
+of his hope that his son would finally become interested in it to the
+exclusion of the hopes and purposes which divided them. It seemed to
+March that in the old man's warped and toughened heart he perceived a
+disappointed love for his son greater than for his other children; but
+this might have been fancy. Lindau came in with some copy while Dryfoos
+was there, and March introduced them. When Lindau went out, March
+explained to Dryfoos that he had lost his hand in the war; and he told
+him something of Lindau's career as he had known it. Dryfoos appeared
+greatly pleased that 'Every Other Week' was giving Lindau work. He said
+that he had helped to enlist a good many fellows for the war, and had
+paid money to fill up the Moffitt County quota under the later calls for
+troops. He had never been an Abolitionist, but he had joined the
+Anti-Nebraska party in '55, and he had voted for Fremont and for every
+Republican President since then.
+
+At his own house March saw more of Lindau than of any other contributor,
+but the old man seemed to think that he must transact all his business
+with March at his place of business. The transaction had some
+peculiarities which perhaps made this necessary. Lindau always expected
+to receive his money when he brought his copy, as an acknowledgment of
+the immediate right of the laborer to his hire; and he would not take it
+in a check because he did not approve of banks, and regarded the whole
+system of banking as the capitalistic manipulation of the people's money.
+He would receive his pay only from March's hand, because he wished to be
+understood as working for him, and honestly earning money honestly
+earned; and sometimes March inwardly winced a little at letting the old
+man share the increase of capital won by such speculation as Dryfoos's,
+but he shook off the feeling. As the summer advanced, and the artists and
+classes that employed Lindau as a model left town one after another, he
+gave largely of his increasing leisure to the people in the office of
+'Every Other Week.' It was pleasant for March to see the respect with
+which Conrad Dryfoos always used him, for the sake of his hurt and his
+gray beard. There was something delicate and fine in it, and there was
+nothing unkindly on Fulkerson's part in the hostilities which usually
+passed between himself and Lindau. Fulkerson bore himself reverently at
+times, too, but it was not in him to keep that up, especially when Lindau
+appeared with more beer aboard than, as Fulkerson said, he could manage
+shipshape. On these occasions Fulkerson always tried to start him on the
+theme of the unduly rich; he made himself the champion of monopolies, and
+enjoyed the invectives which Lindau heaped upon him as a slave of
+capital; he said that it did him good.
+
+One day, with the usual show of writhing under Lindau's scorn, he said,
+"Well, I understand that although you despise me now, Lindau--"
+
+"I ton't desbise you," the old man broke in, his nostrils swelling and
+his eyes flaming with excitement, "I bity you."
+
+"Well, it seems to come to the same thing in the end," said Fulkerson.
+"What I understand is that you pity me now as the slave of capital, but
+you would pity me a great deal more if I was the master of it."
+
+"How you mean?"
+
+"If I was rich."
+
+"That would tebendt," said Lindau, trying to control himself. "If you hat
+inheritedt your money, you might pe innocent; but if you hat mate it,
+efery man that resbectedt himself would haf to ask how you mate it, and
+if you hat mate moch, he would know--"
+
+"Hold on; hold on, now, Lindau! Ain't that rather un-American doctrine?
+We're all brought up, ain't we, to honor the man that made his money, and
+look down--or try to look down; sometimes it's difficult on the fellow
+that his father left it to?"
+
+The old man rose and struck his breast. "On Amerigan!" he roared, and, as
+he went on, his accent grew more and more uncertain. "What iss Amerigan?
+Dere iss no Ameriga any more! You start here free and brafe, and you
+glaim for efery man de right to life, liperty, and de bursuit of
+habbiness. And where haf you entedt? No man that vorks vith his handts
+among you has the liperty to bursue his habbiness. He iss the slafe of
+some richer man, some gompany, some gorporation, dat crindt him down to
+the least he can lif on, and that rops him of the marchin of his earnings
+that he knight pe habby on. Oh, you Amerigans, you haf cot it down goldt,
+as you say! You ton't puy foters; you puy lechislatures and goncressmen;
+you puy gourts; you puy gombetitors; you pay infentors not to infent; you
+atfertise, and the gounting-room sees dat de etitorial-room toesn't
+tink."
+
+"Yes, we've got a little arrangement of that sort with March here," said
+Fulkerson.
+
+"Oh, I am sawry," said the old man, contritely, "I meant noting bersonal.
+I ton't tink we are all cuilty or gorrubt, and efen among the rich there
+are goodt men. But gabidal"--his passion rose again--"where you find
+gabidal, millions of money that a man hass cot togeder in fife, ten,
+twenty years, you findt the smell of tears and ploodt! Dat iss what I
+say. And you cot to loog oudt for yourself when you meet a rich man
+whether you meet an honest man."
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, "I wish I was a subject of suspicion with you,
+Lindau. By-the-way," he added, "I understand that you think capital was
+at the bottom of the veto of that pension of yours."
+
+"What bension? What feto?"--The old man flamed up again. "No bension of
+mine was efer fetoedt. I renounce my bension, begause I would sgorn to
+dake money from a gofernment that I ton't peliefe in any more. Where you
+hear that story?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Fulkerson, rather embarrassed. "It's common
+talk."
+
+"It's a gommon lie, then! When the time gome dat dis iss a free gountry
+again, then I dake a bension again for my woundts; but I would sdarfe
+before I dake a bension now from a rebublic dat iss bought oap by
+monobolies, and ron by drusts and gompines, and railroadts andt oil
+gompanies."
+
+"Look out, Lindau," said Fulkerson. "You bite yourself mit dat dog some
+day." But when the old man, with a ferocious gesture of renunciation,
+whirled out of the place, he added: "I guess I went a little too far that
+time. I touched him on a sore place; I didn't mean to; I heard some talk
+about his pension being vetoed from Miss Leighton." He addressed these
+exculpations to March's grave face, and to the pitying deprecation in the
+eyes of Conrad Dryfoos, whom Lindau's roaring wrath had summoned to the
+door. "But I'll make it all right with him the next time he comes. I
+didn't know he was loaded, or I wouldn't have monkeyed with him."
+
+"Lindau does himself injustice when he gets to talking in that way," said
+March. "I hate to hear him. He's as good an American as any of us; and
+it's only because he has too high an ideal of us--"
+
+"Oh, go on! Rub it in--rub it in!" cried Fulkerson, clutching his hair in
+suffering, which was not altogether burlesque. "How did I know he had
+renounced his 'bension'? Why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"I didn't know it myself. I only knew that he had none, and I didn't ask,
+for I had a notion that it might be a painful subject."
+
+Fulkerson tried to turn it off lightly. "Well, he's a noble old fellow;
+pity he drinks." March would not smile, and Fulkerson broke out: "Dog on
+it! I'll make it up to the old fool the next time he comes. I don't like
+that dynamite talk of his; but any man that's given his hand to the
+country has got mine in his grip for good. Why, March! You don't suppose
+I wanted to hurt his feelings, do you?"
+
+"Why, of course not, Fulkerson."
+
+But they could not get away from a certain ruefulness for that time, and
+in the evening Fulkerson came round to March's to say that he had got
+Lindau's address from Conrad, and had looked him up at his lodgings.
+
+"Well, there isn't so much bric-a-brac there, quite, as Mrs. Green left
+you; but I've made it all right with Lindau, as far as I'm concerned. I
+told him I didn't know when I spoke that way, and I honored him for
+sticking to his 'brinciples'; I don't believe in his 'brincibles'; and we
+wept on each other's necks--at least, he did. Dogged if he didn't kiss me
+before I knew what he was up to. He said I was his chenerous gong
+friendt, and he begged my barton if he had said anything to wound me. I
+tell you it was an affecting scene, March; and rats enough round in that
+old barracks where he lives to fit out a first-class case of delirium
+tremens. What does he stay there for? He's not obliged to?"
+
+Lindau's reasons, as March repeated them, affected Fulkerson as
+deliciously comical; but after that he confined his pleasantries at the
+office to Beaton and Conrad Dryfoos, or, as he said, he spent the rest of
+the summer in keeping Lindau smoothed up.
+
+It is doubtful if Lindau altogether liked this as well. Perhaps he missed
+the occasions Fulkerson used to give him of bursting out against the
+millionaires; and he could not well go on denouncing as the slafe of
+gabidal a man who had behaved to him as Fulkerson had done, though
+Fulkerson's servile relations to capital had been in nowise changed by
+his nople gonduct.
+
+Their relations continued to wear this irksome character of mutual
+forbearance; and when Dryfoos returned in October and Fulkerson revived
+the question of that dinner in celebration of the success of 'Every Other
+Week,' he carried his complaisance to an extreme that alarmed March for
+the consequences.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+"You see," Fulkerson explained, "I find that the old man has got an idea
+of his own about that banquet, and I guess there's some sense in it. He
+wants to have a preliminary little dinner, where we can talk the thing up
+first--half a dozen of us; and he wants to give us the dinner at his
+house. Well, that's no harm. I don't believe the old man ever gave a
+dinner, and he'd like to show off a little; there's a good deal of human
+nature in the old man, after all. He thought of you, of course, and
+Colonel Woodburn, and Beaton, and me at the foot of the table; and
+Conrad; and I suggested Kendricks: he's such a nice little chap; and the
+old man himself brought up the idea of Lindau. He said you told him
+something about him, and he asked why couldn't we have him, too; and I
+jumped at it."
+
+"Have Lindau to dinner?" asked March.
+
+"Certainly; why not? Father Dryfoos has a notion of paying the old fellow
+a compliment for what he done for the country. There won't be any trouble
+about it. You can sit alongside of him, and cut up his meat for him, and
+help him to things--"
+
+"Yes, but it won't do, Fulkerson! I don't believe Lindau ever had on a
+dress-coat in his life, and I don't believe his 'brincibles' would let
+him wear one."
+
+"Well, neither had Dryfoos, for the matter of that. He's as
+high-principled as old Pan-Electric himself, when it comes to a
+dress-coat," said Fulkerson. "We're all going to go in business dress;
+the old man stipulated for that.
+
+"It isn't the dress-coat alone," March resumed. "Lindau and Dryfoos
+wouldn't get on. You know they're opposite poles in everything. You
+mustn't do it. Dryfoos will be sure to say something to outrage Lindau's
+'brincibles,' and there'll be an explosion. It's all well enough for
+Dryfoos to feel grateful to Lindau, and his wish to honor him does him
+credit; but to have Lindau to dinner isn't the way. At the best, the old
+fellow would be very unhappy in such a house; he would have a bad
+conscience; and I should be sorry to have him feel that he'd been
+recreant to his 'brincibles'; they're about all he's got, and whatever we
+think of them, we're bound to respect his fidelity to them." March warmed
+toward Lindau in taking this view of him. "I should feel ashamed if I
+didn't protest against his being put in a false position. After all, he's
+my old friend, and I shouldn't like to have him do himself injustice if
+he is a crank."
+
+"Of course," said Fulkerson, with some trouble in his face. "I appreciate
+your feeling. But there ain't any danger," he added, buoyantly. "Anyhow,
+you spoke too late, as the Irishman said to the chicken when he swallowed
+him in a fresh egg. I've asked Lindau, and he's accepted with blayzure;
+that's what he says."
+
+March made no other comment than a shrug.
+
+"You'll see," Fulkerson continued, "it 'll go off all right. I'll engage
+to make it, and I won't hold anybody else responsible."
+
+In the course of his married life March had learned not to censure the
+irretrievable; but this was just what his wife had not learned; and she
+poured out so much astonishment at what Fulkerson had done, and so much
+disapproval, that March began to palliate the situation a little.
+
+"After all, it isn't a question of life and death; and, if it were, I
+don't see how it's to be helped now."
+
+"Oh, it's not to be helped now. But I am surprised at Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, Fulkerson has his moments of being merely human, too."
+
+Mrs. March would not deign a direct defence of her favorite. "Well, I'm
+glad there are not to be ladies."
+
+"I don't know. Dryfoos thought of having ladies, but it seems your
+infallible Fulkerson overruled him. Their presence might have kept Lindau
+and our host in bounds."
+
+It had become part of the Marches' conjugal joke for him to pretend that
+she could allow nothing wrong in Fulkerson, and he now laughed with a
+mocking air of having expected it when she said: "Well, then, if Mr.
+Fulkerson says he will see that it all comes out right, I suppose you
+must trust his tact. I wouldn't trust yours, Basil. The first wrong step
+was taken when Mr. Lindau was asked to help on the magazine."
+
+"Well, it was your infallible Fulkerson that took the step, or at least
+suggested it. I'm happy to say I had totally forgotten my early friend."
+
+Mrs. March was daunted and silenced for a moment. Then she said: "Oh,
+pshaw! You know well enough he did it to please you."
+
+"I'm very glad he didn't do it to please you, Isabel," said her husband,
+with affected seriousness. "Though perhaps he did."
+
+He began to look at the humorous aspect of the affair, which it certainly
+had, and to comment on the singular incongruities which 'Every Other
+Week' was destined to involve at every moment of its career. "I wonder if
+I'm mistaken in supposing that no other periodical was ever like it.
+Perhaps all periodicals are like it. But I don't believe there's another
+publication in New York that could bring together, in honor of itself, a
+fraternity and equality crank like poor old Lindau, and a belated
+sociological crank like Woodburn, and a truculent speculator like old
+Dryfoos, and a humanitarian dreamer like young Dryfoos, and a
+sentimentalist like me, and a nondescript like Beaton, and a pure
+advertising essence like Fulkerson, and a society spirit like Kendricks.
+If we could only allow one another to talk uninterruptedly all the time,
+the dinner would be the greatest success in the world, and we should come
+home full of the highest mutual respect. But I suspect we can't manage
+that--even your infallible Fulkerson couldn't work it--and I'm afraid
+that there'll be some listening that'll spoil the pleasure of the time."
+
+March was so well pleased with this view of the case that he suggested
+the idea involved to Fulkerson. Fulkerson was too good a fellow not to
+laugh at another man's joke, but he laughed a little ruefully, and he
+seemed worn with more than one kind of care in the interval that passed
+between the present time and the night of the dinner.
+
+Dryfoos necessarily depended upon him for advice concerning the scope and
+nature of the dinner, but he received the advice suspiciously, and
+contested points of obvious propriety with pertinacious stupidity.
+Fulkerson said that when it came to the point he would rather have had
+the thing, as he called it, at Delmonico's or some other restaurant; but
+when he found that Dryfoos's pride was bound up in having it at his own
+house, he gave way to him. Dryfoos also wanted his woman-cook to prepare
+the dinner, but Fulkerson persuaded him that this would not do; he must
+have it from a caterer. Then Dryfoos wanted his maids to wait at table,
+but Fulkerson convinced him that this would be incongruous at a man's
+dinner. It was decided that the dinner should be sent in from
+Frescobaldi's, and Dryfoos went with Fulkerson to discuss it with the
+caterer. He insisted upon having everything explained to him, and the
+reason for having it, and not something else in its place; and he treated
+Fulkerson and Frescobaldi as if they were in league to impose upon him.
+There were moments when Fulkerson saw the varnish of professional
+politeness cracking on the Neapolitan's volcanic surface, and caught a
+glimpse of the lava fires of the cook's nature beneath; he trembled for
+Dryfoos, who was walking rough-shod over him in the security of an
+American who had known how to make his money, and must know how to spend
+it; but he got him safely away at last, and gave Frescobaldi a wink of
+sympathy for his shrug of exhaustion as they turned to leave him.
+
+It was at first a relief and then an anxiety with Fulkerson that Lindau
+did not come about after accepting the invitation to dinner, until he
+appeared at Dryfoos's house, prompt to the hour. There was, to be sure,
+nothing to bring him; but Fulkerson was uneasily aware that Dryfoos
+expected to meet him at the office, and perhaps receive some verbal
+acknowledgment of the honor done him. Dryfoos, he could see, thought he
+was doing all his invited guests a favor; and while he stood in a certain
+awe of them as people of much greater social experience than himself,
+regarded them with a kind of contempt, as people who were going to have a
+better dinner at his house than they could ever afford to have at their
+own. He had finally not spared expense upon it; after pushing Frescobaldi
+to the point of eruption with his misgivings and suspicions at the first
+interview, he had gone to him a second time alone, and told him not to
+let the money stand between him and anything he would like to do. In the
+absence of Frescobaldi's fellow-conspirator he restored himself in the
+caterer's esteem by adding whatever he suggested; and Fulkerson, after
+trembling for the old man's niggardliness, was now afraid of a fantastic
+profusion in the feast. Dryfoos had reduced the scale of the banquet as
+regarded the number of guests, but a confusing remembrance of what
+Fulkerson had wished to do remained with him in part, and up to the day
+of the dinner he dropped in at Frescobaldi's and ordered more dishes and
+more of them. He impressed the Italian as an American original of a novel
+kind; and when he asked Fulkerson how Dryfoos had made his money, and
+learned that it was primarily in natural gas, he made note of some of his
+eccentric tastes as peculiarities that were to be caressed in any future
+natural-gas millionaire who might fall into his hands. He did not
+begrudge the time he had to give in explaining to Dryfoos the relation of
+the different wines to the different dishes; Dryfoos was apt to
+substitute a costlier wine where he could for a cheaper one, and he gave
+Frescobaldi carte blanche for the decoration of the table with pieces of
+artistic confectionery. Among these the caterer designed one for a
+surprise to his patron and a delicate recognition of the source of his
+wealth, which he found Dryfoos very willing to talk about, when he
+intimated that he knew what it was.
+
+Dryfoos left it to Fulkerson to invite the guests, and he found ready
+acceptance of his politeness from Kendricks, who rightly regarded the
+dinner as a part of the 'Every Other Week' business, and was too sweet
+and kind-hearted, anyway, not to seem very glad to come. March was a
+matter of course; but in Colonel Woodburn, Fulkerson encountered a
+reluctance which embarrassed him the more because he was conscious of
+having, for motives of his own, rather strained a point in suggesting the
+colonel to Dryfoos as a fit subject for invitation. There had been only
+one of the colonel's articles printed as yet, and though it had made a
+sensation in its way, and started the talk about that number, still it
+did not fairly constitute him a member of the staff, or even entitle him
+to recognition as a regular contributor. Fulkerson felt so sure of
+pleasing him with Dryfoos's message that he delivered it in full family
+council at the widow's. His daughter received it with all the enthusiasm
+that Fulkerson had hoped for, but the colonel said, stiffly, "I have not
+the pleasure of knowing Mr. Dryfoos." Miss Woodburn appeared ready to
+fall upon him at this, but controlled herself, as if aware that filial
+authority had its limits, and pressed her lips together without saying
+anything.
+
+"Yes, I know," Fulkerson admitted. "But it isn't a usual case. Mr.
+Dryfoos don't go in much for the conventionalities; I reckon he don't
+know much about 'em, come to boil it down; and he hoped"--here Fulkerson
+felt the necessity of inventing a little--"that you would excuse any want
+of ceremony; it's to be such an informal affair, anyway; we're all going
+in business dress, and there ain't going to be any ladies. He'd have come
+himself to ask you, but he's a kind of a bashful old fellow. It's all
+right, Colonel Woodburn."
+
+"I take it that it is, sir," said the colonel, courteously, but with
+unabated state, "coming from you. But in these matters we have no right
+to burden our friends with our decisions."
+
+"Of course, of course," said Fulkerson, feeling that he had been
+delicately told to mind his own business.
+
+"I understand," the colonel went on, "the relation that Mr. Dryfoos bears
+to the periodical in which you have done me the honor to print my papah,
+but this is a question of passing the bounds of a purely business
+connection, and of eating the salt of a man whom you do not definitely
+know to be a gentleman."
+
+"Mah goodness!" his daughter broke in. "If you bah your own salt with his
+money--"
+
+"It is supposed that I earn his money before I buy my salt with it,"
+returned her father, severely. "And in these times, when money is got in
+heaps, through the natural decay of our nefarious commercialism, it
+behooves a gentleman to be scrupulous that the hospitality offered him is
+not the profusion of a thief with his booty. I don't say that Mr.
+Dryfoos's good-fortune is not honest. I simply say that I know nothing
+about it, and that I should prefer to know something before I sat down at
+his board."
+
+"You're all right, colonel," said Fulkerson, "and so is Mr. Dryfoos. I
+give you my word that there are no flies on his personal integrity, if
+that's what you mean. He's hard, and he'd push an advantage, but I don't
+believe he would take an unfair one. He's speculated and made money every
+time, but I never heard of his wrecking a railroad or belonging to any
+swindling company or any grinding monopoly. He does chance it in stocks,
+but he's always played on the square, if you call stocks gambling."
+
+"May I think this over till morning?" asked the colonel.
+
+"Oh, certainly, certainly," said Fulkerson, eagerly. "I don't know as
+there's any hurry."
+
+Miss Woodburn found a chance to murmur to him before he went: "He'll
+come. And Ah'm so much oblahged, Mr. Fulkerson. Ah jost know it's all
+you' doing, and it will give papa a chance to toak to some new people,
+and get away from us evahlastin' women for once."
+
+"I don't see why any one should want to do that," said Fulkerson, with
+grateful gallantry. "But I'll be dogged," he said to March when he told
+him about this odd experience, "if I ever expected to find Colonel
+Woodburn on old Lindau's ground. He did come round handsomely this
+morning at breakfast and apologized for taking time to think the
+invitation over before he accepted. 'You understand,' he says, 'that if
+it had been to the table of some friend not so prosperous as Mr.
+Dryfoos--your friend Mr. March, for instance--it would have been
+sufficient to know that he was your friend. But in these days it is a
+duty that a gentleman owes himself to consider whether he wishes to know
+a rich man or not. The chances of making money disreputably are so great
+that the chances are against a man who has made money if he's made a
+great deal of it.'"
+
+March listened with a face of ironical insinuation. "That was very good;
+and he seems to have had a good deal of confidence in your patience and
+in your sense of his importance to the occasion--"
+
+"No, no," Fulkerson protested, "there's none of that kind of thing about
+the colonel. I told him to take time to think it over; he's the
+simplest-hearted old fellow in the world."
+
+"I should say so. After all, he didn't give any reason he had for
+accepting. But perhaps the young lady had the reason."
+
+"Pshaw, March!" said Fulkerson.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+So far as the Dryfoos family was concerned, the dinner might as well have
+been given at Frescobaldi's rooms. None of the ladies appeared. Mrs.
+Dryfoos was glad to escape to her own chamber, where she sat before an
+autumnal fire, shaking her head and talking to herself at times, with the
+foreboding of evil which old women like her make part of their religion.
+The girls stood just out of sight at the head of the stairs, and disputed
+which guest it was at each arrival; Mrs. Mandel had gone to her room to
+write letters, after beseeching them not to stand there. When Kendricks
+came, Christine gave Mela a little pinch, equivalent to a little mocking
+shriek; for, on the ground of his long talk with Mela at Mrs. Horn's, in
+the absence of any other admirer, they based a superstition of his
+interest in her; when Beaton came, Mela returned the pinch, but
+awkwardly, so that it hurt, and then Christine involuntarily struck her.
+
+Frescobaldi's men were in possession everywhere they had turned the cook
+out of her kitchen and the waitress out of her pantry; the reluctant
+Irishman at the door was supplemented by a vivid Italian, who spoke
+French with the guests, and said, "Bien, Monsieur," and "toute suite,"
+and "Merci!" to all, as he took their hats and coats, and effused a
+hospitality that needed no language but the gleam of his eyes and teeth
+and the play of his eloquent hands. From his professional dress-coat,
+lustrous with the grease spotted on it at former dinners and parties,
+they passed to the frocks of the elder and younger Dryfoos in the
+drawing-room, which assumed informality for the affair, but did not put
+their wearers wholly at their ease. The father's coat was of black
+broadcloth, and he wore it unbuttoned; the skirts were long, and the
+sleeves came down to his knuckles; he shook hands with his guests, and
+the same dryness seemed to be in his palm and throat, as he huskily asked
+each to take a chair. Conrad's coat was of modern texture and cut, and
+was buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience within its
+lapels; he met March with his entreating smile, and he seemed no more
+capable of coping with the situation than his father. They both waited
+for Fulkerson, who went about and did his best to keep life in the party
+during the half-hour that passed before they sat down at dinner. Beaton
+stood gloomily aloof, as if waiting to be approached on the right basis
+before yielding an inch of his ground; Colonel Woodburn, awaiting the
+moment when he could sally out on his hobby, kept himself intrenched
+within the dignity of a gentleman, and examined askance the figure of old
+Lindau as he stared about the room, with his fine head up, and his empty
+sleeve dangling over his wrist. March felt obliged to him for wearing a
+new coat in the midst of that hostile luxury, and he was glad to see
+Dryfoos make up to him and begin to talk with him, as if he wished to
+show him particular respect, though it might have been because he was
+less afraid of him than of the others. He heard Lindau saying, "Boat, the
+name is Choarman?" and Dryfoos beginning to explain his Pennsylvania
+Dutch origin, and he suffered himself, with a sigh of relief, to fall
+into talk with Kendricks, who was always pleasant; he was willing to talk
+about something besides himself, and had no opinions that he was not
+ready to hold in abeyance for the time being out of kindness to others.
+In that group of impassioned individualities, March felt him a refuge and
+comfort--with his harmless dilettante intention of some day writing a
+novel, and his belief that he was meantime collecting material for it.
+
+Fulkerson, while breaking the ice for the whole company, was mainly
+engaged in keeping Colonel Woodburn thawed out. He took Kendricks away
+from March and presented him to the colonel as a person who, like
+himself, was looking into social conditions; he put one hand on
+Kendricks's shoulder, and one on the colonel's, and made some flattering
+joke, apparently at the expense of the young fellow, and then left them.
+March heard Kendricks protest in vain, and the colonel say, gravely: "I
+do not wonder, sir, that these things interest you. They constitute a
+problem which society must solve or which will dissolve society," and he
+knew from that formula, which the colonel had, once used with him, that
+he was laying out a road for the exhibition of the hobby's paces later.
+
+Fulkerson came back to March, who had turned toward Conrad Dryfoos, and
+said, "If we don't get this thing going pretty soon, it 'll be the death
+of me," and just then Frescobaldi's butler came in and announced to
+Dryfoos that dinner was served. The old man looked toward Fulkerson with
+a troubled glance, as if he did not know what to do; he made a gesture to
+touch Lindau's elbow. Fulkerson called out, "Here's Colonel Woodburn, Mr.
+Dryfoos," as if Dryfoos were looking for him; and he set the example of
+what he was to do by taking Lindau's arm himself. "Mr. Lindau is going to
+sit at my end of the table, alongside of March. Stand not upon the order
+of your going, gentlemen, but fall in at once." He contrived to get
+Dryfoos and the colonel before him, and he let March follow with
+Kendricks. Conrad came last with Beaton, who had been turning over the
+music at the piano, and chafing inwardly at the whole affair. At the
+table Colonel Woodburn was placed on Dryfoos's right, and March on his
+left. March sat on Fulkerson's right, with Lindau next him; and the young
+men occupied the other seats.
+
+"Put you next to March, Mr. Lindau," said Fulkerson, "so you can begin to
+put Apollinaris in his champagne-glass at the right moment; you know his
+little weakness of old; sorry to say it's grown on him."
+
+March laughed with kindly acquiescence in Fulkerson's wish to start the
+gayety, and Lindau patted him on the shoulder. "I know hiss veakness. If
+he liges a class of vine, it iss begause his loaf ingludes efen hiss
+enemy, as Shakespeare galled it."
+
+"Ah, but Shakespeare couldn't have been thinking of champagne," said
+Kendricks.
+
+"I suppose, sir," Colonel Woodburn interposed, with lofty courtesy,
+"champagne could hardly have been known in his day."
+
+"I suppose not, colonel," returned the younger man, deferentially. "He
+seemed to think that sack and sugar might be a fault; but he didn't
+mention champagne."
+
+"Perhaps he felt there was no question about that," suggested Beaton, who
+then felt that he had not done himself justice in the sally.
+
+"I wonder just when champagne did come in," said March.
+
+"I know when it ought to come in," said Fulkerson. "Before the soup!"
+
+They all laughed, and gave themselves the air of drinking champagne out
+of tumblers every day, as men like to do. Dryfoos listened uneasily; he
+did not quite understand the allusions, though he knew what Shakespeare
+was, well enough; Conrad's face expressed a gentle deprecation of joking
+on such a subject, but he said nothing.
+
+The talk ran on briskly through the dinner. The young men tossed the ball
+back and forth; they made some wild shots, but they kept it going, and
+they laughed when they were hit. The wine loosed Colonel Woodburn's
+tongue; he became very companionable with the young fellows; with the
+feeling that a literary dinner ought to have a didactic scope, he praised
+Scott and Addison as the only authors fit to form the minds of gentlemen.
+
+Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the name of Flaubert as a
+master of style. "Style, you know," he added, "is the man."
+
+"Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir," the colonel assented; he
+wondered who Flaubert was.
+
+Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he said these were the masters.
+He recited some lurid verses from Baudelaire; Lindau pronounced them a
+disgrace to human nature, and gave a passage from Victor Hugo on Louis
+Napoleon, with his heavy German accent, and then he quoted Schiller.
+"Ach, boat that is a peaudifool! Not zo?" he demanded of March.
+
+"Yes, beautiful; but, of course, you know I think there's nobody like
+Heine!"
+
+Lindau threw back his great old head and laughed, showing a want of teeth
+under his mustache. He put his hand on March's back. "This poy--he was a
+poy den--wars so gracy to pekin reading Heine that he gommence with the
+tictionary bevore he knows any Grammar, and ve bick it out vort by vort
+togeder."
+
+"He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh, Lindau?" asked Fulkerson,
+burlesquing the old man's accent, with an impudent wink that made Lindau
+himself laugh. "But in the dark ages, I mean, there in Indianapolis. Just
+how long ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?" Fulkerson saw the
+restiveness in Dryfoos's eye at the purely literary course the talk had
+taken; he had intended it to lead up that way to business, to 'Every
+Other Week;' but he saw that it was leaving Dryfoos too far out, and he
+wished to get it on the personal ground, where everybody is at home.
+
+"Ledt me zee," mused Lindau. "Wass it in fifty-nine or zixty, Passil? Idt
+wass a year or dwo pefore the war proke oudt, anyway."
+
+"Those were exciting times," said Dryfoos, making his first entry into
+the general talk. "I went down to Indianapolis with the first company
+from our place, and I saw the red-shirts pouring in everywhere. They had
+a song,
+
+  "Oh, never mind the weather, but git over double trouble,
+   For we're bound for the land of Canaan."
+
+The fellows locked arms and went singin' it up and down four or five
+abreast in the moonlight; crowded everybody else off the sidewalk."
+
+"I remember, I remember," said Lindau, nodding his head slowly up and
+down. "A coodt many off them nefer gome pack from that landt of Ganaan,
+Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"You're right, Mr. Lindau. But I reckon it was worth it--the country
+we've got now. Here, young man!" He caught the arm of the waiter who was
+going round with the champagne bottle. "Fill up Mr. Lindau's glass,
+there. I want to drink the health of those old times with him. Here's to
+your empty sleeve, Mr. Lindau. God bless it! No offence to you, Colonel
+Woodburn," said Dryfoos, turning to him before he drank.
+
+"Not at all, sir, not at all," said the colonel. "I will drink with you,
+if you will permit me."
+
+"We'll all drink--standing!" cried Fulkerson. "Help March to get up,
+somebody! Fill high the bowl with Samian Apollinaris for Coonrod! Now,
+then, hurrah for Lindau!"
+
+They cheered, and hammered on the table with the butts of their
+knife-handles. Lindau remained seated. The tears came into his eyes; he
+said, "I thank you, chendlemen," and hiccoughed.
+
+"I'd 'a' went into the war myself," said Dryfoos, "but I was raisin' a
+family of young children, and I didn't see how I could leave my farm. But
+I helped to fill up the quota at every call, and when the volunteering
+stopped I went round with the subscription paper myself; and we offered
+as good bounties as any in the State. My substitute was killed in one of
+the last skirmishes--in fact, after Lee's surrender--and I've took care
+of his family, more or less, ever since."
+
+"By-the-way, March," said Fulkerson, "what sort of an idea would it be to
+have a good war story--might be a serial--in the magazine? The war has
+never fully panned out in fiction yet. It was used a good deal just after
+it was over, and then it was dropped. I think it's time to take it up
+again. I believe it would be a card."
+
+It was running in March's mind that Dryfoos had an old rankling shame in
+his heart for not having gone into the war, and that he had often made
+that explanation of his course without having ever been satisfied with
+it. He felt sorry for him; the fact seemed pathetic; it suggested a
+dormant nobleness in the man.
+
+Beaton was saying to Fulkerson: "You might get a series of sketches by
+substitutes; the substitutes haven't been much heard from in the war
+literature. How would 'The Autobiography of a Substitute' do? You might
+follow him up to the moment he was killed in the other man's place, and
+inquire whether he had any right to the feelings of a hero when he was
+only hired in the place of one. Might call it 'The Career of a Deputy
+Hero.'"
+
+"I fancy," said March, "that there was a great deal of mixed motive in
+the men who went into the war as well as in those who kept out of it. We
+canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have
+been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocations." He found
+himself saying this in Dryfoos's behalf; the old man looked at him
+gratefully at first, he thought, and then suspiciously.
+
+Lindau turned his head toward him and said: "You are righdt, Passil; you
+are righdt. I haf zeen on the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions of
+human paseness--chelousy, fanity, ecodistic bridte. I haf zeen men in the
+face off death itself gofferned by motifes as low as--as pusiness
+motifes."
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, "it would be a grand thing for 'Every Other Week'
+if we could get some of those ideas worked up into a series. It would
+make a lot of talk."
+
+Colonel Woodburn ignored him in saying, "I think, Major Lindau--"
+
+"High brifate; prefet gorporal," the old man interrupted, in rejection of
+the title.
+
+Hendricks laughed and said, with a glance of appreciation at Lindau,
+"Brevet corporal is good."
+
+Colonel Woodburn frowned a little, and passed over the joke. "I think Mr.
+Lindau is right. Such exhibitions were common to both sides, though if
+you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so, I think they were less
+frequent on ours. We were fighting more immediately for existence. We
+were fewer than you were, and we knew it; we felt more intensely that if
+each were not for all, then none was for any."
+
+The colonel's words made their impression. Dryfoos said, with authority,
+"That is so."
+
+"Colonel Woodburn," Fulkerson called out, "if you'll work up those ideas
+into a short paper--say, three thousand words--I'll engage to make March
+take it."
+
+The colonel went on without replying: "But Mr. Lindau is right in
+characterizing some of the motives that led men to the cannon's mouth as
+no higher than business motives, and his comparison is the most forcible
+that he could have used. I was very much struck by it."
+
+The hobby was out, the colonel was in the saddle with so firm a seat that
+no effort sufficed to dislodge him. The dinner went on from course to
+course with barbaric profusion, and from time to time Fulkerson tried to
+bring the talk back to 'Every Other Week.' But perhaps because that was
+only the ostensible and not the real object of the dinner, which was to
+bring a number of men together under Dryfoos's roof, and make them the
+witnesses of his splendor, make them feel the power of his wealth,
+Fulkerson's attempts failed. The colonel showed how commercialism was the
+poison at the heart of our national life; how we began as a simple,
+agricultural people, who had fled to these shores with the instinct,
+divinely implanted, of building a state such as the sun never shone upon
+before; how we had conquered the wilderness and the savage; how we had
+flung off, in our struggle with the mother-country, the trammels of
+tradition and precedent, and had settled down, a free nation, to the
+practice of the arts of peace; how the spirit of commercialism had stolen
+insidiously upon us, and the infernal impulse of competition had
+embroiled us in a perpetual warfare of interests, developing the worst
+passions of our nature, and teaching us to trick and betray and destroy
+one another in the strife for money, till now that impulse had exhausted
+itself, and we found competition gone and the whole economic problem in
+the hands of monopolies--the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the
+Rubber Trust, and what not. And now what was the next thing? Affairs
+could not remain as they were; it was impossible; and what was the next
+thing?
+
+The company listened for the main part silently. Dryfoos tried to grasp
+the idea of commercialism as the colonel seemed to hold it; he conceived
+of it as something like the dry-goods business on a vast scale, and he
+knew he had never been in that. He did not like to hear competition
+called infernal; he had always supposed it was something sacred; but he
+approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the Standard Oil Company; it
+was all true; the Standard Oil has squeezed Dryfoos once, and made him
+sell it a lot of oil-wells by putting down the price of oil so low in
+that region that he lost money on every barrel he pumped.
+
+All the rest listened silently, except Lindau; at every point the colonel
+made against the present condition of things he said more and more
+fiercely, "You are righdt, you are righdt." His eyes glowed, his hand
+played with his knife-hilt. When the colonel demanded, "And what is the
+next thing?" he threw himself forward, and repeated: "Yes, sir! What is
+the next thing?"
+
+"Natural gas, by thunder!" shouted Fulkerson.
+
+One of the waiters had profited by Lindau's posture to lean over him and
+put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar. It
+expressed Frescobaldi's conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature
+had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a
+small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in
+combustion as it issued from the ground. Fulkerson burst into a roar of
+laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi's personal tribute to
+Dryfoos. Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained
+the work of sinking a gas-well, as he had already explained it to
+Frescobaldi. In the midst of his lecture he caught sight of the caterer
+himself, where he stood in the pantry doorway, smiling with an artist's
+anxiety for the effect of his masterpiece.
+
+"Come in, come in, Frescobaldi! We want to congratulate you," Fulkerson
+called to him. "Here, gentlemen! Here's Frescobaldi's health."
+
+They all drank; and Frescobaldi, smiling brilliantly and rubbing his
+hands as he bowed right and left, permitted himself to say to Dryfoos:
+"You are please; no? You like?"
+
+"First-rate, first-rate!" said the old man; but when the Italian had
+bowed himself out and his guests had sunk into their seats again, he said
+dryly to Fulkerson, "I reckon they didn't have to torpedo that well, or
+the derrick wouldn't look quite so nice and clean."
+
+"Yes," Fulkerson answered, "and that ain't quite the style--that little
+wiggly-waggly blue flame--that the gas acts when you touch off a good
+vein of it. This might do for weak gas"; and he went on to explain:
+
+"They call it weak gas when they tap it two or three hundred feet down;
+and anybody can sink a well in his back yard and get enough gas to light
+and heat his house. I remember one fellow that had it blazing up from a
+pipe through a flower-bed, just like a jet of water from a fountain. My,
+my, my! You fel--you gentlemen--ought to go out and see that country, all
+of you. Wish we could torpedo this well, Mr. Dryfoos, and let 'em see how
+it works! Mind that one you torpedoed for me? You know, when they sink a
+well," he went on to the company, "they can't always most generally
+sometimes tell whether they're goin' to get gas or oil or salt water.
+Why, when they first began to bore for salt water out on the Kanawha,
+back about the beginning of the century, they used to get gas now and
+then, and then they considered it a failure; they called a gas-well a
+blower, and give it up in disgust; the time wasn't ripe for gas yet. Now
+they bore away sometimes till they get half-way to China, and don't seem
+to strike anything worth speaking of. Then they put a dynamite torpedo
+down in the well and explode it. They have a little bar of iron that they
+call a Go-devil, and they just drop it down on the business end of the
+torpedo, and then stand from under, if you please! You hear a noise, and
+in about half a minute you begin to see one, and it begins to rain oil
+and mud and salt water and rocks and pitchforks and adoptive citizens;
+and when it clears up the derrick's painted--got a coat on that'll wear
+in any climate. That's what our honored host meant. Generally get some
+visiting lady, when there's one round, to drop the Go-devil. But that day
+we had to put up with Conrad here. They offered to let me drop it, but I
+declined. I told 'em I hadn't much practice with Go-devils in the
+newspaper syndicate business, and I wasn't very well myself, anyway.
+Astonishing," Fulkerson continued, with the air of relieving his
+explanation by an anecdote, "how reckless they get using dynamite when
+they're torpedoing wells. We stopped at one place where a fellow was
+handling the cartridges pretty freely, and Mr. Dryfoos happened to
+caution him a little, and that ass came up with one of 'em in his hand,
+and began to pound it on the buggy-wheel to show us how safe it was. I
+turned green, I was so scared; but Mr. Dryfoos kept his color, and kind
+of coaxed the fellow till he quit. You could see he was the fool kind,
+that if you tried to stop him he'd keep on hammering that cartridge, just
+to show that it wouldn't explode, till he blew you into Kingdom Come.
+When we got him to go away, Mr. Dryfoos drove up to his foreman. 'Pay
+Sheney off, and discharge him on the spot,' says he. 'He's too safe a man
+to have round; he knows too much about dynamite.' I never saw anybody so
+cool."
+
+Dryfoos modestly dropped his head under Fulkerson's flattery and, without
+lifting it, turned his eyes toward Colonel Woodburn. "I had all sorts of
+men to deal with in developing my property out there, but I had very
+little trouble with them, generally speaking."
+
+"Ah, ah! you foundt the laboring-man reasonable--dractable--tocile?"
+Lindau put in.
+
+"Yes, generally speaking," Dryfoos answered. "They mostly knew which side
+of their bread was buttered. I did have one little difficulty at one
+time. It happened to be when Mr. Fulkerson was out there. Some of the men
+tried to form a union--"
+
+"No, no!" cried Fulkerson. "Let me tell that! I know you wouldn't do
+yourself justice, Mr. Dryfoos, and I want 'em to know how a strike can be
+managed, if you take it in time. You see, some of those fellows got a
+notion that there ought to be a union among the working-men to keep up
+wages, and dictate to the employers, and Mr. Dryfoos's foreman was the
+ringleader in the business. They understood pretty well that as soon as
+he found it out that foreman would walk the plank, and so they watched
+out till they thought they had Mr. Dryfoos just where they wanted
+him--everything on the keen jump, and every man worth his weight in
+diamonds--and then they came to him, and--told him to sign a promise to
+keep that foreman to the end of the season, or till he was through with
+the work on the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under penalty of having them
+all knock off. Mr. Dryfoos smelled a mouse, but he couldn't tell where
+the mouse was; he saw that they did have him, and he signed, of course.
+There wasn't anything really against the fellow, anyway; he was a
+first-rate man, and he did his duty every time; only he'd got some of
+those ideas into his head, and they turned it. Mr. Dryfoos signed, and
+then he laid low."
+
+March saw Lindau listening with a mounting intensity, and heard him
+murmur in German, "Shameful! shameful!"
+
+Fulkerson went on: "Well, it wasn't long before they began to show their
+hand, but Mr. Dryfoos kept dark. He agreed to everything; there never was
+such an obliging capitalist before; there wasn't a thing they asked of
+him that he didn't do, with the greatest of pleasure, and all went merry
+as a marriage-bell till one morning a whole gang of fresh men marched
+into the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under the escort of a dozen
+Pinkertons with repeating rifles at half-cock, and about fifty fellows
+found themselves out of a job. You never saw such a mad set."
+
+"Pretty neat," said Kendricks, who looked at the affair purely from an
+aesthetic point of view. "Such a coup as that would tell tremendously in
+a play."
+
+"That was vile treason," said Lindau in German to March. "He's an
+infamous traitor! I cannot stay here. I must go."
+
+He struggled to rise, while March held him by the coat, and implored him
+under his voice: "For Heaven's sake, don't, Lindau! You owe it to
+yourself not to make a scene, if you come here." Something in it all
+affected him comically; he could not help laughing.
+
+The others were discussing the matter, and seemed not to have noticed
+Lindau, who controlled himself and sighed: "You are right. I must have
+patience."
+
+Beaton was saying to Dryfoos, "Pity your Pinkertons couldn't have given
+them a few shots before they left."
+
+"No, that wasn't necessary," said Dryfoos. "I succeeded in breaking up
+the union. I entered into an agreement with other parties not to employ
+any man who would not swear that he was non-union. If they had attempted
+violence, of course they could have been shot. But there was no fear of
+that. Those fellows can always be depended upon to cut one another's
+throats in the long run."
+
+"But sometimes," said Colonel Woodburn, who had been watching throughout.
+for a chance to mount his hobby again, "they make a good deal of trouble
+first. How was it in the great railroad strike of '77?"
+
+"Well, I guess there was a little trouble that time, colonel," said
+Fulkerson. "But the men that undertake to override the laws and paralyze
+the industries of a country like this generally get left in the end."
+
+"Yes, sir, generally; and up to a certain point, always. But it's the
+exceptional that is apt to happen, as well as the unexpected. And a
+little reflection will convince any gentleman here that there is always a
+danger of the exceptional in your system. The fact is, those fellows have
+the game in their own hands already. A strike of the whole body of the
+Brotherhood of Engineers alone would starve out the entire Atlantic
+seaboard in a week; labor insurrection could make head at a dozen given
+points, and your government couldn't move a man over the roads without
+the help of the engineers."
+
+"That is so," said Kendrick, struck by the dramatic character of the
+conjecture. He imagined a fiction dealing with the situation as something
+already accomplished.
+
+"Why don't some fellow do the Battle of Dorking act with that thing?"
+said Fulkerson. "It would be a card."
+
+"Exactly what I was thinking, Mr. Fulkerson," said Kendricks.
+
+Fulkerson laughed. "Telepathy--clear case of mind transference. Better
+see March, here, about it. I'd like to have it in 'Every Other Week.' It
+would make talk."
+
+"Perhaps it might set your people to thinking as well as talking," said
+the colonel.
+
+"Well, sir," said Dryfoos, setting his lips so tightly together that his
+imperial stuck straight outward, "if I had my way, there wouldn't be any
+Brotherhood of Engineers, nor any other kind of labor union in the whole
+country."
+
+"What!" shouted Lindau. "You would sobbress the unionss of the
+voarking-men?"
+
+"Yes, I would."
+
+"And what would you do with the unionss of the gabidalists--the
+drosts--and gompines, and boolss? Would you dake the righdt from one and
+gif it to the odder?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I would," said Dryfoos, with a wicked look at him.
+
+Lindau was about to roar back at him with some furious protest, but March
+put his hand on his shoulder imploringly, and Lindau turned to him to say
+in German: "But it is infamous--infamous! What kind of man is this? Who
+is he? He has the heart of a tyrant."
+
+Colonel Woodburn cut in. "You couldn't do that, Mr. Dryfoos, under your
+system. And if you attempted it, with your conspiracy laws, and that kind
+of thing, it might bring the climax sooner than you expected. Your
+commercialized society has built its house on the sands. It will have to
+go. But I should be sorry if it went before its time."
+
+"You are righdt, sir," said Lindau. "It would be a bity. I hobe it will
+last till it feelss its rottenness, like Herodt. Boat, when its hour
+gomes, when it trope to bieces with the veight off its own
+gorrubtion--what then?"
+
+"It's not to be supposed that a system of things like this can drop to
+pieces of its own accord, like the old Republic of Venice," said the
+colonel. "But when the last vestige of commercial society is gone, then
+we can begin to build anew; and we shall build upon the central idea,
+not of the false liberty you now worship, but of responsibility
+--responsibility. The enlightened, the moneyed, the cultivated class shall
+be responsible to the central authority--emperor, duke, president; the
+name does not matter--for the national expense and the national defence,
+and it shall be responsible to the working-classes of all kinds for homes
+and lands and implements, and the opportunity to labor at all times.
+
+"The working-classes shall be responsible to the leisure class for the
+support of its dignity in peace, and shall be subject to its command in
+war. The rich shall warrant the poor against planless production and the
+ruin that now follows, against danger from without and famine from
+within, and the poor--"
+
+"No, no, no!" shouted Lindau. "The State shall do that--the whole beople.
+The men who voark shall have and shall eat; and the men that will not
+voark, they shall sdarfe. But no man need sdarfe. He will go to the
+State, and the State will see that he haf voark, and that he haf foodt.
+All the roadts and mills and mines and landts shall be the beople's and
+be ron by the beople for the beople. There shall be no rich and no boor;
+and there shall not be war any more, for what bower wouldt dare to addack
+a beople bound togeder in a broderhood like that?"
+
+"Lion and lamb act," said Fulkerson, not well knowing, after so much
+champagne, what words he was using.
+
+No one noticed him, and Colonel Woodburn said coldly to Lindau, "You are
+talking paternalism, sir."
+
+"And you are dalking feutalism!" retorted the old man.
+
+The colonel did not reply. A silence ensued, which no one broke till
+Fulkerson said: "Well, now, look here. If either one of these millenniums
+was brought about, by force of arms, or otherwise, what would become of
+'Every Other Week'? Who would want March for an editor? How would Beaton
+sell his pictures? Who would print Mr. Kendricks's little society verses
+and short stories? What would become of Conrad and his good works?" Those
+named grinned in support of Fulkerson's diversion, but Lindau and the
+colonel did not speak; Dryfoos looked down at his plate, frowning.
+
+A waiter came round with cigars, and Fulkerson took one. "Ah," he said,
+as he bit off the end, and leaned over to the emblematic masterpiece,
+where the brandy was still feebly flickering, "I wonder if there's enough
+natural gas left to light my cigar." His effort put the flame out and
+knocked the derrick over; it broke in fragments on the table. Fulkerson
+cackled over the ruin: "I wonder if all Moffitt will look that way after
+labor and capital have fought it out together. I hope this ain't ominous
+of anything personal, Dryfoos?"
+
+"I'll take the risk of it," said the old man, harshly.
+
+He rose mechanically, and Fulkerson said to Frescobaldi's man, "You can
+bring us the coffee in the library."
+
+The talk did not recover itself there. Landau would not sit down; he
+refused coffee, and dismissed himself with a haughty bow to the company;
+Colonel Woodburn shook hands elaborately all round, when he had smoked
+his cigar; the others followed him. It seemed to March that his own
+good-night from Dryfoos was dry and cold.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+March met Fulkerson on the steps of the office next morning, when he
+arrived rather later than his wont. Fulkerson did not show any of the
+signs of suffering from the last night's pleasure which painted
+themselves in March's face. He flirted his hand gayly in the air, and
+said, "How's your poor head?" and broke into a knowing laugh. "You don't
+seem to have got up with the lark this morning. The old gentleman is in
+there with Conrad, as bright as a biscuit; he's beat you down. Well, we
+did have a good time, didn't we? And old Lindau and the colonel, didn't
+they have a good time? I don't suppose they ever had a chance before to
+give their theories quite so much air. Oh, my! how they did ride over us!
+I'm just going down to see Beaton about the cover of the Christmas
+number. I think we ought to try it in three or four colors, if we are
+going to observe the day at all." He was off before March could pull
+himself together to ask what Dryfoos wanted at the office at that hour of
+the morning; he always came in the afternoon on his way up-town.
+
+The fact of his presence renewed the sinister misgivings with which March
+had parted from him the night before, but Fulkerson's cheerfulness seemed
+to gainsay them; afterward March did not know whether to attribute this
+mood to the slipperiness that he was aware of at times in Fulkerson, or
+to a cynical amusement he might have felt at leaving him alone to the old
+man, who mounted to his room shortly after March had reached it.
+
+A sort of dumb anger showed itself in his face; his jaw was set so firmly
+that he did not seem able at once to open it. He asked, without the
+ceremonies of greeting, "What does that one-armed Dutchman do on this
+book?"
+
+"What does he do?" March echoed, as people are apt to do with a question
+that is mandatory and offensive.
+
+"Yes, sir, what does he do? Does he write for it?"
+
+"I suppose you mean Lindau," said March. He saw no reason for refusing to
+answer Dryfoos's demand, and he decided to ignore its terms. "No, he
+doesn't write for it in the usual way. He translates for it; he examines
+the foreign magazines, and draws my attention to anything he thinks of
+interest. But I told you about this before--"
+
+"I know what you told me, well enough. And I know what he is. He is a
+red-mouthed labor agitator. He's one of those foreigners that come here
+from places where they've never had a decent meal's victuals in their
+lives, and as soon as they get their stomachs full, they begin to make
+trouble between our people and their hands. There's where the strikes
+come from, and the unions and the secret societies. They come here and
+break our Sabbath, and teach their atheism. They ought to be hung! Let
+'em go back if they don't like it over here. They want to ruin the
+country."
+
+March could not help smiling a little at the words, which came fast
+enough now in the hoarse staccato of Dryfoos's passion. "I don't know
+whom you mean by they, generally speaking; but I had the impression that
+poor old Lindau had once done his best to save the country. I don't
+always like his way of talking, but I know that he is one of the truest
+and kindest souls in the world; and he is no more an atheist than I am.
+He is my friend, and I can't allow him to be misunderstood."
+
+"I don't care what he is," Dryfoos broke out, "I won't have him round. He
+can't have any more work from this office. I want you to stop it. I want
+you to turn him off."
+
+March was standing at his desk, as he had risen to receive Dryfoos when
+he entered. He now sat down, and began to open his letters.
+
+"Do you hear?" the old man roared at him. "I want you to turn him off."
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Dryfoos," said March, succeeding in an effort to speak
+calmly, "I don't know you, in such a matter as this. My arrangements as
+editor of 'Every Other Week' were made with Mr. Fulkerson. I have always
+listened to any suggestion he has had to make."
+
+"I don't care for Mr. Fulkerson! He has nothing to do with it," retorted
+Dryfoos; but he seemed a little daunted by March's position.
+
+"He has everything to do with it as far as I am concerned," March
+answered, with a steadiness that he did not feel. "I know that you are
+the owner of the periodical, but I can't receive any suggestion from you,
+for the reason that I have given. Nobody but Mr. Fulkerson has any right
+to talk with me about its management."
+
+Dryfoos glared at him for a moment, and demanded, threateningly: "Then
+you say you won't turn that old loafer off? You say that I have got to
+keep on paying my money out to buy beer for a man that would cut my
+throat if he got the chance?"
+
+"I say nothing at all, Mr. Dryfoos," March answered. The blood came into
+his face, and he added: "But I will say that if you speak again of Mr.
+Lindau in those terms, one of us must leave this room. I will not hear
+you."
+
+Dryfoos looked at him with astonishment; then he struck his hat down on
+his head, and stamped out of the room and down the stairs; and a vague
+pity came into March's heart that was not altogether for himself. He
+might be the greater sufferer in the end, but he was sorry to have got
+the better of that old man for the moment; and he felt ashamed of the
+anger into which Dryfoos's anger had surprised him. He knew he could not
+say too much in defence of Lindau's generosity and unselfishness, and he
+had not attempted to defend him as a political economist. He could not
+have taken any ground in relation to Dryfoos but that which he held, and
+he felt satisfied that he was right in refusing to receive instructions
+or commands from him. Yet somehow he was not satisfied with the whole
+affair, and not merely because his present triumph threatened his final
+advantage, but because he felt that in his heart he had hardly done
+justice to Dryfoos's rights in the matter; it did not quite console him
+to reflect that Dryfoos had himself made it impossible. He was tempted to
+go home and tell his wife what had happened, and begin his preparations
+for the future at once. But he resisted this weakness and kept
+mechanically about his work, opening the letters and the manuscripts
+before him with that curious double action of the mind common in men of
+vivid imaginations. It was a relief when Conrad Dryfoos, having
+apparently waited to make sure that his father would not return, came up
+from the counting-room and looked in on March with a troubled face.
+
+"Mr. March," he began, "I hope father hasn't been saying anything to you
+that you can't overlook. I know he was very much excited, and when he is
+excited he is apt to say things that he is sorry for."
+
+The apologetic attitude taken for Dryfoos, so different from any attitude
+the peremptory old man would have conceivably taken for himself, made
+March smile. "Oh no. I fancy the boot is on the other leg. I suspect I've
+said some things your father can't overlook, Conrad." He called the young
+man by his Christian name partly to distinguish him from his father,
+partly from the infection of Fulkerson's habit, and partly from a
+kindness for him that seemed naturally to express itself in that way.
+
+"I know he didn't sleep last night, after you all went away," Conrad
+pursued, "and of course that made him more irritable; and he was tried a
+good deal by some of the things that Mr. Lindau said."
+
+"I was tried a good deal myself," said March. "Lindau ought never to have
+been there."
+
+"No." Conrad seemed only partially to assent.
+
+"I told Mr. Fulkerson so. I warned him that Lindau would be apt to break
+out in some way. It wasn't just to him, and it wasn't just to your
+father, to ask him."
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson had a good motive," Conrad gently urged. "He did it
+because he hurt his feelings that day about the pension."
+
+"Yes, but it was a mistake. He knew that Lindau was inflexible about his
+principles, as he calls them, and that one of his first principles is to
+denounce the rich in season and out of season. I don't remember just what
+he said last night; and I really thought I'd kept him from breaking out
+in the most offensive way. But your father seems very much incensed."
+
+"Yes, I know," said Conrad.
+
+"Of course, I don't agree with Lindau. I think there are as many good,
+kind, just people among the rich as there are among the poor, and that
+they are as generous and helpful. But Lindau has got hold of one of those
+partial truths that hurt worse than the whole truth, and--"
+
+"Partial truth!" the young man interrupted. "Didn't the Saviour himself
+say, 'How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of
+God?'"
+
+"Why, bless my soul!" cried March. "Do you agree with Lindau?"
+
+"I agree with the Lord Jesus Christ," said the young man, solemnly, and a
+strange light of fanaticism, of exaltation, came into his wide blue eyes.
+"And I believe He meant the kingdom of heaven upon this earth, as well as
+in the skies."
+
+March threw himself back in his chair and looked at him with a kind of
+stupefaction, in which his eye wandered to the doorway, where he saw
+Fulkerson standing, it seemed to him a long time, before he heard him
+saying: "Hello, hello! What's the row? Conrad pitching into you on old
+Lindau's account, too?"
+
+The young man turned, and, after a glance at Fulkerson's light, smiling
+face, went out, as if in his present mood he could not bear the contact
+of that persiflant spirit.
+
+March felt himself getting provisionally very angry again. "Excuse me,
+Fulkerson, but did you know when you went out what Mr. Dryfoos wanted to
+see me for?"
+
+"Well, no, I didn't exactly," said Fulkerson, taking his usual seat on a
+chair and looking over the back of it at March. "I saw he was on his car
+about something, and I thought I'd better not monkey with him much. I
+supposed he was going to bring you to book about old Lindau, somehow."
+Fulkerson broke into a laugh.
+
+March remained serious. "Mr. Dryfoos," he said, willing to let the simple
+statement have its own weight with Fulkerson, and nothing more, "came in
+here and ordered me to discharge Lindau from his employment on the
+magazine--to turn him off, as he put it."
+
+"Did he?" asked Fulkerson, with unbroken cheerfulness. "The old man is
+business, every time. Well, I suppose you can easily get somebody else to
+do Lindau's work for you. This town is just running over with
+half-starved linguists. What did you say?"
+
+"What did I say?" March echoed. "Look here, Fulkerson; you may regard
+this as a joke, but I don't. I'm not used to being spoken to as if I were
+the foreman of a shop, and told to discharge a sensitive and cultivated
+man like Lindau, as if he were a drunken mechanic; and if that's your
+idea of me--"
+
+"Oh, hello, now, March! You mustn't mind the old man's way. He don't mean
+anything by it--he don't know any better, if you come to that."
+
+"Then I know better," said March. "I refused to receive any instructions
+from Mr. Dryfoos, whom I don't know in my relations with 'Every Other
+Week,' and I referred him to you."
+
+"You did?" Fulkerson whistled. "He owns the thing!"
+
+"I don't care who owns the thing," said March. "My negotiations were with
+you alone from the beginning, and I leave this matter with you. What do
+you wish done about Lindau?"
+
+"Oh, better let the old fool drop," said Fulkerson. "He'll light on his
+feet somehow, and it will save a lot of rumpus."
+
+"And if I decline to let him drop?"
+
+"Oh, come, now, March; don't do that," Fulkerson began.
+
+"If I decline to let him drop," March repeated, "what will you do?"
+
+"I'll be dogged if I know what I'll do," said Fulkerson. "I hope you
+won't take that stand. If the old man went so far as to speak to you
+about it, his mind is made up, and we might as well knock under first as
+last."
+
+"And do you mean to say that you would not stand by me in what I
+considered my duty--in a matter of principle?"
+
+"Why, of course, March," said Fulkerson, coaxingly, "I mean to do the
+right thing. But Dryfoos owns the magazine--"
+
+"He doesn't own me," said March, rising. "He has made the little mistake
+of speaking to me as if he did; and when"--March put on his hat and took
+his overcoat down from its nail--"when you bring me his apologies, or
+come to say that, having failed to make him understand they were
+necessary, you are prepared to stand by me, I will come back to this
+desk. Otherwise my resignation is at your service."
+
+He started toward the door, and Fulkerson intercepted him. "Ah, now, look
+here, March! Don't do that! Hang it all, don't you see where it leaves
+me? Now, you just sit down a minute and talk it over. I can make you
+see--I can show you--Why, confound the old Dutch beer-buzzer! Twenty of
+him wouldn't be worth the trouble he's makin'. Let him go, and the old
+man 'll come round in time."
+
+"I don't think we've understood each other exactly, Mr. Fulkerson," said
+March, very haughtily. "Perhaps we never can; but I'll leave you to think
+it out."
+
+He pushed on, and Fulkerson stood aside to let him pass, with a dazed
+look and a mechanical movement. There was something comic in his rueful
+bewilderment to March, who was tempted to smile, but he said to himself
+that he had as much reason to be unhappy as Fulkerson, and he did not
+smile. His indignation kept him hot in his purpose to suffer any
+consequence rather than submit to the dictation of a man like Dryfoos; he
+felt keenly the degradation of his connection with him, and all his
+resentment of Fulkerson's original uncandor returned; at the same time
+his heart ached with foreboding. It was not merely the work in which he
+had constantly grown happier that he saw taken from him; but he felt the
+misery of the man who stakes the security and plenty and peace of home
+upon some cast, and knows that losing will sweep from him most that most
+men find sweet and pleasant in life. He faced the fact, which no good man
+can front without terror, that he was risking the support of his family,
+and for a point of pride, of honor, which perhaps he had no right to
+consider in view of the possible adversity. He realized, as every
+hireling must, no matter how skillfully or gracefully the tie is
+contrived for his wearing, that he belongs to another, whose will is his
+law. His indignation was shot with abject impulses to go back and tell
+Fulkerson that it was all right, and that he gave up. To end the anguish
+of his struggle he quickened his steps, so that he found he was reaching
+home almost at a run.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+He must have made more clatter than he supposed with his key at the
+apartment door, for his wife had come to let him in when he flung it
+open. "Why, Basil," she said, "what's brought you back? Are you sick?
+You're all pale. Well, no wonder! This is the last of Mr. Fulkerson's
+dinners you shall go to. You're not strong enough for it, and your
+stomach will be all out of order for a week. How hot you are! and in a
+drip of perspiration! Now you'll be sick." She took his hat away, which
+hung dangling in his hand, and pushed him into a chair with tender
+impatience. "What is the matter? Has anything happened?"
+
+"Everything has happened," he said, getting his voice after one or two
+husky endeavors for it; and then he poured out a confused and huddled
+statement of the case, from which she only got at the situation by
+prolonged cross-questioning.
+
+At the end she said, "I knew Lindau would get you into trouble."
+
+This cut March to the heart. "Isabel!" he cried, reproachfully.
+
+"Oh, I know," she retorted, and the tears began to come. "I don't wonder
+you didn't want to say much to me about that dinner at breakfast. I
+noticed it; but I thought you were just dull, and so I didn't insist. I
+wish I had, now. If you had told me what Lindau had said, I should have
+known what would have come of it, and I could have advised you--"
+
+"Would you have advised me," March demanded, curiously, "to submit to
+bullying like that, and meekly consent to commit an act of cruelty
+against a man who had once been such a friend to me?"
+
+"It was an unlucky day when you met him. I suppose we shall have to go.
+And just when we had got used to New York, and begun to like it. I don't
+know where we shall go now; Boston isn't like home any more; and we
+couldn't live on two thousand there; I should be ashamed to try. I'm sure
+I don't know where we can live on it. I suppose in some country village,
+where there are no schools, or anything for the children. I don't know
+what they'll say when we tell them, poor things."
+
+Every word was a stab in March's heart, so weakly tender to his own; his
+wife's tears, after so much experience of the comparative lightness of
+the griefs that weep themselves out in women, always seemed wrung from
+his own soul; if his children suffered in the least through him, he felt
+like a murderer. It was far worse than he could have imagined, the way
+his wife took the affair, though he had imagined certain words, or
+perhaps only looks, from her that were bad enough. He had allowed for
+trouble, but trouble on his account: a svmpathy that might burden and
+embarrass him; but he had not dreamed of this merely domestic, this
+petty, this sordid view of their potential calamity, which left him
+wholly out of the question, and embraced only what was most crushing and
+desolating in the prospect. He could not bear it. He caught up his hat
+again, and, with some hope that his wife would try to keep him, rushed
+out of the house. He wandered aimlessly about, thinking the same
+exhausting thoughts over and over, till he found himself horribly hungry;
+then he went into a restaurant for his lunch, and when he paid he tried
+to imagine how he should feel if that were really his last dollar.
+
+He went home toward the middle of the afternoon, basely hoping that
+Fulkerson had sent him some conciliatory message, or perhaps was waiting
+there for him to talk it over; March was quite willing to talk it over
+now. But it was his wife who again met him at the door, though it seemed
+another woman than the one he had left weeping in the morning.
+
+"I told the children," she said, in smiling explanation of his absence
+from lunch, "that perhaps you were detained by business. I didn't know
+but you had gone back to the office."
+
+"Did you think I would go back there, Isabel?" asked March, with a
+haggard look. "Well, if you say so, I will go back, and do what Dryfoos
+ordered me to do. I'm sufficiently cowed between him and you, I can
+assure you."
+
+"Nonsense," she said. "I approve of everything you did. But sit down,
+now, and don't keep walking that way, and let me see if I understand it
+perfectly. Of course, I had to have my say out."
+
+She made him go all over his talk with Dryfoos again, and report his own
+language precisely. From time to time, as she got his points, she said,
+"That was splendid," "Good enough for him!" and "Oh, I'm so glad you said
+that to him!" At the end she said:
+
+"Well, now, let's look at it from his point of view. Let's be perfectly
+just to him before we take another step forward."
+
+"Or backward," March suggested, ruefully. "The case is simply this: he
+owns the magazine."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"And he has a right to expect that I will consider his pecuniary
+interests--"
+
+"Oh, those detestable pecuniary interests! Don't you wish there wasn't
+any money in the world?"
+
+"Yes; or else that there was a great deal more of it. And I was perfectly
+willing to do that. I have always kept that in mind as one of my duties
+to him, ever since I understood what his relation to the magazine was."
+
+"Yes, I can bear witness to that in any court of justice. You've done it
+a great deal more than I could, Basil. And it was just the same way with
+those horrible insurance people."
+
+"I know," March went on, trying to be proof against her flatteries, or at
+least to look as if he did not deserve praise; "I know that what Lindau
+said was offensive to him, and I can understand how he felt that he had a
+right to punish it. All I say is that he had no right to punish it
+through me."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, askingly.
+
+"If it had been a question of making 'Every Other Week' the vehicle of
+Lindau's peculiar opinions--though they're not so very peculiar; he might
+have got the most of them out of Ruskin--I shouldn't have had any ground
+to stand on, or at least then I should have had to ask myself whether his
+opinions would be injurious to the magazine or not."
+
+"I don't see," Mrs. March interpolated, "how they could hurt it much
+worse than Colonel Woodburn's article crying up slavery."
+
+"Well," said March, impartially, "we could print a dozen articles
+praising the slavery it's impossible to have back, and it wouldn't hurt
+us. But if we printed one paper against the slavery which Lindau claims
+still exists, some people would call us bad names, and the counting-room
+would begin to feel it. But that isn't the point. Lindau's connection
+with 'Every Other Week' is almost purely mechanical; he's merely a
+translator of such stories and sketches as he first submits to me, and it
+isn't at all a question of his opinions hurting us, but of my becoming an
+agent to punish him for his opinions. That is what I wouldn't do; that's
+what I never will do."
+
+"If you did," said his wife, "I should perfectly despise you. I didn't
+understand how it was before. I thought you were just holding out against
+Dryfoos because he took a dictatorial tone with you, and because you
+wouldn't recognize his authority. But now I'm with you, Basil, every
+time, as that horrid little Fulkerson says. But who would ever have
+supposed he would be so base as to side against you?"
+
+"I don't know," said March, thoughtfully, "that we had a right to expect
+anything else. Fulkerson's standards are low; they're merely business
+standards, and the good that's in him is incidental and something quite
+apart from his morals and methods. He's naturally a generous and
+right-minded creature, but life has taught him to truckle and trick, like
+the rest of us."
+
+"It hasn't taught you that, Basil."
+
+"Don't be so sure. Perhaps it's only that I'm a poor scholar. But I don't
+know, really, that I despise Fulkerson so much for his course this
+morning as for his gross and fulsome flatteries of Dryfoos last night. I
+could hardly stomach it."
+
+His wife made him tell her what they were, and then she said, "Yes, that
+was loathsome; I couldn't have believed it of Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Perhaps he only did it to keep the talk going, and to give the old man a
+chance to say something," March leniently suggested. "It was a worse
+effect because he didn't or couldn't follow up Fulkerson's lead."
+
+"It was loathsome, all the same," his wife insisted. "It's the end of Mr.
+Fulkerson, as far as I'm concerned."
+
+"I didn't tell you before," March resumed, after a moment, "of my little
+interview with Conrad Dryfoos after his father left," and now he went on
+to repeat what had passed between him and the young man.
+
+"I suspect that he and his father had been having some words before the
+old man came up to talk with me, and that it was that made him so
+furious."
+
+"Yes, but what a strange position for the son of such a man to take! Do
+you suppose he says such things to his father?"
+
+"I don't know; but I suspect that in his meek way Conrad would say what
+he believed to anybody. I suppose we must regard him as a kind of crank."
+
+"Poor young fellow! He always makes me feel sad, somehow. He has such a
+pathetic face. I don't believe I ever saw him look quite happy, except
+that night at Mrs. Horn's, when he was talking with Miss Vance; and then
+he made me feel sadder than ever."
+
+"I don't envy him the life he leads at home, with those convictions of
+his. I don't see why it wouldn't be as tolerable there for old Lindau
+himself."
+
+"Well, now," said Mrs. March, "let us put them all out of our minds and
+see what we are going to do ourselves."
+
+They began to consider their ways and means, and how and where they
+should live, in view of March's severance of his relations with 'Every
+Other Week.' They had not saved anything from the first year's salary;
+they had only prepared to save; and they had nothing solid but their two
+thousand to count upon. But they built a future in which they easily
+lived on that and on what March earned with his pen. He became a free
+lance, and fought in whatever cause he thought just; he had no ties, no
+chains. They went back to Boston with the heroic will to do what was most
+distasteful; they would have returned to their own house if they had not
+rented it again; but, any rate, Mrs. March helped out by taking boarders,
+or perhaps only letting rooms to lodgers. They had some hard struggles,
+but they succeeded.
+
+"The great thing," she said, "is to be right. I'm ten times as happy as
+if you had come home and told me that you had consented to do what
+Dryfoos asked and he had doubled your salary."
+
+"I don't think that would have happened in any event," said March, dryly.
+
+"Well, no matter. I just used it for an example."
+
+They both experienced a buoyant relief, such as seems to come to people
+who begin life anew on whatever terms. "I hope we are young enough yet,
+Basil," she said, and she would not have it when he said they had once
+been younger.
+
+They heard the children's knock on the door; they knocked when they came
+home from school so that their mother might let them in. "Shall we tell
+them at once?" she asked, and ran to open for them before March could
+answer.
+
+They were not alone. Fulkerson, smiling from ear to ear, was with them.
+"Is March in?" he asked.
+
+"Mr. March is at home, yes," she said very haughtily. "He's in his
+study," and she led the way there, while the children went to their
+rooms.
+
+"Well, March," Fulkerson called out at sight of him, "it's all right! The
+old man has come down."
+
+"I suppose if you gentlemen are going to talk business--" Mrs. March
+began.
+
+"Oh, we don't want you to go away," said Fulkerson. "I reckon March has
+told you, anyway."
+
+"Yes, I've told her," said March. "Don't go, Isabel. What do you mean,
+Fulkerson?"
+
+"He's just gone on up home, and he sent me round with his apologies. He
+sees now that he had no business to speak to you as he did, and he
+withdraws everything. He'd 'a' come round himself if I'd said so, but I
+told him I could make it all right."
+
+Fulkerson looked so happy in having the whole affair put right, and the
+Marches knew him to be so kindly affected toward them, that they could
+not refuse for the moment to share his mood. They felt themselves
+slipping down from the moral height which they had gained, and March made
+a clutch to stay himself with the question, "And Lindau?"
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, "he's going to leave Lindau to me. You won't have
+anything to do with it. I'll let the old fellow down easy."
+
+"Do you mean," asked March, "that Mr. Dryfoos insists on his being
+dismissed?"
+
+"Why, there isn't any dismissing about it," Fulkerson argued. "If you
+don't send him any more work, he won't do any more, that's all. Or if he
+comes round, you can--He's to be referred to me."
+
+March shook his head, and his wife, with a sigh, felt herself plucked up
+from the soft circumstance of their lives, which she had sunk back into
+so quickly, and set beside him on that cold peak of principle again. "It
+won't do, Fulkerson. It's very good of you, and all that, but it comes to
+the same thing in the end. I could have gone on without any apology from
+Mr. Dryfoos; he transcended his authority, but that's a minor matter. I
+could have excused it to his ignorance of life among gentlemen; but I
+can't consent to Lindau's dismissal--it comes to that, whether you do it
+or I do it, and whether it's a positive or a negative thing--because he
+holds this opinion or that."
+
+"But don't you see," said Fulkerson, "that it's just Lindau's opinions
+the old man can't stand? He hasn't got anything against him personally. I
+don't suppose there's anybody that appreciates Lindau in some ways more
+than the old man does."
+
+"I understand. He wants to punish him for his opinions. Well, I can't
+consent to that, directly or indirectly. We don't print his opinions, and
+he has a perfect right to hold them, whether Mr. Dryfoos agrees with them
+or not."
+
+Mrs. March had judged it decorous for her to say nothing, but she now
+went and sat down in the chair next her husband.
+
+"Ah, dog on it!" cried Fulkerson, rumpling his hair with both his hands.
+"What am I to do? The old man says he's got to go."
+
+"And I don't consent to his going," said March.
+
+"And you won't stay if he goes."
+
+Fulkerson rose. "Well, well! I've got to see about it. I'm afraid the old
+man won't stand it, March; I am, indeed. I wish you'd reconsider. I--I'd
+take it as a personal favor if you would. It leaves me in a fix. You see
+I've got to side with one or the other."
+
+March made no reply to this, except to say, "Yes, you must stand by him,
+or you must stand by me."
+
+"Well, well! Hold on awhile! I'll see you in the morning. Don't take any
+steps--"
+
+"Oh, there are no steps to take," said March, with a melancholy smile.
+"The steps are stopped; that's all." He sank back into his chair when
+Fulkerson was gone and drew a long breath. "This is pretty rough. I
+thought we had got through it."
+
+"No," said his wife. "It seems as if I had to make the fight all over
+again."
+
+"Well, it's a good thing it's a holy war."
+
+"I can't bear the suspense. Why didn't you tell him outright you wouldn't
+go back on any terms?"
+
+"I might as well, and got the glory. He'll never move Dryfoos. I suppose
+we both would like to go back, if we could."
+
+"Oh, I suppose so."
+
+They could not regain their lost exaltation, their lost dignity. At
+dinner Mrs. March asked the children how they would like to go back to
+Boston to live.
+
+"Why, we're not going, are we?" asked Tom, without enthusiasm.
+
+"I was just wondering how you felt about it, now," she said, with an
+underlook at her husband.
+
+"Well, if we go back," said Bella, "I want to live on the Back Bay. It's
+awfully Micky at the South End."
+
+"I suppose I should go to Harvard," said Tom, "and I'd room out at
+Cambridge. It would be easier to get at you on the Back Bay."
+
+The parents smiled ruefully at each other, and, in view of these grand
+expectations of his children, March resolved to go as far as he could in
+meeting Dryfoos's wishes. He proposed the theatre as a distraction from
+the anxieties that he knew were pressing equally on his wife. "We might
+go to the 'Old Homestead,'" he suggested, with a sad irony, which only
+his wife felt.
+
+"Oh yes, let's!" cried Bella.
+
+While they were getting ready, someone rang, and Bella went to the door,
+and then came to tell her father that it was Mr. Lindau. "He says he
+wants to see you just a moment. He's in the parlor, and he won't sit
+down, or anything."
+
+"What can he want?" groaned Mrs. March, from their common dismay.
+
+March apprehended a storm in the old man's face. But he only stood in the
+middle of the room, looking very sad and grave. "You are Going oudt," he
+said. "I won't geep you long. I haf gome to pring pack dose macassines
+and dis mawney. I can't do any more voark for you; and I can't geep the
+mawney you haf baid me a'ready. It iss not hawnest mawney--that hass been
+oarned py voark; it iss mawney that hass peen mate py sbeculation, and
+the obbression off lapor, and the necessity of the boor, py a man--Here
+it is, efery tollar, efery zent. Dake it; I feel as if dere vas ploodt on
+it."
+
+"Why, Lindau," March began, but the old man interrupted him.
+
+"Ton't dalk to me, Passil! I could not haf believedt it of you. When you
+know how I feel about dose tings, why tidn't you dell me whose mawney you
+bay oudt to me? Ach, I ton't plame you--I ton't rebroach you. You haf
+nefer thought of it; boat I have thought, and I should be Guilty, I must
+share that man's Guilt, if I gept hiss mawney. If you hat toldt me at the
+peginning--if you hat peen frank with me boat it iss all righdt; you can
+go on; you ton't see dese tings as I see them; and you haf cot a family,
+and I am a free man. I voark to myself, and when I ton't voark, I sdarfe
+to myself. But I geep my handts glean, voark or sdarfe. Gif him hiss
+mawney pack! I am sawry for him; I would not hoart hiss feelings, boat I
+could not pear to douch him, and hiss mawney iss like boison!"
+
+March tried to reason with Lindau, to show him the folly, the injustice,
+the absurdity of his course; it ended in their both getting angry, and in
+Lindau's going away in a whirl of German that included Basil in the guilt
+of the man whom Lindau called his master.
+
+"Well," said Mrs. March. "He is a crank, and I think you're well rid of
+him. Now you have no quarrel with that horrid old Dryfoos, and you can
+keep right on."
+
+"Yes," said March, "I wish it didn't make me feel so sneaking. What a
+long day it's been! It seems like a century since I got up."
+
+"Yes, a thousand years. Is there anything else left to happen?"
+
+"I hope not. I'd like to go to bed."
+
+"Why, aren't you going to the theatre?" wailed Bella, coming in upon her
+father's desperate expression.
+
+"The theatre? Oh yes, certainly! I meant after we got home," and March
+amused himself at the puzzled countenance of the child. "Come on! Is Tom
+ready?"
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Fulkerson parted with the Marches in such trouble of mind that he did not
+feel able to meet that night the people whom he usually kept so gay at
+Mrs. Leighton's table. He went to Maroni's for his dinner, for this
+reason and for others more obscure. He could not expect to do anything
+more with Dryfoos at once; he knew that Dryfoos must feel that he had
+already made an extreme concession to March, and he believed that if he
+was to get anything more from him it must be after Dryfoos had dined. But
+he was not without the hope, vague and indefinite as it might be, that he
+should find Lindau at Maroni's, and perhaps should get some concession
+from him, some word of regret or apology which he could report to
+Dryfoos, and at lest make the means of reopening the affair with him;
+perhaps Lindau, when he knew how matters stood, would back down
+altogether, and for March's sake would withdraw from all connection with
+'Every Other Week' himself, and so leave everything serene. Fulkerson
+felt capable, in his desperation, of delicately suggesting such a course
+to Lindau, or even of plainly advising it: he did not care for Lindau a
+great deal, and he did care a great deal for the magazine.
+
+But he did not find Lindau at Maroni's; he only found Beaton. He sat
+looking at the doorway as Fulkerson entered, and Fulkerson naturally came
+and took a place at his table. Something in Beaton's large-eyed solemnity
+of aspect invited Fulkerson to confidence, and he said, as he pulled his
+napkin open and strung it, still a little damp (as the scanty,
+often-washed linen at Maroni's was apt to be), across his knees, "I was
+looking for you this morning, to talk with you about the Christmas
+number, and I was a good deal worked up because I couldn't find you; but
+I guess I might as well have spared myself my emotions."
+
+"Why?" asked Beaton, briefly.
+
+"Well, I don't know as there's going to be any Christmas number."
+
+"Why?" Beaton asked again.
+
+"Row between the financial angel and the literary editor about the chief
+translator and polyglot smeller."
+
+"Lindau?"
+
+"Lindau is his name."
+
+"What does the literary editor expect after Lindau's expression of his
+views last night?"
+
+"I don't know what he expected, but the ground he took with the old man
+was that, as Lindau's opinions didn't characterize his work on the
+magazine, he would not be made the instrument of punishing him for them
+the old man wanted him turned off, as he calls it."
+
+"Seems to be pretty good ground," said Beaton, impartially, while he
+speculated, with a dull trouble at heart, on the effect the row would
+have on his own fortunes. His late visit home had made him feel that the
+claim of his family upon him for some repayment of help given could not
+be much longer delayed; with his mother sick and his father growing old,
+he must begin to do something for them, but up to this time he had spent
+his salary even faster than he had earned it. When Fulkerson came in he
+was wondering whether he could get him to increase it, if he threatened
+to give up his work, and he wished that he was enough in love with
+Margaret Vance, or even Christine Dryfoos, to marry her, only to end in
+the sorrowful conviction that he was really in love with Alma Leighton,
+who had no money, and who had apparently no wish to be married for love,
+even. "And what are you going to do about it?" he asked, listlessly.
+
+"Be dogged if I know what I'm going to do about it," said Fulkerson.
+"I've been round all day, trying to pick up the pieces--row began right
+after breakfast this morning--and one time I thought I'd got the thing
+all put together again. I got the old man to say that he had spoken to
+March a little too authoritatively about Lindau; that, in fact, he ought
+to have communicated his wishes through me; and that he was willing to
+have me get rid of Lindau, and March needn't have anything to do with it.
+I thought that was pretty white, but March says the apologies and regrets
+are all well enough in their way, but they leave the main question where
+they found it."
+
+"What is the main question?" Beaton asked, pouring himself out some
+Chianti. As he set the flask down he made the reflection that if he would
+drink water instead of Chianti he could send his father three dollars a
+week, on his back debts, and he resolved to do it.
+
+"The main question, as March looks at it, is the question of punishing
+Lindau for his private opinions; he says that if he consents to my
+bouncing the old fellow it's the same as if he bounced him."
+
+"It might have that complexion in some lights," said Beaton. He drank off
+his Chianti, and thought he would have it twice a week, or make Maroni
+keep the half-bottles over for him, and send his father two dollars. "And
+what are you going to do now?"
+
+"That's what I don't know," said Fulkerson, ruefully. After a moment he
+said, desperately, "Beaton, you've got a pretty good head; why don't you
+suggest something?"
+
+"Why don't you let March go?" Beaton suggested.
+
+"Ah, I couldn't," said Fulkerson. "I got him to break up in Boston and
+come here; I like him; nobody else could get the hang of the thing like
+he has; he's--a friend." Fulkerson said this with the nearest approach he
+could make to seriousness, which was a kind of unhappiness.
+
+Beaton shrugged. "Oh, if you can afford to have ideals, I congratulate
+you. They're too expensive for me. Then, suppose you get rid of Dryfoos?"
+
+Fulkerson laughed forlornly. "Go on, Bildad. Like to sprinkle a few ashes
+over my boils? Don't mind me!"
+
+They both sat silent a little while, and then Beaton said, "I suppose you
+haven't seen Dryfoos the second time?"
+
+"No. I came in here to gird up my loins with a little dinner before I
+tackled him. But something seems to be the matter with Maroni's cook. I
+don't want anything to eat."
+
+"The cooking's about as bad as usual," said Beaton. After a moment he
+added, ironically, for he found Fulkerson's misery a kind of relief from
+his own, and was willing to protract it as long as it was amusing, "Why
+not try an envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary?"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Get that other old fool to go to Dryfoos for you!"
+
+"Which other old fool? The old fools seem to be as thick as flies."
+
+"That Southern one."
+
+"Colonel Woodburn?"
+
+"Mmmmm."
+
+"He did seem to rather take to the colonel!" Fulkerson mused aloud.
+
+"Of course he did. Woodburn, with his idiotic talk about patriarchal
+slavery, is the man on horseback to Dryfoos's muddy imagination. He'd
+listen to him abjectly, and he'd do whatever Woodburn told him to do."
+Beaton smiled cynically.
+
+Fulkerson got up and reached for his coat and hat. "You've struck it, old
+man." The waiter came up to help him on with his coat; Fulkerson slipped
+a dollar in his hand. "Never mind the coat; you can give the rest of my
+dinner to the poor, Paolo. Beaton, shake! You've saved my life, little
+boy, though I don't think you meant it." He took Beaton's hand and
+solemnly pressed it, and then almost ran out of the door.
+
+They had just reached coffee at Mrs. Leighton's when he arrived and sat
+down with them and began to put some of the life of his new hope into
+them. His appetite revived, and, after protesting that he would not take
+anything but coffee, he went back and ate some of the earlier courses.
+But with the pressure of his purpose driving him forward, he did not
+conceal from Miss Woodburn, at least, that he was eager to get her apart
+from the rest for some reason. When he accomplished this, it seemed as if
+he had contrived it all himself, but perhaps he had not wholly contrived
+it.
+
+"I'm so glad to get a chance to speak to you alone," he said at once; and
+while she waited for the next word he made a pause, and then said,
+desperately, "I want you to help me; and if you can't help me, there's no
+help for me."
+
+"Mah goodness," she said, "is the case so bad as that? What in the woald
+is the trouble?"
+
+"Yes, it's a bad case," said Fulkerson. "I want your father to help me."
+
+"Oh, I thoat you said me!"
+
+"Yes; I want you to help me with your father. I suppose I ought to go to
+him at once, but I'm a little afraid of him."
+
+"And you awe not afraid of me? I don't think that's very flattering, Mr.
+Fulkerson. You ought to think Ah'm twahce as awful as papa."
+
+"Oh, I do! You see, I'm quite paralyzed before you, and so I don't feel
+anything."
+
+"Well, it's a pretty lahvely kyand of paralysis. But--go on."
+
+"I will--I will. If I can only begin."
+
+"Pohaps Ah maght begin fo' you."
+
+"No, you can't. Lord knows, I'd like to let you. Well, it's like this."
+
+Fulkerson made a clutch at his hair, and then, after another hesitation,
+he abruptly laid the whole affair before her. He did not think it
+necessary to state the exact nature of the offence Lindau had given
+Dryfoos, for he doubted if she could grasp it, and he was profuse of his
+excuses for troubling her with the matter, and of wonder at himself for
+having done so. In the rapture of his concern at having perhaps made a
+fool of himself, he forgot why he had told her; but she seemed to like
+having been confided in, and she said, "Well, Ah don't see what you can
+do with you' ahdeals of friendship except stand bah Mr. Mawch."
+
+"My ideals of friendship? What do you mean?"
+
+"Oh, don't you suppose we know? Mr. Beaton said you we' a pofect Bahyard
+in friendship, and you would sacrifice anything to it."
+
+"Is that so?" said Fulkerson, thinking how easily he could sacrifice
+Lindau in this case. He had never supposed before that he was chivalrous
+in such matters, but he now began to see it in that light, and he
+wondered that he could ever have entertained for a moment the idea of
+throwing March over.
+
+"But Ah most say," Miss Woodburn went on, "Ah don't envy you you' next
+interview with Mr. Dryfoos. Ah suppose you'll have to see him at once
+aboat it."
+
+The conjecture recalled Fulkerson to the object of his confidences. "Ah,
+there's where your help comes in. I've exhausted all the influence I have
+with Dryfoos--"
+
+"Good gracious, you don't expect Ah could have any!"
+
+They both laughed at the comic dismay with which she conveyed the
+preposterous notion; and Fulkerson said, "If I judged from myself, I
+should expect you to bring him round instantly."
+
+"Oh, thank you, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, with mock meekness.
+
+"Not at all. But it isn't Dryfoos I want you to help me with; it's your
+father. I want your father to interview Dryfoos for me, and I--I'm afraid
+to ask him."
+
+"Poo' Mr. Fulkerson!" she said, and she insinuated something through her
+burlesque compassion that lifted him to the skies. He swore in his heart
+that the woman never lived who was so witty, so wise, so beautiful, and
+so good. "Come raght with me this minute, if the cyoast's clea'." She
+went to the door of the diningroom and looked in across its gloom to the
+little gallery where her father sat beside a lamp reading his evening
+paper; Mrs. Leighton could be heard in colloquy with the cook below, and
+Alma had gone to her room. She beckoned Fulkerson with the hand
+outstretched behind her, and said, "Go and ask him."
+
+"Alone!" he palpitated.
+
+"Oh, what a cyowahd!" she cried, and went with him. "Ah suppose you'll
+want me to tell him aboat it."
+
+"Well, I wish you'd begin, Miss Woodburn," he said. "The fact is, you
+know, I've been over it so much I'm kind of sick of the thing."
+
+Miss Woodburn advanced and put her hand on her father's shoulder. "Look
+heah, papa! Mr. Fulkerson wants to ask you something, and he wants me to
+do it fo' him."
+
+The colonel looked up through his glasses with the sort of ferocity
+elderly men sometimes have to put on in order to keep their glasses from
+falling off. His daughter continued: "He's got into an awful difficulty
+with his edito' and his proprieto', and he wants you to pacify them."
+
+"I do not know whethah I understand the case exactly," said the colonel,
+"but Mr. Fulkerson may command me to the extent of my ability."
+
+"You don't understand it aftah what Ah've said?" cried the girl. "Then Ah
+don't see but what you'll have to explain it you'self, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, Miss Woodburn has been so luminous about it, colonel," said
+Fulkerson, glad of the joking shape she had given the affair, "that I can
+only throw in a little side-light here and there."
+
+The colonel listened as Fulkerson went on, with a grave diplomatic
+satisfaction. He felt gratified, honored, even, he said, by Mr.
+Fulkerson's appeal to him; and probably it gave him something of the high
+joy that an affair of honor would have brought him in the days when he
+had arranged for meetings between gentlemen. Next to bearing a challenge,
+this work of composing a difficulty must have been grateful. But he gave
+no outward sign of his satisfaction in making a resume of the case so as
+to get the points clearly in his mind.
+
+"I was afraid, sir," he said, with the state due to the serious nature of
+the facts, "that Mr. Lindau had given Mr. Dryfoos offence by some of his
+questions at the dinner-table last night."
+
+"Perfect red rag to a bull," Fulkerson put in; and then he wanted to
+withdraw his words at the colonel's look of displeasure.
+
+"I have no reflections to make upon Mr. Landau," Colonel Woodburn
+continued, and Fulkerson felt grateful to him for going on; "I do not
+agree with Mr. Lindau; I totally disagree with him on sociological
+points; but the course of the conversation had invited him to the
+expression of his convictions, and he had a right to express them, so far
+as they had no personal bearing."
+
+"Of course," said Fulkerson, while Miss Woodburn perched on the arm of
+her father's chair.
+
+"At the same time, sir, I think that if Mr. Dryfoos felt a personal
+censure in Mr. Lindau's questions concerning his suppression of the
+strike among his workmen, he had a right to resent it."
+
+"Exactly," Fulkerson assented.
+
+"But it must be evident to you, sir, that a high-spirited gentleman like
+Mr. March--I confess that my feelings are with him very warmly in the
+matter--could not submit to dictation of the nature you describe."
+
+"Yes, I see," said Fulkerson; and, with that strange duplex action of the
+human mind, he wished that it was his hair, and not her father's, that
+Miss Woodburn was poking apart with the corner of her fan.
+
+"Mr. Lindau," the colonel concluded, "was right from his point of view,
+and Mr. Dryfoos was equally right. The position of Mr. March is perfectly
+correct--"
+
+His daughter dropped to her feet from his chair-arm. "Mah goodness! If
+nobody's in the wrong, ho' awe you evah going to get the mattah
+straight?"
+
+"Yes, you see," Fulkerson added, "nobody can give in."
+
+"Pardon me," said the colonel, "the case is one in which all can give
+in."
+
+"I don't know which 'll begin," said Fulkerson.
+
+The colonel rose. "Mr. Lindau must begin, sir. We must begin by seeing
+Mr. Lindau, and securing from him the assurance that in the expression of
+his peculiar views he had no intention of offering any personal offence
+to Mr. Dryfoos. If I have formed a correct estimate of Mr. Lindau, this
+will be perfectly simple."
+
+Fulkerson shook his head. "But it wouldn't help. Dryfoos don't care a rap
+whether Lindau meant any personal offence or not. As far as that is
+concerned, he's got a hide like a hippopotamus. But what he hates is
+Lindau's opinions, and what he says is that no man who holds such
+opinions shall have any work from him. And what March says is that no man
+shall be punished through him for his opinions, he don't care what they
+are."
+
+The colonel stood a moment in silence. "And what do you expect me to do
+under the circumstances?"
+
+"I came to you for advice--I thought you might suggest----?"
+
+"Do you wish me to see Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"Well, that's about the size of it," Fulkerson admitted. "You see,
+colonel," he hastened on, "I know that you have a great deal of influence
+with him; that article of yours is about the only thing he's ever read in
+'Every Other Week,' and he's proud of your acquaintance. Well, you
+know"--and here Fulkerson brought in the figure that struck him so much
+in Beaton's phrase and had been on his tongue ever since--"you're the
+man on horseback to him; and he'd be more apt to do what you say than if
+anybody else said it."
+
+"You are very good, sir," said the colonel, trying to be proof against
+the flattery, "but I am afraid you overrate my influence." Fulkerson let
+him ponder it silently, and his daughter governed her impatience by
+holding her fan against her lips. Whatever the process was in the
+colonel's mind, he said at last: "I see no good reason for declining to
+act for you, Mr. Fulkerson, and I shall be very happy if I can be of
+service to you. But"--he stopped Fulkerson from cutting in with
+precipitate thanks--"I think I have a right, sir, to ask what your course
+will be in the event of failure?"
+
+"Failure?" Fulkerson repeated, in dismay.
+
+"Yes, sir. I will not conceal from you that this mission is one not
+wholly agreeable to my feelings."
+
+"Oh, I understand that, colonel, and I assure you that I appreciate, I--"
+
+"There is no use trying to blink the fact, sir, that there are certain
+aspects of Mr. Dryfoos's character in which he is not a gentleman. We
+have alluded to this fact before, and I need not dwell upon it now: I may
+say, however, that my misgivings were not wholly removed last night."
+
+"No," Fulkerson assented; though in his heart he thought the old man had
+behaved very well.
+
+"What I wish to say now is that I cannot consent to act for you, in this
+matter, merely as an intermediary whose failure would leave the affair in
+state quo."
+
+"I see," said Fulkerson.
+
+"And I should like some intimation, some assurance, as to which party
+your own feelings are with in the difference."
+
+The colonel bent his eyes sharply on Fulkerson; Miss Woodburn let hers
+fall; Fulkerson felt that he was being tested, and he said, to gain time,
+"As between Lindau and Dryfoos?" though he knew this was not the point.
+
+"As between Mr. Dryfoos and Mr. March," said the colonel.
+
+Fulkerson drew a long breath and took his courage in both hands. "There
+can't be any choice for me in such a case. I'm for March, every time."
+
+The colonel seized his hand, and Miss Woodburn said, "If there had been
+any choice fo' you in such a case, I should never have let papa stir a
+step with you."
+
+"Why, in regard to that," said the colonel, with a literal application
+of the idea, "was it your intention that we should both go?"
+
+"Well, I don't know; I suppose it was."
+
+"I think it will be better for me to go alone," said the colonel; and,
+with a color from his experience in affairs of honor, he added: "In these
+matters a principal cannot appear without compromising his dignity. I
+believe I have all the points clearly in mind, and I think I should act
+more freely in meeting Mr. Dryfoos alone."
+
+Fulkerson tried to hide the eagerness with which he met these agreeable
+views. He felt himself exalted in some sort to the level of the colonel's
+sentiments, though it would not be easy to say whether this was through
+the desperation bred of having committed himself to March's side, or
+through the buoyant hope he had that the colonel would succeed in his
+mission.
+
+"I'm not afraid to talk with Dryfoos about it," he said.
+
+"There is no question of courage," said the colonel. "It is a question of
+dignity--of personal dignity."
+
+"Well, don't let that delay you, papa," said his daughter, following him
+to the door, where she found him his hat, and Fulkerson helped him on
+with his overcoat. "Ah shall be jost wald to know ho' it's toned oat."
+
+"Won't you let me go up to the house with you?" Fulkerson began. "I
+needn't go in--"
+
+"I prefer to go alone," said the colonel. "I wish to turn the points over
+in my mind, and I am afraid you would find me rather dull company."
+
+He went out, and Fulkerson returned with Miss Woodburn to the
+drawing-room, where she said the Leightons were. They, were not there,
+but she did not seem disappointed.
+
+"Well, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, "you have got an ahdeal of friendship,
+sure enough."
+
+"Me?" said Fulkerson. "Oh, my Lord! Don't you see I couldn't do anything
+else? And I'm scared half to death, anyway. If the colonel don't bring
+the old man round, I reckon it's all up with me. But he'll fetch him. And
+I'm just prostrated with gratitude to you, Miss Woodburn."
+
+She waved his thanks aside with her fan. "What do you mean by its being
+all up with you?"
+
+"Why, if the old man sticks to his position, and I stick to March, we've
+both got to go overboard together. Dryfoos owns the magazine; he can stop
+it, or he can stop us, which amounts to the same thing, as far as we're
+concerned."
+
+"And then what?" the girl pursued.
+
+"And then, nothing--till we pick ourselves up."
+
+"Do you mean that Mr. Dryfoos will put you both oat of your places?"
+
+"He may."
+
+"And Mr. Mawch takes the risk of that jost fo' a principle?"
+
+"I reckon."
+
+"And you do it jost fo' an ahdeal?"
+
+"It won't do to own it. I must have my little axe to grind, somewhere."
+
+"Well, men awe splendid," sighed the girl. "Ah will say it."
+
+"Oh, they're not so much better than women," said Fulkerson, with a
+nervous jocosity. "I guess March would have backed down if it hadn't been
+for his wife. She was as hot as pepper about it, and you could see that
+she would have sacrificed all her husband's relations sooner than let him
+back down an inch from the stand he had taken. It's pretty easy for a man
+to stick to a principle if he has a woman to stand by him. But when you
+come to play it alone--"
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson," said the girl, solemnly, "Ah will stand bah you in this,
+if all the woald tones against you." The tears came into her eyes, and
+she put out her hand to him.
+
+"You will?" he shouted, in a rapture. "In every way--and always--as long
+as you live? Do you mean it?" He had caught her hand to his breast and
+was grappling it tight there and drawing her to him.
+
+The changing emotions chased one another through her heart and over her
+face: dismay, shame, pride, tenderness. "You don't believe," she said,
+hoarsely, "that Ah meant that?"
+
+"No, but I hope you do mean it; for if you don't, nothing else means
+anything."
+
+There was no space, there was only a point of wavering. "Ah do mean it."
+
+When they lifted their eyes from each other again it was half-past ten.
+"No' you most go," she said.
+
+"But the colonel--our fate?"
+
+"The co'nel is often oat late, and Ah'm not afraid of ouah fate, no' that
+we've taken it into ouah own hands." She looked at him with dewy eyes of
+trust, of inspiration.
+
+"Oh, it's going to come out all right," he said. "It can't come out wrong
+now, no matter what happens. But who'd have thought it, when I came into
+this house, in such a state of sin and misery, half an hour ago--"
+
+"Three houahs and a half ago!" she said. "No! you most jost go. Ah'm
+tahed to death. Good-night. You can come in the mawning to see--papa." She
+opened the door and pushed him out with enrapturing violence, and he ran
+laughing down the steps into her father's arms.
+
+"Why, colonel! I was just going up to meet you." He had really thought he
+would walk off his exultation in that direction.
+
+"I am very sorry to say, Mr. Fulkerson," the colonel began, gravely,
+"that Mr. Dryfoos adheres to his position."
+
+"Oh, all right," said Fulkerson, with unabated joy. "It's what I
+expected. Well, my course is clear; I shall stand by March, and I guess
+the world won't come to an end if he bounces us both. But I'm
+everlastingly obliged to you, Colonel Woodburn, and I don't know what to
+say to you. I--I won't detain you now; it's so late. I'll see you in the
+morning. Good-ni--"
+
+Fulkerson did not realize that it takes two to part. The colonel laid
+hold of his arm and turned away with him. "I will walk toward your place
+with you. I can understand why you should be anxious to know the
+particulars of my interview with Mr. Dryfoos"; and in the statement which
+followed he did not spare him the smallest. It outlasted their walk and
+detained them long on the steps of the 'Every Other Week' building. But
+at the end Fulkerson let himself in with his key as light of heart as if
+he had been listening to the gayest promises that fortune could make.
+
+By the time he met March at the office next morning, a little, but only a
+very little, misgiving saddened his golden heaven. He took March's hand
+with high courage, and said, "Well, the old man sticks to his point,
+March." He added, with the sense of saying it before Miss Woodburn: "And
+I stick by you. I've thought it all over, and I'd rather be right with
+you than wrong with him."
+
+"Well, I appreciate your motive, Fulkerson," said March. "But
+perhaps--perhaps we can save over our heroics for another occasion.
+Lindau seems to have got in with his, for the present."
+
+He told him of Lindau's last visit, and they stood a moment looking at
+each other rather queerly. Fulkerson was the first to recover his
+spirits. "Well," he said, cheerily, "that let's us out."
+
+"Does it? I'm not sure it lets me out," said March; but he said this in
+tribute to his crippled self-respect rather than as a forecast of any
+action in the matter.
+
+"Why, what are you going to do?" Fulkerson asked. "If Lindau won't work
+for Dryfoos, you can't make him."
+
+March sighed. "What are you going to do with this money?" He glanced at
+the heap of bills he had flung on the table between them.
+
+Fulkerson scratched his head. "Ah, dogged if I know: Can't we give it to
+the deserving poor, somehow, if we can find 'em?"
+
+"I suppose we've no right to use it in any way.  You must give it to
+Dryfoos."
+
+"To the deserving rich? Well, you can always find them. I reckon you
+don't want to appear in the transaction! I don't, either; but I guess I
+must." Fulkerson gathered up the money and carried it to Conrad. He
+directed him to account for it in his books as conscience-money, and he
+enjoyed the joke more than Conrad seemed to do when he was told where it
+came from.
+
+Fulkerson was able to wear off the disagreeable impression the affair
+left during the course of the fore-noon, and he met Miss Woodburn with
+all a lover's buoyancy when he went to lunch. She was as happy as he when
+he told her how fortunately the whole thing had ended, and he took her
+view that it was a reward of his courage in having dared the worst. They
+both felt, as the newly plighted always do, that they were in the best
+relations with the beneficent powers, and that their felicity had been
+especially looked to in the disposition of events. They were in a glow of
+rapturous content with themselves and radiant worship of each other; she
+was sure that he merited the bright future opening to them both, as much
+as if he owed it directly to some noble action of his own; he felt that
+he was indebted for the favor of Heaven entirely to the still incredible
+accident of her preference of him over other men.
+
+Colonel Woodburn, who was not yet in the secret of their love, perhaps
+failed for this reason to share their satisfaction with a result so
+unexpectedly brought about. The blessing on their hopes seemed to his
+ignorance to involve certain sacrifices of personal feeling at which he
+hinted in suggesting that Dryfoos should now be asked to make some
+abstract concessions and acknowledgments; his daughter hastened to deny
+that these were at all necessary; and Fulkerson easily explained why. The
+thing was over; what was the use of opening it up again?
+
+"Perhaps none," the colonel admitted. But he added, "I should like the
+opportunity of taking Mr. Lindau's hand in the presence of Mr. Dryfoos
+and assuring him that I considered him a man of principle and a man of
+honor--a gentleman, sir, whom I was proud and happy to have known."
+
+"Well, Ah've no doabt," said his daughter, demurely, "that you'll have
+the chance some day; and we would all lahke to join you. But at the same
+tahme, Ah think Mr. Fulkerson is well oat of it fo' the present."
+
+
+PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    Anticipative reprisal
+    Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience
+    Courtship
+    Got their laugh out of too many things in life
+    Had learned not to censure the irretrievable
+    Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance
+    Ignorant of her ignorance
+    It don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time
+    Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs
+    Life has taught him to truckle and trick
+    Man's willingness to abide in the present
+    No longer the gross appetite for novelty
+    No right to burden our friends with our decisions
+    Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues
+    Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find
+
+
+
+
+FIFTH PART
+
+
+I.
+
+Superficially, the affairs of 'Every Other Week' settled into their
+wonted form again, and for Fulkerson they seemed thoroughly reinstated.
+But March had a feeling of impermanency from what had happened, mixed
+with a fantastic sense of shame toward Lindau. He did not sympathize with
+Lindau's opinions; he thought his remedy for existing evils as wildly
+impracticable as Colonel Woodburn's. But while he thought this, and while
+he could justly blame Fulkerson for Lindau's presence at Dryfoos's
+dinner, which his zeal had brought about in spite of March's protests,
+still he could not rid himself of the reproach of uncandor with Lindau.
+He ought to have told him frankly about the ownership of the magazine,
+and what manner of man the man was whose money he was taking. But he said
+that he never could have imagined that he was serious in his preposterous
+attitude in regard to a class of men who embody half the prosperity of
+the country; and he had moments of revolt against his own humiliation
+before Lindau, in which he found it monstrous that he should return
+Dryfoos's money as if it had been the spoil of a robber. His wife agreed
+with him in these moments, and said it was a great relief not to have
+that tiresome old German coming about. They had to account for his
+absence evasively to the children, whom they could not very well tell
+that their father was living on money that Lindau disdained to take, even
+though Lindau was wrong and their father was right. This heightened Mrs.
+March's resentment toward both Lindau and Dryfoos, who between them had
+placed her husband in a false position. If anything, she resented
+Dryfoos's conduct more than Lindau's. He had never spoken to March about
+the affair since Lindau had renounced his work, or added to the
+apologetic messages he had sent by Fulkerson. So far as March knew,
+Dryfoos had been left to suppose that Lindau had simply stopped for some
+reason that did not personally affect him. They never spoke of him, and
+March was too proud to ask either Fulkerson or Conrad whether the old man
+knew that Lindau had returned his money. He avoided talking to Conrad,
+from a feeling that if he did he should involuntarily lead him on to
+speak of his differences with his father. Between himself and Fulkerson,
+even, he was uneasily aware of a want of their old perfect friendliness.
+Fulkerson had finally behaved with honor and courage; but his provisional
+reluctance had given March the measure of Fulkerson's character in one
+direction, and he could not ignore the fact that it was smaller than he
+could have wished.
+
+He could not make out whether Fulkerson shared his discomfort or not. It
+certainly wore away, even with March, as time passed, and with Fulkerson,
+in the bliss of his fortunate love, it was probably far more transient,
+if it existed at all. He advanced into the winter as radiantly as if to
+meet the spring, and he said that if there were any pleasanter month of
+the year than November, it was December, especially when the weather was
+good and wet and muddy most of the time, so that you had to keep indoors
+a long while after you called anywhere.
+
+Colonel Woodburn had the anxiety, in view of his daughter's engagement,
+when she asked his consent to it, that such a dreamer must have in regard
+to any reality that threatens to affect the course of his reveries. He
+had not perhaps taken her marriage into account, except as a remote
+contingency; and certainly Fulkerson was not the kind of son-in-law that
+he had imagined in dealing with that abstraction. But because he had
+nothing of the sort definitely in mind, he could not oppose the selection
+of Fulkerson with success; he really knew nothing against him, and he
+knew, many things in his favor; Fulkerson inspired him with the liking
+that every one felt for him in a measure; he amused him, he cheered him;
+and the colonel had been so much used to leaving action of all kinds to
+his daughter that when he came to close quarters with the question of a
+son-in-law he felt helpless to decide it, and he let her decide it, as if
+it were still to be decided when it was submitted to him. She was
+competent to treat it in all its phases: not merely those of personal
+interest, but those of duty to the broken Southern past, sentimentally
+dear to him, and practically absurd to her. No such South as he
+remembered had ever existed to her knowledge, and no such civilization as
+he imagined would ever exist, to her belief, anywhere. She took the world
+as she found it, and made the best of it. She trusted in Fulkerson; she
+had proved his magnanimity in a serious emergency; and in small things
+she was willing fearlessly to chance it with him. She was not a
+sentimentalist, and there was nothing fantastic in her expectations; she
+was a girl of good sense and right mind, and she liked the immediate
+practicality as well as the final honor of Fulkerson. She did not
+idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him; she did him
+justice, and she would not have believed that she did him more than
+justice if she had sometimes known him to do himself less.
+
+Their engagement was a fact to which the Leighton household adjusted
+itself almost as simply as the lovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the
+ladies at once, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson could keep from
+March very long. He sent word of it to Mrs. March by her husband; and his
+engagement perhaps did more than anything else to confirm the confidence
+in him which had been shaken by his early behavior in the Lindau episode,
+and not wholly restored by his tardy fidelity to March. But now she felt
+that a man who wished to get married so obviously and entirely for love
+was full of all kinds of the best instincts, and only needed the guidance
+of a wife, to become very noble. She interested herself intensely in
+balancing the respective merits of the engaged couple, and after her call
+upon Miss Woodburn in her new character she prided herself upon
+recognizing the worth of some strictly Southern qualities in her, while
+maintaining the general average of New England superiority. She could not
+reconcile herself to the Virginian custom illustrated in her having been
+christened with the surname of Madison; and she said that its pet form of
+Mad, which Fulkerson promptly invented, only made it more ridiculous.
+
+Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton. He was afraid, somehow, of
+Beaton's taking the matter in the cynical way; Miss Woodburn said she
+would break off the engagement if Beaton was left to guess it or find it
+out by accident, and then Fulkerson plucked up his courage. Beaton
+received the news with gravity, and with a sort of melancholy meekness
+that strongly moved Fulkerson's sympathy, and made him wish that Beaton
+was engaged, too.
+
+It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left him behind and forgotten;
+in a manner, it made him feel trifled with. Something of the
+unfriendliness of fate seemed to overcast his resentment, and he allowed
+the sadness of his conviction that he had not the means to marry on to
+tinge his recognition of the fact that Alma Leighton would not have
+wanted him to marry her if he had. He was now often in that martyr mood
+in which he wished to help his father; not only to deny himself Chianti,
+but to forego a fur-lined overcoat which he intended to get for the
+winter, He postponed the moment of actual sacrifice as regarded the
+Chianti, and he bought the overcoat in an anguish of self-reproach. He
+wore it the first evening after he got it in going to call upon the
+Leightons, and it seemed to him a piece of ghastly irony when Alma
+complimented his picturesqueness in it and asked him to let her sketch
+him.
+
+"Oh, you can sketch me," he said, with so much gloom that it made her
+laugh.
+
+"If you think it's so serious, I'd rather not."
+
+"No, no! Go ahead! How do you want me?"
+
+"Oh, fling yourself down on a chair in one of your attitudes of studied
+negligence; and twist one corner of your mustache with affected absence
+of mind."
+
+"And you think I'm always studied, always affected?"
+
+"I didn't say so."
+
+"I didn't ask you what you said."
+
+"And I won't tell you what I think."
+
+"Ah, I know what you think."
+
+"What made you ask, then?" The girl laughed again with the satisfaction
+of her sex in cornering a man.
+
+Beaton made a show of not deigning to reply, and put himself in the pose
+she suggested, frowning.
+
+"Ah, that's it. But a little more animation--
+
+  "'As when a great thought strikes along the brain,
+   And flushes all the cheek.'"
+
+She put her forehead down on the back of her hand and laughed again. "You
+ought to be photographed. You look as if you were sitting for it."
+
+Beaton said: "That's because I know I am being photographed, in one way.
+I don't think you ought to call me affected. I never am so with you; I
+know it wouldn't be of any use."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Beaton, you flatter."
+
+"No, I never flatter you."
+
+"I meant you flattered yourself."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. Imagine."
+
+"I know what you mean. You think I can't be sincere with anybody."
+
+"Oh no, I don't."
+
+"What do you think?"
+
+"That you can't--try." Alma gave another victorious laugh.
+
+Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson would once have both feigned a great interest
+in Alma's sketching Beaton, and made it the subject of talk, in which
+they approached as nearly as possible the real interest of their lives.
+Now they frankly remained away in the dining-room, which was very cozy
+after the dinner had disappeared; the colonel sat with his lamp and paper
+in the gallery beyond; Mrs. Leighton was about her housekeeping affairs,
+in the content she always felt when Alma was with Beaton.
+
+"They seem to be having a pretty good time in there," said Fulkerson,
+detaching himself from his own absolute good time as well as he could.
+
+"At least Alma does," said Miss Woodburn.
+
+"Do you think she cares for him?"
+
+"Quahte as moch as he desoves."
+
+"What makes you all down on Beaton around here? He's not such a bad
+fellow."
+
+"We awe not all doan on him. Mrs. Leighton isn't doan on him."
+
+"Oh, I guess if it was the old lady, there wouldn't be much question
+about it."
+
+They both laughed, and Alma said, "They seem to be greatly amused with
+something in there."
+
+"Me, probably," said Beaton. "I seem to amuse everybody to-night."
+
+"Don't you always?"
+
+"I always amuse you, I'm afraid, Alma."
+
+She looked at him as if she were going to snub him openly for using her
+name; but apparently she decided to do it covertly. "You didn't at first.
+I really used to believe you could be serious, once."
+
+"Couldn't you believe it again? Now?"
+
+"Not when you put on that wind-harp stop."
+
+"Wetmore has been talking to you about me. He would sacrifice his best
+friend to a phrase. He spends his time making them."
+
+"He's made some very pretty ones about you."
+
+"Like the one you just quoted?"
+
+"No, not exactly. He admires you ever so much. He says" She stopped,
+teasingly.
+
+"What?"
+
+"He says you could be almost anything you wished, if you didn't wish to
+be everything."
+
+"That sounds more like the school of Wetmore. That's what you say, Alma.
+Well, if there were something you wished me to be, I could be it."
+
+"We might adapt Kingsley: 'Be good, sweet man, and let who will be
+clever.'" He could not help laughing. She went on: "I always thought that
+was the most patronizing and exasperating thing ever addressed to a human
+girl; and we've had to stand a good deal in our time. I should like to
+have it applied to the other 'sect' a while. As if any girl that was a
+girl would be good if she had the remotest chance of being clever."
+
+"Then you wouldn't wish me to be good?" Beaton asked.
+
+"Not if you were a girl."
+
+"You want to shock me. Well, I suppose I deserve it. But if I were
+one-tenth part as good as you are, Alma, I should have a lighter heart
+than I have now. I know that I'm fickle, but I'm not false, as you think
+I am."
+
+"Who said I thought you were false?"
+
+"No one," said Beaton. "It isn't necessary, when you look it--live it."
+
+"Oh, dear! I didn't know I devoted my whole time to the subject."
+
+"I know I'm despicable. I could tell you something--the history of this
+day, even--that would make you despise me." Beaton had in mind his
+purchase of the overcoat, which Alma was getting in so effectively, with
+the money he ought to have sent his father. "But," he went on, darkly,
+with a sense that what he was that moment suffering for his selfishness
+must somehow be a kind of atonement, which would finally leave him to the
+guiltless enjoyment of the overcoat, "you wouldn't believe the depths of
+baseness I could descend to."
+
+"I would try," said Alma, rapidly shading the collar, "if you'd give me
+some hint."
+
+Beaton had a sudden wish to pour out his remorse to her, but he was
+afraid of her laughing at him. He said to himself that this was a very
+wholesome fear, and that if he could always have her at hand he should
+not make a fool of himself so often. A man conceives of such an office as
+the very noblest for a woman; he worships her for it if he is
+magnanimous. But Beaton was silent, and Alma put back her head for the
+right distance on her sketch. "Mr. Fulkerson thinks you are the sublimest
+of human beings for advising him to get Colonel Woodburn to interview Mr.
+Dryfoos about Lindau. What have you ever done with your Judas?"
+
+"I haven't done anything with it. Nadel thought he would take hold of it
+at one time, but he dropped it again. After all, I don't suppose it could
+be popularized. Fulkerson wanted to offer it as a premium to subscribers
+for 'Every Other Week,' but I sat down on that."
+
+Alma could not feel the absurdity of this, and she merely said, "'Every
+Other Week' seems to be going on just the same as ever."
+
+"Yes, the trouble has all blown over, I believe. Fulkerson," said Beaton,
+with a return to what they were saying, "has managed the whole business
+very well. But he exaggerates the value of my advice."
+
+"Very likely," Alma suggested, vaguely. "Or, no! Excuse me! He couldn't,
+he couldn't!" She laughed delightedly at Beaton's foolish look of
+embarrassment.
+
+He tried to recover his dignity in saying, "He's 'a very good fellow, and
+he deserves his happiness."
+
+"Oh, indeed!" said Alma, perversely. "Does any one deserve happiness?"
+
+"I know I don't," sighed Beaton.
+
+"You mean you don't get it."
+
+"I certainly don't get it."
+
+"Ah, but that isn't the reason."
+
+"What is?"
+
+"That's the secret of the universe," She bit in her lower lip, and looked
+at him with eyes, of gleaming fun.
+
+"Are you never serious?" he asked.
+
+"With serious people always."
+
+"I am serious; and you have the secret of my happiness--" He threw
+himself impulsively forward in his chair.
+
+"Oh, pose, pose!" she cried.
+
+"I won't pose," he answered, "and you have got to listen to me. You know
+I'm in love with you; and I know that once you cared for me. Can't that
+time--won't it--come back again? Try to think so, Alma!"
+
+"No," she said, briefly and seriously enough.
+
+"But that seems impossible. What is it I've done what have you against
+me?"
+
+"Nothing. But that time is past. I couldn't recall it if I wished. Why
+did you bring it up? You've broken your word. You know I wouldn't have
+let you keep coming here if you hadn't promised never to refer to it."
+
+"How could I help it? With that happiness near us--Fulkerson--"
+
+"Oh, it's that? I might have known it!"
+
+"No, it isn't that--it's something far deeper. But if it's nothing you
+have against me, what is it, Alma, that keeps you from caring for me now
+as you did then? I haven't changed."
+
+"But I have. I shall never care for you again, Mr. Beaton; you might as
+well understand it once for all. Don't think it's anything in yourself,
+or that I think you unworthy of me. I'm not so self-satisfied as that; I
+know very well that I'm not a perfect character, and that I've no claim
+on perfection in anybody else. I think women who want that are fools;
+they won't get it, and they don't deserve it. But I've learned a good
+deal more about myself than I knew in St. Barnaby, and a life of work, of
+art, and of art alone that's what I've made up my mind to."
+
+"A woman that's made up her mind to that has no heart to hinder her!"
+
+"Would a man have that had done so?"
+
+"But I don't believe you, Alma. You're merely laughing at me. And,
+besides, with me you needn't give up art. We could work together. You
+know how much I admire your talent. I believe I could help it--serve it;
+I would be its willing slave, and yours, Heaven knows!"
+
+"I don't want any slave--nor any slavery. I want to be free always. Now
+do you see? I don't care for you, and I never could in the old way; but I
+should have to care for some one more than I believe I ever shall to give
+up my work. Shall we go on?" She looked at her sketch.
+
+"No, we shall not go on," he said, gloomily, as he rose.
+
+"I suppose you blame me," she said, rising too.
+
+"Oh no! I blame no one--or only myself. I threw my chance away."
+
+"I'm glad you see that; and I'm glad you did it. You don't believe me, of
+course. Why do men think life can be only the one thing to women? And if
+you come to the selfish view, who are the happy women? I'm sure that if
+work doesn't fail me, health won't, and happiness won't."
+
+"But you could work on with me--"
+
+"Second fiddle. Do you suppose I shouldn't be woman enough to wish my
+work always less and lower than yours? At least I've heart enough for
+that!"
+
+"You've heart enough for anything, Alma. I was a fool to say you hadn't."
+
+"I think the women who keep their hearts have an even chance, at least,
+of having heart--"
+
+"Ah, there's where you're wrong!"
+
+"But mine isn't mine to give you, anyhow. And now I don't want you ever
+to speak to me about this again."
+
+"Oh, there's no danger!" he cried, bitterly. "I shall never willingly see
+you again."
+
+"That's as you like, Mr. Beaton. We've had to be very frank, but I don't
+see why we shouldn't be friends. Still, we needn't, if you don't like."
+
+"And I may come--I may come here--as--as usual?"
+
+"Why, if you can consistently," she said, with a smile, and she held out
+her hand to him.
+
+He went home dazed, and feeling as if it were a bad joke that had been
+put upon him. At least the affair went so deep that it estranged the
+aspect of his familiar studio. Some of the things in it were not very
+familiar; he had spent lately a great deal on rugs, on stuffs, on
+Japanese bric-a-brac. When he saw these things in the shops he had felt
+that he must have them; that they were necessary to him; and he was
+partly in debt for them, still without having sent any of his earnings to
+pay his father. As he looked at them now he liked to fancy something
+weird and conscious in them as the silent witnesses of a broken life. He
+felt about among some of the smaller objects on the mantel for his pipe.
+Before he slept he was aware, in the luxury of his despair, of a remote
+relief, an escape; and, after all, the understanding he had come to with
+Alma was only the explicit formulation of terms long tacit between them.
+Beaton would have been puzzled more than he knew if she had taken him
+seriously. It was inevitable that he should declare himself in love with
+her; but he was not disappointed at her rejection of his love; perhaps
+not so much as he would have been at its acceptance, though he tried to
+think otherwise, and to give himself airs of tragedy. He did not really
+feel that the result was worse than what had gone before, and it left him
+free.
+
+But he did not go to the Leightons again for so long a time that Mrs.
+Leighton asked Alma what had happened. Alma told her.
+
+"And he won't come any more?" her mother sighed, with reserved censure.
+
+"Oh, I think he will. He couldn't very well come the next night. But he
+has the habit of coming, and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything--even
+the habit of thinking he's in love with some one."
+
+"Alma," said her mother, "I don't think it's very nice for a girl to let
+a young man keep coming to see her after she's refused him."
+
+"Why not, if it amuses him and doesn't hurt the girl?"
+
+"But it does hurt her, Alma. It--it's indelicate. It isn't fair to him;
+it gives him hopes."
+
+"Well, mamma, it hasn't happened in the given case yet. If Mr. Beaton
+comes again, I won't see him, and you can forbid him the house."
+
+"If I could only feel sure, Alma," said her mother, taking up another
+branch of the inquiry, "that you really knew your own mind, I should be
+easier about it."
+
+"Then you can rest perfectly quiet, mamma. I do know my own mind; and,
+what's worse, I know Mr. Beaton's mind."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean that he spoke to me the other night simply because Mr.
+Fulkerson's engagement had broken him all up."
+
+"What expressions!" Mrs. Leighton lamented.
+
+"He let it out himself," Alma went on. "And you wouldn't have thought it
+was very flattering yourself. When I'm made love to, after this, I prefer
+to be made love to in an off-year, when there isn't another engaged
+couple anywhere about."
+
+"Did you tell him that, Alma?"
+
+"Tell him that! What do you mean, mamma? I may be indelicate, but I'm not
+quite so indelicate as that."
+
+"I didn't mean you were indelicate, really, Alma, but I wanted to warn
+you. I think Mr. Beaton was very much in earnest."
+
+"Oh, so did he!"
+
+"And you didn't?"
+
+"Oh yes, for the time being. I suppose he's very much in earnest with
+Miss Vance at times, and with Miss Dryfoos at others. Sometimes he's a
+painter, and sometimes he's an architect, and sometimes he's a sculptor.
+He has too many gifts--too many tastes."
+
+"And if Miss Vance and Miss Dryfoos--"
+
+"Oh, do say Sculpture and Architecture, mamma! It's getting so dreadfully
+personal!"
+
+"Alma, you know that I only wish to get at your real feeling in the
+matter."
+
+"And you know that I don't want to let you--especially when I haven't got
+any real feeling in the matter. But I should think--speaking in the
+abstract entirely--that if either of those arts was ever going to be in
+earnest about him, it would want his exclusive devotion for a week at
+least."
+
+"I didn't know," said Mrs. Leighton, "that he was doing anything now at
+the others. I thought he was entirely taken up with his work on 'Every
+Other Week.'"
+
+"Oh, he is! he is!"
+
+"And you certainly can't say, my dear, that he hasn't been very
+kind--very useful to you, in that matter."
+
+"And so I ought to have said yes out of gratitude? Thank you, mamma! I
+didn't know you held me so cheap."
+
+"You know whether I hold you cheap or not, Alma. I don't want you to
+cheapen yourself. I don't want you to trifle with any one. I want you to
+be honest with yourself."
+
+"Well, come now, mamma! Suppose you begin. I've been perfectly honest
+with myself, and I've been honest with Mr. Beaton. I don't care for him,
+and I've told him I didn't; so he may be supposed to know it. If he comes
+here after this, he'll come as a plain, unostentatious friend of the
+family, and it's for you to say whether he shall come in that capacity or
+not. I hope you won't trifle with him, and let him get the notion that
+he's coming on any other basis."
+
+Mrs. Leighton felt the comfort of the critical attitude far too keenly to
+abandon it for anything constructive. She only said, "You know very well,
+Alma, that's a matter I can have nothing to do with."
+
+"Then you leave him entirely to me?"
+
+"I hope you will regard his right to candid and open treatment."
+
+"He's had nothing but the most open and candid treatment from me, mamma.
+It's you that wants to play fast and loose with him. And, to tell you the
+truth, I believe he would like that a good deal better; I believe that,
+if there's anything he hates, it's openness and candor." Alma laughed,
+and put her arms round her mother, who could not help laughing a little,
+too.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela the social opportunity
+which the spring had offered. After the musicale at Mrs. Horn's, they
+both made their party-call, as Mela said, in due season; but they did not
+find Mrs. Horn at home, and neither she nor Miss Vance came to see them
+after people returned to town in the fall. They tried to believe for a
+time that Mrs. Horn had not got their cards; this pretence failed them,
+and they fell back upon their pride, or rather Christine's pride. Mela
+had little but her good-nature to avail her in any exigency, and if Mrs.
+Horn or Miss Vance had come to call after a year of neglect, she would
+have received them as amiably as if they had not lost a day in coming.
+But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they would not have been
+forgiven; and she had planned the words and the behavior with which she
+would have punished them if they had appeared then. Neither sister
+imagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christine was
+suspicious, at least, and it was Mela who invented the hypothesis of the
+lost cards. As nothing happened to prove or to disprove the fact, she
+said, "I move we put Coonrod up to gittun' it out of Miss Vance, at some
+of their meetun's."
+
+"If you do," said Christine, "I'll kill you."
+
+Christine, however, had the visits of Beaton to console her, and, if
+these seemed to have no definite aim, she was willing to rest in the
+pleasure they gave her vanity; but Mela had nothing. Sometimes she even
+wished they were all back on the farm.
+
+"It would be the best thing for both of you," said Mrs. Dryfoos, in
+answer to such a burst of desperation. "I don't think New York is any
+place for girls."
+
+"Well, what I hate, mother," said Mela, "is, it don't seem to be any
+place for young men, either." She found this so good when she had said it
+that she laughed over it till Christine was angry.
+
+"A body would think there had never been any joke before."
+
+"I don't see as it's a joke," said Mrs. Dryfoos. "It's the plain truth."
+
+"Oh, don't mind her, mother," said Mela. "She's put out because her old
+Mr. Beaton ha'r't been round for a couple o' weeks. If you don't watch
+out, that fellow 'll give you the slip yit, Christine, after all your
+pains."
+
+"Well, there ain't anybody to give you the slip, Mela," Christine clawed
+back.
+
+"No; I ha'n't ever set my traps for anybody." This was what Mela said for
+want of a better retort; but it was not quite true. When Kendricks came
+with Beaton to call after her father's dinner, she used all her cunning
+to ensnare him, and she had him to herself as long as Beaton stayed;
+Dryfoos sent down word that he was not very well and had gone to bed. The
+novelty of Mela had worn off for Kendricks, and she found him, as she
+frankly told him, not half as entertaining as he was at Mrs. Horn's; but
+she did her best with him as the only flirtable material which had yet
+come to her hand. It would have been her ideal to have the young men stay
+till past midnight, and her father come down-stairs in his stocking-feet
+and tell them it was time to go. But they made a visit of decorous
+brevity, and Kendricks did not come again. She met him afterward, once,
+as she was crossing the pavement in Union Square to get into her coupe,
+and made the most of him; but it was necessarily very little, and so he
+passed out of her life without having left any trace in her heart, though
+Mela had a heart that she would have put at the disposition of almost any
+young man that wanted it. Kendricks himself, Manhattan cockney as he was,
+with scarcely more outlook into the average American nature than if he
+had been kept a prisoner in New York society all his days, perceived a
+property in her which forbade him as a man of conscience to trifle with
+her; something earthly good and kind, if it was simple and vulgar. In
+revising his impressions of her, it seemed to him that she would come
+even to better literary effect if this were recognized in her; and it
+made her sacred, in spite of her willingness to fool and to be fooled, in
+her merely human quality. After all, he saw that she wished honestly to
+love and to be loved, and the lures she threw out to that end seemed to
+him pathetic rather than ridiculous; he could not join Beaton in laughing
+at her; and he did not like Beaton's laughing at the other girl, either.
+It seemed to Kendricks, with the code of honor which he mostly kept to
+himself because he was a little ashamed to find there were so few others
+like it, that if Beaton cared nothing for the other girl--and Christine
+appeared simply detestable to Kendricks--he had better keep away from
+her, and not give her the impression he was in love with her. He rather
+fancied that this was the part of a gentleman, and he could not have
+penetrated to that aesthetic and moral complexity which formed the
+consciousness of a nature like Beaton's and was chiefly a torment to
+itself; he could not have conceived of the wayward impulses indulged at
+every moment in little things till the straight highway was traversed and
+well-nigh lost under their tangle. To do whatever one likes is finally to
+do nothing that one likes, even though one continues to do what one will;
+but Kendricks, though a sage of twenty-seven, was still too young to
+understand this.
+
+Beaton scarcely understood it himself, perhaps because he was not yet
+twenty-seven. He only knew that his will was somehow sick; that it spent
+itself in caprices, and brought him no happiness from the fulfilment of
+the most vehement wish. But he was aware that his wishes grew less and
+less vehement; he began to have a fear that some time he might have none
+at all. It seemed to him that if he could once do something that was
+thoroughly distasteful to himself, he might make a beginning in the right
+direction; but when he tried this on a small scale, it failed, and it
+seemed stupid. Some sort of expiation was the thing he needed, he was
+sure; but he could not think of anything in particular to expiate; a man
+could not expiate his temperament, and his temperament was what Beaton
+decided to be at fault. He perceived that it went deeper than even fate
+would have gone; he could have fulfilled an evil destiny and had done
+with it, however terrible. His trouble was that he could not escape from
+himself; and, for the most part, he justified himself in refusing to try.
+After he had come to that distinct understanding with Alma Leighton, and
+experienced the relief it really gave him, he thought for a while that if
+it had fallen out otherwise, and she had put him in charge of her
+destiny, he might have been better able to manage his own. But as it was,
+he could only drift, and let all other things take their course. It was
+necessary that he should go to see her afterward, to show her that he was
+equal to the event; but he did not go so often, and he went rather
+oftener to the Dryfooses; it was not easy to see Margaret Vance, except
+on the society terms. With much sneering and scorning, he fulfilled the
+duties to Mrs. Horn without which he knew he should be dropped from her
+list; but one might go to many of her Thursdays without getting many
+words with her niece. Beaton hardly knew whether he wanted many; the girl
+kept the charm of her innocent stylishness; but latterly she wanted to
+talk more about social questions than about the psychical problems that
+young people usually debate so personally. Son of the working-people as
+he was, Beaton had never cared anything about such matters; he did not
+know about them or wish to know; he was perhaps too near them. Besides,
+there was an embarrassment, at least on her part, concerning the
+Dryfooses. She was too high-minded to blame him for having tempted her to
+her failure with them by his talk about them; but she was conscious of
+avoiding them in her talk. She had decided not to renew the effort she
+had made in the spring; because she could not do them good as
+fellow-creatures needing food and warmth and work, and she would not try
+to befriend them socially; she had a horror of any such futile
+sentimentality. She would have liked to account to Beaton in this way for
+a course which she suspected he must have heard their comments upon, but
+she did not quite know how to do it; she could not be sure how much or
+how little he cared for them. Some tentative approaches which she made
+toward explanation were met with such eager disclaim of personal interest
+that she knew less than before what to think; and she turned the talk
+from the sisters to the brother, whom it seemed she still continued to
+meet in their common work among the poor.
+
+"He seems very different," she ventured.
+
+"Oh, quite," said Beaton. "He's the kind of person that you might suppose
+gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life; he's a cloistered
+nature--the nature that atones and suffers for. But he's awfully dull
+company, don't you think? I never can get anything out of him."
+
+"He's very much in earnest."
+
+"Remorselessly. We've got a profane and mundane creature there at the
+office who runs us all, and it's shocking merely to see the contact of
+the tyro natures. When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos--he likes to put
+his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish
+motive, that he has an eye to office, and is working up a political
+interest for himself on the East Side--it's something inexpressible."
+
+"I should think so," said Miss Vance, with such lofty disapproval that
+Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused it.
+He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, "Well, the man of one
+idea is always a little ridiculous."
+
+"When his idea is right?" she demanded. "A right idea can't be
+ridiculous."
+
+"Oh, I only said the man that held it was. He's flat; he has no relief,
+no projection."
+
+She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived that he had silenced her to
+his own disadvantage. It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a
+little too exacting for comfort in her idealism. He put down the cup of
+tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn staccato: "I must go.
+Good-bye!" and got instantly away from her, with an effect he had of
+having suddenly thought of something imperative.
+
+He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment's hail and farewell, and felt
+himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation
+with half a dozen other people. He fancied that at crises of this strange
+interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him, and
+confidential, of all things, about her niece. She ended by not having
+palpably been so. In fact, the concern in her mind would have been
+difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments Mrs.
+Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could somehow be
+interested in lower things than those which occupied her. She had watched
+with growing anxiety the girl's tendency to various kinds of
+self-devotion. She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire
+withdrawal from the world in a life of good works. Before now, girls had
+entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the young
+and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament to be
+influenced by them. During the past summer she had been unhappy at her
+separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their
+stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried her
+aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come.
+Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she
+befriended. Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was
+actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers. This, of course,
+had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society,
+and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing
+it. At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it;
+she was afraid that Margaret's health would give way under the strain,
+and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a
+decline. She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as she
+could employ. At an age when such things weary, she threw herself into
+the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after her;
+and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion her course
+from ball to ball, from reception to reception, from parlor-reading to
+parlor-reading, from musicale to musicale, from play to play, from opera
+to opera. She tasted, after she had practically renounced them, the
+bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionable amusement, in the hope that
+Margaret might find them sweet, and now at the end she had to own to
+herself that she had failed. It was coming Lent again, and the girl had
+only grown thinner and more serious with the diversions that did not
+divert her from the baleful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn felt
+that she was throwing her youth away. Margaret could have borne either
+alone, but together they were wearing her out. She felt it a duty to
+undergo the pleasures her aunt appointed for her, but she could not
+forego the other duties in which she found her only pleasure.
+
+She kept up her music still because she could employ it at the meetings
+for the entertainment, and, as she hoped, the elevation of her
+working-women; but she neglected the other aesthetic interests which once
+occupied her; and, at sight of Beaton talking with her, Mrs. Horn caught
+at the hope that he might somehow be turned to account in reviving
+Margaret's former interest in art. She asked him if Mr. Wetmore had his
+classes that winter as usual; and she said she wished Margaret could be
+induced to go again: Mr. Wetmore always said that she did not draw very
+well, but that she had a great deal of feeling for it, and her work was
+interesting. She asked, were the Leightons in town again; and she
+murmured a regret that she had not been able to see anything of them,
+without explaining why; she said she had a fancy that if Margaret knew
+Miss Leighton, and what she was doing, it might stimulate her, perhaps.
+She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on with her art? Beaton said,
+Oh yes, he believed so.
+
+But his manner did not encourage Mrs. Horn to pursue her aims in that
+direction, and she said, with a sigh, she wished he still had a class;
+she always fancied that Margaret got more good from his instruction than
+from any one else's.
+
+He said that she was very good; but there was really nobody who knew half
+as much as Wetmore, or could make any one understand half as much. Mrs.
+Horn was afraid, she said, that Mr. Wetmore's terrible sincerity
+discouraged Margaret; he would not let her have any illusions about the
+outcome of what she was doing; and did not Mr. Beaton think that some
+illusion was necessary with young people? Of course, it was very nice of
+Mr. Wetmore to be so honest, but it did not always seem to be the wisest
+thing. She begged Mr. Beaton to try to think of some one who would be a
+little less severe. Her tone assumed a deeper interest in the people who
+were coming up and going away, and Beaton perceived that he was
+dismissed.
+
+He went away with vanity flattered by the sense of having been appealed
+to concerning Margaret, and then he began to chafe at what she had said
+of Wetmore's honesty, apropos of her wish that he still had a class
+himself. Did she mean, confound her? that he was insincere, and would let
+Miss Vance suppose she had more talent than she really had? The more
+Beaton thought of this, the more furious he became, and the more he was
+convinced that something like it had been unconsciously if not
+consciously in her mind. He framed some keen retorts, to the general
+effect that with the atmosphere of illusion preserved so completely at
+home, Miss Vance hardly needed it in her art studies. Having just
+determined never to go near Mrs. Horn's Thursdays again, he decided to go
+once more, in order to plant this sting in her capacious but somewhat
+callous bosom; and he planned how he would lead the talk up to the point
+from which he should launch it.
+
+In the mean time he felt the need of some present solace, such as only
+unqualified worship could give him; a cruel wish to feel his power in
+some direction where, even if it were resisted, it could not be overcome,
+drove him on. That a woman who was to Beaton the embodiment of
+artificiality should intimate, however innocently--the innocence made it
+all the worse--that he was less honest than Wetmore, whom he knew to be
+so much more honest, was something that must be retaliated somewhere
+before his self-respect could be restored. It was only five o'clock, and
+he went on up-town to the Dryfooses', though he had been there only the
+night before last. He asked for the ladies, and Mrs. Mandel received him.
+
+"The young ladies are down-town shopping," she said, "but I am very glad
+of the opportunity of seeing you alone, Mr. Beaton. You know I lived
+several years in Europe."
+
+"Yes," said Beaton, wondering what that could have to do with her
+pleasure in seeing him alone. "I believe so?" He involuntarily gave his
+words the questioning inflection.
+
+"You have lived abroad, too, and so you won't find what I am going to ask
+so strange. Mr. Beaton, why do you come so much to this house?" Mrs.
+Mandel bent forward with an aspect of ladylike interest and smiled.
+
+Beaton frowned. "Why do I come so much?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why do I--Excuse me, Mrs. Mandel, but will you allow me to ask why you
+ask?"
+
+"Oh, certainly. There's no reason why I shouldn't say, for I wish you to
+be very frank with me. I ask because there are two young ladies in this
+house; and, in a certain way, I have to take the place of a mother to
+them. I needn't explain why; you know all the people here, and you
+understand. I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be
+speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people. They do
+not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help
+themselves or one another. But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure
+you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here. You are
+either interested in one of these young girls or you are not. If you are,
+I have nothing more to say. If you are not--" Mrs. Mandel continued to
+smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy gleam.
+
+Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself. He
+had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be
+sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses,
+but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and
+sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years his
+senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty. He reddened, and
+then turned an angry pallor. "Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel. Do you ask
+this from the young ladies?"
+
+"Certainly not," she said, with the best temper, and with something in
+her tone that convicted Beaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of
+her authority in the form of a sneer. "As I have suggested, they would
+hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter. I have no
+objection to saying that I ask it from the father of the young ladies. Of
+course, in and for myself I should have no right to know anything about
+your affairs. I assure you the duty of knowing isn't very pleasant." The
+little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as something rather nice.
+
+"I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel," he said, with a dreamy
+sadness in his own. He lifted his eyes and looked into hers. "If I told
+you that I cared nothing about them in the way you intimate?"
+
+"Then I should prefer to let you characterize your own conduct in
+continuing to come here for the year past, as you have done, and tacitly
+leading them on to infer differently." They both mechanically kept up the
+fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine, but there was no doubt in
+the mind of either which of the young ladies the other meant. A good many
+thoughts went through Beaton's mind, and none of them were flattering. He
+had not been unconscious that the part he had played toward this girl was
+ignoble, and that it had grown meaner as the fancy which her beauty had
+at first kindled in him had grown cooler. He was aware that of late he
+had been amusing himself with her passion in a way that was not less than
+cruel, not because he wished to do so, but because he was listless and
+wished nothing. He rose in saying: "I might be a little more lenient than
+you think, Mrs. Mandel; but I won't trouble you with any palliating
+theory. I will not come any more."
+
+He bowed, and Mrs. Mandel said, "Of course, it's only your action that I
+am concerned with."
+
+She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he could not conceive what it
+had cost her to nerve herself up to her too easy victory. He left Mrs.
+Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and he went away
+hating her as an enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he
+particularly needed exalting. It was really very simple for him to stop
+going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simple for Mrs.
+Mandel to deal with the consequences of his not coming. He only thought
+how lightly she had stopped him, and the poor woman whom he had left
+trembling for what she had been obliged to do embodied for him the
+conscience that accused him of unpleasant things.
+
+"By heavens! this is piling it up," he said to himself through his set
+teeth, realizing how it had happened right on top of that stupid insult
+from Mrs. Horn. Now he should have to give up his place on 'Every Other
+Week; he could not keep that, under the circumstances, even if some
+pretence were not made to get rid of him; he must hurry and anticipate
+any such pretence; he must see Fulkerson at once; he wondered where he
+should find him at that hour. He thought, with bitterness so real that it
+gave him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainly he could find him
+a little later at Mrs. Leighton's; and Fulkerson's happiness became an
+added injury.
+
+The thing had, of course, come about just at the wrong time. There never
+had been a time when Beaton needed money more, when he had spent what he
+had and what he expected to have so recklessly. He was in debt to
+Fulkerson personally and officially for advance payments of salary. The
+thought of sending money home made him break into a scoffing laugh, which
+he turned into a cough in order to deceive the passers. What sort of face
+should he go with to Fulkerson and tell him that he renounced his
+employment on 'Every Other Week;' and what should he do when he had
+renounced it? Take pupils, perhaps; open a class? A lurid conception of a
+class conducted on those principles of shameless flattery at which Mrs.
+Horn had hinted--he believed now she had meant to insult him--presented
+itself. Why should not he act upon the suggestion? He thought with
+loathing for the whole race of women--dabblers in art. How easy the thing
+would be: as easy as to turn back now and tell that old fool's girl that
+he loved her, and rake in half his millions. Why should not he do that?
+No one else cared for him; and at a year's end, probably, one woman would
+be like another as far as the love was concerned, and probably he should
+not be more tired if the woman were Christine Dryfoos than if she were
+Margaret Vance. He kept Alma Leighton out of the question, because at the
+bottom of his heart he believed that she must be forever unlike every
+other woman to him.
+
+The tide of his confused and aimless reverie had carried him far
+down-town, he thought; but when he looked up from it to see where he was
+he found himself on Sixth Avenue, only a little below Thirty-ninth
+Street, very hot and blown; that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling. He
+could not possibly walk down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even to
+the Elevated station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to wait
+for a surface-car, and fell again into his bitter fancies. After a while
+he roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car coming.
+He found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily swinging his club by
+its thong from his wrist.
+
+"When do you suppose a car will be along?" he asked, rather in a general
+sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any special belief that the
+policeman could tell him.
+
+The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco-juice into the gutter. "In
+about a week," he said, nonchalantly.
+
+"What's the matter?" asked Beaton, wondering what the joke could be.
+
+"Strike," said the policeman. His interest in Beaton's ignorance seemed
+to overcome his contempt of it. "Knocked off everywhere this morning
+except Third Avenue and one or two cross-town lines." He spat again and
+kept his bulk at its incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men
+on the corner below: They were neatly dressed, and looked like something
+better than workingmen, and they had a holiday air of being in their best
+clothes.
+
+"Some of the strikers?" asked Beaton.
+
+The policeman nodded.
+
+"Any trouble yet?"
+
+"There won't be any trouble till we begin to move the cars," said the
+policeman.
+
+Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the men whose action would
+now force him to walk five blocks and mount the stairs of the Elevated
+station. "If you'd take out eight or ten of those fellows," he said,
+ferociously, "and set them up against a wall and shoot them, you'd save a
+great deal of bother."
+
+"I guess we sha'n't have to shoot much," said the policeman, still
+swinging his locust. "Anyway, we shant begin it. If it comes to a fight,
+though," he said, with a look at the men under the scooping rim of his
+helmet, "we can drive the whole six thousand of 'em into the East River
+without pullin' a trigger."
+
+"Are there six thousand in it?"
+
+"About."
+
+"What do the infernal fools expect to live on?"
+
+"The interest of their money, I suppose," said the officer, with a grin
+of satisfaction in his irony. "It's got to run its course. Then they'll
+come back with their heads tied up and their tails between their legs,
+and plead to be taken on again."
+
+"If I was a manager of the roads," said Beaton, thinking of how much he
+was already inconvenienced by the strike, and obscurely connecting it as
+one of the series with the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of Mrs.
+Horn and Mrs. Mandel, "I would see them starve before I'd take them
+back--every one of them."
+
+"Well," said the policeman, impartially, as a man might whom the
+companies allowed to ride free, but who had made friends with a good many
+drivers and conductors in the course of his free riding, "I guess that's
+what the roads would like to do if they could; but the men are too many
+for them, and there ain't enough other men to take their places."
+
+"No matter," said Beaton, severely. "They can bring in men from other
+places."
+
+"Oh, they'll do that fast enough," said the policeman.
+
+A man came out of the saloon on the corner where the strikers were
+standing, noisy drunk, and they began, as they would have said, to have
+some fun with him. The policeman left Beaton, and sauntered slowly down
+toward the group as if in the natural course of an afternoon ramble. On
+the other side of the street Beaton could see another officer sauntering
+up from the block below. Looking up and down the avenue, so silent of its
+horse-car bells, he saw a policeman at every corner. It was rather
+impressive.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The strike made a good deal of talk in the office of 'Every Other Week'
+that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal. He congratulated himself
+that he was not personally incommoded by it, like some of the fellows who
+lived uptown, and had not everything under one roof, as it were. He
+enjoyed the excitement of it, and he kept the office boy running out to
+buy the extras which the newsmen came crying through the street almost
+every hour with a lamentable, unintelligible noise. He read not only the
+latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial comments on it,
+which praised the firm attitude of both parties, and the admirable
+measures taken by the police to preserve order. Fulkerson enjoyed the
+interviews with the police captains and the leaders of the strike; he
+equally enjoyed the attempts of the reporters to interview the road
+managers, which were so graphically detailed, and with such a fine
+feeling for the right use of scare-heads as to have almost the value of
+direct expression from them, though it seemed that they had resolutely
+refused to speak. He said, at second-hand from the papers, that if the
+men behaved themselves and respected the rights of property, they would
+have public sympathy with them every time; but just as soon as they began
+to interfere with the roads' right to manage their own affairs in their
+own way, they must be put down with an iron hand; the phrase "iron hand"
+did Fulkerson almost as much good as if it had never been used before.
+News began to come of fighting between the police and the strikers when
+the roads tried to move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia,
+and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage of the police. At the
+same time, he believed what the strikers said, and that the trouble was
+not made by them, but by gangs of roughs acting without their approval.
+In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival of the State Board of
+Arbitration, which took up its quarters, with a great many scare-heads,
+at one of the principal hotels, and invited the roads and the strikers to
+lay the matter in dispute before them; he said that now we should see the
+working of the greatest piece of social machinery in modern times. But it
+appeared to work only in the alacrity of the strikers to submit their
+grievance. The roads were as one road in declaring that there was nothing
+to arbitrate, and that they were merely asserting their right to manage
+their own affairs in their own way. One of the presidents was reported to
+have told a member of the Board, who personally summoned him, to get out
+and to go about his business. Then, to Fulkerson's extreme
+disappointment, the august tribunal, acting on behalf of the sovereign
+people in the interest of peace, declared itself powerless, and got out,
+and would, no doubt, have gone about its business if it had had any.
+Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps because the extras did not;
+but March laughed at this result.
+
+"It's a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and
+his forty thousand men. I suppose somebody told him at the top of the
+hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about his
+business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had marched up
+with all that ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in an affair of
+this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the
+public has no rights at all. The roads and the strikers are allowed to
+fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and precisely a
+private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having tolerated--as
+any street war in Florence or Verona--and to fight it out at our pains
+and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they get tired.
+It's a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand
+inhabitants."
+
+"What would you do?" asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view of
+the case.
+
+"Do? Nothing. Hasn't the State Board of Arbitration declared itself
+powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and we're so used to being
+snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our hold
+on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in their
+own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed us no
+services in return for their privileges."
+
+"That's a good deal so," said Fulkerson, disordering his hair. "Well,
+it's nuts for the colonel nowadays. He says if he was boss of this town
+he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man 'em with
+policemen, and run 'em till the managers had come to terms with the
+strikers; and he'd do that every time there was a strike."
+
+"Doesn't that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?"
+asked March.
+
+"I don't know. It savors of horse sense."
+
+"You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought you were the most engaged
+man I ever saw; but I guess you're more father-in-lawed. And before
+you're married, too."
+
+"Well, the colonel's a glorious old fellow, March. I wish he had the
+power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed
+in. He's on the keen jump from morning till night, and he's up late and
+early to see the row. I'm afraid he'll get shot at some of the fights; he
+sees them all; I can't get any show at them: haven't seen a brickbat
+shied or a club swung yet. Have you?"
+
+"No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the
+papers, and that's what I really want to do, I suppose. Besides, I'm
+solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under
+penalty of having her bring the children and go with me. Her theory is
+that we must all die together; the children haven't been at school since
+the strike began. There's no precaution that Mrs. March hasn't used. She
+watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this
+office."
+
+Fulkerson laughed and said: "Well, it's probably the only thing that's
+saved your life. Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?"
+
+"No. You don't mean to say he's killed!"
+
+"Not if he knows it. But I don't know--What do you say, March? What's the
+reason you couldn't get us up a paper on the strike?"
+
+"I knew it would fetch round to 'Every Other Week,' somehow."
+
+"No, but seriously. There'll be plenty of newspaper accounts. But you
+could treat it in the historical spirit--like something that happened
+several centuries ago; De Foe's Plague of London style. Heigh? What made
+me think of it was Beaton. If I could get hold of him, you two could go
+round together and take down its aesthetic aspects. It's a big thing,
+March, this strike is. I tell you it's imposing to have a private war, as
+you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New York not
+minding it a bit. See? Might take that view of it. With your
+descriptions and Beaton's sketches--well, it would just be the greatest
+card! Come! What do you say?"
+
+"Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I'm killed and
+she and the children are not killed with me?"
+
+"Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks
+to do the literary part?"
+
+"I've no doubt he'd jump at the chance. I've yet to see the form of
+literature that Kendricks wouldn't lay down his life for."
+
+"Say!" March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another
+inspiration, and smiled patiently. "Look here! What's the reason we
+couldn't get one of the strikers to write it up for us?"
+
+"Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents," March suggested.
+
+"No; I'm in earnest. They say some of those fellows--especially the
+foreigners--are educated men. I know one fellow--a Bohemian--that used to
+edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He could write it out in his kind of
+Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it."
+
+"I guess not," said March, dryly.
+
+"Why not? He'd do it for the cause, wouldn't he? Suppose you put it up on
+him the next time you see him."
+
+"I don't see Lindau any more," said March. He added, "I guess he's
+renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos's money."
+
+"Pshaw! You don't mean he hasn't been round since?"
+
+"He came for a while, but he's left off coming now. I don't feel
+particularly gay about it," March said, with some resentment of
+Fulkerson's grin. "He's left me in debt to him for lessons to the
+children."
+
+Fulkerson laughed out. "Well, he is the greatest old fool! Who'd 'a'
+thought he'd 'a' been in earnest with those 'brincibles' of his? But I
+suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a
+world."
+
+"There has to be one such crank, it seems," March partially assented.
+"One's enough for me."
+
+"I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too," said Fulkerson. "Why, it
+must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see 'gabidal'
+embarrassed like it is by this strike. It must make old Lindau feel like
+he was back behind those barricades at Berlin. Well, he's a splendid old
+fellow; pity he drinks, as I remarked once before."
+
+When March left the office he did not go home so directly as he came,
+perhaps because Mrs. March's eye was not on him. He was very curious
+about some aspects of the strike, whose importance, as a great social
+convulsion, he felt people did not recognize; and, with his temperance in
+everything, he found its negative expressions as significant as its more
+violent phases. He had promised his wife solemnly that he would keep away
+from these, and he had a natural inclination to keep his promise; he had
+no wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets shot when there is
+any firing on a mob. He interested himself in the apparent indifference
+of the mighty city, which kept on about its business as tranquilly as if
+the private war being fought out in its midst were a vague rumor of
+Indian troubles on the frontier; and he realized how there might once
+have been a street feud of forty years in Florence without interfering
+materially with the industry and prosperity of the city. On Broadway
+there was a silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells and
+hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the avenues,
+roofed by the elevated roads, this silence of the surface tracks was not
+noticeable at all in the roar of the trains overhead. Some of the
+cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with a policeman on the rear
+of each; on the Third Avenge line, operated by non-union men, who had not
+struck, there were two policemen beside the driver of every car, and two
+beside the conductor, to protect them from the strikers. But there were
+no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly about in
+groups on the corners. While March watched them at a safe distance, a car
+laden with policemen came down the track, but none of the strikers
+offered to molest it. In their simple Sunday best, March thought them
+very quiet, decent-looking people, and he could well believe that they
+had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks in other parts of the city.
+He could hardly believe that there were any such outbreaks; he began more
+and more to think them mere newspaper exaggerations in the absence of any
+disturbance, or the disposition to it, that he could see. He walked on to
+the East River.
+
+Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspect as Second Avenue;
+groups of men stood on the corners, and now and then a police-laden car
+was brought unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and
+talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.
+
+March got a cross-town car, and came back to the West Side. A policeman,
+looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the platform.
+
+"I suppose you'll be glad when this cruel war is over," March suggested,
+as he got in.
+
+The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.
+
+His behavior, from a man born to the joking give and take of our life,
+impressed March. It gave him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had
+read of the French troops putting on toward the populace just before the
+coup d'etat; he began to feel like the populace; but he struggled with
+himself and regained his character of philosophical observer. In this
+character he remained in the car and let it carry him by the corner where
+he ought to have got out and gone home, and let it keep on with him to
+one of the farthermost tracks westward, where so much of the fighting was
+reported to have taken place. But everything on the way was as quiet as
+on the East Side.
+
+Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake that he was
+half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped down from the
+platform and ran forward.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Dryfoos sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. Mandel as usual to pour
+out his coffee. Conrad had gone down-town; the two girls lay abed much
+later than their father breakfasted, and their mother had gradually grown
+too feeble to come down till lunch. Suddenly Christine appeared at the
+door. Her face was white to the edges of her lips, and her eyes were
+blazing.
+
+"Look here, father! Have you been saying anything to Mr. Beaton?"
+
+The old man looked up at her across his coffee-cup through his frowning
+brows. "No."
+
+Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shook in her hand.
+
+"Then what's the reason he don't come here any more?" demanded the girl;
+and her glance darted from her father to Mrs. Mandel. "Oh, it's you, is
+it? I'd like to know who told you to meddle in other people's business?"
+
+"I did," said Dryfoos, savagely. "I told her to ask him what he wanted
+here, and he said he didn't want anything, and he stopped coming. That's
+all. I did it myself."
+
+"Oh, you did, did you?" said the girl, scarcely less insolently than she
+had spoken to Mrs. Mandel. "I should like to know what you did it for?
+I'd like to know what made you think I wasn't able to take care of
+myself. I just knew somebody had been meddling, but I didn't suppose it
+was you. I can manage my own affairs in my own way, if you please, and
+I'll thank you after this to leave me to myself in what don't concern
+you."
+
+"Don't concern me? You impudent jade!" her father began.
+
+Christine advanced from the doorway toward the table; she had her hands
+closed upon what seemed trinkets, some of which glittered and dangled
+from them. She said, "Will you go to him and tell him that this
+meddlesome minx, here, had no business to say anything about me to him,
+and you take it all back?"
+
+"No!" shouted the old man. "And if--"
+
+"That's all I want of you!" the girl shouted in her turn. "Here are your
+presents." With both hands she flung the jewels-pins and rings and
+earrings and bracelets--among the breakfast-dishes, from which some of
+them sprang to the floor. She stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring
+from the finger where Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her
+father's plate. Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard her
+running up-stairs.
+
+The old man made a start toward her, but he fell back in his chair before
+she was gone, and, with a fierce, grinding movement of his jaws,
+controlled himself. "Take--take those things up," he gasped to Mrs.
+Mandel. He seemed unable to rise again from his chair; but when she asked
+him if he were unwell, he said no, with an air of offence, and got
+quickly to his feet. He mechanically picked up the intaglio ring from the
+table while he stood there, and put it on his little finger; his hand was
+not much bigger than Christine's. "How do you suppose she found it out?"
+he asked, after a moment.
+
+"She seems to have merely suspected it," said Mrs. Mandel, in a tremor,
+and with the fright in her eyes which Christine's violence had brought
+there.
+
+"Well, it don't make any difference. She had to know, somehow, and now
+she knows." He started toward the door of the library, as if to go into
+the hall, where his hat and coat hung.
+
+"Mr. Dryfoos," palpitated Mrs. Mandel, "I can't remain here, after the
+language your daughter has used to me--I can't let you leave me--I--I'm
+afraid of her--"
+
+"Lock yourself up, then," said the old man, rudely. He added, from the
+hall before he went out, "I reckon she'll quiet down now."
+
+He took the Elevated road. The strike seemed a vary far-off thing, though
+the paper he bought to look up the stockmarket was full of noisy
+typography about yesterday's troubles on the surface lines. Among the
+millions in Wall Street there was some joking and some swearing, but not
+much thinking, about the six thousand men who had taken such chances in
+their attempt to better their condition. Dryfoos heard nothing of the
+strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange, where he spent two or three
+hours watching a favorite stock of his go up and go down under the
+betting. By the time the Exchange closed it had risen eight points, and
+on this and some other investments he was five thousand dollars richer
+than he had been in the morning. But he had expected to be richer still,
+and he was by no means satisfied with his luck. All through the
+excitement of his winning and losing had played the dull, murderous rage
+he felt toward the child who had defied him, and when the game was over
+and he started home his rage mounted into a sort of frenzy; he would
+teach her, he would break her. He walked a long way without thinking, and
+then waited for a car. None came, and he hailed a passing coupe.
+
+"What has got all the cars?" he demanded of the driver, who jumped down
+from his box to open the door for him and get his direction.
+
+"Been away?" asked the driver. "Hasn't been any car along for a week.
+Strike."
+
+"Oh yes," said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, and he remained staring
+at the driver after he had taken his seat.
+
+The man asked, "Where to?"
+
+Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said, with
+uncontrollable fury: "I told you once! Go up to West Eleventh, and drive
+along slow on the south side; I'll show you the place."
+
+He could not remember the number of 'Every Other Week' office, where he
+suddenly decided to stop before he went home. He wished to see Fulkerson,
+and ask him something about Beaton: whether he had been about lately, and
+whether he had dropped any hint of what had happened concerning
+Christine; Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow's
+confidence.
+
+There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither Dryfoos
+returned after glancing into Fulkerson's empty office. "Where's
+Fulkerson?" he asked, sitting down with his hat on.
+
+"He went out a few moments ago," said Conrad, glancing at the clock. "I'm
+afraid he isn't coming back again today, if you wanted to see him."
+
+Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate March's room.
+"That other fellow out, too?"
+
+"He went just before Mr. Fulkerson," answered Conrad.
+
+"Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the afternoon?" asked
+the old man.
+
+"No," said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been there a
+score of times and found the whole staff of "Every Other Week" at work
+between four and five. "Mr. March, you know, always takes a good deal of
+his work home with him, and I suppose Mr. Fulkerson went out so early
+because there isn't much doing to-day. Perhaps it's the strike that makes
+it dull."
+
+"The strike--yes! It's a pretty piece of business to have everything
+thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want a chance to lay off and
+get drunk." Dryfoos seemed to think Conrad would make some answer to
+this, but the young man's mild face merely saddened, and he said nothing.
+"I've got a coupe out there now that I had to take because I couldn't get
+a car. If I had my way I'd have a lot of those vagabonds hung. They're
+waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then rob the houses--pack of
+dirty, worthless whelps. They ought to call out the militia, and fire
+into 'em. Clubbing is too good for them." Conrad was still silent, and
+his father sneered, "But I reckon you don't think so."
+
+"I think the strike is useless," said Conrad.
+
+"Oh, you do, do you? Comin' to your senses a little. Gettin' tired
+walkin' so much. I should like to know what your gentlemen over there on
+the East Side think about the strike, anyway."
+
+The young fellow dropped his eyes. "I am not authorized to speak for
+them."
+
+"Oh, indeed! And perhaps you're not authorized to speak for yourself?"
+
+"Father, you know we don't agree about these things. I'd rather not
+talk--"
+
+"But I'm goin' to make you talk this time!" cried Dryfoos, striking the
+arm of the chair he sat in with the side of his fist. A maddening thought
+of Christine came over him. "As long as you eat my bread, you have got to
+do as I say. I won't have my children telling me what I shall do and
+sha'n't do, or take on airs of being holier than me. Now, you just speak
+up! Do you think those loafers are right, or don't you? Come!"
+
+Conrad apparently judged it best to speak. "I think they were very
+foolish to strike--at this time, when the Elevated roads can do the
+work."
+
+"Oh, at this time, heigh! And I suppose they think over there on the East
+Side that it 'd been wise to strike before we got the Elevated." Conrad
+again refused to answer, and his father roared, "What do you think?"
+
+"I think a strike is always bad business. It's war; but sometimes there
+don't seem any other way for the workingmen to get justice. They say that
+sometimes strikes do raise the wages, after a while."
+
+"Those lazy devils were paid enough already," shrieked the old man.
+
+"They got two dollars a day. How much do you think they ought to 'a' got?
+Twenty?"
+
+Conrad hesitated, with a beseeching look at his father. But he decided to
+answer. "The men say that with partial work, and fines, and other things,
+they get sometimes a dollar, and sometimes ninety cents a day."
+
+"They lie, and you know they lie," said his father, rising and coming
+toward him. "And what do you think the upshot of it all will be, after
+they've ruined business for another week, and made people hire hacks, and
+stolen the money of honest men? How is it going to end?"
+
+"They will have to give in."
+
+"Oh, give in, heigh! And what will you say then, I should like to know?
+How will you feel about it then? Speak!"
+
+"I shall feel as I do now. I know you don't think that way, and I don't
+blame you--or anybody. But if I have got to say how I shall feel, why, I
+shall feel sorry they didn't succeed, for I believe they have a righteous
+cause, though they go the wrong way to help themselves."
+
+His father came close to him, his eyes blazing, his teeth set. "Do you
+dare so say that to me?"
+
+"Yes. I can't help it. I pity them; my whole heart is with those poor
+men."
+
+"You impudent puppy!" shouted the old man. He lifted his hand and struck
+his son in the face. Conrad caught his hand with his own left, and, while
+the blood began to trickle from a wound that Christine's intaglio ring
+had made in his temple, he looked at him with a kind of grieving wonder,
+and said, "Father!"
+
+The old man wrenched his fist away and ran out of the house. He
+remembered his address now, and he gave it as he plunged into the coupe.
+He trembled with his evil passion, and glared out of the windows at the
+passers as he drove home; he only saw Conrad's mild, grieving, wondering
+eyes, and the blood slowly trickling from the wound in his temple.
+
+Conrad went to the neat-set bowl in Fulkerson's comfortable room and
+washed the blood away, and kept bathing the wound with the cold water
+till it stopped bleeding. The cut was not deep, and he thought he would
+not put anything on it. After a while he locked up the office and started
+out, he hardly knew where. But he walked on, in the direction he had
+taken, till he found himself in Union Square, on the pavement in front of
+Brentano's. It seemed to him that he heard some one calling gently to
+him, "Mr. Dryfoos!"
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Conrad looked confusedly around, and the same voice said again, "Mr.
+Dryfoos!" and he saw that it was a lady speaking to him from a coupe
+beside the curbing, and then he saw that it was Miss Vance.
+
+She smiled when he gave signs of having discovered her, and came up to
+the door of her carriage. "I am so glad to meet you. I have been longing
+to talk to somebody; nobody seems to feel about it as I do. Oh, isn't it
+horrible? Must they fail? I saw cars running on all the lines as I came
+across; it made me sick at heart. Must those brave fellows give in? And
+everybody seems to hate them so--I can't bear it." Her face was estranged
+with excitement, and there were traces of tears on it. "You must think me
+almost crazy to stop you in the street this way; but when I caught sight
+of you I had to speak. I knew you would sympathize--I knew you would feel
+as I do. Oh, how can anybody help honoring those poor men for standing by
+one another as they do? They are risking all they have in the world for
+the sake of justice! Oh, they are true heroes! They are staking the bread
+of their wives and children on the dreadful chance they've taken! But no
+one seems to understand it. No one seems to see that they are willing to
+suffer more now that other poor men may suffer less hereafter. And those
+wretched creatures that are coming in to take their places--those
+traitors--"
+
+"We can't blame them for wanting to earn a living, Miss Vance," said
+Conrad.
+
+"No, no! I don't blame them. Who am I, to do such a thing? It's
+we--people like me, of my class--who make the poor betray one another.
+But this dreadful fighting--this hideous paper is full of it!" She held
+up an extra, crumpled with her nervous reading. "Can't something be done
+to stop it? Don't you think that if some one went among them, and tried
+to make them see how perfectly hopeless it was to resist the companies
+and drive off the new men, he might do some good? I have wanted to go and
+try; but I am a woman, and I mustn't! I shouldn't be afraid of the
+strikers, but I'm afraid of what people would say!" Conrad kept pressing
+his handkerchief to the cut in his temple, which he thought might be
+bleeding, and now she noticed this. "Are you hurt, Mr. Dryfoos? You look
+so pale."
+
+"No, it's nothing--a little scratch I've got."
+
+"Indeed, you look pale. Have you a carriage? How will you get home? Will
+you get in here with me and let me drive you?"
+
+"No, no," said Conrad, smiling at her excitement. "I'm perfectly well--"
+
+"And you don't think I'm foolish and wicked for stopping you here and
+talking in this way? But I know you feel as I do!"
+
+"Yes, I feel as you do. You are right--right in every way--I mustn't keep
+you--Good-bye." He stepped back to bow, but she put her beautiful hand
+out of the window, and when he took it she wrung his hand hard.
+
+"Thank you, thank you! You are good and you are just! But no one can do
+anything. It's useless!"
+
+The type of irreproachable coachman on the box whose respectability had
+suffered through the strange behavior of his mistress in this interview
+drove quickly off at her signal, and Conrad stood a moment looking after
+the carriage. His heart was full of joy; it leaped; he thought it would
+burst. As he turned to walk away it seemed to him as if he mounted upon
+the air. The trust she had shown him, the praise she had given him, that
+crush of the hand: he hoped nothing, he formed no idea from it, but it
+all filled him with love that cast out the pain and shame he had been
+suffering. He believed that he could never be unhappy any more; the
+hardness that was in his mind toward his father went out of it; he saw
+how sorely he had tried him; he grieved that he had done it, but the
+means, the difference of his feeling about the cause of their quarrel, he
+was solemnly glad of that since she shared it. He was only sorry for his
+father. "Poor father!" he said under his breath as he went along. He
+explained to her about his father in his reverie, and she pitied his
+father, too.
+
+He was walking over toward the West Side, aimlessly at first, and then at
+times with the longing to do something to save those mistaken men from
+themselves forming itself into a purpose. Was not that what she meant
+when she bewailed her woman's helplessness? She must have wished him to
+try if he, being a man, could not do something; or if she did not, still
+he would try, and if she heard of it she would recall what she had said
+and would be glad he had understood her so. Thinking of her pleasure in
+what he was going to do, he forgot almost what it was; but when he came
+to a street-car track he remembered it, and looked up and down to see if
+there were any turbulent gathering of men whom he might mingle with and
+help to keep from violence. He saw none anywhere; and then suddenly, as
+if at the same moment, for in his exalted mood all events had a
+dream-like simultaneity, he stood at the corner of an avenue, and in the
+middle of it, a little way off, was a street-car, and around the car a
+tumult of shouting, cursing, struggling men. The driver was lashing his
+horses forward, and a policeman was at their heads, with the conductor,
+pulling them; stones, clubs, brickbats hailed upon the car, the horses,
+the men trying to move them. The mob closed upon them in a body, and then
+a patrol-wagon whirled up from the other side, and a squad of policemen
+leaped out and began to club the rioters. Conrad could see how they
+struck them under the rims of their hats; the blows on their skulls
+sounded as if they had fallen on stone; the rioters ran in all
+directions.
+
+One of the officers rushed up toward the corner where Conrad stood, and
+then he saw at his side a tall, old man, with a long, white beard, who
+was calling out at the policemen: "Ah, yes! Glup the strikerss--gif it to
+them! Why don't you co and glup the bresidents that insoalt your lawss,
+and gick your Boart of Arpidration out-of-toors? Glup the strikerss--they
+cot no friendts! They cot no money to pribe you, to dreat you!"
+
+The officer lifted his club, and the old man threw his left arm up to
+shield his head. Conrad recognized Lindau, and now he saw the empty
+sleeve dangle in the air over the stump of his wrist. He heard a shot in
+that turmoil beside the car, and something seemed to strike him in the
+breast. He was going to say to the policeman: "Don't strike him! He's an
+old soldier! You see he has no hand!" but he could not speak, he could
+not move his tongue. The policeman stood there; he saw his face: it was
+not bad, not cruel; it was like the face of a statue, fixed,
+perdurable--a mere image of irresponsible and involuntary authority. Then
+Conrad fell forward, pierced through the heart by that shot fired from
+the car.
+
+March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his car, and at the same
+moment he saw Lindau drop under the club of the policeman, who left him
+where he fell and joined the rest of the squad in pursuing the rioters.
+The fighting round the car in the avenue ceased; the driver whipped his
+horses into a gallop, and the place was left empty.
+
+March would have liked to run; he thought how his wife had implored him
+to keep away from the rioting; but he could not have left Lindau lying
+there if he would. Something stronger than his will drew him to the spot,
+and there he saw Conrad, dead beside the old man.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+In the cares which Mrs. March shared with her husband that night she was
+supported partly by principle, but mainly by the potent excitement which
+bewildered Conrad's family and took all reality from what had happened.
+It was nearly midnight when the Marches left them and walked away toward
+the Elevated station with Fulkerson. Everything had been done, by that
+time, that could be done; and Fulkerson was not without that satisfaction
+in the business-like despatch of all the details which attends each step
+in such an affair and helps to make death tolerable even to the most
+sorely stricken. We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little
+space to another; and only one interest at a time fills these. Fulkerson
+was cheerful when they got into the street, almost gay; and Mrs. March
+experienced a rebound from her depression which she felt that she ought
+not to have experienced. But she condoned the offence a little in
+herself, because her husband remained so constant in his gravity; and,
+pending the final accounting he must make her for having been where he
+could be of so much use from the first instant of the calamity, she was
+tenderly, gratefully proud of all the use he had been to Conrad's family,
+and especially his miserable old father. To her mind, March was the
+principal actor in the whole affair, and much more important in having
+seen it than those who had suffered in it. In fact, he had suffered
+incomparably.
+
+"Well, well," said Fulkerson. "They'll get along now. We've done all we
+could, and there's nothing left but for them to bear it. Of course it's
+awful, but I guess it 'll come out all right. I mean," he added, "they'll
+pull through now."
+
+"I suppose," said March, "that nothing is put on us that we can't bear.
+But I should think," he went on, musingly, "that when God sees what we
+poor finite creatures can bear, hemmed round with this eternal darkness
+of death, He must respect us."
+
+"Basil!" said his wife. But in her heart she drew nearer to him for the
+words she thought she ought to rebuke him for.
+
+"Oh, I know," he said, "we school ourselves to despise human nature. But
+God did not make us despicable, and I say, whatever end He meant us for,
+He must have some such thrill of joy in our adequacy to fate as a father
+feels when his son shows himself a man. When I think what we can be if we
+must, I can't believe the least of us shall finally perish."
+
+"Oh, I reckon the Almighty won't scoop any of us," said Fulkerson, with a
+piety of his own.
+
+"That poor boy's father!" sighed Mrs. March. "I can't get his face out of
+my sight. He looked so much worse than death."
+
+"Oh, death doesn't look bad," said March. "It's life that looks so in its
+presence. Death is peace and pardon. I only wish poor old Lindau was as
+well out of it as Conrad there."
+
+"Ah, Lindau! He has done harm enough," said Mrs. March. "I hope he will
+be careful after this."
+
+March did not try to defend Lindau against her theory of the case, which
+inexorably held him responsible for Conrad's death.
+
+"Lindau's going to come out all right, I guess," said Fulkerson. "He was
+first-rate when I saw him at the hospital to-night." He whispered in
+March's ear, at a chance he got in mounting the station stairs: "I didn't
+like to tell you there at the house, but I guess you'd better know. They
+had to take Lindau's arm off near the shoulder. Smashed all to pieces by
+the clubbing."
+
+In the house, vainly rich and foolishly unfit for them, the bereaved
+family whom the Marches had just left lingered together, and tried to get
+strength to part for the night. They were all spent with the fatigue that
+comes from heaven to such misery as theirs, and they sat in a torpor in
+which each waited for the other to move, to speak.
+
+Christine moved, and Mela spoke. Christine rose and went out of the room
+without saying a word, and they heard her going up-stairs. Then Mela
+said:
+
+"I reckon the rest of us better be goun' too, father. Here, let's git
+mother started."
+
+She put her arm round her mother, to lift her from her chair, but the old
+man did not stir, and Mela called Mrs. Mandel from the next room. Between
+them they raised her to her feet.
+
+"Ain't there anybody agoin' to set up with it?" she asked, in her hoarse
+pipe. "It appears like folks hain't got any feelin's in New York. Woon't
+some o' the neighbors come and offer to set up, without waitin' to be
+asked?"
+
+"Oh, that's all right, mother. The men 'll attend to that. Don't you
+bother any," Mela coaxed, and she kept her arm round her mother, with
+tender patience.
+
+"Why, Mely, child! I can't feel right to have it left to hirelin's so.
+But there ain't anybody any more to see things done as they ought. If
+Coonrod was on'y here--"
+
+"Well, mother, you are pretty mixed!" said Mela, with a strong tendency
+to break into her large guffaw. But she checked herself and said: "I know
+just how you feel, though. It keeps acomun' and agoun'; and it's so and
+it ain't so, all at once; that's the plague of it. Well, father! Ain't
+you goun' to come?"
+
+"I'm goin' to stay, Mela," said the old man, gently, without moving. "Get
+your mother to bed, that's a good girl."
+
+"You goin' to set up with him, Jacob?" asked the old woman.
+
+"Yes, 'Liz'beth, I'll set up. You go to bed."
+
+"Well, I will, Jacob. And I believe it 'll do you good to set up. I
+wished I could set up with you; but I don't seem to have the stren'th I
+did when the twins died. I must git my sleep, so's to--I don't like very
+well to have you broke of your rest, Jacob, but there don't appear to be
+anybody else. You wouldn't have to do it if Coonrod was here. There I go
+ag'in! Mercy! mercy!"
+
+"Well, do come along, then, mother," said Mela; and she got her out of
+the room, with Mrs. Mandel's help, and up the stairs.
+
+From the top the old woman called down, "You tell Coonrod--" She stopped,
+and he heard her groan out, "My Lord! my Lord!"
+
+He sat, one silence in the dining-room, where they had all lingered
+together, and in the library beyond the hireling watcher sat, another
+silence. The time passed, but neither moved, and the last noise in the
+house ceased, so that they heard each other breathe, and the vague,
+remote rumor of the city invaded the inner stillness. It grew louder
+toward morning, and then Dryfoos knew from the watcher's deeper breathing
+that he had fallen into a doze.
+
+He crept by him to the drawing-room, where his son was; the place was
+full of the awful sweetness of the flowers that Fulkerson had brought,
+and that lay above the pulseless breast. The old man turned up a burner
+in the chandelier, and stood looking on the majestic serenity of the dead
+face.
+
+He could not move when he saw his wife coming down the stairway in the
+hall. She was in her long, white flannel bed gown, and the candle she
+carried shook with her nervous tremor. He thought she might be walking in
+her sleep, but she said, quite simply, "I woke up, and I couldn't git to
+sleep ag'in without comin' to have a look." She stood beside their dead
+son with him, "well, he's beautiful, Jacob. He was the prettiest baby!
+And he was always good, Coonrod was; I'll say that for him. I don't
+believe he ever give me a minute's care in his whole life. I reckon I
+liked him about the best of all the children; but I don't know as I ever
+done much to show it. But you was always good to him, Jacob; you always
+done the best for him, ever since he was a little feller. I used to be
+afraid you'd spoil him sometimes in them days; but I guess you're glad
+now for every time you didn't cross him. I don't suppose since the twins
+died you ever hit him a lick." She stooped and peered closer at the face.
+"Why, Jacob, what's that there by his pore eye?" Dryfoos saw it, too, the
+wound that he had feared to look for, and that now seemed to redden on
+his sight. He broke into a low, wavering cry, like a child's in despair,
+like an animal's in terror, like a soul's in the anguish of remorse.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The evening after the funeral, while the Marches sat together talking it
+over, and making approaches, through its shadow, to the question of their
+own future, which it involved, they were startled by the twitter of the
+electric bell at their apartment door. It was really not so late as the
+children's having gone to bed made it seem; but at nine o'clock it was
+too late for any probable visitor except Fulkerson. It might be he, and
+March was glad to postpone the impending question to his curiosity
+concerning the immediate business Fulkerson might have with him. He went
+himself to the door, and confronted there a lady deeply veiled in black
+and attended by a very decorous serving-woman.
+
+"Are you alone, Mr. March--you and Mrs. March?" asked the lady, behind
+her veil; and, as he hesitated, she said: "You don't know me! Miss
+Vance"; and she threw back her veil, showing her face wan and agitated in
+the dark folds. "I am very anxious to see you--to speak with you both.
+May I come in?"
+
+"Why, certainly, Miss Vance," he answered, still too much stupefied by
+her presence to realize it.
+
+She promptly entered, and saying, with a glance at the hall chair by the
+door, "My maid can sit here?" followed him to the room where he had left
+his wife.
+
+Mrs. March showed herself more capable of coping with the fact. She
+welcomed Miss Vance with the liking they both felt for the girl, and with
+the sympathy which her troubled face inspired.
+
+"I won't tire you with excuses for coming, Mrs. March," she said, "for it
+was the only thing left for me to do; and I come at my aunt's
+suggestion." She added this as if it would help to account for her more
+on the conventional plane, and she had the instinctive good taste to
+address herself throughout to Mrs. March as much as possible, though what
+she had to say was mainly for March. "I don't know how to begin--I don't
+know how to speak of this terrible affair. But you know what I mean. I
+feel as if I had lived a whole lifetime since it happened. I don't want
+you to pity me for it," she said, forestalling a politeness from Mrs.
+March. "I'm the last one to be thought of, and you mustn't mind me if I
+try to make you. I came to find out all of the truth that I can, and when
+I know just what that is I shall know what to do. I have read the
+inquest; it's all burned into my brain. But I don't care for that--for
+myself: you must let me say such things without minding me. I know that
+your husband--that Mr. March was there; I read his testimony; and I
+wished to ask him--to ask him--" She stopped and looked distractedly
+about. "But what folly! He must have said everything he knew--he had to."
+Her eyes wandered to him from his wife, on whom she had kept them with
+instinctive tact.
+
+"I said everything--yes," he replied. "But if you would like to know--"
+
+"Perhaps I had better tell you something first. I had just parted with
+him--it couldn't have been more than half an hour--in front of
+Brentano's; he must have gone straight to his death. We were talking, and
+I--I said, Why didn't some one go among the strikers and plead with them
+to be peaceable, and keep them from attacking the new men. I knew that he
+felt as I did about the strikers: that he was their friend. Did you
+see--do you know anything that makes you think he had been trying to do
+that?"
+
+"I am sorry," March began, "I didn't see him at all till--till I saw him
+lying dead."
+
+"My husband was there purely by accident," Mrs. March put in. "I had
+begged and entreated him not to go near the striking anywhere. And he had
+just got out of the car, and saw the policeman strike that wretched
+Lindau--he's been such an anxiety to me ever since we have had anything
+to do with him here; my husband knew him when he was a boy in the West.
+Mr. March came home from it all perfectly prostrated; it made us all
+sick! Nothing so horrible ever came into our lives before. I assure you
+it was the most shocking experience."
+
+Miss Vance listened to her with that look of patience which those who
+have seen much of the real suffering of the world--the daily portion of
+the poor--have for the nervous woes of comfortable people. March hung his
+head; he knew it would be useless to protest that his share of the
+calamity was, by comparison, infinitesimally small.
+
+After she had heard Mrs. March to the end even of her repetitions, Miss
+Vance said, as if it were a mere matter of course that she should have
+looked the affair up, "Yes, I have seen Mr. Lindau at the hospital--"
+
+"My husband goes every day to see him," Mrs. March interrupted, to give
+a final touch to the conception of March's magnanimity throughout.
+
+"The poor man seems to have been in the wrong at the time," said Miss
+Vance.
+
+"I could almost say he had earned the right to be wrong. He's a man of
+the most generous instincts, and a high ideal of justice, of equity--too
+high to be considered by a policeman with a club in his hand," said
+March, with a bold defiance of his wife's different opinion of Lindau.
+"It's the policeman's business, I suppose, to club the ideal when he
+finds it inciting a riot."
+
+"Oh, I don't blame Mr. Lindau; I don't blame the policeman; he was as
+much a mere instrument as his club was. I am only trying to find out how
+much I am to blame myself. I had no thought of Mr. Dryfoos's going
+there--of his attempting to talk with the strikers and keep them quiet; I
+was only thinking, as women do, of what I should try to do if I were a
+man.
+
+"But perhaps he understood me to ask him to go--perhaps my words sent him
+to his death."
+
+She had a sort of calm in her courage to know the worst truth as to her
+responsibility that forbade any wish to flatter her out of it. "I'm
+afraid," said March, "that is what can never be known now." After a
+moment he added: "But why should you wish to know? If he went there as a
+peacemaker, he died in a good cause, in such a way as he would wish to
+die, I believe."
+
+"Yes," said the girl; "I have thought of that. But death is awful; we
+must not think patiently, forgivingly of sending any one to their death
+in the best cause."--"I fancy life was an awful thing to Conrad Dryfoos,"
+March replied. "He was thwarted and disappointed, without even pleasing
+the ambition that thwarted and disappointed him. That poor old man, his
+father, warped him from his simple, lifelong wish to be a minister, and
+was trying to make a business man of him. If it will be any consolation
+to you to know it, Miss Vance, I can assure you that he was very unhappy,
+and I don't see how he could ever have been happy here."
+
+"It won't," said the girl, steadily. "If people are born into this world,
+it's because they were meant to live in it. It isn't a question of being
+happy here; no one is happy, in that old, selfish way, or can be; but he
+could have been of great use."
+
+"Perhaps he was of use in dying. Who knows? He may have been trying to
+silence Lindau."
+
+"Oh, Lindau wasn't worth it!" cried Mrs. March.
+
+Miss Vance looked at her as if she did not quite understand. Then she
+turned to March. "He might have been unhappy, as we all are; but I know
+that his life here would have had a higher happiness than we wish for or
+aim for." The tears began to run silently down her cheeks.
+
+"He looked strangely happy that day when he left me. He had hurt himself
+somehow, and his face was bleeding from a scratch; he kept his
+handkerchief up; he was pale, but such a light came into his face when he
+shook hands--ah, I know he went to try and do what I said!" They were all
+silent, while she dried her eyes and then put her handkerchief back into
+the pocket from which she had suddenly pulled it, with a series of vivid,
+young-ladyish gestures, which struck March by their incongruity with the
+occasion of their talk, and yet by their harmony with the rest of her
+elegance. "I am sorry, Miss Vance," he began, "that I can't really tell
+you anything more--"
+
+"You are very kind," she said, controlling herself and rising quickly. "I
+thank you--thank you both very much." She turned to Mrs. March and shook
+hands with her and then with him. "I might have known--I did know that
+there wasn't anything more for you to tell. But at least I've found out
+from you that there was nothing, and now I can begin to bear what I must.
+How are those poor creatures--his mother and father, his sisters? Some
+day, I hope, I shall be ashamed to have postponed them to the thought of
+myself; but I can't pretend to be yet. I could not come to the funeral; I
+wanted to."
+
+She addressed her question to Mrs. March, who answered: "I can
+understand. But they were pleased with the flowers you sent; people are,
+at such times, and they haven't many friends."
+
+"Would you go to see them?" asked the girl. "Would you tell them what
+I've told you?"
+
+Mrs. March looked at her husband.
+
+"I don't see what good it would do. They wouldn't understand. But if it
+would relieve you--"
+
+"I'll wait till it isn't a question of self-relief," said the girl.
+"Good-bye!"
+
+She left them to long debate of the event. At the end Mrs. March said,
+"She is a strange being; such a mixture of the society girl and the
+saint."
+
+Her husband answered: "She's the potentiality of several kinds of
+fanatic. She's very unhappy, and I don't see how she's to be happier
+about that poor fellow. I shouldn't be surprised if she did inspire him
+to attempt something of that kind."
+
+"Well, you got out of it very well, Basil. I admired the way you managed.
+I was afraid you'd say something awkward."
+
+"Oh, with a plain line of truth before me, as the only possible thing, I
+can get on pretty well. When it comes to anything decorative, I'd rather
+leave it to you, Isabel."
+
+She seemed insensible of his jest. "Of course, he was in love with her.
+That was the light that came into his face when he was going to do what
+he thought she wanted him to do."
+
+"And she--do you think that she was--"
+
+"What an idea! It would have been perfectly grotesque!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Their affliction brought the Dryfooses into humaner relations with the
+Marches, who had hitherto regarded them as a necessary evil, as the
+odious means of their own prosperity. Mrs. March found that the women of
+the family seemed glad of her coming, and in the sense of her usefulness
+to them all she began to feel a kindness even for Christine. But she
+could not help seeing that between the girl and her father there was an
+unsettled account, somehow, and that it was Christine and not the old man
+who was holding out. She thought that their sorrow had tended to refine
+the others. Mela was much more subdued, and, except when she abandoned
+herself to a childish interest in her mourning, she did nothing to shock
+Mrs. March's taste or to seem unworthy of her grief. She was very good to
+her mother, whom the blow had left unchanged, and to her father, whom it
+had apparently fallen upon with crushing weight. Once, after visiting
+their house, Mrs. March described to March a little scene between Dryfoos
+and Mela, when he came home from Wall Street, and the girl met him at the
+door with a kind of country simpleness, and took his hat and stick, and
+brought him into the room where Mrs. March sat, looking tired and broken.
+She found this look of Dryfoos's pathetic, and dwelt on the sort of
+stupefaction there was in it; he must have loved his son more than they
+ever realized. "Yes," said March, "I suspect he did. He's never been
+about the place since that day; he was always dropping in before, on his
+way up-town. He seems to go down to Wall Street every day, just as
+before, but I suppose that's mechanical; he wouldn't know what else to
+do; I dare say it's best for him. The sanguine Fulkerson is getting a
+little anxious about the future of 'Every Other Week.' Now Conrad's gone,
+he isn't sure the old man will want to keep on with it, or whether he'll
+have to look up another Angel. He wants to get married, I imagine, and he
+can't venture till this point is settled."
+
+"It's a very material point to us too, Basil," said Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, of course. I hadn't overlooked that, you may be sure. One of the
+things that Fulkerson and I have discussed is a scheme for buying the
+magazine. Its success is pretty well assured now, and I shouldn't be
+afraid to put money into it--if I had the money."
+
+"I couldn't let you sell the house in Boston, Basil!"
+
+"And I don't want to. I wish we could go back and live in it and get the
+rent, too! It would be quite a support. But I suppose if Dryfoos won't
+keep on, it must come to another Angel. I hope it won't be a literary
+one, with a fancy for running my department."
+
+"Oh, I guess whoever takes the magazine will be glad enough to keep you!"
+
+"Do you think so? Well, perhaps. But I don't believe Fulkerson would let
+me stand long between him and an Angel of the right description."
+
+"Well, then, I believe he would. And you've never seen anything, Basil,
+to make you really think that Mr. Fulkerson didn't appreciate you to the
+utmost."
+
+"I think I came pretty near an undervaluation in that Lindau trouble. I
+shall always wonder what put a backbone into Fulkerson just at that
+crisis. Fulkerson doesn't strike me as the stuff of a moral hero."
+
+"At any rate, he was one," said Mrs. March, "and that's quite enough for
+me."
+
+March did not answer. "What a noble thing life is, anyway! Here I am,
+well on the way to fifty, after twenty-five years of hard work, looking
+forward to the potential poor-house as confidently as I did in youth. We
+might have saved a little more than we have saved; but the little more
+wouldn't avail if I were turned out of my place now; and we should have
+lived sordidly to no purpose. Some one always has you by the throat,
+unless you have some one else in your grip. I wonder if that's the
+attitude the Almighty intended His respectable creatures to take toward
+one another! I wonder if He meant our civilization, the battle we fight
+in, the game we trick in! I wonder if He considers it final, and if the
+kingdom of heaven on earth, which we pray for--"
+
+"Have you seen Lindau to-day?" Mrs. March asked.
+
+"You inferred it from the quality of my piety?" March laughed, and then
+suddenly sobered. "Yes, I saw him. It's going rather hard with him, I'm
+afraid. The amputation doesn't heal very well; the shock was very great,
+and he's old. It'll take time. There's so much pain that they have to
+keep him under opiates, and I don't think he fully knew me. At any rate,
+I didn't get my piety from him to-day."
+
+"It's horrible! Horrible!" said Mrs. March. "I can't get over it! After
+losing his hand in the war, to lose his whole arm now in this way! It
+does seem too cruel! Of course he oughtn't to have been there; we can say
+that. But you oughtn't to have been there, either, Basil."
+
+"Well, I wasn't exactly advising the police to go and club the railroad
+presidents."
+
+"Neither was poor Conrad Dryfoos."
+
+"I don't deny it. All that was distinctly the chance of life and death.
+That belonged to God; and no doubt it was law, though it seems chance.
+But what I object to is this economic chance-world in which we live, and
+which we men seem to have created. It ought to be law as inflexible in
+human affairs as the order of day and night in the physical world that if
+a man will work he shall both rest and eat, and shall not be harassed
+with any question as to how his repose and his provision shall come.
+Nothing less ideal than this satisfies the reason. But in our state of
+things no one is secure of this. No one is sure of finding work; no one
+is sure of not losing it. I may have my work taken away from me at any
+moment by the caprice, the mood, the indigestion of a man who has not the
+qualification for knowing whether I do it well, or ill. At my time of
+life--at every time of life--a man ought to feel that if he will keep on
+doing his duty he shall not suffer in himself or in those who are dear to
+him, except through natural causes. But no man can feel this as things
+are now; and so we go on, pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling,
+thrusting aside and trampling underfoot; lying, cheating, stealing; and
+then we get to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame,
+and look back over the way we've come to a palace of our own, or the
+poor-house, which is about the only possession we can claim in common
+with our brother-men, I don't think the retrospect can be pleasing."
+
+"I know, I know!" said his wife. "I think of those things, too, Basil.
+Life isn't what it seems when you look forward to it. But I think people
+would suffer less, and wouldn't have to work so hard, and could make all
+reasonable provision for the future, if they were not so greedy and so
+foolish."
+
+"Oh, without doubt! We can't put it all on the conditions; we must put
+some of the blame on character. But conditions make character; and people
+are greedy and foolish, and wish to have and to shine, because having and
+shining are held up to them by civilization as the chief good of life. We
+all know they are not the chief good, perhaps not good at all; but if
+some one ventures to say so, all the rest of us call him a fraud and a
+crank, and go moiling and toiling on to the palace or the poor-house. We
+can't help it. If one were less greedy or less foolish, some one else
+would have and would shine at his expense. We don't moil and toil to
+ourselves alone; the palace or the poor-house is not merely for
+ourselves, but for our children, whom we've brought up in the
+superstition that having and shining is the chief good. We dare not teach
+them otherwise, for fear they may falter in the fight when it comes their
+turn, and the children of others will crowd them out of the palace into
+the poor-house. If we felt sure that honest work shared by all would
+bring them honest food shared by all, some heroic few of us, who did not
+wish our children to rise above their fellows--though we could not bear
+to have them fall below--might trust them with the truth. But we have no
+such assurance, and so we go on trembling before Dryfooses and living in
+gimcrackeries."
+
+"Basil, Basil! I was always willing to live more simply than you. You
+know I was!"
+
+"I know you always said so, my dear. But how many bell-ratchets and
+speaking-tubes would you be willing to have at the street door below? I
+remember that when we were looking for a flat you rejected every building
+that had a bell-ratchet or a speaking-tube, and would have nothing to do
+with any that had more than an electric button; you wanted a hall-boy,
+with electric buttons all over him. I don't blame you. I find such things
+quite as necessary as you do."
+
+"And do you mean to say, Basil," she asked, abandoning this unprofitable
+branch of the inquiry, "that you are really uneasy about your place? that
+you are afraid Mr. Dryfoos may give up being an Angel, and Mr. Fulkerson
+may play you false?"
+
+"Play me false? Oh, it wouldn't be playing me false. It would be merely
+looking out for himself, if the new Angel had editorial tastes and wanted
+my place. It's what any one would do."
+
+"You wouldn't do it, Basil!"
+
+"Wouldn't I? Well, if any one offered me more salary than 'Every Other
+Week' pays--say, twice as much--what do you think my duty to my suffering
+family would be? It's give and take in the business world, Isabel;
+especially take. But as to being uneasy, I'm not, in the least. I've the
+spirit of a lion, when it comes to such a chance as that. When I see how
+readily the sensibilities of the passing stranger can be worked in New
+York, I think of taking up the role of that desperate man on Third Avenue
+who went along looking for garbage in the gutter to eat. I think I could
+pick up at least twenty or thirty cents a day by that little game, and
+maintain my family in the affluence it's been accustomed to."
+
+"Basil!" cried his wife. "You don't mean to say that man was an impostor!
+And I've gone about, ever since, feeling that one such case in a million,
+the bare possibility of it, was enough to justify all that Lindau said
+about the rich and the poor!"
+
+March laughed teasingly. "Oh, I don't say he was an impostor. Perhaps he
+really was hungry; but, if he wasn't, what do you think of a civilization
+that makes the opportunity of such a fraud? that gives us all such a bad
+conscience for the need which is that we weaken to the need that isn't?
+Suppose that poor fellow wasn't personally founded on fact: nevertheless,
+he represented the truth; he was the ideal of the suffering which would
+be less effective if realistically treated. That man is a great comfort
+to me. He probably rioted for days on that quarter I gave him; made a
+dinner very likely, or a champagne supper; and if 'Every Other Week'
+wants to get rid of me, I intend to work that racket. You can hang round
+the corner with Bella, and Tom can come up to me in tears, at stated
+intervals, and ask me if I've found anything yet. To be sure, we might be
+arrested and sent up somewhere. But even in that extreme case we should
+be provided for. Oh no, I'm not afraid of losing my place! I've merely a
+sort of psychological curiosity to know how men like Dryfoos and
+Fulkerson will work out the problem before them."
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+It was a curiosity which Fulkerson himself shared, at least concerning
+Dryfoos. "I don't know what the old man's going to do," he said to March
+the day after the Marches had talked their future over. "Said anything to
+you yet?"
+
+"No, not a word."
+
+"You're anxious, I suppose, same as I am. Fact is," said Fulkerson,
+blushing a little, "I can't ask to have a day named till I know where I
+am in connection with the old man. I can't tell whether I've got to look
+out for something else or somebody else. Of course, it's full soon yet."
+
+"Yes," March said, "much sooner than it seems to us. We're so anxious
+about the future that we don't remember how very recent the past is."
+
+"That's something so. The old man's hardly had time yet to pull himself
+together. Well, I'm glad you feel that way about it, March. I guess it's
+more of a blow to him than we realize. He was a good deal bound up in
+Coonrod, though he didn't always use him very well. Well, I reckon it's
+apt to happen so oftentimes; curious how cruel love can be. Heigh? We're
+an awful mixture, March!"
+
+"Yes, that's the marvel and the curse, as Browning says."
+
+"Why, that poor boy himself," pursued Fulkerson, "had streaks of the mule
+in him that could give odds to Beaton, and he must have tried the old man
+by the way he would give in to his will and hold out against his
+judgment. I don't believe he ever budged a hairs-breadth from his
+original position about wanting to be a preacher and not wanting to be a
+business man. Well, of course! I don't think business is all in all; but
+it must have made the old man mad to find that without saying anything,
+or doing anything to show it, and after seeming to come over to his
+ground, and really coming, practically, Coonrod was just exactly where he
+first planted himself, every time."
+
+"Yes, people that have convictions are difficult. Fortunately, they're
+rare."
+
+"Do you think so? It seems to me that everybody's got convictions. Beaton
+himself, who hasn't a principle to throw at a dog, has got convictions
+the size of a barn. They ain't always the same ones, I know, but they're
+always to the same effect, as far as Beaton's being Number One is
+concerned. The old man's got convictions or did have, unless this thing
+lately has shaken him all up--and he believes that money will do
+everything. Colonel Woodburn's got convictions that he wouldn't part with
+for untold millions. Why, March, you got convictions yourself!"
+
+"Have I?" said March. "I don't know what they are."
+
+"Well, neither do I; but I know you were ready to kick the trough over
+for them when the old man wanted us to bounce Lindau that time."
+
+"Oh yes," said March; he remembered the fact; but he was still uncertain
+just what the convictions were that he had been so stanch for.
+
+"I suppose we could have got along without you," Fulkerson mused aloud.
+"It's astonishing how you always can get along in this world without the
+man that is simply indispensable. Makes a fellow realize that he could
+take a day off now and then without deranging the solar system a great
+deal. Now here's Coonrod--or, rather, he isn't. But that boy managed his
+part of the schooner so well that I used to tremble when I thought of his
+getting the better of the old man and going into a convent or something
+of that kind; and now here he is, snuffed out in half a second, and I
+don't believe but what we shall be sailing along just as chipper as usual
+inside of thirty days. I reckon it will bring the old man to the point
+when I come to talk with him about who's to be put in Coonrod's place. I
+don't like very well to start the subject with him; but it's got to be
+done some time."
+
+"Yes," March admitted. "It's terrible to think how unnecessary even the
+best and wisest of us is to the purposes of Providence. When I looked at
+that poor young fellow's face sometimes--so gentle and true and pure--I
+used to think the world was appreciably richer for his being in it. But
+are we appreciably poorer for his being out of it now?"
+
+"No, I don't reckon we are," said Fulkerson. "And what a lot of the raw
+material of all kinds the Almighty must have, to waste us the way He
+seems to do. Think of throwing away a precious creature like Coonrod
+Dryfoos on one chance in a thousand of getting that old fool of a Lindau
+out of the way of being clubbed! For I suppose that was what Coonrod was
+up to. Say! Have you been round to see Lindau to-day?"
+
+Something in the tone or the manner of Fulkerson startled March. "No! I
+haven't seen him since yesterday."
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Fulkerson. "I guess I saw him a little while
+after you did, and that young doctor there seemed to feel kind of worried
+about him.
+
+"Or not worried, exactly; they can't afford to let such things worry
+them, I suppose; but--"
+
+"He's worse?" asked March.
+
+"Oh, he didn't say so. But I just wondered if you'd seen him to-day."
+
+"I think I'll go now," said March, with a pang at heart. He had gone
+every day to see Lindau, but this day he had thought he would not go, and
+that was why his heart smote him. He knew that if he were in Lindau's
+place Lindau would never have left his side if he could have helped it.
+March tried to believe that the case was the same, as it stood now; it
+seemed to him that he was always going to or from the hospital; he said
+to himself that it must do Lindau harm to be visited so much. But he knew
+that this was not true when he was met at the door of the ward where
+Lindau lay by the young doctor, who had come to feel a personal interest
+in March's interest in Lindau.
+
+He smiled without gayety, and said, "He's just going."
+
+"What! Discharged?"
+
+"Oh no. He has been failing very fast since you saw him yesterday, and
+now--" They had been walking softly and talking softly down the aisle
+between the long rows of beds. "Would you care to see him?"
+
+The doctor made a slight gesture toward the white canvas screen which in
+such places forms the death-chamber of the poor and friendless. "Come
+round this way--he won't know you! I've got rather fond of the poor old
+fellow. He wouldn't have a clergyman--sort of agnostic, isn't he? A good
+many of these Germans are--but the young lady who's been coming to see
+him--"
+
+They both stopped. Lindau's grand, patriarchal head, foreshortened to
+their view, lay white upon the pillow, and his broad, white beard flowed
+upon the sheet, which heaved with those long last breaths. Beside his bed
+Margaret Vance was kneeling; her veil was thrown back, and her face was
+lifted; she held clasped between her hands the hand of the dying man; she
+moved her lips inaudibly.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+In spite of the experience of the whole race from time immemorial, when
+death comes to any one we know we helplessly regard it as an incident of
+life, which will presently go on as before. Perhaps this is an
+instinctive perception of the truth that it does go on somewhere; but we
+have a sense of death as absolutely the end even for earth only if it
+relates to some one remote or indifferent to us. March tried to project
+Lindau to the necessary distance from himself in order to realize the
+fact in his case, but he could not, though the man with whom his youth
+had been associated in a poetic friendship had not actually reentered the
+region of his affection to the same degree, or in any like degree. The
+changed conditions forbade that. He had a soreness of heart concerning
+him; but he could not make sure whether this soreness was grief for his
+death, or remorse for his own uncandor with him about Dryfoos, or a
+foreboding of that accounting with his conscience which he knew his wife
+would now exact of him down to the last minutest particular of their
+joint and several behavior toward Lindau ever since they had met him in
+New York.
+
+He felt something knock against his shoulder, and he looked up to have
+his hat struck from his head by a horse's nose. He saw the horse put his
+foot on the hat, and he reflected, "Now it will always look like an
+accordion," and he heard the horse's driver address him some sarcasms
+before he could fully awaken to the situation. He was standing bareheaded
+in the middle of Fifth Avenue and blocking the tide of carriages flowing
+in either direction. Among the faces put out of the carriage windows he
+saw that of Dryfoos looking from a coupe. The old man knew him, and said,
+"Jump in here, Mr. March"; and March, who had mechanically picked up his
+hat, and was thinking, "Now I shall have to tell Isabel about this at
+once, and she will never trust me on the street again without her,"
+mechanically obeyed. Her confidence in him had been undermined by his
+being so near Conrad when he was shot; and it went through his mind that
+he would get Dryfoos to drive him to a hatter's, where he could buy a new
+hat, and not be obliged to confess his narrow escape to his wife till the
+incident was some days old and she could bear it better. It quite drove
+Lindau's death out of his mind for the moment; and when Dryfoos said if
+he was going home he would drive up to the first cross-street and turn
+back with him, March said he would be glad if he would take him to a
+hat-store. The old man put his head out again and told the driver to take
+them to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. "There's a hat-store around there
+somewhere, seems to me," he said; and they talked of March's accident as
+well as they could in the rattle and clatter of the street till they
+reached the place. March got his hat, passing a joke with the hatter
+about the impossibility of pressing his old hat over again, and came out
+to thank Dryfoos and take leave of him.
+
+"If you ain't in any great hurry," the old man said, "I wish you'd get in
+here a minute. I'd like to have a little talk with you."
+
+"Oh, certainly," said March, and he thought: "It's coming now about what
+he intends to do with 'Every Other Week.' Well, I might as well have all
+the misery at once and have it over."
+
+Dryfoos called up to his driver, who bent his head down sidewise to
+listen: "Go over there on Madison Avenue, onto that asphalt, and keep
+drivin' up and down till I stop you. I can't hear myself think on these
+pavements," he said to March. But after they got upon the asphalt, and
+began smoothly rolling over it, he seemed in no haste to begin. At last
+he said, "I wanted to talk with you about that--that Dutchman that was at
+my dinner--Lindau," and March's heart gave a jump with wonder whether he
+could already have heard of Lindau's death; but in an instant he
+perceived that this was impossible. "I been talkin' with Fulkerson about
+him, and he says they had to take the balance of his arm off."
+
+March nodded; it seemed to him he could not speak. He could not make out
+from the close face of the old man anything of his motive. It was set,
+but set as a piece of broken mechanism is when it has lost the power to
+relax itself. There was no other history in it of what the man had passed
+through in his son's death.
+
+"I don't know," Dryfoos resumed, looking aside at the cloth window-strap,
+which he kept fingering, "as you quite understood what made me the
+maddest. I didn't tell him I could talk Dutch, because I can't keep it up
+with a regular German; but my father was Pennsylvany Dutch, and I could
+understand what he was saying to you about me. I know I had no business
+to understood it, after I let him think I couldn't but I did, and I
+didn't like very well to have a man callin' me a traitor and a tyrant at
+my own table. Well, I look at it differently now, and I reckon I had
+better have tried to put up with it; and I would, if I could have
+known--" He stopped with a quivering lip, and then went on: "Then, again,
+I didn't like his talkin' that paternalism of his. I always heard it was
+the worst kind of thing for the country; I was brought up to think the
+best government was the one that governs the least; and I didn't want to
+hear that kind of talk from a man that was livin' on my money. I couldn't
+bear it from him. Or I thought I couldn't before--before--" He stopped
+again, and gulped. "I reckon now there ain't anything I couldn't bear."
+March was moved by the blunt words and the mute stare forward with which
+they ended. "Mr. Dryfoos, I didn't know that you understood Lindau's
+German, or I shouldn't have allowed him he wouldn't have allowed
+himself--to go on. He wouldn't have knowingly abused his position of
+guest to censure you, no matter how much he condemned you." "I don't care
+for it now," said Dryfoos. "It's all past and gone, as far as I'm
+concerned; but I wanted you to see that I wasn't tryin' to punish him for
+his opinions, as you said."
+
+"No; I see now," March assented, though he thought his position still
+justified. "I wish--"
+
+"I don't know as I understand much about his opinions, anyway; but I
+ain't ready to say I want the men dependent on me to manage my business
+for me. I always tried to do the square thing by my hands; and in that
+particular case out there I took on all the old hands just as fast as
+they left their Union. As for the game I came on them, it was dog eat
+dog, anyway."
+
+March could have laughed to think how far this old man was from even
+conceiving of Lindau's point of view, and how he was saying the worst of
+himself that Lindau could have said of him. No one could have
+characterized the kind of thing he had done more severely than he when he
+called it dog eat dog.
+
+"There's a great deal to be said on both sides," March began, hoping to
+lead up through this generality to the fact of Lindau's death; but the
+old man went on:
+
+"Well, all I wanted him to know is that I wasn't trying to punish him for
+what he said about things in general. You naturally got that idea, I
+reckon; but I always went in for lettin' people say what they please and
+think what they please; it's the only way in a free country."
+
+"I'm afraid, Mr. Dryfoos, that it would make little difference to Lindau
+now--"
+
+"I don't suppose he bears malice for it," said Dryfoos, "but what I want
+to do is to have him told so. He could understand just why I didn't want
+to be called hard names, and yet I didn't object to his thinkin' whatever
+he pleased. I'd like him to know--"
+
+"No one can speak to him, no one can tell him," March began again, but
+again Dryfoos prevented him from going on.
+
+"I understand it's a delicate thing; and I'm not askin' you to do it.
+What I would really like to do--if you think he could be prepared for it,
+some way, and could stand it--would be to go to him myself, and tell him
+just what the trouble was. I'm in hopes, if I done that, he could see how
+I felt about it."
+
+A picture of Dryfoos going to the dead Lindau with his vain regrets
+presented itself to March, and he tried once more to make the old man
+understand. "Mr. Dryfoos," he said, "Lindau is past all that forever,"
+and he felt the ghastly comedy of it when Dryfoos continued, without
+heeding him.
+
+"I got a particular reason why I want him to believe it wasn't his ideas
+I objected to--them ideas of his about the government carryin' everything
+on and givin' work. I don't understand 'em exactly, but I found a
+writin'--among--my son's--things" (he seemed to force the words through
+his teeth), "and I reckon he--thought--that way. Kind of a diary--where
+he--put down--his thoughts. My son and me--we differed about a good--many
+things." His chin shook, and from time to time he stopped. "I wasn't very
+good to him, I reckon; I crossed him where I guess I got no business to
+cross him; but I thought everything of--Coonrod. He was the best boy,
+from a baby, that ever was; just so patient and mild, and done whatever
+he was told. I ought to 'a' let him been a preacher! Oh, my son! my son!"
+The sobs could not be kept back any longer; they shook the old man with a
+violence that made March afraid for him; but he controlled himself at
+last with a series of hoarse sounds like barks. "Well, it's all past and
+gone! But as I understand you from what you saw, when Coonrod
+was--killed, he was tryin' to save that old man from trouble?"
+
+"Yes, yes! It seemed so to me."
+
+"That'll do, then! I want you to have him come back and write for the
+book when he gets well. I want you to find out and let me know if there's
+anything I can do for him. I'll feel as if I done it--for my--son. I'll
+take him into my own house, and do for him there, if you say so, when he
+gets so he can be moved. I'll wait on him myself. It's what Coonrod 'd
+do, if he was here. I don't feel any hardness to him because it was him
+that got Coonrod killed, as you might say, in one sense of the term; but
+I've tried to think it out, and I feel like I was all the more beholden
+to him because my son died tryin' to save him. Whatever I do, I'll be
+doin' it for Coonrod, and that's enough for me." He seemed to have
+finished, and he turned to March as if to hear what he had to say.
+
+March hesitated. "I'm afraid, Mr. Dryfoos--Didn't Fulkerson tell you that
+Lindau was very sick?"
+
+"Yes, of course. But he's all right, he said."
+
+Now it had to come, though the fact had been latterly playing fast and
+loose with March's consciousness. Something almost made him smile; the
+willingness he had once felt to give this old man pain; then he consoled
+himself by thinking that at least he was not obliged to meet Dryfoos's
+wish to make atonement with the fact that Lindau had renounced him, and
+would on no terms work for such a man as he, or suffer any kindness from
+him. In this light Lindau seemed the harder of the two, and March had the
+momentary force to say--
+
+"Mr. Dryfoos--it can't be. Lindau--I have just come from him--is dead."
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+"How did he take it? How could he bear it? Oh, Basil! I wonder you could
+have the heart to say it to him. It was cruel!"
+
+"Yes, cruel enough, my dear," March owned to his wife, when they talked
+the matter over on his return home. He could not wait till the children
+were out of the way, and afterward neither he nor his wife was sorry that
+he had spoken of it before them. The girl cried plentifully for her old
+friend who was dead, and said she hated Mr. Dryfoos, and then was sorry
+for him, too; and the boy listened to all, and spoke with a serious sense
+that pleased his father. "But as to how he took it," March went on to
+answer his wife's question about Dryfoos--"how do any of us take a thing
+that hurts? Some of us cry out, and some of us don't. Dryfoos drew a kind
+of long, quivering breath, as a child does when it grieves--there's
+something curiously simple and primitive about him--and didn't say
+anything. After a while he asked me how he could see the people at the
+hospital about the remains; I gave him my card to the young doctor there
+that had charge of Lindau. I suppose he was still carrying forward his
+plan of reparation in his mind--to the dead for the dead. But how
+useless! If he could have taken the living Lindau home with him, and
+cared for him all his days, what would it have profited the gentle
+creature whose life his worldly ambition vexed and thwarted here? He
+might as well offer a sacrifice at Conrad's grave. Children," said March,
+turning to them, "death is an exile that no remorse and no love can
+reach. Remember that, and be good to every one here on earth, for your
+longing to retrieve any harshness or unkindness to the dead will be the
+very ecstasy of anguish to you. I wonder," he mused, "if one of the
+reasons why we're shut up to our ignorance of what is to be hereafter
+isn't because if we were sure of another world we might be still more
+brutal to one another here, in the hope of making reparation somewhere
+else. Perhaps, if we ever come to obey the law of love on earth, the
+mystery of death will be taken away."
+
+"Well"--the ancestral Puritanism spoke in Mrs. March--"these two old men
+have been terribly punished. They have both been violent and wilful, and
+they have both been punished. No one need ever tell me there is not a
+moral government of the universe!"
+
+March always disliked to hear her talk in this way, which did both her
+head and heart injustice. "And Conrad," he said, "what was he punished
+for?"
+
+"He?"--she answered, in an exaltation--"he suffered for the sins of
+others."
+
+"Ah, well, if you put it in that way, yes. That goes on continually.
+That's another mystery."
+
+He fell to brooding on it, and presently he heard his son saying, "I
+suppose, papa, that Mr. Lindau died in a bad cause?"
+
+March was startled. He had always been so sorry for Lindau, and admired
+his courage and generosity so much, that he had never fairly considered
+this question. "Why, yes," he answered; "he died in the cause of
+disorder; he was trying to obstruct the law. No doubt there was a wrong
+there, an inconsistency and an injustice that he felt keenly; but it
+could not be reached in his way without greater wrong."
+
+"Yes; that's what I thought," said the boy. "And what's the use of our
+ever fighting about anything in America? I always thought we could vote
+anything we wanted."
+
+"We can, if we're honest, and don't buy and sell one another's votes,"
+said his father. "And men like Lindau, who renounce the American means as
+hopeless, and let their love of justice hurry them into sympathy with
+violence--yes, they are wrong; and poor Lindau did die in a bad cause, as
+you say, Tom."
+
+"I think Conrad had no business there, or you, either, Basil," said his
+wife.
+
+"Oh, I don't defend myself," said March. "I was there in the cause of
+literary curiosity and of conjugal disobedience. But Conrad--yes, he had
+some business there: it was his business to suffer there for the sins of
+others. Isabel, we can't throw aside that old doctrine of the Atonement
+yet. The life of Christ, it wasn't only in healing the sick and going
+about to do good; it was suffering for the sins of others. That's as
+great a mystery as the mystery of death. Why should there be such a
+principle in the world? But it's been felt, and more or less dumbly,
+blindly recognized ever since Calvary. If we love mankind, pity them, we
+even wish to suffer for them. That's what has created the religious
+orders in all times--the brotherhoods and sisterhoods that belong to our
+day as much as to the mediaeval past. That's what is driving a girl like
+Margaret Vance, who has everything that the world can offer her young
+beauty, on to the work of a Sister of Charity among the poor and the
+dying."
+
+"Yes, yes!" cried Mrs. March. "How--how did she look there, Basil?" She
+had her feminine misgivings; she was not sure but the girl was something
+of a poseuse, and enjoyed the picturesqueness, as well as the pain; and
+she wished to be convinced that it was not so.
+
+"Well," she said, when March had told again the little there was to tell,
+"I suppose it must be a great trial to a woman like Mrs. Horn to have her
+niece going that way."
+
+"The way of Christ?" asked March, with a smile.
+
+"Oh, Christ came into the world to teach us how to live rightly in it,
+too. If we were all to spend our time in hospitals, it would be rather
+dismal for the homes. But perhaps you don't think the homes are worth
+minding?" she suggested, with a certain note in her voice that he knew.
+
+He got up and kissed her. "I think the gimcrackeries are." He took the
+hat he had set down on the parlor table on coming in, and started to put
+it in the hall, and that made her notice it.
+
+"You've been getting a new hat!"
+
+"Yes," he hesitated; "the old one had got--was decidedly shabby."
+
+"Well, that's right. I don't like you to wear them too long. Did you
+leave the old one to be pressed?"
+
+"Well, the hatter seemed to think it was hardly worth pressing," said
+March. He decided that for the present his wife's nerves had quite all
+they could bear.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+It was in a manner grotesque, but to March it was all the more natural
+for that reason, that Dryfoos should have Lindau's funeral from his
+house. He knew the old man to be darkly groping, through the payment of
+these vain honors to the dead, for some atonement to his son, and he
+imagined him finding in them such comfort as comes from doing all one
+can, even when all is useless.
+
+No one knew what Lindau's religion was, and in default they had had the
+Anglican burial service read over him; it seems so often the refuge of
+the homeless dead. Mrs. Dryfoos came down for the ceremony. She
+understood that it was for Coonrod's sake that his father wished the
+funeral to be there; and she confided to Mrs. March that she believed
+Coonrod would have been pleased. "Coonrod was a member of the 'Piscopal
+Church; and fawther's doin' the whole thing for Coonrod as much as for
+anybody. He thought the world of Coonrod, fawther did. Mela, she kind of
+thought it would look queer to have two funerals from the same house,
+hand-runnin', as you might call it, and one of 'em no relation, either;
+but when she saw how fawther was bent on it, she give in. Seems as if she
+was tryin' to make up to fawther for Coonrod as much as she could. Mela
+always was a good child, but nobody can ever come up to Coonrod."
+
+March felt all the grotesqueness, the hopeless absurdity of Dryfoos's
+endeavor at atonement in these vain obsequies to the man for whom he
+believed his son to have died; but the effort had its magnanimity, its
+pathos, and there was a poetry that appealed to him in the reconciliation
+through death of men, of ideas, of conditions, that could only have gone
+warring on in life. He thought, as the priest went on with the solemn
+liturgy, how all the world must come together in that peace which,
+struggle and strive as we may, shall claim us at last. He looked at
+Dryfoos, and wondered whether he would consider these rites a sufficient
+tribute, or whether there was enough in him to make him realize their
+futility, except as a mere sign of his wish to retrieve the past. He
+thought how we never can atone for the wrong we do; the heart we have
+grieved and wounded cannot kindle with pity for us when once it is
+stilled; and yet we can put our evil from us with penitence, and somehow,
+somewhere, the order of loving kindness, which our passion or our
+wilfulness has disturbed, will be restored.
+
+Dryfoos, through Fulkerson, had asked all the more intimate contributors
+of 'Every Other Week' to come. Beaton was absent, but Fulkerson had
+brought Miss Woodburn, with her father, and Mrs. Leighton and Alma, to
+fill up, as he said. Mela was much present, and was official with the
+arrangement of the flowers and the welcome of the guests. She imparted
+this impersonality to her reception of Kendricks, whom Fulkerson met in
+the outer hall with his party, and whom he presented in whisper to them
+all. Kendricks smiled under his breath, as it were, and was then mutely
+and seriously polite to the Leightons. Alma brought a little bunch of
+flowers, which were lost in those which Dryfoos had ordered to be
+unsparingly provided.
+
+It was a kind of satisfaction to Mela to have Miss Vance come, and
+reassuring as to how it would look to have the funeral there; Miss Vance
+would certainly not have come unless it had been all right; she had come,
+and had sent some Easter lilies.
+
+"Ain't Christine coming down?" Fulkerson asked Mela.
+
+"No, she ain't a bit well, and she ain't been, ever since Coonrod died. I
+don't know, what's got over her," said Mela. She added, "Well, I should
+'a' thought Mr. Beaton would 'a' made out to 'a' come!"
+
+"Beaton's peculiar," said Fulkerson. "If he thinks you want him he takes
+a pleasure in not letting you have him."
+
+"Well, goodness knows, I don't want him," said the girl.
+
+Christine kept her room, and for the most part kept her bed; but there
+seemed nothing definitely the matter with her, and she would not let them
+call a doctor. Her mother said she reckoned she was beginning to feel the
+spring weather, that always perfectly pulled a body down in New York; and
+Mela said if being as cross as two sticks was any sign of spring-fever,
+Christine had it bad. She was faithfully kind to her, and submitted to
+all her humors, but she recompensed herself by the freest criticism of
+Christine when not in actual attendance on her. Christine would not
+suffer Mrs. Mandel to approach her, and she had with her father a sullen
+submission which was not resignation. For her, apparently, Conrad had not
+died, or had died in vain.
+
+"Pshaw!" said Mela, one morning when she came to breakfast, "I reckon if
+we was to send up an old card of Mr. Beaton's she'd rattle down-stairs
+fast enough. If she's sick, she's love-sick. It makes me sick to see
+her."
+
+Mela was talking to Mrs. Mandel, but her father looked up from his plate
+and listened. Mela went on: "I don't know what's made the fellow quit
+comun'. But he was an aggravatun' thing, and no more dependable than
+water. It's just like Air. Fulkerson said, if he thinks you want him
+he'll take a pleasure in not lettun' you have him. I reckon that's what's
+the matter with Christine. I believe in my heart the girl 'll die if she
+don't git him."
+
+Mela went on to eat her breakfast with her own good appetite. She now
+always came down to keep her father company, as she said, and she did her
+best to cheer and comfort him. At least she kept the talk going, and she
+had it nearly all to herself, for Mrs. Mandel was now merely staying on
+provisionally, and, in the absence of any regrets or excuses from
+Christine, was looking ruefully forward to the moment when she must leave
+even this ungentle home for the chances of the ruder world outside.
+
+The old man said nothing at table, but, when Mela went up to see if she
+could do anything for Christine, he asked Mrs. Mandel again about all the
+facts of her last interview with Beaton.
+
+She gave them as fully as she could remember them, and the old man made
+no comment on them. But he went out directly after, and at the 'Every
+Other Week' office he climbed the stairs to Fulkerson's room and asked
+for Beaton's address. No one yet had taken charge of Conrad's work, and
+Fulkerson was running the thing himself, as he said, till he could talk
+with Dryfoos about it. The old man would not look into the empty room
+where he had last seen his son alive; he turned his face away and hurried
+by the door.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+The course of public events carried Beaton's private affairs beyond the
+reach of his simple first intention to renounce his connection with
+'Every Other Week.' In fact, this was not perhaps so simple as it seemed,
+and long before it could be put in effect it appeared still simpler to do
+nothing about the matter--to remain passive and leave the initiative to
+Dryfoos, to maintain the dignity of unconsciousness and let recognition
+of any change in the situation come from those who had caused the change.
+After all, it was rather absurd to propose making a purely personal
+question the pivot on which his relations with 'Every Other Week' turned.
+He took a hint from March's position and decided that he did not know
+Dryfoos in these relations; he knew only Fulkerson, who had certainly had
+nothing to do with Mrs. Mandel's asking his intentions. As he reflected
+upon this he became less eager to look Fulkerson up and make the magazine
+a partner of his own sufferings. This was the soberer mood to which
+Beaton trusted that night even before he slept, and he awoke fully
+confirmed in it. As he examined the offence done him in the cold light of
+day, he perceived that it had not come either from Mrs. Mandel, who was
+visibly the faltering and unwilling instrument of it, or from Christine,
+who was altogether ignorant of it, but from Dryfoos, whom he could not
+hurt by giving up his place. He could only punish Fulkerson by that, and
+Fulkerson was innocent. Justice and interest alike dictated the passive
+course to which Beaton inclined; and he reflected that he might safely
+leave the punishment of Dryfoos to Christine, who would find out what had
+happened, and would be able to take care of herself in any encounter of
+tempers with her father.
+
+Beaton did not go to the office during the week that followed upon this
+conclusion; but they were used there to these sudden absences of his,
+and, as his work for the time was in train, nothing was made of his
+staying away, except the sarcastic comment which the thought of him was
+apt to excite in the literary department. He no longer came so much to
+the Leightons, and Fulkerson was in no state of mind to miss any one
+there except Miss Woodburn, whom he never missed. Beaton was left, then,
+unmolestedly awaiting the course of destiny, when he read in the morning
+paper, over his coffee at Maroni's, the deeply scare-headed story of
+Conrad's death and the clubbing of Lindau. He probably cared as little
+for either of them as any man that ever saw them; but he felt a shock, if
+not a pang, at Conrad's fate, so out of keeping with his life and
+character. He did not know what to do; and he did nothing. He was not
+asked to the funeral, but he had not expected that, and, when Fulkerson
+brought him notice that Lindau was also to be buried from Dryfoos's
+house, it was without his usual sullen vindictiveness that he kept away.
+In his sort, and as much as a man could who was necessarily so much taken
+up with himself, he was sorry for Conrad's father; Beaton had a peculiar
+tenderness for his own father, and he imagined how his father would feel
+if it were he who had been killed in Conrad's place, as it might very
+well have been; he sympathized with himself in view of the possibility;
+and for once they were mistaken who thought him indifferent and merely
+brutal in his failure to appear at Lindau's obsequies.
+
+He would really have gone if he had known how to reconcile his presence
+in that house with the terms of his effective banishment from it; and he
+was rather forgivingly finding himself wronged in the situation, when
+Dryfoos knocked at the studio door the morning after Lindau's funeral.
+Beaton roared out, "Come in!" as he always did to a knock if he had not a
+model; if he had a model he set the door slightly ajar, and with his
+palette on his thumb frowned at his visitor and told him he could not
+come in. Dryfoos fumbled about for the knob in the dim passageway
+outside, and Beaton, who had experience of people's difficulties with it,
+suddenly jerked the door open. The two men stood confronted, and at first
+sight of each other their quiescent dislike revived. Each would have been
+willing to turn away from the other, but that was not possible. Beaton
+snorted some sort of inarticulate salutation, which Dryfoos did not try
+to return; he asked if he could see him alone for a minute or two, and
+Beaton bade him come in, and swept some paint-blotched rags from the
+chair which he told him to take. He noticed, as the old man sank
+tremulously into it, that his movement was like that of his own father,
+and also that he looked very much like Christine. Dryfoos folded his
+hands tremulously on the top of his horn-handled stick, and he was rather
+finely haggard, with the dark hollows round his black eyes and the fall
+of the muscles on either side of his chin. He had forgotten to take his
+soft, wide-brimmed hat off; and Beaton felt a desire to sketch him just
+as he sat.
+
+Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from the dreary absence into
+which he fell at first. "Young man," he began, "maybe I've come here on a
+fool's errand," and Beaton rather fancied that beginning.
+
+But it embarrassed him a little, and he said, with a shy glance aside, "I
+don't know what you mean." "I reckon," Dryfoos answered, quietly, "you
+got your notion, though. I set that woman on to speak to you the way she
+done. But if there was anything wrong in the way she spoke, or if you
+didn't feel like she had any right to question you up as if we suspected
+you of anything mean, I want you to say so."
+
+Beaton said nothing, and the old man went on.
+
+"I ain't very well up in the ways of the world, and I don't pretend to
+be. All I want is to be fair and square with everybody. I've made
+mistakes, though, in my time--" He stopped, and Beaton was not proof
+against the misery of his face, which was twisted as with some strong
+physical ache. "I don't know as I want to make any more, if I can help
+it. I don't know but what you had a right to keep on comin', and if you
+had I want you to say so. Don't you be afraid but what I'll take it in
+the right way. I don't want to take advantage of anybody, and I don't ask
+you to say any more than that."
+
+Beaton did not find the humiliation of the man who had humiliated him so
+sweet as he could have fancied it might be. He knew how it had come
+about, and that it was an effect of love for his child; it did not matter
+by what ungracious means she had brought him to know that he loved her
+better than his own will, that his wish for her happiness was stronger
+than his pride; it was enough that he was now somehow brought to give
+proof of it. Beaton could not be aware of all that dark coil of
+circumstance through which Dryfoos's present action evolved itself; the
+worst of this was buried in the secret of the old man's heart, a worm of
+perpetual torment. What was apparent to another was that he was broken by
+the sorrow that had fallen upon him, and it was this that Beaton
+respected and pitied in his impulse to be frank and kind in his answer.
+
+"No, I had no right to keep coming to your house in the way I did,
+unless--unless I meant more than I ever said." Beaton added: "I don't say
+that what you did was usual--in this country, at any rate; but I can't
+say you were wrong. Since you speak to me about the matter, it's only
+fair to myself to say that a good deal goes on in life without much
+thinking of consequences. That's the way I excuse myself."
+
+"And you say Mrs. Mandel done right?" asked Dryfoos, as if he wished
+simply to be assured of a point of etiquette.
+
+"Yes, she did right. I've nothing to complain of."
+
+"That's all I wanted to know," said Dryfoos; but apparently he had not
+finished, and he did not go, though the silence that Beaton now kept gave
+him a chance to do so. He began a series of questions which had no
+relation to the matter in hand, though they were strictly personal to
+Beaton. "What countryman are you?" he asked, after a moment.
+
+"What countryman?" Beaton frowned back at him.
+
+"Yes, are you an American by birth?"
+
+"Yes; I was born in Syracuse."
+
+"Protestant?"
+
+"My father is a Scotch Seceder."
+
+"What business is your father in?"
+
+Beaton faltered and blushed; then he answered:
+
+"He's in the monument business, as he calls it. He's a tombstone cutter."
+Now that he was launched, Beaton saw no reason for not declaring, "My
+father's always been a poor man, and worked with his own hands for his
+living." He had too slight esteem socially for Dryfoos to conceal a fact
+from him that he might have wished to blink with others.
+
+"Well, that's right," said Dryfoos. "I used to farm it myself. I've got a
+good pile of money together, now. At first it didn't come easy; but now
+it's got started it pours in and pours in; it seems like there was no end
+to it. I've got well on to three million; but it couldn't keep me from
+losin' my son. It can't buy me back a minute of his life; not all the
+money in the world can do it!"
+
+He grieved this out as if to himself rather than to Beaton, who, scarcely
+ventured to say, "I know--I am very sorry--"
+
+"How did you come," Dryfoos interrupted, "to take up paintin'?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Beaton, a little scornfully. "You don't take
+a thing of that kind up, I fancy. I always wanted to paint."
+
+"Father try to stop you?"
+
+"No. It wouldn't have been of any use. Why--"
+
+"My son, he wanted to be a preacher, and I did stop him or I thought I
+did. But I reckon he was a preacher, all the same, every minute of his
+life. As you say, it ain't any use to try to stop a thing like that. I
+reckon if a child has got any particular bent, it was given to it; and
+it's goin' against the grain, it's goin' against the law, to try to bend
+it some other way. There's lots of good business men, Mr. Beaton, twenty
+of 'em to every good preacher?"
+
+"I imagine more than twenty," said Beaton, amused and touched through his
+curiosity as to what the old man was driving at by the quaint simplicity
+of his speculations.
+
+"Father ever come to the city?"
+
+"No; he never has the time; and my mother's an invalid."
+
+"Oh! Brothers and sisters?"
+
+"Yes; we're a large family."
+
+"I lost two little fellers--twins," said Dryfoos, sadly. "But we hain't
+ever had but just the five. Ever take portraits?"
+
+"Yes," said Beaton, meeting this zigzag in the queries as seriously as
+the rest. "I don't think I am good at it."
+
+Dryfoos got to his feet. "I wish you'd paint a likeness of my son. You've
+seen him plenty of times. We won't fight about the price, don't you be
+afraid of that."
+
+Beaton was astonished, and in a mistaken way he was disgusted. He saw
+that Dryfoos was trying to undo Mrs. Mandel's work practically, and get
+him to come again to his house; that he now conceived of the offence
+given him as condoned, and wished to restore the former situation. He
+knew that he was attempting this for Christine's sake, but he was not the
+man to imagine that Dryfoos was trying not only to tolerate him, but to
+like him; and, in fact, Dryfoos was not wholly conscious himself of this
+end. What they both understood was that Dryfoos was endeavoring to get at
+Beaton through Conrad's memory; but with one this was its dedication to a
+purpose of self sacrifice, and with the other a vulgar and shameless use
+of it.
+
+"I couldn't do it," said Beaton. "I couldn't think of attempting it."
+
+"Why not?" Dryfoos persisted. "We got some photographs of him; he didn't
+like to sit very well; but his mother got him to; and you know how he
+looked."
+
+"I couldn't do it--I couldn't. I can't even consider it. I'm very sorry.
+I would, if it were possible. But it isn't possible."
+
+"I reckon if you see the photographs once--"
+
+"It isn't that, Mr. Dryfoos. But I'm not in the way of that kind of thing
+any more."
+
+"I'd give any price you've a mind to name--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't the money!" cried Beaton, beginning to lose control of
+himself.
+
+The old man did not notice him. He sat with his head fallen forward, and
+his chin resting on his folded hands. Thinking of the portrait, he saw
+Conrad's face before him, reproachful, astonished, but all gentle as it
+looked when Conrad caught his hand that day after he struck him; he heard
+him say, "Father!" and the sweat gathered on his forehead. "Oh, my God!"
+he groaned. "No; there ain't anything I can do now."
+
+Beaton did not know whether Dryfoos was speaking to him or not. He
+started toward him. "Are you ill?"
+
+"No, there ain't anything the matter," said the old man. "But I guess
+I'll lay down on your settee a minute." He tottered with Beaton's help to
+the aesthetic couch covered with a tiger-skin, on which Beaton had once
+thought of painting a Cleopatra; but he could never get the right model.
+As the old man stretched himself out on it, pale and suffering, he did
+not look much like a Cleopatra, but Beaton was struck with his
+effectiveness, and the likeness between him and his daughter; she would
+make a very good Cleopatra in some ways. All the time, while these
+thoughts passed through his mind, he was afraid Dryfoos would die. The
+old man fetched his breath in gasps, which presently smoothed and
+lengthened into his normal breathing. Beaton got him a glass of wine, and
+after tasting it he sat up.
+
+"You've got to excuse me," he said, getting back to his characteristic
+grimness with surprising suddenness, when once he began to recover
+himself. "I've been through a good deal lately; and sometimes it ketches
+me round the heart like a pain."
+
+In his life of selfish immunity from grief, Beaton could not understand
+this experience that poignant sorrow brings; he said to himself that
+Dryfoos was going the way of angina pectoris; as he began shuffling off
+the tiger-skin he said: "Had you better get up? Wouldn't you like me to
+call a doctor?"
+
+"I'm all right, young man." Dryfoos took his hat and stick from him, but
+he made for the door so uncertainly that Beaton put his hand under his
+elbow and helped him out, and down the stairs, to his coupe.
+
+"Hadn't you better let me drive home with you?" he asked.
+
+"What?" said Dryfoos, suspiciously.
+
+Beaton repeated his question.
+
+"I guess I'm able to go home alone," said Dryfoos, in a surly tone, and
+he put his head out of the window and called up "Home!" to the driver,
+who immediately started off and left Beaton standing beside the
+curbstone.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Beaton wasted the rest of the day in the emotions and speculations which
+Dryfoos's call inspired. It was not that they continuously occupied him,
+but they broke up the train of other thoughts, and spoiled him for work;
+a very little spoiled Beaton for work; he required just the right mood
+for work. He comprehended perfectly well that Dryfoos had made him that
+extraordinary embassy because he wished him to renew his visits, and he
+easily imagined the means that had brought him to this pass. From what he
+knew of that girl he did not envy her father his meeting with her when he
+must tell her his mission had failed. But had it failed? When Beaton came
+to ask himself this question, he could only perceive that he and Dryfoos
+had failed to find any ground of sympathy, and had parted in the same
+dislike with which they had met. But as to any other failure, it was
+certainly tacit, and it still rested with him to give it effect. He could
+go back to Dryfoos's house, as freely as before, and it was clear that he
+was very much desired to come back. But if he went back it was also clear
+that he must go back with intentions more explicit than before, and now
+he had to ask himself just how much or how little he had meant by going
+there. His liking for Christine had certainly not increased, but the
+charm, on the other hand, of holding a leopardess in leash had not yet
+palled upon him. In his life of inconstancies, it was a pleasure to rest
+upon something fixed, and the man who had no control over himself liked
+logically enough to feel his control of some one else. The fact cannot
+other wise be put in terms, and the attraction which Christine Dryfoos
+had for him, apart from this, escapes from all terms, as anything purely
+and merely passional must. He had seen from the first that she was a cat,
+and so far as youth forecasts such things, he felt that she would be a
+shrew. But he had a perverse sense of her beauty, and he knew a sort of
+life in which her power to molest him with her temper could be reduced to
+the smallest proportions, and even broken to pieces. Then the
+consciousness of her money entered. It was evident that the old man had
+mentioned his millions in the way of a hint to him of what he might
+reasonably expect if he would turn and be his son-in-law. Beaton did not
+put it to himself in those words; and in fact his cogitations were not in
+words at all. It was the play of cognitions, of sensations, formlessly
+tending to the effect which can only be very clumsily interpreted in
+language. But when he got to this point in them, Beaton rose to
+magnanimity and in a flash of dramatic reverie disposed of a part of
+Dryfoos's riches in placing his father and mother, and his brothers and
+sisters, beyond all pecuniary anxiety forever. He had no shame, no
+scruple in this, for he had been a pensioner upon others ever since a
+Syracusan amateur of the arts had detected his talent and given him the
+money to go and study abroad. Beaton had always considered the money a
+loan, to be repaid out of his future success; but he now never dreamt of
+repaying it; as the man was rich, he had even a contempt for the notion
+of repaying him; but this did not prevent him from feeling very keenly
+the hardships he put his father to in borrowing money from him, though he
+never repaid his father, either. In this reverie he saw himself
+sacrificed in marriage with Christine Dryfoos, in a kind of admiring
+self-pity, and he was melted by the spectacle of the dignity with which
+he suffered all the lifelong trials ensuing from his unselfishness. The
+fancy that Alma Leighton came bitterly to regret him, contributed to
+soothe and flatter him, and he was not sure that Margaret. Vance did not
+suffer a like loss in him.
+
+There had been times when, as he believed, that beautiful girl's high
+thoughts had tended toward him; there had been looks, gestures, even
+words, that had this effect to him, or that seemed to have had it; and
+Beaton saw that he might easily construe Mrs. Horn's confidential appeal
+to him to get Margaret interested in art again as something by no means
+necessarily offensive, even though it had been made to him as to a master
+of illusion. If Mrs. Horn had to choose between him and the life of good
+works to which her niece was visibly abandoning herself, Beaton could not
+doubt which she would choose; the only question was how real the danger
+of a life of good works was.
+
+As he thought of these two girls, one so charming and the other so
+divine, it became indefinitely difficult to renounce them for Christine
+Dryfoos, with her sultry temper and her earthbound ideals. Life had been
+so flattering to Beaton hitherto that he could not believe them both
+finally indifferent; and if they were not indifferent, perhaps he did not
+wish either of them to be very definite. What he really longed for was
+their sympathy; for a man who is able to walk round quite ruthlessly on
+the feelings of others often has very tender feelings of his own, easily
+lacerated, and eagerly responsive to the caresses of compassion. In this
+frame Beaton determined to go that afternoon, though it was not Mrs.
+Horn's day, and call upon her in the hope of possibly seeing Miss Vance
+alone. As he continued in it, he took this for a sign and actually went.
+It did not fall out at once as he wished, but he got Mrs. Horn to talking
+again about her niece, and Mrs. Horn again regretted that nothing could
+be done by the fine arts to reclaim Margaret from good works.
+
+"Is she at home? Will you let me see her?" asked Beacon, with something
+of the scientific interest of a physician inquiring for a patient whose
+symptoms have been rehearsed to him. He had not asked for her before.
+
+"Yes, certainly," said Mrs. Horn, and she went herself to call Margaret,
+and she did not return with her. The girl entered with the gentle grace
+peculiar to her; and Beaton, bent as he was on his own consolation, could
+not help being struck with the spiritual exaltation of her look. At sight
+of her, the vague hope he had never quite relinquished, that they might
+be something more than aesthetic friends, died in his heart. She wore
+black, as she often did; but in spite of its fashion her dress received a
+nun-like effect from the pensive absence of her face. "Decidedly,"
+thought Beaton, "she is far gone in good works."
+
+But he rose, all the same, to meet her on the old level, and he began at
+once to talk to her of the subject he had been discussing with her aunt.
+He said frankly that they both felt she had unjustifiably turned her back
+upon possibilities which she ought not to neglect.
+
+"You know very well," she answered, "that I couldn't do anything in that
+way worth the time I should waste on it. Don't talk of it, please. I
+suppose my aunt has been asking you to say this, but it's no use. I'm
+sorry it's no use, she wishes it so much; but I'm not sorry otherwise.
+You can find the pleasure at least of doing good work in it; but I
+couldn't find anything in it but a barren amusement. Mr. Wetmore is
+right; for me, it's like enjoying an opera, or a ball."
+
+"That's one of Wetmore's phrases. He'd sacrifice anything to them."
+
+She put aside the whole subject with a look. "You were not at Mr.
+Dryfoos's the other day. Have you seen them, any of them, lately?"
+
+"I haven't been there for some time, no," said Beaton, evasively. But he
+thought if he was to get on to anything, he had better be candid. "Mr.
+Dryfoos was at my studio this morning. He's got a queer notion. He wants
+me to paint his son's portrait."
+
+She started. "And will you--"
+
+"No, I couldn't do such a thing. It isn't in my way. I told him so. His
+son had a beautiful face an antique profile; a sort of early Christian
+type; but I'm too much of a pagan for that sort of thing."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yes," Beaton continued, not quite liking her assent after he had invited
+it. He had his pride in being a pagan, a Greek, but it failed him in her
+presence, now; and he wished that she had protested he was none. "He was
+a singular creature; a kind of survival; an exile in our time and place.
+I don't know: we don't quite expect a saint to be rustic; but with all
+his goodness Conrad Dryfoos was a country person. If he were not dying
+for a cause you could imagine him milking." Beaton intended a contempt
+that came from the bitterness of having himself once milked the family
+cow.
+
+His contempt did not reach Miss Vance. "He died for a cause," she said.
+"The holiest."
+
+"Of labor?"
+
+"Of peace. He was there to persuade the strikers to be quiet and go
+home."
+
+"I haven't been quite sure," said Beaton. "But in any case he had no
+business there. The police were on hand to do the persuading."
+
+"I can't let you talk so!" cried the girl. "It's shocking! Oh, I know
+it's the way people talk, and the worst is that in the sight of the world
+it's the right way. But the blessing on the peacemakers is not for the
+policemen with their clubs."
+
+Beaton saw that she was nervous; he made his reflection that she was
+altogether too far gone in good works for the fine arts to reach her; he
+began to think how he could turn her primitive Christianity to the
+account of his modern heathenism. He had no deeper design than to get
+flattered back into his own favor far enough to find courage for some
+sort of decisive step. In his heart he was trying to will whether he
+should or should not go back to Dryfoos's house. It could not be from the
+caprice that had formerly taken him; it must be from a definite purpose;
+again he realized this. "Of course; you are right," he said. "I wish I
+could have answered that old man differently. I fancy he was bound up in
+his son, though he quarrelled with him, and crossed him. But I couldn't
+do it; it wasn't possible." He said to himself that if she said "No,"
+now, he would be ruled by her agreement with him; and if she disagreed
+with him, he would be ruled still by the chance, and would go no more to
+the Dryfooses'. He found himself embarrassed to the point of blushing
+when she said nothing, and left him, as it were, on his own hands. "I
+should like to have given him that comfort; I fancy he hasn't much
+comfort in life; but there seems no comfort in me."
+
+He dropped his head in a fit attitude for compassion; but she poured no
+pity upon it.
+
+"There is no comfort for us in ourselves," she said. "It's hard to get
+outside; but there's only despair within. When we think we have done
+something for others, by some great effort, we find it's all for our own
+vanity."
+
+"Yes," said Beaton. "If I could paint pictures for righteousness' sake, I
+should have been glad to do Conrad Dryfoos for his father. I felt sorry
+for him. Did the rest seem very much broken up? You saw them all?"
+
+"Not all. Miss Dryfoos was ill, her sister said. It's hard to tell how
+much people suffer. His mother seemed bewildered. The younger sister is a
+simple creature; she looks like him; I think she must have something of
+his spirit."
+
+"Not much spirit of any kind, I imagine," said Beaton. "But she's amiably
+material. Did they say Miss Dryfoos was seriously ill?"
+
+"No. I supposed she might be prostrated by her brother's death."
+
+"Does she seem that kind of person to you, Miss Vance?" asked Beaton.
+
+"I don't know. I haven't tried to see so much of them as I might, the
+past winter. I was not sure about her when I met her; I've never seen
+much of people, except in my own set, and the--very poor. I have been
+afraid I didn't understand her. She may have a kind of pride that would
+not let her do herself justice."
+
+Beaton felt the unconscious dislike in the endeavor of praise. "Then she
+seems to you like a person whose life--its trials, its chances--would
+make more of than she is now?"
+
+"I didn't say that. I can't judge of her at all; but where we don't know,
+don't you think we ought to imagine the best?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Beaton. "I didn't know but what I once said of them might
+have prejudiced you against them. I have accused myself of it." He always
+took a tone of conscientiousness, of self-censure, in talking with Miss
+Vance; he could not help it.
+
+"Oh no. And I never allowed myself to form any judgment of her. She is
+very pretty, don't you think, in a kind of way?"
+
+"Very."
+
+"She has a beautiful brunette coloring: that floury white and the
+delicate pink in it. Her eyes are beautiful."
+
+"She's graceful, too," said Beaton. "I've tried her in color; but I
+didn't make it out."
+
+"I've wondered sometimes," said Miss Vance, "whether that elusive quality
+you find in some people you try to paint doesn't characterize them all
+through. Miss Dryfoos might be ever so much finer and better than we
+would find out in the society way that seems the only way."
+
+"Perhaps," said Beaton, gloomily; and he went away profoundly discouraged
+by this last analysis of Christine's character. The angelic
+imperviousness of Miss Vance to properties of which his own wickedness
+was so keenly aware in Christine might have made him laugh, if it had not
+been such a serious affair with him. As it was, he smiled to think how
+very differently Alma Leighton would have judged her from Miss Vance's
+premises. He liked that clear vision of Alma's even when it pierced his
+own disguises. Yes, that was the light he had let die out, and it might
+have shone upon his path through life. Beaton never felt so poignantly
+the disadvantage of having on any given occasion been wanting to his own
+interests through his self-love as in this. He had no one to blame but
+himself for what had happened, but he blamed Alma for what might happen
+in the future because she shut out the way of retrieval and return. When
+he thought of the attitude she had taken toward him, it seemed
+incredible, and he was always longing to give her a final chance to
+reverse her final judgment. It appeared to him that the time had come for
+this now, if ever.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+While we are still young we feel a kind of pride, a sort of fierce
+pleasure, in any important experience, such as we have read of or heard
+of in the lives of others, no matter how painful. It was this pride, this
+pleasure, which Beaton now felt in realizing that the toils of fate were
+about him, that between him and a future of which Christine Dryfoos must
+be the genius there was nothing but the will, the mood, the fancy of a
+girl who had not given him the hope that either could ever again be in
+his favor. He had nothing to trust to, in fact, but his knowledge that he
+had once had them all; she did not deny that; but neither did she conceal
+that he had flung away his power over them, and she had told him that
+they never could be his again. A man knows that he can love and wholly
+cease to love, not once merely, but several times; he recognizes the fact
+in regard to himself, both theoretically and practically; but in regard
+to women he cherishes the superstition of the romances that love is once
+for all, and forever. It was because Beaton would not believe that Alma
+Leighton, being a woman, could put him out of her heart after suffering
+him to steal into it, that he now hoped anything from her, and she had
+been so explicit when they last spoke of that affair that he did not hope
+much. He said to himself that he was going to cast himself on her mercy,
+to take whatever chance of life, love, and work there was in her having
+the smallest pity on him. If she would have none, then there was but one
+thing he could do: marry Christine and go abroad. He did not see how he
+could bring this alternative to bear upon Alma; even if she knew what he
+would do in case of a final rejection, he had grounds for fearing she
+would not care; but he brought it to bear upon himself, and it nerved him
+to a desperate courage. He could hardly wait for evening to come, before
+he went to see her; when it came, it seemed to have come too soon. He had
+wrought himself thoroughly into the conviction that he was in earnest,
+and that everything depended upon her answer to him, but it was not till
+he found himself in her presence, and alone with her, that he realized
+the truth of his conviction. Then the influences of her grace, her
+gayety, her arch beauty, above all, her good sense, penetrated his soul
+like a subtle intoxication, and he said to himself that he was right; he
+could not live without her; these attributes of hers were what he needed
+to win him, to cheer him, to charm him, to guide him. He longed so to
+please her, to ingratiate himself with her, that he attempted to be light
+like her in his talk, but lapsed into abysmal absences and gloomy
+recesses of introspection.
+
+"What are you laughing at?" he asked, suddenly starting from one of
+these.
+
+"What you are thinking of."
+
+"It's nothing to laugh at. Do you know what I'm thinking of?"
+
+"Don't tell, if it's dreadful."
+
+"Oh, I dare say you wouldn't think it's dreadful," he said, with
+bitterness. "It's simply the case of a man who has made a fool of himself
+and sees no help of retrieval in himself."
+
+"Can any one else help a man unmake a fool of himself?" she asked, with a
+smile.
+
+"Yes. In a case like this."
+
+"Dear me! This is very interesting."
+
+She did not ask him what the case was, but he was launched now, and he
+pressed on. "I am the man who has made a fool of himself--"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"And you can help me out if you will. Alma, I wish you could see me as I
+really am."
+
+"Do you, Mr. Beacon? Perhaps I do."
+
+"No; you don't. You formulated me in a certain way, and you won't allow
+for the change that takes place in every one. You have changed; why
+shouldn't I?"
+
+"Has this to do with your having made a fool of yourself?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh! Then I don't see how you have changed."
+
+She laughed, and he too, ruefully. "You're cruel. Not but what I deserve
+your mockery. But the change was not from the capacity of making a fool
+of myself. I suppose I shall always do that more or less--unless you help
+me. Alma! Why can't you have a little compassion? You know that I must
+always love you."
+
+"Nothing makes me doubt that like your saying it, Mr. Beaton. But now
+you've broken your word--"
+
+"You are to blame for that. You knew I couldn't keep it!"
+
+"Yes, I'm to blame. I was wrong to let you come--after that. And so I
+forgive you for speaking to me in that way again. But it's perfectly
+impossible and perfectly useless for me to hear you any more on that
+subject; and so-good-bye!"
+
+She rose, and he perforce with her. "And do you mean it?" he asked.
+"Forever?"
+
+"Forever. This is truly the last time I will ever see you if I can help
+it. Oh, I feel sorry enough for you!" she said, with a glance at his
+face. "I do believe you are in earnest. But it's too late now. Don't let
+us talk about it any more! But we shall, if we meet, and so,--"
+
+"And so good-bye! Well, I've nothing more to say, and I might as well say
+that. I think you've been very good to me. It seems to me as if you had
+been--shall I say it?--trying to give me a chance. Is that so?" She
+dropped her eyes and did not answer.
+
+"You found it was no use! Well, I thank you for trying. It's curious to
+think that I once had your trust, your regard, and now I haven't it. You
+don't mind my remembering that I had? It'll be some little consolation,
+and I believe it will be some help. I know I can't retrieve the past now.
+It is too late. It seems too preposterous--perfectly lurid--that I could
+have been going to tell you what a tangle I'd got myself in, and to ask
+you to help untangle me. I must choke in the infernal coil, but I'd like
+to have the sweetness of your pity in it--whatever it is."
+
+She put out her hand. "Whatever it is, I do pity you; I said that."
+
+"Thank you." He kissed the hand she gave him and went.
+
+He had gone on some such terms before; was it now for the last time? She
+believed it was. She felt in herself a satiety, a fatigue, in which his
+good looks, his invented airs and poses, his real trouble, were all alike
+repulsive. She did not acquit herself of the wrong of having let him
+think she might yet have liked him as she once did; but she had been
+honestly willing to see whether she could. It had mystified her to find
+that when they first met in New York, after their summer in St. Barnaby,
+she cared nothing for him; she had expected to punish him for his
+neglect, and then fancy him as before, but she did not. More and more she
+saw him selfish and mean, weak-willed, narrow-minded, and hard-hearted;
+and aimless, with all his talent. She admired his talent in proportion as
+she learned more of artists, and perceived how uncommon it was; but she
+said to herself that if she were going to devote herself to art, she
+would do it at first-hand. She was perfectly serene and happy in her
+final rejection of Beaton; he had worn out not only her fancy, but her
+sympathy, too.
+
+This was what her mother would not believe when Alma reported the
+interview to her; she would not believe it was the last time they should
+meet; death itself can hardly convince us that it is the last time of
+anything, of everything between ourselves and the dead. "Well, Alma," she
+said, "I hope you'll never regret what you've done."
+
+"You may be sure I shall not regret it. If ever I'm low-spirited about
+anything, I'll think of giving Mr. Beaton his freedom, and that will
+cheer me up."
+
+"And don't you expect to get married? Do you intend to be an old maid?"
+demanded her mother, in the bonds of the superstition women have so long
+been under to the effect that every woman must wish to get married, if
+for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid.
+
+"Well, mamma," said Alma, "I intend being a young one for a few years
+yet; and then I'll see. If I meet the right person, all well and good; if
+not, not. But I shall pick and choose, as a man does; I won't merely be
+picked and chosen."
+
+"You can't help yourself; you may be very glad if you are picked and
+chosen."
+
+"What nonsense, mamma! A girl can get any man she wants, if she goes
+about it the right way. And when my 'fated fairy prince' comes along, I
+shall just simply make furious love to him and grab him. Of course, I
+shall make a decent pretence of talking in my sleep. I believe it's done
+that way more than half the time. The fated fairy prince wouldn't see the
+princess in nine cases out of ten if she didn't say something; he would
+go mooning along after the maids of honor."
+
+Mrs. Leighton tried to look unspeakable horror; but she broke down and
+laughed. "Well, you are a strange girl, Alma."
+
+"I don't know about that. But one thing I do know, mamma, and that is
+that Prince Beaton isn't the F. F. P. for me. How strange you are, mamma!
+Don't you think it would be perfectly disgusting to accept a person you
+didn't care for, and let him go on and love you and marry you? It's
+sickening."
+
+"Why, certainly, Alma. It's only because I know you did care for him
+once--"
+
+"And now I don't. And he didn't care for me once, and now he does. And so
+we're quits."
+
+"If I could believe--"
+
+"You had better brace up and try, mamma; for as Mr. Fulkerson says, it's
+as sure as guns. From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, he's
+loathsome to me; and he keeps getting loathsomer. Ugh! Goodnight!"
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+"Well, I guess she's given him the grand bounce at last," said Fulkerson
+to March in one of their moments of confidence at the office. "That's
+Mad's inference from appearances--and disappearances; and some little
+hints from Alma Leighton."
+
+"Well, I don't know that I have any criticisms to offer," said March. "It
+may be bad for Beaton, but it's a very good thing for Miss Leighton. Upon
+the whole, I believe I congratulate her."
+
+"Well, I don't know. I always kind of hoped it would turn out the other
+way. You know I always had a sneaking fondness for the fellow."
+
+"Miss Leighton seems not to have had."
+
+"It's a pity she hadn't. I tell you, March, it ain't so easy for a girl
+to get married, here in the East, that she can afford to despise any
+chance."
+
+"Isn't that rather a low view of it?"
+
+"It's a common-sense view. Beaton has the making of a first-rate fellow
+in him. He's the raw material of a great artist and a good citizen. All
+he wants is somebody to take him in hand and keep him from makin' an ass
+of himself and kickin' over the traces generally, and ridin' two or three
+horses bareback at once."
+
+"It seems a simple problem, though the metaphor is rather complicated,"
+said March. "But talk to Miss Leighton about it. I haven't given Beaton
+the grand bounce."
+
+He began to turn over the manuscripts on his table, and Fulkerson went
+away. But March found himself thinking of the matter from time to time
+during the day, and he spoke to his wife about it when he went home. She
+surprised him by taking Fulkerson's view of it.
+
+"Yes, it's a pity she couldn't have made up her mind to have him. It's
+better for a woman to be married."
+
+"I thought Paul only went so far as to say it was well. But what would
+become of Miss Leighton's artistic career if she married?"
+
+"Oh, her artistic career!" said Mrs. March, with matronly contempt of it.
+
+"But look here!" cried her husband. "Suppose she doesn't like him?"
+
+"How can a girl of that age tell whether she likes any one or not?"
+
+"It seems to me you were able to tell at that age, Isabel. But let's
+examine this thing. (This thing! I believe Fulkerson is characterizing my
+whole parlance, as well as your morals.) Why shouldn't we rejoice as much
+at a non-marriage as a marriage? When we consider the enormous risks
+people take in linking their lives together, after not half so much
+thought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I think we ought to be glad
+whenever they don't do it. I believe that this popular demand for the
+matrimony of others comes from our novel-reading. We get to thinking that
+there is no other happiness or good-fortune in life except marriage; and
+it's offered in fiction as the highest premium for virtue, courage,
+beauty, learning, and saving human life. We all know it isn't. We know
+that in reality marriage is dog cheap, and anybody can have it for the
+asking--if he keeps asking enough people. By-and-by some fellow will wake
+up and see that a first-class story can be written from the anti-marriage
+point of view; and he'll begin with an engaged couple, and devote his
+novel to disengaging them and rendering them separately happy ever after
+in the denouement. It will make his everlasting fortune."
+
+"Why don't you write it, Basil?" she asked. "It's a delightful idea. You
+could do it splendidly."
+
+He became fascinated with the notion. He developed it in detail; but at
+the end he sighed and said: "With this 'Every Other Week' work on my
+hands, of course I can't attempt a novel. But perhaps I sha'n't have it
+long."
+
+She was instantly anxious to know what he meant, and the novel and Miss
+Leighton's affair were both dropped out of their thoughts. "What do you
+mean? Has Mr. Fulkerson said anything yet?"
+
+"Not a word. He knows no more about it than I do. Dryfoos hasn't spoken,
+and we're both afraid to ask him. Of course, I couldn't ask him."
+
+"No."
+
+"But it's pretty uncomfortable, to be kept hanging by the gills so, as
+Fulkerson says."
+
+"Yes, we don't know what to do."
+
+March and Fulkerson said the same to each other; and Fulkerson said that
+if the old man pulled out, he did not know what would happen. He had no
+capital to carry the thing on, and the very fact that the old man had
+pulled out would damage it so that it would be hard to get anybody else
+to put it. In the mean time Fulkerson was running Conrad's office-work,
+when he ought to be looking after the outside interests of the thing; and
+he could not see the day when he could get married.
+
+"I don't know which it's worse for, March: you or me. I don't know, under
+the circumstances, whether it's worse to have a family or to want to have
+one. Of course--of course! We can't hurry the old man up. It wouldn't be
+decent, and it would be dangerous. We got to wait."
+
+He almost decided to draw upon Dryfoos for some money; he did not need
+any, but, he said maybe the demand would act as a hint upon him. One day,
+about a week after Alma's final rejection of Beaton, Dryfoos came into
+March's office. Fulkerson was out, but the old man seemed not to have
+tried to see him.
+
+He put his hat on the floor by his chair, after he sat down, and looked
+at March awhile with his old eyes, which had the vitreous glitter of old.
+eyes stimulated to sleeplessness. Then he said, abruptly, "Mr. March, how
+would you like to take this thing off my hands?"
+
+"I don't understand, exactly," March began; but of course he understood
+that Dryfoos was offering to let him have 'Every Other Week' on some
+terms or other, and his heart leaped with hope.
+
+The old man knew he understood, and so he did not explain. He said: "I am
+going to Europe, to take my family there. The doctor thinks it might do
+my wife some good; and I ain't very well myself, and my girls both want
+to go; and so we're goin'. If you want to take this thing off my hands, I
+reckon I can let you have it in 'most any shape you say. You're all
+settled here in New York, and I don't suppose you want to break up, much,
+at your time of life, and I've been thinkin' whether you wouldn't like to
+take the thing."
+
+The word, which Dryfoos had now used three times, made March at last
+think of Fulkerson; he had been filled too full of himself to think of
+any one else till he had mastered the notion of such wonderful good
+fortune as seemed about falling to him. But now he did think of
+Fulkerson, and with some shame and confusion; for he remembered how, when
+Dryfoos had last approached him there on the business of his connection
+with 'Every Other Week,' he had been very haughty with him, and told him
+that he did not know him in this connection. He blushed to find how far
+his thoughts had now run without encountering this obstacle of etiquette.
+
+"Have you spoken to Mr. Fulkerson?" he asked.
+
+"No, I hain't. It ain't a question of management. It's a question of
+buying and selling. I offer the thing to you first. I reckon Fulkerson
+couldn't get on very well without you."
+
+March saw the real difference in the two cases, and he was glad to see
+it, because he could act more decisively if not hampered by an obligation
+to consistency. "I am gratified, of course, Mr. Dryfoos; extremely
+gratified; and it's no use pretending that I shouldn't be happy beyond
+bounds to get possession of 'Every Other Week.' But I don't feel quite
+free to talk about it apart from Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Oh, all right!" said the old man, with quick offence.
+
+March hastened to say: "I feel bound to Mr. Fulkerson in every way. He
+got me to come here, and I couldn't even seem to act without him."
+
+He put it questioningly, and the old man answered:
+
+"Yes, I can see that. When 'll he be in? I can wait." But he looked
+impatient.
+
+"Very soon, now," said March, looking at his watch. "He was only to be
+gone a moment," and while he went on to talk with Dryfoos, he wondered
+why the old man should have come first to speak with him, and whether it
+was from some obscure wish to make him reparation for displeasures in the
+past, or from a distrust or dislike of Fulkerson. Whichever light he
+looked at it in, it was flattering.
+
+"Do you think of going abroad soon?" he asked.
+
+"What? Yes--I don't know--I reckon. We got our passage engaged. It's on
+one of them French boats. We're goin' to Paris."
+
+"Oh! That will be interesting to the young ladies."
+
+"Yes. I reckon we're goin' for them. 'Tain't likely my wife and me would
+want to pull up stakes at our age," said the old man, sorrowfully.
+
+"But you may find it do you good, Mr. Dryfoos," said March, with a
+kindness that was real, mixed as it was with the selfish interest he now
+had in the intended voyage.
+
+"Well, maybe, maybe," sighed the old man; and he dropped his head
+forward. "It don't make a great deal of difference what we do or we don't
+do, for the few years left."
+
+"I hope Mrs. Dryfoos is as well as usual," said March, finding the ground
+delicate and difficult.
+
+"Middlin', middlin'," said the old man. "My daughter Christine, she ain't
+very well."
+
+"Oh," said March. It was quite impossible for him to affect a more
+explicit interest in the fact. He and Dryfoos sat silent for a few
+moments, and he was vainly casting about in his thought for something
+else which would tide them over the interval till Fulkerson came, when he
+heard his step on the stairs.
+
+"Hello, hello!" he said. "Meeting of the clans!" It was always a meeting
+of the clans, with Fulkerson, or a field day, or an extra session, or a
+regular conclave, whenever he saw people of any common interest together.
+"Hain't seen you here for a good while, Mr. Dryfoos. Did think some of
+running away with 'Every Other Week' one while, but couldn't seem to work
+March up to the point."
+
+He gave Dryfoos his hand, and pushed aside the papers on the corner of
+March's desk, and sat down there, and went on briskly with the nonsense
+he could always talk while he was waiting for another to develop any
+matter of business; he told March afterward that he scented business in
+the air as soon as he came into the room where he and Dryfoos were
+sitting.
+
+Dryfoos seemed determined to leave the word to March, who said, after an
+inquiring look at him, "Mr. Dryfoos has been proposing to let us have
+'Every Other Week,' Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, that's good; that suits yours truly; March & Fulkerson, publishers
+and proprietors, won't pretend it don't, if the terms are all right."
+
+"The terms," said the old man, "are whatever you want 'em. I haven't got
+any more use for the concern--" He gulped, and stopped; they knew what he
+was thinking of, and they looked down in pity. He went on: "I won't put
+any more money in it; but what I've put in a'ready can stay; and you can
+pay me four per cent."
+
+He got upon his feet; and March and Fulkerson stood, too.
+
+"Well, I call that pretty white," said Fulkerson. "It's a bargain as far
+as I'm concerned. I suppose you'll want to talk it over with your wife,
+March?"
+
+"Yes; I shall," said March. "I can see that it's a great chance; but I
+want to talk it over with my wife."
+
+"Well, that's right," said the old man. "Let me hear from you tomorrow."
+
+He went out, and Fulkerson began to dance round the room. He caught March
+about his stalwart girth and tried to make him waltz; the office-boy came
+to the door and looked on with approval.
+
+"Come, come, you idiot!" said March, rooting himself to the carpet.
+
+"It's just throwing the thing into our mouths," said Fulkerson. "The
+wedding will be this day week. No cards! Teedle-lumpty-diddle!
+Teedle-lumpty-dee! What do you suppose he means by it, March?" he asked,
+bringing himself soberly up, of a sudden. "What is his little game? Or is
+he crazy? It don't seem like the Dryfoos of my previous acquaintance."
+
+"I suppose," March suggested, "that he's got money enough, so that he
+don't care for this--"
+
+"Pshaw! You're a poet! Don't you know that the more money that kind of
+man has got, the more he cares for money? It's some fancy of his--like
+having Lindau's funeral at his house--By Jings, March, I believe you're
+his fancy!"
+
+"Oh, now! Don't you be a poet, Fulkerson!"
+
+"I do! He seemed to take a kind of shine to you from the day you wouldn't
+turn off old Lindau; he did, indeed. It kind of shook him up. It made him
+think you had something in you. He was deceived by appearances. Look
+here! I'm going round to see Mrs. March with you, and explain the thing
+to her. I know Mrs. March! She wouldn't believe you knew what you were
+going in for. She has a great respect for your mind, but she don't think
+you've got any sense. Heigh?"
+
+"All right," said March, glad of the notion; and it was really a comfort
+to have Fulkerson with him to develop all the points; and it was
+delightful to see how clearly and quickly she seized them; it made March
+proud of her. She was only angry that they had lost any time in coming to
+submit so plain a case to her.
+
+Mr. Dryfoos might change his mind in the night, and then everything would
+be lost. They must go to him instantly, and tell him that they accepted;
+they must telegraph him.
+
+"Might as well send a district messenger; he'd get there next week," said
+Fulkerson. "No, no! It'll all keep till to-morrow, and be the better for
+it. If he's got this fancy for March, as I say, he ain't agoing to change
+it in a single night. People don't change their fancies for March in a
+lifetime. Heigh?"
+
+When Fulkerson turned up very early at the office next morning, as March
+did, he was less strenuous about Dryfoos's fancy for March. It was as if
+Miss Woodburn might have blown cold upon that theory, as something unjust
+to his own merit, for which she would naturally be more jealous than he.
+
+March told him what he had forgotten to tell him the day before, though
+he had been trying, all through their excited talk, to get it in, that
+the Dryfooses were going abroad.
+
+"Oh, ho!" cried Fulkerson. "That's the milk in the cocoanut, is it? Well,
+I thought there must be something."
+
+But this fact had not changed Mrs. March at all in her conviction that it
+was Mr. Dryfoos's fancy for her husband which had moved him to make him
+this extraordinary offer, and she reminded him that it had first been
+made to him, without regard to Fulkerson. "And perhaps," she went on,
+"Mr. Dryfoos has been changed---softened; and doesn't find money all in
+all any more. He's had enough to change him, poor old man!"
+
+"Does anything from without change us?" her husband mused aloud. "We're
+brought up to think so by the novelists, who really have the charge of
+people's thinking, nowadays. But I doubt it, especially if the thing
+outside is some great event, something cataclysmal, like this tremendous
+sorrow of Dryfoos's."
+
+"Then what is it that changes us?" demanded his wife, almost angry with
+him for his heresy.
+
+"Well, it won't do to say, the Holy Spirit indwelling. That would sound
+like cant at this day. But the old fellows that used to say that had some
+glimpses of the truth. They knew that it is the still, small voice that
+the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom. I suppose I should have
+to say that we didn't change at all. We develop. There's the making of
+several characters in each of us; we are each several characters, and
+sometimes this character has the lead in us, and sometimes that. From
+what Fulkerson has told me of Dryfoos, I should say he had always had the
+potentiality of better things in him than he has ever been yet; and
+perhaps the time has come for the good to have its chance. The growth in
+one direction has stopped; it's begun in another; that's all. The man
+hasn't been changed by his son's death; it stunned, it benumbed him; but
+it couldn't change him. It was an event, like any other, and it had to
+happen as much as his being born. It was forecast from the beginning of
+time, and was as entirely an effect of his coming into the world--"
+
+"Basil! Basil!" cried his wife. "This is fatalism!"
+
+"Then you think," he said, "that a sparrow falls to the ground without
+the will of God?" and he laughed provokingly. But he went on more
+soberly: "I don't know what it all means Isabel though I believe it means
+good. What did Christ himself say? That if one rose from the dead it
+would not avail. And yet we are always looking for the miraculous! I
+believe that unhappy old man truly grieves for his son, whom he treated
+cruelly without the final intention of cruelty, for he loved him and
+wished to be proud of him; but I don't think his death has changed him,
+any more than the smallest event in the chain of events remotely working
+through his nature from the beginning. But why do you think he's changed
+at all? Because he offers to sell me 'Every Other Week' on easy terms? He
+says himself that he has no further use for the thing; and he knows
+perfectly well that he couldn't get his money out of it now, without an
+enormous shrinkage. He couldn't appear at this late day as the owner, and
+sell it to anybody but Fulkerson and me for a fifth of what it's cost
+him. He can sell it to us for all it's cost him; and four per cent. is no
+bad interest on his money till we can pay it back. It's a good thing for
+us; but we have to ask whether Dryfoos has done us the good, or whether
+it's the blessing of Heaven. If it's merely the blessing of Heaven, I
+don't propose being grateful for it."
+
+March laughed again, and his wife said, "It's disgusting."
+
+"It's business," he assented. "Business is business; but I don't say it
+isn't disgusting. Lindau had a low opinion of it."
+
+"I think that with all his faults Mr. Dryfoos is a better man than
+Lindau," she proclaimed.
+
+"Well, he's certainly able to offer us a better thing in 'Every Other
+Week,'" said March.
+
+She knew he was enamoured of the literary finish of his cynicism, and
+that at heart he was as humbly and truly grateful as she was for the
+good-fortune opening to them.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Beaton was at his best when he parted for the last time with Alma
+Leighton, for he saw then that what had happened to him was the necessary
+consequence of what he had been, if not what he had done. Afterward he
+lost this clear vision; he began to deny the fact; he drew upon his
+knowledge of life, and in arguing himself into a different frame of mind
+he alleged the case of different people who had done and been much worse
+things than he, and yet no such disagreeable consequence had befallen
+them. Then he saw that it was all the work of blind chance, and he said
+to himself that it was this that made him desperate, and willing to call
+evil his good, and to take his own wherever he could find it. There was a
+great deal that was literary and factitious and tawdry in the mood in
+which he went to see Christine Dryfoos, the night when the Marches sat
+talking their prospects over; and nothing that was decided in his
+purpose. He knew what the drift of his mind was, but he had always
+preferred to let chance determine his events, and now since chance had
+played him such an ill turn with Alma, he left it the whole
+responsibility. Not in terms, but in effect, this was his thought as he
+walked on up-town to pay the first of the visits which Dryfoos had
+practically invited him to resume. He had an insolent satisfaction in
+having delayed it so long; if he was going back he was going back on his
+own conditions, and these were to be as hard and humiliating as he could
+make them. But this intention again was inchoate, floating, the stuff of
+an intention, rather than intention; an expression of temperament
+chiefly.
+
+He had been expected before that. Christine had got out of Mela that her
+father had been at Beaton's studio; and then she had gone at the old man
+and got from him every smallest fact of the interview there. She had
+flung back in his teeth the good-will toward herself with which he had
+gone to Beaton. She was furious with shame and resentment; she told him
+he had made bad worse, that he had made a fool of himself to no end; she
+spared neither his age nor his grief-broken spirit, in which his will
+could not rise against hers. She filled the house with her rage,
+screaming it out upon him; but when her fury was once spent, she began to
+have some hopes from what her father had done. She no longer kept her
+bed; every evening she dressed herself in the dress Beaton admired the
+most, and sat up till a certain hour to receive him. She had fixed a day
+in her own mind before which, if he came, she would forgive him all he
+had made her suffer: the mortification, the suspense, the despair. Beyond
+this, she had the purpose of making her father go to Europe; she felt
+that she could no longer live in America, with the double disgrace that
+had been put upon her.
+
+Beaton rang, and while the servant was coming the insolent caprice seized
+him to ask for the young ladies instead of the old man, as he had
+supposed of course he should do. The maid who answered the bell, in the
+place of the reluctant Irishman of other days, had all his hesitation in
+admitting that the young ladies were at home.
+
+He found Mela in the drawing-room. At sight of him she looked scared; but
+she seemed to be reassured by his calm. He asked if he was not to have
+the pleasure of seeing Miss Dryfoos, too; and Mela said she reckoned the
+girl had gone up-stairs to tell her. Mela was in black, and Beaton noted
+how well the solid sable became her rich red-blonde beauty; he wondered
+what the effect would be with Christine.
+
+But she, when she appeared, was not in mourning. He fancied that she wore
+the lustrous black silk, with the breadths of white Venetian lace about
+the neck which he had praised, because he praised it. Her cheeks burned
+with a Jacqueminot crimson; what should be white in her face was chalky
+white. She carried a plumed ostrich fan, black and soft, and after giving
+him her hand, sat down and waved it to and fro slowly, as he remembered
+her doing the night they first met. She had no ideas, except such as
+related intimately to herself, and she had no gabble, like Mela; and she
+let him talk. It was past the day when she promised herself she would
+forgive him; but as he talked on she felt all her passion for him revive,
+and the conflict of desires, the desire to hate, the desire to love, made
+a dizzying whirl in her brain. She looked at him, half doubting whether
+he was really there or not. He had never looked so handsome, with his
+dreamy eyes floating under his heavy overhanging hair, and his pointed
+brown beard defined against his lustrous shirtfront. His mellowly
+modulated, mysterious voice lulled her; when Mela made an errand out of
+the room, and Beaton crossed to her and sat down by her, she shivered.
+
+"Are you cold?" he asked, and she felt the cruel mockery and exultant
+consciousness of power in his tone, as perhaps a wild thing feels
+captivity in the voice of its keeper. But now, she said she would still
+forgive him if he asked her.
+
+Mela came back, and the talk fell again to the former level; but Beaton
+had not said anything that really meant what she wished, and she saw that
+he intended to say nothing. Her heart began to burn like a fire in her
+breast.
+
+"You been tellun' him about our goun' to Europe?" Mela asked.
+
+"No," said Christine, briefly, and looking at the fan spread out on her
+lap.
+
+Beaton asked when; and then he rose, and said if it was so soon, he
+supposed he should not see them again, unless he saw them in Paris; he
+might very likely run over during the summer. He said to himself that he
+had given it a fair trial with Christine, and he could not make it go.
+
+Christine rose, with a kind of gasp; and mechanically followed him to the
+door of the drawing-room; Mela came, too; and while he was putting on his
+overcoat, she gurgled and bubbled in good-humor with all the world.
+Christine stood looking at him, and thinking how still handsomer he was
+in his overcoat; and that fire burned fiercer in her. She felt him more
+than life to her and knew him lost, and the frenzy, that makes a woman
+kill the man she loves, or fling vitriol to destroy the beauty she cannot
+have for all hers, possessed her lawless soul. He gave his hand to Mela,
+and said, in his wind-harp stop, "Good-bye."
+
+As he put out his hand to Christine, she pushed it aside with a scream of
+rage; she flashed at him, and with both hands made a feline pass at the
+face he bent toward her. He sprang back, and after an instant of
+stupefaction he pulled open the door behind him and ran out into the
+street.
+
+"Well, Christine Dryfoos!" said Mela, "Sprang at him like a wild-cat!"
+
+"I don't care," Christine shrieked. "I'll tear his eyes out!" She flew
+up-stairs to her own room, and left the burden of the explanation to
+Mela, who did it justice.
+
+Beaton found himself, he did not know how, in his studio, reeking with
+perspiration and breathless. He must almost have run. He struck a match
+with a shaking hand, and looked at his face in the glass. He expected to
+see the bleeding marks of her nails on his cheeks, but he could see
+nothing. He grovelled inwardly; it was all so low and coarse and vulgar;
+it was all so just and apt to his deserts.
+
+There was a pistol among the dusty bric-a-brac on the mantel which he had
+kept loaded to fire at a cat in the area. He took it and sat looking into
+the muzzle, wishing it might go off by accident and kill him. It slipped
+through his hand and struck the floor, and there was a report; he sprang
+into the air, feeling that he had been shot. But he found himself still
+alive, with only a burning line along his cheek, such as one of
+Christine's finger-nails might have left.
+
+He laughed with cynical recognition of the fact that he had got his
+punishment in the right way, and that his case was not to be dignified
+into tragedy.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The Marches, with Fulkerson, went to see the Dryfooses off on the French
+steamer. There was no longer any business obligation on them to be civil,
+and there was greater kindness for that reason in the attention they
+offered. 'Every Other Week' had been made over to the joint ownership of
+March and Fulkerson, and the details arranged with a hardness on
+Dryfoos's side which certainly left Mrs. March with a sense of his
+incomplete regeneration. Yet when she saw him there on the steamer, she
+pitied him; he looked wearied and bewildered; even his wife, with her
+twitching head, and her prophecies of evil, croaked hoarsely out, while
+she clung to Mrs. March's hand where they sat together till the
+leave-takers were ordered ashore, was less pathetic. Mela was looking
+after both of them, and trying to cheer them in a joyful excitement. "I
+tell 'em it's goun' to add ten years to both their lives," she said. "The
+voyage 'll do their healths good; and then, we're gittun' away from that
+miser'ble pack o' servants that was eatun' us up, there in New York. I
+hate the place!" she said, as if they had already left it. "Yes, Mrs.
+Mandel's goun', too," she added, following the direction of Mrs. March's
+eyes where they noted Mrs. Mandel, speaking to Christine on the other
+side of the cabin. "Her and Christine had a kind of a spat, and she was
+goun' to leave, but here only the other day, Christine offered to make it
+up with her, and now they're as thick as thieves. Well, I reckon we
+couldn't very well 'a' got along without her. She's about the only one
+that speaks French in this family."
+
+Mrs. March's eyes still dwelt upon Christine's face; it was full of a
+furtive wildness. She seemed to be keeping a watch to prevent herself
+from looking as if she were looking for some one. "Do you know," Mrs.
+March said to her husband as they jingled along homeward in the
+Christopher Street bob-tail car, "I thought she was in love with that
+detestable Mr. Beaton of yours at one time; and that he was amusing
+himself with her."
+
+"I can bear a good deal, Isabel," said March, "but I wish you wouldn't
+attribute Beaton to me. He's the invention of that Mr. Fulkerson of
+yours."
+
+"Well, at any rate, I hope, now, you'll both get rid of him, in the
+reforms you're going to carry out."
+
+These reforms were for a greater economy in the management of 'Every
+Other Week;' but in their very nature they could not include the
+suppression of Beaton. He had always shown himself capable and loyal to
+the interests of the magazine, and both the new owners were glad to keep
+him. He was glad to stay, though he made a gruff pretence of
+indifference, when they came to look over the new arrangement with him.
+In his heart he knew that he was a fraud; but at least he could say to
+himself with truth that he had not now the shame of taking Dryfoos's
+money.
+
+March and Fulkerson retrenched at several points where it had seemed
+indispensable to spend, as long as they were not spending their own: that
+was only human. Fulkerson absorbed Conrad's department into his, and
+March found that he could dispense with Kendricks in the place of
+assistant which he had lately filled since Fulkerson had decided that
+March was overworked. They reduced the number of illustrated articles,
+and they systematized the payment of contributors strictly according to
+the sales of each number, on their original plan of co-operation: they
+had got to paying rather lavishly for material without reference to the
+sales.
+
+Fulkerson took a little time to get married, and went on his wedding
+journey out to Niagara, and down the St. Lawrence to Quebec over the line
+of travel that the Marches had taken on their wedding journey. He had the
+pleasure of going from Montreal to Quebec on the same boat on which he
+first met March.
+
+They have continued very good friends, and their wives are almost without
+the rivalry that usually embitters the wives of partners. At first Mrs.
+March did not like Mrs. Fulkerson's speaking of her husband as the Ownah,
+and March as the Edito'; but it appeared that this was only a convenient
+method of recognizing the predominant quality in each, and was meant
+neither to affirm nor to deny anything. Colonel Woodburn offered as his
+contribution to the celebration of the copartnership, which Fulkerson
+could not be prevented from dedicating with a little dinner, the story of
+Fulkerson's magnanimous behavior in regard to Dryfoos at that crucial
+moment when it was a question whether he should give up Dryfoos or give
+up March. Fulkerson winced at it; but Mrs. March told her husband that
+now, whatever happened, she should never have any misgivings of Fulkerson
+again; and she asked him if he did not think he ought to apologize to him
+for the doubts with which he had once inspired her. March said that he
+did not think so.
+
+The Fulkersons spent the summer at a seaside hotel in easy reach of the
+city; but they returned early to Mrs. Leighton's, with whom they are to
+board till spring, when they are going to fit up Fulkerson's bachelor
+apartment for housekeeping. Mrs. March, with her Boston scruple, thinks
+it will be odd, living over the 'Every Other Week' offices; but there
+will be a separate street entrance to the apartment; and besides, in New
+York you may do anything.
+
+The future of the Leightons promises no immediate change. Kendricks goes
+there a good deal to see the Fulkersons, and Mrs. Fulkerson says he comes
+to see Alma. He has seemed taken with her ever since he first met her at
+Dryfoos's, the day of Lindau's funeral, and though Fulkerson objects to
+dating a fancy of that kind from an occasion of that kind, he justly
+argues with March that there can be no harm in it, and that we are liable
+to be struck by lightning any time. In the mean while there is no proof
+that Alma returns Kendricks's interest, if he feels any. She has got a
+little bit of color into the fall exhibition; but the fall exhibition is
+never so good as the spring exhibition. Wetmore is rather sorry she has
+succeeded in this, though he promoted her success. He says her real hope
+is in black and white, and it is a pity for her to lose sight of her
+original aim of drawing for illustration.
+
+News has come from Paris of the engagement of Christine Dryfoos. There
+the Dryfooses met with the success denied them in New York; many American
+plutocrats must await their apotheosis in Europe, where society has them,
+as it were, in a translation. Shortly after their arrival they were
+celebrated in the newspapers as the first millionaire American family of
+natural-gas extraction who had arrived in the capital of civilization;
+and at a French watering-place Christine encountered her fate--a nobleman
+full of present debts and of duels in the past. Fulkerson says the old
+man can manage the debtor, and Christine can look out for the duellist.
+"They say those fellows generally whip their wives. He'd better not try
+it with Christine, I reckon, unless he's practised with a panther."
+
+One day, shortly after their return to town in the autumn from the brief
+summer outing they permitted themselves, the Marches met Margaret Vance.
+At first they did not know her in the dress of the sisterhood which she
+wore; but she smiled joyfully, almost gayly, on seeing them, and though
+she hurried by with the sister who accompanied her, and did not stay to
+speak, they felt that the peace that passeth understanding had looked at
+them from her eyes.
+
+"Well, she is at rest, there can't be any doubt of that," he said, as he
+glanced round at the drifting black robe which followed her free,
+nun-like walk.
+
+"Yes, now she can do all the good she likes," sighed his wife. "I
+wonder--I wonder if she ever told his father about her talk with poor
+Conrad that day he was shot?"
+
+"I don't know. I don't care. In any event, it would be right. She did
+nothing wrong. If she unwittingly sent him to his death, she sent him to
+die for God's sake, for man's sake."
+
+"Yes--yes. But still--"
+
+"Well, we must trust that look of hers."
+
+
+PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    Affected absence of mind
+    Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever
+    Comfort of the critical attitude
+    Conscience weakens to the need that isn't
+    Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach
+    Death is peace and pardon
+    Did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him
+    Does any one deserve happiness
+    Does anything from without change us?
+    Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation
+    Favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting
+    Hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death
+    Indispensable
+    Love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence
+    Married for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid
+    Nervous woes of comfortable people
+    Novelists, who really have the charge of people's thinking
+    People that have convictions are difficult
+    Rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage
+    Respect for your mind, but she don't think you've got any sense
+    Superstition of the romances that love is once for all
+    Superstition that having and shining is the chief good
+    To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes
+    Took the world as she found it, and made the best of it
+    What we can be if we must
+    When you look it--live it
+    Would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Hazard Of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells
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diff --git a/old/wh6nf10.txt b/old/wh6nf10.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..10e74c3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/wh6nf10.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,18118 @@
+The Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes
+by William Dean Howells
+#55 in our series by William Dean Howells
+
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+Title: Hazard of New Fortunes, Complete
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4600]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 13, 2002]
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Hazard of New Fortunes, by Howells, complete
+**********This file should be named wh6nf10.txt or wh6nf10.zip*********
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+for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making
+an entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+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
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+
+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 be 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.  Aud 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.
+
+In their search they were obliged, as March complained, to the
+acquisition of useless information in a degree unequalled in their
+experience.  They came to excel in the sad knowledge of the line at which
+respectability distinguishes itself from shabbiness.  Flattering
+advertisements took them to numbers of huge apartment-houses chiefly
+distinguishable from tenement-houses by the absence of fire-escapes on
+their facades, till Mrs. March refused to stop at any door where there
+were more than six bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes on either hand.
+Before the middle of the afternoon she decided against ratchets
+altogether, and confined herself to knobs, neatly set in the door-trim.
+Her husband was still sunk in the superstition that you can live anywhere
+you like in New York, and he would have paused at some places where her
+quicker eye caught the fatal sign of "Modes" in the ground-floor windows.
+She found that there was an east and west line beyond which they could
+not go if they wished to keep their self-respect, and that within the
+region to which they had restricted themselves there was a choice of
+streets.  At first all the New York streets looked to them ill-paved,
+dirty, and repulsive; the general infamy imparted itself in their casual
+impression to streets in no wise guilty.  But they began to notice that
+some streets were quiet and clean, and, though never so quiet and clean
+as Boston streets, that they wore an air of encouraging reform, and
+suggested a future of greater and greater domesticity.  Whole blocks of
+these downtown cross-streets seemed to have been redeemed from decay, and
+even in the midst of squalor a dwelling here and there had been seized,
+painted a dull red as to its brick-work, and a glossy black as to its
+wood-work, and with a bright brass bell-pull and door-knob and a large
+brass plate for its key-hole escutcheon, had been endowed with an effect
+of purity and pride which removed its shabby neighborhood far from it.
+Some of these houses were quite small, and imaginably within their means;
+but, as March said, some body seemed always to be living there himself,
+and the fact that none of them was to rent kept Mrs. March true to her
+ideal of a fiat.  Nothing prevented its realization so much as its
+difference from the New York ideal of a flat, which was inflexibly seven
+rooms and a bath.  One or two rooms might be at the front, the rest
+crooked and cornered backward through in creasing and then decreasing
+darkness till they reached a light bedroom or kitchen at the rear.
+It might be the one or the other, but it was always the seventh room with
+the bath; or if, as sometimes happened, it was the eighth, it was so
+after having counted the bath as one; in this case the janitor said you
+always counted the bath as one.  If the flats were advertised as having
+"all light rooms," he explained that any room with a window giving into
+the open air of a court or shaft was counted a light room.
+
+The Marches tried to make out why it was that these flats were go much
+more repulsive than the apartments which everyone lived in abroad; but
+they could only do so upon the supposition that in their European days
+they were too young, too happy, too full of the future, to notice whether
+rooms were inside or outside, light or dark, big or little, high or low.
+"Now we're imprisoned in the present," he said, "and we have to make the
+worst of it."
+
+In their despair he had an inspiration, which she declared worthy of him:
+it was to take two small flats, of four or five rooms and a bath, and
+live in both.  They tried this in a great many places, but they never
+could get two flats of the kind on the same floor where there was steam
+heat and an elevator.  At one place they almost did it.  They had
+resigned themselves to the humility of the neighborhood, to the
+prevalence of modistes and livery-stablemen (they seem to consort much in
+New York), to the garbage in the gutters and the litter of paper in the
+streets, to the faltering slats in the surrounding window-shutters and
+the crumbled brownstone steps and sills, when it turned out that one of
+the apartments had been taken between two visits they made.  Then the
+only combination left open to them was of a ground-floor flat to the
+right and a third-floor flat to the left.
+
+Still they kept this inspiration in reserve for use at the first
+opportunity.  In the mean time there were several flats which they
+thought they could almost make do: notably one where they could get an
+extra servant's room in the basement four flights down, and another where
+they could get it in the roof five flights up.  At the first the janitor
+was respectful and enthusiastic; at the second he had an effect of
+ironical pessimism.  When they trembled on the verge of taking his
+apartment, he pointed out a spot in the kalsomining of the parlor
+ceiling, and gratuitously said, Now such a thing as that he should not
+agree to put in shape unless they took the apartment for a term of years.
+The apartment was unfurnished, and they recurred to the fact that they
+wanted a furnished apartment, and made their escape.  This saved them in
+several other extremities; but short of extremity they could not keep
+their different requirements in mind, and were always about to decide
+without regard to some one of them.
+
+They went to several places twice without intending: once to that old-
+fashioned house with the pleasant colored janitor, and wandered all over
+the apartment again with a haunting sense of familiarity, and then
+recognized the janitor and laughed; and to that house with the pathetic
+widow and the pretty daughter who wished to take them to board.  They
+stayed to excuse their blunder, and easily came by the fact that the
+mother had taken the house that the girl might have a home while she was
+in New York studying art, and they hoped to pay their way by taking
+boarders.  Her daughter was at her class now, the mother concluded; and
+they encouraged her to believe that it could only be a few days till the
+rest of her scheme was realized.
+
+"I dare say we could be perfectly comfortable there," March suggested
+when they had got away.  "Now if we were truly humane we would modify our
+desires to meet their needs and end this sickening search, wouldn't we?"
+
+"Yes, but we're not truly humane," his wife answered, "or at least not in
+that sense.  You know you hate boarding; and if we went there I should
+have them on my sympathies the whole time."
+
+"I see.  And then you would take it out of me."
+
+"Then I should take it out of you.  And if you are going to be so weak,
+Basil, and let every little thing work upon you in that way, you'd better
+not come to New York.  You'll see enough misery here."
+
+"Well, don't take that superior tone with me, as if I were a child that
+had its mind set on an undesirable toy, Isabel."
+
+"Ah, don't you suppose it's because you are such a child in some respects
+that I like you, dear?"  she demanded, without relenting.
+
+"But I don't find so much misery in New York.  I don't suppose there's
+any more suffering here to the population than there is in the country.
+And they're so gay about it all.  I think the outward aspect of the place
+and the hilarity of the sky and air must get into the people's blood.
+The weather is simply unapproachable; and I don't care if it is the
+ugliest place in the world, as you say.  I suppose it is.  It shrieks and
+yells with ugliness here and there but it never loses its spirits.  That
+widow is from the country.  When she's been a year in New York she'll be
+as gay--as gay as an L road."  He celebrated a satisfaction they both had
+in the L roads.  "They kill the streets and avenues, but at least they
+partially hide them, and that is some comfort; and they do triumph over
+their prostrate forms with a savage exultation that is intoxicating.
+Those bends in the L that you get in the corner of Washington Square, or
+just below the Cooper Institute--they're the gayest things in the world.
+Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incomparably picturesque!  And the
+whole city is so," said March, "or else the L would never have got built
+here.  New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay; but, prince or
+pauper, it's gay always."
+
+"Yes, gay is the word," she admitted, with a sigh.  "But frantic.
+I can't get used to it.  They forget death, Basil; they forget death in
+New York."
+
+"Well, I don't know that I've ever found much advantage in remembering
+it."
+
+"Don't say such a thing, dearest."
+
+He could see that she had got to the end of her nervous strength for the
+present, and he proposed that they should take the Elevated road as far
+as it would carry them into the country, and shake off their nightmare of
+flat-hunting for an hour or two; but her conscience would not let her.
+She convicted him of levity equal to that of the New-Yorkers in proposing
+such a thing; and they dragged through the day.  She was too tired to
+care for dinner, and in the night she had a dream from which she woke
+herself with a cry that roused him, too.  It was something about the
+children at first, whom they had talked of wistfully before falling
+asleep, and then it was of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a
+series of sections growing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the
+monstrous articulate was quite luminous again.  She shuddered at the
+vague description she was able to give; but he asked, "Did it offer to
+bite you?"
+
+"No.  That was the most frightful thing about it; it had no mouth."
+
+March laughed.  "Why, my dear, it was nothing but a harmless New York
+flat--seven rooms and a bath."
+
+"I really believe it was," she consented, recognizing an architectural
+resemblance, and she fell asleep again, and woke renewed for the work
+before them.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but it still had interest; and
+they varied their day by taking a coupe, by renouncing advertisements,
+and by reverting to agents.  Some of these induced them to consider the
+idea of furnished houses; and Mrs. March learned tolerance for Fulkerson
+by accepting permits to visit flats and houses which had none of the
+qualifications she desired in either, and were as far beyond her means as
+they were out of the region to which she had geographically restricted
+herself.  They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand dollar
+apartments, and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothing
+to do with the rent; the higher the rent was, the more critical they were
+of the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of the richly decorated
+rooms.  They never knew whether they had deceived the janitor or not; as
+they came in a coupe, they hoped they had.
+
+They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in the
+perspective than an L road.  The fire-escapes, with their light iron
+balconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; the
+roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women's heads
+seemed to show at every window.  In the basements, over which flights of
+high stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers' shops
+abounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to bacon and
+sausages, and cobblers' and tinners' shops, and the like, in proportion
+to the small needs of a poor neighborhood.  Ash barrels lined the
+sidewalks, and garbage heaps filled the gutters; teams of all trades
+stood idly about; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the
+street, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the
+children and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women; the burly
+blue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner; a drunkard
+zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him.  It was not the abode of the
+extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world,
+transmitting itself from generation to generation, and establishing
+conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does to
+those of some incurable disease, like leprosy.
+
+The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic
+view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of tenement-
+houses; when they would have contented themselves with saying that it was
+as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence, and with wondering why
+nobody came to paint it; they would have thought they were sufficiently
+serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure to appreciate
+it, and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it here under
+their noses.  It was to the nose that the street made one of its
+strongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of the coupe.
+"Why does he take us through such a disgusting street?"  she demanded,
+with an exasperation of which her husband divined the origin.
+
+"This driver may be a philanthropist in disguise," he answered, with
+dreamy irony, "and may want us to think about the people who are not
+merely carried through this street in a coupe, but have to spend their
+whole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopes of driving out of it,
+except in a hearse.  I must say they don't seem to mind it.  I haven't
+seen a jollier crowd anywhere in New York.  They seem to have forgotten
+death a little more completely than any of their fellow-citizens, Isabel.
+And I wonder what they think of us, making this gorgeous progress through
+their midst.  I suppose they think we're rich, and hate us--if they hate
+rich people; they don't look as if they hated anybody.  Should we be as
+patient as they are with their discomfort?  I don't believe there's steam
+heat or an elevator in the whole block.  Seven rooms and a bath would be
+more than the largest and genteelest family would know what to do with.
+They wouldn't know what to do with the bath, anyway."
+
+His monologue seemed to interest his wife apart from the satirical point
+it had for themselves.  "You ought to get Mr. Fulkerson to let you work
+some of these New York sights up for Every Other Week, Basil; you could
+do them very nicely."
+
+"Yes; I've thought of that.  But don't let's leave the personal ground.
+Doesn't it make you feel rather small and otherwise unworthy when you see
+the kind of street these fellow-beings of yours live in, and then think
+how particular you are about locality and the number of bellpulls?
+I don't see even ratchets and speaking-tubes at these doors."  He craned
+his neck out of the window for a better look, and the children of
+discomfort cheered him, out of sheer good feeling and high spirits.
+"I didn't know I was so popular.  Perhaps it's a recognition of my humane
+sentiments."
+
+"Oh, it's very easy to have humane sentiments, and to satirize ourselves
+for wanting eight rooms and a bath in a good neighborhood, when we see
+how these wretched creatures live," said his wife.  "But if we shared all
+we have with them, and then settled down among them, what good would it
+do?"
+
+"Not the least in the world.  It might help us for the moment, but it
+wouldn't keep the wolf from their doors for a week; and then they would
+go on just as before, only they wouldn't be on such good terms with the
+wolf.  The only way for them is to keep up an unbroken intimacy with the
+wolf; then they can manage him somehow.  I don't know how, and I'm afraid
+I don't want to.  Wouldn't you like to have this fellow drive us round
+among the halls of pride somewhere for a little while?  Fifth Avenue or
+Madison, up-town?"
+
+"No; we've no time to waste.  I've got a place near Third Avenue, on a
+nice cross street, and I want him to take us there."  It proved that she
+had several addresses near together, and it seemed best to dismiss their
+coupe and do the rest of their afternoon's work on foot.  It came to
+nothing; she was not humbled in the least by what she had seen in the
+tenement-house street; she yielded no point in her ideal of a flat, and
+the flats persistently refused to lend themselves to it.  She lost all
+patience with them.
+
+"Oh, I don't say the flats are in the right of it," said her husband,
+when she denounced their stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a Christian
+home.  "But I'm not so sure that we are, either.  I've been thinking
+about that home business ever since my sensibilities were dragged--in a
+coupe--through that tenement-house street.  Of course, no child born and
+brought up in such a place as that could have any conception of home.
+But that's because those poor people can't give character to their
+habitations.  They have to take what they can get.  But people like us--
+that is, of our means--do give character to the average flat.  It's made
+to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so it's made for
+social show, not for family life at all.  Think of a baby in a flat!
+It's a contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of motherhood.
+The flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social life.  It's
+made to give artificial people a society basis on a little money--too
+much money, of course, for what they get.  So the cost of the building is
+put into marble halls and idiotic decoration of all kinds.  I don't.
+object to the conveniences, but none of these flats has a living-room.
+They have drawing-rooms to foster social pretence, and they have dining-
+rooms and bedrooms; but they have no room where the family can all come
+together and feel the sweetness of being a family.  The bedrooms are
+black-holes mostly, with a sinful waste of space in each.  If it were not
+for the marble halls, and the decorations, and the foolishly expensive
+finish, the houses could be built round a court, and the flats could be
+shaped something like a Pompeiian house, with small sleeping-closets--
+only lit from the outside--and the rest of the floor thrown into two or
+three large cheerful halls, where all the family life could go on, and
+society could be transacted unpretentiously.  Why, those tenements are
+better and humaner than those flats!  There the whole family lives in the
+kitchen, and has its consciousness of being; but the flat abolishes the
+family consciousness.  It's confinement without coziness; it's cluttered
+without being snug.  You couldn't keep a self-respecting cat in a flat;
+you couldn't go down cellar to get cider.  No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as
+we know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible in the Franco-
+American flat, not because it's humble, but because it's false."
+
+"Well, then," said Mrs. March, "let's look at houses."
+
+He had been denouncing the flat in the abstract, and he had not expected
+this concrete result.  But he said, "We will look at houses, then."
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+Nothing mystifies a man more than a woman's aberrations from some point
+at which he, supposes her fixed as a star.  In these unfurnished houses,
+without steam or elevator, March followed his wife about with patient
+wonder.  She rather liked the worst of them best: but she made him go
+down into the cellars and look at the furnaces; she exacted from him a
+rigid inquest of the plumbing.  She followed him into one of the cellars
+by the fitful glare of successively lighted matches, and they enjoyed a
+moment in which the anomaly of their presence there on that errand, so
+remote from all the facts of their long-established life in Boston,
+realized itself for them.
+
+"Think how easily we might have been murdered and nobody been any the
+wiser!" she said when they were comfortably outdoors again.
+
+"Yes, or made way with ourselves in an access of emotional insanity,
+supposed to have been induced by unavailing flat-hunting," he suggested.
+She fell in with the notion.  "I'm beginning to feel crazy.  But I don't
+want you to lose your head, Basil.  And I don't want you to
+sentimentalize any of the things you see in New York.  I think you were
+disposed to do it in that street we drove through.  I don't believe
+there's any real suffering--not real suffering--among those people; that
+is, it would be suffering from our point of view, but they've been used
+to it all their lives, and they don't feel their' discomfort so much."
+
+"Of course, I understand that, and I don't propose to sentimentalize
+them.  I think when people get used to a bad state of things they had
+better stick to it; in fact, they don't usually like a better state so
+well, and I shall keep that firmly in mind."
+
+She laughed with him, and they walked along the L bestridden avenue,
+exhilarated by their escape from murder and suicide in that cellar,
+toward the nearest cross town track, which they meant to take home to
+their hotel.  "Now to-night we will go to the theatre," she said, "and
+get this whole house business out of our minds, and be perfectly fresh
+for a new start in the morning."  Suddenly she clutched his arm.  "Why,
+did you see that man?"  and she signed with her head toward a decently
+dressed person who walked beside them, next the gutter, stooping over as
+if to examine it, and half halting at times.
+
+"No.  What?"
+
+"Why, I saw him pick up a dirty bit of cracker from the pavement and cram
+it into his mouth and eat it down as if he were famished.  And look! he's
+actually hunting for more in those garbage heaps!"
+
+This was what the decent-looking man with the hard hands and broken nails
+of a workman was doing-like a hungry dog.  They kept up with him, in the
+fascination of the sight, to the next corner, where he turned down the
+side street still searching the gutter.
+
+They walked on a few paces.  Then March said, "I must go after him," and
+left his wife standing.
+
+"Are you in want--hungry?"  he asked the man.
+
+The man said he could not speak English, Monsieur.
+
+March asked his question in French.
+
+The man shrugged a pitiful, desperate shrug, "Mais, Monsieur--"
+
+March put a coin in his hand, and then suddenly the man's face twisted
+up; he caught the hand of this alms-giver in both of his and clung to it.
+"Monsieur! Monsieur!" he gasped, and the tears rained down his face.
+
+His benefactor pulled himself away, shocked and ashamed, as one is by
+such a chance, and got back to his wife, and the man lapsed back into the
+mystery of misery out of which he had emerged.
+
+March felt it laid upon him to console his wife for what had happened.
+"Of course, we might live here for years and not see another case like
+that; and, of course, there are twenty places where he could have gone
+for help if he had known where to find them."
+
+"Ah, but it's the possibility of his needing the help so badly as that,"
+she answered.  "That's what I can't bear, and I shall not come to a place
+where such things are possible, and we may as well stop our house-hunting
+here at once."
+
+"Yes?  And what part of Christendom will you live in?  Such things are
+possible everywhere in our conditions."
+
+"Then we must change the conditions--"
+
+"Oh no; we must go to the theatre and forget them.  We can stop at
+Brentano's for our tickets as we pass through Union Square."
+
+"I am not going to the theatre, Basil.  I am going home to Boston to-
+night.  You can stay and find a flat."
+
+He convinced her of the absurdity of her position, and even of its
+selfishness; but she said that her mind was quite made up irrespective of
+what had happened, that she had been away from the children long enough;
+that she ought to be at home to finish up the work of leaving it.  The
+word brought a sigh.  "Ah, I don't know why we should see nothing but sad
+and ugly things now.  When we were young--"
+
+"Younger," he put in.  "We're still young."
+
+"That's what we pretend, but we know better.  But I was thinking how
+pretty and pleasant things used to be turning up all the time on our
+travels in the old days.  Why, when we were in New York here on our
+wedding journey the place didn't seem half so dirty as it does now, and
+none of these dismal things happened."
+
+"It was a good deal dirtier," he answered; "and I fancy worse in every
+way-hungrier, raggeder, more wretchedly housed.  But that wasn't the
+period of life for us to notice it.  Don't you remember, when we started
+to Niagara the last time, how everybody seemed middle-aged and
+commonplace; and when we got there there were no evident brides; nothing
+but elderly married people?"
+
+"At least they weren't starving," she rebelled.
+
+"No, you don't starve in parlor-cars and first-class hotels; but if you
+step out of them you run your chance of seeing those who do, if you're
+getting on pretty well in the forties.  If it's the unhappy who see
+unhappiness, think what misery must be revealed to people who pass their
+lives in the really squalid tenement-house streets--I don't mean
+picturesque avenues like that we passed through."
+
+"But we are not unhappy," she protested, bringing the talk back to the
+personal base again, as women must to get any good out of talk.  "We're
+really no unhappier than we were when we were young."
+
+"We're more serious."
+
+"Well, I hate it; and I wish you wouldn't be so serious, if that's what
+it brings us to."
+
+"I will be trivial from this on," said March.  "Shall we go to the Hole
+in the Ground to-night?"
+
+"I am going to Boston."
+
+"It's much the same thing.  How do you like that for triviality?  It's a
+little blasphemous, I'll allow."
+
+"It's very silly," she said.
+
+At the hotel they found a letter from the agent who had sent them the
+permit to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment.  He wrote that she had
+heard they were pleased with her apartment, and that she thought she
+could make the terms to suit.  She had taken her passage for Europe, and
+was very anxious to let the flat before she sailed.  She would call that
+evening at seven.
+
+"Mrs. Grosvenor Green!" said Mrs. March.  "Which of the ten thousand
+flats is it, Basil?"
+
+"The gimcrackery," he answered.  "In the Xenophon, you know."
+
+"Well, she may save herself the trouble.  I shall not see her.  Or yes--
+I must.  I couldn't go away without seeing what sort of creature could
+have planned that fly-away flat.  She must be a perfect--"
+
+"Parachute," March suggested.
+
+"No!  anybody so light as that couldn't come down."
+
+"Well, toy balloon."
+
+"Toy balloon will do for the present," Mrs. March admitted.  "But I feel
+that naught but herself can be her parallel for volatility."
+
+When Mrs. Grosvenor-Green's card came up they both descended to the hotel
+parlor, which March said looked like the saloon of a Moorish day-boat;
+not that he knew of any such craft, but the decorations were so Saracenic
+and the architecture so Hudson Riverish.  They found there on the grand
+central divan a large lady whose vast smoothness, placidity, and
+plumpness set at defiance all their preconceptions of Mrs. Grosvenor
+Green, so that Mrs. March distinctly paused with her card in her hand
+before venturing even tentatively to address her.  Then she was
+astonished at the low, calm voice in which Mrs. Green acknowledged
+herself, and slowly proceeded to apologize for calling.  It was not quite
+true that she had taken her passage for Europe, but she hoped soon to do
+so, and she confessed that in the mean time she was anxious to let her
+flat.  She was a little worn out with the care of housekeeping--
+Mrs. March breathed, "Oh yes!" in the sigh with which ladies recognize
+one another's martyrdom--and Mrs. Green had business abroad, and she was
+going to pursue her art studies in Paris; she drew in Mr. Ilcomb's class
+now, but the instruction was so much better in Paris; and as the
+superintendent seemed to think the price was the only objection, she had
+ventured to call.
+
+"Then we didn't deceive him in the least," thought Mrs. March, while she
+answered, sweetly: "No; we were only afraid that it would be too small
+for our family.  We require a good many rooms."  She could not forego the
+opportunity of saying, "My husband is coming to New York to take charge
+of a literary periodical, and he will have to have a room to write in,"
+which made Mrs. Green bow to March, and made March look sheepish.  "But
+we did think the apartment very charming", (It was architecturally
+charming, she protested to her conscience)," and we should have been so
+glad if we could have got into it."  She followed this with some account
+of their house-hunting, amid soft murmurs of sympathy from Mrs. Green,
+who said that she had been through all that, and that if she could have
+shown her apartment to them she felt sure that she could have explained
+it so that they would have seen its capabilities better, Mrs. March
+assented to this, and Mrs. Green added that if they found nothing exactly
+suitable she would be glad to have them look at it again; and then Mrs.
+March said that she was going back to Boston herself, but she was leaving
+Mr. March to continue the search; and she had no doubt he would be only
+too glad to see the apartment by daylight.  "But if you take it, Basil,"
+she warned him, when they were alone, "I shall simply renounce you.  I
+wouldn't live in that junk-shop if you gave it to me.  But who would have
+thought she was that kind of looking person?  Though of course I might
+have known if I had stopped to think once.  It's because the place
+doesn't express her at all that it's so unlike her.  It couldn't be like
+anybody, or anything that flies in the air, or creeps upon the earth, or
+swims in the waters under the earth.  I wonder where in the world she's
+from; she's no New-Yorker; even we can see that; and she's not quite a
+country person, either; she seems like a person from some large town,
+where she's been an aesthetic authority.  And she can't find good enough
+art instruction in New York, and has to go to Paris for it!  Well, it's
+pathetic, after all, Basil.  I can't help feeling sorry for a person who
+mistakes herself to that extent."
+
+"I can't help feeling sorry for the husband of a person who mistakes
+herself to that extent.  What is Mr. Grosvenor Green going to do in Paris
+while she's working her way into the Salon?"
+
+"Well, you keep away from her apartment, Basil; that's all I've got to
+say to you.  And yet I do like some things about her."
+
+"I like everything about her but her apartment," said March.
+
+"I like her going to be out of the country," said his wife.  "We
+shouldn't be overlooked.  And the place was prettily shaped, you can't
+deny it.  And there was an elevator and steam heat.  And the location is
+very convenient.  And there was a hall-boy to bring up cards.  The halls
+and stairs were kept very clean and nice.  But it wouldn't do.  I could
+put you a folding bed in the room where you wrote, and we could even have
+one in the parlor"
+
+"Behind a portiere?  I couldn't stand any more portieres!"
+
+"And we could squeeze the two girls into one room, or perhaps only bring
+Margaret, and put out the whole of the wash.  Basil!" she almost
+shrieked, "it isn't to be thought of!"
+
+He retorted, "I'm not thinking of it, my dear."
+
+Fulkerson came in just before they started for Mrs. March's train, to
+find out what had become of them, he said, and to see whether they had
+got anything to live in yet.
+
+"Not a thing," she said.  "And I'm just going back to Boston, and leaving
+Mr. March here to do anything he pleases about it.  He has 'carte
+blanche.'"
+
+"But freedom brings responsibility, you know, Fulkerson, and it's the
+same as if I'd no choice.  I'm staying behind because I'm left, not
+because I expect to do anything."
+
+"Is that so?"  asked Fulkerson.  "Well, we must see what can be done.  I
+supposed you would be all settled by this time, or I should have humped
+myself to find you something.  None of those places I gave you amounts to
+anything?"
+
+"As much as forty thousand others we've looked at," said Mrs. March.
+"Yes, one of them does amount to something.  It comes so near being what
+we want that I've given Mr. March particular instructions not to go near
+it."
+
+She told him about Mrs. Grosvenor Green and her flats, and at the end he
+said:
+
+"Well, well, we must look out for that.  I'll keep an eye on him, Mrs.
+March, and see that he doesn't do anything rash, and I won't leave him
+till he's found just the right thing.  It exists, of course; it must in a
+city of eighteen hundred thousand people, and the only question is where
+to find it.  You leave him to me, Mrs. March; I'll watch out for him."
+
+Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the station when he found they
+were not driving, but she bade him a peremptory good-bye at the hotel
+door.
+
+"He's very nice, Basil, and his way with you is perfectly charming.
+It's very sweet to see how really fond of you he is.  But I didn't want
+him stringing along with us up to Forty-second Street and spoiling our
+last moments together."
+
+At Third Avenue they took the Elevated for which she confessed an
+infatuation.  She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the
+world, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say
+that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it.  She now
+said that the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and
+that the fleeing intimacy you formed with people in second and third
+floor interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had
+a domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effect
+of good society with all its security and exclusiveness.  He said it was
+better than the theatre, of which it reminded him, to see those people
+through their windows: a family party of work-folk at a late tea, some of
+the men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying
+her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a
+table; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together.  What
+suggestion! what drama? what infinite interest!  At the Forty-second
+Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the track
+to the branch road for the Central Depot, and looked up and down the long
+stretch of the Elevated to north and south.  The track that found and
+lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable
+lights; the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points
+and blots of gas far and near; the architectural shapes of houses and
+churches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble
+in them, and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with
+vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam-formed an incomparable
+perspective.  They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, which
+in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles; and
+they were just to the Arachne roof spun in iron over the cross street on
+which they ran to the depot; but for the present they were mostly
+inarticulate before it.  They had another moment of rich silence when
+they paused in the gallery that leads from the Elevated station to the
+waiting-rooms in the Central Depot and looked down upon the great night
+trains lying on the tracks dim under the rain of gas-lights that starred
+without dispersing the vast darkness of the place.  What forces, what
+fates, slept in these bulks which would soon be hurling themselves north
+and south and west through the night!  Now they waited there like fabled
+monsters of Arab story ready for the magician's touch, tractable,
+reckless, will-less--organized lifelessness full of a strange semblance
+of life.
+
+The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrill of patriotic pride
+in the fact that the whole world perhaps could not afford just the like.
+Then they hurried down to the ticket-offices, and he got her a lower
+berth in the Boston sleeper, and went with her to the car.  They made the
+most of the fact that her berth was in the very middle of the car; and
+she promised to write as soon as she reached home.  She promised also
+that, having seen the limitations of New York in respect to flats, she
+would not be hard on him if he took something not quite ideal.  Only he
+must remember that it was not to be above Twentieth Street nor below
+Washington Square; it must not be higher than the third floor; it must
+have an elevator, steam heat, hail-boys, and a pleasant janitor.  These
+were essentials; if he could not get them, then they must do without.
+But he must get them.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to
+their ideals from their husbands than from themselves.  Early in their
+married life she had taken charge of him in all matters which she
+considered practical.  She did not include the business of bread-winning
+in these; that was an affair that might safely be left to his absent-
+minded, dreamy inefficiency, and she did not interfere with him there.
+But in such things as rehanging the pictures, deciding on a summer
+boarding-place, taking a seaside cottage, repapering rooms, choosing
+seats at the theatre, seeing what the children ate when she was not at
+table, shutting the cat out at night, keeping run of calls and
+invitations, and seeing if the furnace was dampered, he had failed her so
+often that she felt she could not leave him the slightest discretion in
+regard to a flat.  Her total distrust of his judgment in the matters
+cited and others like them consisted with the greatest admiration of his
+mind and respect for his character.  She often said that if he would only
+bring these to bear in such exigencies he would be simply perfect; but
+she had long given up his ever doing so.  She subjected him, therefore,
+to an iron code, but after proclaiming it she was apt to abandon him to
+the native lawlessness of his temperament.  She expected him in this
+event to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with
+considerable comfort in holding him accountable.  He learned to expect
+this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with whatever he
+did he waited patiently till she forgot her grievance and began to
+extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable.  She would almost
+admit at moments that what he had done was a very good thing, but she
+reserved the right to return in full force to her original condemnation
+of it; and she accumulated each act of independent volition in witness
+and warning against him.  Their mass oppressed but never deterred him.
+He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices, and he
+did it without any apparent recollection of his former misdeeds and their
+consequences.  There was a good deal of comedy in it all, and some
+tragedy.
+
+He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbands of his kind will
+imagine, on going back to his hotel alone.  It was, perhaps, a revulsion
+from the pain of parting; and he toyed with the idea of Mrs. Grosvenor
+Green's apartment, which, in its preposterous unsuitability, had a
+strange attraction.  He felt that he could take it with less risk than
+anything else they had seen, but he said he would look at all the other
+places in town first.  He really spent the greater part of the next day
+in hunting up the owner of an apartment that had neither steam heat nor
+an elevator, but was otherwise perfect, and trying to get him to take
+less than the agent asked.  By a curious psychical operation he was able,
+in the transaction, to work himself into quite a passionate desire for
+the apartment, while he held the Grosvenor Green apartment in the
+background of his mind as something that he could return to as altogether
+more suitable.  He conducted some simultaneous negotiation for a
+furnished house, which enhanced still more the desirability of the
+Grosvenor Green apartment.  Toward evening he went off at a tangent far
+up-town, so as to be able to tell his wife how utterly preposterous the
+best there would be as compared even with this ridiculous Grosvenor Green
+gimcrackery.  It is hard to report the processes of his sophistication;
+perhaps this, again, may best be left to the marital imagination.
+
+He rang at the last of these up-town apartments as it was falling dusk,
+and it was long before the janitor appeared.  Then the man was very
+surly, and said if he looked at the flat now he would say it was too
+dark, like all the rest.  His reluctance irritated March in proportion to
+his insincerity in proposing to look at it at all.  He knew he did not
+mean to take it under any circumstances; that he was going to use his
+inspection of it in dishonest justification of his disobedience to his
+wife; but he put on an air of offended dignity.  "If you don't wish to
+show the apartment," he said, "I don't care to see it."
+
+The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt dreaded the stairs.  He
+scratched a match on his thigh, and led the way up.  March was sorry for
+him, and he put his fingers on a quarter in his waistcoat-pocket to give
+him at parting.  At the same time, be had to trump up an objection to the
+flat.  This was easy, for it was advertised as containing ten rooms, and
+he found the number eked out with the bath-room and two large closets.
+"It's light enough," said March, "but I don't see how you make out ten
+rooms"
+
+"There's ten rooms," said the man, deigning no proof.
+
+March took his fingers off the quarter, and went down-stairs and out of
+the door without another word.  It would be wrong, it would be
+impossible, to give the man anything after such insolence.  He reflected,
+with shame, that it was also cheaper to punish than forgive him.
+
+He returned to his hotel prepared for any desperate measure, and
+convinced now that the Grosvenor Green apartment was not merely the only
+thing left for him, but was, on its own merits, the best thing in New
+York.
+
+Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading-room, and it gave March the
+curious thrill with which a man closes with temptation when he said:
+"Look here!  Why don't you take that woman's flat in the Xenophon?  She's
+been at the agents again, and they've been at me.  She likes your look--
+or Mrs. March's--and I guess you can have it at a pretty heavy discount
+from the original price.  I'm authorized to say you can have it for one
+seventy-five a month, and I don't believe it would be safe for you to
+offer one fifty."
+
+March shook his head, and dropped a mask of virtuous rejection over his
+corrupt acquiescence.  "It's too small for us--we couldn't squeeze into
+it."
+
+"Why, look here!" Fulkerson persisted.  "How many rooms do you people
+want?"
+
+"I've got to have a place to work--"
+
+"Of course! And you've got to have it at the Fifth Wheel office."
+
+"I hadn't thought of that," March began.  "I suppose I could do my work
+at the office, as there's not much writing--"
+
+"Why, of course you can't do your work at home.  You just come round with
+me now, and look at that again."
+
+"No; I can't do it."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I--I've got to dine."
+
+"All right," said Fulkerson.  "Dine with me.  I want to take you round to
+a little Italian place that I know."
+
+One may trace the successive steps of March's descent in this simple
+matter with the same edification that would attend the study of the self-
+delusions and obfuscations of a man tempted to crime.  The process is
+probably not at all different, and to the philosophical mind the kind of
+result is unimportant; the process is everything.
+
+Fulkerson led him down one block and half across another to the steps of
+a small dwelling-house, transformed, like many others, into a restaurant
+of the Latin ideal, with little or no structural change from the pattern
+of the lower middle-class New York home.  There were the corroded
+brownstone steps, the mean little front door, and the cramped entry with
+its narrow stairs by which ladies could go up to a dining-room appointed
+for them on the second floor; the parlors on the first were set about
+with tables, where men smoked cigarettes between the courses, and a
+single waiter ran swiftly to and fro with plates and dishes, and,
+exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cook beyond a slide in the back
+parlor.  He rushed at the new-comers, brushed the soiled table-cloth
+before them with a towel on his arm, covered its worst stains with a
+napkin, and brought them, in their order, the vermicelli soup, the fried
+fish, the cheese-strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast fowl
+and salad, and the wizened pear and coffee which form the dinner at such
+places.
+
+"Ah, this is nice!" said Fulkerson, after the laying of the charitable
+napkin, and he began to recognize acquaintances, some of whom he
+described to March as young literary men and artists with whom they
+should probably have to do; others were simply frequenters of the place,
+and were of all nationalities and religions apparently--at least, several
+were Hebrews and Cubans.  "You get a pretty good slice of New York here,"
+he said, "all except the frosting on top.  That you won't find much at
+Maroni's, though you will occasionally.  I don't mean the ladies ever,
+of course."  The ladies present seemed harmless and reputable-looking
+people enough, but certainly they were not of the first fashion, and,
+except in a few instances, not Americans.  "It's like cutting straight
+down through a fruitcake," Fulkerson went on, "or a mince-pie, when you
+don't know who made the pie; you get a little of everything."  He ordered
+a small flask of Chianti with the dinner, and it came in its pretty
+wicker jacket.  March smiled upon it with tender reminiscence, and
+Fulkerson laughed.  "Lights you up a little.  I brought old Dryfoos here
+one day, and he thought it was sweet-oil; that's the kind of bottle they
+used to have it in at the country drug-stores."
+
+"Yes, I remember now; but I'd totally forgotten it," said March.
+"How far back that goes!  Who's Dryfoos?"
+
+"Dryfoos?"  Fulkerson, still smiling, tore off a piece of the half-yard
+of French loaf which had been supplied them, with two pale, thin disks of
+butter, and fed it into himself.  "Old Dryfoos?  Well, of course! I call
+him old, but he ain't so very.  About fifty, or along there."
+
+"No," said March, "that isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be."
+
+"Well, I suppose you've got to know about him, anyway," said Fulkerson,
+thoughtfully.  "And I've been wondering just how I should tell you.
+Can't always make out exactly how much of a Bostonian you really are!
+Ever been out in the natural-gas country?"
+
+"No," said March.  "I've had a good deal of curiosity about it, but I've
+never been able to get away except in summer, and then we always
+preferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara and back through
+Canada, the route we took on our wedding journey.  The children like it
+as much as we do."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Fulkerson.  "Well, the natural-gas country is worth
+seeing.  I don't mean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in Northern Ohio
+and Indiana around Moffitt--that's the place in the heart of the gas
+region that they've been booming so.  Yes, you ought to see that country.
+If you haven't been West for a good many years, you haven't got any idea
+how old the country looks.  You remember how the fields used to be all
+full of stumps?"
+
+"I should think so."
+
+"Well, you won't see any stumps now.  All that country out around Moffitt
+is just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as old as England.  You
+know how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented a
+stump-extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen.  Now they
+just touch 'em off with a little dynamite, and they've got a cellar dug
+and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it.
+Only they haven't got any use for kindling in that country--all gas.
+I rode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-
+planting time, and every once in a while I'd come to a place with a piece
+of ragged old stove-pipe stickin' up out of the ground, and blazing away
+like forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it any
+more than if it was spring violets.  Horses didn't notice it, either.
+Well, they've always known about the gas out there; they say there are
+places in the woods where it's been burning ever since the country was
+settled.
+
+"But when you come in sight of Moffitt--my, oh, my!  Well, you come in
+smell of it about as soon.  That gas out there ain't odorless, like the
+Pittsburg gas, and so it's perfectly safe; but the smell isn't bad--about
+as bad as the finest kind of benzine.  Well, the first thing that strikes
+you when you come to Moffitt is the notion that there has been a good
+warm, growing rain, and the town's come up overnight.  That's in the
+suburbs, the annexes, and additions.  But it ain't shabby--no shanty-farm
+business; nice brick and frame houses, some of 'em Queen Anne style, and
+all of 'em looking as if they had come to stay.  And when you drive up
+from the depot you think everybody's moving.  Everything seems to be
+piled into the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up
+everywhere.  You know the kind of street Main Street always used to be in
+our section--half plank-road and turnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a
+lot of stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story higher
+than the back, and here and there a decent building with the gable end to
+the public; and a court-house and jail and two taverns and three or four
+churches.  Well, they're all there in Moffitt yet, but architecture has
+struck it hard, and they've got a lot of new buildings that needn't be
+ashamed of themselves anywhere; the new court-house is as big as St.
+Peter's, and the Grand Opera-house is in the highest style of the art.
+You can't buy a lot on that street for much less than you can buy a lot
+in New York--or you couldn't when the boom was on; I saw the place just
+when the boom was in its prime.  l went out there to work the newspapers
+in the syndicate business, and I got one of their men to write me a real
+bright, snappy account of the gas; and they just took me in their arms
+and showed me everything.  Well, it was wonderful, and it was beautiful,
+too!  To see a whole community stirred up like that was--just like a big
+boy, all hope and high spirits, and no discount on the remotest future;
+nothing but perpetual boom to the end of time--I tell you it warmed your
+blood.  Why, there were some things about it that made you think what a
+nice kind of world this would be if people ever took hold together,
+instead of each fellow fighting it out on his own hook, and devil take
+the hindmost.  They made up their minds at Moffitt that if they wanted
+their town to grow they'd got to keep their gas public property.  So they
+extended their corporation line so as to take in pretty much the whole
+gas region round there; and then the city took possession of every well
+that was put down, and held it for the common good.  Anybody that's a
+mind to come to Moffitt and start any kind of manufacture can have all
+the gas he wants free; and for fifteen dollars a year you can have all
+the gas you want to heat and light your private house.  The people hold
+on to it for themselves, and, as I say, it's a grand sight to see a whole
+community hanging together and working for the good of all, instead of
+splitting up into as many different cut-throats as there are able-bodied
+citizens.  See that fellow?"  Fulkerson broke off, and indicated with a
+twirl of his head a short, dark, foreign-looking man going out of the
+door.  "They say that fellow's a Socialist.  I think it's a shame they're
+allowed to come here.  If they don't like the way we manage our affairs
+let 'em stay at home," Fulkerson continued.  "They do a lot of mischief,
+shooting off their mouths round here.  I believe in free speech and all
+that; but I'd like to see these fellows shut up in jail and left to jaw
+one another to death.  We don't want any of their poison."
+
+March did not notice the vanishing Socialist.  He was watching, with a
+teasing sense of familiarity, a tall, shabbily dressed, elderly man, who
+had just come in.  He had the aquiline profile uncommon among Germans,
+and yet March recognized him at once as German.  His long, soft beard and
+mustache had once been fair, and they kept some tone of their yellow in
+the gray to which they had turned.  His eyes were full, and his lips and
+chin shaped the beard to the noble outline which shows in the beards the
+Italian masters liked to paint for their Last Suppers.  His carriage was
+erect and soldierly, and March presently saw that he had lost his left
+hand.  He took his place at a table where the overworked waiter found
+time to cut up his meat and put everything in easy reach of his right
+hand.
+
+"Well," Fulkerson resumed, "they took me round everywhere in Moffitt, and
+showed me their big wells--lit 'em up for a private view, and let me hear
+them purr with the soft accents of a mass-meeting of locomotives.  Why,
+when they let one of these wells loose in a meadow that they'd piped it
+into temporarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from the mouth of
+the pipe and blew it over half an acre of ground.  They say when they let
+one of their big wells burn away all winter before they had learned how
+to control it, that well kept up a little summer all around it; the grass
+stayed green, and the flowers bloomed all through the winter.  I don't
+know whether it's so or not.  But I can believe anything of natural gas.
+My! but it was beautiful when they turned on the full force of that well
+and shot a roman candle into the gas--that's the way they light it--and a
+plume of fire about twenty feet wide and seventy-five feet high, all red
+and yellow and violet, jumped into the sky, and that big roar shook the
+ground under your feet! You felt like saying:
+
+"'Don't trouble yourself; I'm perfectly convinced.  I believe in Moffitt.'
+We-e-e-ll!" drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath, "that's where I met
+old Dryfoos."
+
+"Oh yes!--Dryfoos," said March.  He observed that the waiter had brought
+the old one-handed German a towering glass of beer.
+
+"Yes," Fulkerson laughed.  "We've got round to Dryfoos again.  I thought
+I could cut a long story short, but I seem to be cutting a short story
+long.  If you're not in a hurry, though--"
+
+"Not in the least.  Go on as long as you like."
+
+"I met him there in the office of a real-estate man--speculator, of
+course; everybody was, in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, and public-
+spirited as all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me about him.
+Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, about three or four miles
+out of Moffitt, and he'd lived there pretty much all his life; father was
+one of the first settlers.  Everybody knew he had the right stuff in him,
+but he was slower than molasses in January, like those Pennsylvania
+Dutch.  He'd got together the largest and handsomest farm anywhere around
+there; and he was making money on it, just like he was in some business
+somewhere; he was a very intelligent man; he took the papers and kept
+himself posted; but he was awfully old-fashioned in his ideas.  He hung
+on to the doctrines as well as the dollars of the dads; it was a real
+thing with him.  Well, when the boom began to come he hated it awfully,
+and he fought it.  He used to write communications to the weekly
+newspaper in Moffitt--they've got three dailies there now--and throw cold
+water on the boom.  He couldn't catch on no way.  It made him sick to
+hear the clack that went on about the gas the whole while, and that
+stirred up the neighborhood and got into his family.  Whenever he'd hear
+of a man that had been offered a big price for his land and was going to
+sell out and move into town, he'd go and labor with him and try to talk
+him out of it, and tell him how long his fifteen or twenty thousand would
+last him to live on, and shake the Standard Oil Company before him, and
+try to make him believe it wouldn't be five years before the Standard
+owned the whole region.
+
+"Of course, he couldn't do anything with them.  When a man's offered a
+big price for his farm, he don't care whether it's by a secret emissary
+from the Standard Oil or not; he's going to sell and get the better of
+the other fellow if he can.  Dryfoos couldn't keep the boom out of has
+own family even.  His wife was with him.  She thought whatever he said
+and did was just as right as if it had been thundered down from Sinai.
+But the young folks were sceptical, especially the girls that had been
+away to school.  The boy that had been kept at home because he couldn't
+be spared from helping his father manage the farm was more like him, but
+they contrived to stir the boy up--with the hot end of the boom, too.
+So when a fellow came along one day and offered old Dryfoos a cool
+hundred thousand for his farm, it was all up with Dryfoos.  He'd 'a'
+liked to 'a' kept the offer to himself and not done anything about it,
+but his vanity wouldn't let him do that; and when he let it out in his
+family the girls outvoted him.  They just made him sell.
+
+"He wouldn't sell all.  He kept about eighty acres that was off in some
+piece by itself, but the three hundred that had the old brick house on
+it, and the big barn--that went, and Dryfoos bought him a place in
+Moffitt and moved into town to live on the interest of his money.  Just
+What he had scolded and ridiculed everybody else for doing.  Well, they
+say that at first he seemed like he would go crazy.  He hadn't anything
+to do.  He took a fancy to that land-agent, and he used to go and set in
+his office and ask him what he should do.  'I hain't got any horses, I
+hain't got any cows, I hain't got any pigs, I hain't got any chickens.
+I hain't got anything to do from sun-up to sun-down.'  The fellow said
+the tears used to run down the old fellow's cheeks, and if he hadn't been
+so busy himself he believed he should 'a' cried, too.  But most o' people
+thought old Dryfoos was down in the mouth because he hadn't asked more
+for his farm, when he wanted to buy it back and found they held it at a
+hundred and fifty thousand.  People couldn't believe he was just homesick
+and heartsick for the old place.  Well, perhaps he was sorry he hadn't
+asked more; that's human nature, too.
+
+"After a while something happened.  That land-agent used to tell Dryfoos
+to get out to Europe with his money and see life a little, or go and live
+in Washington, where he could be somebody; but Dryfoos wouldn't, and he
+kept listening to the talk there, and all of a sudden he caught on.  He
+came into that fellow's one day with a plan for cutting up the eighty
+acres he'd kept into town lots; and he'd got it all plotted out so-well,
+and had so many practical ideas about it, that the fellow was astonished.
+He went right in with him, as far as Dryfoos would let him, and glad of
+the chance; and they were working the thing for all it was worth when I
+struck Moffitt.  Old Dryfoos wanted me to go out and see the Dryfoos &
+Hendry Addition--guess he thought maybe I'd write it up; and he drove me
+out there himself.  Well, it was funny to see a town made: streets driven
+through; two rows of shadetrees, hard and soft, planted; cellars dug and
+houses put up-regular Queen Anne style, too, with stained glass-all at
+once.  Dryfoos apologized for the streets because they were hand-made;
+said they expected their street-making machine Tuesday, and then they
+intended to push things."
+
+Fulkerson enjoyed the effect of his picture on March for a moment, and
+then went on: "He was mighty intelligent, too, and he questioned me up
+about my business as sharp as I ever was questioned; seemed to kind of
+strike his fancy; I guess he wanted to find out if there was any money in
+it.  He was making money, hand over hand, then; and he never stopped
+speculating and improving till he'd scraped together three or four
+hundred thousand dollars, they said a million, but they like round
+numbers at Moffitt, and I guess half a million would lay over it
+comfortably and leave a few thousands to spare, probably.  Then he came
+on to New York."
+
+Fulkerson struck a match against the ribbed side of the porcelain cup
+that held the matches in the centre of the table, and lit a cigarette,
+which he began to smoke, throwing his head back with a leisurely effect,
+as if he had got to the end of at least as much of his story as he meant
+to tell without prompting.
+
+March asked him the desired question.  "What in the world for?"
+
+Fulkerson took out his cigarette and said, with a smile: "To spend his
+money, and get his daughters into the old Knickerbocker society.  Maybe
+he thought they were all the same kind of Dutch."
+
+"And has he succeeded?"
+
+"Well, they're not social leaders yet.  But it's only a question of time
+--generation or two--especially if time's money, and if Every Other Week
+is the success it's bound to be."
+
+"You don't mean to say, Fulkerson," said March, with a half-doubting,
+half-daunted laugh, "that he's your Angel?"
+
+"That's what I mean to say," returned Fulkerson.  "I ran onto him in
+Broadway one day last summer.  If you ever saw anybody in your life;
+you're sure to meet him in Broadway again, sooner or later.  That's the
+philosophy of the bunco business; country people from the same
+neighborhood are sure to run up against each other the first time they
+come to New York.  I put out my hand, and I said, 'Isn't this Mr. Dryfoos
+from Moffitt?'  He didn't seem to have any use for my hand; he let me
+keep it, and he squared those old lips of his till his imperial stuck
+straight out.  Ever see Bernhardt in 'L'Etrangere'?  Well, the American
+husband is old Dryfoos all over; no mustache; and hay-colored chin-
+whiskers cut slanting froze the corners of his mouth.  He cocked his
+little gray eyes at me, and says he: 'Yes, young man; my name is Dryfoos,
+and I'm from Moffitt.  But I don't want no present of Longfellow's Works,
+illustrated; and I don't want to taste no fine teas; but I know a
+policeman that does; and if you're the son of my old friend Squire
+Strohfeldt, you'd better get out.'  'Well, then,' said I, 'how would you
+like to go into the newspaper syndicate business?'  He gave another look
+at me, and then he burst out laughing, and he grabbed my hand, and he
+just froze to it.  I never saw anybody so glad.
+
+"Well, the long and the short of it was that I asked him round here to
+Maroni's to dinner; and before we broke up for the night we had settled
+the financial side of the plan that's brought you to New York.  I can
+see,'t said Fulkerson, who had kept his eyes fast on March's face, "that
+you don't more than half like the idea of Dryfoos.  It ought to give you
+more confidence in the thing than you ever had.  You needn't be afraid,"
+he added, with some feeling, "that I talked Dryfoos into the thing for my
+own advantage."
+
+"Oh, my dear Fulkerson!" March protested, all the more fervently because
+he was really a little guilty.
+
+"Well, of course not! I didn't mean you were.  But I just happened to
+tell him what I wanted to go into when I could see my way to it, and he
+caught on of his own accord.  The fact is," said Fulkerson, "I guess I'd
+better make a clean breast of it, now I'm at it, Dryfoos wanted to get
+something for that boy of his to do.  He's in railroads himself, and he's
+in mines and other things, and he keeps busy, and he can't bear to have
+his boy hanging round the house doing nothing, like as if he was a girl.
+I told him that the great object of a rich man was to get his son into
+just that fix, but he couldn't seem to see it, and the boy hated it
+himself.  He's got a good head, and he wanted to study for the ministry
+when they were all living together out on the farm; but his father had
+the old-fashioned ideas about that.  You know they used to think that any
+sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of; but they wanted
+the good timber for business; and so the old man wouldn't let him.
+You'll see the fellow; you'll like him; he's no fool, I can tell you; and
+he's going to be our publisher, nominally at first and actually when I've
+taught him the ropes a little."
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+Fulkerson stopped and looked at March, whom he saw lapsing into a serious
+silence.  Doubtless he divined his uneasiness with the facts that had
+been given him to digest.  He pulled out his watch and glanced at it.
+"See here, how would you like to go up to Forty-sixth street with me, and
+drop in on old Dryfoos?  Now's your chance.  He's going West tomorrow,
+and won't be back for a month or so.  They'll all be glad to see you, and
+you'll understand things better when you've seen him and his family.  I
+can't explain."
+
+March reflected a moment.  Then he said, with a wisdom that surprised
+him, for he would have liked to yield to the impulse of his curiosity:
+"Perhaps we'd better wait till Mrs. March comes down, and let things take
+the usual course.  The Dryfoos ladies will want to call on her as the
+last-comer, and if I treated myself 'en garcon' now, and paid the first
+visit, it might complicate matters."
+
+"Well, perhaps you're right," said Fulkerson.  "I don't know much about
+these things, and I don't believe Ma Dryfoos does, either."  He was on
+his legs lighting another cigarette.  "I suppose the girls are getting
+themselves up in etiquette, though.  Well, then, let's have a look at the
+'Every Other Week' building, and then, if you like your quarters there,
+you can go round and close for Mrs. Green's flat."
+
+March's dormant allegiance to his wife's wishes had been roused by his
+decision in favor of good social usage.  "I don't think I shall take the
+flat," he said.
+
+"Well, don't reject it without giving it another look, anyway.  Come on!"
+
+He helped March on with his light overcoat, and the little stir they made
+for their departure caught the notice of the old German; he looked up
+from his beer at them.  March was more than ever impressed with something
+familiar in his face.  In compensation for his prudence in regard to the
+Dryfooses he now indulged an impulse.  He stepped across to where the old
+man sat, with his bald head shining like ivory under the gas-jet, and his
+fine patriarchal length of bearded mask taking picturesque lights and
+shadows, and put out his hand to him.
+
+"Lindau! Isn't this Mr. Lindau?"
+
+The old man lifted himself slowly to his feet with mechanical politeness,
+and cautiously took March's hand.  "Yes, my name is Lindau," he said,
+slowly, while he scanned March's face.  Then he broke into a long cry.
+"Ah-h-h-h-h, my dear poy! my gong friendt! my-my--Idt is Passil Marge,
+not zo?  Ah, ha, ha, ha! How gladt I am to zee you! Why, I am gladt! And
+you rememberdt me?  You remember Schiller, and Goethe, and Uhland?  And
+Indianapolis?  You still lif in Indianapolis?  It sheers my hardt to zee
+you.  But you are lidtle oldt, too?  Tventy-five years makes a
+difference.  Ah, I am gladt! Dell me, idt is Passil Marge, not zo?"
+
+He looked anxiously into March's face, with a gentle smile of mixed hope
+and doubt, and March said: "As sure as it's Berthold Lindau, and I guess
+it's you.  And you remember the old times?  You were as much of a boy as
+I was, Lindau.  Are you living in New York?  Do you recollect how you
+tried to teach me to fence?  I don't know how to this day, Lindau.  How
+good you were, and how patient! Do you remember how we used to sit up in
+the little parlor back of your printing-office, and read Die Rauber and
+Die Theilung der Erde and Die Glocke?  And Mrs. Lindau?  Is she with--"
+
+"Deadt--deadt long ago.  Right after I got home from the war--tventy
+years ago.  But tell me, you are married?  Children?  Yes! Goodt! And how
+oldt are you now?"
+
+"It makes me seventeen to see you, Lindau, but I've got a son nearly as
+old."
+
+"Ah, ha, ha! Goodt! And where do you lif?"
+
+"Well, I'm just coming to live in New York," March said, looking over at
+Fulkerson, who had been watching his interview with the perfunctory smile
+of sympathy that people put on at the meeting of old friends.  "I want to
+introduce you to my friend Mr. Fulkerson.  He and I are going into a
+literary enterprise here."
+
+"Ah! zo?"  said the old man, with polite interest.  He took Fulkerson's
+proffered hand, and they all stood talking a few moments together.
+
+Then Fulkerson said, with another look at his watch, "Well, March, we're
+keeping Mr. Lindau from his dinner."
+
+"Dinner!" cried the old man.  "Idt's better than breadt and meadt to see
+Mr. Marge!"
+
+"I must be going, anyway," said March.  "But I must see you again soon,
+Lindau.  Where do you live?  I want a long talk."
+
+"And I.  You will find me here at dinner-time."  said the old man.  "It
+is the best place"; and March fancied him reluctant to give another
+address.
+
+To cover his consciousness he answered, gayly: "Then, it's 'auf
+wiedersehen' with us.  Well!"
+
+"Also!" The old man took his hand, and made a mechanical movement with
+his mutilated arm, as if he would have taken it in a double clasp.  He
+laughed at himself.  "I wanted to gif you the other handt, too, but I
+gafe it to your gountry a goodt while ago."
+
+"To my country?"  asked March, with a sense of pain, and yet lightly, as
+if it were a joke of the old man's.  "Your country, too, Lindau?"
+
+The old man turned very grave, and said, almost coldly, "What gountry
+hass a poor man got, Mr. Marge?"
+
+"Well, you ought to have a share in the one you helped to save for us
+rich men, Lindau," March returned, still humoring the joke.
+
+The old man smiled sadly, but made no answer as he sat down again.
+
+"Seems to be a little soured," said Fulkerson, as they went down the
+steps.  He was one of those Americans whose habitual conception of life
+is unalloyed prosperity.  When any experience or observation of his went
+counter to it he suffered--something like physical pain.  He eagerly
+shrugged away the impression left upon his buoyancy by Lindau, and added
+to March's continued silence, "What did I tell you about meeting every
+man in New York that you ever knew before?"
+
+I never expected to meat Lindau in the world again," said March, more to
+himself than to Fulkerson.  "I had an impression that he had been killed
+in the war.  I almost wish he had been."
+
+"Oh, hello, now!" cried Fulkerson.
+
+March laughed, but went on soberly: "He was a man predestined to
+adversity, though.  When I first knew him out in Indianapolis he was
+starving along with a sick wife and a sick newspaper.  It was before the
+Germans had come over to the Republicans generally, but Lindau was
+fighting the anti-slavery battle just as naturally at Indianapolis in
+1858 as he fought behind the barricades at Berlin in 1848.  And yet he
+was always such a gentle soul!  And so generous!  He taught me German for
+the love of it; he wouldn't spoil his pleasure by taking a cent from me;
+he seemed to get enough out of my being young and enthusiastic, and out
+of prophesying great things for me.  I wonder what the poor old fellow is
+doing here, with that one hand of his?"
+
+"Not amassing a very 'handsome pittance,' I guess, as Artemus Ward would
+say," said Fulkerson, getting back some of his lightness.  "There are
+lots of two-handed fellows in New York that are not doing much better, I
+guess.  Maybe he gets some writing on the German papers."
+
+"I hope so.  He's one of the most accomplished men!  He used to be a
+splendid musician--pianist--and knows eight or ten languages."
+
+"Well, it's astonishing," said Fulkerson, "how much lumber those Germans
+can carry around in their heads all their lives, and never work it up
+into anything.  It's a pity they couldn't do the acquiring, and let out
+the use of their learning to a few bright Americans.  We could make
+things hum, if we could arrange 'em that way."
+
+He talked on, unheeded by March, who went along half-consciously
+tormented by his lightness in the pensive memories the meeting with
+Lindau had called up.  Was this all that sweet, unselfish nature could
+come to?  What a homeless old age at that meagre Italian table d'hote,
+with that tall glass of beer for a half-hour's oblivion!  That shabby
+dress, that pathetic mutilation!  He must have a pension, twelve dollars
+a month, or eighteen, from a grateful country.  But what else did he eke
+out with?
+
+"Well, here we are," said Fulkerson, cheerily.  He ran up the steps
+before March, and opened the carpenter's temporary valve in the door
+frame, and led the way into a darkness smelling sweetly of unpainted
+wood-work and newly dried plaster; their feat slipped on shavings and
+grated on sand.  He scratched a match, and found a candle, and then
+walked about up and down stairs, and lectured on the advantages of the
+place.  He had fitted up bachelor apartments for himself in the house,
+and said that he was going to have a flat to let on the top floor.
+"I didn't offer it to you because I supposed you'd be too proud to live
+over your shop; and it's too small, anyway; only five rooms."
+
+"Yes, that's too small," said March, shirking the other point.
+
+"Well, then, here's the room I intend for your office," said Fulkerson,
+showing him into a large back parlor one flight up.  "You'll have it
+quiet from the street noises here, and you can be at home or not, as you
+please.  There'll be a boy on the stairs to find out.  Now, you see, this
+makes the Grosvenor Green flat practicable, if you want it."
+
+March felt the forces of fate closing about him and pushing him to a
+decision.  He feebly fought them off till he could have another look at
+the flat.  Then, baked and subdued still more by the unexpected presence
+of Mrs. Grosvenor Green herself, who was occupying it so as to be able to
+show it effectively, he took it.  He was aware more than ever of its
+absurdities; he knew that his wife would never cease to hate it; but he
+had suffered one of those eclipses of the imagination to which men of his
+temperament are subject, and into which he could see no future for his
+desires.  He felt a comfort in irretrievably committing himself, and
+exchanging the burden of indecision for the burden of responsibility.
+
+"I don't know," said Fulkerson, as they walked back to his hotel
+together, "but you might fix it up with that lone widow and her pretty
+daughter to take part of their house here."  He seemed to be reminded of
+it by the fact of passing the house, and March looked up at its dark
+front.  He could not have told exactly why be felt a pang of remorse at
+the sight, and doubtless it was more regret for having taken the
+Grosvenor Green flat than for not having taken the widow's rooms.  Still,
+he could not forget her wistfulness when his wife and he were looking at
+them, and her disappointment when they decided against them.  He had
+toyed, in, his after-talk to Mrs. March, with a sort of hypothetical
+obligation they had to modify their plans so as to meet the widow's want
+of just such a family as theirs; they had both said what a blessing it
+would be to her, and what a pity they could not do it; but they had
+decided very distinctly that they could not.  Now it seemed to him that
+they might; and he asked himself whether he had not actually departed as
+much from their ideal as if he had taken board with the widow.  Suddenly
+it seemed to him that his wife asked him this, too.
+
+"I reckon," said Fulkerson, "that she could have arranged to give you
+your meals in your rooms, and it would have come to about the same thing
+as housekeeping."
+
+"No sort of boarding can be the same as house-keeping," said March.
+"I want my little girl to have the run of a kitchen, and I want the whole
+family to have the moral effect of housekeeping.  It's demoralizing to
+board, in every way; it isn't a home, if anybody else takes the care of
+it off your hands."
+
+"Well, I suppose so," Fulkerson assented; but March's words had a hollow
+ring to himself, and in his own mind he began to retaliate his
+dissatisfaction upon Fulkerson.
+
+He parted from him on the usual terms outwardly, but he felt obscurely
+abused by Fulkerson in regard to the Dryfooses, father and son.  He did
+not know but Fulkerson had taken an advantage of him in allowing him to
+commit himself to their enterprise with out fully and frankly telling him
+who and what his backer was; he perceived that with young Dryfoos as the
+publisher and Fulkerson as the general director of the paper there might
+be very little play for his own ideas of its conduct.  Perhaps it was the
+hurt to his vanity involved by the recognition of this fact that made him
+forget how little choice he really had in the matter, and how, since he
+had not accepted the offer to edit the insurance paper, nothing remained
+for him but to close with Fulkerson.  In this moment of suspicion and
+resentment he accused Fulkerson of hastening his decision in regard to
+the Grosvenor Green apartment; he now refused to consider it a decision,
+and said to himself that if he felt disposed to do so he would send Mrs.
+Green a note reversing it in the morning.  But he put it all off till
+morning with his clothes, when he went to bed, he put off even thinking
+what his wife would say; he cast Fulkerson and his constructive treachery
+out of his mind, too, and invited into it some pensive reveries of the
+past, when he still stood at the parting of the ways, and could take this
+path or that.  In his middle life this was not possible; he must follow
+the path chosen long, ago, wherever, it led.  He was not master of
+himself, as he once seemed, but the servant of those he loved; if he
+could do what he liked, perhaps he might renounce this whole New York
+enterprise, and go off somewhere out of the reach of care; but he could
+not do what he liked, that was very clear.  In the pathos of this
+conviction he dwelt compassionately upon the thought of poor old Lindau;
+he resolved to make him accept a handsome sum of money--more than he
+could spare, something that he would feel the loss of--in payment of the
+lessons in German and fencing given so long ago.  At the usual rate for
+such lessons, his debt, with interest for twenty-odd years, would run
+very far into the hundreds.  Too far, he perceived, for his wife's joyous
+approval; he determined not to add the interest; or he believed that
+Lindau would refuse the interest; he put a fine speech in his mouth,
+making him do so; and after that he got Lindau employment on 'Every Other
+Week,' and took care of him till he died.
+
+Through all his melancholy and munificence he was aware of sordid
+anxieties for having taken the Grosvenor Green apartment.  These began to
+assume visible, tangible shapes as he drowsed, and to became personal
+entities, from which he woke, with little starts, to a realization of
+their true nature, and then suddenly fell fast asleep.
+
+In the accomplishment of the events which his reverie played with, there
+was much that retroactively stamped it with prophecy, but much also that
+was better than he forboded.  He found that with regard to the Grosvenor
+Green apartment he had not allowed for his wife's willingness to get any
+sort of roof over her head again after the removal from their old home,
+or for the alleviations that grow up through mere custom.  The practical
+workings of the apartment were not so bad; it had its good points, and
+after the first sensation of oppression in it they began to feel the
+convenience of its arrangement.  They were at that time of life when
+people first turn to their children's opinion with deference, and, in the
+loss of keenness in their own likes and dislikes, consult the young
+preferences which are still so sensitive.  It went far to reconcile Mrs.
+March to the apartment that her children were pleased with its novelty;
+when this wore off for them, she had herself begun to find it much more
+easily manageable than a house.  After she had put away several barrels
+of gimcracks, and folded up screens and rugs and skins, and carried them
+all off to the little dark store-room which the flat developed, she
+perceived at once a roominess and coziness in it unsuspected before.
+Then, when people began to call, she had a pleasure, a superiority, in
+saying that it was a furnished apartment, and in disclaiming all
+responsibility for the upholstery and decoration.  If March was by, she
+always explained that it was Mr. March's fancy, and amiably laughed it
+off with her callers as a mannish eccentricity.  Nobody really seemed to
+think it otherwise than pretty; and this again was a triumph for Mrs.
+March, because it showed how inferior the New York taste was to the
+Boston taste in such matters.
+
+March submitted silently to his punishment, and laughed with her before
+company at his own eccentricity.  She had been so preoccupied with the
+adjustment of the family to its new quarters and circumstances that the
+time passed for laying his misgivings, if they were misgivings, about
+Fulkerson before her, and when an occasion came for expressing them they
+had themselves passed in the anxieties of getting forward the first
+number of 'Every Other Week.'  He kept these from her, too, and the
+business that brought them to New York had apparently dropped into
+abeyance before the questions of domestic economy that presented and
+absented themselves.  March knew his wife to be a woman of good mind and
+in perfect sympathy with him, but he understood the limitations of her
+perspective; and if he was not too wise, he was too experienced to
+intrude upon it any affairs of his till her own were reduced to the right
+order and proportion.  It would have been folly to talk to her of
+Fulkerson's conjecturable uncandor while she was in doubt whether her
+cook would like the kitchen, or her two servants would consent to room
+together; and till it was decided what school Tom should go to, and
+whether Bella should have lessons at home or not, the relation which
+March was to bear to the Dryfooses, as owner and publisher, was not to be
+discussed with his wife.  He might drag it in, but he was aware that with
+her mind distracted by more immediate interests he could not get from her
+that judgment, that reasoned divination, which he relied upon so much.
+She would try, she would do her best, but the result would be a view
+clouded and discolored by the effort she must make.
+
+He put the whole matter by, and gave himself to the details of the work
+before him.  In this he found not only escape, but reassurance, for it
+became more and more apparent that whatever was nominally the structure
+of the business, a man of his qualifications and his instincts could not
+have an insignificant place in it.  He had also the consolation of liking
+his work, and of getting an instant grasp of it that grew constantly
+firmer and closer.  The joy of knowing that he had not made a mistake was
+great.  In giving rein to ambitions long forborne he seemed to get back
+to the youth when he had indulged them first; and after half a lifetime
+passed in pursuits alien to his nature, he was feeling the serene
+happiness of being mated through his work to his early love.  From the
+outside the spectacle might have had its pathos, and it is not easy to
+justify such an experiment as he had made at his time of life, except
+upon the ground where he rested from its consideration--the ground of
+necessity.
+
+His work was more in his thoughts than himself, however; and as the time
+for the publication of the first number of his periodical came nearer,
+his cares all centred upon it.  Without fixing any date, Fulkerson had
+announced it, and pushed his announcements with the shameless vigor of a
+born advertiser.  He worked his interest with the press to the utmost,
+and paragraphs of a variety that did credit to his ingenuity were afloat
+everywhere.  Some of them were speciously unfavorable in tone; they
+criticised and even ridiculed the principles on which the new departure
+in literary journalism was based.  Others defended it; others yet denied
+that this rumored principle was really the principle.  All contributed to
+make talk.  All proceeded from the same fertile invention.
+
+March observed with a degree of mortification that the talk was very
+little of it in the New York press; there the references to the novel
+enterprise were slight and cold.  But Fulkerson said: "Don't mind that,
+old man.  It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this;
+New York has very little to do with it.  Now if it were a play, it would
+be different.  New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or
+break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine.  The great mass of the
+readers are outside of New York, and the rural districts are what we have
+got to go for.  They don't read much in New York; they write, and talk
+about what they've written.  Don't you worry."
+
+The rumor of Fulkerson's connection with the enterprise accompanied many
+of the paragraphs, and he was able to stay March's thirst for employment
+by turning over to him from day to day heaps of the manuscripts which
+began to pour in from his old syndicate writers, as well as from
+adventurous volunteers all over the country.  With these in hand March
+began practically to plan the first number, and to concrete a general
+scheme from the material and the experience they furnished.  They had
+intended to issue the first number with the new year, and if it had been
+an affair of literature alone, it would have been very easy; but it was
+the art leg they limped on, as Fulkerson phrased it.  They had not merely
+to deal with the question of specific illustrations for this article or
+that, but to decide the whole character of their illustrations, and first
+of all to get a design for a cover which should both ensnare the heedless
+and captivate the fastidious.  These things did not come properly within
+March's province--that had been clearly understood--and for a while
+Fulkerson tried to run the art leg himself.  The phrase was again his,
+but it was simpler to make the phrase than to run the leg.  The difficult
+generation, at once stiff-backed and slippery, with which he had to do in
+this endeavor, reduced even so buoyant an optimist to despair, and after
+wasting some valuable weeks in trying to work the artists himself, he
+determined to get an artist to work them.  But what artist?  It could not
+be a man with fixed reputation and a following: he would be too costly,
+and would have too many enemies among his brethren, even if he would
+consent to undertake the job.  Fulkerson had a man in mind, an artist,
+too, who would have been the very thing if he had been the thing at all.
+He had talent enough, and his sort of talent would reach round the whole
+situation, but, as Fulkerson said, he was as many kinds of an ass as he
+was kinds of an artist.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Anticipative homesickness
+Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of
+Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much
+As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting
+Considerable comfort in holding him accountable
+Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable
+Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another
+Handsome pittance
+He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices
+Hypothetical difficulty
+Never-blooming shrub
+Poverty as hopeless as any in the world
+Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him
+Servant of those he loved
+Sigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdom
+Sorry he hadn't asked more; that's human nature
+That isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be
+Tried to be homesick for them, but failed
+Turn to their children's opinion with deference
+Wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes v1,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+PART SECOND
+
+
+I.
+
+The evening when March closed with Mrs. Green's reduced offer, and
+decided to take her apartment, the widow whose lodgings he had rejected
+sat with her daughter in an upper room at the back of her house.  In the
+shaded glow of the drop-light she was sewing, and the girl was drawing at
+the same table.  From time to time, as they talked, the girl lifted her
+head and tilted it a little on one side so as to get some desired effect
+of her work.
+
+"It's a mercy the cold weather holds off," said the mother.  "We should
+have to light the furnace, unless we wanted to scare everybody away with
+a cold house; and I don't know who would take care of it, or what would
+become of us, every way."
+
+"They seem to have been scared away from a house that wasn't cold," said
+the girl.  "Perhaps they might like a cold one.  But it's too early for
+cold yet.  It's only just in the beginning of November."
+
+"The Messenger says they've had a sprinkling of snow."
+
+"Oh yes, at St. Barnaby! I don't know when they don't have sprinklings of
+snow there.  I'm awfully glad we haven't got that winter before us."
+
+The widow sighed as mothers do who feel the contrast their experience
+opposes to the hopeful recklessness of such talk as this.  "We may have a
+worse winter here," she said, darkly.
+
+"Then I couldn't stand it," said the girl, "and I should go in for
+lighting out to Florida double-quick."
+
+"And how would you get to Florida?"  demanded her mother, severely.
+
+"Oh, by the usual conveyance Pullman vestibuled train, I suppose.  What
+makes you so blue, mamma?"  The girl was all the time sketching away,
+rubbing out, lifting her head for the effect, and then bending it over
+her work again without looking at her mother.
+
+"I am not blue, Alma.  But I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of
+yours."
+
+"Why?  What harm does it do?"
+
+"Harm?"  echoed the mother.
+
+Pending the effort she must make in saying, the girl cut in: "Yes, harm.
+You've kept your despair dusted off and ready for use at an instant's
+notice ever since we came, and what good has it done?  I'm going to keep
+on hoping to the bitter end.  That's what papa did."
+
+It was what the Rev. Archibald Leighton had done with all the
+consumptive's buoyancy.  The morning he died he told them that now he had
+turned the point and was really going to get well.  The cheerfulness was
+not only in his disease, but in his temperament.  Its excess was always a
+little against him in his church work, and Mrs. Leighton was right enough
+in feeling that if it had not been for the ballast of her instinctive
+despondency he would have made shipwreck of such small chances of
+prosperity as befell him in life.  It was not from him that his daughter
+got her talent, though he had left her his temperament intact of his
+widow's legal thirds.  He was one of those men of whom the country people
+say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him.  Mrs.
+Leighton had long eked out their income by taking a summer boarder or
+two, as a great favor, into her family; and when the greater need came,
+she frankly gave up her house to the summer-folks (as they call them in
+the country), and managed it for their comfort from the small quarter of
+it in which she shut herself up with her daughter.
+
+The notion of shutting up is an exigency of the rounded period.  The fact
+is, of course, that Alma Leighton was not shut up in any sense whatever.
+She was the pervading light, if not force, of the house.  She was a good
+cook, and she managed the kitchen with the help of an Irish girl, while
+her mother looked after the rest of the housekeeping.  But she was not
+systematic; she had inspiration but not discipline, and her mother
+mourned more over the days when Alma left the whole dinner to the Irish
+girl than she rejoiced in those when one of Alma's great thoughts took
+form in a chicken-pie of incomparable savor or in a matchless pudding.
+The off-days came when her artistic nature was expressing itself in
+charcoal, for she drew to the admiration of all among the lady boarders
+who could not draw.  The others had their reserves; they readily conceded
+that Alma had genius, but they were sure she needed instruction.  On the
+other hand, they were not so radical as to agree with the old painter who
+came every summer to paint the elms of the St. Barnaby meadows.  He
+contended that she needed to be a man in order to amount to anything; but
+in this theory he was opposed by an authority, of his own sex, whom the
+lady sketchers believed to speak with more impartiality in a matter
+concerning them as much as Alma Leighton.  He said that instruction would
+do, and he was not only, younger and handsomer, but he was fresher from
+the schools than old Harrington, who, even the lady sketchers could see,
+painted in an obsolescent manner.  His name was Beaton--Angus Beaton; but
+he was not Scotch, or not more Scotch than Mary Queen of Scots was.  His
+father was a Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York, and it
+had taken only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces of native
+and ancestral manner in him.  He wore his black beard cut shorter than
+his mustache, and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders well
+thrown back and with a lateral curve of his person when he talked about
+art, which would alone have carried conviction even if he had not had a
+thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and
+had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it
+the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French.  One of the ladies
+said that you always thought of him as having spoken French after it was
+over, and accused herself of wrong in not being able to feel afraid of
+him.  None of the ladies was afraid of him, though they could not believe
+that he was really so deferential to their work as he seemed; and they
+knew, when he would not criticise Mr. Harrington's work, that he was just
+acting from principle.
+
+They may or may not have known the deference with which he treated Alma's
+work; but the girl herself felt that his abrupt, impersonal comment
+recognized her as a real sister in art.  He told her she ought to come to
+New York, and draw in the League, or get into some painter's private
+class; and it was the sense of duty thus appealed to which finally
+resulted in the hazardous experiment she and her mother were now making.
+There were no logical breaks in the chain of their reasoning from past
+success with boarders in St. Barnaby to future success with boarders in
+New York.  Of course the outlay was much greater.  The rent of the
+furnished house they had taken was such that if they failed their
+experiment would be little less than ruinous.
+
+But they were not going to fail; that was what Alma contended, with a
+hardy courage that her mother sometimes felt almost invited failure, if
+it did not deserve it.  She was one of those people who believe that if
+you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen.  She acted on this
+superstition as if it were a religion.
+
+"If it had not been for my despair, as you call it, Alma," she answered,
+"I don't know where we should have been now."
+
+"I suppose we should have been in St. Barnaby," said the girl.  "And if
+it's worse to be in New York, you see what your despair's done, mamma.
+But what's the use?  You meant well, and I don't blame you.  You can't
+expect even despair to come out always just the way you want it.  Perhaps
+you've used too much of it."  The girl laughed, and Mrs. Leighton
+laughed, too.  Like every one else, she was not merely a prevailing mood,
+as people are apt to be in books, but was an irregularly spheroidal
+character, with surfaces that caught the different lights of circumstance
+and reflected them.  Alma got up and took a pose before the mirror, which
+she then transferred to her sketch.  The room was pinned about with other
+sketches, which showed with fantastic indistinctness in the shaded
+gaslight.  Alma held up the drawing.  "How do you like it?"
+
+Mrs. Leighton bent forward over her sewing to look at it.  "You've got
+the man's face rather weak."
+
+"Yes, that's so.  Either I see all the hidden weakness that's in men's
+natures, and bring it to the surface in their figures, or else I put my
+own weakness into them.  Either way, it's a drawback to their presenting
+a truly manly appearance.  As long as I have one of the miserable objects
+before me, I can draw him; but as soon as his back's turned I get to
+putting ladies into men's clothes.  I should think you'd be scandalized,
+mamma, if you were a really feminine person.  It must be your despair
+that helps you to bear up.  But what's the matter with the young lady in
+young lady's clothes?  Any dust on her?"
+
+"What expressions!" said Mrs. Leighton.  "Really, Alma, for a refined
+girl you are the most unrefined!"
+
+"Go on--about the girl in the picture!" said Alma, slightly knocking her
+mother on the shoulder, as she stood over her.
+
+"I don't see anything to her.  What's she doing?"
+
+"Oh, just being made love to, I suppose."
+
+"She's perfectly insipid!"
+
+"You're awfully articulate, mamma! Now, if Mr. Wetmore were to criticise
+that picture he'd draw a circle round it in the air, and look at it
+through that, and tilt his head first on one side and then on the other,
+and then look at you, as if you were a figure in it, and then collapse
+awhile, and moan a little and gasp, 'Isn't your young lady a little too-
+too--' and then he'd try to get the word out of you, and groan and suffer
+some more; and you'd say, 'She is, rather,' and that would give him
+courage, and he'd say, 'I don't mean that she's so very--' 'Of course
+not.' 'You understand?' 'Perfectly.  I see it myself, now.' 'Well, then'
+---and he'd take your pencil and begin to draw--'I should give her a
+little more--Ah?' 'Yes, I see the difference.'--'You see the difference?'
+And he'd go off to some one else, and you'd know that you'd been doing
+the wishy-washiest thing in the world, though he hadn't spoken a word of
+criticism, and couldn't.  But he wouldn't have noticed the expression at
+all; he'd have shown you where your drawing was bad.  He doesn't care for
+what he calls the literature of a thing; he says that will take care of
+itself if the drawing's good.  He doesn't like my doing these chic
+things; but I'm going to keep it up, for I think it's the nearest way to
+illustrating."
+
+She took her sketch and pinned it up on the door.
+
+"And has Mr. Beaton been about, yet?"  asked her mother.
+
+"No," said the girl, with her back still turned; and she added,
+"I believe he's in New York; Mr. Wetmore's seen him."
+
+"It's a little strange he doesn't call."
+
+"It would be if he were not an artist.  But artists never do anything
+like other people.  He was on his good behavior while he was with us, and
+he's a great deal more conventional than most of them; but even he can't
+keep it up.  That's what makes me really think that women can never
+amount to anything in art.  They keep all their appointments, and fulfil
+all their duties just as if they didn't know anything about art.  Well,
+most of them don't.  We've got that new model to-day."
+
+"What new model?"
+
+"The one Mr. Wetmore was telling us about the old German; he's splendid.
+He's got the most beautiful head; just like the old masters' things.  He
+used to be Humphrey Williams's model for his Biblical-pieces; but since
+he's dead, the old man hardly gets anything to do.  Mr. Wetmore says
+there isn't anybody in the Bible that Williams didn't paint him as.
+He's the Law and the Prophets in all his Old Testament pictures, and he's
+Joseph, Peter, Judas Iscariot, and the Scribes and Pharisees in the New."
+
+"It's a good thing people don't know how artists work, or some of the
+most sacred pictures would have no influence," said Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"Why, of course not!" cried the girl.  "And the influence is the last
+thing a painter thinks of--or supposes he thinks of.  What he knows he's
+anxious about is the drawing and the color.  But people will never
+understand how simple artists are.  When I reflect what a complex and
+sophisticated being I am, I'm afraid I can never come to anything in art.
+Or I should be if I hadn't genius."
+
+"Do you think Mr. Beaton is very simple?"  asked Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"Mr. Wetmore doesn't think he's very much of an artist.  He thinks he
+talks too well.  They believe that if a man can express himself clearly
+he can't paint."
+
+"And what do you believe?"
+
+"Oh, I can express myself, too."
+
+The mother seemed to be satisfied with this evasion.  After a while she
+said, "I presume he will call when he gets settled."
+
+The girl made no answer to this.  "One of the girls says that old model
+is an educated man.  He was in the war, and lost a hand.  Doesn't it seem
+a pity for such a man to have to sit to a class of affected geese like us
+as a model?  I declare it makes me sick.  And we shall keep him a week,
+and pay him six or seven dollars for the use of his grand old head, and
+then what will he do?  The last time he was regularly employed was when
+Mr. Mace was working at his Damascus Massacre.  Then he wanted so many
+Arab sheiks and Christian elders that he kept old Mr. Lindau steadily
+employed for six months.  Now he has to pick up odd jobs where he can."
+
+"I suppose he has his pension," said Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"No; one of the girls"--that was the way Alma always described her
+fellow-students--"says he has no pension.  He didn't apply for it for a
+long time, and then there was a hitch about it, and it was somethinged
+--vetoed, I believe she said."
+
+"Who vetoed it?"  asked Mrs. Leighton, with some curiosity about the
+process, which she held in reserve.
+
+"I don't know-whoever vetoes things.  I wonder what Mr. Wetmore does
+think of us--his class.  We must seem perfectly crazy.  There isn't one
+of us really knows what she's doing it for, or what she expects to happen
+when she's done it.  I suppose every one thinks she has genius.  I know
+the Nebraska widow does, for she says that unless you have genius it
+isn't the least use.  Everybody's puzzled to know what she does with her
+baby when she's at work--whether she gives it soothing syrup.  I wonder
+how Mr. Wetmore can keep from laughing in our faces.  I know he does
+behind our backs."
+
+Mrs. Leighton's mind wandered back to another point.  "Then if he says
+Mr. Beaton can't paint, I presume he doesn't respect him very much."
+
+"Oh, he never said he couldn't paint.  But I know he thinks so.  He says
+he's an excellent critic."
+
+"Alma," her mother said, with the effect of breaking off, "what do you
+suppose is the reason he hasn't been near us?"
+
+"Why, I don't know, mamma, except that it would have been natural for
+another person to come, and he's an artist at least, artist enough for
+that."
+
+"That doesn't account for it altogether.  He was very nice at St.
+Barnaby, and seemed so interested in you--your work."
+
+"Plenty of people were nice at St. Barnaby.  That rich Mrs. Horn couldn't
+contain her joy when she heard we were coming to New York, but she hasn't
+poured in upon us a great deal since we got here."
+
+"But that's different.  She's very fashionable, and she's taken up with
+her own set.  But Mr. Beaton's one of our kind."
+
+"Thank you.  Papa wasn't quite a tombstone-cutter, mamma."
+
+"That makes it all the harder to bear.  He can't be ashamed of us.
+Perhaps he doesn't know where we are."
+
+"Do you wish to send him your card, mamma?"  The girl flushed and towered
+in scorn of the idea.
+
+"Why, no, Alma," returned her mother.
+
+"Well, then," said Alma.
+
+But Mrs. Leighton was not so easily quelled.  She had got her mind on Mr.
+Beaton, and she could not detach it at once.  Besides, she was one of
+those women (they are commoner than the same sort of men) whom it does
+not pain to take out their most intimate thoughts and examine them in the
+light of other people's opinions.  "But I don't see how he can behave so.
+He must know that--"
+
+"That what, mamma?"  demanded the girl.
+
+"That he influenced us a great deal in coming--"
+
+"He didn't.  If he dared to presume to think such a thing--"
+
+"Now, Alma," said her mother, with the clinging persistence of such
+natures, "you know he did.  And it's no use for you to pretend that we
+didn't count upon him in--in every way.  You may not have noticed his
+attentions, and I don't say you did, but others certainly did; and I must
+say that I didn't expect he would drop us so."
+
+"Drop us!" cried Alma, in a fury.  "Oh!"
+
+"Yes, drop us, Alma.  He must know where we are.  Of course, Mr.
+Wetmore's spoken to him about you, and it's a shame that he hasn't been
+near us.  I should have thought common gratitude, common decency, would
+have brought him after--after all we did for him."
+
+"We did nothing for him--nothing! He paid his board, and that ended it."
+
+"No, it didn't, Alma.  You know what he used to say--about its being like
+home, and all that; and I must say that after his attentions to you, and
+all the things you told me he said, I expected something very dif--"
+
+A sharp peal of the door-bell thrilled through the house, and as if the
+pull of the bell-wire had twitched her to her feet, Mrs. Leighton sprang
+up and grappled with her daughter in their common terror.
+
+They both glared at the clock and made sure that it was five minutes
+after nine.  Then they abandoned themselves some moments to the
+unrestricted play of their apprehensions.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+"Why, Alma," whispered the mother, "who in the world can it be at this
+time of night?  You don't suppose he--"
+
+"Well, I'm not going to the door, anyhow, mother, I don't care who it is;
+and, of course, he wouldn't be such a goose as to come at this hour."
+She put on a look of miserable trepidation, and shrank back from the
+door, while the hum of the bell died away, in the hall.
+
+"What shall we do?"  asked Mrs. Leighton, helplessly.
+
+"Let him go away--whoever they are," said Alma.
+
+Another and more peremptory ring forbade them refuge in this simple
+expedient.
+
+"Oh, dear! what shall we do?  Perhaps it's a despatch."
+
+The conjecture moved Alma to no more than a rigid stare.  "I shall not
+go," she said.  A third ring more insistent than the others followed, and
+she said: "You go ahead, mamma, and I'll come behind to scream if it's
+anybody.  We can look through the side-lights at the door first."
+
+Mrs. Leighton fearfully led the way from the back chamber where they bad
+been sitting, and slowly descended the stairs.  Alma came behind and
+turned up the hall gas-jet with a sudden flash that made them both jump a
+little.  The gas inside rendered it more difficult to tell who was on the
+threshold, but Mrs. Leighton decided from a timorous peep through the
+scrims that it was a lady and gentleman.  Something in this distribution
+of sex emboldened her; she took her life in her hand, and opened the
+door.
+
+The lady spoke.  "Does Mrs. Leighton live heah?"  she said, in a rich,
+throaty voice; and she feigned a reference to the agent's permit she held
+in her hand.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Leighton; she mechanically occupied the doorway, while
+Alma already quivered behind her with impatience of her impoliteness.
+
+"Oh," said the lady, who began to appear more and more a young lady,
+"Ah didn't know but Ah had mistaken the hoase.  Ah suppose it's rather
+late to see the apawtments, and Ah most ask you to pawdon us."  She put
+this tentatively, with a delicately growing recognition of Mrs. Leighton
+as the lady of the house, and a humorous intelligence of the situation in
+the glance she threw Alma over her mother's shoulder.  "Ah'm afraid we
+most have frightened you."
+
+"Oh, not at all," said Alma; and at the same time her mother said,
+"Will you walk in, please?"
+
+The gentleman promptly removed his hat and made the Leightons an
+inclusive bow.  "You awe very kind, madam, and I am sorry for the trouble
+we awe giving you."  He was tall and severe-looking, with a gray,
+trooperish mustache and iron-gray hair, and, as Alma decided, iron-gray
+eyes.  His daughter was short, plump, and fresh-colored, with an effect
+of liveliness that did not all express itself in her broad-vowelled,
+rather formal speech, with its odd valuations of some of the auxiliary
+verbs, and its total elision of the canine letter.
+
+"We awe from the Soath," she said, "and we arrived this mawning, but we
+got this cyahd from the brokah just befo' dinnah, and so we awe rathah
+late."
+
+"Not at all; it's only nine o'clock," said Mrs. Leighton.  She looked up
+from the card the young lady had given her, and explained, "We haven't
+got in our servants yet, and we had to answer the bell ourselves, and--"
+
+"You were frightened, of coase," said the young lady, caressingly.
+
+The gentleman said they ought not to have come so late, and he offered
+some formal apologies.
+
+"We should have been just as much scared any time after five o'clock,"
+Alma said to the sympathetic intelligence in the girl's face.
+
+She laughed out.  "Of coase!  Ah would have my hawt in my moath all day
+long, too, if Ah was living in a big hoase alone."
+
+A moment of stiffness followed; Mrs. Leighton would have liked to
+withdraw from the intimacy of the situation, but she did not know how.
+It was very well for these people to assume to be what they pretended;
+but, she reflected too late, she had no proof of it except the agent's
+permit.  They were all standing in the hall together, and she prolonged
+the awkward pause while she examined the permit.  "You are Mr. Woodburn?"
+she asked, in a way that Alma felt implied he might not be.
+
+"Yes, madam; from Charlottesboag, Virginia," he answered, with the slight
+umbrage a man shows when the strange cashier turns his check over and
+questions him before cashing it.
+
+Alma writhed internally, but outwardly remained subordinate; she examined
+the other girl's dress, and decided in a superficial consciousness that
+she had made her own bonnet.
+
+"I shall be glad to show you my rooms," said Mrs. Leighton, with an
+irrelevant sigh.  "You must excuse their being not just as I should wish
+them.  We're hardly settled yet."
+
+"Don't speak of it, madam," said the gentleman, "if you can overlook the
+trouble we awe giving you at such an unseasonable houah."
+
+"Ah'm a hoasekeepah mahself," Miss Woodburn joined in, "and Ah know ho'
+to accyoant fo' everything."
+
+Mrs. Leighton led the way up-stairs, and the young lady decided upon the
+large front room and small side room on the third story.  She said she
+could take the small one, and the other was so large that her father
+could both sleep and work in it.  She seemed not ashamed to ask if Mrs.
+Leighton's price was inflexible, but gave way laughing when her father
+refused to have any bargaining, with a haughty self-respect which he
+softened to deference for Mrs. Leighton.  His impulsiveness opened the
+way for some confidence from her, and before the affair was arranged she
+was enjoying in her quality of clerical widow the balm of the Virginians'
+reverent sympathy.  They said they were church people themselves.
+
+"Ah don't know what yo' mothah means by yo' hoase not being in oddah,"
+the young lady said to Alma as they went down-stairs together.  "Ah'm a
+great hoasekeepah mahself, and Ah mean what Ah say."
+
+They had all turned mechanically into the room where the Leightons were
+sitting when the Woodburns rang: Mr. Woodburn consented to sit down, and
+he remained listening to Mrs. Leighton while his daughter bustled up to
+the sketches pinned round the room and questioned Alma about them.
+
+"Ah suppose you awe going to be a great awtust?" she said, in friendly
+banter, when Alma owned to having done the things.  "Ah've a great notion
+to take a few lessons mahself.  Who's yo' teachah?"
+
+Alma said she was drawing in Mr. Wetmore's class, and Miss Woodburn said:
+"Well, it's just beautiful, Miss Leighton; it's grand.  Ah suppose it's
+raght expensive, now?  Mah goodness! we have to cyoant the coast so much
+nowadays; it seems to me we do nothing but cyoant it.  Ah'd like to hah
+something once without askin' the price."
+
+"Well, if you didn't ask it," said Alma, "I don't believe Mr. Wetmore
+would ever know what the price of his lessons was.  He has to think, when
+you ask him."
+
+"Why, he most be chomming," said Miss Woodburn.  "Perhaps Ah maght get
+the lessons for nothing from him.  Well, Ah believe in my soul Ah'll
+trah.  Now ho' did you begin?  and ho' do you expect to get anything oat
+of it?"  She turned on Alma eyes brimming with a shrewd mixture of fun
+and earnest, and Alma made note of the fact that she had an early
+nineteenth-century face, round, arch, a little coquettish, but extremely
+sensible and unspoiled-looking, such as used to be painted a good deal in
+miniature at that period; a tendency of her brown hair to twine and twist
+at the temples helped the effect; a high comb would have completed it,
+Alma felt, if she had her bonnet off.  It was almost a Yankee country-
+girl type; but perhaps it appeared so to Alma because it was, like that,
+pure Anglo-Saxon.  Alma herself, with her dull, dark skin, slender in
+figure, slow in speech, with aristocratic forms in her long hands, and
+the oval of her fine face pointed to a long chin, felt herself much more
+Southern in style than this blooming, bubbling, bustling Virginian.
+
+"I don't know," she answered, slowly.
+
+"Going to take po'traits," suggested Miss Woodburn, "or just paint the
+ahdeal?"  A demure burlesque lurked in her tone.
+
+"I suppose I don't expect to paint at all," said Alma.  "I'm going to
+illustrate books--if anybody will let me."
+
+"Ah should think they'd just joamp at you," said Miss Woodburn.  "Ah'll
+tell you what let's do, Miss Leighton: you make some pictures, and Ah'll
+wrahte a book fo' them.  Ah've got to do something.  Ali maght as well
+wrahte a book.  You know we Southerners have all had to go to woak.  But
+Ah don't mand it.  I tell papa I shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein'
+poo' if it wasn't fo' the inconvenience."
+
+"Yes, it's inconvenient," said Alma; "but you forget it when you're at
+work, don't you think?"
+
+"Mah, yes! Perhaps that's one reason why poo' people have to woak so
+hawd-to keep their wands off their poverty."
+
+The girls both tittered, and turned from talking in a low tone with their
+backs toward their elders, and faced them.
+
+"Well, Madison," said Mr. Woodburn, "it is time we should go.  I bid you
+good-night, madam," he bowed to Mrs. Leighton.  "Good-night," he bowed
+again to Alma.
+
+His daughter took leave of them in formal phrase, but with a jolly
+cordiality of manner that deformalized it.  "We shall be roand raght soon
+in the mawning, then," she threatened at the door.
+
+"We shall be all ready for you," Alma called after her down the steps.
+
+"Well, Alma?"  her mother asked, when the door closed upon them.
+
+"She doesn't know any more about art," said Alma, "than--nothing at all.
+But she's jolly and good-hearted.  She praised everything that was bad in
+my sketches, and said she was going to take lessons herself.  When a
+person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it, you know
+where they belong artistically."
+
+Mrs. Leighton shook her head with a sigh.  "I wish I knew where they
+belonged financially.  We shall have to get in two girls at once.  I
+shall have to go out the first thing in the morning, and then our
+troubles will begin."
+
+"Well, didn't you want them to begin?  I will stay home and help you get
+ready.  Our prosperity couldn't begin without the troubles, if you mean
+boarders, and boarders mean servants.  I shall be very glad to be
+afflicted with a cook for a while myself."
+
+"Yes; but we don't know anything about these people, or whether they will
+be able to pay us.  Did she talk as if they were well off?"
+
+"She talked as if they were poor; poo' she called it."
+
+"Yes, how queerly she pronounced," said Mrs. Leighton.  "Well, I ought to
+have told them that I required the first week in advance."
+
+"Mamma! If that's the way you're going to act!"
+
+"Oh, of course, I couldn't, after he wouldn't let her bargain for the
+rooms.  I didn't like that."
+
+"I did.  And you can see that they were perfect ladies; or at least one
+of them."  Alma laughed at herself, but her mother did not notice.
+
+"Their being ladies won't help if they've got no money.  It 'll make it
+all the worse."
+
+"Very well, then; we have no money, either.  We're a match for them any
+day there.  We can show them that two can play at that game."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Arnus Beaton's studio looked at first glance like many other painters'
+studios.  A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light;
+casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil
+and water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table, with
+paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed
+comfortlessly on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk
+trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with
+its head on one side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress
+dropped before it; dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor;
+canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with costumes:
+these features one might notice anywhere.  But, besides, there was a
+bookcase with an unusual number of books in it, and there was an open
+colonial writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and scutcheoned, with
+foreign periodicals--French and English--littering its leaf, and some
+pages of manuscript scattered among them.  Above all, there was a
+sculptor's revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling,
+with an eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay and on the
+head of the old man who sat on the platform beside it.
+
+Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to
+advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they have
+more than one.  But they are apparently immensely interested as well as
+distracted by them.  When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed,
+up to a certain point, with any one who said literature was his proper
+expression; but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point,
+he would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist,
+and supremely a colorist.  At the certain point in either art he was apt
+to break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other.
+In these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings, very
+striking, very original, very chic, very everything but habitable.
+It was in this way that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he had
+at first approached rather slightingly as a mere decorative accessory of
+architecture.  But it had grown in his respect till he maintained that
+the accessory business ought to be all the other way: that temples should
+be raised to enshrine statues, not statues made to ornament temples; that
+was putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance.  This was when he
+had carried a plastic study so far that the sculptors who saw it said
+that Beaton might have been an architect, but would certainly never be a
+sculptor.  At the same time he did some hurried, nervous things that had
+a popular charm, and that sold in plaster reproductions, to the profit of
+another.  Beaton justly despised the popular charm in these, as well as
+in the paintings he sold from time to time; he said it was flat burglary
+to have taken money for them, and he would have been living almost wholly
+upon the bounty of the old tombstone-cutter in Syracuse if it had not
+been for the syndicate letters which he supplied to Fulkerson for ten
+dollars a week.
+
+They were very well done, but he hated doing them after the first two or
+three, and had to be punched up for them by Fulkerson, who did not cease
+to prize them, and who never failed to punch him up.  Beaton being what
+he was, Fulkerson was his creditor as well as patron; and Fulkerson being
+what he was, had an enthusiastic patience with the elusive, facile,
+adaptable, unpractical nature of Beaton.  He was very proud of his art-
+letters, as he called them; but then Fulkerson was proud of everything he
+secured for his syndicate.  The fact that he had secured it gave it
+value; he felt as if he had written it himself.
+
+One art trod upon another's heels with Beaton.  The day before he had
+rushed upon canvas the conception of a picture which he said to himself
+was glorious, and to others (at the table d'hote of Maroni) was not bad.
+He had worked at it in a fury till the light failed him, and he execrated
+the dying day.  But he lit his lamp and transferred the process of his
+thinking from the canvas to the opening of the syndicate letter which be
+knew Fulkerson would be coming for in the morning.  He remained talking
+so long after dinner in the same strain as he had painted and written in
+that he could not finish his letter that night.  The next morning, while
+he was making his tea for breakfast, the postman brought him a letter
+from his father enclosing a little check, and begging him with tender,
+almost deferential, urgence to come as lightly upon him as possible, for
+just now his expenses were very heavy.  It brought tears of shame into
+Beaton's eyes--the fine, smouldering, floating eyes that many ladies
+admired, under the thick bang--and he said to himself that if he were
+half a man he would go home and go to work cutting gravestones in his
+father's shop.  But he would wait, at least, to finish his picture; and
+as a sop to his conscience, to stay its immediate ravening, he resolved
+to finish that syndicate letter first, and borrow enough money from
+Fulkerson to be able to send his father's check back; or, if not that,
+then to return the sum of it partly in Fulkerson's check.  While he still
+teemed with both of these good intentions the old man from whom he was
+modelling his head of Judas came, and Beaton saw that he must get through
+with him before he finished either the picture or the letter; he would
+have to pay him for the time, anyway.  He utilized the remorse with which
+he was tingling to give his Judas an expression which he found novel in
+the treatment of that character--a look of such touching, appealing self-
+abhorrence that Beaton's artistic joy in it amounted to rapture; between
+the breathless moments when he worked in dead silence for an effect that
+was trying to escape him, he sang and whistled fragments of comic opera.
+
+In one of the hushes there came a blow on the outside of the door that
+made Beaton jump, and swear with a modified profanity that merged itself
+in apostrophic prayer.  He knew it must be Fulkerson, and after roaring
+"Come in!" he said to the model, "That 'll do this morning, Lindau."
+
+Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust and compared it by
+fleeting glances with the old man as he got stiffly up and suffered
+Beaton to help him on with his thin, shabby overcoat.
+
+"Can you come to-morrow, Lindau?"
+
+"No, not to-morrow, Mr. Peaton.  I haf to zit for the young ladties."
+
+"Oh!" said Beaton.  "Wet-more's class?  Is Miss Leighton doing you?"
+
+"I don't know their namess," Lindau began, when Fulkerson said:
+
+"Hope you haven't forgotten mine, Mr. Lindau?  I met you with Mr. March
+at Maroni's one night."  Fulkerson offered him a universally shakable
+hand.
+
+"Oh yes! I am gladt to zee you again, Mr. Vulkerson.  And Mr. Marge--he
+don't zeem to gome any more?"
+
+"Up to his eyes in work.  Been moving on from Boston and getting settled,
+and starting in on our enterprise.  Beaton here hasn't got a very
+flattering likeness of you, hey?  Well, good-morning," he said, for
+Lindau appeared not to have heard him and was escaping with a bow through
+the door.
+
+Beaton lit a cigarette which he pinched nervously between his lips before
+he spoke.  "You've come for that letter, I suppose, Fulkerson?  It isn't
+done."
+
+Fulkerson turned from staring at the bust to which he had mounted.  "What
+you fretting about that letter for?  I don't want your letter."
+
+Beaton stopped biting his cigarette and looked at him.  "Don't want my
+letter?  Oh, very good!" he bristled up.  He took his cigarette from his
+lips, and blew the smoke through his nostrils, and then looked at
+Fulkerson.
+
+"No; I don't want your letter; I want you."
+
+Beacon disdained to ask an explanation, but he internally lowered his
+crest, while he continued to look at Fulkerson without changing his
+defiant countenance.  This suited Fulkerson well enough, and he went on
+with relish, "I'm going out of the syndicate business, old man, and I'm
+on a new thing."  He put his leg over the back of a chair and rested his
+foot on its seat, and, with one hand in his pocket, he laid the scheme of
+'Every Other Week' before Beaton with the help of the other.  The artist
+went about the room, meanwhile, with an effect of indifference which by
+no means offended Fulkerson.  He took some water into his mouth from a
+tumbler, which he blew in a fine mist over the head of Judas before
+swathing it in a dirty cotton cloth; he washed his brushes and set his
+palette; he put up on his easel the picture he had blocked on the day
+before, and stared at it with a gloomy face; then he gathered the sheets
+of his unfinished letter together and slid them into a drawer of his
+writing-desk.  By the time he had finished and turned again to Fulkerson,
+Fulkerson was saying: "I did think we could have the first number out by
+New-Year's; but it will take longer than that--a month longer; but I'm
+not sorry, for the holidays kill everything; and by February, or the
+middle of February, people will get their breath again and begin to look
+round and ask what's new.  Then we'll reply in the language of
+Shakespeare and Milton, 'Every Other Week; and don't you forget it.'"
+He took down his leg and asked, "Got a pipe of 'baccy anywhere?"
+
+Beaton nodded at a clay stem sticking out of a Japanese vase of bronze on
+his mantel.  "There's yours," he said; and Fulkerson said, "Thanks," and
+filled the pipe and sat down and began to smoke tranquilly.
+
+Beaton saw that he would have to speak now.  "And what do you want with
+me?"
+
+"You?  Oh yes," Fulkerson humorously dramatized a return to himself from
+a pensive absence.  "Want you for the art department."
+
+Beaton shook his head.  "I'm not your man, Fulkerson," he said,
+compassionately.  "You want a more practical hand, one that's in touch
+with what's going.  I'm getting further and further away from this
+century and its claptrap.  I don't believe in your enterprise; I don't
+respect it, and I won't have anything to do with it.  It would-choke me,
+that kind of thing."
+
+"That's all right," said Fulkerson.  He esteemed a man who was not going
+to let himself go cheap.  "Or if it isn't, we can make it.  You and March
+will pull together first-rate.  I don't care how much ideal you put into
+the thing; the more the better.  I can look after the other end of the
+schooner myself."
+
+"You don't understand me," said Beaton.  "I'm not trying to get a rise
+out of you.  I'm in earnest.  What you want is some man who can have
+patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius, and with genius
+turning mediocrity on his hands.  I haven't any luck with men; I don't
+get on with them; I'm not popular."  Beaton recognized the fact with the
+satisfaction which it somehow always brings to human pride.
+
+"So much the better!"  Fulkerson was ready for him at this point.
+"I don't want you to work the old-established racket the reputations.
+When I want them I'll go to them with a pocketful of rocks--knock-down
+argument.  But my idea is to deal with the volunteer material.  Look at
+the way the periodicals are carried on now! Names! names! names!  In a
+country that's just boiling over with literary and artistic ability of
+every kind the new fellows have no chance.  The editors all engage their
+material.  I don't believe there are fifty volunteer contributions
+printed in a year in all the New York magazines.  It's all wrong; it's
+suicidal.  'Every Other Week' is going back to the good old anonymous
+system, the only fair system.  It's worked well in literature, and it
+will work well in art."
+
+"It won't work well in art," said Beaton.  "There you have a totally
+different set of conditions.  What you'll get by inviting volunteer
+illustrations will be a lot of amateur trash.  And how are you going to
+submit your literature for illustration?  It can't be done.  At any rate,
+I won't undertake to do it."
+
+"We'll get up a School of Illustration," said Fulkerson, with cynical
+security.  "You can read the things and explain 'em, and your pupils can
+make their sketches under your eye.  They wouldn't be much further out
+than most illustrations are if they never knew what they were
+illustrating.  You might select from what comes in and make up a sort of
+pictorial variations to the literature without any particular reference
+to it.  Well, I understand you to accept?"
+
+"No, you don't."
+
+"That is, to consent to help us with your advice and criticism.  That's
+all I want.  It won't commit you to anything; and you can be as anonymous
+as anybody."  At the door Fulkerson added: "By-the-way, the new man--the
+fellow that's taken my old syndicate business--will want you to keep on;
+but I guess he's going to try to beat you down on the price of the
+letters.  He's going in for retrenchment.  I brought along a check for
+this one; I'm to pay for that."  He offered Beaton an envelope.
+
+"I can't take it, Fulkerson.  The letter's paid for already."  Fulkerson
+stepped forward and laid the envelope on the table among the tubes of
+paint.
+
+"It isn't the letter merely.  I thought you wouldn't object to a little
+advance on your 'Every Other Week' work till you kind of got started."
+
+Beaton remained inflexible.  "It can't be done, Fulkerson.  Don't I tell
+you I can't sell myself out to a thing I don't believe in?  Can't you
+understand that?"
+
+"Oh yes; I can understand that first-rate.  I don't want to buy you; I
+want to borrow you.  It's all right.  See?  Come round when you can; I'd
+like to introduce you to old March.  That's going to be our address."  He
+put a card on the table beside the envelope, and Beaton allowed him to go
+without making him take the check back.  He had remembered his father's
+plea; that unnerved him, and he promised himself again to return his
+father's poor little check and to work on that picture and give it to
+Fulkerson for the check he had left and for his back debts.  He resolved
+to go to work on the picture at once; he had set his palette for it; but
+first he looked at Fulkerson's check.  It was for only fifty dollars, and
+the canny Scotch blood in Beaton rebelled; he could not let this picture
+go for any such money; he felt a little like a man whose generosity has
+been trifled with.  The conflict of emotions broke him up, and he could
+not work.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The day wasted away in Beaton's hands; at half-past four o'clock he went
+out to tea at the house of a lady who was At Home that afternoon from
+four till seven.  By this time Beaton was in possession of one of those
+other selves of which we each have several about us, and was again the
+laconic, staccato, rather worldlified young artist whose moments of a
+controlled utterance and a certain distinction of manner had commended
+him to Mrs. Horn's fancy in the summer at St. Barnaby.
+
+Mrs. Horn's rooms were large, and they never seemed very full, though
+this perhaps was because people were always so quiet.  The ladies, who
+outnumbered the men ten to one, as they always do at a New York tea, were
+dressed in sympathy with the low tone every one spoke in, and with the
+subdued light which gave a crepuscular uncertainty to the few objects,
+the dim pictures, the unexcited upholstery, of the rooms.  One breathed
+free of bric-a-brac there, and the new-comer breathed softly as one does
+on going into church after service has begun.  This might be a suggestion
+from the voiceless behavior of the man-servant who let you in, but it was
+also because Mrs. Horn's At Home was a ceremony, a decorum, and not
+festival.  At far greater houses there was more gayety, at richer houses
+there was more freedom; the suppression at Mrs. Horn's was a personal,
+not a social, effect; it was an efflux of her character, demure,
+silentious, vague, but very correct.
+
+Beaton easily found his way to her around the grouped skirts and among
+the detached figures, and received a pressure of welcome from the hand
+which she momentarily relaxed from the tea-pot.  She sat behind a table
+put crosswise of a remote corner, and offered tea to people whom a niece
+of hers received provisionally or sped finally in the outer room.  They
+did not usually take tea, and when they did they did not usually drink
+it; but Beaton was, feverishly glad of his cup; he took rum and lemon in
+it, and stood talking at Mrs. Horn's side till the next arrival should
+displace him: he talked in his French manner.
+
+"I have been hoping to see you," she said.  "I wanted to ask you about
+the Leightons.  Did they really come?"
+
+"I believe so.  They are in town--yes.  I haven't seen them."
+
+"Then you don't know how they're getting on--that pretty creature, with
+her cleverness, and poor Mrs. Leighton?  I was afraid they were venturing
+on a rash experiment.  Do you know where they are?"
+
+"In West Eleventh Street somewhere.  Miss Leighton is in Mr. Wetmore's
+class."
+
+"I must look them up.  Do you know their number?"
+
+"Not at the moment.  I can find out."
+
+"Do," said Mrs. Horn.  "What courage they must have, to plunge into New
+York as they've done!  I really didn't think they would.  I wonder if
+they've succeeded in getting anybody into their house yet?"
+
+"I don't know," said Beaton.
+
+"I discouraged their coming all I could," she sighed, "and I suppose you
+did, too.  But it's quite useless trying to make people in a place like
+St. Barnaby understand how it is in town."
+
+"Yes," said Beaton.  He stirred his tea, while inwardly he tried to
+believe that he had really discouraged the Leightons from coming to New
+York.  Perhaps the vexation of his failure made him call Mrs. Horn in his
+heart a fraud.
+
+"Yes," she went on, "it is very, very hard.  And when they won't
+understand, and rush on their doom, you feel that they are going to hold
+you respons--"
+
+Mrs. Horn's eyes wandered from Beaton; her voice faltered in the faded
+interest of her remark, and then rose with renewed vigor in greeting a
+lady who came up and stretched her glove across the tea-cups.
+
+Beaton got himself away and out of the house with a much briefer adieu to
+the niece than he had meant to make.  The patronizing compassion of Mrs.
+Horn for the Leightons filled him with indignation toward her, toward
+himself.  There was no reason why he should not have ignored them as he
+had done; but there was a feeling.  It was his nature to be careless, and
+he had been spoiled into recklessness; he neglected everybody, and only
+remembered them when it suited his whim or his convenience; but he
+fiercely resented the inattentions of others toward himself.  He had no
+scruple about breaking an engagement or failing to keep an appointment;
+he made promises without thinking of their fulfilment, and not because he
+was a faithless person, but because he was imaginative, and expected at
+the time to do what he said, but was fickle, and so did not.  As most of
+his shortcomings were of a society sort, no great harm was done to
+anybody else.  He had contracted somewhat the circle of his acquaintance
+by what some people called his rudeness, but most people treated it as
+his oddity, and were patient with it.  One lady said she valued his
+coming when he said he would come because it had the charm of the
+unexpected.  "Only it shows that it isn't always the unexpected that
+happens," she explained.
+
+It did not occur to him that his behavior was immoral; he did not realize
+that it was creating a reputation if not a character for him.  While we
+are still young we do not realize that our actions have this effect.  It
+seems to us that people will judge us from what we think and feel.  Later
+we find out that this is impossible; perhaps we find it out too late;
+some of us never find it out at all.
+
+In spite of his shame about the Leightons, Beaton had no present
+intention of looking them up or sending Mrs. Horn their address.  As a
+matter of fact, he never did send it; but he happened to meet Mr. Wetmore
+and his wife at the restaurant where he dined, and he got it of the
+painter for himself.  He did not ask him how Miss Leighton was getting
+on; but Wetmore launched out, with Alma for a tacit text, on the futility
+of women generally going in for art.  "Even when they have talent they've
+got too much against them.  Where a girl doesn't seem very strong, like
+Miss Leighton, no amount of chic is going to help."
+
+His wife disputed him on behalf of her sex, as women always do.
+
+"No, Dolly," he persisted; "she'd better be home milking the cows and
+leading the horse to water."
+
+Do you think she'd better be up till two in the morning at balls and
+going all day to receptions and luncheons?"
+
+"Oh, guess it isn't a question of that, even if she weren't drawing.
+You knew them at home," he said to Beaton.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I remember.  Her mother said you suggested me.  Well, the girl has some
+notion of it; there's no doubt about that.  But--she's a woman.  The
+trouble with these talented girls is that they're all woman.  If they
+weren't, there wouldn't be much chance for the men, Beaton.  But we've
+got Providence on our own side from the start.  I'm able to watch all
+their inspirations with perfect composure.  I know just how soon it's
+going to end in nervous breakdown.  Somebody ought to marry them all and
+put them out of their misery."
+
+"And what will you do with your students who are married already?"  his
+wife said.  She felt that she had let him go on long enough.
+
+"Oh, they ought to get divorced."
+
+"You ought to be ashamed to take their money if that's what you think of
+them."
+
+"My dear, I have a wife to support."
+
+Beaton intervened with a question.  "Do you mean that Miss Leighton isn't
+standing it very well?"
+
+"How do I know?  She isn't the kind that bends; she's the kind that
+breaks."
+
+After a little silence Mrs. Wetmore asked, "Won't you come home with us,
+Mr. Beaton?"
+
+"Thank you; no.  I have an engagement."
+
+"I don't see why that should prevent you," said Wetmore.  "But you always
+were a punctilious cuss.  Well!"
+
+Beaton lingered over his cigar; but no one else whom he knew came in,
+and he yielded to the threefold impulse of conscience, of curiosity,
+of inclination, in going to call at the Leightons'.  He asked for the
+ladies, and the maid showed him into the parlor, where he found Mrs.
+Leighton and Miss Woodburn.
+
+The widow met him with a welcome neatly marked by resentment; she meant
+him to feel that his not coming sooner had been noticed.  Miss Woodburn
+bubbled and gurgled on, and did what she could to mitigate his
+punishment, but she did not feel authorized to stay it, till Mrs.
+Leighton, by studied avoidance of her daughter's name, obliged Beaton to
+ask for her.  Then Miss Woodburn caught up her work, and said, "Ah'll go
+and tell her, Mrs. Leighton."  At the top of the stairs she found Alma,
+and Alma tried to make it seem as if she had not been standing there.
+"Mah goodness, chald! there's the handsomest young man asking for you
+down there you evah saw.  Alh told you' mothah Ah would come up fo' you."
+
+" What--who is it?"
+
+" Don't you know?  But bo' could you?  He's got the most beautiful eyes,
+and he wea's his hai' in a bang, and he talks English like it was
+something else, and his name's Mr. Beaton."
+
+"Did he-ask for me?"  said Alma, with a dreamy tone.  She put her hand on
+the stairs rail, and a little shiver ran over her.
+
+"Didn't I tell you?  Of coase he did!  And you ought to go raght down if
+you want to save the poo' fellah's lahfe; you' mothah's just freezin' him
+to death."
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+"She is?"  cried Alma.  "Tchk!" She flew downstairs, and flitted swiftly
+into the room, and fluttered up to Beaton, and gave him a crushing hand-
+shake.
+
+"How very kind, of you to come and see us, Mr. Beaton!  When did you come
+to New York?  Don't you find it warm here?  We've only just lighted the
+furnace, but with this mild weather it seems too early.  Mamma does keep
+it so hot!"  She rushed about opening doors and shutting registers, and
+then came back and sat facing him from the sofa with a mask of radiant
+cordiality.  "How have you been since we saw you?"
+
+"Very well," said Beaton.  "I hope you're well, Miss Leighton?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly! I think New York agrees with us both wonderfully.  I
+never knew such air.  And to think of our not having snow yet!  I should
+think everybody would want to come here!  Why don't you come,
+Mr. Beaton?"
+
+Beaton lifted his eyes and looked at her.  "I--I live in New York," he
+faltered.
+
+"In New York City!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Surely, Alma," said her mother, "you remember Mr. Beaton's telling us he
+lived in New York."
+
+"But I thought you came from Rochester; or was it Syracuse?  I always
+get those places mixed up."
+
+"Probably I told you my father lived at Syracuse.  I've been in New York
+ever since I came home from Paris," said Beaton, with the confusion of a
+man who feels himself played upon by a woman.
+
+"From Paris!" Alma echoed, leaning forward, with her smiling mask tight
+on.  "Wasn't it Munich where you studied?"
+
+"I was at Munich, too.  I met Wetmore there."
+
+"Oh, do you know Mr. Wetmore?"
+
+"Why, Alma," her mother interposed again, "it was Mr. Beaton who told you
+of Mr. Wetmore."
+
+"Was it?  Why, yes, to be sure.  It was Mrs. Horn who suggested Mr.
+Ilcomb.  I remember now.  I can't thank you enough for having sent me to
+Mr. Wetmore, Mr. Beaton.  Isn't he delightful?  Oh yes, I'm a perfect
+Wetmorian, I can assure you.  The whole class is the same way."
+
+"I just met him and Mrs. Wetmore at dinner," said Beaton, attempting the
+recovery of something that he had lost through the girl's shining ease
+and steely sprightliness.  She seemed to him so smooth and hard, with a
+repellent elasticity from which he was flung off.  "I hope you're not
+working too hard, Miss Leighton?"
+
+"Oh no! I enjoy every minute of it, and grow stronger on it.  Do I look
+very much wasted away?"  She looked him full in the face, brilliantly
+smiling, and intentionally beautiful.
+
+"No," he said, with a slow sadness; "I never saw you looking better."
+
+"Poor Mr. Beaton!" she said, in recognition of his doleful tune.  "It
+seems to be quite a blow."
+
+"Oh no--"
+
+"I remember all the good advice you used to give me about not working too
+hard, and probably it's that that's saved my life--that and the house-
+hunting.  Has mamma told you of our adventures in getting settled?
+
+"Some time we must.  It was such fun!  And didn't you think we were
+fortunate to get such a pretty house?  You must see both our parlors."
+She jumped up, and her mother followed her with a bewildered look as she
+ran into the back parlor and flashed up the gas.
+
+"Come in here, Mr. Beaton.  I want to show you the great feature of the
+house."  She opened the low windows that gave upon a glazed veranda
+stretching across the end of the room.  "Just think of this in New York!
+You can't see it very well at night, but when the southern sun pours in
+here all the afternoon--"
+
+"Yes, I can imagine it," he said.  He glanced up at the bird-cage hanging
+from the roof.  "I suppose Gypsy enjoys it."
+
+"You remember Gypsy?"  she said; and she made a cooing, kissing little
+noise up at the bird, who responded drowsily.  "Poor old Gypsum!  Well,
+he sha'n't be disturbed.  Yes, it's Gyp's delight, and Colonel Woodburn
+likes to write here in the morning.  Think of us having a real live
+author in the house!  And Miss Woodburn: I'm so glad you've seen her!
+They're Southern people."
+
+"Yes, that was obvious in her case."
+
+"From her accent?  Isn't it fascinating?  I didn't believe I could ever
+endure Southerners, but we're like one family with the Woodburns.  I
+should think you'd want to paint Miss Woodburn.  Don't you think her
+coloring is delicious?  And such a quaint kind of eighteenth-century type
+of beauty!  But she's perfectly lovely every way, and everything she says
+is so funny.  The Southerners seem to be such great talkers; better than
+we are, don't you think?"
+
+"I don't know," said Beaton, in pensive discouragement.  He was sensible
+of being manipulated, operated, but he was helpless to escape from the
+performer or to fathom her motives.  His pensiveness passed into gloom,
+and was degenerating into sulky resentment when he went away, after
+several failures to get back to the old ground he had held in relation to
+Alma.  He retrieved something of it with Mrs. Leighton; but Alma
+glittered upon him to the last with a keen impenetrable candor, a child-
+like singleness of glance, covering unfathomable reserve.
+
+"Well, Alma," said her mother, when the door had closed upon him.
+
+"Well, mother."  Then, after a moment, she said, with a rush: "Did you
+think I was going to let him suppose we were piqued at his not coming?
+Did you suppose I was going to let him patronize us, or think that we
+were in the least dependent on his favor or friendship?"
+
+Her mother did not attempt to answer her.  She merely said, "I shouldn't
+think he would come any more."
+
+"Well, we have got on so far without him; perhaps we can live through the
+rest of the winter."
+
+"I couldn't help feeling sorry for him.  He was quite stupefied.  I could
+see that he didn't know what to make of you."
+
+"He's not required to make anything of me," said Alma.
+
+"Do you think he really believed you had forgotten all those things?"
+
+"Impossible to say, mamma."
+
+"Well, I don't think it was quite right, Alma."
+
+"I'll leave him to you the next time.  Miss Woodburn said you were
+freezing him to death when I came down."
+
+"That was quite different.  But, there won't be any next time, I'm
+afraid," sighed Mrs. Leighton.
+
+Beaton went home feeling sure there would not.  He tried to read when he
+got to his room; but Alma's looks, tones, gestures, whirred through and
+through the woof of the story like shuttles; he could not keep them out,
+and he fell asleep at last, not because he forgot them, but because he
+forgave them.  He was able to say to himself that he had been justly cut
+off from kindness which he knew how to value in losing it.  He did not
+expect ever to right himself in Alma's esteem, but he hoped some day to
+let her know that he had understood.  It seemed to him that it would be a
+good thing if she should find it out after his death.  He imagined her
+being touched by it under those circumstances.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had done himself injustice.
+When he uncovered his Judas and looked at it, he could not believe that
+the man who was capable of such work deserved the punishment Miss
+Leighton had inflicted upon him.  He still forgave her, but in the
+presence of a thing like that he could not help respecting himself; he
+believed that if she could see it she would be sorry that she had cut
+herself off from his acquaintance.  He carried this strain of conviction
+all through his syndicate letter, which he now took out of his desk and
+finished, with an increasing security of his opinions and a mounting
+severity in his judgments.  He retaliated upon the general condition of
+art among us the pangs of wounded vanity, which Alma had made him feel,
+and he folded up his manuscript and put it in his pocket, almost healed
+of his humiliation.  He had been able to escape from its sting so
+entirely while he was writing that the notion of making his life more and
+more literary commended itself to him.  As it was now evident that the
+future was to be one of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an oblivion
+tinged with bitterness, he formlessly reasoned in favor of reconsidering
+his resolution against Fulkerson's offer.  One must call it reasoning,
+but it was rather that swift internal dramatization which constantly goes
+on in persons of excitable sensibilities, and which now seemed to sweep
+Beaton physically along toward the 'Every Other Week' office, and carried
+his mind with lightning celerity on to a time when he should have given
+that journal such quality and authority in matters of art as had never
+been enjoyed by any in America before.  With the prosperity which he made
+attend his work he changed the character of the enterprise, and with
+Fulkerson's enthusiastic support he gave the public an art journal of as
+high grade as 'Les Lettres et les Arts', and very much that sort of
+thing.  All this involved now the unavailing regret of Alma Leighton, and
+now his reconciliation with her they were married in Grace Church,
+because Beaton had once seen a marriage there, and had intended to paint
+a picture of it some time.
+
+Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his responding with due
+dryness to Fulkerson's cheery "Hello, old man!" when he found himself in
+the building fitted up for the 'Every Other Week' office.  Fulkerson's
+room was back of the smaller one occupied by the bookkeeper; they had
+been respectively the reception-room and dining-room of the little place
+in its dwelling-house days, and they had been simply and tastefully
+treated in their transformation into business purposes.  The narrow old
+trim of the doors and windows had been kept, and the quaintly ugly marble
+mantels.  The architect had said, Better let them stay they expressed
+epoch, if not character.
+
+"Well, have you come round to go to work?  Just hang up your coat on the
+floor anywhere," Fulkerson went on.
+
+"I've come to bring you that letter," said Beaton, all the more haughtily
+because he found that Fulkerson was not alone when he welcomed him in
+these free and easy terms.  There was a quiet-looking man, rather stout,
+and a little above the middle height, with a full, close-cropped iron-
+gray beard, seated beyond the table where Fulkerson tilted himself back,
+with his knees set against it; and leaning against the mantel there was a
+young man with a singularly gentle face, in which the look of goodness
+qualified and transfigured a certain simplicity.  His large blue eyes
+were somewhat prominent; and his rather narrow face was drawn forward in
+a nose a little too long perhaps, if it had not been for the full chin
+deeply cut below the lip, and jutting firmly forward.
+
+"Introduce you to Mr. March, our editor, Mr. Beaton," Fulkerson said,
+rolling his head in the direction of the elder man; and then nodding it
+toward the younger, he said, "Mr. Dryfoos, Mr. Beaton."  Beaton shook
+hands with March, and then with Mr. Dryfoos, and Fulkerson went on,
+gayly: "We were just talking of you, Beaton--well, you know the old
+saying.  Mr. March, as I told you, is our editor, and Mr. Dryfoos has
+charge of the publishing department--he's the counting-room incarnate,
+the source of power, the fountain of corruption, the element that
+prevents journalism being the high and holy thing that it would be if
+there were no money in it."  Mr. Dryfoos turned his large, mild eyes upon
+Beaton, and laughed with the uneasy concession which people make to a
+character when they do not quite approve of the character's language.
+"What Mr. March and I are trying to do is to carry on this thing so that
+there won't be any money in it--or very little; and we're planning to
+give the public a better article for the price than it's ever had before.
+Now here's a dummy we've had made up for 'Every Other Week', and as we've
+decided to adopt it, we would naturally like your opinion of it, so's to
+know what opinion to have of you."  He reached forward and pushed toward
+Beaton a volume a little above the size of the ordinary duodecimo book;
+its ivory-white pebbled paper cover was prettily illustrated with a water
+-colored design irregularly washed over the greater part of its surface:
+quite across the page at top, and narrowing from right to left as it
+descended.  In the triangular space left blank the title of the
+periodical and the publisher's imprint were tastefully lettered so as to
+be partly covered by the background of color.
+
+"It's like some of those Tartarin books of Daudet's," said Beacon,
+looking at it with more interest than he suffered to be seen.  "But it's
+a book, not a magazine."  He opened its pages of thick, mellow white
+paper, with uncut leaves, the first few pages experimentally printed in
+the type intended to be used, and illustrated with some sketches drawn
+into and over the text, for the sake of the effect.
+
+"A Daniel--a Daniel come to judgment!  Sit down, Dan'el, and take it
+easy."  Fulkerson pushed a chair toward Beaton, who dropped into it.
+"You're right, Dan'el; it's a book, to all practical intents and
+purposes.  And what we propose to do with the American public is to give
+it twenty-four books like this a year--a complete library--for the absurd
+sum of six dollars.  We don't intend to sell 'em--it's no name for the
+transaction--but to give 'em.  And what we want to get out of you--beg,
+borrow, buy, or steal from you is an opinion whether we shall make the
+American public this princely present in paper covers like this, or in
+some sort of flexible boards, so they can set them on the shelf and say
+no more about it.  Now, Dan'el, come to judgment, as our respected friend
+Shylock remarked."
+
+Beacon had got done looking at the dummy, and he dropped it on the table
+before Fulkerson, who pushed it away, apparently to free himself from
+partiality.  "I don't know anything about the business side, and I can't
+tell about the effect of either style on the sales; but you'll spoil the
+whole character of the cover if you use anything thicker than that
+thickish paper."
+
+"All right; very good; first-rate.  The ayes have it.  Paper it is.  I
+don't mind telling you that we had decided for that paper before you came
+in.  Mr. March wanted it, because he felt in his bones just the way you
+do about it, and Mr. Dryfoos wanted it, because he's the counting-room
+incarnate, and it's cheaper; and I 'wanted it, because I always like to
+go with the majority.  Now what do you think of that little design
+itself?"
+
+"The sketch?"  Beaton pulled the book toward him again and looked at it
+again.  "Rather decorative.  Drawing's not remarkable.  Graceful; rather
+nice."  He pushed the book away again, and Fulkerson pulled it to his
+aide of the table.
+
+"Well, that's a piece of that amateur trash you despise so much.  I went
+to a painter I know-by-the-way, he was guilty of suggesting you for this
+thing, but I told him I was ahead of him--and I got him to submit my idea
+to one of his class, and that's the result.  Well, now, there ain't
+anything in this world that sells a book like a pretty cover, and we're
+going to have a pretty cover for 'Every Other Week' every time.  We've
+cut loose from the old traditional quarto literary newspaper size, and
+we've cut loose from the old two-column big page magazine size; we're
+going to have a duodecimo page, clear black print, and paper that 'll
+make your mouth water; and we're going to have a fresh illustration for
+the cover of each number, and we ain't agoing to give the public any rest
+at all.  Sometimes we're going to have a delicate little landscape like
+this, and sometimes we're going to have an indelicate little figure, or
+as much so as the law will allow."
+
+The young man leaning against the mantelpiece blushed a sort of protest.
+
+March smiled and said, dryly, "Those are the numbers that Mr. Fulkerson
+is going to edit himself."
+
+"Exactly.  And Mr. Beaton, here, is going to supply the floating females,
+gracefully airing themselves against a sunset or something of that kind."
+Beaton frowned in embarrassment, while Fulkerson went on philosophically;
+"It's astonishing how you fellows can keep it up at this stage of the
+proceedings; you can paint things that your harshest critic would be
+ashamed to describe accurately; you're as free as the theatre.  But
+that's neither here nor there.  What I'm after is the fact that we're
+going to have variety in our title-pages, and we are going to have
+novelty in the illustrations of the body of the book.  March, here, if he
+had his own way, wouldn't have any illustrations at all."
+
+"Not because I don't like them, Mr. Beacon," March interposed, "but
+because I like them too much.  I find that I look at the pictures in an
+illustrated article, but I don't read the article very much, and I fancy
+that's the case with most other people.  You've got to doing them so
+prettily that you take our eyes off the literature, if you don't take our
+minds off."
+
+"Like the society beauties on the stage: people go in for the beauty so
+much that they don't know what the play is.  But the box-office gets
+there all the same, and that's what Mr. Dryfoos wants."  Fulkerson looked
+up gayly at Mr. Dryfoos, who smiled deprecatingly.
+
+"It was different," March went on, "when the illustrations used to be
+bad.  Then the text had some chance."
+
+"Old legitimate drama days, when ugliness and genius combined to storm
+the galleries," said Fulkerson.
+
+"We can still make them bad enough," said Beaton, ignoring Fulkerson in
+his remark to March.
+
+Fulkerson took the reply upon himself.  "Well, you needn't make 'em so
+bad as the old-style cuts; but you can make them unobtrusive, modestly
+retiring.  We've got hold of a process something like that those French
+fellows gave Daudet thirty-five thousand dollars to write a novel to use
+with; kind of thing that begins at one side; or one corner, and spreads
+in a sort of dim religious style over the print till you can't tell which
+is which.  Then we've got a notion that where the pictures don't behave
+quite so sociably, they can be dropped into the text, like a little
+casual remark, don't you know, or a comment that has some connection, or
+maybe none at all, with what's going on in the story.  Something like
+this."  Fulkerson took away one knee from the table long enough to open
+the drawer, and pull from it a book that he shoved toward Beacon.
+"That's a Spanish book I happened to see at Brentano's, and I froze to it
+on account of the pictures.  I guess they're pretty good."
+
+"Do you expect to get such drawings in this country?"  asked Beaton,
+after a glance at the book.  "Such character--such drama?  You won't."
+
+"Well, I'm not so sure," said Fulkerson, "come to get our amateurs warmed
+up to the work.  But what I want is to get the physical effect, so to
+speak-get that sized picture into our page, and set the fashion of it.
+I shouldn't care if the illustration was sometimes confined to an initial
+letter and a tail-piece."
+
+"Couldn't be done here.  We haven't the touch.  We're good in some
+things, but this isn't in our way," said Beaton, stubbornly.  "I can't
+think of a man who could do it; that is, among those that would."
+
+"Well, think of some woman, then," said Fulkerson, easily.  "I've got a
+notion that the women could help us out on this thing, come to get 'em
+interested.  There ain't anything so popular as female fiction; why not
+try female art?"
+
+"The females themselves have been supposed to have been trying it for a
+good while," March suggested; and Mr. Dryfoos laughed nervously; Beaton
+remained solemnly silent.
+
+"Yes, I know," Fulkerson assented.  "But I don't mean that kind exactly.
+What we want to do is to work the 'ewig Weibliche' in this concern.  We
+want to make a magazine that will go for the women's fancy every time.
+I don't mean with recipes for cooking and fashions and personal gossip
+about authors and society, but real high-tone literature that will show
+women triumphing in all the stories, or else suffering tremendously.
+We've got to recognize that women form three-fourths of the reading
+public in this country, and go for their tastes and their sensibilities
+and their sex-piety along the whole line.  They do like to think that
+women can do things better than men; and if we can let it leak out and
+get around in the papers that the managers of 'Every Other Week' couldn't
+stir a peg in the line of the illustrations they wanted till they got a
+lot of God-gifted girls to help them, it 'll make the fortune of the
+thing.  See?"
+
+He looked sunnily round at the other men, and March said: "You ought to
+be in charge of a Siamese white elephant, Fulkerson.  It's a disgrace to
+be connected with you."
+
+"It seems to me," said Becton, "that you'd better get a God-gifted girl
+for your art editor."
+
+Fulkerson leaned alertly forward, and touched him on the shoulder, with a
+compassionate smile.  "My dear boy, they haven't got the genius of
+organization.  It takes a very masculine man for that--a man who combines
+the most subtle and refined sympathies with the most forceful purposes
+and the most ferruginous will-power.  Which his name is Angus Beaton, and
+here he sets!"
+
+The others laughed with Fulkerson at his gross burlesque of flattery, and
+Becton frowned sheepishly.  "I suppose you understand this man's style,"
+he growled toward March.
+
+"He does, my son," said Fulkerson.  "He knows that I cannot tell a lie."
+He pulled out his watch, and then got suddenly upon his feet.
+
+"It's quarter of twelve, and I've got an appointment."  Beaton rose too,
+and Fulkerson put the two books in his lax hands.  "Take these along,
+Michelangelo Da Vinci, my friend, and put your multitudinous mind on them
+for about an hour, and let us hear from you to-morrow.  We hang upon your
+decision."
+
+"There's no deciding to be done," said Beaton.  "You can't combine the
+two styles.  They'd kill each other."
+
+"A Dan'el, a Dan'el come to judgment!  I knew you could help us out!
+Take 'em along, and tell us which will go the furthest with the 'ewig
+Weibliche.'  Dryfoos, I want a word with you."  He led the way into the
+front room, flirting an airy farewell to Beaton with his hand as he went.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+March and Beaton remained alone together for a moment, and March said:
+"I hope you will think it worth while to take hold with us, Mr. Beaton.
+Mr. Fulkerson puts it in his own way, of course; but we really want to
+make a nice thing of the magazine."  He had that timidity of the elder in
+the presence of the younger man which the younger, preoccupied with his
+own timidity in the presence of the elder, cannot imagine.  Besides,
+March was aware of the gulf that divided him as a literary man from
+Beaton as an artist, and he only ventured to feel his way toward sympathy
+with him.  "We want to make it good; we want to make it high.  Fulkerson
+is right about aiming to please the women, but of course he caricatures
+the way of going about it."
+
+For answer, Beaton flung out, "I can't go in for a thing I don't
+understand the plan of."
+
+March took it for granted that he had wounded some exposed sensibility,
+of Beaton's.  He continued still more deferentially: "Mr. Fulkerson's
+notion--I must say the notion is his, evolved from his syndicate
+experience--is that we shall do best in fiction to confine our selves to
+short stories, and make each number complete in itself.  He found that
+the most successful things he could furnish his newspapers were short
+stories; we Americans are supposed to excel in writing them; and most
+people begin with them in fiction; and it's Mr. Fulkerson's idea to work
+unknown talent, as he says, and so he thinks he can not only get them
+easily, but can gradually form a school of short-story writers.  I can't
+say I follow him altogether, but I respect his experience.  We shall not
+despise translations of short stories, but otherwise the matter will all
+be original, and, of course, it won't all be short stories.  We shall use
+sketches of travel, and essays, and little dramatic studies, and bits of
+biography and history; but all very light, and always short enough to be
+completed in a single number.  Mr. Fulkerson believes in pictures, and
+most of the things would be capable of illustration."
+
+"I see," said Beaton.
+
+"I don't know but this is the whole affair," said March, beginning to
+stiffen a little at the young man's reticence.
+
+"I understand.  Thank you for taking the trouble to explain.  Good-
+morning."  Beaton bowed himself off, without offering to shake hands.
+
+Fulkerson came in after a while from the outer office, and Mr. Dryfoos
+followed him.  "Well, what do you think of our art editor?"
+
+"Is he our art editor?"  asked March.  "I wasn't quite certain when he
+left."
+
+"Did he take the books?"
+
+"Yes, he took the books."
+
+"I guess he's all right, then."  Fulkerson added, in concession to the
+umbrage he detected in March.
+
+"Beaton has his times of being the greatest ass in the solar system, but
+he usually takes it out in personal conduct.  When it comes to work, he's
+a regular horse."
+
+"He appears to have compromised for the present by being a perfect mule,"
+said March.
+
+"Well, he's in a transition state," Fulkerson allowed.  "He's the man for
+us.  He really understands what we want.  You'll see; he'll catch on.
+That lurid glare of his will wear off in the course of time.  He's really
+a good fellow when you take him off his guard; and he's full of ideas.
+He's spread out over a good deal of ground at present, and so he's pretty
+thin; but come to gather him up into a lump, there's a good deal of
+substance to him.  Yes, there is.  He's a first-rate critic, and he's a
+nice fellow with the other artists.  They laugh at his universality, but
+they all like him.  He's the best kind of a teacher when he condescends
+to it; and he's just the man to deal with our volunteer work.  Yes, sir,
+he's a prize.  Well, I must go now."
+
+Fulkerson went out of the street door, and then came quickly back.  "By-
+the-bye, March, I saw that old dynamiter of yours round at Beaton's room
+yesterday."
+
+"What old dynamiter of mine?"
+
+"That old one-handed Dutchman--friend of your youth--the one we saw at
+Maroni's--"
+
+"Oh-Lindau!" said March, with a vague pang of self reproach for having
+thought of Lindau so little after the first flood of his tender feeling
+toward him was past.
+
+"Yes, our versatile friend was modelling him as Judas Iscariot.  Lindau
+makes a first-rate Judas, and Beaton has got a big thing in that head if
+he works the religious people right.  But what I was thinking of was
+this--it struck me just as I was going out of the door: Didn't you tell
+me Lindau knew forty or fifty, different languages?"
+
+"Four or five, yes."
+
+"Well, we won't quarrel about the number.  The question is, Why not work
+him in the field of foreign literature?  You can't go over all their
+reviews and magazines, and he could do the smelling for you, if you could
+trust his nose.  Would he know a good thing?"
+
+"I think he would," said March, on whom the scope of Fulkerson's
+suggestion gradually opened.  "He used to have good taste, and he must
+know the ground.  Why, it's a capital idea, Fulkerson!  Lindau wrote very
+fair English, and he could translate, with a little revision."
+
+"And he would probably work cheap.  Well, hadn't you better see him about
+it?  I guess it 'll be quite a windfall for him."
+
+"Yes, it will.  I'll look him up.  Thank you for the suggestion,
+Fulkerson."
+
+"Oh, don't mention it! I don't mind doing 'Every Other Week' a good turn
+now and then when it comes in my way."  Fulkerson went out again, and
+this time March was finally left with Mr. Dryfoos.
+
+"Mrs. March was very sorry not to be at home when your sisters called the
+other day.  She wished me to ask if they had any afternoon in particular.
+There was none on your mother's card."
+
+"No, sir," said the young man, with a flush of embarrassment that seemed
+habitual with him.  "She has no day.  She's at home almost every day.
+She hardly ever goes out."
+
+"Might we come some evening?"  March asked.  "We should be very glad to
+do that, if she would excuse the informality.  Then I could come with
+Mrs. March."
+
+"Mother isn't very formal," said the young man.  "She would be very glad
+to see you."
+
+"Then we'll come some night this week, if you will let us.  When do you
+expect your father back?"
+
+"Not much before Christmas.  He's trying to settle up some things at
+Moffitt."
+
+"And what do you think of our art editor?"  asked March, with a smile,
+for the change of subject.
+
+"Oh, I don't know much about such things," said the young man, with
+another of his embarrassed flushes.  "Mr. Fulkerson seems to feel sure
+that he is the one for us."
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson seemed to think that I was the one for you, too," said
+March; and he laughed.  "That's what makes me doubt his infallibility.
+But he couldn't do worse with Mr. Beaton."
+
+Mr. Dryfoos reddened and looked down, as if unable or unwilling to cope
+with the difficulty of making a polite protest against March's self-
+depreciation.  He said, after a moment: "It's new business to all of us
+except Mr. Fulkerson.  But I think it will succeed.  I think we can do
+some good in it."
+
+March asked rather absently, "Some good?"  Then he added: "Oh yes;
+I think we can.  What do you mean by good?  Improve the public taste?
+Elevate the standard of literature?  Give young authors and artists a
+chance?"
+
+This was the only good that had ever been in March's mind, except the
+good that was to come in a material way from his success, to himself and
+to his family.
+
+"I don't know," said the young man; and he looked down in a shamefaced
+fashion.  He lifted his head and looked into March's face.  "I suppose I
+was thinking that some time we might help along.  If we were to have
+those sketches of yours about life in every part of New York--"
+
+March's authorial vanity was tickled.  "Fulkerson has been talking to you
+about them?  He seemed to think they would be a card.  He believes that
+there's no subject so fascinating to the general average of people
+throughout the country as life in New York City; and he liked my notion
+of doing these things."  March hoped that Dryfoos would answer that
+Fulkerson was perfectly enthusiastic about his notion; but he did not
+need this stimulus, and, at any rate, he went on without it.  "The fact
+is, it's something that struck my fancy the moment I came here; I found
+myself intensely interested in the place, and I began to make notes,
+consciously and unconsciously, at once.  Yes, I believe I can get
+something quite attractive out of it.  I don't in the least know what it
+will be yet, except that it will be very desultory; and I couldn't at all
+say when I can get at it.  If we postpone the first number till February
+I might get a little paper into that.  Yes, I think it might be a good
+thing for us," March said, with modest self-appreciation.
+
+"If you can make the comfortable people understand how the uncomfortable
+people live, it will be a very good thing, Mr. March.  Sometimes it seems
+to me that the only trouble is that we don't know one another well
+enough; and that the first thing is to do this."  The young fellow spoke
+with the seriousness in which the beauty of his face resided.  Whenever
+he laughed his face looked weak, even silly.  It seemed to be a sense of
+this that made him hang his head or turn it away at such times.
+
+"That's true," said March, from the surface only.  "And then, those
+phases of low life are immensely picturesque.  Of course, we must try to
+get the contrasts of luxury for the sake of the full effect.  That won't
+be so easy.  You can't penetrate to the dinner-party of a millionaire
+under the wing of a detective as you could to a carouse in Mulberry
+Street, or to his children's nursery with a philanthropist as you can to
+a street-boy's lodging-house."  March laughed, and again the young man
+turned his head away.  "Still, something can be done in that way by tact
+and patience."
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+That evening March went with his wife to return the call of the Dryfoos
+ladies.  On their way up-town in the Elevated he told her of his talk
+with young Dryfoos.  "I confess I was a little ashamed before him
+afterward for having looked at the matter so entirely from the aesthetic
+point of view.  But of course, you know, if I went to work at those
+things with an ethical intention explicitly in mind, I should spoil
+them."
+
+"Of course," said his wife.  She had always heard him say something of
+this kind about such things.
+
+He went on: "But I suppose that's just the point that such a nature as
+young Dryfoos's can't get hold of, or keep hold of.  We're a queer lot,
+down there, Isabel--perfect menagerie.  If it hadn't been that Fulkerson
+got us together, and really seems to know what he did it for, I should
+say he was the oddest stick among us.  But when I think of myself and my
+own crankiness for the literary department; and young Dryfoos, who ought
+really to be in the pulpit, or a monastery, or something, for publisher;
+and that young Beaton, who probably hasn't a moral fibre in his
+composition, for the art man, I don't know but we could give Fulkerson
+odds and still beat him in oddity."
+
+His wife heaved a deep sigh of apprehension, of renunciation, of
+monition.  "Well, I'm glad you can feel so light about it, Basil."
+
+"Light?  I feel gay!  With Fulkerson at the helm, I tell you the rocks
+and the lee shore had better keep out of the way."  He laughed with
+pleasure in his metaphor.  "Just when you think Fulkerson has taken leave
+of his senses he says or does something that shows he is on the most
+intimate and inalienable terms with them all the time.  You know how I've
+been worrying over those foreign periodicals, and trying to get some
+translations from them for the first number?  Well, Fulkerson has brought
+his centipedal mind to bear on the subject, and he's suggested that old
+German friend of mine I was telling you of--the one I met in the
+restaurant--the friend of my youth."
+
+"Do you think he could do it?"  asked Mrs. March, sceptically.
+
+"He's a perfect Babel of strange tongues; and he's the very man for the
+work, and I was ashamed I hadn't thought of him myself, for I suspect he
+needs the work."
+
+"Well, be careful how you get mixed up with him, then, Basil," said his
+wife, who had the natural misgiving concerning the friends of her
+husband's youth that all wives have.  "You know the Germans are so
+unscrupulously dependent.  You don't know anything about him now."
+
+"I'm not afraid of Lindau," said March.  "He was the best and kindest man
+I ever saw, the most high-minded, the most generous.  He lost a hand in
+the war that helped to save us and keep us possible, and that stump of
+his is character enough for me."
+
+"Oh, you don't think I could have meant anything against him!" said Mrs.
+March, with the tender fervor that every woman who lived in the time of
+the war must feel for those who suffered in it.  "All that I meant was
+that I hoped you would not get mixed up with him too much.  You're so apt
+to be carried away by your impulses."
+
+"They didn't carry me very far away in the direction of poor old Lindau,
+I'm ashamed to think," said March.  "I meant all sorts of fine things by
+him after I met him; and then I forgot him, and I had to be reminded of
+him by Fulkerson."
+
+She did not answer him, and he fell into a remorseful reverie, in which
+he rehabilitated Lindau anew, and provided handsomely for his old age.
+He got him buried with military honors, and had a shaft raised over him,
+with a medallion likeness by Beaton and an epitaph by himself, by the
+time they reached Forty-second Street; there was no time to write
+Lindau's life, however briefly, before the train stopped.
+
+They had to walk up four blocks and then half a block across before they
+came to the indistinctive brownstone house where the Dryfooses lived.
+It was larger than some in the same block, but the next neighborhood of a
+huge apartment-house dwarfed it again.  March thought he recognized the
+very flat in which he had disciplined the surly janitor, but he did not
+tell his wife; he made her notice the transition character of the street,
+which had been mostly built up in apartment-houses, with here and there a
+single dwelling dropped far down beneath and beside them, to that jag-
+toothed effect on the sky-line so often observable in such New York
+streets.  "I don't know exactly what the old gentleman bought here for,"
+he said, as they waited on the steps after ringing, "unless he expects to
+turn it into flats by-and-by.  Otherwise, I don't believe he'll get his
+money back."
+
+An Irish serving-man, with a certain surprise that delayed him, said the
+ladies were at home, and let the Marches in, and then carried their cards
+up-stairs.  The drawing-room, where he said they could sit down while he
+went on this errand, was delicately, decorated in white and gold, and
+furnished with a sort of extravagant good taste; there was nothing to
+object to in the satin furniture, the pale, soft, rich carpet, the
+pictures, and the bronze and china bric-a-brac, except that their
+costliness was too evident; everything in the room meant money too
+plainly, and too much of it.  The Marches recognized this in the hoarse
+whispers which people cannot get their voices above when they try to talk
+away the interval of waiting in such circumstances; they conjectured from
+what they had heard of the Dryfooses that this tasteful luxury in no wise
+expressed their civilization.  "Though when you come to that," said
+March, "I don't know that Mrs. Green's gimcrackery expresses ours."
+
+"Well, Basil, I didn't take the gimcrackery.  That was your--"
+
+The rustle of skirts on the stairs without arrested Mrs. March in the
+well-merited punishment which she never failed to inflict upon her
+husband when the question of the gimcrackery--they always called it that-
+-came up.  She rose at the entrance of a bright-looking, pretty-looking,
+mature, youngish lady, in black silk of a neutral implication, who put
+out her hand to her, and said, with a very cheery, very ladylike accent,
+"Mrs. March?"  and then added to both of them, while she shook hands with
+March, and before they could get the name out of their months: "No, not
+Miss Dryfoos!  Neither of them; nor Mrs. Dryfoos.  Mrs. Mandel.  The
+ladies will be down in a moment.  Won't you throw off your sacque, Mrs.
+March?  I'm afraid it's rather warm here, coming from the outside."
+
+"I will throw it back, if you'll allow me," said Mrs. March, with a sort
+of provisionality, as if, pending some uncertainty as to Mrs. Mandel's
+quality and authority, she did not feel herself justified in going
+further.
+
+But if she did not know about Mrs. Mandel, Mrs. Mandel seemed to know
+about her.  "Oh, well, do!" she said, with a sort of recognition of the
+propriety of her caution.  "I hope you are feeling a little at home in
+New York.  We heard so much of your trouble in getting a flat, from Mr.
+Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, a true Bostonian doesn't give up quite so soon," said Mrs. March.
+
+"But I will say New York doesn't seem so far away, now we're here."
+
+"I'm sure you'll like it.  Every one does."  Mrs. Mandel added to March,
+"It's very sharp out, isn't it?"
+
+"Rather sharp.  But after our Boston winters I don't know but I ought to
+repudiate the word."
+
+"Ah, wait till you have been here through March!" said Mrs. Mandel.  She
+began with him, but skillfully transferred the close of her remark, and
+the little smile of menace that went with it, to his wife.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, "or April, either: Talk about our east winds!"
+
+"Oh, I'm sure they can't be worse than our winds," Mrs. Mandel returned,
+caressingly.
+
+"If we escape New York pneumonia," March laughed, "it will only be to
+fall a prey to New York malaria as soon as the frost is out of the
+ground."
+
+"Oh, but you know," said Mrs. Mandel, "I think our malaria has really
+been slandered a little.  It's more a matter of drainage--of plumbing.
+I don't believe it would be possible for malaria to get into this house,
+we've had it gone over so thoroughly."
+
+Mrs. March said, while she tried to divine Mrs. Mandel's position from
+this statement, "It's certainly the first duty."
+
+"If Mrs. March could have had her way, we should have had the drainage of
+our whole ward put in order," said her husband, "before we ventured to
+take a furnished apartment for the winter."
+
+Mrs. Mandel looked discreetly at Mrs. March for permission to laugh at
+this, but at the same moment both ladies became preoccupied with a second
+rustling on the stairs.
+
+Two tall, well-dressed young girls came in, and Mrs. Mandel introduced,
+"Miss Dryfoos, Mrs. March; and Miss Mela Dryfoos, Mr. March," she added,
+and the girls shook hands in their several ways with the Marches.
+
+Miss Dryfoos had keen black eyes, and her hair was intensely black.  Her
+face, but for the slight inward curve of the nose, was regular, and the
+smallness of her nose and of her mouth did not weaken her face, but gave
+it a curious effect of fierceness, of challenge.  She had a large black
+fan in her hand, which she waved in talking, with a slow, watchful
+nervousness.  Her sister was blonde, and had a profile like her
+brother's; but her chin was not so salient, and the weak look of the
+mouth was not corrected by the spirituality or the fervor of his eyes,
+though hers were of the same mottled blue.  She dropped into the low seat
+beside Mrs. Mandel, and intertwined her fingers with those of the hand
+which Mrs. Mandel let her have.  She smiled upon the Marches, while Miss
+Dryfoos watched them intensely, with her eyes first on one and then on
+the other, as if she did not mean to let any expression of theirs escape
+her.
+
+"My mother will be down in a minute," she said to Mrs. March.
+
+"I hope we're not disturbing her.  It is so good of you to let us come in
+the evening," Mrs. March replied.
+
+"Oh, not at all," said the girl.  "We receive in the evening."
+
+"When we do receive," Miss Mela put in.  "We don't always get the chance
+to."  She began a laugh, which she checked at a smile from Mrs. Mandel,
+which no one could have seen to be reproving.
+
+Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan, and looked up defiantly at Mrs.
+March.  "I suppose you have hardly got settled.  We were afraid we would
+disturb you when we called."
+
+"Oh no! We were very sorry to miss your visit.  We are quite settled in
+our new quarters.  Of course, it's all very different from Boston."
+
+"I hope it's more of a sociable place there," Miss Mela broke in again.
+"I never saw such an unsociable place as New York.  We've been in this
+house three months, and I don't believe that if we stayed three years any
+of the neighbors would call."
+
+"I fancy proximity doesn't count for much in New York," March suggested.
+
+Mrs. Mandel said: "That's what I tell Miss Mela.  But she is a very
+social nature, and can't reconcile herself to the fact."
+
+"No, I can't," the girl pouted.  "I think it was twice as much fun in
+Moffitt.  I wish I was there now."
+
+"Yes," said March, "I think there's a great deal more enjoyment in those
+smaller places.  There's not so much going on in the way of public
+amusements, and so people make more of one another.  There are not so
+many concerts, theatres, operas--"
+
+"Oh, they've got a splendid opera-house in Moffitt.  It's just grand,"
+said Miss Mela.
+
+"Have you been to the opera here, this winter?"  Mrs. March asked of the
+elder girl.
+
+She was glaring with a frown at her sister, and detached her eyes from
+her with an effort.  "What did you say?"  she demanded, with an absent
+bluntness.  "Oh yes.  Yes! We went once.  Father took a box at the
+Metropolitan."
+
+"Then you got a good dose of Wagner, I suppose?"  said March.
+
+"What?"  asked the girl.
+
+"I don't think Miss Dryfoos is very fond of Wagner's music," Mrs. Mandel
+said.  "I believe you are all great Wagnerites in Boston?"
+
+"I'm a very bad Bostonian, Mrs. Mandel.  I suspect myself of preferring
+Verdi," March answered.
+
+Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan again, and said, "I like 'Trovatore'
+the best."
+
+"It's an opera I never get tired of," said March, and Mrs. March and Mrs:
+Mandel exchanged a smile of compassion for his simplicity.  He detected
+it, and added: "But I dare say I shall come down with the Wagner fever in
+time.  I've been exposed to some malignant cases of it."
+
+"That night we were there," said Miss Mela, "they had to turn the gas
+down all through one part of it, and the papers said the ladies were
+awful mad because they couldn't show their diamonds.  I don't wonder, if
+they all had to pay as much for their boxes as we did.  We had to pay
+sixty dollars."  She looked at the Marches for their sensation at this
+expense.
+
+March said: "Well, I think I shall take my box by the month, then.  It
+must come cheaper, wholesale."
+
+"Oh no, it don't," said the girl, glad to inform him.  "The people that
+own their boxes, and that had to give fifteen or twenty thousand dollars
+apiece for them, have to pay sixty dollars a night whenever there's a
+performance, whether they go or not."
+
+"Then I should go every night," March said.
+
+"Most of the ladies were low neck--"
+
+March interposed, "Well, I shouldn't go low-neck."
+
+The girl broke into a fondly approving laugh at his drolling.  "Oh, I
+guess you love to train!  Us girls wanted to go low neck, too; but father
+said we shouldn't, and mother said if we did she wouldn't come to the
+front of the box once.  Well, she didn't, anyway.  We might just as well
+'a' gone low neck.  She stayed back the whole time, and when they had
+that dance--the ballet, you know--she just shut her eyes.  Well, Conrad
+didn't like that part much, either; but us girls and Mrs. Mandel, we
+brazened it out right in the front of the box.  We were about the only
+ones there that went high neck.  Conrad had to wear a swallow-tail;
+but father hadn't any, and he had to patch out with a white cravat.
+You couldn't see what he had on in the back o' the box, anyway."
+
+Mrs. March looked at Miss Dryfoos, who was waving her fan more and more
+slowly up and down, and who, when she felt herself looked at, returned
+Mrs. March's smile, which she meant to be ingratiating and perhaps
+sympathetic, with a flash that made her start, and then ran her fierce
+eyes over March's face.  "Here comes mother," she said, with a sort of
+breathlessness, as if speaking her thought aloud, and through the open
+door the Marches could see the old lady on the stairs.
+
+She paused half-way down, and turning, called up: "Coonrod! Coonrod!
+You bring my shawl down with you."
+
+Her daughter Mela called out to her, "Now, mother, Christine 'll give it
+to you for not sending Mike."
+
+"Well, I don't know where he is, Mely, child," the mother answered back.
+"He ain't never around when he's wanted, and when he ain't, it seems like
+a body couldn't git shet of him, nohow."
+
+"Well, you ought to ring for him!" cried Miss Mela, enjoying the joke.
+
+Her mother came in with a slow step; her head shook slightly as she
+looked about the room, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps from a touch of
+palsy.  In either case the fact had a pathos which Mrs. March confessed
+in the affection with which she took her hard, dry, large, old hand when
+she was introduced to her, and in the sincerity which she put into the
+hope that she was well.
+
+"I'm just middlin'," Mrs. Dryfoos replied.  "I ain't never so well,
+nowadays.  I tell fawther I don't believe it agrees with me very well
+here, but he says I'll git used to it.  He's away now, out at Moffitt,"
+she said to March, and wavered on foot a moment before she sank into a
+chair.  She was a tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl, and her gray
+hair had a memory of blondeness in it like Lindau's, March noticed.  She
+wore a simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she held a handkerchief
+folded square, as it had come from the laundress.  Something like the
+Sabbath quiet of a little wooden meeting-house in thick Western woods
+expressed itself to him from her presence.
+
+"Laws, mother!" said Miss Mela; "what you got that old thing on for?  If
+I'd 'a' known you'd 'a' come down in that!"
+
+"Coonrod said it was all right, Mely," said her mother.
+
+Miss Mela explained to the Marches: "Mother was raised among the
+Dunkards, and she thinks it's wicked to wear anything but a gray silk
+even for dress-up."
+
+"You hain't never heared o' the Dunkards, I reckon," the old woman said
+to Mrs. March.  "Some folks calls 'em the Beardy Men, because they don't
+never shave; and they wash feet like they do in the Testament.  My uncle
+was one.  He raised me."
+
+"I guess pretty much everybody's a Beardy Man nowadays, if he ain't a
+Dunkard!"
+
+Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally, but March was saying to
+his wife: "It's a Pennsylvania German sect, I believe--something like the
+Quakers.  I used to see them when I was a boy."
+
+"Aren't they something like the Mennists?"  asked Mrs. Mandel.
+
+"They're good people," said the old woman, "and the world 'd be a heap
+better off if there was more like 'em."
+
+Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her shoulders before he shook
+hands with the visitors.  "I am glad you found your way here," he said to
+them.
+
+Christine, who had been bending forward over her fan, now lifted herself
+up with a sigh and leaned back in her chair.
+
+"I'm sorry my father isn't here," said the young man to Mrs. March.
+"He's never met you yet?"
+
+"No; and I should like to see him.  We hear a great deal about your
+father, you know, from Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Oh, I hope you don't believe everything Mr. Fulkerson says about
+people," Mela cried.  "He's the greatest person for carrying on when he
+gets going I ever saw.  It makes Christine just as mad when him and
+mother gets to talking about religion; she says she knows he don't care
+anything more about it than the man in the moon.  I reckon he don't try
+it on much with father."
+
+"Your fawther ain't ever been a perfessor," her mother interposed; "but
+he's always been a good church-goin' man."
+
+"Not since we come to New York," retorted the girl.
+
+"He's been all broke up since he come to New York," said the old woman,
+with an aggrieved look.
+
+Mrs. Mandel attempted a diversion.  "Have you heard any of our great New
+York preachers yet, Mrs. March?"
+
+"No, I haven't," Mrs. March admitted; and she tried to imply by her
+candid tone that she intended to begin hearing them the very next Sunday.
+
+"There are a great many things here," said Conrad, "to take your thoughts
+off the preaching that you hear in most of the churches.  I think the
+city itself is preaching the best sermon all the time."
+
+"I don't know that I understand you," said March.
+
+Mela answered for him.  "Oh, Conrad has got a lot of notions that nobody
+can understand.  You ought to see the church he goes to when he does go.
+I'd about as lief go to a Catholic church myself; I don't see a bit o'
+difference.  He's the greatest crony with one of their preachers; he
+dresses just like a priest, and he says he is a priest."  She laughed for
+enjoyment of the fact, and her brother cast down his eyes.
+
+Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it the personal tone which
+the talk was always assuming.  "Have you been to the fall exhibition?"
+she asked Christine; and the girl drew herself up out of the abstraction
+she seemed sunk in.
+
+"The exhibition?"  She looked at Mrs. Mandel.
+
+"The pictures of the Academy, you know," Mrs. Mandel explained.
+"Where I wanted you to go the day you had your dress tried on,"
+
+"No; we haven't been yet.  Is it good?"  She had turned to Mrs. March
+again.
+
+"I believe the fall exhibitions are never so good as the spring ones.
+But there are some good pictures."
+
+"I don't believe I care much about pictures," said Christine.  "I don't
+understand them."
+
+"Ah, that's no excuse for not caring about them," said March, lightly.
+"The painters themselves don't, half the time."
+
+The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiant and appealing,
+insolent and anxious, which he had noticed before, especially when she
+stole it toward himself and his wife during her sister's babble.  In the
+light of Fulkerson's history of the family, its origin and its ambition,
+he interpreted it to mean a sense of her sister's folly and an ignorant
+will to override his opinion of anything incongruous in themselves and
+their surroundings.  He said to himself that she was deathly proud--too
+proud to try to palliate anything, but capable of anything that would put
+others under her feet.  Her eyes seemed hopelessly to question his wife's
+social quality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest, the
+inexperienced girl's doubt whether to treat them with much or little
+respect.  He lost himself in fancies about her and her ideals,
+necessarily sordid, of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphs
+and disappointments before her.  Her sister would accept both with a
+lightness that would keep no trace of either; but in her they would sink
+lastingly deep.  He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. Dryfoos saying
+to him, in her hoarse voice:
+
+"I think it's a shame, some of the pictur's a body sees in the winders.
+They say there's a law ag'inst them things; and if there is, I don't
+understand why the police don't take up them that paints 'em.  I hear 182
+tell, since I been here, that there's women that goes to have pictur's
+took from them that way by men painters."  The point seemed aimed at
+March, as if he were personally responsible for the scandal, and it fell
+with a silencing effect for the moment.  Nobody seemed willing to take it
+up, and Mrs. Dryfoos went on, with an old woman's severity: "I say they
+ought to be all tarred and feathered and rode on a rail.  They'd be
+drummed out of town in Moffitt."
+
+Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh: "I should think they would! And
+they wouldn't anybody go low neck to the opera-house there, either--not
+low neck the way they do here, anyway."
+
+"And that pack of worthless hussies," her mother resumed, "that come out
+on the stage, and begun to kick"
+
+"Laws, mother!" the girl shouted, "I thought you said you had your eyes
+shut!"
+
+All but these two simpler creatures were abashed at the indecorum of
+suggesting in words the commonplaces of the theatre and of art.
+
+"Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believe my eyes.  I don't know
+what they're doin' in all their churches, to let such things go on," said
+the old woman.  "It's a sin and a shame, I think.  Don't you, Coonrod?"
+
+A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he was about to deliver.
+
+"If it's going to be company, Coonrod," said his mother, making an effort
+to rise, "I reckon I better go up-stairs."
+
+"It's Mr. Fulkerson, I guess," said Conrad.  "He thought he might come";
+and at the mention of this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoos sank contentedly
+back in her chair, and a relaxation of their painful tension seemed to
+pass through the whole company.  Conrad went to the door himself (the
+serving-man tentatively, appeared some minutes later) and let in
+Fulkerson's cheerful voice before his cheerful person.
+
+"Ah, how dye do, Conrad?  Brought our friend, Mr. Beaton, with me," those
+within heard him say; and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats,
+they saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set square and his arms
+akimbo.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+"Ah! hello! hello !" Fulkerson said, in recognition of the Marches.
+"Regular gathering of the clans.  How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos?  How do you
+do, Mrs. Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks?
+How you wuz?"  He shook hands gayly all round, and took a chair next the
+old lady, whose hand he kept in his own, and left Conrad to introduce
+Beaton.  But he would not let the shadow of Beaton's solemnity fall upon
+the company.  He began to joke with Mrs. Dryfoos, and to match
+rheumatisms with her, and he included all the ladies in the range of
+appropriate pleasantries.  "I've brought Mr. Beaton along to-night,
+and I want you to make him feel at home, like you do me, Mrs. Dryfoos.
+He hasn't got any rheumatism to speak of; but his parents live in
+Syracuse, and he's a kind of an orphan, and we've just adopted him down
+at the office.  When you going to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs.
+Mandel, for a champagne lunch?  I will have some hydro-Mela, and
+Christine it, heigh?  How's that for a little starter?  We dropped in at
+your place a moment, Mrs. March, and gave the young folks a few pointers
+about their studies.  My goodness! it does me good to see a boy like that
+of yours; business, from the word go; and your girl just scoops my
+youthful affections.  She's a beauty, and I guess she's good, too.  Well,
+well, what a world it is! Miss Christine, won't you show Mr. Beaton that
+seal ring of yours?  He knows about such things, and I brought him here
+to see it as much as anything.  It's an intaglio I brought from the other
+side," he explained to Mrs. March, "and I guess you'll like to look at
+it.  Tried to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when I couldn't, I sold
+it to 'em.  Bound to see it on Miss Christine's hand somehow!  Hold on!
+Let him see it where it belongs, first!"
+
+He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and let
+her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the ring on
+it.  Then he left her to hear the painter's words about it, which he
+continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a gas-
+jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.
+
+"Well, Mely, child," Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her
+mother's habitual address, "and how are you getting along?  Mrs. Mandel
+hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly?  Well, that's right.
+You know you'd be roaming all over the pasture if she didn't."
+
+The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him.
+on his own ground of privileged character.  He brought them all together
+in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had
+inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both
+the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society, and that two
+young men had been devoted to them.
+
+"Oh, I think he's just as lovely as he can live!" said Mela, as she stood
+a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the others
+had left them after the departure of their guests.
+
+"Who?"  asked Christine, deeply.  As she glanced down at her ring, her
+eyes burned with a softened fire.
+
+She had allowed Beaton to change it himself from the finger where she had
+worn it to the finger on which he said she ought to wear it.  She did not
+know whether it was right to let him, but she was glad she had done it.
+
+"Who?  Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie! Not that old stuckup Mr. Beaton of
+yours!"
+
+"He is proud," assented Christine, with a throb of exultation.
+
+Beaton and Fulkerson went to the Elevated station with the Marches; but
+the painter said he was going to walk home, and Fulkerson let him go
+alone.
+
+"One way is enough for me," he explained.  "When I walk up, I don't.
+walk down.  Bye-bye, my son!"  He began talking about Beaton to the
+Marches as they climbed the station stairs together.  "That fellow
+puzzles me.  I don't know anybody that I have such a desire to kick, and
+at the same time that I want to flatter up so much.  Affect you that
+way?" he asked of March.
+
+"Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes."
+
+"And how is it with you, Mrs. March?"
+
+"Oh, I want to flatter him up."
+
+"No; really?  Why?  Hold on! I've got the change."
+
+Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket-office window; and made them
+his guests, with the inexorable American hospitality, for the ride down-
+town.  "Three!" he said to the ticket-seller; and, when he had walked
+them before him out on the platform and dropped his tickets into the urn,
+he persisted in his inquiry, "Why?"
+
+"Why, because you always want to flatter conceited people, don't you?"
+Mrs. March answered, with a laugh.
+
+"Do you?  Yes, I guess you do.  You think Beaton is conceited?"
+
+"Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"I guess you're partly right," said Fulkerson, with a sigh, so
+unaccountable in its connection that they all laughed.
+
+"An ideal 'busted'?"  March suggested.
+
+"No, not that, exactly," said Fulkerson.  "But I had a notion maybe
+Beaton wasn't conceited all the time."
+
+"Oh!" Mrs. March exulted, "nobody could be so conceited all the time as
+Mr. Beaton is most of the time.  He must have moments of the direst
+modesty, when he'd be quite flattery-proof."
+
+"Yes, that's what I mean.  I guess that's what makes me want to kick him.
+He's left compliments on my hands that no decent man would."
+
+"Oh! that's tragical," said March.
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson," Mrs. March began, with change of subject in her voice,
+"who is Mrs. Mandel?"
+
+"Who?  What do you think of her?"  he rejoined.  "I'll tell you about her
+when we get in the cars.  Look at that thing!  Ain't it beautiful?"
+
+They leaned over the track and looked up at the next station, where the
+train, just starting, throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white
+moonlight.
+
+"The most beautiful thing in New York--the one always and certainly
+beautiful thing here," said March; and his wife sighed, "Yes, yes."
+She clung to him, and remained rapt by the sight till the train drew
+near, and then pulled him back in a panic.
+
+"Well, there ain't really much to tell about her," Fulkerson resumed when
+they were seated in the car.  "She's an invention of mine."
+
+"Of yours?"  cried Mrs. March.
+
+"Of course!" exclaimed her husband.
+
+"Yes--at least in her present capacity.  She sent me a story for the
+syndicate, back in July some time, along about the time I first met old
+Dryfoos here.  It was a little too long for my purpose, and I thought I
+could explain better how I wanted it cut in a call than I could in a
+letter.  She gave a Brooklyn address, and I went to see her.  I found
+her," said Fulkerson, with a vague defiance, "a perfect lady.  She was
+living with an aunt over there; and she had seen better days, when she
+was a girl, and worse ones afterward.  I don't mean to say her husband
+was a bad fellow; I guess he was pretty good; he was her music-teacher;
+she met him in Germany, and they got married there, and got through her
+property before they came over here.  Well, she didn't strike me like a
+person that could make much headway in literature.  Her story was well
+enough, but it hadn't much sand in it; kind of-well, academic, you know.
+I told her so, and she understood, and cried a little; but she did the
+best she could with the thing, and I took it and syndicated it.  She kind
+of stuck in my mind, and the first time I went to see the Dryfooses they
+were stopping at a sort of family hotel then till they could find a
+house--"Fulkerson broke off altogether, and said, "I don't know as I know
+just how the Dryfooses struck you, Mrs. March?"
+
+"Can't you imagine?"  she answered, with a kindly, smile.
+
+"Yes; but I don't believe I could guess how they would have struck you
+last summer when I first saw them.  My! oh my! there was the native earth
+for you.  Mely is a pretty wild colt now, but you ought to have seen her
+before she was broken to harness.
+
+"And Christine?  Ever see that black leopard they got up there in the
+Central Park?  That was Christine.  Well, I saw what they wanted.  They
+all saw it--nobody is a fool in all directions, and the Dryfooses are in
+their right senses a good deal of the time.  Well, to cut a long story
+short, I got Mrs. Mandel to take 'em in hand--the old lady as well as the
+girls.  She was a born lady, and always lived like one till she saw
+Mandel; and that something academic that killed her for a writer was just
+the very thing for them.  She knows the world well enough to know just
+how much polish they can take on, and she don't try to put on a bit more.
+See?"
+
+"Yes, I can see," said Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, she took hold at once, as ready as a hospital-trained nurse; and
+there ain't anything readier on this planet.  She runs the whole concern,
+socially and economically, takes all the care of housekeeping off the old
+lady's hands, and goes round with the girls.  By-the-bye, I'm going to
+take my meals at your widow's, March, and Conrad's going to have his
+lunch there.  I'm sick of browsing about."
+
+"Mr. March's widow?"  said his wife, looking at him with provisional
+severity.
+
+"I have no widow, Isabel," he said, "and never expect to have, till I
+leave you in the enjoyment of my life-insurance.  I suppose Fulkerson
+means the lady with the daughter who wanted to take us to board."
+
+"Oh yes.  How are they getting on, I do wonder?"  Mrs. March asked of
+Fulkerson.
+
+"Well, they've got one family to board; but it's a small one.  I guess
+they'll pull through.  They didn't want to take any day boarders at
+first, the widow said; I guess they have had to come to it."
+
+"Poor things!" sighed Mrs. March.  "I hope they'll go back to the
+country."
+
+"Well, I don't know.  When you've once tasted New York--You wouldn't go
+back to Boston, would you?"
+
+"Instantly."
+
+Fulkerson laughed out a tolerant incredulity.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room, and sat down
+before the dull fire in his grate to think.  It struck him there was a
+dull fire in his heart a great deal like it; and he worked out a fanciful
+analogy with the coals, still alive, and the ashes creeping over them,
+and the dead clay and cinders.  He felt sick of himself, sick of his life
+and of all his works.  He was angry with Fulkerson for having got him
+into that art department of his, for having bought him up; and he was
+bitter at fate because he had been obliged to use the money to pay some
+pressing debts, and had not been able to return the check his father had
+sent him.  He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassion for
+him; and he set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his
+own baseness.  This was the kind of world it was; but he washed his hands
+of it.  The fault was in human nature, and he reflected with pride that
+he had at least not invented human nature; he had not sunk so low as that
+yet.  The notion amused him; he thought he might get a Satanic epigram
+out of it some way.  But in the mean time that girl, that wild animal,
+she kept visibly, tangibly before him; if he put out his hand he might
+touch hers, he might pass his arm round her waist.  In Paris, in a set he
+knew there, what an effect she would be with that look of hers, and that
+beauty, all out of drawing!  They would recognize the flame quality in
+her.  He imagined a joke about her being a fiery spirit, or nymph, naiad,
+whatever, from one of her native gas-wells.  He began to sketch on a bit
+of paper from the table at his elbow vague lines that veiled and revealed
+a level, dismal landscape, and a vast flame against an empty sky, and a
+shape out of the flame that took on a likeness and floated detached from
+it.  The sketch ran up the left side of the sheet and stretched across
+it.  Beaton laughed out.  Pretty good to let Fulkerson have that for the
+cover of his first number!  In black and red it would be effective; it
+would catch the eye from the news-stands.  He made a motion to throw it
+on the fire, but held it back and slid it into the table-drawer, and
+smoked on.  He saw the dummy with the other sketch in the open drawer
+which he had brought away from Fulkerson's in the morning and slipped in
+there, and he took it out and looked at it.  He made some criticisms in
+line with his pencil on it, correcting the drawing here and there, and
+then he respected it a little more, though he still smiled at the
+feminine quality--a young lady quality.
+
+In spite of his experience the night he called upon the Leightons, Beaton
+could not believe that Alma no longer cared for him.  She played at
+having forgotten him admirably, but he knew that a few months before she
+had been very mindful of him.  He knew he had neglected them since they
+came to New York, where he had led them to expect interest, if not
+attention; but he was used to neglecting people, and he was somewhat less
+used to being punished for it--punished and forgiven.  He felt that Alma
+had punished him so thoroughly that she ought to have been satisfied with
+her work and to have forgiven him in her heart afterward.  He bore no
+resentment after the first tingling moments were-past; he rather admired
+her for it; and he would have been ready to go back half an hour later
+and accept pardon and be on the footing of last summer again.  Even now
+he debated with himself whether it was too late to call; but, decidedly,
+a quarter to ten seemed late.  The next day he determined never to call
+upon the Leightons again; but he had no reason for this; it merely came
+into a transitory scheme of conduct, of retirement from the society of
+women altogether; and after dinner he went round to see them.
+
+He asked for the ladies, and they all three received him, Alma not
+without a surprise that intimated itself to him, and her mother with no
+appreciable relenting; Miss Woodburn, with the needlework which she found
+easier to be voluble over than a book, expressed in her welcome a
+neutrality both cordial to Beaton and loyal to Alma.
+
+"Is it snowing outdo's?"  she asked, briskly, after the greetings were
+transacted.  "Mah goodness!" she said, in answer to his apparent surprise
+at the question.  "Ah mahght as well have stayed in the Soath, for all
+the winter Ah have seen in New York yet."
+
+"We don't often have snow much before New-Year's," said Beaton.
+
+"Miss Woodburn is wild for a real Northern winter," Mrs. Leighton
+explained.
+
+"The othah naght Ah woke up and looked oat of the window and saw all the
+roofs covered with snow, and it turned oat to be nothing but moonlaght.
+Ah was never so disappointed in mah lahfe," said Miss Woodburn.
+
+"If you'll come to St. Barnaby next summer, you shall have all the winter
+you want," said Alma.
+
+"I can't let you slander St. Barnaby in that way," said Beaton, with the
+air of wishing to be understood as meaning more than he said.
+
+"Yes?"  returned Alma, coolly.  "I didn't know you were so fond of the
+climate."
+
+"I never think of it as a climate.  It's a landscape.  It doesn't matter
+whether it's hot or cold."
+
+"With the thermometer twenty below, you'd find that it mattered," Alma
+persisted.
+
+"Is that the way you feel about St. Barnaby, too, Mrs. Leighton?"  Beaton
+asked, with affected desolation.
+
+"I shall be glad enough to go back in the summer," Mrs. Leighton
+conceded.
+
+"And I should be glad to go now," said Beaton, looking at Alma.  He had
+the dummy of 'Every Other Week' in his hand, and he saw Alma's eyes
+wandering toward it whenever he glanced at her.  "I should be glad to go
+anywhere to get out of a job I've undertaken," he continued, to Mrs.
+Leighton.  "They're going to start some sort of a new illustrated
+magazine, and they've got me in for their art department.  I'm not fit
+for it; I'd like to run away.  Don't you want to advise me a little, Mrs.
+Leighton?  You know how much I value your taste, and I'd like to have you
+look at the design for the cover of the first number: they're going to
+have a different one for every number.  I don't know whether you'll agree
+with me, but I think this is rather nice."
+
+He faced the dummy round, and then laid it on the table before Mrs.
+Leighton, pushing some of her work aside to make room for it and standing
+over her while she bent forward to look at it.
+
+Alma kept her place, away from the table.
+
+"Mah goodness! Ho' exciting!" said Miss Woodburn.  "May anybody look?"
+
+"Everybody," said Beaton.
+
+"Well, isn't it perfectly choming!" Miss Woodburn exclaimed.  "Come and
+look at this, Miss Leighton," she called to Alma, who reluctantly
+approached.
+
+What lines are these?"  Mrs. Leighton asked, pointing to Beaton's pencil
+scratches.
+
+"They're suggestions of modifications," he replied.
+
+"I don't think they improve it much.  What do you think, Alma?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said the girl, constraining her voice to an effect of
+indifference and glancing carelessly down at the sketch.  "The design
+might be improved; but I don't think those suggestions would do it."
+
+"They're mine," said Beaton, fixing his eyes upon her with a beautiful
+sad dreaminess that he knew he could put into them; he spoke with a
+dreamy remoteness of tone--his wind-harp stop, Wetmore called it.
+
+"I supposed so," said Alma, calmly.
+
+"Oh, mah goodness!" cried Miss Woodburn.  "Is that the way you awtusts
+talk to each othah?  Well, Ah'm glad Ah'm not an awtust--unless I could
+do all the talking."
+
+"Artists cannot tell a fib," Alma said, "or even act one," and she
+laughed in Beaton's upturned face.
+
+He did not unbend his dreamy gaze.  "You're quite right.  The suggestions
+are stupid."
+
+Alma turned to Miss Woodburn: "You hear?  Even when we speak of our own
+work."
+
+"Ah nevah hoad anything lahke it!"
+
+"And the design itself ?"  Beaton persisted.
+
+"Oh, I'm not an art editor," Alma answered, with a laugh of exultant
+evasion.
+
+A tall, dark, grave-looking man of fifty, with a swarthy face and iron-
+gray mustache and imperial and goatee, entered the room.  Beaton knew the
+type; he had been through Virginia sketching for one of the illustrated
+papers, and he had seen such men in Richmond.  Miss Woodburn hardly
+needed to say, "May Ah introduce you to mah fathaw, Co'nel Woodburn, Mr.
+Beaton?"
+
+The men shook hands, and Colonel Woodburn said, in that soft, gentle,
+slow Southern voice without our Northern contractions: "I am very glad to
+meet you, sir; happy to make yo' acquaintance.  Do not move, madam," he
+said to Mrs. Leighton, who made a deprecatory motion to let him pass to
+the chair beyond her; "I can find my way."  He bowed a bulk that did not
+lend itself readily to the devotion, and picked up the ball of yarn she
+had let drop out of her lap in half rising.  "Yo' worsteds, madam."
+
+"Yarn, yarn, Colonel Woodburn!" Alma shouted.  "You're quite
+incorrigible.  A spade is a spade!"
+
+"But sometimes it is a trump, my dear young lady," said the Colonel, with
+unabated gallantry; "and when yo' mothah uses yarn, it is worsteds.  But
+I respect worsteds even under the name of yarn: our ladies--my own mothah
+and sistahs--had to knit the socks we wore--all we could get in the woe."
+
+"Yes, and aftah the woe," his daughter put in.  "The knitting has not
+stopped yet in some places.  Have you been much in the Soath,
+Mr. Beaton?"
+
+Beaton explained just how much.
+
+"Well, sir," said the Colonel, "then you have seen a country making
+gigantic struggles to retrieve its losses, sir.  The South is advancing
+with enormous strides, sir."
+
+"Too fast for some of us to keep up," said Miss Woodburn, in an audible
+aside.  "The pace in Charlottesboag is pofectly killing, and we had to
+drop oat into a slow place like New York."
+
+"The progress in the South is material now," said the Colonel; "and those
+of us whose interests are in another direction find ourselves--isolated
+--isolated, sir.  The intellectual centres are still in the No'th, sir;
+the great cities draw the mental activity of the country to them, sir.
+Necessarily New York is the metropolis."
+
+"Oh, everything comes here," said Beaton, impatient of the elder's
+ponderosity.  Another sort of man would have sympathized with the
+Southerner's willingness to talk of himself, and led him on to speak of
+his plans and ideals.  But the sort of man that Beaton was could not do
+this; he put up the dummy into the wrapper he had let drop on the floor
+beside him, and tied it round with string while Colonel Woodburn was
+talking.  He got to his feet with the words he spoke and offered Mrs.
+Leighton his hand.
+
+"Must you go?"  she asked, in surprise.
+
+"I am on my way to a reception," he said.  She had noticed that he was in
+evening dress; and now she felt the vague hurt that people invited
+nowhere feel in the presence of those who are going somewhere.  She did
+not feel it for herself, but for her daughter; and she knew Alma would
+not have let her feel it if she could have prevented it.  But Alma had
+left the room for a moment, and she tacitly indulged this sense of injury
+in her behalf.
+
+"Please say good-night to Miss Leighton for me," Beaton continued.  He
+bowed to Miss Woodburn, "Goodnight, Miss Woodburn," and to her father,
+bluntly, "Goodnight."
+
+"Good-night, sir," said the Colonel, with a sort of severe suavity.
+
+"Oh, isn't he choming!" Miss Woodburn whispered to Mrs. Leighton when
+Beaton left the room.
+
+Alma spoke to him in the hall without.  "You knew that was my design, Mr.
+Beaton.  Why did you bring it?"
+
+"Why?"  He looked at her in gloomy hesitation.
+
+Then he said: "You know why.  I wished to talk it over with you, to serve
+you, please you, get back your good opinion.  But I've done neither the
+one nor the other; I've made a mess of the whole thing."
+
+Alma interrupted him.  "Has it been accepted?"
+
+"It will be accepted, if you will let it."
+
+"Let it?"  she laughed.  "I shall be delighted."  She saw him swayed a
+little toward her.  "It's a matter of business, isn't it?"
+
+"Purely.  Good-night."
+
+When Alma returned to the room, Colonel Woodburn was saying to Mrs.
+Leighton: "I do not contend that it is impossible, madam, but it is very
+difficult in a thoroughly commercialized society, like yours, to have the
+feelings of a gentleman.  How can a business man, whose prosperity, whose
+earthly salvation, necessarily lies in the adversity of some one else, be
+delicate and chivalrous, or even honest?  If we could have had time to
+perfect our system at the South, to eliminate what was evil and develop
+what was good in it, we should have had a perfect system.  But the virus
+of commercialism was in us, too; it forbade us to make the best of a
+divine institution, and tempted us to make the worst.  Now the curse is
+on the whole country; the dollar is the measure of every value, the stamp
+of every success.  What does not sell is a failure; and what sells
+succeeds."
+
+"The hobby is oat, mah deah," said Miss Woodburn, in an audible aside to
+Alma.
+
+"Were you speaking of me, Colonel Woodburn?"  Alma asked.
+
+"Surely not, my dear young lady."
+
+"But he's been saying that awtusts are just as greedy aboat money as
+anybody," said his daughter.
+
+"The law of commercialism is on everything in a commercial society," the
+Colonel explained, softening the tone in which his convictions were
+presented.  "The final reward of art is money, and not the pleasure of
+creating."
+
+"Perhaps they would be willing to take it all oat in that if othah people
+would let them pay their bills in the pleasure of creating," his daughter
+teased.
+
+"They are helpless, like all the rest," said her father, with the same
+deference to her as to other women.  "I do not blame them."
+
+"Oh, mah goodness! Didn't you say, sir, that Mr. Beaton had bad manners?"
+
+Alma relieved a confusion which he seemed to feel in reference to her.
+"Bad manners?  He has no manners! That is, when he's himself.  He has
+pretty good ones when he's somebody else."
+
+Miss Woodburn began, "Oh, mah-" and then stopped herself.  Alma's mother
+looked at her with distressed question, but the girl seemed perfectly
+cool and contented; and she gave her mind provisionally to a point
+suggested by Colonel Woodburn's talk.
+
+"Still, I can't believe it was right to hold people in slavery, to whip
+them and sell them.  It never did seem right to me," she added, in
+apology for her extreme sentiments to the gentleness of her adversary.
+
+"I quite agree with you, madam," said the Colonel.  "Those were the
+abuses of the institution.  But if we had not been vitiated on the one
+hand and threatened on the other by the spirit of commercialism from the
+North--and from Europe, too--those abuses could have been eliminated,
+and the institution developed in the direction of the mild patriarchalism
+of the divine intention."  The Colonel hitched his chair, which figured a
+hobby careering upon its hind legs, a little toward Mrs. Leighton and the
+girls approached their heads and began to whisper; they fell
+deferentially silent when the Colonel paused in his argument, and went on
+again when he went on.
+
+At last they heard Mrs. Leighton saying, "And have you heard from the
+publishers about your book yet?"
+
+Then Miss Woodburn cut in, before her father could answer: "The coase of
+commercialism is on that, too.  They are trahing to fahnd oat whethah it
+will pay."
+
+"And they are right-quite right," said the Colonel.  "There is no longer
+any other criterion; and even a work that attacks the system must be
+submitted to the tests of the system."
+
+"The system won't accept destruction on any othah tomes," said Miss
+Woodburn, demurely.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+At the reception, where two men in livery stood aside to let him pass up
+the outside steps of the house, and two more helped him off with his
+overcoat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room,
+the Syracuse stone-cutter's son met the niece of Mrs. Horn, and began at
+once to tell her about his evening at the Dryfooses'.  He was in very
+good spirits, for so far as he could have been elated or depressed by his
+parting with Alma Leighton he had been elated; she had not treated his
+impudence with the contempt that he felt it deserved; she must still be
+fond of him; and the warm sense of this, by operation of an obscure but
+well-recognized law of the masculine being, disposed him to be rather
+fond of Miss Vance.  She was a slender girl, whose semi-aesthetic dress
+flowed about her with an accentuation of her long forms, and redeemed
+them from censure by the very frankness with which it confessed them;
+nobody could have said that Margaret Vance was too tall.  Her pretty
+little head, which she had an effect of choosing to have little in the
+same spirit of judicious defiance, had a good deal of reading in it; she
+was proud to know literary and artistic fashions as well as society
+fashions.  She liked being singled out by an exterior distinction so
+obvious as Beaton's, and she listened with sympathetic interest to his
+account of those people.  He gave their natural history reality by
+drawing upon his own; he reconstructed their plebeian past from the
+experiences of his childhood and his youth of the pre-Parisian period;
+and he had a pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance of the
+world.
+
+"What different kinds of people you meet!" said the girl at last, with an
+envious sigh.  Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination,
+if not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common
+people, and made them seem so very much more worth while than the people
+one met.
+
+She said something like this to Beaton.  He answered: "You can meet the
+people I'm talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble.
+It's what they came to New York for.  I fancy it's the great ambition of
+their lives to be met."
+
+"Oh yes," said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked
+up and said, intellectually: "Don't you think it's a great pity?  How
+much better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!"
+
+"Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them," said Beaton.
+"I don't suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?"
+
+"No," said Miss Vance, amused.  "Not that I shouldn't like to go."
+
+"What a daring spirit! You ought to be on the staff of 'Every Other
+Week,'" said Beaton.
+
+"The staff-Every Other Week?  What is it?"
+
+"The missing link; the long-felt want of a tie between the Arts and the
+Dollars."  Beaton gave her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketch of
+the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of the new enterprise.
+
+Miss Vance understood too little about business of any kind to know how
+it differed from other enterprises of its sort.  She thought it was
+delightful; she thought Beaton must be glad to be part of it, though he
+had represented himself so bored, so injured, by Fulkerson's insisting
+upon having him.  "And is it a secret?  Is it a thing not to be
+spoken of?"
+
+"'Tutt' altro'!  Fulkerson will be enraptured to have it spoken of in
+society.  He would pay any reasonable bill for the advertisement."
+
+"What a delightful creature! Tell him it shall all be spent in charity."
+
+"He would like that.  He would get two paragraphs out of the fact, and
+your name would go into the 'Literary Notes' of all the newspapers."
+
+"Oh, but I shouldn't want my name used!" cried the girl, half horrified
+into fancying the situation real.
+
+"Then you'd better not say anything about 'Every Other Week'.  Fulkerson
+is preternaturally unscrupulous."
+
+March began to think so too, at times.  He was perpetually suggesting
+changes in the make-up of the first number, with a view to its greater
+vividness of effect.  One day he came and said: "This thing isn't going
+to have any sort of get up and howl about it, unless you have a paper in
+the first number going for Bevans's novels.  Better get Maxwell to do
+it."
+
+"Why, I thought you liked Bevans's novels?"
+
+"So I did; but where the good of 'Every Other Week' is concerned I am a
+Roman father.  The popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell is the man
+to do it.  There hasn't been a new magazine started for the last three
+years that hasn't had an article from Maxwell in its first number cutting
+Bevans all to pieces.  If people don't see it, they'll think 'Every Other
+Week' is some old thing."
+
+March did not know whether Fulkerson was joking or not.  He suggested,
+"Perhaps they'll think it's an old thing if they do see it."
+
+"Well, get somebody else, then; or else get Maxwell to write under an
+assumed name.  Or--I forgot!  He'll be anonymous under our system,
+anyway.  Now there ain't a more popular racket for us to work in that
+first number than a good, swinging attack on Bevans.  People read his
+books and quarrel over 'em, and the critics are all against him, and a
+regular flaying, with salt and vinegar rubbed in afterward, will tell
+more with people who like good old-fashioned fiction than anything else.
+I like Bevans's things, but, dad burn it! when it comes to that first
+number, I'd offer up anybody."
+
+"What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulkerson!" said March, with a
+laugh.
+
+Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous about the attack on the
+novelist.  "Say!" he called out, gayly, "what should you think of a paper
+defending the late lamented system of slavery'?"
+
+"What do you mean, Fulkerson?"  asked March, with a puzzled smile.
+
+Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk, and pushed himself back, but
+kept his balance to the eye by canting his hat sharply forward."  There's
+an old cock over there at the widow's that's written a book to prove that
+slavery was and is the only solution of the labor problem.  He's a
+Southerner."
+
+"I should imagine," March assented.
+
+"He's got it on the brain that if the South could have been let alone by
+the commercial spirit and the pseudophilanthropy of the North, it would
+have worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition for the laborer,
+in which he would have been insured against want, and protected in all
+his personal rights by the state.  He read the introduction to me last
+night.  I didn't catch on to all the points--his daughter's an awfully
+pretty girl, and I was carrying that fact in my mind all the time, too,
+you know--but that's about the gist of it."
+
+"Seems to regard it as a lost opportunity?"  said March.
+
+"Exactly!  What a mighty catchy title, Neigh?  Look well on the title-
+page."
+
+"Well written?"
+
+"I reckon so; I don't know.  The Colonel read it mighty eloquently."
+
+"It mightn't be such bad business," said March, in a muse.  "Could you
+get me a sight of it without committing yourself?"
+
+"If the Colonel hasn't sent it off to another publisher this morning.  He
+just got it back with thanks yesterday.  He likes to keep it travelling."
+
+"Well, try it.  I've a notion it might be a curious thing."
+
+"Look here, March," said Fulkerson, with the effect of taking a fresh
+hold; "I wish you could let me have one of those New York things of yours
+for the first number.  After all, that's going to be the great card."
+
+"I couldn't, Fulkerson; I couldn't, really.  I want to philosophize the
+material, and I'm too new to it all yet.  I don't want to do merely
+superficial sketches."
+
+"Of course! Of course! I understand that.  Well, I don't want to hurry
+you.  Seen that old fellow of yours yet?  I think we ought to have that
+translation in the first number; don't you?  We want to give 'em a notion
+of what we're going to do in that line."
+
+"Yes," said March; "and I was going out to look up Lindau this morning.
+I've inquired at Maroni's, and he hasn't been there for several days.
+I've some idea perhaps he's sick.  But they gave me his address, and I'm
+going to see."
+
+"Well, that's right.  We want the first number to be the keynote in every
+way."
+
+March shook his head.  "You can't make it so.  The first number is bound
+to be a failure always, as far as the representative character goes.
+It's invariably the case.  Look at the first numbers of all the things
+you've seen started.  They're experimental, almost amateurish, and
+necessarily so, not only because the men that are making them up are
+comparatively inexperienced like ourselves, but because the material sent
+them to deal with is more or less consciously tentative.  People send
+their adventurous things to a new periodical because the whole thing is
+an adventure.  I've noticed that quality in all the volunteer
+contributions; it's in the articles that have been done to order even.
+No; I've about made up my mind that if we can get one good striking paper
+into the first number that will take people's minds off the others, we
+shall be doing all we can possible hope for.  I should like," March
+added, less seriously, "to make up three numbers ahead, and publish the
+third one first."
+
+Fulkerson dropped forward and struck his fist on the desk.  "It's a
+first-rate idea.  Why not do it?"
+
+March laughed.  "Fulkerson, I don't believe there's any quackish thing
+you wouldn't do in this cause.  From time to time I'm thoroughly ashamed
+of being connected with such a charlatan."
+
+Fulkerson struck his hat sharply backward.  "Ah, dad burn it! To give
+that thing the right kind of start I'd walk up and down Broadway between
+two boards, with the title-page of Every Other Week facsimiled on one and
+my name and address on the--"
+
+He jumped to his feet and shouted, "March, I'll do it!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"I'll hire a lot of fellows to make mud-turtles of themselves, and I'll
+have a lot of big facsimiles of the title-page, and I'll paint the town
+red!"
+
+March looked aghast at him.  "Oh, come, now, Fulkerson!"
+
+"I mean it.  I was in London when a new man had taken hold of the old
+Cornhill, and they were trying to boom it, and they had a procession of
+these mudturtles that reached from Charing Cross to Temple Bar.  Cornhill
+Magazine.  Sixpence.  Not a dull page in it.' I said to myself then that
+it was the livest thing I ever saw.  I respected the man that did that
+thing from the bottom of my heart.  I wonder I ever forgot it.  But it
+shows what a shaky thing the human mind is at its best."
+
+"You infamous mountebank!", said March, with great amusement at
+Fulkerson's access; "you call that congeries of advertising instinct of
+yours the human mind at its best?  Come, don't be so diffident,
+Fulkerson.  Well, I'm off to find Lindau, and when I come back I hope Mr.
+Dryfoos will have you under control.  I don't suppose you'll be quite
+sane again till after the first number is out.  Perhaps public opinion
+will sober you then."
+
+"Confound it, March! How do you think they will take it?  I swear I'm
+getting so nervous I don't know half the time which end of me is up.
+I believe if we don't get that thing out by the first of February it 'll
+be the death of me."
+
+"Couldn't wait till Washington's Birthday?  I was thinking it would give
+the day a kind of distinction, and strike the public imagination, if--"
+
+"No, I'll be dogged if I could!" Fulkerson lapsed more and more into the
+parlance of his early life in this season of strong excitement.
+"I believe if Beaton lags any on the art leg I'll kill him."
+
+"Well, I shouldn't mind your killing Beaton," said March, tranquilly, as
+he went out.
+
+He went over to Third Avenue and took the Elevated down to Chatham
+Square.  He found the variety of people in the car as unfailingly
+entertaining as ever.  He rather preferred the East Side to the West Side
+lines, because they offered more nationalities, conditions, and
+characters to his inspection.  They draw not only from the up-town
+American region, but from all the vast hive of populations swarming
+between them and the East River.  He had found that, according to the
+hour, American husbands going to and from business, and American wives
+going to and from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road, and that
+the most picturesque admixture to these familiar aspects of human nature
+were the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American Hebrews, who
+otherwise contributed to the effect of well-clad comfort and citizen-
+self-satisfaction of the crowd.  Now and then he had found himself in a
+car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the
+line, where he had read how they are worked and fed and housed like
+beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect, he
+had occasion for pensive question within himself as to what notion these
+poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life
+under its conditions; and whether they found them practically very
+different from those of the immemorial brigandage and enforced complicity
+with rapine under which they had been born.  But, after all, this was an
+infrequent effect, however massive, of travel on the West Side, whereas
+the East offered him continual entertainment in like sort.  The sort was
+never quite so squalid.  For short distances the lowest poverty, the
+hardest pressed labor, must walk; but March never entered a car without
+encountering some interesting shape of shabby adversity, which was almost
+always adversity of foreign birth.  New York is still popularly supposed
+to be in the control of the Irish, but March noticed in these East Side
+travels of his what must strike every observer returning to the city
+after a prolonged absence: the numerical subordination of the dominant
+race.  If they do not outvote them, the people of Germanic, of Slavonic,
+of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock outnumber the prepotent Celts; and March
+seldom found his speculation centred upon one of these.  The small eyes,
+the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted
+skulls, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of
+Italians; the blonde dulness of Germans; the cold quiet of Scandinavians
+--fire under ice--were aspects that he identified, and that gave him
+abundant suggestion for the personal histories he constructed, and for
+the more public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with the future
+economy of our heterogeneous commonwealth.  It must be owned that he did
+not take much trouble about this; what these poor people were thinking,
+hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering; just where and how they lived; who
+and what they individually were--these were the matters of his waking
+dreams as he stared hard at them, while the train raced farther into the
+gay ugliness--the shapeless, graceful, reckless picturesqueness of the
+Bowery.
+
+There were certain signs, certain facades, certain audacities of the
+prevailing hideousness that always amused him in that uproar to the eye
+which the strident forms and colors made.  He was interested in the
+insolence with which the railway had drawn its erasing line across the
+Corinthian front of an old theatre, almost grazing its fluted pillars,
+and flouting its dishonored pediment.  The colossal effigies of the fat
+women and the tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums; the vistas
+of shabby cross streets; the survival of an old hip-roofed house here and
+there at their angles; the Swiss chalet, histrionic decorativeness of the
+stations in prospect or retrospect; the vagaries of the lines that
+narrowed together or stretched apart according to the width of the
+avenue, but always in wanton disregard of the life that dwelt, and bought
+and sold, and rejoiced or sorrowed, and clattered or crawled, around,
+below, above--were features of the frantic panorama that perpetually
+touched his sense of humor and moved his sympathy.  Accident and then
+exigency seemed the forces at work to this extraordinary effect; the play
+of energies as free and planless as those that force the forest from the
+soil to the sky; and then the fierce struggle for survival, with the
+stronger life persisting over the deformity, the mutilation, the
+destruction, the decay of the weaker.  The whole at moments seemed to him
+lawless, godless; the absence of intelligent, comprehensive purpose in
+the huge disorder, and the violent struggle to subordinate the result to
+the greater good, penetrated with its dumb appeal the consciousness of a
+man who had always been too self-enwrapped to perceive the chaos to which
+the individual selfishness must always lead.
+
+But there was still nothing definite, nothing better than a vague
+discomfort, however poignant, in his half recognition of such facts; and
+he descended the station stairs at Chatham Square with a sense of the
+neglected opportunities of painters in that locality.  He said to himself
+that if one of those fellows were to see in Naples that turmoil of cars,
+trucks, and teams of every sort, intershot with foot-passengers going and
+coming to and from the crowded pavements, under the web of the railroad
+tracks overhead, and amid the spectacular approach of the streets that
+open into the square, he would have it down in his sketch-book at once.
+He decided simultaneously that his own local studies must be illustrated,
+and that be must come with the artist and show him just which bits to do,
+not knowing that the two arts can never approach the same material from
+the same point.  He thought he would particularly like his illustrator to
+render the Dickensy, cockneyish quality of the, shabby-genteel ballad-
+seller of whom he stopped to ask his way to the street where Lindau
+lived, and whom he instantly perceived to be, with his stock in trade,
+the sufficient object of an entire study by himself.  He had his ballads
+strung singly upon a cord against the house wall, and held down in piles
+on the pavement with stones and blocks of wood. Their control in this way
+intimated a volatility which was not perceptible in their sentiment.
+They were mostly tragical or doleful: some of them dealt with the wrongs
+of the working-man; others appealed to a gay experience of the high seas;
+but vastly the greater part to memories and associations of an Irish
+origin; some still uttered the poetry of plantation life in the artless
+accents of the end--man.  Where they trusted themselves, with syntax that
+yielded promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, to the ordinary
+American speech, it was to strike directly for the affections, to
+celebrate the domestic ties, and, above all, to embalm the memories of
+angel and martyr mothers whose dissipated sons deplored their sufferings
+too late.  March thought this not at all a bad thing in them; he smiled
+in patronage of their simple pathos; he paid the tribute of a laugh when
+the poet turned, as he sometimes did, from his conception of angel and
+martyr motherhood, and portrayed the mother in her more familiar phases
+of virtue and duty, with the retributive shingle or slipper in her hand.
+He bought a pocketful of this literature, popular in a sense which the
+most successful book can never be, and enlisted the ballad vendor so
+deeply in the effort to direct him to Lindau's dwelling by the best way
+that he neglected another customer, till a sarcasm on his absent-
+mindedness stung hint to retort, "I'm a-trying to answer a gentleman a
+civil question; that's where the absent-minded comes in."
+
+It seemed for some reason to be a day of leisure with the Chinese
+dwellers in Mott Street, which March had been advised to take first.
+They stood about the tops of basement stairs, and walked two and two
+along the dirty pavement, with their little hands tucked into their
+sleeves across their breasts, aloof in immaculate cleanliness from the
+filth around them, and scrutinizing the scene with that cynical sneer of
+faint surprise to which all aspects of our civilization seem to move
+their superiority.  Their numbers gave character to the street, and
+rendered not them, but what was foreign to them, strange there; so that
+March had a sense of missionary quality in the old Catholic church, built
+long before their incursion was dreamed of.  It seemed to have come to
+them there, and he fancied in the statued saint that looked down from its
+facade something not so much tolerant as tolerated, something
+propitiatory, almost deprecatory.  It was a fancy, of course; the street
+was sufficiently peopled with Christian children, at any rate, swarming
+and shrieking at their games; and presently a Christian mother appeared,
+pushed along by two policemen on a handcart, with a gelatinous tremor
+over the paving and a gelatinous jouncing at the curbstones.  She lay
+with her face to the sky, sending up an inarticulate lamentation; but the
+indifference of the officers forbade the notion of tragedy in her case.
+She was perhaps a local celebrity; the children left off their games, and
+ran gayly trooping after her; even the young fellow and young girl
+exchanging playful blows in a robust flirtation at the corner of a liquor
+store suspended their scuffle with a pleased interest as she passed.
+March understood the unwillingness of the poor to leave the worst
+conditions in the city for comfort and plenty in the country when he
+reflected upon this dramatic incident, one of many no doubt which daily
+occur to entertain them in such streets.  A small town could rarely offer
+anything comparable to it, and the country never.  He said that if life
+appeared so hopeless to him as it must to the dwellers in that
+neighborhood he should not himself be willing to quit its distractions,
+its alleviations, for the vague promise of unknown good in the distance
+somewhere.
+
+But what charm could such a man as Lindau find in such a place?  It could
+not be that he lived there because he was too poor to live elsewhere:
+with a shutting of the heart, March refused to believe this as he looked
+round on the abounding evidences of misery, and guiltily remembered his
+neglect of his old friend.  Lindau could probably find as cheap a lodging
+in some decenter part of the town; and, in fact, there was some
+amelioration of the prevailing squalor in the quieter street which he
+turned into from Mott.
+
+A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened the door for him when he
+pulled, with a shiver of foreboding, the bell-knob, from which a yard of
+rusty crape dangled.  But it was not Lindau who was dead, for the woman
+said he was at home, and sent March stumbling up the four or five dark
+flights of stairs that led to his tenement.  It was quite at the top of
+the house, and when March obeyed the German-English "Komm!" that followed
+his knock, he found himself in a kitchen where a meagre breakfast was
+scattered in stale fragments on the table before the stove.  The place
+was bare and cold; a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gave it a convivial
+air.  On the left from this kitchen was a room with a bed in it, which
+seemed also to be a cobbler's shop: on the right, through a door that
+stood ajar, came the German-English voice again, saying this time,
+"Hier!"
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+March pushed the door open into a room like that on the left, but with a
+writing-desk instead of a cobbler's bench, and a bed, where Lindau sat
+propped up; with a coat over his shoulders and a skull-cap on his head,
+reading a book, from which he lifted his eyes to stare blankly over his
+spectacles at March.  His hairy old breast showed through the night-
+shirt, which gaped apart; the stump of his left arm lay upon the book to
+keep it open.
+
+"Ah, my tear yo'ng friendt! Passil! Marge! Iss it you?"  he called out,
+joyously, the next moment.
+
+"Why, are you sick, Lindau?"  March anxiously scanned his face in taking
+his hand.
+
+Lindau laughed.  "No; I'm all righdt.  Only a lidtle lazy, and a lidtle
+eggonomigal.  Idt's jeaper to stay in pedt sometimes as to geep a fire a-
+goin' all the time.  Don't wandt to gome too hardt on the 'brafer
+Mann', you know:
+
+          "Braver Mann, er schafft mir zu essen."
+
+You remember?  Heine?  You readt Heine still?  Who is your favorite boet
+now, Passil?  You write some boetry yourself yet?  No?  Well, I am gladt
+to zee you.  Brush those baperss off of that jair.  Well, idt is goodt
+for zore eyess.  How didt you findt where I lif?
+
+"They told me at Maroni's," said March.  He tried to keep his eyes on
+Lindau's face, and not see the discomfort of the room, but he was aware
+of the shabby and frowsy bedding, the odor of stale smoke, and the pipes
+and tobacco shreds mixed with the books and manuscripts strewn over the
+leaf of the writing-desk.  He laid down on the mass the pile of foreign
+magazines he had brought under his arm.  "They gave me another address
+first."
+
+"Yes.  I have chust gome here," said Lindau.  "Idt is not very coy,
+Neigh?"
+
+"It might be gayer," March admitted, with a smile.  "Still," he added,
+soberly, "a good many people seem to live in this part of the town.
+Apparently they die here, too, Lindau.  There is crape on your outside
+door.  I didn't know but it was for you."
+
+"Nodt this time," said Lindau, in the same humor.  "Berhaps some other
+time.  We geep the ondertakers bratty puzy down here."
+
+"Well," said March, "undertakers must live, even if the rest of us have
+to die to let them."  Lindau laughed, and March went on: "But I'm glad it
+isn't your funeral, Lindau.  And you say you're not sick, and so I don't
+see why we shouldn't come to business."
+
+"Pusiness?"  Lindau lifted his eyebrows.  "You gome on pusiness?"
+
+"And pleasure combined," said March, and he went on to explain the
+service he desired at Lindau's hands.
+
+The old man listened with serious attention, and with assenting nods that
+culminated in a spoken expression of his willingness to undertake the
+translations.  March waited with a sort of mechanical expectation of his
+gratitude for the work put in his way, but nothing of the kind came from
+Lindau, and March was left to say, "Well, everything is understood, then;
+and I don't know that I need add that if you ever want any little advance
+on the work--"
+
+"I will ask you," said Lindau, quietly, "and I thank you for that.  But I
+can wait; I ton't needt any money just at bresent."  As if he saw some
+appeal for greater frankness in, March's eye, he went on: "I tidn't gome
+here begause I was too boor to lif anywhere else, and I ton't stay in
+pedt begause I couldn't haf a fire to geep warm if I wanted it.  I'm nodt
+zo padt off as Marmontel when he went to Paris.  I'm a lidtle loaxurious,
+that is all.  If I stay in pedt it's zo I can fling money away on
+somethings else.  Heigh?"
+
+"But what are you living here for, Lindau ?"  March smiled at the irony
+lurking in Lindau's words.
+
+"Well, you zee, I foundt I was begoming a lidtle too moch of an
+aristograt.  I hadt a room oap in Creenvidge Willage, among dose pig pugs
+over on the West Side, and I foundt"--Liudau's voice lost its jesting
+quality, and his face darkened--"that I was beginning to forget the
+boor!"
+
+"I should have thought," said March, with impartial interest, "that you
+might have seen poverty enough, now and then, in Greenwich Village to
+remind you of its existence."
+
+"Nodt like here," said Lindau.  "Andt you must zee it all the dtime--zee
+it, hear it, smell it, dtaste it--or you forget it.  That is what I gome
+here for.  I was begoming a ploated aristograt.  I thought I was nodt
+like these beople down here, when I gome down once to look aroundt;
+I thought I must be somethings else, and zo I zaid I better take myself
+in time, and I gome here among my brothers--the becears and the thiefs!"
+A noise made itself heard in the next room, as if the door were furtively
+opened, and a faint sound of tiptoeing and of hands clawing on a table.
+
+"Thiefs!" Lindau repeated, with a shout.  "Lidtle thiefs, that gabture
+your breakfast.  Ah! ha! ha!"  A wild scurrying of feet, joyous cries and
+tittering, and a slamming door followed upon his explosion, and he
+resumed in the silence: "Idt is the children cot pack from school.  They
+gome and steal what I leaf there on my daple.  Idt's one of our lidtle
+chokes; we onderstand one another; that's all righdt.  Once the gobbler
+in the other room there he used to chase 'em; he couldn't onderstand
+their lidtle tricks.  Now dot goppler's teadt, and he ton't chase 'em any
+more.  He was a Bohemian.  Gindt of grazy, I cuess."
+
+"Well, it's a sociable existence," March suggested.  "But perhaps if you
+let them have the things without stealing--"
+
+"Oh no, no!  Most nodt mage them too gonceitedt.  They mostn't go and
+feel themselfs petter than those boor millionairss that hadt to steal
+their money."
+
+March smiled indulgently at his old friend's violence.  "Oh, there are
+fagots and fagots, you know, Lindau; perhaps not all the millionaires are
+so guilty."
+
+"Let us speak German!" cried Lindau, in his own tongue, pushing his book
+aside, and thrusting his skullcap back from his forehead.  "How much
+money can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing some other
+man?"
+
+"Well, if you'll let me answer in English," said March, "I should say
+about five thousand dollars a year.  I name that figure because it's my
+experience that I never could earn more; but the experience of other men
+may be different, and if they tell me they can earn ten, or twenty, or
+fifty thousand a year, I'm not prepared to say they can't do it."
+
+Lindau hardly waited for his answer.  "Not the most gifted man that ever
+lived, in the practice of any art or science, and paid at the highest
+rate that exceptional genius could justly demand from those who have
+worked for their money, could ever earn a million dollars.  It is the
+landlords and the merchant princes, the railroad kings and the coal
+barons (the oppressors to whom you instinctively give the titles of
+tyrants)--it is these that make the millions, but no man earns them.
+What artist, what physician, what scientist, what poet was ever a
+millionaire?"
+
+"I can only think of the poet Rogers," said March, amused by Lindau's
+tirade.  "But he was as exceptional as the other Rogers, the martyr,
+who died with warm feet."  Lindau had apparently not understood his joke,
+and he went on, with the American ease of mind about everything: "But you
+must allow, Lindau, that some of those fellows don't do so badly with
+their guilty gains.  Some of them give work to armies of poor people--"
+
+Lindau furiously interrupted: "Yes, when they have gathered their
+millions together from the hunger and cold and nakedness and ruin and
+despair of hundreds of thousands of other men, they 'give work' to the
+poor!  They give work!  They allow their helpless brothers to earn enough
+to keep life in them!  They give work!  Who is it gives toil, and where
+will your rich men be when once the poor shall refuse to give toil'?
+Why, you have come to give me work!"
+
+March laughed outright.  "Well, I'm not a millionaire, anyway, Lindau,
+and I hope you won't make an example of me by refusing to give toil.  I
+dare say the millionaires deserve it, but I'd rather they wouldn't suffer
+in my person."
+
+"No," returned the old man, mildly relaxing the fierce glare he had bent
+upon March.  "No man deserves to sufer at the hands of another.  I lose
+myself when I think of the injustice in the world.  But I must not forget
+that I am like the worst of them."
+
+"You might go up Fifth Avenue and live among the rich awhile, when you're
+in danger of that," suggested March.  "At any rate," he added, by an
+impulse which he knew he could not justify to his wife, "I wish you'd
+come some day and lunch with their emissary.  I've been telling Mrs.
+March about you, and I want her and the children to see you.  Come over
+with these things and report."  He put his hand on the magazines as he
+rose.
+
+"I will come," said Lindau, gently.
+
+"Shall I give you your book?"  asked March.
+
+"No; I gidt oap bretty soon."
+
+"And--and--can you dress yourself?"
+
+"I vhistle, 'and one of those lidtle fellowss comess.  We haf to dake
+gare of one another in a blace like this.  Idt iss nodt like the worldt,"
+said Lindau, gloomily.
+
+March thought he ought to cheer him up.  "Oh, it isn't such a bad world,
+Lindau!  After all, the average of millionaires is small in it."  He
+added, "And I don't believe there's an American living that could look at
+that arm of yours and not wish to lend you a hand for the one you gave us
+all."  March felt this to be a fine turn, and his voice trembled slightly
+in saying it.
+
+Lindau smiled grimly.  "You think zo?  I wouldn't moch like to drost 'em.
+I've driedt idt too often."  He began to speak German again fiercely:
+"Besides, they owe me nothing.  Do you think I knowingly gave my hand to
+save this oligarchy of traders and tricksters, this aristocracy of
+railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine-slave drivers and mill-serf
+owners?  No; I gave it to the slave; the slave--ha! ha! ha!--whom I
+helped to unshackle to the common liberty of hunger and cold.  And you
+think I would be the beneficiary of such a state of things?"
+
+"I'm sorry to hear you talk so, Lindau," said March; "very sorry."
+He stopped with a look of pain, and rose to go.  Lindau suddenly broke
+into a laugh and into English.
+
+"Oh, well, it is only dalk, Passil, and it toes me goodt.  My parg is
+worse than my pidte, I cuess.  I pring these things roundt bretty soon.
+Good-bye, Passil, my tear poy.  Auf wiedersehen!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+March went away thinking of what Lindau had said, but not for the
+impersonal significance of his words so much as for the light they cast
+upon Lindau himself.  He thought the words violent enough, but in
+connection with what he remembered of the cheery, poetic, hopeful
+idealist, they were even more curious than lamentable.  In his own life
+of comfortable reverie he had never heard any one talk so before, but he
+had read something of the kind now and then in blatant labor newspapers
+which he had accidentally fallen in with, and once at a strikers' meeting
+he had heard rich people denounced with the same frenzy.  He had made his
+own reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric, and the obvious
+buncombe of the motive, and he had not taken the matter seriously.
+
+He could not doubt Lindau's sincerity, and he wondered how he came to
+that way of thinking.  From his experience of himself he accounted for a
+prevailing literary quality in it; he decided it to be from Lindau's
+reading and feeling rather than his reflection.  That was the notion he
+formed of some things he had met with in Ruskin to much the same effect;
+he regarded them with amusement as the chimeras of a rhetorician run away
+with by his phrases.
+
+But as to Lindau, the chief thing in his mind was a conception of the
+droll irony of a situation in which so fervid a hater of millionaires
+should be working, indirectly at least, for the prosperity of a man like
+Dryfoos, who, as March understood, had got his money together out of
+every gambler's chance in speculation, and all a schemer's thrift from
+the error and need of others.  The situation was not more incongruous,
+however, than all the rest of the 'Every Other Week' affair.  It seemed
+to him that there were no crazy fortuities that had not tended to its
+existence, and as time went on, and the day drew near for the issue of
+the first number, the sense of this intensified till the whole lost at
+moments the quality of a waking fact, and came to be rather a fantastic
+fiction of sleep.
+
+Yet the heterogeneous forces did co-operate to a reality which March
+could not deny, at least in their presence, and the first number was
+representative of all their nebulous intentions in a tangible form.
+As a result, it was so respectable that March began to respect these
+intentions, began to respect himself for combining and embodying them in
+the volume which appealed to him with a novel fascination, when the first
+advance copy was laid upon his desk.  Every detail of it was tiresomely
+familiar already, but the whole had a fresh interest now.  He now saw how
+extremely fit and effective Miss Leighton's decorative design for the
+cover was, printed in black and brick-red on the delicate gray tone of
+the paper.  It was at once attractive and refined, and he credited Beaton
+with quite all he merited in working it over to the actual shape.  The
+touch and the taste of the art editor were present throughout the number.
+As Fulkerson said, Beaton had caught on with the delicacy of a humming-
+bird and the tenacity of a bulldog to the virtues of their illustrative
+process, and had worked it for all it was worth.  There were seven papers
+in the number, and a poem on the last page of the cover, and he had found
+some graphic comment for each.  It was a larger proportion than would
+afterward be allowed, but for once in a way it was allowed.  Fulkerson
+said they could not expect to get their money back on that first number,
+anyway.  Seven of the illustrations were Beaton's; two or three he got
+from practised hands; the rest were the work of unknown people which he
+had suggested, and then related and adapted with unfailing ingenuity to
+the different papers.  He handled the illustrations with such sympathy as
+not to destroy their individual quality, and that indefinable charm which
+comes from good amateur work in whatever art.  He rescued them from their
+weaknesses and errors, while he left in them the evidence of the pleasure
+with which a clever young man, or a sensitive girl, or a refined woman
+had done them.  Inevitably from his manipulation, however, the art of the
+number acquired homogeneity, and there was nothing casual in its
+appearance.  The result, March eagerly owned, was better than the
+literary result, and he foresaw that the number would be sold and praised
+chiefly for its pictures.  Yet he was not ashamed of the literature, and
+he indulged his admiration of it the more freely because he had not only
+not written it, but in a way had not edited it.  To be sure, he had
+chosen all the material, but he had not voluntarily put it all together
+for that number; it had largely put itself together, as every number of
+every magazine does, and as it seems more and more to do, in the
+experience of every editor.  There had to be, of course, a story, and
+then a sketch of travel.  There was a literary essay and a social essay;
+there was a dramatic trifle, very gay, very light; there was a dashing
+criticism on the new pictures, the new plays, the new books, the new
+fashions; and then there was the translation of a bit of vivid Russian
+realism, which the editor owed to Lindau's exploration of the foreign
+periodicals left with him; Lindau was himself a romanticist of the Victor
+Hugo sort, but he said this fragment of Dostoyevski was good of its kind.
+The poem was a bit of society verse, with a backward look into simpler
+and wholesomer experiences.
+
+Fulkerson was extremely proud of the number; but he said it was too good
+--too good from every point of view.  The cover was too good, and the
+paper was too good, and that device of rough edges, which got over the
+objection to uncut leaves while it secured their aesthetic effect, was a
+thing that he trembled for, though he rejoiced in it as a stroke of the
+highest genius.  It had come from Beaton at the last moment, as a
+compromise, when the problem of the vulgar croppiness of cut leaves and
+the unpopularity of uncut leaves seemed to have no solution but suicide.
+Fulkerson was still morally crawling round on his hands and knees, as he
+said, in abject gratitude at Beaton's feet, though he had his qualms, his
+questions; and he declared that Beaton was the most inspired ass since
+Balaam's.  "We're all asses, of course," he admitted, in semi-apology to
+March; "but we're no such asses as Beaton."  He said that if the tasteful
+decorativeness of the thing did not kill it with the public outright,
+its literary excellence would give it the finishing stroke. Perhaps that
+might be overlooked in the impression of novelty which a first number
+would give, but it must never happen again.  He implored March to promise
+that it should never happen again; be said their only hope was in the
+immediate cheapening of the whole affair.  It was bad enough to give the
+public too much quantity for their money, but to throw in such quality as
+that was simply ruinous; it must be stopped.  These were the expressions
+of his intimate moods; every front that he presented to the public wore a
+glow of lofty, of devout exultation.  His pride in the number gushed out
+in fresh bursts of rhetoric to every one whom he could get to talk with
+him about it.  He worked the personal kindliness of the press to the
+utmost.  He did not mind making himself ridiculous or becoming a joke in
+the good cause, as he called it.  He joined in the applause when a
+humorist at the club feigned to drop dead from his chair at Fulkerson's
+introduction of the topic, and he went on talking that first number into
+the surviving spectators.  He stood treat upon all occasions, and he
+lunched attaches of the press at all hours.  He especially befriended the
+correspondents of the newspapers of other cities, for, as he explained to
+March, those fellows could give him any amount of advertising simply as
+literary gossip.  Many of the fellows were ladies who could not be so
+summarily asked out to lunch, but Fulkerson's ingenuity was equal to
+every exigency, and he contrived somehow to make each of these feel that
+she had been possessed of exclusive information.  There was a moment when
+March conjectured a willingness in Fulkerson to work Mrs. March into the
+advertising department, by means of a tea to these ladies and their
+friends which she should administer in his apartment, but he did not
+encourage Fulkerson to be explicit, and the moment passed.  Afterward,
+when he told his wife about it, he was astonished to find that she would
+not have minded doing it for Fulkerson, and he experienced another proof
+of the bluntness of the feminine instincts in some directions, and of the
+personal favor which Fulkerson seemed to enjoy with the whole sex.  This
+alone was enough to account for the willingness of these correspondents
+to write about the first number, but March accused him of sending it to
+their addresses with boxes of Jacqueminot roses and Huyler candy.
+
+Fulkerson let him enjoy his joke.  He said that he would do that or
+anything else for the good cause, short of marrying the whole circle of
+female correspondents.
+
+March was inclined to hope that if the first number had been made too
+good for the country at large, the more enlightened taste of metropolitan
+journalism would invite a compensating favor for it in New York.  But
+first Fulkerson and then the event proved him wrong.  In spite of the
+quality of the magazine, and in spite of the kindness which so many
+newspaper men felt for Fulkerson, the notices in the New York papers
+seemed grudging and provisional to the ardor of the editor.  A merit in
+the work was acknowledged, and certain defects in it for which March had
+trembled were ignored; but the critics astonished him by selecting for
+censure points which he was either proud of or had never noticed; which
+being now brought to his notice he still could not feel were faults.  He
+owned to Fulkerson that if they had said so and so against it, he could
+have agreed with them, but that to say thus and so was preposterous; and
+that if the advertising had not been adjusted with such generous
+recognition of the claims of the different papers, he should have known
+the counting-room was at the bottom of it.  As it was, he could only
+attribute it to perversity or stupidity.  It was certainly stupid to
+condemn a magazine novelty like 'Every Other Week' for being novel; and
+to augur that if it failed, it would fail through its departure from the
+lines on which all the other prosperous magazines had been built, was in
+the last degree perverse, and it looked malicious.  The fact that it was
+neither exactly a book nor a magazine ought to be for it and not against
+it, since it would invade no other field; it would prosper on no ground
+but its own.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+The more March thought of the injustice of the New York press (which had
+not, however, attacked the literary quality of the number) the more
+bitterly he resented it; and his wife's indignation superheated his own.
+'Every Other Week' had become a very personal affair with the whole
+family; the children shared their parents' disgust; Belle was outspoken
+in, her denunciations of a venal press.  Mrs. March saw nothing but ruin
+ahead, and began tacitly to plan a retreat to Boston, and an
+establishment retrenched to the basis of two thousand a year.  She shed
+some secret tears in anticipation of the privations which this must
+involve; but when Fulkerson came to see March rather late the night of
+the publication day, she nobly told him that if the worst came to the
+worst she could only have the kindliest feeling toward him, and should
+not regard him as in the slightest degree responsible.
+
+"Oh, hold on, hold on!" he protested.  "You don't think we've made a
+failure, do you?"
+
+"Why, of course," she faltered, while March remained gloomily silent.
+
+"Well, I guess we'll wait for the official count, first.  Even New York
+hasn't gone against us, and I guess there's a majority coming down to
+Harlem River that could sweep everything before it, anyway."
+
+"What do you mean, Fulkerson?"  March demanded, sternly.
+
+"Oh, nothing! Only, the 'News Company' has ordered ten thousand now; and
+you know we had to give them the first twenty on commission."
+
+"What do you mean?"  March repeated; his wife held her breath.
+
+"I mean that the first number is a booming success already, and that it's
+going to a hundred thousand before it stops.  That unanimity and variety
+of censure in the morning papers, combined with the attractiveness of the
+thing itself, has cleared every stand in the city, and now if the favor
+of the country press doesn't turn the tide against us, our fortune's
+made."  The Marches remained dumb.  "Why, look here! Didn't I tell you
+those criticisms would be the making of us, when they first began to turn
+you blue this morning, March?"
+
+"He came home to lunch perfectly sick," said Mrs. Marcli; "and I wouldn't
+let him go back again."
+
+"Didn't I tell you so?"  Fulkerson persisted.
+
+March could not remember that he had, or that he had been anything but
+incoherently and hysterically jocose over the papers, but he said, "Yes,
+yes--I think so."
+
+"I knew it from the start," said Fulkerson.  "The only other person who
+took those criticisms in the right spirit was Mother Dryfoos--I've just
+been bolstering up the Dryfoos family.  She had them read to her by Mrs.
+Mandel, and she understood them to be all the most flattering prophecies
+of success.  Well, I didn't read between the lines to that extent, quite;
+but I saw that they were going to help us, if there was anything in us,
+more than anything that could have been done.  And there was something in
+us! I tell you, March, that seven-shooting self-cocking donkey of a
+Beaton has given us the greatest start!  He's caught on like a mouse.
+He's made the thing awfully chic; it's jimmy; there's lots of dog about
+it.  He's managed that process so that the illustrations look as
+expensive as first-class wood-cuts, and they're cheaper than chromos.
+He's put style into the whole thing."
+
+"Oh yes," said March, with eager meekness, "it's Beaton that's done it."
+
+Fulkerson read jealousy of Beaton in Mrs. March's face.  "Beaton has
+given us the start because his work appeals to the eye.  There's no
+denying that the pictures have sold this first number; but I expect the
+literature of this first number to sell the pictures of the second.  I've
+been reading it all over, nearly, since I found how the cat was jumping;
+I was anxious about it, and I tell you, old man, it's good.  Yes, sir!
+I was afraid maybe you had got it too good, with that Boston refinement
+of yours; but I reckon you haven't.  I'll risk it.  I don't see how you
+got so much variety into so few things, and all of them palpitant, all of
+'em on the keen jump with actuality."
+
+The mixture of American slang with the jargon of European criticism in
+Fulkerson's talk made March smile, but his wife did not seem to notice it
+in her exultation.  "That is just what I say," she broke in.  "It's
+perfectly wonderful.  I never was anxious about it a moment, except, as
+you say, Mr. Fulkerson, I was afraid it might be too good."
+
+They went on in an antiphony of praise till March said: "Really, I don't
+see what's left me but to strike for higher wages.  I perceive that I'm
+indispensable."
+
+"Why, old man, you're coming in on the divvy, you know," said Fulkerson.
+
+They both laughed, and when Fulkerson was gone, Mrs. March asked her
+husband what a divvy was.
+
+"It's a chicken before it's hatched."
+
+"No! Truly?"
+
+He explained, and she began to spend the divvy.
+
+At Mrs. Leighton's Fulkerson gave Alma all the honor of the success; he
+told her mother that the girl's design for the cover had sold every
+number, and Mrs. Leighton believed him.
+
+"Well, Ah think Ah maght have some of the glory," Miss Woodburn pouted.
+"Where am Ah comin' in?"
+
+"You're coming in on the cover of the next number," said Fulkerson."
+We're going to have your face there; Miss Leighton's going to sketch it
+in."  He said this reckless of the fact that he had already shown them
+the design of the second number, which was Beaton's weird bit of gas-
+country landscape.
+
+"Ah don't see why you don't wrahte the fiction for your magazine, Mr.
+Fulkerson," said the girl.
+
+This served to remind Fulkerson of something.  He turned to her father.
+"I'll tell you what, Colonel Woodburn, I want Mr. March to see some
+chapters of that book of yours.  I've been talking to him about it."
+
+"I do not think it would add to the popularity of your periodical, sir,"
+said the Colonel, with a stately pleasure in being asked.  "My views of a
+civilization based upon responsible slavery would hardly be acceptable to
+your commercialized society."
+
+"Well, not as a practical thing, of course," Fulkerson admitted.  "But as
+something retrospective, speculative, I believe it would make a hit.
+There's so much going on now about social questions; I guess people would
+like to read it."
+
+"I do not know that my work is intended to amuse people," said the
+Colonel, with some state.
+
+"Mah goodness! Ah only wish it WAS, then," said his daughter; and she
+added: "Yes, Mr. Fulkerson, the Colonel will be very glad to submit
+po'tions of his woak to yo' edito'.  We want to have some of the honaw.
+Perhaps we can say we helped to stop yo' magazine, if we didn't help to
+stawt it."
+
+They all laughed at her boldness, and Fulkerson said: "It 'll take a good
+deal more than that to stop 'Every Other Week'.  The Colonel's whole book
+couldn't do it."  Then he looked unhappy, for Colonel Woodburn did not
+seem to enjoy his reassuring words; but Miss Woodburn came to his rescue.
+"You maght illustrate it with the po'trait of the awthoris daughtaw, if
+it's too late for the covah."
+
+"Going to have that in every number, Miss Woodburn!" he cried.
+
+"Oh, mah goodness!" she said, with mock humility.
+
+Alma sat looking at her piquant head, black, unconsciously outlined
+against the lamp, as she sat working by the table.  "Just keep still a
+moment!"
+
+She got her sketch-block and pencils, and began to draw; Fulkerson tilted
+himself forward and looked over her shoulder; he smiled outwardly;
+inwardly he was divided between admiration of Miss Woodburn's arch beauty
+and appreciation of the skill which reproduced it; at the same time he
+was trying to remember whether March had authorized him to go so far as
+to ask for a sight of Colonel Woodburn's manuscript.  He felt that he had
+trenched upon March's province, and he framed one apology to the editor
+for bringing him the manuscript, and another to the author for bringing
+it back.
+
+"Most Ah hold raght still like it was a photograph?"  asked Miss
+Woodburn.  "Can Ah toak?"
+
+"Talk all you want," said Alma, squinting her eyes.  "And you needn't be
+either adamantine, nor yet--wooden."
+
+"Oh, ho' very good of you!  Well, if Ah can toak--go on, Mr. Fulkerson!"
+
+"Me talk?  I can't breathe till this thing is done!" sighed Fulkerson; at
+that point of his mental drama the Colonel was behaving rustily about the
+return of his manuscript, and he felt that he was looking his last on
+Miss Woodburn's profile.
+
+"Is she getting it raght?"  asked the girl.
+
+"I don't know which is which," said Fulkerson.
+
+"Oh, Ah hope Ah shall! Ah don't want to go round feelin' like a sheet of
+papah half the time."
+
+"You could rattle on, just the same," suggested Alma.
+
+"Oh, now! Jost listen to that, Mr. Fulkerson.  Do you call that any way
+to toak to people?"
+
+"You might know which you were by the color," Fulkerson began, and then
+be broke off from the personal consideration with a business inspiration,
+and smacked himself on the knee, "We could print it in color!"
+
+Mrs. Leighton gathered up her sewing and held it with both hands in her
+lap, while she came round, and looked critically at the sketch and the
+model over her glasses.  "It's very good, Alma," she said.
+
+Colonel Woodburn remained restively on his side of the table.  "Of
+course, Mr. Fulkerson, you were jesting, sir, when you spoke of printing
+a sketch of my daughter."
+
+"Why, I don't know--If you object--?
+
+"I do, sir--decidedly," said the Colonel.
+
+"Then that settles it, of course,--I only meant--"
+
+"Indeed it doesn't!" cried the girl.  "Who's to know who it's from?
+Ah'm jost set on havin' it printed! Ah'm going to appear as the head of
+Slavery--in opposition to the head of Liberty."
+
+"There'll be a revolution inside of forty-eight hours, and we'll have the
+Colonel's system going wherever a copy of 'Every Other Week' circulates,"
+said Fulkerson.
+
+"This sketch belongs to me," Alma interposed.  "I'm not going to let it
+be printed."
+
+"Oh, mah goodness!" said Miss Woodburn, laughing good-humoredly.
+"That's becose you were brought up to hate slavery."
+
+"I should like Mr. Beaton to see it," said Mrs. Leighton, in a sort of
+absent tone.  She added, to Fulkerson: "I rather expected he might be in
+to-night."
+
+"Well, if he comes we'll leave it to Beaton," Fulkerson said, with relief
+in the solution, and an anxious glance at the Colonel, across the table,
+to see how he took that form of the joke.  Miss Woodburn intercepted his
+glance and laughed, and Fulkerson laughed, too, but rather forlornly.
+
+Alma set her lips primly and turned her head first on one side and then
+on the other to look at the sketch.  "I don't think we'll leave it to Mr.
+Beaton, even if he comes."
+
+"We left the other design for the cover to Beaton," Fulkerson insinuated.
+"I guess you needn't be afraid of him."
+
+"Is it a question of my being afraid?"  Alma asked; she seemed coolly
+intent on her drawing.
+
+"Miss Leighton thinks he ought to be afraid of her," Miss Woodburn
+explained.
+
+"It's a question of his courage, then?" said Alma.
+
+"Well, I don't think there are many young ladies that Beaton's afraid
+of," said Fulkerson, giving himself the respite of this purely random
+remark, while he interrogated the faces of Mrs. Leighton and Colonel
+Woodburn for some light upon the tendency of their daughters' words.
+
+He was not helped by Mrs. Leighton's saying, with a certain anxiety,
+"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, you're as much in the dark as I am myself, then," said Fulkerson.
+"I suppose I meant that Beaton is rather--a--favorite, you know.  The
+women like him."
+
+Mrs. Leighton sighed, and Colonel Woodburn rose and left the room.
+
+In the silence that followed, Fulkerson looked from one lady to the other
+with dismay.  "I seem to have put my foot in it, somehow," he suggested,
+and Miss Woodburn gave a cry of laughter.
+
+"Poo' Mr. Fulkerson!  Poo' Mr. Fulkerson!  Papa thoat you wanted him to
+go."
+
+"Wanted him to go?"  repeated Fulkerson.
+
+"We always mention Mr. Beaton when we want to get rid of papa."
+
+"Well, it seems to me that I have noticed that he didn't take much
+interest in Beaton, as a general topic.  But I don't know that I ever saw
+it drive him out of the room before!"
+
+"Well, he isn't always so bad," said Miss Woodburn.  "But it was a case
+of hate at first sight, and it seems to be growin' on papa."
+
+"Well, I can understand that," said Fulkerson.  "The impulse to destroy
+Beaton is something that everybody has to struggle against at the start."
+
+"I must say, Mr. Fulkerson," said Mrs. Leighton, in the tremor through
+which she nerved herself to differ openly with any one she liked,
+"I never had to struggle with anything of the kind, in regard to
+Mr. Beaton.  He has always been most respectful and--and--considerate,
+with me, whatever he has been with others."
+
+"Well, of course, Mrs. Leighton!" Fulkerson came back in a soothing tone.
+"But you see you're the rule that proves the exception.  I was speaking
+of the way men felt about Beaton.  It's different with ladies; I just
+said so."
+
+"Is it always different?"  Alma asked, lifting her head and her hand from
+her drawing, and staring at it absently.
+
+Fulkerson pushed both his hands through his whiskers.  "Look here!  Look
+here!" he said.  "Won't somebody start some other subject?  We haven't
+had the weather up yet, have we?  Or the opera?  What is the matter with
+a few remarks about politics?"
+
+"Why, Ah thoat you lahked to toak about the staff of yo' magazine," said
+Miss Woodburn.
+
+"Oh, I do!" said Fulkerson.  "But not always about the same member of it.
+He gets monotonous, when he doesn't get complicated.  I've just come
+round from the Marches'," he added, to Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"I suppose they've got thoroughly settled in their apartment by this
+time."  Mrs. Leighton said something like this whenever the Marches were
+mentioned.  At the bottom of her heart she had not forgiven them for not
+taking her rooms; she had liked their looks so much; and she was always
+hoping that they were uncomfortable or dissatisfied; she could not help
+wanting them punished a little.
+
+"Well, yes; as much as they ever will be," Fulkerson answered.
+"The Boston style is pretty different, you know; and the Marches are old-
+fashioned folks, and I reckon they never went in much for bric-a-brac
+They've put away nine or ten barrels of dragon candlesticks, but they
+keep finding new ones."
+
+"Their landlady has just joined our class," said Alma.  "Isn't her name
+Green?  She happened to see my copy of 'Every Other Week', and said she
+knew the editor; and told me."
+
+"Well, it's a little world," said Fulkerson.  "You seem to be touching
+elbows with everybody.  Just think of your having had our head translator
+for a model."
+
+"Ah think that your whole publication revolves aroand the Leighton
+family," said Miss Woodburn.
+
+"That's pretty much so," Fulkerson admitted.  "Anyhow, the publisher
+seems disposed to do so."
+
+"Are you the publisher?  I thought it was Mr. Dryfoos," said Alma.
+
+"It is."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+The tone and the word gave Fulkerson a discomfort which he promptly
+confessed.  "Missed again."
+
+The girls laughed, and he regained something of his lost spirits, and
+smiled upon their gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it.
+
+Miss Woodburn asked, "And is Mr. Dryfoos senio' anything like ouah Mr.
+Dryfoos?"
+
+"Not the least."
+
+"But he's jost as exemplary?"
+
+"Yes; in his way."
+
+"Well, Ah wish Ah could see all those pinks of puffection togethah,
+once."
+
+"Why, look here! I've been thinking I'd celebrate a little, when the old
+gentleman gets back.  Have a little supper--something of that kind.  How
+would you like to let me have your parlors for it, Mrs. Leighton?  You
+ladies could stand on the stairs, and have a peep at us, in the bunch."
+
+"Oh, mah!  What a privilege!  And will Miss Alma be there, with the othah
+contributors?  Ah shall jost expah of envy!"
+
+"She won't be there in person," said Fulkerson, "but she'll be
+represented by the head of the art department."
+
+"Mah goodness! And who'll the head of the publishing department
+represent?"
+
+"He can represent you," said Alma.
+
+"Well, Ah want to be represented, someho'."
+
+"We'll have the banquet the night before you appear on the cover of our
+fourth number," said Fulkerson.
+
+"Ah thoat that was doubly fo'bidden," said Miss Woodburn.  "By the stern
+parent and the envious awtust."
+
+"We'll get Beaton to get round them, somehow.  I guess we can trust him
+to manage that."
+
+Mrs. Leighton sighed her resentment of the implication.
+
+"I always feel that Mr. Beaton doesn't do himself justice," she began.
+
+Fulkerson could not forego the chance of a joke.  "Well, maybe he would
+rather temper justice with mercy in a case like his."  This made both the
+younger ladies laugh.  "I judge this is my chance to get off with my
+life," he added, and he rose as he spoke.  "Mrs. Leighton, I am about the
+only man of my sex who doesn't thirst for Beaton's blood most of the
+time.  But I know him and I don't.  He's more kinds of a good fellow than
+people generally understand.  He doesn't wear his heart upon his sleeve-
+not his ulster sleeve, anyway.  You can always count me on your side when
+it's a question of finding Beaton not guilty if he'll leave the State."
+
+Alma set her drawing against the wall, in rising to say goodnight to
+Fulkerson.  He bent over on his stick to look at it.  "Well, it's
+beautiful," he sighed, with unconscious sincerity.
+
+Alma made him a courtesy of mock modesty.  "Thanks to Miss Woodburn!"
+
+"Oh no! All she had to do was simply to stay put."
+
+"Don't you think Ah might have improved it if Ah had, looked better?"
+the girl asked, gravely.
+
+"Oh, you couldn't!" said Fulkerson, and he went off triumphant in their
+applause and their cries of "Which? which?"
+
+Mrs. Leighton sank deep into an accusing gloom when at last she found
+herself alone with her daughter.  "I don't know what you are thinking
+about, Alma Leighton.  If you don't like Mr. Beaton--"
+
+"I don't."
+
+"You don't?  You know better than that.  You know that, you did care for
+him."
+
+"Oh! that's a very different thing.  That's a thing that can be got
+over."
+
+"Got over!" repeated Mrs. Leighton, aghast.
+
+"Of course, it can!  Don't be romantic, mamma.  People get over dozens of
+such fancies.  They even marry for love two or three times."
+
+"Never!" cried her mother, doing her best to feel shocked; and at last
+looking it.
+
+Her looking it had no effect upon Alma.  "You can easily get over caring
+for people; but you can't get over liking them--if you like them because
+they are sweet and good.  That's what lasts.  I was a simple goose,
+and he imposed upon me because he was a sophisticated goose.  Now the
+case is reversed."
+
+"He does care for you, now.  You can see it.  Why do you encourage him to
+come here?"
+
+"I don't," said Alma.  "I will tell him to keep away if you like.  But
+whether he comes or goes, it will be the same."
+
+"Not to him, Alma!  He is in love with you!"
+
+"He has never said so."
+
+"And you would really let him say so, when you intend to refuse him?"
+
+"I can't very well refuse him till he does say so."
+
+This was undeniable.  Mrs. Leighton could only demand, in an awful tone,
+"May I ask why--if you cared for him; and I know you care for him still
+you will refuse him?"
+
+Alma laughed.  "Because--because I'm wedded to my Art, and I'm not going
+to commit bigamy, whatever I do."
+
+"Alma!"
+
+"Well, then, because I don't like him--that is, I don't believe in him,
+and don't trust him.  He's fascinating, but he's false and he's fickle.
+He can't help it, I dare say."
+
+"And you are perfectly hard.  Is it possible that you were actually
+pleased to have Mr. Fulkerson tease you about Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"Oh, good-night, now, mamma! This is becoming personal"
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Artists never do anything like other people
+Ballast of her instinctive despondency
+Clinging persistence of such natures
+Dividend: It's a chicken before it's hatched
+Gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it
+Hopeful recklessness
+How much can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing
+I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of yours
+If you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen
+It must be your despair that helps you to bear up
+Marry for love two or three times
+No man deserves to sufer at the hands of another
+Patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius
+Person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it
+Say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him
+Shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo'--its inconvenience
+Timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes, v2
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+PART THIRD
+
+
+I.
+
+The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial success of 'Every Other
+Week' expanded in Fulkerson's fancy into a series.  Instead of the
+publishing and editorial force, with certain of the more representative
+artists and authors sitting down to a modest supper in Mrs. Leighton's
+parlors, he conceived of a dinner at Delmonico's, with the principal
+literary and artistic, people throughout the country as guests, and an
+inexhaustible hospitality to reporters and correspondents, from whom
+paragraphs, prophetic and historic, would flow weeks before and after the
+first of the series.  He said the thing was a new departure in magazines;
+it amounted to something in literature as radical as the American
+Revolution in politics: it was the idea of self government in the arts;
+and it was this idea that had never yet been fully developed in regard to
+it.  That was what must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and the
+speeches must be reported.  Then it would go like wildfire.  He asked
+March whether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he
+was sure, would come; he was a literary man.  They ought to invite Mr.
+Evarts, and the Cardinal and the leading Protestant divines.  His
+ambition stopped at nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there
+he had to wait the return of the elder Dryfoos from the West, and Dryfoos
+was still delayed at Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was
+afraid he would stay there till his own enthusiasm escaped in other
+activities, other plans.
+
+Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall under a superstitious
+subjection to another man; but March could not help seeing that in this
+possible measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson's fetish.  He did not revere him,
+March decided, because it was not in Fulkerson's nature to revere
+anything; he could like and dislike, but he could not respect.
+Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; and besides the homage
+which those who have not pay to those who have, Fulkerson rendered
+Dryfoos the tribute of a feeling which March could only define as a sort
+of bewilderment.  As well as March could make out, this feeling was
+evoked by the spectacle of Dryfoos's unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was
+fond of dazzling himself with.  It perfectly consisted with a keen sense
+of whatever was sordid and selfish in a man on whom his career must have
+had its inevitable effect.  He liked to philosophize the case with March,
+to recall Dryfoos as he was when he first met him still somewhat in the
+sap, at Moffitt, and to study the processes by which he imagined him to
+have dried into the hardened speculator, without even the pretence to any
+advantage but his own in his ventures.  He was aware of painting the
+character too vividly, and he warned March not to accept it exactly in
+those tints, but to subdue them and shade it for himself.  He said that
+where his advantage was not concerned, there was ever so much good in
+Dryfoos, and that if in some things be had grown inflexible, he had
+expanded in others to the full measure of the vast scale on which he did
+business.  It had seemed a little odd to March that a man should put
+money into such an enterprise as 'Every Other Week' and go off about
+other affairs, not only without any sign of anxiety, but without any sort
+of interest.  But Fulkerson said that was the splendid side of Dryfoos.
+He had a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to the strain of any such
+uncertainty.  He had faced the music once for all, when he asked
+Fulkerson what the thing would cost in the different degrees of potential
+failure; and then he had gone off, leaving everything to Fulkerson and
+the younger Dryfoos, with the instruction simply to go ahead and not
+bother him about it.  Fulkerson called that pretty tall for an old fellow
+who used to bewail the want of pigs and chickens to occupy his mind.
+He alleged it as another proof of the versatility of the American mind,
+and of the grandeur of institutions and opportunities that let every man
+grow to his full size, so that any man in America could run the concern
+if necessary.  He believed that old Dryfoos could step into Bismarck's
+shoes and run the German Empire at ten days' notice, or about as long as
+it would take him to go from New York to Berlin.  But Bismarck would not
+know anything about Dryfoos's plans till Dryfoos got ready to show his
+hand.  Fulkerson himself did not pretend to say what the old man had been
+up to since he went West.  He was at Moffitt first, and then he was at
+Chicago, and then he had gone out to Denver to look after some mines he
+had out there, and a railroad or two; and now he was at Moffitt again.
+He was supposed to be closing up his affairs there, but nobody could say.
+
+Fulkerson told March the morning after Dryfoos returned that he had not
+only not pulled out at Moffitt, but had gone in deeper, ten times deeper
+than ever. He was in a royal good-humor, Fulkerson reported, and was
+going to drop into the office on his way up from the Street (March
+understood Wall Street) that afternoon.  He was tickled to death with
+'Every Other Week' so far as it had gone, and was anxious to pay his
+respects to the editor.
+
+March accounted for some rhetoric in this, but let it flatter him, and
+prepared himself for a meeting about which he could see that Fulkerson
+was only less nervous than he had shown himself about the public
+reception of the first number.  It gave March a disagreeable feeling of
+being owned and of being about to be inspected by his proprietor; but he
+fell back upon such independence as he could find in the thought of those
+two thousand dollars of income beyond the caprice of his owner, and
+maintained an outward serenity.
+
+He was a little ashamed afterward of the resolution it had cost him to do
+so.  It was not a question of Dryfoos's physical presence: that was
+rather effective than otherwise, and carried a suggestion of moneyed
+indifference to convention in the gray business suit of provincial cut,
+and the low, wide-brimmed hat of flexible black felt.  He had a stick
+with an old-fashioned top of buckhorn worn smooth and bright by the palm
+of his hand, which had not lost its character in fat, and which had a
+history of former work in its enlarged knuckles, though it was now as
+soft as March's, and must once have been small even for a man of Mr.
+Dryfoos's stature; he was below the average size.  But what struck March
+was the fact that Dryfoos seemed furtively conscious of being a country
+person, and of being aware that in their meeting he was to be tried by
+other tests than those which would have availed him as a shrewd
+speculator.  He evidently had some curiosity about March, as the first of
+his kind whom he bad encountered; some such curiosity as the country
+school trustee feels and tries to hide in the presence of the new
+schoolmaster.  But the whole affair was, of course, on a higher plane; on
+one side Dryfoos was much more a man of the world than March was, and he
+probably divined this at once, and rested himself upon the fact in a
+measure.  It seemed to be his preference that his son should introduce
+them, for he came upstairs with Conrad, and they had fairly made
+acquaintance before Fulkerson joined them.
+
+Conrad offered to leave them at once, but his father made him stay.
+"I reckon Mr. March and I haven't got anything so private to talk about
+that we want to keep it from the other partners.  Well, Mr. March, are
+you getting used to New York yet?  It takes a little time."
+
+"Oh yes.  But not so much time as most places.  Everybody belongs more or
+less in New York; nobody has to belong here altogether."
+
+"Yes, that is so.  You can try it, and go away if you don't like it a
+good deal easier than you could from a smaller place.  Wouldn't make so
+much talk, would it?"  He glanced at March with a jocose light in his
+shrewd eyes.  "That is the way I feel about it all the time: just
+visiting.  Now, it wouldn't be that way in Boston, I reckon?"
+
+"You couldn't keep on visiting there your whole life," said March.
+
+Dryfoos laughed, showing his lower teeth in a way that was at once simple
+and fierce.  "Mr. Fulkerson didn't hardly know as he could get you to
+leave.  I suppose you got used to it there.  I never been in your city."
+
+"I had got used to it; but it was hardly my city, except by marriage.  My
+wife's a Bostonian."
+
+"She's been a little homesick here, then," said Dryfoos, with a smile of
+the same quality as his laugh.
+
+"Less than I expected," said March.  "Of course, she was very much
+attached to our old home."
+
+"I guess my wife won't ever get used to New York," said Dryfoos, and he
+drew in his lower lip with a sharp sigh.  "But my girls like it; they're
+young.  You never been out our way yet, Mr. March?  Out West?"
+
+"Well, only for the purpose of being born, and brought up.  I used to
+live in Crawfordsville, and then Indianapolis."
+
+"Indianapolis is bound to be a great place," said Dryfoos.  "I remember
+now, Mr. Fulkerson told me you was from our State."  He went on to brag
+of the West, as if March were an Easterner and had to be convinced.
+"You ought to see all that country.  It's a great country."
+
+"Oh yes," said March, "I understand that."  He expected the praise of the
+great West to lead up to some comment on 'Every Other Week'; and there
+was abundant suggestion of that topic in the manuscripts, proofs of
+letter-press and illustrations, with advance copies of the latest number
+strewn over his table.
+
+But Dryfoos apparently kept himself from looking at these things.
+He rolled his head about on his shoulders to take in the character of the
+room, and said to his son, "You didn't change the woodwork, after all."
+
+"No; the architect thought we had better let it be, unless we meant to
+change the whole place.  He liked its being old-fashioned."
+
+"I hope you feel comfortable here, Mr. March," the old man said, bringing
+his eyes to bear upon him again after their tour of inspection.
+
+"Too comfortable for a working-man," said March, and he thought that this
+remark must bring them to some talk about his work, but the proprietor
+only smiled again.
+
+"I guess I sha'n't lose much on this house," he returned, as if musing
+aloud.  "This down-town property is coming up.  Business is getting in on
+all these side streets.  I thought I paid a pretty good price for it,
+too."  He went on to talk of real estate, and March began to feel a
+certain resentment at his continued avoidance of the only topic in which
+they could really have a common interest.  "You live down this way
+somewhere, don't you?" the old man concluded.
+
+"Yes.  I wished to be near my work."  March was vexed with himself for
+having recurred to it; but afterward he was not sure but Dryfoos shared
+his own diffidence in the matter, and was waiting for him to bring it
+openly into the talk.  At times he seemed wary and masterful, and then
+March felt that he was being examined and tested; at others so simple
+that March might well have fancied that he needed encouragement, and
+desired it.  He talked of his wife and daughters in a way that invited
+March to say friendly things of his family, which appeared to give the
+old man first an undue pleasure and then a final distrust.  At moments he
+turned, with an effect of finding relief in it, to his son and spoke to
+him across March of matters which he was unacquainted with; he did not
+seem aware that this was rude, but the young man must have felt it so; he
+always brought the conversation back, and once at some cost to himself
+when his father made it personal.
+
+"I want to make a regular New York business man out of that fellow," he
+said to March, pointing at Conrad with his stick.  "You s'pose I'm ever
+going to do it?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," said March, trying to fall in with the joke.
+"Do you mean nothing but a business man?"
+
+The old man laughed at whatever latent meaning he fancied in this, and
+said: "You think he would be a little too much for me there?  Well, I've
+seen enough of 'em to know it don't always take a large pattern of a man
+to do a large business.  But I want him to get the business training, and
+then if he wants to go into something else he knows what the world is,
+anyway.  Heigh?"
+
+"Oh yes!" March assented, with some compassion for the young man
+reddening patiently under his father's comment.
+
+Dryfoos went on as if his son were not in hearing.  "Now that boy wanted
+to be a preacher.  What does a preacher know about the world he preaches
+against when he's been brought up a preacher?  He don't know so much as a
+bad little boy in his Sunday-school; he knows about as much as a girl.
+I always told him, You be a man first, and then you be a preacher, if you
+want to.  Heigh?"
+
+"Precisely."  March began to feel some compassion for himself in being
+witness of the young fellow's discomfort under his father's homily.
+
+"When we first come to New York, I told him, Now here's your chance to
+see the world on a big scale.  You know already what work and saving and
+steady habits and sense will bring a man, to; you don't want to go round
+among the rich; you want to go among the poor, and see what laziness and
+drink and dishonesty and foolishness will bring men to.  And I guess he
+knows, about as well as anybody; and if he ever goes to preaching he'll
+know what he's preaching about."  The old man smiled his fierce, simple
+smile, and in his sharp eyes March fancied contempt of the ambition he
+had balked in his son.  The present scene must have been one of many
+between them, ending in meek submission on the part of the young man,
+whom his father, perhaps without realizing his cruelty, treated as a
+child.  March took it hard that he should be made to suffer in the
+presence of a co-ordinate power like himself, and began to dislike the
+old man out of proportion to his offence, which might have been mere want
+of taste, or an effect of mere embarrassment before him.  But evidently,
+whatever rebellion his daughters had carried through against him, he had
+kept his dominion over this gentle spirit unbroken.  March did not choose
+to make any response, but to let him continue, if he would, entirely upon
+his own impulse.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+A silence followed, of rather painful length.  It was broken by the
+cheery voice of Fulkerson, sent before him to herald Fulkerson's cheery
+person.  "Well, I suppose you've got the glorious success of 'Every Other
+Week' down pretty cold in your talk by this time.  I should have been up
+sooner to join you, but I was nipping a man for the last page of the
+cover.  I guess we'll have to let the Muse have that for an advertisement
+instead of a poem the next time, March.  Well, the old gentleman given
+you boys your scolding?"  The person of Fulkerson had got into the room
+long before he reached this question, and had planted itself astride a
+chair.  Fulkerson looked over the chairback, now at March, and now at the
+elder Dryfoos as he spoke.
+
+March answered him.  "I guess we must have been waiting for you,
+Fulkerson.  At any rate, we hadn't got to the scolding yet."
+
+"Why, I didn't suppose Mr. Dryfoos could 'a' held in so long.  I
+understood he was awful mad at the way the thing started off, and wanted
+to give you a piece of his mind, when he got at you.  I inferred as much
+from a remark that he made."  March and Dryfoos looked foolish, as men do
+when made the subject of this sort of merry misrepresentation.
+
+"I reckon my scolding will keep awhile yet," said the old man, dryly.
+
+"Well, then, I guess it's a good chance to give Mr. Dryfoos an idea of
+what we've really done--just while we're resting, as Artemus Ward says.
+Heigh, March?"
+
+"I will let you blow the trumpet, Fulkerson.  I think it belongs strictly
+to the advertising department," said March.  He now distinctly resented
+the old man's failure to say anything to him of the magazine; he made his
+inference that it was from a suspicion of his readiness to presume upon a
+recognition of his share in the success, and he was determined to second
+no sort of appeal for it.
+
+"The advertising department is the heart and soul of every business,"
+said Fulkerson, hardily, "and I like to keep my hand in with a little
+practise on the trumpet in private.  I don't believe Mr. Dryfoos has got
+any idea of the extent of this thing.  He's been out among those
+Rackensackens, where we were all born, and he's read the notices in their
+seven by nine dailies, and he's seen the thing selling on the cars, and
+he thinks he appreciates what's been done.  But I should just like to
+take him round in this little old metropolis awhile, and show him 'Every
+Other Week' on the centre tables of the millionaires--the Vanderbilts and
+the Astors--and in the homes of culture and refinement everywhere, and
+let him judge for himself.  It's the talk of the clubs and the dinner-
+tables; children cry for it; it's the Castoria of literature and the
+Pearline of art, the 'Won't-be-happy-till-he-gets-it of every en
+lightened man, woman, and child in this vast city.  I knew we could
+capture the country; but, my goodness! I didn't expect to have New York
+fall into our hands at a blow.  But that's just exactly what New York has
+done.  Every Other Week supplies the long-felt want that's been grinding
+round in New York and keeping it awake nights ever since the war.  It's
+the culmination of all the high and ennobling ideals of the past."
+
+"How much," asked Dryfoos, "do you expect to get out of it the first
+year, if it keeps the start it's got?"
+
+"Comes right down to business, every time!" said Fulkerson, referring the
+characteristic to March with a delighted glance.  "Well, sir, if
+everything works right, and we get rain enough to fill up the springs,
+and it isn't a grasshopper year, I expect to clear above all expenses
+something in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars."
+
+"Humph! And you are all going to work a year--editor, manager, publisher,
+artists, writers, printers, and the rest of 'em--to clear twenty-five
+thousand dollars?--I made that much in half a day in Moffitt once.  I see
+it made in half a minute in Wall Street, sometimes."  The old man
+presented this aspect of the case with a good-natured contempt, which
+included Fulkerson and his enthusiasm in an obvious liking.
+
+His son suggested, "But when we make that money here, no one loses it."
+
+"Can you prove that?"  His father turned sharply upon him.  "Whatever is
+won is lost.  It's all a game; it don't make any difference what you bet
+on.  Business is business, and a business man takes his risks with his
+eyes open."
+
+"Ah, but the glory!" Fulkerson insinuated with impudent persiflage.
+"I hadn't got to the glory yet, because it's hard to estimate it; but put
+the glory at the lowest figure, Mr. Dryfoos, and add it to the twenty-
+five thousand, and you've got an annual income from 'Every Other Week' of
+dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double-track, from this
+office to the moon.  I don't mention any of the sister planets because I
+like to keep within bounds."
+
+Dryfoos showed his lower teeth for pleasure in Fulkerson's fooling, and
+said, "That's what I like about you, Mr. Fulkerson--you always keep
+within bounds."
+
+"Well, I ain't a shrinking Boston violet, like March, here.  More
+sunflower in my style of diffidence; but I am modest, I don't deny it,"
+said Fulkerson.  "And I do hate to have a thing overstated."
+
+"And the glory--you do really think there's something in the glory that
+pays?"
+
+"Not a doubt of it!  I shouldn't care for the paltry return in money,"
+said Fulkerson, with a burlesque of generous disdain, "if it wasn't for
+the glory along with it."
+
+"And how should you feel about the glory, if there was no money along
+with it?"
+
+"Well, sir, I'm happy to say we haven't come to that yet."
+
+"Now, Conrad, here," said the old man, with a sort of pathetic rancor,
+"would rather have the glory alone.  I believe he don't even care much
+for your kind of glory, either, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+Fulkerson ran his little eyes curiously over Conrad's face and then
+March's, as if searching for a trace there of something gone before which
+would enable him to reach Dryfoos's whole meaning.  He apparently
+resolved to launch himself upon conjecture.  "Oh, well, we know how
+Conrad feels about the things of this world, anyway.  I should like to
+take 'em on the plane of another sphere, too, sometimes; but I noticed a
+good while ago that this was the world I was born into, and so I made up
+my mind that I would do pretty much what I saw the rest of the folks
+doing here below.  And I can't see but what Conrad runs the thing on
+business principles in his department, and I guess you'll find it so if
+you look into it.  I consider that we're a whole team and big dog under
+the wagon with you to draw on for supplies, and March, here, at the head
+of the literary business, and Conrad in the counting-room, and me to do
+the heavy lying in the advertising part.  Oh, and Beaton, of course, in
+the art.  I 'most forgot Beaton--Hamlet with Hamlet left out."
+
+Dryfoos looked across at his son.  "Wasn't that the fellow's name that
+was there last night?"
+
+"Yes," said Conrad.
+
+The old man rose.  "Well, I reckon I got to be going.  You ready to go
+up-town, Conrad?"
+
+"Well, not quite yet, father."
+
+The old man shook hands with March, and went downstairs, followed by his
+son.
+
+Fulkerson remained.
+
+"He didn't jump at the chance you gave him to compliment us all round,
+Fulkerson," said March, with a smile not wholly of pleasure.
+
+Fulkerson asked, with as little joy in the grin he had on, "Didn't he say
+anything to you before I came in?"
+
+"Not a word."
+
+"Dogged if I know what to make of it," sighed Fulkerson, "but I guess
+he's been having a talk with Conrad that's soured on him.  I reckon maybe
+he came back expecting to find that boy reconciled to the glory of this
+world, and Conrad's showed himself just as set against it as ever."
+
+"It might have been that," March admitted, pensively.  "I fancied
+something of the kind myself from words the old man let drop."
+
+Fulkerson made him explain, and then he said:
+
+"That's it, then; and it's all right.  Conrad 'll come round in time; and
+all we've got to do is to have patience with the old man till he does.
+I know he likes you."  Fulkerson affirmed this only interrogatively, and
+looked so anxiously to March for corroboration that March laughed.
+
+"He dissembled his love," he said; but afterward, in describing to his
+wife his interview with Mr. Dryfoos, he was less amused with this fact.
+
+When she saw that he was a little cast down by it, she began to encourage
+him.  "He's just a common, ignorant man, and probably didn't know how to
+express himself.  You may be perfectly sure that he's delighted with the
+success of the magazine, and that he understands as well as you do that
+he owes it all to you."
+
+"Ah, I'm not so sure.  I don't believe a man's any better for having made
+money so easily and rapidly as Dryfoos has done, and I doubt if he's any
+wiser.  I don't know just the point he's reached in his evolution from
+grub to beetle, but I do know that so far as it's gone the process must
+have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions.  I guess
+he's come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that
+intellectual ability is among them--what we call intellectual ability.
+He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous
+instincts, and I don't see why it shouldn't have reached his mental make-
+up.  He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into
+suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity.  That's the
+way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos's experience, and I am not very proud
+when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and
+ambition of most Americans.  I rather think they came pretty near being
+mine, once."
+
+"No, dear, they never did," his wife protested.
+
+"Well, they're not likely to be in the future.  The Dryfoos feature of
+'Every Other Week' is thoroughly distasteful to me."
+
+"Why, but he hasn't really got anything to do with it, has he, beyond
+furnishing the money?"
+
+"That's the impression that Fulkerson has allowed us to get.  But the man
+that holds the purse holds the reins.  He may let us guide the horse, but
+when he likes he can drive.  If we don't like his driving, then we can
+get down."
+
+Mrs. March was less interested in this figure of speech than in the
+personal aspects involved.  "Then you think Mr. Fulkerson has deceived
+you?"
+
+"Oh no!" said her husband, laughing.  "But I think he has deceived
+himself, perhaps."
+
+"How?"  she pursued.
+
+"He may have thought he was using Dryfoos, when Dryfoos was using him,
+and he may have supposed he was not afraid of him when he was very much
+so.  His courage hadn't been put to the test, and courage is a matter of
+proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can't tell whether
+you've got it till you try."
+
+"Nonsense!  Do you mean that he would ever sacrifice you to Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"I hope he may not be tempted.  But I'd rather be taking the chances with
+Fulkerson alone than with Fulkerson and Dryfoos to back him.  Dryfoos
+seems, somehow, to take the poetry and the pleasure out of the thing."
+
+Mrs. March was a long time silent.  Then she began, "Well, my dear, I
+never wanted to come to New York--"
+
+"Neither did I," March promptly put in.
+
+"But now that we're here," she went on, "I'm not going to have you
+letting every little thing discourage you.  I don't see what there was in
+Mr. Dryfoos's manner to give you any anxiety.  He's just a common,
+stupid, inarticulate country person, and he didn't know how to express
+himself, as I said in the beginning, and that's the reason he didn't say
+anything."
+
+"Well, I don't deny you're right about it."
+
+"It's dreadful," his wife continued, "to be mixed up with such a man and
+his family, but I don't believe he'll ever meddle with your management,
+and, till he does, all you need do is to have as little to do with him as
+possible, and go quietly on your own way."
+
+"Oh, I shall go on quietly enough," said March.  "I hope I sha'n't begin
+going stealthily."
+
+"Well, my dear," said Mrs. March, "just let me know when you're tempted
+to do that.  If ever you sacrifice the smallest grain of your honesty or
+your self-respect to Mr. Dryfoos, or anybody else, I will simply renounce
+you."
+
+"In view of that I'm rather glad the management of 'Every Other Week'
+involves tastes and not convictions," said March.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+That night Dryfoos was wakened from his after-dinner nap by the sound of
+gay talk and nervous giggling in the drawing-room.  The talk, which was
+Christine's, and the giggling, which was Mela's, were intershot with the
+heavier tones of a man's voice; and Dryfoos lay awhile on the leathern
+lounge in his library, trying to make out whether he knew the voice.  His
+wife sat in a deep chair before the fire, with her eyes on his face,
+waiting for him to wake.
+
+"Who is that out there?"  he asked, without opening his eyes.
+
+"Indeed, indeed, I don't know, Jacob," his wife answered.  "I reckon it's
+just some visitor of the girls'."
+
+"Was I snoring?"
+
+"Not a bit.  You was sleeping as quiet!  I did hate to have 'em wake you,
+and I was just goin' out to shoo them.  They've been playin' something,
+and that made them laugh."
+
+"I didn't know but I had snored," said the old man, sitting up.
+
+"No," said his wife.  Then she asked, wistfully, "Was you out at the old
+place, Jacob?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Did it look natural?"
+
+"Yes; mostly.  They're sinking the wells down in the woods pasture."
+
+"And--the children's graves?"
+
+"They haven't touched that part.  But I reckon we got to have 'em moved
+to the cemetery.  I bought a lot."
+
+The old woman began softly to weep.  "It does seem too hard that they
+can't be let to rest in peace, pore little things.  I wanted you and me
+to lay there, too, when our time come, Jacob.  Just there, back o' the
+beehives and under them shoomakes--my, I can see the very place!  And I
+don't believe I'll ever feel at home anywheres else.  I woon't know where
+I am when the trumpet sounds.  I have to think before I can tell where
+the east is in New York; and what if I should git faced the wrong way
+when I raise?  Jacob, I wonder you could sell it!"  Her head shook, and
+the firelight shone on her tears as she searched the folds of her dress
+for her pocket.
+
+A peal of laughter came from the drawing-room, and then the sound of
+chords struck on the piano.
+
+"Hush! Don't you cry, 'Liz'beth!" said Dryfoos.  "Here; take my
+handkerchief.  I've got a nice lot in the cemetery, and I'm goin' to have
+a monument, with two lambs on it--like the one you always liked so much.
+It ain't the fashion, any more, to have family buryin' grounds; they're
+collectin' 'em into the cemeteries, all round."
+
+"I reckon I got to bear it," said his wife, muffling her face in his
+handkerchief.  "And I suppose the Lord kin find me, wherever I am.  But I
+always did want to lay just there.  You mind how we used to go out and
+set there, after milkin', and watch the sun go down, and talk about where
+their angels was, and try to figger it out?"
+
+"I remember, 'Liz'beth."
+
+The man's voice in the drawing-room sang a snatch of French song,
+insolent, mocking, salient; and then Christine's attempted the same
+strain, and another cry of laughter from Mela followed.
+
+"Well, I always did expect to lay there.  But I reckon it's all right.
+It won't be a great while, now, anyway.  Jacob, I don't believe I'm a-
+goin' to live very long.  I know it don't agree with me here."
+
+"Oh, I guess it does, 'Liz'beth.  You're just a little pulled down with
+the weather.  It's coming spring, and you feel it; but the doctor says
+you're all right.  I stopped in, on the way up, and he says so."
+
+"I reckon he don't know everything," the old woman persisted: "I've been
+runnin' down ever since we left Moffitt, and I didn't feel any too well
+there, even.  It's a very strange thing, Jacob, that the richer you git,
+the less you ain't able to stay where you want to, dead or alive."
+
+"It's for the children we do it," said Dryfoos.  "We got to give them
+their chance in the world."
+
+"Oh, the world!  They ought to bear the yoke in their youth, like we
+done.  I know it's what Coonrod would like to do."
+
+Dryfoos got upon his feet.  "If Coonrod 'll mind his own business, and do
+what I want him to, he'll have yoke enough to bear."  He moved from his
+wife, without further effort to comfort her, and pottered heavily out
+into the dining-room.  Beyond its obscurity stretched the glitter of the
+deep drawing-room.  His feet, in their broad; flat slippers, made no
+sound on the dense carpet, and he came unseen upon the little group there
+near the piano.  Mela perched upon the stool with her back to the keys,
+and Beaton bent over Christine, who sat with a banjo in her lap, letting
+him take her hands and put them in the right place on the instrument.
+Her face was radiant with happiness, and Mela was watching her with
+foolish, unselfish pleasure in her bliss.
+
+There was nothing wrong in the affair to a man of Dryfoos's traditions
+and perceptions, and if it had been at home in the farm sitting-room,
+or even in his parlor at Moffitt, he would not have minded a young man's
+placing his daughter's hands on a banjo, or even holding them there;
+it would have seemed a proper, attention from him if he was courting her.
+But here, in such a house as this, with the daughter of a man who had
+made as much money as he had, he did not know but it was a liberty.
+He felt the angry doubt of it which beset him in regard to so many
+experiences of his changed life; he wanted to show his sense of it, if it
+was a liberty, but he did not know how, and he did not know that it was
+so.  Besides, he could not help a touch of the pleasure in Christine's
+happiness which Mela showed; and he would have gone back to the library,
+if he could, without being discovered.
+
+But Beaton had seen him, and Dryfoos, with a nonchalant nod to the young
+man, came forward.  "What you got there, Christine?"
+
+"A banjo," said the girl, blushing in her father's presence.
+
+Mela gurgled.  "Mr. Beaton is learnun' her the first position."
+
+Beaton was not embarrassed.  He was in evening dress, and his face,
+pointed with its brown beard, showed extremely handsome above the expanse
+of his broad, white shirt-front.  He gave back as nonchalant a nod as he
+had got, and, without further greeting to Dryfoos, he said to Christine:
+"No, no.  You must keep your hand and arm so."  He held them in position.
+"There!  Now strike with your right hand.  See?"
+
+"I don't believe I can ever learn," said the girl, with a fond upward
+look at him.
+
+"Oh yes, you can," said Beaton.
+
+They both ignored Dryfoos in the little play of protests which followed,
+and he said, half jocosely, half suspiciously, "And is the banjo the
+fashion, now?"  He remembered it as the emblem of low-down show business,
+and associated it with end-men and blackened faces and grotesque shirt-
+collars.
+
+"It's all the rage," Mela shouted, in answer for all.  "Everybody plays
+it.  Mr. Beaton borrowed this from a lady friend of his."
+
+"Humph!  Pity I got you a piano, then," said Dryfoos.  "A banjo would
+have been cheaper."
+
+Beaton so far admitted him to the conversation as to seem reminded of the
+piano by his mentioning it.  He said to Mela, "Oh, won't you just strike
+those chords?"  and as Mela wheeled about and beat the keys he took the
+banjo from Christine and sat down with it.  "This way!" He strummed it,
+and murmured the tune Dryfoos had heard him singing from the library,
+while he kept his beautiful eyes floating on Christine's.  "You try that,
+now; it's very simple."
+
+"Where is Mrs. Mandel?"  Dryfoos demanded, trying to assert himself.
+
+Neither of the girls seemed to have heard him at first in the chatter
+they broke into over what Beaton proposed.  Then Mela said, absently,
+"Oh, she had to go out to see one of her friends that's sick," and she
+struck the piano keys.  "Come; try it, Chris!"
+
+Dryfoos turned about unheeded and went back to the library.  He would
+have liked to put Beaton out of his house, and in his heart he burned
+against him as a contumacious hand; he would have liked to discharge him
+from the art department of 'Every Other Week' at once.  But he was aware
+of not having treated Beaton with much ceremony, and if the young man had
+returned his behavior in kind, with an electrical response to his own
+feeling, had he any right to complain?  After all, there was no harm in
+his teaching Christine the banjo.
+
+His wife still sat looking into the fire.  "I can't see," she said,
+"as we've got a bit more comfort of our lives, Jacob, because we've got
+such piles and piles of money.  I wisht to gracious we was back on the
+farm this minute.  I wisht you had held out ag'inst the childern about
+sellin' it; 'twould 'a' bin the best thing fur 'em, I say.  I believe in
+my soul they'll git spoiled here in New York.  I kin see a change in 'em
+a'ready--in the girls."
+
+Dryfoos stretched himself on the lounge again.  "I can't see as Coonrod
+is much comfort, either.  Why ain't he here with his sisters?  What does
+all that work of his on the East Side amount to?  It seems as if he done
+it to cross me, as much as anything."  Dryfoos complained to his wife on
+the basis of mere affectional habit, which in married life often survives
+the sense of intellectual equality.  He did not expect her to reason with
+him, but there was help in her listening, and though she could only
+soothe his fretfulness with soft answers which were often wide of the
+purpose, he still went to her for solace.  "Here, I've gone into this
+newspaper business, or whatever it is, on his account, and he don't seem
+any more satisfied than ever.  I can see he hain't got his heart in it."
+
+"The pore boy tries; I know he does, Jacob; and he wants to please you.
+But he give up a good deal when he give up bein' a preacher; I s'pose we
+ought to remember that."
+
+"A preacher!" sneered Dryfoos.  "I reckon bein' a preacher wouldn't
+satisfy him now.  He had the impudence to tell me this afternoon that he
+would like to be a priest; and he threw it up to me that he never could
+be because I'd kept him from studyin'."
+
+"He don't mean a Catholic priest--not a Roman one, Jacob," the old woman
+explained, wistfully.  "He's told me all about it.  They ain't the kind
+o' Catholics we been used to; some sort of 'Piscopalians; and they do a
+heap o' good amongst the poor folks over there.  He says we ain't got any
+idea how folks lives in them tenement houses, hundreds of 'em in one
+house, and whole families in a room; and it burns in his heart to help
+'em like them Fathers, as be calls 'em, that gives their lives to it.
+He can't be a Father, he says, because he can't git the eddication now;
+but he can be a Brother; and I can't find a word to say ag'inst it, when
+it gits to talkin', Jacob."
+
+"I ain't saying anything against his priests, 'Liz'beth," said Dryfoos.
+"They're all well enough in their way; they've given up their lives to
+it, and it's a matter of business with them, like any other.  But what
+I'm talking about now is Coonrod.  I don't object to his doin' all the
+charity he wants to, and the Lord knows I've never been stingy with him
+about it.  He might have all the money he wants, to give round any way he
+pleases."
+
+"That's what I told him once, but he says money ain't the thing--or not
+the only thing you got to give to them poor folks.  You got to give your
+time and your knowledge and your love--I don't know what all you got to
+give yourself, if you expect to help 'em.  That's what Coonrod says."
+
+"Well, I can tell him that charity begins at home," said Dryfoos, sitting
+up in his impatience.  "And he'd better give himself to us a little--to
+his old father and mother.  And his sisters.  What's he doin' goin' off
+there to his meetings, and I don't know what all, an' leavin' them here
+alone?"
+
+"Why, ain't Mr. Beaton with 'em?"  asked the old woman.  "I thought I
+heared his voice."
+
+"Mr. Beaton!  Of course he is!  And who's Mr. Beaton, anyway?"
+
+"Why, ain't he one of the men in Coonrod's office?  I thought I heared--"
+
+"Yes, he is!  But who is he?  What's he doing round here?  Is he makin'
+up to Christine?"
+
+"I reckon he is.  From Mely's talk, she's about crazy over the fellow.
+Don't you like him, Jacob?"
+
+"I don't know him, or what he is.  He hasn't got any manners.  Who
+brought him here?  How'd he come to come, in the first place?"
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson brung him, I believe," said the old woman, patiently.
+
+"Fulkerson!" Dryfoos snorted.  "Where's Mrs. Mandel, I should like to
+know?  He brought her, too.  Does she go traipsin' off this way every
+evening?"
+
+"No, she seems to be here pretty regular most o' the time.  I don't know
+how we could ever git along without her, Jacob; she seems to know just
+what to do, and the girls would be ten times as outbreakin' without her.
+I hope you ain't thinkin' o' turnin' her off, Jacob?"
+
+Dryfoos did not think it necessary to answer such a question.  "It's all
+Fulkerson, Fulkerson, Fulkerson.  It seems to me that Fulkerson about
+runs this family.  He brought Mrs. Mandel, and he brought that Beaton,
+and he brought that Boston fellow!  I guess I give him a dose, though;
+and I'll learn Fulkerson that he can't have everything his own way.  I
+don't want anybody to help me spend my money.  I made it, and I can
+manage it.  I guess Mr. Fulkerson can bear a little watching now.  He's
+been travelling pretty free, and he's got the notion he's driving, maybe.
+I'm a-going to look after that book a little myself."
+
+"You'll kill yourself, Jacob," said his wife, "tryin' to do so many
+things.  And what is it all fur?  I don't see as we're better off, any,
+for all the money.  It's just as much care as it used to be when we was
+all there on the farm together.  I wisht we could go back, Ja--"
+
+"We can't go back!" shouted the old man, fiercely.  "There's no farm any
+more to go back to.  The fields is full of gas-wells and oil-wells and
+hell-holes generally; the house is tore down, and the barn's goin'--"
+
+"The barn!" gasped the old woman.  "Oh, my!"
+
+"If I was to give all I'm worth this minute, we couldn't go back to the
+farm, any more than them girls in there could go back and be little
+children.  I don't say we're any better off, for the money.  I've got
+more of it now than I ever had; and there's no end to the luck; it pours
+in.  But I feel like I was tied hand and foot.  I don't know which way to
+move; I don't know what's best to do about anything.  The money don't
+seem to buy anything but more and more care and trouble.  We got a big
+house that we ain't at home in; and we got a lot of hired girls round
+under our feet that hinder and don't help.  Our children don't mind us,
+and we got no friends or neighbors.  But it had to be.  I couldn't help
+but sell the farm, and we can't go back to it, for it ain't there.  So
+don't you say anything more about it, 'Liz'beth."
+
+"Pore Jacob!" said his wife.  "Well, I woon't, dear."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+It was clear to Beaton that Dryfoos distrusted him; and the fact
+heightened his pleasure in Christine's liking for him.  He was as sure of
+this as he was of the other, though he was not so sure of any reason for
+his pleasure in it.  She had her charm; the charm of wildness to which a
+certain wildness in himself responded; and there were times when his
+fancy contrived a common future for them, which would have a prosperity
+forced from the old fellow's love of the girl.  Beaton liked the idea of
+this compulsion better than he liked the idea of the money; there was
+something a little repulsive in that; he imagined himself rejecting it;
+he almost wished he was enough in love with the girl to marry her without
+it; that would be fine.  He was taken with her in a certain' measure, in
+a certain way; the question was in what measure, in what way.
+
+It was partly to escape from this question that he hurried down-town, and
+decided to spend with the Leightons the hour remaining on his hands
+before it was time to go to the reception for which he was dressed.
+It seemed to him important that he should see Alma Leighton.  After all,
+it was her charm that was most abiding with him; perhaps it was to be
+final.  He found himself very happy in his present relations with her.
+She had dropped that barrier of pretences and ironical surprise.  It
+seemed to him that they had gone back to the old ground of common
+artistic interest which he had found so pleasant the summer before.
+Apparently she and her mother had both forgiven his neglect of them in
+the first months of their stay in New York; he was sure that Mrs.
+Leighton liked him as well as ever, and, if there was still something a
+little provisional in Alma's manner at times, it was something that
+piqued more than it discouraged; it made him curious, not anxious.
+
+He found the young ladies with Fulkerson when he rang.  He seemed to be
+amusing them both, and they were both amused beyond the merit of so small
+a pleasantry, Beaton thought, when Fulkerson said: "Introduce myself,
+Mr. Beaton: Mr. Fulkerson of 'Every Other Week.'  Think I've met you at
+our place."  The girls laughed, and Alma explained that her mother was
+not very well, and would be sorry not to see him.  Then she turned, as he
+felt, perversely, and went on talking with Fulkerson and left him to Miss
+Woodburn.
+
+She finally recognized his disappointment: "Ah don't often get a chance
+at you, Mr. Beaton, and Ah'm just goin' to toak yo' to death.  Yo' have
+been Soath yo'self, and yo' know ho' we do toak."
+
+"I've survived to say yes," Beaton admitted.
+
+"Oh, now, do you think we toak so much mo' than you do in the No'th?"
+the young lady deprecated.
+
+"I don't know.  I only know you can't talk too much for me.  I should
+like to hear you say Soath and house and about for the rest of my life."
+
+"That's what Ah call raght personal, Mr. Beaton.  Now Ah'm goin' to be
+personal, too."  Miss Woodburn flung out over her lap the square of cloth
+she was embroidering, and asked him: "Don't you think that's beautiful?
+Now, as an awtust--a great awtust?"
+
+"As a great awtust, yes," said Beaton, mimicking her accent.  "If I were
+less than great I might have something to say about the arrangement of
+colors.  You're as bold and original as Nature."
+
+"Really?  Oh, now, do tell me yo' favo'ite colo', Mr. Beaton."
+
+"My favorite color?  Bless my soul, why should I prefer any?  Is blue
+good, or red wicked?  Do people have favorite colors?"  Beaton found
+himself suddenly interested.
+
+"Of co'se they do," answered the girl.  "Don't awtusts?"
+
+"I never heard of one that had--consciously."
+
+"Is it possible?  I supposed they all had.  Now mah favo'ite colo' is
+gawnet.  Don't you think it's a pretty colo'?"
+
+"It depends upon how it's used.  Do you mean in neckties?"  Beaton stole
+a glance at the one Fulkerson was wearing.
+
+Miss Woodburn laughed with her face bowed upon her wrist.  "Ah do think
+you gentlemen in the No'th awe ten tahms as lahvely as the ladies."
+
+"Strange," said Beaton.  "In the South--Soath, excuse me! I made the
+observation that the ladies were ten times as lively as the gentlemen.
+What is that you're working?"
+
+"This?"  Miss Woodburn gave it another flirt, and looked at it with a
+glance of dawning recognition.  "Oh, this is a table-covah.  Wouldn't you
+lahke to see where it's to go?"
+
+"Why, certainly."
+
+"Well, if you'll be raght good I'll let yo' give me some professional
+advass about putting something in the co'ners or not, when you have seen
+it on the table."
+
+She rose and led the way into the other room.  Beaton knew she wanted to
+talk with him about something else; but he waited patiently to let her
+play her comedy out.  She spread the cover on the table, and he advised
+her, as he saw she wished, against putting anything in the corners; just
+run a line of her stitch around the edge, he said.
+
+"Mr.  Fulkerson and Ah, why, we've been having a regular faght aboat it,"
+she commented.  "But we both agreed, fahnally, to leave it to you; Mr.
+Fulkerson said you'd be sure to be raght.  Ah'm so glad you took mah
+sahde.  But he's a great admahrer of yours, Mr. Beaton," she concluded,
+demurely, suggestively.
+
+"Is he?  Well, I'm a great admirer of Fulkerson," said Beaton, with a
+capricious willingness to humor her wish to talk about Fulkerson.
+"He's a capital fellow; generous, magnanimous, with quite an ideal of
+friendship and an eye single to the main chance all the time.  He would
+advertise 'Every Other Week' on his family vault."
+
+Miss Woodburn laughed, and said she should tell him what Beaton had said.
+
+"Do.  But he's used to defamation from me, and he'll think you're
+joking."
+
+"Ah suppose," said Miss Woodburn, "that he's quahte the tahpe of a New
+York business man."  She added, as if it followed logically, "He's so
+different from what I thought a New York business man would be."
+
+"It's your Virginia tradition to despise business," said Beaton, rudely.
+
+Miss Woodburn laughed again.  "Despahse it? Mah goodness! we want to get
+into it and woak it fo' all it's wo'th,' as Mr. Fulkerson says.  That
+tradition is all past.  You don't know what the Soath is now.  Ah suppose
+mah fathaw despahses business, but he's a tradition himself, as Ah tell
+him."  Beaton would have enjoyed joining the young lady in anything she
+might be going to say in derogation of her father, but he restrained
+himself, and she went on more and more as if she wished to account for
+her father's habitual hauteur with Beaton, if not to excuse it.  "Ah tell
+him he don't understand the rising generation.  He was brought up in the
+old school, and he thinks we're all just lahke he was when he was young,
+with all those ahdeals of chivalry and family; but, mah goodness! it's
+money that cyoants no'adays in the Soath, just lahke it does everywhere
+else.  Ah suppose, if we could have slavery back in the fawm mah fathaw
+thinks it could have been brought up to, when the commercial spirit
+wouldn't let it alone, it would be the best thing; but we can't have it
+back, and Ah tell him we had better have the commercial spirit as the
+next best thing."
+
+Miss Woodburn went on, with sufficient loyalty and piety, to expose the
+difference of her own and her father's ideals, but with what Beaton
+thought less reference to his own unsympathetic attention than to a
+knowledge finally of the personnel and materiel of 'Every Other Week.'
+and Mr. Fulkerson's relation to the enterprise.  "You most excuse my
+asking so many questions, Mr. Beaton.  You know it's all mah doing that
+we awe heah in New York.  Ah just told mah fathaw that if he was evah
+goin' to do anything with his wrahtings, he had got to come No'th, and Ah
+made him come.  Ah believe he'd have stayed in the Soath all his lahfe.
+And now Mr. Fulkerson wants him to let his editor see some of his
+wrahtings, and Ah wanted to know something aboat the magazine.  We awe a
+great deal excited aboat it in this hoase, you know, Mr. Beaton," she
+concluded, with a look that now transferred the interest from Fulkerson
+to Alma.  She led the way back to the room where they were sitting, and
+went up to triumph over Fulkerson with Beaton's decision about the table-
+cover.
+
+Alma was left with Beaton near the piano, and he began to talk about the
+Dryfooses as he sat down on the piano-stool.  He said he had been giving
+Miss Dryfoos a lesson on the banjo; he had borrowed the banjo of Miss
+Vance.  Then he struck the chord he had been trying to teach Christine,
+and played over the air he had sung.
+
+"How do you like that?"  he asked, whirling round.
+
+"It seems rather a disrespectful little tune, somehow," said Alma,
+placidly.
+
+Beaton rested his elbow on the corner of the piano and gazed dreamily at
+her.  "Your perceptions are wonderful.  It is disrespectful.  I played
+it, up there, because I felt disrespectful to them."
+
+"Do you claim that as a merit?"
+
+"No, I state it as a fact.  How can you respect such people?"
+
+"You might respect yourself, then," said the girl.  "Or perhaps that
+wouldn't be so easy, either."
+
+"No, it wouldn't.  I like to have you say these things to me," said
+Beaton, impartially.
+
+"Well, I like to say them," Alma returned.
+
+"They do me good."
+
+"Oh, I don't know that that was my motive."
+
+"There is no one like you--no one," said Beaton, as if apostrophizing her
+in her absence.  "To come from that house, with its assertions of money--
+you can hear it chink; you can smell the foul old banknotes; it stifles
+you--into an atmosphere like this, is like coming into another world."
+
+"Thank you," said Alma.  "I'm glad there isn't that unpleasant odor here;
+but I wish there was a little more of the chinking."
+
+"No, no! Don't say that!" he implored.  "I like to think that there is
+one soul uncontaminated by the sense of money in this big, brutal, sordid
+city."
+
+"You mean two," said Alma, with modesty.  "But if you stifle at the
+Dryfooses', why do you go there?"
+
+"Why do I go?"  he mused.  "Don't you believe in knowing all the natures,
+the types, you can?  Those girls are a strange study: the young one is a
+simple, earthly creature, as common as an oat-field and the other a sort
+of sylvan life: fierce, flashing, feline--"
+
+Alma burst out into a laugh.  "What apt alliteration!  And do they like
+being studied?  I should think the sylvan life might--scratch."
+
+"No," said Beaton, with melancholy absence, "it only-purrs."
+
+The girl felt a rising indignation.  "Well, then, Mr. Beaton, I should
+hope it would scratch, and bite, too.  I think you've no business to go
+about studying people, as you do.  It's abominable."
+
+"Go on," said the young man.  "That Puritan conscience of yours!
+It appeals to the old Covenanter strain in me--like a voice of pre-
+existence.  Go on--"
+
+"Oh, if I went on I should merely say it was not only abominable, but
+contemptible."
+
+"You could be my guardian angel, Alma," said the young man, making his
+eyes more and more slumbrous and dreamy.
+
+"Stuff! I hope I have a soul above buttons!"
+
+He smiled, as she rose, and followed her across the room.  "Good-night;
+Mr. Beaton," she said.
+
+Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson came in from the other room.  "What!  You're
+not going, Beaton?"
+
+"Yes; I'm going to a reception.  I stopped in on my way."
+
+"To kill time," Alma explained.
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, gallantly, "this is the last place I should like
+to do it.  But I guess I'd better be going, too.  It has sometimes
+occurred to me that there is such a thing as staying too late.  But with
+Brother Beaton, here, just starting in for an evening's amusement, it
+does seem a little early yet.  Can't you urge me to stay, somebody?"
+
+The two girls laughed, and Miss Woodburn said:
+
+"Mr. Beaton is such a butterfly of fashion! Ah wish Ah was on mah way to
+a pawty.  Ah feel quahte envious."
+
+"But he didn't say it to make you," Alma explained, with meek softness.
+
+"Well, we can't all be swells.  Where is your party, anyway, Beaton?"
+asked Fulkerson.  "How do you manage to get your invitations to those
+things?  I suppose a fellow has to keep hinting round pretty lively,
+Neigh?"
+
+Beaton took these mockeries serenely, and shook hands with Miss Woodburn,
+with the effect of having already shaken hands with Alma.  She stood with
+hers clasped behind her.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Beaton went away with the smile on his face which he had kept in
+listening to Fulkerson, and carried it with him to the reception.
+He believed that Alma was vexed with him for more personal reasons than
+she had implied; it flattered him that she should have resented what he
+told her of the Dryfooses.  She had scolded him in their behalf
+apparently; but really because he had made her jealous by his interest,
+of whatever kind, in some one else.  What followed, had followed
+naturally.  Unless she had been quite a simpleton she could not have met
+his provisional love-making on any other terms; and the reason why Beaton
+chiefly liked Alma Leighton was that she was not a simpleton.  Even up in
+the country, when she was overawed by his acquaintance, at first, she was
+not very deeply overawed, and at times she was not overawed at all.
+At such times she astonished him by taking his most solemn histrionics
+with flippant incredulity, and even burlesquing them.  But he could see,
+all the same, that he had caught her fancy, and he admired the skill with
+which she punished his neglect when they met in New York.  He had really
+come very near forgetting the Leightons; the intangible obligations of
+mutual kindness which hold some men so fast, hung loosely upon him;
+it would not have hurt him to break from them altogether; but when he
+recognized them at last, he found that it strengthened them indefinitely
+to have Alma ignore them so completely.  If she had been sentimental, or
+softly reproachful, that would have been the end; he could not have stood
+it; he would have had to drop her.  But when she met him on his own
+ground, and obliged him to be sentimental, the game was in her hands.
+Beaton laughed, now, when he thought of that, and he said to himself that
+the girl had grown immensely since she had come to New York; nothing
+seemed to have been lost upon her; she must have kept her eyes uncommonly
+wide open.  He noticed that especially in their talks over her work; she
+had profited by everything she had seen and heard; she had all of
+Wetmore's ideas pat; it amused Beaton to see how she seized every useful
+word that he dropped, too, and turned him to technical account whenever
+she could.  He liked that; she had a great deal of talent; there was no
+question of that; if she were a man there could be no question of her
+future.  He began to construct a future for her; it included provision
+for himself, too; it was a common future, in which their lives and work
+were united.
+
+He was full of the glow of its prosperity when he met Margaret Vance at
+the reception.
+
+The house was one where people might chat a long time together without
+publicly committing themselves to an interest in each other except such a
+grew out of each other's ideas.  Miss Vance was there because she united
+in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the fashionable
+people and of the aesthetic people who met there on common ground.  It
+was almost the only house in New York where this happened often, and it
+did not happen very often there.  It was a literary house, primarily,
+with artistic qualifications, and the frequenters of it were mostly
+authors and artists; Wetmore, who was always trying to fit everything
+with a phrase, said it was the unfrequenters who were fashionable.  There
+was great ease there, and simplicity; and if there was not distinction,
+it was not for want of distinguished people, but because there seems to
+be some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level,
+that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface
+the deeply underlying nobody.  The effect for some temperaments, for
+consciousness, for egotism, is admirable; for curiosity, for hero
+worship, it is rather baffling.  It is the spirit of the street
+transferred to the drawing-room; indiscriminating, levelling, but
+doubtless finally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity of the place,
+if not consenting to the grandeur of reputations or presences.
+
+Beaton now denied that this house represented a salon at all, in the old
+sense; and he held that the salon was impossible, even undesirable,
+with us, when Miss Vance sighed for it.  At any rate, he said that this
+turmoil of coming and going, this bubble and babble, this cackling and
+hissing of conversation was not the expression of any such civilization
+as had created the salon.  Here, he owned, were the elements of
+intellectual delightfulness, but he said their assemblage in such
+quantity alone denied the salon; there was too much of a good thing.
+The French word implied a long evening of general talk among the guests,
+crowned with a little chicken at supper, ending at cock-crow.  Here was
+tea, with milk or with lemon-baths of it and claret-cup for the hardier
+spirits throughout the evening.  It was very nice, very pleasant, but it
+was not the little chicken--not the salon.  In fact, he affirmed, the
+salon descended from above, out of the great world, and included the
+aesthetic world in it.  But our great world--the rich people, were
+stupid, with no wish to be otherwise; they were not even curious about
+authors and artists.  Beaton fancied himself speaking impartially, and so
+he allowed himself to speak bitterly; he said that in no other city in
+the world, except Vienna, perhaps, were such people so little a part of
+society.
+
+"It isn't altogether the rich people's fault," said Margaret; and she
+spoke impartially, too.  "I don't believe that the literary men and the
+artists would like a salon that descended to them.  Madame Geoffrin, you
+know, was very plebeian; her husband was a business man of some sort."
+
+"He would have been a howling swell in New York," said Beaton, still
+impartially.
+
+Wetmore came up to their corner, with a scroll of bread and butter in one
+hand and a cup of tea in the other.  Large and fat, and clean-shaven, he
+looked like a monk in evening dress.
+
+"We were talking about salons," said Margaret.
+
+"Why don't you open a salon yourself?"  asked Wetmore, breathing thickly
+from the anxiety of getting through the crowd without spilling his tea.
+
+"Like poor Lady Barberina Lemon?"  said the girl, with a laugh.  "What a
+good story!  That idea of a woman who couldn't be interested in any of
+the arts because she was socially and traditionally the material of them!
+We can, never reach that height of nonchalance in this country."
+
+"Not if we tried seriously?" suggested the painter.  "I've an idea that
+if the Americans ever gave their minds to that sort of thing, they could
+take the palm--or the cake, as Beaton here would say--just as they do in
+everything else.  When we do have an aristocracy, it will be an
+aristocracy that will go ahead of anything the world has ever seen.
+Why don't somebody make a beginning, and go in openly for an ancestry,
+and a lower middle class, and an hereditary legislature, and all the
+rest?  We've got liveries, and crests, and palaces, and caste feeling.
+We're all right as far as we've gone, and we've got the money to go any
+length."
+
+"Like your natural-gas man, Mr. Beaton," said the girl, with a smiling
+glance round at him.
+
+"Ah!" said Wetmore, stirring his tea, "has Beaton got a natural-gas man?"
+
+"My natural-gas man," said Beaton, ignoring Wetmore's question, "doesn't
+know how to live in his palace yet, and I doubt if he has any caste
+feeling.  I fancy his family believe themselves victims of it.  They say
+--one of the young ladies does--that she never saw such an unsociable
+place as New York; nobody calls."
+
+"That's good!" said Wetmore.  "I suppose they're all ready for company,
+too: good cook, furniture, servants, carriages?"
+
+"Galore," said Beaton.
+
+"Well, that's too bad.  There's a chance for you, Miss Vance.  Doesn't
+your philanthropy embrace the socially destitute as well as the
+financially?  Just think of a family like that, without a friend, in a
+great city!  I should think common charity had a duty there--not to
+mention the uncommon."
+
+He distinguished that kind as Margaret's by a glance of ironical
+deference.  She had a repute for good works which was out of proportion
+to the works, as it always is, but she was really active in that way,
+under the vague obligation, which we now all feel, to be helpful.  She
+was of the church which seems to have found a reversion to the imposing
+ritual of the past the way back to the early ideals of Christian
+brotherhood.
+
+"Oh, they seem to have Mr. Beaton," Margaret answered, and Beaton felt
+obscurely flattered by her reference to his patronage of the Dryfooses.
+
+He explained to Wetmore: "They have me because they partly own me.
+Dryfoos is Fulkerson's financial backer in 'Every Other Week'."
+
+"Is that so?  Well, that's interesting, too.  Aren't you rather
+astonished, Miss Vance, to see what a petty thing Beaton is making of
+that magazine of his?"
+
+"Oh," said Margaret, "it's so very nice, every way; it makes you feel as
+if you did have a country, after all.  It's as chic--that detestable
+little word!--as those new French books."
+
+"Beaton modelled it on them.  But you mustn't suppose he does everything
+about 'Every Other Week'; he'd like you to.  Beaton, you haven't come up
+to that cover of your first number, since.  That was the design of one of
+my pupils, Miss Vance--a little girl that Beaton discovered down in New
+Hampshire last summer."
+
+"Oh yes.  And have you great hopes of her, Mr. Wetmore?"
+
+"She seems to have more love of it and knack for it than any one of her
+sex I've seen yet.  It really looks like a case of art for art's sake,
+at times.  But you can't tell.  They're liable to get married at any
+moment, you know.  Look here, Beaton, when your natural-gas man gets to
+the picture-buying stage in his development, just remember your old
+friends, will you?  You know, Miss Vance, those new fellows have their
+regular stages.  They never know what to do with their money, but they
+find out that people buy pictures, at one point.  They shut your things
+up in their houses where nobody comes, and after a while they overeat
+themselves--they don't know what, else to do--and die of apoplexy, and
+leave your pictures to a gallery, and then they see the light.  It's
+slow, but it's pretty sure.  Well, I see Beaton isn't going to move on,
+as he ought to do; and so I must.  He always was an unconventional
+creature."
+
+Wetmore went away, but Beaton remained, and he outstayed several other
+people who came up to speak to Miss Vance.  She was interested in
+everybody, and she liked the talk of these clever literary, artistic,
+clerical, even theatrical people, and she liked the sort of court with
+which they recognized her fashion as well as her cleverness; it was very
+pleasant to be treated intellectually as if she were one of themselves,
+and socially as if she was not habitually the same, but a sort of guest
+in Bohemia, a distinguished stranger.  If it was Arcadia rather than
+Bohemia, still she felt her quality of distinguished stranger.  The
+flattery of it touched her fancy, and not her vanity; she had very little
+vanity.  Beaton's devotion made the same sort of appeal; it was not so
+much that she liked him as she liked being the object of his admiration.
+She was a girl of genuine sympathies, intellectual rather than
+sentimental.  In fact, she was an intellectual person, whom qualities of
+the heart saved from being disagreeable, as they saved her on the other
+hand from being worldly or cruel in her fashionableness.  She had read a
+great many books, and had ideas about them, quite courageous and original
+ideas; she knew about pictures--she had been in Wetmore's class; she was
+fond of music; she was willing to understand even politics; in Boston she
+might have been agnostic, but in New York she was sincerely religious;
+she was very accomplished; and perhaps it was her goodness that prevented
+her feeling what was not best in Beaton.
+
+"Do you think," she said, after the retreat of one of the comers and
+goers left her alone with him again, "that those young ladies would like
+me to call on them?"
+
+"Those young ladies?"  Beaton echoed.  "Miss Leighton and--"
+
+"No; I have been there with my aunt's cards already."
+
+"Oh yes," said Beaton, as if he had known of it; he admired the pluck and
+pride with which Alma had refrained from ever mentioning the fact to him,
+and had kept her mother from mentioning it, which must have been
+difficult.
+
+"I mean the Miss Dryfooses.  It seems really barbarous, if nobody goes
+near them.  We do all kinds of things, and help all kinds of people in
+some ways, but we let strangers remain strangers unless they know how to
+make their way among us."
+
+"The Dryfooses certainly wouldn't know how to make their way among you,"
+said Beaton, with a sort of dreamy absence in his tone.
+
+Miss Vance went on, speaking out the process of reasoning in her mind,
+rather than any conclusions she had reached.  "We defend ourselves by
+trying to believe that they must have friends of their own, or that they
+would think us patronizing, and wouldn't like being made the objects of
+social charity; but they needn't really suppose anything of the kind."
+
+"I don't imagine they would," said Beaton.  "I think they'd be only too
+happy to have you come.  But you wouldn't know what to do with each
+other, indeed, Miss Vance."
+
+"Perhaps we shall like each other," said the girl, bravely, "and then we
+shall know.  What Church are they of?"
+
+"I don't believe they're of any," said Beaton.  "The mother was brought
+up a Dunkard."
+
+"A Dunkard?"
+
+Beaton told what he knew of the primitive sect, with its early Christian
+polity, its literal interpretation of Christ's ethics, and its quaint
+ceremonial of foot-washing; he made something picturesque of that.
+"The father is a Mammon-worshipper, pure and simple.  I suppose the young
+ladies go to church, but I don't know where.  They haven't tried to
+convert me."
+
+"I'll tell them not to despair--after I've converted them," said Miss
+Vance.  "Will you let me use you as a 'point d'appui', Mr. Beaton?"
+
+"Any way you like.  If you're really going to see them, perhaps I'd
+better make a confession.  I left your banjo with them, after I got it
+put in order."
+
+"How very nice!  Then we have a common interest already."
+
+"Do you mean the banjo, or--"
+
+"The banjo, decidedly.  Which of them plays?"
+
+"Neither.  But the eldest heard that the banjo was 'all the rage,' as the
+youngest says.  Perhaps you can persuade them that good works are the
+rage, too."
+
+Beaton had no very lively belief that Margaret would go to see the
+Dryfooses; he did so few of the things he proposed that he went upon the
+theory that others must be as faithless.  Still, he had a cruel amusement
+in figuring the possible encounter between Margaret Vance, with her
+intellectual elegance, her eager sympathies and generous ideals, and
+those girls with their rude past, their false and distorted perspective,
+their sordid and hungry selfishness, and their faith in the omnipotence
+of their father's wealth wounded by their experience of its present
+social impotence.  At the bottom of his heart he sympathized with them
+rather than with her; he was more like them.
+
+People had ceased coming, and some of them were going.  Miss Vance said
+she must go, too, and she was about to rise, when the host came up with
+March; Beaton turned away.
+
+"Miss Vance, I want to introduce Mr. March, the editor of 'Every Other
+Week.'  You oughtn't to be restricted to the art department.  We literary
+fellows think that arm of the service gets too much of the glory
+nowadays."  His banter was for Beaton, but he was already beyond ear-
+shot, and the host went on:
+
+Mr. March can talk with you about your favorite Boston.  He's just turned
+his back on it."
+
+"Oh, I hope not!" said Miss Vance.  "I can't imagine anybody voluntarily
+leaving Boston."
+
+"I don't say he's so bad as that," said the host, committing March to
+her.  "He came to New York because he couldn't help it--like the rest of
+us.  I never know whether that's a compliment to New York or not."
+
+They talked Boston a little while, without finding that they had common
+acquaintance there; Miss Vance must have concluded that society was much
+larger in Boston than she had supposed from her visits there, or else
+that March did not know many people in it.  But she was not a girl to
+care much for the inferences that might be drawn from such conclusions;
+she rather prided herself upon despising them; and she gave herself to
+the pleasure of being talked to as if she were of March's own age.
+In the glow of her sympathetic beauty and elegance he talked his best,
+and tried to amuse her with his jokes, which he had the art of tingeing
+with a little seriousness on one side.  He made her laugh; and he
+flattered her by making her think; in her turn she charmed him so much by
+enjoying what he said that he began to brag of his wife, as a good
+husband always does when another woman charms him; and she asked, Oh was
+Mrs. March there; and would he introduce her?
+
+She asked Mrs. March for her address, and whether she had a day; and she
+said she would come to see her, if she would let her.  Mrs. March could
+not be so enthusiastic about her as March was, but as they walked home
+together they talked the girl over, and agreed about her beauty and her
+amiability.  Mrs. March said she seemed very unspoiled for a person who
+must have been so much spoiled.  They tried to analyze her charm, and
+they succeeded in formulating it as a combination of intellectual
+fashionableness and worldly innocence.  "I think," said Mrs. March,
+"that city girls, brought up as she must have been, are often the most
+innocent of all.  They never imagine the wickedness of the world, and if
+they marry happily they go through life as innocent as children.
+Everything combines to keep them so; the very hollowness of society
+shields them.  They are the loveliest of the human race.  But perhaps the
+rest have to pay too much for them."
+
+"For such an exquisite creature as Miss Vance," said March, "we couldn't
+pay too much."
+
+A wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air at the street-crossing in
+front of them.  A girl's voice called out: "Run, run, Jen!  The copper is
+after you."  A woman's figure rushed stumbling across the way and into
+the shadow of the houses, pursued by a burly policeman.
+
+"Ah, but if that's part of the price?"
+
+They went along fallen from the gay spirit of their talk into a silence
+which he broke with a sigh.  "Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl
+we left yonder really belong to the same system of things?  How
+impossible each makes the other seem!"
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Mrs. Horn believed in the world and in society and its unwritten
+constitution devoutly, and she tolerated her niece's benevolent
+activities as she tolerated her aesthetic sympathies because these
+things, however oddly, were tolerated--even encouraged--by society;
+and they gave Margaret a charm.  They made her originality interesting.
+Mrs. Horn did not intend that they should ever go so far as to make her
+troublesome; and it was with a sense of this abeyant authority of her
+aunt's that the girl asked her approval of her proposed call upon the
+Dryfooses.  She explained as well as she could the social destitution of
+these opulent people, and she had of course to name Beaton as the source
+of her knowledge concerning them.
+
+"Did Mr. Beaton suggest your calling on them?"
+
+"No; he rather discouraged it."
+
+"And why do you think you ought to go in this particular instance?  New
+York is full of people who don't know anybody."
+
+Margaret laughed.  "I suppose it's like any other charity: you reach the
+cases you know of.  The others you say you can't help, and you try to
+ignore them."
+
+"It's very romantic," said Mrs. Horn.  "I hope you've counted the cost;
+all the possible consequences."
+
+Margaret knew that her aunt had in mind their common experience with the
+Leightons, whom, to give their common conscience peace, she had called
+upon with her aunt's cards and excuses, and an invitation for her
+Thursdays, somewhat too late to make the visit seem a welcome to New
+York.  She was so coldly received, not so much for herself as in her
+quality of envoy, that her aunt experienced all the comfort which
+vicarious penance brings.  She did not perhaps consider sufficiently her
+niece's guiltlessness in the expiation.  Margaret was not with her at
+St. Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there, and never saw the
+Leightons till she went to call upon them.  She never complained: the
+strain of asceticism, which mysteriously exists in us all, and makes us
+put peas, boiled or unboiled, in our shoes, gave her patience with the
+snub which the Leightons presented her for her aunt.  But now she said,
+with this in mind: "Nothing seems simpler than to get rid of people if
+you don't want them.  You merely have to let them alone."
+
+"It isn't so pleasant, letting them alone," said Mrs. Horn.
+
+"Or having them let you alone," said Margaret; for neither Mrs. Leighton
+nor Alma had ever come to enjoy the belated hospitality of Mrs. Horn's
+Thursdays.
+
+"Yes, or having them let you alone," Mrs. Horn courageously consented.
+"And all that I ask you, Margaret, is to be sure that you really want to
+know these people."
+
+"I don't," said the girl, seriously, "in the usual way."
+
+"Then the question is whether you do in the un usual way.  They will
+build a great deal upon you," said Mrs. Horn, realizing how much the
+Leightons must have built upon her, and how much out of proportion to her
+desert they must now dislike her; for she seemed to have had them on her
+mind from the time they came, and had always meant to recognize any
+reasonable claim they had upon her.
+
+"It seems very odd, very sad," Margaret returned, "that you never could
+act unselfishly in society affairs.  If I wished to go and see those
+girls just to do them a pleasure, and perhaps because if they're strange
+and lonely, I might do them good, even--it would be impossible."
+
+"Quite," said her aunt.  "Such a thing would be quixotic.  Society
+doesn't rest upon any such basis.  It can't; it would go to pieces, if
+people acted from unselfish motives."
+
+"Then it's a painted savage!" said the girl.  "All its favors are really
+bargains.  It's gifts are for gifts back again."
+
+"Yes, that is true," said Mrs. Horn, with no more sense of wrong in the
+fact than the political economist has in the fact that wages are the
+measure of necessity and not of merit.  "You get what you pay for.  It's
+a matter of business."  She satisfied herself with this formula, which
+she did not invent, as fully as if it were a reason; but she did not
+dislike her niece's revolt against it.  That was part of Margaret's
+originality, which pleased her aunt in proportion to her own
+conventionality; she was really a timid person, and she liked the show of
+courage which Margaret's magnanimity often reflected upon her.  She had
+through her a repute, with people who did not know her well, for
+intellectual and moral qualities; she was supposed to be literary and
+charitable; she almost had opinions and ideals, but really fell short of
+their possession.  She thought that she set bounds to the girl's
+originality because she recognized them.  Margaret understood this better
+than her aunt, and knew that she had consulted her about going to see the
+Dryfooses out of deference, and with no expectation of luminous
+instruction.  She was used to being a law to herself, but she knew what
+she might and might not do, so that she was rather a by-law.  She was the
+kind of girl that might have fancies for artists and poets, but might end
+by marrying a prosperous broker, and leavening a vast lump of moneyed and
+fashionable life with her culture, generosity, and good-will.  The
+intellectual interests were first with her, but she might be equal to
+sacrificing them; she had the best heart, but she might know how to
+harden it; if she was eccentric, her social orbit was defined; comets
+themselves traverse space on fixed lines.  She was like every one else,
+a congeries of contradictions and inconsistencies, but obedient to the
+general expectation of what a girl of her position must and must not
+finally be.  Provisionally, she was very much what she liked to be.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Margaret Vance tried to give herself some reason for going to call upon
+the Dryfooses, but she could find none better than the wish to do a kind
+thing.  This seemed queerer and less and less sufficient as she examined
+it, and she even admitted a little curiosity as a harmless element in her
+motive, without being very well satisfied with it.  She tried to add a
+slight sense of social duty, and then she decided to have no motive at
+all, but simply to pay her visit as she would to any other eligible
+strangers she saw fit to call upon.  She perceived that she must be very
+careful not to let them see that any other impulse had governed her; she
+determined, if possible, to let them patronize her; to be very modest and
+sincere and diffident, and, above all, not to play a part.  This was
+easy, compared with the choice of a manner that should convey to them the
+fact that she was not playing a part.  When the hesitating Irish serving-
+man had acknowledged that the ladies were at home, and had taken her card
+to them, she sat waiting for them in the drawing-room.  Her study of its
+appointments, with their impersonal costliness, gave her no suggestion
+how to proceed; the two sisters were upon her before she had really
+decided, and she rose to meet them with the conviction that she was going
+to play a part for want of some chosen means of not doing so.  She found
+herself, before she knew it, making her banjo a property in the little
+comedy, and professing so much pleasure in the fact that Miss Dryfoos was
+taking it up; she had herself been so much interested by it.  Anything,
+she said, was a relief from the piano; and then, between the guitar and
+the banjo, one must really choose the banjo, unless one wanted to devote
+one's whole natural life to the violin.  Of course, there was the
+mandolin; but Margaret asked if they did not feel that the bit of shell
+you struck it with interposed a distance between you and the real soul of
+the instrument; and then it did have such a faint, mosquitoy little tone!
+She made much of the question, which they left her to debate alone while
+they gazed solemnly at her till she characterized the tone of the
+mandolin, when Mela broke into a large, coarse laugh.
+
+"Well, that's just what it does sound like," she explained defiantly to
+her sister.  "I always feel like it was going to settle somewhere, and I
+want to hit myself a slap before it begins to bite.  I don't see what
+ever brought such a thing into fashion."
+
+Margaret had not expected to be so powerfully seconded, and she asked,
+after gathering herself together, "And you are both learning the banjo?"
+"My, no!" said Mela, "I've gone through enough with the piano.  Christine
+is learnun' it."
+
+"I'm so glad you are making my banjo useful at the outset, Miss Dryfoos."
+Both girls stared at her, but found it hard to cope with the fact that
+this was the lady friend whose banjo Beaton had lent them.  "Mr. Beaton
+mentioned that he had left it here.  I hope you'll keep it as long as you
+find it useful."
+
+At this amiable speech even Christine could not help thanking her.
+"Of course," she said, "I expect to get another, right off.  Mr. Beaton
+is going to choose it for me."
+
+"You are very fortunate.  If you haven't a teacher yet I should so like
+to recommend mine."
+
+Mela broke out in her laugh again.  "Oh, I guess Christine's pretty well
+suited with the one she's got," she said, with insinuation.  Her sister
+gave her a frowning glance, and Margaret did not tempt her to explain.
+
+"Then that's much better," she said.  "I have a kind of superstition in
+such matters; I don't like to make a second choice.  In a shop I like to
+take the first thing of the kind I'm looking for, and even if I choose
+further I come back to the original."
+
+"How funny!" said Mela.  "Well, now, I'm just the other way.  I always
+take the last thing, after I've picked over all the rest.  My luck always
+seems to be at the bottom of the heap.  Now, Christine, she's more like
+you.  I believe she could walk right up blindfolded and put her hand on
+the thing she wants every time."
+
+"I'm like father," said Christine, softened a little by the celebration
+of her peculiarity.  "He says the reason so many people don't get what
+they want is that they don't want it bad enough.  Now, when I want a
+thing, it seems to me that I want it all through."
+
+"Well, that's just like father, too," said Mela.  "That's the way he done
+when he got that eighty-acre piece next to Moffitt that he kept when he
+sold the farm, and that's got some of the best gas-wells on it now that
+there is anywhere."  She addressed the explanation to her sister, to the
+exclusion of Margaret, who, nevertheless, listened with a smiling face
+and a resolutely polite air of being a party to the conversation.  Mela
+rewarded her amiability by saying to her, finally, "You've never been in
+the natural-gas country, have you?"
+
+"Oh no! And I should so much like to see it!" said Margaret, with a
+fervor that was partly, voluntary.
+
+"Would you?  Well, we're kind of sick of it, but I suppose it would
+strike a stranger."
+
+"I never got tired of looking at the big wells when they lit them up,"
+said Christine.  "It seems as if the world was on fire."
+
+"Yes, and when you see the surface-gas burnun' down in the woods, like it
+used to by our spring-house-so still, and never spreadun' any, just like
+a bed of some kind of wild flowers when you ketch sight of it a piece
+off."
+
+They began to tell of the wonders of their strange land in an antiphony
+of reminiscences and descriptions; they unconsciously imputed a merit to
+themselves from the number and violence of the wells on their father's
+property; they bragged of the high civilization of Moffitt, which they
+compared to its advantage with that of New York.  They became excited by
+Margaret's interest in natural gas, and forgot to be suspicious and
+envious.
+
+She said, as she rose, "Oh, how much I should like to see it all!"  Then
+she made a little pause, and added:
+
+"I'm so sorry my aunt's Thursdays are over; she never has them after
+Lent, but we're to have some people Tuesday evening at a little concert
+which a musical friend is going to give with some other artists.  There
+won't be any banjos, I'm afraid, but there'll be some very good singing,
+and my aunt would be so glad if you could come with your mother."
+
+She put down her aunt's card on the table near her, while Mela gurgled,
+as if it were the best joke: "Oh, my!  Mother never goes anywhere; you
+couldn't get her out for love or money."  But she was herself overwhelmed
+with a simple joy at Margaret's politeness, and showed it in a sensuous
+way, like a child, as if she had been tickled.  She came closer to
+Margaret and seemed about to fawn physically upon her.
+
+"Ain't she just as lovely as she can live?"  she demanded of her sister
+when Margaret was gone.
+
+"I don't know," said Christine.  "I guess she wanted to know who
+Mr. Beaton had been lending her banjo to."
+
+"Pshaw!  Do you suppose she's in love with him?"  asked Mela, and then
+she broke into her hoarse laugh at the look her sister gave her.  "Well,
+don't eat me, Christine! I wonder who she is, anyway?  I'm goun' to git
+it out of Mr. Beaton the next time he calls.  I guess she's somebody.
+Mrs. Mandel can tell.  I wish that old friend of hers would hurry up and
+git well--or something.  But I guess we appeared about as well as she
+did.  I could see she was afraid of you, Christine.  I reckon it's
+gittun' around a little about father; and when it does I don't believe we
+shall want for callers.  Say, are you goun'? To that concert of theirs?"
+
+"I don't know.  Not till I know who they are first."
+
+"Well, we've got to hump ourselves if we're goun' to find out before
+Tuesday."
+
+As she went home Margaret felt wrought in her that most incredible of the
+miracles, which, nevertheless, any one may make his experience.  She felt
+kindly to these girls because she had tried to make them happy, and she
+hoped that in the interest she had shown there had been none of the
+poison of flattery.  She was aware that this was a risk she ran in such
+an attempt to do good.  If she had escaped this effect she was willing to
+leave the rest with Providence.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The notion that a girl of Margaret Vance's traditions would naturally
+form of girls like Christine and Mela Dryfoos would be that they were
+abashed in the presence of the new conditions of their lives, and that
+they must receive the advance she had made them with a certain grateful
+humility.  However they received it, she had made it upon principle, from
+a romantic conception of duty; but this was the way she imagined they
+would receive it, because she thought that she would have done so if she
+had been as ignorant and unbred as they.  Her error was in arguing their
+attitude from her own temperament, and endowing them, for the purposes of
+argument, with her perspective.  They had not the means, intellectual or
+moral, of feeling as she fancied.  If they had remained at home on the
+farm where they were born, Christine would have grown up that embodiment
+of impassioned suspicion which we find oftenest in the narrowest spheres,
+and Mela would always have been a good-natured simpleton; but they would
+never have doubted their equality with the wisest and the finest.  As it
+was, they had not learned enough at school to doubt it, and the splendor
+of their father's success in making money had blinded them forever to any
+possible difference against them.  They had no question of themselves in
+the social abeyance to which they had been left in New York.  They had
+been surprised, mystified; it was not what they had expected; there must
+be some mistake.
+
+They were the victims of an accident, which would be repaired as soon as
+the fact of their father's wealth had got around.  They had been
+steadfast in their faith, through all their disappointment, that they
+were not only better than most people by virtue of his money, but as good
+as any; and they took Margaret's visit, so far as they, investigated its
+motive, for a sign that at last it was beginning to get around; of
+course, a thing could not get around in New York so quick as it could in
+a small place.  They were confirmed in their belief by the sensation of
+Mrs. Mandel when she returned to duty that afternoon, and they consulted
+her about going to Mrs. Horn's musicale.  If she had felt any doubt at
+the name for there were Horns and Horns--the address on the card put the
+matter beyond question; and she tried to make her charges understand what
+a precious chance had befallen them.  She did not succeed; they had not
+the premises, the experience, for a sufficient impression; and she undid
+her work in part by the effort to explain that Mrs. Horn's standing was
+independent of money; that though she was positively rich, she was
+comparatively poor.  Christine inferred that Miss Vance had called
+because she wished to be the first to get in with them since it had begun
+to get around.  This view commended itself to Mela, too, but without
+warping her from her opinion that Miss Vance was all the same too sweet
+for anything.  She had not so vivid a consciousness of her father's money
+as Christine had; but she reposed perhaps all the more confidently upon
+its power.  She was far from thinking meanly of any one who thought
+highly of her for it; that seemed so natural a result as to be amiable,
+even admirable; she was willing that any such person should get all the
+good there was in such an attitude toward her.
+
+They discussed the matter that night at dinner before their father and
+mother, who mostly sat silent at their meals; the father frowning
+absently over his plate, with his head close to it, and making play into
+his mouth with the back of his knife (he had got so far toward the use of
+his fork as to despise those who still ate from the edge of their
+knives), and the mother partly missing hers at times in the nervous
+tremor that shook her face from side to side.
+
+After a while the subject of Mela's hoarse babble and of Christine's
+high-pitched, thin, sharp forays of assertion and denial in the field
+which her sister's voice seemed to cover, made its way into the old man's
+consciousness, and he perceived that they were talking with Mrs. Mandel
+about it, and that his wife was from time to time offering an irrelevant
+and mistaken comment.  He agreed with Christine, and silently took her
+view of the affair some time before he made any sign of having listened.
+There had been a time in his life when other things besides his money
+seemed admirable to him.  He had once respected himself for the hard-
+headed, practical common sense which first gave him standing among his
+country neighbors; which made him supervisor, school trustee, justice of
+the peace, county commissioner, secretary of the Moffitt County
+Agricultural Society.  In those days he had served the public with
+disinterested zeal and proud ability; he used to write to the Lake Shore
+Farmer on agricultural topics; he took part in opposing, through the
+Moffitt papers, the legislative waste of the people's money; on the
+question of selling a local canal to the railroad company, which killed
+that fine old State work, and let the dry ditch grow up to grass, he
+might have gone to the Legislature, but he contented himself with
+defeating the Moffitt member who had voted for the job.  If he opposed
+some measures for the general good, like high schools and school
+libraries, it was because he lacked perspective, in his intense
+individualism, and suspected all expense of being spendthrift.  He
+believed in good district schools, and he had a fondness, crude but
+genuine, for some kinds of reading--history, and forensics of an
+elementary sort.
+
+With his good head for figures he doubted doctors and despised preachers;
+he thought lawyers were all rascals, but he respected them for their
+ability; he was not himself litigious, but he enjoyed the intellectual
+encounters of a difficult lawsuit, and he often attended a sitting of the
+fall term of court, when he went to town, for the pleasure of hearing the
+speeches.  He was a good citizen, and a good husband.  As a good father,
+he was rather severe with his children, and used to whip them, especially
+the gentle Conrad, who somehow crossed him most, till the twins died.
+After that he never struck any of them; and from the sight of a blow
+dealt a horse he turned as if sick.  It was a long time before he lifted
+himself up from his sorrow, and then the will of the man seemed to have
+been breached through his affections.  He let the girls do as they
+pleased--the twins had been girls; he let them go away to school, and got
+them a piano.  It was they who made him sell the farm.  If Conrad had
+only had their spirit he could have made him keep it, he felt; and he
+resented the want of support he might have found in a less yielding
+spirit than his son's.
+
+His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunity of making
+money quickly and abundantly, which offered itself to him after he sold
+his farm.  He awoke to it slowly, from a desolation in which he tasted
+the last bitter of homesickness, the utter misery of idleness and
+listlessness.  When he broke down and cried for the hard-working,
+wholesome life he had lost, he was near the end of this season of
+despair, but he was also near the end of what was best in himself.
+He devolved upon a meaner ideal than that of conservative good
+citizenship, which had been his chief moral experience: the money he had
+already made without effort and without merit bred its unholy self-love
+in him; he began to honor money, especially money that had been won
+suddenly and in large sums; for money that had been earned painfully,
+slowly, and in little amounts, he had only pity and contempt.  The poison
+of that ambition to go somewhere and be somebody which the local
+speculators had instilled into him began to work in the vanity which had
+succeeded his somewhat scornful self-respect; he rejected Europe as the
+proper field for his expansion; he rejected Washington; he preferred New
+York, whither the men who have made money and do not yet know that money
+has made them, all instinctively turn.  He came where he could watch his
+money breed more money, and bring greater increase of its kind in an hour
+of luck than the toil of hundreds of men could earn in a year.  He called
+it speculation, stocks, the Street; and his pride, his faith in himself,
+mounted with his luck.  He expected, when he had sated his greed,
+to begin to spend, and he had formulated an intention to build a great
+house, to add another to the palaces of the country-bred millionaires who
+have come to adorn the great city.  In the mean time he made little
+account of the things that occupied his children, except to fret at the
+ungrateful indifference of his son to the interests that could alone make
+a man of him.  He did not know whether his daughters were in society or
+not; with people coming and going in the house he would have supposed
+they must be so, no matter who the people were; in some vague way he felt
+that he had hired society in Mrs. Mandel, at so much a year.  He never
+met a superior himself except now and then a man of twenty or thirty
+millions to his one or two, and then he felt his soul creep within him,
+without a sense of social inferiority; it was a question of financial
+inferiority; and though Dryfoos's soul bowed itself and crawled, it was
+with a gambler's admiration of wonderful luck.  Other men said these
+many-millioned millionaires were smart, and got their money by sharp
+practices to which lesser men could not attain; but Dryfoos believed that
+he could compass the same ends, by the same means, with the same chances;
+he respected their money, not them.
+
+When he now heard Mrs. Mandel and his daughters talking of that person,
+whoever she was, that Mrs. Mandel seemed to think had honored his girls
+by coming to see them, his curiosity was pricked as much as his pride was
+galled.
+
+"Well, anyway," said Mela, "I don't care whether Christine's goon' or
+not; I am.  And you got to go with me, Mrs. Mandel."
+
+"Well, there's a little difficulty," said Mrs. Mandel, with her unfailing
+dignity and politeness.  "I haven't been asked, you know."
+
+"Then what are we goun' to do?"  demanded Mela, almost crossly.  She was
+physically too amiable, she felt too well corporeally, ever to be quite
+cross.  "She might 'a' knowed--well known--we couldn't 'a' come alone,
+in New York.  I don't see why, we couldn't.  I don't call it much of an
+invitation."
+
+"I suppose she thought you could come with your mother," Mrs. Mandel
+suggested.
+
+"She didn't say anything about mother: Did she, Christine?  Or, yes, she
+did, too.  And I told her she couldn't git mother out.  Don't you
+remember?"
+
+"I didn't pay much attention," said Christine.  "I wasn't certain we
+wanted to go."
+
+"I reckon you wasn't goun' to let her see that we cared much," said Mela,
+half reproachful, half proud of this attitude of Christine.  "Well,
+I don't see but what we got to stay at home."  She laughed at this lame
+conclusion of the matter.
+
+"Perhaps Mr. Conrad--you could very properly take him without an express
+invitation--" Mrs. Mandel began.
+
+Conrad looked up in alarm and protest.  "I--I don't think I could go that
+evening--"
+
+"What's the reason?" his father broke in, harshly.  "You're not such a
+sheep that you're afraid to go into company with your sisters?  Or are
+you too good to go with them?"
+
+"If it's to be anything like that night when them hussies come out and
+danced that way," said Mrs. Dryfoos, "I don't blame Coonrod for not
+wantun' to go.  I never saw the beat of it."
+
+Mela sent a yelling laugh across the table to her mother.  "Well, I wish
+Miss Vance could 'a' heard that!  Why, mother, did you think it like the
+ballet?"
+
+"Well, I didn't know, Mely, child," said the old woman.  "I didn't know
+what it was like.  I hain't never been to one, and you can't be too
+keerful where you go, in a place like New York."
+
+"What's the reason you can't go?"  Dryfoos ignored the passage between
+his wife and daughter in making this demand of his son, with a sour face.
+
+"I have an engagement that night--it's one of our meetings."
+
+"I reckon you can let your meeting go for one night," said Dryfoos.
+"It can't be so important as all that, that you must disappoint your
+sisters."
+
+"I don't like to disappoint those poor creatures.  They depend so much
+upon the meetings--"
+
+"I reckon they can stand it for one night," said the old man.  He added,
+"The poor ye have with you always."
+
+"That's so, Coonrod," said his mother.  "It's the Saviour's own words."
+
+"Yes, mother.  But they're not meant just as father used them."
+
+"How do you know how they were meant?  Or how I used them?"  cried the
+father.  "Now you just make your plans to go with the girls, Tuesday
+night.  They can't go alone, and Mrs. Mandel can't go with them."
+
+"Pshaw!" said Mela.  "We don't want to take Conrad away from his meetun',
+do we, Chris?"
+
+"I don't know," said Christine, in her high, fine voice.  "They could get
+along without him for one night, as father says."
+
+"Well, I'm not a-goun' to take him," said Mela.  "Now, Mrs. Mandel, just
+think out some other way.  Say! What's the reason we couldn't get
+somebody else to take us just as well?  Ain't that rulable?"
+
+"It would be allowable--"
+
+"Allowable, I mean," Mela corrected herself.
+
+"But it might look a little significant, unless it was some old family
+friend."
+
+"Well, let's get Mr. Fulkerson to take us.  He's the oldest family friend
+we got."
+
+"I won't go with Mr. Fulkerson," said Christine, serenely.
+
+"Why, I'm sure, Christine," her mother pleaded, "Mr. Fulkerson is a very
+good young man, and very nice appearun'."
+
+Mela shouted, "He's ten times as pleasant as that old Mr. Beaton of
+Christine's!"
+
+Christine made no effort to break the constraint that fell upon the table
+at this sally, but her father said: "Christine is right, Mela.  It
+wouldn't do for you to go with any other young man.  Conrad will go with
+you."
+
+"I'm not certain I want to go, yet," said Christine.
+
+"Well, settle that among yourselves.  But if you want to go, your brother
+will go with you."
+
+"Of course, Coonrod 'll go, if his sisters wants him to," the old woman
+pleaded.  "I reckon it ain't agoun' to be anything very bad; and if it
+is, Coonrod, why you can just git right up and come out."
+
+"It will be all right, mother.  And I will go, of course."
+
+"There, now, I knowed you would, Coonrod.  Now, fawther!"  This appeal
+was to make the old man say something in recognition of Conrad's
+sacrifice.
+
+"You'll always find," he said, "that it's those of your own household
+that have the first claim on you."
+
+"That's so, Coonrod," urged his mother.  "It's Bible truth.  Your fawther
+ain't a perfesser, but he always did read his Bible.  Search the
+Scriptures.  That's what it means."
+
+"Laws!" cried Mely, "a body can see, easy enough from mother, where
+Conrad's wantun' to be a preacher comes from.  I should 'a' thought she'd
+'a' wanted to been one herself."
+
+"Let your women keep silence in the churches," said the old woman,
+solemnly.
+
+"There you go again, mother! I guess if you was to say that to some of
+the lady ministers nowadays, you'd git yourself into trouble."  Mela
+looked round for approval, and gurgled out a hoarse laugh.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The Dryfooses went late to Mrs. Horn's musicale, in spite of Mrs.
+Mandel's advice.  Christine made the delay, both because she wished to
+show Miss Vance that she was (not) anxious, and because she had some
+vague notion of the distinction of arriving late at any sort of
+entertainment.  Mrs. Mandel insisted upon the difference between this
+musicale and an ordinary reception; but Christine rather fancied
+disturbing a company that had got seated, and perhaps making people rise
+and stand, while she found her way to her place, as she had seen them.
+do for a tardy comer at the theatre.
+
+Mela, whom she did not admit to her reasons or feelings always, followed
+her with the servile admiration she had for all that Christine did; and
+she took on trust as somehow successful the result of Christine's
+obstinacy, when they were allowed to stand against the wall at the back
+of the room through the whole of the long piece begun just before they
+came in.  There had been no one to receive them; a few people, in the
+rear rows of chairs near them, turned their heads to glance at them, and
+then looked away again.  Mela had her misgivings; but at the end of the
+piece Miss Vance came up to them at once, and then Mela knew that she had
+her eyes on them all the time, and that Christine must have been right.
+Christine said nothing about their coming late, and so Mela did not make
+any excuse, and Miss Vance seemed to expect none.  She glanced with a
+sort of surprise at Conrad, when Christine introduced him; Mela did not
+know whether she liked their bringing him, till she shook hands with him,
+and said: "Oh, I am very glad indeed!  Mr. Dryfoos and I have met
+before."  Without explaining where or when, she led them to her aunt and
+presented them, and then said, "I'm going to put you with some friends of
+yours," and quickly seated them next the Marches.  Mela liked that well
+enough; she thought she might have some joking with Mr. March, for all
+his wife was so stiff; but the look which Christine wore seemed to
+forbid, provisionally at least, any such recreation.  On her part,
+Christine was cool with the Marches.  It went through her mind that they
+must have told Miss Vance they knew her; and perhaps they had boasted of
+her intimacy.  She relaxed a little toward them when she saw Beaton
+leaning against the wall at the end of the row next Mrs. March.  Then she
+conjectured that he might have told Miss Vance of her acquaintance with
+the Marches, and she bent forward and nodded to Mrs. March across Conrad,
+Mela, and Mr. March.  She conceived of him as a sort of hand of her
+father's, but she was willing to take them at their apparent social
+valuation for the time.  She leaned back in her chair, and did not look
+up at Beaton after the first furtive glance, though she felt his eyes on
+her.
+
+The music began again almost at once, before Mela had time to make Conrad
+tell her where Miss Vance had met him before.  She would not have minded
+interrupting the music; but every one else seemed so attentive, even
+Christine, that she had not the courage. The concert went onto an end
+without realizing for her the ideal of pleasure which one ought to find.
+in society.  She was not exacting, but it seemed to her there were very
+few young men, and when the music was over, and their opportunity came to
+be sociable, they were not very sociable.  They were not introduced, for
+one thing; but it appeared to Mela that they might have got introduced,
+if they had any sense; she saw them looking at her, and she was glad she
+had dressed so much; she was dressed more than any other lady there, and
+either because she was the most dressed of any person there, or because
+it had got around who her father was, she felt that she had made an
+impression on the young men.  In her satisfaction with this, and from her
+good nature, she was contented to be served with her refreshments after
+the concert by Mr. March, and to remain joking with him.  She was at her
+ease; she let her hoarse voice out in her largest laugh; she accused him,
+to the admiration of those near, of getting her into a perfect gale.  It
+appeared to her, in her own pleasure, her mission to illustrate to the
+rather subdued people about her what a good time really was, so that they
+could have it if they wanted it.  Her joy was crowned when March modestly
+professed himself unworthy to monopolize her, and explained how selfish
+he felt in talking to a young lady when there were so many young men
+dying to do so.
+
+"Oh, pshaw, dyun', yes!" cried Mela, tasting the irony.  "I guess I see
+them!"
+
+He asked if he might really introduce a friend of his to her, and she
+said, Well, yes, if be thought he could live to get to her; and March
+brought up a man whom he thought very young and Mela thought very old.
+He was a contributor to 'Every Other Week,' and so March knew him;
+he believed himself a student of human nature in behalf of literature,
+and he now set about studying Mela.  He tempted her to express her
+opinion on all points, and he laughed so amiably at the boldness and
+humorous vigor of her ideas that she was delighted with him.  She asked
+him if he was a New-Yorker by birth; and she told him she pitied him,
+when he said he had never been West.  She professed herself perfectly
+sick of New York, and urged him to go to Moffitt if he wanted to see a
+real live town.  He wondered if it would do to put her into literature
+just as she was, with all her slang and brag, but he decided that he
+would have to subdue her a great deal: he did not see how he could
+reconcile the facts of her conversation with the facts of her appearance:
+her beauty, her splendor of dress, her apparent right to be where she
+was.  These things perplexed him; he was afraid the great American novel,
+if true, must be incredible.  Mela said he ought to hear her sister go on
+about New York when they first came; but she reckoned that Christine was
+getting so she could put up with it a little better, now.  She looked
+significantly across the room to the place where Christine was now
+talking with Beaton; and the student of human nature asked, Was she here?
+and, Would she introduce him?  Mela said she would, the first chance she
+got; and she added, They would be much pleased to have him call.  She
+felt herself to be having a beautiful time, and she got directly upon
+such intimate terms with the student of human nature that she laughed
+with him about some peculiarities of his, such as his going so far about
+to ask things he wanted to know from her; she said she never did believe
+in beating about the bush much.  She had noticed the same thing in Miss
+Vance when she came to call that day; and when the young man owned that
+he came rather a good deal to Mrs. Horn's house, she asked him, Well,
+what sort of a girl was Miss Vance, anyway, and where did he suppose she
+had met her brother?  The student of human nature could not say as to
+this, and as to Miss Vance he judged it safest to treat of the non-
+society side of her character, her activity in charity, her special
+devotion to the work among the poor on the East Side, which she
+personally engaged in.
+
+"Oh, that's where Conrad goes, too!"  Mela interrupted.  "I'll bet
+anything that's where she met him.  I wisht I could tell Christine!
+But I suppose she would want to kill me, if I was to speak to her now."
+
+The student of human nature said, politely, "Oh, shall I take you to
+her?"
+
+Mela answered, "I guess you better not!" with a laugh so significant that
+he could not help his inferences concerning both Christine's absorption
+in the person she was talking with and the habitual violence of her
+temper.  He made note of how Mela helplessly spoke of all her family by
+their names, as if he were already intimate with them; he fancied that if
+he could get that in skillfully, it would be a valuable color in his
+study; the English lord whom she should astonish with it began to form
+himself out of the dramatic nebulosity in his mind, and to whirl on a
+definite orbit in American society.  But he was puzzled to decide whether
+Mela's willingness to take him into her confidence on short notice was
+typical or personal: the trait of a daughter of the natural-gas
+millionaire, or a foible of her own.
+
+Beaton talked with Christine the greater part of the evening that was
+left after the concert.  He was very grave, and took the tone of a
+fatherly friend; he spoke guardedly of the people present, and moderated
+the severity of some of Christine's judgments of their looks and
+costumes.  He did this out of a sort of unreasoned allegiance to
+Margaret, whom he was in the mood of wishing to please by being very kind
+and good, as she always was.  He had the sense also of atoning by this
+behavior for some reckless things he had said before that to Christine;
+he put on a sad, reproving air with her, and gave her the feeling of
+being held in check.
+
+She chafed at it, and said, glancing at Margaret in talk with her
+brother, "I don't think Miss Vance is so very pretty, do you?"
+
+"I never think whether she's pretty or not," said Becton, with dreamy,
+affectation.  "She is merely perfect.  Does she know your brother?"
+
+"So she says.  I didn't suppose Conrad ever went anywhere, except to
+tenement-houses."
+
+"It might have been there," Becton suggested.  "She goes among friendless
+people everywhere."
+
+"Maybe that's the reason she came to see us!" said Christine.
+
+Becton looked at her with his smouldering eyes, and felt the wish to say,
+"Yes, it was exactly that," but he only allowed himself to deny the
+possibility of any such motive in that case.  He added: "I am so glad you
+know her, Miss Dryfoos.  I never met Miss Vance without feeling myself
+better and truer, somehow; or the wish to be so."
+
+"And you think we might be improved, too?"  Christine retorted.  "Well,
+I must say you're not very flattering, Mr. Becton, anyway."
+
+Becton would have liked to answer her according to her cattishness, with
+a good clawing sarcasm that would leave its smart in her pride; but he
+was being good, and he could not change all at once.  Besides, the girl's
+attitude under the social honor done her interested him.  He was sure she
+had never been in such good company before, but he could see that she was
+not in the least affected by the experience.  He had told her who this
+person and that was; and he saw she had understood that the names were of
+consequence; but she seemed to feel her equality with them all.
+Her serenity was not obviously akin to the savage stoicism in which
+Beaton hid his own consciousness of social inferiority; but having won
+his way in the world so far by his talent, his personal quality, he did
+not conceive the simple fact in her case.  Christine was self-possessed
+because she felt that a knowledge of her father's fortune had got around,
+and she had the peace which money gives to ignorance; but Beaton
+attributed her poise to indifference to social values.  This, while he
+inwardly sneered at it, avenged him upon his own too keen sense of them,
+and, together with his temporary allegiance to Margaret's goodness, kept
+him from retaliating Christine's vulgarity.  He said, "I don't see how
+that could be," and left the question of flattery to settle itself.
+
+The people began to go away, following each other up to take leave of
+Mrs. Horn.  Christine watched them with unconcern, and either because she
+would not be governed by the general movement, or because she liked being
+with Beaton, gave no sign of going.  Mela was still talking to the
+student of human nature, sending out her laugh in deep gurgles amid the
+unimaginable confidences she was making him about herself, her family,
+the staff of 'Every Other Week,' Mrs. Mandel, and the kind of life they
+had all led before she came to them.  He was not a blind devotee of art
+for art's sake, and though he felt that if one could portray Mela just as
+she was she would be the richest possible material, he was rather ashamed
+to know some of the things she told him; and he kept looking anxiously
+about for a chance of escape.  The company had reduced itself to the
+Dryfoos groups and some friends of Mrs. Horn's who had the right to
+linger, when Margaret crossed the room with Conrad to Christine and
+Beaton.
+
+"I'm so glad, Miss Dryfoos, to find that I was not quite a stranger to
+you all when I ventured to call, the other day.  Your brother and I are
+rather old acquaintances, though I never knew who he was before.  I don't
+know just how to say we met where he is valued so much.  I suppose I
+mustn't try to say how much," she added, with a look of deep regard at
+him.
+
+Conrad blushed and stood folding his arms tight over his breast, while
+his sister received Margaret's confession with the suspicion which was
+her first feeling in regard to any new thing.  What she concluded was
+that this girl was trying to get in with them, for reasons of her own.
+She said: "Yes; it's the first I ever heard of his knowing you.  He's so
+much taken up with his meetings, he didn't want to come to-night."
+
+Margaret drew in her lip before she answered, without apparent resentment
+of the awkwardness or ungraciousness, whichever she found it: "I don't
+wonder!  You become so absorbed in such work that you think nothing else
+is worth while.  But I'm glad Mr. Dryfoos could come with you; I'm so
+glad you could all come; I knew you would enjoy the music.  Do sit
+down--"
+
+"No," said Christine, bluntly; "we must be going.  Mela!" she called out,
+"come!"
+
+The last group about Mrs. Horn looked round, but Christine advanced upon
+them undismayed, and took the hand Mrs. Horn promptly gave her.  "Well, I
+must bid you good-night."
+
+"Oh, good-night," murmured the elder lady.  "So very kind of you to
+come."
+
+"I've had the best kind of a time," said Mela, cordially.  "I hain't
+laughed so much, I don't know when."
+
+"Oh, I'm glad you enjoyed it," said Mrs. Horn, in the same polite murmur
+she had used with Christine; but she said nothing to either sister about
+any future meeting.
+
+They were apparently not troubled.  Mela said over her shoulder to the
+student of human nature, "The next time I see you I'll give it to you for
+what you said about Moffitt."
+
+Margaret made some entreating paces after them, but she did not succeed
+in covering the retreat of the sisters against critical conjecture.  She
+could only say to Conrad, as if recurring to the subject, "I hope we can
+get our friends to play for us some night.  I know it isn't any real
+help, but such things take the poor creatures out of themselves for the
+time being, don't you think?"
+
+"Oh yes," he answered.  "They're good in that way."  He turned back
+hesitatingly to Mrs. Horn, and said, with a blush, "I thank you for a
+happy evening."
+
+"Oh, I am very glad," she replied, in her murmur.
+
+One of the old friends of the house arched her eyebrows in saying good-
+night, and offered the two young men remaining seats home in her
+carriage.  Beaton gloomily refused, and she kept herself from asking the
+student of human nature, till she had got him into her carriage, "What is
+Moffitt, and what did you say about it?"
+
+"Now you see, Margaret," said Mrs. Horn, with bated triumph, when the
+people were all gone.
+
+"Yes, I see," the girl consented.  "From one point of view, of course
+it's been a failure.  I don't think we've given Miss Dryfoos a pleasure,
+but perhaps nobody could.  And at least we've given her the opportunity
+of enjoying herself."
+
+"Such people," said Mrs. Horn, philosophically, "people with their money,
+must of course be received sooner or later.  You can't keep them out.
+Only, I believe I would rather let some one else begin with them.  The
+Leightons didn't come?"
+
+"I sent them cards.  I couldn't call again."
+
+Mrs. Horn sighed a little.  "I suppose Mr. Dryfoos is one of your fellow-
+philanthropists?"
+
+"He's one of the workers," said Margaret.  "I met him several times at
+the Hall, but I only knew his first name.  I think he's a great friend of
+Father Benedict; he seems devoted to the work.  Don't you think he looks
+good?"
+
+"Very," said Mrs. Horn, with a color of censure in her assent.  "The
+younger girl seemed more amiable than her sister.  But what manners!"
+
+"Dreadful!" said Margaret, with knit brows, and a pursed mouth of
+humorous suffering.  "But she appeared to feel very much at home."
+
+"Oh, as to that, neither of them was much abashed.  Do you suppose
+Mr. Beaton gave the other one some hints for that quaint dress of hers?
+I don't imagine that black and lace is her own invention.  She seems to
+have some sort of strange fascination for him."
+
+"She's very picturesque," Margaret explained.  "And artists see points in
+people that the rest of us don't."
+
+"Could it be her money?"  Mrs. Horn insinuated.  "He must be very poor."
+
+"But he isn't base," retorted the girl, with a generous indignation that
+made her aunt smile.
+
+"Oh no; but if he fancies her so picturesque, it doesn't follow that he
+would object to her being rich."
+
+"It would with a man like Mr. Beaton!"
+
+"You are an idealist, Margaret.  I suppose your Mr. March has some
+disinterested motive in paying court to Miss Mela--Pamela, I suppose, is
+her name.  He talked to her longer than her literature would have
+lasted."
+
+"He seems a very kind person," said Margaret.
+
+"And Mr. Dryfoos pays his salary?"
+
+"I don't know anything about that.  But that wouldn't make any difference
+with him."
+
+Mrs. Horn laughed out at this security; but she was not displeased by the
+nobleness which it came from.  She liked Margaret to be high-minded, and
+was really not distressed by any good that was in her.
+
+The Marches walked home, both because it was not far, and because they
+must spare in carriage hire at any rate.  As soon as they were out of the
+house, she applied a point of conscience to him.
+
+"I don't see how you could talk to that girl so long, Basil, and make her
+laugh so."
+
+"Why, there seemed no one else to do it, till I thought of Kendricks."
+
+"Yes, but I kept thinking, Now he's pleasant to her because he thinks
+it's to his interest.  If she had no relation to 'Every Other Week,' he
+wouldn't waste his time on her."
+
+"Isabel," March complained, "I wish you wouldn't think of me in he, him,
+and his; I never personalize you in my thoughts: you remain always a
+vague unindividualized essence, not quite without form and void, but
+nounless and pronounless.  I call that a much more beautiful mental
+attitude toward the object of one's affections.  But if you must he and
+him and his me in your thoughts, I wish you'd have more kindly thoughts
+of me."
+
+"Do you deny that it's true, Basil?"
+
+"Do you believe that it's true, Isabel?"
+
+"No matter.  But could you excuse it if it were?"
+
+"Ah, I see you'd have been capable of it in my, place, and you're
+ashamed."
+
+"Yes," sighed the wife, "I'm afraid that I should.  But tell me that you
+wouldn't, Basil!"
+
+"I can tell you that I wasn't.  But I suppose that in a real exigency,
+I could truckle to the proprietary Dryfooses as well as you."
+
+"Oh no; you mustn't, dear! I'm a woman, and I'm dreadfully afraid.  But
+you must always be a man, especially with that horrid old Mr. Dryfoos.
+Promise me that you'll never yield the least point to him in a matter of
+right and wrong!"
+
+"Not if he's right and I'm wrong?"
+
+"Don't trifle, dear! You know what I mean.  Will you promise?"
+
+"I'll promise to submit the point to you, and let you do the yielding.
+As for me, I shall be adamant.  Nothing I like better."
+
+"They're dreadful, even that poor, good young fellow, who's so different
+from all the rest; he's awful, too, because you feel that he's a martyr
+to them."
+
+"And I never did like martyrs a great deal," March interposed.
+
+"I wonder how they came to be there," Mrs. March pursued, unmindful of
+his joke.
+
+"That is exactly what seemed to be puzzling Miss Mela about us.  She
+asked, and I explained as well as I could; and then she told me that Miss
+Vance had come to call on them and invited them; and first they didn't
+know how they could come till they thought of making Conrad bring them.
+But she didn't say why Miss Vance called on them.  Mr. Dryfoos doesn't
+employ her on 'Every Other Week.'  But I suppose she has her own vile
+little motive."
+
+"It can't be their money; it can't be!" sighed Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, I don't know.  We all respect money."
+
+"Yes, but Miss Vance's position is so secure.  She needn't pay court to
+those stupid, vulgar people."
+
+"Well, let's console ourselves with the belief that she would, if she
+needed.  Such people as the Dryfooses are the raw material of good
+society.  It isn't made up of refined or meritorious people--professors
+and litterateurs, ministers and musicians, and their families.  All the
+fashionable people there to-night were like the Dryfooses a generation or
+two ago.  I dare say the material works up faster now, and in a season or
+two you won't know the Dryfooses from the other plutocrats.  THEY will--
+a little better than they do now; they'll see a difference, but nothing
+radical, nothing painful.  People who get up in the world by service to
+others--through letters, or art, or science--may have their modest little
+misgivings as to their social value, but people that rise by money--
+especially if their gains are sudden--never have.  And that's the kind of
+people that form our nobility; there's no use pretending that we haven't
+a nobility; we might as well pretend we haven't first-class cars in the
+presence of a vestibuled Pullman.  Those girls had no more doubt of their
+right to be there than if they had been duchesses: we thought it was very
+nice of Miss Vance to come and ask us, but they didn't; they weren't
+afraid, or the least embarrassed; they were perfectly natural--like born
+aristocrats.  And you may be sure that if the plutocracy that now owns
+the country ever sees fit to take on the outward signs of an aristocracy
+--titles, and arms, and ancestors--it won't falter from any inherent
+question of its worth.  Money prizes and honors itself, and if there is
+anything it hasn't got, it believes it can buy it."
+
+Well, Basil," said his wife, "I hope you won't get infected with Lindau's
+ideas of rich people.  Some of them are very good and kind."
+
+"Who denies that?  Not even Lindau himself.  It's all right.  And the
+great thing is that the evening's enjoyment is over.  I've got my society
+smile off, and I'm radiantly happy.  Go on with your little pessimistic
+diatribes, Isabel; you can't spoil my pleasure."
+
+
+"I could see," said Mela, as she and Christine drove home together, "that
+she was as jealous as she could be, all the time you was talkun' to Mr.
+Beaton.  She pretended to be talkun' to Conrad, but she kep' her eye on
+you pretty close, I can tell you.  I bet she just got us there to see how
+him and you would act together.  And I reckon she was satisfied.  He's
+dead gone on you, Chris."
+
+Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the flatteries with which
+Mela plied her in the hope of some return in kind, and not at all because
+she felt spitefully toward Miss Vance, or in anywise wished her ill.
+"Who was that fellow with you so long?" asked Christine.  "I suppose you
+turned yourself inside out to him, like you always do."
+
+Mela was transported by the cruel ingratitude.  "It's a lie! I didn't
+tell him a single thing."
+
+
+Conrad walked home, choosing to do so because he did not wish to hear his
+sisters' talk of the evening, and because there was a tumult in his
+spirit which he wished to let have its way.  In his life with its single
+purpose, defeated by stronger wills than his own, and now struggling
+partially to fulfil itself in acts of devotion to others, the thought of
+women had entered scarcely more than in that of a child.  His ideals were
+of a virginal vagueness; faces, voices, gestures had filled his fancy at
+times, but almost passionately; and the sensation that he now indulged
+was a kind of worship, ardent, but reverent and exalted.  The brutal
+experiences of the world make us forget that there are such natures in
+it, and that they seem to come up out of the lowly earth as well as down
+from the high heaven.  In the heart of this man well on toward thirty
+there had never been left the stain of a base thought; not that
+suggestion and conjecture had not visited him, but that he had not
+entertained them, or in any-wise made them his.  In a Catholic age and
+country, he would have been one of those monks who are sainted after
+death for the angelic purity of their lives, and whose names are invoked
+by believers in moments of trial, like San Luigi Gonzaga.  As he now
+walked along thinking, with a lover's beatified smile on his face, of how
+Margaret Vance had spoken and looked, he dramatized scenes in which be
+approved himself to her by acts of goodness and unselfishness, and died
+to please her for the sake of others.  He made her praise him for them,
+to his face, when he disclaimed their merit, and after his death, when he
+could not.  All the time he was poignantly sensible of her grace, her
+elegance, her style; they seemed to intoxicate him; some tones of her
+voice thrilled through his nerves, and some looks turned his brain with a
+delicious, swooning sense of her beauty; her refinement bewildered him.
+But all this did not admit the idea of possession, even of aspiration.
+At the most his worship only set her beyond the love of other men as far
+as beyond his own.
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Affectional habit
+Brag of his wife, as a good husband always does
+But when we make that money here, no one loses it
+Courage hadn't been put to the test
+Family buryin' grounds
+Homage which those who have not pay to those who have
+Hurry up and git well--or something
+Made money and do not yet know that money has made them
+Society: All its favors are really bargains
+Wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit
+Without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes, v3
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+PART FOURTH
+
+
+I.
+
+Not long after Lent, Fulkerson set before Dryfoos one day his scheme for
+a dinner in celebration of the success of 'Every Other Week.'  Dryfoos
+had never meddled in any manner with the conduct of the periodical;
+but Fulkerson easily saw that he was proud of his relation to it, and he
+proceeded upon the theory that he would be willing to have this relation
+known: On the days when he had been lucky in stocks, he was apt to drop
+in at the office on Eleventh Street, on his way up-town, and listen to
+Fulkerson's talk.  He was on good enough terms with March, who revised
+his first impressions of the man, but they had not much to say to each
+other, and it seemed to March that Dryfoos was even a little afraid of
+him, as of a piece of mechanism he had acquired, but did not quite
+understand; he left the working of it to Fulkerson, who no doubt bragged
+of it sufficiently.  The old man seemed to have as little to say to his
+son; he shut himself up with Fulkerson, where the others could hear the
+manager begin and go on with an unstinted flow of talk about 'Every Other
+Week;' for Fulkerson never talked of anything else if he could help it,
+and was always bringing the conversation back to it if it strayed:
+
+The day he spoke of the dinner he rose and called from his door: "March,
+I say, come down here a minute, will you?  Conrad, I want you, too."
+
+The editor and the publisher found the manager and the proprietor seated
+on opposite sides of the table.  "It's about those funeral baked meats,
+you know," Fulkerson explained, "and I was trying to give Mr. Dryfoos
+some idea of what we wanted to do.  That is, what I wanted to do," he
+continued, turning from March to Dryfoos.  "March, here, is opposed to
+it, of course.  He'd like to publish 'Every Other Week' on the sly; keep
+it out of the papers, and off the newsstands; he's a modest Boston
+petunia, and he shrinks from publicity; but I am not that kind of herb
+myself, and I want all the publicity we can get--beg, borrow, or steal--
+for this thing.  I say that you can't work the sacred rites of
+hospitality in a better cause, and what I propose is a little dinner for
+the purpose of recognizing the hit we've made with this thing.  My idea
+was to strike you for the necessary funds, and do the thing on a handsome
+scale.  The term little dinner is a mere figure of speech.  A little
+dinner wouldn't make a big talk, and what we want is the big talk,
+at present, if we don't lay up a cent.  My notion was that pretty soon
+after Lent, now, when everybody is feeling just right, we should begin to
+send out our paragraphs, affirmative, negative, and explanatory, and
+along about the first of May we should sit down about a hundred strong,
+the most distinguished people in the country, and solemnize our triumph.
+There it is in a nutshell.  I might expand and I might expound, but
+that's the sum and substance of it."
+
+Fulkerson stopped, and ran his eyes eagerly over the faces of his three
+listeners, one after the other.  March was a little surprised when
+Dryfoos turned to him, but that reference of the question seemed to give
+Fulkerson particular pleasure: "What do you think, Mr. March?"
+
+The editor leaned back in his chair.  "I don't pretend to have Mr.
+Fulkerson's genius for advertising; but it seems to me a little early
+yet.  We might celebrate later when we've got more to celebrate.  At
+present we're a pleasing novelty, rather than a fixed fact."
+
+"Ah, you don't get the idea!" said Fulkerson.  "What we want to do with
+this dinner is to fix the fact."
+
+"Am I going to come in anywhere?"  the old man interrupted.
+
+"You're going to come in at the head of the procession!  We are going to
+strike everything that is imaginative and romantic in the newspaper soul
+with you and your history and your fancy for going in for this thing.
+I can start you in a paragraph that will travel through all the
+newspapers, from Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida.  We have had
+all sorts of rich men backing up literary enterprises, but the natural-
+gas man in literature is a new thing, and the combination of your
+picturesque past and your aesthetic present is something that will knock
+out the sympathies of the American public the first round.  I feel,"
+said Fulkerson, with a tremor of pathos in his voice, "that 'Every Other
+Week' is at a disadvantage before the public as long as it's supposed to
+be my enterprise, my idea.  As far as I'm known at all, I'm known simply
+as a syndicate man, and nobody in the press believes that I've got the
+money to run the thing on a grand scale; a suspicion of insolvency must
+attach to it sooner or later, and the fellows on the press will work up
+that impression, sooner or later, if we don't give them something else to
+work up.  Now, as soon as I begin to give it away to the correspondents
+that you're in it, with your untold millions--that, in fact, it was your
+idea from the start, that you originated it to give full play to the
+humanitarian tendencies of Conrad here, who's always had these theories
+of co-operation, and longed to realize them for the benefit of our
+struggling young writers and artists--"
+
+March had listened with growing amusement to the mingled burlesque and
+earnest of Fulkerson's self-sacrificing impudence, and with wonder as to
+how far Dryfoos was consenting to his preposterous proposition, when
+Conrad broke out: "Mr. Fulkerson, I could not allow you to do that.  It
+would not be true; I did not wish to be here; and--and what I think--what
+I wish to do--that is something I will not let any one put me in a false
+position about.  No!"  The blood rushed into the young man's gentle face,
+and he met his father's glance with defiance.
+
+Dryfoos turned from him to Fulkerson without speaking, and Fulkerson
+said, caressingly: "Why, of course, Coonrod!  I know how you feel, and I
+shouldn't let anything of that sort go out uncontradicted afterward.  But
+there isn't anything in these times that would give us better standing
+with the public than some hint of the way you feel about such things.
+The publics expects to be interested, and nothing would interest it more
+than to be told that the success of 'Every Other Week' sprang from the
+first application of the principle of Live and let Live to a literary
+enterprise.  It would look particularly well, coming from you and your
+father, but if you object, we can leave that part out; though if you
+approve of the principle I don't see why you need object.  The main thing
+is to let the public know that it owes this thing to the liberal and
+enlightened spirit of one of the foremost capitalists of the country; and
+that his purposes are not likely to be betrayed in the hands of his son,
+I should get a little cut made from a photograph of your father, and
+supply it gratis with the paragraphs."
+
+"I guess," said the old man, "we will get along without the cut."
+
+Fulkerson laughed.  "Well, well!  Have it your own way, But the sight of
+your face in the patent outsides of the country press would be worth half
+a dozen subscribers in every school district throughout the length and
+breadth of this fair land."
+
+"There was a fellow," Dryfoos explained, in an aside to March, "that was
+getting up a history of Moffitt, and he asked me to let him put a steel
+engraving of me in.  He said a good many prominent citizens were going to
+have theirs in, and his price was a hundred and fifty dollars.  I told
+him I couldn't let mine go for less than two hundred, and when he said he
+could give me a splendid plate for that money, I said I should want it
+cash, You never saw a fellow more astonished when he got it through him.
+that I expected him to pay the two hundred."
+
+Fulkerson laughed in keen appreciation of the joke.  "Well, sir, I guess
+'Every Other Week' will pay you that much.  But if you won't sell at any
+price, all right; we must try to worry along without the light of your
+countenance on, the posters, but we got to have it for the banquet."
+
+"I don't seem to feel very hungry, yet," said they old man, dryly.
+
+"Oh, 'l'appeit vient en mangeant', as our French friends say.  You'll be
+hungry enough when you see the preliminary Little Neck clam.  It's too
+late for oysters."
+
+"Doesn't that fact seem to point to a postponement till they get back,
+sometime in October," March suggested,
+
+"No, no!" said Fulkerson, "you don't catch on to the business end of this
+thing, my friends.  You're proceeding on something like the old exploded
+idea that the demand creates the supply, when everybody knows, if he's
+watched the course of modern events, that it's just as apt to be the
+other way.  I contend that we've got a real substantial success to
+celebrate now; but even if we hadn't, the celebration would do more than
+anything else to create the success, if we got it properly before the
+public.  People will say: Those fellows are not fools; they wouldn't go
+and rejoice over their magazine unless they had got a big thing in it.
+And the state of feeling we should produce in the public mind would make
+a boom of perfectly unprecedented grandeur for E. O. W.  Heigh?"
+
+He looked sunnily from one to the other in succession.  The elder Dryfoos
+said, with his chin on the top of his stick, "I reckon those Little Neck
+clams will keep."
+
+"Well, just as you say," Fulkerson cheerfully assented.  "I understand
+you to agree to the general principle of a little dinner?"
+
+"The smaller the better," said the old man.
+
+"Well, I say a little dinner because the idea of that seems to cover the
+case, even if we vary the plan a little.  I had thought of a reception,
+maybe, that would include the lady contributors and artists, and the
+wives and daughters of the other contributors.  That would give us the
+chance to ring in a lot of society correspondents and get the thing
+written up in first-class shape.  By-the-way!" cried Fulkerson, slapping
+himself on the leg, "why not have the dinner and the reception both?"
+
+"I don't understand," said Dryfoos.
+
+"Why, have a select little dinner for ten or twenty choice spirits of the
+male persuasion, and then, about ten o'clock, throw open your palatial
+drawing-rooms and admit the females to champagne, salads, and ices.  It
+is the very thing!  Come!"
+
+"What do you think of it, Mr. March?"  asked Dryfoos, on whose social
+inexperience Fulkerson's words projected no very intelligible image, and
+who perhaps hoped for some more light.
+
+"It's a beautiful vision," said March, "and if it will take more time to
+realize it I think I approve.  I approve of anything that will delay Mr.
+Fulkerson's advertising orgie."
+
+"Then," Fulkerson pursued, "we could have the pleasure of Miss Christine
+and Miss Mela's company; and maybe Mrs. Dryfoos would look in on us in
+the course of the evening.  There's no hurry, as Mr. March suggests, if
+we can give the thing this shape.  I will cheerfully adopt the idea of my
+honorable colleague."
+
+March laughed at his impudence, but at heart he was ashamed of Fulkerson
+for proposing to make use of Dryfoos and his house in that way.
+He fancied something appealing in the look that the old man turned on
+him, and something indignant in Conrad's flush; but probably this was
+only his fancy.  He reflected that neither of them could feel it as
+people of more worldly knowledge would, and he consoled himself with the
+fact that Fulkerson was really not such a charlatan as he seemed.  But it
+went through his mind that this was a strange end for all Dryfoos's
+money-making to come to; and he philosophically accepted the fact of his
+own humble fortunes when he reflected how little his money could buy for
+such a man.  It was an honorable use that Fulkerson was putting it to in
+'Every Other Week;' it might be far more creditably spent on such an
+enterprise than on horses, or wines, or women, the usual resources of the
+brute rich; and if it were to be lost, it might better be lost that way
+than in stocks.  He kept a smiling face turned to Dryfoos while these
+irreverent considerations occupied him, and hardened his heart against
+father and son and their possible emotions.
+
+The old man rose to put an end to the interview.  He only repeated,
+"I guess those clams will keep till fall."
+
+But Fulkerson was apparently satisfied with the progress he had made; and
+when he joined March for the stroll homeward after office hours, he was
+able to detach his mind from the subject, as if content to leave it.
+
+"This is about the best part of the year in New York," he said; In some
+of the areas the grass had sprouted, and the tender young foliage had
+loosened itself froze the buds on a sidewalk tree here and there; the
+soft air was full of spring, and the delicate sky, far aloof, had the
+look it never wears at any other season.  "It ain't a time of year to
+complain much of, anywhere; but I don't want anything better than the
+month of May in New York.  Farther South it's too hot, and I've been in
+Boston in May when that east wind of yours made every nerve in my body
+get up and howl.  I reckon the weather has a good deal to do with the
+local temperament.  The reason a New York man takes life so easily with
+all his rush is that his climate don't worry him.  But a Boston man must
+be rasped the whole while by the edge in his air.  That accounts for his
+sharpness; and when he's lived through twenty-five or thirty Boston Mays,
+he gets to thinking that Providence has some particular use for him, or
+he wouldn't have survived, and that makes him conceited.  See?"
+
+"I see," said March.  "But I don't know how you're going to work that
+idea into an advertisement, exactly."
+
+"Oh, pahaw, now, March!  You don't think I've got that on the brain all
+the time?"
+
+"You were gradually leading up to 'Every Other Week', somehow."
+
+"No, sir; I wasn't.  I was just thinking what a different creature a
+Massachusetts man is from a Virginian, And yet I suppose they're both as
+pure English stock as you'll get anywhere in America.  Marsh, I think
+Colonel Woodburn's paper is going to make a hit."
+
+"You've got there!  When it knocks down the sale about one-half, I shall
+know it's made a hit."
+
+"I'm not afraid," said Fulkerson.  "That thing is going to attract
+attention.  It's well written--you can take the pomposity out of it, here
+and there and it's novel.  Our people like a bold strike, and it's going
+to shake them up tremendously to have serfdom advocated on high moral
+grounds as the only solution of the labor problem.  You see, in the first
+place, he goes for their sympathies by the way he portrays the actual
+relations of capital and labor; he shows how things have got to go from
+bad to worse, and then he trots out his little old hobby, and proves that
+if slavery had not been interfered with, it would have perfected itself
+in the interest of humanity.  He makes a pretty strong plea for it."
+
+March threw back his head and laughed.  "He's converted you! I swear,
+Fulkerson, if we had accepted and paid for an article advocating
+cannibalism as the only resource for getting rid of the superfluous poor,
+you'd begin to believe in it."
+
+Fulkerson smiled in approval of the joke, and only said: "I wish you
+could meet the colonel in the privacy of the domestic circle, March.
+You'd like him.  He's a splendid old fellow; regular type.  Talk about
+spring!
+
+"You ought to see the widow's little back yard these days.  You know that
+glass gallery just beyond the dining-room?  Those girls have got the pot-
+plants out of that, and a lot more, and they've turned the edges of that
+back yard, along the fence, into a regular bower; they've got sweet peas
+planted, and nasturtiums, and we shall be in a blaze of glory about the
+beginning of June.  Fun to see 'em work in the garden, and the bird
+bossing the job in his cage under the cherry-tree.  Have to keep the
+middle of the yard for the clothesline, but six days in the week it's a
+lawn, and I go over it with a mower myself.  March, there ain't anything
+like a home, is there?  Dear little cot of your own, heigh?  I tell you,
+March, when I get to pushing that mower round, and the colonel is smoking
+his cigar in the gallery, and those girls are pottering over the flowers,
+one of these soft evenings after dinner, I feel like a human being.  Yes,
+I do.  I struck it rich when I concluded to take my meals at the widow's.
+For eight dollars a week I get good board, refined society, and all the
+advantages of a Christian home.  By-the-way, you've never had much talk
+with Miss Woodburn, have you, March?"
+
+"Not so much as with Miss Woodburn's father."
+
+"Well, he is rather apt to scoop the conversation.  I must draw his fire,
+sometime, when you and Mrs. March are around, and get you a chance with
+Miss Woodburn."
+
+"I should like that better, I believe," said March.
+
+"Well, I shouldn't wonder if you did.  Curious, but Miss Woodburn isn't
+at all your idea of a Southern girl.  She's got lots of go; she's never
+idle a minute; she keeps the old gentleman in first-class shape, and she
+don't believe a bit in the slavery solution of the labor problem; says
+she's glad it's gone, and if it's anything like the effects of it, she's
+glad it went before her time.  No, sir, she's as full of snap as the
+liveliest kind of a Northern girl.  None of that sunny Southern languor
+you read about."
+
+"I suppose the typical Southerner, like the typical anything else, is
+pretty difficult to find," said March.  "But perhaps Miss Woodburn
+represents the new South.  The modern conditions must be producing a
+modern type."
+
+"Well, that's what she and the colonel both say.  They say there ain't
+anything left of that Walter Scott dignity and chivalry in the rising
+generation; takes too much time.  You ought to see her sketch the old-
+school, high-and-mighty manners, as they survive among some of the
+antiques in Charlottesburg.  If that thing could be put upon the stage it
+would be a killing success.  Makes the old gentleman laugh in spite of
+himself.  But he's as proud of her as Punch, anyway.  Why don't you and
+Mrs. March come round oftener?  Look here!  How would it do to have a
+little excursion, somewhere, after the spring fairly gets in its work?"
+
+"Reporters present?"
+
+"No, no! Nothing of that kind; perfectly sincere and disinterested
+enjoyment."
+
+"Oh, a few handbills to be scattered around: "Buy Every Other Week,"
+Look out for the next number of 'Every Other Week,' 'Every Other Week at
+all the news-stands.'  Well, I'll talk it over with Mrs. March.  I
+suppose there's no great hurry."
+
+March told his wife of the idyllic mood in which he had left Fulkerson at
+the widow's door, and she said he must be in love.
+
+"Why, of course! I wonder I didn't think of that.  But Fulkerson is such
+an impartial admirer of the whole sex that you can't think of his liking
+one more than another.  I don't know that he showed any unjust
+partiality, though, in his talk of 'those girls,' as he called them.
+And I always rather fancied that Mrs. Mandel--he's done so much for her,
+you know; and she is such a well-balanced, well-preserved person, and so
+lady-like and correct----"
+
+"Fulkerson had the word for her: academic.  She's everything that
+instruction and discipline can make of a woman; but I shouldn't think
+they could make enough of her to be in love with."
+
+"Well, I don't know.  The academic has its charm.  There are moods in
+which I could imagine myself in love with an academic person.  That
+regularity of line; that reasoned strictness of contour; that neatness of
+pose; that slightly conventional but harmonious grouping of the emotions
+and morals--you can see how it would have its charm, the Wedgwood in
+human nature?  I wonder where Mrs. Mandel keeps her urn and her willow."
+
+"I should think she might have use for them in that family, poor thing!"
+said Mrs. March.
+
+"Ah, that reminds me," said her husband, "that we had another talk with
+the old gentleman, this afternoon, about Fulkerson's literary, artistic,
+and advertising orgie, and it's postponed till October."
+
+"The later the better, I should think," said Mrs: March, who did not
+really think about it at all, but whom the date fixed for it caused to
+think of the intervening time.  "We have got to consider what we will do
+about the summer, before long, Basil."
+
+"Oh, not yet, not yet," he pleaded; with that man's willingness to abide
+in the present, which is so trying to a woman.  "It's only the end of
+April."
+
+"It will be the end of June before we know.  And these people wanting the
+Boston house another year complicates it.  We can't spend the summer
+there, as we planned."
+
+"They oughtn't to have offered us an increased rent; they have taken an
+advantage of us."
+
+"I don't know that it matters," said Mrs. March.  "I had decided not to
+go there."
+
+"Had you?  This is a surprise."
+
+"Everything is a surprise to you, Basil, when it happens."
+
+"True; I keep the world fresh, that way."
+
+"It wouldn't have been any change to go from one city to another for the
+summer.  We might as well have stayed in New York."
+
+"Yes, I wish we had stayed," said March, idly humoring a conception of
+the accomplished fact.  "Mrs. Green would have let us have the
+gimcrackery very cheap for the summer months; and we could have made all
+sorts of nice little excursions and trips off and been twice as well as
+if we had spent the summer away."
+
+"Nonsense!  You know we couldn't spend the summer in New York."
+
+"I know I could."
+
+"What stuff!  You couldn't manage."
+
+"Oh yes, I could.  I could take my meals at Fulkerson's widow's; or at
+Maroni's, with poor old Lindau: he's got to dining there again.  Or, I
+could keep house, and he could dine with me here."
+
+There was a teasing look in March's eyes, and he broke into a laugh, at
+the firmness with which his wife said: "I think if there is to be any
+housekeeping, I will stay, too; and help to look after it.  I would try
+not intrude upon you and your guest."
+
+"Oh, we should be only too glad to have you join us," said March, playing
+with fire.
+
+"Very well, then, I wish you would take him off to Maroni's, the next
+time he comes to dine here!" cried his wife.
+
+The experiment of making March's old friend free of his house had not
+given her all the pleasure that so kind a thing ought to have afforded so
+good a woman.  She received Lindau at first with robust benevolence, and
+the high resolve not to let any of his little peculiarities alienate her
+from a sense of his claim upon her sympathy and gratitude, not only as a
+man who had been so generously fond of her husband in his youth, but a
+hero who had suffered for her country.  Her theory was that his
+mutilation must not be ignored, but must be kept in mind as a monument of
+his sacrifice, and she fortified Bella with this conception, so that the
+child bravely sat next his maimed arm at table and helped him to dishes
+he could not reach, and cut up his meat for him.  As for Mrs. March
+herself, the thought of his mutilation made her a little faint; she was
+not without a bewildered resentment of its presence as a sort of
+oppression.  She did not like his drinking so much of March's beer,
+either; it was no harm, but it was somehow unworthy, out of character
+with a hero of the war.  But what she really could not reconcile herself
+to was the violence of Lindau's sentiments concerning the whole political
+and social fabric.  She did not feel sure that he should be allowed to
+say such things before the children, who had been nurtured in the faith
+of Bunker Hill and Appomattox, as the beginning and the end of all
+possible progress in human rights.  As a woman she was naturally an
+aristocrat, but as an American she was theoretically a democrat; and it
+astounded, it alarmed her, to hear American democracy denounced as a
+shuffling evasion.  She had never cared much for the United States
+Senate, but she doubted if she ought to sit by when it was railed at as a
+rich man's club.  It shocked her to be told that the rich and poor were
+not equal before the law in a country where justice must be paid for at
+every step in fees and costs, or where a poor man must go to war in his
+own person, and a rich man might hire someone to go in his.  Mrs. March
+felt that this rebellious mind in Lindau really somehow outlawed him from
+sympathy, and retroactively undid his past suffering for the country: she
+had always particularly valued that provision of the law, because in
+forecasting all the possible mischances that might befall her own son,
+she had been comforted by the thought that if there ever was another war,
+and Tom were drafted, his father could buy him a substitute.  Compared
+with such blasphemy as this, Lindau's declaration that there was not
+equality of opportunity in America, and that fully one-half the people
+were debarred their right to the pursuit of happiness by the hopeless
+conditions of their lives, was flattering praise.  She could not listen
+to such things in silence, though, and it did not help matters when
+Lindau met her arguments with facts and reasons which she felt she was
+merely not sufficiently instructed to combat, and he was not quite
+gentlemanly to urge.  "I am afraid for the effect on the children," she
+said to her husband.  "Such perfectly distorted ideas--Tom will be ruined
+by them."
+
+"Oh, let Tom find out where they're false," said March.  "It will be good
+exercise for his faculties of research.  At any rate, those things are
+getting said nowadays; he'll have to hear them sooner or later."
+
+"Had he better hear them at home?"  demanded his wife.
+
+"Why, you know, as you're here to refute them, Isabel," he teased,
+"perhaps it's the best place.  But don't mind poor old Lindau, my dear.
+He says himself that his parg is worse than his pidte, you know."
+
+"Ah, it's too late now to mind him," she sighed.  In a moment of rash
+good feeling, or perhaps an exalted conception of duty, she had herself
+proposed that Lindau should come every week and read German with Tom; and
+it had become a question first how they could get him to take pay for it,
+and then how they could get him to stop it.  Mrs. March never ceased to
+wonder at herself for having brought this about, for she had warned her
+husband against making any engagement with Lindau which would bring him
+regularly to the house: the Germans stuck so, and were so unscrupulously
+dependent.  Yet, the deed being done, she would not ignore the duty of
+hospitality, and it was always she who made the old man stay to their
+Sunday-evening tea when he lingered near the hour, reading Schiller and
+Heine and Uhland with the boy, in the clean shirt with which he observed
+the day; Lindau's linen was not to be trusted during the week.  She now
+concluded a season of mournful reflection by saying, "He will get you
+into trouble, somehow, Basil."
+
+"Well, I don't know how, exactly.  I regard Lindau as a political
+economist of an unusual type; but I shall not let him array me against
+the constituted authorities.  Short of that, I think I am safe."
+
+"Well, be careful, Basil; be careful.  You know you are so rash."
+
+"I suppose I may continue to pity him?  He is such a poor, lonely old
+fellow.  Are you really sorry he's come into our lives, my dear?"
+
+"No, no; not that.  I feel as you do about it; but I wish I felt easier
+about him--sure, that is, that we're not doing wrong to let him keep on
+talking so."
+
+"I suspect we couldn't help it," March returned, lightly.  "It's one of
+what Lindau calls his 'brincibles' to say what he thinks."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The Marches had no longer the gross appetite for novelty which urges
+youth to a surfeit of strange scenes, experiences, ideas; and makes
+travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues, an inexhaustible delight.
+But there is no doubt that the chief pleasure of their life in New York
+was from its quality of foreignness: the flavor of olives, which, once
+tasted, can never be forgotten.  The olives may not be of the first
+excellence; they may be a little stale, and small and poor, to begin
+with, but they are still olives, and the fond palate craves them.
+The sort which grew in New York, on lower Sixth Avenue and in the region
+of Jefferson Market and on the soft exposures south of Washington Square,
+were none the less acceptable because they were of the commonest Italian
+variety.
+
+The Marches spent a good deal of time and money in a grocery of that
+nationality, where they found all the patriotic comestibles and potables,
+and renewed their faded Italian with the friendly family in charge.
+Italian table d'hotes formed the adventure of the week, on the day when
+Mrs. March let her domestics go out, and went herself to dine abroad with
+her husband and children; and they became adepts in the restaurants where
+they were served, and which they varied almost from dinner to dinner.
+The perfect decorum of these places, and their immunity from offence in
+any, emboldened the Marches to experiment in Spanish restaurants, where
+red pepper and beans insisted in every dinner, and where once they
+chanced upon a night of 'olla podrida', with such appeals to March's
+memory of a boyish ambition to taste the dish that he became poetic and
+then pensive over its cabbage and carrots, peas and bacon.  For a rare
+combination of international motives they prized most the table d'hote of
+a French lady, who had taken a Spanish husband in a second marriage, and
+had a Cuban negro for her cook, with a cross-eyed Alsation for waiter,
+and a slim young South-American for cashier.  March held that some thing
+of the catholic character of these relations expressed itself in the
+generous and tolerant variety of the dinner, which was singularly
+abundant for fifty cents, without wine.  At one very neat French place he
+got a dinner at the same price with wine, but it was not so abundant; and
+March inquired in fruitless speculation why the table d'hote of the
+Italians, a notoriously frugal and abstemious people, should be usually
+more than you wanted at seventy-five cents and a dollar, and that of the
+French rather less at half a dollar.  He could not see that the
+frequenters were greatly different at the different places; they were
+mostly Americans, of subdued manners and conjecturably subdued fortunes,
+with here and there a table full of foreigners.  There was no noise and
+not much smoking anywhere; March liked going to that neat French place
+because there Madame sat enthroned and high behind a 'comptoir' at one
+side of the room, and every body saluted her in going out.  It was there
+that a gentle-looking young couple used to dine, in whom the Marches
+became effectlessly interested, because they thought they looked like
+that when they were young.  The wife had an aesthetic dress, and defined
+her pretty head by wearing her back-hair pulled up very tight under her
+bonnet; the husband had dreamy eyes set wide apart under a pure forehead.
+"They are artists, August, I think," March suggested to the waiter, when
+he had vainly asked about them.  "Oh, hartis, cedenly," August consented;
+but Heaven knows whether they were, or what they were: March never
+learned.
+
+This immunity from acquaintance, this touch-and go quality in their New
+York sojourn, this almost loss of individuality at times, after the
+intense identification of their Boston life, was a relief, though Mrs.
+March had her misgivings, and questioned whether it were not perhaps too
+relaxing to the moral fibre.  March refused to explore his conscience;
+he allowed that it might be so; but he said he liked now and then to feel
+his personality in that state of solution.  They went and sat a good deal
+in the softening evenings among the infants and dotards of Latin
+extraction in Washington Square, safe from all who ever knew them,
+and enjoyed the advancing season, which thickened the foliage of the
+trees and flattered out of sight the church warden's Gothic of the
+University Building.  The infants were sometimes cross, and cried in
+their weary mothers' or little sisters' arms; but they did not disturb
+the dotards, who slept, some with their heads fallen forward, and some
+with their heads fallen back; March arbitrarily distinguished those with
+the drooping faces as tipsy and ashamed to confront the public.
+The small Italian children raced up and down the asphalt paths, playing
+American games of tag and hide and-whoop; larger boys passed ball, in
+training for potential championships.  The Marches sat and mused, or
+quarrelled fitfully about where they should spend the summer, like
+sparrows, he once said, till the electric lights began to show distinctly
+among the leaves, and they looked round and found the infants and dotards
+gone and the benches filled with lovers.  That was the signal for the
+Marches to go home.  He said that the spectacle of so much courtship as
+the eye might take in there at a glance was not, perhaps, oppressive, but
+the thought that at the same hour the same thing was going on all over
+the country, wherever two young fools could get together, was more than
+he could bear; he did not deny that it was natural, and, in a measure.
+authorized, but he declared that it was hackneyed; and the fact that it
+must go on forever, as long as the race lasted, made him tired.
+
+At home, generally, they found that the children had not missed them, and
+were perfectly safe.  It was one of the advantages of a flat that they
+could leave the children there whenever they liked without anxiety.  They
+liked better staying there than wandering about in the evening with their
+parents, whose excursions seemed to them somewhat aimless, and their
+pleasures insipid.  They studied, or read, or looked out of the window at
+the street sights; and their mother always came back to them with a pang
+for their lonesomeness.  Bella knew some little girls in the house, but
+in a ceremonious way; Tom had formed no friendships among the boys at
+school such as he had left in Boston; as nearly as he could explain, the
+New York fellows carried canes at an age when they would have had them
+broken for them by the other boys at Boston; and they were both sissyish
+and fast.  It was probably prejudice; he never could say exactly what
+their demerits were, and neither he nor Bella was apparently so homesick
+as they pretended, though they answered inquirers, the one that New York
+was a hole, and the other that it was horrid, and that all they lived for
+was to get back to Boston.  In the mean time they were thrown much upon
+each other for society, which March said was well for both of them; he
+did not mind their cultivating a little gloom and the sense of a common
+wrong; it made them better comrades, and it was providing them with
+amusing reminiscences for the future.  They really enjoyed Bohemianizing
+in that harmless way: though Tom had his doubts of its respectability; he
+was very punctilious about his sister, and went round from his own school
+every day to fetch her home from hers.  The whole family went to the
+theatre a good deal, and enjoyed themselves together in their desultory
+explorations of the city.
+
+They lived near Greenwich Village, and March liked strolling through its
+quaintness toward the waterside on a Sunday, when a hereditary
+Sabbatarianism kept his wife at home; he made her observe that it even
+kept her at home from church.  He found a lingering quality of pure
+Americanism in the region, and he said the very bells called to worship
+in a nasal tone.  He liked the streets of small brick houses, with here
+and there one painted red, and the mortar lines picked out in white, and
+with now and then a fine wooden portal of fluted pillars and a bowed
+transom.  The rear of the tenement-houses showed him the picturesqueness
+of clothes-lines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence; and the new
+apartment-houses, breaking the old sky-line with their towering stories,
+implied a life as alien to the American manner as anything in continental
+Europe.  In fact, foreign faces and foreign tongues prevailed in
+Greenwich Village, but no longer German or even Irish tongues or faces.
+The eyes and earrings of Italians twinkled in and out of the alleyways
+and basements, and they seemed to abound even in the streets, where long
+ranks of trucks drawn up in Sunday rest along the curbstones suggested
+the presence of a race of sturdier strength than theirs.  March liked the
+swarthy, strange visages; he found nothing menacing for the future in
+them; for wickedness he had to satisfy himself as he could with the
+sneering, insolent, clean-shaven mug of some rare American of the b'hoy
+type, now almost as extinct in New York as the dodo or the volunteer
+fireman.  When he had found his way, among the ash-barrels and the groups
+of decently dressed church-goers, to the docks, he experienced a
+sufficient excitement in the recent arrival of a French steamer, whose
+sheds were thronged with hacks and express-wagons, and in a tacit inquiry
+into the emotions of the passengers, fresh from the cleanliness of Paris,
+and now driving up through the filth of those streets.
+
+Some of the streets were filthier than others; there was at least a
+choice; there were boxes and barrels of kitchen offal on all the
+sidewalks, but not everywhere manure-heaps, and in some places the stench
+was mixed with the more savory smell of cooking.  One Sunday morning,
+before the winter was quite gone, the sight of the frozen refuse melting
+in heaps, and particularly the loathsome edges of the rotting ice near
+the gutters, with the strata of waste-paper and straw litter, and egg-
+shells and orange peel, potato-skins and cigar-stumps, made him unhappy.
+He gave a whimsical shrug for the squalor of the neighboring houses, and
+said to himself rather than the boy who was with him: "It's curious,
+isn't it, how fond the poor people are of these unpleasant thoroughfares?
+You always find them living in the worst streets."
+
+"The burden of all the wrong in the world comes on the poor," said the
+boy.  "Every sort of fraud and swindling hurts them the worst.  The city
+wastes the money it's paid to clean the streets with, and the poor have
+to suffer, for they can't afford to pay twice, like the rich."
+
+March stopped short.  "Hallo, Tom!  Is that your wisdom?"
+
+"It's what Mr. Lindau says," answered the boy, doggedly, as if not
+pleased to have his ideas mocked at, even if they were second-hand.
+
+"And you didn't tell him that the poor lived in dirty streets because
+they liked them, and were too lazy and worthless to have them cleaned?"
+
+"No; I didn't."
+
+"I'm surprised.  What do you think of Lindau, generally speaking, Tom?"
+
+"Well, sir, I don't like the way he talks about some things.  I don't
+suppose this country is perfect, but I think it's about the best there
+is, and it don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time."
+
+"Sound, my son," said March, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder and
+beginning to walk on.  "Well?"
+
+"Well, then, he says that it isn't the public frauds only that the poor
+have to pay for, but they have to pay for all the vices of the rich; that
+when a speculator fails, or a bank cashier defaults, or a firm suspends,
+or hard times come, it's the poor who have to give up necessaries where
+the rich give up luxuries."
+
+"Well, well!  And then?"
+
+"Well, then I think the crank comes in, in Mr. Lindau.  He says there's
+no need of failures or frauds or hard times.  It's ridiculous.  There
+always have been and there always will be.  But if you tell him that, it
+seems to make him perfectly furious."
+
+March repeated the substance of this talk to his wife.  "I'm glad to know
+that Tom can see through such ravings.  He has lots of good common
+sense."
+
+It was the afternoon of the same Sunday, and they were sauntering up
+Fifth Avenue, and admiring the wide old double houses at the lower end;
+at one corner they got a distinct pleasure out of the gnarled elbows that
+a pollarded wistaria leaned upon the top of a garden wall--for its
+convenience in looking into the street, he said.  The line of these
+comfortable dwellings, once so fashionable, was continually broken by the
+facades of shops; and March professed himself vulgarized by a want of
+style in the people they met in their walk to Twenty-third Street.
+
+"Take me somewhere to meet my fellow-exclusives, Isabel," he demanded.
+"I pine for the society of my peers."
+
+He hailed a passing omnibus, and made his wife get on the roof with him.
+"Think of our doing such a thing in Boston!" she sighed, with a little
+shiver of satisfaction in her immunity from recognition and comment.
+
+"You wouldn't be afraid to do it in London or Paris?"
+
+"No; we should be strangers there--just as we are in New York.  I wonder
+how long one could be a stranger here."
+
+"Oh, indefinitely, in our way of living.  The place is really vast, so
+much larger than it used to seem, and so heterogeneous."
+
+When they got down very far up-town, and began to walk back by Madison
+Avenue, they found themselves in a different population from that they
+dwelt among; not heterogeneous at all; very homogeneous, and almost
+purely American; the only qualification was American Hebrew.  Such a well
+-dressed, well-satisfied, well-fed looking crowd poured down the broad
+sidewalks before the handsome, stupid houses that March could easily
+pretend he had got among his fellow-plutocrats at last.  Still he
+expressed his doubts whether this Sunday afternoon parade, which seemed
+to be a thing of custom, represented the best form among the young people
+of that region; he wished he knew; he blamed himself for becoming of a
+fastidious conjecture; he could not deny the fashion and the richness and
+the indigeneity of the spectacle; the promenaders looked New-Yorky; they
+were the sort of people whom you would know for New-Yorkers elsewhere,
+--so well equipped and so perfectly kept at all points.  Their silk hats
+shone, and their boots; their frocks had the right distension behind, and
+their bonnets perfect poise and distinction.
+
+The Marches talked of these and other facts of their appearance, and
+curiously questioned whether this were the best that a great material
+civilization could come to; it looked a little dull.  The men's faces
+were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull; the women's were pretty
+and knowing, and yet dull.  It was, probably, the holiday expression of
+the vast, prosperous commercial class, with unlimited money, and no
+ideals that money could not realize; fashion and comfort were all that
+they desired to compass, and the culture that furnishes showily, that
+decorates and that tells; the culture, say, of plays and operas, rather
+than books.
+
+Perhaps the observers did the promenaders injustice; they might not have
+been as common-minded as they looked.  "But," March said, "I understand
+now why the poor people don't come up here and live in this clean,
+handsome, respectable quarter of the town; they would be bored to death.
+On the whole, I think I should prefer Mott Street myself."
+
+In other walks the Marches tried to find some of the streets they had
+wandered through the first day of their wedding journey in New York, so
+long ago. They could not make sure of them; but once they ran down to the
+Battery, and easily made sure of that, though not in its old aspect.
+They recalled the hot morning, when they sauntered over the trodden weed
+that covered the sickly grass-plots there, and sentimentalized the
+sweltering paupers who had crept out of the squalid tenements about for a
+breath of air after a sleepless night.  Now the paupers were gone, and
+where the old mansions that had fallen to their use once stood, there
+towered aloft and abroad those heights and masses of many-storied brick-
+work for which architecture has yet no proper form and aesthetics no
+name.  The trees and shrubs, all in their young spring green, blew
+briskly over the guarded turf in the south wind that came up over the
+water; and in the well-paved alleys the ghosts of eighteenth-century
+fashion might have met each other in their old haunts, and exchanged
+stately congratulations upon its vastly bettered condition, and perhaps
+puzzled a little over the colossal lady on Bedloe's Island, with her
+lifted torch, and still more over the curving tracks and chalet-stations
+of the Elevated road.  It is an outlook of unrivalled beauty across the
+bay, that smokes and flashes with the in numerable stacks and sails of
+commerce, to the hills beyond, where the moving forest of masts halts at
+the shore, and roots itself in the groves of the many villaged uplands.
+The Marches paid the charming prospects a willing duty, and rejoiced in
+it as generously as if it had been their own.  Perhaps it was, they
+decided.  He said people owned more things in common than they were apt
+to think; and they drew the consolations of proprietorship from the
+excellent management of Castle Garden, which they penetrated for a
+moment's glimpse of the huge rotunda, where the immigrants first set foot
+on our continent.  It warmed their hearts, so easily moved to any cheap
+sympathy, to see the friendly care the nation took of these humble
+guests; they found it even pathetic to hear the proper authority calling
+out the names of such as had kin or acquaintance waiting there to meet
+them.  No one appeared troubled or anxious; the officials had a
+conscientious civility; the government seemed to manage their welcome as
+well as a private company or corporation could have done.  In fact, it
+was after the simple strangers had left the government care that March
+feared their woes might begin; and he would have liked the government to
+follow each of them to his home, wherever he meant to fix it within our
+borders.  He made note of the looks of the licensed runners and touters
+waiting for the immigrants outside the government premises; he intended
+to work them up into a dramatic effect in some sketch, but they remained
+mere material in his memorandum-book, together with some quaint old
+houses on the Sixth Avenue road, which he had noticed on the way down.
+On the way up, these were superseded in his regard by some hip-roof
+structures on the Ninth Avenue, which he thought more Dutch-looking.
+The perspectives of the cross-streets toward the river were very lively,
+with their turmoil of trucks and cars and carts and hacks and foot
+passengers, ending in the chimneys and masts of shipping, and final
+gleams of dancing water.  At a very noisy corner, clangorous with some
+sort of ironworking, he made his wife enjoy with him the quiet sarcasm of
+an inn that called itself the Home-like Hotel, and he speculated at
+fantastic length on the gentle associations of one who should have passed
+his youth under its roof.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+First and last, the Marches did a good deal of travel on the Elevated
+roads, which, he said, gave you such glimpses of material aspects in the
+city as some violent invasion of others' lives might afford in human
+nature.  Once, when the impulse of adventure was very strong in them,
+they went quite the length of the West Side lines, and saw the city
+pushing its way by irregular advances into the country.  Some spaces,
+probably held by the owners for that rise in value which the industry of
+others providentially gives to the land of the wise and good, it left
+vacant comparatively far down the road, and built up others at remoter
+points.  It was a world of lofty apartment houses beyond the Park,
+springing up in isolated blocks, with stretches of invaded rusticity
+between, and here and there an old country-seat standing dusty in its
+budding vines with the ground before it in rocky upheaval for city
+foundations.  But wherever it went or wherever it paused, New York gave
+its peculiar stamp; and the adventurers were amused to find One Hundred
+and Twenty-fifth Street inchoately like Twenty-third Street and
+Fourteenth Street in its shops and shoppers.  The butchers' shops and
+milliners' shops on the avenue might as well have been at Tenth as at One
+Hundredth Street.
+
+The adventurers were not often so adventurous.  They recognized that in
+their willingness to let their fancy range for them, and to let
+speculation do the work of inquiry, they were no longer young.  Their
+point of view was singularly unchanged, and their impressions of New York
+remained the same that they had been fifteen years before: huge, noisy,
+ugly, kindly, it seemed to them now as it seemed then.  The main
+difference was that they saw it more now as a life, and then they only
+regarded it as a spectacle; and March could not release himself from a
+sense of complicity with it, no matter what whimsical, or alien, or
+critical attitude he took.  A sense of the striving and the suffering
+deeply possessed him; and this grew the more intense as he gained some
+knowledge of the forces at work-forces of pity, of destruction, of
+perdition, of salvation.  He wandered about on Sunday not only through
+the streets, but into this tabernacle and that, as the spirit moved him,
+and listened to those who dealt with Christianity as a system of
+economics as well as a religion.  He could not get his wife to go with
+him; she listened to his report of what he heard, and trembled; it all
+seemed fantastic and menacing.  She lamented the literary peace, the
+intellectual refinement of the life they had left behind them; and he
+owned it was very pretty, but he said it was not life--it was death-in-
+life.  She liked to hear him talk in that strain of virtuous self-
+denunciation, but she asked him, "Which of your prophets are you going to
+follow?" and he answered: "All-all!  And a fresh one every Sunday."
+And so they got their laugh out of it at last, but with some sadness at
+heart, and with a dim consciousness that they had got their laugh out of
+too many things in life.
+
+What really occupied and compassed his activities, in spite of his
+strenuous reveries of work beyond it, was his editorship.  On its social
+side it had not fulfilled all the expectations which Fulkerson's radiant
+sketch of its duties and relations had caused him to form of it.  Most of
+the contributions came from a distance; even the articles written in New
+York reached him through the post, and so far from having his valuable
+time, as they called it, consumed in interviews with his collaborators,
+he rarely saw any of them.  The boy on the stairs, who was to fence him
+from importunate visitors, led a life of luxurious disoccupation, and
+whistled almost uninterruptedly.  When any one came, March found himself
+embarrassed and a little anxious.  The visitors were usually young men,
+terribly respectful, but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinions
+chasmally different from his; and he felt in their presence something
+like an anachronism, something like a fraud.  He tried to freshen up his
+sympathies on them, to get at what they were really thinking and feeling,
+and it was some time before he could understand that they were not really
+thinking and feeling anything of their own concerning their art, but were
+necessarily, in their quality of young, inexperienced men, mere
+acceptants of older men's thoughts and feelings, whether they were
+tremendously conservative, as some were, or tremendously progressive, as
+others were.  Certain of them called themselves realists, certain
+romanticists; but none of them seemed to know what realism was, or what
+romanticism; they apparently supposed the difference a difference of
+material.  March had imagined himself taking home to lunch or dinner the
+aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked, whether he liked their work
+or not; but this was not an easy matter.  Those who were at all
+interesting seemed to have engagements and preoccupations; after two or
+three experiments with the bashfuller sort--those who had come up to the
+metropolis with manuscripts in their hands, in the good old literary
+tradition--he wondered whether he was otherwise like them when he was
+young like them.  He could not flatter himself that he was not; and yet
+he had a hope that the world had grown worse since his time, which his
+wife encouraged:
+
+Mrs. March was not eager to pursue the hospitalities which she had at
+first imagined essential to the literary prosperity of 'Every Other
+Week'; her family sufficed her; she would willingly have seen no one out
+of it but the strangers at the weekly table-d'hote dinner, or the
+audiences at the theatres.  March's devotion to his work made him
+reluctant to delegate it to any one; and as the summer advanced, and the
+question of where to go grew more vexed, he showed a man's base
+willingness to shirk it for himself by not going anywhere.  He asked his
+wife why she did not go somewhere with the children, and he joined her in
+a search for non-malarial regions on the map when she consented to
+entertain this notion.  But when it came to the point she would not go;
+he offered to go with her then, and then she would not let him.  She said
+she knew he would be anxious about his work; he protested that he could
+take it with him to any distance within a few hours, but she would not be
+persuaded.  She would rather he stayed; the effect would be better with
+Mr. Fulkerson; they could make excursions, and they could all get off a
+week or two to the seashore near Boston--the only real seashore--in
+August.  The excursions were practically confined to a single day at
+Coney Island; and once they got as far as Boston on the way to the
+seashore near Boston; that is, Mrs. March and the children went; an
+editorial exigency kept March at the last moment.  The Boston streets
+seemed very queer and clean and empty to the children, and the buildings
+little; in the horse-cars the Boston faces seemed to arraign their mother
+with a down-drawn severity that made her feel very guilty.  She knew that
+this was merely the Puritan mask, the cast of a dead civilization, which
+people of very amiable and tolerant minds were doomed to wear, and she
+sighed to think that less than a year of the heterogeneous gayety of New
+York should have made her afraid of it.  The sky seemed cold and gray;
+the east wind, which she had always thought so delicious in summer, cut
+her to the heart.  She took her children up to the South End, and in the
+pretty square where they used to live they stood before their alienated
+home, and looked up at its close-shuttered windows.  The tenants must
+have been away, but Mrs. March had not the courage to ring and make sure,
+though she had always promised herself that she would go all over the
+house when she came back, and see how they had used it; she could pretend
+a desire for something she wished to take away.  She knew she could not
+bear it now; and the children did not seem eager.  She did not push on to
+the seaside; it would be forlorn there without their father; she was glad
+to go back to him in the immense, friendly homelessness of New York, and
+hold him answerable for the change, in her heart or her mind, which made
+its shapeless tumult a refuge and a consolation.
+
+She found that he had been giving the cook a holiday, and dining about
+hither and thither with Fulkerson.  Once he had dined with him at the
+widow's (as they always called Mrs. Leighton), and then had spent the
+evening there, and smoked with Fulkerson and Colonel Woodburn on the
+gallery overlooking the back yard.  They were all spending the summer in
+New York.  The widow had got so good an offer for her house at St.
+Barnaby for the summer that she could not refuse it; and the Woodburns
+found New York a watering-place of exemplary coolness after the burning
+Augusts and Septembers of Charlottesburg.
+
+"You can stand it well enough in our climate, sir," the colonel
+explained, "till you come to the September heat, that sometimes runs well
+into October; and then you begin to lose your temper, sir.  It's never
+quite so hot as it is in New York at times, but it's hot longer, sir."
+He alleged, as if something of the sort were necessary, the example of a
+famous Southwestern editor who spent all his summers in a New York hotel
+as the most luxurious retreat on the continent, consulting the weather
+forecasts, and running off on torrid days to the mountains or the sea,
+and then hurrying back at the promise of cooler weather.  The colonel had
+not found it necessary to do this yet; and he had been reluctant to leave
+town, where he was working up a branch of the inquiry which had so long
+occupied him, in the libraries, and studying the great problem of labor
+and poverty as it continually presented itself to him in the streets.
+He said that he talked with all sorts of people, whom he found
+monstrously civil, if you took them in the right way; and he went
+everywhere in the city without fear and apparently without danger.  March
+could not find out that he had ridden his hobby into the homes of want
+which he visited, or had proposed their enslavement to the inmates as a
+short and simple solution of the great question of their lives; he
+appeared to have contented himself with the collection of facts for the
+persuasion of the cultivated classes.  It seemed to March a confirmation
+of this impression that the colonel should address his deductions from
+these facts so unsparingly to him; he listened with a respectful
+patience, for which Fulkerson afterward personally thanked him.
+Fulkerson said it was not often the colonel found such a good listener;
+generally nobody listened but Mrs. Leighton, who thought his ideas were
+shocking, but honored him for holding them so conscientiously.  Fulkerson
+was glad that March, as the literary department, had treated the old
+gentleman so well, because there was an open feud between him and the art
+department.  Beaton was outrageously rude, Fulkerson must say; though as
+for that, the old colonel seemed quite able to take care of himself, and
+gave Beaton an unqualified contempt in return for his unmannerliness.
+The worst of it was, it distressed the old lady so; she admired Beaton as
+much as she respected the colonel, and she admired Beaton, Fulkerson
+thought, rather more than Miss Leighton did; he asked March if he had
+noticed them together.  March had noticed them, but without any very
+definite impression except that Beaton seemed to give the whole evening
+to the girl.  Afterward he recollected that he had fancied her rather
+harassed by his devotion, and it was this point that he wished to present
+for his wife's opinion.
+
+"Girls often put on that air," she said.  "It's one of their ways of
+teasing.  But then, if the man was really very much in love, and she was
+only enough in love to be uncertain of herself, she might very well seem
+troubled.  It would be a very serious question.  Girls often don't know
+what to do in such a case."
+
+"Yes," said March, "I've often been glad that I was not a girl, on that
+account.  But I guess that on general principles Beaton is not more in
+love than she is.  I couldn't imagine that young man being more in love
+with anybody, unless it was himself.  He might be more in love with
+himself than any one else was."
+
+"Well, he doesn't interest me a great deal, and I can't say Miss Leighton
+does, either.  I think she can take care of herself.  She has herself
+very well in hand."
+
+"Why so censorious?"  pleaded March.  "I don't defend her for having
+herself in hand; but is it a fault?"
+
+Mrs. March did not say.  She asked, "And how does Mr. Fulkerson's affair
+get on?"
+
+"His affair?  You really think it is one?  Well, I've fancied so myself,
+and I've had an idea of some time asking him; Fulkerson strikes one as
+truly domesticable, conjugable at heart; but I've waited for him to
+speak."
+
+"I should think so."
+
+"Yes.  He's never opened on the subject yet.  Do you know, I think
+Fulkerson has his moments of delicacy."
+
+"Moments! He's all delicacy in regard to women."
+
+"Well, perhaps so.  There is nothing in them to rouse his advertising
+instincts."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Dryfoos family stayed in town till August. Then the father went West
+again to look after his interests; and Mrs. Mandel took the two girls to
+one of the great hotels in Saratoga.  Fulkerson said that he had never
+seen anything like Saratoga for fashion, and Mrs. Mandel remembered that
+in her own young ladyhood this was so for at least some weeks of the
+year.  She had been too far withdrawn from fashion since her marriage to
+know whether it was still so or not.  In this, as in so many other
+matters, the Dryfoos family helplessly relied upon Fulkerson, in spite of
+Dryfoos's angry determination that he should not run the family, and in
+spite of Christine's doubt of his omniscience; if he did not know
+everything, she was aware that he knew more than herself.  She thought
+that they had a right to have him go with them to Saratoga, or at least
+go up and engage their rooms beforehand; but Fulkerson did not offer to
+do either, and she did not quite see her way to commanding his services.
+The young ladies took what Mela called splendid dresses with them; they
+sat in the park of tall, slim trees which the hotel's quadrangle
+enclosed, and listened to the music in the morning, or on the long piazza
+in the afternoon and looked at the driving in the street, or in the vast
+parlors by night, where all the other ladies were, and they felt that
+they were of the best there.  But they knew nobody, and Mrs. Mandel was
+so particular that Mela was prevented from continuing the acquaintance
+even of the few young men who danced with her at the Saturday-night hops.
+They drove about, but they went to places without knowing why, except
+that the carriage man took them, and they had all the privileges of a
+proud exclusivism without desiring them.  Once a motherly matron seemed
+to perceive their isolation, and made overtures to them, but then
+desisted, as if repelled by Christine's suspicion, or by Mela's too
+instant and hilarious good-fellowship, which expressed itself in hoarse
+laughter and in a flow of talk full of topical and syntactical freedom.
+From time to time she offered to bet Christine that if Mr. Fulkerson was
+only there they would have a good time; she wondered what they were all
+doing in New York, where she wished herself; she rallied her sister about
+Beaton, and asked her why she did not write and tell him to come up
+there.
+
+Mela knew that Christine had expected Beaton to follow them.  Some banter
+had passed between them to this effect; he said he should take them in on
+his way home to Syracuse.  Christine would not have hesitated to write to
+him and remind him of his promise; but she had learned to distrust her
+literature with Beaton since he had laughed at the spelling in a scrap of
+writing which dropped out of her music-book one night.  She believed that
+he would not have laughed if he had known it was hers; but she felt that
+she could hide better the deficiencies which were not committed to paper;
+she could manage with him in talking; she was too ignorant of her
+ignorance to recognize the mistakes she made then.  Through her own
+passion she perceived that she had some kind of fascination for him; she
+was graceful, and she thought it must be that; she did not understand
+that there was a kind of beauty in her small, irregular features that
+piqued and haunted his artistic sense, and a look in her black eyes
+beyond her intelligence and intention.  Once he sketched her as they sat
+together, and flattered the portrait without getting what he wanted in
+it; he said he must try her some time in color; and he said things which,
+when she made Mela repeat them, could only mean that he admired her more
+than anybody else.  He came fitfully, but he came often, and she rested
+content in a girl's indefiniteness concerning the affair; if her thought
+went beyond lovemaking to marriage, she believed that she could have him
+if she wanted him.  Her father's money counted in this; she divined that
+Beaton was poor; but that made no difference; she would have enough for
+both; the money would have counted as an irresistible attraction if there
+had been no other.
+
+The affair had gone on in spite of the sidelong looks of restless dislike
+with which Dryfoos regarded it; but now when Beaton did not come to
+Saratoga it necessarily dropped, and Christine's content with it.  She
+bore the trial as long as she could; she used pride and resentment
+against it; but at last she could not bear it, and with Mela's help she
+wrote a letter, bantering Beaton on his stay in New York, and playfully
+boasting of Saratoga.  It seemed to them both that it was a very bright
+letter, and would be sure to bring him; they would have had no scruple
+about sending it but for the doubt they had whether they had got some of
+the words right.  Mela offered to bet Christine anything she dared that
+they were right, and she said, Send it anyway; it was no difference if
+they were wrong.  But Christine could not endure to think of that laugh
+of Beaton's, and there remained only Mrs. Mandel as authority on the
+spelling.  Christine dreaded her authority on other points, but Mela said
+she knew she would not interfere, and she undertook to get round her.
+Mrs. Mandel pronounced the spelling bad, and the taste worse; she forbade
+them to send the letter; and Mela failed to get round her, though she
+threatened, if Mrs. Mandel would not tell her how to spell the wrong
+words, that she would send the letter as it was; then Mrs. Mandel said
+that if Mr. Beaton appeared in Saratoga she would instantly take them
+both home.  When Mela reported this result, Christine accused her of
+having mismanaged the whole business; she quarrelled with her, and they
+called each other names.  Christine declared that she would not stay in
+Saratoga, and that if Mrs. Mandel did not go back to New York with her
+she should go alone.  They returned the first week in September; but by
+that time Beaton had gone to see his people in Syracuse.
+
+Conrad Dryfoos remained at home with his mother after his father went
+West.  He had already taken such a vacation as he had been willing to
+allow himself, and had spent it on a charity farm near the city, where
+the fathers with whom he worked among the poor on the East Side in the
+winter had sent some of their wards for the summer.  It was not possible
+to keep his recreation a secret at the office, and Fulkerson found a
+pleasure in figuring the jolly time Brother Conrad must have teaching
+farm work among those paupers and potential reprobates.  He invented
+details of his experience among them, and March could not always help
+joining in the laugh at Conrad's humorless helplessness under Fulkerson's
+burlesque denunciation of a summer outing spent in such dissipation.
+
+They had time for a great deal of joking at the office during the season
+of leisure which penetrates in August to the very heart of business, and
+they all got on terms of greater intimacy if not greater friendliness
+than before.  Fulkerson had not had so long to do with the advertising
+side of human nature without developing a vein of cynicism, of no great
+depth, perhaps, but broad, and underlying his whole point of view; he
+made light of Beaton's solemnity, as he made light of Conrad's humanity.
+The art editor, with abundant sarcasm, had no more humor than the
+publisher, and was an easy prey in the manager's hands; but when he had
+been led on by Fulkerson's flatteries to make some betrayal of egotism,
+he brooded over it till he had thought how to revenge himself in
+elaborate insult.  For Beaton's talent Fulkerson never lost his
+admiration; but his joke was to encourage him to give himself airs of
+being the sole source of the magazine's prosperity.  No bait of this sort
+was too obvious for Beaton to swallow; he could be caught with it as
+often as Fulkerson chose; though he was ordinarily suspicious as to the
+motives of people in saying things.  With March he got on no better than
+at first.  He seemed to be lying in wait for some encroachment of the
+literary department on the art department, and he met it now and then
+with anticipative reprisal.  After these rebuffs, the editor delivered
+him over to the manager, who could turn Beaton's contrary-mindedness to
+account by asking the reverse of what he really wanted done.  This was
+what Fulkerson said; the fact was that he did get on with Beaton and
+March contented himself with musing upon the contradictions of a
+character at once so vain and so offensive, so fickle and so sullen, so
+conscious and so simple.
+
+After the first jarring contact with Dryfoos, the editor ceased to feel
+the disagreeable fact of the old man's mastery of the financial
+situation.  None of the chances which might have made it painful
+occurred; the control of the whole affair remained in Fulkerson's hands;
+before he went West again, Dryfoos had ceased to come about the office,
+as if, having once worn off the novelty of the sense of owning a literary
+periodical, he was no longer interested in it.
+
+Yet it was a relief, somehow, when he left town, which he did not do
+without coming to take a formal leave of the editor at his office.
+He seemed willing to leave March with a better impression than he had
+hitherto troubled himself to make; he even said some civil things about
+the magazine, as if its success pleased him; and he spoke openly to March
+of his hope that his son would finally become interested in it to the
+exclusion of the hopes and purposes which divided them.  It seemed to
+March that in the old man's warped and toughened heart he perceived a
+disappointed love for his son greater than for his other children; but
+this might have been fancy.  Lindau came in with some copy while Dryfoos
+was there, and March introduced them.  When Lindau went out, March
+explained to Dryfoos that he had lost his hand in the war; and he told
+him something of Lindau's career as he had known it.  Dryfoos appeared
+greatly pleased that 'Every Other Week' was giving Lindau work.  He said
+that he had helped to enlist a good many fellows for the war, and had
+paid money to fill up the Moffitt County quota under the later calls for
+troops.  He had never been an Abolitionist, but he had joined the Anti-
+Nebraska party in '55, and he had voted for Fremont and for every
+Republican President since then.
+
+At his own house March saw more of Lindau than of any other contributor,
+but the old man seemed to think that he must transact all his business
+with March at his place of business.  The transaction had some
+peculiarities which perhaps made this necessary.  Lindau always expected
+to receive his money when he brought his copy, as an acknowledgment of
+the immediate right of the laborer to his hire; and he would not take it
+in a check because he did not approve of banks, and regarded the whole
+system of banking as the capitalistic manipulation of the people's money.
+He would receive his pay only from March's hand, because he wished to be
+understood as working for him, and honestly earning money honestly
+earned; and sometimes March inwardly winced a little at letting the old
+man share the increase of capital won by such speculation as Dryfoos's,
+but he shook off the feeling.  As the summer advanced, and the artists
+and classes that employed Lindau as a model left town one after another,
+he gave largely of his increasing leisure to the people in the office of
+'Every Other Week.'  It was pleasant for March to see the respect with
+which Conrad Dryfoos always used him, for the sake of his hurt and his
+gray beard.  There was something delicate and fine in it, and there was
+nothing unkindly on Fulkerson's part in the hostilities which usually
+passed between himself and Lindau.  Fulkerson bore himself reverently at
+times, too, but it was not in him to keep that up, especially when Lindau
+appeared with more beer aboard than, as Fulkerson said, he could manage
+shipshape.  On these occasions Fulkerson always tried to start him on the
+theme of the unduly rich; he made himself the champion of monopolies, and
+enjoyed the invectives which Lindau heaped upon him as a slave of
+capital; he said that it did him good.
+
+One day, with the usual show of writhing under Lindau's scorn, he said,
+"Well, I understand that although you despise me now, Lindau--"
+
+"I ton't desbise you," the old man broke in, his nostrils swelling and
+his eyes flaming with excitement, "I bity you."
+
+"Well, it seems to come to the same thing in the end," said Fulkerson.
+"What I understand is that you pity me now as the slave of capital, but
+you would pity me a great deal more if I was the master of it."
+
+"How you mean?"
+
+"If I was rich."
+
+"That would tebendt," said Lindau, trying to control himself.  "If you
+hat inheritedt your money, you might pe innocent; but if you hat mate it,
+efery man that resbectedt himself would haf to ask how you mate it, and
+if you hat mate moch, he would know--"
+
+"Hold on; hold on, now, Lindau!  Ain't that rather un-American doctrine?
+We're all brought up, ain't we, to honor the man that made his money, and
+look down--or try to look down; sometimes it's difficult on the fellow
+that his father left it to?"
+
+The old man rose and struck his breast.  "On Amerigan!" he roared, and,
+as he went on, his accent grew more and more uncertain.  "What iss
+Amerigan?  Dere iss no Ameriga any more!  You start here free and brafe,
+and you glaim for efery man de right to life, liperty, and de bursuit of
+habbiness.  And where haf you entedt?  No man that vorks vith his handts
+among you has the liperty to bursue his habbiness.  He iss the slafe of
+some richer man, some gompany, some gorporation, dat crindt him down to
+the least he can lif on, and that rops him of the marchin of his earnings
+that he knight pe habby on.  Oh, you Amerigans, you haf cot it down
+goldt, as you say!  You ton't puy foters; you puy lechislatures and
+goncressmen; you puy gourts; you puy gombetitors; you pay infentors not
+to infent; you atfertise, and the gounting-room sees dat de etitorial-
+room toesn't tink."
+
+"Yes, we've got a little arrangement of that sort with March here," said
+Fulkerson.
+
+"Oh, I am sawry," said the old man, contritely, "I meant noting bersonal.
+I ton't tink we are all cuilty or gorrubt, and efen among the rich there
+are goodt men.  But gabidal"--his passion rose again" where you find
+gabidal, millions of money that a man hass cot togeder in fife, ten,
+twenty years, you findt the smell of tears and ploodt!  Dat iss what I
+say.  And you cot to loog oudt for yourself when you meet a rich man
+whether you meet an honest man."
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, "I wish I was a subject of suspicion with you,
+Lindau.  By-the-way," he added, "I understand that you think capital was
+at the bottom of the veto of that pension of yours."
+
+"What bension?  What feto?"--The old man flamed up again.  "No bension
+of mine was efer fetoedt.  I renounce my bension, begause I would sgorn
+to dake money from a gofernment that I ton't peliefe in any more.  Where
+you hear that story?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Fulkerson, rather embarrassed.  "It's common
+talk."
+
+"It's a gommon lie, then!  When the time gome dat dis iss a free gountry
+again, then I dake a bension again for my woundts; but I would sdarfe
+before I dake a bension now from a rebublic dat iss bought oap by
+monobolies, and ron by drusts and gompines, and railroadts andt oil
+gompanies."
+
+"Look out, Lindau," said Fulkerson.  "You bite yourself mit dat dog some
+day."  But when the old man, with a ferocious gesture of renunciation,
+whirled out of the place, he added: "I guess I went a little too far that
+time.  I touched him on a sore place; I didn't mean to; I heard some talk
+about his pension being vetoed from Miss Leighton."  He addressed these
+exculpations to March's grave face, and to the pitying deprecation in the
+eyes of Conrad Dryfoos, whom Lindau's roaring wrath had summoned to the
+door.  "But I'll make it all right with him the next time he comes.  I
+didn't know he was loaded, or I wouldn't have monkeyed with him."
+
+"Lindau does himself injustice when he gets to talking in that way," said
+March.  "I hate to hear him.  He's as good an American as any of us; and
+it's only because he has too high an ideal of us--"
+
+"Oh, go on! Rub it in--rub it in!" cried Fulkerson, clutching his hair in
+suffering, which was not altogether burlesque.  "How did I know he had
+renounced his 'bension'?  Why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"I didn't know it myself.  I only knew that he had none, and I didn't
+ask, for I had a notion that it might be a painful subject."
+
+Fulkerson tried to turn it off lightly.  "Well, he's a noble old fellow;
+pity he drinks."  March would not smile, and Fulkerson broke out: "Dog on
+it!  I'll make it up to the old fool the next time he comes.  I don't
+like that dynamite talk of his; but any man that's given his hand to the
+country has got mine in his grip for good.  Why, March! You don't suppose
+I wanted to hurt his feelings, do you?"
+
+"Why, of course not, Fulkerson."
+
+But they could not get away from a certain ruefulness for that time, and
+in the evening Fulkerson came round to March's to say that he had got
+Lindau's address from Conrad, and had looked him up at his lodgings.
+
+"Well, there isn't so much bric-a-brac there, quite, as Mrs. Green left
+you; but I've made it all right with Lindau, as far as I'm concerned.
+I told him I didn't know when I spoke that way, and I honored him for
+sticking to his 'brinciples'; I don't believe in his 'brincibles';
+and we wept on each other's necks--at least, he did.  Dogged if he didn't
+kiss me before I knew what he was up to.  He said I was his chenerous
+gong friendt, and he begged my barton if he had said anything to wound
+me.  I tell you it was an affecting scene, March; and rats enough round
+in that old barracks where he lives to fit out a first-class case of
+delirium tremens.  What does he stay there for?  He's not obliged to?"
+
+Lindau's reasons, as March repeated them, affected Fulkerson as
+deliciously comical; but after that he confined his pleasantries at the
+office to Beaton and Conrad Dryfoos, or, as he said, he spent the rest of
+the summer in keeping Lindau smoothed up.
+
+It is doubtful if Lindau altogether liked this as well.  Perhaps he
+missed the occasions Fulkerson used to give him of bursting out against
+the millionaires; and he could not well go on denouncing as the slafe of
+gabidal a man who had behaved to him as Fulkerson had done, though
+Fulkerson's servile relations to capital had been in nowise changed by
+his nople gonduct.
+
+Their relations continued to wear this irksome character of mutual
+forbearance; and when Dryfoos returned in October and Fulkerson revived
+the question of that dinner in celebration of the success of 'Every Other
+Week,' he carried his complaisance to an extreme that alarmed March for
+the consequences.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+"You see," Fulkerson explained, "I find that the old man has got an idea
+of his own about that banquet, and I guess there's some sense in it.  He
+wants to have a preliminary little dinner, where we can talk the thing up
+first-half a dozen of us; and he wants to give us the dinner at his
+house.  Well, that's no harm.  I don't believe the old man ever gave a
+dinner, and he'd like to show off a little; there's a good deal of human
+nature in the old man, after all.  He thought of you, of course, and
+Colonel Woodburn, and Beaton, and me at the foot of the table; and
+Conrad; and I suggested Kendricks: he's such a nice little chap; and the
+old man himself brought up the idea of Lindau.  He said you told him
+something about him, and he asked why couldn't we have him, too; and I
+jumped at it."
+
+"Have Lindau to dinner?"  asked March.
+
+"Certainly; why not?  Father Dryfoos has a notion of paying the old
+fellow a compliment for what he done for the country.  There won't be any
+trouble about it.  You can sit alongside of him, and cut up his meat for
+him, and help him to things--"
+
+"Yes, but it won't do, Fulkerson!  I don't believe Lindau ever had on a
+dress-coat in his life, and I don't believe his 'brincibles' would let
+him wear one."
+
+"Well, neither had Dryfoos, for the matter of that.  He's as high-
+principled as old Pan-Electric himself, when it comes to a dress-coat,"
+said Fulkerson.  "We're all going to go in business dress; the old man
+stipulated for that.
+
+"It isn't the dress-coat alone," March resumed.  "Lindau and Dryfoos
+wouldn't get on.  You know they're opposite poles in everything.  You
+mustn't do it.  Dryfoos will be sure to say something to outrage Lindau's
+'brincibles,' and there'll be an explosion.  It's all well enough for
+Dryfoos to feel grateful to Lindau, and his wish to honor him does him
+credit; but to have Lindau to dinner isn't the way.  At the best, the old
+fellow would be very unhappy in such a house; he would have a bad
+conscience; and I should be sorry to have him feel that he'd been
+recreant to his 'brincibles'; they're about all he's got, and whatever we
+think of them, we're bound to respect his fidelity to them."  March
+warmed toward Lindau in taking this view of him.  "I should feel ashamed
+if I didn't protest against his being put in a false position.  After
+all, he's my old friend, and I shouldn't like to have him do himself
+injustice if he is a crank."
+
+"Of course," said Fulkerson, with some trouble in his face.
+"I appreciate your feeling.  But there ain't any danger," he added,
+buoyantly.  "Anyhow, you spoke too late, as the Irishman said to the
+chicken when he swallowed him in a fresh egg.  I've asked Lindau, and
+he's accepted with blayzure; that's what he says."
+
+March made no other comment than a shrug.
+
+"You'll see," Fulkerson continued, "it 'll go off all right.  I'll engage
+to make it, and I won't hold anybody else responsible."
+
+In the course of his married life March had learned not to censure the
+irretrievable; but this was just what his wife had not learned; and she
+poured out so much astonishment at what Fulkerson had done, and so much
+disapproval, that March began to palliate the situation a little.
+
+"After all, it isn't a question of life and death; and, if it were, I
+don't see how it's to be helped now."
+
+"Oh, it's not to be helped now.  But I am surprised at Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, Fulkerson has his moments of being merely human, too."
+
+Mrs. March would not deign a direct defence of her favorite.  "Well, I'm
+glad there are not to be ladies."
+
+"I don't know.  Dryfoos thought of having ladies, but it seems your
+infallible Fulkerson overruled him.  Their presence might have kept
+Lindau and our host in bounds."
+
+It had become part of the Marches' conjugal joke for him to pretend that
+she could allow nothing wrong in Fulkerson, and he now laughed with a
+mocking air of having expected it when she said: "Well, then, if Mr.
+Fulkerson says he will see that it all comes out right, I suppose you
+must trust his tact.  I wouldn't trust yours, Basil.  The first wrong
+step was taken when Mr. Lindau was asked to help on the magazine."
+
+"Well, it was your infallible Fulkerson that took the step, or at least
+suggested it.  I'm happy to say I had totally forgotten my early friend."
+
+Mrs. March was daunted and silenced for a moment.  Then she said: "Oh,
+pshaw!  You know well enough he did it to please you."
+
+"I'm very glad he didn't do it to please you, Isabel," said her husband,
+with affected seriousness.  "Though perhaps he did."
+
+He began to look at the humorous aspect of the affair, which it certainly
+had, and to comment on the singular incongruities which 'Every Other
+Week' was destined to involve at every moment of its career.
+"I wonder if I'm mistaken in supposing that no other periodical was ever
+like it.  Perhaps all periodicals are like it.  But I don't believe
+there's another publication in New York that could bring together, in
+honor of itself, a fraternity and equality crank like poor old Lindau,
+and a belated sociological crank like Woodburn, and a truculent
+speculator like old Dryfoos, and a humanitarian dreamer like young
+Dryfoos, and a sentimentalist like me, and a nondescript like Beaton,
+and a pure advertising essence like Fulkerson, and a society spirit like
+Kendricks.  If we could only allow one another to talk uninterruptedly
+all the time, the dinner would be the greatest success in the world,
+and we should come home full of the highest mutual respect.  But I
+suspect we can't manage that--even your infallible Fulkerson couldn't
+work it--and I'm afraid that there'll be some listening that 'll spoil
+the pleasure of the time."
+
+March was so well pleased with this view of the case that he suggested
+the idea involved to Fulkerson.  Fulkerson was too good a fellow not to
+laugh at another man's joke, but he laughed a little ruefully, and he
+seemed worn with more than one kind of care in the interval that passed
+between the present time and the night of the dinner.
+
+Dryfoos necessarily depended upon him for advice concerning the scope and
+nature of the dinner, but he received the advice suspiciously, and
+contested points of obvious propriety with pertinacious stupidity.
+Fulkerson said that when it came to the point he would rather have had
+the thing, as he called it, at Delmonico's or some other restaurant; but
+when he found that Dryfoos's pride was bound up in having it at his own
+house, he gave way to him.  Dryfoos also wanted his woman-cook to prepare
+the dinner, but Fulkerson persuaded him that this would not do; he must
+have it from a caterer.  Then Dryfoos wanted his maids to wait at table,
+but Fulkerson convinced him that this would be incongruous at a man's
+dinner.  It was decided that the dinner should be sent in from
+Frescobaldi's, and Dryfoos went with Fulkerson to discuss it with the
+caterer.  He insisted upon having everything explained to him, and the
+reason for having it, and not something else in its place; and he treated
+Fulkerson and Frescobaldi as if they were in league to impose upon him.
+There were moments when Fulkerson saw the varnish of professional
+politeness cracking on the Neapolitan's volcanic surface, and caught a
+glimpse of the lava fires of the cook's nature beneath; he trembled for
+Dryfoos, who was walking rough-shod over him in the security of an
+American who had known how to make his money, and must know how to spend
+it; but he got him safely away at last, and gave Frescobaldi a wink of
+sympathy for his shrug of exhaustion as they turned to leave him.
+
+It was at first a relief and then an anxiety with Fulkerson that Lindau
+did not come about after accepting the invitation to dinner, until he
+appeared at Dryfoos's house, prompt to the hour.  There was, to be sure,
+nothing to bring him; but Fulkerson was uneasily aware that Dryfoos
+expected to meet him at the office, and perhaps receive some verbal
+acknowledgment of the honor done him.  Dryfoos, he could see, thought he
+was doing all his invited guests a favor; and while he stood in a certain
+awe of them as people of much greater social experience than himself,
+regarded them with a kind of contempt, as people who were going to have a
+better dinner at his house than they could ever afford to have at their
+own.  He had finally not spared expense upon it; after pushing
+Frescobaldi to the point of eruption with his misgivings and suspicions
+at the first interview, he had gone to him a second time alone, and told
+him not to let the money stand between him and anything he would like to
+do.  In the absence of Frescobaldi's fellow-conspirator he restored
+himself in the caterer's esteem by adding whatever he suggested; and
+Fulkerson, after trembling for the old man's niggardliness, was now
+afraid of a fantastic profusion in the feast.  Dryfoos had reduced the
+scale of the banquet as regarded the number of guests, but a confusing
+remembrance of what Fulkerson had wished to do remained with him in part,
+and up to the day of the dinner he dropped in at Frescobaldi's and
+ordered more dishes and more of them.  He impressed the Italian as an
+American original of a novel kind; and when he asked Fulkerson how
+Dryfoos had made his money, and learned that it was primarily in natural
+gas, he made note of some of his eccentric tastes as peculiarities that
+were to be caressed in any future natural-gas millionaire who might fall
+into his hands.  He did not begrudge the time he had to give in
+explaining to Dryfoos the relation of the different wines to the
+different dishes; Dryfoos was apt to substitute a costlier wine where he
+could for a cheaper one, and he gave Frescobaldi carte blanche for the
+decoration of the table with pieces of artistic confectionery.  Among
+these the caterer designed one for a surprise to his patron and a
+delicate recognition of the source of his wealth, which he found Dryfoos
+very willing to talk about, when he intimated that he knew what it was.
+
+Dryfoos left it to Fulkerson to invite the guests, and he found ready
+acceptance of his politeness from Kendricks, who rightly regarded the
+dinner as a part of the 'Every Other Week' business, and was too sweet
+and kind-hearted, anyway, not to seem very glad to come.  March was a
+matter of course; but in Colonel Woodburn, Fulkerson encountered a
+reluctance which embarrassed him the more because he was conscious of
+having, for motives of his own, rather strained a point in suggesting the
+colonel to Dryfoos as a fit subject for invitation.  There had been only
+one of the colonel's articles printed as yet, and though it had made a
+sensation in its way, and started the talk about that number, still it
+did not fairly constitute him a member of the staff, or even entitle him
+to recognition as a regular contributor.  Fulkerson felt so sure of
+pleasing him with Dryfoos's message that he delivered it in full family
+council at the widow's.  His daughter received it with all the enthusiasm
+that Fulkerson had hoped for, but the colonel said, stiffly, "I have not
+the pleasure of knowing Mr. Dryfoos."  Miss Woodburn appeared ready to
+fall upon him at this, but controlled herself, as if aware that filial
+authority had its limits, and pressed her lips together without saying
+anything.
+
+"Yes, I know," Fulkerson admitted.  "But it isn't a usual case.  Mr.
+Dryfoos don't go in much for the conventionalities; I reckon he don't
+know much about 'em, come to boil it down; and he hoped"--here Fulkerson
+felt the necessity of inventing a little--"that you would excuse any want
+of ceremony; it's to be such an informal affair, anyway; we're all going
+in business dress, and there ain't going to be any ladies.  He'd have
+come himself to ask you, but he's a kind of a bashful old fellow.  It's
+all right, Colonel Woodburn."
+
+"I take it that it is, sir," said the colonel, courteously, but with
+unabated state, "coming from you.  But in these matters we have no right
+to burden our friends with our decisions."
+
+"Of course, of course," said Fulkerson, feeling that he had been
+delicately told to mind his own business.
+
+"I understand," the colonel went on, "the relation that Mr. Dryfoos bears
+to the periodical in which you have done me the honor to print my papah,
+but this is a question of passing the bounds of a purely business
+connection, and of eating the salt of a man whom you do not definitely
+know to be a gentleman."
+
+"Mah goodness!" his daughter broke in.  "If you bah your own salt with
+his money--"
+
+"It is supposed that I earn his money before I buy my salt with it,"
+returned her father, severely.  "And in these times, when money is got in
+heaps, through the natural decay of our nefarious commercialism, it
+behooves a gentleman to be scrupulous that the hospitality offered him is
+not the profusion of a thief with his booty.  I don't say that Mr.
+Dryfoos's good-fortune is not honest.  I simply say that I know nothing
+about it, and that I should prefer to know something before I sat down at
+his board."
+
+"You're all right, colonel," said Fulkerson, "and so is Mr. Dryfoos.
+I give you my word that there are no flies on his personal integrity,
+if that's what you mean.  He's hard, and he'd push an advantage, but I
+don't believe he would take an unfair one.  He's speculated and made
+money every time, but I never heard of his wrecking a railroad or
+belonging to any swindling company or any grinding monopoly.  He does
+chance it in stocks, but he's always played on the square, if you call
+stocks gambling."
+
+"May I, think this over till morning?"  asked the colonel.
+
+"Oh, certainly, certainly," said Fulkerson, eagerly.  "I don't know as
+there's any hurry."
+
+Miss Woodburn found a chance to murmur to him before he went: "He'll
+come.  And Ah'm so much oblahged, Mr. Fulkerson.  Ah jost know it's all
+you' doing, and it will give papa a chance to toak to some new people,
+and get away from us evahlastin' women for once."
+
+"I don't see why any one should want to do that," said Fulkerson, with
+grateful gallantry.  "But I'll be dogged," he said to March when he told
+him about this odd experience, "if I ever expected to find Colonel
+Woodburn on old Lindau's ground.  He did come round handsomely this
+morning at breakfast and apologized for taking time to think the
+invitation over before he accepted.  'You understand,' he says, 'that if
+it had been to the table of some friend not so prosperous as Mr. Dryfoos
+--your friend Mr. March, for instance--it would have been sufficient to
+know that he was your friend.  But in these days it is a duty that a
+gentleman owes himself to consider whether he wishes to know a rich man
+or not.  The chances of making money disreputably are so great that the
+chances are against a man who has made money if he's made a great deal of
+it.'"
+
+March listened with a face of ironical insinuation.  "That was very good;
+and he seems to have had a good deal of confidence in your patience and
+in your sense of his importance to the occasion--"
+
+"No, no," Fulkerson protested, "there's none of that kind of thing about
+the colonel.  I told him to take time to think it over; he's the
+simplest-hearted old fellow in the world."
+
+"I should say so.  After all, he didn't give any reason he had for
+accepting.  But perhaps the young lady had the reason."
+
+"Pshaw, March!" said Fulkerson.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+So far as the Dryfoos family was concerned, the dinner might as well have
+been given at Frescobaldi's rooms.  None of the ladies appeared.  Mrs.
+Dryfoos was glad to escape to her own chamber, where she sat before an
+autumnal fire, shaking her head and talking to herself at times, with the
+foreboding of evil which old women like her make part of their religion.
+The girls stood just out of sight at the head of the stairs, and disputed
+which guest it was at each arrival; Mrs. Mandel had gone to her room to
+write letters, after beseeching them not to stand there.  When Kendricks
+came, Christine gave Mela a little pinch, equivalent to a little mocking
+shriek; for, on the ground of his long talk with Mela at Mrs. Horn's, in
+the absence of any other admirer, they based a superstition of his
+interest in her; when Beaton came, Mela returned the pinch, but
+awkwardly, so that it hurt, and then Christine involuntarily struck her.
+
+Frescobaldi's men were in possession everywhere they had turned the cook
+out of her kitchen and the waitress out of her pantry; the reluctant
+Irishman at the door was supplemented by a vivid Italian, who spoke
+French with the guests, and said, "Bien, Monsieur," and "toute suite,"
+and "Merci!" to all, as he took their hats and coats, and effused a
+hospitality that needed no language but the gleam of his eyes and teeth
+and the play of his eloquent hands.  From his professional dress-coat,
+lustrous with the grease spotted on it at former dinners and parties,
+they passed to the frocks of the elder and younger Dryfoos in the
+drawing-room, which assumed informality for the affair, but did not put
+their wearers wholly at their ease.  The father's coat was of black
+broadcloth, and he wore it unbuttoned; the skirts were long, and the
+sleeves came down to his knuckles; he shook hands with his guests, and
+the same dryness seemed to be in his palm and throat, as he huskily asked
+each to take a chair.  Conrad's coat was of modern texture and cut, and
+was buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience within its
+lapels; he met March with his entreating smile, and he seemed no more
+capable of coping with the situation than his father.  They both waited
+for Fulkerson, who went about and did his best to keep life in the party
+during the half-hour that passed before they sat down at dinner.  Beaton
+stood gloomily aloof, as if waiting to be approached on the right basis
+before yielding an inch of his ground; Colonel Woodburn, awaiting the
+moment when he could sally out on his hobby, kept himself intrenched
+within the dignity of a gentleman, and examined askance the figure of old
+Lindau as he stared about the room, with his fine head up, and his empty
+sleeve dangling over his wrist. March felt obliged to him for wearing a
+new coat in the midst of that hostile luxury, and he was glad to see
+Dryfoos make up to him and begin to talk with him, as if he wished to
+show him particular respect, though it might have been because he was
+less afraid of him than of the others.  He heard Lindau saying, "Boat,
+the name is Choarman?" and Dryfoos beginning to explain his Pennsylvania
+Dutch origin, and he suffered himself, with a sigh of relief, to fall
+into talk with Kendricks, who was always pleasant; he was willing to talk
+about something besides himself, and had no opinions that he was not
+ready to hold in abeyance for the time being out of kindness to others.
+In that group of impassioned individualities, March felt him a refuge and
+comfort--with his harmless dilettante intention of some day writing a
+novel, and his belief that he was meantime collecting material for it.
+
+Fulkerson, while breaking the ice for the whole company, was mainly
+engaged in keeping Colonel Woodburn thawed out.  He took Kendricks away
+from March and presented him to the colonel as a person who, like
+himself, was looking into social conditions; he put one hand on
+Kendricks's shoulder, and one on the colonel's, and made some flattering
+joke, apparently at the expense of the young fellow, and then left them.
+March heard Kendricks protest in vain, and the colonel say, gravely:
+"I do not wonder, sir, that these things interest you.  They constitute a
+problem which society must solve or which will dissolve society," and he
+knew from that formula, which the colonel had, once used with him, that
+he was laying out a road for the exhibition of the hobby's paces later.
+
+Fulkerson came back to March, who had turned toward Conrad Dryfoos, and
+said, "If we don't get this thing going pretty soon, it 'll be the death
+of me," and just then Frescobaldi's butler came in and announced to
+Dryfoos that dinner was served.  The old man looked toward Fulkerson with
+a troubled glance, as if he did not know what to do; he made a gesture to
+touch Lindau's elbow.  Fulkerson called out, "Here's Colonel Woodburn,
+Mr. Dryfoos," as if Dryfoos were looking for him; and he set the example
+of what he was to do by taking Lindau's arm himself.  "Mr. Lindau is
+going to sit at my end of the table, alongside of March.  Stand not upon
+the order of your going, gentlemen, but fall in at once."  He contrived
+to get Dryfoos and the colonel before him, and he let March follow with
+Kendricks.  Conrad came last with Beaton, who had been turning over the
+music at the piano, and chafing inwardly at the whole affair.  At the
+table Colonel Woodburn was placed on Dryfoos's right, and March on his
+left.  March sat on Fulkerson's right, with Lindau next him; and the
+young men occupied the other seats.
+
+"Put you next to March, Mr. Lindau," said Fulkerson, "so you can begin to
+put Apollinaris in his champagne-glass at the right moment; you know his
+little weakness of old; sorry to say it's grown on him."
+
+March laughed with kindly acquiescence in Fulkerson's wish to start the
+gayety, and Lindau patted him on the shoulder.  "I know hiss veakness.
+If he liges a class of vine, it iss begause his loaf ingludes efen hiss
+enemy, as Shakespeare galled it."
+
+"Ah, but Shakespeare couldn't have been thinking of champagne," said
+Kendricks.
+
+"I suppose, sir," Colonel Woodburn interposed, with lofty courtesy,
+"champagne could hardly have been known in his day."
+
+"I suppose not, colonel," returned the younger man, deferentially.
+"He seemed to think that sack and sugar might be a fault; but he didn't
+mention champagne."
+
+"Perhaps he felt there was no question about that," suggested Beaton, who
+then felt that he had not done himself justice in the sally.
+
+"I wonder just when champagne did come in," said March.
+
+"I know when it ought to come in," said Fulkerson.  "Before the soup!"
+
+They all laughed, and gave themselves the air of drinking champagne out
+of tumblers every day, as men like to do.  Dryfoos listened uneasily; he
+did not quite understand the allusions, though he knew what Shakespeare
+was, well enough; Conrad's face expressed a gentle deprecation of joking
+on such a subject, but he said nothing.
+
+The talk ran on briskly through the dinner.  The young men tossed the
+ball back and forth; they made some wild shots, but they kept it going,
+and they laughed when they were hit.  The wine loosed Colonel Woodburn's
+tongue; he became very companionable with the young fellows; with the
+feeling that a literary dinner ought to have a didactic scope, he praised
+Scott and Addison as the only authors fit to form the minds of gentlemen.
+
+Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the name of Flaubert as a
+master of style.  "Style, you know," he added, "is the man."
+
+"Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir," the colonel assented; he
+wondered who Flaubert was.
+
+Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he said these were the masters.
+He recited some lurid verses from Baudelaire; Lindau pronounced them a
+disgrace to human nature, and gave a passage from Victor Hugo on Louis
+Napoleon, with his heavy German accent, and then he quoted Schiller.
+"Ach, boat that is a peaudifool! Not zo?"  he demanded of March.
+
+"Yes, beautiful; but, of course, you know I think there's nobody like
+Heine!"
+
+Lindau threw back his great old head and laughed, showing a want of teeth
+under his mustache.  He put his hand on March's back.  "This poy--he was
+a poy den--wars so gracy to pekin reading Heine that he gommence with the
+tictionary bevore he knows any Grammar, and ve bick it out vort by vort
+togeder."
+
+"He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh, Lindau ?"  asked
+Fulkerson, burlesquing the old man's accent, with an impudent wink that
+made Lindau himself laugh.  "But in the dark ages, I mean, there in
+Indianapolis.  Just how long ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?"
+Fulkerson saw the restiveness in Dryfoos's eye at the purely literary
+course the talk had taken; he had intended it to lead up that way to
+business, to 'Every Other Week;' but he saw that it was leaving Dryfoos
+too far out, and he wished to get it on the personal ground, where
+everybody is at home.
+
+"Ledt me zee," mused Lindau.  "Wass it in fifty-nine or zixty, Passil?
+Idt wass a year or dwo pefore the war proke oudt, anyway."
+
+"Those were exciting times," said Dryfoos, making his first entry into
+the general talk.  "I went down to Indianapolis with the first company
+from our place, and I saw the red-shirts pouring in everywhere.  They had
+a song,
+
+    "Oh, never mind the weather, but git over double trouble,
+     For we're bound for the land of Canaan."
+
+The fellows locked arms and went singin' it up and down four or five
+abreast in the moonlight; crowded everybody' else off the sidewalk."
+
+"I remember, I remember," said Lindau, nodding his head slowly up and
+down.  "A coodt many off them nefer gome pack from that landt of Ganaan,
+Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"You're right, Mr. Lindau.  But I reckon it was worth it--the country
+we've got now.  Here, young man!"  He caught the arm of the waiter who was
+going round with the champagne bottle.  "Fill up Mr. Lindau's glass,
+there.  I want to drink the health of those old times with him.  Here's
+to your empty sleeve, Mr. Lindau.  God bless it!  No offence to you,
+Colonel Woodburn," said Dryfoos, turning to him before he drank.
+
+"Not at all, sir, not at all," said the colonel.  "I will drink with you,
+if you will permit me."
+
+"We'll all drink--standing!" cried Fulkerson.  "Help March to get up,
+somebody! Fill high the bowl with Samian Apollinaris for Coonrod!  Now,
+then, hurrah for Lindau!"
+
+They cheered, and hammered on the table with the butts of their knife-
+handles.  Lindau remained seated.  The tears came into his eyes; he said,
+"I thank you, chendlemen," and hiccoughed.
+
+"I'd 'a' went into the war myself," said Dryfoos, "but I was raisin'
+a family of young children, and I didn't see how I could leave my farm.
+But I helped to fill up the quota at every call, and when the
+volunteering stopped I went round with the subscription paper myself;
+and we offered as good bounties as any in the State.  My substitute was
+killed in one of the last skirmishes--in fact, after Lee's surrender--
+and I've took care of his family, more or less, ever since."
+
+"By-the-way, March," said Fulkerson, "what sort of an idea would it be to
+have a good war story--might be a serial--in the magazine?  The war has
+never fully panned out in fiction yet.  It was used a good deal just
+after it was over, and then it was dropped.  I think it's time to take it
+up again.  I believe it would be a card."
+
+It was running in March's mind that Dryfoos had an old rankling shame in
+his heart for not having gone into the war, and that he had often made
+that explanation of his course without having ever been satisfied with
+it.  He felt sorry for him; the fact seemed pathetic; it suggested a
+dormant nobleness in the man.
+
+Beaton was saying to Fulkerson: "You might get a series of sketches by
+substitutes; the substitutes haven't been much heard from in the war
+literature.  How would 'The Autobiography of a Substitute' do?  You might
+follow him up to the moment he was killed in the other man's place, and
+inquire whether he had any right to the feelings of a hero when he was
+only hired in the place of one.  Might call it 'The Career of a Deputy
+Hero.'"
+
+"I fancy," said March, "that there was a great deal of mixed motive in
+the men who went into the war as well as in those who kept out of it.
+We canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have
+been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocations."  He found
+himself saying this in Dryfoos's behalf; the old man looked at him
+gratefully at first, he thought, and then suspiciously.
+
+Lindau turned his head toward him and said: "You are righdt, Passil; you
+are righdt.  I haf zeen on the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions
+of human paseness--chelousy, fanity, ecodistic bridte.  I haf zeen men in
+the face off death itself gofferned by motifes as low as--as pusiness
+motifes."
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, "it would be a grand thing for 'Every Other Week'
+if we could get some of those ideas worked up into a series.  It would
+make a lot of talk."
+
+Colonel Woodburn ignored him in saying, "I think, Major Lindau--"
+
+"High brifate; prefet gorporal," the old man interrupted, in rejection of
+the title.
+
+Hendricks laughed and said, with a glance of appreciation at Lindau,
+"Brevet corporal is good."
+
+Colonel Woodburn frowned a little, and passed over the joke.  "I think
+Mr. Lindau is right.  Such exhibitions were common to both sides, though
+if you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so, I think they were less
+frequent on ours.  We were fighting more immediately for existence.
+We were fewer than you were, and we knew it; we felt more intensely that
+if each were not for all, then none was for any."
+
+The colonel's words made their impression.  Dryfoos said, with authority,
+"That is so."
+
+"Colonel Woodburn," Fulkerson called out, "if you'll work up those ideas
+into a short paper--say, three thousand words--I'll engage to make March
+take it."
+
+The colonel went on without replying: "But Mr. Lindau is right in
+characterizing some of the motives that led men to the cannon's mouth as
+no higher than business motives, and his comparison is the most forcible
+that he could have used.  I was very much struck by it."
+
+The hobby was out, the colonel was in the saddle with so firm a seat that
+no effort sufficed to dislodge him.  The dinner went on from course to
+course with barbaric profusion, and from time to time Fulkerson tried to
+bring the talk back to 'Every Other Week.'  But perhaps because that was
+only the ostensible and not the real object of the dinner, which was to
+bring a number of men together under Dryfoos's roof, and make them the
+witnesses of his splendor, make them feel the power of his wealth,
+Fulkerson's attempts failed.  The colonel showed how commercialism was
+the poison at the heart of our national life; how we began as a simple,
+agricultural people, who had fled to these shores with the instinct,
+divinely implanted, of building a state such as the sun never shone upon
+before; how we had conquered the wilderness and the savage; how we had
+flung off, in our struggle with the mother-country, the trammels of
+tradition and precedent, and had settled down, a free nation, to the
+practice of the arts of peace; how the spirit of commercialism had stolen
+insidiously upon us, and the infernal impulse of competition had
+embroiled us in a perpetual warfare of interests, developing the worst
+passions of our nature, and teaching us to trick and betray and destroy
+one another in the strife for money, till now that impulse had exhausted
+itself, and we found competition gone and the whole economic problem in
+the hands of monopolies--the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the
+Rubber Trust, and what not.  And now what was the next thing?  Affairs
+could not remain as they were; it was impossible; and what was the next
+thing?
+
+The company listened for the main part silently.  Dryfoos tried to grasp
+the idea of commercialism as the colonel seemed to hold it; he conceived
+of it as something like the dry-goods business on a vast scale, and he
+knew he had never been in that.  He did not like to hear competition
+called infernal; he had always supposed it was something sacred; but he
+approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the Standard Oil Company; it
+was all true; the Standard Oil has squeezed Dryfoos once, and made him
+sell it a lot of oil-wells by putting down the price of oil so low in
+that region that he lost money on every barrel he pumped.
+
+All the rest listened silently, except Lindau; at every point the colonel
+made against the present condition of things he said more and more
+fiercely, "You are righdt, you are righdt."  His eyes glowed, his hand
+played with his knife-hilt.  When the colonel demanded, "And what is the
+next thing?"  he threw himself forward, and repeated: "Yes, sir!  What is
+the next thing?"
+
+"Natural gas, by thunder!" shouted Fulkerson.
+
+One of the waiters had profited by Lindau's posture to lean over him and
+put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar.  It
+expressed Frescobaldi's conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature
+had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a
+small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in
+combustion as it issued from the ground.  Fulkerson burst into a roar of
+laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi's personal tribute to
+Dryfoos.  Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained
+the work of sinking a gas-well, as he had already explained it to
+Frescobaldi.  In the midst of his lecture he caught sight of the caterer
+himself, where he stood in the pantry doorway, smiling with an artist's
+anxiety for the effect of his masterpiece.
+
+"Come in, come in, Frescobaldi!  We want to congratulate you," Fulkerson
+called to him.  "Here, gentlemen! Here's Frescobaldi's health."
+
+They all drank; and Frescobaldi, smiling brilliantly and rubbing his
+hands as he bowed right and left, permitted himself to say to Dryfoos:
+"You are please; no?  You like?"
+
+"First-rate, first-rate!" said the old man; but when the Italian had
+bowed himself out and his guests had sunk into their seats again, he said
+dryly to Fulkerson, "I reckon they didn't have to torpedo that well, or
+the derrick wouldn't look quite so nice and clean."
+
+"Yes," Fulkerson answered, "and that ain't quite the style--that little
+wiggly-waggly blue flame--that the gas acts when you touch off a good
+vein of it.  This might do for weak gas"; and he went on to explain:
+
+"They call it weak gas when they tap it two or three hundred feet down;
+and anybody can sink a well in his back yard and get enough gas to light
+and heat his house.  I remember one fellow that had it blazing up from a
+pipe through a flower-bed, just like a jet of water from a fountain.
+My, my, my! You fel--you gentlemen--ought to go out and see that
+country, all of you.  Wish we could torpedo this well, Mr. Dryfoos, and
+let 'em see how it works!  Mind that one you torpedoed for me?  You know,
+when they sink a well," he went on to the company, "they can't always
+most generally sometimes tell whether they're goin' to get gas or oil or
+salt water.  Why, when they first began to bore for salt water out on the
+Kanawha, back about the beginning of the century, they used to get gas
+now and then, and then they considered it a failure; they called a gas-
+well a blower, and give it up in disgust; the time wasn't ripe for gas
+yet.  Now they bore away sometimes till they get half-way to China, and
+don't seem to strike anything worth speaking of.  Then they put a
+dynamite torpedo down in the well and explode it.  They have a little bar
+of iron that they call a Go-devil, and they just drop it down on the
+business end of the torpedo, and then stand from under, if you please!
+You hear a noise, and in about half a minute you begin to see one, and it
+begins to rain oil and mud and salt water and rocks and pitchforks and
+adoptive citizens; and when it clears up the derrick's painted--got a
+coat on that 'll wear in any climate.  That's what our honored host
+meant.  Generally get some visiting lady, when there's one round, to drop
+the Go-devil.  But that day we had to put up with Conrad here.  They
+offered to let me drop it, but I declined.  I told 'em I hadn't much
+practice with Go-devils in the newspaper syndicate business, and I wasn't
+very well myself, anyway.  Astonishing," Fulkerson continued, with the
+air of relieving his explanation by an anecdote, "how reckless they get
+using dynamite when they're torpedoing wells.  We stopped at one place
+where a fellow was handling the cartridges pretty freely, and Mr. Dryfoos
+happened to caution him a little, and that ass came up with one of 'em in
+his hand, and began to pound it on the buggy-wheel to show us how safe it
+was.  I turned green, I was so scared; but Mr. Dryfoos kept his color,
+and kind of coaxed the fellow till he quit.  You could see he was the
+fool kind, that if you tried to stop him he'd keep on hammering that
+cartridge, just to show that it wouldn't explode, till he blew you into
+Kingdom Come.  When we got him to go away, Mr. Dryfoos drove up to his
+foreman.  'Pay Sheney off, and discharge him on the spot,' says he.
+'He's too safe a man to have round; he knows too much about dynamite.'
+I never saw anybody so cool."
+
+Dryfoos modestly dropped his head under Fulkerson's flattery and, without
+lifting it, turned his eyes toward Colonel Woodburn.  "I had all sorts of
+men to deal with in developing my property out there, but I had very
+little trouble with them, generally speaking."
+
+"Ah, ah! you foundt the laboring-man reasonable--dractable--tocile?"
+Lindau put in.
+
+"Yes, generally speaking," Dryfoos answered.  "They mostly knew which
+side of their bread was buttered.  I did have one little difficulty at
+one time.  It happened to be when Mr. Fulkerson was out there.  Some of
+the men tried to form a union--"
+
+"No, no!" cried Fulkerson.  "Let me tell that! I know you wouldn't do
+yourself justice, Mr. Dryfoos, and I want 'em to know how a strike can be
+managed, if you take it in time.  You see, some of those fellows got a
+notion that there ought to be a union among the working-men to keep up
+wages, and dictate to the employers, and Mr. Dryfoos's foreman was the
+ringleader in the business.  They understood pretty well that as soon as
+he found it out that foreman would walk the plank, and so they watched
+out till they thought they had Mr. Dryfoos just where they wanted him--
+everything on the keen jump, and every man worth his weight in diamonds
+--and then they came to him, and--told him to sign a promise to keep that
+foreman to the end of the season, or till he was through with the work on
+the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under penalty of having them all knock
+off.  Mr. Dryfoos smelled a mouse, but he couldn't tell where the mouse
+was; he saw that they did have him, and he signed, of course.  There
+wasn't anything really against the fellow, anyway; he was a first-rate
+man, and he did his duty every time; only he'd got some of those ideas
+into his head, and they turned it.  Mr. Dryfoos signed, and then he laid
+low."
+
+March saw Lindau listening with a mounting intensity, and heard him
+murmur in German, "Shameful! shameful!"
+
+Fulkerson went on: "Well, it wasn't long before they began to show their
+hand, but Mr. Dryfoos kept dark.  He agreed to everything; there never
+was such an obliging capitalist before; there wasn't a thing they asked
+of him that he didn't do, with the greatest of pleasure, and all went
+merry as a marriage-bell till one morning a whole gang of fresh men
+marched into the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under the escort of a dozen
+Pinkertons with repeating rifles at half-cock, and about fifty fellows
+found themselves out of a job.  You never saw such a mad set."
+
+"Pretty neat," said Kendricks, who looked at the affair purely from an
+aesthetic point of view.  "Such a coup as that would tell tremendously in
+a play."
+
+"That was vile treason," said Lindau in German to March.  "He's an
+infamous traitor! I cannot stay here.  I must go."
+
+He struggled to rise, while March held him by the coat, and implored him
+under his voice: "For Heaven's sake, don't, Lindau! You owe it to
+yourself not to make a scene, if you come here."  Something in it all
+affected him comically; he could not help laughing.
+
+The others were discussing the matter, and seemed not to have noticed
+Lindau, who controlled himself and sighed: "You are right.  I must have
+patience."
+
+Beaton was saying to Dryfoos, "Pity your Pinkertons couldn't have given
+them a few shots before they left."
+
+"No, that wasn't necessary," said Dryfoos.  "I succeeded in breaking up
+the union.  I entered into an agreement with other parties not to employ
+any man who would not swear that he was non-union.  If they had attempted
+violence, of course they could have been shot.  But there was no fear of
+that.  Those fellows can always be depended upon to cut one another's
+throats in the long run."
+
+"But sometimes," said Colonel Woodburn, who had been watching throughout.
+for a chance to mount his hobby again, "they make a good deal of trouble
+first.  How was it in the great railroad strike of '77?"
+
+"Well, I guess there was a little trouble that time, colonel," said
+Fulkerson.  "But the men that undertake to override the laws and paralyze
+the industries of a country like this generally get left in the end."
+
+"Yes, sir, generally; and up to a certain point, always.  But it's the
+exceptional that is apt to happen, as well as the unexpected.  And a
+little reflection will convince any gentleman here that there is always a
+danger of the exceptional in your system.  The fact is, those fellows
+have the game in their own hands already.  A strike of the whole body of
+the Brotherhood of Engineers alone would starve out the entire Atlantic
+seaboard in a week; labor insurrection could make head at a dozen given
+points, and your government couldn't move a man over the roads without
+the help of the engineers."
+
+"That is so," said Kendrick, struck by the dramatic character of the
+conjecture.  He imagined a fiction dealing with the situation as
+something already accomplished.
+
+"Why don't some fellow do the Battle of Dorking act with that thing?"
+said Fulkerson.  "It would be a card."
+
+"Exactly what I was thinking, Mr. Fulkerson," said Kendricks.
+
+Fulkerson laughed.  "Telepathy--clear case of mind transference.  Better
+see March, here, about it.  I'd like to have it in 'Every Other Week.'
+It would make talk."
+
+"Perhaps it might set your people to thinking as well as talking," said
+the colonel.
+
+"Well, sir," said Dryfoos, setting his lips so tightly together that his
+imperial stuck straight outward, "if I had my way, there wouldn't be any
+Brotherhood of Engineers, nor any other kind of labor union in the whole
+country."
+
+"What!" shouted Lindau.  "You would sobbress the unionss of the voarking-
+men?"
+
+"Yes, I would."
+
+"And what would you do with the unionss of the gabidalists--the drosts--
+and gompines, and boolss?  Would you dake the righdt from one and gif it
+to the odder?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I would," said Dryfoos, with a wicked look at him.
+
+Lindau was about to roar back at him with some furious protest, but March
+put his hand on his shoulder imploringly, and Lindau turned to him to say
+in German: "But it is infamous--infamous! What kind of man is this?  Who
+is he?  He has the heart of a tyrant."
+
+Colonel Woodburn cut in.  "You couldn't do that, Mr. Dryfoos, under your
+system.  And if you attempted it, with your conspiracy laws, and that
+kind of thing, it might bring the climax sooner than you expected.  Your
+commercialized society has built its house on the sands.  It will have to
+go.  But I should be sorry if it went before its time."
+
+"You are righdt, sir," said Lindau.  "It would be a bity.  I hobe it will
+last till it feelss its rottenness, like Herodt.  Boat, when its hour
+gomes, when it trope to bieces with the veight off its own gorrubtion--
+what then?"
+
+"It's not to be supposed that a system of things like this can drop to
+pieces of its own accord, like the old Republic of Venice," said the
+colonel.  "But when the last vestige of commercial society is gone, then
+we can begin to build anew; and we shall build upon the central idea, not
+of the false liberty you now worship, but of responsibility--
+responsibility.  The enlightened, the moneyed, the cultivated class shall
+be responsible to the central authority--emperor, duke, president; the
+name does not matter--for the national expense and the national defence,
+and it shall be responsible to the working-classes of all kinds for homes
+and lands and implements, and the opportunity to labor at all times.
+
+"The working-classes shall be responsible to the leisure class for the
+support of its dignity in peace, and shall be subject to its command in
+war.  The rich shall warrant the poor against planless production and the
+ruin that now follows, against danger from without and famine from
+within, and the poor--"
+
+"No, no, no!" shouted Lindau.  "The State shall do that--the whole
+beople.  The men who voark shall have and shall eat; and the men that
+will not voark, they shall sdarfe.  But no man need sdarfe.  He will go
+to the State, and the State will see that he haf voark, and that he haf
+foodt.  All the roadts and mills and mines and landts shall be the
+beople's and be ron by the beople for the beople.  There shall be no rich
+and no boor; and there shall not be war any more, for what bower wouldt
+dare to addack a beople bound togeder in a broderhood like that?"
+
+"Lion and lamb act," said Fulkerson, not well knowing, after so much
+champagne, what words he was using.
+
+No one noticed him, and Colonel Woodburn said coldly to Lindau, "You are
+talking paternalism, sir."
+
+"And you are dalking feutalism!" retorted the old man.
+
+The colonel did not reply.  A silence ensued, which no one broke till
+Fulkerson said: "Well, now, look here.  If either one of these
+millenniums was brought about, by force of arms, or otherwise, what would
+become of 'Every Other Week'?  Who would want March for an editor?  How
+would Beaton sell his pictures?  Who would print Mr. Kendricks's little
+society verses and short stories?  What would become of Conrad and his
+good works?"  Those named grinned in support of Fulkerson's diversion,
+but Lindau and the colonel did not speak; Dryfoos looked down at his
+plate, frowning.
+
+A waiter came round with cigars, and Fulkerson took one.  "Ah," he said,
+as he bit off the end, and leaned over to the emblematic masterpiece,
+where the brandy was still feebly flickering, "I wonder if there's enough
+natural gas left to light my cigar."  His effort put the flame out and
+knocked the derrick over; it broke in fragments on the table.  Fulkerson
+cackled over the ruin: "I wonder if all Moffitt will look that way after
+labor and capital have fought it out together.  I hope this ain't ominous
+of anything personal, Dryfoos?"
+
+"I'll take the risk of it," said the old man, harshly.
+
+He rose mechanically, and Fulkerson said to Frescobaldi's man, "You can
+bring us the coffee in the library."
+
+The talk did not recover itself there.  Landau would not sit down; he
+refused coffee, and dismissed himself with a haughty bow to the company;
+Colonel Woodburn shook hands elaborately all round, when he had smoked
+his cigar; the others followed him.  It seemed to March that his own
+good-night from Dryfoos was dry and cold.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+March met Fulkerson on the steps of the office next morning, when he
+arrived rather later than his wont.  Fulkerson did not show any of the
+signs of suffering from the last night's pleasure which painted
+themselves in March's face.  He flirted his hand gayly in the air,
+and said, "How's your poor head?"  and broke into a knowing laugh.
+"You don't seem to have got up with the lark this morning.  The old
+gentleman is in there with Conrad, as bright as a biscuit; he's beat you
+down.  Well, we did have a good time, didn't we?  And old Lindau and the
+colonel, didn't they have a good time?  I don't suppose they ever had a
+chance before to give their theories quite so much air.  Oh, my! how they
+did ride over us!  I'm just going down to see Beaton about the cover of
+the Christmas number.  I think we ought to try it in three or four
+colors, if we are going to observe the day at all."  He was off before
+March could pull himself together to ask what Dryfoos wanted at the
+office at that hour of the morning; he always came in the afternoon on
+his way up-town.
+
+The fact of his presence renewed the sinister misgivings with which March
+had parted from him the night before, but Fulkerson's cheerfulness seemed
+to gainsay them; afterward March did not know whether to attribute this
+mood to the slipperiness that he was aware of at times in Fulkerson, or
+to a cynical amusement he might have felt at leaving him alone to the old
+man, who mounted to his room shortly after March had reached it.
+
+A sort of dumb anger showed itself in his face; his jaw was set so firmly
+that he did not seem able at once to open it.  He asked, without the
+ceremonies of greeting, "What does that one-armed Dutchman do on this
+book?"
+
+"What does he do?"  March echoed, as people are apt to do with a question
+that is mandatory and offensive.
+
+"Yes, sir, what does he do?  Does he write for it?"
+
+"I suppose you mean Lindau," said March.  He saw no reason for refusing
+to answer Dryfoos's demand, and he decided to ignore its terms.  "No,
+he doesn't write for it in the usual way.  He translates for it;
+he examines the foreign magazines, and draws my attention to anything he
+thinks of interest.  But I told you about this before--"
+
+"I know what you told me, well enough.  And I know what he is.  He is a
+red-mouthed labor agitator.  He's one of those foreigners that come here
+from places where they've never had a decent meal's victuals in their
+lives, and as soon as they get their stomachs full, they begin to make
+trouble between our people and their hands.  There's where the strikes
+come from, and the unions and the secret societies.  They come here and
+break our Sabbath, and teach their atheism.  They ought to be hung!
+Let 'em go back if they don't like it over here.  They want to ruin the
+country."
+
+March could not help smiling a little at the words, which came fast
+enough now in the hoarse staccato of Dryfoos's passion.  "I don't know
+whom you mean by they, generally speaking; but I had the impression that
+poor old Lindau had once done his best to save the country.  I don't
+always like his way of talking, but I know that he is one of the truest
+and kindest souls in the world; and he is no more an atheist than I am.
+He is my friend, and I can't allow him to be misunderstood."
+
+"I don't care what he is," Dryfoos broke out, "I won't have him round.
+He can't have any more work from this office.  I want you to stop it.
+I want you to turn him off."
+
+March was standing at his desk, as he had risen to receive Dryfoos when
+he entered.  He now sat down, and began to open his letters.
+
+"Do you hear?"  the old man roared at him.  "I want you to turn him off."
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Dryfoos," said March, succeeding in an effort to speak
+calmly, "I don't know you, in such a matter as this.  My arrangements as
+editor of 'Every Other Week' were made with Mr. Fulkerson.  I have always
+listened to any suggestion he has had to make."
+
+"I don't care for Mr. Fulkerson?  He has nothing to do with it," retorted
+Dryfoos; but he seemed a little daunted by March's position.
+
+"He has everything to do with it as far as I am concerned," March
+answered, with a steadiness that he did not feel.  "I know that you are
+the owner of the periodical, but I can't receive any suggestion from you,
+for the reason that I have given.  Nobody but Mr. Fulkerson has any right
+to talk with me about its management."
+
+Dryfoos glared at him for a moment, and demanded, threateningly: "Then
+you say you won't turn that old loafer off?  You say that I have got to
+keep on paying my money out to buy beer for a man that would cut my
+throat if he got the chance?"
+
+"I say nothing at all, Mr. Dryfoos," March answered.  The blood came into
+his face, and he added: "But I will say that if you speak again of Mr.
+Lindau in those terms, one of us must leave this room.  I will not hear
+you."
+
+Dryfoos looked at him with astonishment; then he struck his hat down on
+his head, and stamped out of the room and down the stairs; and a vague
+pity came into March's heart that was not altogether for himself.
+He might be the greater sufferer in the end, but he was sorry to have got
+the better of that old man for the moment; and he felt ashamed of the
+anger into which Dryfoos's anger had surprised him.  He knew he could not
+say too much in defence of Lindau's generosity and unselfishness, and he
+had not attempted to defend him as a political economist.  He could not
+have taken any ground in relation to Dryfoos but that which he held, and
+he felt satisfied that he was right in refusing to receive instructions
+or commands from him.  Yet somehow he was not satisfied with the whole
+affair, and not merely because his present triumph threatened his final
+advantage, but because he felt that in his heat he had hardly done
+justice to Dryfoos's rights in the matter; it did not quite console him
+to reflect that Dryfoos had himself made it impossible.  He was tempted
+to go home and tell his wife what had happened, and begin his
+preparations for the future at once.  But he resisted this weakness and
+kept mechanically about his work, opening the letters and the manuscripts
+before him with that curious double action of the mind common in men of
+vivid imaginations.  It was a relief when Conrad Dryfoos, having
+apparently waited to make sure that his father would not return, came up
+from the counting-room and looked in on March with a troubled face.
+
+"Mr. March," he began, "I hope father hasn't been saying anything to you
+that you can't overlook.  I know he was very much excited, and when he is
+excited he is apt to say things that he is sorry for."
+
+The apologetic attitude taken for Dryfoos, so different from any attitude
+the peremptory old man would have conceivably taken for himself, made
+March smile.  "Oh no.  I fancy the boot is on the other leg.  I suspect
+I've said some things your father can't overlook, Conrad."  He called the
+young man by his Christian name partly to distinguish him from his
+father, partly from the infection of Fulkerson's habit, and partly from a
+kindness for him that seemed naturally to express itself in that way.
+
+"I know he didn't sleep last night, after you all went away," Conrad
+pursued, "and of course that made him more irritable; and he was tried a
+good deal by some of the things that Mr. Lindau said."
+
+"I was tried a good deal myself," said March.  "Lindau ought never to
+have been there."
+
+"No."  Conrad seemed only partially to assent.
+
+"I told Mr. Fulkerson so.  I warned him that Lindau would be apt to break
+out in some way.  It wasn't just to him, and it wasn't just to your
+father, to ask him."
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson had a good motive," Conrad gently urged.  "He did it
+because he hurt his feelings that day about the pension."
+
+"Yes, but it was a mistake.  He knew that Lindau was inflexible about his
+principles, as he calls them, and that one of his first principles is to
+denounce the rich in season and out of season.  I don't remember just
+what he said last night; and I really thought I'd kept him from breaking
+out in the most offensive way.  But your father seems very much
+incensed."
+
+"Yes, I know," said Conrad.
+
+"Of course, I don't agree with Lindau.  I think there are as many good,
+kind, just people among the rich as there are among the poor, and that
+they are as generous and helpful.  But Lindau has got hold of one of
+those partial truths that hurt worse than the whole truth, and--"
+
+"Partial truth!" the young man interrupted.  "Didn't the Saviour himself
+say, 'How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of
+God?'"
+
+"Why, bless my soul!" cried March.  "Do you agree with Lindau?"
+
+"I agree with the Lord Jesus Christ," said the young man, solemnly, and a
+strange light of fanaticism, of exaltation, came into his wide blue eyes.
+"And I believe He meant the kingdom of heaven upon this earth, as well as
+in the skies."
+
+March threw himself back in his chair and looked at him with a kind of
+stupefaction, in which his eye wandered to the doorway, where he saw
+Fulkerson standing, it seemed to him a long time, before he heard him
+saying: "Hello, hello! What's the row?  Conrad pitching into you on old
+Lindau's account, too?"
+
+The young man turned, and, after a glance at Fulkerson's light, smiling
+face, went out, as if in his present mood he could not bear the contact
+of that persiflant spirit.
+
+March felt himself getting provisionally very angry again.  "Excuse me,
+Fulkerson, but did you know when you went out what Mr. Dryfoos wanted to
+see me for?"
+
+"Well, no, I didn't exactly," said Fulkerson, taking his usual seat on a
+chair and looking over the back of it at March.  "I saw he was on his car
+about something, and I thought I'd better not monkey with him much.
+I supposed he was going to bring you to book about old Lindau, somehow."
+Fulkerson broke into a laugh.
+
+March remained serious.  "Mr. Dryfoos," he said, willing to let the
+simple statement have its own weight with Fulkerson, and nothing more,
+"came in here and ordered me to discharge Lindau from his employment on
+the magazine--to turn him off, as he put it."
+
+"Did he?"  asked Fulkerson, with unbroken cheerfulness.  "The old man is
+business, every time.  Well, I suppose you can easily get somebody else
+to do Lindau's work for you.  This town is just running over with half-
+starved linguists.  What did you say?"
+
+"What did I say?"  March echoed.  "Look here, Fulkerson; you may regard
+this as a joke, but I don't.  I'm not used to being spoken to as if I
+were the foreman of a shop, and told to discharge a sensitive and
+cultivated man like Lindau, as if he were a drunken mechanic; and if
+that's your idea of me--"
+
+"Oh, hello, now, March! You mustn't mind the old man's way.  He don't
+mean anything by it--he don't know any better, if you come to that."
+
+"Then I know better," said March.  "I refused to receive any instructions
+from Mr. Dryfoos, whom I don't know in my relations with 'Every Other
+Week,' and I referred him to you."
+
+"You did?" Fulkerson whistled.  "He owns the thing!"
+
+"I don't care who owns the thing," said March.  "My negotiations were
+with you alone from the beginning, and I leave this matter with you.
+What do you wish done about Lindau?"
+
+"Oh, better let the old fool drop," said Fulkerson.  "He'll light on his
+feet somehow, and it will save a lot of rumpus."
+
+"And if I decline to let him drop?"
+
+"Oh, come, now, March; don't do that," Fulkerson began.
+
+"If I decline to let him drop," March repeated, "what will you do?"
+
+"I'll be dogged if I know what I'll do," said Fulkerson.  "I hope you
+won't take that stand.  If the old man went so far as to speak to you
+about it, his mind is made up, and we might as well knock under first as
+last."
+
+"And do you mean to say that you would not stand by me in what I
+considered my duty-in a matter of principle?"
+
+"Why, of course, March," said Fulkerson, coaxingly, "I mean to do the
+right thing.  But Dryfoos owns the magazine--"
+
+"He doesn't own me," said March, rising.  "He has made the little mistake
+of speaking to me as if he did; and when"--March put on his hat and took
+his overcoat down from its nail--"when you bring me his apologies, or
+come to say that, having failed to make him understand they were
+necessary, you are prepared to stand by me, I will come back to this
+desk.  Otherwise my resignation is at your service."
+
+He started toward the door, and Fulkerson intercepted him.  "Ah, now,
+look here, March!  Don't do that!  Hang it all, don't you see where it
+leaves me?  Now, you just sit down a minute and talk it over.  I can make
+you see--I can show you--Why, confound the old Dutch beer-buzzer!  Twenty
+of him wouldn't be worth the trouble he's makin'.  Let him go, and the
+old man 'll come round in time."
+
+"I don't think we've understood each other exactly, Mr. Fulkerson," said
+March, very haughtily.  "Perhaps we never can; but I'll leave you to
+think it out."
+
+He pushed on, and Fulkerson stood aside to let him pass, with a dazed
+look and a mechanical movement.  There was something comic in his rueful
+bewilderment to March, who was tempted to smile, but he said to himself
+that he had as much reason to be unhappy as Fulkerson, and he did not
+smile.  His indignation kept him hot in his purpose to suffer any
+consequence rather than submit to the dictation of a man like Dryfoos;
+he felt keenly the degradation of his connection with him, and all his
+resentment of Fulkerson's original uncandor returned; at the same time
+his heart ached with foreboding.  It was not merely the work in which he
+had constantly grown happier that he saw taken from him; but he felt the
+misery of the man who stakes the security and plenty and peace of home
+upon some cast, and knows that losing will sweep from him most that most
+men find sweet and pleasant in life.  He faced the fact, which no good
+man can front without terror, that he was risking the support of his
+family, and for a point of pride, of honor, which perhaps he had no right
+to consider in view of the possible adversity.  He realized, as every
+hireling must, no matter how skillfully or gracefully the tie is
+contrived for his wearing, that he belongs to another, whose will is his
+law.  His indignation was shot with abject impulses to go back and tell
+Fulkerson that it was all right, and that he gave up.  To end the anguish
+of his struggle he quickened his steps, so that he found he was reaching
+home almost at a run.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+He must have made more clatter than he supposed with his key at the
+apartment door, for his wife had come to let him in when he flung it
+open.  "Why, Basil," she said, "what's brought you back?  Are you sick?
+You're all pale.  Well, no wonder!  This is the last of Mr. Fulkerson's
+dinners you shall go to.  You're not strong enough for it, and your
+stomach will be all out of order for a week.  How hot you are! and in a
+drip of perspiration!  Now you'll be sick."  She took his hat away, which
+hung dangling in his hand, and pushed him into a chair with tender
+impatience.  "What is the matter?  Has anything happened?"
+
+"Everything has happened," he said, getting his voice after one or two
+husky endeavors for it; and then he poured out a confused and huddled
+statement of the case, from which she only got at the situation by
+prolonged cross-questioning.
+
+At the end she said, "I knew Lindau would get you into trouble."
+
+This cut March to the heart.  "Isabel!" he cried, reproachfully.
+
+"Oh, I know," she retorted, and the tears began to come.  "I don't wonder
+you didn't want to say much to me about that dinner at breakfast.
+I noticed it; but I thought you were just dull, and so I didn't insist.
+I wish I had, now.  If you had told me what Lindau had said, I should
+have known what would have come of it, and I could have advised you--"
+
+"Would you have advised me," March demanded, curiously, "to submit to
+bullying like that, and meekly consent to commit an act of cruelty
+against a man who had once been such a friend to me?"
+
+"It was an unlucky day when you met him.  I suppose we shall have to go.
+And just when we bad got used to New York, and begun to like it.  I don't
+know where we shall go now; Boston isn't like home any more; and we
+couldn't live on two thousand there; I should be ashamed to try.  I'm
+sure I don't know where we can live on it.  I suppose in some country
+village, where there are no schools, or anything for the children.  I
+don't know what they'll say when we tell them, poor things."
+
+Every word was a stab in March's heart, so weakly tender to his own; his
+wife's tears, after so much experience of the comparative lightness of
+the griefs that weep themselves out in women, always seemed wrung from
+his own soul; if his children suffered in the least through him, he felt
+like a murderer.  It was far worse than he could have imagined, the way
+his wife took the affair, though he had imagined certain words, or
+perhaps only looks, from her that were bad enough.  He had allowed for
+trouble, but trouble on his account: a svmpathy that might burden and
+embarrass him; but he had not dreamed of this merely domestic, this
+petty, this sordid view of their potential calamity, which left him
+wholly out of the question, and embraced only what was most crushing and
+desolating in the prospect.  He could not bear it.  He caught up his hat
+again, and, with some hope that his wife would try to keep him, rushed
+out of the house.  He wandered aimlessly about, thinking the same
+exhausting thoughts over and over, till he found himself horribly hungry;
+then he went into a restaurant for his lunch, and when he paid he tried
+to imagine how he should feel if that were really his last dollar.
+
+He went home toward the middle of the afternoon, basely hoping that
+Fulkerson had sent him some conciliatory message, or perhaps was waiting
+there for him to talk it over; March was quite willing to talk it over
+now.  But it was his wife who again met him at the door, though it seemed
+another woman than the one he had left weeping in the morning.
+
+"I told the children," she said, in smiling explanation of his absence
+from lunch, "that perhaps you were detained by business.  I didn't know
+but you had gone back to the office."
+
+"Did you think I would go back there, Isabel?"  asked March, with a
+haggard look.  "Well, if you say so, I will go back, and do what Dryfoos
+ordered me to do.  I'm sufficiently cowed between him and you, I can
+assure you."
+
+"Nonsense," she said.  "I approve of everything you did.  But sit down,
+now, and don't keep walking that way, and let me see if I understand it
+perfectly.  Of course, I had to have my say out."
+
+She made him go all over his talk with Dryfoos again, and report his own
+language precisely.  From time to time, as she got his points, she said,
+"That was splendid," "Good enough for him!" and "Oh, I'm so glad you said
+that to him!" At the end she said:
+
+"Well, now, let's look at it from his point of view.  Let's be perfectly
+just to him before we take another step forward."
+
+"Or backward," March suggested, ruefully.  "The case is simply this: he
+owns the magazine."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"And he has a right to expect that I will consider his pecuniary
+interests--"
+
+"Oh, those detestable pecuniary interests!  Don't you wish there wasn't
+any money in the world?"
+
+"Yes; or else that there was a great deal more of it.  And I was
+perfectly willing to do that.  I have always kept that in mind as one of
+my duties to him, ever since I understood what his relation to the
+magazine was."
+
+"Yes, I can bear witness to that in any court of justice.  You've done it
+a great deal more than I could, Basil.  And it was just the same way with
+those horrible insurance people."
+
+"I know," March went on, trying to be proof against her flatteries, or at
+least to look as if he did not deserve praise; "I know that what Lindau
+said was offensive to him, and I can understand how he felt that he had a
+right to punish it.  All I say is that he had no right to punish it
+through me."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, askingly.
+
+"If it had been a question of making 'Every Other Week' the vehicle of
+Lindau's peculiar opinions--though they're not so very peculiar; he might
+have got the most of them out of Ruskin--I shouldn't have had any ground
+to stand on, or at least then I should have had to ask myself whether his
+opinions would be injurious to the magazine or not."
+
+"I don't see," Mrs. March interpolated, "how they could hurt it much
+worse than Colonel Woodburn's article crying up slavery."
+
+"Well," said March, impartially, "we could print a dozen articles
+praising the slavery it's impossible to have back, and it wouldn't hurt
+us.  But if we printed one paper against the slavery which Lindau claims
+still exists, some people would call us bad names, and the counting-room
+would begin to feel it.  But that isn't the point.  Lindau's connection
+with 'Every Other Week' is almost purely mechanical; he's merely a
+translator of such stories and sketches as he first submits to me, and it
+isn't at all a question of his opinions hurting us, but of my becoming an
+agent to punish him for his opinions.  That is what I wouldn't do; that's
+what I never will do."
+
+"If you did," said his wife, "I should perfectly despise you.  I didn't
+understand how it was before.  I thought you were just holding out
+against Dryfoos because he took a dictatorial tone with you, and because
+you wouldn't recognize his authority.  But now I'm with you, Basil, every
+time, as that horrid little Fulkerson says.  But who would ever have
+supposed he would be so base as to side against you?"
+
+"I don't know," said March, thoughtfully, "that we had a right to expect
+anything else.  Fulkerson's standards are low; they're merely business
+standards, and the good that's in him is incidental and something quite
+apart from his morals and methods.  He's naturally a generous and right-
+minded creature, but life has taught him to truckle and trick, like the
+rest of us."
+
+"It hasn't taught you that, Basil."
+
+"Don't be so sure.  Perhaps it's only that I'm a poor scholar.  But I
+don't know, really, that I despise Fulkerson so much for his course this
+morning as for his gross and fulsome flatteries of Dryfoos last night.
+I could hardly stomach it."
+
+His wife made him tell her what they were, and then she said, "Yes, that
+was loathsome; I couldn't have believed it of Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Perhaps he only did it to keep the talk going, and to give the old man a
+chance to say something," March leniently suggested.  "It was a worse
+effect because he didn't or couldn't follow up Fulkerson's lead."
+
+"It was loathsome, all the same," his wife insisted.  "It's the end of
+Mr. Fulkerson, as far as I'm concerned."
+
+"I didn't tell you before," March resumed, after a moment, "of my little
+interview with Conrad Dryfoos after his father left," and now he went on
+to repeat what had passed between him and the young man.
+
+"I suspect that he and his father had been having some words before the
+old man came up to talk with me, and that it was that made him so
+furious."
+
+"Yes, but what a strange position for the son of such a man to take!
+Do you suppose he says such things to his father?"
+
+"I don't know; but I suspect that in his meek way Conrad would say what
+he believed to anybody.  I suppose we must regard him as a kind of
+crank."
+
+"Poor young fellow! He always makes me feel sad, somehow.  He has such a
+pathetic face.  I don't believe I ever saw him look quite happy, except
+that night at Mrs. Horn's, when he was talking with Miss Vance; and then
+he made me feel sadder than ever."
+
+"I don't envy him the life he leads at home, with those convictions of
+his.  I don't see why it wouldn't be as tolerable there for old Lindau
+himself."
+
+"Well, now," said Mrs. March, "let us put them all out of our minds and
+see what we are going to do ourselves."
+
+They began to consider their ways and means, and how and where they
+should live, in view of March's severance of his relations with 'Every
+Other Week.'  They had not saved anything from the first year's salary;
+they had only prepared to save; and they had nothing solid but their two
+thousand to count upon.  But they built a future in which they easily
+lived on that and on what March earned with his pen.  He became a free
+lance, and fought in whatever cause he thought just; he had no ties, no
+chains.  They went back to Boston with the heroic will to do what was
+most distasteful; they would have returned to their own house if they had
+not rented it again; but, any rate, Mrs. March helped out by taking
+boarders, or perhaps only letting rooms to lodgers.  They had some hard
+struggles, but they succeeded.
+
+"The great thing," she said, "is to be right.  I'm ten times as happy as
+if you had come home and told me that you had consented to do what
+Dryfoos asked and he had doubled your salary."
+
+"I don't think that would have happened in any event," said March, dryly.
+
+"Well, no matter.  I just used it for an example."
+
+They both experienced a buoyant relief, such as seems to come to people
+who begin life anew on whatever terms.  "I hope we are young enough yet,
+Basil," she said, and she would not have it when he said they had once
+been younger.
+
+They heard the children's knock on the door; they knocked when they came
+home from school so that their mother might let them in.  "Shall we tell
+them at once?"  she asked, and ran to open for them before March could
+answer.
+
+They were not alone.  Fulkerson, smiling from ear to ear, was with them.
+"Is March in?"  he asked.
+
+"Mr. March is at home, yes," she said very haughtily.  "He's in his
+study," and she led the way there, while the children went to their
+rooms.
+
+"Well, March," Fulkerson called out at sight of him, "it's all right!
+The old man has come down."
+
+"I suppose if you gentlemen are going to talk business--" Mrs. March
+began.
+
+"Oh, we don't want you to go away," said Fulkerson.  "I reckon March has
+told you, anyway."
+
+"Yes, I've told her," said March.  "Don't go, Isabel.  What do you mean,
+Fulkerson ?"
+
+"He's just gone on up home, and he sent me round with his apologies.
+He sees now that he had no business to speak to you as he did, and he
+withdraws everything.  He'd 'a' come round himself if I'd said so, but I
+told him I could make it all right."
+
+Fulkerson looked so happy in having the whole affair put right, and the
+Marches knew him to be so kindly affected toward them, that they could
+not refuse for the moment to share his mood.  They felt themselves
+slipping down from the moral height which they had gained, and March made
+a clutch to stay himself with the question, "And Lindau?"
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, "he's going to leave Lindau to me.  You won't
+have anything to do with it.  I'll let the old fellow down easy."
+
+"Do you mean," asked March, "that Mr. Dryfoos insists on his being
+dismissed?"
+
+"Why, there isn't any dismissing about it," Fulkerson argued.  "If you
+don't send him any more work, he won't do any more, that's all.  Or if he
+comes round, you can--He's to be referred to me."
+
+March shook his head, and his wife, with a sigh, felt herself plucked up
+from the soft circumstance of their lives, which she had sunk back into
+so quickly, and set beside him on that cold peak of principle again.
+"It won't do, Fulkerson.  It's very good of you, and all that, but it
+comes to the same thing in the end.  I could have gone on without any
+apology from Mr. Dryfoos; he transcended his authority, but that's a
+minor matter.  I could have excused it to his ignorance of life among
+gentlemen; but I can't consent to Lindau's dismissal--it comes to that,
+whether you do it or I do it, and whether it's a positive or a negative
+thing--because he holds this opinion or that."
+
+"But don't you see," said Fulkerson, "that it's just Lindau's opinions
+the old man can't stand?  He hasn't got anything against him personally.
+I don't suppose there's anybody that appreciates Lindau in some ways more
+than the old man does."
+
+"I understand.  He wants to punish him for his opinions.  Well, I can't
+consent to that, directly or indirectly.  We don't print his opinions,
+and he has a perfect right to hold them, whether Mr. Dryfoos agrees with
+them or not."
+
+Mrs. March had judged it decorous for her to say nothing, but she now
+went and sat down in the chair next her husband.
+
+"Ah, dog on it!" cried Fulkerson, rumpling his hair with both his hands.
+"What am I to do?  The old man says he's got to go."
+
+"And I don't consent to his going," said March.
+
+"And you won't stay if he goes."
+
+Fulkerson rose.  "Well, well! I've got to see about it.  I'm afraid the
+old man won't stand it, March; I am, indeed.  I wish you'd reconsider.
+I--I'd take it as a personal favor if you would.  It leaves me in a fix.
+You see I've got to side with one or the other."
+
+March made no reply to this, except to say, "Yes, you must stand by him,
+or you must stand by me."
+
+"Well, well!  Hold on awhile! I'll see you in the morning.  Don't take
+any steps--"
+
+"Oh, there are no steps to take," said March, with a melancholy smile.
+"The steps are stopped; that's all."  He sank back into his chair when
+Fulkerson was gone and drew a long breath.  "This is pretty rough.  I
+thought we had got through it."
+
+"No," said his wife.  "It seems as if I had to make the fight all over
+again."
+
+"Well, it's a good thing it's a holy war."
+
+"I can't bear the suspense.  Why didn't you tell him outright you
+wouldn't go back on any terms?"
+
+"I might as well, and got the glory.  He'll never move Dryfoos.  I
+suppose we both would like to go back, if we could."
+
+"Oh, I suppose so."
+
+They could not regain their lost exaltation, their lost dignity.  At
+dinner Mrs. March asked the children how they would like to go back to
+Boston to live.
+
+"Why, we're not going, are we?"  asked Tom, without enthusiasm.
+
+"I was just wondering how you felt about it, now," she said, with an
+underlook at her husband.
+
+"Well, if we go back," said Bella, "I want to live on the Back Bay.  It's
+awfully Micky at the South End."
+
+"I suppose I should go to Harvard," said Tom, "and I'd room out at
+Cambridge.  It would be easier to get at you on the Back Bay."
+
+The parents smiled ruefully at each other, and, in view of these grand
+expectations of his children, March resolved to go as far as he could in
+meeting Dryfoos's wishes.  He proposed the theatre as a distraction from
+the anxieties that he knew were pressing equally on his wife.  "We might
+go to the 'Old Homestead,'" he suggested, with a sad irony, which only
+his wife felt.
+
+"Oh yes, let's!" cried Bella.
+
+While they were getting ready, some one rang, and Bella went to the door,
+and then came to tell her father that it was Mr. Lindau.  "He says he
+wants to see you just a moment.  He's in the parlor, and he won't sit
+down, or anything."
+
+"What can he want?"  groaned Mrs. March, from their common dismay.
+
+March apprehended a storm in the old man's face.  But he only stood in
+the middle of the room, looking very sad and grave.  "You are Going
+oudt," he said.  "I won't geep you long.  I haf gome to pring pack dose
+macassines and dis mawney.  I can't do any more voark for you; and I
+can't geep the mawney you haf baid me a'ready.  It iss not hawnest mawney
+--that hass been oarned py voark; it iss mawney that hass peen mate py
+sbeculation, and the obbression off lapor, and the necessity of the boor,
+py a man--Here it is, efery tollar, efery zent.  Dake it; I feel as if
+dere vas ploodt on it."
+
+"Why, Lindau," March began, but the old man interrupted him.
+
+"Ton't dalk to me, Passil!  I could not haf believedt it of you.  When
+you know how I feel about dose tings, why tidn't you dell me whose mawney
+you bay oudt to me?  Ach, I ton't plame you--I ton't rebroach you.  You
+haf nefer thought of it; boat I have thought, and I should be Guilty,
+I must share that man's Guilt, if I gept hiss mawney.  If you hat toldt
+me at the peginning--if you hat peen frank with meboat it iss all righdt;
+you can go on; you ton't see dese tings as I see them; and you haf cot a
+family, and I am a free man.  I voark to myself, and when I ton't voark,
+I sdarfe to myself.  But.  I geep my handts glean, voark or sdarfe.  Gif
+him hiss mawney pack! I am sawry for him; I would not hoart hiss
+feelings, boat I could not pear to douch him, and hiss mawney iss like
+boison!"
+
+March tried to reason with Lindau, to show him the folly, the injustice,
+the absurdity of his course; it ended in their both getting angry, and in
+Lindau's going away in a whirl of German that included Basil in the guilt
+of the man whom Lindau called his master.
+
+"Well," said Mrs. March.  "He is a crank, and I think you're well rid of
+him.  Now you have no quarrel with that horrid old Dryfoos, and you can
+keep right on."
+
+"Yes," said March, "I wish it didn't make me feel so sneaking.  What a
+long day it's been! It seems like a century since I got up."
+
+"Yes, a thousand years.  Is there anything else left to happen?"
+
+"I hope not.  I'd like to go to bed."
+
+"Why, aren't you going to the theatre?"  wailed Bella, coming in upon her
+father's desperate expression.
+
+"The theatre?  Oh yes, certainly! I meant after we got home," and March
+amused himself at the puzzled countenance of the child.  "Come on!
+Is Tom ready?"
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Fulkerson parted with the Marches in such trouble of mind that he did not
+feel able to meet that night the people whom he usually kept so gay at
+Mrs. Leighton's table.  He went to Maroni's for his dinner, for this
+reason and for others more obscure.  He could not expect to do anything
+more with Dryfoos at once; he knew that Dryfoos must feel that he had
+already made an extreme concession to March, and he believed that if he
+was to get anything more from him it must be after Dryfoos had dined.
+But he was not without the hope, vague and indefinite as it might be,
+that he should find Lindau at Maroni's, and perhaps should get some
+concession from him, some word of regret or apology which he could report
+to Dryfoos, and at lest make the means of reopening the affair with him;
+perhaps Lindau, when he knew how matters stood, would back down
+altogether, and for March's sake would withdraw from all connection with
+'Every Other Week' himself, and so leave everything serene.  Fulkerson
+felt capable, in his desperation, of delicately suggesting such a course
+to Lindau, or even of plainly advising it: he did not care for Lindau a
+great deal, and he did care a great deal for the magazine.
+
+But he did not find Lindau at Maroni's; he only found Beaton.  He sat
+looking at the doorway as Fulkerson entered, and Fulkerson naturally came
+and took a place at his table.  Something in Beaton's large-eyed
+solemnity of aspect invited Fulkerson to confidence, and he said, as he
+pulled his napkin open and strung it, still a little damp (as the scanty,
+often-washed linen at Maroni's was apt to be), across his knees, "I was
+looking for you this morning, to talk with you about the Christmas
+number, and I was a good deal worked up because I couldn't find you; but
+I guess I might as well have spared myself my emotions."
+
+"Why?"  asked Beaton, briefly.
+
+"Well, I don't know as there's going to be any Christmas number."
+
+"Why?"  Beaton asked again.
+
+"Row between the financial angel and the literary editor about the chief
+translator and polyglot smeller."
+
+"Lindau?"
+
+"Lindau is his name."
+
+"What does the literary editor expect after Lindau's expression of his
+views last night?"
+
+"I don't know what he expected, but the ground he took with the old man
+was that, as Lindau's opinions didn't characterize his work on the
+magazine, he would not be made the instrument of punishing him for them
+the old man wanted him turned off, as he calls it."
+
+"Seems to be pretty good ground," said Beaton, impartially, while he
+speculated, with a dull trouble at heart, on the effect the row would
+have on his own fortunes.  His late visit home had made him feel that the
+claim of his family upon him for some repayment of help given could not
+be much longer delayed; with his mother sick and his father growing old,
+he must begin to do something for them, but up to this time he had spent
+his salary even faster than he had earned it.  When Fulkerson came in he
+was wondering whether he could get him to increase it, if he threatened
+to give up his work, and he wished that he was enough in love with
+Margaret Vance, or even Christine Dryfoos, to marry her, only to end in
+the sorrowful conviction that he was really in love with Alma Leighton,
+who had no money, and who had apparently no wish to be married for love,
+even.  "And what are you going to do about it?"  he asked, listlessly.
+
+"Be dogged if I know what I'm going to do about it," said Fulkerson.
+"I've been round all day, trying to pick up the pieces--row began right
+after breakfast this morning--and one time I thought I'd got the thing
+all put together again.  I got the old man to say that he had spoken to
+March a little too authoritatively about Lindau; that, in fact, he ought
+to have communicated his wishes through me; and that he was willing to
+have me get rid of Lindau, and March needn't have anything to do with it.
+I thought that was pretty white, but March says the apologies and regrets
+are all well enough in their way, but they leave the main question where
+they found it."
+
+"What is the main question?"  Beaton asked, pouring himself out some
+Chianti.  As he set the flask down he made the reflection that if he
+would drink water instead of Chianti he could send his father three
+dollars a week, on his back debts, and he resolved to do it.
+
+"The main question, as March looks at it, is the question of punishing
+Lindau for his private opinions; he says that if he consents to my
+bouncing the old fellow it's the same as if he bounced him."
+
+"It might have that complexion in some lights," said Beaton.  He drank
+off his Chianti, and thought he would have it twice a week, or make
+Maroni keep the half-bottles over for him, and send his father two
+dollars.  "And what are you going to do now?"
+
+"That's what I don't know," said Fulkerson, ruefully.  After a moment he
+said, desperately, "Beaton, you've got a pretty good head; why don't you
+suggest something?"
+
+"Why don't you let March go?"  Beaton suggested.
+
+"Ah, I couldn't," said Fulkerson.  "I got him to break up in Boston and
+come here; I like him; nobody else could get the hang of the thing like
+he has; he's--a friend."  Fulkerson said this with the nearest approach
+he could make to seriousness, which was a kind of unhappiness.
+
+Beaton shrugged.  "Oh, if you can afford to have ideals, I congratulate
+you.  They're too expensive for me.  Then, suppose you get rid of
+Dryfoos?"
+
+Fulkerson laughed forlornly.  "Go on, Bildad.  Like to sprinkle a few
+ashes over my boils?  Don't mind me!"
+
+They both sat silent a little while, and then Beaton said, "I suppose you
+haven't seen Dryfoos the second time?"
+
+"No.  I came in here to gird up my loins with a little dinner before I
+tackled him.  But something seems to be the matter with Maroni's cook.
+I don't want anything to eat."
+
+"The cooking's about as bad as usual," said Beaton.  After a moment he
+added, ironically, for he found Fulkerson's misery a kind of relief from
+his own, and was willing to protract it as long as it was amusing, "Why
+not try an envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary?"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Get that other old fool to go to Dryfoos for you!"
+
+"Which other old fool?  The old fools seem to be as thick as flies."
+
+"That Southern one."
+
+"Colonel Woodburn?"
+
+"Mmmmm."
+
+"He did seem to rather take to the colonel!" Fulkerson mused aloud.
+
+"Of course he did.  Woodburn, with his idiotic talk about patriarchal
+slavery, is the man on horseback to Dryfoos's muddy imagination.  He'd
+listen to him abjectly, and he'd do whatever Woodburn told him to do."
+Beaton smiled cynically.
+
+Fulkerson got up and reached for his coat and hat.  "You've struck it,
+old man."  The waiter came up to help him on with his coat; Fulkerson
+slipped a dollar in his hand.  "Never mind the coat; you can give the
+rest of my dinner to the poor, Paolo.  Beaton, shake! You've saved my
+life, little boy, though I don't think you meant it."  He took Beaton's
+hand and solemnly pressed it, and then almost ran out of the door.
+
+They had just reached coffee at Mrs. Leighton's when he arrived and sat
+down with them and began to put some of the life of his new hope into
+them.  His appetite revived, and, after protesting that he would not take
+anything but coffee, he went back and ate some of the earlier courses.
+But with the pressure of his purpose driving him forward, he did not
+conceal from Miss Woodburn, at least, that he was eager to get her apart
+from the rest for some reason.  When he accomplished this, it seemed as
+if he had contrived it all himself, but perhaps he had not wholly
+contrived it.
+
+"I'm so glad to get a chance to speak to you alone," he said at once; and
+while she waited for the next word he made a pause, and then said,
+desperately, "I want you to help me; and if you can't help me, there's no
+help for me."
+
+"Mah goodness," she said, "is the case so bad as that?  What in the woald
+is the trouble?"
+
+"Yes, it's a bad case," said Fulkerson.  "I want your father to help me."
+
+"Oh, I thoat you said me!"
+
+"Yes; I want you to help me with your father.  I suppose I ought to go to
+him at once, but I'm a little afraid of him."
+
+"And you awe not afraid of me?  I don't think that's very flattering, Mr.
+Fulkerson.  You ought to think Ah'm twahce as awful as papa."
+
+"Oh, I do! You see, I'm quite paralyzed before you, and so I don't feel
+anything."
+
+"Well, it's a pretty lahvely kyand of paralysis.  But--go on."
+
+"I will--I will.  If I can only begin."
+
+"Pohaps Ah maght begin fo' you."
+
+"No, you can't.  Lord knows, I'd like to let you.  Well, it's like this."
+
+Fulkerson made a clutch at his hair, and then, after another hesitation,
+he abruptly laid the whole affair before her.  He did not think it
+necessary to state the exact nature of the offence Lindau had given
+Dryfoos, for he doubted if she could grasp it, and he was profuse of his
+excuses for troubling her with the matter, and of wonder at himself for
+having done so.  In the rapture of his concern at having perhaps made a
+fool of himself, he forgot why he had told her; but she seemed to like
+having been confided in, and she said, "Well, Ah don't see what you can
+do with you' ahdeals of friendship except stand bah Mr. Mawch."
+
+"My ideals of friendship?  What do you mean?"
+
+"Oh, don't you suppose we know?  Mr. Beaton said you we' a pofect Bahyard
+in friendship, and you would sacrifice anything to it."
+
+"Is that so?"  said Fulkerson, thinking how easily he could sacrifice
+Lindau in this case.  He had never supposed before that he was chivalrous
+in such matters, but he now began to see it in that light, and he
+wondered that he could ever have entertained for a moment the idea of
+throwing March over.
+
+"But Ah most say," Miss Woodburn went on, "Ah don't envy you you' next
+interview with Mr. Dryfoos.  Ah suppose you'll have to see him at once
+aboat it."
+
+The conjecture recalled Fulkerson to the object of his confidences.
+"Ah, there's where your help comes in.  I've exhausted all the influence
+I have with Dryfoos--"
+
+"Good gracious, you don't expect Ah could have any!"
+
+They both laughed at the comic dismay with which she conveyed the
+preposterous notion; and Fulkerson said, "If I judged from myself,
+I should expect you to bring him round instantly."
+
+"Oh, thank you, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, with mock meekness.
+
+"Not at all.  But it isn't Dryfoos I want you to help me with; it's your
+father.  I want your father to interview Dryfoos for me, and I-I'm afraid
+to ask him."
+
+"Poo' Mr. Fulkerson!" she said, and she insinuated something through her
+burlesque compassion that lifted him to the skies.  He swore in his heart
+that the woman never lived who was so witty, so wise, so beautiful, and
+so good.  "Come raght with me this minute, if the cyoast's clea'."  She
+went to the door of the diningroom and looked in across its gloom to the
+little gallery where her father sat beside a lamp reading his evening
+paper; Mrs. Leighton could be heard in colloquy with the cook below, and
+Alma had gone to her room.  She beckoned Fulkerson with the hand
+outstretched behind her, and said, "Go and ask him."
+
+"Alone!" he palpitated.
+
+"Oh, what a cyowahd!" she cried, and went with him.  "Ah suppose you'll
+want me to tell him aboat it."
+
+"Well, I wish you'd begin, Miss Woodburn," he said.  "The fact is, you
+know, I've been over it so much I'm kind of sick of the thing."
+
+Miss Woodburn advanced and put her hand on her father's shoulder.  "Look
+heah, papa!  Mr. Fulkerson wants to ask you something, and he wants me to
+do it fo' him."
+
+The colonel looked up through his glasses with the sort of ferocity
+elderly men sometimes have to put on in order to keep their glasses from
+falling off.  His daughter continued:  "He's got into an awful difficulty
+with his edito' and his proprieto', and he wants you to pacify them."
+
+"I do not know whethah I understand the case exactly," said the colonel,
+"but Mr. Fulkerson may command me to the extent of my ability."
+
+"You don't understand it aftah what Ah've said?"  cried the girl.  "Then
+Ah don't see but what you'll have to explain it you'self, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, Miss Woodburn has been so luminous about it, colonel," said
+Fulkerson, glad of the joking shape she had given the affair, "that I can
+only throw in a little side-light here and there."
+
+The colonel listened as Fulkerson went on, with a grave diplomatic
+satisfaction.  He felt gratified, honored, even, he said, by Mr.
+Fulkerson's appeal to him; and probably it gave him something of the high
+joy that an affair of honor would have brought him in the days when he
+had arranged for meetings between gentlemen.  Next to bearing a
+challenge, this work of composing a difficulty must have been grateful.
+But he gave no outward sign of his satisfaction in making a resume of the
+case so as to get the points clearly in his mind.
+
+"I was afraid, sir," he said, with the state due to the serious nature of
+the facts, "that Mr. Lindau had given Mr. Dryfoos offence by some of his
+questions at the dinner-table last night."
+
+"Perfect red rag to a bull," Fulkerson put in; and then he wanted to
+withdraw his words at the colonel's look of displeasure.
+
+"I have no reflections to make upon Mr. Landau," Colonel Woodburn
+continued, and Fulkerson felt grateful to him for going on; "I do not
+agree with Mr. Lindau; I totally disagree with him on sociological
+points; but the course of the conversation had invited him to the
+expression of his convictions, and he had a right to express them, so far
+as they had no personal bearing."
+
+"Of course," said Fulkerson, while Miss Woodburn perched on the arm of
+her father's chair.
+
+"At the same time, sir, I think that if Mr. Dryfoos felt a personal
+censure in Mr. Lindau's questions concerning his suppression of the
+strike among his workmen, he had a right to resent it."
+
+"Exactly," Fulkerson assented.
+
+"But it must be evident to you, sir, that a high-spirited gentleman like
+Mr. March--I confess that my feelings are with him very warmly in the
+matter--could not submit to dictation of the nature you describe."
+
+"Yes, I see," said Fulkerson; and, with that strange duplex action of the
+human mind, he wished that it was his hair, and not her father's, that
+Miss Woodburn was poking apart with the corner of her fan.
+
+"Mr. Lindau," the colonel concluded, "was right from his point of view,
+and Mr. Dryfoos was equally right.  The position of Mr. March is
+perfectly correct--"
+
+His daughter dropped to her feet from his chair-arm.  "Mah goodness!
+If nobody's in the wrong, ho' awe you evah going to get the mattah
+straight?"
+
+"Yes, you see," Fulkerson added, "nobody can give in."
+
+"Pardon me," said the colonel, "the case is one in which all can give
+in."
+
+"I don't know which 'll begin," said Fulkerson.
+
+The colonel rose.  "Mr. Lindau must begin, sir.  We must begin by seeing
+Mr. Lindau, and securing from him the assurance that in the expression of
+his peculiar views he had no intention of offering any personal offence
+to Mr. Dryfoos.  If I have formed a correct estimate of Mr. Lindau, this
+will be perfectly simple."
+
+Fulkerson shook his head.  "But it wouldn't help.  Dryfoos don't care a
+rap whether Lindau meant any personal offence or not.  As far as that is
+concerned, he's got a hide like a hippopotamus.  But what he hates is
+Lindau's opinions, and what he says is that no man who holds such
+opinions shall have any work from him.  And what March says is that no
+man shall be punished through him for his opinions, he don't care what
+they are."
+
+The colonel stood a moment in silence.  "And what do you expect me to do
+under the circumstances?"
+
+"I came to you for advice--I thought you might suggest----?"
+
+"Do you wish me to see Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"Well, that's about the size of it," Fulkerson admitted.  "You see,
+colonel," he hastened on, "I know that you have a great deal of influence
+with him; that article of yours is about the only thing he's ever read in
+'Every Other Week,' and he's proud of your acquaintance.  Well, you know"
+--and here Fulkerson brought in the figure that struck him so much in
+Beaton's phrase and had been on his tongue ever since--" you're the man
+on horseback to him; and he'd be more apt to do what you say than if
+anybody else said it."
+
+"You are very good, sir," said the colonel, trying to be proof against
+the flattery, "but I am afraid you overrate my influence."  Fulkerson let
+him ponder it silently, and his daughter governed her impatience by
+holding her fan against her lips.  Whatever the process was in the
+colonel's mind, he said at last: "I see no good reason for declining to
+act for you, Mr. Fulkerson, and I shall be very happy if I can be of
+service to you.  But"--he stopped Fulkerson from cutting in with
+precipitate thanks--"I think I have a right, sir, to ask what your course
+will be in the event of failure?"
+
+"Failure?"  Fulkerson repeated, in dismay.
+
+"Yes, sir.  I will not conceal from you that this mission is one not
+wholly agreeable to my feelings."
+
+"Oh, I understand that, colonel, and I assure you that I appreciate, I--"
+
+"There is no use trying to blink the fact, sir, that there are certain
+aspects of Mr. Dryfoos's character in which he is not a gentleman.
+We have alluded to this fact before, and I need not dwell upon it now: I
+may say, however, that my misgivings were not wholly removed last night."
+
+"No," Fulkerson assented; though in his heart he thought the old man had
+behaved very well.
+
+"What I wish to say now is that I cannot consent to act for you, in this
+matter, merely as an intermediary whose failure would leave the affair in
+state quo."
+
+"I see," said Fulkerson.
+
+
+"And I should like some intimation, some assurance, as to which party
+your own feelings are with in the difference."
+
+The colonel bent his eyes sharply on Fulkerson; Miss Woodburn let hers
+fall; Fulkerson felt that he was being tested, and he said, to gain time,
+"As between Lindau and Dryfoos?" though he knew this was not the point.
+
+"As between Mr. Dryfoos and Mr. March," said the colonel.
+
+Fulkerson drew a long breath and took his courage in both hands.  "There
+can't be any choice for me in such a case.  I'm for March, every time."
+
+The colonel seized his hand, and Miss Woodburn said, "If there had been
+any choice fo' you in such a case, I should never have let papa stir a
+step with you."
+
+"Why, in regard to that," said the colonel, with a, literal application
+of the idea, "was it your intention that we should both go?"
+
+"Well, I don't know; I suppose it was."
+
+"I think it will be better for me to go alone," said the colonel; and,
+with a color from his experience in affairs of honor, he added: "In these
+matters a principal cannot appear without compromising his dignity.
+I believe I have all the points clearly in mind, and I think I should act
+more freely in meeting Mr. Dryfoos alone."
+
+Fulkerson tried to hide the eagerness with which he met these agreeable
+views.  He felt himself exalted in some sort to the level of the
+colonel's sentiments, though it would not be easy to say whether this was
+through the desperation bred of having committed himself to March's side,
+or through the buoyant hope he had that the colonel would succeed in his
+mission.
+
+"I'm not afraid to talk with Dryfoos about it," he said.
+
+"There is no question of courage," said the colonel.  "It is a question
+of dignity--of personal dignity."
+
+"Well, don't let that delay you, papa," said his daughter, following him
+to the door, where she found him his hat, and Fulkerson helped him on
+with his overcoat.  "Ah shall be jost wald to know ho' it's toned oat."
+
+"Won't you let me go up to the house with you?"  Fulkerson began.
+"I needn't go in--"
+
+"I prefer to go alone," said the colonel.  "I wish to turn the points
+over in my mind, and I am afraid you would find me rather dull company."
+
+He went out, and Fulkerson returned with Miss Woodburn to the drawing-
+room, where she said the Leightons were.  They, were not there, but she
+did not seem disappointed.
+
+"Well, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, "you have got an ahdeal of friendship,
+sure enough."
+
+"Me?"  said Fulkerson.  "Oh, my Lord!  Don't you see I couldn't do
+anything else?  And I'm scared half to death, anyway.  If the colonel
+don't bring the old man round, I reckon it's all up with me.  But he'll
+fetch him.  And I'm just prostrated with gratitude to you, Miss
+Woodburn."
+
+She waved his thanks aside with her fan.  "What do you mean by its being
+all up with you?"
+
+"Why, if the old man sticks to his position, and I stick to March, we've
+both got to go overboard together.  Dryfoos owns the magazine; he can
+stop it, or he can stop us, which amounts to the same thing, as far as
+we're concerned."
+
+"And then what?" the girl pursued.
+
+"And then, nothing--till we pick ourselves up."
+
+"Do you mean that Mr. Dryfoos will put you both oat of your places?"
+
+"He may."
+
+"And Mr. Mawch takes the risk of that jost fo' a principle?"
+
+"I reckon."
+
+"And you do it jost fo' an ahdeal?"
+
+"It won't do to own it.  I must have my little axe to grind, somewhere."
+
+"Well, men awe splendid," sighed the girl.  "Ah will say it."
+
+"Oh, they're not so much better than women," said Fulkerson, with a
+nervous jocosity.  "I guess March would have backed down if it hadn't
+been for his wife.  She was as hot as pepper about it, and you could see
+that she would have sacrificed all her husband's relations sooner than
+let him back down an inch from the stand he had taken.  It's pretty easy
+for a man to stick to a principle if he has a woman to stand by him.
+But when you come to play it alone--"
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson," said the girl, solemnly, "Ah will stand bah you in this,
+if all the woald tones against you."  The tears came into her eyes, and
+she put out her hand to him.
+
+"You will?"  he shouted, in a rapture.  "In every way--and always--as
+long as you live?  Do you mean it?"  He had caught her hand to his breast
+and was grappling it tight there and drawing her to him.
+
+The changing emotions chased one another through her heart and over her
+face: dismay, shame, pride, tenderness.  "You don't believe," she said,
+hoarsely, "that Ah meant that?"
+
+"No, but I hope you do mean it; for if you don't, nothing else means
+anything."
+
+There was no space, there was only a point of wavering.  "Ah do mean it."
+
+When they lifted their eyes from each other again it was half-past ten.
+"No' you most go," she said.
+
+"But the colonel--our fate?"
+
+"The co'nel is often oat late, and Ah'm not afraid of ouah fate, no' that
+we've taken it into ouah own hands."  She looked at him with dewy eyes of
+trust, of inspiration.
+
+"Oh, it's going to come out all right," he said.  "It can't come out
+wrong now, no matter what happens.  But who'd have thought it, when I
+came into this house, in such a state of sin and misery, half an hour
+ago--"
+
+"Three houahs and a half ago!" she said.  "No! you most jost go.  Ah'm
+tahed to death.  Good-night.  You can come in the mawning to see-papa."
+She opened the door and pushed him out with enrapturing violence, and he
+ran laughing down the steps into her father's arms.
+
+"Why, colonel!  I was just going up to meet you."  He had really thought
+he would walk off his exultation in that direction.
+
+"I am very sorry to say, Mr. Fulkerson," the colonel began, gravely,
+"that Mr. Dryfoos adheres to his position."
+
+"Oh, all right," said Fulkerson, with unabated joy.  "It's what I
+expected.  Well, my course is clear; I shall stand by March, and I guess
+the world won't come to an end if he bounces us both.  But I'm
+everlastingly obliged to you, Colonel Woodburn, and I don't know what to
+say to you.  I--I won't detain you now; it's so late.  I'll see you in
+the morning.  Good-ni--"
+
+Fulkerson did not realize that it takes two to part.  The colonel laid
+hold of his arm and turned away with him.  "I will walk toward your place
+with you.  I can understand why you should be anxious to know the
+particulars of my interview with Mr. Dryfoos"; and in the statement which
+followed he did not spare him the smallest.  It outlasted their walk and
+detained them long on the steps of the 'Every Other Week' building.  But
+at the end Fulkerson let himself in with his key as light of heart as if
+he had been listening to the gayest promises that fortune could make.
+
+By the tune he met March at the office next morning, a little, but only a
+very little, misgiving saddened his golden heaven.  He took March's hand
+with high courage, and said, "Well, the old man sticks to his point,
+March."  He added, with the sense of saying it before Miss Woodburn: "And
+I stick by you.  I've thought it all over, and I'd rather be right with
+you than wrong with him."
+
+"Well, I appreciate your motive, Fulkerson," said March.  "But perhaps--
+perhaps we can save over our heroics for another occasion.  Lindau seems
+to have got in with his, for the present."
+
+He told him of Lindau's last visit, and they stood a moment looking at
+each other rather queerly.  Fulkerson was the first to recover his
+spirits.  "Well," he said, cheerily, "that let's us out."
+
+"Does it?  I'm not sure it lets me out," said March; but he said this in
+tribute to his crippled self-respect rather than as a forecast of any
+action in the matter.
+
+"Why, what are you going to do?"  Fulkerson asked.  "If Lindau won't work
+for Dryfoos, you can't make him."
+
+March sighed.  "What are you going to do with this money?"  He glanced at
+the heap of bills he had flung on the table between them.
+
+Fulkerson scratched his head.  "Ah, dogged if I know: Can't we give it
+to the deserving poor, somehow, if we can find 'em?"
+
+"I suppose we've no right to use it in any way.   You must give it to
+Dryfoos."
+
+"To the deserving rich?  Well, you can always find them.  I reckon you
+don't want to appear in the transaction!  I don't, either; but I guess I
+must."  Fulkerson gathered up the money and carried it to Conrad.
+He directed him to account for it in his books as conscience-money, and
+he enjoyed the joke more than Conrad seemed to do when he was told where
+it came from.
+
+Fulkerson was able to wear off the disagreeable impression the affair
+left during the course of the fore-noon, and he met Miss Woodburn with
+all a lover's buoyancy when he went to lunch.  She was as happy as he
+when he told her how fortunately the whole thing had ended, and he took
+her view that it was a reward of his courage in having dared the worst.
+They both felt, as the newly plighted always do, that they were in the
+best relations with the beneficent powers, and that their felicity had
+been especially looked to in the disposition of events.  They were in a
+glow of rapturous content with themselves and radiant worship of each
+other; she was sure that he merited the bright future opening to them
+both, as much as if he owed it directly to some noble action of his own;
+he felt that he was indebted for the favor of Heaven entirely to the
+still incredible accident of her preference of him over other men.
+
+Colonel Woodburn, who was not yet in the secret of their love, perhaps
+failed for this reason to share their satisfaction with a result so
+unexpectedly brought about.  The blessing on their hopes seemed to his
+ignorance to involve certain sacrifices of personal feeling at which he
+hinted in suggesting that Dryfoos should now be asked to make some
+abstract concessions and acknowledgments; his daughter hastened to deny
+that these were at all necessary; and Fulkerson easily explained why.
+The thing was over; what was the use of opening it up again?
+
+"Perhaps none," the colonel admitted.  But he added, "I should like the
+opportunity of taking Mr. Lindau's hand in the presence of Mr. Dryfoos
+and assuring him that I considered him a man of principle and a man of
+honor--a gentleman, sir, whom I was proud and happy to have known."
+
+"Well, Ah've no doabt," said his daughter, demurely, "that you'll have
+the chance some day; and we would all lahke to join you.  But at the same
+tahme, Ah think Mr. Fulkerson is well oat of it fo' the present."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Anticipative reprisal
+Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience
+Courtship
+Got their laugh out of too many things in life
+Had learned not to censure the irretrievable
+Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance
+Ignorant of her ignorance
+It don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time
+Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs
+Life has taught him to truckle and trick
+Man's willingness to abide in the present
+No longer the gross appetite for novelty
+No right to burden our friends with our decisions
+Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues
+Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes, v4
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+PART FIFTH
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Superficially, the affairs of 'Every Other Week' settled into their
+wonted form again, and for Fulkerson they seemed thoroughly reinstated.
+But March had a feeling of impermanency from what had happened, mixed
+with a fantastic sense of shame toward Lindau.  He did not sympathize
+with Lindau's opinions; he thought his remedy for existing evils as
+wildly impracticable as Colonel Woodburn's.  But while he thought this,
+and while he could justly blame Fulkerson for Lindau's presence at
+Dryfoos's dinner, which his zeal had brought about in spite of March's
+protests, still he could not rid himself of the reproach of uncandor with
+Lindau.  He ought to have told him frankly about the ownership of the
+magazine, and what manner of man the man was whose money he was taking.
+But he said that he never could have imagined that he was serious in his
+preposterous attitude in regard to a class of men who embody half the
+prosperity of the country; and he had moments of revolt against his own
+humiliation before Lindau, in which he found it monstrous that he should
+return Dryfoos's money as if it had been the spoil of a robber.  His wife
+agreed with him in these moments, and said it was a great relief not to
+have that tiresome old German coming about.  They had to account for his
+absence evasively to the children, whom they could not very well tell
+that their father was living on money that Lindau disdained to take, even
+though Lindau was wrong and their father was right.  This heightened Mrs.
+March's resentment toward both Lindau and Dryfoos, who between them had
+placed her husband in a false position.  If anything, she resented
+Dryfoos's conduct more than Lindau's.  He had never spoken to March about
+the affair since Lindau had renounced his work, or added to the
+apologetic messages he had sent by Fulkerson.  So far as March knew,
+Dryfoos had been left to suppose that Lindau had simply stopped for some
+reason that did not personally affect him.  They never spoke of him, and
+March was too proud to ask either Fulkerson or Conrad whether the old man
+knew that Lindau had returned his money.  He avoided talking to Conrad,
+from a feeling that if be did he should involuntarily lead him on to
+speak of his differences with his father.  Between himself and Fulkerson,
+even, he was uneasily aware of a want of their old perfect friendliness.
+Fulkerson had finally behaved with honor and courage; but his provisional
+reluctance had given March the measure of Fulkerson's character in one
+direction, and he could not ignore the fact that it was smaller than he
+could have wished.
+
+He could not make out whether Fulkerson shared his discomfort or not.
+It certainly wore away, even with March, as time passed, and with
+Fulkerson, in the bliss of his fortunate love, it was probably far more
+transient, if it existed at all.  He advanced into the winter as
+radiantly as if to meet the spring, and he said that if there were any
+pleasanter month of the year than November, it was December, especially
+when the weather was good and wet and muddy most of the time, so that you
+had to keep indoors a long while after you called anywhere.
+
+Colonel Woodburn had the anxiety, in view of his daughter's engagement,
+when she asked his consent to it, that such a dreamer must have in regard
+to any reality that threatens to affect the course of his reveries.  He
+had not perhaps taken her marriage into account, except as a remote
+contingency; and certainly Fulkerson was not the kind of son-in-law that
+he had imagined in dealing with that abstraction.  But because he had
+nothing of the sort definitely in mind, he could not oppose the selection
+of Fulkerson with success; he really knew nothing against him, and he
+knew, many things in his favor; Fulkerson inspired him with the liking
+that every one felt for him in a measure; he amused him, he cheered him;
+and the colonel had been so much used to leaving action of all kinds to
+his daughter that when he came to close quarters with the question of a
+son-in-law he felt helpless to decide it, and he let her decide it, as if
+it were still to be decided when it was submitted to him.  She was
+competent to treat it in all its phases: not merely those of personal
+interest, but those of duty to the broken Southern past, sentimentally
+dear to him, and practically absurd to her.  No such South as he
+remembered had ever existed to her knowledge, and no such civilization as
+he imagined would ever exist, to her belief, anywhere.  She took the
+world as she found it, and made the best of it.  She trusted in
+Fulkerson; she had proved his magnanimity in a serious emergency; and in
+small things she was willing fearlessly to chance it with him.  She was
+not a sentimentalist, and there was nothing fantastic in her
+expectations; she was a girl of good sense and right mind, and she liked
+the immediate practicality as well as the final honor of Fulkerson.  She
+did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him; she did
+him justice, and she would not have believed that she did him more than
+justice if she had sometimes known him to do himself less.
+
+Their engagement was a fact to which the Leighton household adjusted
+itself almost as simply as the lovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the
+ladies at once, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson could keep from
+March very long.  He sent word of it to Mrs. March by her husband; and
+his engagement perhaps did more than anything else to confirm the
+confidence in him which had been shaken by his early behavior in the
+Lindau episode, and not wholly restored by his tardy fidelity to March.
+But now she felt that a man who wished to get married so obviously and
+entirely for love was full of all kinds of the best instincts, and only
+needed the guidance of a wife, to become very noble.  She interested
+herself intensely in balancing the respective merits of the engaged
+couple, and after her call upon Miss Woodburn in her new character she
+prided herself upon recognizing the worth of some strictly Southern
+qualities in her, while maintaining the general average of New England
+superiority.  She could not reconcile herself to the Virginian custom
+illustrated in her having been christened with the surname of Madison;
+and she said that its pet form of Mad, which Fulkerson promptly invented,
+only made it more ridiculous.
+
+Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton.  He was afraid, somehow, of
+Beaton's taking the matter in the cynical way; Miss Woodburn said she
+would break off the engagement if Beaton was left to guess it or find it
+out by accident, and then Fulkerson plucked up his courage.  Beaton
+received the news with gravity, and with a sort of melancholy meekness
+that strongly moved Fulkerson's sympathy, and made him wish that Beaton
+was engaged, too.
+
+It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left him behind and forgotten;
+in a manner, it made him feel trifled with.  Something of the
+unfriendliness of fate seemed to overcast his resentment, and he allowed
+the sadness of his conviction that he had not the means to marry on to
+tinge his recognition of the fact that Alma Leighton would not have
+wanted him to marry her if he had.  He was now often in that martyr mood
+in which he wished to help his father; not only to deny himself Chianti,
+but to forego a fur-lined overcoat which he intended to get for the
+winter, He postponed the moment of actual sacrifice as regarded the
+Chianti, and he bought the overcoat in an anguish of self-reproach.
+He wore it the first evening after he got it in going to call upon the
+Leightons, and it seemed to him a piece of ghastly irony when Alma
+complimented his picturesqueness in it and asked him to let her sketch
+him.
+
+"Oh, you can sketch me," he said, with so much gloom that it made her
+laugh.
+
+"If you think it's so serious, I'd rather not."
+
+"No, no! Go ahead! How do you want me?"
+
+Oh, fling yourself down on a chair in one of your attitudes of studied
+negligence; and twist one corner of your mustache with affected absence
+of mind."
+
+"And you think I'm always studied, always affected?"
+
+"I didn't say so."
+
+"I didn't ask you what you said."
+
+"And I won't tell you what I think."
+
+"Ah, I know what you think."
+
+"What made you ask, then?"  The girl laughed again with the satisfaction
+of her sex in cornering a man.
+
+Beaton made a show of not deigning to reply, and put himself in the pose
+she suggested, frowning.
+
+"Ah, that's it.  But a little more animation--
+
+   "'As when a great thought strikes along the brain,
+     And flushes all the cheek.'"
+
+She put her forehead down on the back of her hand and laughed again.
+"You ought to be photographed.  You look as if you were sitting for it."
+
+Beaton said: "That's because I know I am being photographed, in one way.
+I don't think you ought to call me affected.  I never am so with you; I
+know it wouldn't be of any use."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Beaton, you flatter."
+
+"No, I never flatter you."
+
+"I meant you flattered yourself."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  Imagine."
+
+"I know what you mean.  You think I can't be sincere with anybody."
+
+"Oh no, I don't."
+
+"What do you think?"
+
+"That you can't--try."  Alma gave another victorious laugh.
+
+Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson would once have both feigned a great interest
+in Alma's sketching Beaton, and made it the subject of talk, in which
+they approached as nearly as possible the real interest of their lives.
+Now they frankly remained away in the dining-room, which was very cozy
+after the dinner had disappeared; the colonel sat with his lamp and paper
+in the gallery beyond; Mrs. Leighton was about her housekeeping affairs,
+in the content she always felt when Alma was with Beaton.
+
+"They seem to be having a pretty good time in there," said Fulkerson,
+detaching himself from his own absolute good time as well as he could.
+
+"At least Alma does," said Miss Woodburn.
+
+"Do you think she cares for him?"
+
+"Quahte as moch as he desoves."
+
+"What makes you all down on Beaton around here?  He's not such a bad
+fellow."
+
+"We awe not all doan on him.  Mrs. Leighton isn't doan on him."
+
+"Oh, I guess if it was the old lady, there wouldn't be much question
+about it."
+
+They both laughed, and Alma said, "They seem to be greatly amused with
+something in there."
+
+"Me, probably," said Beaton.  "I seem to amuse everybody to-night."
+
+"Don't you always?"
+
+"I always amuse you, I'm afraid, Alma."
+
+She looked at him as if she were going to snub him openly for using her
+name; but apparently she decided to do it covertly.  "You didn't at
+first.  I really used to believe you could be serious, once."
+
+"Couldn't you believe it again?  Now?"
+
+"Not when you put on that wind-harp stop."
+
+"Wetmore has been talking to you about me.  He would sacrifice his best
+friend to a phrase.  He spends his time making them."
+
+"He's made some very pretty ones about you."
+
+"Like the one you just quoted?"
+
+"No, not exactly.  He admires you ever so much.  He says" She stopped,
+teasingly.
+
+"What?"
+
+"He says you could be almost anything you wished, if you didn't wish to
+be everything."
+
+"That sounds more like the school of Wetmore.  That's what you say, Alma.
+Well, if there were something you wished me to be, I could be it."
+
+"We might adapt Kingsley: 'Be good, sweet man, and let who will be
+clever.'"  He could not help laughing.  She went on: "I always thought
+that was the most patronizing and exasperating thing ever addressed to a
+human girl; and we've had to stand a good deal in our time.  I should
+like to have it applied to the other 'sect' a while.  As if any girl that
+was a girl would be good if she had the remotest chance of being clever."
+
+"Then you wouldn't wish me to be good?"  Beaton asked.
+
+"Not if you were a girl."
+
+"You want to shock me.  Well, I suppose I deserve it.  But if I were one-
+tenth part as good as you are, Alma, I should have a lighter heart than I
+have now.  I know that I'm fickle, but I'm not false, as you think I am."
+
+"Who said I thought you were false?"
+
+"No one," said Beaton.  "It isn't necessary, when you look it--live it."
+
+"Oh, dear!  I didn't know I devoted my whole time to the subject."
+
+"I know I'm despicable.  I could tell you something--the history of this
+day, even--that would make you despise me."  Beaton had in mind his
+purchase of the overcoat, which Alma was getting in so effectively, with
+the money he ought to have sent his father.  "But," he went on, darkly,
+with a sense that what he was that moment suffering for his selfishness
+must somehow be a kind of atonement, which would finally leave him to the
+guiltless enjoyment of the overcoat, "you wouldn't believe the depths of
+baseness I could descend to."
+
+"I would try," said Alma, rapidly shading the collar, "if you'd give me
+some hint."
+
+Beaton had a sudden wish to pour out his remorse to her, but he was
+afraid of her laughing at him.  He said to himself that this was a very
+wholesome fear, and that if he could always have her at hand he should
+not make a fool of himself so often.  A man conceives of such an office
+as the very noblest for a woman; he worships her for it if he is
+magnanimous.  But Beaton was silent, and Alma put back her head for the
+right distance on her sketch.  "Mr. Fulkerson thinks you are the
+sublimest of human beings for advising him to get Colonel Woodburn to
+interview Mr. Dryfoos about Lindau.  What have you ever done with your
+Judas?"
+
+"I haven't done anything with it.  Nadel thought he would take hold of it
+at one time, but he dropped it again.  After all, I don't suppose it
+could be popularized.  Fulkerson wanted to offer it as a premium to
+subscribers for 'Every Other Week,' but I sat down on that."
+
+Alma could not feel the absurdity of this, and she merely said, "'Every
+Other Week' seems to be going on just the same as ever."
+
+"Yes, the trouble has all blown over, I believe.  Fulkerson," said
+Beaton, with a return to what they were saying, "has managed the whole
+business very well.  But he exaggerates the value of my advice."
+
+"Very likely," Alma suggested, vaguely.  "Or, no! Excuse me! He couldn't,
+he couldn't!" She laughed delightedly at Beaton's foolish look of
+embarrassment.
+
+He tried to recover his dignity in saying, "He's 'a very good fellow, and
+he deserves his happiness."
+
+"Oh, indeed!" said Alma, perversely.  "Does any one deserve happiness?"
+
+"I know I don't," sighed Beaton.
+
+"You mean you don't get it."
+
+"I certainly don't get it."
+
+"Ah, but that isn't the reason."
+
+"What is?"
+
+"That's the secret of the universe," She bit in her lower lip, and looked
+at him with eyes, of gleaming fun.
+
+"Are you never serious?"  he asked.
+
+"With serious people always."
+
+"I am serious; and you have the secret of my happiness--"  He threw
+himself impulsively forward in his chair.
+
+"Oh, pose, pose!" she cried.
+
+"I won't pose," he answered, "and you have got to listen to me.  You
+know I'm in love with you; and I know that once you cared for me.  Can't
+that time--won't it--come back again?  Try to think so, Alma!"
+
+"No," she said, briefly and seriously enough.
+
+"But that seems impossible.  What is it I've done what have you against
+me?"
+
+"Nothing.  But that time is past.  I couldn't recall it if I wished.  Why
+did you bring it up?  You've broken your word.  You know I wouldn't have
+let you keep coming here if you hadn't promised never to refer to it."
+
+"How could I help it?  With that happiness near us--Fulkerson--"
+
+"Oh, it's that?  I might have known it!"
+
+"No, it isn't that--it's something far deeper.  But if it's nothing you
+have against me, what is it, Alma, that keeps you from caring for me now
+as you did then?  I haven't changed."
+
+"But I have.  I shall never care for you again, Mr. Beaton; you might as
+well understand it once for all.  Don't think it's anything in yourself,
+or that I think you unworthy of me.  I'm not so self-satisfied as that;
+I know very well that I'm not a perfect character, and that I've no claim
+on perfection in anybody else.  I think women who want that are fools;
+they won't get it, and they don't deserve it.  But I've learned a good.
+deal more about myself than I knew in St. Barnaby, and a life of work, of
+art, and of art alone that's what I've made up my mind to."
+
+"A woman that's made up her mind to that has no heart to hinder her!"
+
+"Would a man have that had done so?"
+
+"But I don't believe you, Alma.  You're merely laughing at me.  And,
+besides, with me you needn't give up art.  We could work together.  You
+know how much I admire your talent.  I believe I could help it--serve it;
+I would be its willing slave, and yours, Heaven knows!"
+
+"I don't want any slave--nor any slavery.  I want to be free always.  Now
+do you see?  I don't care for you, and I never could in the old way; but
+I should have to care for some one more than I believe I ever shall to
+give up my work.  Shall we go on?"  She looked at her sketch.
+
+"No, we shall not go on," he said, gloomily, as he rose.
+
+"I suppose you blame me," she said, rising too.
+
+"Oh no! I blame no one--or only myself.  I threw my chance away."
+
+"I'm glad you see that; and I'm glad you did it.  You don't believe me,
+of course.  Why do men think life can be only the one thing to women?
+And if you come to the selfish view, who are the happy women?  I'm sure
+that if work doesn't fail me, health won't, and happiness won't."
+
+"But you could work on with me--"
+
+"Second fiddle.  Do you suppose I shouldn't be woman enough to wish my
+work always less and lower than yours?  At least I've heart enough for
+that!"
+
+"You've heart enough for anything, Alma.  I was a fool to say you
+hadn't."
+
+"I think the women who keep their hearts have an even chance, at least,
+of having heart--"
+
+"Ah, there's where you're wrong!"
+
+"But mine isn't mine to give you, anyhow.  And now I don't want you ever
+to speak to me about this again."
+
+"Oh, there's no danger!" he cried, bitterly.  "I shall never willingly
+see you again."
+
+"That's as you like, Mr. Beaton.  We've had to be very frank, but I don't
+see why we shouldn't be friends.  Still, we needn't, if you don't like."
+
+"And I may come--I may come here--as--as usual?"
+
+"Why, if you can consistently," she said, with a smile, and she held out
+her hand to him.
+
+He went home dazed, and feeling as if it were a bad joke that had been
+put upon him.  At least the affair went so deep that it estranged the
+aspect of his familiar studio.  Some of the things in it were not very
+familiar; he had spent lately a great deal on rugs, on stuffs, on
+Japanese bric-a-brac.  When he saw these things in the shops he had felt
+that he must have them; that they were necessary to him; and he was
+partly in debt for them, still without having sent any of his earnings to
+pay his father.  As he looked at them now he liked to fancy something
+weird and conscious in them as the silent witnesses of a broken life.
+He felt about among some of the smaller objects on the mantel for his
+pipe.  Before he slept he was aware, in the luxury of his despair, of a
+remote relief, an escape; and, after all, the understanding he had come
+to with Alma was only the explicit formulation of terms long tacit
+between them.  Beaton would have been puzzled more than he knew if she
+had taken him seriously.  It was inevitable that he should declare
+himself in love with her; but he was not disappointed at her rejection of
+his love; perhaps not so much as he would have been at its acceptance,
+though he tried to think otherwise, and to give himself airs of tragedy.
+He did not really feel that the result was worse than what had gone
+before, and it left him free.
+
+But he did not go to the Leightons again for so long a time that Mrs.
+Leighton asked Alma what had happened.  Alma told her.
+
+"And he won't come any more?"  her mother sighed, with reserved censure.
+
+"Oh, I think he will.  He couldn't very well come the next night.  But he
+has the habit of coming, and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything--even
+the habit of thinking he's in love with some one."
+
+"Alma," said her mother, "I don't think it's very nice for a girl to let
+a young man keep coming to see her after she's refused him."
+
+"Why not, if it amuses him and doesn't hurt the girl?"
+
+"But it does hurt her, Alma.  It--it's indelicate.  It isn't fair to him;
+it gives him hopes."
+
+"Well, mamma, it hasn't happened in the given case yet.  If Mr. Beaton
+comes again, I won't see him, and you can forbid him the house."
+
+"If I could only feel sure, Alma," said her mother, taking up another
+branch of the inquiry, "that you really knew your own mind, I should be
+easier about it."
+
+"Then you can rest perfectly quiet, mamma.  I do know my own mind; and,
+what's worse, I know Mr. Beaton's mind."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean that he spoke to me the other night simply because Mr.
+Fulkerson's engagement had broken him all up."
+
+"What expressions!" Mrs. Leighton lamented.
+
+"He let it out himself," Alma went on.  "And you wouldn't have thought it
+was very flattering yourself.  When I'm made love to, after this,
+I prefer to be made love to in an off-year, when there isn't another
+engaged couple anywhere about."
+
+"Did you tell him that, Alma?"
+
+"Tell him that! What do you mean, mamma?  I may be indelicate, but I'm
+not quite so indelicate as that."
+
+"I didn't mean you were indelicate, really, Alma, but I wanted to warn
+you.  I think Mr. Beaton was very much in earnest."
+
+"Oh, so did he!"
+
+"And you didn't?"
+
+"Oh yes, for the time being.  I suppose he's very much in earnest with
+Miss Vance at times, and with Miss Dryfoos at others.  Sometimes he's a
+painter, and sometimes he's an architect, and sometimes he's a sculptor.
+He has too many gifts--too many tastes."
+
+"And if Miss Vance and Miss Dryfoos--"
+
+"Oh, do say Sculpture and Architecture, mamma! It's getting so dreadfully
+personal!"
+
+"Alma, you know that I only wish to get at your real feeling in the
+matter."
+
+"And you know that I don't want to let you--especially when I haven't got
+any real feeling in the matter.  But I should think--speaking in the
+abstract entirely--that if either of those arts was ever going to be in
+earnest about him, it would want his exclusive devotion for a week at
+least."
+
+"I didn't know," said Mrs. Leighton, "that he was doing anything now at
+the others.  I thought he was entirely taken up with his work on 'Every
+Other Week.'"
+
+"Oh, he is! he is!"
+
+"And you certainly can't say, my dear, that he hasn't been very kind--
+very useful to you, in that matter."
+
+"And so I ought to have said yes out of gratitude?  Thank you, mamma! I
+didn't know you held me so cheap."
+
+"You know whether I hold you cheap or not, Alma.  I don't want you to
+cheapen yourself.  I don't want you to trifle with any one.  I want you
+to be honest with yourself."
+
+"Well, come now, mamma! Suppose you begin.  I've been perfectly honest
+with myself, and I've been honest with Mr. Beaton.  I don't care for him,
+and I've told him I didn't; so he may be supposed to know it.  If he
+comes here after this, he'll come as a plain, unostentatious friend of
+the family, and it's for you to say whether he shall come in that
+capacity or not.  I hope you won't trifle with him, and let him get the
+notion that he's coming on any other basis."
+
+Mrs. Leighton felt the comfort of the critical attitude far too keenly to
+abandon it for anything constructive.  She only said, "You know very
+well, Alma, that's a matter I can have nothing to do with."
+
+"Then you leave him entirely to me?"
+
+"I hope you will regard his right to candid and open treatment."
+
+"He's had nothing but the most open and candid treatment from me, mamma.
+It's you that wants to play fast and loose with him.  And, to tell you
+the truth, I believe he would like that a good deal better; I believe
+that, if there's anything he hates, it's openness and candor."
+Alma laughed, and put her arms round her mother, who could not help
+laughing a little, too.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela the social opportunity
+which the spring had offered.  After the musicale at Mrs. Horn's, they
+both made their party-call, as Mela said, in due season; but they did not
+find Mrs. Horn at home, and neither she nor Miss Vance came to see them
+after people returned to town in the fall.  They tried to believe for a
+time that Mrs. Horn had not got their cards; this pretence failed them,
+and they fell back upon their pride, or rather Christine's pride.  Mela
+had little but her good-nature to avail her in any exigency, and if Mrs.
+Horn or Miss Vance had come to call after a year of neglect, she would
+have received them as amiably as if they had not lost a day in coming.
+But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they would not have been
+forgiven; and she had planned the words and the behavior with which she
+would have punished them if they had appeared then.  Neither sister
+imagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christine was
+suspicious, at least, and it was Mela who invented the hypothesis of the
+lost cards.  As nothing happened to prove or to disprove the fact, she
+said, "I move we put Coonrod up to gittun' it out of Miss Vance, at some
+of their meetun's."
+
+"If you do," said Christine, "I'll kill you."
+
+Christine, however, had the visits of Beaton to console her, and, if
+these seemed to have no definite aim, she was willing to rest in the
+pleasure they gave her vanity; but Mela had nothing.  Sometimes she even
+wished they were all back on the farm.
+
+"It would be the best thing for both of you," said Mrs. Dryfoos, in
+answer to such a burst of desperation.  "I don't think New York is any
+place for girls."
+
+"Well, what I hate, mother," said Mela, "is, it don't seem to be any
+place for young men, either."  She found this so good when she had said
+it that she laughed over it till Christine was angry.
+
+"A body would think there had never been any joke before."
+
+"I don't see as it's a joke," said Mrs. Dryfoos.  "It's the plain truth."
+
+"Oh, don't mind her, mother," said Mela.  "She's put out because her old
+Mr. Beaton ha'r't been round for a couple o' weeks.  If you don't watch
+out, that fellow 'll give you the slip yit, Christine, after all your
+pains."
+
+"Well, there ain't anybody to give you the slip, Mela," Christine clawed
+back.
+
+"No; I ha'n't ever set my traps for anybody."  This was what Mela said
+for want of a better retort; but it was not quite true.  When Kendricks
+came with Beaton to call after her father's dinner, she used all her
+cunning to ensnare him, and she had him to herself as long as Beaton
+stayed; Dryfoos sent down word that he was not very well and had gone to
+bed.  The novelty of Mela had worn off for Kendricks, and she found him,
+as she frankly told him, not half as entertaining as he was at Mrs.
+Horn's; but she did her best with him as the only flirtable material
+which had yet come to her hand.  It would have been her ideal to have the
+young men stay till past midnight, and her father come down-stairs in his
+stocking-feet and tell them it was time to go.  But they made a visit of
+decorous brevity, and Kendricks did not come again. She met him
+afterward, once, as she was crossing the pavement in Union Square to get
+into her coupe, and made the most of him; but it was necessarily very
+little, and so he passed out of her life without having left any trace in
+her heart, though Mela had a heart that she would have put at the
+disposition of almost any young man that wanted it.  Kendricks himself,
+Manhattan cockney as he was, with scarcely more out look into the average
+American nature than if he had been kept a prisoner in New York society
+all his days, perceived a property in her which forbade him as a man of
+conscience to trifle with her; something earthly good and kind, if it was
+simple and vulgar.  In revising his impressions of her, it seemed to him
+that she would come even to better literary effect if this were
+recognized in her; and it made her sacred, in spite of her willingness to
+fool and to be fooled, in her merely human quality.  After all, he saw
+that she wished honestly to love and to be loved, and the lures she threw
+out to that end seemed to him pathetic rather than ridiculous; he could
+not join Beaton in laughing at her; and he did not like Beaton's laughing
+at the other girl, either.  It seemed to Kendricks, with the code of
+honor which he mostly kept to himself because he was a little ashamed to
+find there were so few others like it, that if Beaton cared nothing for
+the other girl--and Christine appeared simply detestable to Kendricks--
+he had better keep away from her, and not give her the impression he was
+in love with her.  He rather fancied that this was the part of a
+gentleman, and he could not have penetrated to that aesthetic and moral
+complexity which formed the consciousness of a nature like Beaton's and
+was chiefly a torment to itself; he could not have conceived of the
+wayward impulses indulged at every moment in little things till the
+straight highway was traversed and well-nigh lost under their tangle.
+To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes, even
+though one continues to do what one will; but Kendricks, though a sage of
+twenty-seven, was still too young to understand this.
+
+Beaton scarcely understood it himself, perhaps because he was not yet
+twenty-seven.  He only knew that his will was somehow sick; that it spent
+itself in caprices, and brought him no happiness from the fulfilment of
+the most vehement wish.  But he was aware that his wishes grew less and
+less vehement; he began to have a fear that some time he might have none
+at all.  It seemed to him that if he could once do something that was
+thoroughly distasteful to himself, he might make a beginning in the right
+direction; but when he tried this on a small scale, it failed, and it
+seemed stupid.  Some sort of expiation was the thing he needed, he was
+sure; but he could not think of anything in particular to expiate; a man
+could not expiate his temperament, and his temperament was what Beaton
+decided to be at fault.  He perceived that it went deeper than even fate
+would have gone; he could have fulfilled an evil destiny and had done
+with it, however terrible.  His trouble was that he could not escape from
+himself; and, for the most part, he justified himself in refusing to try.
+After he had come to that distinct understanding with Alma Leighton,
+and experienced the relief it really gave him, he thought for a while
+that if it had fallen out otherwise, and she had put him in charge of her
+destiny, he might have been better able to manage his own.  But as it
+was, he could only drift, and let all other things take their course.
+It was necessary that he should go to see her afterward, to show her that
+he was equal to the event; but he did not go so often, and he went rather
+oftener to the Dryfooses; it was not easy to see Margaret Vance, except
+on the society terms.  With much sneering and scorning, he fulfilled the
+duties to Mrs. Horn without which he knew he should be dropped from her
+list; but one might go to many of her Thursdays without getting many
+words with her niece.  Beaton hardly knew whether he wanted many; the
+girl kept the charm of her innocent stylishness; but latterly she wanted
+to talk more about social questions than about the psychical problems
+that young people usually debate so personally.  Son of the working-
+people as he was, Beaton had never cared anything about such matters;
+he did not know about them or wish to know; he was perhaps too near them.
+Besides, there was an embarrassment, at least on her part, concerning the
+Dryfooses.  She was too high-minded to blame him for having tempted her
+to her failure with them by his talk about them; but she was conscious of
+avoiding them in her talk.  She had decided not to renew the effort she
+had made in the spring; because she could not do them good as fellow-
+creatures needing food and warmth and work, and she would not try to
+befriend them socially; she had a horror of any such futile
+sentimentality.  She would have liked to account to Beaton in this way
+for a course which she suspected he must have heard their comments upon,
+but she did not quite know how to do it; she could not be sure how much
+or how little he cared for them.  Some tentative approaches which she
+made toward explanation were met with such eager disclaim of personal
+interest that she knew less than before what to think; and she turned the
+talk from the sisters to the brother, whom it seemed she still continued
+to meet in their common work among the poor.
+
+"He seems very different," she ventured.
+
+"Oh, quite," said Beaton.  "He's the kind of person that you might
+suppose gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life; he's a
+cloistered nature--the nature that atones and suffers for.  But he's
+awfully dull company, don't you think?  I never can get anything out of
+him."
+
+"He's very much in earnest."
+
+"Remorselessly.  We've got a profane and mundane creature there at the
+office who runs us all, and it's shocking merely to see the contact of
+the tyro natures.  When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos--he likes to put
+his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish
+motive, that he has an eye to office, and is working up a political
+interest for himself on the East Side--it's something inexpressible."
+
+"I should think so," said Miss Vance, with such lofty disapproval that
+Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused it.
+He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, "Well, the man of one
+idea is always a little ridiculous."
+
+"When his idea is right?"  she demanded.  "A right idea can't be
+ridiculous."
+
+"Oh, I only said the man that held it was.  He's flat; he has no relief,
+no projection."
+
+She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived that he had silenced her to
+his own, disadvantage.  It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a
+little too exacting for comfort in her idealism.  He put down the cup of
+tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn staccato: "I must go.
+Good-bye!" and got instantly away from her, with an effect he had of
+having suddenly thought of something imperative.
+
+He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment's hail and farewell, and felt
+himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation
+with half a dozen other people.  He fancied that at crises of this
+strange interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him,
+and confidential, of all things, about her niece.  She ended by not
+having palpably been so.  In fact, the concern in her mind would have
+been difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments
+Mrs. Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could
+somehow be interested in lower things than those which occupied her.
+She had watched with growing anxiety the girl's tendency to various kinds
+of self-devotion.  She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire
+withdrawal from the world in a life of good works.  Before now, girls had
+entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the young
+and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament to be
+influenced by them.  During the past summer she had been unhappy at her
+separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their
+stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried her
+aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come.
+Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she
+befriended.  Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was
+actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers.  This, of course,
+had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society,
+and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing
+it.  At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it;
+she was afraid that Margaret's health would give way under the strain,
+and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a
+decline.  She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as
+she could employ.  At an age when such things weary, she threw herself
+into the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after
+her; and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion her
+course from ball to ball, from reception to reception, from parlor-
+reading to parlor-reading, from musicale to musicale, from play to play,
+from opera to opera.  She tasted, after she had practically renounced
+them, the bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionable amusement, in the
+hope that Margaret might find them sweet, and now at the end she had to
+own to herself that she had failed.  It was coming Lent again, and the
+girl had only grown thinner and more serious with the diversions that did
+not divert her from the baleful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn
+felt that she was throwing her youth away.  Margaret could have borne
+either alone, but together they were wearing her out.  She felt it a duty
+to undergo the pleasures her aunt appointed for her, but she could not
+forego the other duties in which she found her only pleasure.
+
+She kept up her music still because she could employ it at the meetings
+for the entertainment, and, as she hoped, the elevation of her working-
+women; but she neglected the other aesthetic interests which once
+occupied her; and, at sight of Beaton talking with her, Mrs. Horn caught
+at the hope that he might somehow be turned to account in reviving
+Margaret's former interest in art.  She asked him if Mr. Wetmore had his
+classes that winter as usual; and she said she wished Margaret could be
+induced to go again:  Mr. Wetmore always said that she did not draw very
+well, but that she had a great deal of feeling for it, and her work was
+interesting.  She asked, were the Leightons in town again; and she
+murmured a regret that she had not been able to see anything of them,
+without explaining why; she said she had a fancy that if Margaret knew
+Miss Leighton, and what she was doing, it might stimulate her, perhaps.
+She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on with her art?  Beaton said,
+Oh yes, he believed so.
+
+But his manner did not encourage Mrs. Horn to pursue her aims in that
+direction, and she said, with a sigh, she wished he still had a class;
+she always fancied that Margaret got more good from his instruction than
+from any one else's.
+
+He said that she was very good; but there was really nobody who knew half
+as much as Wetmore, or could make any one understand half as much.
+Mrs. Horn was afraid, she said, that Mr. Wetmore's terrible sincerity
+discouraged Margaret; he would not let her have any illusions about the
+outcome of what she was doing; and did not Mr. Beaton think that some
+illusion was necessary with young people?  Of course, it was very nice of
+Mr. Wetmore to be so honest, but it did not always seem to be the wisest
+thing.  She begged Mr. Beaton to try to think of some one who would be a
+little less severe.  Her tone assumed a deeper interest in the people who
+were coming up and going away, and Beaton perceived that he was
+dismissed.
+
+He went away with vanity flattered by the sense of having been appealed
+to concerning Margaret, and then he began to chafe at what she had said
+of Wetmore's honesty, apropos of her wish that he still had a class
+himself.  Did she mean, confound her? that he was insincere, and would
+let Miss Vance suppose she had more talent than she really had?  The more
+Beaton thought of this, the more furious he became, and the more he was
+convinced that something like it had been unconsciously if not
+consciously in her mind.  He framed some keen retorts, to the general
+effect that with the atmosphere of illusion preserved so completely at
+home, Miss Vance hardly needed it in her art studies.  Having just
+determined never to go near Mrs. Horn's Thursdays again, he decided to go
+once more, in order to plant this sting in her capacious but somewhat
+callous bosom; and he planned how he would lead the talk up to the point
+from which he should launch it.
+
+In the mean time he felt the need of some present solace, such as only
+unqualified worship could give him; a cruel wish to feel his power in
+some direction where, even if it were resisted, it could not be overcome,
+drove him on.  That a woman who was to Beaton the embodiment of
+artificiality should intimate, however innocently--the innocence made it
+all the worse--that he was less honest than Wetmore, whom he knew to be
+so much more honest, was something that must be retaliated somewhere
+before his self-respect could be restored.  It was only five o'clock, and
+he went on up-town to the Dryfooses', though he had been there only the
+night before last.  He asked for the ladies, and Mrs. Mandel received
+him.
+
+"The young ladies are down-town shopping," she said, "but I am very glad
+of the opportunity of seeing you alone, Mr. Beaton.  You know I lived
+several years in Europe."
+
+"Yes," said Beaton, wondering what that could have to do with her
+pleasure in seeing him alone.  "I believe so?"  He involuntarily gave his
+words the questioning inflection.
+
+"You have lived abroad, too, and so you won't find what I am going to ask
+so strange.  Mr. Beaton, why do you come so much to this house?"  Mrs.
+Mandel bent forward with an aspect of ladylike interest and smiled.
+
+Beaton frowned.  "Why do I come so much?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why do I--Excuse me, Mrs. Mandel, but will you allow me to ask why you
+ask?"
+
+"Oh, certainly.  There's no reason why I shouldn't say, for I wish you to
+be very frank with me.  I ask because there are two young ladies in this
+house; and, in a certain way, I have to take the place of a mother to
+them.  I needn't explain why; you know all the people here, and you
+understand.  I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be
+speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people.  They do
+not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help
+themselves or one another.  But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure
+you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here.  You are
+either interested in one of these young girls or you are not.  If you
+are, I have nothing more to say.  If you are not--" Mrs. Mandel continued
+to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy
+gleam.
+
+Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself.  He
+had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be
+sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses,
+but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and
+sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years his
+senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty.  He reddened, and
+then turned an angry pallor.  "Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel.  Do you ask
+this from the young ladies?"
+
+"Certainly not," she said, with the best temper, and with something in
+her tone that convicted Beaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of
+her authority in the form of a sneer.  "As I have suggested, they would
+hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter.  I have no
+objection to saying that I ask it from the father of the young ladies.
+Of course, in and for myself I should have no right to know anything
+about your affairs.  I assure you the duty of knowing isn't very
+pleasant."  The little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as
+something rather nice.
+
+"I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel," he said, with a dreamy
+sadness in his own.  He lifted his eyes and looked into hers.  "If I told
+you that I cared nothing about them in the way you intimate?"
+
+"Then I should prefer to let you characterize your own conduct in
+continuing to come here for the year past, as you have done, and tacitly
+leading them on to infer differently."  They both mechanically kept up
+the fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine, but there was no doubt
+in the mind of either which of the young ladies the other meant.
+A good many thoughts went through Beaton's mind, and none of them were
+flattering.  He had not been unconscious that the part he had played
+toward this girl was ignoble, and that it had grown meaner as the fancy
+which her beauty had at first kindled in him had grown cooler.  He was
+aware that of late he had been amusing himself with her passion in a way
+that was not less than cruel, not because he wished to do so, but because
+he was listless and wished nothing.  He rose in saying: "I might be a
+little more lenient than you think, Mrs. Mandel; but I won't trouble you
+with any palliating theory.  I will not come any more."
+
+He bowed, and Mrs. Mandel said, "Of course, it's only your action that I
+am concerned with."
+
+She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he could not conceive what it
+had cost her to nerve herself up to her too easy victory.  He left Mrs.
+Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and he went away
+hating her as an enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he
+particularly needed exalting.  It was really very simple for him to stop
+going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simple for Mrs.
+Mandel to deal with the consequences of his not coming.  He only thought
+how lightly she had stopped him, and the poor woman whom he had left
+trembling for what she had been obliged to do embodied for him the
+conscience that accused him of unpleasant things.
+
+"By heavens! this is piling it up," he said to himself through his set
+teeth, realizing how it had happened right on top of that stupid insult
+from Mrs. Horn.  Now he should have to give up his place on 'Every Other
+Week; he could not keep that, under the circumstances, even if some
+pretence were not made to get rid of him; he must hurry and anticipate
+any such pretence; he must see Fulkerson at once; he wondered where he
+should find him at that hour.  He thought, with bitterness so real that
+it gave him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainly he could find
+him a little later at Mrs. Leighton's; and Fulkerson's happiness became
+an added injury.
+
+The thing had, of course, come about just at the wrong time.  There never
+had been a time when Beaton needed money more, when he had spent what he
+had and what he expected to have so recklessly.  He was in debt to
+Fulkerson personally and officially for advance payments of salary.  The
+thought of sending money home made him break into a scoffing laugh, which
+he turned into a cough in order to deceive the passers.  What sort of
+face should he go with to Fulkerson and tell him that he renounced his
+employment on 'Every Other Week;' and what should he do when he had
+renounced it?  Take pupils, perhaps; open a class?  A lurid conception of
+a class conducted on those principles of shameless flattery at which Mrs.
+Horn had hinted--he believed now she had meant to insult him--presented
+itself.  Why should not he act upon the suggestion?  He thought with
+loathing for the whole race of women--dabblers in art.  How easy the
+thing would be: as easy as to turn back now and tell that old fool's girl
+that he loved her, and rake in half his millions.  Why should not he do
+that?  No one else cared for him; and at a year's end, probably, one
+woman would be like another as far as the love was concerned, and
+probably he should not be more tired if the woman were Christine Dryfoos
+than if she were Margaret Vance.  He kept Alma Leighton out of the
+question, because at the bottom of his heart he believed that she must be
+forever unlike every other woman to him.
+
+The tide of his confused and aimless reverie had carried him far down-
+town, he thought; but when he looked up from it to see where he was he
+found himself on Sixth Avenue, only a little below Thirty-ninth Street,
+very hot and blown; that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling.  He could not
+possibly walk down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even to the
+Elevated station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to wait for a
+surface-car, and fell again into his bitter fancies.  After a while he
+roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car coming.  He
+found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily swinging his club by its
+thong from his wrist.
+
+"When do you suppose a car will be along?"  he asked, rather in a general
+sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any special belief that the
+policeman could tell him.
+
+The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco-juice into the gutter.
+"In about a week," he said, nonchalantly.
+
+"What's the matter?"  asked Beaton, wondering what the joke could be.
+
+"Strike," said the policeman.  His interest in Beaton's ignorance seemed
+to overcome his contempt of it.  "Knocked off everywhere this morning
+except Third Avenue and one or two cross-town lines."  He spat again and
+kept his bulk at its incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men
+on the corner below: They were neatly dressed, and looked like something
+better than workingmen, and they had a holiday air of being in their best
+clothes.
+
+"Some of the strikers?"  asked Beaton.
+
+The policeman nodded.
+
+"Any trouble yet?"
+
+"There won't be any trouble till we begin to move the cars," said the
+policeman.
+
+Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the men whose action would
+now force him to walk five blocks and mount the stairs of the Elevated
+station.  "If you'd take out eight or ten of those fellows," he said,
+ferociously, "and set them up against a wall and shoot them, you'd save a
+great deal of bother."
+
+"I guess we sha'n't have to shoot much," said the policeman, still
+swinging his locust.  "Anyway, we shant begin it.  If it comes to a
+fight, though," he said, with a look at the men under the scooping rim of
+his helmet, "we can drive the whole six thousand of 'em into the East
+River without pullin' a trigger."
+
+"Are there six thousand in it?"
+
+"About."
+
+"What do the infernal fools expect to live on?"
+
+"The interest of their money, I suppose," said the officer, with a grin
+of satisfaction in his irony.  "It's got to run its course.  Then they'll
+come back with their heads tied up and their tails between their legs,
+and plead to be taken on again."
+
+"If I was a manager of the roads," said Beaton, thinking of how much he
+was already inconvenienced by the strike, and obscurely connecting it as
+one of the series with the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of Mrs.
+Horn and Mrs. Mandel, "I would see them starve before I'd take them back
+--every one of them."
+
+"Well," said the policeman, impartially, as a man might whom the
+companies allowed to ride free, but who had made friends with a good many
+drivers and conductors in the course of his free riding, "I guess that's
+what the roads would like to do if they could; but the men are too many
+for them, and there ain't enough other men to take their places."
+
+"No matter," said Beaton, severely.  "They can bring in men from other
+places."
+
+"Oh, they'll do that fast enough," said the policeman.
+
+A man came out of the saloon on the corner where the strikers were
+standing, noisy drunk, and they began, as they would have said, to have
+some fun with him.  The policeman left Beaton, and sauntered slowly down
+toward the group as if in the natural course of an afternoon ramble.  On
+the other side of the street Beaton could see another officer sauntering
+up from the block below.  Looking up and down the avenue, so silent of
+its horse-car bells, he saw a policeman at every corner.  It was rather
+impressive.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The strike made a good deal of talk in it he office of 'Every Other Week'
+that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal.  He congratulated himself
+that he was not personally incommoded by it, like some of the fellows who
+lived uptown, and had not everything under one roof, as it were.  He
+enjoyed the excitement of it, and he kept the office boy running out to
+buy the extras which the newsmen came crying through the street almost
+every hour with a lamentable, unintelligible noise.  He read not only the
+latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial comments on it,
+which praised the firm attitude of both parties, and the admirable
+measures taken by the police to preserve order.  Fulkerson enjoyed the
+interviews with the police captains and the leaders of the strike; he
+equally enjoyed the attempts of the reporters to interview the road
+managers, which were so graphically detailed, and with such a fine
+feeling for the right use of scare-heads as to have almost the value of
+direct expression from them, though it seemed that they had resolutely
+refused to speak.  He said, at second-hand from the papers, that if the
+men behaved themselves and respected the rights of property, they would
+have public sympathy with them every time; but just as soon as they began
+to interfere with the roads' right to manage their own affairs in their
+own way, they must be put down with an iron hand; the phrase "iron hand"
+did Fulkerson almost as much good as if it had never been used before.
+News began to come of fighting between the police and the strikers when
+the roads tried to move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia,
+and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage of the police.  At
+the same time, he believed what the strikers said, and that the trouble
+was not made by them, but by gangs of roughs acting without their
+approval.  In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival of the State
+Board of Arbitration, which took up its quarters, with a great many
+scare-heads, at one of the principal hotels, and invited the roads and
+the strikers to lay the matter in dispute before them; he said that now
+we should see the working of the greatest piece of social machinery in
+modern times.  But it appeared to work only in the alacrity of the
+strikers to submit their grievance.  The road; were as one road in
+declaring that there was nothing to arbitrate, and that they were merely
+asserting their right to manage their own affairs in their own way.
+One of the presidents was reported to have told a member of the Board,
+who personally summoned him, to get out and to go about his business.
+Then, to Fulkerson's extreme disappointment, the august tribunal, acting
+on behalf of the sovereign people in the interest of peace, declared
+itself powerless, and got out, and would, no doubt, have gone about its
+business if it had had any.  Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps
+because the extras did not; but March laughed at this result.
+
+"It's a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and
+his forty thousand men.  I suppose somebody told him at the top of the
+hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about his
+business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had marched up
+with all that ceremony.  What amuses me is to find that in an affair of
+this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the
+public has no rights at all.  The roads and the strikers are allowed to
+fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and precisely a
+private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having tolerated--
+as any street war in Florence or Verona--and to fight it out at our pains
+and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they get tired.
+It's a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand
+inhabitants."
+
+"What would you do?" asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view of
+the case.
+
+"Do?  Nothing.  Hasn't the State Board of Arbitration declared itself
+powerless?  We have no hold upon the strikers; and we're so used to being
+snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our hold
+on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in their
+own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed us no
+services in return for their privileges."
+
+"That's a good deal so," said Fulkerson, disordering his hair.  "Well,
+it's nuts for the colonel nowadays.  He says if he was boss of this town
+he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man 'em with
+policemen, and run 'em till the managers had come to terms with the
+strikers; and he'd do that every time there was a strike."
+
+"Doesn't that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?"
+asked March.
+
+"I don't know.  It savors of horse sense."
+
+"You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson.  I thought you were the most engaged
+man I ever saw; but I guess you're more father-in-lawed.  And before
+you're married, too."
+
+"Well, the colonel's a glorious old fellow, March.  I wish he had the
+power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed
+in.  He's on the keen jump from morning till night, and he's up late and
+early to see the row.  I'm afraid he'll get shot at some of the fights;
+he sees them all; I can't get any show at them: haven't seen a brickbat
+shied or a club swung yet.  Have you?"
+
+"No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the
+papers, and that's what I really want to do, I suppose.  Besides, I'm
+solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under
+penalty of having her bring the children and go with me.  Her theory is
+that we must all die together; the children haven't been at school since
+the strike began.  There's no precaution that Mrs. March hasn't used.
+She watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this
+office."
+
+Fulkerson laughed and said: "Well, it's probably the only thing that's
+saved your life.  Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?"
+
+"No.  You don't mean to say he's killed!"
+
+"Not if he knows it.  But I don't know--What do you say, March?  What's
+the reason you couldn't get us up a paper on the strike?"
+
+"I knew it would fetch round to 'Every Other Week,' somehow."
+
+"No, but seriously.  There 'll be plenty of news paper accounts.  But you
+could treat it in the historical spirit--like something that happened
+several centuries ago; De Foe's Plague of London style.  Heigh?  What
+made me think of it was Beaton.  If I could get hold of him, you two
+could go round together and take down its aesthetic aspects.  It's a big
+thing, March, this strike is.  I tell you it's imposing to have a private
+war, as you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New
+York not minding, it a bit.  See?  Might take that view of it.  With your
+descriptions and Beaton's sketches--well, it would just be the greatest
+card!  Come!  What do you say?"
+
+"Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I'm killed and
+she and the children are not killed with me?"
+
+"Well, it would be difficult.  I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks
+to do the literary part?"
+
+"I've no doubt he'd jump at the chance.  I've yet to see the form of
+literature that Kendricks wouldn't lay down his life for."
+
+"Say!" March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another
+inspiration, and smiled patiently.  "Look here!  What's the reason we
+couldn't get one of the strikers to write it up for us?"
+
+"Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents," March suggested.
+
+"No; I'm in earnest.  They say some of those fellows-especially the
+foreigners--are educated men.  I know one fellow--a Bohemian--that used
+to edit a Bohemian newspaper here.  He could write it out in his kind of
+Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it."
+
+"I guess not," said March, dryly.
+
+"Why not?  He'd do it for the cause, wouldn't he?  Suppose you put it up
+on him the next time you see him."
+
+"I don't see Lindau any more," said March.  He added, "I guess he's
+renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos's money."
+
+"Pshaw!  You don't mean he hasn't been round since?"
+
+"He came for a while, but he's left off coming now.  I don't feel
+particularly gay about it," March said, with some resentment of
+Fulkerson's grin.  "He's left me in debt to him for lessons to the
+children."
+
+Fulkerson laughed out.  "Well, he is the greatest old fool!  Who'd 'a'
+thought he'd 'a' been in earnest with those 'brincibles' of his?  But I
+suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a
+world."
+
+"There has to be one such crank, it seems," March partially assented.
+"One's enough for me."
+
+"I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too," said Fulkerson.  "Why, it
+must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see 'gabidal'
+embarrassed like it is by this strike.  It must make old Lindau feel like
+he was back behind those barricades at Berlin.  Well, he's a splendid old
+fellow; pity he drinks, as I remarked once before."
+
+When March left the office he did not go home so directly as he came,
+perhaps because Mrs. March's eye was not on him.  He was very curious
+about some aspects of the strike, whose importance, as a great social
+convulsion, he felt people did not recognize; and, with his temperance in
+everything, he found its negative expressions as significant as its more
+violent phases.  He had promised his wife solemnly that he would keep
+away from these, and he had a natural inclination to keep his promise;
+he had no wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets shot when
+there is any firing on a mob.  He interested himself in the apparent
+indifference of the mighty city, which kept on about its business as
+tranquilly as if the private war being fought out in its midst were a
+vague rumor of Indian troubles on the frontier; and he realized how there
+might once have been a street feud of forty years in Florence without
+interfering materially with the industry and prosperity of the city.
+On Broadway there was a silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car
+bells and hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the
+avenues, roofed by the elevated roads, this silence of the surface tracks
+was not noticeable at all in the roar of the trains overhead.  Some of
+the cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with a policeman on the
+rear of each; on the Third Avenge line, operated by non-union men, who
+had not struck, there were two policemen beside the driver of every car,
+and two beside the conductor, to protect them from the strikers.  But
+there were no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly
+about in groups on the corners.  While March watched them at a safe
+distance, a car laden with policemen came down the track, but none of the
+strikers offered to molest it.  In their simple Sunday best, March
+thought them very quiet, decent-looking people, and he could well believe
+that they had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks in other parts of
+the city.  He could hardly believe that there were any such outbreaks; he
+began more and more to think them mere newspaper exaggerations in the
+absence of any disturbance, or the disposition to it, that he could see.
+He walked on to the East River
+
+Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspect as Second Avenue;
+groups of men stood on the corners, and now and then a police-laden car
+was brought unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and
+talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.
+
+March got a cross-town car, and came back to the West Side.  A policeman,
+looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the platform.
+
+"I suppose you'll be glad when this cruel war is over," March suggested,
+as he got in.
+
+The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.
+
+His behavior, from a man born to the joking give and take of our life,
+impressed March.  It gave him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had
+read of the French troops putting on toward the populace just before the
+coup d'etat; he began to feel like the populace; but he struggled with
+himself and regained his character of philosophical observer.  In this
+character he remained in the car and let it carry him by the corner where
+he ought to have got out and gone home, and let it keep on with him to
+one of the farthermost tracks westward, where so much of the fighting was
+reported to have taken place.  But everything on the way was as quiet as
+on the East Side.
+
+Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake that he was
+half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped down from the
+platform and ran forward.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Dryfoos sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. Mandel as usual to pour
+out his coffee.  Conrad had gone down-town; the two girls lay abed much
+later than their father breakfasted, and their mother had gradually grown
+too feeble to come down till lunch.  Suddenly Christine appeared at the
+door.  Her face was white to the edges of her lips, and her eyes were
+blazing.
+
+"Look here, father! Have you been saying anything to Mr. Beaton?"
+
+The old man looked up at her across his coffee-cup through his frowning
+brows.  "No."
+
+Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shook in her hand.
+
+"Then what's the reason he don't come here any more?"  demanded the girl;
+and her glance darted from her father to Mrs. Mandel.  "Oh, it's you, is
+it?  I'd like to know who told you to meddle in other people's business?"
+
+"I did," said Dryfoos, savagely.  "I told her to ask him what he wanted
+here, and he said he didn't want anything, and he stopped coming.  That's
+all.  I did it myself."
+
+"Oh, you did, did you?"  said the girl, scarcely less insolently than she
+had spoken to Mrs. Mandel.  "I should like to know what you did it for?
+I'd like to know what made you think I wasn't able to take care of
+myself.  I just knew somebody had been meddling, but I didn't suppose it
+was you.  I can manage my own affairs in my own way, if you please, and
+I'll thank you after this to leave me to myself in what don't concern
+you."
+
+"Don't concern me?  You impudent jade!" her father began.
+
+Christine advanced from the doorway toward the table; she had her hands
+closed upon what seemed trinkets, some of which glittered and dangled
+from them.  She said, "Will you go to him and tell him that this
+meddlesome minx, here, had no business to say anything about me to him,
+and you take it all back?"
+
+"No!" shouted the old man.  "And if--"
+
+"That's all I want of you!" the girl shouted in her turn.  "Here are your
+presents."  With both hands she flung the jewels-pins and rings and
+earrings and bracelets--among the breakfast-dishes, from which some of
+them sprang to the floor.  She stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring
+from the finger where Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her
+father's plate.  Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard her
+running up-stairs.
+
+The old man made a start toward her, but he fell back in his chair before
+she was gone, and, with a fierce, grinding movement of his jaws,
+controlled himself.  "Take-take those things up," he gasped to Mrs.
+Mandel.  He seemed unable to rise again from his chair; but when she
+asked him if he were unwell, he said no, with an air of offence, and got
+quickly to his feet.  He mechanically picked up the intaglio ring from
+the table while he stood there, and put it on his little finger; his hand
+was not much bigger than Christine's.  "How do you suppose she found it
+out?"  he asked, after a moment.
+
+"She seems to have merely suspected it," said Mrs. Mandel, in a tremor,
+and with the fright in her eyes which Christine's violence had brought
+there.
+
+"Well, it don't make any difference.  She had to know, somehow, and now
+she knows."  He started toward the door of the library, as if to go into
+the hall, where his hat and coat hung.
+
+"Mr. Dryfoos," palpitated Mrs. Mandel, "I can't remain here, after the
+language your daughter has used to me--I can't let you leave me--I--I'm
+afraid of her--"
+
+"Lock yourself up, then," said the old man, rudely.  He added, from the
+hall before lie went out, "I reckon she'll quiet down now."
+
+He took the Elevated road.  The strike seemed a vary far-off thing,
+though the paper he bought to look up the stockmarket was full of noisy
+typography about yesterday's troubles on the surface lines.  Among the
+millions in Wall Street there was some joking and some swearing, but not
+much thinking, about the six thousand men who had taken such chances in
+their attempt to better their condition.  Dryfoos heard nothing of the
+strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange, where he spent two or three
+hours watching a favorite stock of his go up and go down under the
+betting.  By the time the Exchange closed it had risen eight points, and
+on this and some other investments he was five thousand dollars richer
+than he had been in the morning.  But he had expected to be richer still,
+and he was by no means satisfied with his luck.  All through the
+excitement of his winning and losing had played the dull, murderous rage
+he felt toward they child who had defied him, and when the game was over
+and he started home his rage mounted into a sort of frenzy; he would
+teach her, he would break her.  He walked a long way without thinking,
+and then waited for a car.  None came, and he hailed a passing coupe.
+
+"What has got all the cars?"  he demanded of the driver, who jumped down
+from his box to open the door for him and get his direction.
+
+"Been away?"  asked the driver.  "Hasn't been any car along for a week.
+Strike."
+
+"Oh yes," said Dryfoos.  He felt suddenly giddy, and he remained staring
+at the driver after he had taken his seat.
+
+The man asked, "Where to?"
+
+Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said, with
+uncontrollable fury: "I told you once! Go up to West Eleventh, and drive
+along slow on the south side; I'll show you the place."
+
+He could not remember the number of 'Every Other Week' office, where he
+suddenly decided to stop before he went home.  He wished to see
+Fulkerson, and ask him something about Beaton: whether he had been about
+lately, and whether he had dropped any hint of what had happened
+concerning Christine; Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow's
+confidence.
+
+There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither Dryfoos
+returned after glancing into Fulkerson's empty office.  "Where's
+Fulkerson?"  he asked, sitting down with his hat on.
+
+"He went out a few moments ago," said Conrad, glancing at the clock.
+"I'm afraid he isn't coming back again today, if you wanted to see him."
+
+Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate March's room.
+"That other fellow out, too?"
+
+"He went just before Mr. Fulkerson," answered Conrad.
+
+"Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the afternoon ?"  asked
+the old man.
+
+"No," said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been there a
+score of times and found the whole staff of Every Other leek at work
+between four and five.  "Mr. March, you know, always takes a good deal of
+his work home with him, and I suppose Mr. Fulkerson went out so early
+because there isn't much doing to-day.  Perhaps it's the strike that
+makes it dull."
+
+"The strike-yes! It's a pretty piece of business to have everything
+thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want a chance to lay off and
+get drunk."  Dryfoos seemed to think Conrad would make some answer to
+this, but the young man's mild face merely saddened, and he said nothing.
+"I've got a coupe out there now that I had to take because I couldn't get
+a car.  If I had my way I'd have a lot of those vagabonds hung.  They're
+waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then rob the houses--pack of
+dirty, worthless whelps.  They ought to call out the militia, and fire
+into 'em.  Clubbing is too good for them."  Conrad was still silent, and
+his father sneered, "But I reckon you don't think so."
+
+"I think the strike is useless," said Conrad.
+
+"Oh, you do, do you?  Comin' to your senses a little.  Gettin' tired
+walkin' so much.  I should like to know what your gentlemen over there on
+the East Side think about the strike, anyway."
+
+The young fellow dropped his eyes.  "I am not authorized to speak for
+them."
+
+"Oh, indeed! And perhaps you're not authorized to speak for yourself?"
+
+"Father, you know we don't agree about these things.  I'd rather not
+talk--"
+
+"But I'm goin' to make you talk this time!" cried Dryfoos, striking the
+arm of the chair he sat in with the side of his fist.  A maddening
+thought of Christine came over him.  "As long as you eat my bread, you
+have got to do as I say.  I won't have my children telling me what I
+shall do and sha'n't do, or take on airs of being holier than me.  Now,
+you just speak up!  Do you think those loafers are right, or don't you?
+Come!"
+
+Conrad apparently judged it best to speak.  "I think they were very
+foolish to strike--at this time, when the Elevated roads can do the
+work."
+
+"Oh, at this time, heigh!  And I suppose they think over there on the
+East Side that it 'd been wise to strike before we got the Elevated."
+Conrad again refused to answer, and his father roared, "What do you
+think?"
+
+"I think a strike is always bad business.  It's war; but sometimes there
+don't seem any other way for the workingmen to get justice.  They say
+that sometimes strikes do raise the wages, after a while."
+
+"Those lazy devils were paid enough already," shrieked the old man.
+
+"They got two dollars a day.  How much do you think they ought to 'a'
+got?  Twenty?"
+
+Conrad hesitated, with a beseeching look at his father.  But he decided
+to answer.  "The men say that with partial work, and fines, and other
+things, they get sometimes a dollar, and sometimes ninety cents a day."
+
+"They lie, and you know they lie," said his father, rising and coming
+toward him.  "And what do you think the upshot of it all will be, after
+they've ruined business for another week, and made people hire hacks, and
+stolen the money of honest men?  How is it going to end?"
+
+"They will have to give in."
+
+"Oh, give in, heigh!  And what will you say then, I should like to know?
+How will you feel about it then?  Speak!"
+
+"I shall feel as I do now.  I know you don't think that way, and I don't
+blame you--or anybody.  But if I have got to say how I shall feel, why, I
+shall feel sorry they didn't succeed, for I believe they have a righteous
+cause, though they go the wrong way to help themselves."
+
+His father came close to him, his eyes blazing, his teeth set.  "Do you
+dare so say that to me?"
+
+"Yes.  I can't help it.  I pity them; my whole heart is with those poor
+men."
+
+"You impudent puppy!" shouted the old man.  He lifted his hand and struck
+his son in the face.  Conrad caught his hand with his own left, and,
+while the blood began to trickle from a wound that Christine's intaglio
+ring had made in his temple, he looked at him with a kind of grieving
+wonder, and said, "Father!"
+
+The old man wrenched his fist away and ran out of the house.  He
+remembered his address now, and he gave it as he plunged into the coupe.
+He trembled with his evil passion, and glared out of the windows at the
+passers as he drove home; he only saw Conrad's mild, grieving, wondering
+eyes, and the blood slowly trickling from the wound in his temple.
+
+Conrad went to the neat-set bowl in Fulkerson's comfortable room and
+washed the blood away, and kept bathing the wound with the cold water
+till it stopped bleeding.  The cut was not deep, and he thought he would
+not put anything on it.  After a while he locked up the office and
+started out, be hardly knew where.  But he walked on, in the direction he
+had taken, till he found himself in Union Square, on the pavement in
+front of Brentano's.  It seemed to him that he heard some one calling
+gently to him, "Mr. Dryfoos!"
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Conrad looked confusedly around, and the same voice said again, "Mr.
+Dryfoos!" and he saw that it was a lady speaking to him from a coupe
+beside the curbing, and then he saw that it was Miss Vance.
+
+She smiled when, he gave signs of having discovered her, and came up to
+the door of her carriage.  "I am so glad to meet you.  I have been
+longing to talk to somebody; nobody seems to feel about it as I do.  Oh,
+isn't it horrible?  Must they fail?  I saw cars running on all the lines
+as I came across; it made me sick at heart.  Must those brave fellows
+give in?  And everybody seems to hate them so--I can't bear it."  Her
+face was estranged with excitement, and there were traces of tears on it.
+"You must think me almost crazy to stop you in the street this way; but
+when I caught sight of you I had to speak.  I knew you would sympathize--
+I knew you would feel as I do.  Oh, how can anybody help honoring those
+poor men for standing by one another as they do?  They are risking all
+they have in the world for the sake of justice! Oh, they are true heroes!
+They are staking the bread of their wives and children on the dreadful
+chance they've taken! But no one seems to understand it.  No one seems to
+see that they are willing to suffer more now that other poor men may
+suffer less hereafter.  And those wretched creatures that are coming in
+to take their places--those traitors--"
+
+"We can't blame them for wanting to earn a living, Miss Vance," said
+Conrad.
+
+"No, no!  I don't blame them.  Who am I, to do such a thing?  It's we
+--people like me, of my class--who make the poor betray one another.
+But this dreadful fighting--this hideous paper is full of it!"  She held
+up an extra, crumpled with her nervous reading.  "Can't something be done
+to stop it?  Don't you think that if some one went among them, and tried
+to make them see how perfectly hopeless it was to resist the companies
+and drive off the new men, he might do some good?  I have wanted to go
+and try; but I am a woman, and I mustn't!  I shouldn't be afraid of the
+strikers, but I'm afraid of what people would say!"  Conrad kept pressing
+his handkerchief to the cut in his temple, which he thought might be
+bleeding, and now she noticed this.  "Are you hurt, Mr. Dryfoos?
+You look so pale."
+
+"No, it's nothing--a little scratch I've got."
+
+"Indeed, you look pale.  Have you a carriage?  How will you get home?
+Will you get in here with me and let me drive you?"
+
+"No, no," said Conrad, smiling at her excitement.  "I'm perfectly well--"
+
+"And you don't think I'm foolish and wicked for stopping you here and
+talking in this way?  But I know you feel as I do!"
+
+"Yes, I feel as you do.  You are right--right in every way--I mustn't
+keep you--Good-bye."  He stepped back to bow, but she put her beautiful
+hand out of the window, and when he took it she wrung his hand hard.
+
+"Thank you, thank you!  You are good and you are just! But no one can do
+anything.  It's useless!"
+
+The type of irreproachable coachman on the box whose respectability had
+suffered through the strange behavior of his mistress in this interview
+drove quickly off at her signal, and Conrad stood a moment looking after
+the carriage.  His heart was full of joy; it leaped; he thought it would
+burst.  As he turned to walk away it seemed to him as if he mounted upon
+the air.  The trust she had shown him, the praise she had given him, that
+crush of the hand: he hoped nothing, he formed no idea from it, but it
+all filled him with love that cast out the pain and shame he had been
+suffering.  He believed that he could never be unhappy any more; the
+hardness that was in his mind toward his father went out of it; he saw
+how sorely he had tried him; he grieved that he had done it, but the
+means, the difference of his feeling about the cause of their quarrel,
+he was solemnly glad of that since she shared it.  He was only sorry for
+his father.  "Poor father!" he said under his breath as he went along.
+He explained to her about his father in his reverie, and she pitied his
+father, too.
+
+He was walking over toward the West Side, aimlessly at first, and then at
+times with the longing to do something to save those mistaken men from
+themselves forming itself into a purpose.  Was not that what she meant
+when she bewailed her woman's helplessness?  She must have wished him to
+try if he, being a man, could not do something; or if she did not, still
+he would try, and if she heard of it she would recall what she had said
+and would be glad he had understood her so.  Thinking of her pleasure in
+what he was going to do, he forgot almost what it was; but when he came
+to a street-car track he remembered it, and looked up and down to see if
+there were any turbulent gathering of men whom he might mingle with and
+help to keep from violence.  He saw none anywhere; and then suddenly, as
+if at the same moment, for in his exalted mood all events had a dream-
+like simultaneity, he stood at the corner of an avenue, and in the middle
+of it, a little way off, was a street-car, and around the car a tumult of
+shouting, cursing, struggling men.  The driver was lashing his horses
+forward, and a policeman was at their heads, with the conductor, pulling
+them; stones, clubs, brickbats hailed upon the car, the horses, the men
+trying to move them.  The mob closed upon them in a body, and then a
+patrol-wagon whirled up from the other side, and a squad of policemen
+leaped out and began to club the rioters.  Conrad could see how they
+struck them under the rims of their hats; the blows on their skulls
+sounded as if they had fallen on stone; the rioters ran in all
+directions.
+
+One of the officers rushed up toward the corner where Conrad stood, and
+then he saw at his side a tall, old man, with a long, white beard, who
+was calling out at the policemen: "Ah, yes! Glup the strikerss--gif it to
+them!  Why don't you co and glup the bresidents that insoalt your lawss,
+and gick your Boart of Arpidration out-of-toors?  Glup the strikerss--
+they cot no friendts!  They cot no money to pribe you, to dreat you!"
+
+The officer lifted his club, and the old man threw his left arm up to
+shield his head.  Conrad recognized Zindau, and now he saw the empty
+sleeve dangle in the air over the stump of his wrist.  He heard a shot in
+that turmoil beside the car, and something seemed to strike him in the
+breast.  He was going to say to the policeman: "Don't strike him!  He's
+an old soldier!  You see he has no hand!" but he could not speak, he
+could not move his tongue.  The policeman stood there; he saw his face:
+it was not bad, not cruel; it was like the face of a statue, fixed,
+perdurable--a mere image of irresponsible and involuntary authority.
+Then Conrad fell forward, pierced through the heart by that shot fired
+from the car.
+
+March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his car, and at the same
+moment he saw Lindau drop under the club of the policeman, who left him
+where he fell and joined the rest of the squad in pursuing the rioters.
+The fighting round the car in the avenue ceased; the driver whipped his
+horses into a gallop, and the place was left empty.
+
+March would have liked to run; he thought how his wife had implored him
+to keep away from the rioting; but he could not have left Lindau lying
+there if he would.  Something stronger than his will drew him to the
+spot, and there he saw Conrad, dead beside the old man.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+In the cares which Mrs. March shared with her husband that night she was
+supported partly by principle, but mainly by the, potent excitement which
+bewildered Conrad's family and took all reality from what had happened.
+It was nearly midnight when the Marches left them and walked away toward
+the Elevated station with Fulkerson.  Everything had been done, by that
+time, that could be done; and Fulkerson was not without that satisfaction
+in the business-like despatch of all the details which attends each step
+in such an affair and helps to make death tolerable even to the most
+sorely stricken.  We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little
+space to another; and only one interest at a time fills these.  Fulkerson
+was cheerful when they got into the street, almost gay; and Mrs. March
+experienced a rebound from her depression which she felt that she ought
+not to have experienced.  But she condoned the offence a little in
+herself, because her husband remained so constant in his gravity; and,
+pending the final accounting he must make her for having been where he
+could be of so much use from the first instant of the calamity, she was
+tenderly, gratefully proud of all the use he had been to Conrad's family,
+and especially his miserable old father.  To her mind, March was the
+principal actor in the whole affair, and much more important in having
+seen it than those who had suffered in it.  In fact, he had suffered
+incomparably.
+
+
+"Well, well," said Fulkerson.  "They'll get along now.  We've done all we
+could, and there's nothing left but for them to bear it.  Of course it's
+awful, but I guess it 'll come out all right.  I mean," he added,
+"they'll pull through now."
+
+"I suppose," said March, "that nothing is put on us that we can't bear.
+But I should think," he went on, musingly, "that when God sees what we
+poor finite creatures can bear, hemmed round with this eternal darkness
+of death, He must respect us."
+
+"Basil!" said his wife.  But in her heart she drew nearer to him for the
+words she thought she ought to rebuke him for.
+
+"Oh, I know," he said, "we school ourselves to despise human nature.
+But God did not make us despicable, and I say, whatever end He meant us
+for, He must have some such thrill of joy in our adequacy to fate as a
+father feels when his son shows himself a man.  When I think what we can
+be if we must, I can't believe the least of us shall finally perish."
+
+"Oh, I reckon the Almighty won't scoop any of us," said Fulkerson, with a
+piety of his own.
+
+"That poor boy's father!" sighed Mrs. March.  "I can't get his face out
+of my sight.  He looked so much worse than death."
+
+"Oh, death doesn't look bad," said March.  "It's life that looks so in
+its presence.  Death is peace and pardon.  I only wish poor old Lindau
+was as well out of it as Conrad there."
+
+"Ah, Lindau!  He has done harm enough," said Mrs. March.  "I hope he will
+be careful after this."
+
+March did not try to defend Lindau against her theory of the case, which
+inexorably held him responsible for Conrad's death.
+
+"Lindau's going to come out all right, I guess," said Fulkerson.  "He was
+first-rate when I saw him at the hospital to-night."  He whispered in
+March's ear, at a chance he got in mounting the station stairs: "I didn't
+like to tell you there at the house, but I guess you'd better know.  They
+had to take Lindau's arm off near the shoulder.  Smashed all to pieces by
+the clubbing."
+
+In the house, vainly rich and foolishly unfit for them, the bereaved
+family whom the Marches had just left lingered together, and tried to get
+strength to part for the night.  They were all spent with the fatigue
+that comes from heaven to such misery as theirs, and they sat in a torpor
+in which each waited for the other to move, to speak.
+
+Christine moved, and Mela spoke.  Christine rose and went out of the room
+without saying a word, and they heard her going up-stairs.  Then Mela
+said:
+
+"I reckon the rest of us better be goun' too, father.  Here, let's git
+mother started."
+
+She put her arm round her mother, to lift her from her chair, but the old
+man did not stir, and Mela called Mrs. Mandel from the next room.
+Between them they raised her to her feet.
+
+"Ain't there anybody agoin' to set up with it?"  she asked, in her hoarse
+pipe.  "It appears like folks hain't got any feelin's in New York.
+Woon't some o' the neighbors come and offer to set up, without waitin' to
+be asked?"
+
+"Oh, that's all right, mother.  The men 'll attend to that.  Don't you
+bother any," Mela coaxed, and she kept her arm round her mother, with
+tender patience.
+
+"Why, Mely, child! I can't feel right to have it left to hirelin's so.
+But there ain't anybody any more to see things done as they ought.  If
+Coonrod was on'y here--"
+
+"Well, mother, you are pretty mixed!" said Mela, with a strong tendency
+to break into her large guffaw.  But she checked herself and said:
+"I know just how you feel, though.  It keeps acomun' and agoun'; and it's
+so and it ain't so, all at once; that's the plague of it.  Well, father!
+Ain't you goun' to come?"
+
+"I'm goin' to stay, Mela," said the old man, gently, without moving.
+"Get your mother to bed, that's a good girl."
+
+"You goin' to set up with him, Jacob?"  asked the old woman.
+
+"Yes, 'Liz'beth, I'll set up.  You go to bed."
+
+"Well, I will, Jacob.  And I believe it 'll do you good to set up.
+I wished I could set up with you; but I don't seem to have the stren'th
+I did when the twins died.  I must git my sleep, so's to--I don't like
+very well to have you broke of your rest, Jacob, but there don't appear
+to be anybody else.  You wouldn't have to do it if Coonrod was here.
+There I go ag'in!  Mercy!  mercy!"
+
+"Well, do come along, then, mother," said Mela; and she got her out of
+the room, with Mrs. Mandel's help, and up the stairs.
+
+From the top the old woman called down, "You tell Coonrod--" She stopped,
+and he heard her groan out, "My Lord! my Lord!"
+
+He sat, one silence in the dining-room, where they had all lingered
+together, and in the library beyond the hireling watcher sat, another
+silence.  The time passed, but neither moved, and the last noise in the
+house ceased, so that they heard each other breathe, and the vague,
+remote rumor of the city invaded the inner stillness.  It grew louder
+toward morning, and then Dryfoos knew from the watcher's deeper breathing
+that he had fallen into a doze.
+
+He crept by him to the drawing-room, where his son was; the place was
+full of the awful sweetness of the flowers that Fulkerson had brought,
+and that lay above the pulseless breast.  The old man turned up a burner
+in the chandelier, and stood looking on the majestic serenity of the dead
+face.
+
+He could not move when he saw his wife coming down the stairway in the
+hall.  She was in her long, white flannel bed gown, and the candle she
+carried shook with her nervous tremor.  He thought she might be walking
+in her sleep, but she said, quite simply, "I woke up, and I couldn't git
+to sleep ag'in without comin' to have a look."  She stood beside their
+dead son with him.  "well, he's beautiful, Jacob.  He was the prettiest
+baby!  And he was always good, Coonrod was; I'll say that for him.
+I don't believe he ever give me a minute's care in his whole life.
+I reckon I liked him about the best of all the children; but I don't know
+as I ever done much to show it.  But you was always good to him, Jacob;
+you always done the best for him, ever since he was a little feller.
+I used to be afraid you'd spoil him sometimes in them days; but I guess
+you're glad now for every time you didn't cross him.  I don't suppose
+since the twins died you ever hit him a lick."  She stooped and peered
+closer at the face.  "Why, Jacob, what's that there by his pore eye?"
+Dryfoos saw it, too, the wound that he had feared to look for, and that
+now seemed to redden on his sight.  He broke into a low, wavering cry,
+like a child's in despair, like an animal's in terror, like a soul's in
+the anguish of remorse.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The evening after the funeral, while the Marches sat together talking it
+over, and making approaches, through its shadow, to the question of their
+own future, which it involved, they were startled by the twitter of the
+electric bell at their apartment door.  It was really not so late as the
+children's having gone to bed made it seem; but at nine o'clock it was
+too late for any probable visitor except Fulkerson.  It might be he, and
+March was glad to postpone the impending question to his curiosity
+concerning the immediate business Fulkerson might have with him.  He went
+himself to the door, and confronted there a lady deeply veiled in black
+and attended by a very decorous serving-woman.
+
+"Are you alone, Mr. March--you and Mrs. March ?"  asked the lady, behind
+her veil; and, as he hesitated, she said: "You don't know me!  Miss
+Vance"; and she threw back her veil, showing her face wan and agitated in
+the dark folds.  "I am very anxious to see you--to speak with you both.
+May I come in?"
+
+"Why, certainly, Miss Vance," he answered, still too much stupefied by
+her presence to realize it.
+
+She promptly entered, and saying, with a glance at the hall chair by the
+door, "My maid can sit here?"  followed him to the room where he had left
+his wife.
+
+Mrs. March showed herself more capable of coping with the fact.  She
+welcomed Miss Vance with the liking they both felt for the girl, and with
+the sympathy which her troubled face inspired.
+
+"I won't tire you with excuses for coming, Mrs. March," she said, "for it
+was the only thing left for me to do; and I come at my aunt's
+suggestion."  She added this as if it would help to account for her more
+on the conventional plane, and she had the instinctive good taste to
+address herself throughout to Mrs. March as much as possible, though what
+she had to say was mainly for March.  "I don't know how to begin--I don't
+know how to speak of this terrible affair.  But you know what I mean.
+I feel as if I had lived a whole lifetime since it happened.  I don't
+want you to pity me for it," she said, forestalling a politeness from
+Mrs. March.  "I'm the last one to be thought of, and you mustn't mind me
+if I try to make you.  I came to find out all of the truth that I can,
+and when I know just what that is I shall know what to do.  I have read
+the inquest; it's all burned into my brain.  But I don't care for that--
+for myself: you must let me say such things without minding me.  I know
+that your husband--that Mr. March was there; I read his testimony; and I
+wished to ask him--to ask him--" She stopped and looked distractedly
+about.  "But what folly! He must have said everything he knew--he had
+to."  Her eves wandered to him from his wife, on whom she had kept them
+with instinctive tact.
+
+"I said everything--yes," he replied.  "But if you would like to know--"
+
+"Perhaps I had better tell you something first.  I had just parted with
+him--it couldn't have been more than half an hour--in front of
+Brentano's; he must have gone straight to his death.  We were talking,
+and I--I said, Why didn't some one go among the strikers and plead with
+them to be peaceable, and keep them from attacking the new men.  I knew
+that he felt as I did about the strikers: that he was their friend.  Did
+you see--do you know anything that makes you think he had been trying to
+do that?"
+
+"I am sorry," March began, "I didn't see him at all till--till I saw him
+lying dead."
+
+"My husband was there purely by accident," Mrs. March put in.  "I had
+begged and entreated him not to go near the striking anywhere.  And he
+had just got out of the car, and saw the policeman strike that wretched
+Lindau--he's been such an anxiety to me ever since we have had anything
+to do with him here; my husband knew him when he was a boy in the West.
+Mr. March came home from it all perfectly prostrated; it made us all
+sick! Nothing so horrible ever came into our lives before.  I assure you
+it was the most shocking experience."
+
+Miss Vance listened to her with that look of patience which those who
+have seen much of the real suffering of the world--the daily portion of
+the poor--have for the nervous woes of comfortable people.  March hung
+his head; he knew it would be useless to protest that his share of the
+calamity was, by comparison, infinitesimally small.
+
+After she had heard Mrs. March to the end even of her repetitions, Miss
+Vance said, as if it were a mere matter of course that she should have
+looked the affair up, "Yes, I have seen Mr. Lindau at the hospital--"
+
+"My husband goes every day to see him," Mrs. March interrupted, to give.
+a final touch to the conception of March's magnanimity throughout.
+
+"The poor man seems to have been in the wrong at the time," said Miss
+Vance.
+
+"I could almost say he had earned the right to be wrong.  He's a man of
+the most generous instincts, and a high ideal of justice, of equity--too
+high to be considered by a policeman with a club in his hand," said
+March, with a bold defiance of his wife's different opinion of Lindau.
+"It's the policeman's business, I suppose, to club the ideal when he
+finds it inciting a riot."
+
+"Oh, I don't blame Mr. Lindau; I don't blame the policeman; he was as
+much a mere instrument as his club was.  I am only trying to find out how
+much I am to blame myself.  I had no thought of Mr. Dryfoos's going
+there--of his attempting to talk with the strikers and keep them quiet;
+I was only thinking, as women do, of what I should try to do if I were a
+man.
+
+"But perhaps he understood me to ask him to go--perhaps my words sent him
+to his death."
+
+She had a sort of calm in her courage to know the worst truth as to her
+responsibility that forbade any wish to flatter her out of it.  "I'm
+afraid," said March, "that is what can never be known now."  After a
+moment he added: "But why should you wish to know?  If he went there as a
+peacemaker, he died in a good cause, in such a way as he would wish to
+die, I believe."
+
+"Yes," said the girl; "I have thought of that.  But death is awful; we
+must not think patiently, forgivingly of sending any one to their death
+in the best cause."--"I fancy life was an awful thing to Conrad Dryfoos,"
+March replied.  "He was thwarted and disappointed, without even pleasing
+the ambition that thwarted and disappointed him.  That poor old man, his
+father, warped him from his simple, lifelong wish to be a minister, and
+was trying to make a business man of him.  If it will be any consolation
+to you to know it, Miss Vance, I can assure you that he was very unhappy,
+and I don't see how he could ever have been happy here."
+
+"It won't," said the girl, steadily.  "If people are born into this
+world, it's because they were meant to live in it.  It isn't a question
+of being happy here; no one is happy, in that old, selfish way, or can
+be; but he could have been of great use."
+
+"Perhaps he was of use in dying.  Who knows?  He may have been trying to
+silence Lindau."
+
+"Oh, Lindau wasn't worth it!" cried Mrs. March.
+
+Miss Vance looked at her as if she did not quite understand.  Then she
+turned to March.  "He might have been unhappy, as we all are; but I know
+that his life here would have had a higher happiness than we wish for or
+aim for."  The tears began to run silently down her cheeks.
+
+"He looked strangely happy that day when he left me.  He had hurt himself
+somehow, and his face was bleeding from a scratch; he kept his
+handkerchief up; he was pale, but such a light came into his face when he
+shook hands--ah, I know he went to try and do what I said!"  They were
+all silent, while she dried her eyes and then put her handkerchief back
+into the pocket from which she had suddenly pulled it, with a series of
+vivid, young-ladyish gestures, which struck March by their incongruity
+with the occasion of their talk, and yet by their harmony with the rest
+of her elegance.  "I am sorry, Miss Vance," he began, "that I can't
+really tell you anything more--"
+
+"You are very kind," she said, controlling herself and rising quickly.
+"I thank you--thank you both very much."  She turned to Mrs. March and
+shook hands with her and then with him.  "I might have known--I did know
+that there wasn't anything more for you to tell.  But at least I've found
+out from you that there was nothing, and now I can begin to bear what I
+must.  How are those poor creatures--his mother and father, his sisters?
+Some day, I hope, I shall be ashamed to have postponed them to the
+thought of myself; but I can't pretend to be yet.  I could not come to
+the funeral; I wanted to."
+
+She addressed her question to Mrs. March, who answered: "I can
+understand.  But they were pleased with the flowers you sent; people are,
+at such times, and they haven't many friends."
+
+"Would you go to see them?"  asked the girl.  "Would you tell them what
+I've told you?"
+
+Mrs. March looked at her husband.
+
+"I don't see what good it would do.  They wouldn't understand.  But if it
+would relieve you--"
+
+"I'll wait till it isn't a question of self-relief," said the girl.
+"Good-bye!"
+
+She left them to long debate of the event.  At the end Mrs. March said,
+"She is a strange being; such a mixture of the society girl and the
+saint."
+
+Her husband answered: "She's the potentiality of several kinds of
+fanatic.  She's very unhappy, and I don't see how she's to be happier
+about that poor fellow.  I shouldn't be surprised if she did inspire him
+to attempt something of that kind."
+
+"Well, you got out of it very well, Basil.  I admired the way you
+managed.  I was afraid you'd say something awkward."
+
+"Oh, with a plain line of truth before me, as the only possible thing,
+I can get on pretty well.  When it comes to anything decorative, I'd
+rather leave it to you, Isabel."
+
+She seemed insensible of his jest.  "Of course, he was in love with her.
+That was the light that came into his face when he was going to do what
+he thought she wanted him to do."
+
+"And she--do you think that she was--"
+
+"What an idea!  It would have been perfectly grotesque!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Their affliction brought the Dryfooses into humaner relations with the
+Marches, who had hitherto regarded them as a necessary evil, as the
+odious means of their own prosperity.  Mrs. March found that the women of
+the family seemed glad of her coming, and in the sense of her usefulness
+to them all she began to feel a kindness even for Christine.  But she
+could not help seeing that between the girl and her father there was an
+unsettled account, somehow, and that it was Christine and not the old man
+who was holding out.  She thought that their sorrow had tended to refine
+the others.  Mela was much more subdued, and, except when she abandoned
+herself to a childish interest in her mourning, she did nothing to shock
+Mrs. March's taste or to seem unworthy of her grief.  She was very good
+to her mother, whom the blow had left unchanged, and to her father, whom
+it had apparently fallen upon with crushing weight.  Once, after visiting
+their house, Mrs. March described to March a little scene between Dryfoos
+and Mela, when he came home from Wall Street, and the girl met him at the
+door with a kind of country simpleness, and took his hat and stick, and
+brought him into the room where Mrs. March sat, looking tired and broken.
+She found this look of Dryfoos's pathetic, and dwelt on the sort of
+stupefaction there was in it; he must have loved his son more than they
+ever realized.  "Yes," said March, "I suspect he did.  He's never been
+about the place since that day; he was always dropping in before, on his
+way up-town.  He seems to go down to Wall Street every day, just as
+before, but I suppose that's mechanical; he wouldn't know what else to
+do; I dare say it's best for him.  The sanguine Fulkerson is getting a
+little anxious about the future of 'Every Other Week.'  Now Conrad's
+gone, he isn't sure the old man will want to keep on with it, or whether
+he'll have to look up another Angel.  He wants to get married, I imagine,
+and he can't venture till this point is settled."
+
+"It's a very material point to us too, Basil," said Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, of course.  I hadn't overlooked that, you may be sure.  One of the
+things that Fulkerson and I have discussed is a scheme for buying the
+magazine.  Its success is pretty well assured now, and I shouldn't be
+afraid to put money into it--if I had the money."
+
+"I couldn't let you sell the house in Boston, Basil!"
+
+"And I don't want to.  I wish we could go back and live in it and get the
+rent, too!  It would be quite a support.  But I suppose if Dryfoos won't
+keep on, it must come to another Angel.  I hope it won't be a literary
+one, with a fancy for running my department."
+
+"Oh, I guess whoever takes the magazine will be glad enough to keep you!"
+
+"Do you think so?  Well, perhaps.  But I don't believe Fulkerson would
+let me stand long between him and an Angel of the right description."
+
+"Well, then, I believe he would.  And you've never seen anything, Basil,
+to make you really think that Mr. Fulkerson didn't appreciate you to the
+utmost."
+
+"I think I came pretty near an undervaluation in that Lindau trouble.
+I shall always wonder what put a backbone into Fulkerson just at that
+crisis.  Fulkerson doesn't strike me as the stuff of a moral hero."
+
+"At any rate, he was one," said Mrs. March, "and that's quite enough for
+me."
+
+March did not answer.  "What a noble thing life is, anyway!  Here I am,
+well on the way to fifty, after twenty-five years of hard work, looking
+forward to the potential poor-house as confidently as I did in youth.
+We might have saved a little more than we have saved; but the little more
+wouldn't avail if I were turned out of my place now; and we should have
+lived sordidly to no purpose.  Some one always has you by the throat,
+unless you have some one else in your grip.  I wonder if that's the
+attitude the Almighty intended His respectable creatures to take toward
+one another!  I wonder if He meant our civilization, the battle we fight
+in, the game we trick in!  I wonder if He considers it final, and if the
+kingdom of heaven on earth, which we pray for--"
+
+"Have you seen Lindau to-day?"  Mrs. March asked.
+
+"You inferred it from the quality of my piety?"  March laughed, and then
+suddenly sobered.  "Yes, I saw him.  It's going rather hard with him,
+I'm afraid.  The amputation doesn't heal very well; the shock was very
+great, and he's old.  It 'll take time.  There's so much pain that they
+have to keep him under opiates, and I don't think he fully knew me.  At
+any rate, I didn't get my piety from him to-day."
+
+"It's horrible! Horrible!" said Mrs. March.  "I can't get over it!
+After losing his hand in the war, to lose his whole arm now in this way!
+It does seem too cruel!  Of course he oughtn't to have been there; we can
+say that.  But you oughtn't to have been there, either, Basil."
+
+"Well, I wasn't exactly advising the police to go and club the railroad
+presidents."
+
+"Neither was poor Conrad Dryfoos."
+
+"I don't deny it.  All that was distinctly the chance of life and death.
+That belonged to God; and no doubt it was law, though it seems chance.
+But what I object to is this economic chance-world in which we live, and
+which we men seem to have created.  It ought to be law as inflexible in
+human affairs as the order of day and night in the physical world that if
+a man will work he shall both rest and eat, and shall not be harassed
+with any question as to how his repose and his provision shall come.
+Nothing less ideal than this satisfies the reason.  But in our state of
+things no one is secure of this.  No one is sure of finding work; no one
+is sure of not losing it.  I may have my work taken away from me at any
+moment by the caprice, the mood, the indigestion of a man who has not the
+qualification for knowing whether I do it well, or ill.  At my time of
+life--at every time of life--a man ought to feel that if he will keep on
+doing his duty he shall not suffer in himself or in those who are dear to
+him, except through natural causes.  But no man can feel this as things
+are now; and so we go on, pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling,
+thrusting aside and trampling underfoot; lying, cheating, stealing; and
+then we get to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame,
+and look back over the way we've come to a palace of our own, or the
+poor-house, which is about the only possession we can claim in common
+with our brother-men, I don't think the retrospect can be pleasing."
+
+"I know, I know!" said his wife.  "I think of those things, too, Basil.
+Life isn't what it seems when you look forward to it.  But I think people
+would suffer less, and wouldn't have to work so hard, and could make all
+reasonable provision for the future, if they were not so greedy and so
+foolish."
+
+"Oh, without doubt!  We can't put it all on the conditions; we must put
+some of the blame on character.  But conditions make character; and
+people are greedy and foolish, and wish to have and to shine, because
+having and shining are held up to them by civilization as the chief good
+of life.  We all know they are not the chief good, perhaps not good at
+all; but if some one ventures to say so, all the rest of us call him a
+fraud and a crank, and go moiling and toiling on to the palace or the
+poor-house.  We can't help it.  If one were less greedy or less foolish,
+some one else would have and would shine at his expense.  We don't moil
+and toil to ourselves alone; the palace or the poor-house is not merely
+for ourselves, but for our children, whom we've brought up in the
+superstition that having and shining is the chief good.  We dare not
+teach them otherwise, for fear they may falter in the fight when it comes
+their turn, and the children of others will crowd them out of the palace
+into the poor-house.  If we felt sure that honest work shared by all
+would bring them honest food shared by all, some heroic few of us, who
+did not wish our children to rise above their fellows--though we could
+not bear to have them fall below--might trust them with the truth.  But
+we have no such assurance, and so we go on trembling before Dryfooses and
+living in gimcrackeries."
+
+"Basil, Basil! I was always willing to live more simply than you.  You
+know I was!"
+
+"I know you always said so, my dear.  But how many bell-ratchets and
+speaking-tubes would you be willing to have at the street door below?
+I remember that when we were looking for a flat you rejected every
+building that had a bell-ratchet or a speaking-tube, and would have
+nothing to do with any that had more than an electric button; you wanted
+a hall-boy, with electric buttons all over him.  I don't blame you.  I
+find such things quite as necessary as you do."
+
+"And do you mean to say, Basil," she asked, abandoning this unprofitable
+branch of the inquiry, "that you are really uneasy about your place?
+that you are afraid Mr. Dryfoos may give up being an Angel, and Mr.
+Fulkerson may play you false?"
+
+"Play me false?  Oh, it wouldn't be playing me false.  It would be merely
+looking out for himself, if the new Angel had editorial tastes and wanted
+my place.  It's what any one would do."
+
+"You wouldn't do it, Basil!"
+
+"Wouldn't I?  Well, if any one offered me more salary than 'Every Other
+Week' pays--say, twice as much--what do you think my duty to my suffering
+family would be?  It's give and take in the business world, Isabel;
+especially take.  But as to being uneasy, I'm not, in the least.  I've
+the spirit of a lion, when it comes to such a chance as that.  When I see
+how readily the sensibilities of the passing stranger can be worked in
+New York, I think of taking up the role of that desperate man on Third
+Avenue who went along looking for garbage in the gutter to eat.  I think
+I could pick up at least twenty or thirty cents a day by that little
+game, and maintain my family in the affluence it's been accustomed to."
+
+"Basil!" cried his wife.  "You don't mean to say that man was an
+impostor!  And I've gone about, ever since, feeling that one such case in
+a million, the bare possibility of it, was enough to justify all that
+Lindau said about the rich and the poor!"
+
+March laughed teasingly.  "Oh, I don't say he was an impostor.  Perhaps
+he really was hungry; but, if he wasn't, what do you think of a
+civilization that makes the opportunity of such a fraud? that gives us
+all such a bad conscience for the need which is that we weaken to the
+need that isn't?  Suppose that poor fellow wasn't personally founded on
+fact: nevertheless, he represented the truth; he was the ideal of the
+suffering which would be less effective if realistically treated.  That
+man is a great comfort to me.  He probably rioted for days on that
+quarter I gave him; made a dinner very likely, or a champagne supper; and
+if 'Every Other Week' wants to get rid of me, I intend to work that
+racket.  You can hang round the corner with Bella, and Tom can come up to
+me in tears, at stated intervals, and ask me if I've found anything yet.
+To be sure, we might be arrested and sent up somewhere.  But even in that
+extreme case we should be provided for.  Oh no, I'm not afraid of losing
+my place!  I've merely a sort of psychological curiosity to know how men
+like Dryfoos and Fulkerson will work out the problem before them."
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+It was a curiosity which Fulkerson himself shared, at least concerning
+Dryfoos.  "I don't know what the old man's going to do," he said to March
+the day after the Marches had talked their future over.  "Said anything
+to you yet?"
+
+"No, not a word."
+
+"You're anxious, I suppose, same as I am.  Fact is," said Fulkerson,
+blushing a little, "I can't ask to have a day named till I know where I
+am in connection with the old man.  I can't tell whether I've got to look
+out for something else or somebody else.  Of course, it's full soon yet."
+
+"Yes," March said, "much sooner than it seems to us.  We're so anxious
+about the future that we don't remember how very recent the past is."
+
+"That's something so.  The old man's hardly had time yet to pull himself
+together.  Well, I'm glad you feel that way about it, March.  I guess
+it's more of a blow to him than we realize.  He was a good deal bound up
+in Coonrod, though he didn't always use him very well.  Well, I reckon
+it's apt to happen so oftentimes; curious how cruel love can be.  Heigh?
+We're an awful mixture, March!"
+
+"Yes, that's the marvel and the curse, as Browning says."
+
+"Why, that poor boy himself," pursued Fulkerson, had streaks of the mule
+in him that could give odds to Beaton, and he must have tried the old man
+by the way he would give in to his will and hold out against his
+judgment.  I don't believe he ever budged a hairs-breadth from his
+original position about wanting to be a preacher and not wanting to be a
+business man.  Well, of course!  I don't think business is all in all;
+but it must have made the old man mad to find that without saying
+anything, or doing anything to show it, and after seeming to come over to
+his ground, and really coming, practically, Coonrod was just exactly
+where he first planted himself, every time."
+
+"Yes, people that have convictions are difficult.  Fortunately, they're
+rare."
+
+"Do you think so?  It seems to me that everybody's got convictions.
+Beaton himself, who hasn't a principle to throw at a dog, has got
+convictions the size of a barn.  They ain't always the same ones, I know,
+but they're always to the same effect, as far as Beaton's being Number
+One is concerned.  The old man's got convictions or did have, unless this
+thing lately has shaken him all up--and he believes that money will do
+everything.  Colonel Woodburn's got convictions that he wouldn't part
+with for untold millions.  Why, March, you got convictions yourself!"
+
+"Have I?"  said March.  "I don't know what they are."
+
+"Well, neither do I; but I know you were ready to kick the trough over
+for them when the old man wanted us to bounce Lindau that time."
+
+"Oh yes," said March; he remembered the fact; but he was still uncertain
+just what the convictions were that he had been so stanch for.
+
+"I suppose we could have got along without you," Fulkerson mused aloud.
+"It's astonishing how you always can get along in this world without the
+man that is simply indispensable.  Makes a fellow realize that he could
+take a day off now and then without deranging the solar system a great
+deal.  Now here's Coonrod--or, rather, he isn't.  But that boy managed
+his part of the schooner so well that I used to tremble when I thought of
+his getting the better of the old man and going into a convent or
+something of that kind; and now here he is, snuffed out in half a second,
+and I don't believe but what we shall be sailing along just as chipper as
+usual inside of thirty days.  I reckon it will bring the old man to the
+point when I come to talk with him about who's to be put in Coonrod's
+place.  I don't like very well to start the subject with him; but it's
+got to be done some time."
+
+"Yes," March admitted.  "It's terrible to think how unnecessary even the
+best and wisest of us is to the purposes of Providence.  When I looked at
+that poor young fellow's face sometimes--so gentle and true and pure--
+I used to think the world was appreciably richer for his being in it.
+But are we appreciably poorer for his being out of it now?"
+
+"No, I don't reckon we are," said Fulkerson.  "And what a lot of the raw
+material of all kinds the Almighty must have, to waste us the way He
+seems to do.  Think of throwing away a precious creature like Coonrod
+Dryfoos on one chance in a thousand of getting that old fool of a Lindau
+out of the way of being clubbed!  For I suppose that was what Coonrod was
+up to.  Say!  Have you been round to see Lindau to-day?"
+
+Something in the tone or the manner of Fulkerson startled March.  "No!
+I haven't seen him since yesterday."
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Fulkerson.  "I guess I saw him a little while
+after you did, and that young doctor there seemed to feel kind of worried
+about him.
+
+"Or not worried, exactly; they can't afford to let such things worry them,
+I suppose; but--"
+
+"He's worse?"  asked March.
+
+"Oh, he didn't say so.  But I just wondered if you'd seen him to-day."
+
+"I think I'll go now," said March, with a pang at heart.  He had gone
+every day to see Lindau, but this day he had thought he would not go, and
+that was why his heart smote him.  He knew that if he were in Lindau's
+place Lindau would never have left his side if he could have helped it.
+March tried to believe that the case was the same, as it stood now; it
+seemed to him that he was always going to or from the hospital; he said
+to himself that it must do Lindau harm to be visited so much.  But be
+knew that this was not true when he was met at the door of the ward where
+Lindau lay by the young doctor, who had come to feel a personal interest
+in March's interest in Lindau.
+
+He smiled without gayety, and said, "He's just going."
+
+"What! Discharged?"
+
+"Oh no.  He has been failing very fast since you saw him yesterday, and
+now--" They had been walking softly and talking softly down the aisle
+between the long rows of beds.  "Would you care to see him?"
+
+The doctor made a slight gesture toward the white canvas screen which in
+such places forms the death-chamber of the poor and friendless.  "Come
+round this way--he won't know you! I've got rather fond of the poor old
+fellow.  He wouldn't have a clergyman--sort of agnostic, isn't he?  A
+good many of these Germans are--but the young lady who's been coming to
+see him--"
+
+They both stopped. Lindau's grand, patriarchal head, foreshortened to
+their view, lay white upon the pillow, and his broad, white beard flowed
+upon the sheet, which heaved with those long last breaths.  Beside his
+bed Margaret Vance was kneeling; her veil was thrown back, and her face
+was lifted; she held clasped between her hands the hand of the dying man;
+she moved her lips inaudibly.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+In spite of the experience of the whole race from time immemorial, when
+death comes to any one we know we helplessly regard it as an incident of
+life, which will presently go on as before.  Perhaps this is an
+instinctive perception of the truth that it does go on somewhere; but we
+have a sense of death as absolutely the end even for earth only if it
+relates to some one remote or indifferent to us.  March tried to project
+Lindau to the necessary distance from himself in order to realize the
+fact in his case, but he could not, though the man with whom his youth
+had been associated in a poetic friendship had not actually reentered the
+region of his affection to the same degree, or in any like degree.  The
+changed conditions forbade that.  He had a soreness of heart concerning
+him; but he could not make sure whether this soreness was grief for his
+death, or remorse for his own uncandor with him about Dryfoos, or a
+foreboding of that accounting with his conscience which he knew his wife
+would now exact of him down to the last minutest particular of their
+joint and several behavior toward Lindau ever since they had met him in
+New York.
+
+He felt something knock against his shoulder, and he looked up to have
+his hat struck from his head by a horse's nose.  He saw the horse put his
+foot on the hat, and he reflected, "Now it will always look like an
+accordion," and he heard the horse's driver address him some sarcasms
+before he could fully awaken to the situation.  He was standing
+bareheaded in the middle of Fifth Avenue and blocking the tide of
+carriages flowing in either direction.  Among the faces put out of the
+carriage windows he saw that of Dryfoos looking from a coupe.  The old
+man knew him, and said, "Jump in here, Mr. March"; and March, who had
+mechanically picked up his hat, and was thinking, "Now I shall have to
+tell Isabel about this at once, and she will never trust me on the street
+again without her," mechanically obeyed.  Her confidence in him had been
+undermined by his being so near Conrad when he was shot; and it went
+through his mind that he would get Dryfoos to drive him to a hatter's,
+where he could buy a new hat, and not be obliged to confess his narrow
+escape to his wife till the incident was some days old and she could bear
+it better.  It quite drove Lindau's death out of his mind for the moment;
+and when Dryfoos said if he was going home he would drive up to the first
+cross-street and turn back with him, March said he would be glad if he
+would take him to a hat-store.  The old man put his head out again and
+told the driver to take them to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.  "There's a hat-
+store around there somewhere, seems to me," he said; and they talked of
+March's accident as well as they could in the rattle and clatter of the
+street till they reached the place.  March got his hat, passing a joke
+with the hatter about the impossibility of pressing his old hat over
+again, and came out to thank Dryfoos and take leave of him.
+
+"If you ain't in any great hurry," the old man said, "I wish you'd get in
+here a minute.  I'd like to have a little talk with you."
+
+"Oh, certainly," said March, and he thought: "It's coming now about what
+he intends to do with 'Every Other Week.'  Well, I might as well have all
+the misery at once and have it over."
+
+Dryfoos called up to his driver, who bent his head down sidewise to
+listen: "Go over there on Madison Avenue, onto that asphalt, and keep
+drivin' up and down till I stop you.  I can't hear myself think on these
+pavements," he said to March.  But after they got upon the asphalt, and
+began smoothly rolling over it, he seemed in no haste to begin.  At last
+he said, "I wanted to talk with you about that--that Dutchman that was at
+my dinner--Lindau," and March's heart gave a jump with wonder whether he
+could already have heard of Lindau's death; but in an instant he
+perceived that this was impossible.  "I been talkin' with Fulkerson about
+him, and he says they had to take the balance of his arm off."
+
+March nodded; it seemed to him he could not speak.  He could not make out
+from the close face of the old man anything of his motive.  It was set,
+but set as a piece of broken mechanism is when it has lost the power to
+relax itself.  There was no other history in it of what the man had
+passed through in his son's death.
+
+"I don't know," Dryfoos resumed, looking aside at the cloth window-strap,
+which he kept fingering, "as you quite understood what made me the
+maddest.  I didn't tell him I could talk Dutch, because I can't keep it
+up with a regular German; but my father was Pennsylvany Dutch, and I
+could understand what he was saying to you about me.  I know I had no
+business to understood it, after I let him think I couldn't but I did,
+and I didn't like very well to have a man callin' me a traitor and a
+tyrant at my own table.  Well, I look at it differently now, and I reckon
+I had better have tried to put up with it; and I would, if I could have
+known--" He stopped with a quivering lip, and then went on: "Then, again,
+I didn't like his talkin' that paternalism of his.  I always heard it was
+the worst kind of thing for the country; I was brought up to think the
+best government was the one that governs the least; and I didn't want to
+hear that kind of talk from a man that was livin' on my money.
+I couldn't bear it from him.  Or I thought I couldn't before--before--"
+He stopped again, and gulped.  "I reckon  now there ain't anything I
+couldn't bear."  March was moved by the blunt words and the mute stare
+forward with which they ended.  "Mr. Dryfoos, I didn't know that you
+understood Lindau's German, or I shouldn't have allowed him he wouldn't
+have allowed himself--to go on.  He wouldn't have knowingly abused his
+position of guest to censure you, no matter how much he condemned you."
+"I don't care for it now," said Dryfoos.  "It's all past and gone, as far
+as I'm concerned; but I wanted you to see that I wasn't tryin' to punish
+him for his opinions, as you said."
+
+"No; I see now," March assented, though he thought, his position still
+justified.  "I wish--"
+
+"I don't know as I understand much about his opinions, anyway; but I
+ain't ready to say I want the men dependent on me to manage my business
+for me.  I always tried to do the square thing by my hands; and in that
+particular case out there I took on all the old hands just as fast as
+they left their Union.  As for the game I came on them, it was dog eat
+dog, anyway."
+
+March could have laughed to think how far this old man was from even
+conceiving of Lindau's point'of view, and how he was saying the worst of
+himself that Lindau could have said of him.  No one could have
+characterized the kind of thing he had done more severely than he when he
+called it dog eat dog.
+
+"There's a great deal to be said on both sides," March began, hoping to
+lead up through this generality to the fact of Lindau's death; but the
+old man went on:
+
+"Well, all I wanted him to know is that I wasn't trying to punish him for
+what he said about things in general.  You naturally got that idea, I
+reckon; but I always went in for lettin' people say what they please and
+think what they please; it's the only way in a free country."
+
+"I'm afraid, Mr. Dryfoos, that it would make little difference to Lindau
+now--"
+
+"I don't suppose he bears malice for it," said Dryfoos, "but what I want
+to do is to have him told so.  He could understand just why I didn't want
+to be called hard names, and yet I didn't object to his thinkin' whatever
+he pleased.  I'd like him to know--"
+
+"No one can speak to him, no one can tell him," March began again, but
+again Dryfoos prevented him from going on.
+
+"I understand it's a delicate thing; and I'm not askin' you to do it.
+What I would really like to do--if you think he could be prepared for it,
+some way, and could stand it--would be to go to him myself, and tell him
+just what the trouble was.  I'm in hopes, if I done that, he could see
+how I felt about it."
+
+A picture of Dryfoos going to the dead Lindau with his vain regrets
+presented itself to March, and he tried once more to make the old man
+understand.  "Mr. Dryfoos," he said, "Lindau is past all that forever,"
+and he felt the ghastly comedy of it when Dryfoos continued, without
+heeding him
+
+"I got a particular reason why I want him to believe it wasn't his ideas
+I objected to--them ideas of his about the government carryin' everything
+on and givin' work.  I don't understand 'em exactly, but I found a
+writin'--among--my son's-things" (he seemed to force the words through
+his teeth), "and I reckon he--thought--that way.  Kind of a diary--where
+he--put down--his thoughts.  My son and me--we differed about a good-
+many things."  His chin shook, and from time to time he stopped.  "I
+wasn't very good to him, I reckon; I crossed him where I guess I got no
+business to cross him; but I thought everything of--Coonrod.  He was the
+best boy, from a baby, that ever was; just so patient and mild, and done
+whatever he was told.  I ought to 'a' let him been a preacher!  Oh, my
+son! my son!" The sobs could not be kept back any longer; they shook the
+old man with a violence that made March afraid for him; but he controlled
+himself at last with a series of hoarse sounds like barks.  "Well, it's
+all past and gone!  But as I understand you from what you saw, when
+Coonrod was--killed, he was tryin' to save that old man from trouble?"
+
+Yes, yes! It seemed so to me."
+
+"That 'll do, then! I want you to have him come back and write for the
+book when he gets well.  I want you to find out and let me know if
+there's anything I can do for him.  I'll feel as if I done it--for my--
+son.  I'll take him into my own house, and do for him there, if you say
+so, when he gets so he can be moved.  I'll wait on him myself.  It's what
+Coonrod 'd do, if he was here.  I don't feel any hardness to him because
+it was him that got Coonrod killed, as you might say, in one sense of the
+term; but I've tried to think it out, and I feel like I was all the more
+beholden to him because my son died tryin' to save him.  Whatever I do,
+I'll be doin' it for Coonrod, and that's enough for me."  He seemed to
+have finished, and he turned to March as if to hear what he had to say.
+
+March hesitated.  "I'm afraid, Mr. Dryfoos--Didn't Fulkerson tell you
+that Lindau was very sick?"
+
+"Yes, of course.  But he's all right, he said."
+
+Now it had to come, though the fact had been latterly playing fast and
+loose with March's consciousness.  Something almost made him smile; the
+willingness he had once felt to give this old man pain; then he consoled
+himself by thinking that at least he was not obliged to meet Dryfoos's
+wish to make atonement with the fact that Lindau had renounced him, and
+would on no terms work for such a man as he, or suffer any kindness from
+him.  In this light Lindau seemed the harder of the two, and March had
+the momentary force to say
+
+"Mr. Dryfoos--it can't be.  Lindau--I have just come from him--is dead."
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+"How did he take it?  How could he bear it?  Oh, Basil! I wonder you
+could have the heart to say it to him.  It was cruel!"
+
+"Yes, cruel enough, my dear," March owned to his wife, when they talked
+the matter over on his return home.  He could not wait till the children
+were out of the way, and afterward neither he nor his wife was sorry that
+he had spoken of it before them.  The girl cried plentifully for her old
+friend who was dead, and said she hated Mr. Dryfoos, and then was sorry
+for him, too; and the boy listened to all, and spoke with a serious sense
+that pleased his father.  "But as to how he took it," March went on to
+answer his wife's question about Dryfoos--"how do any of us take a thing
+that hurts?  Some of us cry out, and some of us don't.  Dryfoos drew a
+kind of long, quivering breath, as a child does when it grieves--there's
+something curiously simple and primitive about him--and didn't say
+anything.  After a while he asked me how he could see the people at the
+hospital about the remains; I gave him my card to the young doctor there
+that had charge of Lindau.  I suppose he was still carrying forward his
+plan of reparation in his mind--to the dead for the dead.  But how
+useless!  If he could have taken the living Lindau home with him, and
+cared for him all his days, what would it have profited the gentle
+creature whose life his worldly ambition vexed and thwarted here?
+He might as well offer a sacrifice at Conrad's grave.  Children," said
+March, turning to them, "death is an exile that no remorse and no love
+can reach.  Remember that, and be good to every one here on earth, for
+your longing to retrieve any harshness or unkindness to the dead will be
+the very ecstasy of anguish to you.  I wonder," he mused, "if one of the
+reasons why we're shut up to our ignorance of what is to be hereafter
+isn't because if we were sure of another world we might be still more
+brutal to one another here, in the hope of making reparation somewhere
+else.  Perhaps, if we ever come to obey the law of love on earth, the
+mystery of death will be taken away."
+
+"Well"--the ancestral Puritanism spoke in Mrs. March--" these two old men
+have been terribly punished.  They have both been violent and wilful, and
+they have both been punished.  No one need ever tell me there is not a
+moral government of the universe!"
+
+March always disliked to hear her talk in this way, which did both her
+head and heart injustice.  "And Conrad," he said, "what was he punished
+for?"
+
+"He?"  she answered, in an exaltation--" he suffered for the sins of
+others."
+
+"Ah, well, if you put it in that way, yes.  That goes on continually.
+That's another mystery."
+
+He fell to brooding on it, and presently he heard his son saying,
+"I suppose, papa, that Mr. Lindau died in a bad cause?"
+
+March was startled.  He had always been so sorry for Lindau, and admired
+his courage and generosity so much, that he had never fairly considered
+this question.  "Why, yes," he answered; "he died in the cause of
+disorder; he was trying to obstruct the law.  No doubt there was a wrong
+there, an inconsistency and an injustice that he felt keenly; but it
+could not be reached in his way without greater wrong."
+
+"Yes; that's what I thought," said the boy.  "And what's the use of our
+ever fighting about anything in America?  I always thought we could vote
+anything we wanted."
+
+"We can, if we're honest, and don't buy and sell one another's votes,"
+said his father.  "And men like Lindau, who renounce the American means
+as hopeless, and let their love of justice hurry them into sympathy with
+violence--yes, they are wrong; and poor Lindau did die in a bad cause, as
+you say, Tom."
+
+"I think Conrad had no business there, or you, either, Basil," said his
+wife.
+
+"Oh, I don't defend myself," said March.  "I was there in the cause of
+literary curiosity and of conjugal disobedience.  But Conrad--yes, he had
+some business there: it was his business to suffer there for the sins of
+others.  Isabel, we can't throw aside that old doctrine of the Atonement
+yet.  The life of Christ, it wasn't only in healing the sick and going
+about to do good; it was suffering for the sins of others.  That's as
+great a mystery as the mystery of death.  Why should there be such a
+principle in the world?  But it's been felt, and more or less dumbly,
+blindly recognized ever since Calvary.  If we love mankind, pity them,
+we even wish to suffer for them.  That's what has created the religious
+orders in all times--the brotherhoods and sisterhoods that belong to our
+day as much as to the mediaeval past.  That's what is driving a girl like
+Margaret Vance, who has everything that the world can offer her young
+beauty, on to the work of a Sister of Charity among the poor and the
+dying."
+
+"Yes, yes!" cried Mrs. March.  "How--how did she look there, Basil?"  She
+had her feminine misgivings; she was not sure but the girl was something
+of a poseuse, and enjoyed the picturesqueness, as well as the pain; and
+she wished to be convinced that it was not so.
+
+"Well," she said, when March had told again the little there was to tell,
+"I suppose it must be a great trial to a woman like Mrs. Horn to have her
+niece going that way."
+
+"The way of Christ?"  asked March, with a smile.
+
+"Oh, Christ came into the world to teach us how to live rightly in it,
+too.  If we were all to spend our time in hospitals, it would be rather
+dismal for the homes.  But perhaps you don't think the homes are worth
+minding?"  she suggested, with a certain note in her voice that he knew.
+
+He got up and kissed her.  "I think the gimcrackeries are."  He took the
+hat he had set down on the parlor table on coming in, and started to put
+it in the hall, and that made her notice it.
+
+"You've been getting a new hat!"
+
+"Yes," he hesitated; "the old one had got--was decidedly shabby."
+
+"Well, that's right.  I don't like you to wear them too long.  Did you
+leave the old one to be pressed?"
+
+"Well, the hatter seemed to think it was hardly worth pressing," said
+March.  He decided that for the present his wife's nerves had quite all
+they could bear.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+It was in a manner grotesque, but to March it was all the more natural
+for that reason, that Dryfoos should have Lindau's funeral from his
+house.  He knew the old man to be darkly groping, through the payment of
+these vain honors to the dead, for some atonement to his son, and he
+imagined him finding in them such comfort as comes from doing all one
+can, even when all is useless.
+
+No one knew what Lindau's religion was, and in default they had had the
+Anglican burial service read over him; it seems so often the refuge of
+the homeless dead.  Mrs. Dryfoos came down for the ceremony.  She
+understood that it was for Coonrod's sake that his father wished the
+funeral to be there; and she confided to Mrs. March that she believed
+Coonrod would have been pleased.  "Coonrod was a member of the 'Piscopal
+Church; and fawther's doin' the whole thing for Coonrod as much as for
+anybody.  He thought the world of Coonrod, fawther did.  Mela, she kind
+of thought it would look queer to have two funerals from the same house,
+hand-runnin', as you might call it, and one of 'em no relation, either;
+but when she saw how fawther was bent on it, she give in.  Seems as if
+she was tryin' to make up to fawther for Coonrod as much as she could.
+Mela always was a good child, but nobody can ever come up to Coonrod."
+
+March felt all the grotesqueness, the hopeless absurdity of Dryfoos's
+endeavor at atonement in these vain obsequies to the man for whom he
+believed his son to have died; but the effort had its magnanimity, its
+pathos, and there was a poetry that appealed to him in the reconciliation
+through death of men, of ideas, of conditions, that could only have gone
+warring on in life.  He thought, as the priest went on with the solemn
+liturgy, how all the world must come together in that peace which,
+struggle and strive as we may, shall claim us at last.  He looked at
+Dryfoos, and wondered whether he would consider these rites a sufficient
+tribute, or whether there was enough in him to make him realize their
+futility, except as a mere sign of his wish to retrieve the past.  He
+thought how we never can atone for the wrong we do; the heart we have
+grieved and wounded cannot kindle with pity for us when once it is
+stilled; and yet we can put our evil from us with penitence, and somehow,
+somewhere, the order of loving kindness, which our passion or our
+wilfulness has disturbed, will be restored.
+
+Dryfoos, through Fulkerson, had asked all the more intimate contributors
+of 'Every Other Week' to come.  Beaton was absent, but Fulkerson had
+brought Miss Woodburn, with her father, and Mrs. Leighton and Alma, to
+fill up, as he said.  Mela was much present, and was official with the
+arrangement of the flowers and the welcome of the guests.  She imparted
+this impersonality to her reception of Kendricks, whom Fulkerson met in
+the outer hall with his party, and whom he presented in whisper to them
+all.  Kendricks smiled under his breath, as it were, and was then mutely
+and seriously polite to the Leightons.  Alma brought a little bunch of
+flowers, which were lost in those which Dryfoos had ordered to be
+unsparingly provided.
+
+It was a kind of satisfaction to Mela to have Miss Vance come, and
+reassuring as to how it would look to have the funeral there; Miss Vance
+would certainly not have come unless it had been all right; she had come,
+and had sent some Easter lilies.
+
+"Ain't Christine coming down?"  Fulkerson asked Mela.
+
+"No, she ain't a bit well, and she ain't been, ever since Coonrod died.
+I don't know, what's got over her," said Mela.  She added, "Well, I
+should 'a' thought Mr. Beaton would 'a' made out to 'a' come!"
+
+"Beaton's peculiar," said Fulkerson.  "If he thinks you want him he takes
+a pleasure in not letting you have him."
+
+"Well, goodness knows, I don't want him," said the girl.
+
+Christine kept her room, and for the most part kept her bed; but there
+seemed nothing definitely the matter with her, and she would not let them
+call a doctor.  Her mother said she reckoned she was beginning to feel
+the spring weather, that always perfectly pulled a body down in New York;
+and Mela said if being as cross as two sticks was any sign of spring-
+fever, Christine had it bad.  She was faithfully kind to her, and
+submitted to all her humors, but she recompensed herself by the freest
+criticism of Christine when not in actual attendance on her.  Christine
+would not suffer Mrs. Mandel to approach her, and she had with her father
+a sullen submission which was not resignation.  For her, apparently,
+Conrad had not died, or had died in vain.
+
+"Pshaw!" said Mela, one morning when she came to breakfast, "I reckon if
+we was to send up an old card of Mr. Beaton's she'd rattle down-stairs
+fast enough.  If she's sick, she's love-sick.  It makes me sick to see
+her."
+
+Mela was talking to Mrs. Mandel, but her father looked up from his plate
+and listened.  Mela went on: "I don't know what's made the fellow quit
+comun'.  But he was an aggravatun' thing, and no more dependable than
+water.  It's just like Air.  Fulkerson said, if he thinks you want him
+he'll take a pleasure in not lettun' you have him.  I reckon that's
+what's the matter with Christine.  I believe in my heart the girl 'll die
+if she don't git him."
+
+Mela went on to eat her breakfast with her own good appetite.  She now
+always came down to keep her father company, as she said, and she did her
+best to cheer and comfort him.  At least she kept the talk going, and she
+had it nearly all to herself, for Mrs.  Mandel was now merely staying on
+provisionally, and, in the absence of any regrets or excuses from
+Christine, was looking ruefully forward to the moment when she must leave
+even this ungentle home for the chances of the ruder world outside.
+
+The old man said nothing at table, but, when Mela went up to see if she
+could do anything for Christine, he asked Mrs. Mandel again about all the
+facts of her last interview with Beaton.
+
+She gave them as fully as she could remember them, and the old man made
+no comment on them.  But he went out directly after, and at the 'Every
+Other Week' office he climbed the stairs to Fulkerson's room and asked
+for Beaton's address.  No one yet had taken charge of Conrad's work, and
+Fulkerson was running the thing himself, as he said, till he could talk
+with Dryfoos about it.  The old man would not look into the empty room
+where he had last seen his son alive; he turned his face away and hurried
+by the door.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+The course of public events carried Beaton's private affairs beyond the
+reach of his simple first intention to renounce his connection with
+'Every Other Week.'  In fact, this was not perhaps so simple as it
+seemed, and long before it could be put in effect it appeared still
+simpler to do nothing about the matter--to remain passive and leave the
+initiative to Dryfoos, to maintain the dignity of unconsciousness and let
+recognition of any change in the situation come from those who had caused
+the change.  After all, it was rather absurd to propose making a purely
+personal question the pivot on which his relations with 'Every Other
+Week' turned.  He took a hint from March's position and decided that he
+did not know Dryfoos in these relations; he knew only Fulkerson, who had
+certainly had nothing to do with Mrs. Mandel's asking his intentions.
+As he reflected upon this he became less eager to look Fulkerson up and
+make the magazine a partner of his own sufferings.  This was the soberer
+mood to which Beaton trusted that night even before he slept, and he
+awoke fully confirmed in it.  As he examined the offence done him in the
+cold light of day, he perceived that it had not come either from Mrs.
+Mandel, who was visibly the faltering and unwilling instrument of it,
+or from Christine, who was altogether ignorant of it, but from Dryfoos,
+whom he could not hurt by giving up his place.  He could only punish
+Fulkerson by that, and Fulkerson was innocent.  Justice and interest
+alike dictated the passive course to which Beaton inclined; and he
+reflected that he might safely leave the punishment of Dryfoos to
+Christine, who would find out what had happened, and would be able to
+take care of herself in any encounter of tempers with her father.
+
+Beaton did not go to the office during the week that followed upon this
+conclusion; but they were used there to these sudden absences of his,
+and, as his work for the time was in train, nothing was made of his
+staying away, except the sarcastic comment which the thought of him was
+apt to excite in the literary department.  He no longer came so much to
+the Leightons, and Fulkerson was in no state of mind to miss any one
+there except Miss Woodburn, whom he never missed.  Beaton was left, then,
+unmolestedly awaiting the course of destiny, when he read in the morning
+paper, over his coffee at Maroni's, the deeply scare-headed story of
+Conrad's death and the clubbing of Lindau.  He probably cared as little
+for either of them as any man that ever saw them; but he felt a shock,
+if not a pang, at Conrad's fate, so out of keeping with his life and
+character.  He did not know what to do; and he did nothing.  He was not
+asked to the funeral, but he had not expected that, and, when Fulkerson
+brought him notice that Lindau was also to be buried from Dryfoos's
+house, it was without his usual sullen vindictiveness that he kept away.
+In his sort, and as much as a man could who was necessarily so much taken
+up with himself, he was sorry for Conrad's father; Beaton had a peculiar
+tenderness for his own father, and he imagined how his father would feel
+if it were he who had been killed in Conrad's place, as it might very
+well have been; he sympathized with himself in view of the possibility;
+and for once they were mistaken who thought him indifferent and merely
+brutal in his failure to appear at Lindau's obsequies.
+
+He would really have gone if he had known how to reconcile his presence
+in that house with the terms of his effective banishment from it; and he
+was rather forgivingly finding himself wronged in the situation, when
+Dryfoos knocked at the studio door the morning after Lindau's funeral.
+Beaton roared out, "Come in!" as he always did to a knock if he had not
+a model; if he had a model he set the door slightly ajar, and with his
+palette on his thumb frowned at his visitor and told him he could not
+come in.  Dryfoos fumbled about for the knob in the dim passageway
+outside, and Beaton, who had experience of people's difficulties with it,
+suddenly jerked the door open.  The two men stood confronted, and at
+first sight of each other their quiescent dislike revived.  Each would
+have been willing to turn away from the other, but that was not possible.
+Beaton snorted some sort of inarticulate salutation, which Dryfoos did
+not try to return; he asked if he could see him alone for a minute or
+two, and Beaton bade him come in, and swept some paint-blotched rags from
+the chair which he told him to take.  He noticed, as the old man sank
+tremulously into it, that his movement was like that of his own father,
+and also that he looked very much like Christine.  Dryfoos folded his
+hands tremulously on the top of his horn-handled stick, and he was rather
+finely haggard, with the dark hollows round his black eyes and the fall
+of the muscles on either side of his chin.  He had forgotten to take his
+soft, wide-brimmed hat off; and Beaton felt a desire to sketch him just
+as he sat.
+
+Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from the dreary absence into
+which he fell at first.  "Young man," he began, "maybe I've come here on
+a fool's errand," and Beaton rather fancied that beginning.
+
+But it embarrassed him a little, and he said, with a shy glance aside, "I
+don't know what you mean."
+"I reckon," Dryfoos answered, quietly, "you got your notion, though.
+I set that woman on to speak to you the way she done.  But if there was
+anything wrong in the way she spoke, or if you didn't feel like she had
+any right to question you up as if we suspected you of anything mean, I
+want you to say so."
+
+Beaton said nothing, and the old man went on.
+
+"I ain't very well up in the ways of the world, and I don't pretend to
+be.  All I want is to be fair and square with everybody.  I've made
+mistakes, though, in my time--" He stopped, and Beaton was not proof
+against the misery of his face, which was twisted as with some strong
+physical ache.  "I don't know as I want to make any more, if I can help
+it.  I don't know but what you had a right to keep on comin', and if you
+had I want you to say so.  Don't you be afraid but what I'll take it in
+the right way.  I don't want to take advantage of anybody, and I don't
+ask you to say any more than that."
+
+Beaton did not find the humiliation of the man who had humiliated him so
+sweet as he could have fancied it might be.  He knew how it had come
+about, and that it was an effect of love for his child; it did not matter
+by what ungracious means she had brought him to know that he loved her
+better than his own will, that his wish for her happiness was stronger
+than his pride; it was enough that he was now somehow brought to give
+proof of it.  Beaton could not be aware of all that dark coil of
+circumstance through which Dryfoos's present action evolved itself;
+the worst of this was buried in the secret of the old man's heart, a worm
+of perpetual torment.  What was apparent to another was that he was
+broken by the sorrow that had fallen upon him, and it was this that
+Beaton respected and pitied in his impulse to be frank and kind in his
+answer.
+
+"No, I had no right to keep coming to your house in the way I did,
+unless--unless I meant more than I ever said."  Beaton added: "I don't
+say that what you did was usual--in this country, at any rate; but I
+can't say you were wrong.  Since you speak to me about the matter, it's
+only fair to myself to say that a good deal goes on in life without much
+thinking of consequences.  That's the way I excuse myself."
+
+"And you say Mrs. Mandel done right?"  asked Dryfoos, as if he wished
+simply to be assured of a point of etiquette.
+
+"Yes, she did right.  I've nothing to complain of."
+
+"That's all I wanted to know," said Dryfoos; but apparently he had not
+finished, and he did not go, though the silence that Beaton now kept gave
+him a chance to do so.  He began a series of questions which had no
+relation to the matter in hand, though they were strictly personal to
+Beaton.  "What countryman are you?"  he asked, after a moment.
+
+"What countryman?"  Beaton frowned back at him.
+
+"Yes, are you an American by birth?"
+
+"Yes; I was born in Syracuse."
+
+"Protestant?"
+
+"My father is a Scotch Seceder."
+
+"What business is your father in?"
+
+Beaton faltered and blushed; then he answered:
+
+"He's in the monument business, as he calls it.  He's a tombstone
+cutter."  Now that he was launched, Beaton saw no reason for not
+declaring, "My father's always been a poor man, and worked with his own
+hands for his living."  He had too slight esteem socially for Dryfoos to
+conceal a fact from him that he might have wished to blink with others.
+
+"Well, that's right," said Dryfoos.  "I used to farm it myself.  I've got
+a good pile of money together, now.  At first it didn't come easy; but
+now it's got started it pours in and pours in; it seems like there was no
+end to it.  I've got well on to three million; but it couldn't keep me
+from losin' my son.  It can't buy me back a minute of his life; not all
+the money in the world can do it!"
+
+He grieved this out as if to himself rather than to Beaton, who, scarcely
+ventured to say, "I know--I am very sorry--"
+
+"How did you come," Dryfoos interrupted, "to take up paintin'?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Beaton, a little scornfully.  "You don't.
+take a thing of that kind up, I fancy.  I always wanted to paint."
+
+"Father try to stop you?"
+
+"No.  It wouldn't have been of any use.  Why--"
+
+"My son, he wanted to be a preacher, and I did stop him or I thought I
+did.  But I reckon he was a preacher, all the same, every minute of his
+life.  As you say, it ain't any use to try to stop a thing like that.
+I reckon if a child has got any particular bent, it was given to it;
+and it's goin' against the grain, it's goin' against the law, to try to
+bend it some other way.  There's lots of good business men, Mr. Beaton,
+twenty of 'em to every good preacher?"
+
+"I imagine more than twenty," said Beaton, amused and touched through his
+curiosity as to what the old man was driving at by the quaint simplicity
+of his speculations.
+
+"Father ever come to the city?"
+
+"No; he never has the time; and my mother's an invalid."
+
+"Oh! Brothers and sisters?"
+
+"Yes; we're a large family."
+
+"I lost two little fellers--twins," said Dryfoos, sadly.  "But we hain't
+ever had but just the five.  Ever take portraits?"
+
+"Yes," said Beaton, meeting this zigzag in the queries as seriously as
+the rest.  "I don't think I am good at it."
+
+Dryfoos got to his feet.  "I wish you'd paint a likeness of my son.
+You've seen him plenty of times.  We won't fight about the price, don't
+you be afraid of that."
+
+Beaton was astonished, and in a mistaken way he was disgusted.  He saw
+that Dryfoos was trying to undo Mrs. Mandel's work practically, and get
+him to come again to his house; that he now conceived of the offence
+given him as condoned, and wished to restore the former situation.  He
+knew that he was attempting this for Christine's sake, but he was not the
+man to imagine that Dryfoos was trying not only to tolerate him, but to
+like him; and, in fact, Dryfoos was not wholly conscious himself of this
+end.  What they both understood was that Dryfoos was endeavoring to get
+at Beaton through Conrad's memory; but with one this was its dedication
+to a purpose of self sacrifice, and with the other a vulgar and shameless
+use of it.
+
+"I couldn't do it," said Beaton.  "I couldn't think of attempting it."
+
+"Why not?"  Dryfoos persisted.  "We got some photographs of him; he
+didn't like to sit very well; but his mother got him to; and you know how
+he looked."
+
+"I couldn't do it--I couldn't.  I can't even consider it.  I'm very
+sorry.  I would, if it were possible.  But it isn't possible."
+
+"I reckon if you see the photographs once"
+
+"It isn't that, Mr. Dryfoos.  But I'm not in the way of that kind of
+thing any more."
+
+"I'd give any price you've a mind to name--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't the money!" cried Beaton, beginning to lose control of
+himself.
+
+The old man did not notice him.  He sat with his head fallen forward, and
+his chin resting on his folded hands.  Thinking of the portrait, he saw
+Conrad's face before him, reproachful, astonished, but all gentle as it
+looked when Conrad caught his hand that day after he struck him; he heard
+him say, "Father!" and the sweat gathered on his forehead.  "Oh, my God!"
+he groaned.  "No; there ain't anything I can do now."
+
+Beaton did not know whether Dryfoos was speaking to him or not.  He
+started toward him.  "Are you ill?"
+
+"No, there ain't anything the matter," said the old man.  "But I guess
+I'll lay down on your settee a minute."  He tottered with Beaton's help
+to the aesthetic couch covered with a tiger-skin, on which Beaton had
+once thought of painting a Cleopatra; but he could never get the right
+model.  As the old man stretched himself out on it, pale and suffering,
+he did not look much like a Cleopatra, but Beaton was struck with his
+effectiveness, and the likeness between him and his daughter; she would
+make a very good Cleopatra in some ways.  All the time, while these
+thoughts passed through his mind, he was afraid Dryfoos would die.
+The old man fetched his breath in gasps, which presently smoothed and
+lengthened into his normal breathing.  Beaton got him a glass of wine,
+and after tasting it he sat up.
+
+"You've got to excuse me," he said, getting back to his characteristic
+grimness with surprising suddenness, when once he began to recover
+himself.  "I've been through a good deal lately; and sometimes it ketches
+me round the heart like a pain."
+
+In his life of selfish immunity from grief, Beaton could not understand
+this experience that poignant sorrow brings; he said to himself that
+Dryfoos was going the way of angina pectoris; as he began shuffling off
+the tiger-skin he said: "Had you better get up?  Wouldn't you like me to
+call a doctor?"
+
+"I'm all right, young man."  Dryfoos took his hat and stick from him, but
+he made for the door so uncertainly that Beaton put his hand under his
+elbow and helped him out, and down the stairs, to his coupe.
+
+"Hadn't you better let me drive home with you?"  he asked.
+
+"What?"  said Dryfoos, suspiciously.
+
+Beaton repeated his question.
+
+"I guess I'm able to go home alone," said Dryfoos, in a surly tone, and
+he put his head out of the window and called up "Home!" to the driver,
+who immediately started off and left Beaton standing beside the
+curbstone.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Beaton wasted the rest of the day in the emotions and speculations which
+Dryfoos's call inspired.  It was not that they continuously occupied him,
+but they broke up the train of other thoughts, and spoiled him for work;
+a very little spoiled Beaton for work; he required just the right mood
+for work.  He comprehended perfectly well that Dryfoos had made him that
+extraordinary embassy because he wished him to renew his visits, and he
+easily imagined the means that had brought him to this pass.  From what
+he knew of that girl he did not envy her father his meeting with her when
+he must tell her his mission had failed.  But had it failed?  When Beaton
+came to ask himself this question, he could only perceive that he and
+Dryfoos had failed to find any ground of sympathy, and had parted in the
+same dislike with which they had met.  But as to any other failure, it
+was certainly tacit, and it still rested with him to give it effect.
+He could go back to Dryfoos's house, as freely as before, and it was
+clear that he was very much desired to come back.  But if he went back it
+was also clear that he must go back with intentions more explicit than
+before, and now he had to ask himself just how much or how little he had
+meant by going there.  His liking for Christine had certainly not
+increased, but the charm, on the other hand, of holding a leopardess in
+leash had not yet palled upon him.  In his life of inconstancies, it was
+a pleasure to rest upon something fixed, and the man who had no control
+over himself liked logically enough to feel his control of some one else.
+The fact cannot other wise be put in terms, and the attraction which
+Christine Dryfoos had for him, apart from this, escapes from all terms,
+as anything purely and merely passional must.  He had seen from the first
+that she was a cat, and so far as youth forecasts such things, he felt
+that she would be a shrew.  But he had a perverse sense of her beauty,
+and he knew a sort of life in which her power to molest him with her
+temper could be reduced to the smallest proportions, and even broken to
+pieces.  Then the consciousness of her money entered.  It was evident
+that the old man had mentioned his millions in the way of a hint to him
+of what he might reasonably expect if he would turn and be his son-in-
+law.  Beaton did not put it to himself in those words; and in fact his
+cogitations were not in words at all.  It was the play of cognitions,
+of sensations, formlessly tending to the effect which can only be very
+clumsily interpreted in language.  But when he got to this point in them,
+Beaton rose to magnanimity and in a flash of dramatic reverie disposed of
+a part of Dryfoos's riches in placing his father and mother, and his
+brothers and sisters, beyond all pecuniary anxiety forever.  He had no
+shame, no scruple in this, for he had been a pensioner upon others ever
+since a Syracusan amateur of the arts had detected his talent and given
+him the money to go and study abroad.  Beaton had always considered the
+money a loan, to be repaid out of his future success; but he now never
+dreamt of repaying it; as the man was rich, he had even a contempt for
+the notion of repaying him; but this did not prevent him from feeling
+very keenly the hardships he put his father to in borrowing money from
+him, though he never repaid his father, either.  In this reverie he saw
+himself sacrificed in marriage with Christine Dryfoos, in a kind of
+admiring self-pity, and he was melted by the spectacle of the dignity
+with which he suffered all the lifelong trials ensuing from his
+unselfishness.  The fancy that Alma Leighton came bitterly to regret him,
+contributed to soothe and flatter him, and he was not sure that Margaret.
+Vance did not suffer a like loss in him.
+
+There had been times when, as he believed, that beautiful girl's high
+thoughts had tended toward him; there had been looks, gestures, even
+words, that had this effect to him, or that seemed to have had it; and
+Beaton saw that he might easily construe Mrs. Horn's confidential appeal
+to him to get Margaret interested in art again as something by no means
+necessarily offensive, even though it had been made to him as to a master
+of illusion.  If Mrs. Horn had to choose between him and the life of good
+works to which her niece was visibly abandoning herself, Beaton could not
+doubt which she would choose; the only question was how real the danger
+of a life of good works was.
+
+As he thought of these two girls, one so charming and the other so
+divine, it became indefinitely difficult to renounce them for Christine
+Dryfoos, with her sultry temper and her earthbound ideals.  Life had been
+so flattering to Beaton hitherto that he could not believe them both
+finally indifferent; and if they were not indifferent, perhaps he did not
+wish either of them to be very definite.  What he really longed for was
+their sympathy; for a man who is able to walk round quite ruthlessly on
+the feelings of others often has very tender feelings of his own, easily
+lacerated, and eagerly responsive to the caresses of compassion.  In this
+frame Beaton determined to go that afternoon, though it was not Mrs.
+Horn's day, and call upon her in the hope of possibly seeing Miss Vance
+alone.  As he continued in it, he took this for a sign and actually went.
+It did not fall out at once as he wished, but he got Mrs. Horn to talking
+again about her niece, and Mrs. Horn again regretted that nothing could
+be done by the fine arts to reclaim Margaret from good works.
+
+"Is she at home?  Will you let me see her?"  asked Beacon, with something
+of the scientific interest of a physician inquiring for a patient whose
+symptoms have been rehearsed to him.  He had not asked for her before.
+
+"Yes, certainly," said Mrs. Horn, and she went herself to call Margaret,
+and she did not return with her.  The girl entered with the gentle grace
+peculiar to her; and Beaton, bent as he was on his own consolation,
+could not help being struck with the spiritual exaltation of her look.
+At sight of her, the vague hope he had never quite relinquished, that
+they might be something more than aesthetic friends, died in his heart.
+She wore black, as she often did; but in spite of its fashion her dress
+received a nun-like effect from the pensive absence of her face.
+"Decidedly," thought Beaton, "she is far gone in good works."
+
+But he rose, all the same, to meet her on the old level, and he began at
+once to talk to her of the subject he had been discussing with her aunt.
+He said frankly that they both felt she had unjustifiably turned her back
+upon possibilities which she ought not to neglect.
+
+"You know very well," she answered, "that I couldn't do anything in that
+way worth the time I should waste on it.  Don't talk of it, please.
+I suppose my aunt has been asking you to say this, but it's no use.
+I'm sorry it's no use, she wishes it so much; but I'm not sorry
+otherwise.  You can find the pleasure at least of doing good work in it;
+but I couldn't find anything in it but a barren amusement.  Mr. Wetmore
+is right; for me, it's like enjoying an opera, or a ball."
+
+"That's one of Wetmore's phrases.  He'd sacrifice anything to them."
+
+She put aside the whole subject with a look.  "You were not at Mr.
+Dryfoos's the other day.  Have you seen them, any of them, lately?"
+
+"I haven't been there for some time, no," said Beaton, evasively.
+But he thought if he was to get on to anything, he had better be candid.
+"Mr. Dryfoos was at my studio this morning.  He's got a queer notion.
+He wants me to paint his son's portrait."
+
+She started.  "And will you--"
+
+"No, I couldn't do such a thing.  It isn't in my way.  I told him so.
+His son had a beautiful face an antique profile; a sort of early
+Christian type; but I'm too much of a pagan for that sort of thing."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yes," Beaton continued, not quite liking her assent after he had invited
+it.  He had his pride in being a pagan, a Greek, but it failed him in her
+presence, now; and he wished that she had protested he was none.  "He was
+a singular creature; a kind of survival; an exile in our time and place.
+I don't know: we don't quite expect a saint to be rustic; but with all
+his goodness Conrad Dryfoos was a country person.  If he were not dying
+for a cause you could imagine him milking."  Beaton intended a contempt
+that came from the bitterness of having himself once milked the family
+cow.
+
+His contempt did not reach Miss Vance.  "He died for a cause," she said.
+"The holiest."
+
+"Of labor?"
+
+"Of peace.  He was there to persuade the strikers to be quiet and go
+home."
+
+"I haven't been quite sure," said Beaton.  "But in any case he had no
+business there.  The police were on hand to do the persuading."
+
+"I can't let you talk so!" cried the girl.  "It's shocking!  Oh, I know
+it's the way people talk, and the worst is that in the sight of the world
+it's the right way.  But the blessing on the peacemakers is not for the
+policemen with their clubs."
+
+Beaton saw that she was nervous; he made his reflection that she was
+altogether too far gone in good works for the fine arts to reach her;
+he began to think how he could turn her primitive Christianity to the
+account of his modern heathenism.  He had no deeper design than to get
+flattered back into his own favor far enough to find courage for some
+sort of decisive step.  In his heart he was trying to will whether he
+should or should not go back to Dryfoos's house.  It could not be from
+the caprice that had formerly taken him; it must be from a definite
+purpose; again he realized this.  "Of course; you are right," he said.
+"I wish I could have answered that old man differently.  I fancy he was
+bound up in his son, though he quarrelled with him, and crossed him.  But
+I couldn't do it; it wasn't possible."  He said to himself that if she
+said "No," now, he would be ruled by her agreement with him; and if she
+disagreed with him, he would be ruled still by the chance, and would go
+no more to the Dryfooses'.  He found himself embarrassed to the point of
+blushing when she said nothing, and left him, as it were, on his own
+hands.  "I should like to have given him that comfort; I fancy he hasn't
+much comfort in life; but there seems no comfort in me."
+
+He dropped his head in a fit attitude for compassion; but she poured no
+pity upon it.
+
+"There is no comfort for us in ourselves," she said.  "It's hard to get
+outside; but there's only despair within.  When we think we have done
+something for others, by some great effort, we find it's all for our own
+vanity."
+
+"Yes," said Beaton.  "If I could paint pictures for righteousness' sake,
+I should have been glad to do Conrad Dryfoos for his father.  I felt
+sorry for him.  Did the rest seem very much broken up?  You saw them
+all?"
+
+"Not all.  Miss Dryfoos was ill, her sister said.  It's hard to tell how
+much people suffer.  His mother seemed bewildered.  The younger sister is
+a simple creature; she looks like him; I think she must have something of
+his spirit."
+
+"Not much spirit of any kind, I imagine," said Beaton.  "But she's
+amiably material.  Did they say Miss Dryfoos was seriously ill?"
+
+"No.  I supposed she might be prostrated by her brother's death."
+
+"Does she seem that kind of person to you, Miss Vance?"  asked Beaton.
+
+"I don't know.  I haven't tried to see so much of them as I might, the
+past winter.  I was not sure about her when I met her; I've never seen
+much of people, except in my own set, and the--very poor.  I have been
+afraid I didn't understand her.  She may have a kind of pride that would
+not let her do herself justice."
+
+Beaton felt the unconscious dislike in the endeavor of praise.  "Then she
+seems to you like a person whose life--its trials, its chances--would
+make more of than she is now?"
+
+"I didn't say that.  I can't judge of her at all; but where we don't
+know, don't you think we ought to imagine the best?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Beaton.  "I didn't know but what I once said of them might
+have prejudiced you against them.  I have accused myself of it."  He
+always took a tone of conscientiousness, of self-censure, in talking with
+Miss Vance; he could not help it.
+
+"Oh no.  And I never allowed myself to form any judgment of her.  She is
+very pretty, don't you think, in a kind of way?"
+
+"Very."
+
+"She has a beautiful brunette coloring: that floury white and the
+delicate pink in it.  Her eyes are beautiful."
+
+"She's graceful, too," said Beaton.  "I've tried her in color; but I
+didn't make it out."
+
+"I've wondered sometimes," said Miss Vance, "whether that elusive quality
+you find in some people you try to paint doesn't characterize them all
+through.  Miss Dryfoos might be ever so much finer and better than we
+would find out in the society way that seems the only way."
+
+"Perhaps," said Beaton, gloomily; and he went away profoundly discouraged
+by this last analysis of Christine's character.  The angelic
+imperviousness of Miss Vance to properties of which his own wickedness
+was so keenly aware in Christine might have made him laugh, if it had not
+been such a serious affair with him.  As it was, he smiled to think how
+very differently Alma Leighton would have judged her from Miss Vance's
+premises.  He liked that clear vision of Alma's even when it pierced his
+own disguises.  Yes, that was the light he had let die out, and it might
+have shone upon his path through life.  Beaton never felt so poignantly
+the disadvantage of having on any given occasion been wanting to his own
+interests through his self-love as in this.  He had no one to blame but
+himself for what had happened, but he blamed Alma for what might happen
+in the future because she shut out the way of retrieval and return.  When
+be thought of the attitude she had taken toward him, it seemed
+incredible, and he was always longing to give her a final chance to
+reverse her final judgment.  It appeared to him that the time had come
+for this now, if ever.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+While we are still young we feel a kind of pride, a sort of fierce
+pleasure, in any important experience, such as we have read of or heard
+of in the lives of others, no matter how painful.  It was this pride,
+this pleasure, which Beaton now felt in realizing that the toils of fate
+were about him, that between him and a future of which Christine Dryfoos
+must be the genius there was nothing but the will, the mood, the fancy of
+a girl who had not given him the hope that either could ever again be in
+his favor.  He had nothing to trust to, in fact, but his knowledge that
+he had once had them all; she did not deny that; but neither did she
+conceal that he had flung away his power over them, and she had told him
+that they never could be his again.  A man knows that he can love and
+wholly cease to love, not once merely, but several times; he recognizes
+the fact in regard to himself, both theoretically and practically; but in
+regard to women he cherishes the superstition of the romances that love
+is once for all, and forever.  It was because Beaton would not believe
+that Alma Leighton, being a woman, could put him out of her heart after
+suffering him to steal into it, that he now hoped anything from her, and
+she had been so explicit when they last spoke of that affair that he did
+not hope much.  He said to himself that he was going to cast himself on
+her mercy, to take whatever chance of life, love, and work there was in
+her having the smallest pity on him.  If she would have none, then there
+was but one thing he could do: marry Christine and go abroad.  He did not
+see how he could bring this alternative to bear upon Alma; even if she
+knew what he would do in case of a final rejection, he had grounds for
+fearing she would not care; but he brought it to bear upon himself, and
+it nerved him to a desperate courage.  He could hardly wait for evening
+to come, before he went to see her; when it came, it seemed to have come
+too soon.  He had wrought himself thoroughly into the conviction that he
+was in earnest, and that everything depended upon her answer to him, but
+it was not till he found himself in her presence, and alone with her,
+that he realized the truth of his conviction.  Then the influences of her
+grace, her gayety, her arch beauty, above all, her good sense, penetrated
+his soul like a subtle intoxication, and he said to himself that he was
+right; he could not live without her; these attributes of hers were what
+he needed to win him, to cheer him, to charm him, to guide him.  He
+longed so to please her, to ingratiate himself with her, that he
+attempted to be light like her in his talk, but lapsed into abysmal
+absences and gloomy recesses of introspection.
+
+"What are you laughing at?"  he asked, suddenly starting from one of
+these.
+
+"What you are thinking of."
+
+"It's nothing to laugh at.  Do you know what I'm thinking of?"
+
+"Don't tell, if it's dreadful."
+
+"Oh, I dare say you wouldn't think it's dreadful," he said, with
+bitterness.  "It's simply the case of a man who has made a fool of
+himself and sees no help of retrieval in himself."
+
+"Can any one else help a man unmake a fool of himself?"  she asked, with
+a smile.
+
+"Yes.  In a case like this."
+
+"Dear me! This is very interesting."
+
+She did not ask him what the case was, but he was launched now, and he
+pressed on.  "I am the man who has made a fool of himself--"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"And you can help me out if you will.  Alma, I wish you could see me as I
+really am."
+
+"Do you, Mr. Beacon?  Perhaps I do."
+
+"No; you don't.  You formulated me in a certain way, and you won't allow
+for the change that takes place in every one.  You have changed; why
+shouldn't I?"
+
+"Has this to do with your having made a fool of yourself?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh! Then I don't see how you have changed."
+
+She laughed, and he too, ruefully.  "You're cruel.  Not but what I
+deserve your mockery.  But the change was not from the capacity of making
+a fool of myself.  I suppose I shall always do that more or less--unless
+you help me.  Alma! Why can't you have a little compassion?  You know
+that I must always love you."
+
+"Nothing makes me doubt that like your saying it, Mr. Beaton.  But now
+you've broken your word--"
+
+"You are to blame for that.  You knew I couldn't keep it!"
+
+"Yes, I'm to blame.  I was wrong to let you come--after that.  And so I
+forgive you for speaking to me in that way again.  But it's perfectly
+impossible and perfectly useless for me to hear you any more on that
+subject; and so-good-bye!"
+
+She rose, and he perforce with her.  "And do you mean it?"  he asked.
+"Forever?"
+
+"Forever.  This is truly the last time I will ever see you if I can help
+it.  Oh, I feel sorry enough for you!" she said, with a glance at his
+face.  "I do believe you are in earnest.  But it's too late now.  Don't
+let us talk about it any more! But we shall, if we meet, and so,--"
+
+"And so good-bye! Well, I've nothing more to say, and I might as well
+say that.  I think you've been very good to me.  It seems to me as if you
+had been--shall I say it?--trying to give me a chance.  Is that so?"
+She dropped her eyes and did not answer.
+
+"You found it was no use! Well, I thank you for trying.  It's curious to
+think that I once had your trust, your regard, and now I haven't it.  You
+don't mind my remembering that I had?  It'll be some little consolation,
+and I believe it will be some help.  I know I can't retrieve the past
+now.  It is too late.  It seems too preposterous--perfectly lurid--that I
+could have been going to tell you what a tangle I'd got myself in, and to
+ask you to help untangle me.  I must choke in the infernal coil, but I'd
+like to have the sweetness of your pity in it--whatever it is."
+
+She put out her hand.  "Whatever it is, I do pity you; I said that."
+
+"Thank you."  He kissed the band she gave him and went.
+
+He had gone on some such terms before; was it now for the last time?  She
+believed it was.  She felt in herself a satiety, a fatigue, in which his
+good looks, his invented airs and poses, his real trouble, were all alike
+repulsive.  She did not acquit herself of the wrong of having let him
+think she might yet have liked him as she once did; but she had been
+honestly willing to see whether she could.  It had mystified her to find
+that when they first met in New York, after their summer in St.  Barnaby,
+she cared nothing for him; she had expected to punish him for his
+neglect, and then fancy him as before, but she did not.  More and more
+she saw him selfish and mean, weak-willed, narrow-minded, and hard-
+hearted; and aimless, with all his talent.  She admired his talent in
+proportion as she learned more of artists, and perceived how uncommon it
+was; but she said to herself that if she were going to devote herself to
+art, she would do it at first-hand.  She was perfectly serene and happy
+in her final rejection of Beaton; he had worn out not only her fancy, but
+her sympathy, too.
+
+This was what her mother would not believe when Alma reported the
+interview to her; she would not believe it was the last time they should
+meet; death itself can hardly convince us that it is the last time of
+anything, of everything between ourselves and the dead.  "Well, Alma,"
+she said, "I hope you'll never regret what you've done."
+
+"You may be sure I shall not regret it.  If ever I'm low-spirited about
+anything, I'll think of giving Mr. Beaton his freedom, and that will
+cheer me up."
+
+"And don't you expect to get married?  Do you intend to be an old maid?"
+demanded her mother, in the bonds of the superstition women have so long
+been under to the effect that every woman must wish to get married, if
+for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid.
+
+"Well, mamma," said Alma, "I intend being a young one for a few years
+yet; and then I'll see.  If I meet the right person, all well and good;
+if not, not.  But I shall pick and choose, as a man does; I won't merely
+be picked and chosen."
+
+"You can't help yourself; you may be very glad if you are picked and
+chosen."
+
+"What nonsense, mamma! A girl can get any man she wants, if she goes
+about.  it the right way.  And when my 'fated fairy prince' comes along,
+I shall just simply make furious love to him and grab him.  Of course,
+I shall make a decent pretence of talking in my sleep.  I believe it's
+done that way more than half the time.  The fated fairy prince wouldn't
+see the princess in nine cases out of ten if she didn't say something;
+he would go mooning along after the maids of honor."
+
+Mrs. Leighton tried to look unspeakable horror; but she broke down and
+laughed.  "Well, you are a strange girl, Alma."
+
+"I don't know about that.  But one thing I do know, mamma, and that is
+that Prince Beaton isn't the F. F. P. for me.  How strange you are,
+mamma!  Don't you think it would be perfectly disgusting to accept a
+person you didn't care for, and let him go on and love you and marry you?
+It's sickening."
+
+"Why, certainly, Alma.  It's only because I know you did care for him
+once--"
+
+"And now I don't.  And he didn't care for me once, and now he does.  And
+so we're quits."
+
+"If I could believe--"
+
+"You had better brace up and try, mamma; for as Mr. Fulkerson says, it's
+as sure as guns.  From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot,
+he's loathsome to me; and he keeps getting loathsomer.  Ugh! Goodnight!"
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+"Well, I guess she's given him the grand bounce at last," said Fulkerson
+to March in one of their moments of confidence at the office.  "That's
+Mad's inference from appearances--and disappearances; and some little
+hints from Alma Leighton."
+
+"Well, I don't know that I have any criticisms to offer," said March.
+"It may be bad for Beaton, but it's a very good thing for Miss Leighton.
+Upon the whole, I believe I congratulate her."
+
+"Well, I don't know.  I always kind of hoped it would turn out the other
+way.  You know I always had a sneaking fondness for the fellow."
+
+"Miss Leighton seems not to have had."
+
+"It's a pity she hadn't.  I tell you, March, it ain't so easy for a girl
+to get married, here in the East, that she can afford to despise any
+chance."
+
+"Isn't that rather a low view of it?"
+
+"It's a common-sense view.  Beaton has the making of a first-rate fellow
+in him.  He's the raw material of a great artist and a good citizen.  All
+he wants is somebody to take him in hand and keep him from makin' an ass
+of himself and kickin' over the traces generally, and ridin' two or three
+horses bareback at once."
+
+"It seems a simple problem, though the metaphor is rather complicated,"
+said March.  "But talk to Miss Leighton about it.  I haven't given Beaton
+the grand bounce."
+
+He began to turn over the manuscripts on his table, and Fulkerson went
+away.  But March found himself thinking of the matter from time to time
+during the day, and he spoke to his wife about it when he went home.  She
+surprised him by taking Fulkerson's view of it.
+
+"Yes, it's a pity she couldn't have made up her mind to have him.  It's
+better for a woman to be married."
+
+"I thought Paul only went so far as to say it was well.  But what would
+become of Miss Leighton's artistic career if she married?"
+
+"Oh, her artistic career!" said Mrs. March, with matronly contempt of it.
+
+"But look here!" cried her husband.  "Suppose she doesn't like him?"
+
+"How can a girl of that age tell whether she likes any one or not?"
+
+"It seems to me you were able to tell at. that age, Isabel.  But let's
+examine this thing.  (This thing!  I believe Fulkerson is characterizing
+my whole parlance, as well as your morals.) Why shouldn't we rejoice as
+much at a non-marriage as a marriage?  When we consider the enormous
+risks people take in linking their lives together, after not half so much
+thought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I think we ought to be glad
+whenever they don't do it.  I believe that this popular demand for the
+matrimony of others comes from our novel-reading.  We get to thinking
+that there is no other happiness or good-fortune in life except marriage;
+and it's offered in fiction as the highest premium for virtue, courage,
+beauty, learning, and saving human life.  We all know it isn't.  We know
+that in reality marriage is dog cheap, and anybody can have it for the
+asking--if he keeps asking enough people.  By-and-by some fellow will
+wake up and see that a first-class story can be written from the anti-
+marriage point of view; and he'll begin with an engaged couple, and
+devote his novel to disengaging them and rendering them separately happy
+ever after in the denouement.  It will make his everlasting fortune."
+
+"Why don't you write it, Basil?"  she asked.  "It's a delightful idea.
+You could do it splendidly."
+
+He became fascinated with the notion.  He developed it in detail; but at
+the end he sighed and said: "With this 'Every Other Week' work on my
+hands, of course I can't attempt a novel.  But perhaps I sha'n't have it
+long."
+
+She was instantly anxious to know what he meant, and the novel and Miss
+Leighton's affair were both dropped out of their thoughts.  "What do you
+mean?  Has Mr. Fulkerson said anything yet?"
+
+"Not a word.  He knows no more about it than I do.  Dryfoos hasn't
+spoken, and we're both afraid to ask him.  Of course, I couldn't ask
+him."
+
+"No."
+
+"But it's pretty uncomfortable, to be kept hanging by the gills so, as
+Fulkerson says."
+
+"Yes, we don't know what to do."
+
+March and Fulkerson said the same to each other; and Fulkerson said that
+if the old man pulled out, he did not know what would happen.  He had no
+capital to carry the thing on, and the very fact that the old man had
+pulled out would damage it so that it would be hard to get anybody else
+to put it.  In the mean time Fulkerson was running Conrad's office-work,
+when he ought to be looking after the outside interests of the thing; and
+he could not see the day when he could get married.
+
+"I don't know which it's worse for, March: you or me.  I don't know,
+under the circumstances, whether it's worse to have a family or to want
+to have one.  Of course--of course! We can't hurry the old man up.  It
+wouldn't be decent, and it would be dangerous.  We got to wait."
+
+He almost decided to draw upon Dryfoos for some money; he did not need
+any, but, he said maybe the demand would act as a hint upon him.  One
+day, about a week after Alma's final rejection of Beaton, Dryfoos came
+into March's office.  Fulkerson was out, but the old man seemed not to
+have tried to see him.
+
+He put his hat on the floor by his chair, after he sat down, and looked
+at March awhile with his old eyes, which had the vitreous glitter of old.
+eyes stimulated to sleeplessness.  Then he said, abruptly, "Mr. March,
+how would you like to take this thing off my hands?"
+
+"I don't understand, exactly," March began; but of course he understood
+that Dryfoos was offering to let him have 'Every Other Week' on some
+terms or other, and his heart leaped with hope.
+
+The old man knew he understood, and so he did not explain.  He said:
+"I am going to Europe, to take my family there.  The doctor thinks it
+might do my wife some good; and I ain't very well myself, and my girls
+both want to go; and so we're goin'.  If you want to take this thing off
+my hands, I reckon I can let you have it in 'most any shape you say.
+You're all settled here in New York, and I don't suppose you want to
+break up, much, at your time of life, and I've been thinkin' whether you
+wouldn't like to take the thing."
+
+The word, which Dryfoos had now used three times, made March at last
+think of Fulkerson; he had been filled too full of himself to think of
+any one else till he had mastered the notion of such wonderful good
+fortune as seemed about falling to him.  But now he did think of
+Fulkerson, and with some shame and confusion; for he remembered how, when
+Dryfoos had last approached him there on the business of his connection
+with 'Every Other Week,' he had been very haughty with him, and told him
+that he did not know him in this connection.  He blushed to find how far
+his thoughts had now run without encountering this obstacle of etiquette.
+
+"Have you spoken to Mr. Fulkerson?"  he asked.
+
+"No, I hain't.  It ain't a question of management.  It's a question of
+buying and selling.  I offer the thing to you first.  I reckon Fulkerson
+couldn't get on very well without you."
+
+March saw the real difference in the two cases, and he was glad to see
+it, because he could act more decisively if not hampered by an obligation
+to consistency.  "I am gratified, of course, Mr. Dryfoos; extremely
+gratified; and it's no use pretending that I shouldn't be happy beyond
+bounds to get possession of 'Every Other Week.'  But I don't feel quite
+free to talk about it apart from Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Oh, all right!" said the old man, with quick offence.
+
+March hastened to say: "I feel bound to Mr. Fulkerson in every way.  He
+got me to come here, and I couldn't even seem to act without him."
+
+He put it questioningly, and the old man answered:
+
+"Yes, I can see that.  When 'll he be in?  I can wait."  But he looked
+impatient.
+
+"Very soon, now," said March, looking at his watch.  "He was only to be
+gone a moment," and while he went on to talk with Dryfoos, he wondered
+why the old man should have come first to speak with him, and whether it
+was from some obscure wish to make him reparation for displeasures in the
+past, or from a distrust or dislike of Fulkerson.  Whichever light he
+looked at it in, it was flattering.
+
+"Do you think of going abroad soon?"  he asked.
+
+"What?  Yes--I don't know--I reckon.  We got our passage engaged.  It's
+on one of them French boats.  We're goin' to Paris."
+
+"Oh! That will be interesting to the young ladies."
+
+"Yes.  I reckon we're goin' for them.  'Tain't likely my wife and me
+would want to pull up stakes at our age," said the old man, sorrowfully.
+
+"But you may find it do you good, Mr. Dryfoos," said March, with a
+kindness that was real, mixed as it was with the selfish interest he now
+had in the intended voyage.
+
+"Well, maybe, maybe," sighed the old man; and he dropped his head
+forward.  "It don't make a great deal of difference what we do or we
+don't do, for the few years left."
+
+"I hope Mrs. Dryfoos is as well as usual," said March, finding the ground
+delicate and difficult.
+
+"Middlin', middlin'," said the old man.  "My daughter Christine, she
+ain't very well."
+
+"Oh," said March.  It was quite impossible for him to affect a more
+explicit interest in the fact.  He and Dryfoos sat silent for a few
+moments, and he was vainly casting about in his thought for something
+else which would tide them over the interval till Fulkerson came, when he
+heard his step on the stairs.
+
+"Hello, hello!" he said.  "Meeting of the clans!"  It was always a
+meeting of the clans, with Fulkerson, or a field day, or an extra
+session, or a regular conclave, whenever he saw people of any common
+interest together.  "Hain't seen you here for a good while, Mr. Dryfoos.
+Did think some of running away with 'Every Other Week' one while, but
+couldn't seem to work March up to the point."
+
+He gave Dryfoos his hand, and pushed aside the papers on the corner of
+March's desk, and sat down there, and went on briskly with the nonsense
+he could always talk while he was waiting for another to develop any
+matter of business; he told March afterward that he scented business in
+the air as soon as he came into the room where he and Dryfoos were
+sitting.
+
+Dryfoos seemed determined to leave the word to March, who said, after an
+inquiring look at him, "Mr. Dryfoos has been proposing to let us have
+'Every Other Week,' Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, that's good; that suits yours truly; March & Fulkerson, publishers
+and proprietors, won't pretend it don't, if the terms are all right."
+
+"The terms," said the old man, "are whatever you want 'em.  I haven't got
+any more use for the concern--"  He gulped, and stopped; they knew what
+he was thinking of, and they looked down in pity.  He went on: "I won't
+put any more money in it; but what I've put in a'ready can stay; and you
+can pay me four per cent."
+
+He got upon his feet; and March and Fulkerson stood, too.
+
+"Well, I call that pretty white," said Fulkerson.  "It's a bargain as far
+as I'm concerned.  I suppose you'll want to talk it over with your wife,
+March?"
+
+"Yes; I shall," said March.  "I can see that it's a great chance; but I
+want to talk it over with my wife."
+
+"Well, that's right," said the old man.  "Let me hear from you tomorrow."
+
+He went out, and Fulkerson began to dance round the room.  He caught
+March about his stalwart girth and tried to make him waltz; the office-
+boy came to the door and looked on with approval.
+
+"Come, come, you idiot!" said March, rooting himself to the carpet.
+
+"It's just throwing the thing into our mouths," said Fulkerson.  "The
+wedding will be this day week.  No cards!  Teedle-lumpty-diddle! Teedle-
+lumpty-dee!  What do you suppose he means by it, March ?"  he asked,
+bringing himself soberly up, of a sudden.  "What is his little game?  Or
+is he crazy?  It don't seem like the Dryfoos of my previous
+acquaintance."
+
+"I suppose," March suggested, "that he's got money enough, so that he
+don't care for this--"
+
+"Pshaw!  You're a poet!  Don't you know that the more money that kind of
+man has got, the more he cares for money?  It's some fancy of his--like
+having Lindau's funeral at his house--By Jings, March, I believe you're
+his fancy!"
+
+"Oh, now!  Don't you be a poet, Fulkerson!"
+
+"I do!  He seemed to take a kind of shine to you from the day you
+wouldn't turn off old Lindau; he did, indeed.  It kind of shook him up.
+It made him think you had something in you.  He was deceived by
+appearances.  Look here!  I'm going round to see Mrs. March with you,
+and explain the thing to her.  I know Mrs. March!  She wouldn't believe
+you knew what you were going in for.  She has a great respect for your
+mind, but she don't think you've got any sense.  Heigh?"
+
+"All right," said March, glad of the notion; and it was really a comfort
+to have Fulkerson with him to develop all the points; and it was
+delightful to see how clearly and quickly she seized them; it made March
+proud of her.  She was only angry that they had lost any time in coming
+to submit so plain a case to her.
+
+Mr. Dryfoos might change his mind in the night, and then everything would
+be lost.  They must go to him instantly, and tell him that they accepted;
+they must telegraph him.
+
+"Might as well send a district messenger; he'd get there next week," said
+Fulkerson.  "No, no!  It 'll all keep till to-morrow, and be the better
+for it.  If he's got this fancy for March, as I say, he ain't agoing to
+change it in a single night.  People don't change their fancies for March
+in a lifetime.  Heigh?"
+
+When Fulkerson turned up very early at the office next morning, as March
+did, he was less strenuous about Dryfoos's fancy for March.  It was as if
+Miss Woodburn might have blown cold upon that theory, as something unjust
+to his own merit, for which she would naturally be more jealous than he.
+
+March told him what he had forgotten to tell him the day before, though
+he had been trying, all through their excited talk, to get it in, that
+the Dryfooses were going abroad.
+
+"Oh, ho!" cried Fulkerson.  "That's the milk in the cocoanut, is it?
+Well, I thought there must be something."
+
+But this fact had not changed Mrs. March at all in her conviction that it
+was Mr. Dryfoos's fancy for her husband which had moved him to make him
+this extraordinary offer, and she reminded him that it had first been
+made to him, without regard to Fulkerson.  "And perhaps," she went on,
+"Mr. Dryfoos has been changed---softened; and doesn't find money all in
+all any more.  He's had enough to change him, poor old man!"
+
+"Does anything from without change us?"  her husband mused aloud.  "We're
+brought up to think so by the novelists, who really have the charge of
+people's thinking, nowadays.  But I doubt it, especially if the thing
+outside is some great event, something cataclysmal, like this tremendous
+sorrow of Dryfoos's."
+
+"Then what is it that changes us?"  demanded his wife, almost angry with
+him for his heresy.
+
+"Well, it won't do to say, the Holy Spirit indwelling.  That would sound
+like cant at this day.  But the old fellows that used to say that had
+some glimpses of the truth.  They knew that it is the still, small voice
+that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.  I suppose I
+should have to say that we didn't change at all.  We develop.  There's
+the making of several characters in each of us; we are each several
+characters, and sometimes this character has the lead in us, and
+sometimes that.  From what Fulkerson has told me of Dryfoos, I should say
+he had always had the potentiality of better things in him than he has
+ever been yet; and perhaps the time has come for the good to have its
+chance.  The growth in one direction has stopped; it's begun in another;
+that's all.  The man hasn't been changed by his son's death; it stunned,
+it benumbed him; but it couldn't change him.  It was an event, like any
+other, and it had to happen as much as his being born.  It was forecast
+from the beginning of time, and was as entirely an effect of his coming
+into the world--"
+
+"Basil!  Basil!" cried his wife.  "This is fatalism!"
+
+"Then you think," he said, "that a sparrow falls to the ground without
+the will of God?"  and he laughed provokingly.  But he went on more
+soberly: "I don't know what it all means Isabel though I believe it means
+good.  What did Christ himself say?  That if one rose from the dead it
+would not avail.  And yet we are always looking for the miraculous!
+I believe that unhappy old man truly grieves for his son, whom he treated
+cruelly without the final intention of cruelty, for he loved him and
+wished to be proud of him; but I don't think his death has changed him,
+any more than the smallest event in the chain of events remotely working
+through his nature from the beginning.  But why do you think he's changed
+at all?  Because he offers to sell me Every Other Week on easy terms?
+He says himself that he has no further use for the thing; and he knows
+perfectly well that he couldn't get his money out of it now, without an
+enormous shrinkage.  He couldn't appear at this late day as the owner,
+and sell it to anybody but Fulkerson and me for a fifth of what it's cost
+him.  He can sell it to us for all it's cost him; and four per cent.  is
+no bad interest on his money till we can pay it back.  It's a good thing
+for us; but we have to ask whether Dryfoos has done us the good, or
+whether it's the blessing of Heaven.  If it's merely the blessing of
+Heaven, I don't propose being grateful for it."
+
+March laughed again, and his wife said, "It's disgusting."
+
+"It's business," he assented.  "Business is business; but I don't say it
+isn't disgusting.  Lindau had a low opinion of it."
+
+"I think that with all his faults Mr. Dryfoos is a better man than
+Lindau," she proclaimed.
+
+"Well, he's certainly able to offer us a better thing in 'Every Other
+Week,'" said March.
+
+She knew he was enamoured of the literary finish of his cynicism, and
+that at heart he was as humbly and truly grateful as she was for the
+good-fortune opening to them.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Beaton was at his best when he parted for the last time with Alma
+Leighton, for he saw then that what had happened to him was the necessary
+consequence of what he had been, if not what he had done.  Afterward he
+lost this clear vision; he began to deny the fact; he drew upon his
+knowledge of life, and in arguing himself into a different frame of mind
+he alleged the case of different people who had done and been much worse
+things than he, and yet no such disagreeable consequence had befallen
+them.  Then he saw that it was all the work of blind chance, and he said
+to himself that it was this that made him desperate, and willing to call
+evil his good, and to take his own wherever he could find it.  There was
+a great deal that was literary and factitious and tawdry in the mood in
+which he went to see Christine Dryfoos, the night when the Marches sat
+talking their prospects over; and nothing that was decided in his
+purpose.  He knew what the drift of his mind was, but he had always
+preferred to let chance determine his events, and now since chance had
+played him such an ill turn with Alma, he left it the whole
+responsibility.  Not in terms, but in effect, this was his thought as he
+walked on up-town to pay the first of the visits which Dryfoos had
+practically invited him to resume.  He had an insolent satisfaction in
+having delayed it so long; if he was going back he was going back on his
+own conditions, and these were to be as hard and humiliating as he could
+make them.  But this intention again was inchoate, floating, the stuff of
+an intention, rather than intention; an expression of temperament
+chiefly.
+
+He had been expected before that.  Christine had got out of Mela that her
+father had been at Beaton's studio; and then she had gone at the old man
+and got from him every smallest fact of the interview there.  She had
+flung back in his teeth the good-will toward herself with which he had
+gone to Beaton.  She was furious with shame and resentment; she told him
+he had made bad worse, that he had made a fool of himself to no end; she
+spared neither his age nor his grief-broken spirit, in which his will
+could not rise against hers.  She filled the house with her rage,
+screaming it out upon him; but when her fury was once spent, she began to
+have some hopes from what her father had done.  She no longer kept her
+bed; every evening she dressed herself in the dress Beaton admired the
+most, and sat up till a certain hour to receive him.  She had fixed a day
+in her own mind before which, if he came, she would forgive him all he
+had made her suffer: the mortification, the suspense, the despair.
+Beyond this, she had the purpose of making her father go to Europe; she
+felt that she could no longer live in America, with the double disgrace
+that had been put upon her.
+
+Beaton rang, and while the servant was coming the insolent caprice seized
+him to ask for the young ladies instead of the old man, as he had
+supposed of course he should do.  The maid who answered the bell, in the
+place of the reluctant Irishman of other days, had all his hesitation in
+admitting that the young ladies were at home.
+
+He found Mela in the drawing-room.  At sight of him she looked scared;
+but she seemed to be reassured by his calm.  He asked if he was not to
+have the pleasure of seeing Miss Dryfoos, too; and Mela said she reckoned
+the girl had gone up-stairs to tell her.  Mela was in black, and Beaton
+noted how well the solid sable became her rich red-blonde beauty; he
+wondered what the effect would be with Christine.
+
+But she, when she appeared, was not in mourning.  He fancied that she
+wore the lustrous black silk, with the breadths of white Venetian lace
+about the neck which he had praised, because he praised it.  Her cheeks
+burned with a Jacqueminot crimson; what should be white in her face was
+chalky white.  She carried a plumed ostrich fan, black and soft, and
+after giving him her hand, sat down and waved it to and fro slowly, as he
+remembered her doing the night they first met.  She had no ideas, except
+such as related intimately to herself, and she had no gabble, like Mela;
+and she let him talk.  It was past the day when she promised herself she
+would forgive him; but as he talked on she felt all her passion for him
+revive, and the conflict of desires, the desire to hate, the desire to
+love, made a dizzying whirl in her brain.  She looked at him, half
+doubting whether he was really there or not.  He had never looked so
+handsome, with his dreamy eyes floating under his heavy overhanging hair,
+and his pointed brown beard defined against his lustrous shirtfront.  His
+mellowly modulated, mysterious voice lulled her; when Mela made an errand
+out of the room, and Beaton crossed to her and sat down by her, she
+shivered.
+
+"Are you cold?"  he asked, and she felt the cruel mockery and exultant
+consciousness of power in his tone, as perhaps a wild thing feels
+captivity in the voice of its keeper.  But now, she said she would still
+forgive him if he asked her.
+
+Mela came back, and the talk fell again to the former level; but Beaton
+had not said anything that really meant what she wished, and she saw that
+he intended to say nothing.  Her heart began to burn like a fire in her
+breast.
+
+"You been tellun' him about our goun' to Europe?"  Mela asked.
+
+"No," said Christine, briefly, and looking at the fan spread out on her
+lap.
+
+Beaton asked when; and then he rose, and said if it was so soon, he
+supposed he should not see them again, unless he saw them in Paris; he
+might very likely run over during the summer.  He said to himself that he
+had given it a fair trial with Christine, and he could not make it go.
+
+Christine rose, with a kind of gasp; and mechanically followed him to the
+door of the drawing-room; Mela came, too; and while he was putting on his
+overcoat, she gurgled and bubbled in good-humor with all the world.
+Christine stood looking at him, and thinking how still handsomer he was
+in his overcoat; and that fire burned fiercer in her.  She felt him more
+than life to her and knew him lost, and the frenzy, that makes a woman
+kill the man she loves, or fling vitriol to destroy the beauty she cannot
+have for all hers, possessed her lawless soul.  He gave his hand to Mela,
+and said, in his wind-harp stop, "Good-bye."
+
+As he put out his hand to Christine, she pushed it aside with a scream of
+rage; she flashed at him, and with both hands made a feline pass at the
+face he bent toward her.  He sprang back, and after an instant of
+stupefaction he pulled open the door behind him and ran out into the
+street.
+
+"Well, Christine Dryfoos!" said Mela, "Sprang at him like a wild-cat!"
+
+"I, don't care," Christine shrieked.  "I'll tear his eyes out!"  She flew
+up-stairs to her own room, and left the burden of the explanation to
+Mela, who did it justice.
+
+Beaton found himself, he did not know how, in his studio, reeking with
+perspiration and breathless.  He must almost have run.  He struck a match
+with a shaking hand, and looked at his face in the glass.  He expected to
+see the bleeding marks of her nails on his cheeks, but he could see
+nothing.  He grovelled inwardly; it was all so low and coarse and vulgar;
+it was all so just and apt to his deserts.
+
+There was a pistol among the dusty bric-a-brac on the mantel which he had
+kept loaded to fire at a cat in the area.  He took it and sat looking
+into the muzzle, wishing it might go off by accident and kill him.
+It slipped through his hand and struck the floor, and there was a report;
+he sprang into the air, feeling that he had been shot.  But he found
+himself still alive, with only a burning line along his cheek, such as
+one of Christine's finger-nails might have left.
+
+He laughed with cynical recognition of the fact that he had got his
+punishment in the right way, and that his case was not to be dignified
+into tragedy.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The Marches, with Fulkerson, went to see the Dryfooses off on the French
+steamer.  There was no longer any business obligation on them to be
+civil, and there was greater kindness for that reason in the attention
+they offered.  'Every Other Week' had been made over to the joint
+ownership of March and Fulkerson, and the details arranged with a
+hardness on Dryfoos's side which certainly left Mrs. March with a sense
+of his incomplete regeneration.  Yet when she saw him there on the
+steamer, she pitied him; he looked wearied and bewildered; even his wife,
+with her twitching head, and her prophecies of evil, croaked hoarsely
+out, while she clung to Mrs. March's hand where they sat together till
+the leave-takers were ordered ashore, was less pathetic.  Mela was
+looking after both of them, and trying to cheer them in a joyful
+excitement.  "I tell 'em it's goun' to add ten years to both their
+lives," she said.  "The voyage 'll do their healths good; and then, we're
+gittun' away from that miser'ble pack o' servants that was eatun' us up,
+there in New York.  I hate the place!" she said, as if they had already
+left it.  "Yes, Mrs. Mandel's goun', too," she added, following the
+direction of Mrs. March's eyes where they noted Mrs. Mandel, speaking to
+Christine on the other side of the cabin.  "Her and Christine had a kind
+of a spat, and she was goun' to leave, but here only the other day,
+Christine offered to make it up with her, and now they're as thick as
+thieves.  Well, I reckon we couldn't very well 'a' got along without her.
+She's about the only one that speaks French in this family."
+
+Mrs. March's eyes still dwelt upon Christine's face; it was full of a
+furtive wildness.  She seemed to be keeping a watch to prevent herself
+from looking as if she were looking for some one.  "Do you know," Mrs.
+March said to her husband as they jingled along homeward in the
+Christopher Street bob-tail car, "I thought she was in love with that
+detestable Mr. Beaton of yours at one time; and that he was amusing
+himself with her."
+
+"I can bear a good deal, Isabel," said March, "but I wish you wouldn't
+attribute Beaton to me.  He's the invention of that Mr. Fulkerson of
+yours."
+
+"Well, at any rate, I hope, now, you'll both get rid of him, in the
+reforms you're going to carry out."
+
+These reforms were for a greater economy in the management of 'Every
+Other Week;' but in their very nature they could not include the
+suppression of Beaton.  He had always shown himself capable and loyal to
+the interests of the magazine, and both the new owners were glad to keep
+him.  He was glad to stay, though he made a gruff pretence of
+indifference, when they came to look over the new arrangement with him.
+In his heart he knew that he was a fraud; but at least he could say to
+himself with truth that he had not now the shame of taking Dryfoos's
+money.
+
+March and Fulkerson retrenched at several points where it had seemed
+indispensable to spend, as long as they were not spending their own:
+that was only human.  Fulkerson absorbed Conrad's department into his,
+and March found that he could dispense with Kendricks in the place of
+assistant which he had lately filled since Fulkerson had decided that
+March was overworked.  They reduced the number of illustrated articles,
+and they systematized the payment of contributors strictly according to
+the sales of each number, on their original plan of co-operation: they
+had got to paying rather lavishly for material without reference to the
+sales.
+
+Fulkerson took a little time to get married, and went on his wedding
+journey out to Niagara, and down the St. Lawrence to Quebec over the line
+of travel that the Marches had taken on their wedding journey.  He had
+the pleasure of going from Montreal to Quebec on the same boat on which
+he first met March.
+
+They have continued very good friends, and their wives are almost without
+the rivalry that usually embitters the wives of partners.  At first Mrs.
+March did not like Mrs. Fulkerson's speaking of her husband as the Ownah,
+and March as the Edito'; but it appeared that this was only a convenient
+method of recognizing the predominant quality in each, and was meant
+neither to affirm nor to deny anything.  Colonel Woodburn offered as his
+contribution to the celebration of the copartnership, which Fulkerson
+could not be prevented from dedicating with a little dinner, the story of
+Fulkerson's magnanimous behavior in regard to Dryfoos at that crucial
+moment when it was a question whether he should give up Dryfoos or give
+up March.  Fulkerson winced at it; but Mrs. March told her husband that
+now, whatever happened, she should never have any misgivings of Fulkerson
+again; and she asked him if he did not think he ought to apologize to him
+for the doubts with which he had once inspired her.  March said that he
+did not think so.
+
+The Fulkersons spent the summer at a seaside hotel in easy reach of the
+city; but they returned early to Mrs. Leighton's, with whom they are to
+board till spring, when they are going to fit up Fulkerson's bachelor
+apartment for housekeeping.  Mrs. March, with her Boston scruple, thinks
+it will be odd, living over the 'Every Other Week' offices; but there
+will be a separate street entrance to the apartment; and besides, in New
+York you may do anything.
+
+The future of the Leightons promises no immediate change.  Kendricks goes
+there a good deal to see the Fulkersons, and Mrs. Fulkerson says he comes
+to see Alma.  He has seemed taken with her ever since he first met her at
+Dryfoos's, the day of Lindau's funeral, and though Fulkerson objects to
+dating a fancy of that kind from an occasion of that kind, he justly
+argues with March that there can be no harm in it, and that we are liable
+to be struck by lightning any time.  In the mean while there is no proof
+that Alma returns Kendricks's interest, if he feels any.  She has got a
+little bit of color into the fall exhibition; but the fall exhibition is
+never so good as the spring exhibition.  Wetmore is rather sorry she has
+succeeded in this, though he promoted her success.  He says her real hope
+is in black and white, and it is a pity for her to lose sight of her
+original aim of drawing for illustration.
+
+News has come from Paris of the engagement of Christine Dryfoos.  There
+the Dryfooses met with the success denied them in New York; many American
+plutocrats must await their apotheosis in Europe, where society has them,
+as it were, in a translation.  Shortly after their arrival they were
+celebrated in the news papers as the first millionaire American family of
+natural-gas extraction who had arrived in the capital of civilization;
+and at a French watering-place Christine encountered her fate--a nobleman
+full of present debts and of duels in the past.  Fulkerson says the old
+man can manage the debtor, and Christine can look out for the duellist.
+"They say those fellows generally whip their wives.  He'd better not try
+it with Christine, I reckon, unless he's practised with a panther."
+
+One day, shortly after their return to town in the autumn from the brief
+summer outing they permitted themselves, the Marches met Margaret Vance.
+At first they did not know her in the dress of the sisterhood which she
+wore; but she smiled joyfully, almost gayly, on seeing them, and though
+she hurried by with the sister who accompanied her, and did not stay to
+speak, they felt that the peace that passeth understanding had looked at
+them from her eyes.
+
+"Well, she is at rest, there can't be any doubt of that," he said, as he
+glanced round at the drifting black robe which followed her free, nun-
+like walk.
+
+"Yes, now she can do all the good she likes," sighed his wife.
+"I wonder--I wonder if she ever told his father about her talk with poor
+Conrad that day he was shot?"
+
+"I don't know.  I don't care.  In any event, it would be right.  She did
+nothing wrong.  If she unwittingly sent him to his death, she sent him to
+die for God's sake, for man's sake."
+
+"Yes--yes.  But still--"
+
+"Well, we must trust that look of hers."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Affected absence of mind
+Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever
+Comfort of the critical attitude
+Conscience weakens to the need that isn't
+Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach
+Death is peace and pardon
+Did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him
+Does any one deserve happiness
+Does anything from without change us?
+Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation
+Favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting
+Hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death
+Indispensable
+Love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence
+Married for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid
+Nervous woes of comfortable people
+Novelists, who really have the charge of people's thinking
+People that have convictions are difficult
+Rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage
+Respect for your mind, but she don't think you've got any sense
+Superstition of the romances that love is once for all
+Superstition that having and shining is the chief good
+To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes
+Took the world as she found it, and made the best of it
+What we can be if we must
+When you look it--live it
+Would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes, v5
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, ENTIRE:
+
+Affected absence of mind
+Affectional habit
+Anticipative homesickness
+Anticipative reprisal
+Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of
+Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much
+Artists never do anything like other people
+As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting
+Ballast of her instinctive despondency
+Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever
+Brag of his wife, as a good husband always does
+But when we make that money here, no one loses it
+Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience
+Clinging persistence of such natures
+Comfort of the critical attitude
+Conscience weakens to the need that isn't
+Considerable comfort in holding him accountable
+Courage hadn't been put to the test
+Courtship
+Death is peace and pardon
+Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach
+Did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him
+Dividend: It's a chicken before it's hatched
+Does anything from without change us?
+Does any one deserve happiness
+Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation
+Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable
+Family buryin' grounds
+Favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting
+Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another
+Gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it
+Got their laugh out of too many things in life
+Had learned not to censure the irretrievable
+Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance
+Handsome pittance
+He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices
+Hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death
+Homage which those who have not pay to those who have
+Hopeful recklessness
+How much can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing
+Hurry up and git well--or something
+Hypothetical difficulty
+I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of yours
+If you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen
+Ignorant of her ignorance
+Indispensable
+It must be your despair that helps you to bear up
+It don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time
+Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs
+Life has taught him to truckle and trick
+Love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence
+Made money and do not yet know that money has made them
+Man's willingness to abide in the present
+Married for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid
+Marry for love two or three times
+Nervous woes of comfortable people
+Never-blooming shrub
+No man deserves to sufer at the hands of another
+No longer the gross appetite for novelty
+No right to burden our friends with our decisions
+Novelists, who really have the charge of people's thinking
+Patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius
+People that have convictions are difficult
+Person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it
+Poverty as hopeless as any in the world
+Rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage
+Respect for your mind, but she don't think you've got any sense
+Say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him
+Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him
+Servant of those he loved
+Shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo'--its inconvenience
+Sigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdom
+Society: All its favors are really bargains
+Sorry he hadn't asked more; that's human nature
+Superstition of the romances that love is once for all
+Superstition that having and shining is the chief good
+That isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be
+Timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man
+To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes
+Took the world as she found it, and made the best of it
+Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues
+Tried to be homesick for them, but failed
+Turn to their children's opinion with deference
+Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find
+Wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit
+What we can be if we must
+When you look it--live it
+Wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do
+Without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child
+Would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase
+
+[The End]
+
+
+
+
+***********************************************************************
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+End of the Project Gutenberg etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes, Complete
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Ebook of A Hazard of New Fortunes, Complete
+#55 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: A Hazard of New Fortunes, Complete
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Edition: 11
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext #4600]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on February 13, 2002]
+[This file was last updated on March 3,2002]
+
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES ***
+
+
+
+
+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+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
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+
+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 be 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.
+
+In their search they were obliged, as March complained, to the
+acquisition of useless information in a degree unequalled in their
+experience.  They came to excel in the sad knowledge of the line at which
+respectability distinguishes itself from shabbiness.  Flattering
+advertisements took them to numbers of huge apartment-houses chiefly
+distinguishable from tenement-houses by the absence of fire-escapes on
+their facades, till Mrs. March refused to stop at any door where there
+were more than six bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes on either hand.
+Before the middle of the afternoon she decided against ratchets
+altogether, and confined herself to knobs, neatly set in the door-trim.
+Her husband was still sunk in the superstition that you can live anywhere
+you like in New York, and he would have paused at some places where her
+quicker eye caught the fatal sign of "Modes" in the ground-floor windows.
+She found that there was an east and west line beyond which they could
+not go if they wished to keep their self-respect, and that within the
+region to which they had restricted themselves there was a choice of
+streets.  At first all the New York streets looked to them ill-paved,
+dirty, and repulsive; the general infamy imparted itself in their casual
+impression to streets in no wise guilty.  But they began to notice that
+some streets were quiet and clean, and, though never so quiet and clean
+as Boston streets, that they wore an air of encouraging reform, and
+suggested a future of greater and greater domesticity.  Whole blocks of
+these downtown cross-streets seemed to have been redeemed from decay, and
+even in the midst of squalor a dwelling here and there had been seized,
+painted a dull red as to its brick-work, and a glossy black as to its
+wood-work, and with a bright brass bell-pull and door-knob and a large
+brass plate for its key-hole escutcheon, had been endowed with an effect
+of purity and pride which removed its shabby neighborhood far from it.
+Some of these houses were quite small, and imaginably within their means;
+but, as March said, some body seemed always to be living there himself,
+and the fact that none of them was to rent kept Mrs. March true to her
+ideal of a fiat.  Nothing prevented its realization so much as its
+difference from the New York ideal of a flat, which was inflexibly seven
+rooms and a bath.  One or two rooms might be at the front, the rest
+crooked and cornered backward through in creasing and then decreasing
+darkness till they reached a light bedroom or kitchen at the rear.
+It might be the one or the other, but it was always the seventh room with
+the bath; or if, as sometimes happened, it was the eighth, it was so
+after having counted the bath as one; in this case the janitor said you
+always counted the bath as one.  If the flats were advertised as having
+"all light rooms," he explained that any room with a window giving into
+the open air of a court or shaft was counted a light room.
+
+The Marches tried to make out why it was that these flats were go much
+more repulsive than the apartments which everyone lived in abroad; but
+they could only do so upon the supposition that in their European days
+they were too young, too happy, too full of the future, to notice whether
+rooms were inside or outside, light or dark, big or little, high or low.
+"Now we're imprisoned in the present," he said, "and we have to make the
+worst of it."
+
+In their despair he had an inspiration, which she declared worthy of him:
+it was to take two small flats, of four or five rooms and a bath, and
+live in both.  They tried this in a great many places, but they never
+could get two flats of the kind on the same floor where there was steam
+heat and an elevator.  At one place they almost did it.  They had
+resigned themselves to the humility of the neighborhood, to the
+prevalence of modistes and livery-stablemen (they seem to consort much in
+New York), to the garbage in the gutters and the litter of paper in the
+streets, to the faltering slats in the surrounding window-shutters and
+the crumbled brownstone steps and sills, when it turned out that one of
+the apartments had been taken between two visits they made.  Then the
+only combination left open to them was of a ground-floor flat to the
+right and a third-floor flat to the left.
+
+Still they kept this inspiration in reserve for use at the first
+opportunity.  In the mean time there were several flats which they
+thought they could almost make do: notably one where they could get an
+extra servant's room in the basement four flights down, and another where
+they could get it in the roof five flights up.  At the first the janitor
+was respectful and enthusiastic; at the second he had an effect of
+ironical pessimism.  When they trembled on the verge of taking his
+apartment, he pointed out a spot in the kalsomining of the parlor
+ceiling, and gratuitously said, Now such a thing as that he should not
+agree to put in shape unless they took the apartment for a term of years.
+The apartment was unfurnished, and they recurred to the fact that they
+wanted a furnished apartment, and made their escape.  This saved them in
+several other extremities; but short of extremity they could not keep
+their different requirements in mind, and were always about to decide
+without regard to some one of them.
+
+They went to several places twice without intending: once to that old-
+fashioned house with the pleasant colored janitor, and wandered all over
+the apartment again with a haunting sense of familiarity, and then
+recognized the janitor and laughed; and to that house with the pathetic
+widow and the pretty daughter who wished to take them to board.  They
+stayed to excuse their blunder, and easily came by the fact that the
+mother had taken the house that the girl might have a home while she was
+in New York studying art, and they hoped to pay their way by taking
+boarders.  Her daughter was at her class now, the mother concluded; and
+they encouraged her to believe that it could only be a few days till the
+rest of her scheme was realized.
+
+"I dare say we could be perfectly comfortable there," March suggested
+when they had got away.  "Now if we were truly humane we would modify our
+desires to meet their needs and end this sickening search, wouldn't we?"
+
+"Yes, but we're not truly humane," his wife answered, "or at least not in
+that sense.  You know you hate boarding; and if we went there I should
+have them on my sympathies the whole time."
+
+"I see.  And then you would take it out of me."
+
+"Then I should take it out of you.  And if you are going to be so weak,
+Basil, and let every little thing work upon you in that way, you'd better
+not come to New York.  You'll see enough misery here."
+
+"Well, don't take that superior tone with me, as if I were a child that
+had its mind set on an undesirable toy, Isabel."
+
+"Ah, don't you suppose it's because you are such a child in some respects
+that I like you, dear?"  she demanded, without relenting.
+
+"But I don't find so much misery in New York.  I don't suppose there's
+any more suffering here to the population than there is in the country.
+And they're so gay about it all.  I think the outward aspect of the place
+and the hilarity of the sky and air must get into the people's blood.
+The weather is simply unapproachable; and I don't care if it is the
+ugliest place in the world, as you say.  I suppose it is.  It shrieks and
+yells with ugliness here and there but it never loses its spirits.  That
+widow is from the country.  When she's been a year in New York she'll be
+as gay--as gay as an L road."  He celebrated a satisfaction they both had
+in the L roads.  "They kill the streets and avenues, but at least they
+partially hide them, and that is some comfort; and they do triumph over
+their prostrate forms with a savage exultation that is intoxicating.
+Those bends in the L that you get in the corner of Washington Square, or
+just below the Cooper Institute--they're the gayest things in the world.
+Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incomparably picturesque!  And the
+whole city is so," said March, "or else the L would never have got built
+here.  New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay; but, prince or
+pauper, it's gay always."
+
+"Yes, gay is the word," she admitted, with a sigh.  "But frantic.
+I can't get used to it.  They forget death, Basil; they forget death in
+New York."
+
+"Well, I don't know that I've ever found much advantage in remembering
+it."
+
+"Don't say such a thing, dearest."
+
+He could see that she had got to the end of her nervous strength for the
+present, and he proposed that they should take the Elevated road as far
+as it would carry them into the country, and shake off their nightmare of
+flat-hunting for an hour or two; but her conscience would not let her.
+She convicted him of levity equal to that of the New-Yorkers in proposing
+such a thing; and they dragged through the day.  She was too tired to
+care for dinner, and in the night she had a dream from which she woke
+herself with a cry that roused him, too.  It was something about the
+children at first, whom they had talked of wistfully before falling
+asleep, and then it was of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a
+series of sections growing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the
+monstrous articulate was quite luminous again.  She shuddered at the
+vague description she was able to give; but he asked, "Did it offer to
+bite you?"
+
+"No.  That was the most frightful thing about it; it had no mouth."
+
+March laughed.  "Why, my dear, it was nothing but a harmless New York
+flat--seven rooms and a bath."
+
+"I really believe it was," she consented, recognizing an architectural
+resemblance, and she fell asleep again, and woke renewed for the work
+before them.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but it still had interest; and
+they varied their day by taking a coupe, by renouncing advertisements,
+and by reverting to agents.  Some of these induced them to consider the
+idea of furnished houses; and Mrs. March learned tolerance for Fulkerson
+by accepting permits to visit flats and houses which had none of the
+qualifications she desired in either, and were as far beyond her means as
+they were out of the region to which she had geographically restricted
+herself.  They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand dollar
+apartments, and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothing
+to do with the rent; the higher the rent was, the more critical they were
+of the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of the richly decorated
+rooms.  They never knew whether they had deceived the janitor or not; as
+they came in a coupe, they hoped they had.
+
+They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in the
+perspective than an L road.  The fire-escapes, with their light iron
+balconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; the
+roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women's heads
+seemed to show at every window.  In the basements, over which flights of
+high stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers' shops
+abounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to bacon and
+sausages, and cobblers' and tinners' shops, and the like, in proportion
+to the small needs of a poor neighborhood.  Ash barrels lined the
+sidewalks, and garbage heaps filled the gutters; teams of all trades
+stood idly about; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the
+street, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the
+children and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women; the burly
+blue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner; a drunkard
+zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him.  It was not the abode of the
+extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world,
+transmitting itself from generation to generation, and establishing
+conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does to
+those of some incurable disease, like leprosy.
+
+The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic
+view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of tenement-
+houses; when they would have contented themselves with saying that it was
+as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence, and with wondering why
+nobody came to paint it; they would have thought they were sufficiently
+serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure to appreciate
+it, and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it here under
+their noses.  It was to the nose that the street made one of its
+strongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of the coupe.
+"Why does he take us through such a disgusting street?"  she demanded,
+with an exasperation of which her husband divined the origin.
+
+"This driver may be a philanthropist in disguise," he answered, with
+dreamy irony, "and may want us to think about the people who are not
+merely carried through this street in a coupe, but have to spend their
+whole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopes of driving out of it,
+except in a hearse.  I must say they don't seem to mind it.  I haven't
+seen a jollier crowd anywhere in New York.  They seem to have forgotten
+death a little more completely than any of their fellow-citizens, Isabel.
+And I wonder what they think of us, making this gorgeous progress through
+their midst.  I suppose they think we're rich, and hate us--if they hate
+rich people; they don't look as if they hated anybody.  Should we be as
+patient as they are with their discomfort?  I don't believe there's steam
+heat or an elevator in the whole block.  Seven rooms and a bath would be
+more than the largest and genteelest family would know what to do with.
+They wouldn't know what to do with the bath, anyway."
+
+His monologue seemed to interest his wife apart from the satirical point
+it had for themselves.  "You ought to get Mr. Fulkerson to let you work
+some of these New York sights up for Every Other Week, Basil; you could
+do them very nicely."
+
+"Yes; I've thought of that.  But don't let's leave the personal ground.
+Doesn't it make you feel rather small and otherwise unworthy when you see
+the kind of street these fellow-beings of yours live in, and then think
+how particular you are about locality and the number of bellpulls?
+I don't see even ratchets and speaking-tubes at these doors."  He craned
+his neck out of the window for a better look, and the children of
+discomfort cheered him, out of sheer good feeling and high spirits.
+"I didn't know I was so popular.  Perhaps it's a recognition of my humane
+sentiments."
+
+"Oh, it's very easy to have humane sentiments, and to satirize ourselves
+for wanting eight rooms and a bath in a good neighborhood, when we see
+how these wretched creatures live," said his wife.  "But if we shared all
+we have with them, and then settled down among them, what good would it
+do?"
+
+"Not the least in the world.  It might help us for the moment, but it
+wouldn't keep the wolf from their doors for a week; and then they would
+go on just as before, only they wouldn't be on such good terms with the
+wolf.  The only way for them is to keep up an unbroken intimacy with the
+wolf; then they can manage him somehow.  I don't know how, and I'm afraid
+I don't want to.  Wouldn't you like to have this fellow drive us round
+among the halls of pride somewhere for a little while?  Fifth Avenue or
+Madison, up-town?"
+
+"No; we've no time to waste.  I've got a place near Third Avenue, on a
+nice cross street, and I want him to take us there."  It proved that she
+had several addresses near together, and it seemed best to dismiss their
+coupe and do the rest of their afternoon's work on foot.  It came to
+nothing; she was not humbled in the least by what she had seen in the
+tenement-house street; she yielded no point in her ideal of a flat, and
+the flats persistently refused to lend themselves to it.  She lost all
+patience with them.
+
+"Oh, I don't say the flats are in the right of it," said her husband,
+when she denounced their stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a Christian
+home.  "But I'm not so sure that we are, either.  I've been thinking
+about that home business ever since my sensibilities were dragged--in a
+coupe--through that tenement-house street.  Of course, no child born and
+brought up in such a place as that could have any conception of home.
+But that's because those poor people can't give character to their
+habitations.  They have to take what they can get.  But people like us--
+that is, of our means--do give character to the average flat.  It's made
+to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so it's made for
+social show, not for family life at all.  Think of a baby in a flat!
+It's a contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of motherhood.
+The flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social life.  It's
+made to give artificial people a society basis on a little money--too
+much money, of course, for what they get.  So the cost of the building is
+put into marble halls and idiotic decoration of all kinds.  I don't.
+object to the conveniences, but none of these flats has a living-room.
+They have drawing-rooms to foster social pretence, and they have dining-
+rooms and bedrooms; but they have no room where the family can all come
+together and feel the sweetness of being a family.  The bedrooms are
+black-holes mostly, with a sinful waste of space in each.  If it were not
+for the marble halls, and the decorations, and the foolishly expensive
+finish, the houses could be built round a court, and the flats could be
+shaped something like a Pompeiian house, with small sleeping-closets--
+only lit from the outside--and the rest of the floor thrown into two or
+three large cheerful halls, where all the family life could go on, and
+society could be transacted unpretentiously.  Why, those tenements are
+better and humaner than those flats!  There the whole family lives in the
+kitchen, and has its consciousness of being; but the flat abolishes the
+family consciousness.  It's confinement without coziness; it's cluttered
+without being snug.  You couldn't keep a self-respecting cat in a flat;
+you couldn't go down cellar to get cider.  No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as
+we know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible in the Franco-
+American flat, not because it's humble, but because it's false."
+
+"Well, then," said Mrs. March, "let's look at houses."
+
+He had been denouncing the flat in the abstract, and he had not expected
+this concrete result.  But he said, "We will look at houses, then."
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+Nothing mystifies a man more than a woman's aberrations from some point
+at which he, supposes her fixed as a star.  In these unfurnished houses,
+without steam or elevator, March followed his wife about with patient
+wonder.  She rather liked the worst of them best: but she made him go
+down into the cellars and look at the furnaces; she exacted from him a
+rigid inquest of the plumbing.  She followed him into one of the cellars
+by the fitful glare of successively lighted matches, and they enjoyed a
+moment in which the anomaly of their presence there on that errand, so
+remote from all the facts of their long-established life in Boston,
+realized itself for them.
+
+"Think how easily we might have been murdered and nobody been any the
+wiser!" she said when they were comfortably outdoors again.
+
+"Yes, or made way with ourselves in an access of emotional insanity,
+supposed to have been induced by unavailing flat-hunting," he suggested.
+She fell in with the notion.  "I'm beginning to feel crazy.  But I don't
+want you to lose your head, Basil.  And I don't want you to
+sentimentalize any of the things you see in New York.  I think you were
+disposed to do it in that street we drove through.  I don't believe
+there's any real suffering--not real suffering--among those people; that
+is, it would be suffering from our point of view, but they've been used
+to it all their lives, and they don't feel their' discomfort so much."
+
+"Of course, I understand that, and I don't propose to sentimentalize
+them.  I think when people get used to a bad state of things they had
+better stick to it; in fact, they don't usually like a better state so
+well, and I shall keep that firmly in mind."
+
+She laughed with him, and they walked along the L bestridden avenue,
+exhilarated by their escape from murder and suicide in that cellar,
+toward the nearest cross town track, which they meant to take home to
+their hotel.  "Now to-night we will go to the theatre," she said, "and
+get this whole house business out of our minds, and be perfectly fresh
+for a new start in the morning."  Suddenly she clutched his arm.  "Why,
+did you see that man?"  and she signed with her head toward a decently
+dressed person who walked beside them, next the gutter, stooping over as
+if to examine it, and half halting at times.
+
+"No.  What?"
+
+"Why, I saw him pick up a dirty bit of cracker from the pavement and cram
+it into his mouth and eat it down as if he were famished.  And look! he's
+actually hunting for more in those garbage heaps!"
+
+This was what the decent-looking man with the hard hands and broken nails
+of a workman was doing-like a hungry dog.  They kept up with him, in the
+fascination of the sight, to the next corner, where he turned down the
+side street still searching the gutter.
+
+They walked on a few paces.  Then March said, "I must go after him," and
+left his wife standing.
+
+"Are you in want--hungry?"  he asked the man.
+
+The man said he could not speak English, Monsieur.
+
+March asked his question in French.
+
+The man shrugged a pitiful, desperate shrug, "Mais, Monsieur--"
+
+March put a coin in his hand, and then suddenly the man's face twisted
+up; he caught the hand of this alms-giver in both of his and clung to it.
+"Monsieur! Monsieur!" he gasped, and the tears rained down his face.
+
+His benefactor pulled himself away, shocked and ashamed, as one is by
+such a chance, and got back to his wife, and the man lapsed back into the
+mystery of misery out of which he had emerged.
+
+March felt it laid upon him to console his wife for what had happened.
+"Of course, we might live here for years and not see another case like
+that; and, of course, there are twenty places where he could have gone
+for help if he had known where to find them."
+
+"Ah, but it's the possibility of his needing the help so badly as that,"
+she answered.  "That's what I can't bear, and I shall not come to a place
+where such things are possible, and we may as well stop our house-hunting
+here at once."
+
+"Yes?  And what part of Christendom will you live in?  Such things are
+possible everywhere in our conditions."
+
+"Then we must change the conditions--"
+
+"Oh no; we must go to the theatre and forget them.  We can stop at
+Brentano's for our tickets as we pass through Union Square."
+
+"I am not going to the theatre, Basil.  I am going home to Boston to-
+night.  You can stay and find a flat."
+
+He convinced her of the absurdity of her position, and even of its
+selfishness; but she said that her mind was quite made up irrespective of
+what had happened, that she had been away from the children long enough;
+that she ought to be at home to finish up the work of leaving it.  The
+word brought a sigh.  "Ah, I don't know why we should see nothing but sad
+and ugly things now.  When we were young--"
+
+"Younger," he put in.  "We're still young."
+
+"That's what we pretend, but we know better.  But I was thinking how
+pretty and pleasant things used to be turning up all the time on our
+travels in the old days.  Why, when we were in New York here on our
+wedding journey the place didn't seem half so dirty as it does now, and
+none of these dismal things happened."
+
+"It was a good deal dirtier," he answered; "and I fancy worse in every
+way-hungrier, raggeder, more wretchedly housed.  But that wasn't the
+period of life for us to notice it.  Don't you remember, when we started
+to Niagara the last time, how everybody seemed middle-aged and
+commonplace; and when we got there there were no evident brides; nothing
+but elderly married people?"
+
+"At least they weren't starving," she rebelled.
+
+"No, you don't starve in parlor-cars and first-class hotels; but if you
+step out of them you run your chance of seeing those who do, if you're
+getting on pretty well in the forties.  If it's the unhappy who see
+unhappiness, think what misery must be revealed to people who pass their
+lives in the really squalid tenement-house streets--I don't mean
+picturesque avenues like that we passed through."
+
+"But we are not unhappy," she protested, bringing the talk back to the
+personal base again, as women must to get any good out of talk.  "We're
+really no unhappier than we were when we were young."
+
+"We're more serious."
+
+"Well, I hate it; and I wish you wouldn't be so serious, if that's what
+it brings us to."
+
+"I will be trivial from this on," said March.  "Shall we go to the Hole
+in the Ground to-night?"
+
+"I am going to Boston."
+
+"It's much the same thing.  How do you like that for triviality?  It's a
+little blasphemous, I'll allow."
+
+"It's very silly," she said.
+
+At the hotel they found a letter from the agent who had sent them the
+permit to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green's apartment.  He wrote that she had
+heard they were pleased with her apartment, and that she thought she
+could make the terms to suit.  She had taken her passage for Europe, and
+was very anxious to let the flat before she sailed.  She would call that
+evening at seven.
+
+"Mrs. Grosvenor Green!" said Mrs. March.  "Which of the ten thousand
+flats is it, Basil?"
+
+"The gimcrackery," he answered.  "In the Xenophon, you know."
+
+"Well, she may save herself the trouble.  I shall not see her.  Or yes--
+I must.  I couldn't go away without seeing what sort of creature could
+have planned that fly-away flat.  She must be a perfect--"
+
+"Parachute," March suggested.
+
+"No!  anybody so light as that couldn't come down."
+
+"Well, toy balloon."
+
+"Toy balloon will do for the present," Mrs. March admitted.  "But I feel
+that naught but herself can be her parallel for volatility."
+
+When Mrs. Grosvenor-Green's card came up they both descended to the hotel
+parlor, which March said looked like the saloon of a Moorish day-boat;
+not that he knew of any such craft, but the decorations were so Saracenic
+and the architecture so Hudson Riverish.  They found there on the grand
+central divan a large lady whose vast smoothness, placidity, and
+plumpness set at defiance all their preconceptions of Mrs. Grosvenor
+Green, so that Mrs. March distinctly paused with her card in her hand
+before venturing even tentatively to address her.  Then she was
+astonished at the low, calm voice in which Mrs. Green acknowledged
+herself, and slowly proceeded to apologize for calling.  It was not quite
+true that she had taken her passage for Europe, but she hoped soon to do
+so, and she confessed that in the mean time she was anxious to let her
+flat.  She was a little worn out with the care of housekeeping--
+Mrs. March breathed, "Oh yes!" in the sigh with which ladies recognize
+one another's martyrdom--and Mrs. Green had business abroad, and she was
+going to pursue her art studies in Paris; she drew in Mr. Ilcomb's class
+now, but the instruction was so much better in Paris; and as the
+superintendent seemed to think the price was the only objection, she had
+ventured to call.
+
+"Then we didn't deceive him in the least," thought Mrs. March, while she
+answered, sweetly: "No; we were only afraid that it would be too small
+for our family.  We require a good many rooms."  She could not forego the
+opportunity of saying, "My husband is coming to New York to take charge
+of a literary periodical, and he will have to have a room to write in,"
+which made Mrs. Green bow to March, and made March look sheepish.  "But
+we did think the apartment very charming", (It was architecturally
+charming, she protested to her conscience)," and we should have been so
+glad if we could have got into it."  She followed this with some account
+of their house-hunting, amid soft murmurs of sympathy from Mrs. Green,
+who said that she had been through all that, and that if she could have
+shown her apartment to them she felt sure that she could have explained
+it so that they would have seen its capabilities better, Mrs. March
+assented to this, and Mrs. Green added that if they found nothing exactly
+suitable she would be glad to have them look at it again; and then Mrs.
+March said that she was going back to Boston herself, but she was leaving
+Mr. March to continue the search; and she had no doubt he would be only
+too glad to see the apartment by daylight.  "But if you take it, Basil,"
+she warned him, when they were alone, "I shall simply renounce you.  I
+wouldn't live in that junk-shop if you gave it to me.  But who would have
+thought she was that kind of looking person?  Though of course I might
+have known if I had stopped to think once.  It's because the place
+doesn't express her at all that it's so unlike her.  It couldn't be like
+anybody, or anything that flies in the air, or creeps upon the earth, or
+swims in the waters under the earth.  I wonder where in the world she's
+from; she's no New-Yorker; even we can see that; and she's not quite a
+country person, either; she seems like a person from some large town,
+where she's been an aesthetic authority.  And she can't find good enough
+art instruction in New York, and has to go to Paris for it!  Well, it's
+pathetic, after all, Basil.  I can't help feeling sorry for a person who
+mistakes herself to that extent."
+
+"I can't help feeling sorry for the husband of a person who mistakes
+herself to that extent.  What is Mr. Grosvenor Green going to do in Paris
+while she's working her way into the Salon?"
+
+"Well, you keep away from her apartment, Basil; that's all I've got to
+say to you.  And yet I do like some things about her."
+
+"I like everything about her but her apartment," said March.
+
+"I like her going to be out of the country," said his wife.  "We
+shouldn't be overlooked.  And the place was prettily shaped, you can't
+deny it.  And there was an elevator and steam heat.  And the location is
+very convenient.  And there was a hall-boy to bring up cards.  The halls
+and stairs were kept very clean and nice.  But it wouldn't do.  I could
+put you a folding bed in the room where you wrote, and we could even have
+one in the parlor"
+
+"Behind a portiere?  I couldn't stand any more portieres!"
+
+"And we could squeeze the two girls into one room, or perhaps only bring
+Margaret, and put out the whole of the wash.  Basil!" she almost
+shrieked, "it isn't to be thought of!"
+
+He retorted, "I'm not thinking of it, my dear."
+
+Fulkerson came in just before they started for Mrs. March's train, to
+find out what had become of them, he said, and to see whether they had
+got anything to live in yet.
+
+"Not a thing," she said.  "And I'm just going back to Boston, and leaving
+Mr. March here to do anything he pleases about it.  He has 'carte
+blanche.'"
+
+"But freedom brings responsibility, you know, Fulkerson, and it's the
+same as if I'd no choice.  I'm staying behind because I'm left, not
+because I expect to do anything."
+
+"Is that so?"  asked Fulkerson.  "Well, we must see what can be done.  I
+supposed you would be all settled by this time, or I should have humped
+myself to find you something.  None of those places I gave you amounts to
+anything?"
+
+"As much as forty thousand others we've looked at," said Mrs. March.
+"Yes, one of them does amount to something.  It comes so near being what
+we want that I've given Mr. March particular instructions not to go near
+it."
+
+She told him about Mrs. Grosvenor Green and her flats, and at the end he
+said:
+
+"Well, well, we must look out for that.  I'll keep an eye on him, Mrs.
+March, and see that he doesn't do anything rash, and I won't leave him
+till he's found just the right thing.  It exists, of course; it must in a
+city of eighteen hundred thousand people, and the only question is where
+to find it.  You leave him to me, Mrs. March; I'll watch out for him."
+
+Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the station when he found they
+were not driving, but she bade him a peremptory good-bye at the hotel
+door.
+
+"He's very nice, Basil, and his way with you is perfectly charming.
+It's very sweet to see how really fond of you he is.  But I didn't want
+him stringing along with us up to Forty-second Street and spoiling our
+last moments together."
+
+At Third Avenue they took the Elevated for which she confessed an
+infatuation.  She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the
+world, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say
+that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it.  She now
+said that the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and
+that the fleeing intimacy you formed with people in second and third
+floor interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had
+a domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effect
+of good society with all its security and exclusiveness.  He said it was
+better than the theatre, of which it reminded him, to see those people
+through their windows: a family party of work-folk at a late tea, some of
+the men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying
+her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a
+table; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together.  What
+suggestion! what drama? what infinite interest!  At the Forty-second
+Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the track
+to the branch road for the Central Depot, and looked up and down the long
+stretch of the Elevated to north and south.  The track that found and
+lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable
+lights; the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points
+and blots of gas far and near; the architectural shapes of houses and
+churches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble
+in them, and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with
+vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam-formed an incomparable
+perspective.  They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, which
+in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles; and
+they were just to the Arachne roof spun in iron over the cross street on
+which they ran to the depot; but for the present they were mostly
+inarticulate before it.  They had another moment of rich silence when
+they paused in the gallery that leads from the Elevated station to the
+waiting-rooms in the Central Depot and looked down upon the great night
+trains lying on the tracks dim under the rain of gas-lights that starred
+without dispersing the vast darkness of the place.  What forces, what
+fates, slept in these bulks which would soon be hurling themselves north
+and south and west through the night!  Now they waited there like fabled
+monsters of Arab story ready for the magician's touch, tractable,
+reckless, will-less--organized lifelessness full of a strange semblance
+of life.
+
+The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrill of patriotic pride
+in the fact that the whole world perhaps could not afford just the like.
+Then they hurried down to the ticket-offices, and he got her a lower
+berth in the Boston sleeper, and went with her to the car.  They made the
+most of the fact that her berth was in the very middle of the car; and
+she promised to write as soon as she reached home.  She promised also
+that, having seen the limitations of New York in respect to flats, she
+would not be hard on him if he took something not quite ideal.  Only he
+must remember that it was not to be above Twentieth Street nor below
+Washington Square; it must not be higher than the third floor; it must
+have an elevator, steam heat, hail-boys, and a pleasant janitor.  These
+were essentials; if he could not get them, then they must do without.
+But he must get them.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to
+their ideals from their husbands than from themselves.  Early in their
+married life she had taken charge of him in all matters which she
+considered practical.  She did not include the business of bread-winning
+in these; that was an affair that might safely be left to his absent-
+minded, dreamy inefficiency, and she did not interfere with him there.
+But in such things as rehanging the pictures, deciding on a summer
+boarding-place, taking a seaside cottage, repapering rooms, choosing
+seats at the theatre, seeing what the children ate when she was not at
+table, shutting the cat out at night, keeping run of calls and
+invitations, and seeing if the furnace was dampered, he had failed her so
+often that she felt she could not leave him the slightest discretion in
+regard to a flat.  Her total distrust of his judgment in the matters
+cited and others like them consisted with the greatest admiration of his
+mind and respect for his character.  She often said that if he would only
+bring these to bear in such exigencies he would be simply perfect; but
+she had long given up his ever doing so.  She subjected him, therefore,
+to an iron code, but after proclaiming it she was apt to abandon him to
+the native lawlessness of his temperament.  She expected him in this
+event to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with
+considerable comfort in holding him accountable.  He learned to expect
+this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with whatever he
+did he waited patiently till she forgot her grievance and began to
+extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable.  She would almost
+admit at moments that what he had done was a very good thing, but she
+reserved the right to return in full force to her original condemnation
+of it; and she accumulated each act of independent volition in witness
+and warning against him.  Their mass oppressed but never deterred him.
+He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices, and he
+did it without any apparent recollection of his former misdeeds and their
+consequences.  There was a good deal of comedy in it all, and some
+tragedy.
+
+He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbands of his kind will
+imagine, on going back to his hotel alone.  It was, perhaps, a revulsion
+from the pain of parting; and he toyed with the idea of Mrs. Grosvenor
+Green's apartment, which, in its preposterous unsuitability, had a
+strange attraction.  He felt that he could take it with less risk than
+anything else they had seen, but he said he would look at all the other
+places in town first.  He really spent the greater part of the next day
+in hunting up the owner of an apartment that had neither steam heat nor
+an elevator, but was otherwise perfect, and trying to get him to take
+less than the agent asked.  By a curious psychical operation he was able,
+in the transaction, to work himself into quite a passionate desire for
+the apartment, while he held the Grosvenor Green apartment in the
+background of his mind as something that he could return to as altogether
+more suitable.  He conducted some simultaneous negotiation for a
+furnished house, which enhanced still more the desirability of the
+Grosvenor Green apartment.  Toward evening he went off at a tangent far
+up-town, so as to be able to tell his wife how utterly preposterous the
+best there would be as compared even with this ridiculous Grosvenor Green
+gimcrackery.  It is hard to report the processes of his sophistication;
+perhaps this, again, may best be left to the marital imagination.
+
+He rang at the last of these up-town apartments as it was falling dusk,
+and it was long before the janitor appeared.  Then the man was very
+surly, and said if he looked at the flat now he would say it was too
+dark, like all the rest.  His reluctance irritated March in proportion to
+his insincerity in proposing to look at it at all.  He knew he did not
+mean to take it under any circumstances; that he was going to use his
+inspection of it in dishonest justification of his disobedience to his
+wife; but he put on an air of offended dignity.  "If you don't wish to
+show the apartment," he said, "I don't care to see it."
+
+The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt dreaded the stairs.  He
+scratched a match on his thigh, and led the way up.  March was sorry for
+him, and he put his fingers on a quarter in his waistcoat-pocket to give
+him at parting.  At the same time, be had to trump up an objection to the
+flat.  This was easy, for it was advertised as containing ten rooms, and
+he found the number eked out with the bath-room and two large closets.
+"It's light enough," said March, "but I don't see how you make out ten
+rooms"
+
+"There's ten rooms," said the man, deigning no proof.
+
+March took his fingers off the quarter, and went down-stairs and out of
+the door without another word.  It would be wrong, it would be
+impossible, to give the man anything after such insolence.  He reflected,
+with shame, that it was also cheaper to punish than forgive him.
+
+He returned to his hotel prepared for any desperate measure, and
+convinced now that the Grosvenor Green apartment was not merely the only
+thing left for him, but was, on its own merits, the best thing in New
+York.
+
+Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading-room, and it gave March the
+curious thrill with which a man closes with temptation when he said:
+"Look here!  Why don't you take that woman's flat in the Xenophon?  She's
+been at the agents again, and they've been at me.  She likes your look--
+or Mrs. March's--and I guess you can have it at a pretty heavy discount
+from the original price.  I'm authorized to say you can have it for one
+seventy-five a month, and I don't believe it would be safe for you to
+offer one fifty."
+
+March shook his head, and dropped a mask of virtuous rejection over his
+corrupt acquiescence.  "It's too small for us--we couldn't squeeze into
+it."
+
+"Why, look here!" Fulkerson persisted.  "How many rooms do you people
+want?"
+
+"I've got to have a place to work--"
+
+"Of course! And you've got to have it at the Fifth Wheel office."
+
+"I hadn't thought of that," March began.  "I suppose I could do my work
+at the office, as there's not much writing--"
+
+"Why, of course you can't do your work at home.  You just come round with
+me now, and look at that again."
+
+"No; I can't do it."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I--I've got to dine."
+
+"All right," said Fulkerson.  "Dine with me.  I want to take you round to
+a little Italian place that I know."
+
+One may trace the successive steps of March's descent in this simple
+matter with the same edification that would attend the study of the self-
+delusions and obfuscations of a man tempted to crime.  The process is
+probably not at all different, and to the philosophical mind the kind of
+result is unimportant; the process is everything.
+
+Fulkerson led him down one block and half across another to the steps of
+a small dwelling-house, transformed, like many others, into a restaurant
+of the Latin ideal, with little or no structural change from the pattern
+of the lower middle-class New York home.  There were the corroded
+brownstone steps, the mean little front door, and the cramped entry with
+its narrow stairs by which ladies could go up to a dining-room appointed
+for them on the second floor; the parlors on the first were set about
+with tables, where men smoked cigarettes between the courses, and a
+single waiter ran swiftly to and fro with plates and dishes, and,
+exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cook beyond a slide in the back
+parlor.  He rushed at the new-comers, brushed the soiled table-cloth
+before them with a towel on his arm, covered its worst stains with a
+napkin, and brought them, in their order, the vermicelli soup, the fried
+fish, the cheese-strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast fowl
+and salad, and the wizened pear and coffee which form the dinner at such
+places.
+
+"Ah, this is nice!" said Fulkerson, after the laying of the charitable
+napkin, and he began to recognize acquaintances, some of whom he
+described to March as young literary men and artists with whom they
+should probably have to do; others were simply frequenters of the place,
+and were of all nationalities and religions apparently--at least, several
+were Hebrews and Cubans.  "You get a pretty good slice of New York here,"
+he said, "all except the frosting on top.  That you won't find much at
+Maroni's, though you will occasionally.  I don't mean the ladies ever,
+of course."  The ladies present seemed harmless and reputable-looking
+people enough, but certainly they were not of the first fashion, and,
+except in a few instances, not Americans.  "It's like cutting straight
+down through a fruitcake," Fulkerson went on, "or a mince-pie, when you
+don't know who made the pie; you get a little of everything."  He ordered
+a small flask of Chianti with the dinner, and it came in its pretty
+wicker jacket.  March smiled upon it with tender reminiscence, and
+Fulkerson laughed.  "Lights you up a little.  I brought old Dryfoos here
+one day, and he thought it was sweet-oil; that's the kind of bottle they
+used to have it in at the country drug-stores."
+
+"Yes, I remember now; but I'd totally forgotten it," said March.
+"How far back that goes!  Who's Dryfoos?"
+
+"Dryfoos?"  Fulkerson, still smiling, tore off a piece of the half-yard
+of French loaf which had been supplied them, with two pale, thin disks of
+butter, and fed it into himself.  "Old Dryfoos?  Well, of course! I call
+him old, but he ain't so very.  About fifty, or along there."
+
+"No," said March, "that isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be."
+
+"Well, I suppose you've got to know about him, anyway," said Fulkerson,
+thoughtfully.  "And I've been wondering just how I should tell you.
+Can't always make out exactly how much of a Bostonian you really are!
+Ever been out in the natural-gas country?"
+
+"No," said March.  "I've had a good deal of curiosity about it, but I've
+never been able to get away except in summer, and then we always
+preferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara and back through
+Canada, the route we took on our wedding journey.  The children like it
+as much as we do."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Fulkerson.  "Well, the natural-gas country is worth
+seeing.  I don't mean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in Northern Ohio
+and Indiana around Moffitt--that's the place in the heart of the gas
+region that they've been booming so.  Yes, you ought to see that country.
+If you haven't been West for a good many years, you haven't got any idea
+how old the country looks.  You remember how the fields used to be all
+full of stumps?"
+
+"I should think so."
+
+"Well, you won't see any stumps now.  All that country out around Moffitt
+is just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as old as England.  You
+know how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented a
+stump-extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen.  Now they
+just touch 'em off with a little dynamite, and they've got a cellar dug
+and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it.
+Only they haven't got any use for kindling in that country--all gas.
+I rode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-
+planting time, and every once in a while I'd come to a place with a piece
+of ragged old stove-pipe stickin' up out of the ground, and blazing away
+like forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it any
+more than if it was spring violets.  Horses didn't notice it, either.
+Well, they've always known about the gas out there; they say there are
+places in the woods where it's been burning ever since the country was
+settled.
+
+"But when you come in sight of Moffitt--my, oh, my!  Well, you come in
+smell of it about as soon.  That gas out there ain't odorless, like the
+Pittsburg gas, and so it's perfectly safe; but the smell isn't bad--about
+as bad as the finest kind of benzine.  Well, the first thing that strikes
+you when you come to Moffitt is the notion that there has been a good
+warm, growing rain, and the town's come up overnight.  That's in the
+suburbs, the annexes, and additions.  But it ain't shabby--no shanty-farm
+business; nice brick and frame houses, some of 'em Queen Anne style, and
+all of 'em looking as if they had come to stay.  And when you drive up
+from the depot you think everybody's moving.  Everything seems to be
+piled into the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up
+everywhere.  You know the kind of street Main Street always used to be in
+our section--half plank-road and turnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a
+lot of stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story higher
+than the back, and here and there a decent building with the gable end to
+the public; and a court-house and jail and two taverns and three or four
+churches.  Well, they're all there in Moffitt yet, but architecture has
+struck it hard, and they've got a lot of new buildings that needn't be
+ashamed of themselves anywhere; the new court-house is as big as St.
+Peter's, and the Grand Opera-house is in the highest style of the art.
+You can't buy a lot on that street for much less than you can buy a lot
+in New York--or you couldn't when the boom was on; I saw the place just
+when the boom was in its prime.  I went out there to work the newspapers
+in the syndicate business, and I got one of their men to write me a real
+bright, snappy account of the gas; and they just took me in their arms
+and showed me everything.  Well, it was wonderful, and it was beautiful,
+too!  To see a whole community stirred up like that was--just like a big
+boy, all hope and high spirits, and no discount on the remotest future;
+nothing but perpetual boom to the end of time--I tell you it warmed your
+blood.  Why, there were some things about it that made you think what a
+nice kind of world this would be if people ever took hold together,
+instead of each fellow fighting it out on his own hook, and devil take
+the hindmost.  They made up their minds at Moffitt that if they wanted
+their town to grow they'd got to keep their gas public property.  So they
+extended their corporation line so as to take in pretty much the whole
+gas region round there; and then the city took possession of every well
+that was put down, and held it for the common good.  Anybody that's a
+mind to come to Moffitt and start any kind of manufacture can have all
+the gas he wants free; and for fifteen dollars a year you can have all
+the gas you want to heat and light your private house.  The people hold
+on to it for themselves, and, as I say, it's a grand sight to see a whole
+community hanging together and working for the good of all, instead of
+splitting up into as many different cut-throats as there are able-bodied
+citizens.  See that fellow?"  Fulkerson broke off, and indicated with a
+twirl of his head a short, dark, foreign-looking man going out of the
+door.  "They say that fellow's a Socialist.  I think it's a shame they're
+allowed to come here.  If they don't like the way we manage our affairs
+let 'em stay at home," Fulkerson continued.  "They do a lot of mischief,
+shooting off their mouths round here.  I believe in free speech and all
+that; but I'd like to see these fellows shut up in jail and left to jaw
+one another to death.  We don't want any of their poison."
+
+March did not notice the vanishing Socialist.  He was watching, with a
+teasing sense of familiarity, a tall, shabbily dressed, elderly man, who
+had just come in.  He had the aquiline profile uncommon among Germans,
+and yet March recognized him at once as German.  His long, soft beard and
+mustache had once been fair, and they kept some tone of their yellow in
+the gray to which they had turned.  His eyes were full, and his lips and
+chin shaped the beard to the noble outline which shows in the beards the
+Italian masters liked to paint for their Last Suppers.  His carriage was
+erect and soldierly, and March presently saw that he had lost his left
+hand.  He took his place at a table where the overworked waiter found
+time to cut up his meat and put everything in easy reach of his right
+hand.
+
+"Well," Fulkerson resumed, "they took me round everywhere in Moffitt, and
+showed me their big wells--lit 'em up for a private view, and let me hear
+them purr with the soft accents of a mass-meeting of locomotives.  Why,
+when they let one of these wells loose in a meadow that they'd piped it
+into temporarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from the mouth of
+the pipe and blew it over half an acre of ground.  They say when they let
+one of their big wells burn away all winter before they had learned how
+to control it, that well kept up a little summer all around it; the grass
+stayed green, and the flowers bloomed all through the winter.  I don't
+know whether it's so or not.  But I can believe anything of natural gas.
+My! but it was beautiful when they turned on the full force of that well
+and shot a roman candle into the gas--that's the way they light it--and a
+plume of fire about twenty feet wide and seventy-five feet high, all red
+and yellow and violet, jumped into the sky, and that big roar shook the
+ground under your feet! You felt like saying:
+
+"'Don't trouble yourself; I'm perfectly convinced.  I believe in Moffitt.'
+We-e-e-ll!" drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath, "that's where I met
+old Dryfoos."
+
+"Oh yes!--Dryfoos," said March.  He observed that the waiter had brought
+the old one-handed German a towering glass of beer.
+
+"Yes," Fulkerson laughed.  "We've got round to Dryfoos again.  I thought
+I could cut a long story short, but I seem to be cutting a short story
+long.  If you're not in a hurry, though--"
+
+"Not in the least.  Go on as long as you like."
+
+"I met him there in the office of a real-estate man--speculator, of
+course; everybody was, in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, and public-
+spirited as all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me about him.
+Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, about three or four miles
+out of Moffitt, and he'd lived there pretty much all his life; father was
+one of the first settlers.  Everybody knew he had the right stuff in him,
+but he was slower than molasses in January, like those Pennsylvania
+Dutch.  He'd got together the largest and handsomest farm anywhere around
+there; and he was making money on it, just like he was in some business
+somewhere; he was a very intelligent man; he took the papers and kept
+himself posted; but he was awfully old-fashioned in his ideas.  He hung
+on to the doctrines as well as the dollars of the dads; it was a real
+thing with him.  Well, when the boom began to come he hated it awfully,
+and he fought it.  He used to write communications to the weekly
+newspaper in Moffitt--they've got three dailies there now--and throw cold
+water on the boom.  He couldn't catch on no way.  It made him sick to
+hear the clack that went on about the gas the whole while, and that
+stirred up the neighborhood and got into his family.  Whenever he'd hear
+of a man that had been offered a big price for his land and was going to
+sell out and move into town, he'd go and labor with him and try to talk
+him out of it, and tell him how long his fifteen or twenty thousand would
+last him to live on, and shake the Standard Oil Company before him, and
+try to make him believe it wouldn't be five years before the Standard
+owned the whole region.
+
+"Of course, he couldn't do anything with them.  When a man's offered a
+big price for his farm, he don't care whether it's by a secret emissary
+from the Standard Oil or not; he's going to sell and get the better of
+the other fellow if he can.  Dryfoos couldn't keep the boom out of has
+own family even.  His wife was with him.  She thought whatever he said
+and did was just as right as if it had been thundered down from Sinai.
+But the young folks were sceptical, especially the girls that had been
+away to school.  The boy that had been kept at home because he couldn't
+be spared from helping his father manage the farm was more like him, but
+they contrived to stir the boy up--with the hot end of the boom, too.
+So when a fellow came along one day and offered old Dryfoos a cool
+hundred thousand for his farm, it was all up with Dryfoos.  He'd 'a'
+liked to 'a' kept the offer to himself and not done anything about it,
+but his vanity wouldn't let him do that; and when he let it out in his
+family the girls outvoted him.  They just made him sell.
+
+"He wouldn't sell all.  He kept about eighty acres that was off in some
+piece by itself, but the three hundred that had the old brick house on
+it, and the big barn--that went, and Dryfoos bought him a place in
+Moffitt and moved into town to live on the interest of his money.  Just
+What he had scolded and ridiculed everybody else for doing.  Well, they
+say that at first he seemed like he would go crazy.  He hadn't anything
+to do.  He took a fancy to that land-agent, and he used to go and set in
+his office and ask him what he should do.  'I hain't got any horses, I
+hain't got any cows, I hain't got any pigs, I hain't got any chickens.
+I hain't got anything to do from sun-up to sun-down.'  The fellow said
+the tears used to run down the old fellow's cheeks, and if he hadn't been
+so busy himself he believed he should 'a' cried, too.  But most o' people
+thought old Dryfoos was down in the mouth because he hadn't asked more
+for his farm, when he wanted to buy it back and found they held it at a
+hundred and fifty thousand.  People couldn't believe he was just homesick
+and heartsick for the old place.  Well, perhaps he was sorry he hadn't
+asked more; that's human nature, too.
+
+"After a while something happened.  That land-agent used to tell Dryfoos
+to get out to Europe with his money and see life a little, or go and live
+in Washington, where he could be somebody; but Dryfoos wouldn't, and he
+kept listening to the talk there, and all of a sudden he caught on.  He
+came into that fellow's one day with a plan for cutting up the eighty
+acres he'd kept into town lots; and he'd got it all plotted out so-well,
+and had so many practical ideas about it, that the fellow was astonished.
+He went right in with him, as far as Dryfoos would let him, and glad of
+the chance; and they were working the thing for all it was worth when I
+struck Moffitt.  Old Dryfoos wanted me to go out and see the Dryfoos &
+Hendry Addition--guess he thought maybe I'd write it up; and he drove me
+out there himself.  Well, it was funny to see a town made: streets driven
+through; two rows of shadetrees, hard and soft, planted; cellars dug and
+houses put up-regular Queen Anne style, too, with stained glass-all at
+once.  Dryfoos apologized for the streets because they were hand-made;
+said they expected their street-making machine Tuesday, and then they
+intended to push things."
+
+Fulkerson enjoyed the effect of his picture on March for a moment, and
+then went on: "He was mighty intelligent, too, and he questioned me up
+about my business as sharp as I ever was questioned; seemed to kind of
+strike his fancy; I guess he wanted to find out if there was any money in
+it.  He was making money, hand over hand, then; and he never stopped
+speculating and improving till he'd scraped together three or four
+hundred thousand dollars, they said a million, but they like round
+numbers at Moffitt, and I guess half a million would lay over it
+comfortably and leave a few thousands to spare, probably.  Then he came
+on to New York."
+
+Fulkerson struck a match against the ribbed side of the porcelain cup
+that held the matches in the centre of the table, and lit a cigarette,
+which he began to smoke, throwing his head back with a leisurely effect,
+as if he had got to the end of at least as much of his story as he meant
+to tell without prompting.
+
+March asked him the desired question.  "What in the world for?"
+
+Fulkerson took out his cigarette and said, with a smile: "To spend his
+money, and get his daughters into the old Knickerbocker society.  Maybe
+he thought they were all the same kind of Dutch."
+
+"And has he succeeded?"
+
+"Well, they're not social leaders yet.  But it's only a question of time
+--generation or two--especially if time's money, and if Every Other Week
+is the success it's bound to be."
+
+"You don't mean to say, Fulkerson," said March, with a half-doubting,
+half-daunted laugh, "that he's your Angel?"
+
+"That's what I mean to say," returned Fulkerson.  "I ran onto him in
+Broadway one day last summer.  If you ever saw anybody in your life;
+you're sure to meet him in Broadway again, sooner or later.  That's the
+philosophy of the bunco business; country people from the same
+neighborhood are sure to run up against each other the first time they
+come to New York.  I put out my hand, and I said, 'Isn't this Mr. Dryfoos
+from Moffitt?'  He didn't seem to have any use for my hand; he let me
+keep it, and he squared those old lips of his till his imperial stuck
+straight out.  Ever see Bernhardt in 'L'Etrangere'?  Well, the American
+husband is old Dryfoos all over; no mustache; and hay-colored chin-
+whiskers cut slanting froze the corners of his mouth.  He cocked his
+little gray eyes at me, and says he: 'Yes, young man; my name is Dryfoos,
+and I'm from Moffitt.  But I don't want no present of Longfellow's Works,
+illustrated; and I don't want to taste no fine teas; but I know a
+policeman that does; and if you're the son of my old friend Squire
+Strohfeldt, you'd better get out.'  'Well, then,' said I, 'how would you
+like to go into the newspaper syndicate business?'  He gave another look
+at me, and then he burst out laughing, and he grabbed my hand, and he
+just froze to it.  I never saw anybody so glad.
+
+"Well, the long and the short of it was that I asked him round here to
+Maroni's to dinner; and before we broke up for the night we had settled
+the financial side of the plan that's brought you to New York.  I can
+see,'t said Fulkerson, who had kept his eyes fast on March's face, "that
+you don't more than half like the idea of Dryfoos.  It ought to give you
+more confidence in the thing than you ever had.  You needn't be afraid,"
+he added, with some feeling, "that I talked Dryfoos into the thing for my
+own advantage."
+
+"Oh, my dear Fulkerson!" March protested, all the more fervently because
+he was really a little guilty.
+
+"Well, of course not! I didn't mean you were.  But I just happened to
+tell him what I wanted to go into when I could see my way to it, and he
+caught on of his own accord.  The fact is," said Fulkerson, "I guess I'd
+better make a clean breast of it, now I'm at it, Dryfoos wanted to get
+something for that boy of his to do.  He's in railroads himself, and he's
+in mines and other things, and he keeps busy, and he can't bear to have
+his boy hanging round the house doing nothing, like as if he was a girl.
+I told him that the great object of a rich man was to get his son into
+just that fix, but he couldn't seem to see it, and the boy hated it
+himself.  He's got a good head, and he wanted to study for the ministry
+when they were all living together out on the farm; but his father had
+the old-fashioned ideas about that.  You know they used to think that any
+sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of; but they wanted
+the good timber for business; and so the old man wouldn't let him.
+You'll see the fellow; you'll like him; he's no fool, I can tell you; and
+he's going to be our publisher, nominally at first and actually when I've
+taught him the ropes a little."
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+Fulkerson stopped and looked at March, whom he saw lapsing into a serious
+silence.  Doubtless he divined his uneasiness with the facts that had
+been given him to digest.  He pulled out his watch and glanced at it.
+"See here, how would you like to go up to Forty-sixth street with me, and
+drop in on old Dryfoos?  Now's your chance.  He's going West tomorrow,
+and won't be back for a month or so.  They'll all be glad to see you, and
+you'll understand things better when you've seen him and his family.  I
+can't explain."
+
+March reflected a moment.  Then he said, with a wisdom that surprised
+him, for he would have liked to yield to the impulse of his curiosity:
+"Perhaps we'd better wait till Mrs. March comes down, and let things take
+the usual course.  The Dryfoos ladies will want to call on her as the
+last-comer, and if I treated myself 'en garcon' now, and paid the first
+visit, it might complicate matters."
+
+"Well, perhaps you're right," said Fulkerson.  "I don't know much about
+these things, and I don't believe Ma Dryfoos does, either."  He was on
+his legs lighting another cigarette.  "I suppose the girls are getting
+themselves up in etiquette, though.  Well, then, let's have a look at the
+'Every Other Week' building, and then, if you like your quarters there,
+you can go round and close for Mrs. Green's flat."
+
+March's dormant allegiance to his wife's wishes had been roused by his
+decision in favor of good social usage.  "I don't think I shall take the
+flat," he said.
+
+"Well, don't reject it without giving it another look, anyway.  Come on!"
+
+He helped March on with his light overcoat, and the little stir they made
+for their departure caught the notice of the old German; he looked up
+from his beer at them.  March was more than ever impressed with something
+familiar in his face.  In compensation for his prudence in regard to the
+Dryfooses he now indulged an impulse.  He stepped across to where the old
+man sat, with his bald head shining like ivory under the gas-jet, and his
+fine patriarchal length of bearded mask taking picturesque lights and
+shadows, and put out his hand to him.
+
+"Lindau! Isn't this Mr. Lindau?"
+
+The old man lifted himself slowly to his feet with mechanical politeness,
+and cautiously took March's hand.  "Yes, my name is Lindau," he said,
+slowly, while he scanned March's face.  Then he broke into a long cry.
+"Ah-h-h-h-h, my dear poy! my gong friendt! my-my--Idt is Passil Marge,
+not zo?  Ah, ha, ha, ha! How gladt I am to zee you! Why, I am gladt! And
+you rememberdt me?  You remember Schiller, and Goethe, and Uhland?  And
+Indianapolis?  You still lif in Indianapolis?  It sheers my hardt to zee
+you.  But you are lidtle oldt, too?  Tventy-five years makes a
+difference.  Ah, I am gladt! Dell me, idt is Passil Marge, not zo?"
+
+He looked anxiously into March's face, with a gentle smile of mixed hope
+and doubt, and March said: "As sure as it's Berthold Lindau, and I guess
+it's you.  And you remember the old times?  You were as much of a boy as
+I was, Lindau.  Are you living in New York?  Do you recollect how you
+tried to teach me to fence?  I don't know how to this day, Lindau.  How
+good you were, and how patient! Do you remember how we used to sit up in
+the little parlor back of your printing-office, and read Die Rauber and
+Die Theilung der Erde and Die Glocke?  And Mrs. Lindau?  Is she with--"
+
+"Deadt--deadt long ago.  Right after I got home from the war--tventy
+years ago.  But tell me, you are married?  Children?  Yes! Goodt! And how
+oldt are you now?"
+
+"It makes me seventeen to see you, Lindau, but I've got a son nearly as
+old."
+
+"Ah, ha, ha! Goodt! And where do you lif?"
+
+"Well, I'm just coming to live in New York," March said, looking over at
+Fulkerson, who had been watching his interview with the perfunctory smile
+of sympathy that people put on at the meeting of old friends.  "I want to
+introduce you to my friend Mr. Fulkerson.  He and I are going into a
+literary enterprise here."
+
+"Ah! zo?"  said the old man, with polite interest.  He took Fulkerson's
+proffered hand, and they all stood talking a few moments together.
+
+Then Fulkerson said, with another look at his watch, "Well, March, we're
+keeping Mr. Lindau from his dinner."
+
+"Dinner!" cried the old man.  "Idt's better than breadt and meadt to see
+Mr. Marge!"
+
+"I must be going, anyway," said March.  "But I must see you again soon,
+Lindau.  Where do you live?  I want a long talk."
+
+"And I.  You will find me here at dinner-time."  said the old man.  "It
+is the best place"; and March fancied him reluctant to give another
+address.
+
+To cover his consciousness he answered, gayly: "Then, it's 'auf
+wiedersehen' with us.  Well!"
+
+"Also!" The old man took his hand, and made a mechanical movement with
+his mutilated arm, as if he would have taken it in a double clasp.  He
+laughed at himself.  "I wanted to gif you the other handt, too, but I
+gafe it to your gountry a goodt while ago."
+
+"To my country?"  asked March, with a sense of pain, and yet lightly, as
+if it were a joke of the old man's.  "Your country, too, Lindau?"
+
+The old man turned very grave, and said, almost coldly, "What gountry
+hass a poor man got, Mr. Marge?"
+
+"Well, you ought to have a share in the one you helped to save for us
+rich men, Lindau," March returned, still humoring the joke.
+
+The old man smiled sadly, but made no answer as he sat down again.
+
+"Seems to be a little soured," said Fulkerson, as they went down the
+steps.  He was one of those Americans whose habitual conception of life
+is unalloyed prosperity.  When any experience or observation of his went
+counter to it he suffered--something like physical pain.  He eagerly
+shrugged away the impression left upon his buoyancy by Lindau, and added
+to March's continued silence, "What did I tell you about meeting every
+man in New York that you ever knew before?"
+
+I never expected to meat Lindau in the world again," said March, more to
+himself than to Fulkerson.  "I had an impression that he had been killed
+in the war.  I almost wish he had been."
+
+"Oh, hello, now!" cried Fulkerson.
+
+March laughed, but went on soberly: "He was a man predestined to
+adversity, though.  When I first knew him out in Indianapolis he was
+starving along with a sick wife and a sick newspaper.  It was before the
+Germans had come over to the Republicans generally, but Lindau was
+fighting the anti-slavery battle just as naturally at Indianapolis in
+1858 as he fought behind the barricades at Berlin in 1848.  And yet he
+was always such a gentle soul!  And so generous!  He taught me German for
+the love of it; he wouldn't spoil his pleasure by taking a cent from me;
+he seemed to get enough out of my being young and enthusiastic, and out
+of prophesying great things for me.  I wonder what the poor old fellow is
+doing here, with that one hand of his?"
+
+"Not amassing a very 'handsome pittance,' I guess, as Artemus Ward would
+say," said Fulkerson, getting back some of his lightness.  "There are
+lots of two-handed fellows in New York that are not doing much better, I
+guess.  Maybe he gets some writing on the German papers."
+
+"I hope so.  He's one of the most accomplished men!  He used to be a
+splendid musician--pianist--and knows eight or ten languages."
+
+"Well, it's astonishing," said Fulkerson, "how much lumber those Germans
+can carry around in their heads all their lives, and never work it up
+into anything.  It's a pity they couldn't do the acquiring, and let out
+the use of their learning to a few bright Americans.  We could make
+things hum, if we could arrange 'em that way."
+
+He talked on, unheeded by March, who went along half-consciously
+tormented by his lightness in the pensive memories the meeting with
+Lindau had called up.  Was this all that sweet, unselfish nature could
+come to?  What a homeless old age at that meagre Italian table d'hote,
+with that tall glass of beer for a half-hour's oblivion!  That shabby
+dress, that pathetic mutilation!  He must have a pension, twelve dollars
+a month, or eighteen, from a grateful country.  But what else did he eke
+out with?
+
+"Well, here we are," said Fulkerson, cheerily.  He ran up the steps
+before March, and opened the carpenter's temporary valve in the door
+frame, and led the way into a darkness smelling sweetly of unpainted
+wood-work and newly dried plaster; their feat slipped on shavings and
+grated on sand.  He scratched a match, and found a candle, and then
+walked about up and down stairs, and lectured on the advantages of the
+place.  He had fitted up bachelor apartments for himself in the house,
+and said that he was going to have a flat to let on the top floor.
+"I didn't offer it to you because I supposed you'd be too proud to live
+over your shop; and it's too small, anyway; only five rooms."
+
+"Yes, that's too small," said March, shirking the other point.
+
+"Well, then, here's the room I intend for your office," said Fulkerson,
+showing him into a large back parlor one flight up.  "You'll have it
+quiet from the street noises here, and you can be at home or not, as you
+please.  There'll be a boy on the stairs to find out.  Now, you see, this
+makes the Grosvenor Green flat practicable, if you want it."
+
+March felt the forces of fate closing about him and pushing him to a
+decision.  He feebly fought them off till he could have another look at
+the flat.  Then, baked and subdued still more by the unexpected presence
+of Mrs. Grosvenor Green herself, who was occupying it so as to be able to
+show it effectively, he took it.  He was aware more than ever of its
+absurdities; he knew that his wife would never cease to hate it; but he
+had suffered one of those eclipses of the imagination to which men of his
+temperament are subject, and into which he could see no future for his
+desires.  He felt a comfort in irretrievably committing himself, and
+exchanging the burden of indecision for the burden of responsibility.
+
+"I don't know," said Fulkerson, as they walked back to his hotel
+together, "but you might fix it up with that lone widow and her pretty
+daughter to take part of their house here."  He seemed to be reminded of
+it by the fact of passing the house, and March looked up at its dark
+front.  He could not have told exactly why be felt a pang of remorse at
+the sight, and doubtless it was more regret for having taken the
+Grosvenor Green flat than for not having taken the widow's rooms.  Still,
+he could not forget her wistfulness when his wife and he were looking at
+them, and her disappointment when they decided against them.  He had
+toyed, in, his after-talk to Mrs. March, with a sort of hypothetical
+obligation they had to modify their plans so as to meet the widow's want
+of just such a family as theirs; they had both said what a blessing it
+would be to her, and what a pity they could not do it; but they had
+decided very distinctly that they could not.  Now it seemed to him that
+they might; and he asked himself whether he had not actually departed as
+much from their ideal as if he had taken board with the widow.  Suddenly
+it seemed to him that his wife asked him this, too.
+
+"I reckon," said Fulkerson, "that she could have arranged to give you
+your meals in your rooms, and it would have come to about the same thing
+as housekeeping."
+
+"No sort of boarding can be the same as house-keeping," said March.
+"I want my little girl to have the run of a kitchen, and I want the whole
+family to have the moral effect of housekeeping.  It's demoralizing to
+board, in every way; it isn't a home, if anybody else takes the care of
+it off your hands."
+
+"Well, I suppose so," Fulkerson assented; but March's words had a hollow
+ring to himself, and in his own mind he began to retaliate his
+dissatisfaction upon Fulkerson.
+
+He parted from him on the usual terms outwardly, but he felt obscurely
+abused by Fulkerson in regard to the Dryfooses, father and son.  He did
+not know but Fulkerson had taken an advantage of him in allowing him to
+commit himself to their enterprise with out fully and frankly telling him
+who and what his backer was; he perceived that with young Dryfoos as the
+publisher and Fulkerson as the general director of the paper there might
+be very little play for his own ideas of its conduct.  Perhaps it was the
+hurt to his vanity involved by the recognition of this fact that made him
+forget how little choice he really had in the matter, and how, since he
+had not accepted the offer to edit the insurance paper, nothing remained
+for him but to close with Fulkerson.  In this moment of suspicion and
+resentment he accused Fulkerson of hastening his decision in regard to
+the Grosvenor Green apartment; he now refused to consider it a decision,
+and said to himself that if he felt disposed to do so he would send Mrs.
+Green a note reversing it in the morning.  But he put it all off till
+morning with his clothes, when he went to bed, he put off even thinking
+what his wife would say; he cast Fulkerson and his constructive treachery
+out of his mind, too, and invited into it some pensive reveries of the
+past, when he still stood at the parting of the ways, and could take this
+path or that.  In his middle life this was not possible; he must follow
+the path chosen long, ago, wherever, it led.  He was not master of
+himself, as he once seemed, but the servant of those he loved; if he
+could do what he liked, perhaps he might renounce this whole New York
+enterprise, and go off somewhere out of the reach of care; but he could
+not do what he liked, that was very clear.  In the pathos of this
+conviction he dwelt compassionately upon the thought of poor old Lindau;
+he resolved to make him accept a handsome sum of money--more than he
+could spare, something that he would feel the loss of--in payment of the
+lessons in German and fencing given so long ago.  At the usual rate for
+such lessons, his debt, with interest for twenty-odd years, would run
+very far into the hundreds.  Too far, he perceived, for his wife's joyous
+approval; he determined not to add the interest; or he believed that
+Lindau would refuse the interest; he put a fine speech in his mouth,
+making him do so; and after that he got Lindau employment on 'Every Other
+Week,' and took care of him till he died.
+
+Through all his melancholy and munificence he was aware of sordid
+anxieties for having taken the Grosvenor Green apartment.  These began to
+assume visible, tangible shapes as he drowsed, and to became personal
+entities, from which he woke, with little starts, to a realization of
+their true nature, and then suddenly fell fast asleep.
+
+In the accomplishment of the events which his reverie played with, there
+was much that retroactively stamped it with prophecy, but much also that
+was better than he forboded.  He found that with regard to the Grosvenor
+Green apartment he had not allowed for his wife's willingness to get any
+sort of roof over her head again after the removal from their old home,
+or for the alleviations that grow up through mere custom.  The practical
+workings of the apartment were not so bad; it had its good points, and
+after the first sensation of oppression in it they began to feel the
+convenience of its arrangement.  They were at that time of life when
+people first turn to their children's opinion with deference, and, in the
+loss of keenness in their own likes and dislikes, consult the young
+preferences which are still so sensitive.  It went far to reconcile Mrs.
+March to the apartment that her children were pleased with its novelty;
+when this wore off for them, she had herself begun to find it much more
+easily manageable than a house.  After she had put away several barrels
+of gimcracks, and folded up screens and rugs and skins, and carried them
+all off to the little dark store-room which the flat developed, she
+perceived at once a roominess and coziness in it unsuspected before.
+Then, when people began to call, she had a pleasure, a superiority, in
+saying that it was a furnished apartment, and in disclaiming all
+responsibility for the upholstery and decoration.  If March was by, she
+always explained that it was Mr. March's fancy, and amiably laughed it
+off with her callers as a mannish eccentricity.  Nobody really seemed to
+think it otherwise than pretty; and this again was a triumph for Mrs.
+March, because it showed how inferior the New York taste was to the
+Boston taste in such matters.
+
+March submitted silently to his punishment, and laughed with her before
+company at his own eccentricity.  She had been so preoccupied with the
+adjustment of the family to its new quarters and circumstances that the
+time passed for laying his misgivings, if they were misgivings, about
+Fulkerson before her, and when an occasion came for expressing them they
+had themselves passed in the anxieties of getting forward the first
+number of 'Every Other Week.'  He kept these from her, too, and the
+business that brought them to New York had apparently dropped into
+abeyance before the questions of domestic economy that presented and
+absented themselves.  March knew his wife to be a woman of good mind and
+in perfect sympathy with him, but he understood the limitations of her
+perspective; and if he was not too wise, he was too experienced to
+intrude upon it any affairs of his till her own were reduced to the right
+order and proportion.  It would have been folly to talk to her of
+Fulkerson's conjecturable uncandor while she was in doubt whether her
+cook would like the kitchen, or her two servants would consent to room
+together; and till it was decided what school Tom should go to, and
+whether Bella should have lessons at home or not, the relation which
+March was to bear to the Dryfooses, as owner and publisher, was not to be
+discussed with his wife.  He might drag it in, but he was aware that with
+her mind distracted by more immediate interests he could not get from her
+that judgment, that reasoned divination, which he relied upon so much.
+She would try, she would do her best, but the result would be a view
+clouded and discolored by the effort she must make.
+
+He put the whole matter by, and gave himself to the details of the work
+before him.  In this he found not only escape, but reassurance, for it
+became more and more apparent that whatever was nominally the structure
+of the business, a man of his qualifications and his instincts could not
+have an insignificant place in it.  He had also the consolation of liking
+his work, and of getting an instant grasp of it that grew constantly
+firmer and closer.  The joy of knowing that he had not made a mistake was
+great.  In giving rein to ambitions long forborne he seemed to get back
+to the youth when he had indulged them first; and after half a lifetime
+passed in pursuits alien to his nature, he was feeling the serene
+happiness of being mated through his work to his early love.  From the
+outside the spectacle might have had its pathos, and it is not easy to
+justify such an experiment as he had made at his time of life, except
+upon the ground where he rested from its consideration--the ground of
+necessity.
+
+His work was more in his thoughts than himself, however; and as the time
+for the publication of the first number of his periodical came nearer,
+his cares all centred upon it.  Without fixing any date, Fulkerson had
+announced it, and pushed his announcements with the shameless vigor of a
+born advertiser.  He worked his interest with the press to the utmost,
+and paragraphs of a variety that did credit to his ingenuity were afloat
+everywhere.  Some of them were speciously unfavorable in tone; they
+criticised and even ridiculed the principles on which the new departure
+in literary journalism was based.  Others defended it; others yet denied
+that this rumored principle was really the principle.  All contributed to
+make talk.  All proceeded from the same fertile invention.
+
+March observed with a degree of mortification that the talk was very
+little of it in the New York press; there the references to the novel
+enterprise were slight and cold.  But Fulkerson said: "Don't mind that,
+old man.  It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this;
+New York has very little to do with it.  Now if it were a play, it would
+be different.  New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or
+break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine.  The great mass of the
+readers are outside of New York, and the rural districts are what we have
+got to go for.  They don't read much in New York; they write, and talk
+about what they've written.  Don't you worry."
+
+The rumor of Fulkerson's connection with the enterprise accompanied many
+of the paragraphs, and he was able to stay March's thirst for employment
+by turning over to him from day to day heaps of the manuscripts which
+began to pour in from his old syndicate writers, as well as from
+adventurous volunteers all over the country.  With these in hand March
+began practically to plan the first number, and to concrete a general
+scheme from the material and the experience they furnished.  They had
+intended to issue the first number with the new year, and if it had been
+an affair of literature alone, it would have been very easy; but it was
+the art leg they limped on, as Fulkerson phrased it.  They had not merely
+to deal with the question of specific illustrations for this article or
+that, but to decide the whole character of their illustrations, and first
+of all to get a design for a cover which should both ensnare the heedless
+and captivate the fastidious.  These things did not come properly within
+March's province--that had been clearly understood--and for a while
+Fulkerson tried to run the art leg himself.  The phrase was again his,
+but it was simpler to make the phrase than to run the leg.  The difficult
+generation, at once stiff-backed and slippery, with which he had to do in
+this endeavor, reduced even so buoyant an optimist to despair, and after
+wasting some valuable weeks in trying to work the artists himself, he
+determined to get an artist to work them.  But what artist?  It could not
+be a man with fixed reputation and a following: he would be too costly,
+and would have too many enemies among his brethren, even if he would
+consent to undertake the job.  Fulkerson had a man in mind, an artist,
+too, who would have been the very thing if he had been the thing at all.
+He had talent enough, and his sort of talent would reach round the whole
+situation, but, as Fulkerson said, he was as many kinds of an ass as he
+was kinds of an artist.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Anticipative homesickness
+Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of
+Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much
+As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting
+Considerable comfort in holding him accountable
+Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable
+Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another
+Handsome pittance
+He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices
+Hypothetical difficulty
+Never-blooming shrub
+Poverty as hopeless as any in the world
+Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him
+Servant of those he loved
+Sigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdom
+Sorry he hadn't asked more; that's human nature
+That isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be
+Tried to be homesick for them, but failed
+Turn to their children's opinion with deference
+Wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes v1,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+PART SECOND
+
+
+I.
+
+The evening when March closed with Mrs. Green's reduced offer, and
+decided to take her apartment, the widow whose lodgings he had rejected
+sat with her daughter in an upper room at the back of her house.  In the
+shaded glow of the drop-light she was sewing, and the girl was drawing at
+the same table.  From time to time, as they talked, the girl lifted her
+head and tilted it a little on one side so as to get some desired effect
+of her work.
+
+"It's a mercy the cold weather holds off," said the mother.  "We should
+have to light the furnace, unless we wanted to scare everybody away with
+a cold house; and I don't know who would take care of it, or what would
+become of us, every way."
+
+"They seem to have been scared away from a house that wasn't cold," said
+the girl.  "Perhaps they might like a cold one.  But it's too early for
+cold yet.  It's only just in the beginning of November."
+
+"The Messenger says they've had a sprinkling of snow."
+
+"Oh yes, at St. Barnaby! I don't know when they don't have sprinklings of
+snow there.  I'm awfully glad we haven't got that winter before us."
+
+The widow sighed as mothers do who feel the contrast their experience
+opposes to the hopeful recklessness of such talk as this.  "We may have a
+worse winter here," she said, darkly.
+
+"Then I couldn't stand it," said the girl, "and I should go in for
+lighting out to Florida double-quick."
+
+"And how would you get to Florida?"  demanded her mother, severely.
+
+"Oh, by the usual conveyance Pullman vestibuled train, I suppose.  What
+makes you so blue, mamma?"  The girl was all the time sketching away,
+rubbing out, lifting her head for the effect, and then bending it over
+her work again without looking at her mother.
+
+"I am not blue, Alma.  But I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of
+yours."
+
+"Why?  What harm does it do?"
+
+"Harm?"  echoed the mother.
+
+Pending the effort she must make in saying, the girl cut in: "Yes, harm.
+You've kept your despair dusted off and ready for use at an instant's
+notice ever since we came, and what good has it done?  I'm going to keep
+on hoping to the bitter end.  That's what papa did."
+
+It was what the Rev. Archibald Leighton had done with all the
+consumptive's buoyancy.  The morning he died he told them that now he had
+turned the point and was really going to get well.  The cheerfulness was
+not only in his disease, but in his temperament.  Its excess was always a
+little against him in his church work, and Mrs. Leighton was right enough
+in feeling that if it had not been for the ballast of her instinctive
+despondency he would have made shipwreck of such small chances of
+prosperity as befell him in life.  It was not from him that his daughter
+got her talent, though he had left her his temperament intact of his
+widow's legal thirds.  He was one of those men of whom the country people
+say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him.  Mrs.
+Leighton had long eked out their income by taking a summer boarder or
+two, as a great favor, into her family; and when the greater need came,
+she frankly gave up her house to the summer-folks (as they call them in
+the country), and managed it for their comfort from the small quarter of
+it in which she shut herself up with her daughter.
+
+The notion of shutting up is an exigency of the rounded period.  The fact
+is, of course, that Alma Leighton was not shut up in any sense whatever.
+She was the pervading light, if not force, of the house.  She was a good
+cook, and she managed the kitchen with the help of an Irish girl, while
+her mother looked after the rest of the housekeeping.  But she was not
+systematic; she had inspiration but not discipline, and her mother
+mourned more over the days when Alma left the whole dinner to the Irish
+girl than she rejoiced in those when one of Alma's great thoughts took
+form in a chicken-pie of incomparable savor or in a matchless pudding.
+The off-days came when her artistic nature was expressing itself in
+charcoal, for she drew to the admiration of all among the lady boarders
+who could not draw.  The others had their reserves; they readily conceded
+that Alma had genius, but they were sure she needed instruction.  On the
+other hand, they were not so radical as to agree with the old painter who
+came every summer to paint the elms of the St. Barnaby meadows.  He
+contended that she needed to be a man in order to amount to anything; but
+in this theory he was opposed by an authority, of his own sex, whom the
+lady sketchers believed to speak with more impartiality in a matter
+concerning them as much as Alma Leighton.  He said that instruction would
+do, and he was not only, younger and handsomer, but he was fresher from
+the schools than old Harrington, who, even the lady sketchers could see,
+painted in an obsolescent manner.  His name was Beaton--Angus Beaton; but
+he was not Scotch, or not more Scotch than Mary Queen of Scots was.  His
+father was a Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York, and it
+had taken only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces of native
+and ancestral manner in him.  He wore his black beard cut shorter than
+his mustache, and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders well
+thrown back and with a lateral curve of his person when he talked about
+art, which would alone have carried conviction even if he had not had a
+thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and
+had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it
+the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French.  One of the ladies
+said that you always thought of him as having spoken French after it was
+over, and accused herself of wrong in not being able to feel afraid of
+him.  None of the ladies was afraid of him, though they could not believe
+that he was really so deferential to their work as he seemed; and they
+knew, when he would not criticise Mr. Harrington's work, that he was just
+acting from principle.
+
+They may or may not have known the deference with which he treated Alma's
+work; but the girl herself felt that his abrupt, impersonal comment
+recognized her as a real sister in art.  He told her she ought to come to
+New York, and draw in the League, or get into some painter's private
+class; and it was the sense of duty thus appealed to which finally
+resulted in the hazardous experiment she and her mother were now making.
+There were no logical breaks in the chain of their reasoning from past
+success with boarders in St. Barnaby to future success with boarders in
+New York.  Of course the outlay was much greater.  The rent of the
+furnished house they had taken was such that if they failed their
+experiment would be little less than ruinous.
+
+But they were not going to fail; that was what Alma contended, with a
+hardy courage that her mother sometimes felt almost invited failure, if
+it did not deserve it.  She was one of those people who believe that if
+you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen.  She acted on this
+superstition as if it were a religion.
+
+"If it had not been for my despair, as you call it, Alma," she answered,
+"I don't know where we should have been now."
+
+"I suppose we should have been in St. Barnaby," said the girl.  "And if
+it's worse to be in New York, you see what your despair's done, mamma.
+But what's the use?  You meant well, and I don't blame you.  You can't
+expect even despair to come out always just the way you want it.  Perhaps
+you've used too much of it."  The girl laughed, and Mrs. Leighton
+laughed, too.  Like every one else, she was not merely a prevailing mood,
+as people are apt to be in books, but was an irregularly spheroidal
+character, with surfaces that caught the different lights of circumstance
+and reflected them.  Alma got up and took a pose before the mirror, which
+she then transferred to her sketch.  The room was pinned about with other
+sketches, which showed with fantastic indistinctness in the shaded
+gaslight.  Alma held up the drawing.  "How do you like it?"
+
+Mrs. Leighton bent forward over her sewing to look at it.  "You've got
+the man's face rather weak."
+
+"Yes, that's so.  Either I see all the hidden weakness that's in men's
+natures, and bring it to the surface in their figures, or else I put my
+own weakness into them.  Either way, it's a drawback to their presenting
+a truly manly appearance.  As long as I have one of the miserable objects
+before me, I can draw him; but as soon as his back's turned I get to
+putting ladies into men's clothes.  I should think you'd be scandalized,
+mamma, if you were a really feminine person.  It must be your despair
+that helps you to bear up.  But what's the matter with the young lady in
+young lady's clothes?  Any dust on her?"
+
+"What expressions!" said Mrs. Leighton.  "Really, Alma, for a refined
+girl you are the most unrefined!"
+
+"Go on--about the girl in the picture!" said Alma, slightly knocking her
+mother on the shoulder, as she stood over her.
+
+"I don't see anything to her.  What's she doing?"
+
+"Oh, just being made love to, I suppose."
+
+"She's perfectly insipid!"
+
+"You're awfully articulate, mamma! Now, if Mr. Wetmore were to criticise
+that picture he'd draw a circle round it in the air, and look at it
+through that, and tilt his head first on one side and then on the other,
+and then look at you, as if you were a figure in it, and then collapse
+awhile, and moan a little and gasp, 'Isn't your young lady a little too-
+too--' and then he'd try to get the word out of you, and groan and suffer
+some more; and you'd say, 'She is, rather,' and that would give him
+courage, and he'd say, 'I don't mean that she's so very--' 'Of course
+not.' 'You understand?' 'Perfectly.  I see it myself, now.' 'Well, then'
+---and he'd take your pencil and begin to draw--'I should give her a
+little more--Ah?' 'Yes, I see the difference.'--'You see the difference?'
+And he'd go off to some one else, and you'd know that you'd been doing
+the wishy-washiest thing in the world, though he hadn't spoken a word of
+criticism, and couldn't.  But he wouldn't have noticed the expression at
+all; he'd have shown you where your drawing was bad.  He doesn't care for
+what he calls the literature of a thing; he says that will take care of
+itself if the drawing's good.  He doesn't like my doing these chic
+things; but I'm going to keep it up, for I think it's the nearest way to
+illustrating."
+
+She took her sketch and pinned it up on the door.
+
+"And has Mr. Beaton been about, yet?"  asked her mother.
+
+"No," said the girl, with her back still turned; and she added,
+"I believe he's in New York; Mr. Wetmore's seen him."
+
+"It's a little strange he doesn't call."
+
+"It would be if he were not an artist.  But artists never do anything
+like other people.  He was on his good behavior while he was with us, and
+he's a great deal more conventional than most of them; but even he can't
+keep it up.  That's what makes me really think that women can never
+amount to anything in art.  They keep all their appointments, and fulfil
+all their duties just as if they didn't know anything about art.  Well,
+most of them don't.  We've got that new model to-day."
+
+"What new model?"
+
+"The one Mr. Wetmore was telling us about the old German; he's splendid.
+He's got the most beautiful head; just like the old masters' things.  He
+used to be Humphrey Williams's model for his Biblical-pieces; but since
+he's dead, the old man hardly gets anything to do.  Mr. Wetmore says
+there isn't anybody in the Bible that Williams didn't paint him as.
+He's the Law and the Prophets in all his Old Testament pictures, and he's
+Joseph, Peter, Judas Iscariot, and the Scribes and Pharisees in the New."
+
+"It's a good thing people don't know how artists work, or some of the
+most sacred pictures would have no influence," said Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"Why, of course not!" cried the girl.  "And the influence is the last
+thing a painter thinks of--or supposes he thinks of.  What he knows he's
+anxious about is the drawing and the color.  But people will never
+understand how simple artists are.  When I reflect what a complex and
+sophisticated being I am, I'm afraid I can never come to anything in art.
+Or I should be if I hadn't genius."
+
+"Do you think Mr. Beaton is very simple?"  asked Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"Mr. Wetmore doesn't think he's very much of an artist.  He thinks he
+talks too well.  They believe that if a man can express himself clearly
+he can't paint."
+
+"And what do you believe?"
+
+"Oh, I can express myself, too."
+
+The mother seemed to be satisfied with this evasion.  After a while she
+said, "I presume he will call when he gets settled."
+
+The girl made no answer to this.  "One of the girls says that old model
+is an educated man.  He was in the war, and lost a hand.  Doesn't it seem
+a pity for such a man to have to sit to a class of affected geese like us
+as a model?  I declare it makes me sick.  And we shall keep him a week,
+and pay him six or seven dollars for the use of his grand old head, and
+then what will he do?  The last time he was regularly employed was when
+Mr. Mace was working at his Damascus Massacre.  Then he wanted so many
+Arab sheiks and Christian elders that he kept old Mr. Lindau steadily
+employed for six months.  Now he has to pick up odd jobs where he can."
+
+"I suppose he has his pension," said Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"No; one of the girls"--that was the way Alma always described her
+fellow-students--"says he has no pension.  He didn't apply for it for a
+long time, and then there was a hitch about it, and it was somethinged
+--vetoed, I believe she said."
+
+"Who vetoed it?"  asked Mrs. Leighton, with some curiosity about the
+process, which she held in reserve.
+
+"I don't know-whoever vetoes things.  I wonder what Mr. Wetmore does
+think of us--his class.  We must seem perfectly crazy.  There isn't one
+of us really knows what she's doing it for, or what she expects to happen
+when she's done it.  I suppose every one thinks she has genius.  I know
+the Nebraska widow does, for she says that unless you have genius it
+isn't the least use.  Everybody's puzzled to know what she does with her
+baby when she's at work--whether she gives it soothing syrup.  I wonder
+how Mr. Wetmore can keep from laughing in our faces.  I know he does
+behind our backs."
+
+Mrs. Leighton's mind wandered back to another point.  "Then if he says
+Mr. Beaton can't paint, I presume he doesn't respect him very much."
+
+"Oh, he never said he couldn't paint.  But I know he thinks so.  He says
+he's an excellent critic."
+
+"Alma," her mother said, with the effect of breaking off, "what do you
+suppose is the reason he hasn't been near us?"
+
+"Why, I don't know, mamma, except that it would have been natural for
+another person to come, and he's an artist at least, artist enough for
+that."
+
+"That doesn't account for it altogether.  He was very nice at St.
+Barnaby, and seemed so interested in you--your work."
+
+"Plenty of people were nice at St. Barnaby.  That rich Mrs. Horn couldn't
+contain her joy when she heard we were coming to New York, but she hasn't
+poured in upon us a great deal since we got here."
+
+"But that's different.  She's very fashionable, and she's taken up with
+her own set.  But Mr. Beaton's one of our kind."
+
+"Thank you.  Papa wasn't quite a tombstone-cutter, mamma."
+
+"That makes it all the harder to bear.  He can't be ashamed of us.
+Perhaps he doesn't know where we are."
+
+"Do you wish to send him your card, mamma?"  The girl flushed and towered
+in scorn of the idea.
+
+"Why, no, Alma," returned her mother.
+
+"Well, then," said Alma.
+
+But Mrs. Leighton was not so easily quelled.  She had got her mind on Mr.
+Beaton, and she could not detach it at once.  Besides, she was one of
+those women (they are commoner than the same sort of men) whom it does
+not pain to take out their most intimate thoughts and examine them in the
+light of other people's opinions.  "But I don't see how he can behave so.
+He must know that--"
+
+"That what, mamma?"  demanded the girl.
+
+"That he influenced us a great deal in coming--"
+
+"He didn't.  If he dared to presume to think such a thing--"
+
+"Now, Alma," said her mother, with the clinging persistence of such
+natures, "you know he did.  And it's no use for you to pretend that we
+didn't count upon him in--in every way.  You may not have noticed his
+attentions, and I don't say you did, but others certainly did; and I must
+say that I didn't expect he would drop us so."
+
+"Drop us!" cried Alma, in a fury.  "Oh!"
+
+"Yes, drop us, Alma.  He must know where we are.  Of course, Mr.
+Wetmore's spoken to him about you, and it's a shame that he hasn't been
+near us.  I should have thought common gratitude, common decency, would
+have brought him after--after all we did for him."
+
+"We did nothing for him--nothing! He paid his board, and that ended it."
+
+"No, it didn't, Alma.  You know what he used to say--about its being like
+home, and all that; and I must say that after his attentions to you, and
+all the things you told me he said, I expected something very dif--"
+
+A sharp peal of the door-bell thrilled through the house, and as if the
+pull of the bell-wire had twitched her to her feet, Mrs. Leighton sprang
+up and grappled with her daughter in their common terror.
+
+They both glared at the clock and made sure that it was five minutes
+after nine.  Then they abandoned themselves some moments to the
+unrestricted play of their apprehensions.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+"Why, Alma," whispered the mother, "who in the world can it be at this
+time of night?  You don't suppose he--"
+
+"Well, I'm not going to the door, anyhow, mother, I don't care who it is;
+and, of course, he wouldn't be such a goose as to come at this hour."
+She put on a look of miserable trepidation, and shrank back from the
+door, while the hum of the bell died away, in the hall.
+
+"What shall we do?"  asked Mrs. Leighton, helplessly.
+
+"Let him go away--whoever they are," said Alma.
+
+Another and more peremptory ring forbade them refuge in this simple
+expedient.
+
+"Oh, dear! what shall we do?  Perhaps it's a despatch."
+
+The conjecture moved Alma to no more than a rigid stare.  "I shall not
+go," she said.  A third ring more insistent than the others followed, and
+she said: "You go ahead, mamma, and I'll come behind to scream if it's
+anybody.  We can look through the side-lights at the door first."
+
+Mrs. Leighton fearfully led the way from the back chamber where they bad
+been sitting, and slowly descended the stairs.  Alma came behind and
+turned up the hall gas-jet with a sudden flash that made them both jump a
+little.  The gas inside rendered it more difficult to tell who was on the
+threshold, but Mrs. Leighton decided from a timorous peep through the
+scrims that it was a lady and gentleman.  Something in this distribution
+of sex emboldened her; she took her life in her hand, and opened the
+door.
+
+The lady spoke.  "Does Mrs. Leighton live heah?"  she said, in a rich,
+throaty voice; and she feigned a reference to the agent's permit she held
+in her hand.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Leighton; she mechanically occupied the doorway, while
+Alma already quivered behind her with impatience of her impoliteness.
+
+"Oh," said the lady, who began to appear more and more a young lady,
+"Ah didn't know but Ah had mistaken the hoase.  Ah suppose it's rather
+late to see the apawtments, and Ah most ask you to pawdon us."  She put
+this tentatively, with a delicately growing recognition of Mrs. Leighton
+as the lady of the house, and a humorous intelligence of the situation in
+the glance she threw Alma over her mother's shoulder.  "Ah'm afraid we
+most have frightened you."
+
+"Oh, not at all," said Alma; and at the same time her mother said,
+"Will you walk in, please?"
+
+The gentleman promptly removed his hat and made the Leightons an
+inclusive bow.  "You awe very kind, madam, and I am sorry for the trouble
+we awe giving you."  He was tall and severe-looking, with a gray,
+trooperish mustache and iron-gray hair, and, as Alma decided, iron-gray
+eyes.  His daughter was short, plump, and fresh-colored, with an effect
+of liveliness that did not all express itself in her broad-vowelled,
+rather formal speech, with its odd valuations of some of the auxiliary
+verbs, and its total elision of the canine letter.
+
+"We awe from the Soath," she said, "and we arrived this mawning, but we
+got this cyahd from the brokah just befo' dinnah, and so we awe rathah
+late."
+
+"Not at all; it's only nine o'clock," said Mrs. Leighton.  She looked up
+from the card the young lady had given her, and explained, "We haven't
+got in our servants yet, and we had to answer the bell ourselves, and--"
+
+"You were frightened, of coase," said the young lady, caressingly.
+
+The gentleman said they ought not to have come so late, and he offered
+some formal apologies.
+
+"We should have been just as much scared any time after five o'clock,"
+Alma said to the sympathetic intelligence in the girl's face.
+
+She laughed out.  "Of coase!  Ah would have my hawt in my moath all day
+long, too, if Ah was living in a big hoase alone."
+
+A moment of stiffness followed; Mrs. Leighton would have liked to
+withdraw from the intimacy of the situation, but she did not know how.
+It was very well for these people to assume to be what they pretended;
+but, she reflected too late, she had no proof of it except the agent's
+permit.  They were all standing in the hall together, and she prolonged
+the awkward pause while she examined the permit.  "You are Mr. Woodburn?"
+she asked, in a way that Alma felt implied he might not be.
+
+"Yes, madam; from Charlottesboag, Virginia," he answered, with the slight
+umbrage a man shows when the strange cashier turns his check over and
+questions him before cashing it.
+
+Alma writhed internally, but outwardly remained subordinate; she examined
+the other girl's dress, and decided in a superficial consciousness that
+she had made her own bonnet.
+
+"I shall be glad to show you my rooms," said Mrs. Leighton, with an
+irrelevant sigh.  "You must excuse their being not just as I should wish
+them.  We're hardly settled yet."
+
+"Don't speak of it, madam," said the gentleman, "if you can overlook the
+trouble we awe giving you at such an unseasonable houah."
+
+"Ah'm a hoasekeepah mahself," Miss Woodburn joined in, "and Ah know ho'
+to accyoant fo' everything."
+
+Mrs. Leighton led the way up-stairs, and the young lady decided upon the
+large front room and small side room on the third story.  She said she
+could take the small one, and the other was so large that her father
+could both sleep and work in it.  She seemed not ashamed to ask if Mrs.
+Leighton's price was inflexible, but gave way laughing when her father
+refused to have any bargaining, with a haughty self-respect which he
+softened to deference for Mrs. Leighton.  His impulsiveness opened the
+way for some confidence from her, and before the affair was arranged she
+was enjoying in her quality of clerical widow the balm of the Virginians'
+reverent sympathy.  They said they were church people themselves.
+
+"Ah don't know what yo' mothah means by yo' hoase not being in oddah,"
+the young lady said to Alma as they went down-stairs together.  "Ah'm a
+great hoasekeepah mahself, and Ah mean what Ah say."
+
+They had all turned mechanically into the room where the Leightons were
+sitting when the Woodburns rang: Mr. Woodburn consented to sit down, and
+he remained listening to Mrs. Leighton while his daughter bustled up to
+the sketches pinned round the room and questioned Alma about them.
+
+"Ah suppose you awe going to be a great awtust?" she said, in friendly
+banter, when Alma owned to having done the things.  "Ah've a great notion
+to take a few lessons mahself.  Who's yo' teachah?"
+
+Alma said she was drawing in Mr. Wetmore's class, and Miss Woodburn said:
+"Well, it's just beautiful, Miss Leighton; it's grand.  Ah suppose it's
+raght expensive, now?  Mah goodness! we have to cyoant the coast so much
+nowadays; it seems to me we do nothing but cyoant it.  Ah'd like to hah
+something once without askin' the price."
+
+"Well, if you didn't ask it," said Alma, "I don't believe Mr. Wetmore
+would ever know what the price of his lessons was.  He has to think, when
+you ask him."
+
+"Why, he most be chomming," said Miss Woodburn.  "Perhaps Ah maght get
+the lessons for nothing from him.  Well, Ah believe in my soul Ah'll
+trah.  Now ho' did you begin?  and ho' do you expect to get anything oat
+of it?"  She turned on Alma eyes brimming with a shrewd mixture of fun
+and earnest, and Alma made note of the fact that she had an early
+nineteenth-century face, round, arch, a little coquettish, but extremely
+sensible and unspoiled-looking, such as used to be painted a good deal in
+miniature at that period; a tendency of her brown hair to twine and twist
+at the temples helped the effect; a high comb would have completed it,
+Alma felt, if she had her bonnet off.  It was almost a Yankee country-
+girl type; but perhaps it appeared so to Alma because it was, like that,
+pure Anglo-Saxon.  Alma herself, with her dull, dark skin, slender in
+figure, slow in speech, with aristocratic forms in her long hands, and
+the oval of her fine face pointed to a long chin, felt herself much more
+Southern in style than this blooming, bubbling, bustling Virginian.
+
+"I don't know," she answered, slowly.
+
+"Going to take po'traits," suggested Miss Woodburn, "or just paint the
+ahdeal?"  A demure burlesque lurked in her tone.
+
+"I suppose I don't expect to paint at all," said Alma.  "I'm going to
+illustrate books--if anybody will let me."
+
+"Ah should think they'd just joamp at you," said Miss Woodburn.  "Ah'll
+tell you what let's do, Miss Leighton: you make some pictures, and Ah'll
+wrahte a book fo' them.  Ah've got to do something.  Ali maght as well
+wrahte a book.  You know we Southerners have all had to go to woak.  But
+Ah don't mand it.  I tell papa I shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein'
+poo' if it wasn't fo' the inconvenience."
+
+"Yes, it's inconvenient," said Alma; "but you forget it when you're at
+work, don't you think?"
+
+"Mah, yes! Perhaps that's one reason why poo' people have to woak so
+hawd-to keep their wands off their poverty."
+
+The girls both tittered, and turned from talking in a low tone with their
+backs toward their elders, and faced them.
+
+"Well, Madison," said Mr. Woodburn, "it is time we should go.  I bid you
+good-night, madam," he bowed to Mrs. Leighton.  "Good-night," he bowed
+again to Alma.
+
+His daughter took leave of them in formal phrase, but with a jolly
+cordiality of manner that deformalized it.  "We shall be roand raght soon
+in the mawning, then," she threatened at the door.
+
+"We shall be all ready for you," Alma called after her down the steps.
+
+"Well, Alma?"  her mother asked, when the door closed upon them.
+
+"She doesn't know any more about art," said Alma, "than--nothing at all.
+But she's jolly and good-hearted.  She praised everything that was bad in
+my sketches, and said she was going to take lessons herself.  When a
+person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it, you know
+where they belong artistically."
+
+Mrs. Leighton shook her head with a sigh.  "I wish I knew where they
+belonged financially.  We shall have to get in two girls at once.  I
+shall have to go out the first thing in the morning, and then our
+troubles will begin."
+
+"Well, didn't you want them to begin?  I will stay home and help you get
+ready.  Our prosperity couldn't begin without the troubles, if you mean
+boarders, and boarders mean servants.  I shall be very glad to be
+afflicted with a cook for a while myself."
+
+"Yes; but we don't know anything about these people, or whether they will
+be able to pay us.  Did she talk as if they were well off?"
+
+"She talked as if they were poor; poo' she called it."
+
+"Yes, how queerly she pronounced," said Mrs. Leighton.  "Well, I ought to
+have told them that I required the first week in advance."
+
+"Mamma! If that's the way you're going to act!"
+
+"Oh, of course, I couldn't, after he wouldn't let her bargain for the
+rooms.  I didn't like that."
+
+"I did.  And you can see that they were perfect ladies; or at least one
+of them."  Alma laughed at herself, but her mother did not notice.
+
+"Their being ladies won't help if they've got no money.  It 'll make it
+all the worse."
+
+"Very well, then; we have no money, either.  We're a match for them any
+day there.  We can show them that two can play at that game."
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+Arnus Beaton's studio looked at first glance like many other painters'
+studios.  A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light;
+casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil
+and water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table, with
+paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed
+comfortlessly on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk
+trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with
+its head on one side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress
+dropped before it; dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor;
+canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with costumes:
+these features one might notice anywhere.  But, besides, there was a
+bookcase with an unusual number of books in it, and there was an open
+colonial writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and scutcheoned, with
+foreign periodicals--French and English--littering its leaf, and some
+pages of manuscript scattered among them.  Above all, there was a
+sculptor's revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling,
+with an eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay and on the
+head of the old man who sat on the platform beside it.
+
+Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to
+advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they have
+more than one.  But they are apparently immensely interested as well as
+distracted by them.  When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed,
+up to a certain point, with any one who said literature was his proper
+expression; but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point,
+he would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist,
+and supremely a colorist.  At the certain point in either art he was apt
+to break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other.
+In these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings, very
+striking, very original, very chic, very everything but habitable.
+It was in this way that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he had
+at first approached rather slightingly as a mere decorative accessory of
+architecture.  But it had grown in his respect till he maintained that
+the accessory business ought to be all the other way: that temples should
+be raised to enshrine statues, not statues made to ornament temples; that
+was putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance.  This was when he
+had carried a plastic study so far that the sculptors who saw it said
+that Beaton might have been an architect, but would certainly never be a
+sculptor.  At the same time he did some hurried, nervous things that had
+a popular charm, and that sold in plaster reproductions, to the profit of
+another.  Beaton justly despised the popular charm in these, as well as
+in the paintings he sold from time to time; he said it was flat burglary
+to have taken money for them, and he would have been living almost wholly
+upon the bounty of the old tombstone-cutter in Syracuse if it had not
+been for the syndicate letters which he supplied to Fulkerson for ten
+dollars a week.
+
+They were very well done, but he hated doing them after the first two or
+three, and had to be punched up for them by Fulkerson, who did not cease
+to prize them, and who never failed to punch him up.  Beaton being what
+he was, Fulkerson was his creditor as well as patron; and Fulkerson being
+what he was, had an enthusiastic patience with the elusive, facile,
+adaptable, unpractical nature of Beaton.  He was very proud of his art-
+letters, as he called them; but then Fulkerson was proud of everything he
+secured for his syndicate.  The fact that he had secured it gave it
+value; he felt as if he had written it himself.
+
+One art trod upon another's heels with Beaton.  The day before he had
+rushed upon canvas the conception of a picture which he said to himself
+was glorious, and to others (at the table d'hote of Maroni) was not bad.
+He had worked at it in a fury till the light failed him, and he execrated
+the dying day.  But he lit his lamp and transferred the process of his
+thinking from the canvas to the opening of the syndicate letter which be
+knew Fulkerson would be coming for in the morning.  He remained talking
+so long after dinner in the same strain as he had painted and written in
+that he could not finish his letter that night.  The next morning, while
+he was making his tea for breakfast, the postman brought him a letter
+from his father enclosing a little check, and begging him with tender,
+almost deferential, urgence to come as lightly upon him as possible, for
+just now his expenses were very heavy.  It brought tears of shame into
+Beaton's eyes--the fine, smouldering, floating eyes that many ladies
+admired, under the thick bang--and he said to himself that if he were
+half a man he would go home and go to work cutting gravestones in his
+father's shop.  But he would wait, at least, to finish his picture; and
+as a sop to his conscience, to stay its immediate ravening, he resolved
+to finish that syndicate letter first, and borrow enough money from
+Fulkerson to be able to send his father's check back; or, if not that,
+then to return the sum of it partly in Fulkerson's check.  While he still
+teemed with both of these good intentions the old man from whom he was
+modelling his head of Judas came, and Beaton saw that he must get through
+with him before he finished either the picture or the letter; he would
+have to pay him for the time, anyway.  He utilized the remorse with which
+he was tingling to give his Judas an expression which he found novel in
+the treatment of that character--a look of such touching, appealing self-
+abhorrence that Beaton's artistic joy in it amounted to rapture; between
+the breathless moments when he worked in dead silence for an effect that
+was trying to escape him, he sang and whistled fragments of comic opera.
+
+In one of the hushes there came a blow on the outside of the door that
+made Beaton jump, and swear with a modified profanity that merged itself
+in apostrophic prayer.  He knew it must be Fulkerson, and after roaring
+"Come in!" he said to the model, "That 'll do this morning, Lindau."
+
+Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust and compared it by
+fleeting glances with the old man as he got stiffly up and suffered
+Beaton to help him on with his thin, shabby overcoat.
+
+"Can you come to-morrow, Lindau?"
+
+"No, not to-morrow, Mr. Peaton.  I haf to zit for the young ladties."
+
+"Oh!" said Beaton.  "Wet-more's class?  Is Miss Leighton doing you?"
+
+"I don't know their namess," Lindau began, when Fulkerson said:
+
+"Hope you haven't forgotten mine, Mr. Lindau?  I met you with Mr. March
+at Maroni's one night."  Fulkerson offered him a universally shakable
+hand.
+
+"Oh yes! I am gladt to zee you again, Mr. Vulkerson.  And Mr. Marge--he
+don't zeem to gome any more?"
+
+"Up to his eyes in work.  Been moving on from Boston and getting settled,
+and starting in on our enterprise.  Beaton here hasn't got a very
+flattering likeness of you, hey?  Well, good-morning," he said, for
+Lindau appeared not to have heard him and was escaping with a bow through
+the door.
+
+Beaton lit a cigarette which he pinched nervously between his lips before
+he spoke.  "You've come for that letter, I suppose, Fulkerson?  It isn't
+done."
+
+Fulkerson turned from staring at the bust to which he had mounted.  "What
+you fretting about that letter for?  I don't want your letter."
+
+Beaton stopped biting his cigarette and looked at him.  "Don't want my
+letter?  Oh, very good!" he bristled up.  He took his cigarette from his
+lips, and blew the smoke through his nostrils, and then looked at
+Fulkerson.
+
+"No; I don't want your letter; I want you."
+
+Beacon disdained to ask an explanation, but he internally lowered his
+crest, while he continued to look at Fulkerson without changing his
+defiant countenance.  This suited Fulkerson well enough, and he went on
+with relish, "I'm going out of the syndicate business, old man, and I'm
+on a new thing."  He put his leg over the back of a chair and rested his
+foot on its seat, and, with one hand in his pocket, he laid the scheme of
+'Every Other Week' before Beaton with the help of the other.  The artist
+went about the room, meanwhile, with an effect of indifference which by
+no means offended Fulkerson.  He took some water into his mouth from a
+tumbler, which he blew in a fine mist over the head of Judas before
+swathing it in a dirty cotton cloth; he washed his brushes and set his
+palette; he put up on his easel the picture he had blocked on the day
+before, and stared at it with a gloomy face; then he gathered the sheets
+of his unfinished letter together and slid them into a drawer of his
+writing-desk.  By the time he had finished and turned again to Fulkerson,
+Fulkerson was saying: "I did think we could have the first number out by
+New-Year's; but it will take longer than that--a month longer; but I'm
+not sorry, for the holidays kill everything; and by February, or the
+middle of February, people will get their breath again and begin to look
+round and ask what's new.  Then we'll reply in the language of
+Shakespeare and Milton, 'Every Other Week; and don't you forget it.'"
+He took down his leg and asked, "Got a pipe of 'baccy anywhere?"
+
+Beaton nodded at a clay stem sticking out of a Japanese vase of bronze on
+his mantel.  "There's yours," he said; and Fulkerson said, "Thanks," and
+filled the pipe and sat down and began to smoke tranquilly.
+
+Beaton saw that he would have to speak now.  "And what do you want with
+me?"
+
+"You?  Oh yes," Fulkerson humorously dramatized a return to himself from
+a pensive absence.  "Want you for the art department."
+
+Beaton shook his head.  "I'm not your man, Fulkerson," he said,
+compassionately.  "You want a more practical hand, one that's in touch
+with what's going.  I'm getting further and further away from this
+century and its claptrap.  I don't believe in your enterprise; I don't
+respect it, and I won't have anything to do with it.  It would-choke me,
+that kind of thing."
+
+"That's all right," said Fulkerson.  He esteemed a man who was not going
+to let himself go cheap.  "Or if it isn't, we can make it.  You and March
+will pull together first-rate.  I don't care how much ideal you put into
+the thing; the more the better.  I can look after the other end of the
+schooner myself."
+
+"You don't understand me," said Beaton.  "I'm not trying to get a rise
+out of you.  I'm in earnest.  What you want is some man who can have
+patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius, and with genius
+turning mediocrity on his hands.  I haven't any luck with men; I don't
+get on with them; I'm not popular."  Beaton recognized the fact with the
+satisfaction which it somehow always brings to human pride.
+
+"So much the better!"  Fulkerson was ready for him at this point.
+"I don't want you to work the old-established racket the reputations.
+When I want them I'll go to them with a pocketful of rocks--knock-down
+argument.  But my idea is to deal with the volunteer material.  Look at
+the way the periodicals are carried on now! Names! names! names!  In a
+country that's just boiling over with literary and artistic ability of
+every kind the new fellows have no chance.  The editors all engage their
+material.  I don't believe there are fifty volunteer contributions
+printed in a year in all the New York magazines.  It's all wrong; it's
+suicidal.  'Every Other Week' is going back to the good old anonymous
+system, the only fair system.  It's worked well in literature, and it
+will work well in art."
+
+"It won't work well in art," said Beaton.  "There you have a totally
+different set of conditions.  What you'll get by inviting volunteer
+illustrations will be a lot of amateur trash.  And how are you going to
+submit your literature for illustration?  It can't be done.  At any rate,
+I won't undertake to do it."
+
+"We'll get up a School of Illustration," said Fulkerson, with cynical
+security.  "You can read the things and explain 'em, and your pupils can
+make their sketches under your eye.  They wouldn't be much further out
+than most illustrations are if they never knew what they were
+illustrating.  You might select from what comes in and make up a sort of
+pictorial variations to the literature without any particular reference
+to it.  Well, I understand you to accept?"
+
+"No, you don't."
+
+"That is, to consent to help us with your advice and criticism.  That's
+all I want.  It won't commit you to anything; and you can be as anonymous
+as anybody."  At the door Fulkerson added: "By-the-way, the new man--the
+fellow that's taken my old syndicate business--will want you to keep on;
+but I guess he's going to try to beat you down on the price of the
+letters.  He's going in for retrenchment.  I brought along a check for
+this one; I'm to pay for that."  He offered Beaton an envelope.
+
+"I can't take it, Fulkerson.  The letter's paid for already."  Fulkerson
+stepped forward and laid the envelope on the table among the tubes of
+paint.
+
+"It isn't the letter merely.  I thought you wouldn't object to a little
+advance on your 'Every Other Week' work till you kind of got started."
+
+Beaton remained inflexible.  "It can't be done, Fulkerson.  Don't I tell
+you I can't sell myself out to a thing I don't believe in?  Can't you
+understand that?"
+
+"Oh yes; I can understand that first-rate.  I don't want to buy you; I
+want to borrow you.  It's all right.  See?  Come round when you can; I'd
+like to introduce you to old March.  That's going to be our address."  He
+put a card on the table beside the envelope, and Beaton allowed him to go
+without making him take the check back.  He had remembered his father's
+plea; that unnerved him, and he promised himself again to return his
+father's poor little check and to work on that picture and give it to
+Fulkerson for the check he had left and for his back debts.  He resolved
+to go to work on the picture at once; he had set his palette for it; but
+first he looked at Fulkerson's check.  It was for only fifty dollars, and
+the canny Scotch blood in Beaton rebelled; he could not let this picture
+go for any such money; he felt a little like a man whose generosity has
+been trifled with.  The conflict of emotions broke him up, and he could
+not work.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The day wasted away in Beaton's hands; at half-past four o'clock he went
+out to tea at the house of a lady who was At Home that afternoon from
+four till seven.  By this time Beaton was in possession of one of those
+other selves of which we each have several about us, and was again the
+laconic, staccato, rather worldlified young artist whose moments of a
+controlled utterance and a certain distinction of manner had commended
+him to Mrs. Horn's fancy in the summer at St. Barnaby.
+
+Mrs. Horn's rooms were large, and they never seemed very full, though
+this perhaps was because people were always so quiet.  The ladies, who
+outnumbered the men ten to one, as they always do at a New York tea, were
+dressed in sympathy with the low tone every one spoke in, and with the
+subdued light which gave a crepuscular uncertainty to the few objects,
+the dim pictures, the unexcited upholstery, of the rooms.  One breathed
+free of bric-a-brac there, and the new-comer breathed softly as one does
+on going into church after service has begun.  This might be a suggestion
+from the voiceless behavior of the man-servant who let you in, but it was
+also because Mrs. Horn's At Home was a ceremony, a decorum, and not
+festival.  At far greater houses there was more gayety, at richer houses
+there was more freedom; the suppression at Mrs. Horn's was a personal,
+not a social, effect; it was an efflux of her character, demure,
+silentious, vague, but very correct.
+
+Beaton easily found his way to her around the grouped skirts and among
+the detached figures, and received a pressure of welcome from the hand
+which she momentarily relaxed from the tea-pot.  She sat behind a table
+put crosswise of a remote corner, and offered tea to people whom a niece
+of hers received provisionally or sped finally in the outer room.  They
+did not usually take tea, and when they did they did not usually drink
+it; but Beaton was, feverishly glad of his cup; he took rum and lemon in
+it, and stood talking at Mrs. Horn's side till the next arrival should
+displace him: he talked in his French manner.
+
+"I have been hoping to see you," she said.  "I wanted to ask you about
+the Leightons.  Did they really come?"
+
+"I believe so.  They are in town--yes.  I haven't seen them."
+
+"Then you don't know how they're getting on--that pretty creature, with
+her cleverness, and poor Mrs. Leighton?  I was afraid they were venturing
+on a rash experiment.  Do you know where they are?"
+
+"In West Eleventh Street somewhere.  Miss Leighton is in Mr. Wetmore's
+class."
+
+"I must look them up.  Do you know their number?"
+
+"Not at the moment.  I can find out."
+
+"Do," said Mrs. Horn.  "What courage they must have, to plunge into New
+York as they've done!  I really didn't think they would.  I wonder if
+they've succeeded in getting anybody into their house yet?"
+
+"I don't know," said Beaton.
+
+"I discouraged their coming all I could," she sighed, "and I suppose you
+did, too.  But it's quite useless trying to make people in a place like
+St. Barnaby understand how it is in town."
+
+"Yes," said Beaton.  He stirred his tea, while inwardly he tried to
+believe that he had really discouraged the Leightons from coming to New
+York.  Perhaps the vexation of his failure made him call Mrs. Horn in his
+heart a fraud.
+
+"Yes," she went on, "it is very, very hard.  And when they won't
+understand, and rush on their doom, you feel that they are going to hold
+you respons--"
+
+Mrs. Horn's eyes wandered from Beaton; her voice faltered in the faded
+interest of her remark, and then rose with renewed vigor in greeting a
+lady who came up and stretched her glove across the tea-cups.
+
+Beaton got himself away and out of the house with a much briefer adieu to
+the niece than he had meant to make.  The patronizing compassion of Mrs.
+Horn for the Leightons filled him with indignation toward her, toward
+himself.  There was no reason why he should not have ignored them as he
+had done; but there was a feeling.  It was his nature to be careless, and
+he had been spoiled into recklessness; he neglected everybody, and only
+remembered them when it suited his whim or his convenience; but he
+fiercely resented the inattentions of others toward himself.  He had no
+scruple about breaking an engagement or failing to keep an appointment;
+he made promises without thinking of their fulfilment, and not because he
+was a faithless person, but because he was imaginative, and expected at
+the time to do what he said, but was fickle, and so did not.  As most of
+his shortcomings were of a society sort, no great harm was done to
+anybody else.  He had contracted somewhat the circle of his acquaintance
+by what some people called his rudeness, but most people treated it as
+his oddity, and were patient with it.  One lady said she valued his
+coming when he said he would come because it had the charm of the
+unexpected.  "Only it shows that it isn't always the unexpected that
+happens," she explained.
+
+It did not occur to him that his behavior was immoral; he did not realize
+that it was creating a reputation if not a character for him.  While we
+are still young we do not realize that our actions have this effect.  It
+seems to us that people will judge us from what we think and feel.  Later
+we find out that this is impossible; perhaps we find it out too late;
+some of us never find it out at all.
+
+In spite of his shame about the Leightons, Beaton had no present
+intention of looking them up or sending Mrs. Horn their address.  As a
+matter of fact, he never did send it; but he happened to meet Mr. Wetmore
+and his wife at the restaurant where he dined, and he got it of the
+painter for himself.  He did not ask him how Miss Leighton was getting
+on; but Wetmore launched out, with Alma for a tacit text, on the futility
+of women generally going in for art.  "Even when they have talent they've
+got too much against them.  Where a girl doesn't seem very strong, like
+Miss Leighton, no amount of chic is going to help."
+
+His wife disputed him on behalf of her sex, as women always do.
+
+"No, Dolly," he persisted; "she'd better be home milking the cows and
+leading the horse to water."
+
+Do you think she'd better be up till two in the morning at balls and
+going all day to receptions and luncheons?"
+
+"Oh, guess it isn't a question of that, even if she weren't drawing.
+You knew them at home," he said to Beaton.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I remember.  Her mother said you suggested me.  Well, the girl has some
+notion of it; there's no doubt about that.  But--she's a woman.  The
+trouble with these talented girls is that they're all woman.  If they
+weren't, there wouldn't be much chance for the men, Beaton.  But we've
+got Providence on our own side from the start.  I'm able to watch all
+their inspirations with perfect composure.  I know just how soon it's
+going to end in nervous breakdown.  Somebody ought to marry them all and
+put them out of their misery."
+
+"And what will you do with your students who are married already?"  his
+wife said.  She felt that she had let him go on long enough.
+
+"Oh, they ought to get divorced."
+
+"You ought to be ashamed to take their money if that's what you think of
+them."
+
+"My dear, I have a wife to support."
+
+Beaton intervened with a question.  "Do you mean that Miss Leighton isn't
+standing it very well?"
+
+"How do I know?  She isn't the kind that bends; she's the kind that
+breaks."
+
+After a little silence Mrs. Wetmore asked, "Won't you come home with us,
+Mr. Beaton?"
+
+"Thank you; no.  I have an engagement."
+
+"I don't see why that should prevent you," said Wetmore.  "But you always
+were a punctilious cuss.  Well!"
+
+Beaton lingered over his cigar; but no one else whom he knew came in,
+and he yielded to the threefold impulse of conscience, of curiosity,
+of inclination, in going to call at the Leightons'.  He asked for the
+ladies, and the maid showed him into the parlor, where he found Mrs.
+Leighton and Miss Woodburn.
+
+The widow met him with a welcome neatly marked by resentment; she meant
+him to feel that his not coming sooner had been noticed.  Miss Woodburn
+bubbled and gurgled on, and did what she could to mitigate his
+punishment, but she did not feel authorized to stay it, till Mrs.
+Leighton, by studied avoidance of her daughter's name, obliged Beaton to
+ask for her.  Then Miss Woodburn caught up her work, and said, "Ah'll go
+and tell her, Mrs. Leighton."  At the top of the stairs she found Alma,
+and Alma tried to make it seem as if she had not been standing there.
+"Mah goodness, chald! there's the handsomest young man asking for you
+down there you evah saw.  Alh told you' mothah Ah would come up fo' you."
+
+"What--who is it?"
+
+"Don't you know?  But bo' could you?  He's got the most beautiful eyes,
+and he wea's his hai' in a bang, and he talks English like it was
+something else, and his name's Mr. Beaton."
+
+"Did he-ask for me?"  said Alma, with a dreamy tone.  She put her hand on
+the stairs rail, and a little shiver ran over her.
+
+"Didn't I tell you?  Of coase he did!  And you ought to go raght down if
+you want to save the poo' fellah's lahfe; you' mothah's just freezin' him
+to death."
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+"She is?"  cried Alma.  "Tchk!" She flew downstairs, and flitted swiftly
+into the room, and fluttered up to Beaton, and gave him a crushing hand-
+shake.
+
+"How very kind, of you to come and see us, Mr. Beaton!  When did you come
+to New York?  Don't you find it warm here?  We've only just lighted the
+furnace, but with this mild weather it seems too early.  Mamma does keep
+it so hot!"  She rushed about opening doors and shutting registers, and
+then came back and sat facing him from the sofa with a mask of radiant
+cordiality.  "How have you been since we saw you?"
+
+"Very well," said Beaton.  "I hope you're well, Miss Leighton?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly! I think New York agrees with us both wonderfully.  I
+never knew such air.  And to think of our not having snow yet!  I should
+think everybody would want to come here!  Why don't you come,
+Mr. Beaton?"
+
+Beaton lifted his eyes and looked at her.  "I--I live in New York," he
+faltered.
+
+"In New York City!" she exclaimed.
+
+"Surely, Alma," said her mother, "you remember Mr. Beaton's telling us he
+lived in New York."
+
+"But I thought you came from Rochester; or was it Syracuse?  I always
+get those places mixed up."
+
+"Probably I told you my father lived at Syracuse.  I've been in New York
+ever since I came home from Paris," said Beaton, with the confusion of a
+man who feels himself played upon by a woman.
+
+"From Paris!" Alma echoed, leaning forward, with her smiling mask tight
+on.  "Wasn't it Munich where you studied?"
+
+"I was at Munich, too.  I met Wetmore there."
+
+"Oh, do you know Mr. Wetmore?"
+
+"Why, Alma," her mother interposed again, "it was Mr. Beaton who told you
+of Mr. Wetmore."
+
+"Was it?  Why, yes, to be sure.  It was Mrs. Horn who suggested Mr.
+Ilcomb.  I remember now.  I can't thank you enough for having sent me to
+Mr. Wetmore, Mr. Beaton.  Isn't he delightful?  Oh yes, I'm a perfect
+Wetmorian, I can assure you.  The whole class is the same way."
+
+"I just met him and Mrs. Wetmore at dinner," said Beaton, attempting the
+recovery of something that he had lost through the girl's shining ease
+and steely sprightliness.  She seemed to him so smooth and hard, with a
+repellent elasticity from which he was flung off.  "I hope you're not
+working too hard, Miss Leighton?"
+
+"Oh no! I enjoy every minute of it, and grow stronger on it.  Do I look
+very much wasted away?"  She looked him full in the face, brilliantly
+smiling, and intentionally beautiful.
+
+"No," he said, with a slow sadness; "I never saw you looking better."
+
+"Poor Mr. Beaton!" she said, in recognition of his doleful tune.  "It
+seems to be quite a blow."
+
+"Oh no--"
+
+"I remember all the good advice you used to give me about not working too
+hard, and probably it's that that's saved my life--that and the house-
+hunting.  Has mamma told you of our adventures in getting settled?
+
+"Some time we must.  It was such fun!  And didn't you think we were
+fortunate to get such a pretty house?  You must see both our parlors."
+She jumped up, and her mother followed her with a bewildered look as she
+ran into the back parlor and flashed up the gas.
+
+"Come in here, Mr. Beaton.  I want to show you the great feature of the
+house."  She opened the low windows that gave upon a glazed veranda
+stretching across the end of the room.  "Just think of this in New York!
+You can't see it very well at night, but when the southern sun pours in
+here all the afternoon--"
+
+"Yes, I can imagine it," he said.  He glanced up at the bird-cage hanging
+from the roof.  "I suppose Gypsy enjoys it."
+
+"You remember Gypsy?"  she said; and she made a cooing, kissing little
+noise up at the bird, who responded drowsily.  "Poor old Gypsum!  Well,
+he sha'n't be disturbed.  Yes, it's Gyp's delight, and Colonel Woodburn
+likes to write here in the morning.  Think of us having a real live
+author in the house!  And Miss Woodburn: I'm so glad you've seen her!
+They're Southern people."
+
+"Yes, that was obvious in her case."
+
+"From her accent?  Isn't it fascinating?  I didn't believe I could ever
+endure Southerners, but we're like one family with the Woodburns.  I
+should think you'd want to paint Miss Woodburn.  Don't you think her
+coloring is delicious?  And such a quaint kind of eighteenth-century type
+of beauty!  But she's perfectly lovely every way, and everything she says
+is so funny.  The Southerners seem to be such great talkers; better than
+we are, don't you think?"
+
+"I don't know," said Beaton, in pensive discouragement.  He was sensible
+of being manipulated, operated, but he was helpless to escape from the
+performer or to fathom her motives.  His pensiveness passed into gloom,
+and was degenerating into sulky resentment when he went away, after
+several failures to get back to the old ground he had held in relation to
+Alma.  He retrieved something of it with Mrs. Leighton; but Alma
+glittered upon him to the last with a keen impenetrable candor, a child-
+like singleness of glance, covering unfathomable reserve.
+
+"Well, Alma," said her mother, when the door had closed upon him.
+
+"Well, mother."  Then, after a moment, she said, with a rush: "Did you
+think I was going to let him suppose we were piqued at his not coming?
+Did you suppose I was going to let him patronize us, or think that we
+were in the least dependent on his favor or friendship?"
+
+Her mother did not attempt to answer her.  She merely said, "I shouldn't
+think he would come any more."
+
+"Well, we have got on so far without him; perhaps we can live through the
+rest of the winter."
+
+"I couldn't help feeling sorry for him.  He was quite stupefied.  I could
+see that he didn't know what to make of you."
+
+"He's not required to make anything of me," said Alma.
+
+"Do you think he really believed you had forgotten all those things?"
+
+"Impossible to say, mamma."
+
+"Well, I don't think it was quite right, Alma."
+
+"I'll leave him to you the next time.  Miss Woodburn said you were
+freezing him to death when I came down."
+
+"That was quite different.  But, there won't be any next time, I'm
+afraid," sighed Mrs. Leighton.
+
+Beaton went home feeling sure there would not.  He tried to read when he
+got to his room; but Alma's looks, tones, gestures, whirred through and
+through the woof of the story like shuttles; he could not keep them out,
+and he fell asleep at last, not because he forgot them, but because he
+forgave them.  He was able to say to himself that he had been justly cut
+off from kindness which he knew how to value in losing it.  He did not
+expect ever to right himself in Alma's esteem, but he hoped some day to
+let her know that he had understood.  It seemed to him that it would be a
+good thing if she should find it out after his death.  He imagined her
+being touched by it under those circumstances.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had done himself injustice.
+When he uncovered his Judas and looked at it, he could not believe that
+the man who was capable of such work deserved the punishment Miss
+Leighton had inflicted upon him.  He still forgave her, but in the
+presence of a thing like that he could not help respecting himself; he
+believed that if she could see it she would be sorry that she had cut
+herself off from his acquaintance.  He carried this strain of conviction
+all through his syndicate letter, which he now took out of his desk and
+finished, with an increasing security of his opinions and a mounting
+severity in his judgments.  He retaliated upon the general condition of
+art among us the pangs of wounded vanity, which Alma had made him feel,
+and he folded up his manuscript and put it in his pocket, almost healed
+of his humiliation.  He had been able to escape from its sting so
+entirely while he was writing that the notion of making his life more and
+more literary commended itself to him.  As it was now evident that the
+future was to be one of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an oblivion
+tinged with bitterness, he formlessly reasoned in favor of reconsidering
+his resolution against Fulkerson's offer.  One must call it reasoning,
+but it was rather that swift internal dramatization which constantly goes
+on in persons of excitable sensibilities, and which now seemed to sweep
+Beaton physically along toward the 'Every Other Week' office, and carried
+his mind with lightning celerity on to a time when he should have given
+that journal such quality and authority in matters of art as had never
+been enjoyed by any in America before.  With the prosperity which he made
+attend his work he changed the character of the enterprise, and with
+Fulkerson's enthusiastic support he gave the public an art journal of as
+high grade as 'Les Lettres et les Arts', and very much that sort of
+thing.  All this involved now the unavailing regret of Alma Leighton, and
+now his reconciliation with her they were married in Grace Church,
+because Beaton had once seen a marriage there, and had intended to paint
+a picture of it some time.
+
+Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his responding with due
+dryness to Fulkerson's cheery "Hello, old man!" when he found himself in
+the building fitted up for the 'Every Other Week' office.  Fulkerson's
+room was back of the smaller one occupied by the bookkeeper; they had
+been respectively the reception-room and dining-room of the little place
+in its dwelling-house days, and they had been simply and tastefully
+treated in their transformation into business purposes.  The narrow old
+trim of the doors and windows had been kept, and the quaintly ugly marble
+mantels.  The architect had said, Better let them stay they expressed
+epoch, if not character.
+
+"Well, have you come round to go to work?  Just hang up your coat on the
+floor anywhere," Fulkerson went on.
+
+"I've come to bring you that letter," said Beaton, all the more haughtily
+because he found that Fulkerson was not alone when he welcomed him in
+these free and easy terms.  There was a quiet-looking man, rather stout,
+and a little above the middle height, with a full, close-cropped iron-
+gray beard, seated beyond the table where Fulkerson tilted himself back,
+with his knees set against it; and leaning against the mantel there was a
+young man with a singularly gentle face, in which the look of goodness
+qualified and transfigured a certain simplicity.  His large blue eyes
+were somewhat prominent; and his rather narrow face was drawn forward in
+a nose a little too long perhaps, if it had not been for the full chin
+deeply cut below the lip, and jutting firmly forward.
+
+"Introduce you to Mr. March, our editor, Mr. Beaton," Fulkerson said,
+rolling his head in the direction of the elder man; and then nodding it
+toward the younger, he said, "Mr. Dryfoos, Mr. Beaton."  Beaton shook
+hands with March, and then with Mr. Dryfoos, and Fulkerson went on,
+gayly: "We were just talking of you, Beaton--well, you know the old
+saying.  Mr. March, as I told you, is our editor, and Mr. Dryfoos has
+charge of the publishing department--he's the counting-room incarnate,
+the source of power, the fountain of corruption, the element that
+prevents journalism being the high and holy thing that it would be if
+there were no money in it."  Mr. Dryfoos turned his large, mild eyes upon
+Beaton, and laughed with the uneasy concession which people make to a
+character when they do not quite approve of the character's language.
+"What Mr. March and I are trying to do is to carry on this thing so that
+there won't be any money in it--or very little; and we're planning to
+give the public a better article for the price than it's ever had before.
+Now here's a dummy we've had made up for 'Every Other Week', and as we've
+decided to adopt it, we would naturally like your opinion of it, so's to
+know what opinion to have of you."  He reached forward and pushed toward
+Beaton a volume a little above the size of the ordinary duodecimo book;
+its ivory-white pebbled paper cover was prettily illustrated with a water
+-colored design irregularly washed over the greater part of its surface:
+quite across the page at top, and narrowing from right to left as it
+descended.  In the triangular space left blank the title of the
+periodical and the publisher's imprint were tastefully lettered so as to
+be partly covered by the background of color.
+
+"It's like some of those Tartarin books of Daudet's," said Beacon,
+looking at it with more interest than he suffered to be seen.  "But it's
+a book, not a magazine."  He opened its pages of thick, mellow white
+paper, with uncut leaves, the first few pages experimentally printed in
+the type intended to be used, and illustrated with some sketches drawn
+into and over the text, for the sake of the effect.
+
+"A Daniel--a Daniel come to judgment!  Sit down, Dan'el, and take it
+easy."  Fulkerson pushed a chair toward Beaton, who dropped into it.
+"You're right, Dan'el; it's a book, to all practical intents and
+purposes.  And what we propose to do with the American public is to give
+it twenty-four books like this a year--a complete library--for the absurd
+sum of six dollars.  We don't intend to sell 'em--it's no name for the
+transaction--but to give 'em.  And what we want to get out of you--beg,
+borrow, buy, or steal from you is an opinion whether we shall make the
+American public this princely present in paper covers like this, or in
+some sort of flexible boards, so they can set them on the shelf and say
+no more about it.  Now, Dan'el, come to judgment, as our respected friend
+Shylock remarked."
+
+Beacon had got done looking at the dummy, and he dropped it on the table
+before Fulkerson, who pushed it away, apparently to free himself from
+partiality.  "I don't know anything about the business side, and I can't
+tell about the effect of either style on the sales; but you'll spoil the
+whole character of the cover if you use anything thicker than that
+thickish paper."
+
+"All right; very good; first-rate.  The ayes have it.  Paper it is.  I
+don't mind telling you that we had decided for that paper before you came
+in.  Mr. March wanted it, because he felt in his bones just the way you
+do about it, and Mr. Dryfoos wanted it, because he's the counting-room
+incarnate, and it's cheaper; and I 'wanted it, because I always like to
+go with the majority.  Now what do you think of that little design
+itself?"
+
+"The sketch?"  Beaton pulled the book toward him again and looked at it
+again.  "Rather decorative.  Drawing's not remarkable.  Graceful; rather
+nice."  He pushed the book away again, and Fulkerson pulled it to his
+aide of the table.
+
+"Well, that's a piece of that amateur trash you despise so much.  I went
+to a painter I know-by-the-way, he was guilty of suggesting you for this
+thing, but I told him I was ahead of him--and I got him to submit my idea
+to one of his class, and that's the result.  Well, now, there ain't
+anything in this world that sells a book like a pretty cover, and we're
+going to have a pretty cover for 'Every Other Week' every time.  We've
+cut loose from the old traditional quarto literary newspaper size, and
+we've cut loose from the old two-column big page magazine size; we're
+going to have a duodecimo page, clear black print, and paper that 'll
+make your mouth water; and we're going to have a fresh illustration for
+the cover of each number, and we ain't agoing to give the public any rest
+at all.  Sometimes we're going to have a delicate little landscape like
+this, and sometimes we're going to have an indelicate little figure, or
+as much so as the law will allow."
+
+The young man leaning against the mantelpiece blushed a sort of protest.
+
+March smiled and said, dryly, "Those are the numbers that Mr. Fulkerson
+is going to edit himself."
+
+"Exactly.  And Mr. Beaton, here, is going to supply the floating females,
+gracefully airing themselves against a sunset or something of that kind."
+Beaton frowned in embarrassment, while Fulkerson went on philosophically;
+"It's astonishing how you fellows can keep it up at this stage of the
+proceedings; you can paint things that your harshest critic would be
+ashamed to describe accurately; you're as free as the theatre.  But
+that's neither here nor there.  What I'm after is the fact that we're
+going to have variety in our title-pages, and we are going to have
+novelty in the illustrations of the body of the book.  March, here, if he
+had his own way, wouldn't have any illustrations at all."
+
+"Not because I don't like them, Mr. Beacon," March interposed, "but
+because I like them too much.  I find that I look at the pictures in an
+illustrated article, but I don't read the article very much, and I fancy
+that's the case with most other people.  You've got to doing them so
+prettily that you take our eyes off the literature, if you don't take our
+minds off."
+
+"Like the society beauties on the stage: people go in for the beauty so
+much that they don't know what the play is.  But the box-office gets
+there all the same, and that's what Mr. Dryfoos wants."  Fulkerson looked
+up gayly at Mr. Dryfoos, who smiled deprecatingly.
+
+"It was different," March went on, "when the illustrations used to be
+bad.  Then the text had some chance."
+
+"Old legitimate drama days, when ugliness and genius combined to storm
+the galleries," said Fulkerson.
+
+"We can still make them bad enough," said Beaton, ignoring Fulkerson in
+his remark to March.
+
+Fulkerson took the reply upon himself.  "Well, you needn't make 'em so
+bad as the old-style cuts; but you can make them unobtrusive, modestly
+retiring.  We've got hold of a process something like that those French
+fellows gave Daudet thirty-five thousand dollars to write a novel to use
+with; kind of thing that begins at one side; or one corner, and spreads
+in a sort of dim religious style over the print till you can't tell which
+is which.  Then we've got a notion that where the pictures don't behave
+quite so sociably, they can be dropped into the text, like a little
+casual remark, don't you know, or a comment that has some connection, or
+maybe none at all, with what's going on in the story.  Something like
+this."  Fulkerson took away one knee from the table long enough to open
+the drawer, and pull from it a book that he shoved toward Beacon.
+"That's a Spanish book I happened to see at Brentano's, and I froze to it
+on account of the pictures.  I guess they're pretty good."
+
+"Do you expect to get such drawings in this country?"  asked Beaton,
+after a glance at the book.  "Such character--such drama?  You won't."
+
+"Well, I'm not so sure," said Fulkerson, "come to get our amateurs warmed
+up to the work.  But what I want is to get the physical effect, so to
+speak-get that sized picture into our page, and set the fashion of it.
+I shouldn't care if the illustration was sometimes confined to an initial
+letter and a tail-piece."
+
+"Couldn't be done here.  We haven't the touch.  We're good in some
+things, but this isn't in our way," said Beaton, stubbornly.  "I can't
+think of a man who could do it; that is, among those that would."
+
+"Well, think of some woman, then," said Fulkerson, easily.  "I've got a
+notion that the women could help us out on this thing, come to get 'em
+interested.  There ain't anything so popular as female fiction; why not
+try female art?"
+
+"The females themselves have been supposed to have been trying it for a
+good while," March suggested; and Mr. Dryfoos laughed nervously; Beaton
+remained solemnly silent.
+
+"Yes, I know," Fulkerson assented.  "But I don't mean that kind exactly.
+What we want to do is to work the 'ewig Weibliche' in this concern.  We
+want to make a magazine that will go for the women's fancy every time.
+I don't mean with recipes for cooking and fashions and personal gossip
+about authors and society, but real high-tone literature that will show
+women triumphing in all the stories, or else suffering tremendously.
+We've got to recognize that women form three-fourths of the reading
+public in this country, and go for their tastes and their sensibilities
+and their sex-piety along the whole line.  They do like to think that
+women can do things better than men; and if we can let it leak out and
+get around in the papers that the managers of 'Every Other Week' couldn't
+stir a peg in the line of the illustrations they wanted till they got a
+lot of God-gifted girls to help them, it 'll make the fortune of the
+thing.  See?"
+
+He looked sunnily round at the other men, and March said: "You ought to
+be in charge of a Siamese white elephant, Fulkerson.  It's a disgrace to
+be connected with you."
+
+"It seems to me," said Becton, "that you'd better get a God-gifted girl
+for your art editor."
+
+Fulkerson leaned alertly forward, and touched him on the shoulder, with a
+compassionate smile.  "My dear boy, they haven't got the genius of
+organization.  It takes a very masculine man for that--a man who combines
+the most subtle and refined sympathies with the most forceful purposes
+and the most ferruginous will-power.  Which his name is Angus Beaton, and
+here he sets!"
+
+The others laughed with Fulkerson at his gross burlesque of flattery, and
+Becton frowned sheepishly.  "I suppose you understand this man's style,"
+he growled toward March.
+
+"He does, my son," said Fulkerson.  "He knows that I cannot tell a lie."
+He pulled out his watch, and then got suddenly upon his feet.
+
+"It's quarter of twelve, and I've got an appointment."  Beaton rose too,
+and Fulkerson put the two books in his lax hands.  "Take these along,
+Michelangelo Da Vinci, my friend, and put your multitudinous mind on them
+for about an hour, and let us hear from you to-morrow.  We hang upon your
+decision."
+
+"There's no deciding to be done," said Beaton.  "You can't combine the
+two styles.  They'd kill each other."
+
+"A Dan'el, a Dan'el come to judgment!  I knew you could help us out!
+Take 'em along, and tell us which will go the furthest with the 'ewig
+Weibliche.'  Dryfoos, I want a word with you."  He led the way into the
+front room, flirting an airy farewell to Beaton with his hand as he went.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+March and Beaton remained alone together for a moment, and March said:
+"I hope you will think it worth while to take hold with us, Mr. Beaton.
+Mr. Fulkerson puts it in his own way, of course; but we really want to
+make a nice thing of the magazine."  He had that timidity of the elder in
+the presence of the younger man which the younger, preoccupied with his
+own timidity in the presence of the elder, cannot imagine.  Besides,
+March was aware of the gulf that divided him as a literary man from
+Beaton as an artist, and he only ventured to feel his way toward sympathy
+with him.  "We want to make it good; we want to make it high.  Fulkerson
+is right about aiming to please the women, but of course he caricatures
+the way of going about it."
+
+For answer, Beaton flung out, "I can't go in for a thing I don't
+understand the plan of."
+
+March took it for granted that he had wounded some exposed sensibility,
+of Beaton's.  He continued still more deferentially: "Mr. Fulkerson's
+notion--I must say the notion is his, evolved from his syndicate
+experience--is that we shall do best in fiction to confine our selves to
+short stories, and make each number complete in itself.  He found that
+the most successful things he could furnish his newspapers were short
+stories; we Americans are supposed to excel in writing them; and most
+people begin with them in fiction; and it's Mr. Fulkerson's idea to work
+unknown talent, as he says, and so he thinks he can not only get them
+easily, but can gradually form a school of short-story writers.  I can't
+say I follow him altogether, but I respect his experience.  We shall not
+despise translations of short stories, but otherwise the matter will all
+be original, and, of course, it won't all be short stories.  We shall use
+sketches of travel, and essays, and little dramatic studies, and bits of
+biography and history; but all very light, and always short enough to be
+completed in a single number.  Mr. Fulkerson believes in pictures, and
+most of the things would be capable of illustration."
+
+"I see," said Beaton.
+
+"I don't know but this is the whole affair," said March, beginning to
+stiffen a little at the young man's reticence.
+
+"I understand.  Thank you for taking the trouble to explain.  Good-
+morning."  Beaton bowed himself off, without offering to shake hands.
+
+Fulkerson came in after a while from the outer office, and Mr. Dryfoos
+followed him.  "Well, what do you think of our art editor?"
+
+"Is he our art editor?"  asked March.  "I wasn't quite certain when he
+left."
+
+"Did he take the books?"
+
+"Yes, he took the books."
+
+"I guess he's all right, then."  Fulkerson added, in concession to the
+umbrage he detected in March.
+
+"Beaton has his times of being the greatest ass in the solar system, but
+he usually takes it out in personal conduct.  When it comes to work, he's
+a regular horse."
+
+"He appears to have compromised for the present by being a perfect mule,"
+said March.
+
+"Well, he's in a transition state," Fulkerson allowed.  "He's the man for
+us.  He really understands what we want.  You'll see; he'll catch on.
+That lurid glare of his will wear off in the course of time.  He's really
+a good fellow when you take him off his guard; and he's full of ideas.
+He's spread out over a good deal of ground at present, and so he's pretty
+thin; but come to gather him up into a lump, there's a good deal of
+substance to him.  Yes, there is.  He's a first-rate critic, and he's a
+nice fellow with the other artists.  They laugh at his universality, but
+they all like him.  He's the best kind of a teacher when he condescends
+to it; and he's just the man to deal with our volunteer work.  Yes, sir,
+he's a prize.  Well, I must go now."
+
+Fulkerson went out of the street door, and then came quickly back.  "By-
+the-bye, March, I saw that old dynamiter of yours round at Beaton's room
+yesterday."
+
+"What old dynamiter of mine?"
+
+"That old one-handed Dutchman--friend of your youth--the one we saw at
+Maroni's--"
+
+"Oh-Lindau!" said March, with a vague pang of self reproach for having
+thought of Lindau so little after the first flood of his tender feeling
+toward him was past.
+
+"Yes, our versatile friend was modelling him as Judas Iscariot.  Lindau
+makes a first-rate Judas, and Beaton has got a big thing in that head if
+he works the religious people right.  But what I was thinking of was
+this--it struck me just as I was going out of the door: Didn't you tell
+me Lindau knew forty or fifty, different languages?"
+
+"Four or five, yes."
+
+"Well, we won't quarrel about the number.  The question is, Why not work
+him in the field of foreign literature?  You can't go over all their
+reviews and magazines, and he could do the smelling for you, if you could
+trust his nose.  Would he know a good thing?"
+
+"I think he would," said March, on whom the scope of Fulkerson's
+suggestion gradually opened.  "He used to have good taste, and he must
+know the ground.  Why, it's a capital idea, Fulkerson!  Lindau wrote very
+fair English, and he could translate, with a little revision."
+
+"And he would probably work cheap.  Well, hadn't you better see him about
+it?  I guess it 'll be quite a windfall for him."
+
+"Yes, it will.  I'll look him up.  Thank you for the suggestion,
+Fulkerson."
+
+"Oh, don't mention it! I don't mind doing 'Every Other Week' a good turn
+now and then when it comes in my way."  Fulkerson went out again, and
+this time March was finally left with Mr. Dryfoos.
+
+"Mrs. March was very sorry not to be at home when your sisters called the
+other day.  She wished me to ask if they had any afternoon in particular.
+There was none on your mother's card."
+
+"No, sir," said the young man, with a flush of embarrassment that seemed
+habitual with him.  "She has no day.  She's at home almost every day.
+She hardly ever goes out."
+
+"Might we come some evening?"  March asked.  "We should be very glad to
+do that, if she would excuse the informality.  Then I could come with
+Mrs. March."
+
+"Mother isn't very formal," said the young man.  "She would be very glad
+to see you."
+
+"Then we'll come some night this week, if you will let us.  When do you
+expect your father back?"
+
+"Not much before Christmas.  He's trying to settle up some things at
+Moffitt."
+
+"And what do you think of our art editor?"  asked March, with a smile,
+for the change of subject.
+
+"Oh, I don't know much about such things," said the young man, with
+another of his embarrassed flushes.  "Mr. Fulkerson seems to feel sure
+that he is the one for us."
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson seemed to think that I was the one for you, too," said
+March; and he laughed.  "That's what makes me doubt his infallibility.
+But he couldn't do worse with Mr. Beaton."
+
+Mr. Dryfoos reddened and looked down, as if unable or unwilling to cope
+with the difficulty of making a polite protest against March's self-
+depreciation.  He said, after a moment: "It's new business to all of us
+except Mr. Fulkerson.  But I think it will succeed.  I think we can do
+some good in it."
+
+March asked rather absently, "Some good?"  Then he added: "Oh yes;
+I think we can.  What do you mean by good?  Improve the public taste?
+Elevate the standard of literature?  Give young authors and artists a
+chance?"
+
+This was the only good that had ever been in March's mind, except the
+good that was to come in a material way from his success, to himself and
+to his family.
+
+"I don't know," said the young man; and he looked down in a shamefaced
+fashion.  He lifted his head and looked into March's face.  "I suppose I
+was thinking that some time we might help along.  If we were to have
+those sketches of yours about life in every part of New York--"
+
+March's authorial vanity was tickled.  "Fulkerson has been talking to you
+about them?  He seemed to think they would be a card.  He believes that
+there's no subject so fascinating to the general average of people
+throughout the country as life in New York City; and he liked my notion
+of doing these things."  March hoped that Dryfoos would answer that
+Fulkerson was perfectly enthusiastic about his notion; but he did not
+need this stimulus, and, at any rate, he went on without it.  "The fact
+is, it's something that struck my fancy the moment I came here; I found
+myself intensely interested in the place, and I began to make notes,
+consciously and unconsciously, at once.  Yes, I believe I can get
+something quite attractive out of it.  I don't in the least know what it
+will be yet, except that it will be very desultory; and I couldn't at all
+say when I can get at it.  If we postpone the first number till February
+I might get a little paper into that.  Yes, I think it might be a good
+thing for us," March said, with modest self-appreciation.
+
+"If you can make the comfortable people understand how the uncomfortable
+people live, it will be a very good thing, Mr. March.  Sometimes it seems
+to me that the only trouble is that we don't know one another well
+enough; and that the first thing is to do this."  The young fellow spoke
+with the seriousness in which the beauty of his face resided.  Whenever
+he laughed his face looked weak, even silly.  It seemed to be a sense of
+this that made him hang his head or turn it away at such times.
+
+"That's true," said March, from the surface only.  "And then, those
+phases of low life are immensely picturesque.  Of course, we must try to
+get the contrasts of luxury for the sake of the full effect.  That won't
+be so easy.  You can't penetrate to the dinner-party of a millionaire
+under the wing of a detective as you could to a carouse in Mulberry
+Street, or to his children's nursery with a philanthropist as you can to
+a street-boy's lodging-house."  March laughed, and again the young man
+turned his head away.  "Still, something can be done in that way by tact
+and patience."
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+That evening March went with his wife to return the call of the Dryfoos
+ladies.  On their way up-town in the Elevated he told her of his talk
+with young Dryfoos.  "I confess I was a little ashamed before him
+afterward for having looked at the matter so entirely from the aesthetic
+point of view.  But of course, you know, if I went to work at those
+things with an ethical intention explicitly in mind, I should spoil
+them."
+
+"Of course," said his wife.  She had always heard him say something of
+this kind about such things.
+
+He went on: "But I suppose that's just the point that such a nature as
+young Dryfoos's can't get hold of, or keep hold of.  We're a queer lot,
+down there, Isabel--perfect menagerie.  If it hadn't been that Fulkerson
+got us together, and really seems to know what he did it for, I should
+say he was the oddest stick among us.  But when I think of myself and my
+own crankiness for the literary department; and young Dryfoos, who ought
+really to be in the pulpit, or a monastery, or something, for publisher;
+and that young Beaton, who probably hasn't a moral fibre in his
+composition, for the art man, I don't know but we could give Fulkerson
+odds and still beat him in oddity."
+
+His wife heaved a deep sigh of apprehension, of renunciation, of
+monition.  "Well, I'm glad you can feel so light about it, Basil."
+
+"Light?  I feel gay!  With Fulkerson at the helm, I tell you the rocks
+and the lee shore had better keep out of the way."  He laughed with
+pleasure in his metaphor.  "Just when you think Fulkerson has taken leave
+of his senses he says or does something that shows he is on the most
+intimate and inalienable terms with them all the time.  You know how I've
+been worrying over those foreign periodicals, and trying to get some
+translations from them for the first number?  Well, Fulkerson has brought
+his centipedal mind to bear on the subject, and he's suggested that old
+German friend of mine I was telling you of--the one I met in the
+restaurant--the friend of my youth."
+
+"Do you think he could do it?"  asked Mrs. March, sceptically.
+
+"He's a perfect Babel of strange tongues; and he's the very man for the
+work, and I was ashamed I hadn't thought of him myself, for I suspect he
+needs the work."
+
+"Well, be careful how you get mixed up with him, then, Basil," said his
+wife, who had the natural misgiving concerning the friends of her
+husband's youth that all wives have.  "You know the Germans are so
+unscrupulously dependent.  You don't know anything about him now."
+
+"I'm not afraid of Lindau," said March.  "He was the best and kindest man
+I ever saw, the most high-minded, the most generous.  He lost a hand in
+the war that helped to save us and keep us possible, and that stump of
+his is character enough for me."
+
+"Oh, you don't think I could have meant anything against him!" said Mrs.
+March, with the tender fervor that every woman who lived in the time of
+the war must feel for those who suffered in it.  "All that I meant was
+that I hoped you would not get mixed up with him too much.  You're so apt
+to be carried away by your impulses."
+
+"They didn't carry me very far away in the direction of poor old Lindau,
+I'm ashamed to think," said March.  "I meant all sorts of fine things by
+him after I met him; and then I forgot him, and I had to be reminded of
+him by Fulkerson."
+
+She did not answer him, and he fell into a remorseful reverie, in which
+he rehabilitated Lindau anew, and provided handsomely for his old age.
+He got him buried with military honors, and had a shaft raised over him,
+with a medallion likeness by Beaton and an epitaph by himself, by the
+time they reached Forty-second Street; there was no time to write
+Lindau's life, however briefly, before the train stopped.
+
+They had to walk up four blocks and then half a block across before they
+came to the indistinctive brownstone house where the Dryfooses lived.
+It was larger than some in the same block, but the next neighborhood of a
+huge apartment-house dwarfed it again.  March thought he recognized the
+very flat in which he had disciplined the surly janitor, but he did not
+tell his wife; he made her notice the transition character of the street,
+which had been mostly built up in apartment-houses, with here and there a
+single dwelling dropped far down beneath and beside them, to that jag-
+toothed effect on the sky-line so often observable in such New York
+streets.  "I don't know exactly what the old gentleman bought here for,"
+he said, as they waited on the steps after ringing, "unless he expects to
+turn it into flats by-and-by.  Otherwise, I don't believe he'll get his
+money back."
+
+An Irish serving-man, with a certain surprise that delayed him, said the
+ladies were at home, and let the Marches in, and then carried their cards
+up-stairs.  The drawing-room, where he said they could sit down while he
+went on this errand, was delicately, decorated in white and gold, and
+furnished with a sort of extravagant good taste; there was nothing to
+object to in the satin furniture, the pale, soft, rich carpet, the
+pictures, and the bronze and china bric-a-brac, except that their
+costliness was too evident; everything in the room meant money too
+plainly, and too much of it.  The Marches recognized this in the hoarse
+whispers which people cannot get their voices above when they try to talk
+away the interval of waiting in such circumstances; they conjectured from
+what they had heard of the Dryfooses that this tasteful luxury in no wise
+expressed their civilization.  "Though when you come to that," said
+March, "I don't know that Mrs. Green's gimcrackery expresses ours."
+
+"Well, Basil, I didn't take the gimcrackery.  That was your--"
+
+The rustle of skirts on the stairs without arrested Mrs. March in the
+well-merited punishment which she never failed to inflict upon her
+husband when the question of the gimcrackery--they always called it that-
+-came up.  She rose at the entrance of a bright-looking, pretty-looking,
+mature, youngish lady, in black silk of a neutral implication, who put
+out her hand to her, and said, with a very cheery, very ladylike accent,
+"Mrs. March?"  and then added to both of them, while she shook hands with
+March, and before they could get the name out of their months: "No, not
+Miss Dryfoos!  Neither of them; nor Mrs. Dryfoos.  Mrs. Mandel.  The
+ladies will be down in a moment.  Won't you throw off your sacque, Mrs.
+March?  I'm afraid it's rather warm here, coming from the outside."
+
+"I will throw it back, if you'll allow me," said Mrs. March, with a sort
+of provisionality, as if, pending some uncertainty as to Mrs. Mandel's
+quality and authority, she did not feel herself justified in going
+further.
+
+But if she did not know about Mrs. Mandel, Mrs. Mandel seemed to know
+about her.  "Oh, well, do!" she said, with a sort of recognition of the
+propriety of her caution.  "I hope you are feeling a little at home in
+New York.  We heard so much of your trouble in getting a flat, from Mr.
+Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, a true Bostonian doesn't give up quite so soon," said Mrs. March.
+
+"But I will say New York doesn't seem so far away, now we're here."
+
+"I'm sure you'll like it.  Every one does."  Mrs. Mandel added to March,
+"It's very sharp out, isn't it?"
+
+"Rather sharp.  But after our Boston winters I don't know but I ought to
+repudiate the word."
+
+"Ah, wait till you have been here through March!" said Mrs. Mandel.  She
+began with him, but skillfully transferred the close of her remark, and
+the little smile of menace that went with it, to his wife.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, "or April, either: Talk about our east winds!"
+
+"Oh, I'm sure they can't be worse than our winds," Mrs. Mandel returned,
+caressingly.
+
+"If we escape New York pneumonia," March laughed, "it will only be to
+fall a prey to New York malaria as soon as the frost is out of the
+ground."
+
+"Oh, but you know," said Mrs. Mandel, "I think our malaria has really
+been slandered a little.  It's more a matter of drainage--of plumbing.
+I don't believe it would be possible for malaria to get into this house,
+we've had it gone over so thoroughly."
+
+Mrs. March said, while she tried to divine Mrs. Mandel's position from
+this statement, "It's certainly the first duty."
+
+"If Mrs. March could have had her way, we should have had the drainage of
+our whole ward put in order," said her husband, "before we ventured to
+take a furnished apartment for the winter."
+
+Mrs. Mandel looked discreetly at Mrs. March for permission to laugh at
+this, but at the same moment both ladies became preoccupied with a second
+rustling on the stairs.
+
+Two tall, well-dressed young girls came in, and Mrs. Mandel introduced,
+"Miss Dryfoos, Mrs. March; and Miss Mela Dryfoos, Mr. March," she added,
+and the girls shook hands in their several ways with the Marches.
+
+Miss Dryfoos had keen black eyes, and her hair was intensely black.  Her
+face, but for the slight inward curve of the nose, was regular, and the
+smallness of her nose and of her mouth did not weaken her face, but gave
+it a curious effect of fierceness, of challenge.  She had a large black
+fan in her hand, which she waved in talking, with a slow, watchful
+nervousness.  Her sister was blonde, and had a profile like her
+brother's; but her chin was not so salient, and the weak look of the
+mouth was not corrected by the spirituality or the fervor of his eyes,
+though hers were of the same mottled blue.  She dropped into the low seat
+beside Mrs. Mandel, and intertwined her fingers with those of the hand
+which Mrs. Mandel let her have.  She smiled upon the Marches, while Miss
+Dryfoos watched them intensely, with her eyes first on one and then on
+the other, as if she did not mean to let any expression of theirs escape
+her.
+
+"My mother will be down in a minute," she said to Mrs. March.
+
+"I hope we're not disturbing her.  It is so good of you to let us come in
+the evening," Mrs. March replied.
+
+"Oh, not at all," said the girl.  "We receive in the evening."
+
+"When we do receive," Miss Mela put in.  "We don't always get the chance
+to."  She began a laugh, which she checked at a smile from Mrs. Mandel,
+which no one could have seen to be reproving.
+
+Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan, and looked up defiantly at Mrs.
+March.  "I suppose you have hardly got settled.  We were afraid we would
+disturb you when we called."
+
+"Oh no! We were very sorry to miss your visit.  We are quite settled in
+our new quarters.  Of course, it's all very different from Boston."
+
+"I hope it's more of a sociable place there," Miss Mela broke in again.
+"I never saw such an unsociable place as New York.  We've been in this
+house three months, and I don't believe that if we stayed three years any
+of the neighbors would call."
+
+"I fancy proximity doesn't count for much in New York," March suggested.
+
+Mrs. Mandel said: "That's what I tell Miss Mela.  But she is a very
+social nature, and can't reconcile herself to the fact."
+
+"No, I can't," the girl pouted.  "I think it was twice as much fun in
+Moffitt.  I wish I was there now."
+
+"Yes," said March, "I think there's a great deal more enjoyment in those
+smaller places.  There's not so much going on in the way of public
+amusements, and so people make more of one another.  There are not so
+many concerts, theatres, operas--"
+
+"Oh, they've got a splendid opera-house in Moffitt.  It's just grand,"
+said Miss Mela.
+
+"Have you been to the opera here, this winter?"  Mrs. March asked of the
+elder girl.
+
+She was glaring with a frown at her sister, and detached her eyes from
+her with an effort.  "What did you say?"  she demanded, with an absent
+bluntness.  "Oh yes.  Yes! We went once.  Father took a box at the
+Metropolitan."
+
+"Then you got a good dose of Wagner, I suppose?"  said March.
+
+"What?"  asked the girl.
+
+"I don't think Miss Dryfoos is very fond of Wagner's music," Mrs. Mandel
+said.  "I believe you are all great Wagnerites in Boston?"
+
+"I'm a very bad Bostonian, Mrs. Mandel.  I suspect myself of preferring
+Verdi," March answered.
+
+Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan again, and said, "I like 'Trovatore'
+the best."
+
+"It's an opera I never get tired of," said March, and Mrs. March and Mrs:
+Mandel exchanged a smile of compassion for his simplicity.  He detected
+it, and added: "But I dare say I shall come down with the Wagner fever in
+time.  I've been exposed to some malignant cases of it."
+
+"That night we were there," said Miss Mela, "they had to turn the gas
+down all through one part of it, and the papers said the ladies were
+awful mad because they couldn't show their diamonds.  I don't wonder, if
+they all had to pay as much for their boxes as we did.  We had to pay
+sixty dollars."  She looked at the Marches for their sensation at this
+expense.
+
+March said: "Well, I think I shall take my box by the month, then.  It
+must come cheaper, wholesale."
+
+"Oh no, it don't," said the girl, glad to inform him.  "The people that
+own their boxes, and that had to give fifteen or twenty thousand dollars
+apiece for them, have to pay sixty dollars a night whenever there's a
+performance, whether they go or not."
+
+"Then I should go every night," March said.
+
+"Most of the ladies were low neck--"
+
+March interposed, "Well, I shouldn't go low-neck."
+
+The girl broke into a fondly approving laugh at his drolling.  "Oh, I
+guess you love to train!  Us girls wanted to go low neck, too; but father
+said we shouldn't, and mother said if we did she wouldn't come to the
+front of the box once.  Well, she didn't, anyway.  We might just as well
+'a' gone low neck.  She stayed back the whole time, and when they had
+that dance--the ballet, you know--she just shut her eyes.  Well, Conrad
+didn't like that part much, either; but us girls and Mrs. Mandel, we
+brazened it out right in the front of the box.  We were about the only
+ones there that went high neck.  Conrad had to wear a swallow-tail;
+but father hadn't any, and he had to patch out with a white cravat.
+You couldn't see what he had on in the back o' the box, anyway."
+
+Mrs. March looked at Miss Dryfoos, who was waving her fan more and more
+slowly up and down, and who, when she felt herself looked at, returned
+Mrs. March's smile, which she meant to be ingratiating and perhaps
+sympathetic, with a flash that made her start, and then ran her fierce
+eyes over March's face.  "Here comes mother," she said, with a sort of
+breathlessness, as if speaking her thought aloud, and through the open
+door the Marches could see the old lady on the stairs.
+
+She paused half-way down, and turning, called up: "Coonrod! Coonrod!
+You bring my shawl down with you."
+
+Her daughter Mela called out to her, "Now, mother, Christine 'll give it
+to you for not sending Mike."
+
+"Well, I don't know where he is, Mely, child," the mother answered back.
+"He ain't never around when he's wanted, and when he ain't, it seems like
+a body couldn't git shet of him, nohow."
+
+"Well, you ought to ring for him!" cried Miss Mela, enjoying the joke.
+
+Her mother came in with a slow step; her head shook slightly as she
+looked about the room, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps from a touch of
+palsy.  In either case the fact had a pathos which Mrs. March confessed
+in the affection with which she took her hard, dry, large, old hand when
+she was introduced to her, and in the sincerity which she put into the
+hope that she was well.
+
+"I'm just middlin'," Mrs. Dryfoos replied.  "I ain't never so well,
+nowadays.  I tell fawther I don't believe it agrees with me very well
+here, but he says I'll git used to it.  He's away now, out at Moffitt,"
+she said to March, and wavered on foot a moment before she sank into a
+chair.  She was a tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl, and her gray
+hair had a memory of blondeness in it like Lindau's, March noticed.  She
+wore a simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she held a handkerchief
+folded square, as it had come from the laundress.  Something like the
+Sabbath quiet of a little wooden meeting-house in thick Western woods
+expressed itself to him from her presence.
+
+"Laws, mother!" said Miss Mela; "what you got that old thing on for?  If
+I'd 'a' known you'd 'a' come down in that!"
+
+"Coonrod said it was all right, Mely," said her mother.
+
+Miss Mela explained to the Marches: "Mother was raised among the
+Dunkards, and she thinks it's wicked to wear anything but a gray silk
+even for dress-up."
+
+"You hain't never heared o' the Dunkards, I reckon," the old woman said
+to Mrs. March.  "Some folks calls 'em the Beardy Men, because they don't
+never shave; and they wash feet like they do in the Testament.  My uncle
+was one.  He raised me."
+
+"I guess pretty much everybody's a Beardy Man nowadays, if he ain't a
+Dunkard!"
+
+Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally, but March was saying to
+his wife: "It's a Pennsylvania German sect, I believe--something like the
+Quakers.  I used to see them when I was a boy."
+
+"Aren't they something like the Mennists?"  asked Mrs. Mandel.
+
+"They're good people," said the old woman, "and the world 'd be a heap
+better off if there was more like 'em."
+
+Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her shoulders before he shook
+hands with the visitors.  "I am glad you found your way here," he said to
+them.
+
+Christine, who had been bending forward over her fan, now lifted herself
+up with a sigh and leaned back in her chair.
+
+"I'm sorry my father isn't here," said the young man to Mrs. March.
+"He's never met you yet?"
+
+"No; and I should like to see him.  We hear a great deal about your
+father, you know, from Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Oh, I hope you don't believe everything Mr. Fulkerson says about
+people," Mela cried.  "He's the greatest person for carrying on when he
+gets going I ever saw.  It makes Christine just as mad when him and
+mother gets to talking about religion; she says she knows he don't care
+anything more about it than the man in the moon.  I reckon he don't try
+it on much with father."
+
+"Your fawther ain't ever been a perfessor," her mother interposed; "but
+he's always been a good church-goin' man."
+
+"Not since we come to New York," retorted the girl.
+
+"He's been all broke up since he come to New York," said the old woman,
+with an aggrieved look.
+
+Mrs. Mandel attempted a diversion.  "Have you heard any of our great New
+York preachers yet, Mrs. March?"
+
+"No, I haven't," Mrs. March admitted; and she tried to imply by her
+candid tone that she intended to begin hearing them the very next Sunday.
+
+"There are a great many things here," said Conrad, "to take your thoughts
+off the preaching that you hear in most of the churches.  I think the
+city itself is preaching the best sermon all the time."
+
+"I don't know that I understand you," said March.
+
+Mela answered for him.  "Oh, Conrad has got a lot of notions that nobody
+can understand.  You ought to see the church he goes to when he does go.
+I'd about as lief go to a Catholic church myself; I don't see a bit o'
+difference.  He's the greatest crony with one of their preachers; he
+dresses just like a priest, and he says he is a priest."  She laughed for
+enjoyment of the fact, and her brother cast down his eyes.
+
+Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it the personal tone which
+the talk was always assuming.  "Have you been to the fall exhibition?"
+she asked Christine; and the girl drew herself up out of the abstraction
+she seemed sunk in.
+
+"The exhibition?"  She looked at Mrs. Mandel.
+
+"The pictures of the Academy, you know," Mrs. Mandel explained.
+"Where I wanted you to go the day you had your dress tried on,"
+
+"No; we haven't been yet.  Is it good?"  She had turned to Mrs. March
+again.
+
+"I believe the fall exhibitions are never so good as the spring ones.
+But there are some good pictures."
+
+"I don't believe I care much about pictures," said Christine.  "I don't
+understand them."
+
+"Ah, that's no excuse for not caring about them," said March, lightly.
+"The painters themselves don't, half the time."
+
+The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiant and appealing,
+insolent and anxious, which he had noticed before, especially when she
+stole it toward himself and his wife during her sister's babble.  In the
+light of Fulkerson's history of the family, its origin and its ambition,
+he interpreted it to mean a sense of her sister's folly and an ignorant
+will to override his opinion of anything incongruous in themselves and
+their surroundings.  He said to himself that she was deathly proud--too
+proud to try to palliate anything, but capable of anything that would put
+others under her feet.  Her eyes seemed hopelessly to question his wife's
+social quality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest, the
+inexperienced girl's doubt whether to treat them with much or little
+respect.  He lost himself in fancies about her and her ideals,
+necessarily sordid, of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphs
+and disappointments before her.  Her sister would accept both with a
+lightness that would keep no trace of either; but in her they would sink
+lastingly deep.  He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. Dryfoos saying
+to him, in her hoarse voice:
+
+"I think it's a shame, some of the pictur's a body sees in the winders.
+They say there's a law ag'inst them things; and if there is, I don't
+understand why the police don't take up them that paints 'em.  I hear 182
+tell, since I been here, that there's women that goes to have pictur's
+took from them that way by men painters."  The point seemed aimed at
+March, as if he were personally responsible for the scandal, and it fell
+with a silencing effect for the moment.  Nobody seemed willing to take it
+up, and Mrs. Dryfoos went on, with an old woman's severity: "I say they
+ought to be all tarred and feathered and rode on a rail.  They'd be
+drummed out of town in Moffitt."
+
+Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh: "I should think they would! And
+they wouldn't anybody go low neck to the opera-house there, either--not
+low neck the way they do here, anyway."
+
+"And that pack of worthless hussies," her mother resumed, "that come out
+on the stage, and begun to kick"
+
+"Laws, mother!" the girl shouted, "I thought you said you had your eyes
+shut!"
+
+All but these two simpler creatures were abashed at the indecorum of
+suggesting in words the commonplaces of the theatre and of art.
+
+"Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believe my eyes.  I don't know
+what they're doin' in all their churches, to let such things go on," said
+the old woman.  "It's a sin and a shame, I think.  Don't you, Coonrod?"
+
+A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he was about to deliver.
+
+"If it's going to be company, Coonrod," said his mother, making an effort
+to rise, "I reckon I better go up-stairs."
+
+"It's Mr. Fulkerson, I guess," said Conrad.  "He thought he might come";
+and at the mention of this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoos sank contentedly
+back in her chair, and a relaxation of their painful tension seemed to
+pass through the whole company.  Conrad went to the door himself (the
+serving-man tentatively, appeared some minutes later) and let in
+Fulkerson's cheerful voice before his cheerful person.
+
+"Ah, how dye do, Conrad?  Brought our friend, Mr. Beaton, with me," those
+within heard him say; and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats,
+they saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set square and his arms
+akimbo.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+"Ah! hello! hello !" Fulkerson said, in recognition of the Marches.
+"Regular gathering of the clans.  How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos?  How do you
+do, Mrs. Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks?
+How you wuz?"  He shook hands gayly all round, and took a chair next the
+old lady, whose hand he kept in his own, and left Conrad to introduce
+Beaton.  But he would not let the shadow of Beaton's solemnity fall upon
+the company.  He began to joke with Mrs. Dryfoos, and to match
+rheumatisms with her, and he included all the ladies in the range of
+appropriate pleasantries.  "I've brought Mr. Beaton along to-night,
+and I want you to make him feel at home, like you do me, Mrs. Dryfoos.
+He hasn't got any rheumatism to speak of; but his parents live in
+Syracuse, and he's a kind of an orphan, and we've just adopted him down
+at the office.  When you going to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs.
+Mandel, for a champagne lunch?  I will have some hydro-Mela, and
+Christine it, heigh?  How's that for a little starter?  We dropped in at
+your place a moment, Mrs. March, and gave the young folks a few pointers
+about their studies.  My goodness! it does me good to see a boy like that
+of yours; business, from the word go; and your girl just scoops my
+youthful affections.  She's a beauty, and I guess she's good, too.  Well,
+well, what a world it is! Miss Christine, won't you show Mr. Beaton that
+seal ring of yours?  He knows about such things, and I brought him here
+to see it as much as anything.  It's an intaglio I brought from the other
+side," he explained to Mrs. March, "and I guess you'll like to look at
+it.  Tried to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when I couldn't, I sold
+it to 'em.  Bound to see it on Miss Christine's hand somehow!  Hold on!
+Let him see it where it belongs, first!"
+
+He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and let
+her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the ring on
+it.  Then he left her to hear the painter's words about it, which he
+continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a gas-
+jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.
+
+"Well, Mely, child," Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her
+mother's habitual address, "and how are you getting along?  Mrs. Mandel
+hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly?  Well, that's right.
+You know you'd be roaming all over the pasture if she didn't."
+
+The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him.
+on his own ground of privileged character.  He brought them all together
+in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had
+inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both
+the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society, and that two
+young men had been devoted to them.
+
+"Oh, I think he's just as lovely as he can live!" said Mela, as she stood
+a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the others
+had left them after the departure of their guests.
+
+"Who?"  asked Christine, deeply.  As she glanced down at her ring, her
+eyes burned with a softened fire.
+
+She had allowed Beaton to change it himself from the finger where she had
+worn it to the finger on which he said she ought to wear it.  She did not
+know whether it was right to let him, but she was glad she had done it.
+
+"Who?  Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie! Not that old stuckup Mr. Beaton of
+yours!"
+
+"He is proud," assented Christine, with a throb of exultation.
+
+Beaton and Fulkerson went to the Elevated station with the Marches; but
+the painter said he was going to walk home, and Fulkerson let him go
+alone.
+
+"One way is enough for me," he explained.  "When I walk up, I don't.
+walk down.  Bye-bye, my son!"  He began talking about Beaton to the
+Marches as they climbed the station stairs together.  "That fellow
+puzzles me.  I don't know anybody that I have such a desire to kick, and
+at the same time that I want to flatter up so much.  Affect you that
+way?" he asked of March.
+
+"Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes."
+
+"And how is it with you, Mrs. March?"
+
+"Oh, I want to flatter him up."
+
+"No; really?  Why?  Hold on! I've got the change."
+
+Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket-office window; and made them
+his guests, with the inexorable American hospitality, for the ride down-
+town.  "Three!" he said to the ticket-seller; and, when he had walked
+them before him out on the platform and dropped his tickets into the urn,
+he persisted in his inquiry, "Why?"
+
+"Why, because you always want to flatter conceited people, don't you?"
+Mrs. March answered, with a laugh.
+
+"Do you?  Yes, I guess you do.  You think Beaton is conceited?"
+
+"Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"I guess you're partly right," said Fulkerson, with a sigh, so
+unaccountable in its connection that they all laughed.
+
+"An ideal 'busted'?"  March suggested.
+
+"No, not that, exactly," said Fulkerson.  "But I had a notion maybe
+Beaton wasn't conceited all the time."
+
+"Oh!" Mrs. March exulted, "nobody could be so conceited all the time as
+Mr. Beaton is most of the time.  He must have moments of the direst
+modesty, when he'd be quite flattery-proof."
+
+"Yes, that's what I mean.  I guess that's what makes me want to kick him.
+He's left compliments on my hands that no decent man would."
+
+"Oh! that's tragical," said March.
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson," Mrs. March began, with change of subject in her voice,
+"who is Mrs. Mandel?"
+
+"Who?  What do you think of her?"  he rejoined.  "I'll tell you about her
+when we get in the cars.  Look at that thing!  Ain't it beautiful?"
+
+They leaned over the track and looked up at the next station, where the
+train, just starting, throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white
+moonlight.
+
+"The most beautiful thing in New York--the one always and certainly
+beautiful thing here," said March; and his wife sighed, "Yes, yes."
+She clung to him, and remained rapt by the sight till the train drew
+near, and then pulled him back in a panic.
+
+"Well, there ain't really much to tell about her," Fulkerson resumed when
+they were seated in the car.  "She's an invention of mine."
+
+"Of yours?"  cried Mrs. March.
+
+"Of course!" exclaimed her husband.
+
+"Yes--at least in her present capacity.  She sent me a story for the
+syndicate, back in July some time, along about the time I first met old
+Dryfoos here.  It was a little too long for my purpose, and I thought I
+could explain better how I wanted it cut in a call than I could in a
+letter.  She gave a Brooklyn address, and I went to see her.  I found
+her," said Fulkerson, with a vague defiance, "a perfect lady.  She was
+living with an aunt over there; and she had seen better days, when she
+was a girl, and worse ones afterward.  I don't mean to say her husband
+was a bad fellow; I guess he was pretty good; he was her music-teacher;
+she met him in Germany, and they got married there, and got through her
+property before they came over here.  Well, she didn't strike me like a
+person that could make much headway in literature.  Her story was well
+enough, but it hadn't much sand in it; kind of-well, academic, you know.
+I told her so, and she understood, and cried a little; but she did the
+best she could with the thing, and I took it and syndicated it.  She kind
+of stuck in my mind, and the first time I went to see the Dryfooses they
+were stopping at a sort of family hotel then till they could find a
+house--"Fulkerson broke off altogether, and said, "I don't know as I know
+just how the Dryfooses struck you, Mrs. March?"
+
+"Can't you imagine?"  she answered, with a kindly, smile.
+
+"Yes; but I don't believe I could guess how they would have struck you
+last summer when I first saw them.  My! oh my! there was the native earth
+for you.  Mely is a pretty wild colt now, but you ought to have seen her
+before she was broken to harness.
+
+"And Christine?  Ever see that black leopard they got up there in the
+Central Park?  That was Christine.  Well, I saw what they wanted.  They
+all saw it--nobody is a fool in all directions, and the Dryfooses are in
+their right senses a good deal of the time.  Well, to cut a long story
+short, I got Mrs. Mandel to take 'em in hand--the old lady as well as the
+girls.  She was a born lady, and always lived like one till she saw
+Mandel; and that something academic that killed her for a writer was just
+the very thing for them.  She knows the world well enough to know just
+how much polish they can take on, and she don't try to put on a bit more.
+See?"
+
+"Yes, I can see," said Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, she took hold at once, as ready as a hospital-trained nurse; and
+there ain't anything readier on this planet.  She runs the whole concern,
+socially and economically, takes all the care of housekeeping off the old
+lady's hands, and goes round with the girls.  By-the-bye, I'm going to
+take my meals at your widow's, March, and Conrad's going to have his
+lunch there.  I'm sick of browsing about."
+
+"Mr. March's widow?"  said his wife, looking at him with provisional
+severity.
+
+"I have no widow, Isabel," he said, "and never expect to have, till I
+leave you in the enjoyment of my life-insurance.  I suppose Fulkerson
+means the lady with the daughter who wanted to take us to board."
+
+"Oh yes.  How are they getting on, I do wonder?"  Mrs. March asked of
+Fulkerson.
+
+"Well, they've got one family to board; but it's a small one.  I guess
+they'll pull through.  They didn't want to take any day boarders at
+first, the widow said; I guess they have had to come to it."
+
+"Poor things!" sighed Mrs. March.  "I hope they'll go back to the
+country."
+
+"Well, I don't know.  When you've once tasted New York--You wouldn't go
+back to Boston, would you?"
+
+"Instantly."
+
+Fulkerson laughed out a tolerant incredulity.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room, and sat down
+before the dull fire in his grate to think.  It struck him there was a
+dull fire in his heart a great deal like it; and he worked out a fanciful
+analogy with the coals, still alive, and the ashes creeping over them,
+and the dead clay and cinders.  He felt sick of himself, sick of his life
+and of all his works.  He was angry with Fulkerson for having got him
+into that art department of his, for having bought him up; and he was
+bitter at fate because he had been obliged to use the money to pay some
+pressing debts, and had not been able to return the check his father had
+sent him.  He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassion for
+him; and he set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his
+own baseness.  This was the kind of world it was; but he washed his hands
+of it.  The fault was in human nature, and he reflected with pride that
+he had at least not invented human nature; he had not sunk so low as that
+yet.  The notion amused him; he thought he might get a Satanic epigram
+out of it some way.  But in the mean time that girl, that wild animal,
+she kept visibly, tangibly before him; if he put out his hand he might
+touch hers, he might pass his arm round her waist.  In Paris, in a set he
+knew there, what an effect she would be with that look of hers, and that
+beauty, all out of drawing!  They would recognize the flame quality in
+her.  He imagined a joke about her being a fiery spirit, or nymph, naiad,
+whatever, from one of her native gas-wells.  He began to sketch on a bit
+of paper from the table at his elbow vague lines that veiled and revealed
+a level, dismal landscape, and a vast flame against an empty sky, and a
+shape out of the flame that took on a likeness and floated detached from
+it.  The sketch ran up the left side of the sheet and stretched across
+it.  Beaton laughed out.  Pretty good to let Fulkerson have that for the
+cover of his first number!  In black and red it would be effective; it
+would catch the eye from the news-stands.  He made a motion to throw it
+on the fire, but held it back and slid it into the table-drawer, and
+smoked on.  He saw the dummy with the other sketch in the open drawer
+which he had brought away from Fulkerson's in the morning and slipped in
+there, and he took it out and looked at it.  He made some criticisms in
+line with his pencil on it, correcting the drawing here and there, and
+then he respected it a little more, though he still smiled at the
+feminine quality--a young lady quality.
+
+In spite of his experience the night he called upon the Leightons, Beaton
+could not believe that Alma no longer cared for him.  She played at
+having forgotten him admirably, but he knew that a few months before she
+had been very mindful of him.  He knew he had neglected them since they
+came to New York, where he had led them to expect interest, if not
+attention; but he was used to neglecting people, and he was somewhat less
+used to being punished for it--punished and forgiven.  He felt that Alma
+had punished him so thoroughly that she ought to have been satisfied with
+her work and to have forgiven him in her heart afterward.  He bore no
+resentment after the first tingling moments were-past; he rather admired
+her for it; and he would have been ready to go back half an hour later
+and accept pardon and be on the footing of last summer again.  Even now
+he debated with himself whether it was too late to call; but, decidedly,
+a quarter to ten seemed late.  The next day he determined never to call
+upon the Leightons again; but he had no reason for this; it merely came
+into a transitory scheme of conduct, of retirement from the society of
+women altogether; and after dinner he went round to see them.
+
+He asked for the ladies, and they all three received him, Alma not
+without a surprise that intimated itself to him, and her mother with no
+appreciable relenting; Miss Woodburn, with the needlework which she found
+easier to be voluble over than a book, expressed in her welcome a
+neutrality both cordial to Beaton and loyal to Alma.
+
+"Is it snowing outdo's?"  she asked, briskly, after the greetings were
+transacted.  "Mah goodness!" she said, in answer to his apparent surprise
+at the question.  "Ah mahght as well have stayed in the Soath, for all
+the winter Ah have seen in New York yet."
+
+"We don't often have snow much before New-Year's," said Beaton.
+
+"Miss Woodburn is wild for a real Northern winter," Mrs. Leighton
+explained.
+
+"The othah naght Ah woke up and looked oat of the window and saw all the
+roofs covered with snow, and it turned oat to be nothing but moonlaght.
+Ah was never so disappointed in mah lahfe," said Miss Woodburn.
+
+"If you'll come to St. Barnaby next summer, you shall have all the winter
+you want," said Alma.
+
+"I can't let you slander St. Barnaby in that way," said Beaton, with the
+air of wishing to be understood as meaning more than he said.
+
+"Yes?"  returned Alma, coolly.  "I didn't know you were so fond of the
+climate."
+
+"I never think of it as a climate.  It's a landscape.  It doesn't matter
+whether it's hot or cold."
+
+"With the thermometer twenty below, you'd find that it mattered," Alma
+persisted.
+
+"Is that the way you feel about St. Barnaby, too, Mrs. Leighton?"  Beaton
+asked, with affected desolation.
+
+"I shall be glad enough to go back in the summer," Mrs. Leighton
+conceded.
+
+"And I should be glad to go now," said Beaton, looking at Alma.  He had
+the dummy of 'Every Other Week' in his hand, and he saw Alma's eyes
+wandering toward it whenever he glanced at her.  "I should be glad to go
+anywhere to get out of a job I've undertaken," he continued, to Mrs.
+Leighton.  "They're going to start some sort of a new illustrated
+magazine, and they've got me in for their art department.  I'm not fit
+for it; I'd like to run away.  Don't you want to advise me a little, Mrs.
+Leighton?  You know how much I value your taste, and I'd like to have you
+look at the design for the cover of the first number: they're going to
+have a different one for every number.  I don't know whether you'll agree
+with me, but I think this is rather nice."
+
+He faced the dummy round, and then laid it on the table before Mrs.
+Leighton, pushing some of her work aside to make room for it and standing
+over her while she bent forward to look at it.
+
+Alma kept her place, away from the table.
+
+"Mah goodness! Ho' exciting!" said Miss Woodburn.  "May anybody look?"
+
+"Everybody," said Beaton.
+
+"Well, isn't it perfectly choming!" Miss Woodburn exclaimed.  "Come and
+look at this, Miss Leighton," she called to Alma, who reluctantly
+approached.
+
+What lines are these?"  Mrs. Leighton asked, pointing to Beaton's pencil
+scratches.
+
+"They're suggestions of modifications," he replied.
+
+"I don't think they improve it much.  What do you think, Alma?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said the girl, constraining her voice to an effect of
+indifference and glancing carelessly down at the sketch.  "The design
+might be improved; but I don't think those suggestions would do it."
+
+"They're mine," said Beaton, fixing his eyes upon her with a beautiful
+sad dreaminess that he knew he could put into them; he spoke with a
+dreamy remoteness of tone--his wind-harp stop, Wetmore called it.
+
+"I supposed so," said Alma, calmly.
+
+"Oh, mah goodness!" cried Miss Woodburn.  "Is that the way you awtusts
+talk to each othah?  Well, Ah'm glad Ah'm not an awtust--unless I could
+do all the talking."
+
+"Artists cannot tell a fib," Alma said, "or even act one," and she
+laughed in Beaton's upturned face.
+
+He did not unbend his dreamy gaze.  "You're quite right.  The suggestions
+are stupid."
+
+Alma turned to Miss Woodburn: "You hear?  Even when we speak of our own
+work."
+
+"Ah nevah hoad anything lahke it!"
+
+"And the design itself ?"  Beaton persisted.
+
+"Oh, I'm not an art editor," Alma answered, with a laugh of exultant
+evasion.
+
+A tall, dark, grave-looking man of fifty, with a swarthy face and iron-
+gray mustache and imperial and goatee, entered the room.  Beaton knew the
+type; he had been through Virginia sketching for one of the illustrated
+papers, and he had seen such men in Richmond.  Miss Woodburn hardly
+needed to say, "May Ah introduce you to mah fathaw, Co'nel Woodburn, Mr.
+Beaton?"
+
+The men shook hands, and Colonel Woodburn said, in that soft, gentle,
+slow Southern voice without our Northern contractions: "I am very glad to
+meet you, sir; happy to make yo' acquaintance.  Do not move, madam," he
+said to Mrs. Leighton, who made a deprecatory motion to let him pass to
+the chair beyond her; "I can find my way."  He bowed a bulk that did not
+lend itself readily to the devotion, and picked up the ball of yarn she
+had let drop out of her lap in half rising.  "Yo' worsteds, madam."
+
+"Yarn, yarn, Colonel Woodburn!" Alma shouted.  "You're quite
+incorrigible.  A spade is a spade!"
+
+"But sometimes it is a trump, my dear young lady," said the Colonel, with
+unabated gallantry; "and when yo' mothah uses yarn, it is worsteds.  But
+I respect worsteds even under the name of yarn: our ladies--my own mothah
+and sistahs--had to knit the socks we wore--all we could get in the woe."
+
+"Yes, and aftah the woe," his daughter put in.  "The knitting has not
+stopped yet in some places.  Have you been much in the Soath,
+Mr. Beaton?"
+
+Beaton explained just how much.
+
+"Well, sir," said the Colonel, "then you have seen a country making
+gigantic struggles to retrieve its losses, sir.  The South is advancing
+with enormous strides, sir."
+
+"Too fast for some of us to keep up," said Miss Woodburn, in an audible
+aside.  "The pace in Charlottesboag is pofectly killing, and we had to
+drop oat into a slow place like New York."
+
+"The progress in the South is material now," said the Colonel; "and those
+of us whose interests are in another direction find ourselves--isolated
+--isolated, sir.  The intellectual centres are still in the No'th, sir;
+the great cities draw the mental activity of the country to them, sir.
+Necessarily New York is the metropolis."
+
+"Oh, everything comes here," said Beaton, impatient of the elder's
+ponderosity.  Another sort of man would have sympathized with the
+Southerner's willingness to talk of himself, and led him on to speak of
+his plans and ideals.  But the sort of man that Beaton was could not do
+this; he put up the dummy into the wrapper he had let drop on the floor
+beside him, and tied it round with string while Colonel Woodburn was
+talking.  He got to his feet with the words he spoke and offered Mrs.
+Leighton his hand.
+
+"Must you go?"  she asked, in surprise.
+
+"I am on my way to a reception," he said.  She had noticed that he was in
+evening dress; and now she felt the vague hurt that people invited
+nowhere feel in the presence of those who are going somewhere.  She did
+not feel it for herself, but for her daughter; and she knew Alma would
+not have let her feel it if she could have prevented it.  But Alma had
+left the room for a moment, and she tacitly indulged this sense of injury
+in her behalf.
+
+"Please say good-night to Miss Leighton for me," Beaton continued.  He
+bowed to Miss Woodburn, "Goodnight, Miss Woodburn," and to her father,
+bluntly, "Goodnight."
+
+"Good-night, sir," said the Colonel, with a sort of severe suavity.
+
+"Oh, isn't he choming!" Miss Woodburn whispered to Mrs. Leighton when
+Beaton left the room.
+
+Alma spoke to him in the hall without.  "You knew that was my design, Mr.
+Beaton.  Why did you bring it?"
+
+"Why?"  He looked at her in gloomy hesitation.
+
+Then he said: "You know why.  I wished to talk it over with you, to serve
+you, please you, get back your good opinion.  But I've done neither the
+one nor the other; I've made a mess of the whole thing."
+
+Alma interrupted him.  "Has it been accepted?"
+
+"It will be accepted, if you will let it."
+
+"Let it?"  she laughed.  "I shall be delighted."  She saw him swayed a
+little toward her.  "It's a matter of business, isn't it?"
+
+"Purely.  Good-night."
+
+When Alma returned to the room, Colonel Woodburn was saying to Mrs.
+Leighton: "I do not contend that it is impossible, madam, but it is very
+difficult in a thoroughly commercialized society, like yours, to have the
+feelings of a gentleman.  How can a business man, whose prosperity, whose
+earthly salvation, necessarily lies in the adversity of some one else, be
+delicate and chivalrous, or even honest?  If we could have had time to
+perfect our system at the South, to eliminate what was evil and develop
+what was good in it, we should have had a perfect system.  But the virus
+of commercialism was in us, too; it forbade us to make the best of a
+divine institution, and tempted us to make the worst.  Now the curse is
+on the whole country; the dollar is the measure of every value, the stamp
+of every success.  What does not sell is a failure; and what sells
+succeeds."
+
+"The hobby is oat, mah deah," said Miss Woodburn, in an audible aside to
+Alma.
+
+"Were you speaking of me, Colonel Woodburn?"  Alma asked.
+
+"Surely not, my dear young lady."
+
+"But he's been saying that awtusts are just as greedy aboat money as
+anybody," said his daughter.
+
+"The law of commercialism is on everything in a commercial society," the
+Colonel explained, softening the tone in which his convictions were
+presented.  "The final reward of art is money, and not the pleasure of
+creating."
+
+"Perhaps they would be willing to take it all oat in that if othah people
+would let them pay their bills in the pleasure of creating," his daughter
+teased.
+
+"They are helpless, like all the rest," said her father, with the same
+deference to her as to other women.  "I do not blame them."
+
+"Oh, mah goodness! Didn't you say, sir, that Mr. Beaton had bad manners?"
+
+Alma relieved a confusion which he seemed to feel in reference to her.
+"Bad manners?  He has no manners! That is, when he's himself.  He has
+pretty good ones when he's somebody else."
+
+Miss Woodburn began, "Oh, mah-" and then stopped herself.  Alma's mother
+looked at her with distressed question, but the girl seemed perfectly
+cool and contented; and she gave her mind provisionally to a point
+suggested by Colonel Woodburn's talk.
+
+"Still, I can't believe it was right to hold people in slavery, to whip
+them and sell them.  It never did seem right to me," she added, in
+apology for her extreme sentiments to the gentleness of her adversary.
+
+"I quite agree with you, madam," said the Colonel.  "Those were the
+abuses of the institution.  But if we had not been vitiated on the one
+hand and threatened on the other by the spirit of commercialism from the
+North--and from Europe, too--those abuses could have been eliminated,
+and the institution developed in the direction of the mild patriarchalism
+of the divine intention."  The Colonel hitched his chair, which figured a
+hobby careering upon its hind legs, a little toward Mrs. Leighton and the
+girls approached their heads and began to whisper; they fell
+deferentially silent when the Colonel paused in his argument, and went on
+again when he went on.
+
+At last they heard Mrs. Leighton saying, "And have you heard from the
+publishers about your book yet?"
+
+Then Miss Woodburn cut in, before her father could answer: "The coase of
+commercialism is on that, too.  They are trahing to fahnd oat whethah it
+will pay."
+
+"And they are right-quite right," said the Colonel.  "There is no longer
+any other criterion; and even a work that attacks the system must be
+submitted to the tests of the system."
+
+"The system won't accept destruction on any othah tomes," said Miss
+Woodburn, demurely.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+At the reception, where two men in livery stood aside to let him pass up
+the outside steps of the house, and two more helped him off with his
+overcoat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room,
+the Syracuse stone-cutter's son met the niece of Mrs. Horn, and began at
+once to tell her about his evening at the Dryfooses'.  He was in very
+good spirits, for so far as he could have been elated or depressed by his
+parting with Alma Leighton he had been elated; she had not treated his
+impudence with the contempt that he felt it deserved; she must still be
+fond of him; and the warm sense of this, by operation of an obscure but
+well-recognized law of the masculine being, disposed him to be rather
+fond of Miss Vance.  She was a slender girl, whose semi-aesthetic dress
+flowed about her with an accentuation of her long forms, and redeemed
+them from censure by the very frankness with which it confessed them;
+nobody could have said that Margaret Vance was too tall.  Her pretty
+little head, which she had an effect of choosing to have little in the
+same spirit of judicious defiance, had a good deal of reading in it; she
+was proud to know literary and artistic fashions as well as society
+fashions.  She liked being singled out by an exterior distinction so
+obvious as Beaton's, and she listened with sympathetic interest to his
+account of those people.  He gave their natural history reality by
+drawing upon his own; he reconstructed their plebeian past from the
+experiences of his childhood and his youth of the pre-Parisian period;
+and he had a pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance of the
+world.
+
+"What different kinds of people you meet!" said the girl at last, with an
+envious sigh.  Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination,
+if not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common
+people, and made them seem so very much more worth while than the people
+one met.
+
+She said something like this to Beaton.  He answered: "You can meet the
+people I'm talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble.
+It's what they came to New York for.  I fancy it's the great ambition of
+their lives to be met."
+
+"Oh yes," said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked
+up and said, intellectually: "Don't you think it's a great pity?  How
+much better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!"
+
+"Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them," said Beaton.
+"I don't suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?"
+
+"No," said Miss Vance, amused.  "Not that I shouldn't like to go."
+
+"What a daring spirit! You ought to be on the staff of 'Every Other
+Week,'" said Beaton.
+
+"The staff-Every Other Week?  What is it?"
+
+"The missing link; the long-felt want of a tie between the Arts and the
+Dollars."  Beaton gave her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketch of
+the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of the new enterprise.
+
+Miss Vance understood too little about business of any kind to know how
+it differed from other enterprises of its sort.  She thought it was
+delightful; she thought Beaton must be glad to be part of it, though he
+had represented himself so bored, so injured, by Fulkerson's insisting
+upon having him.  "And is it a secret?  Is it a thing not to be
+spoken of?"
+
+"'Tutt' altro'!  Fulkerson will be enraptured to have it spoken of in
+society.  He would pay any reasonable bill for the advertisement."
+
+"What a delightful creature! Tell him it shall all be spent in charity."
+
+"He would like that.  He would get two paragraphs out of the fact, and
+your name would go into the 'Literary Notes' of all the newspapers."
+
+"Oh, but I shouldn't want my name used!" cried the girl, half horrified
+into fancying the situation real.
+
+"Then you'd better not say anything about 'Every Other Week'.  Fulkerson
+is preternaturally unscrupulous."
+
+March began to think so too, at times.  He was perpetually suggesting
+changes in the make-up of the first number, with a view to its greater
+vividness of effect.  One day he came and said: "This thing isn't going
+to have any sort of get up and howl about it, unless you have a paper in
+the first number going for Bevans's novels.  Better get Maxwell to do
+it."
+
+"Why, I thought you liked Bevans's novels?"
+
+"So I did; but where the good of 'Every Other Week' is concerned I am a
+Roman father.  The popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell is the man
+to do it.  There hasn't been a new magazine started for the last three
+years that hasn't had an article from Maxwell in its first number cutting
+Bevans all to pieces.  If people don't see it, they'll think 'Every Other
+Week' is some old thing."
+
+March did not know whether Fulkerson was joking or not.  He suggested,
+"Perhaps they'll think it's an old thing if they do see it."
+
+"Well, get somebody else, then; or else get Maxwell to write under an
+assumed name.  Or--I forgot!  He'll be anonymous under our system,
+anyway.  Now there ain't a more popular racket for us to work in that
+first number than a good, swinging attack on Bevans.  People read his
+books and quarrel over 'em, and the critics are all against him, and a
+regular flaying, with salt and vinegar rubbed in afterward, will tell
+more with people who like good old-fashioned fiction than anything else.
+I like Bevans's things, but, dad burn it! when it comes to that first
+number, I'd offer up anybody."
+
+"What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulkerson!" said March, with a
+laugh.
+
+Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous about the attack on the
+novelist.  "Say!" he called out, gayly, "what should you think of a paper
+defending the late lamented system of slavery'?"
+
+"What do you mean, Fulkerson?"  asked March, with a puzzled smile.
+
+Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk, and pushed himself back, but
+kept his balance to the eye by canting his hat sharply forward."  There's
+an old cock over there at the widow's that's written a book to prove that
+slavery was and is the only solution of the labor problem.  He's a
+Southerner."
+
+"I should imagine," March assented.
+
+"He's got it on the brain that if the South could have been let alone by
+the commercial spirit and the pseudophilanthropy of the North, it would
+have worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition for the laborer,
+in which he would have been insured against want, and protected in all
+his personal rights by the state.  He read the introduction to me last
+night.  I didn't catch on to all the points--his daughter's an awfully
+pretty girl, and I was carrying that fact in my mind all the time, too,
+you know--but that's about the gist of it."
+
+"Seems to regard it as a lost opportunity?"  said March.
+
+"Exactly!  What a mighty catchy title, Neigh?  Look well on the title-
+page."
+
+"Well written?"
+
+"I reckon so; I don't know.  The Colonel read it mighty eloquently."
+
+"It mightn't be such bad business," said March, in a muse.  "Could you
+get me a sight of it without committing yourself?"
+
+"If the Colonel hasn't sent it off to another publisher this morning.  He
+just got it back with thanks yesterday.  He likes to keep it travelling."
+
+"Well, try it.  I've a notion it might be a curious thing."
+
+"Look here, March," said Fulkerson, with the effect of taking a fresh
+hold; "I wish you could let me have one of those New York things of yours
+for the first number.  After all, that's going to be the great card."
+
+"I couldn't, Fulkerson; I couldn't, really.  I want to philosophize the
+material, and I'm too new to it all yet.  I don't want to do merely
+superficial sketches."
+
+"Of course! Of course! I understand that.  Well, I don't want to hurry
+you.  Seen that old fellow of yours yet?  I think we ought to have that
+translation in the first number; don't you?  We want to give 'em a notion
+of what we're going to do in that line."
+
+"Yes," said March; "and I was going out to look up Lindau this morning.
+I've inquired at Maroni's, and he hasn't been there for several days.
+I've some idea perhaps he's sick.  But they gave me his address, and I'm
+going to see."
+
+"Well, that's right.  We want the first number to be the keynote in every
+way."
+
+March shook his head.  "You can't make it so.  The first number is bound
+to be a failure always, as far as the representative character goes.
+It's invariably the case.  Look at the first numbers of all the things
+you've seen started.  They're experimental, almost amateurish, and
+necessarily so, not only because the men that are making them up are
+comparatively inexperienced like ourselves, but because the material sent
+them to deal with is more or less consciously tentative.  People send
+their adventurous things to a new periodical because the whole thing is
+an adventure.  I've noticed that quality in all the volunteer
+contributions; it's in the articles that have been done to order even.
+No; I've about made up my mind that if we can get one good striking paper
+into the first number that will take people's minds off the others, we
+shall be doing all we can possible hope for.  I should like," March
+added, less seriously, "to make up three numbers ahead, and publish the
+third one first."
+
+Fulkerson dropped forward and struck his fist on the desk.  "It's a
+first-rate idea.  Why not do it?"
+
+March laughed.  "Fulkerson, I don't believe there's any quackish thing
+you wouldn't do in this cause.  From time to time I'm thoroughly ashamed
+of being connected with such a charlatan."
+
+Fulkerson struck his hat sharply backward.  "Ah, dad burn it! To give
+that thing the right kind of start I'd walk up and down Broadway between
+two boards, with the title-page of Every Other Week facsimiled on one and
+my name and address on the--"
+
+He jumped to his feet and shouted, "March, I'll do it!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"I'll hire a lot of fellows to make mud-turtles of themselves, and I'll
+have a lot of big facsimiles of the title-page, and I'll paint the town
+red!"
+
+March looked aghast at him.  "Oh, come, now, Fulkerson!"
+
+"I mean it.  I was in London when a new man had taken hold of the old
+Cornhill, and they were trying to boom it, and they had a procession of
+these mudturtles that reached from Charing Cross to Temple Bar.  Cornhill
+Magazine.  Sixpence.  Not a dull page in it.' I said to myself then that
+it was the livest thing I ever saw.  I respected the man that did that
+thing from the bottom of my heart.  I wonder I ever forgot it.  But it
+shows what a shaky thing the human mind is at its best."
+
+"You infamous mountebank!", said March, with great amusement at
+Fulkerson's access; "you call that congeries of advertising instinct of
+yours the human mind at its best?  Come, don't be so diffident,
+Fulkerson.  Well, I'm off to find Lindau, and when I come back I hope Mr.
+Dryfoos will have you under control.  I don't suppose you'll be quite
+sane again till after the first number is out.  Perhaps public opinion
+will sober you then."
+
+"Confound it, March! How do you think they will take it?  I swear I'm
+getting so nervous I don't know half the time which end of me is up.
+I believe if we don't get that thing out by the first of February it 'll
+be the death of me."
+
+"Couldn't wait till Washington's Birthday?  I was thinking it would give
+the day a kind of distinction, and strike the public imagination, if--"
+
+"No, I'll be dogged if I could!" Fulkerson lapsed more and more into the
+parlance of his early life in this season of strong excitement.
+"I believe if Beaton lags any on the art leg I'll kill him."
+
+"Well, I shouldn't mind your killing Beaton," said March, tranquilly, as
+he went out.
+
+He went over to Third Avenue and took the Elevated down to Chatham
+Square.  He found the variety of people in the car as unfailingly
+entertaining as ever.  He rather preferred the East Side to the West Side
+lines, because they offered more nationalities, conditions, and
+characters to his inspection.  They draw not only from the up-town
+American region, but from all the vast hive of populations swarming
+between them and the East River.  He had found that, according to the
+hour, American husbands going to and from business, and American wives
+going to and from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road, and that
+the most picturesque admixture to these familiar aspects of human nature
+were the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American Hebrews, who
+otherwise contributed to the effect of well-clad comfort and citizen-
+self-satisfaction of the crowd.  Now and then he had found himself in a
+car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the
+line, where he had read how they are worked and fed and housed like
+beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect, he
+had occasion for pensive question within himself as to what notion these
+poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life
+under its conditions; and whether they found them practically very
+different from those of the immemorial brigandage and enforced complicity
+with rapine under which they had been born.  But, after all, this was an
+infrequent effect, however massive, of travel on the West Side, whereas
+the East offered him continual entertainment in like sort.  The sort was
+never quite so squalid.  For short distances the lowest poverty, the
+hardest pressed labor, must walk; but March never entered a car without
+encountering some interesting shape of shabby adversity, which was almost
+always adversity of foreign birth.  New York is still popularly supposed
+to be in the control of the Irish, but March noticed in these East Side
+travels of his what must strike every observer returning to the city
+after a prolonged absence: the numerical subordination of the dominant
+race.  If they do not outvote them, the people of Germanic, of Slavonic,
+of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock outnumber the prepotent Celts; and March
+seldom found his speculation centred upon one of these.  The small eyes,
+the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted
+skulls, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of
+Italians; the blonde dulness of Germans; the cold quiet of Scandinavians
+--fire under ice--were aspects that he identified, and that gave him
+abundant suggestion for the personal histories he constructed, and for
+the more public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with the future
+economy of our heterogeneous commonwealth.  It must be owned that he did
+not take much trouble about this; what these poor people were thinking,
+hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering; just where and how they lived; who
+and what they individually were--these were the matters of his waking
+dreams as he stared hard at them, while the train raced farther into the
+gay ugliness--the shapeless, graceful, reckless picturesqueness of the
+Bowery.
+
+There were certain signs, certain facades, certain audacities of the
+prevailing hideousness that always amused him in that uproar to the eye
+which the strident forms and colors made.  He was interested in the
+insolence with which the railway had drawn its erasing line across the
+Corinthian front of an old theatre, almost grazing its fluted pillars,
+and flouting its dishonored pediment.  The colossal effigies of the fat
+women and the tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums; the vistas
+of shabby cross streets; the survival of an old hip-roofed house here and
+there at their angles; the Swiss chalet, histrionic decorativeness of the
+stations in prospect or retrospect; the vagaries of the lines that
+narrowed together or stretched apart according to the width of the
+avenue, but always in wanton disregard of the life that dwelt, and bought
+and sold, and rejoiced or sorrowed, and clattered or crawled, around,
+below, above--were features of the frantic panorama that perpetually
+touched his sense of humor and moved his sympathy.  Accident and then
+exigency seemed the forces at work to this extraordinary effect; the play
+of energies as free and planless as those that force the forest from the
+soil to the sky; and then the fierce struggle for survival, with the
+stronger life persisting over the deformity, the mutilation, the
+destruction, the decay of the weaker.  The whole at moments seemed to him
+lawless, godless; the absence of intelligent, comprehensive purpose in
+the huge disorder, and the violent struggle to subordinate the result to
+the greater good, penetrated with its dumb appeal the consciousness of a
+man who had always been too self-enwrapped to perceive the chaos to which
+the individual selfishness must always lead.
+
+But there was still nothing definite, nothing better than a vague
+discomfort, however poignant, in his half recognition of such facts; and
+he descended the station stairs at Chatham Square with a sense of the
+neglected opportunities of painters in that locality.  He said to himself
+that if one of those fellows were to see in Naples that turmoil of cars,
+trucks, and teams of every sort, intershot with foot-passengers going and
+coming to and from the crowded pavements, under the web of the railroad
+tracks overhead, and amid the spectacular approach of the streets that
+open into the square, he would have it down in his sketch-book at once.
+He decided simultaneously that his own local studies must be illustrated,
+and that be must come with the artist and show him just which bits to do,
+not knowing that the two arts can never approach the same material from
+the same point.  He thought he would particularly like his illustrator to
+render the Dickensy, cockneyish quality of the, shabby-genteel ballad-
+seller of whom he stopped to ask his way to the street where Lindau
+lived, and whom he instantly perceived to be, with his stock in trade,
+the sufficient object of an entire study by himself.  He had his ballads
+strung singly upon a cord against the house wall, and held down in piles
+on the pavement with stones and blocks of wood. Their control in this way
+intimated a volatility which was not perceptible in their sentiment.
+They were mostly tragical or doleful: some of them dealt with the wrongs
+of the working-man; others appealed to a gay experience of the high seas;
+but vastly the greater part to memories and associations of an Irish
+origin; some still uttered the poetry of plantation life in the artless
+accents of the end--man.  Where they trusted themselves, with syntax that
+yielded promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, to the ordinary
+American speech, it was to strike directly for the affections, to
+celebrate the domestic ties, and, above all, to embalm the memories of
+angel and martyr mothers whose dissipated sons deplored their sufferings
+too late.  March thought this not at all a bad thing in them; he smiled
+in patronage of their simple pathos; he paid the tribute of a laugh when
+the poet turned, as he sometimes did, from his conception of angel and
+martyr motherhood, and portrayed the mother in her more familiar phases
+of virtue and duty, with the retributive shingle or slipper in her hand.
+He bought a pocketful of this literature, popular in a sense which the
+most successful book can never be, and enlisted the ballad vendor so
+deeply in the effort to direct him to Lindau's dwelling by the best way
+that he neglected another customer, till a sarcasm on his absent-
+mindedness stung hint to retort, "I'm a-trying to answer a gentleman a
+civil question; that's where the absent-minded comes in."
+
+It seemed for some reason to be a day of leisure with the Chinese
+dwellers in Mott Street, which March had been advised to take first.
+They stood about the tops of basement stairs, and walked two and two
+along the dirty pavement, with their little hands tucked into their
+sleeves across their breasts, aloof in immaculate cleanliness from the
+filth around them, and scrutinizing the scene with that cynical sneer of
+faint surprise to which all aspects of our civilization seem to move
+their superiority.  Their numbers gave character to the street, and
+rendered not them, but what was foreign to them, strange there; so that
+March had a sense of missionary quality in the old Catholic church, built
+long before their incursion was dreamed of.  It seemed to have come to
+them there, and he fancied in the statued saint that looked down from its
+facade something not so much tolerant as tolerated, something
+propitiatory, almost deprecatory.  It was a fancy, of course; the street
+was sufficiently peopled with Christian children, at any rate, swarming
+and shrieking at their games; and presently a Christian mother appeared,
+pushed along by two policemen on a handcart, with a gelatinous tremor
+over the paving and a gelatinous jouncing at the curbstones.  She lay
+with her face to the sky, sending up an inarticulate lamentation; but the
+indifference of the officers forbade the notion of tragedy in her case.
+She was perhaps a local celebrity; the children left off their games, and
+ran gayly trooping after her; even the young fellow and young girl
+exchanging playful blows in a robust flirtation at the corner of a liquor
+store suspended their scuffle with a pleased interest as she passed.
+March understood the unwillingness of the poor to leave the worst
+conditions in the city for comfort and plenty in the country when he
+reflected upon this dramatic incident, one of many no doubt which daily
+occur to entertain them in such streets.  A small town could rarely offer
+anything comparable to it, and the country never.  He said that if life
+appeared so hopeless to him as it must to the dwellers in that
+neighborhood he should not himself be willing to quit its distractions,
+its alleviations, for the vague promise of unknown good in the distance
+somewhere.
+
+But what charm could such a man as Lindau find in such a place?  It could
+not be that he lived there because he was too poor to live elsewhere:
+with a shutting of the heart, March refused to believe this as he looked
+round on the abounding evidences of misery, and guiltily remembered his
+neglect of his old friend.  Lindau could probably find as cheap a lodging
+in some decenter part of the town; and, in fact, there was some
+amelioration of the prevailing squalor in the quieter street which he
+turned into from Mott.
+
+A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened the door for him when he
+pulled, with a shiver of foreboding, the bell-knob, from which a yard of
+rusty crape dangled.  But it was not Lindau who was dead, for the woman
+said he was at home, and sent March stumbling up the four or five dark
+flights of stairs that led to his tenement.  It was quite at the top of
+the house, and when March obeyed the German-English "Komm!" that followed
+his knock, he found himself in a kitchen where a meagre breakfast was
+scattered in stale fragments on the table before the stove.  The place
+was bare and cold; a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gave it a convivial
+air.  On the left from this kitchen was a room with a bed in it, which
+seemed also to be a cobbler's shop: on the right, through a door that
+stood ajar, came the German-English voice again, saying this time,
+"Hier!"
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+March pushed the door open into a room like that on the left, but with a
+writing-desk instead of a cobbler's bench, and a bed, where Lindau sat
+propped up; with a coat over his shoulders and a skull-cap on his head,
+reading a book, from which he lifted his eyes to stare blankly over his
+spectacles at March.  His hairy old breast showed through the night-
+shirt, which gaped apart; the stump of his left arm lay upon the book to
+keep it open.
+
+"Ah, my tear yo'ng friendt! Passil! Marge! Iss it you?"  he called out,
+joyously, the next moment.
+
+"Why, are you sick, Lindau?"  March anxiously scanned his face in taking
+his hand.
+
+Lindau laughed.  "No; I'm all righdt.  Only a lidtle lazy, and a lidtle
+eggonomigal.  Idt's jeaper to stay in pedt sometimes as to geep a fire a-
+goin' all the time.  Don't wandt to gome too hardt on the 'brafer
+Mann', you know:
+
+          "Braver Mann, er schafft mir zu essen."
+
+You remember?  Heine?  You readt Heine still?  Who is your favorite boet
+now, Passil?  You write some boetry yourself yet?  No?  Well, I am gladt
+to zee you.  Brush those baperss off of that jair.  Well, idt is goodt
+for zore eyess.  How didt you findt where I lif?
+
+"They told me at Maroni's," said March.  He tried to keep his eyes on
+Lindau's face, and not see the discomfort of the room, but he was aware
+of the shabby and frowsy bedding, the odor of stale smoke, and the pipes
+and tobacco shreds mixed with the books and manuscripts strewn over the
+leaf of the writing-desk.  He laid down on the mass the pile of foreign
+magazines he had brought under his arm.  "They gave me another address
+first."
+
+"Yes.  I have chust gome here," said Lindau.  "Idt is not very coy,
+Neigh?"
+
+"It might be gayer," March admitted, with a smile.  "Still," he added,
+soberly, "a good many people seem to live in this part of the town.
+Apparently they die here, too, Lindau.  There is crape on your outside
+door.  I didn't know but it was for you."
+
+"Nodt this time," said Lindau, in the same humor.  "Berhaps some other
+time.  We geep the ondertakers bratty puzy down here."
+
+"Well," said March, "undertakers must live, even if the rest of us have
+to die to let them."  Lindau laughed, and March went on: "But I'm glad it
+isn't your funeral, Lindau.  And you say you're not sick, and so I don't
+see why we shouldn't come to business."
+
+"Pusiness?"  Lindau lifted his eyebrows.  "You gome on pusiness?"
+
+"And pleasure combined," said March, and he went on to explain the
+service he desired at Lindau's hands.
+
+The old man listened with serious attention, and with assenting nods that
+culminated in a spoken expression of his willingness to undertake the
+translations.  March waited with a sort of mechanical expectation of his
+gratitude for the work put in his way, but nothing of the kind came from
+Lindau, and March was left to say, "Well, everything is understood, then;
+and I don't know that I need add that if you ever want any little advance
+on the work--"
+
+"I will ask you," said Lindau, quietly, "and I thank you for that.  But I
+can wait; I ton't needt any money just at bresent."  As if he saw some
+appeal for greater frankness in, March's eye, he went on: "I tidn't gome
+here begause I was too boor to lif anywhere else, and I ton't stay in
+pedt begause I couldn't haf a fire to geep warm if I wanted it.  I'm nodt
+zo padt off as Marmontel when he went to Paris.  I'm a lidtle loaxurious,
+that is all.  If I stay in pedt it's zo I can fling money away on
+somethings else.  Heigh?"
+
+"But what are you living here for, Lindau ?"  March smiled at the irony
+lurking in Lindau's words.
+
+"Well, you zee, I foundt I was begoming a lidtle too moch of an
+aristograt.  I hadt a room oap in Creenvidge Willage, among dose pig pugs
+over on the West Side, and I foundt"--Liudau's voice lost its jesting
+quality, and his face darkened--"that I was beginning to forget the
+boor!"
+
+"I should have thought," said March, with impartial interest, "that you
+might have seen poverty enough, now and then, in Greenwich Village to
+remind you of its existence."
+
+"Nodt like here," said Lindau.  "Andt you must zee it all the dtime--zee
+it, hear it, smell it, dtaste it--or you forget it.  That is what I gome
+here for.  I was begoming a ploated aristograt.  I thought I was nodt
+like these beople down here, when I gome down once to look aroundt;
+I thought I must be somethings else, and zo I zaid I better take myself
+in time, and I gome here among my brothers--the becears and the thiefs!"
+A noise made itself heard in the next room, as if the door were furtively
+opened, and a faint sound of tiptoeing and of hands clawing on a table.
+
+"Thiefs!" Lindau repeated, with a shout.  "Lidtle thiefs, that gabture
+your breakfast.  Ah! ha! ha!"  A wild scurrying of feet, joyous cries and
+tittering, and a slamming door followed upon his explosion, and he
+resumed in the silence: "Idt is the children cot pack from school.  They
+gome and steal what I leaf there on my daple.  Idt's one of our lidtle
+chokes; we onderstand one another; that's all righdt.  Once the gobbler
+in the other room there he used to chase 'em; he couldn't onderstand
+their lidtle tricks.  Now dot goppler's teadt, and he ton't chase 'em any
+more.  He was a Bohemian.  Gindt of grazy, I cuess."
+
+"Well, it's a sociable existence," March suggested.  "But perhaps if you
+let them have the things without stealing--"
+
+"Oh no, no!  Most nodt mage them too gonceitedt.  They mostn't go and
+feel themselfs petter than those boor millionairss that hadt to steal
+their money."
+
+March smiled indulgently at his old friend's violence.  "Oh, there are
+fagots and fagots, you know, Lindau; perhaps not all the millionaires are
+so guilty."
+
+"Let us speak German!" cried Lindau, in his own tongue, pushing his book
+aside, and thrusting his skullcap back from his forehead.  "How much
+money can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing some other
+man?"
+
+"Well, if you'll let me answer in English," said March, "I should say
+about five thousand dollars a year.  I name that figure because it's my
+experience that I never could earn more; but the experience of other men
+may be different, and if they tell me they can earn ten, or twenty, or
+fifty thousand a year, I'm not prepared to say they can't do it."
+
+Lindau hardly waited for his answer.  "Not the most gifted man that ever
+lived, in the practice of any art or science, and paid at the highest
+rate that exceptional genius could justly demand from those who have
+worked for their money, could ever earn a million dollars.  It is the
+landlords and the merchant princes, the railroad kings and the coal
+barons (the oppressors to whom you instinctively give the titles of
+tyrants)--it is these that make the millions, but no man earns them.
+What artist, what physician, what scientist, what poet was ever a
+millionaire?"
+
+"I can only think of the poet Rogers," said March, amused by Lindau's
+tirade.  "But he was as exceptional as the other Rogers, the martyr,
+who died with warm feet."  Lindau had apparently not understood his joke,
+and he went on, with the American ease of mind about everything: "But you
+must allow, Lindau, that some of those fellows don't do so badly with
+their guilty gains.  Some of them give work to armies of poor people--"
+
+Lindau furiously interrupted: "Yes, when they have gathered their
+millions together from the hunger and cold and nakedness and ruin and
+despair of hundreds of thousands of other men, they 'give work' to the
+poor!  They give work!  They allow their helpless brothers to earn enough
+to keep life in them!  They give work!  Who is it gives toil, and where
+will your rich men be when once the poor shall refuse to give toil'?
+Why, you have come to give me work!"
+
+March laughed outright.  "Well, I'm not a millionaire, anyway, Lindau,
+and I hope you won't make an example of me by refusing to give toil.  I
+dare say the millionaires deserve it, but I'd rather they wouldn't suffer
+in my person."
+
+"No," returned the old man, mildly relaxing the fierce glare he had bent
+upon March.  "No man deserves to sufer at the hands of another.  I lose
+myself when I think of the injustice in the world.  But I must not forget
+that I am like the worst of them."
+
+"You might go up Fifth Avenue and live among the rich awhile, when you're
+in danger of that," suggested March.  "At any rate," he added, by an
+impulse which he knew he could not justify to his wife, "I wish you'd
+come some day and lunch with their emissary.  I've been telling Mrs.
+March about you, and I want her and the children to see you.  Come over
+with these things and report."  He put his hand on the magazines as he
+rose.
+
+"I will come," said Lindau, gently.
+
+"Shall I give you your book?"  asked March.
+
+"No; I gidt oap bretty soon."
+
+"And--and--can you dress yourself?"
+
+"I vhistle, 'and one of those lidtle fellowss comess.  We haf to dake
+gare of one another in a blace like this.  Idt iss nodt like the worldt,"
+said Lindau, gloomily.
+
+March thought he ought to cheer him up.  "Oh, it isn't such a bad world,
+Lindau!  After all, the average of millionaires is small in it."  He
+added, "And I don't believe there's an American living that could look at
+that arm of yours and not wish to lend you a hand for the one you gave us
+all."  March felt this to be a fine turn, and his voice trembled slightly
+in saying it.
+
+Lindau smiled grimly.  "You think zo?  I wouldn't moch like to drost 'em.
+I've driedt idt too often."  He began to speak German again fiercely:
+"Besides, they owe me nothing.  Do you think I knowingly gave my hand to
+save this oligarchy of traders and tricksters, this aristocracy of
+railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine-slave drivers and mill-serf
+owners?  No; I gave it to the slave; the slave--ha! ha! ha!--whom I
+helped to unshackle to the common liberty of hunger and cold.  And you
+think I would be the beneficiary of such a state of things?"
+
+"I'm sorry to hear you talk so, Lindau," said March; "very sorry."
+He stopped with a look of pain, and rose to go.  Lindau suddenly broke
+into a laugh and into English.
+
+"Oh, well, it is only dalk, Passil, and it toes me goodt.  My parg is
+worse than my pidte, I cuess.  I pring these things roundt bretty soon.
+Good-bye, Passil, my tear poy.  Auf wiedersehen!"
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+March went away thinking of what Lindau had said, but not for the
+impersonal significance of his words so much as for the light they cast
+upon Lindau himself.  He thought the words violent enough, but in
+connection with what he remembered of the cheery, poetic, hopeful
+idealist, they were even more curious than lamentable.  In his own life
+of comfortable reverie he had never heard any one talk so before, but he
+had read something of the kind now and then in blatant labor newspapers
+which he had accidentally fallen in with, and once at a strikers' meeting
+he had heard rich people denounced with the same frenzy.  He had made his
+own reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric, and the obvious
+buncombe of the motive, and he had not taken the matter seriously.
+
+He could not doubt Lindau's sincerity, and he wondered how he came to
+that way of thinking.  From his experience of himself he accounted for a
+prevailing literary quality in it; he decided it to be from Lindau's
+reading and feeling rather than his reflection.  That was the notion he
+formed of some things he had met with in Ruskin to much the same effect;
+he regarded them with amusement as the chimeras of a rhetorician run away
+with by his phrases.
+
+But as to Lindau, the chief thing in his mind was a conception of the
+droll irony of a situation in which so fervid a hater of millionaires
+should be working, indirectly at least, for the prosperity of a man like
+Dryfoos, who, as March understood, had got his money together out of
+every gambler's chance in speculation, and all a schemer's thrift from
+the error and need of others.  The situation was not more incongruous,
+however, than all the rest of the 'Every Other Week' affair.  It seemed
+to him that there were no crazy fortuities that had not tended to its
+existence, and as time went on, and the day drew near for the issue of
+the first number, the sense of this intensified till the whole lost at
+moments the quality of a waking fact, and came to be rather a fantastic
+fiction of sleep.
+
+Yet the heterogeneous forces did co-operate to a reality which March
+could not deny, at least in their presence, and the first number was
+representative of all their nebulous intentions in a tangible form.
+As a result, it was so respectable that March began to respect these
+intentions, began to respect himself for combining and embodying them in
+the volume which appealed to him with a novel fascination, when the first
+advance copy was laid upon his desk.  Every detail of it was tiresomely
+familiar already, but the whole had a fresh interest now.  He now saw how
+extremely fit and effective Miss Leighton's decorative design for the
+cover was, printed in black and brick-red on the delicate gray tone of
+the paper.  It was at once attractive and refined, and he credited Beaton
+with quite all he merited in working it over to the actual shape.  The
+touch and the taste of the art editor were present throughout the number.
+As Fulkerson said, Beaton had caught on with the delicacy of a humming-
+bird and the tenacity of a bulldog to the virtues of their illustrative
+process, and had worked it for all it was worth.  There were seven papers
+in the number, and a poem on the last page of the cover, and he had found
+some graphic comment for each.  It was a larger proportion than would
+afterward be allowed, but for once in a way it was allowed.  Fulkerson
+said they could not expect to get their money back on that first number,
+anyway.  Seven of the illustrations were Beaton's; two or three he got
+from practised hands; the rest were the work of unknown people which he
+had suggested, and then related and adapted with unfailing ingenuity to
+the different papers.  He handled the illustrations with such sympathy as
+not to destroy their individual quality, and that indefinable charm which
+comes from good amateur work in whatever art.  He rescued them from their
+weaknesses and errors, while he left in them the evidence of the pleasure
+with which a clever young man, or a sensitive girl, or a refined woman
+had done them.  Inevitably from his manipulation, however, the art of the
+number acquired homogeneity, and there was nothing casual in its
+appearance.  The result, March eagerly owned, was better than the
+literary result, and he foresaw that the number would be sold and praised
+chiefly for its pictures.  Yet he was not ashamed of the literature, and
+he indulged his admiration of it the more freely because he had not only
+not written it, but in a way had not edited it.  To be sure, he had
+chosen all the material, but he had not voluntarily put it all together
+for that number; it had largely put itself together, as every number of
+every magazine does, and as it seems more and more to do, in the
+experience of every editor.  There had to be, of course, a story, and
+then a sketch of travel.  There was a literary essay and a social essay;
+there was a dramatic trifle, very gay, very light; there was a dashing
+criticism on the new pictures, the new plays, the new books, the new
+fashions; and then there was the translation of a bit of vivid Russian
+realism, which the editor owed to Lindau's exploration of the foreign
+periodicals left with him; Lindau was himself a romanticist of the Victor
+Hugo sort, but he said this fragment of Dostoyevski was good of its kind.
+The poem was a bit of society verse, with a backward look into simpler
+and wholesomer experiences.
+
+Fulkerson was extremely proud of the number; but he said it was too good
+--too good from every point of view.  The cover was too good, and the
+paper was too good, and that device of rough edges, which got over the
+objection to uncut leaves while it secured their aesthetic effect, was a
+thing that he trembled for, though he rejoiced in it as a stroke of the
+highest genius.  It had come from Beaton at the last moment, as a
+compromise, when the problem of the vulgar croppiness of cut leaves and
+the unpopularity of uncut leaves seemed to have no solution but suicide.
+Fulkerson was still morally crawling round on his hands and knees, as he
+said, in abject gratitude at Beaton's feet, though he had his qualms, his
+questions; and he declared that Beaton was the most inspired ass since
+Balaam's.  "We're all asses, of course," he admitted, in semi-apology to
+March; "but we're no such asses as Beaton."  He said that if the tasteful
+decorativeness of the thing did not kill it with the public outright,
+its literary excellence would give it the finishing stroke. Perhaps that
+might be overlooked in the impression of novelty which a first number
+would give, but it must never happen again.  He implored March to promise
+that it should never happen again; be said their only hope was in the
+immediate cheapening of the whole affair.  It was bad enough to give the
+public too much quantity for their money, but to throw in such quality as
+that was simply ruinous; it must be stopped.  These were the expressions
+of his intimate moods; every front that he presented to the public wore a
+glow of lofty, of devout exultation.  His pride in the number gushed out
+in fresh bursts of rhetoric to every one whom he could get to talk with
+him about it.  He worked the personal kindliness of the press to the
+utmost.  He did not mind making himself ridiculous or becoming a joke in
+the good cause, as he called it.  He joined in the applause when a
+humorist at the club feigned to drop dead from his chair at Fulkerson's
+introduction of the topic, and he went on talking that first number into
+the surviving spectators.  He stood treat upon all occasions, and he
+lunched attaches of the press at all hours.  He especially befriended the
+correspondents of the newspapers of other cities, for, as he explained to
+March, those fellows could give him any amount of advertising simply as
+literary gossip.  Many of the fellows were ladies who could not be so
+summarily asked out to lunch, but Fulkerson's ingenuity was equal to
+every exigency, and he contrived somehow to make each of these feel that
+she had been possessed of exclusive information.  There was a moment when
+March conjectured a willingness in Fulkerson to work Mrs. March into the
+advertising department, by means of a tea to these ladies and their
+friends which she should administer in his apartment, but he did not
+encourage Fulkerson to be explicit, and the moment passed.  Afterward,
+when he told his wife about it, he was astonished to find that she would
+not have minded doing it for Fulkerson, and he experienced another proof
+of the bluntness of the feminine instincts in some directions, and of the
+personal favor which Fulkerson seemed to enjoy with the whole sex.  This
+alone was enough to account for the willingness of these correspondents
+to write about the first number, but March accused him of sending it to
+their addresses with boxes of Jacqueminot roses and Huyler candy.
+
+Fulkerson let him enjoy his joke.  He said that he would do that or
+anything else for the good cause, short of marrying the whole circle of
+female correspondents.
+
+March was inclined to hope that if the first number had been made too
+good for the country at large, the more enlightened taste of metropolitan
+journalism would invite a compensating favor for it in New York.  But
+first Fulkerson and then the event proved him wrong.  In spite of the
+quality of the magazine, and in spite of the kindness which so many
+newspaper men felt for Fulkerson, the notices in the New York papers
+seemed grudging and provisional to the ardor of the editor.  A merit in
+the work was acknowledged, and certain defects in it for which March had
+trembled were ignored; but the critics astonished him by selecting for
+censure points which he was either proud of or had never noticed; which
+being now brought to his notice he still could not feel were faults.  He
+owned to Fulkerson that if they had said so and so against it, he could
+have agreed with them, but that to say thus and so was preposterous; and
+that if the advertising had not been adjusted with such generous
+recognition of the claims of the different papers, he should have known
+the counting-room was at the bottom of it.  As it was, he could only
+attribute it to perversity or stupidity.  It was certainly stupid to
+condemn a magazine novelty like 'Every Other Week' for being novel; and
+to augur that if it failed, it would fail through its departure from the
+lines on which all the other prosperous magazines had been built, was in
+the last degree perverse, and it looked malicious.  The fact that it was
+neither exactly a book nor a magazine ought to be for it and not against
+it, since it would invade no other field; it would prosper on no ground
+but its own.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+The more March thought of the injustice of the New York press (which had
+not, however, attacked the literary quality of the number) the more
+bitterly he resented it; and his wife's indignation superheated his own.
+'Every Other Week' had become a very personal affair with the whole
+family; the children shared their parents' disgust; Belle was outspoken
+in, her denunciations of a venal press.  Mrs. March saw nothing but ruin
+ahead, and began tacitly to plan a retreat to Boston, and an
+establishment retrenched to the basis of two thousand a year.  She shed
+some secret tears in anticipation of the privations which this must
+involve; but when Fulkerson came to see March rather late the night of
+the publication day, she nobly told him that if the worst came to the
+worst she could only have the kindliest feeling toward him, and should
+not regard him as in the slightest degree responsible.
+
+"Oh, hold on, hold on!" he protested.  "You don't think we've made a
+failure, do you?"
+
+"Why, of course," she faltered, while March remained gloomily silent.
+
+"Well, I guess we'll wait for the official count, first.  Even New York
+hasn't gone against us, and I guess there's a majority coming down to
+Harlem River that could sweep everything before it, anyway."
+
+"What do you mean, Fulkerson?"  March demanded, sternly.
+
+"Oh, nothing! Only, the 'News Company' has ordered ten thousand now; and
+you know we had to give them the first twenty on commission."
+
+"What do you mean?"  March repeated; his wife held her breath.
+
+"I mean that the first number is a booming success already, and that it's
+going to a hundred thousand before it stops.  That unanimity and variety
+of censure in the morning papers, combined with the attractiveness of the
+thing itself, has cleared every stand in the city, and now if the favor
+of the country press doesn't turn the tide against us, our fortune's
+made."  The Marches remained dumb.  "Why, look here! Didn't I tell you
+those criticisms would be the making of us, when they first began to turn
+you blue this morning, March?"
+
+"He came home to lunch perfectly sick," said Mrs. Marcli; "and I wouldn't
+let him go back again."
+
+"Didn't I tell you so?"  Fulkerson persisted.
+
+March could not remember that he had, or that he had been anything but
+incoherently and hysterically jocose over the papers, but he said, "Yes,
+yes--I think so."
+
+"I knew it from the start," said Fulkerson.  "The only other person who
+took those criticisms in the right spirit was Mother Dryfoos--I've just
+been bolstering up the Dryfoos family.  She had them read to her by Mrs.
+Mandel, and she understood them to be all the most flattering prophecies
+of success.  Well, I didn't read between the lines to that extent, quite;
+but I saw that they were going to help us, if there was anything in us,
+more than anything that could have been done.  And there was something in
+us! I tell you, March, that seven-shooting self-cocking donkey of a
+Beaton has given us the greatest start!  He's caught on like a mouse.
+He's made the thing awfully chic; it's jimmy; there's lots of dog about
+it.  He's managed that process so that the illustrations look as
+expensive as first-class wood-cuts, and they're cheaper than chromos.
+He's put style into the whole thing."
+
+"Oh yes," said March, with eager meekness, "it's Beaton that's done it."
+
+Fulkerson read jealousy of Beaton in Mrs. March's face.  "Beaton has
+given us the start because his work appeals to the eye.  There's no
+denying that the pictures have sold this first number; but I expect the
+literature of this first number to sell the pictures of the second.  I've
+been reading it all over, nearly, since I found how the cat was jumping;
+I was anxious about it, and I tell you, old man, it's good.  Yes, sir!
+I was afraid maybe you had got it too good, with that Boston refinement
+of yours; but I reckon you haven't.  I'll risk it.  I don't see how you
+got so much variety into so few things, and all of them palpitant, all of
+'em on the keen jump with actuality."
+
+The mixture of American slang with the jargon of European criticism in
+Fulkerson's talk made March smile, but his wife did not seem to notice it
+in her exultation.  "That is just what I say," she broke in.  "It's
+perfectly wonderful.  I never was anxious about it a moment, except, as
+you say, Mr. Fulkerson, I was afraid it might be too good."
+
+They went on in an antiphony of praise till March said: "Really, I don't
+see what's left me but to strike for higher wages.  I perceive that I'm
+indispensable."
+
+"Why, old man, you're coming in on the divvy, you know," said Fulkerson.
+
+They both laughed, and when Fulkerson was gone, Mrs. March asked her
+husband what a divvy was.
+
+"It's a chicken before it's hatched."
+
+"No! Truly?"
+
+He explained, and she began to spend the divvy.
+
+At Mrs. Leighton's Fulkerson gave Alma all the honor of the success; he
+told her mother that the girl's design for the cover had sold every
+number, and Mrs. Leighton believed him.
+
+"Well, Ah think Ah maght have some of the glory," Miss Woodburn pouted.
+"Where am Ah comin' in?"
+
+"You're coming in on the cover of the next number," said Fulkerson."
+We're going to have your face there; Miss Leighton's going to sketch it
+in."  He said this reckless of the fact that he had already shown them
+the design of the second number, which was Beaton's weird bit of gas-
+country landscape.
+
+"Ah don't see why you don't wrahte the fiction for your magazine, Mr.
+Fulkerson," said the girl.
+
+This served to remind Fulkerson of something.  He turned to her father.
+"I'll tell you what, Colonel Woodburn, I want Mr. March to see some
+chapters of that book of yours.  I've been talking to him about it."
+
+"I do not think it would add to the popularity of your periodical, sir,"
+said the Colonel, with a stately pleasure in being asked.  "My views of a
+civilization based upon responsible slavery would hardly be acceptable to
+your commercialized society."
+
+"Well, not as a practical thing, of course," Fulkerson admitted.  "But as
+something retrospective, speculative, I believe it would make a hit.
+There's so much going on now about social questions; I guess people would
+like to read it."
+
+"I do not know that my work is intended to amuse people," said the
+Colonel, with some state.
+
+"Mah goodness! Ah only wish it WAS, then," said his daughter; and she
+added: "Yes, Mr. Fulkerson, the Colonel will be very glad to submit
+po'tions of his woak to yo' edito'.  We want to have some of the honaw.
+Perhaps we can say we helped to stop yo' magazine, if we didn't help to
+stawt it."
+
+They all laughed at her boldness, and Fulkerson said: "It 'll take a good
+deal more than that to stop 'Every Other Week'.  The Colonel's whole book
+couldn't do it."  Then he looked unhappy, for Colonel Woodburn did not
+seem to enjoy his reassuring words; but Miss Woodburn came to his rescue.
+"You maght illustrate it with the po'trait of the awthoris daughtaw, if
+it's too late for the covah."
+
+"Going to have that in every number, Miss Woodburn!" he cried.
+
+"Oh, mah goodness!" she said, with mock humility.
+
+Alma sat looking at her piquant head, black, unconsciously outlined
+against the lamp, as she sat working by the table.  "Just keep still a
+moment!"
+
+She got her sketch-block and pencils, and began to draw; Fulkerson tilted
+himself forward and looked over her shoulder; he smiled outwardly;
+inwardly he was divided between admiration of Miss Woodburn's arch beauty
+and appreciation of the skill which reproduced it; at the same time he
+was trying to remember whether March had authorized him to go so far as
+to ask for a sight of Colonel Woodburn's manuscript.  He felt that he had
+trenched upon March's province, and he framed one apology to the editor
+for bringing him the manuscript, and another to the author for bringing
+it back.
+
+"Most Ah hold raght still like it was a photograph?"  asked Miss
+Woodburn.  "Can Ah toak?"
+
+"Talk all you want," said Alma, squinting her eyes.  "And you needn't be
+either adamantine, nor yet--wooden."
+
+"Oh, ho' very good of you!  Well, if Ah can toak--go on, Mr. Fulkerson!"
+
+"Me talk?  I can't breathe till this thing is done!" sighed Fulkerson; at
+that point of his mental drama the Colonel was behaving rustily about the
+return of his manuscript, and he felt that he was looking his last on
+Miss Woodburn's profile.
+
+"Is she getting it raght?"  asked the girl.
+
+"I don't know which is which," said Fulkerson.
+
+"Oh, Ah hope Ah shall! Ah don't want to go round feelin' like a sheet of
+papah half the time."
+
+"You could rattle on, just the same," suggested Alma.
+
+"Oh, now! Jost listen to that, Mr. Fulkerson.  Do you call that any way
+to toak to people?"
+
+"You might know which you were by the color," Fulkerson began, and then
+be broke off from the personal consideration with a business inspiration,
+and smacked himself on the knee, "We could print it in color!"
+
+Mrs. Leighton gathered up her sewing and held it with both hands in her
+lap, while she came round, and looked critically at the sketch and the
+model over her glasses.  "It's very good, Alma," she said.
+
+Colonel Woodburn remained restively on his side of the table.  "Of
+course, Mr. Fulkerson, you were jesting, sir, when you spoke of printing
+a sketch of my daughter."
+
+"Why, I don't know--If you object--?
+
+"I do, sir--decidedly," said the Colonel.
+
+"Then that settles it, of course,--I only meant--"
+
+"Indeed it doesn't!" cried the girl.  "Who's to know who it's from?
+Ah'm jost set on havin' it printed! Ah'm going to appear as the head of
+Slavery--in opposition to the head of Liberty."
+
+"There'll be a revolution inside of forty-eight hours, and we'll have the
+Colonel's system going wherever a copy of 'Every Other Week' circulates,"
+said Fulkerson.
+
+"This sketch belongs to me," Alma interposed.  "I'm not going to let it
+be printed."
+
+"Oh, mah goodness!" said Miss Woodburn, laughing good-humoredly.
+"That's becose you were brought up to hate slavery."
+
+"I should like Mr. Beaton to see it," said Mrs. Leighton, in a sort of
+absent tone.  She added, to Fulkerson: "I rather expected he might be in
+to-night."
+
+"Well, if he comes we'll leave it to Beaton," Fulkerson said, with relief
+in the solution, and an anxious glance at the Colonel, across the table,
+to see how he took that form of the joke.  Miss Woodburn intercepted his
+glance and laughed, and Fulkerson laughed, too, but rather forlornly.
+
+Alma set her lips primly and turned her head first on one side and then
+on the other to look at the sketch.  "I don't think we'll leave it to Mr.
+Beaton, even if he comes."
+
+"We left the other design for the cover to Beaton," Fulkerson insinuated.
+"I guess you needn't be afraid of him."
+
+"Is it a question of my being afraid?"  Alma asked; she seemed coolly
+intent on her drawing.
+
+"Miss Leighton thinks he ought to be afraid of her," Miss Woodburn
+explained.
+
+"It's a question of his courage, then?" said Alma.
+
+"Well, I don't think there are many young ladies that Beaton's afraid
+of," said Fulkerson, giving himself the respite of this purely random
+remark, while he interrogated the faces of Mrs. Leighton and Colonel
+Woodburn for some light upon the tendency of their daughters' words.
+
+He was not helped by Mrs. Leighton's saying, with a certain anxiety,
+"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, you're as much in the dark as I am myself, then," said Fulkerson.
+"I suppose I meant that Beaton is rather--a--favorite, you know.  The
+women like him."
+
+Mrs. Leighton sighed, and Colonel Woodburn rose and left the room.
+
+In the silence that followed, Fulkerson looked from one lady to the other
+with dismay.  "I seem to have put my foot in it, somehow," he suggested,
+and Miss Woodburn gave a cry of laughter.
+
+"Poo' Mr. Fulkerson!  Poo' Mr. Fulkerson!  Papa thoat you wanted him to
+go."
+
+"Wanted him to go?"  repeated Fulkerson.
+
+"We always mention Mr. Beaton when we want to get rid of papa."
+
+"Well, it seems to me that I have noticed that he didn't take much
+interest in Beaton, as a general topic.  But I don't know that I ever saw
+it drive him out of the room before!"
+
+"Well, he isn't always so bad," said Miss Woodburn.  "But it was a case
+of hate at first sight, and it seems to be growin' on papa."
+
+"Well, I can understand that," said Fulkerson.  "The impulse to destroy
+Beaton is something that everybody has to struggle against at the start."
+
+"I must say, Mr. Fulkerson," said Mrs. Leighton, in the tremor through
+which she nerved herself to differ openly with any one she liked,
+"I never had to struggle with anything of the kind, in regard to
+Mr. Beaton.  He has always been most respectful and--and--considerate,
+with me, whatever he has been with others."
+
+"Well, of course, Mrs. Leighton!" Fulkerson came back in a soothing tone.
+"But you see you're the rule that proves the exception.  I was speaking
+of the way men felt about Beaton.  It's different with ladies; I just
+said so."
+
+"Is it always different?"  Alma asked, lifting her head and her hand from
+her drawing, and staring at it absently.
+
+Fulkerson pushed both his hands through his whiskers.  "Look here!  Look
+here!" he said.  "Won't somebody start some other subject?  We haven't
+had the weather up yet, have we?  Or the opera?  What is the matter with
+a few remarks about politics?"
+
+"Why, Ah thoat you lahked to toak about the staff of yo' magazine," said
+Miss Woodburn.
+
+"Oh, I do!" said Fulkerson.  "But not always about the same member of it.
+He gets monotonous, when he doesn't get complicated.  I've just come
+round from the Marches'," he added, to Mrs. Leighton.
+
+"I suppose they've got thoroughly settled in their apartment by this
+time."  Mrs. Leighton said something like this whenever the Marches were
+mentioned.  At the bottom of her heart she had not forgiven them for not
+taking her rooms; she had liked their looks so much; and she was always
+hoping that they were uncomfortable or dissatisfied; she could not help
+wanting them punished a little.
+
+"Well, yes; as much as they ever will be," Fulkerson answered.
+"The Boston style is pretty different, you know; and the Marches are old-
+fashioned folks, and I reckon they never went in much for bric-a-brac
+They've put away nine or ten barrels of dragon candlesticks, but they
+keep finding new ones."
+
+"Their landlady has just joined our class," said Alma.  "Isn't her name
+Green?  She happened to see my copy of 'Every Other Week', and said she
+knew the editor; and told me."
+
+"Well, it's a little world," said Fulkerson.  "You seem to be touching
+elbows with everybody.  Just think of your having had our head translator
+for a model."
+
+"Ah think that your whole publication revolves aroand the Leighton
+family," said Miss Woodburn.
+
+"That's pretty much so," Fulkerson admitted.  "Anyhow, the publisher
+seems disposed to do so."
+
+"Are you the publisher?  I thought it was Mr. Dryfoos," said Alma.
+
+"It is."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+The tone and the word gave Fulkerson a discomfort which he promptly
+confessed.  "Missed again."
+
+The girls laughed, and he regained something of his lost spirits, and
+smiled upon their gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it.
+
+Miss Woodburn asked, "And is Mr. Dryfoos senio' anything like ouah Mr.
+Dryfoos?"
+
+"Not the least."
+
+"But he's jost as exemplary?"
+
+"Yes; in his way."
+
+"Well, Ah wish Ah could see all those pinks of puffection togethah,
+once."
+
+"Why, look here! I've been thinking I'd celebrate a little, when the old
+gentleman gets back.  Have a little supper--something of that kind.  How
+would you like to let me have your parlors for it, Mrs. Leighton?  You
+ladies could stand on the stairs, and have a peep at us, in the bunch."
+
+"Oh, mah!  What a privilege!  And will Miss Alma be there, with the othah
+contributors?  Ah shall jost expah of envy!"
+
+"She won't be there in person," said Fulkerson, "but she'll be
+represented by the head of the art department."
+
+"Mah goodness! And who'll the head of the publishing department
+represent?"
+
+"He can represent you," said Alma.
+
+"Well, Ah want to be represented, someho'."
+
+"We'll have the banquet the night before you appear on the cover of our
+fourth number," said Fulkerson.
+
+"Ah thoat that was doubly fo'bidden," said Miss Woodburn.  "By the stern
+parent and the envious awtust."
+
+"We'll get Beaton to get round them, somehow.  I guess we can trust him
+to manage that."
+
+Mrs. Leighton sighed her resentment of the implication.
+
+"I always feel that Mr. Beaton doesn't do himself justice," she began.
+
+Fulkerson could not forego the chance of a joke.  "Well, maybe he would
+rather temper justice with mercy in a case like his."  This made both the
+younger ladies laugh.  "I judge this is my chance to get off with my
+life," he added, and he rose as he spoke.  "Mrs. Leighton, I am about the
+only man of my sex who doesn't thirst for Beaton's blood most of the
+time.  But I know him and I don't.  He's more kinds of a good fellow than
+people generally understand.  He doesn't wear his heart upon his sleeve-
+not his ulster sleeve, anyway.  You can always count me on your side when
+it's a question of finding Beaton not guilty if he'll leave the State."
+
+Alma set her drawing against the wall, in rising to say goodnight to
+Fulkerson.  He bent over on his stick to look at it.  "Well, it's
+beautiful," he sighed, with unconscious sincerity.
+
+Alma made him a courtesy of mock modesty.  "Thanks to Miss Woodburn!"
+
+"Oh no! All she had to do was simply to stay put."
+
+"Don't you think Ah might have improved it if Ah had, looked better?"
+the girl asked, gravely.
+
+"Oh, you couldn't!" said Fulkerson, and he went off triumphant in their
+applause and their cries of "Which? which?"
+
+Mrs. Leighton sank deep into an accusing gloom when at last she found
+herself alone with her daughter.  "I don't know what you are thinking
+about, Alma Leighton.  If you don't like Mr. Beaton--"
+
+"I don't."
+
+"You don't?  You know better than that.  You know that, you did care for
+him."
+
+"Oh! that's a very different thing.  That's a thing that can be got
+over."
+
+"Got over!" repeated Mrs. Leighton, aghast.
+
+"Of course, it can!  Don't be romantic, mamma.  People get over dozens of
+such fancies.  They even marry for love two or three times."
+
+"Never!" cried her mother, doing her best to feel shocked; and at last
+looking it.
+
+Her looking it had no effect upon Alma.  "You can easily get over caring
+for people; but you can't get over liking them--if you like them because
+they are sweet and good.  That's what lasts.  I was a simple goose,
+and he imposed upon me because he was a sophisticated goose.  Now the
+case is reversed."
+
+"He does care for you, now.  You can see it.  Why do you encourage him to
+come here?"
+
+"I don't," said Alma.  "I will tell him to keep away if you like.  But
+whether he comes or goes, it will be the same."
+
+"Not to him, Alma!  He is in love with you!"
+
+"He has never said so."
+
+"And you would really let him say so, when you intend to refuse him?"
+
+"I can't very well refuse him till he does say so."
+
+This was undeniable.  Mrs. Leighton could only demand, in an awful tone,
+"May I ask why--if you cared for him; and I know you care for him still
+you will refuse him?"
+
+Alma laughed.  "Because--because I'm wedded to my Art, and I'm not going
+to commit bigamy, whatever I do."
+
+"Alma!"
+
+"Well, then, because I don't like him--that is, I don't believe in him,
+and don't trust him.  He's fascinating, but he's false and he's fickle.
+He can't help it, I dare say."
+
+"And you are perfectly hard.  Is it possible that you were actually
+pleased to have Mr. Fulkerson tease you about Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"Oh, good-night, now, mamma! This is becoming personal"
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Artists never do anything like other people
+Ballast of her instinctive despondency
+Clinging persistence of such natures
+Dividend: It's a chicken before it's hatched
+Gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it
+Hopeful recklessness
+How much can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing
+I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of yours
+If you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen
+It must be your despair that helps you to bear up
+Marry for love two or three times
+No man deserves to sufer at the hands of another
+Patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius
+Person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it
+Say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him
+Shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo'--its inconvenience
+Timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes, v2
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+PART THIRD
+
+
+I.
+
+The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial success of 'Every Other
+Week' expanded in Fulkerson's fancy into a series.  Instead of the
+publishing and editorial force, with certain of the more representative
+artists and authors sitting down to a modest supper in Mrs. Leighton's
+parlors, he conceived of a dinner at Delmonico's, with the principal
+literary and artistic, people throughout the country as guests, and an
+inexhaustible hospitality to reporters and correspondents, from whom
+paragraphs, prophetic and historic, would flow weeks before and after the
+first of the series.  He said the thing was a new departure in magazines;
+it amounted to something in literature as radical as the American
+Revolution in politics: it was the idea of self government in the arts;
+and it was this idea that had never yet been fully developed in regard to
+it.  That was what must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and the
+speeches must be reported.  Then it would go like wildfire.  He asked
+March whether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he
+was sure, would come; he was a literary man.  They ought to invite Mr.
+Evarts, and the Cardinal and the leading Protestant divines.  His
+ambition stopped at nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there
+he had to wait the return of the elder Dryfoos from the West, and Dryfoos
+was still delayed at Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was
+afraid he would stay there till his own enthusiasm escaped in other
+activities, other plans.
+
+Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall under a superstitious
+subjection to another man; but March could not help seeing that in this
+possible measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson's fetish.  He did not revere him,
+March decided, because it was not in Fulkerson's nature to revere
+anything; he could like and dislike, but he could not respect.
+Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; and besides the homage
+which those who have not pay to those who have, Fulkerson rendered
+Dryfoos the tribute of a feeling which March could only define as a sort
+of bewilderment.  As well as March could make out, this feeling was
+evoked by the spectacle of Dryfoos's unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was
+fond of dazzling himself with.  It perfectly consisted with a keen sense
+of whatever was sordid and selfish in a man on whom his career must have
+had its inevitable effect.  He liked to philosophize the case with March,
+to recall Dryfoos as he was when he first met him still somewhat in the
+sap, at Moffitt, and to study the processes by which he imagined him to
+have dried into the hardened speculator, without even the pretence to any
+advantage but his own in his ventures.  He was aware of painting the
+character too vividly, and he warned March not to accept it exactly in
+those tints, but to subdue them and shade it for himself.  He said that
+where his advantage was not concerned, there was ever so much good in
+Dryfoos, and that if in some things be had grown inflexible, he had
+expanded in others to the full measure of the vast scale on which he did
+business.  It had seemed a little odd to March that a man should put
+money into such an enterprise as 'Every Other Week' and go off about
+other affairs, not only without any sign of anxiety, but without any sort
+of interest.  But Fulkerson said that was the splendid side of Dryfoos.
+He had a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to the strain of any such
+uncertainty.  He had faced the music once for all, when he asked
+Fulkerson what the thing would cost in the different degrees of potential
+failure; and then he had gone off, leaving everything to Fulkerson and
+the younger Dryfoos, with the instruction simply to go ahead and not
+bother him about it.  Fulkerson called that pretty tall for an old fellow
+who used to bewail the want of pigs and chickens to occupy his mind.
+He alleged it as another proof of the versatility of the American mind,
+and of the grandeur of institutions and opportunities that let every man
+grow to his full size, so that any man in America could run the concern
+if necessary.  He believed that old Dryfoos could step into Bismarck's
+shoes and run the German Empire at ten days' notice, or about as long as
+it would take him to go from New York to Berlin.  But Bismarck would not
+know anything about Dryfoos's plans till Dryfoos got ready to show his
+hand.  Fulkerson himself did not pretend to say what the old man had been
+up to since he went West.  He was at Moffitt first, and then he was at
+Chicago, and then he had gone out to Denver to look after some mines he
+had out there, and a railroad or two; and now he was at Moffitt again.
+He was supposed to be closing up his affairs there, but nobody could say.
+
+Fulkerson told March the morning after Dryfoos returned that he had not
+only not pulled out at Moffitt, but had gone in deeper, ten times deeper
+than ever. He was in a royal good-humor, Fulkerson reported, and was
+going to drop into the office on his way up from the Street (March
+understood Wall Street) that afternoon.  He was tickled to death with
+'Every Other Week' so far as it had gone, and was anxious to pay his
+respects to the editor.
+
+March accounted for some rhetoric in this, but let it flatter him, and
+prepared himself for a meeting about which he could see that Fulkerson
+was only less nervous than he had shown himself about the public
+reception of the first number.  It gave March a disagreeable feeling of
+being owned and of being about to be inspected by his proprietor; but he
+fell back upon such independence as he could find in the thought of those
+two thousand dollars of income beyond the caprice of his owner, and
+maintained an outward serenity.
+
+He was a little ashamed afterward of the resolution it had cost him to do
+so.  It was not a question of Dryfoos's physical presence: that was
+rather effective than otherwise, and carried a suggestion of moneyed
+indifference to convention in the gray business suit of provincial cut,
+and the low, wide-brimmed hat of flexible black felt.  He had a stick
+with an old-fashioned top of buckhorn worn smooth and bright by the palm
+of his hand, which had not lost its character in fat, and which had a
+history of former work in its enlarged knuckles, though it was now as
+soft as March's, and must once have been small even for a man of Mr.
+Dryfoos's stature; he was below the average size.  But what struck March
+was the fact that Dryfoos seemed furtively conscious of being a country
+person, and of being aware that in their meeting he was to be tried by
+other tests than those which would have availed him as a shrewd
+speculator.  He evidently had some curiosity about March, as the first of
+his kind whom he bad encountered; some such curiosity as the country
+school trustee feels and tries to hide in the presence of the new
+schoolmaster.  But the whole affair was, of course, on a higher plane; on
+one side Dryfoos was much more a man of the world than March was, and he
+probably divined this at once, and rested himself upon the fact in a
+measure.  It seemed to be his preference that his son should introduce
+them, for he came upstairs with Conrad, and they had fairly made
+acquaintance before Fulkerson joined them.
+
+Conrad offered to leave them at once, but his father made him stay.
+"I reckon Mr. March and I haven't got anything so private to talk about
+that we want to keep it from the other partners.  Well, Mr. March, are
+you getting used to New York yet?  It takes a little time."
+
+"Oh yes.  But not so much time as most places.  Everybody belongs more or
+less in New York; nobody has to belong here altogether."
+
+"Yes, that is so.  You can try it, and go away if you don't like it a
+good deal easier than you could from a smaller place.  Wouldn't make so
+much talk, would it?"  He glanced at March with a jocose light in his
+shrewd eyes.  "That is the way I feel about it all the time: just
+visiting.  Now, it wouldn't be that way in Boston, I reckon?"
+
+"You couldn't keep on visiting there your whole life," said March.
+
+Dryfoos laughed, showing his lower teeth in a way that was at once simple
+and fierce.  "Mr. Fulkerson didn't hardly know as he could get you to
+leave.  I suppose you got used to it there.  I never been in your city."
+
+"I had got used to it; but it was hardly my city, except by marriage.  My
+wife's a Bostonian."
+
+"She's been a little homesick here, then," said Dryfoos, with a smile of
+the same quality as his laugh.
+
+"Less than I expected," said March.  "Of course, she was very much
+attached to our old home."
+
+"I guess my wife won't ever get used to New York," said Dryfoos, and he
+drew in his lower lip with a sharp sigh.  "But my girls like it; they're
+young.  You never been out our way yet, Mr. March?  Out West?"
+
+"Well, only for the purpose of being born, and brought up.  I used to
+live in Crawfordsville, and then Indianapolis."
+
+"Indianapolis is bound to be a great place," said Dryfoos.  "I remember
+now, Mr. Fulkerson told me you was from our State."  He went on to brag
+of the West, as if March were an Easterner and had to be convinced.
+"You ought to see all that country.  It's a great country."
+
+"Oh yes," said March, "I understand that."  He expected the praise of the
+great West to lead up to some comment on 'Every Other Week'; and there
+was abundant suggestion of that topic in the manuscripts, proofs of
+letter-press and illustrations, with advance copies of the latest number
+strewn over his table.
+
+But Dryfoos apparently kept himself from looking at these things.
+He rolled his head about on his shoulders to take in the character of the
+room, and said to his son, "You didn't change the woodwork, after all."
+
+"No; the architect thought we had better let it be, unless we meant to
+change the whole place.  He liked its being old-fashioned."
+
+"I hope you feel comfortable here, Mr. March," the old man said, bringing
+his eyes to bear upon him again after their tour of inspection.
+
+"Too comfortable for a working-man," said March, and he thought that this
+remark must bring them to some talk about his work, but the proprietor
+only smiled again.
+
+"I guess I sha'n't lose much on this house," he returned, as if musing
+aloud.  "This down-town property is coming up.  Business is getting in on
+all these side streets.  I thought I paid a pretty good price for it,
+too."  He went on to talk of real estate, and March began to feel a
+certain resentment at his continued avoidance of the only topic in which
+they could really have a common interest.  "You live down this way
+somewhere, don't you?" the old man concluded.
+
+"Yes.  I wished to be near my work."  March was vexed with himself for
+having recurred to it; but afterward he was not sure but Dryfoos shared
+his own diffidence in the matter, and was waiting for him to bring it
+openly into the talk.  At times he seemed wary and masterful, and then
+March felt that he was being examined and tested; at others so simple
+that March might well have fancied that he needed encouragement, and
+desired it.  He talked of his wife and daughters in a way that invited
+March to say friendly things of his family, which appeared to give the
+old man first an undue pleasure and then a final distrust.  At moments he
+turned, with an effect of finding relief in it, to his son and spoke to
+him across March of matters which he was unacquainted with; he did not
+seem aware that this was rude, but the young man must have felt it so; he
+always brought the conversation back, and once at some cost to himself
+when his father made it personal.
+
+"I want to make a regular New York business man out of that fellow," he
+said to March, pointing at Conrad with his stick.  "You s'pose I'm ever
+going to do it?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," said March, trying to fall in with the joke.
+"Do you mean nothing but a business man?"
+
+The old man laughed at whatever latent meaning he fancied in this, and
+said: "You think he would be a little too much for me there?  Well, I've
+seen enough of 'em to know it don't always take a large pattern of a man
+to do a large business.  But I want him to get the business training, and
+then if he wants to go into something else he knows what the world is,
+anyway.  Heigh?"
+
+"Oh yes!" March assented, with some compassion for the young man
+reddening patiently under his father's comment.
+
+Dryfoos went on as if his son were not in hearing.  "Now that boy wanted
+to be a preacher.  What does a preacher know about the world he preaches
+against when he's been brought up a preacher?  He don't know so much as a
+bad little boy in his Sunday-school; he knows about as much as a girl.
+I always told him, You be a man first, and then you be a preacher, if you
+want to.  Heigh?"
+
+"Precisely."  March began to feel some compassion for himself in being
+witness of the young fellow's discomfort under his father's homily.
+
+"When we first come to New York, I told him, Now here's your chance to
+see the world on a big scale.  You know already what work and saving and
+steady habits and sense will bring a man, to; you don't want to go round
+among the rich; you want to go among the poor, and see what laziness and
+drink and dishonesty and foolishness will bring men to.  And I guess he
+knows, about as well as anybody; and if he ever goes to preaching he'll
+know what he's preaching about."  The old man smiled his fierce, simple
+smile, and in his sharp eyes March fancied contempt of the ambition he
+had balked in his son.  The present scene must have been one of many
+between them, ending in meek submission on the part of the young man,
+whom his father, perhaps without realizing his cruelty, treated as a
+child.  March took it hard that he should be made to suffer in the
+presence of a co-ordinate power like himself, and began to dislike the
+old man out of proportion to his offence, which might have been mere want
+of taste, or an effect of mere embarrassment before him.  But evidently,
+whatever rebellion his daughters had carried through against him, he had
+kept his dominion over this gentle spirit unbroken.  March did not choose
+to make any response, but to let him continue, if he would, entirely upon
+his own impulse.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+A silence followed, of rather painful length.  It was broken by the
+cheery voice of Fulkerson, sent before him to herald Fulkerson's cheery
+person.  "Well, I suppose you've got the glorious success of 'Every Other
+Week' down pretty cold in your talk by this time.  I should have been up
+sooner to join you, but I was nipping a man for the last page of the
+cover.  I guess we'll have to let the Muse have that for an advertisement
+instead of a poem the next time, March.  Well, the old gentleman given
+you boys your scolding?"  The person of Fulkerson had got into the room
+long before he reached this question, and had planted itself astride a
+chair.  Fulkerson looked over the chairback, now at March, and now at the
+elder Dryfoos as he spoke.
+
+March answered him.  "I guess we must have been waiting for you,
+Fulkerson.  At any rate, we hadn't got to the scolding yet."
+
+"Why, I didn't suppose Mr. Dryfoos could 'a' held in so long.  I
+understood he was awful mad at the way the thing started off, and wanted
+to give you a piece of his mind, when he got at you.  I inferred as much
+from a remark that he made."  March and Dryfoos looked foolish, as men do
+when made the subject of this sort of merry misrepresentation.
+
+"I reckon my scolding will keep awhile yet," said the old man, dryly.
+
+"Well, then, I guess it's a good chance to give Mr. Dryfoos an idea of
+what we've really done--just while we're resting, as Artemus Ward says.
+Heigh, March?"
+
+"I will let you blow the trumpet, Fulkerson.  I think it belongs strictly
+to the advertising department," said March.  He now distinctly resented
+the old man's failure to say anything to him of the magazine; he made his
+inference that it was from a suspicion of his readiness to presume upon a
+recognition of his share in the success, and he was determined to second
+no sort of appeal for it.
+
+"The advertising department is the heart and soul of every business,"
+said Fulkerson, hardily, "and I like to keep my hand in with a little
+practise on the trumpet in private.  I don't believe Mr. Dryfoos has got
+any idea of the extent of this thing.  He's been out among those
+Rackensackens, where we were all born, and he's read the notices in their
+seven by nine dailies, and he's seen the thing selling on the cars, and
+he thinks he appreciates what's been done.  But I should just like to
+take him round in this little old metropolis awhile, and show him 'Every
+Other Week' on the centre tables of the millionaires--the Vanderbilts and
+the Astors--and in the homes of culture and refinement everywhere, and
+let him judge for himself.  It's the talk of the clubs and the dinner-
+tables; children cry for it; it's the Castoria of literature and the
+Pearline of art, the 'Won't-be-happy-till-he-gets-it of every en
+lightened man, woman, and child in this vast city.  I knew we could
+capture the country; but, my goodness! I didn't expect to have New York
+fall into our hands at a blow.  But that's just exactly what New York has
+done.  Every Other Week supplies the long-felt want that's been grinding
+round in New York and keeping it awake nights ever since the war.  It's
+the culmination of all the high and ennobling ideals of the past."
+
+"How much," asked Dryfoos, "do you expect to get out of it the first
+year, if it keeps the start it's got?"
+
+"Comes right down to business, every time!" said Fulkerson, referring the
+characteristic to March with a delighted glance.  "Well, sir, if
+everything works right, and we get rain enough to fill up the springs,
+and it isn't a grasshopper year, I expect to clear above all expenses
+something in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars."
+
+"Humph! And you are all going to work a year--editor, manager, publisher,
+artists, writers, printers, and the rest of 'em--to clear twenty-five
+thousand dollars?--I made that much in half a day in Moffitt once.  I see
+it made in half a minute in Wall Street, sometimes."  The old man
+presented this aspect of the case with a good-natured contempt, which
+included Fulkerson and his enthusiasm in an obvious liking.
+
+His son suggested, "But when we make that money here, no one loses it."
+
+"Can you prove that?"  His father turned sharply upon him.  "Whatever is
+won is lost.  It's all a game; it don't make any difference what you bet
+on.  Business is business, and a business man takes his risks with his
+eyes open."
+
+"Ah, but the glory!" Fulkerson insinuated with impudent persiflage.
+"I hadn't got to the glory yet, because it's hard to estimate it; but put
+the glory at the lowest figure, Mr. Dryfoos, and add it to the twenty-
+five thousand, and you've got an annual income from 'Every Other Week' of
+dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double-track, from this
+office to the moon.  I don't mention any of the sister planets because I
+like to keep within bounds."
+
+Dryfoos showed his lower teeth for pleasure in Fulkerson's fooling, and
+said, "That's what I like about you, Mr. Fulkerson--you always keep
+within bounds."
+
+"Well, I ain't a shrinking Boston violet, like March, here.  More
+sunflower in my style of diffidence; but I am modest, I don't deny it,"
+said Fulkerson.  "And I do hate to have a thing overstated."
+
+"And the glory--you do really think there's something in the glory that
+pays?"
+
+"Not a doubt of it!  I shouldn't care for the paltry return in money,"
+said Fulkerson, with a burlesque of generous disdain, "if it wasn't for
+the glory along with it."
+
+"And how should you feel about the glory, if there was no money along
+with it?"
+
+"Well, sir, I'm happy to say we haven't come to that yet."
+
+"Now, Conrad, here," said the old man, with a sort of pathetic rancor,
+"would rather have the glory alone.  I believe he don't even care much
+for your kind of glory, either, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+Fulkerson ran his little eyes curiously over Conrad's face and then
+March's, as if searching for a trace there of something gone before which
+would enable him to reach Dryfoos's whole meaning.  He apparently
+resolved to launch himself upon conjecture.  "Oh, well, we know how
+Conrad feels about the things of this world, anyway.  I should like to
+take 'em on the plane of another sphere, too, sometimes; but I noticed a
+good while ago that this was the world I was born into, and so I made up
+my mind that I would do pretty much what I saw the rest of the folks
+doing here below.  And I can't see but what Conrad runs the thing on
+business principles in his department, and I guess you'll find it so if
+you look into it.  I consider that we're a whole team and big dog under
+the wagon with you to draw on for supplies, and March, here, at the head
+of the literary business, and Conrad in the counting-room, and me to do
+the heavy lying in the advertising part.  Oh, and Beaton, of course, in
+the art.  I 'most forgot Beaton--Hamlet with Hamlet left out."
+
+Dryfoos looked across at his son.  "Wasn't that the fellow's name that
+was there last night?"
+
+"Yes," said Conrad.
+
+The old man rose.  "Well, I reckon I got to be going.  You ready to go
+up-town, Conrad?"
+
+"Well, not quite yet, father."
+
+The old man shook hands with March, and went downstairs, followed by his
+son.
+
+Fulkerson remained.
+
+"He didn't jump at the chance you gave him to compliment us all round,
+Fulkerson," said March, with a smile not wholly of pleasure.
+
+Fulkerson asked, with as little joy in the grin he had on, "Didn't he say
+anything to you before I came in?"
+
+"Not a word."
+
+"Dogged if I know what to make of it," sighed Fulkerson, "but I guess
+he's been having a talk with Conrad that's soured on him.  I reckon maybe
+he came back expecting to find that boy reconciled to the glory of this
+world, and Conrad's showed himself just as set against it as ever."
+
+"It might have been that," March admitted, pensively.  "I fancied
+something of the kind myself from words the old man let drop."
+
+Fulkerson made him explain, and then he said:
+
+"That's it, then; and it's all right.  Conrad 'll come round in time; and
+all we've got to do is to have patience with the old man till he does.
+I know he likes you."  Fulkerson affirmed this only interrogatively, and
+looked so anxiously to March for corroboration that March laughed.
+
+"He dissembled his love," he said; but afterward, in describing to his
+wife his interview with Mr. Dryfoos, he was less amused with this fact.
+
+When she saw that he was a little cast down by it, she began to encourage
+him.  "He's just a common, ignorant man, and probably didn't know how to
+express himself.  You may be perfectly sure that he's delighted with the
+success of the magazine, and that he understands as well as you do that
+he owes it all to you."
+
+"Ah, I'm not so sure.  I don't believe a man's any better for having made
+money so easily and rapidly as Dryfoos has done, and I doubt if he's any
+wiser.  I don't know just the point he's reached in his evolution from
+grub to beetle, but I do know that so far as it's gone the process must
+have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions.  I guess
+he's come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that
+intellectual ability is among them--what we call intellectual ability.
+He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous
+instincts, and I don't see why it shouldn't have reached his mental make-
+up.  He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into
+suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity.  That's the
+way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos's experience, and I am not very proud
+when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and
+ambition of most Americans.  I rather think they came pretty near being
+mine, once."
+
+"No, dear, they never did," his wife protested.
+
+"Well, they're not likely to be in the future.  The Dryfoos feature of
+'Every Other Week' is thoroughly distasteful to me."
+
+"Why, but he hasn't really got anything to do with it, has he, beyond
+furnishing the money?"
+
+"That's the impression that Fulkerson has allowed us to get.  But the man
+that holds the purse holds the reins.  He may let us guide the horse, but
+when he likes he can drive.  If we don't like his driving, then we can
+get down."
+
+Mrs. March was less interested in this figure of speech than in the
+personal aspects involved.  "Then you think Mr. Fulkerson has deceived
+you?"
+
+"Oh no!" said her husband, laughing.  "But I think he has deceived
+himself, perhaps."
+
+"How?"  she pursued.
+
+"He may have thought he was using Dryfoos, when Dryfoos was using him,
+and he may have supposed he was not afraid of him when he was very much
+so.  His courage hadn't been put to the test, and courage is a matter of
+proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can't tell whether
+you've got it till you try."
+
+"Nonsense!  Do you mean that he would ever sacrifice you to Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"I hope he may not be tempted.  But I'd rather be taking the chances with
+Fulkerson alone than with Fulkerson and Dryfoos to back him.  Dryfoos
+seems, somehow, to take the poetry and the pleasure out of the thing."
+
+Mrs. March was a long time silent.  Then she began, "Well, my dear, I
+never wanted to come to New York--"
+
+"Neither did I," March promptly put in.
+
+"But now that we're here," she went on, "I'm not going to have you
+letting every little thing discourage you.  I don't see what there was in
+Mr. Dryfoos's manner to give you any anxiety.  He's just a common,
+stupid, inarticulate country person, and he didn't know how to express
+himself, as I said in the beginning, and that's the reason he didn't say
+anything."
+
+"Well, I don't deny you're right about it."
+
+"It's dreadful," his wife continued, "to be mixed up with such a man and
+his family, but I don't believe he'll ever meddle with your management,
+and, till he does, all you need do is to have as little to do with him as
+possible, and go quietly on your own way."
+
+"Oh, I shall go on quietly enough," said March.  "I hope I sha'n't begin
+going stealthily."
+
+"Well, my dear," said Mrs. March, "just let me know when you're tempted
+to do that.  If ever you sacrifice the smallest grain of your honesty or
+your self-respect to Mr. Dryfoos, or anybody else, I will simply renounce
+you."
+
+"In view of that I'm rather glad the management of 'Every Other Week'
+involves tastes and not convictions," said March.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+That night Dryfoos was wakened from his after-dinner nap by the sound of
+gay talk and nervous giggling in the drawing-room.  The talk, which was
+Christine's, and the giggling, which was Mela's, were intershot with the
+heavier tones of a man's voice; and Dryfoos lay awhile on the leathern
+lounge in his library, trying to make out whether he knew the voice.  His
+wife sat in a deep chair before the fire, with her eyes on his face,
+waiting for him to wake.
+
+"Who is that out there?"  he asked, without opening his eyes.
+
+"Indeed, indeed, I don't know, Jacob," his wife answered.  "I reckon it's
+just some visitor of the girls'."
+
+"Was I snoring?"
+
+"Not a bit.  You was sleeping as quiet!  I did hate to have 'em wake you,
+and I was just goin' out to shoo them.  They've been playin' something,
+and that made them laugh."
+
+"I didn't know but I had snored," said the old man, sitting up.
+
+"No," said his wife.  Then she asked, wistfully, "Was you out at the old
+place, Jacob?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Did it look natural?"
+
+"Yes; mostly.  They're sinking the wells down in the woods pasture."
+
+"And--the children's graves?"
+
+"They haven't touched that part.  But I reckon we got to have 'em moved
+to the cemetery.  I bought a lot."
+
+The old woman began softly to weep.  "It does seem too hard that they
+can't be let to rest in peace, pore little things.  I wanted you and me
+to lay there, too, when our time come, Jacob.  Just there, back o' the
+beehives and under them shoomakes--my, I can see the very place!  And I
+don't believe I'll ever feel at home anywheres else.  I woon't know where
+I am when the trumpet sounds.  I have to think before I can tell where
+the east is in New York; and what if I should git faced the wrong way
+when I raise?  Jacob, I wonder you could sell it!"  Her head shook, and
+the firelight shone on her tears as she searched the folds of her dress
+for her pocket.
+
+A peal of laughter came from the drawing-room, and then the sound of
+chords struck on the piano.
+
+"Hush! Don't you cry, 'Liz'beth!" said Dryfoos.  "Here; take my
+handkerchief.  I've got a nice lot in the cemetery, and I'm goin' to have
+a monument, with two lambs on it--like the one you always liked so much.
+It ain't the fashion, any more, to have family buryin' grounds; they're
+collectin' 'em into the cemeteries, all round."
+
+"I reckon I got to bear it," said his wife, muffling her face in his
+handkerchief.  "And I suppose the Lord kin find me, wherever I am.  But I
+always did want to lay just there.  You mind how we used to go out and
+set there, after milkin', and watch the sun go down, and talk about where
+their angels was, and try to figger it out?"
+
+"I remember, 'Liz'beth."
+
+The man's voice in the drawing-room sang a snatch of French song,
+insolent, mocking, salient; and then Christine's attempted the same
+strain, and another cry of laughter from Mela followed.
+
+"Well, I always did expect to lay there.  But I reckon it's all right.
+It won't be a great while, now, anyway.  Jacob, I don't believe I'm a-
+goin' to live very long.  I know it don't agree with me here."
+
+"Oh, I guess it does, 'Liz'beth.  You're just a little pulled down with
+the weather.  It's coming spring, and you feel it; but the doctor says
+you're all right.  I stopped in, on the way up, and he says so."
+
+"I reckon he don't know everything," the old woman persisted: "I've been
+runnin' down ever since we left Moffitt, and I didn't feel any too well
+there, even.  It's a very strange thing, Jacob, that the richer you git,
+the less you ain't able to stay where you want to, dead or alive."
+
+"It's for the children we do it," said Dryfoos.  "We got to give them
+their chance in the world."
+
+"Oh, the world!  They ought to bear the yoke in their youth, like we
+done.  I know it's what Coonrod would like to do."
+
+Dryfoos got upon his feet.  "If Coonrod 'll mind his own business, and do
+what I want him to, he'll have yoke enough to bear."  He moved from his
+wife, without further effort to comfort her, and pottered heavily out
+into the dining-room.  Beyond its obscurity stretched the glitter of the
+deep drawing-room.  His feet, in their broad; flat slippers, made no
+sound on the dense carpet, and he came unseen upon the little group there
+near the piano.  Mela perched upon the stool with her back to the keys,
+and Beaton bent over Christine, who sat with a banjo in her lap, letting
+him take her hands and put them in the right place on the instrument.
+Her face was radiant with happiness, and Mela was watching her with
+foolish, unselfish pleasure in her bliss.
+
+There was nothing wrong in the affair to a man of Dryfoos's traditions
+and perceptions, and if it had been at home in the farm sitting-room,
+or even in his parlor at Moffitt, he would not have minded a young man's
+placing his daughter's hands on a banjo, or even holding them there;
+it would have seemed a proper, attention from him if he was courting her.
+But here, in such a house as this, with the daughter of a man who had
+made as much money as he had, he did not know but it was a liberty.
+He felt the angry doubt of it which beset him in regard to so many
+experiences of his changed life; he wanted to show his sense of it, if it
+was a liberty, but he did not know how, and he did not know that it was
+so.  Besides, he could not help a touch of the pleasure in Christine's
+happiness which Mela showed; and he would have gone back to the library,
+if he could, without being discovered.
+
+But Beaton had seen him, and Dryfoos, with a nonchalant nod to the young
+man, came forward.  "What you got there, Christine?"
+
+"A banjo," said the girl, blushing in her father's presence.
+
+Mela gurgled.  "Mr. Beaton is learnun' her the first position."
+
+Beaton was not embarrassed.  He was in evening dress, and his face,
+pointed with its brown beard, showed extremely handsome above the expanse
+of his broad, white shirt-front.  He gave back as nonchalant a nod as he
+had got, and, without further greeting to Dryfoos, he said to Christine:
+"No, no.  You must keep your hand and arm so."  He held them in position.
+"There!  Now strike with your right hand.  See?"
+
+"I don't believe I can ever learn," said the girl, with a fond upward
+look at him.
+
+"Oh yes, you can," said Beaton.
+
+They both ignored Dryfoos in the little play of protests which followed,
+and he said, half jocosely, half suspiciously, "And is the banjo the
+fashion, now?"  He remembered it as the emblem of low-down show business,
+and associated it with end-men and blackened faces and grotesque shirt-
+collars.
+
+"It's all the rage," Mela shouted, in answer for all.  "Everybody plays
+it.  Mr. Beaton borrowed this from a lady friend of his."
+
+"Humph!  Pity I got you a piano, then," said Dryfoos.  "A banjo would
+have been cheaper."
+
+Beaton so far admitted him to the conversation as to seem reminded of the
+piano by his mentioning it.  He said to Mela, "Oh, won't you just strike
+those chords?"  and as Mela wheeled about and beat the keys he took the
+banjo from Christine and sat down with it.  "This way!" He strummed it,
+and murmured the tune Dryfoos had heard him singing from the library,
+while he kept his beautiful eyes floating on Christine's.  "You try that,
+now; it's very simple."
+
+"Where is Mrs. Mandel?"  Dryfoos demanded, trying to assert himself.
+
+Neither of the girls seemed to have heard him at first in the chatter
+they broke into over what Beaton proposed.  Then Mela said, absently,
+"Oh, she had to go out to see one of her friends that's sick," and she
+struck the piano keys.  "Come; try it, Chris!"
+
+Dryfoos turned about unheeded and went back to the library.  He would
+have liked to put Beaton out of his house, and in his heart he burned
+against him as a contumacious hand; he would have liked to discharge him
+from the art department of 'Every Other Week' at once.  But he was aware
+of not having treated Beaton with much ceremony, and if the young man had
+returned his behavior in kind, with an electrical response to his own
+feeling, had he any right to complain?  After all, there was no harm in
+his teaching Christine the banjo.
+
+His wife still sat looking into the fire.  "I can't see," she said,
+"as we've got a bit more comfort of our lives, Jacob, because we've got
+such piles and piles of money.  I wisht to gracious we was back on the
+farm this minute.  I wisht you had held out ag'inst the childern about
+sellin' it; 'twould 'a' bin the best thing fur 'em, I say.  I believe in
+my soul they'll git spoiled here in New York.  I kin see a change in 'em
+a'ready--in the girls."
+
+Dryfoos stretched himself on the lounge again.  "I can't see as Coonrod
+is much comfort, either.  Why ain't he here with his sisters?  What does
+all that work of his on the East Side amount to?  It seems as if he done
+it to cross me, as much as anything."  Dryfoos complained to his wife on
+the basis of mere affectional habit, which in married life often survives
+the sense of intellectual equality.  He did not expect her to reason with
+him, but there was help in her listening, and though she could only
+soothe his fretfulness with soft answers which were often wide of the
+purpose, he still went to her for solace.  "Here, I've gone into this
+newspaper business, or whatever it is, on his account, and he don't seem
+any more satisfied than ever.  I can see he hain't got his heart in it."
+
+"The pore boy tries; I know he does, Jacob; and he wants to please you.
+But he give up a good deal when he give up bein' a preacher; I s'pose we
+ought to remember that."
+
+"A preacher!" sneered Dryfoos.  "I reckon bein' a preacher wouldn't
+satisfy him now.  He had the impudence to tell me this afternoon that he
+would like to be a priest; and he threw it up to me that he never could
+be because I'd kept him from studyin'."
+
+"He don't mean a Catholic priest--not a Roman one, Jacob," the old woman
+explained, wistfully.  "He's told me all about it.  They ain't the kind
+o' Catholics we been used to; some sort of 'Piscopalians; and they do a
+heap o' good amongst the poor folks over there.  He says we ain't got any
+idea how folks lives in them tenement houses, hundreds of 'em in one
+house, and whole families in a room; and it burns in his heart to help
+'em like them Fathers, as be calls 'em, that gives their lives to it.
+He can't be a Father, he says, because he can't git the eddication now;
+but he can be a Brother; and I can't find a word to say ag'inst it, when
+it gits to talkin', Jacob."
+
+"I ain't saying anything against his priests, 'Liz'beth," said Dryfoos.
+"They're all well enough in their way; they've given up their lives to
+it, and it's a matter of business with them, like any other.  But what
+I'm talking about now is Coonrod.  I don't object to his doin' all the
+charity he wants to, and the Lord knows I've never been stingy with him
+about it.  He might have all the money he wants, to give round any way he
+pleases."
+
+"That's what I told him once, but he says money ain't the thing--or not
+the only thing you got to give to them poor folks.  You got to give your
+time and your knowledge and your love--I don't know what all you got to
+give yourself, if you expect to help 'em.  That's what Coonrod says."
+
+"Well, I can tell him that charity begins at home," said Dryfoos, sitting
+up in his impatience.  "And he'd better give himself to us a little--to
+his old father and mother.  And his sisters.  What's he doin' goin' off
+there to his meetings, and I don't know what all, an' leavin' them here
+alone?"
+
+"Why, ain't Mr. Beaton with 'em?"  asked the old woman.  "I thought I
+heared his voice."
+
+"Mr. Beaton!  Of course he is!  And who's Mr. Beaton, anyway?"
+
+"Why, ain't he one of the men in Coonrod's office?  I thought I heared--"
+
+"Yes, he is!  But who is he?  What's he doing round here?  Is he makin'
+up to Christine?"
+
+"I reckon he is.  From Mely's talk, she's about crazy over the fellow.
+Don't you like him, Jacob?"
+
+"I don't know him, or what he is.  He hasn't got any manners.  Who
+brought him here?  How'd he come to come, in the first place?"
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson brung him, I believe," said the old woman, patiently.
+
+"Fulkerson!" Dryfoos snorted.  "Where's Mrs. Mandel, I should like to
+know?  He brought her, too.  Does she go traipsin' off this way every
+evening?"
+
+"No, she seems to be here pretty regular most o' the time.  I don't know
+how we could ever git along without her, Jacob; she seems to know just
+what to do, and the girls would be ten times as outbreakin' without her.
+I hope you ain't thinkin' o' turnin' her off, Jacob?"
+
+Dryfoos did not think it necessary to answer such a question.  "It's all
+Fulkerson, Fulkerson, Fulkerson.  It seems to me that Fulkerson about
+runs this family.  He brought Mrs. Mandel, and he brought that Beaton,
+and he brought that Boston fellow!  I guess I give him a dose, though;
+and I'll learn Fulkerson that he can't have everything his own way.  I
+don't want anybody to help me spend my money.  I made it, and I can
+manage it.  I guess Mr. Fulkerson can bear a little watching now.  He's
+been travelling pretty free, and he's got the notion he's driving, maybe.
+I'm a-going to look after that book a little myself."
+
+"You'll kill yourself, Jacob," said his wife, "tryin' to do so many
+things.  And what is it all fur?  I don't see as we're better off, any,
+for all the money.  It's just as much care as it used to be when we was
+all there on the farm together.  I wisht we could go back, Ja--"
+
+"We can't go back!" shouted the old man, fiercely.  "There's no farm any
+more to go back to.  The fields is full of gas-wells and oil-wells and
+hell-holes generally; the house is tore down, and the barn's goin'--"
+
+"The barn!" gasped the old woman.  "Oh, my!"
+
+"If I was to give all I'm worth this minute, we couldn't go back to the
+farm, any more than them girls in there could go back and be little
+children.  I don't say we're any better off, for the money.  I've got
+more of it now than I ever had; and there's no end to the luck; it pours
+in.  But I feel like I was tied hand and foot.  I don't know which way to
+move; I don't know what's best to do about anything.  The money don't
+seem to buy anything but more and more care and trouble.  We got a big
+house that we ain't at home in; and we got a lot of hired girls round
+under our feet that hinder and don't help.  Our children don't mind us,
+and we got no friends or neighbors.  But it had to be.  I couldn't help
+but sell the farm, and we can't go back to it, for it ain't there.  So
+don't you say anything more about it, 'Liz'beth."
+
+"Pore Jacob!" said his wife.  "Well, I woon't, dear."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+It was clear to Beaton that Dryfoos distrusted him; and the fact
+heightened his pleasure in Christine's liking for him.  He was as sure of
+this as he was of the other, though he was not so sure of any reason for
+his pleasure in it.  She had her charm; the charm of wildness to which a
+certain wildness in himself responded; and there were times when his
+fancy contrived a common future for them, which would have a prosperity
+forced from the old fellow's love of the girl.  Beaton liked the idea of
+this compulsion better than he liked the idea of the money; there was
+something a little repulsive in that; he imagined himself rejecting it;
+he almost wished he was enough in love with the girl to marry her without
+it; that would be fine.  He was taken with her in a certain' measure, in
+a certain way; the question was in what measure, in what way.
+
+It was partly to escape from this question that he hurried down-town, and
+decided to spend with the Leightons the hour remaining on his hands
+before it was time to go to the reception for which he was dressed.
+It seemed to him important that he should see Alma Leighton.  After all,
+it was her charm that was most abiding with him; perhaps it was to be
+final.  He found himself very happy in his present relations with her.
+She had dropped that barrier of pretences and ironical surprise.  It
+seemed to him that they had gone back to the old ground of common
+artistic interest which he had found so pleasant the summer before.
+Apparently she and her mother had both forgiven his neglect of them in
+the first months of their stay in New York; he was sure that Mrs.
+Leighton liked him as well as ever, and, if there was still something a
+little provisional in Alma's manner at times, it was something that
+piqued more than it discouraged; it made him curious, not anxious.
+
+He found the young ladies with Fulkerson when he rang.  He seemed to be
+amusing them both, and they were both amused beyond the merit of so small
+a pleasantry, Beaton thought, when Fulkerson said: "Introduce myself,
+Mr. Beaton: Mr. Fulkerson of 'Every Other Week.'  Think I've met you at
+our place."  The girls laughed, and Alma explained that her mother was
+not very well, and would be sorry not to see him.  Then she turned, as he
+felt, perversely, and went on talking with Fulkerson and left him to Miss
+Woodburn.
+
+She finally recognized his disappointment: "Ah don't often get a chance
+at you, Mr. Beaton, and Ah'm just goin' to toak yo' to death.  Yo' have
+been Soath yo'self, and yo' know ho' we do toak."
+
+"I've survived to say yes," Beaton admitted.
+
+"Oh, now, do you think we toak so much mo' than you do in the No'th?"
+the young lady deprecated.
+
+"I don't know.  I only know you can't talk too much for me.  I should
+like to hear you say Soath and house and about for the rest of my life."
+
+"That's what Ah call raght personal, Mr. Beaton.  Now Ah'm goin' to be
+personal, too."  Miss Woodburn flung out over her lap the square of cloth
+she was embroidering, and asked him: "Don't you think that's beautiful?
+Now, as an awtust--a great awtust?"
+
+"As a great awtust, yes," said Beaton, mimicking her accent.  "If I were
+less than great I might have something to say about the arrangement of
+colors.  You're as bold and original as Nature."
+
+"Really?  Oh, now, do tell me yo' favo'ite colo', Mr. Beaton."
+
+"My favorite color?  Bless my soul, why should I prefer any?  Is blue
+good, or red wicked?  Do people have favorite colors?"  Beaton found
+himself suddenly interested.
+
+"Of co'se they do," answered the girl.  "Don't awtusts?"
+
+"I never heard of one that had--consciously."
+
+"Is it possible?  I supposed they all had.  Now mah favo'ite colo' is
+gawnet.  Don't you think it's a pretty colo'?"
+
+"It depends upon how it's used.  Do you mean in neckties?"  Beaton stole
+a glance at the one Fulkerson was wearing.
+
+Miss Woodburn laughed with her face bowed upon her wrist.  "Ah do think
+you gentlemen in the No'th awe ten tahms as lahvely as the ladies."
+
+"Strange," said Beaton.  "In the South--Soath, excuse me! I made the
+observation that the ladies were ten times as lively as the gentlemen.
+What is that you're working?"
+
+"This?"  Miss Woodburn gave it another flirt, and looked at it with a
+glance of dawning recognition.  "Oh, this is a table-covah.  Wouldn't you
+lahke to see where it's to go?"
+
+"Why, certainly."
+
+"Well, if you'll be raght good I'll let yo' give me some professional
+advass about putting something in the co'ners or not, when you have seen
+it on the table."
+
+She rose and led the way into the other room.  Beaton knew she wanted to
+talk with him about something else; but he waited patiently to let her
+play her comedy out.  She spread the cover on the table, and he advised
+her, as he saw she wished, against putting anything in the corners; just
+run a line of her stitch around the edge, he said.
+
+"Mr.  Fulkerson and Ah, why, we've been having a regular faght aboat it,"
+she commented.  "But we both agreed, fahnally, to leave it to you; Mr.
+Fulkerson said you'd be sure to be raght.  Ah'm so glad you took mah
+sahde.  But he's a great admahrer of yours, Mr. Beaton," she concluded,
+demurely, suggestively.
+
+"Is he?  Well, I'm a great admirer of Fulkerson," said Beaton, with a
+capricious willingness to humor her wish to talk about Fulkerson.
+"He's a capital fellow; generous, magnanimous, with quite an ideal of
+friendship and an eye single to the main chance all the time.  He would
+advertise 'Every Other Week' on his family vault."
+
+Miss Woodburn laughed, and said she should tell him what Beaton had said.
+
+"Do.  But he's used to defamation from me, and he'll think you're
+joking."
+
+"Ah suppose," said Miss Woodburn, "that he's quahte the tahpe of a New
+York business man."  She added, as if it followed logically, "He's so
+different from what I thought a New York business man would be."
+
+"It's your Virginia tradition to despise business," said Beaton, rudely.
+
+Miss Woodburn laughed again.  "Despahse it? Mah goodness! we want to get
+into it and woak it fo' all it's wo'th,' as Mr. Fulkerson says.  That
+tradition is all past.  You don't know what the Soath is now.  Ah suppose
+mah fathaw despahses business, but he's a tradition himself, as Ah tell
+him."  Beaton would have enjoyed joining the young lady in anything she
+might be going to say in derogation of her father, but he restrained
+himself, and she went on more and more as if she wished to account for
+her father's habitual hauteur with Beaton, if not to excuse it.  "Ah tell
+him he don't understand the rising generation.  He was brought up in the
+old school, and he thinks we're all just lahke he was when he was young,
+with all those ahdeals of chivalry and family; but, mah goodness! it's
+money that cyoants no'adays in the Soath, just lahke it does everywhere
+else.  Ah suppose, if we could have slavery back in the fawm mah fathaw
+thinks it could have been brought up to, when the commercial spirit
+wouldn't let it alone, it would be the best thing; but we can't have it
+back, and Ah tell him we had better have the commercial spirit as the
+next best thing."
+
+Miss Woodburn went on, with sufficient loyalty and piety, to expose the
+difference of her own and her father's ideals, but with what Beaton
+thought less reference to his own unsympathetic attention than to a
+knowledge finally of the personnel and materiel of 'Every Other Week.'
+and Mr. Fulkerson's relation to the enterprise.  "You most excuse my
+asking so many questions, Mr. Beaton.  You know it's all mah doing that
+we awe heah in New York.  Ah just told mah fathaw that if he was evah
+goin' to do anything with his wrahtings, he had got to come No'th, and Ah
+made him come.  Ah believe he'd have stayed in the Soath all his lahfe.
+And now Mr. Fulkerson wants him to let his editor see some of his
+wrahtings, and Ah wanted to know something aboat the magazine.  We awe a
+great deal excited aboat it in this hoase, you know, Mr. Beaton," she
+concluded, with a look that now transferred the interest from Fulkerson
+to Alma.  She led the way back to the room where they were sitting, and
+went up to triumph over Fulkerson with Beaton's decision about the table-
+cover.
+
+Alma was left with Beaton near the piano, and he began to talk about the
+Dryfooses as he sat down on the piano-stool.  He said he had been giving
+Miss Dryfoos a lesson on the banjo; he had borrowed the banjo of Miss
+Vance.  Then he struck the chord he had been trying to teach Christine,
+and played over the air he had sung.
+
+"How do you like that?"  he asked, whirling round.
+
+"It seems rather a disrespectful little tune, somehow," said Alma,
+placidly.
+
+Beaton rested his elbow on the corner of the piano and gazed dreamily at
+her.  "Your perceptions are wonderful.  It is disrespectful.  I played
+it, up there, because I felt disrespectful to them."
+
+"Do you claim that as a merit?"
+
+"No, I state it as a fact.  How can you respect such people?"
+
+"You might respect yourself, then," said the girl.  "Or perhaps that
+wouldn't be so easy, either."
+
+"No, it wouldn't.  I like to have you say these things to me," said
+Beaton, impartially.
+
+"Well, I like to say them," Alma returned.
+
+"They do me good."
+
+"Oh, I don't know that that was my motive."
+
+"There is no one like you--no one," said Beaton, as if apostrophizing her
+in her absence.  "To come from that house, with its assertions of money--
+you can hear it chink; you can smell the foul old banknotes; it stifles
+you--into an atmosphere like this, is like coming into another world."
+
+"Thank you," said Alma.  "I'm glad there isn't that unpleasant odor here;
+but I wish there was a little more of the chinking."
+
+"No, no! Don't say that!" he implored.  "I like to think that there is
+one soul uncontaminated by the sense of money in this big, brutal, sordid
+city."
+
+"You mean two," said Alma, with modesty.  "But if you stifle at the
+Dryfooses', why do you go there?"
+
+"Why do I go?"  he mused.  "Don't you believe in knowing all the natures,
+the types, you can?  Those girls are a strange study: the young one is a
+simple, earthly creature, as common as an oat-field and the other a sort
+of sylvan life: fierce, flashing, feline--"
+
+Alma burst out into a laugh.  "What apt alliteration!  And do they like
+being studied?  I should think the sylvan life might--scratch."
+
+"No," said Beaton, with melancholy absence, "it only-purrs."
+
+The girl felt a rising indignation.  "Well, then, Mr. Beaton, I should
+hope it would scratch, and bite, too.  I think you've no business to go
+about studying people, as you do.  It's abominable."
+
+"Go on," said the young man.  "That Puritan conscience of yours!
+It appeals to the old Covenanter strain in me--like a voice of pre-
+existence.  Go on--"
+
+"Oh, if I went on I should merely say it was not only abominable, but
+contemptible."
+
+"You could be my guardian angel, Alma," said the young man, making his
+eyes more and more slumbrous and dreamy.
+
+"Stuff! I hope I have a soul above buttons!"
+
+He smiled, as she rose, and followed her across the room.  "Good-night;
+Mr. Beaton," she said.
+
+Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson came in from the other room.  "What!  You're
+not going, Beaton?"
+
+"Yes; I'm going to a reception.  I stopped in on my way."
+
+"To kill time," Alma explained.
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, gallantly, "this is the last place I should like
+to do it.  But I guess I'd better be going, too.  It has sometimes
+occurred to me that there is such a thing as staying too late.  But with
+Brother Beaton, here, just starting in for an evening's amusement, it
+does seem a little early yet.  Can't you urge me to stay, somebody?"
+
+The two girls laughed, and Miss Woodburn said:
+
+"Mr. Beaton is such a butterfly of fashion! Ah wish Ah was on mah way to
+a pawty.  Ah feel quahte envious."
+
+"But he didn't say it to make you," Alma explained, with meek softness.
+
+"Well, we can't all be swells.  Where is your party, anyway, Beaton?"
+asked Fulkerson.  "How do you manage to get your invitations to those
+things?  I suppose a fellow has to keep hinting round pretty lively,
+Neigh?"
+
+Beaton took these mockeries serenely, and shook hands with Miss Woodburn,
+with the effect of having already shaken hands with Alma.  She stood with
+hers clasped behind her.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Beaton went away with the smile on his face which he had kept in
+listening to Fulkerson, and carried it with him to the reception.
+He believed that Alma was vexed with him for more personal reasons than
+she had implied; it flattered him that she should have resented what he
+told her of the Dryfooses.  She had scolded him in their behalf
+apparently; but really because he had made her jealous by his interest,
+of whatever kind, in some one else.  What followed, had followed
+naturally.  Unless she had been quite a simpleton she could not have met
+his provisional love-making on any other terms; and the reason why Beaton
+chiefly liked Alma Leighton was that she was not a simpleton.  Even up in
+the country, when she was overawed by his acquaintance, at first, she was
+not very deeply overawed, and at times she was not overawed at all.
+At such times she astonished him by taking his most solemn histrionics
+with flippant incredulity, and even burlesquing them.  But he could see,
+all the same, that he had caught her fancy, and he admired the skill with
+which she punished his neglect when they met in New York.  He had really
+come very near forgetting the Leightons; the intangible obligations of
+mutual kindness which hold some men so fast, hung loosely upon him;
+it would not have hurt him to break from them altogether; but when he
+recognized them at last, he found that it strengthened them indefinitely
+to have Alma ignore them so completely.  If she had been sentimental, or
+softly reproachful, that would have been the end; he could not have stood
+it; he would have had to drop her.  But when she met him on his own
+ground, and obliged him to be sentimental, the game was in her hands.
+Beaton laughed, now, when he thought of that, and he said to himself that
+the girl had grown immensely since she had come to New York; nothing
+seemed to have been lost upon her; she must have kept her eyes uncommonly
+wide open.  He noticed that especially in their talks over her work; she
+had profited by everything she had seen and heard; she had all of
+Wetmore's ideas pat; it amused Beaton to see how she seized every useful
+word that he dropped, too, and turned him to technical account whenever
+she could.  He liked that; she had a great deal of talent; there was no
+question of that; if she were a man there could be no question of her
+future.  He began to construct a future for her; it included provision
+for himself, too; it was a common future, in which their lives and work
+were united.
+
+He was full of the glow of its prosperity when he met Margaret Vance at
+the reception.
+
+The house was one where people might chat a long time together without
+publicly committing themselves to an interest in each other except such a
+grew out of each other's ideas.  Miss Vance was there because she united
+in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the fashionable
+people and of the aesthetic people who met there on common ground.  It
+was almost the only house in New York where this happened often, and it
+did not happen very often there.  It was a literary house, primarily,
+with artistic qualifications, and the frequenters of it were mostly
+authors and artists; Wetmore, who was always trying to fit everything
+with a phrase, said it was the unfrequenters who were fashionable.  There
+was great ease there, and simplicity; and if there was not distinction,
+it was not for want of distinguished people, but because there seems to
+be some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level,
+that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface
+the deeply underlying nobody.  The effect for some temperaments, for
+consciousness, for egotism, is admirable; for curiosity, for hero
+worship, it is rather baffling.  It is the spirit of the street
+transferred to the drawing-room; indiscriminating, levelling, but
+doubtless finally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity of the place,
+if not consenting to the grandeur of reputations or presences.
+
+Beaton now denied that this house represented a salon at all, in the old
+sense; and he held that the salon was impossible, even undesirable,
+with us, when Miss Vance sighed for it.  At any rate, he said that this
+turmoil of coming and going, this bubble and babble, this cackling and
+hissing of conversation was not the expression of any such civilization
+as had created the salon.  Here, he owned, were the elements of
+intellectual delightfulness, but he said their assemblage in such
+quantity alone denied the salon; there was too much of a good thing.
+The French word implied a long evening of general talk among the guests,
+crowned with a little chicken at supper, ending at cock-crow.  Here was
+tea, with milk or with lemon-baths of it and claret-cup for the hardier
+spirits throughout the evening.  It was very nice, very pleasant, but it
+was not the little chicken--not the salon.  In fact, he affirmed, the
+salon descended from above, out of the great world, and included the
+aesthetic world in it.  But our great world--the rich people, were
+stupid, with no wish to be otherwise; they were not even curious about
+authors and artists.  Beaton fancied himself speaking impartially, and so
+he allowed himself to speak bitterly; he said that in no other city in
+the world, except Vienna, perhaps, were such people so little a part of
+society.
+
+"It isn't altogether the rich people's fault," said Margaret; and she
+spoke impartially, too.  "I don't believe that the literary men and the
+artists would like a salon that descended to them.  Madame Geoffrin, you
+know, was very plebeian; her husband was a business man of some sort."
+
+"He would have been a howling swell in New York," said Beaton, still
+impartially.
+
+Wetmore came up to their corner, with a scroll of bread and butter in one
+hand and a cup of tea in the other.  Large and fat, and clean-shaven, he
+looked like a monk in evening dress.
+
+"We were talking about salons," said Margaret.
+
+"Why don't you open a salon yourself?"  asked Wetmore, breathing thickly
+from the anxiety of getting through the crowd without spilling his tea.
+
+"Like poor Lady Barberina Lemon?"  said the girl, with a laugh.  "What a
+good story!  That idea of a woman who couldn't be interested in any of
+the arts because she was socially and traditionally the material of them!
+We can, never reach that height of nonchalance in this country."
+
+"Not if we tried seriously?" suggested the painter.  "I've an idea that
+if the Americans ever gave their minds to that sort of thing, they could
+take the palm--or the cake, as Beaton here would say--just as they do in
+everything else.  When we do have an aristocracy, it will be an
+aristocracy that will go ahead of anything the world has ever seen.
+Why don't somebody make a beginning, and go in openly for an ancestry,
+and a lower middle class, and an hereditary legislature, and all the
+rest?  We've got liveries, and crests, and palaces, and caste feeling.
+We're all right as far as we've gone, and we've got the money to go any
+length."
+
+"Like your natural-gas man, Mr. Beaton," said the girl, with a smiling
+glance round at him.
+
+"Ah!" said Wetmore, stirring his tea, "has Beaton got a natural-gas man?"
+
+"My natural-gas man," said Beaton, ignoring Wetmore's question, "doesn't
+know how to live in his palace yet, and I doubt if he has any caste
+feeling.  I fancy his family believe themselves victims of it.  They say
+--one of the young ladies does--that she never saw such an unsociable
+place as New York; nobody calls."
+
+"That's good!" said Wetmore.  "I suppose they're all ready for company,
+too: good cook, furniture, servants, carriages?"
+
+"Galore," said Beaton.
+
+"Well, that's too bad.  There's a chance for you, Miss Vance.  Doesn't
+your philanthropy embrace the socially destitute as well as the
+financially?  Just think of a family like that, without a friend, in a
+great city!  I should think common charity had a duty there--not to
+mention the uncommon."
+
+He distinguished that kind as Margaret's by a glance of ironical
+deference.  She had a repute for good works which was out of proportion
+to the works, as it always is, but she was really active in that way,
+under the vague obligation, which we now all feel, to be helpful.  She
+was of the church which seems to have found a reversion to the imposing
+ritual of the past the way back to the early ideals of Christian
+brotherhood.
+
+"Oh, they seem to have Mr. Beaton," Margaret answered, and Beaton felt
+obscurely flattered by her reference to his patronage of the Dryfooses.
+
+He explained to Wetmore: "They have me because they partly own me.
+Dryfoos is Fulkerson's financial backer in 'Every Other Week'."
+
+"Is that so?  Well, that's interesting, too.  Aren't you rather
+astonished, Miss Vance, to see what a petty thing Beaton is making of
+that magazine of his?"
+
+"Oh," said Margaret, "it's so very nice, every way; it makes you feel as
+if you did have a country, after all.  It's as chic--that detestable
+little word!--as those new French books."
+
+"Beaton modelled it on them.  But you mustn't suppose he does everything
+about 'Every Other Week'; he'd like you to.  Beaton, you haven't come up
+to that cover of your first number, since.  That was the design of one of
+my pupils, Miss Vance--a little girl that Beaton discovered down in New
+Hampshire last summer."
+
+"Oh yes.  And have you great hopes of her, Mr. Wetmore?"
+
+"She seems to have more love of it and knack for it than any one of her
+sex I've seen yet.  It really looks like a case of art for art's sake,
+at times.  But you can't tell.  They're liable to get married at any
+moment, you know.  Look here, Beaton, when your natural-gas man gets to
+the picture-buying stage in his development, just remember your old
+friends, will you?  You know, Miss Vance, those new fellows have their
+regular stages.  They never know what to do with their money, but they
+find out that people buy pictures, at one point.  They shut your things
+up in their houses where nobody comes, and after a while they overeat
+themselves--they don't know what, else to do--and die of apoplexy, and
+leave your pictures to a gallery, and then they see the light.  It's
+slow, but it's pretty sure.  Well, I see Beaton isn't going to move on,
+as he ought to do; and so I must.  He always was an unconventional
+creature."
+
+Wetmore went away, but Beaton remained, and he outstayed several other
+people who came up to speak to Miss Vance.  She was interested in
+everybody, and she liked the talk of these clever literary, artistic,
+clerical, even theatrical people, and she liked the sort of court with
+which they recognized her fashion as well as her cleverness; it was very
+pleasant to be treated intellectually as if she were one of themselves,
+and socially as if she was not habitually the same, but a sort of guest
+in Bohemia, a distinguished stranger.  If it was Arcadia rather than
+Bohemia, still she felt her quality of distinguished stranger.  The
+flattery of it touched her fancy, and not her vanity; she had very little
+vanity.  Beaton's devotion made the same sort of appeal; it was not so
+much that she liked him as she liked being the object of his admiration.
+She was a girl of genuine sympathies, intellectual rather than
+sentimental.  In fact, she was an intellectual person, whom qualities of
+the heart saved from being disagreeable, as they saved her on the other
+hand from being worldly or cruel in her fashionableness.  She had read a
+great many books, and had ideas about them, quite courageous and original
+ideas; she knew about pictures--she had been in Wetmore's class; she was
+fond of music; she was willing to understand even politics; in Boston she
+might have been agnostic, but in New York she was sincerely religious;
+she was very accomplished; and perhaps it was her goodness that prevented
+her feeling what was not best in Beaton.
+
+"Do you think," she said, after the retreat of one of the comers and
+goers left her alone with him again, "that those young ladies would like
+me to call on them?"
+
+"Those young ladies?"  Beaton echoed.  "Miss Leighton and--"
+
+"No; I have been there with my aunt's cards already."
+
+"Oh yes," said Beaton, as if he had known of it; he admired the pluck and
+pride with which Alma had refrained from ever mentioning the fact to him,
+and had kept her mother from mentioning it, which must have been
+difficult.
+
+"I mean the Miss Dryfooses.  It seems really barbarous, if nobody goes
+near them.  We do all kinds of things, and help all kinds of people in
+some ways, but we let strangers remain strangers unless they know how to
+make their way among us."
+
+"The Dryfooses certainly wouldn't know how to make their way among you,"
+said Beaton, with a sort of dreamy absence in his tone.
+
+Miss Vance went on, speaking out the process of reasoning in her mind,
+rather than any conclusions she had reached.  "We defend ourselves by
+trying to believe that they must have friends of their own, or that they
+would think us patronizing, and wouldn't like being made the objects of
+social charity; but they needn't really suppose anything of the kind."
+
+"I don't imagine they would," said Beaton.  "I think they'd be only too
+happy to have you come.  But you wouldn't know what to do with each
+other, indeed, Miss Vance."
+
+"Perhaps we shall like each other," said the girl, bravely, "and then we
+shall know.  What Church are they of?"
+
+"I don't believe they're of any," said Beaton.  "The mother was brought
+up a Dunkard."
+
+"A Dunkard?"
+
+Beaton told what he knew of the primitive sect, with its early Christian
+polity, its literal interpretation of Christ's ethics, and its quaint
+ceremonial of foot-washing; he made something picturesque of that.
+"The father is a Mammon-worshipper, pure and simple.  I suppose the young
+ladies go to church, but I don't know where.  They haven't tried to
+convert me."
+
+"I'll tell them not to despair--after I've converted them," said Miss
+Vance.  "Will you let me use you as a 'point d'appui', Mr. Beaton?"
+
+"Any way you like.  If you're really going to see them, perhaps I'd
+better make a confession.  I left your banjo with them, after I got it
+put in order."
+
+"How very nice!  Then we have a common interest already."
+
+"Do you mean the banjo, or--"
+
+"The banjo, decidedly.  Which of them plays?"
+
+"Neither.  But the eldest heard that the banjo was 'all the rage,' as the
+youngest says.  Perhaps you can persuade them that good works are the
+rage, too."
+
+Beaton had no very lively belief that Margaret would go to see the
+Dryfooses; he did so few of the things he proposed that he went upon the
+theory that others must be as faithless.  Still, he had a cruel amusement
+in figuring the possible encounter between Margaret Vance, with her
+intellectual elegance, her eager sympathies and generous ideals, and
+those girls with their rude past, their false and distorted perspective,
+their sordid and hungry selfishness, and their faith in the omnipotence
+of their father's wealth wounded by their experience of its present
+social impotence.  At the bottom of his heart he sympathized with them
+rather than with her; he was more like them.
+
+People had ceased coming, and some of them were going.  Miss Vance said
+she must go, too, and she was about to rise, when the host came up with
+March; Beaton turned away.
+
+"Miss Vance, I want to introduce Mr. March, the editor of 'Every Other
+Week.'  You oughtn't to be restricted to the art department.  We literary
+fellows think that arm of the service gets too much of the glory
+nowadays."  His banter was for Beaton, but he was already beyond ear-
+shot, and the host went on:
+
+Mr. March can talk with you about your favorite Boston.  He's just turned
+his back on it."
+
+"Oh, I hope not!" said Miss Vance.  "I can't imagine anybody voluntarily
+leaving Boston."
+
+"I don't say he's so bad as that," said the host, committing March to
+her.  "He came to New York because he couldn't help it--like the rest of
+us.  I never know whether that's a compliment to New York or not."
+
+They talked Boston a little while, without finding that they had common
+acquaintance there; Miss Vance must have concluded that society was much
+larger in Boston than she had supposed from her visits there, or else
+that March did not know many people in it.  But she was not a girl to
+care much for the inferences that might be drawn from such conclusions;
+she rather prided herself upon despising them; and she gave herself to
+the pleasure of being talked to as if she were of March's own age.
+In the glow of her sympathetic beauty and elegance he talked his best,
+and tried to amuse her with his jokes, which he had the art of tingeing
+with a little seriousness on one side.  He made her laugh; and he
+flattered her by making her think; in her turn she charmed him so much by
+enjoying what he said that he began to brag of his wife, as a good
+husband always does when another woman charms him; and she asked, Oh was
+Mrs. March there; and would he introduce her?
+
+She asked Mrs. March for her address, and whether she had a day; and she
+said she would come to see her, if she would let her.  Mrs. March could
+not be so enthusiastic about her as March was, but as they walked home
+together they talked the girl over, and agreed about her beauty and her
+amiability.  Mrs. March said she seemed very unspoiled for a person who
+must have been so much spoiled.  They tried to analyze her charm, and
+they succeeded in formulating it as a combination of intellectual
+fashionableness and worldly innocence.  "I think," said Mrs. March,
+"that city girls, brought up as she must have been, are often the most
+innocent of all.  They never imagine the wickedness of the world, and if
+they marry happily they go through life as innocent as children.
+Everything combines to keep them so; the very hollowness of society
+shields them.  They are the loveliest of the human race.  But perhaps the
+rest have to pay too much for them."
+
+"For such an exquisite creature as Miss Vance," said March, "we couldn't
+pay too much."
+
+A wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air at the street-crossing in
+front of them.  A girl's voice called out: "Run, run, Jen!  The copper is
+after you."  A woman's figure rushed stumbling across the way and into
+the shadow of the houses, pursued by a burly policeman.
+
+"Ah, but if that's part of the price?"
+
+They went along fallen from the gay spirit of their talk into a silence
+which he broke with a sigh.  "Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl
+we left yonder really belong to the same system of things?  How
+impossible each makes the other seem!"
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+Mrs. Horn believed in the world and in society and its unwritten
+constitution devoutly, and she tolerated her niece's benevolent
+activities as she tolerated her aesthetic sympathies because these
+things, however oddly, were tolerated--even encouraged--by society;
+and they gave Margaret a charm.  They made her originality interesting.
+Mrs. Horn did not intend that they should ever go so far as to make her
+troublesome; and it was with a sense of this abeyant authority of her
+aunt's that the girl asked her approval of her proposed call upon the
+Dryfooses.  She explained as well as she could the social destitution of
+these opulent people, and she had of course to name Beaton as the source
+of her knowledge concerning them.
+
+"Did Mr. Beaton suggest your calling on them?"
+
+"No; he rather discouraged it."
+
+"And why do you think you ought to go in this particular instance?  New
+York is full of people who don't know anybody."
+
+Margaret laughed.  "I suppose it's like any other charity: you reach the
+cases you know of.  The others you say you can't help, and you try to
+ignore them."
+
+"It's very romantic," said Mrs. Horn.  "I hope you've counted the cost;
+all the possible consequences."
+
+Margaret knew that her aunt had in mind their common experience with the
+Leightons, whom, to give their common conscience peace, she had called
+upon with her aunt's cards and excuses, and an invitation for her
+Thursdays, somewhat too late to make the visit seem a welcome to New
+York.  She was so coldly received, not so much for herself as in her
+quality of envoy, that her aunt experienced all the comfort which
+vicarious penance brings.  She did not perhaps consider sufficiently her
+niece's guiltlessness in the expiation.  Margaret was not with her at
+St. Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there, and never saw the
+Leightons till she went to call upon them.  She never complained: the
+strain of asceticism, which mysteriously exists in us all, and makes us
+put peas, boiled or unboiled, in our shoes, gave her patience with the
+snub which the Leightons presented her for her aunt.  But now she said,
+with this in mind: "Nothing seems simpler than to get rid of people if
+you don't want them.  You merely have to let them alone."
+
+"It isn't so pleasant, letting them alone," said Mrs. Horn.
+
+"Or having them let you alone," said Margaret; for neither Mrs. Leighton
+nor Alma had ever come to enjoy the belated hospitality of Mrs. Horn's
+Thursdays.
+
+"Yes, or having them let you alone," Mrs. Horn courageously consented.
+"And all that I ask you, Margaret, is to be sure that you really want to
+know these people."
+
+"I don't," said the girl, seriously, "in the usual way."
+
+"Then the question is whether you do in the un usual way.  They will
+build a great deal upon you," said Mrs. Horn, realizing how much the
+Leightons must have built upon her, and how much out of proportion to her
+desert they must now dislike her; for she seemed to have had them on her
+mind from the time they came, and had always meant to recognize any
+reasonable claim they had upon her.
+
+"It seems very odd, very sad," Margaret returned, "that you never could
+act unselfishly in society affairs.  If I wished to go and see those
+girls just to do them a pleasure, and perhaps because if they're strange
+and lonely, I might do them good, even--it would be impossible."
+
+"Quite," said her aunt.  "Such a thing would be quixotic.  Society
+doesn't rest upon any such basis.  It can't; it would go to pieces, if
+people acted from unselfish motives."
+
+"Then it's a painted savage!" said the girl.  "All its favors are really
+bargains.  It's gifts are for gifts back again."
+
+"Yes, that is true," said Mrs. Horn, with no more sense of wrong in the
+fact than the political economist has in the fact that wages are the
+measure of necessity and not of merit.  "You get what you pay for.  It's
+a matter of business."  She satisfied herself with this formula, which
+she did not invent, as fully as if it were a reason; but she did not
+dislike her niece's revolt against it.  That was part of Margaret's
+originality, which pleased her aunt in proportion to her own
+conventionality; she was really a timid person, and she liked the show of
+courage which Margaret's magnanimity often reflected upon her.  She had
+through her a repute, with people who did not know her well, for
+intellectual and moral qualities; she was supposed to be literary and
+charitable; she almost had opinions and ideals, but really fell short of
+their possession.  She thought that she set bounds to the girl's
+originality because she recognized them.  Margaret understood this better
+than her aunt, and knew that she had consulted her about going to see the
+Dryfooses out of deference, and with no expectation of luminous
+instruction.  She was used to being a law to herself, but she knew what
+she might and might not do, so that she was rather a by-law.  She was the
+kind of girl that might have fancies for artists and poets, but might end
+by marrying a prosperous broker, and leavening a vast lump of moneyed and
+fashionable life with her culture, generosity, and good-will.  The
+intellectual interests were first with her, but she might be equal to
+sacrificing them; she had the best heart, but she might know how to
+harden it; if she was eccentric, her social orbit was defined; comets
+themselves traverse space on fixed lines.  She was like every one else,
+a congeries of contradictions and inconsistencies, but obedient to the
+general expectation of what a girl of her position must and must not
+finally be.  Provisionally, she was very much what she liked to be.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Margaret Vance tried to give herself some reason for going to call upon
+the Dryfooses, but she could find none better than the wish to do a kind
+thing.  This seemed queerer and less and less sufficient as she examined
+it, and she even admitted a little curiosity as a harmless element in her
+motive, without being very well satisfied with it.  She tried to add a
+slight sense of social duty, and then she decided to have no motive at
+all, but simply to pay her visit as she would to any other eligible
+strangers she saw fit to call upon.  She perceived that she must be very
+careful not to let them see that any other impulse had governed her; she
+determined, if possible, to let them patronize her; to be very modest and
+sincere and diffident, and, above all, not to play a part.  This was
+easy, compared with the choice of a manner that should convey to them the
+fact that she was not playing a part.  When the hesitating Irish serving-
+man had acknowledged that the ladies were at home, and had taken her card
+to them, she sat waiting for them in the drawing-room.  Her study of its
+appointments, with their impersonal costliness, gave her no suggestion
+how to proceed; the two sisters were upon her before she had really
+decided, and she rose to meet them with the conviction that she was going
+to play a part for want of some chosen means of not doing so.  She found
+herself, before she knew it, making her banjo a property in the little
+comedy, and professing so much pleasure in the fact that Miss Dryfoos was
+taking it up; she had herself been so much interested by it.  Anything,
+she said, was a relief from the piano; and then, between the guitar and
+the banjo, one must really choose the banjo, unless one wanted to devote
+one's whole natural life to the violin.  Of course, there was the
+mandolin; but Margaret asked if they did not feel that the bit of shell
+you struck it with interposed a distance between you and the real soul of
+the instrument; and then it did have such a faint, mosquitoy little tone!
+She made much of the question, which they left her to debate alone while
+they gazed solemnly at her till she characterized the tone of the
+mandolin, when Mela broke into a large, coarse laugh.
+
+"Well, that's just what it does sound like," she explained defiantly to
+her sister.  "I always feel like it was going to settle somewhere, and I
+want to hit myself a slap before it begins to bite.  I don't see what
+ever brought such a thing into fashion."
+
+Margaret had not expected to be so powerfully seconded, and she asked,
+after gathering herself together, "And you are both learning the banjo?"
+"My, no!" said Mela, "I've gone through enough with the piano.  Christine
+is learnun' it."
+
+"I'm so glad you are making my banjo useful at the outset, Miss Dryfoos."
+Both girls stared at her, but found it hard to cope with the fact that
+this was the lady friend whose banjo Beaton had lent them.  "Mr. Beaton
+mentioned that he had left it here.  I hope you'll keep it as long as you
+find it useful."
+
+At this amiable speech even Christine could not help thanking her.
+"Of course," she said, "I expect to get another, right off.  Mr. Beaton
+is going to choose it for me."
+
+"You are very fortunate.  If you haven't a teacher yet I should so like
+to recommend mine."
+
+Mela broke out in her laugh again.  "Oh, I guess Christine's pretty well
+suited with the one she's got," she said, with insinuation.  Her sister
+gave her a frowning glance, and Margaret did not tempt her to explain.
+
+"Then that's much better," she said.  "I have a kind of superstition in
+such matters; I don't like to make a second choice.  In a shop I like to
+take the first thing of the kind I'm looking for, and even if I choose
+further I come back to the original."
+
+"How funny!" said Mela.  "Well, now, I'm just the other way.  I always
+take the last thing, after I've picked over all the rest.  My luck always
+seems to be at the bottom of the heap.  Now, Christine, she's more like
+you.  I believe she could walk right up blindfolded and put her hand on
+the thing she wants every time."
+
+"I'm like father," said Christine, softened a little by the celebration
+of her peculiarity.  "He says the reason so many people don't get what
+they want is that they don't want it bad enough.  Now, when I want a
+thing, it seems to me that I want it all through."
+
+"Well, that's just like father, too," said Mela.  "That's the way he done
+when he got that eighty-acre piece next to Moffitt that he kept when he
+sold the farm, and that's got some of the best gas-wells on it now that
+there is anywhere."  She addressed the explanation to her sister, to the
+exclusion of Margaret, who, nevertheless, listened with a smiling face
+and a resolutely polite air of being a party to the conversation.  Mela
+rewarded her amiability by saying to her, finally, "You've never been in
+the natural-gas country, have you?"
+
+"Oh no! And I should so much like to see it!" said Margaret, with a
+fervor that was partly, voluntary.
+
+"Would you?  Well, we're kind of sick of it, but I suppose it would
+strike a stranger."
+
+"I never got tired of looking at the big wells when they lit them up,"
+said Christine.  "It seems as if the world was on fire."
+
+"Yes, and when you see the surface-gas burnun' down in the woods, like it
+used to by our spring-house-so still, and never spreadun' any, just like
+a bed of some kind of wild flowers when you ketch sight of it a piece
+off."
+
+They began to tell of the wonders of their strange land in an antiphony
+of reminiscences and descriptions; they unconsciously imputed a merit to
+themselves from the number and violence of the wells on their father's
+property; they bragged of the high civilization of Moffitt, which they
+compared to its advantage with that of New York.  They became excited by
+Margaret's interest in natural gas, and forgot to be suspicious and
+envious.
+
+She said, as she rose, "Oh, how much I should like to see it all!"  Then
+she made a little pause, and added:
+
+"I'm so sorry my aunt's Thursdays are over; she never has them after
+Lent, but we're to have some people Tuesday evening at a little concert
+which a musical friend is going to give with some other artists.  There
+won't be any banjos, I'm afraid, but there'll be some very good singing,
+and my aunt would be so glad if you could come with your mother."
+
+She put down her aunt's card on the table near her, while Mela gurgled,
+as if it were the best joke: "Oh, my!  Mother never goes anywhere; you
+couldn't get her out for love or money."  But she was herself overwhelmed
+with a simple joy at Margaret's politeness, and showed it in a sensuous
+way, like a child, as if she had been tickled.  She came closer to
+Margaret and seemed about to fawn physically upon her.
+
+"Ain't she just as lovely as she can live?"  she demanded of her sister
+when Margaret was gone.
+
+"I don't know," said Christine.  "I guess she wanted to know who
+Mr. Beaton had been lending her banjo to."
+
+"Pshaw!  Do you suppose she's in love with him?"  asked Mela, and then
+she broke into her hoarse laugh at the look her sister gave her.  "Well,
+don't eat me, Christine! I wonder who she is, anyway?  I'm goun' to git
+it out of Mr. Beaton the next time he calls.  I guess she's somebody.
+Mrs. Mandel can tell.  I wish that old friend of hers would hurry up and
+git well--or something.  But I guess we appeared about as well as she
+did.  I could see she was afraid of you, Christine.  I reckon it's
+gittun' around a little about father; and when it does I don't believe we
+shall want for callers.  Say, are you goun'? To that concert of theirs?"
+
+"I don't know.  Not till I know who they are first."
+
+"Well, we've got to hump ourselves if we're goun' to find out before
+Tuesday."
+
+As she went home Margaret felt wrought in her that most incredible of the
+miracles, which, nevertheless, any one may make his experience.  She felt
+kindly to these girls because she had tried to make them happy, and she
+hoped that in the interest she had shown there had been none of the
+poison of flattery.  She was aware that this was a risk she ran in such
+an attempt to do good.  If she had escaped this effect she was willing to
+leave the rest with Providence.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+The notion that a girl of Margaret Vance's traditions would naturally
+form of girls like Christine and Mela Dryfoos would be that they were
+abashed in the presence of the new conditions of their lives, and that
+they must receive the advance she had made them with a certain grateful
+humility.  However they received it, she had made it upon principle, from
+a romantic conception of duty; but this was the way she imagined they
+would receive it, because she thought that she would have done so if she
+had been as ignorant and unbred as they.  Her error was in arguing their
+attitude from her own temperament, and endowing them, for the purposes of
+argument, with her perspective.  They had not the means, intellectual or
+moral, of feeling as she fancied.  If they had remained at home on the
+farm where they were born, Christine would have grown up that embodiment
+of impassioned suspicion which we find oftenest in the narrowest spheres,
+and Mela would always have been a good-natured simpleton; but they would
+never have doubted their equality with the wisest and the finest.  As it
+was, they had not learned enough at school to doubt it, and the splendor
+of their father's success in making money had blinded them forever to any
+possible difference against them.  They had no question of themselves in
+the social abeyance to which they had been left in New York.  They had
+been surprised, mystified; it was not what they had expected; there must
+be some mistake.
+
+They were the victims of an accident, which would be repaired as soon as
+the fact of their father's wealth had got around.  They had been
+steadfast in their faith, through all their disappointment, that they
+were not only better than most people by virtue of his money, but as good
+as any; and they took Margaret's visit, so far as they, investigated its
+motive, for a sign that at last it was beginning to get around; of
+course, a thing could not get around in New York so quick as it could in
+a small place.  They were confirmed in their belief by the sensation of
+Mrs. Mandel when she returned to duty that afternoon, and they consulted
+her about going to Mrs. Horn's musicale.  If she had felt any doubt at
+the name for there were Horns and Horns--the address on the card put the
+matter beyond question; and she tried to make her charges understand what
+a precious chance had befallen them.  She did not succeed; they had not
+the premises, the experience, for a sufficient impression; and she undid
+her work in part by the effort to explain that Mrs. Horn's standing was
+independent of money; that though she was positively rich, she was
+comparatively poor.  Christine inferred that Miss Vance had called
+because she wished to be the first to get in with them since it had begun
+to get around.  This view commended itself to Mela, too, but without
+warping her from her opinion that Miss Vance was all the same too sweet
+for anything.  She had not so vivid a consciousness of her father's money
+as Christine had; but she reposed perhaps all the more confidently upon
+its power.  She was far from thinking meanly of any one who thought
+highly of her for it; that seemed so natural a result as to be amiable,
+even admirable; she was willing that any such person should get all the
+good there was in such an attitude toward her.
+
+They discussed the matter that night at dinner before their father and
+mother, who mostly sat silent at their meals; the father frowning
+absently over his plate, with his head close to it, and making play into
+his mouth with the back of his knife (he had got so far toward the use of
+his fork as to despise those who still ate from the edge of their
+knives), and the mother partly missing hers at times in the nervous
+tremor that shook her face from side to side.
+
+After a while the subject of Mela's hoarse babble and of Christine's
+high-pitched, thin, sharp forays of assertion and denial in the field
+which her sister's voice seemed to cover, made its way into the old man's
+consciousness, and he perceived that they were talking with Mrs. Mandel
+about it, and that his wife was from time to time offering an irrelevant
+and mistaken comment.  He agreed with Christine, and silently took her
+view of the affair some time before he made any sign of having listened.
+There had been a time in his life when other things besides his money
+seemed admirable to him.  He had once respected himself for the hard-
+headed, practical common sense which first gave him standing among his
+country neighbors; which made him supervisor, school trustee, justice of
+the peace, county commissioner, secretary of the Moffitt County
+Agricultural Society.  In those days he had served the public with
+disinterested zeal and proud ability; he used to write to the Lake Shore
+Farmer on agricultural topics; he took part in opposing, through the
+Moffitt papers, the legislative waste of the people's money; on the
+question of selling a local canal to the railroad company, which killed
+that fine old State work, and let the dry ditch grow up to grass, he
+might have gone to the Legislature, but he contented himself with
+defeating the Moffitt member who had voted for the job.  If he opposed
+some measures for the general good, like high schools and school
+libraries, it was because he lacked perspective, in his intense
+individualism, and suspected all expense of being spendthrift.  He
+believed in good district schools, and he had a fondness, crude but
+genuine, for some kinds of reading--history, and forensics of an
+elementary sort.
+
+With his good head for figures he doubted doctors and despised preachers;
+he thought lawyers were all rascals, but he respected them for their
+ability; he was not himself litigious, but he enjoyed the intellectual
+encounters of a difficult lawsuit, and he often attended a sitting of the
+fall term of court, when he went to town, for the pleasure of hearing the
+speeches.  He was a good citizen, and a good husband.  As a good father,
+he was rather severe with his children, and used to whip them, especially
+the gentle Conrad, who somehow crossed him most, till the twins died.
+After that he never struck any of them; and from the sight of a blow
+dealt a horse he turned as if sick.  It was a long time before he lifted
+himself up from his sorrow, and then the will of the man seemed to have
+been breached through his affections.  He let the girls do as they
+pleased--the twins had been girls; he let them go away to school, and got
+them a piano.  It was they who made him sell the farm.  If Conrad had
+only had their spirit he could have made him keep it, he felt; and he
+resented the want of support he might have found in a less yielding
+spirit than his son's.
+
+His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunity of making
+money quickly and abundantly, which offered itself to him after he sold
+his farm.  He awoke to it slowly, from a desolation in which he tasted
+the last bitter of homesickness, the utter misery of idleness and
+listlessness.  When he broke down and cried for the hard-working,
+wholesome life he had lost, he was near the end of this season of
+despair, but he was also near the end of what was best in himself.
+He devolved upon a meaner ideal than that of conservative good
+citizenship, which had been his chief moral experience: the money he had
+already made without effort and without merit bred its unholy self-love
+in him; he began to honor money, especially money that had been won
+suddenly and in large sums; for money that had been earned painfully,
+slowly, and in little amounts, he had only pity and contempt.  The poison
+of that ambition to go somewhere and be somebody which the local
+speculators had instilled into him began to work in the vanity which had
+succeeded his somewhat scornful self-respect; he rejected Europe as the
+proper field for his expansion; he rejected Washington; he preferred New
+York, whither the men who have made money and do not yet know that money
+has made them, all instinctively turn.  He came where he could watch his
+money breed more money, and bring greater increase of its kind in an hour
+of luck than the toil of hundreds of men could earn in a year.  He called
+it speculation, stocks, the Street; and his pride, his faith in himself,
+mounted with his luck.  He expected, when he had sated his greed,
+to begin to spend, and he had formulated an intention to build a great
+house, to add another to the palaces of the country-bred millionaires who
+have come to adorn the great city.  In the mean time he made little
+account of the things that occupied his children, except to fret at the
+ungrateful indifference of his son to the interests that could alone make
+a man of him.  He did not know whether his daughters were in society or
+not; with people coming and going in the house he would have supposed
+they must be so, no matter who the people were; in some vague way he felt
+that he had hired society in Mrs. Mandel, at so much a year.  He never
+met a superior himself except now and then a man of twenty or thirty
+millions to his one or two, and then he felt his soul creep within him,
+without a sense of social inferiority; it was a question of financial
+inferiority; and though Dryfoos's soul bowed itself and crawled, it was
+with a gambler's admiration of wonderful luck.  Other men said these
+many-millioned millionaires were smart, and got their money by sharp
+practices to which lesser men could not attain; but Dryfoos believed that
+he could compass the same ends, by the same means, with the same chances;
+he respected their money, not them.
+
+When he now heard Mrs. Mandel and his daughters talking of that person,
+whoever she was, that Mrs. Mandel seemed to think had honored his girls
+by coming to see them, his curiosity was pricked as much as his pride was
+galled.
+
+"Well, anyway," said Mela, "I don't care whether Christine's goon' or
+not; I am.  And you got to go with me, Mrs. Mandel."
+
+"Well, there's a little difficulty," said Mrs. Mandel, with her unfailing
+dignity and politeness.  "I haven't been asked, you know."
+
+"Then what are we goun' to do?"  demanded Mela, almost crossly.  She was
+physically too amiable, she felt too well corporeally, ever to be quite
+cross.  "She might 'a' knowed--well known--we couldn't 'a' come alone,
+in New York.  I don't see why, we couldn't.  I don't call it much of an
+invitation."
+
+"I suppose she thought you could come with your mother," Mrs. Mandel
+suggested.
+
+"She didn't say anything about mother: Did she, Christine?  Or, yes, she
+did, too.  And I told her she couldn't git mother out.  Don't you
+remember?"
+
+"I didn't pay much attention," said Christine.  "I wasn't certain we
+wanted to go."
+
+"I reckon you wasn't goun' to let her see that we cared much," said Mela,
+half reproachful, half proud of this attitude of Christine.  "Well,
+I don't see but what we got to stay at home."  She laughed at this lame
+conclusion of the matter.
+
+"Perhaps Mr. Conrad--you could very properly take him without an express
+invitation--" Mrs. Mandel began.
+
+Conrad looked up in alarm and protest.  "I--I don't think I could go that
+evening--"
+
+"What's the reason?" his father broke in, harshly.  "You're not such a
+sheep that you're afraid to go into company with your sisters?  Or are
+you too good to go with them?"
+
+"If it's to be anything like that night when them hussies come out and
+danced that way," said Mrs. Dryfoos, "I don't blame Coonrod for not
+wantun' to go.  I never saw the beat of it."
+
+Mela sent a yelling laugh across the table to her mother.  "Well, I wish
+Miss Vance could 'a' heard that!  Why, mother, did you think it like the
+ballet?"
+
+"Well, I didn't know, Mely, child," said the old woman.  "I didn't know
+what it was like.  I hain't never been to one, and you can't be too
+keerful where you go, in a place like New York."
+
+"What's the reason you can't go?"  Dryfoos ignored the passage between
+his wife and daughter in making this demand of his son, with a sour face.
+
+"I have an engagement that night--it's one of our meetings."
+
+"I reckon you can let your meeting go for one night," said Dryfoos.
+"It can't be so important as all that, that you must disappoint your
+sisters."
+
+"I don't like to disappoint those poor creatures.  They depend so much
+upon the meetings--"
+
+"I reckon they can stand it for one night," said the old man.  He added,
+"The poor ye have with you always."
+
+"That's so, Coonrod," said his mother.  "It's the Saviour's own words."
+
+"Yes, mother.  But they're not meant just as father used them."
+
+"How do you know how they were meant?  Or how I used them?"  cried the
+father.  "Now you just make your plans to go with the girls, Tuesday
+night.  They can't go alone, and Mrs. Mandel can't go with them."
+
+"Pshaw!" said Mela.  "We don't want to take Conrad away from his meetun',
+do we, Chris?"
+
+"I don't know," said Christine, in her high, fine voice.  "They could get
+along without him for one night, as father says."
+
+"Well, I'm not a-goun' to take him," said Mela.  "Now, Mrs. Mandel, just
+think out some other way.  Say! What's the reason we couldn't get
+somebody else to take us just as well?  Ain't that rulable?"
+
+"It would be allowable--"
+
+"Allowable, I mean," Mela corrected herself.
+
+"But it might look a little significant, unless it was some old family
+friend."
+
+"Well, let's get Mr. Fulkerson to take us.  He's the oldest family friend
+we got."
+
+"I won't go with Mr. Fulkerson," said Christine, serenely.
+
+"Why, I'm sure, Christine," her mother pleaded, "Mr. Fulkerson is a very
+good young man, and very nice appearun'."
+
+Mela shouted, "He's ten times as pleasant as that old Mr. Beaton of
+Christine's!"
+
+Christine made no effort to break the constraint that fell upon the table
+at this sally, but her father said: "Christine is right, Mela.  It
+wouldn't do for you to go with any other young man.  Conrad will go with
+you."
+
+"I'm not certain I want to go, yet," said Christine.
+
+"Well, settle that among yourselves.  But if you want to go, your brother
+will go with you."
+
+"Of course, Coonrod 'll go, if his sisters wants him to," the old woman
+pleaded.  "I reckon it ain't agoun' to be anything very bad; and if it
+is, Coonrod, why you can just git right up and come out."
+
+"It will be all right, mother.  And I will go, of course."
+
+"There, now, I knowed you would, Coonrod.  Now, fawther!"  This appeal
+was to make the old man say something in recognition of Conrad's
+sacrifice.
+
+"You'll always find," he said, "that it's those of your own household
+that have the first claim on you."
+
+"That's so, Coonrod," urged his mother.  "It's Bible truth.  Your fawther
+ain't a perfesser, but he always did read his Bible.  Search the
+Scriptures.  That's what it means."
+
+"Laws!" cried Mely, "a body can see, easy enough from mother, where
+Conrad's wantun' to be a preacher comes from.  I should 'a' thought she'd
+'a' wanted to been one herself."
+
+"Let your women keep silence in the churches," said the old woman,
+solemnly.
+
+"There you go again, mother! I guess if you was to say that to some of
+the lady ministers nowadays, you'd git yourself into trouble."  Mela
+looked round for approval, and gurgled out a hoarse laugh.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+The Dryfooses went late to Mrs. Horn's musicale, in spite of Mrs.
+Mandel's advice.  Christine made the delay, both because she wished to
+show Miss Vance that she was (not) anxious, and because she had some
+vague notion of the distinction of arriving late at any sort of
+entertainment.  Mrs. Mandel insisted upon the difference between this
+musicale and an ordinary reception; but Christine rather fancied
+disturbing a company that had got seated, and perhaps making people rise
+and stand, while she found her way to her place, as she had seen them.
+do for a tardy comer at the theatre.
+
+Mela, whom she did not admit to her reasons or feelings always, followed
+her with the servile admiration she had for all that Christine did; and
+she took on trust as somehow successful the result of Christine's
+obstinacy, when they were allowed to stand against the wall at the back
+of the room through the whole of the long piece begun just before they
+came in.  There had been no one to receive them; a few people, in the
+rear rows of chairs near them, turned their heads to glance at them, and
+then looked away again.  Mela had her misgivings; but at the end of the
+piece Miss Vance came up to them at once, and then Mela knew that she had
+her eyes on them all the time, and that Christine must have been right.
+Christine said nothing about their coming late, and so Mela did not make
+any excuse, and Miss Vance seemed to expect none.  She glanced with a
+sort of surprise at Conrad, when Christine introduced him; Mela did not
+know whether she liked their bringing him, till she shook hands with him,
+and said: "Oh, I am very glad indeed!  Mr. Dryfoos and I have met
+before."  Without explaining where or when, she led them to her aunt and
+presented them, and then said, "I'm going to put you with some friends of
+yours," and quickly seated them next the Marches.  Mela liked that well
+enough; she thought she might have some joking with Mr. March, for all
+his wife was so stiff; but the look which Christine wore seemed to
+forbid, provisionally at least, any such recreation.  On her part,
+Christine was cool with the Marches.  It went through her mind that they
+must have told Miss Vance they knew her; and perhaps they had boasted of
+her intimacy.  She relaxed a little toward them when she saw Beaton
+leaning against the wall at the end of the row next Mrs. March.  Then she
+conjectured that he might have told Miss Vance of her acquaintance with
+the Marches, and she bent forward and nodded to Mrs. March across Conrad,
+Mela, and Mr. March.  She conceived of him as a sort of hand of her
+father's, but she was willing to take them at their apparent social
+valuation for the time.  She leaned back in her chair, and did not look
+up at Beaton after the first furtive glance, though she felt his eyes on
+her.
+
+The music began again almost at once, before Mela had time to make Conrad
+tell her where Miss Vance had met him before.  She would not have minded
+interrupting the music; but every one else seemed so attentive, even
+Christine, that she had not the courage. The concert went onto an end
+without realizing for her the ideal of pleasure which one ought to find.
+in society.  She was not exacting, but it seemed to her there were very
+few young men, and when the music was over, and their opportunity came to
+be sociable, they were not very sociable.  They were not introduced, for
+one thing; but it appeared to Mela that they might have got introduced,
+if they had any sense; she saw them looking at her, and she was glad she
+had dressed so much; she was dressed more than any other lady there, and
+either because she was the most dressed of any person there, or because
+it had got around who her father was, she felt that she had made an
+impression on the young men.  In her satisfaction with this, and from her
+good nature, she was contented to be served with her refreshments after
+the concert by Mr. March, and to remain joking with him.  She was at her
+ease; she let her hoarse voice out in her largest laugh; she accused him,
+to the admiration of those near, of getting her into a perfect gale.  It
+appeared to her, in her own pleasure, her mission to illustrate to the
+rather subdued people about her what a good time really was, so that they
+could have it if they wanted it.  Her joy was crowned when March modestly
+professed himself unworthy to monopolize her, and explained how selfish
+he felt in talking to a young lady when there were so many young men
+dying to do so.
+
+"Oh, pshaw, dyun', yes!" cried Mela, tasting the irony.  "I guess I see
+them!"
+
+He asked if he might really introduce a friend of his to her, and she
+said, Well, yes, if be thought he could live to get to her; and March
+brought up a man whom he thought very young and Mela thought very old.
+He was a contributor to 'Every Other Week,' and so March knew him;
+he believed himself a student of human nature in behalf of literature,
+and he now set about studying Mela.  He tempted her to express her
+opinion on all points, and he laughed so amiably at the boldness and
+humorous vigor of her ideas that she was delighted with him.  She asked
+him if he was a New-Yorker by birth; and she told him she pitied him,
+when he said he had never been West.  She professed herself perfectly
+sick of New York, and urged him to go to Moffitt if he wanted to see a
+real live town.  He wondered if it would do to put her into literature
+just as she was, with all her slang and brag, but he decided that he
+would have to subdue her a great deal: he did not see how he could
+reconcile the facts of her conversation with the facts of her appearance:
+her beauty, her splendor of dress, her apparent right to be where she
+was.  These things perplexed him; he was afraid the great American novel,
+if true, must be incredible.  Mela said he ought to hear her sister go on
+about New York when they first came; but she reckoned that Christine was
+getting so she could put up with it a little better, now.  She looked
+significantly across the room to the place where Christine was now
+talking with Beaton; and the student of human nature asked, Was she here?
+and, Would she introduce him?  Mela said she would, the first chance she
+got; and she added, They would be much pleased to have him call.  She
+felt herself to be having a beautiful time, and she got directly upon
+such intimate terms with the student of human nature that she laughed
+with him about some peculiarities of his, such as his going so far about
+to ask things he wanted to know from her; she said she never did believe
+in beating about the bush much.  She had noticed the same thing in Miss
+Vance when she came to call that day; and when the young man owned that
+he came rather a good deal to Mrs. Horn's house, she asked him, Well,
+what sort of a girl was Miss Vance, anyway, and where did he suppose she
+had met her brother?  The student of human nature could not say as to
+this, and as to Miss Vance he judged it safest to treat of the non-
+society side of her character, her activity in charity, her special
+devotion to the work among the poor on the East Side, which she
+personally engaged in.
+
+"Oh, that's where Conrad goes, too!"  Mela interrupted.  "I'll bet
+anything that's where she met him.  I wisht I could tell Christine!
+But I suppose she would want to kill me, if I was to speak to her now."
+
+The student of human nature said, politely, "Oh, shall I take you to
+her?"
+
+Mela answered, "I guess you better not!" with a laugh so significant that
+he could not help his inferences concerning both Christine's absorption
+in the person she was talking with and the habitual violence of her
+temper.  He made note of how Mela helplessly spoke of all her family by
+their names, as if he were already intimate with them; he fancied that if
+he could get that in skillfully, it would be a valuable color in his
+study; the English lord whom she should astonish with it began to form
+himself out of the dramatic nebulosity in his mind, and to whirl on a
+definite orbit in American society.  But he was puzzled to decide whether
+Mela's willingness to take him into her confidence on short notice was
+typical or personal: the trait of a daughter of the natural-gas
+millionaire, or a foible of her own.
+
+Beaton talked with Christine the greater part of the evening that was
+left after the concert.  He was very grave, and took the tone of a
+fatherly friend; he spoke guardedly of the people present, and moderated
+the severity of some of Christine's judgments of their looks and
+costumes.  He did this out of a sort of unreasoned allegiance to
+Margaret, whom he was in the mood of wishing to please by being very kind
+and good, as she always was.  He had the sense also of atoning by this
+behavior for some reckless things he had said before that to Christine;
+he put on a sad, reproving air with her, and gave her the feeling of
+being held in check.
+
+She chafed at it, and said, glancing at Margaret in talk with her
+brother, "I don't think Miss Vance is so very pretty, do you?"
+
+"I never think whether she's pretty or not," said Becton, with dreamy,
+affectation.  "She is merely perfect.  Does she know your brother?"
+
+"So she says.  I didn't suppose Conrad ever went anywhere, except to
+tenement-houses."
+
+"It might have been there," Becton suggested.  "She goes among friendless
+people everywhere."
+
+"Maybe that's the reason she came to see us!" said Christine.
+
+Becton looked at her with his smouldering eyes, and felt the wish to say,
+"Yes, it was exactly that," but he only allowed himself to deny the
+possibility of any such motive in that case.  He added: "I am so glad you
+know her, Miss Dryfoos.  I never met Miss Vance without feeling myself
+better and truer, somehow; or the wish to be so."
+
+"And you think we might be improved, too?"  Christine retorted.  "Well,
+I must say you're not very flattering, Mr. Becton, anyway."
+
+Becton would have liked to answer her according to her cattishness, with
+a good clawing sarcasm that would leave its smart in her pride; but he
+was being good, and he could not change all at once.  Besides, the girl's
+attitude under the social honor done her interested him.  He was sure she
+had never been in such good company before, but he could see that she was
+not in the least affected by the experience.  He had told her who this
+person and that was; and he saw she had understood that the names were of
+consequence; but she seemed to feel her equality with them all.
+Her serenity was not obviously akin to the savage stoicism in which
+Beaton hid his own consciousness of social inferiority; but having won
+his way in the world so far by his talent, his personal quality, he did
+not conceive the simple fact in her case.  Christine was self-possessed
+because she felt that a knowledge of her father's fortune had got around,
+and she had the peace which money gives to ignorance; but Beaton
+attributed her poise to indifference to social values.  This, while he
+inwardly sneered at it, avenged him upon his own too keen sense of them,
+and, together with his temporary allegiance to Margaret's goodness, kept
+him from retaliating Christine's vulgarity.  He said, "I don't see how
+that could be," and left the question of flattery to settle itself.
+
+The people began to go away, following each other up to take leave of
+Mrs. Horn.  Christine watched them with unconcern, and either because she
+would not be governed by the general movement, or because she liked being
+with Beaton, gave no sign of going.  Mela was still talking to the
+student of human nature, sending out her laugh in deep gurgles amid the
+unimaginable confidences she was making him about herself, her family,
+the staff of 'Every Other Week,' Mrs. Mandel, and the kind of life they
+had all led before she came to them.  He was not a blind devotee of art
+for art's sake, and though he felt that if one could portray Mela just as
+she was she would be the richest possible material, he was rather ashamed
+to know some of the things she told him; and he kept looking anxiously
+about for a chance of escape.  The company had reduced itself to the
+Dryfoos groups and some friends of Mrs. Horn's who had the right to
+linger, when Margaret crossed the room with Conrad to Christine and
+Beaton.
+
+"I'm so glad, Miss Dryfoos, to find that I was not quite a stranger to
+you all when I ventured to call, the other day.  Your brother and I are
+rather old acquaintances, though I never knew who he was before.  I don't
+know just how to say we met where he is valued so much.  I suppose I
+mustn't try to say how much," she added, with a look of deep regard at
+him.
+
+Conrad blushed and stood folding his arms tight over his breast, while
+his sister received Margaret's confession with the suspicion which was
+her first feeling in regard to any new thing.  What she concluded was
+that this girl was trying to get in with them, for reasons of her own.
+She said: "Yes; it's the first I ever heard of his knowing you.  He's so
+much taken up with his meetings, he didn't want to come to-night."
+
+Margaret drew in her lip before she answered, without apparent resentment
+of the awkwardness or ungraciousness, whichever she found it: "I don't
+wonder!  You become so absorbed in such work that you think nothing else
+is worth while.  But I'm glad Mr. Dryfoos could come with you; I'm so
+glad you could all come; I knew you would enjoy the music.  Do sit
+down--"
+
+"No," said Christine, bluntly; "we must be going.  Mela!" she called out,
+"come!"
+
+The last group about Mrs. Horn looked round, but Christine advanced upon
+them undismayed, and took the hand Mrs. Horn promptly gave her.  "Well, I
+must bid you good-night."
+
+"Oh, good-night," murmured the elder lady.  "So very kind of you to
+come."
+
+"I've had the best kind of a time," said Mela, cordially.  "I hain't
+laughed so much, I don't know when."
+
+"Oh, I'm glad you enjoyed it," said Mrs. Horn, in the same polite murmur
+she had used with Christine; but she said nothing to either sister about
+any future meeting.
+
+They were apparently not troubled.  Mela said over her shoulder to the
+student of human nature, "The next time I see you I'll give it to you for
+what you said about Moffitt."
+
+Margaret made some entreating paces after them, but she did not succeed
+in covering the retreat of the sisters against critical conjecture.  She
+could only say to Conrad, as if recurring to the subject, "I hope we can
+get our friends to play for us some night.  I know it isn't any real
+help, but such things take the poor creatures out of themselves for the
+time being, don't you think?"
+
+"Oh yes," he answered.  "They're good in that way."  He turned back
+hesitatingly to Mrs. Horn, and said, with a blush, "I thank you for a
+happy evening."
+
+"Oh, I am very glad," she replied, in her murmur.
+
+One of the old friends of the house arched her eyebrows in saying good-
+night, and offered the two young men remaining seats home in her
+carriage.  Beaton gloomily refused, and she kept herself from asking the
+student of human nature, till she had got him into her carriage, "What is
+Moffitt, and what did you say about it?"
+
+"Now you see, Margaret," said Mrs. Horn, with bated triumph, when the
+people were all gone.
+
+"Yes, I see," the girl consented.  "From one point of view, of course
+it's been a failure.  I don't think we've given Miss Dryfoos a pleasure,
+but perhaps nobody could.  And at least we've given her the opportunity
+of enjoying herself."
+
+"Such people," said Mrs. Horn, philosophically, "people with their money,
+must of course be received sooner or later.  You can't keep them out.
+Only, I believe I would rather let some one else begin with them.  The
+Leightons didn't come?"
+
+"I sent them cards.  I couldn't call again."
+
+Mrs. Horn sighed a little.  "I suppose Mr. Dryfoos is one of your fellow-
+philanthropists?"
+
+"He's one of the workers," said Margaret.  "I met him several times at
+the Hall, but I only knew his first name.  I think he's a great friend of
+Father Benedict; he seems devoted to the work.  Don't you think he looks
+good?"
+
+"Very," said Mrs. Horn, with a color of censure in her assent.  "The
+younger girl seemed more amiable than her sister.  But what manners!"
+
+"Dreadful!" said Margaret, with knit brows, and a pursed mouth of
+humorous suffering.  "But she appeared to feel very much at home."
+
+"Oh, as to that, neither of them was much abashed.  Do you suppose
+Mr. Beaton gave the other one some hints for that quaint dress of hers?
+I don't imagine that black and lace is her own invention.  She seems to
+have some sort of strange fascination for him."
+
+"She's very picturesque," Margaret explained.  "And artists see points in
+people that the rest of us don't."
+
+"Could it be her money?"  Mrs. Horn insinuated.  "He must be very poor."
+
+"But he isn't base," retorted the girl, with a generous indignation that
+made her aunt smile.
+
+"Oh no; but if he fancies her so picturesque, it doesn't follow that he
+would object to her being rich."
+
+"It would with a man like Mr. Beaton!"
+
+"You are an idealist, Margaret.  I suppose your Mr. March has some
+disinterested motive in paying court to Miss Mela--Pamela, I suppose, is
+her name.  He talked to her longer than her literature would have
+lasted."
+
+"He seems a very kind person," said Margaret.
+
+"And Mr. Dryfoos pays his salary?"
+
+"I don't know anything about that.  But that wouldn't make any difference
+with him."
+
+Mrs. Horn laughed out at this security; but she was not displeased by the
+nobleness which it came from.  She liked Margaret to be high-minded, and
+was really not distressed by any good that was in her.
+
+The Marches walked home, both because it was not far, and because they
+must spare in carriage hire at any rate.  As soon as they were out of the
+house, she applied a point of conscience to him.
+
+"I don't see how you could talk to that girl so long, Basil, and make her
+laugh so."
+
+"Why, there seemed no one else to do it, till I thought of Kendricks."
+
+"Yes, but I kept thinking, Now he's pleasant to her because he thinks
+it's to his interest.  If she had no relation to 'Every Other Week,' he
+wouldn't waste his time on her."
+
+"Isabel," March complained, "I wish you wouldn't think of me in he, him,
+and his; I never personalize you in my thoughts: you remain always a
+vague unindividualized essence, not quite without form and void, but
+nounless and pronounless.  I call that a much more beautiful mental
+attitude toward the object of one's affections.  But if you must he and
+him and his me in your thoughts, I wish you'd have more kindly thoughts
+of me."
+
+"Do you deny that it's true, Basil?"
+
+"Do you believe that it's true, Isabel?"
+
+"No matter.  But could you excuse it if it were?"
+
+"Ah, I see you'd have been capable of it in my, place, and you're
+ashamed."
+
+"Yes," sighed the wife, "I'm afraid that I should.  But tell me that you
+wouldn't, Basil!"
+
+"I can tell you that I wasn't.  But I suppose that in a real exigency,
+I could truckle to the proprietary Dryfooses as well as you."
+
+"Oh no; you mustn't, dear! I'm a woman, and I'm dreadfully afraid.  But
+you must always be a man, especially with that horrid old Mr. Dryfoos.
+Promise me that you'll never yield the least point to him in a matter of
+right and wrong!"
+
+"Not if he's right and I'm wrong?"
+
+"Don't trifle, dear! You know what I mean.  Will you promise?"
+
+"I'll promise to submit the point to you, and let you do the yielding.
+As for me, I shall be adamant.  Nothing I like better."
+
+"They're dreadful, even that poor, good young fellow, who's so different
+from all the rest; he's awful, too, because you feel that he's a martyr
+to them."
+
+"And I never did like martyrs a great deal," March interposed.
+
+"I wonder how they came to be there," Mrs. March pursued, unmindful of
+his joke.
+
+"That is exactly what seemed to be puzzling Miss Mela about us.  She
+asked, and I explained as well as I could; and then she told me that Miss
+Vance had come to call on them and invited them; and first they didn't
+know how they could come till they thought of making Conrad bring them.
+But she didn't say why Miss Vance called on them.  Mr. Dryfoos doesn't
+employ her on 'Every Other Week.'  But I suppose she has her own vile
+little motive."
+
+"It can't be their money; it can't be!" sighed Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, I don't know.  We all respect money."
+
+"Yes, but Miss Vance's position is so secure.  She needn't pay court to
+those stupid, vulgar people."
+
+"Well, let's console ourselves with the belief that she would, if she
+needed.  Such people as the Dryfooses are the raw material of good
+society.  It isn't made up of refined or meritorious people--professors
+and litterateurs, ministers and musicians, and their families.  All the
+fashionable people there to-night were like the Dryfooses a generation or
+two ago.  I dare say the material works up faster now, and in a season or
+two you won't know the Dryfooses from the other plutocrats.  THEY will--
+a little better than they do now; they'll see a difference, but nothing
+radical, nothing painful.  People who get up in the world by service to
+others--through letters, or art, or science--may have their modest little
+misgivings as to their social value, but people that rise by money--
+especially if their gains are sudden--never have.  And that's the kind of
+people that form our nobility; there's no use pretending that we haven't
+a nobility; we might as well pretend we haven't first-class cars in the
+presence of a vestibuled Pullman.  Those girls had no more doubt of their
+right to be there than if they had been duchesses: we thought it was very
+nice of Miss Vance to come and ask us, but they didn't; they weren't
+afraid, or the least embarrassed; they were perfectly natural--like born
+aristocrats.  And you may be sure that if the plutocracy that now owns
+the country ever sees fit to take on the outward signs of an aristocracy
+--titles, and arms, and ancestors--it won't falter from any inherent
+question of its worth.  Money prizes and honors itself, and if there is
+anything it hasn't got, it believes it can buy it."
+
+Well, Basil," said his wife, "I hope you won't get infected with Lindau's
+ideas of rich people.  Some of them are very good and kind."
+
+"Who denies that?  Not even Lindau himself.  It's all right.  And the
+great thing is that the evening's enjoyment is over.  I've got my society
+smile off, and I'm radiantly happy.  Go on with your little pessimistic
+diatribes, Isabel; you can't spoil my pleasure."
+
+
+"I could see," said Mela, as she and Christine drove home together, "that
+she was as jealous as she could be, all the time you was talkun' to Mr.
+Beaton.  She pretended to be talkun' to Conrad, but she kep' her eye on
+you pretty close, I can tell you.  I bet she just got us there to see how
+him and you would act together.  And I reckon she was satisfied.  He's
+dead gone on you, Chris."
+
+Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the flatteries with which
+Mela plied her in the hope of some return in kind, and not at all because
+she felt spitefully toward Miss Vance, or in anywise wished her ill.
+"Who was that fellow with you so long?" asked Christine.  "I suppose you
+turned yourself inside out to him, like you always do."
+
+Mela was transported by the cruel ingratitude.  "It's a lie! I didn't
+tell him a single thing."
+
+
+Conrad walked home, choosing to do so because he did not wish to hear his
+sisters' talk of the evening, and because there was a tumult in his
+spirit which he wished to let have its way.  In his life with its single
+purpose, defeated by stronger wills than his own, and now struggling
+partially to fulfil itself in acts of devotion to others, the thought of
+women had entered scarcely more than in that of a child.  His ideals were
+of a virginal vagueness; faces, voices, gestures had filled his fancy at
+times, but almost passionately; and the sensation that he now indulged
+was a kind of worship, ardent, but reverent and exalted.  The brutal
+experiences of the world make us forget that there are such natures in
+it, and that they seem to come up out of the lowly earth as well as down
+from the high heaven.  In the heart of this man well on toward thirty
+there had never been left the stain of a base thought; not that
+suggestion and conjecture had not visited him, but that he had not
+entertained them, or in any-wise made them his.  In a Catholic age and
+country, he would have been one of those monks who are sainted after
+death for the angelic purity of their lives, and whose names are invoked
+by believers in moments of trial, like San Luigi Gonzaga.  As he now
+walked along thinking, with a lover's beatified smile on his face, of how
+Margaret Vance had spoken and looked, he dramatized scenes in which be
+approved himself to her by acts of goodness and unselfishness, and died
+to please her for the sake of others.  He made her praise him for them,
+to his face, when he disclaimed their merit, and after his death, when he
+could not.  All the time he was poignantly sensible of her grace, her
+elegance, her style; they seemed to intoxicate him; some tones of her
+voice thrilled through his nerves, and some looks turned his brain with a
+delicious, swooning sense of her beauty; her refinement bewildered him.
+But all this did not admit the idea of possession, even of aspiration.
+At the most his worship only set her beyond the love of other men as far
+as beyond his own.
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Affectional habit
+Brag of his wife, as a good husband always does
+But when we make that money here, no one loses it
+Courage hadn't been put to the test
+Family buryin' grounds
+Homage which those who have not pay to those who have
+Hurry up and git well--or something
+Made money and do not yet know that money has made them
+Society: All its favors are really bargains
+Wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit
+Without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes, v3
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+PART FOURTH
+
+
+I.
+
+Not long after Lent, Fulkerson set before Dryfoos one day his scheme for
+a dinner in celebration of the success of 'Every Other Week.'  Dryfoos
+had never meddled in any manner with the conduct of the periodical;
+but Fulkerson easily saw that he was proud of his relation to it, and he
+proceeded upon the theory that he would be willing to have this relation
+known: On the days when he had been lucky in stocks, he was apt to drop
+in at the office on Eleventh Street, on his way up-town, and listen to
+Fulkerson's talk.  He was on good enough terms with March, who revised
+his first impressions of the man, but they had not much to say to each
+other, and it seemed to March that Dryfoos was even a little afraid of
+him, as of a piece of mechanism he had acquired, but did not quite
+understand; he left the working of it to Fulkerson, who no doubt bragged
+of it sufficiently.  The old man seemed to have as little to say to his
+son; he shut himself up with Fulkerson, where the others could hear the
+manager begin and go on with an unstinted flow of talk about 'Every Other
+Week;' for Fulkerson never talked of anything else if he could help it,
+and was always bringing the conversation back to it if it strayed:
+
+The day he spoke of the dinner he rose and called from his door: "March,
+I say, come down here a minute, will you?  Conrad, I want you, too."
+
+The editor and the publisher found the manager and the proprietor seated
+on opposite sides of the table.  "It's about those funeral baked meats,
+you know," Fulkerson explained, "and I was trying to give Mr. Dryfoos
+some idea of what we wanted to do.  That is, what I wanted to do," he
+continued, turning from March to Dryfoos.  "March, here, is opposed to
+it, of course.  He'd like to publish 'Every Other Week' on the sly; keep
+it out of the papers, and off the newsstands; he's a modest Boston
+petunia, and he shrinks from publicity; but I am not that kind of herb
+myself, and I want all the publicity we can get--beg, borrow, or steal--
+for this thing.  I say that you can't work the sacred rites of
+hospitality in a better cause, and what I propose is a little dinner for
+the purpose of recognizing the hit we've made with this thing.  My idea
+was to strike you for the necessary funds, and do the thing on a handsome
+scale.  The term little dinner is a mere figure of speech.  A little
+dinner wouldn't make a big talk, and what we want is the big talk,
+at present, if we don't lay up a cent.  My notion was that pretty soon
+after Lent, now, when everybody is feeling just right, we should begin to
+send out our paragraphs, affirmative, negative, and explanatory, and
+along about the first of May we should sit down about a hundred strong,
+the most distinguished people in the country, and solemnize our triumph.
+There it is in a nutshell.  I might expand and I might expound, but
+that's the sum and substance of it."
+
+Fulkerson stopped, and ran his eyes eagerly over the faces of his three
+listeners, one after the other.  March was a little surprised when
+Dryfoos turned to him, but that reference of the question seemed to give
+Fulkerson particular pleasure: "What do you think, Mr. March?"
+
+The editor leaned back in his chair.  "I don't pretend to have Mr.
+Fulkerson's genius for advertising; but it seems to me a little early
+yet.  We might celebrate later when we've got more to celebrate.  At
+present we're a pleasing novelty, rather than a fixed fact."
+
+"Ah, you don't get the idea!" said Fulkerson.  "What we want to do with
+this dinner is to fix the fact."
+
+"Am I going to come in anywhere?"  the old man interrupted.
+
+"You're going to come in at the head of the procession!  We are going to
+strike everything that is imaginative and romantic in the newspaper soul
+with you and your history and your fancy for going in for this thing.
+I can start you in a paragraph that will travel through all the
+newspapers, from Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida.  We have had
+all sorts of rich men backing up literary enterprises, but the natural-
+gas man in literature is a new thing, and the combination of your
+picturesque past and your aesthetic present is something that will knock
+out the sympathies of the American public the first round.  I feel,"
+said Fulkerson, with a tremor of pathos in his voice, "that 'Every Other
+Week' is at a disadvantage before the public as long as it's supposed to
+be my enterprise, my idea.  As far as I'm known at all, I'm known simply
+as a syndicate man, and nobody in the press believes that I've got the
+money to run the thing on a grand scale; a suspicion of insolvency must
+attach to it sooner or later, and the fellows on the press will work up
+that impression, sooner or later, if we don't give them something else to
+work up.  Now, as soon as I begin to give it away to the correspondents
+that you're in it, with your untold millions--that, in fact, it was your
+idea from the start, that you originated it to give full play to the
+humanitarian tendencies of Conrad here, who's always had these theories
+of co-operation, and longed to realize them for the benefit of our
+struggling young writers and artists--"
+
+March had listened with growing amusement to the mingled burlesque and
+earnest of Fulkerson's self-sacrificing impudence, and with wonder as to
+how far Dryfoos was consenting to his preposterous proposition, when
+Conrad broke out: "Mr. Fulkerson, I could not allow you to do that.  It
+would not be true; I did not wish to be here; and--and what I think--what
+I wish to do--that is something I will not let any one put me in a false
+position about.  No!"  The blood rushed into the young man's gentle face,
+and he met his father's glance with defiance.
+
+Dryfoos turned from him to Fulkerson without speaking, and Fulkerson
+said, caressingly: "Why, of course, Coonrod!  I know how you feel, and I
+shouldn't let anything of that sort go out uncontradicted afterward.  But
+there isn't anything in these times that would give us better standing
+with the public than some hint of the way you feel about such things.
+The publics expects to be interested, and nothing would interest it more
+than to be told that the success of 'Every Other Week' sprang from the
+first application of the principle of Live and let Live to a literary
+enterprise.  It would look particularly well, coming from you and your
+father, but if you object, we can leave that part out; though if you
+approve of the principle I don't see why you need object.  The main thing
+is to let the public know that it owes this thing to the liberal and
+enlightened spirit of one of the foremost capitalists of the country; and
+that his purposes are not likely to be betrayed in the hands of his son,
+I should get a little cut made from a photograph of your father, and
+supply it gratis with the paragraphs."
+
+"I guess," said the old man, "we will get along without the cut."
+
+Fulkerson laughed.  "Well, well!  Have it your own way, But the sight of
+your face in the patent outsides of the country press would be worth half
+a dozen subscribers in every school district throughout the length and
+breadth of this fair land."
+
+"There was a fellow," Dryfoos explained, in an aside to March, "that was
+getting up a history of Moffitt, and he asked me to let him put a steel
+engraving of me in.  He said a good many prominent citizens were going to
+have theirs in, and his price was a hundred and fifty dollars.  I told
+him I couldn't let mine go for less than two hundred, and when he said he
+could give me a splendid plate for that money, I said I should want it
+cash, You never saw a fellow more astonished when he got it through him.
+that I expected him to pay the two hundred."
+
+Fulkerson laughed in keen appreciation of the joke.  "Well, sir, I guess
+'Every Other Week' will pay you that much.  But if you won't sell at any
+price, all right; we must try to worry along without the light of your
+countenance on, the posters, but we got to have it for the banquet."
+
+"I don't seem to feel very hungry, yet," said they old man, dryly.
+
+"Oh, 'l'appeit vient en mangeant', as our French friends say.  You'll be
+hungry enough when you see the preliminary Little Neck clam.  It's too
+late for oysters."
+
+"Doesn't that fact seem to point to a postponement till they get back,
+sometime in October," March suggested,
+
+"No, no!" said Fulkerson, "you don't catch on to the business end of this
+thing, my friends.  You're proceeding on something like the old exploded
+idea that the demand creates the supply, when everybody knows, if he's
+watched the course of modern events, that it's just as apt to be the
+other way.  I contend that we've got a real substantial success to
+celebrate now; but even if we hadn't, the celebration would do more than
+anything else to create the success, if we got it properly before the
+public.  People will say: Those fellows are not fools; they wouldn't go
+and rejoice over their magazine unless they had got a big thing in it.
+And the state of feeling we should produce in the public mind would make
+a boom of perfectly unprecedented grandeur for E. O. W.  Heigh?"
+
+He looked sunnily from one to the other in succession.  The elder Dryfoos
+said, with his chin on the top of his stick, "I reckon those Little Neck
+clams will keep."
+
+"Well, just as you say," Fulkerson cheerfully assented.  "I understand
+you to agree to the general principle of a little dinner?"
+
+"The smaller the better," said the old man.
+
+"Well, I say a little dinner because the idea of that seems to cover the
+case, even if we vary the plan a little.  I had thought of a reception,
+maybe, that would include the lady contributors and artists, and the
+wives and daughters of the other contributors.  That would give us the
+chance to ring in a lot of society correspondents and get the thing
+written up in first-class shape.  By-the-way!" cried Fulkerson, slapping
+himself on the leg, "why not have the dinner and the reception both?"
+
+"I don't understand," said Dryfoos.
+
+"Why, have a select little dinner for ten or twenty choice spirits of the
+male persuasion, and then, about ten o'clock, throw open your palatial
+drawing-rooms and admit the females to champagne, salads, and ices.  It
+is the very thing!  Come!"
+
+"What do you think of it, Mr. March?"  asked Dryfoos, on whose social
+inexperience Fulkerson's words projected no very intelligible image, and
+who perhaps hoped for some more light.
+
+"It's a beautiful vision," said March, "and if it will take more time to
+realize it I think I approve.  I approve of anything that will delay Mr.
+Fulkerson's advertising orgie."
+
+"Then," Fulkerson pursued, "we could have the pleasure of Miss Christine
+and Miss Mela's company; and maybe Mrs. Dryfoos would look in on us in
+the course of the evening.  There's no hurry, as Mr. March suggests, if
+we can give the thing this shape.  I will cheerfully adopt the idea of my
+honorable colleague."
+
+March laughed at his impudence, but at heart he was ashamed of Fulkerson
+for proposing to make use of Dryfoos and his house in that way.
+He fancied something appealing in the look that the old man turned on
+him, and something indignant in Conrad's flush; but probably this was
+only his fancy.  He reflected that neither of them could feel it as
+people of more worldly knowledge would, and he consoled himself with the
+fact that Fulkerson was really not such a charlatan as he seemed.  But it
+went through his mind that this was a strange end for all Dryfoos's
+money-making to come to; and he philosophically accepted the fact of his
+own humble fortunes when he reflected how little his money could buy for
+such a man.  It was an honorable use that Fulkerson was putting it to in
+'Every Other Week;' it might be far more creditably spent on such an
+enterprise than on horses, or wines, or women, the usual resources of the
+brute rich; and if it were to be lost, it might better be lost that way
+than in stocks.  He kept a smiling face turned to Dryfoos while these
+irreverent considerations occupied him, and hardened his heart against
+father and son and their possible emotions.
+
+The old man rose to put an end to the interview.  He only repeated,
+"I guess those clams will keep till fall."
+
+But Fulkerson was apparently satisfied with the progress he had made; and
+when he joined March for the stroll homeward after office hours, he was
+able to detach his mind from the subject, as if content to leave it.
+
+"This is about the best part of the year in New York," he said; In some
+of the areas the grass had sprouted, and the tender young foliage had
+loosened itself froze the buds on a sidewalk tree here and there; the
+soft air was full of spring, and the delicate sky, far aloof, had the
+look it never wears at any other season.  "It ain't a time of year to
+complain much of, anywhere; but I don't want anything better than the
+month of May in New York.  Farther South it's too hot, and I've been in
+Boston in May when that east wind of yours made every nerve in my body
+get up and howl.  I reckon the weather has a good deal to do with the
+local temperament.  The reason a New York man takes life so easily with
+all his rush is that his climate don't worry him.  But a Boston man must
+be rasped the whole while by the edge in his air.  That accounts for his
+sharpness; and when he's lived through twenty-five or thirty Boston Mays,
+he gets to thinking that Providence has some particular use for him, or
+he wouldn't have survived, and that makes him conceited.  See?"
+
+"I see," said March.  "But I don't know how you're going to work that
+idea into an advertisement, exactly."
+
+"Oh, pahaw, now, March!  You don't think I've got that on the brain all
+the time?"
+
+"You were gradually leading up to 'Every Other Week', somehow."
+
+"No, sir; I wasn't.  I was just thinking what a different creature a
+Massachusetts man is from a Virginian, And yet I suppose they're both as
+pure English stock as you'll get anywhere in America.  Marsh, I think
+Colonel Woodburn's paper is going to make a hit."
+
+"You've got there!  When it knocks down the sale about one-half, I shall
+know it's made a hit."
+
+"I'm not afraid," said Fulkerson.  "That thing is going to attract
+attention.  It's well written--you can take the pomposity out of it, here
+and there and it's novel.  Our people like a bold strike, and it's going
+to shake them up tremendously to have serfdom advocated on high moral
+grounds as the only solution of the labor problem.  You see, in the first
+place, he goes for their sympathies by the way he portrays the actual
+relations of capital and labor; he shows how things have got to go from
+bad to worse, and then he trots out his little old hobby, and proves that
+if slavery had not been interfered with, it would have perfected itself
+in the interest of humanity.  He makes a pretty strong plea for it."
+
+March threw back his head and laughed.  "He's converted you! I swear,
+Fulkerson, if we had accepted and paid for an article advocating
+cannibalism as the only resource for getting rid of the superfluous poor,
+you'd begin to believe in it."
+
+Fulkerson smiled in approval of the joke, and only said: "I wish you
+could meet the colonel in the privacy of the domestic circle, March.
+You'd like him.  He's a splendid old fellow; regular type.  Talk about
+spring!
+
+"You ought to see the widow's little back yard these days.  You know that
+glass gallery just beyond the dining-room?  Those girls have got the pot-
+plants out of that, and a lot more, and they've turned the edges of that
+back yard, along the fence, into a regular bower; they've got sweet peas
+planted, and nasturtiums, and we shall be in a blaze of glory about the
+beginning of June.  Fun to see 'em work in the garden, and the bird
+bossing the job in his cage under the cherry-tree.  Have to keep the
+middle of the yard for the clothesline, but six days in the week it's a
+lawn, and I go over it with a mower myself.  March, there ain't anything
+like a home, is there?  Dear little cot of your own, heigh?  I tell you,
+March, when I get to pushing that mower round, and the colonel is smoking
+his cigar in the gallery, and those girls are pottering over the flowers,
+one of these soft evenings after dinner, I feel like a human being.  Yes,
+I do.  I struck it rich when I concluded to take my meals at the widow's.
+For eight dollars a week I get good board, refined society, and all the
+advantages of a Christian home.  By-the-way, you've never had much talk
+with Miss Woodburn, have you, March?"
+
+"Not so much as with Miss Woodburn's father."
+
+"Well, he is rather apt to scoop the conversation.  I must draw his fire,
+sometime, when you and Mrs. March are around, and get you a chance with
+Miss Woodburn."
+
+"I should like that better, I believe," said March.
+
+"Well, I shouldn't wonder if you did.  Curious, but Miss Woodburn isn't
+at all your idea of a Southern girl.  She's got lots of go; she's never
+idle a minute; she keeps the old gentleman in first-class shape, and she
+don't believe a bit in the slavery solution of the labor problem; says
+she's glad it's gone, and if it's anything like the effects of it, she's
+glad it went before her time.  No, sir, she's as full of snap as the
+liveliest kind of a Northern girl.  None of that sunny Southern languor
+you read about."
+
+"I suppose the typical Southerner, like the typical anything else, is
+pretty difficult to find," said March.  "But perhaps Miss Woodburn
+represents the new South.  The modern conditions must be producing a
+modern type."
+
+"Well, that's what she and the colonel both say.  They say there ain't
+anything left of that Walter Scott dignity and chivalry in the rising
+generation; takes too much time.  You ought to see her sketch the old-
+school, high-and-mighty manners, as they survive among some of the
+antiques in Charlottesburg.  If that thing could be put upon the stage it
+would be a killing success.  Makes the old gentleman laugh in spite of
+himself.  But he's as proud of her as Punch, anyway.  Why don't you and
+Mrs. March come round oftener?  Look here!  How would it do to have a
+little excursion, somewhere, after the spring fairly gets in its work?"
+
+"Reporters present?"
+
+"No, no! Nothing of that kind; perfectly sincere and disinterested
+enjoyment."
+
+"Oh, a few handbills to be scattered around: "Buy Every Other Week,"
+Look out for the next number of 'Every Other Week,' 'Every Other Week at
+all the news-stands.'  Well, I'll talk it over with Mrs. March.  I
+suppose there's no great hurry."
+
+March told his wife of the idyllic mood in which he had left Fulkerson at
+the widow's door, and she said he must be in love.
+
+"Why, of course! I wonder I didn't think of that.  But Fulkerson is such
+an impartial admirer of the whole sex that you can't think of his liking
+one more than another.  I don't know that he showed any unjust
+partiality, though, in his talk of 'those girls,' as he called them.
+And I always rather fancied that Mrs. Mandel--he's done so much for her,
+you know; and she is such a well-balanced, well-preserved person, and so
+lady-like and correct----"
+
+"Fulkerson had the word for her: academic.  She's everything that
+instruction and discipline can make of a woman; but I shouldn't think
+they could make enough of her to be in love with."
+
+"Well, I don't know.  The academic has its charm.  There are moods in
+which I could imagine myself in love with an academic person.  That
+regularity of line; that reasoned strictness of contour; that neatness of
+pose; that slightly conventional but harmonious grouping of the emotions
+and morals--you can see how it would have its charm, the Wedgwood in
+human nature?  I wonder where Mrs. Mandel keeps her urn and her willow."
+
+"I should think she might have use for them in that family, poor thing!"
+said Mrs. March.
+
+"Ah, that reminds me," said her husband, "that we had another talk with
+the old gentleman, this afternoon, about Fulkerson's literary, artistic,
+and advertising orgie, and it's postponed till October."
+
+"The later the better, I should think," said Mrs: March, who did not
+really think about it at all, but whom the date fixed for it caused to
+think of the intervening time.  "We have got to consider what we will do
+about the summer, before long, Basil."
+
+"Oh, not yet, not yet," he pleaded; with that man's willingness to abide
+in the present, which is so trying to a woman.  "It's only the end of
+April."
+
+"It will be the end of June before we know.  And these people wanting the
+Boston house another year complicates it.  We can't spend the summer
+there, as we planned."
+
+"They oughtn't to have offered us an increased rent; they have taken an
+advantage of us."
+
+"I don't know that it matters," said Mrs. March.  "I had decided not to
+go there."
+
+"Had you?  This is a surprise."
+
+"Everything is a surprise to you, Basil, when it happens."
+
+"True; I keep the world fresh, that way."
+
+"It wouldn't have been any change to go from one city to another for the
+summer.  We might as well have stayed in New York."
+
+"Yes, I wish we had stayed," said March, idly humoring a conception of
+the accomplished fact.  "Mrs. Green would have let us have the
+gimcrackery very cheap for the summer months; and we could have made all
+sorts of nice little excursions and trips off and been twice as well as
+if we had spent the summer away."
+
+"Nonsense!  You know we couldn't spend the summer in New York."
+
+"I know I could."
+
+"What stuff!  You couldn't manage."
+
+"Oh yes, I could.  I could take my meals at Fulkerson's widow's; or at
+Maroni's, with poor old Lindau: he's got to dining there again.  Or, I
+could keep house, and he could dine with me here."
+
+There was a teasing look in March's eyes, and he broke into a laugh, at
+the firmness with which his wife said: "I think if there is to be any
+housekeeping, I will stay, too; and help to look after it.  I would try
+not intrude upon you and your guest."
+
+"Oh, we should be only too glad to have you join us," said March, playing
+with fire.
+
+"Very well, then, I wish you would take him off to Maroni's, the next
+time he comes to dine here!" cried his wife.
+
+The experiment of making March's old friend free of his house had not
+given her all the pleasure that so kind a thing ought to have afforded so
+good a woman.  She received Lindau at first with robust benevolence, and
+the high resolve not to let any of his little peculiarities alienate her
+from a sense of his claim upon her sympathy and gratitude, not only as a
+man who had been so generously fond of her husband in his youth, but a
+hero who had suffered for her country.  Her theory was that his
+mutilation must not be ignored, but must be kept in mind as a monument of
+his sacrifice, and she fortified Bella with this conception, so that the
+child bravely sat next his maimed arm at table and helped him to dishes
+he could not reach, and cut up his meat for him.  As for Mrs. March
+herself, the thought of his mutilation made her a little faint; she was
+not without a bewildered resentment of its presence as a sort of
+oppression.  She did not like his drinking so much of March's beer,
+either; it was no harm, but it was somehow unworthy, out of character
+with a hero of the war.  But what she really could not reconcile herself
+to was the violence of Lindau's sentiments concerning the whole political
+and social fabric.  She did not feel sure that he should be allowed to
+say such things before the children, who had been nurtured in the faith
+of Bunker Hill and Appomattox, as the beginning and the end of all
+possible progress in human rights.  As a woman she was naturally an
+aristocrat, but as an American she was theoretically a democrat; and it
+astounded, it alarmed her, to hear American democracy denounced as a
+shuffling evasion.  She had never cared much for the United States
+Senate, but she doubted if she ought to sit by when it was railed at as a
+rich man's club.  It shocked her to be told that the rich and poor were
+not equal before the law in a country where justice must be paid for at
+every step in fees and costs, or where a poor man must go to war in his
+own person, and a rich man might hire someone to go in his.  Mrs. March
+felt that this rebellious mind in Lindau really somehow outlawed him from
+sympathy, and retroactively undid his past suffering for the country: she
+had always particularly valued that provision of the law, because in
+forecasting all the possible mischances that might befall her own son,
+she had been comforted by the thought that if there ever was another war,
+and Tom were drafted, his father could buy him a substitute.  Compared
+with such blasphemy as this, Lindau's declaration that there was not
+equality of opportunity in America, and that fully one-half the people
+were debarred their right to the pursuit of happiness by the hopeless
+conditions of their lives, was flattering praise.  She could not listen
+to such things in silence, though, and it did not help matters when
+Lindau met her arguments with facts and reasons which she felt she was
+merely not sufficiently instructed to combat, and he was not quite
+gentlemanly to urge.  "I am afraid for the effect on the children," she
+said to her husband.  "Such perfectly distorted ideas--Tom will be ruined
+by them."
+
+"Oh, let Tom find out where they're false," said March.  "It will be good
+exercise for his faculties of research.  At any rate, those things are
+getting said nowadays; he'll have to hear them sooner or later."
+
+"Had he better hear them at home?"  demanded his wife.
+
+"Why, you know, as you're here to refute them, Isabel," he teased,
+"perhaps it's the best place.  But don't mind poor old Lindau, my dear.
+He says himself that his parg is worse than his pidte, you know."
+
+"Ah, it's too late now to mind him," she sighed.  In a moment of rash
+good feeling, or perhaps an exalted conception of duty, she had herself
+proposed that Lindau should come every week and read German with Tom; and
+it had become a question first how they could get him to take pay for it,
+and then how they could get him to stop it.  Mrs. March never ceased to
+wonder at herself for having brought this about, for she had warned her
+husband against making any engagement with Lindau which would bring him
+regularly to the house: the Germans stuck so, and were so unscrupulously
+dependent.  Yet, the deed being done, she would not ignore the duty of
+hospitality, and it was always she who made the old man stay to their
+Sunday-evening tea when he lingered near the hour, reading Schiller and
+Heine and Uhland with the boy, in the clean shirt with which he observed
+the day; Lindau's linen was not to be trusted during the week.  She now
+concluded a season of mournful reflection by saying, "He will get you
+into trouble, somehow, Basil."
+
+"Well, I don't know how, exactly.  I regard Lindau as a political
+economist of an unusual type; but I shall not let him array me against
+the constituted authorities.  Short of that, I think I am safe."
+
+"Well, be careful, Basil; be careful.  You know you are so rash."
+
+"I suppose I may continue to pity him?  He is such a poor, lonely old
+fellow.  Are you really sorry he's come into our lives, my dear?"
+
+"No, no; not that.  I feel as you do about it; but I wish I felt easier
+about him--sure, that is, that we're not doing wrong to let him keep on
+talking so."
+
+"I suspect we couldn't help it," March returned, lightly.  "It's one of
+what Lindau calls his 'brincibles' to say what he thinks."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The Marches had no longer the gross appetite for novelty which urges
+youth to a surfeit of strange scenes, experiences, ideas; and makes
+travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues, an inexhaustible delight.
+But there is no doubt that the chief pleasure of their life in New York
+was from its quality of foreignness: the flavor of olives, which, once
+tasted, can never be forgotten.  The olives may not be of the first
+excellence; they may be a little stale, and small and poor, to begin
+with, but they are still olives, and the fond palate craves them.
+The sort which grew in New York, on lower Sixth Avenue and in the region
+of Jefferson Market and on the soft exposures south of Washington Square,
+were none the less acceptable because they were of the commonest Italian
+variety.
+
+The Marches spent a good deal of time and money in a grocery of that
+nationality, where they found all the patriotic comestibles and potables,
+and renewed their faded Italian with the friendly family in charge.
+Italian table d'hotes formed the adventure of the week, on the day when
+Mrs. March let her domestics go out, and went herself to dine abroad with
+her husband and children; and they became adepts in the restaurants where
+they were served, and which they varied almost from dinner to dinner.
+The perfect decorum of these places, and their immunity from offence in
+any, emboldened the Marches to experiment in Spanish restaurants, where
+red pepper and beans insisted in every dinner, and where once they
+chanced upon a night of 'olla podrida', with such appeals to March's
+memory of a boyish ambition to taste the dish that he became poetic and
+then pensive over its cabbage and carrots, peas and bacon.  For a rare
+combination of international motives they prized most the table d'hote of
+a French lady, who had taken a Spanish husband in a second marriage, and
+had a Cuban negro for her cook, with a cross-eyed Alsation for waiter,
+and a slim young South-American for cashier.  March held that some thing
+of the catholic character of these relations expressed itself in the
+generous and tolerant variety of the dinner, which was singularly
+abundant for fifty cents, without wine.  At one very neat French place he
+got a dinner at the same price with wine, but it was not so abundant; and
+March inquired in fruitless speculation why the table d'hote of the
+Italians, a notoriously frugal and abstemious people, should be usually
+more than you wanted at seventy-five cents and a dollar, and that of the
+French rather less at half a dollar.  He could not see that the
+frequenters were greatly different at the different places; they were
+mostly Americans, of subdued manners and conjecturably subdued fortunes,
+with here and there a table full of foreigners.  There was no noise and
+not much smoking anywhere; March liked going to that neat French place
+because there Madame sat enthroned and high behind a 'comptoir' at one
+side of the room, and every body saluted her in going out.  It was there
+that a gentle-looking young couple used to dine, in whom the Marches
+became effectlessly interested, because they thought they looked like
+that when they were young.  The wife had an aesthetic dress, and defined
+her pretty head by wearing her back-hair pulled up very tight under her
+bonnet; the husband had dreamy eyes set wide apart under a pure forehead.
+"They are artists, August, I think," March suggested to the waiter, when
+he had vainly asked about them.  "Oh, hartis, cedenly," August consented;
+but Heaven knows whether they were, or what they were: March never
+learned.
+
+This immunity from acquaintance, this touch-and go quality in their New
+York sojourn, this almost loss of individuality at times, after the
+intense identification of their Boston life, was a relief, though Mrs.
+March had her misgivings, and questioned whether it were not perhaps too
+relaxing to the moral fibre.  March refused to explore his conscience;
+he allowed that it might be so; but he said he liked now and then to feel
+his personality in that state of solution.  They went and sat a good deal
+in the softening evenings among the infants and dotards of Latin
+extraction in Washington Square, safe from all who ever knew them,
+and enjoyed the advancing season, which thickened the foliage of the
+trees and flattered out of sight the church warden's Gothic of the
+University Building.  The infants were sometimes cross, and cried in
+their weary mothers' or little sisters' arms; but they did not disturb
+the dotards, who slept, some with their heads fallen forward, and some
+with their heads fallen back; March arbitrarily distinguished those with
+the drooping faces as tipsy and ashamed to confront the public.
+The small Italian children raced up and down the asphalt paths, playing
+American games of tag and hide and-whoop; larger boys passed ball, in
+training for potential championships.  The Marches sat and mused, or
+quarrelled fitfully about where they should spend the summer, like
+sparrows, he once said, till the electric lights began to show distinctly
+among the leaves, and they looked round and found the infants and dotards
+gone and the benches filled with lovers.  That was the signal for the
+Marches to go home.  He said that the spectacle of so much courtship as
+the eye might take in there at a glance was not, perhaps, oppressive, but
+the thought that at the same hour the same thing was going on all over
+the country, wherever two young fools could get together, was more than
+he could bear; he did not deny that it was natural, and, in a measure.
+authorized, but he declared that it was hackneyed; and the fact that it
+must go on forever, as long as the race lasted, made him tired.
+
+At home, generally, they found that the children had not missed them, and
+were perfectly safe.  It was one of the advantages of a flat that they
+could leave the children there whenever they liked without anxiety.  They
+liked better staying there than wandering about in the evening with their
+parents, whose excursions seemed to them somewhat aimless, and their
+pleasures insipid.  They studied, or read, or looked out of the window at
+the street sights; and their mother always came back to them with a pang
+for their lonesomeness.  Bella knew some little girls in the house, but
+in a ceremonious way; Tom had formed no friendships among the boys at
+school such as he had left in Boston; as nearly as he could explain, the
+New York fellows carried canes at an age when they would have had them
+broken for them by the other boys at Boston; and they were both sissyish
+and fast.  It was probably prejudice; he never could say exactly what
+their demerits were, and neither he nor Bella was apparently so homesick
+as they pretended, though they answered inquirers, the one that New York
+was a hole, and the other that it was horrid, and that all they lived for
+was to get back to Boston.  In the mean time they were thrown much upon
+each other for society, which March said was well for both of them; he
+did not mind their cultivating a little gloom and the sense of a common
+wrong; it made them better comrades, and it was providing them with
+amusing reminiscences for the future.  They really enjoyed Bohemianizing
+in that harmless way: though Tom had his doubts of its respectability; he
+was very punctilious about his sister, and went round from his own school
+every day to fetch her home from hers.  The whole family went to the
+theatre a good deal, and enjoyed themselves together in their desultory
+explorations of the city.
+
+They lived near Greenwich Village, and March liked strolling through its
+quaintness toward the waterside on a Sunday, when a hereditary
+Sabbatarianism kept his wife at home; he made her observe that it even
+kept her at home from church.  He found a lingering quality of pure
+Americanism in the region, and he said the very bells called to worship
+in a nasal tone.  He liked the streets of small brick houses, with here
+and there one painted red, and the mortar lines picked out in white, and
+with now and then a fine wooden portal of fluted pillars and a bowed
+transom.  The rear of the tenement-houses showed him the picturesqueness
+of clothes-lines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence; and the new
+apartment-houses, breaking the old sky-line with their towering stories,
+implied a life as alien to the American manner as anything in continental
+Europe.  In fact, foreign faces and foreign tongues prevailed in
+Greenwich Village, but no longer German or even Irish tongues or faces.
+The eyes and earrings of Italians twinkled in and out of the alleyways
+and basements, and they seemed to abound even in the streets, where long
+ranks of trucks drawn up in Sunday rest along the curbstones suggested
+the presence of a race of sturdier strength than theirs.  March liked the
+swarthy, strange visages; he found nothing menacing for the future in
+them; for wickedness he had to satisfy himself as he could with the
+sneering, insolent, clean-shaven mug of some rare American of the b'hoy
+type, now almost as extinct in New York as the dodo or the volunteer
+fireman.  When he had found his way, among the ash-barrels and the groups
+of decently dressed church-goers, to the docks, he experienced a
+sufficient excitement in the recent arrival of a French steamer, whose
+sheds were thronged with hacks and express-wagons, and in a tacit inquiry
+into the emotions of the passengers, fresh from the cleanliness of Paris,
+and now driving up through the filth of those streets.
+
+Some of the streets were filthier than others; there was at least a
+choice; there were boxes and barrels of kitchen offal on all the
+sidewalks, but not everywhere manure-heaps, and in some places the stench
+was mixed with the more savory smell of cooking.  One Sunday morning,
+before the winter was quite gone, the sight of the frozen refuse melting
+in heaps, and particularly the loathsome edges of the rotting ice near
+the gutters, with the strata of waste-paper and straw litter, and egg-
+shells and orange peel, potato-skins and cigar-stumps, made him unhappy.
+He gave a whimsical shrug for the squalor of the neighboring houses, and
+said to himself rather than the boy who was with him: "It's curious,
+isn't it, how fond the poor people are of these unpleasant thoroughfares?
+You always find them living in the worst streets."
+
+"The burden of all the wrong in the world comes on the poor," said the
+boy.  "Every sort of fraud and swindling hurts them the worst.  The city
+wastes the money it's paid to clean the streets with, and the poor have
+to suffer, for they can't afford to pay twice, like the rich."
+
+March stopped short.  "Hallo, Tom!  Is that your wisdom?"
+
+"It's what Mr. Lindau says," answered the boy, doggedly, as if not
+pleased to have his ideas mocked at, even if they were second-hand.
+
+"And you didn't tell him that the poor lived in dirty streets because
+they liked them, and were too lazy and worthless to have them cleaned?"
+
+"No; I didn't."
+
+"I'm surprised.  What do you think of Lindau, generally speaking, Tom?"
+
+"Well, sir, I don't like the way he talks about some things.  I don't
+suppose this country is perfect, but I think it's about the best there
+is, and it don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time."
+
+"Sound, my son," said March, putting his hand on the boy's shoulder and
+beginning to walk on.  "Well?"
+
+"Well, then, he says that it isn't the public frauds only that the poor
+have to pay for, but they have to pay for all the vices of the rich; that
+when a speculator fails, or a bank cashier defaults, or a firm suspends,
+or hard times come, it's the poor who have to give up necessaries where
+the rich give up luxuries."
+
+"Well, well!  And then?"
+
+"Well, then I think the crank comes in, in Mr. Lindau.  He says there's
+no need of failures or frauds or hard times.  It's ridiculous.  There
+always have been and there always will be.  But if you tell him that, it
+seems to make him perfectly furious."
+
+March repeated the substance of this talk to his wife.  "I'm glad to know
+that Tom can see through such ravings.  He has lots of good common
+sense."
+
+It was the afternoon of the same Sunday, and they were sauntering up
+Fifth Avenue, and admiring the wide old double houses at the lower end;
+at one corner they got a distinct pleasure out of the gnarled elbows that
+a pollarded wistaria leaned upon the top of a garden wall--for its
+convenience in looking into the street, he said.  The line of these
+comfortable dwellings, once so fashionable, was continually broken by the
+facades of shops; and March professed himself vulgarized by a want of
+style in the people they met in their walk to Twenty-third Street.
+
+"Take me somewhere to meet my fellow-exclusives, Isabel," he demanded.
+"I pine for the society of my peers."
+
+He hailed a passing omnibus, and made his wife get on the roof with him.
+"Think of our doing such a thing in Boston!" she sighed, with a little
+shiver of satisfaction in her immunity from recognition and comment.
+
+"You wouldn't be afraid to do it in London or Paris?"
+
+"No; we should be strangers there--just as we are in New York.  I wonder
+how long one could be a stranger here."
+
+"Oh, indefinitely, in our way of living.  The place is really vast, so
+much larger than it used to seem, and so heterogeneous."
+
+When they got down very far up-town, and began to walk back by Madison
+Avenue, they found themselves in a different population from that they
+dwelt among; not heterogeneous at all; very homogeneous, and almost
+purely American; the only qualification was American Hebrew.  Such a well
+-dressed, well-satisfied, well-fed looking crowd poured down the broad
+sidewalks before the handsome, stupid houses that March could easily
+pretend he had got among his fellow-plutocrats at last.  Still he
+expressed his doubts whether this Sunday afternoon parade, which seemed
+to be a thing of custom, represented the best form among the young people
+of that region; he wished he knew; he blamed himself for becoming of a
+fastidious conjecture; he could not deny the fashion and the richness and
+the indigeneity of the spectacle; the promenaders looked New-Yorky; they
+were the sort of people whom you would know for New-Yorkers elsewhere,
+--so well equipped and so perfectly kept at all points.  Their silk hats
+shone, and their boots; their frocks had the right distension behind, and
+their bonnets perfect poise and distinction.
+
+The Marches talked of these and other facts of their appearance, and
+curiously questioned whether this were the best that a great material
+civilization could come to; it looked a little dull.  The men's faces
+were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull; the women's were pretty
+and knowing, and yet dull.  It was, probably, the holiday expression of
+the vast, prosperous commercial class, with unlimited money, and no
+ideals that money could not realize; fashion and comfort were all that
+they desired to compass, and the culture that furnishes showily, that
+decorates and that tells; the culture, say, of plays and operas, rather
+than books.
+
+Perhaps the observers did the promenaders injustice; they might not have
+been as common-minded as they looked.  "But," March said, "I understand
+now why the poor people don't come up here and live in this clean,
+handsome, respectable quarter of the town; they would be bored to death.
+On the whole, I think I should prefer Mott Street myself."
+
+In other walks the Marches tried to find some of the streets they had
+wandered through the first day of their wedding journey in New York, so
+long ago. They could not make sure of them; but once they ran down to the
+Battery, and easily made sure of that, though not in its old aspect.
+They recalled the hot morning, when they sauntered over the trodden weed
+that covered the sickly grass-plots there, and sentimentalized the
+sweltering paupers who had crept out of the squalid tenements about for a
+breath of air after a sleepless night.  Now the paupers were gone, and
+where the old mansions that had fallen to their use once stood, there
+towered aloft and abroad those heights and masses of many-storied brick-
+work for which architecture has yet no proper form and aesthetics no
+name.  The trees and shrubs, all in their young spring green, blew
+briskly over the guarded turf in the south wind that came up over the
+water; and in the well-paved alleys the ghosts of eighteenth-century
+fashion might have met each other in their old haunts, and exchanged
+stately congratulations upon its vastly bettered condition, and perhaps
+puzzled a little over the colossal lady on Bedloe's Island, with her
+lifted torch, and still more over the curving tracks and chalet-stations
+of the Elevated road.  It is an outlook of unrivalled beauty across the
+bay, that smokes and flashes with the in numerable stacks and sails of
+commerce, to the hills beyond, where the moving forest of masts halts at
+the shore, and roots itself in the groves of the many villaged uplands.
+The Marches paid the charming prospects a willing duty, and rejoiced in
+it as generously as if it had been their own.  Perhaps it was, they
+decided.  He said people owned more things in common than they were apt
+to think; and they drew the consolations of proprietorship from the
+excellent management of Castle Garden, which they penetrated for a
+moment's glimpse of the huge rotunda, where the immigrants first set foot
+on our continent.  It warmed their hearts, so easily moved to any cheap
+sympathy, to see the friendly care the nation took of these humble
+guests; they found it even pathetic to hear the proper authority calling
+out the names of such as had kin or acquaintance waiting there to meet
+them.  No one appeared troubled or anxious; the officials had a
+conscientious civility; the government seemed to manage their welcome as
+well as a private company or corporation could have done.  In fact, it
+was after the simple strangers had left the government care that March
+feared their woes might begin; and he would have liked the government to
+follow each of them to his home, wherever he meant to fix it within our
+borders.  He made note of the looks of the licensed runners and touters
+waiting for the immigrants outside the government premises; he intended
+to work them up into a dramatic effect in some sketch, but they remained
+mere material in his memorandum-book, together with some quaint old
+houses on the Sixth Avenue road, which he had noticed on the way down.
+On the way up, these were superseded in his regard by some hip-roof
+structures on the Ninth Avenue, which he thought more Dutch-looking.
+The perspectives of the cross-streets toward the river were very lively,
+with their turmoil of trucks and cars and carts and hacks and foot
+passengers, ending in the chimneys and masts of shipping, and final
+gleams of dancing water.  At a very noisy corner, clangorous with some
+sort of ironworking, he made his wife enjoy with him the quiet sarcasm of
+an inn that called itself the Home-like Hotel, and he speculated at
+fantastic length on the gentle associations of one who should have passed
+his youth under its roof.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+First and last, the Marches did a good deal of travel on the Elevated
+roads, which, he said, gave you such glimpses of material aspects in the
+city as some violent invasion of others' lives might afford in human
+nature.  Once, when the impulse of adventure was very strong in them,
+they went quite the length of the West Side lines, and saw the city
+pushing its way by irregular advances into the country.  Some spaces,
+probably held by the owners for that rise in value which the industry of
+others providentially gives to the land of the wise and good, it left
+vacant comparatively far down the road, and built up others at remoter
+points.  It was a world of lofty apartment houses beyond the Park,
+springing up in isolated blocks, with stretches of invaded rusticity
+between, and here and there an old country-seat standing dusty in its
+budding vines with the ground before it in rocky upheaval for city
+foundations.  But wherever it went or wherever it paused, New York gave
+its peculiar stamp; and the adventurers were amused to find One Hundred
+and Twenty-fifth Street inchoately like Twenty-third Street and
+Fourteenth Street in its shops and shoppers.  The butchers' shops and
+milliners' shops on the avenue might as well have been at Tenth as at One
+Hundredth Street.
+
+The adventurers were not often so adventurous.  They recognized that in
+their willingness to let their fancy range for them, and to let
+speculation do the work of inquiry, they were no longer young.  Their
+point of view was singularly unchanged, and their impressions of New York
+remained the same that they had been fifteen years before: huge, noisy,
+ugly, kindly, it seemed to them now as it seemed then.  The main
+difference was that they saw it more now as a life, and then they only
+regarded it as a spectacle; and March could not release himself from a
+sense of complicity with it, no matter what whimsical, or alien, or
+critical attitude he took.  A sense of the striving and the suffering
+deeply possessed him; and this grew the more intense as he gained some
+knowledge of the forces at work-forces of pity, of destruction, of
+perdition, of salvation.  He wandered about on Sunday not only through
+the streets, but into this tabernacle and that, as the spirit moved him,
+and listened to those who dealt with Christianity as a system of
+economics as well as a religion.  He could not get his wife to go with
+him; she listened to his report of what he heard, and trembled; it all
+seemed fantastic and menacing.  She lamented the literary peace, the
+intellectual refinement of the life they had left behind them; and he
+owned it was very pretty, but he said it was not life--it was death-in-
+life.  She liked to hear him talk in that strain of virtuous self-
+denunciation, but she asked him, "Which of your prophets are you going to
+follow?" and he answered: "All-all!  And a fresh one every Sunday."
+And so they got their laugh out of it at last, but with some sadness at
+heart, and with a dim consciousness that they had got their laugh out of
+too many things in life.
+
+What really occupied and compassed his activities, in spite of his
+strenuous reveries of work beyond it, was his editorship.  On its social
+side it had not fulfilled all the expectations which Fulkerson's radiant
+sketch of its duties and relations had caused him to form of it.  Most of
+the contributions came from a distance; even the articles written in New
+York reached him through the post, and so far from having his valuable
+time, as they called it, consumed in interviews with his collaborators,
+he rarely saw any of them.  The boy on the stairs, who was to fence him
+from importunate visitors, led a life of luxurious disoccupation, and
+whistled almost uninterruptedly.  When any one came, March found himself
+embarrassed and a little anxious.  The visitors were usually young men,
+terribly respectful, but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinions
+chasmally different from his; and he felt in their presence something
+like an anachronism, something like a fraud.  He tried to freshen up his
+sympathies on them, to get at what they were really thinking and feeling,
+and it was some time before he could understand that they were not really
+thinking and feeling anything of their own concerning their art, but were
+necessarily, in their quality of young, inexperienced men, mere
+acceptants of older men's thoughts and feelings, whether they were
+tremendously conservative, as some were, or tremendously progressive, as
+others were.  Certain of them called themselves realists, certain
+romanticists; but none of them seemed to know what realism was, or what
+romanticism; they apparently supposed the difference a difference of
+material.  March had imagined himself taking home to lunch or dinner the
+aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked, whether he liked their work
+or not; but this was not an easy matter.  Those who were at all
+interesting seemed to have engagements and preoccupations; after two or
+three experiments with the bashfuller sort--those who had come up to the
+metropolis with manuscripts in their hands, in the good old literary
+tradition--he wondered whether he was otherwise like them when he was
+young like them.  He could not flatter himself that he was not; and yet
+he had a hope that the world had grown worse since his time, which his
+wife encouraged:
+
+Mrs. March was not eager to pursue the hospitalities which she had at
+first imagined essential to the literary prosperity of 'Every Other
+Week'; her family sufficed her; she would willingly have seen no one out
+of it but the strangers at the weekly table-d'hote dinner, or the
+audiences at the theatres.  March's devotion to his work made him
+reluctant to delegate it to any one; and as the summer advanced, and the
+question of where to go grew more vexed, he showed a man's base
+willingness to shirk it for himself by not going anywhere.  He asked his
+wife why she did not go somewhere with the children, and he joined her in
+a search for non-malarial regions on the map when she consented to
+entertain this notion.  But when it came to the point she would not go;
+he offered to go with her then, and then she would not let him.  She said
+she knew he would be anxious about his work; he protested that he could
+take it with him to any distance within a few hours, but she would not be
+persuaded.  She would rather he stayed; the effect would be better with
+Mr. Fulkerson; they could make excursions, and they could all get off a
+week or two to the seashore near Boston--the only real seashore--in
+August.  The excursions were practically confined to a single day at
+Coney Island; and once they got as far as Boston on the way to the
+seashore near Boston; that is, Mrs. March and the children went; an
+editorial exigency kept March at the last moment.  The Boston streets
+seemed very queer and clean and empty to the children, and the buildings
+little; in the horse-cars the Boston faces seemed to arraign their mother
+with a down-drawn severity that made her feel very guilty.  She knew that
+this was merely the Puritan mask, the cast of a dead civilization, which
+people of very amiable and tolerant minds were doomed to wear, and she
+sighed to think that less than a year of the heterogeneous gayety of New
+York should have made her afraid of it.  The sky seemed cold and gray;
+the east wind, which she had always thought so delicious in summer, cut
+her to the heart.  She took her children up to the South End, and in the
+pretty square where they used to live they stood before their alienated
+home, and looked up at its close-shuttered windows.  The tenants must
+have been away, but Mrs. March had not the courage to ring and make sure,
+though she had always promised herself that she would go all over the
+house when she came back, and see how they had used it; she could pretend
+a desire for something she wished to take away.  She knew she could not
+bear it now; and the children did not seem eager.  She did not push on to
+the seaside; it would be forlorn there without their father; she was glad
+to go back to him in the immense, friendly homelessness of New York, and
+hold him answerable for the change, in her heart or her mind, which made
+its shapeless tumult a refuge and a consolation.
+
+She found that he had been giving the cook a holiday, and dining about
+hither and thither with Fulkerson.  Once he had dined with him at the
+widow's (as they always called Mrs. Leighton), and then had spent the
+evening there, and smoked with Fulkerson and Colonel Woodburn on the
+gallery overlooking the back yard.  They were all spending the summer in
+New York.  The widow had got so good an offer for her house at St.
+Barnaby for the summer that she could not refuse it; and the Woodburns
+found New York a watering-place of exemplary coolness after the burning
+Augusts and Septembers of Charlottesburg.
+
+"You can stand it well enough in our climate, sir," the colonel
+explained, "till you come to the September heat, that sometimes runs well
+into October; and then you begin to lose your temper, sir.  It's never
+quite so hot as it is in New York at times, but it's hot longer, sir."
+He alleged, as if something of the sort were necessary, the example of a
+famous Southwestern editor who spent all his summers in a New York hotel
+as the most luxurious retreat on the continent, consulting the weather
+forecasts, and running off on torrid days to the mountains or the sea,
+and then hurrying back at the promise of cooler weather.  The colonel had
+not found it necessary to do this yet; and he had been reluctant to leave
+town, where he was working up a branch of the inquiry which had so long
+occupied him, in the libraries, and studying the great problem of labor
+and poverty as it continually presented itself to him in the streets.
+He said that he talked with all sorts of people, whom he found
+monstrously civil, if you took them in the right way; and he went
+everywhere in the city without fear and apparently without danger.  March
+could not find out that he had ridden his hobby into the homes of want
+which he visited, or had proposed their enslavement to the inmates as a
+short and simple solution of the great question of their lives; he
+appeared to have contented himself with the collection of facts for the
+persuasion of the cultivated classes.  It seemed to March a confirmation
+of this impression that the colonel should address his deductions from
+these facts so unsparingly to him; he listened with a respectful
+patience, for which Fulkerson afterward personally thanked him.
+Fulkerson said it was not often the colonel found such a good listener;
+generally nobody listened but Mrs. Leighton, who thought his ideas were
+shocking, but honored him for holding them so conscientiously.  Fulkerson
+was glad that March, as the literary department, had treated the old
+gentleman so well, because there was an open feud between him and the art
+department.  Beaton was outrageously rude, Fulkerson must say; though as
+for that, the old colonel seemed quite able to take care of himself, and
+gave Beaton an unqualified contempt in return for his unmannerliness.
+The worst of it was, it distressed the old lady so; she admired Beaton as
+much as she respected the colonel, and she admired Beaton, Fulkerson
+thought, rather more than Miss Leighton did; he asked March if he had
+noticed them together.  March had noticed them, but without any very
+definite impression except that Beaton seemed to give the whole evening
+to the girl.  Afterward he recollected that he had fancied her rather
+harassed by his devotion, and it was this point that he wished to present
+for his wife's opinion.
+
+"Girls often put on that air," she said.  "It's one of their ways of
+teasing.  But then, if the man was really very much in love, and she was
+only enough in love to be uncertain of herself, she might very well seem
+troubled.  It would be a very serious question.  Girls often don't know
+what to do in such a case."
+
+"Yes," said March, "I've often been glad that I was not a girl, on that
+account.  But I guess that on general principles Beaton is not more in
+love than she is.  I couldn't imagine that young man being more in love
+with anybody, unless it was himself.  He might be more in love with
+himself than any one else was."
+
+"Well, he doesn't interest me a great deal, and I can't say Miss Leighton
+does, either.  I think she can take care of herself.  She has herself
+very well in hand."
+
+"Why so censorious?"  pleaded March.  "I don't defend her for having
+herself in hand; but is it a fault?"
+
+Mrs. March did not say.  She asked, "And how does Mr. Fulkerson's affair
+get on?"
+
+"His affair?  You really think it is one?  Well, I've fancied so myself,
+and I've had an idea of some time asking him; Fulkerson strikes one as
+truly domesticable, conjugable at heart; but I've waited for him to
+speak."
+
+"I should think so."
+
+"Yes.  He's never opened on the subject yet.  Do you know, I think
+Fulkerson has his moments of delicacy."
+
+"Moments! He's all delicacy in regard to women."
+
+"Well, perhaps so.  There is nothing in them to rouse his advertising
+instincts."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The Dryfoos family stayed in town till August. Then the father went West
+again to look after his interests; and Mrs. Mandel took the two girls to
+one of the great hotels in Saratoga.  Fulkerson said that he had never
+seen anything like Saratoga for fashion, and Mrs. Mandel remembered that
+in her own young ladyhood this was so for at least some weeks of the
+year.  She had been too far withdrawn from fashion since her marriage to
+know whether it was still so or not.  In this, as in so many other
+matters, the Dryfoos family helplessly relied upon Fulkerson, in spite of
+Dryfoos's angry determination that he should not run the family, and in
+spite of Christine's doubt of his omniscience; if he did not know
+everything, she was aware that he knew more than herself.  She thought
+that they had a right to have him go with them to Saratoga, or at least
+go up and engage their rooms beforehand; but Fulkerson did not offer to
+do either, and she did not quite see her way to commanding his services.
+The young ladies took what Mela called splendid dresses with them; they
+sat in the park of tall, slim trees which the hotel's quadrangle
+enclosed, and listened to the music in the morning, or on the long piazza
+in the afternoon and looked at the driving in the street, or in the vast
+parlors by night, where all the other ladies were, and they felt that
+they were of the best there.  But they knew nobody, and Mrs. Mandel was
+so particular that Mela was prevented from continuing the acquaintance
+even of the few young men who danced with her at the Saturday-night hops.
+They drove about, but they went to places without knowing why, except
+that the carriage man took them, and they had all the privileges of a
+proud exclusivism without desiring them.  Once a motherly matron seemed
+to perceive their isolation, and made overtures to them, but then
+desisted, as if repelled by Christine's suspicion, or by Mela's too
+instant and hilarious good-fellowship, which expressed itself in hoarse
+laughter and in a flow of talk full of topical and syntactical freedom.
+From time to time she offered to bet Christine that if Mr. Fulkerson was
+only there they would have a good time; she wondered what they were all
+doing in New York, where she wished herself; she rallied her sister about
+Beaton, and asked her why she did not write and tell him to come up
+there.
+
+Mela knew that Christine had expected Beaton to follow them.  Some banter
+had passed between them to this effect; he said he should take them in on
+his way home to Syracuse.  Christine would not have hesitated to write to
+him and remind him of his promise; but she had learned to distrust her
+literature with Beaton since he had laughed at the spelling in a scrap of
+writing which dropped out of her music-book one night.  She believed that
+he would not have laughed if he had known it was hers; but she felt that
+she could hide better the deficiencies which were not committed to paper;
+she could manage with him in talking; she was too ignorant of her
+ignorance to recognize the mistakes she made then.  Through her own
+passion she perceived that she had some kind of fascination for him; she
+was graceful, and she thought it must be that; she did not understand
+that there was a kind of beauty in her small, irregular features that
+piqued and haunted his artistic sense, and a look in her black eyes
+beyond her intelligence and intention.  Once he sketched her as they sat
+together, and flattered the portrait without getting what he wanted in
+it; he said he must try her some time in color; and he said things which,
+when she made Mela repeat them, could only mean that he admired her more
+than anybody else.  He came fitfully, but he came often, and she rested
+content in a girl's indefiniteness concerning the affair; if her thought
+went beyond lovemaking to marriage, she believed that she could have him
+if she wanted him.  Her father's money counted in this; she divined that
+Beaton was poor; but that made no difference; she would have enough for
+both; the money would have counted as an irresistible attraction if there
+had been no other.
+
+The affair had gone on in spite of the sidelong looks of restless dislike
+with which Dryfoos regarded it; but now when Beaton did not come to
+Saratoga it necessarily dropped, and Christine's content with it.  She
+bore the trial as long as she could; she used pride and resentment
+against it; but at last she could not bear it, and with Mela's help she
+wrote a letter, bantering Beaton on his stay in New York, and playfully
+boasting of Saratoga.  It seemed to them both that it was a very bright
+letter, and would be sure to bring him; they would have had no scruple
+about sending it but for the doubt they had whether they had got some of
+the words right.  Mela offered to bet Christine anything she dared that
+they were right, and she said, Send it anyway; it was no difference if
+they were wrong.  But Christine could not endure to think of that laugh
+of Beaton's, and there remained only Mrs. Mandel as authority on the
+spelling.  Christine dreaded her authority on other points, but Mela said
+she knew she would not interfere, and she undertook to get round her.
+Mrs. Mandel pronounced the spelling bad, and the taste worse; she forbade
+them to send the letter; and Mela failed to get round her, though she
+threatened, if Mrs. Mandel would not tell her how to spell the wrong
+words, that she would send the letter as it was; then Mrs. Mandel said
+that if Mr. Beaton appeared in Saratoga she would instantly take them
+both home.  When Mela reported this result, Christine accused her of
+having mismanaged the whole business; she quarrelled with her, and they
+called each other names.  Christine declared that she would not stay in
+Saratoga, and that if Mrs. Mandel did not go back to New York with her
+she should go alone.  They returned the first week in September; but by
+that time Beaton had gone to see his people in Syracuse.
+
+Conrad Dryfoos remained at home with his mother after his father went
+West.  He had already taken such a vacation as he had been willing to
+allow himself, and had spent it on a charity farm near the city, where
+the fathers with whom he worked among the poor on the East Side in the
+winter had sent some of their wards for the summer.  It was not possible
+to keep his recreation a secret at the office, and Fulkerson found a
+pleasure in figuring the jolly time Brother Conrad must have teaching
+farm work among those paupers and potential reprobates.  He invented
+details of his experience among them, and March could not always help
+joining in the laugh at Conrad's humorless helplessness under Fulkerson's
+burlesque denunciation of a summer outing spent in such dissipation.
+
+They had time for a great deal of joking at the office during the season
+of leisure which penetrates in August to the very heart of business, and
+they all got on terms of greater intimacy if not greater friendliness
+than before.  Fulkerson had not had so long to do with the advertising
+side of human nature without developing a vein of cynicism, of no great
+depth, perhaps, but broad, and underlying his whole point of view; he
+made light of Beaton's solemnity, as he made light of Conrad's humanity.
+The art editor, with abundant sarcasm, had no more humor than the
+publisher, and was an easy prey in the manager's hands; but when he had
+been led on by Fulkerson's flatteries to make some betrayal of egotism,
+he brooded over it till he had thought how to revenge himself in
+elaborate insult.  For Beaton's talent Fulkerson never lost his
+admiration; but his joke was to encourage him to give himself airs of
+being the sole source of the magazine's prosperity.  No bait of this sort
+was too obvious for Beaton to swallow; he could be caught with it as
+often as Fulkerson chose; though he was ordinarily suspicious as to the
+motives of people in saying things.  With March he got on no better than
+at first.  He seemed to be lying in wait for some encroachment of the
+literary department on the art department, and he met it now and then
+with anticipative reprisal.  After these rebuffs, the editor delivered
+him over to the manager, who could turn Beaton's contrary-mindedness to
+account by asking the reverse of what he really wanted done.  This was
+what Fulkerson said; the fact was that he did get on with Beaton and
+March contented himself with musing upon the contradictions of a
+character at once so vain and so offensive, so fickle and so sullen, so
+conscious and so simple.
+
+After the first jarring contact with Dryfoos, the editor ceased to feel
+the disagreeable fact of the old man's mastery of the financial
+situation.  None of the chances which might have made it painful
+occurred; the control of the whole affair remained in Fulkerson's hands;
+before he went West again, Dryfoos had ceased to come about the office,
+as if, having once worn off the novelty of the sense of owning a literary
+periodical, he was no longer interested in it.
+
+Yet it was a relief, somehow, when he left town, which he did not do
+without coming to take a formal leave of the editor at his office.
+He seemed willing to leave March with a better impression than he had
+hitherto troubled himself to make; he even said some civil things about
+the magazine, as if its success pleased him; and he spoke openly to March
+of his hope that his son would finally become interested in it to the
+exclusion of the hopes and purposes which divided them.  It seemed to
+March that in the old man's warped and toughened heart he perceived a
+disappointed love for his son greater than for his other children; but
+this might have been fancy.  Lindau came in with some copy while Dryfoos
+was there, and March introduced them.  When Lindau went out, March
+explained to Dryfoos that he had lost his hand in the war; and he told
+him something of Lindau's career as he had known it.  Dryfoos appeared
+greatly pleased that 'Every Other Week' was giving Lindau work.  He said
+that he had helped to enlist a good many fellows for the war, and had
+paid money to fill up the Moffitt County quota under the later calls for
+troops.  He had never been an Abolitionist, but he had joined the Anti-
+Nebraska party in '55, and he had voted for Fremont and for every
+Republican President since then.
+
+At his own house March saw more of Lindau than of any other contributor,
+but the old man seemed to think that he must transact all his business
+with March at his place of business.  The transaction had some
+peculiarities which perhaps made this necessary.  Lindau always expected
+to receive his money when he brought his copy, as an acknowledgment of
+the immediate right of the laborer to his hire; and he would not take it
+in a check because he did not approve of banks, and regarded the whole
+system of banking as the capitalistic manipulation of the people's money.
+He would receive his pay only from March's hand, because he wished to be
+understood as working for him, and honestly earning money honestly
+earned; and sometimes March inwardly winced a little at letting the old
+man share the increase of capital won by such speculation as Dryfoos's,
+but he shook off the feeling.  As the summer advanced, and the artists
+and classes that employed Lindau as a model left town one after another,
+he gave largely of his increasing leisure to the people in the office of
+'Every Other Week.'  It was pleasant for March to see the respect with
+which Conrad Dryfoos always used him, for the sake of his hurt and his
+gray beard.  There was something delicate and fine in it, and there was
+nothing unkindly on Fulkerson's part in the hostilities which usually
+passed between himself and Lindau.  Fulkerson bore himself reverently at
+times, too, but it was not in him to keep that up, especially when Lindau
+appeared with more beer aboard than, as Fulkerson said, he could manage
+shipshape.  On these occasions Fulkerson always tried to start him on the
+theme of the unduly rich; he made himself the champion of monopolies, and
+enjoyed the invectives which Lindau heaped upon him as a slave of
+capital; he said that it did him good.
+
+One day, with the usual show of writhing under Lindau's scorn, he said,
+"Well, I understand that although you despise me now, Lindau--"
+
+"I ton't desbise you," the old man broke in, his nostrils swelling and
+his eyes flaming with excitement, "I bity you."
+
+"Well, it seems to come to the same thing in the end," said Fulkerson.
+"What I understand is that you pity me now as the slave of capital, but
+you would pity me a great deal more if I was the master of it."
+
+"How you mean?"
+
+"If I was rich."
+
+"That would tebendt," said Lindau, trying to control himself.  "If you
+hat inheritedt your money, you might pe innocent; but if you hat mate it,
+efery man that resbectedt himself would haf to ask how you mate it, and
+if you hat mate moch, he would know--"
+
+"Hold on; hold on, now, Lindau!  Ain't that rather un-American doctrine?
+We're all brought up, ain't we, to honor the man that made his money, and
+look down--or try to look down; sometimes it's difficult on the fellow
+that his father left it to?"
+
+The old man rose and struck his breast.  "On Amerigan!" he roared, and,
+as he went on, his accent grew more and more uncertain.  "What iss
+Amerigan?  Dere iss no Ameriga any more!  You start here free and brafe,
+and you glaim for efery man de right to life, liperty, and de bursuit of
+habbiness.  And where haf you entedt?  No man that vorks vith his handts
+among you has the liperty to bursue his habbiness.  He iss the slafe of
+some richer man, some gompany, some gorporation, dat crindt him down to
+the least he can lif on, and that rops him of the marchin of his earnings
+that he knight pe habby on.  Oh, you Amerigans, you haf cot it down
+goldt, as you say!  You ton't puy foters; you puy lechislatures and
+goncressmen; you puy gourts; you puy gombetitors; you pay infentors not
+to infent; you atfertise, and the gounting-room sees dat de etitorial-
+room toesn't tink."
+
+"Yes, we've got a little arrangement of that sort with March here," said
+Fulkerson.
+
+"Oh, I am sawry," said the old man, contritely, "I meant noting bersonal.
+I ton't tink we are all cuilty or gorrubt, and efen among the rich there
+are goodt men.  But gabidal"--his passion rose again" where you find
+gabidal, millions of money that a man hass cot togeder in fife, ten,
+twenty years, you findt the smell of tears and ploodt!  Dat iss what I
+say.  And you cot to loog oudt for yourself when you meet a rich man
+whether you meet an honest man."
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, "I wish I was a subject of suspicion with you,
+Lindau.  By-the-way," he added, "I understand that you think capital was
+at the bottom of the veto of that pension of yours."
+
+"What bension?  What feto?"--The old man flamed up again.  "No bension
+of mine was efer fetoedt.  I renounce my bension, begause I would sgorn
+to dake money from a gofernment that I ton't peliefe in any more.  Where
+you hear that story?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Fulkerson, rather embarrassed.  "It's common
+talk."
+
+"It's a gommon lie, then!  When the time gome dat dis iss a free gountry
+again, then I dake a bension again for my woundts; but I would sdarfe
+before I dake a bension now from a rebublic dat iss bought oap by
+monobolies, and ron by drusts and gompines, and railroadts andt oil
+gompanies."
+
+"Look out, Lindau," said Fulkerson.  "You bite yourself mit dat dog some
+day."  But when the old man, with a ferocious gesture of renunciation,
+whirled out of the place, he added: "I guess I went a little too far that
+time.  I touched him on a sore place; I didn't mean to; I heard some talk
+about his pension being vetoed from Miss Leighton."  He addressed these
+exculpations to March's grave face, and to the pitying deprecation in the
+eyes of Conrad Dryfoos, whom Lindau's roaring wrath had summoned to the
+door.  "But I'll make it all right with him the next time he comes.  I
+didn't know he was loaded, or I wouldn't have monkeyed with him."
+
+"Lindau does himself injustice when he gets to talking in that way," said
+March.  "I hate to hear him.  He's as good an American as any of us; and
+it's only because he has too high an ideal of us--"
+
+"Oh, go on! Rub it in--rub it in!" cried Fulkerson, clutching his hair in
+suffering, which was not altogether burlesque.  "How did I know he had
+renounced his 'bension'?  Why didn't you tell me?"
+
+"I didn't know it myself.  I only knew that he had none, and I didn't
+ask, for I had a notion that it might be a painful subject."
+
+Fulkerson tried to turn it off lightly.  "Well, he's a noble old fellow;
+pity he drinks."  March would not smile, and Fulkerson broke out: "Dog on
+it!  I'll make it up to the old fool the next time he comes.  I don't
+like that dynamite talk of his; but any man that's given his hand to the
+country has got mine in his grip for good.  Why, March! You don't suppose
+I wanted to hurt his feelings, do you?"
+
+"Why, of course not, Fulkerson."
+
+But they could not get away from a certain ruefulness for that time, and
+in the evening Fulkerson came round to March's to say that he had got
+Lindau's address from Conrad, and had looked him up at his lodgings.
+
+"Well, there isn't so much bric-a-brac there, quite, as Mrs. Green left
+you; but I've made it all right with Lindau, as far as I'm concerned.
+I told him I didn't know when I spoke that way, and I honored him for
+sticking to his 'brinciples'; I don't believe in his 'brincibles';
+and we wept on each other's necks--at least, he did.  Dogged if he didn't
+kiss me before I knew what he was up to.  He said I was his chenerous
+gong friendt, and he begged my barton if he had said anything to wound
+me.  I tell you it was an affecting scene, March; and rats enough round
+in that old barracks where he lives to fit out a first-class case of
+delirium tremens.  What does he stay there for?  He's not obliged to?"
+
+Lindau's reasons, as March repeated them, affected Fulkerson as
+deliciously comical; but after that he confined his pleasantries at the
+office to Beaton and Conrad Dryfoos, or, as he said, he spent the rest of
+the summer in keeping Lindau smoothed up.
+
+It is doubtful if Lindau altogether liked this as well.  Perhaps he
+missed the occasions Fulkerson used to give him of bursting out against
+the millionaires; and he could not well go on denouncing as the slafe of
+gabidal a man who had behaved to him as Fulkerson had done, though
+Fulkerson's servile relations to capital had been in nowise changed by
+his nople gonduct.
+
+Their relations continued to wear this irksome character of mutual
+forbearance; and when Dryfoos returned in October and Fulkerson revived
+the question of that dinner in celebration of the success of 'Every Other
+Week,' he carried his complaisance to an extreme that alarmed March for
+the consequences.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+"You see," Fulkerson explained, "I find that the old man has got an idea
+of his own about that banquet, and I guess there's some sense in it.  He
+wants to have a preliminary little dinner, where we can talk the thing up
+first-half a dozen of us; and he wants to give us the dinner at his
+house.  Well, that's no harm.  I don't believe the old man ever gave a
+dinner, and he'd like to show off a little; there's a good deal of human
+nature in the old man, after all.  He thought of you, of course, and
+Colonel Woodburn, and Beaton, and me at the foot of the table; and
+Conrad; and I suggested Kendricks: he's such a nice little chap; and the
+old man himself brought up the idea of Lindau.  He said you told him
+something about him, and he asked why couldn't we have him, too; and I
+jumped at it."
+
+"Have Lindau to dinner?"  asked March.
+
+"Certainly; why not?  Father Dryfoos has a notion of paying the old
+fellow a compliment for what he done for the country.  There won't be any
+trouble about it.  You can sit alongside of him, and cut up his meat for
+him, and help him to things--"
+
+"Yes, but it won't do, Fulkerson!  I don't believe Lindau ever had on a
+dress-coat in his life, and I don't believe his 'brincibles' would let
+him wear one."
+
+"Well, neither had Dryfoos, for the matter of that.  He's as high-
+principled as old Pan-Electric himself, when it comes to a dress-coat,"
+said Fulkerson.  "We're all going to go in business dress; the old man
+stipulated for that.
+
+"It isn't the dress-coat alone," March resumed.  "Lindau and Dryfoos
+wouldn't get on.  You know they're opposite poles in everything.  You
+mustn't do it.  Dryfoos will be sure to say something to outrage Lindau's
+'brincibles,' and there'll be an explosion.  It's all well enough for
+Dryfoos to feel grateful to Lindau, and his wish to honor him does him
+credit; but to have Lindau to dinner isn't the way.  At the best, the old
+fellow would be very unhappy in such a house; he would have a bad
+conscience; and I should be sorry to have him feel that he'd been
+recreant to his 'brincibles'; they're about all he's got, and whatever we
+think of them, we're bound to respect his fidelity to them."  March
+warmed toward Lindau in taking this view of him.  "I should feel ashamed
+if I didn't protest against his being put in a false position.  After
+all, he's my old friend, and I shouldn't like to have him do himself
+injustice if he is a crank."
+
+"Of course," said Fulkerson, with some trouble in his face.
+"I appreciate your feeling.  But there ain't any danger," he added,
+buoyantly.  "Anyhow, you spoke too late, as the Irishman said to the
+chicken when he swallowed him in a fresh egg.  I've asked Lindau, and
+he's accepted with blayzure; that's what he says."
+
+March made no other comment than a shrug.
+
+"You'll see," Fulkerson continued, "it 'll go off all right.  I'll engage
+to make it, and I won't hold anybody else responsible."
+
+In the course of his married life March had learned not to censure the
+irretrievable; but this was just what his wife had not learned; and she
+poured out so much astonishment at what Fulkerson had done, and so much
+disapproval, that March began to palliate the situation a little.
+
+"After all, it isn't a question of life and death; and, if it were, I
+don't see how it's to be helped now."
+
+"Oh, it's not to be helped now.  But I am surprised at Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, Fulkerson has his moments of being merely human, too."
+
+Mrs. March would not deign a direct defence of her favorite.  "Well, I'm
+glad there are not to be ladies."
+
+"I don't know.  Dryfoos thought of having ladies, but it seems your
+infallible Fulkerson overruled him.  Their presence might have kept
+Lindau and our host in bounds."
+
+It had become part of the Marches' conjugal joke for him to pretend that
+she could allow nothing wrong in Fulkerson, and he now laughed with a
+mocking air of having expected it when she said: "Well, then, if Mr.
+Fulkerson says he will see that it all comes out right, I suppose you
+must trust his tact.  I wouldn't trust yours, Basil.  The first wrong
+step was taken when Mr. Lindau was asked to help on the magazine."
+
+"Well, it was your infallible Fulkerson that took the step, or at least
+suggested it.  I'm happy to say I had totally forgotten my early friend."
+
+Mrs. March was daunted and silenced for a moment.  Then she said: "Oh,
+pshaw!  You know well enough he did it to please you."
+
+"I'm very glad he didn't do it to please you, Isabel," said her husband,
+with affected seriousness.  "Though perhaps he did."
+
+He began to look at the humorous aspect of the affair, which it certainly
+had, and to comment on the singular incongruities which 'Every Other
+Week' was destined to involve at every moment of its career.
+"I wonder if I'm mistaken in supposing that no other periodical was ever
+like it.  Perhaps all periodicals are like it.  But I don't believe
+there's another publication in New York that could bring together, in
+honor of itself, a fraternity and equality crank like poor old Lindau,
+and a belated sociological crank like Woodburn, and a truculent
+speculator like old Dryfoos, and a humanitarian dreamer like young
+Dryfoos, and a sentimentalist like me, and a nondescript like Beaton,
+and a pure advertising essence like Fulkerson, and a society spirit like
+Kendricks.  If we could only allow one another to talk uninterruptedly
+all the time, the dinner would be the greatest success in the world,
+and we should come home full of the highest mutual respect.  But I
+suspect we can't manage that--even your infallible Fulkerson couldn't
+work it--and I'm afraid that there'll be some listening that 'll spoil
+the pleasure of the time."
+
+March was so well pleased with this view of the case that he suggested
+the idea involved to Fulkerson.  Fulkerson was too good a fellow not to
+laugh at another man's joke, but he laughed a little ruefully, and he
+seemed worn with more than one kind of care in the interval that passed
+between the present time and the night of the dinner.
+
+Dryfoos necessarily depended upon him for advice concerning the scope and
+nature of the dinner, but he received the advice suspiciously, and
+contested points of obvious propriety with pertinacious stupidity.
+Fulkerson said that when it came to the point he would rather have had
+the thing, as he called it, at Delmonico's or some other restaurant; but
+when he found that Dryfoos's pride was bound up in having it at his own
+house, he gave way to him.  Dryfoos also wanted his woman-cook to prepare
+the dinner, but Fulkerson persuaded him that this would not do; he must
+have it from a caterer.  Then Dryfoos wanted his maids to wait at table,
+but Fulkerson convinced him that this would be incongruous at a man's
+dinner.  It was decided that the dinner should be sent in from
+Frescobaldi's, and Dryfoos went with Fulkerson to discuss it with the
+caterer.  He insisted upon having everything explained to him, and the
+reason for having it, and not something else in its place; and he treated
+Fulkerson and Frescobaldi as if they were in league to impose upon him.
+There were moments when Fulkerson saw the varnish of professional
+politeness cracking on the Neapolitan's volcanic surface, and caught a
+glimpse of the lava fires of the cook's nature beneath; he trembled for
+Dryfoos, who was walking rough-shod over him in the security of an
+American who had known how to make his money, and must know how to spend
+it; but he got him safely away at last, and gave Frescobaldi a wink of
+sympathy for his shrug of exhaustion as they turned to leave him.
+
+It was at first a relief and then an anxiety with Fulkerson that Lindau
+did not come about after accepting the invitation to dinner, until he
+appeared at Dryfoos's house, prompt to the hour.  There was, to be sure,
+nothing to bring him; but Fulkerson was uneasily aware that Dryfoos
+expected to meet him at the office, and perhaps receive some verbal
+acknowledgment of the honor done him.  Dryfoos, he could see, thought he
+was doing all his invited guests a favor; and while he stood in a certain
+awe of them as people of much greater social experience than himself,
+regarded them with a kind of contempt, as people who were going to have a
+better dinner at his house than they could ever afford to have at their
+own.  He had finally not spared expense upon it; after pushing
+Frescobaldi to the point of eruption with his misgivings and suspicions
+at the first interview, he had gone to him a second time alone, and told
+him not to let the money stand between him and anything he would like to
+do.  In the absence of Frescobaldi's fellow-conspirator he restored
+himself in the caterer's esteem by adding whatever he suggested; and
+Fulkerson, after trembling for the old man's niggardliness, was now
+afraid of a fantastic profusion in the feast.  Dryfoos had reduced the
+scale of the banquet as regarded the number of guests, but a confusing
+remembrance of what Fulkerson had wished to do remained with him in part,
+and up to the day of the dinner he dropped in at Frescobaldi's and
+ordered more dishes and more of them.  He impressed the Italian as an
+American original of a novel kind; and when he asked Fulkerson how
+Dryfoos had made his money, and learned that it was primarily in natural
+gas, he made note of some of his eccentric tastes as peculiarities that
+were to be caressed in any future natural-gas millionaire who might fall
+into his hands.  He did not begrudge the time he had to give in
+explaining to Dryfoos the relation of the different wines to the
+different dishes; Dryfoos was apt to substitute a costlier wine where he
+could for a cheaper one, and he gave Frescobaldi carte blanche for the
+decoration of the table with pieces of artistic confectionery.  Among
+these the caterer designed one for a surprise to his patron and a
+delicate recognition of the source of his wealth, which he found Dryfoos
+very willing to talk about, when he intimated that he knew what it was.
+
+Dryfoos left it to Fulkerson to invite the guests, and he found ready
+acceptance of his politeness from Kendricks, who rightly regarded the
+dinner as a part of the 'Every Other Week' business, and was too sweet
+and kind-hearted, anyway, not to seem very glad to come.  March was a
+matter of course; but in Colonel Woodburn, Fulkerson encountered a
+reluctance which embarrassed him the more because he was conscious of
+having, for motives of his own, rather strained a point in suggesting the
+colonel to Dryfoos as a fit subject for invitation.  There had been only
+one of the colonel's articles printed as yet, and though it had made a
+sensation in its way, and started the talk about that number, still it
+did not fairly constitute him a member of the staff, or even entitle him
+to recognition as a regular contributor.  Fulkerson felt so sure of
+pleasing him with Dryfoos's message that he delivered it in full family
+council at the widow's.  His daughter received it with all the enthusiasm
+that Fulkerson had hoped for, but the colonel said, stiffly, "I have not
+the pleasure of knowing Mr. Dryfoos."  Miss Woodburn appeared ready to
+fall upon him at this, but controlled herself, as if aware that filial
+authority had its limits, and pressed her lips together without saying
+anything.
+
+"Yes, I know," Fulkerson admitted.  "But it isn't a usual case.  Mr.
+Dryfoos don't go in much for the conventionalities; I reckon he don't
+know much about 'em, come to boil it down; and he hoped"--here Fulkerson
+felt the necessity of inventing a little--"that you would excuse any want
+of ceremony; it's to be such an informal affair, anyway; we're all going
+in business dress, and there ain't going to be any ladies.  He'd have
+come himself to ask you, but he's a kind of a bashful old fellow.  It's
+all right, Colonel Woodburn."
+
+"I take it that it is, sir," said the colonel, courteously, but with
+unabated state, "coming from you.  But in these matters we have no right
+to burden our friends with our decisions."
+
+"Of course, of course," said Fulkerson, feeling that he had been
+delicately told to mind his own business.
+
+"I understand," the colonel went on, "the relation that Mr. Dryfoos bears
+to the periodical in which you have done me the honor to print my papah,
+but this is a question of passing the bounds of a purely business
+connection, and of eating the salt of a man whom you do not definitely
+know to be a gentleman."
+
+"Mah goodness!" his daughter broke in.  "If you bah your own salt with
+his money--"
+
+"It is supposed that I earn his money before I buy my salt with it,"
+returned her father, severely.  "And in these times, when money is got in
+heaps, through the natural decay of our nefarious commercialism, it
+behooves a gentleman to be scrupulous that the hospitality offered him is
+not the profusion of a thief with his booty.  I don't say that Mr.
+Dryfoos's good-fortune is not honest.  I simply say that I know nothing
+about it, and that I should prefer to know something before I sat down at
+his board."
+
+"You're all right, colonel," said Fulkerson, "and so is Mr. Dryfoos.
+I give you my word that there are no flies on his personal integrity,
+if that's what you mean.  He's hard, and he'd push an advantage, but I
+don't believe he would take an unfair one.  He's speculated and made
+money every time, but I never heard of his wrecking a railroad or
+belonging to any swindling company or any grinding monopoly.  He does
+chance it in stocks, but he's always played on the square, if you call
+stocks gambling."
+
+"May I, think this over till morning?"  asked the colonel.
+
+"Oh, certainly, certainly," said Fulkerson, eagerly.  "I don't know as
+there's any hurry."
+
+Miss Woodburn found a chance to murmur to him before he went: "He'll
+come.  And Ah'm so much oblahged, Mr. Fulkerson.  Ah jost know it's all
+you' doing, and it will give papa a chance to toak to some new people,
+and get away from us evahlastin' women for once."
+
+"I don't see why any one should want to do that," said Fulkerson, with
+grateful gallantry.  "But I'll be dogged," he said to March when he told
+him about this odd experience, "if I ever expected to find Colonel
+Woodburn on old Lindau's ground.  He did come round handsomely this
+morning at breakfast and apologized for taking time to think the
+invitation over before he accepted.  'You understand,' he says, 'that if
+it had been to the table of some friend not so prosperous as Mr. Dryfoos
+--your friend Mr. March, for instance--it would have been sufficient to
+know that he was your friend.  But in these days it is a duty that a
+gentleman owes himself to consider whether he wishes to know a rich man
+or not.  The chances of making money disreputably are so great that the
+chances are against a man who has made money if he's made a great deal of
+it.'"
+
+March listened with a face of ironical insinuation.  "That was very good;
+and he seems to have had a good deal of confidence in your patience and
+in your sense of his importance to the occasion--"
+
+"No, no," Fulkerson protested, "there's none of that kind of thing about
+the colonel.  I told him to take time to think it over; he's the
+simplest-hearted old fellow in the world."
+
+"I should say so.  After all, he didn't give any reason he had for
+accepting.  But perhaps the young lady had the reason."
+
+"Pshaw, March!" said Fulkerson.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+So far as the Dryfoos family was concerned, the dinner might as well have
+been given at Frescobaldi's rooms.  None of the ladies appeared.  Mrs.
+Dryfoos was glad to escape to her own chamber, where she sat before an
+autumnal fire, shaking her head and talking to herself at times, with the
+foreboding of evil which old women like her make part of their religion.
+The girls stood just out of sight at the head of the stairs, and disputed
+which guest it was at each arrival; Mrs. Mandel had gone to her room to
+write letters, after beseeching them not to stand there.  When Kendricks
+came, Christine gave Mela a little pinch, equivalent to a little mocking
+shriek; for, on the ground of his long talk with Mela at Mrs. Horn's, in
+the absence of any other admirer, they based a superstition of his
+interest in her; when Beaton came, Mela returned the pinch, but
+awkwardly, so that it hurt, and then Christine involuntarily struck her.
+
+Frescobaldi's men were in possession everywhere they had turned the cook
+out of her kitchen and the waitress out of her pantry; the reluctant
+Irishman at the door was supplemented by a vivid Italian, who spoke
+French with the guests, and said, "Bien, Monsieur," and "toute suite,"
+and "Merci!" to all, as he took their hats and coats, and effused a
+hospitality that needed no language but the gleam of his eyes and teeth
+and the play of his eloquent hands.  From his professional dress-coat,
+lustrous with the grease spotted on it at former dinners and parties,
+they passed to the frocks of the elder and younger Dryfoos in the
+drawing-room, which assumed informality for the affair, but did not put
+their wearers wholly at their ease.  The father's coat was of black
+broadcloth, and he wore it unbuttoned; the skirts were long, and the
+sleeves came down to his knuckles; he shook hands with his guests, and
+the same dryness seemed to be in his palm and throat, as he huskily asked
+each to take a chair.  Conrad's coat was of modern texture and cut, and
+was buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience within its
+lapels; he met March with his entreating smile, and he seemed no more
+capable of coping with the situation than his father.  They both waited
+for Fulkerson, who went about and did his best to keep life in the party
+during the half-hour that passed before they sat down at dinner.  Beaton
+stood gloomily aloof, as if waiting to be approached on the right basis
+before yielding an inch of his ground; Colonel Woodburn, awaiting the
+moment when he could sally out on his hobby, kept himself intrenched
+within the dignity of a gentleman, and examined askance the figure of old
+Lindau as he stared about the room, with his fine head up, and his empty
+sleeve dangling over his wrist. March felt obliged to him for wearing a
+new coat in the midst of that hostile luxury, and he was glad to see
+Dryfoos make up to him and begin to talk with him, as if he wished to
+show him particular respect, though it might have been because he was
+less afraid of him than of the others.  He heard Lindau saying, "Boat,
+the name is Choarman?" and Dryfoos beginning to explain his Pennsylvania
+Dutch origin, and he suffered himself, with a sigh of relief, to fall
+into talk with Kendricks, who was always pleasant; he was willing to talk
+about something besides himself, and had no opinions that he was not
+ready to hold in abeyance for the time being out of kindness to others.
+In that group of impassioned individualities, March felt him a refuge and
+comfort--with his harmless dilettante intention of some day writing a
+novel, and his belief that he was meantime collecting material for it.
+
+Fulkerson, while breaking the ice for the whole company, was mainly
+engaged in keeping Colonel Woodburn thawed out.  He took Kendricks away
+from March and presented him to the colonel as a person who, like
+himself, was looking into social conditions; he put one hand on
+Kendricks's shoulder, and one on the colonel's, and made some flattering
+joke, apparently at the expense of the young fellow, and then left them.
+March heard Kendricks protest in vain, and the colonel say, gravely:
+"I do not wonder, sir, that these things interest you.  They constitute a
+problem which society must solve or which will dissolve society," and he
+knew from that formula, which the colonel had, once used with him, that
+he was laying out a road for the exhibition of the hobby's paces later.
+
+Fulkerson came back to March, who had turned toward Conrad Dryfoos, and
+said, "If we don't get this thing going pretty soon, it 'll be the death
+of me," and just then Frescobaldi's butler came in and announced to
+Dryfoos that dinner was served.  The old man looked toward Fulkerson with
+a troubled glance, as if he did not know what to do; he made a gesture to
+touch Lindau's elbow.  Fulkerson called out, "Here's Colonel Woodburn,
+Mr. Dryfoos," as if Dryfoos were looking for him; and he set the example
+of what he was to do by taking Lindau's arm himself.  "Mr. Lindau is
+going to sit at my end of the table, alongside of March.  Stand not upon
+the order of your going, gentlemen, but fall in at once."  He contrived
+to get Dryfoos and the colonel before him, and he let March follow with
+Kendricks.  Conrad came last with Beaton, who had been turning over the
+music at the piano, and chafing inwardly at the whole affair.  At the
+table Colonel Woodburn was placed on Dryfoos's right, and March on his
+left.  March sat on Fulkerson's right, with Lindau next him; and the
+young men occupied the other seats.
+
+"Put you next to March, Mr. Lindau," said Fulkerson, "so you can begin to
+put Apollinaris in his champagne-glass at the right moment; you know his
+little weakness of old; sorry to say it's grown on him."
+
+March laughed with kindly acquiescence in Fulkerson's wish to start the
+gayety, and Lindau patted him on the shoulder.  "I know hiss veakness.
+If he liges a class of vine, it iss begause his loaf ingludes efen hiss
+enemy, as Shakespeare galled it."
+
+"Ah, but Shakespeare couldn't have been thinking of champagne," said
+Kendricks.
+
+"I suppose, sir," Colonel Woodburn interposed, with lofty courtesy,
+"champagne could hardly have been known in his day."
+
+"I suppose not, colonel," returned the younger man, deferentially.
+"He seemed to think that sack and sugar might be a fault; but he didn't
+mention champagne."
+
+"Perhaps he felt there was no question about that," suggested Beaton, who
+then felt that he had not done himself justice in the sally.
+
+"I wonder just when champagne did come in," said March.
+
+"I know when it ought to come in," said Fulkerson.  "Before the soup!"
+
+They all laughed, and gave themselves the air of drinking champagne out
+of tumblers every day, as men like to do.  Dryfoos listened uneasily; he
+did not quite understand the allusions, though he knew what Shakespeare
+was, well enough; Conrad's face expressed a gentle deprecation of joking
+on such a subject, but he said nothing.
+
+The talk ran on briskly through the dinner.  The young men tossed the
+ball back and forth; they made some wild shots, but they kept it going,
+and they laughed when they were hit.  The wine loosed Colonel Woodburn's
+tongue; he became very companionable with the young fellows; with the
+feeling that a literary dinner ought to have a didactic scope, he praised
+Scott and Addison as the only authors fit to form the minds of gentlemen.
+
+Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the name of Flaubert as a
+master of style.  "Style, you know," he added, "is the man."
+
+"Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir," the colonel assented; he
+wondered who Flaubert was.
+
+Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he said these were the masters.
+He recited some lurid verses from Baudelaire; Lindau pronounced them a
+disgrace to human nature, and gave a passage from Victor Hugo on Louis
+Napoleon, with his heavy German accent, and then he quoted Schiller.
+"Ach, boat that is a peaudifool! Not zo?"  he demanded of March.
+
+"Yes, beautiful; but, of course, you know I think there's nobody like
+Heine!"
+
+Lindau threw back his great old head and laughed, showing a want of teeth
+under his mustache.  He put his hand on March's back.  "This poy--he was
+a poy den--wars so gracy to pekin reading Heine that he gommence with the
+tictionary bevore he knows any Grammar, and ve bick it out vort by vort
+togeder."
+
+"He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh, Lindau ?"  asked
+Fulkerson, burlesquing the old man's accent, with an impudent wink that
+made Lindau himself laugh.  "But in the dark ages, I mean, there in
+Indianapolis.  Just how long ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?"
+Fulkerson saw the restiveness in Dryfoos's eye at the purely literary
+course the talk had taken; he had intended it to lead up that way to
+business, to 'Every Other Week;' but he saw that it was leaving Dryfoos
+too far out, and he wished to get it on the personal ground, where
+everybody is at home.
+
+"Ledt me zee," mused Lindau.  "Wass it in fifty-nine or zixty, Passil?
+Idt wass a year or dwo pefore the war proke oudt, anyway."
+
+"Those were exciting times," said Dryfoos, making his first entry into
+the general talk.  "I went down to Indianapolis with the first company
+from our place, and I saw the red-shirts pouring in everywhere.  They had
+a song,
+
+    "Oh, never mind the weather, but git over double trouble,
+     For we're bound for the land of Canaan."
+
+The fellows locked arms and went singin' it up and down four or five
+abreast in the moonlight; crowded everybody' else off the sidewalk."
+
+"I remember, I remember," said Lindau, nodding his head slowly up and
+down.  "A coodt many off them nefer gome pack from that landt of Ganaan,
+Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"You're right, Mr. Lindau.  But I reckon it was worth it--the country
+we've got now.  Here, young man!"  He caught the arm of the waiter who was
+going round with the champagne bottle.  "Fill up Mr. Lindau's glass,
+there.  I want to drink the health of those old times with him.  Here's
+to your empty sleeve, Mr. Lindau.  God bless it!  No offence to you,
+Colonel Woodburn," said Dryfoos, turning to him before he drank.
+
+"Not at all, sir, not at all," said the colonel.  "I will drink with you,
+if you will permit me."
+
+"We'll all drink--standing!" cried Fulkerson.  "Help March to get up,
+somebody! Fill high the bowl with Samian Apollinaris for Coonrod!  Now,
+then, hurrah for Lindau!"
+
+They cheered, and hammered on the table with the butts of their knife-
+handles.  Lindau remained seated.  The tears came into his eyes; he said,
+"I thank you, chendlemen," and hiccoughed.
+
+"I'd 'a' went into the war myself," said Dryfoos, "but I was raisin'
+a family of young children, and I didn't see how I could leave my farm.
+But I helped to fill up the quota at every call, and when the
+volunteering stopped I went round with the subscription paper myself;
+and we offered as good bounties as any in the State.  My substitute was
+killed in one of the last skirmishes--in fact, after Lee's surrender--
+and I've took care of his family, more or less, ever since."
+
+"By-the-way, March," said Fulkerson, "what sort of an idea would it be to
+have a good war story--might be a serial--in the magazine?  The war has
+never fully panned out in fiction yet.  It was used a good deal just
+after it was over, and then it was dropped.  I think it's time to take it
+up again.  I believe it would be a card."
+
+It was running in March's mind that Dryfoos had an old rankling shame in
+his heart for not having gone into the war, and that he had often made
+that explanation of his course without having ever been satisfied with
+it.  He felt sorry for him; the fact seemed pathetic; it suggested a
+dormant nobleness in the man.
+
+Beaton was saying to Fulkerson: "You might get a series of sketches by
+substitutes; the substitutes haven't been much heard from in the war
+literature.  How would 'The Autobiography of a Substitute' do?  You might
+follow him up to the moment he was killed in the other man's place, and
+inquire whether he had any right to the feelings of a hero when he was
+only hired in the place of one.  Might call it 'The Career of a Deputy
+Hero.'"
+
+"I fancy," said March, "that there was a great deal of mixed motive in
+the men who went into the war as well as in those who kept out of it.
+We canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have
+been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocations."  He found
+himself saying this in Dryfoos's behalf; the old man looked at him
+gratefully at first, he thought, and then suspiciously.
+
+Lindau turned his head toward him and said: "You are righdt, Passil; you
+are righdt.  I haf zeen on the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions
+of human paseness--chelousy, fanity, ecodistic bridte.  I haf zeen men in
+the face off death itself gofferned by motifes as low as--as pusiness
+motifes."
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, "it would be a grand thing for 'Every Other Week'
+if we could get some of those ideas worked up into a series.  It would
+make a lot of talk."
+
+Colonel Woodburn ignored him in saying, "I think, Major Lindau--"
+
+"High brifate; prefet gorporal," the old man interrupted, in rejection of
+the title.
+
+Hendricks laughed and said, with a glance of appreciation at Lindau,
+"Brevet corporal is good."
+
+Colonel Woodburn frowned a little, and passed over the joke.  "I think
+Mr. Lindau is right.  Such exhibitions were common to both sides, though
+if you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so, I think they were less
+frequent on ours.  We were fighting more immediately for existence.
+We were fewer than you were, and we knew it; we felt more intensely that
+if each were not for all, then none was for any."
+
+The colonel's words made their impression.  Dryfoos said, with authority,
+"That is so."
+
+"Colonel Woodburn," Fulkerson called out, "if you'll work up those ideas
+into a short paper--say, three thousand words--I'll engage to make March
+take it."
+
+The colonel went on without replying: "But Mr. Lindau is right in
+characterizing some of the motives that led men to the cannon's mouth as
+no higher than business motives, and his comparison is the most forcible
+that he could have used.  I was very much struck by it."
+
+The hobby was out, the colonel was in the saddle with so firm a seat that
+no effort sufficed to dislodge him.  The dinner went on from course to
+course with barbaric profusion, and from time to time Fulkerson tried to
+bring the talk back to 'Every Other Week.'  But perhaps because that was
+only the ostensible and not the real object of the dinner, which was to
+bring a number of men together under Dryfoos's roof, and make them the
+witnesses of his splendor, make them feel the power of his wealth,
+Fulkerson's attempts failed.  The colonel showed how commercialism was
+the poison at the heart of our national life; how we began as a simple,
+agricultural people, who had fled to these shores with the instinct,
+divinely implanted, of building a state such as the sun never shone upon
+before; how we had conquered the wilderness and the savage; how we had
+flung off, in our struggle with the mother-country, the trammels of
+tradition and precedent, and had settled down, a free nation, to the
+practice of the arts of peace; how the spirit of commercialism had stolen
+insidiously upon us, and the infernal impulse of competition had
+embroiled us in a perpetual warfare of interests, developing the worst
+passions of our nature, and teaching us to trick and betray and destroy
+one another in the strife for money, till now that impulse had exhausted
+itself, and we found competition gone and the whole economic problem in
+the hands of monopolies--the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the
+Rubber Trust, and what not.  And now what was the next thing?  Affairs
+could not remain as they were; it was impossible; and what was the next
+thing?
+
+The company listened for the main part silently.  Dryfoos tried to grasp
+the idea of commercialism as the colonel seemed to hold it; he conceived
+of it as something like the dry-goods business on a vast scale, and he
+knew he had never been in that.  He did not like to hear competition
+called infernal; he had always supposed it was something sacred; but he
+approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the Standard Oil Company; it
+was all true; the Standard Oil has squeezed Dryfoos once, and made him
+sell it a lot of oil-wells by putting down the price of oil so low in
+that region that he lost money on every barrel he pumped.
+
+All the rest listened silently, except Lindau; at every point the colonel
+made against the present condition of things he said more and more
+fiercely, "You are righdt, you are righdt."  His eyes glowed, his hand
+played with his knife-hilt.  When the colonel demanded, "And what is the
+next thing?"  he threw himself forward, and repeated: "Yes, sir!  What is
+the next thing?"
+
+"Natural gas, by thunder!" shouted Fulkerson.
+
+One of the waiters had profited by Lindau's posture to lean over him and
+put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar.  It
+expressed Frescobaldi's conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature
+had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a
+small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in
+combustion as it issued from the ground.  Fulkerson burst into a roar of
+laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi's personal tribute to
+Dryfoos.  Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained
+the work of sinking a gas-well, as he had already explained it to
+Frescobaldi.  In the midst of his lecture he caught sight of the caterer
+himself, where he stood in the pantry doorway, smiling with an artist's
+anxiety for the effect of his masterpiece.
+
+"Come in, come in, Frescobaldi!  We want to congratulate you," Fulkerson
+called to him.  "Here, gentlemen! Here's Frescobaldi's health."
+
+They all drank; and Frescobaldi, smiling brilliantly and rubbing his
+hands as he bowed right and left, permitted himself to say to Dryfoos:
+"You are please; no?  You like?"
+
+"First-rate, first-rate!" said the old man; but when the Italian had
+bowed himself out and his guests had sunk into their seats again, he said
+dryly to Fulkerson, "I reckon they didn't have to torpedo that well, or
+the derrick wouldn't look quite so nice and clean."
+
+"Yes," Fulkerson answered, "and that ain't quite the style--that little
+wiggly-waggly blue flame--that the gas acts when you touch off a good
+vein of it.  This might do for weak gas"; and he went on to explain:
+
+"They call it weak gas when they tap it two or three hundred feet down;
+and anybody can sink a well in his back yard and get enough gas to light
+and heat his house.  I remember one fellow that had it blazing up from a
+pipe through a flower-bed, just like a jet of water from a fountain.
+My, my, my! You fel--you gentlemen--ought to go out and see that
+country, all of you.  Wish we could torpedo this well, Mr. Dryfoos, and
+let 'em see how it works!  Mind that one you torpedoed for me?  You know,
+when they sink a well," he went on to the company, "they can't always
+most generally sometimes tell whether they're goin' to get gas or oil or
+salt water.  Why, when they first began to bore for salt water out on the
+Kanawha, back about the beginning of the century, they used to get gas
+now and then, and then they considered it a failure; they called a gas-
+well a blower, and give it up in disgust; the time wasn't ripe for gas
+yet.  Now they bore away sometimes till they get half-way to China, and
+don't seem to strike anything worth speaking of.  Then they put a
+dynamite torpedo down in the well and explode it.  They have a little bar
+of iron that they call a Go-devil, and they just drop it down on the
+business end of the torpedo, and then stand from under, if you please!
+You hear a noise, and in about half a minute you begin to see one, and it
+begins to rain oil and mud and salt water and rocks and pitchforks and
+adoptive citizens; and when it clears up the derrick's painted--got a
+coat on that 'll wear in any climate.  That's what our honored host
+meant.  Generally get some visiting lady, when there's one round, to drop
+the Go-devil.  But that day we had to put up with Conrad here.  They
+offered to let me drop it, but I declined.  I told 'em I hadn't much
+practice with Go-devils in the newspaper syndicate business, and I wasn't
+very well myself, anyway.  Astonishing," Fulkerson continued, with the
+air of relieving his explanation by an anecdote, "how reckless they get
+using dynamite when they're torpedoing wells.  We stopped at one place
+where a fellow was handling the cartridges pretty freely, and Mr. Dryfoos
+happened to caution him a little, and that ass came up with one of 'em in
+his hand, and began to pound it on the buggy-wheel to show us how safe it
+was.  I turned green, I was so scared; but Mr. Dryfoos kept his color,
+and kind of coaxed the fellow till he quit.  You could see he was the
+fool kind, that if you tried to stop him he'd keep on hammering that
+cartridge, just to show that it wouldn't explode, till he blew you into
+Kingdom Come.  When we got him to go away, Mr. Dryfoos drove up to his
+foreman.  'Pay Sheney off, and discharge him on the spot,' says he.
+'He's too safe a man to have round; he knows too much about dynamite.'
+I never saw anybody so cool."
+
+Dryfoos modestly dropped his head under Fulkerson's flattery and, without
+lifting it, turned his eyes toward Colonel Woodburn.  "I had all sorts of
+men to deal with in developing my property out there, but I had very
+little trouble with them, generally speaking."
+
+"Ah, ah! you foundt the laboring-man reasonable--dractable--tocile?"
+Lindau put in.
+
+"Yes, generally speaking," Dryfoos answered.  "They mostly knew which
+side of their bread was buttered.  I did have one little difficulty at
+one time.  It happened to be when Mr. Fulkerson was out there.  Some of
+the men tried to form a union--"
+
+"No, no!" cried Fulkerson.  "Let me tell that! I know you wouldn't do
+yourself justice, Mr. Dryfoos, and I want 'em to know how a strike can be
+managed, if you take it in time.  You see, some of those fellows got a
+notion that there ought to be a union among the working-men to keep up
+wages, and dictate to the employers, and Mr. Dryfoos's foreman was the
+ringleader in the business.  They understood pretty well that as soon as
+he found it out that foreman would walk the plank, and so they watched
+out till they thought they had Mr. Dryfoos just where they wanted him--
+everything on the keen jump, and every man worth his weight in diamonds
+--and then they came to him, and--told him to sign a promise to keep that
+foreman to the end of the season, or till he was through with the work on
+the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under penalty of having them all knock
+off.  Mr. Dryfoos smelled a mouse, but he couldn't tell where the mouse
+was; he saw that they did have him, and he signed, of course.  There
+wasn't anything really against the fellow, anyway; he was a first-rate
+man, and he did his duty every time; only he'd got some of those ideas
+into his head, and they turned it.  Mr. Dryfoos signed, and then he laid
+low."
+
+March saw Lindau listening with a mounting intensity, and heard him
+murmur in German, "Shameful! shameful!"
+
+Fulkerson went on: "Well, it wasn't long before they began to show their
+hand, but Mr. Dryfoos kept dark.  He agreed to everything; there never
+was such an obliging capitalist before; there wasn't a thing they asked
+of him that he didn't do, with the greatest of pleasure, and all went
+merry as a marriage-bell till one morning a whole gang of fresh men
+marched into the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under the escort of a dozen
+Pinkertons with repeating rifles at half-cock, and about fifty fellows
+found themselves out of a job.  You never saw such a mad set."
+
+"Pretty neat," said Kendricks, who looked at the affair purely from an
+aesthetic point of view.  "Such a coup as that would tell tremendously in
+a play."
+
+"That was vile treason," said Lindau in German to March.  "He's an
+infamous traitor! I cannot stay here.  I must go."
+
+He struggled to rise, while March held him by the coat, and implored him
+under his voice: "For Heaven's sake, don't, Lindau! You owe it to
+yourself not to make a scene, if you come here."  Something in it all
+affected him comically; he could not help laughing.
+
+The others were discussing the matter, and seemed not to have noticed
+Lindau, who controlled himself and sighed: "You are right.  I must have
+patience."
+
+Beaton was saying to Dryfoos, "Pity your Pinkertons couldn't have given
+them a few shots before they left."
+
+"No, that wasn't necessary," said Dryfoos.  "I succeeded in breaking up
+the union.  I entered into an agreement with other parties not to employ
+any man who would not swear that he was non-union.  If they had attempted
+violence, of course they could have been shot.  But there was no fear of
+that.  Those fellows can always be depended upon to cut one another's
+throats in the long run."
+
+"But sometimes," said Colonel Woodburn, who had been watching throughout.
+for a chance to mount his hobby again, "they make a good deal of trouble
+first.  How was it in the great railroad strike of '77?"
+
+"Well, I guess there was a little trouble that time, colonel," said
+Fulkerson.  "But the men that undertake to override the laws and paralyze
+the industries of a country like this generally get left in the end."
+
+"Yes, sir, generally; and up to a certain point, always.  But it's the
+exceptional that is apt to happen, as well as the unexpected.  And a
+little reflection will convince any gentleman here that there is always a
+danger of the exceptional in your system.  The fact is, those fellows
+have the game in their own hands already.  A strike of the whole body of
+the Brotherhood of Engineers alone would starve out the entire Atlantic
+seaboard in a week; labor insurrection could make head at a dozen given
+points, and your government couldn't move a man over the roads without
+the help of the engineers."
+
+"That is so," said Kendrick, struck by the dramatic character of the
+conjecture.  He imagined a fiction dealing with the situation as
+something already accomplished.
+
+"Why don't some fellow do the Battle of Dorking act with that thing?"
+said Fulkerson.  "It would be a card."
+
+"Exactly what I was thinking, Mr. Fulkerson," said Kendricks.
+
+Fulkerson laughed.  "Telepathy--clear case of mind transference.  Better
+see March, here, about it.  I'd like to have it in 'Every Other Week.'
+It would make talk."
+
+"Perhaps it might set your people to thinking as well as talking," said
+the colonel.
+
+"Well, sir," said Dryfoos, setting his lips so tightly together that his
+imperial stuck straight outward, "if I had my way, there wouldn't be any
+Brotherhood of Engineers, nor any other kind of labor union in the whole
+country."
+
+"What!" shouted Lindau.  "You would sobbress the unionss of the voarking-
+men?"
+
+"Yes, I would."
+
+"And what would you do with the unionss of the gabidalists--the drosts--
+and gompines, and boolss?  Would you dake the righdt from one and gif it
+to the odder?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I would," said Dryfoos, with a wicked look at him.
+
+Lindau was about to roar back at him with some furious protest, but March
+put his hand on his shoulder imploringly, and Lindau turned to him to say
+in German: "But it is infamous--infamous! What kind of man is this?  Who
+is he?  He has the heart of a tyrant."
+
+Colonel Woodburn cut in.  "You couldn't do that, Mr. Dryfoos, under your
+system.  And if you attempted it, with your conspiracy laws, and that
+kind of thing, it might bring the climax sooner than you expected.  Your
+commercialized society has built its house on the sands.  It will have to
+go.  But I should be sorry if it went before its time."
+
+"You are righdt, sir," said Lindau.  "It would be a bity.  I hobe it will
+last till it feelss its rottenness, like Herodt.  Boat, when its hour
+gomes, when it trope to bieces with the veight off its own gorrubtion--
+what then?"
+
+"It's not to be supposed that a system of things like this can drop to
+pieces of its own accord, like the old Republic of Venice," said the
+colonel.  "But when the last vestige of commercial society is gone, then
+we can begin to build anew; and we shall build upon the central idea, not
+of the false liberty you now worship, but of responsibility--
+responsibility.  The enlightened, the moneyed, the cultivated class shall
+be responsible to the central authority--emperor, duke, president; the
+name does not matter--for the national expense and the national defence,
+and it shall be responsible to the working-classes of all kinds for homes
+and lands and implements, and the opportunity to labor at all times.
+
+"The working-classes shall be responsible to the leisure class for the
+support of its dignity in peace, and shall be subject to its command in
+war.  The rich shall warrant the poor against planless production and the
+ruin that now follows, against danger from without and famine from
+within, and the poor--"
+
+"No, no, no!" shouted Lindau.  "The State shall do that--the whole
+beople.  The men who voark shall have and shall eat; and the men that
+will not voark, they shall sdarfe.  But no man need sdarfe.  He will go
+to the State, and the State will see that he haf voark, and that he haf
+foodt.  All the roadts and mills and mines and landts shall be the
+beople's and be ron by the beople for the beople.  There shall be no rich
+and no boor; and there shall not be war any more, for what bower wouldt
+dare to addack a beople bound togeder in a broderhood like that?"
+
+"Lion and lamb act," said Fulkerson, not well knowing, after so much
+champagne, what words he was using.
+
+No one noticed him, and Colonel Woodburn said coldly to Lindau, "You are
+talking paternalism, sir."
+
+"And you are dalking feutalism!" retorted the old man.
+
+The colonel did not reply.  A silence ensued, which no one broke till
+Fulkerson said: "Well, now, look here.  If either one of these
+millenniums was brought about, by force of arms, or otherwise, what would
+become of 'Every Other Week'?  Who would want March for an editor?  How
+would Beaton sell his pictures?  Who would print Mr. Kendricks's little
+society verses and short stories?  What would become of Conrad and his
+good works?"  Those named grinned in support of Fulkerson's diversion,
+but Lindau and the colonel did not speak; Dryfoos looked down at his
+plate, frowning.
+
+A waiter came round with cigars, and Fulkerson took one.  "Ah," he said,
+as he bit off the end, and leaned over to the emblematic masterpiece,
+where the brandy was still feebly flickering, "I wonder if there's enough
+natural gas left to light my cigar."  His effort put the flame out and
+knocked the derrick over; it broke in fragments on the table.  Fulkerson
+cackled over the ruin: "I wonder if all Moffitt will look that way after
+labor and capital have fought it out together.  I hope this ain't ominous
+of anything personal, Dryfoos?"
+
+"I'll take the risk of it," said the old man, harshly.
+
+He rose mechanically, and Fulkerson said to Frescobaldi's man, "You can
+bring us the coffee in the library."
+
+The talk did not recover itself there.  Landau would not sit down; he
+refused coffee, and dismissed himself with a haughty bow to the company;
+Colonel Woodburn shook hands elaborately all round, when he had smoked
+his cigar; the others followed him.  It seemed to March that his own
+good-night from Dryfoos was dry and cold.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+March met Fulkerson on the steps of the office next morning, when he
+arrived rather later than his wont.  Fulkerson did not show any of the
+signs of suffering from the last night's pleasure which painted
+themselves in March's face.  He flirted his hand gayly in the air,
+and said, "How's your poor head?"  and broke into a knowing laugh.
+"You don't seem to have got up with the lark this morning.  The old
+gentleman is in there with Conrad, as bright as a biscuit; he's beat you
+down.  Well, we did have a good time, didn't we?  And old Lindau and the
+colonel, didn't they have a good time?  I don't suppose they ever had a
+chance before to give their theories quite so much air.  Oh, my! how they
+did ride over us!  I'm just going down to see Beaton about the cover of
+the Christmas number.  I think we ought to try it in three or four
+colors, if we are going to observe the day at all."  He was off before
+March could pull himself together to ask what Dryfoos wanted at the
+office at that hour of the morning; he always came in the afternoon on
+his way up-town.
+
+The fact of his presence renewed the sinister misgivings with which March
+had parted from him the night before, but Fulkerson's cheerfulness seemed
+to gainsay them; afterward March did not know whether to attribute this
+mood to the slipperiness that he was aware of at times in Fulkerson, or
+to a cynical amusement he might have felt at leaving him alone to the old
+man, who mounted to his room shortly after March had reached it.
+
+A sort of dumb anger showed itself in his face; his jaw was set so firmly
+that he did not seem able at once to open it.  He asked, without the
+ceremonies of greeting, "What does that one-armed Dutchman do on this
+book?"
+
+"What does he do?"  March echoed, as people are apt to do with a question
+that is mandatory and offensive.
+
+"Yes, sir, what does he do?  Does he write for it?"
+
+"I suppose you mean Lindau," said March.  He saw no reason for refusing
+to answer Dryfoos's demand, and he decided to ignore its terms.  "No,
+he doesn't write for it in the usual way.  He translates for it;
+he examines the foreign magazines, and draws my attention to anything he
+thinks of interest.  But I told you about this before--"
+
+"I know what you told me, well enough.  And I know what he is.  He is a
+red-mouthed labor agitator.  He's one of those foreigners that come here
+from places where they've never had a decent meal's victuals in their
+lives, and as soon as they get their stomachs full, they begin to make
+trouble between our people and their hands.  There's where the strikes
+come from, and the unions and the secret societies.  They come here and
+break our Sabbath, and teach their atheism.  They ought to be hung!
+Let 'em go back if they don't like it over here.  They want to ruin the
+country."
+
+March could not help smiling a little at the words, which came fast
+enough now in the hoarse staccato of Dryfoos's passion.  "I don't know
+whom you mean by they, generally speaking; but I had the impression that
+poor old Lindau had once done his best to save the country.  I don't
+always like his way of talking, but I know that he is one of the truest
+and kindest souls in the world; and he is no more an atheist than I am.
+He is my friend, and I can't allow him to be misunderstood."
+
+"I don't care what he is," Dryfoos broke out, "I won't have him round.
+He can't have any more work from this office.  I want you to stop it.
+I want you to turn him off."
+
+March was standing at his desk, as he had risen to receive Dryfoos when
+he entered.  He now sat down, and began to open his letters.
+
+"Do you hear?"  the old man roared at him.  "I want you to turn him off."
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Dryfoos," said March, succeeding in an effort to speak
+calmly, "I don't know you, in such a matter as this.  My arrangements as
+editor of 'Every Other Week' were made with Mr. Fulkerson.  I have always
+listened to any suggestion he has had to make."
+
+"I don't care for Mr. Fulkerson?  He has nothing to do with it," retorted
+Dryfoos; but he seemed a little daunted by March's position.
+
+"He has everything to do with it as far as I am concerned," March
+answered, with a steadiness that he did not feel.  "I know that you are
+the owner of the periodical, but I can't receive any suggestion from you,
+for the reason that I have given.  Nobody but Mr. Fulkerson has any right
+to talk with me about its management."
+
+Dryfoos glared at him for a moment, and demanded, threateningly: "Then
+you say you won't turn that old loafer off?  You say that I have got to
+keep on paying my money out to buy beer for a man that would cut my
+throat if he got the chance?"
+
+"I say nothing at all, Mr. Dryfoos," March answered.  The blood came into
+his face, and he added: "But I will say that if you speak again of Mr.
+Lindau in those terms, one of us must leave this room.  I will not hear
+you."
+
+Dryfoos looked at him with astonishment; then he struck his hat down on
+his head, and stamped out of the room and down the stairs; and a vague
+pity came into March's heart that was not altogether for himself.
+He might be the greater sufferer in the end, but he was sorry to have got
+the better of that old man for the moment; and he felt ashamed of the
+anger into which Dryfoos's anger had surprised him.  He knew he could not
+say too much in defence of Lindau's generosity and unselfishness, and he
+had not attempted to defend him as a political economist.  He could not
+have taken any ground in relation to Dryfoos but that which he held, and
+he felt satisfied that he was right in refusing to receive instructions
+or commands from him.  Yet somehow he was not satisfied with the whole
+affair, and not merely because his present triumph threatened his final
+advantage, but because he felt that in his heat he had hardly done
+justice to Dryfoos's rights in the matter; it did not quite console him
+to reflect that Dryfoos had himself made it impossible.  He was tempted
+to go home and tell his wife what had happened, and begin his
+preparations for the future at once.  But he resisted this weakness and
+kept mechanically about his work, opening the letters and the manuscripts
+before him with that curious double action of the mind common in men of
+vivid imaginations.  It was a relief when Conrad Dryfoos, having
+apparently waited to make sure that his father would not return, came up
+from the counting-room and looked in on March with a troubled face.
+
+"Mr. March," he began, "I hope father hasn't been saying anything to you
+that you can't overlook.  I know he was very much excited, and when he is
+excited he is apt to say things that he is sorry for."
+
+The apologetic attitude taken for Dryfoos, so different from any attitude
+the peremptory old man would have conceivably taken for himself, made
+March smile.  "Oh no.  I fancy the boot is on the other leg.  I suspect
+I've said some things your father can't overlook, Conrad."  He called the
+young man by his Christian name partly to distinguish him from his
+father, partly from the infection of Fulkerson's habit, and partly from a
+kindness for him that seemed naturally to express itself in that way.
+
+"I know he didn't sleep last night, after you all went away," Conrad
+pursued, "and of course that made him more irritable; and he was tried a
+good deal by some of the things that Mr. Lindau said."
+
+"I was tried a good deal myself," said March.  "Lindau ought never to
+have been there."
+
+"No."  Conrad seemed only partially to assent.
+
+"I told Mr. Fulkerson so.  I warned him that Lindau would be apt to break
+out in some way.  It wasn't just to him, and it wasn't just to your
+father, to ask him."
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson had a good motive," Conrad gently urged.  "He did it
+because he hurt his feelings that day about the pension."
+
+"Yes, but it was a mistake.  He knew that Lindau was inflexible about his
+principles, as he calls them, and that one of his first principles is to
+denounce the rich in season and out of season.  I don't remember just
+what he said last night; and I really thought I'd kept him from breaking
+out in the most offensive way.  But your father seems very much
+incensed."
+
+"Yes, I know," said Conrad.
+
+"Of course, I don't agree with Lindau.  I think there are as many good,
+kind, just people among the rich as there are among the poor, and that
+they are as generous and helpful.  But Lindau has got hold of one of
+those partial truths that hurt worse than the whole truth, and--"
+
+"Partial truth!" the young man interrupted.  "Didn't the Saviour himself
+say, 'How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of
+God?'"
+
+"Why, bless my soul!" cried March.  "Do you agree with Lindau?"
+
+"I agree with the Lord Jesus Christ," said the young man, solemnly, and a
+strange light of fanaticism, of exaltation, came into his wide blue eyes.
+"And I believe He meant the kingdom of heaven upon this earth, as well as
+in the skies."
+
+March threw himself back in his chair and looked at him with a kind of
+stupefaction, in which his eye wandered to the doorway, where he saw
+Fulkerson standing, it seemed to him a long time, before he heard him
+saying: "Hello, hello! What's the row?  Conrad pitching into you on old
+Lindau's account, too?"
+
+The young man turned, and, after a glance at Fulkerson's light, smiling
+face, went out, as if in his present mood he could not bear the contact
+of that persiflant spirit.
+
+March felt himself getting provisionally very angry again.  "Excuse me,
+Fulkerson, but did you know when you went out what Mr. Dryfoos wanted to
+see me for?"
+
+"Well, no, I didn't exactly," said Fulkerson, taking his usual seat on a
+chair and looking over the back of it at March.  "I saw he was on his car
+about something, and I thought I'd better not monkey with him much.
+I supposed he was going to bring you to book about old Lindau, somehow."
+Fulkerson broke into a laugh.
+
+March remained serious.  "Mr. Dryfoos," he said, willing to let the
+simple statement have its own weight with Fulkerson, and nothing more,
+"came in here and ordered me to discharge Lindau from his employment on
+the magazine--to turn him off, as he put it."
+
+"Did he?"  asked Fulkerson, with unbroken cheerfulness.  "The old man is
+business, every time.  Well, I suppose you can easily get somebody else
+to do Lindau's work for you.  This town is just running over with half-
+starved linguists.  What did you say?"
+
+"What did I say?"  March echoed.  "Look here, Fulkerson; you may regard
+this as a joke, but I don't.  I'm not used to being spoken to as if I
+were the foreman of a shop, and told to discharge a sensitive and
+cultivated man like Lindau, as if he were a drunken mechanic; and if
+that's your idea of me--"
+
+"Oh, hello, now, March! You mustn't mind the old man's way.  He don't
+mean anything by it--he don't know any better, if you come to that."
+
+"Then I know better," said March.  "I refused to receive any instructions
+from Mr. Dryfoos, whom I don't know in my relations with 'Every Other
+Week,' and I referred him to you."
+
+"You did?" Fulkerson whistled.  "He owns the thing!"
+
+"I don't care who owns the thing," said March.  "My negotiations were
+with you alone from the beginning, and I leave this matter with you.
+What do you wish done about Lindau?"
+
+"Oh, better let the old fool drop," said Fulkerson.  "He'll light on his
+feet somehow, and it will save a lot of rumpus."
+
+"And if I decline to let him drop?"
+
+"Oh, come, now, March; don't do that," Fulkerson began.
+
+"If I decline to let him drop," March repeated, "what will you do?"
+
+"I'll be dogged if I know what I'll do," said Fulkerson.  "I hope you
+won't take that stand.  If the old man went so far as to speak to you
+about it, his mind is made up, and we might as well knock under first as
+last."
+
+"And do you mean to say that you would not stand by me in what I
+considered my duty-in a matter of principle?"
+
+"Why, of course, March," said Fulkerson, coaxingly, "I mean to do the
+right thing.  But Dryfoos owns the magazine--"
+
+"He doesn't own me," said March, rising.  "He has made the little mistake
+of speaking to me as if he did; and when"--March put on his hat and took
+his overcoat down from its nail--"when you bring me his apologies, or
+come to say that, having failed to make him understand they were
+necessary, you are prepared to stand by me, I will come back to this
+desk.  Otherwise my resignation is at your service."
+
+He started toward the door, and Fulkerson intercepted him.  "Ah, now,
+look here, March!  Don't do that!  Hang it all, don't you see where it
+leaves me?  Now, you just sit down a minute and talk it over.  I can make
+you see--I can show you--Why, confound the old Dutch beer-buzzer!  Twenty
+of him wouldn't be worth the trouble he's makin'.  Let him go, and the
+old man 'll come round in time."
+
+"I don't think we've understood each other exactly, Mr. Fulkerson," said
+March, very haughtily.  "Perhaps we never can; but I'll leave you to
+think it out."
+
+He pushed on, and Fulkerson stood aside to let him pass, with a dazed
+look and a mechanical movement.  There was something comic in his rueful
+bewilderment to March, who was tempted to smile, but he said to himself
+that he had as much reason to be unhappy as Fulkerson, and he did not
+smile.  His indignation kept him hot in his purpose to suffer any
+consequence rather than submit to the dictation of a man like Dryfoos;
+he felt keenly the degradation of his connection with him, and all his
+resentment of Fulkerson's original uncandor returned; at the same time
+his heart ached with foreboding.  It was not merely the work in which he
+had constantly grown happier that he saw taken from him; but he felt the
+misery of the man who stakes the security and plenty and peace of home
+upon some cast, and knows that losing will sweep from him most that most
+men find sweet and pleasant in life.  He faced the fact, which no good
+man can front without terror, that he was risking the support of his
+family, and for a point of pride, of honor, which perhaps he had no right
+to consider in view of the possible adversity.  He realized, as every
+hireling must, no matter how skillfully or gracefully the tie is
+contrived for his wearing, that he belongs to another, whose will is his
+law.  His indignation was shot with abject impulses to go back and tell
+Fulkerson that it was all right, and that he gave up.  To end the anguish
+of his struggle he quickened his steps, so that he found he was reaching
+home almost at a run.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+He must have made more clatter than he supposed with his key at the
+apartment door, for his wife had come to let him in when he flung it
+open.  "Why, Basil," she said, "what's brought you back?  Are you sick?
+You're all pale.  Well, no wonder!  This is the last of Mr. Fulkerson's
+dinners you shall go to.  You're not strong enough for it, and your
+stomach will be all out of order for a week.  How hot you are! and in a
+drip of perspiration!  Now you'll be sick."  She took his hat away, which
+hung dangling in his hand, and pushed him into a chair with tender
+impatience.  "What is the matter?  Has anything happened?"
+
+"Everything has happened," he said, getting his voice after one or two
+husky endeavors for it; and then he poured out a confused and huddled
+statement of the case, from which she only got at the situation by
+prolonged cross-questioning.
+
+At the end she said, "I knew Lindau would get you into trouble."
+
+This cut March to the heart.  "Isabel!" he cried, reproachfully.
+
+"Oh, I know," she retorted, and the tears began to come.  "I don't wonder
+you didn't want to say much to me about that dinner at breakfast.
+I noticed it; but I thought you were just dull, and so I didn't insist.
+I wish I had, now.  If you had told me what Lindau had said, I should
+have known what would have come of it, and I could have advised you--"
+
+"Would you have advised me," March demanded, curiously, "to submit to
+bullying like that, and meekly consent to commit an act of cruelty
+against a man who had once been such a friend to me?"
+
+"It was an unlucky day when you met him.  I suppose we shall have to go.
+And just when we bad got used to New York, and begun to like it.  I don't
+know where we shall go now; Boston isn't like home any more; and we
+couldn't live on two thousand there; I should be ashamed to try.  I'm
+sure I don't know where we can live on it.  I suppose in some country
+village, where there are no schools, or anything for the children.  I
+don't know what they'll say when we tell them, poor things."
+
+Every word was a stab in March's heart, so weakly tender to his own; his
+wife's tears, after so much experience of the comparative lightness of
+the griefs that weep themselves out in women, always seemed wrung from
+his own soul; if his children suffered in the least through him, he felt
+like a murderer.  It was far worse than he could have imagined, the way
+his wife took the affair, though he had imagined certain words, or
+perhaps only looks, from her that were bad enough.  He had allowed for
+trouble, but trouble on his account: a svmpathy that might burden and
+embarrass him; but he had not dreamed of this merely domestic, this
+petty, this sordid view of their potential calamity, which left him
+wholly out of the question, and embraced only what was most crushing and
+desolating in the prospect.  He could not bear it.  He caught up his hat
+again, and, with some hope that his wife would try to keep him, rushed
+out of the house.  He wandered aimlessly about, thinking the same
+exhausting thoughts over and over, till he found himself horribly hungry;
+then he went into a restaurant for his lunch, and when he paid he tried
+to imagine how he should feel if that were really his last dollar.
+
+He went home toward the middle of the afternoon, basely hoping that
+Fulkerson had sent him some conciliatory message, or perhaps was waiting
+there for him to talk it over; March was quite willing to talk it over
+now.  But it was his wife who again met him at the door, though it seemed
+another woman than the one he had left weeping in the morning.
+
+"I told the children," she said, in smiling explanation of his absence
+from lunch, "that perhaps you were detained by business.  I didn't know
+but you had gone back to the office."
+
+"Did you think I would go back there, Isabel?"  asked March, with a
+haggard look.  "Well, if you say so, I will go back, and do what Dryfoos
+ordered me to do.  I'm sufficiently cowed between him and you, I can
+assure you."
+
+"Nonsense," she said.  "I approve of everything you did.  But sit down,
+now, and don't keep walking that way, and let me see if I understand it
+perfectly.  Of course, I had to have my say out."
+
+She made him go all over his talk with Dryfoos again, and report his own
+language precisely.  From time to time, as she got his points, she said,
+"That was splendid," "Good enough for him!" and "Oh, I'm so glad you said
+that to him!" At the end she said:
+
+"Well, now, let's look at it from his point of view.  Let's be perfectly
+just to him before we take another step forward."
+
+"Or backward," March suggested, ruefully.  "The case is simply this: he
+owns the magazine."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"And he has a right to expect that I will consider his pecuniary
+interests--"
+
+"Oh, those detestable pecuniary interests!  Don't you wish there wasn't
+any money in the world?"
+
+"Yes; or else that there was a great deal more of it.  And I was
+perfectly willing to do that.  I have always kept that in mind as one of
+my duties to him, ever since I understood what his relation to the
+magazine was."
+
+"Yes, I can bear witness to that in any court of justice.  You've done it
+a great deal more than I could, Basil.  And it was just the same way with
+those horrible insurance people."
+
+"I know," March went on, trying to be proof against her flatteries, or at
+least to look as if he did not deserve praise; "I know that what Lindau
+said was offensive to him, and I can understand how he felt that he had a
+right to punish it.  All I say is that he had no right to punish it
+through me."
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. March, askingly.
+
+"If it had been a question of making 'Every Other Week' the vehicle of
+Lindau's peculiar opinions--though they're not so very peculiar; he might
+have got the most of them out of Ruskin--I shouldn't have had any ground
+to stand on, or at least then I should have had to ask myself whether his
+opinions would be injurious to the magazine or not."
+
+"I don't see," Mrs. March interpolated, "how they could hurt it much
+worse than Colonel Woodburn's article crying up slavery."
+
+"Well," said March, impartially, "we could print a dozen articles
+praising the slavery it's impossible to have back, and it wouldn't hurt
+us.  But if we printed one paper against the slavery which Lindau claims
+still exists, some people would call us bad names, and the counting-room
+would begin to feel it.  But that isn't the point.  Lindau's connection
+with 'Every Other Week' is almost purely mechanical; he's merely a
+translator of such stories and sketches as he first submits to me, and it
+isn't at all a question of his opinions hurting us, but of my becoming an
+agent to punish him for his opinions.  That is what I wouldn't do; that's
+what I never will do."
+
+"If you did," said his wife, "I should perfectly despise you.  I didn't
+understand how it was before.  I thought you were just holding out
+against Dryfoos because he took a dictatorial tone with you, and because
+you wouldn't recognize his authority.  But now I'm with you, Basil, every
+time, as that horrid little Fulkerson says.  But who would ever have
+supposed he would be so base as to side against you?"
+
+"I don't know," said March, thoughtfully, "that we had a right to expect
+anything else.  Fulkerson's standards are low; they're merely business
+standards, and the good that's in him is incidental and something quite
+apart from his morals and methods.  He's naturally a generous and right-
+minded creature, but life has taught him to truckle and trick, like the
+rest of us."
+
+"It hasn't taught you that, Basil."
+
+"Don't be so sure.  Perhaps it's only that I'm a poor scholar.  But I
+don't know, really, that I despise Fulkerson so much for his course this
+morning as for his gross and fulsome flatteries of Dryfoos last night.
+I could hardly stomach it."
+
+His wife made him tell her what they were, and then she said, "Yes, that
+was loathsome; I couldn't have believed it of Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Perhaps he only did it to keep the talk going, and to give the old man a
+chance to say something," March leniently suggested.  "It was a worse
+effect because he didn't or couldn't follow up Fulkerson's lead."
+
+"It was loathsome, all the same," his wife insisted.  "It's the end of
+Mr. Fulkerson, as far as I'm concerned."
+
+"I didn't tell you before," March resumed, after a moment, "of my little
+interview with Conrad Dryfoos after his father left," and now he went on
+to repeat what had passed between him and the young man.
+
+"I suspect that he and his father had been having some words before the
+old man came up to talk with me, and that it was that made him so
+furious."
+
+"Yes, but what a strange position for the son of such a man to take!
+Do you suppose he says such things to his father?"
+
+"I don't know; but I suspect that in his meek way Conrad would say what
+he believed to anybody.  I suppose we must regard him as a kind of
+crank."
+
+"Poor young fellow! He always makes me feel sad, somehow.  He has such a
+pathetic face.  I don't believe I ever saw him look quite happy, except
+that night at Mrs. Horn's, when he was talking with Miss Vance; and then
+he made me feel sadder than ever."
+
+"I don't envy him the life he leads at home, with those convictions of
+his.  I don't see why it wouldn't be as tolerable there for old Lindau
+himself."
+
+"Well, now," said Mrs. March, "let us put them all out of our minds and
+see what we are going to do ourselves."
+
+They began to consider their ways and means, and how and where they
+should live, in view of March's severance of his relations with 'Every
+Other Week.'  They had not saved anything from the first year's salary;
+they had only prepared to save; and they had nothing solid but their two
+thousand to count upon.  But they built a future in which they easily
+lived on that and on what March earned with his pen.  He became a free
+lance, and fought in whatever cause he thought just; he had no ties, no
+chains.  They went back to Boston with the heroic will to do what was
+most distasteful; they would have returned to their own house if they had
+not rented it again; but, any rate, Mrs. March helped out by taking
+boarders, or perhaps only letting rooms to lodgers.  They had some hard
+struggles, but they succeeded.
+
+"The great thing," she said, "is to be right.  I'm ten times as happy as
+if you had come home and told me that you had consented to do what
+Dryfoos asked and he had doubled your salary."
+
+"I don't think that would have happened in any event," said March, dryly.
+
+"Well, no matter.  I just used it for an example."
+
+They both experienced a buoyant relief, such as seems to come to people
+who begin life anew on whatever terms.  "I hope we are young enough yet,
+Basil," she said, and she would not have it when he said they had once
+been younger.
+
+They heard the children's knock on the door; they knocked when they came
+home from school so that their mother might let them in.  "Shall we tell
+them at once?"  she asked, and ran to open for them before March could
+answer.
+
+They were not alone.  Fulkerson, smiling from ear to ear, was with them.
+"Is March in?"  he asked.
+
+"Mr. March is at home, yes," she said very haughtily.  "He's in his
+study," and she led the way there, while the children went to their
+rooms.
+
+"Well, March," Fulkerson called out at sight of him, "it's all right!
+The old man has come down."
+
+"I suppose if you gentlemen are going to talk business--" Mrs. March
+began.
+
+"Oh, we don't want you to go away," said Fulkerson.  "I reckon March has
+told you, anyway."
+
+"Yes, I've told her," said March.  "Don't go, Isabel.  What do you mean,
+Fulkerson ?"
+
+"He's just gone on up home, and he sent me round with his apologies.
+He sees now that he had no business to speak to you as he did, and he
+withdraws everything.  He'd 'a' come round himself if I'd said so, but I
+told him I could make it all right."
+
+Fulkerson looked so happy in having the whole affair put right, and the
+Marches knew him to be so kindly affected toward them, that they could
+not refuse for the moment to share his mood.  They felt themselves
+slipping down from the moral height which they had gained, and March made
+a clutch to stay himself with the question, "And Lindau?"
+
+"Well," said Fulkerson, "he's going to leave Lindau to me.  You won't
+have anything to do with it.  I'll let the old fellow down easy."
+
+"Do you mean," asked March, "that Mr. Dryfoos insists on his being
+dismissed?"
+
+"Why, there isn't any dismissing about it," Fulkerson argued.  "If you
+don't send him any more work, he won't do any more, that's all.  Or if he
+comes round, you can--He's to be referred to me."
+
+March shook his head, and his wife, with a sigh, felt herself plucked up
+from the soft circumstance of their lives, which she had sunk back into
+so quickly, and set beside him on that cold peak of principle again.
+"It won't do, Fulkerson.  It's very good of you, and all that, but it
+comes to the same thing in the end.  I could have gone on without any
+apology from Mr. Dryfoos; he transcended his authority, but that's a
+minor matter.  I could have excused it to his ignorance of life among
+gentlemen; but I can't consent to Lindau's dismissal--it comes to that,
+whether you do it or I do it, and whether it's a positive or a negative
+thing--because he holds this opinion or that."
+
+"But don't you see," said Fulkerson, "that it's just Lindau's opinions
+the old man can't stand?  He hasn't got anything against him personally.
+I don't suppose there's anybody that appreciates Lindau in some ways more
+than the old man does."
+
+"I understand.  He wants to punish him for his opinions.  Well, I can't
+consent to that, directly or indirectly.  We don't print his opinions,
+and he has a perfect right to hold them, whether Mr. Dryfoos agrees with
+them or not."
+
+Mrs. March had judged it decorous for her to say nothing, but she now
+went and sat down in the chair next her husband.
+
+"Ah, dog on it!" cried Fulkerson, rumpling his hair with both his hands.
+"What am I to do?  The old man says he's got to go."
+
+"And I don't consent to his going," said March.
+
+"And you won't stay if he goes."
+
+Fulkerson rose.  "Well, well! I've got to see about it.  I'm afraid the
+old man won't stand it, March; I am, indeed.  I wish you'd reconsider.
+I--I'd take it as a personal favor if you would.  It leaves me in a fix.
+You see I've got to side with one or the other."
+
+March made no reply to this, except to say, "Yes, you must stand by him,
+or you must stand by me."
+
+"Well, well!  Hold on awhile! I'll see you in the morning.  Don't take
+any steps--"
+
+"Oh, there are no steps to take," said March, with a melancholy smile.
+"The steps are stopped; that's all."  He sank back into his chair when
+Fulkerson was gone and drew a long breath.  "This is pretty rough.  I
+thought we had got through it."
+
+"No," said his wife.  "It seems as if I had to make the fight all over
+again."
+
+"Well, it's a good thing it's a holy war."
+
+"I can't bear the suspense.  Why didn't you tell him outright you
+wouldn't go back on any terms?"
+
+"I might as well, and got the glory.  He'll never move Dryfoos.  I
+suppose we both would like to go back, if we could."
+
+"Oh, I suppose so."
+
+They could not regain their lost exaltation, their lost dignity.  At
+dinner Mrs. March asked the children how they would like to go back to
+Boston to live.
+
+"Why, we're not going, are we?"  asked Tom, without enthusiasm.
+
+"I was just wondering how you felt about it, now," she said, with an
+underlook at her husband.
+
+"Well, if we go back," said Bella, "I want to live on the Back Bay.  It's
+awfully Micky at the South End."
+
+"I suppose I should go to Harvard," said Tom, "and I'd room out at
+Cambridge.  It would be easier to get at you on the Back Bay."
+
+The parents smiled ruefully at each other, and, in view of these grand
+expectations of his children, March resolved to go as far as he could in
+meeting Dryfoos's wishes.  He proposed the theatre as a distraction from
+the anxieties that he knew were pressing equally on his wife.  "We might
+go to the 'Old Homestead,'" he suggested, with a sad irony, which only
+his wife felt.
+
+"Oh yes, let's!" cried Bella.
+
+While they were getting ready, some one rang, and Bella went to the door,
+and then came to tell her father that it was Mr. Lindau.  "He says he
+wants to see you just a moment.  He's in the parlor, and he won't sit
+down, or anything."
+
+"What can he want?"  groaned Mrs. March, from their common dismay.
+
+March apprehended a storm in the old man's face.  But he only stood in
+the middle of the room, looking very sad and grave.  "You are Going
+oudt," he said.  "I won't geep you long.  I haf gome to pring pack dose
+macassines and dis mawney.  I can't do any more voark for you; and I
+can't geep the mawney you haf baid me a'ready.  It iss not hawnest mawney
+--that hass been oarned py voark; it iss mawney that hass peen mate py
+sbeculation, and the obbression off lapor, and the necessity of the boor,
+py a man--Here it is, efery tollar, efery zent.  Dake it; I feel as if
+dere vas ploodt on it."
+
+"Why, Lindau," March began, but the old man interrupted him.
+
+"Ton't dalk to me, Passil!  I could not haf believedt it of you.  When
+you know how I feel about dose tings, why tidn't you dell me whose mawney
+you bay oudt to me?  Ach, I ton't plame you--I ton't rebroach you.  You
+haf nefer thought of it; boat I have thought, and I should be Guilty,
+I must share that man's Guilt, if I gept hiss mawney.  If you hat toldt
+me at the peginning--if you hat peen frank with meboat it iss all righdt;
+you can go on; you ton't see dese tings as I see them; and you haf cot a
+family, and I am a free man.  I voark to myself, and when I ton't voark,
+I sdarfe to myself.  But.  I geep my handts glean, voark or sdarfe.  Gif
+him hiss mawney pack! I am sawry for him; I would not hoart hiss
+feelings, boat I could not pear to douch him, and hiss mawney iss like
+boison!"
+
+March tried to reason with Lindau, to show him the folly, the injustice,
+the absurdity of his course; it ended in their both getting angry, and in
+Lindau's going away in a whirl of German that included Basil in the guilt
+of the man whom Lindau called his master.
+
+"Well," said Mrs. March.  "He is a crank, and I think you're well rid of
+him.  Now you have no quarrel with that horrid old Dryfoos, and you can
+keep right on."
+
+"Yes," said March, "I wish it didn't make me feel so sneaking.  What a
+long day it's been! It seems like a century since I got up."
+
+"Yes, a thousand years.  Is there anything else left to happen?"
+
+"I hope not.  I'd like to go to bed."
+
+"Why, aren't you going to the theatre?"  wailed Bella, coming in upon her
+father's desperate expression.
+
+"The theatre?  Oh yes, certainly! I meant after we got home," and March
+amused himself at the puzzled countenance of the child.  "Come on!
+Is Tom ready?"
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+Fulkerson parted with the Marches in such trouble of mind that he did not
+feel able to meet that night the people whom he usually kept so gay at
+Mrs. Leighton's table.  He went to Maroni's for his dinner, for this
+reason and for others more obscure.  He could not expect to do anything
+more with Dryfoos at once; he knew that Dryfoos must feel that he had
+already made an extreme concession to March, and he believed that if he
+was to get anything more from him it must be after Dryfoos had dined.
+But he was not without the hope, vague and indefinite as it might be,
+that he should find Lindau at Maroni's, and perhaps should get some
+concession from him, some word of regret or apology which he could report
+to Dryfoos, and at lest make the means of reopening the affair with him;
+perhaps Lindau, when he knew how matters stood, would back down
+altogether, and for March's sake would withdraw from all connection with
+'Every Other Week' himself, and so leave everything serene.  Fulkerson
+felt capable, in his desperation, of delicately suggesting such a course
+to Lindau, or even of plainly advising it: he did not care for Lindau a
+great deal, and he did care a great deal for the magazine.
+
+But he did not find Lindau at Maroni's; he only found Beaton.  He sat
+looking at the doorway as Fulkerson entered, and Fulkerson naturally came
+and took a place at his table.  Something in Beaton's large-eyed
+solemnity of aspect invited Fulkerson to confidence, and he said, as he
+pulled his napkin open and strung it, still a little damp (as the scanty,
+often-washed linen at Maroni's was apt to be), across his knees, "I was
+looking for you this morning, to talk with you about the Christmas
+number, and I was a good deal worked up because I couldn't find you; but
+I guess I might as well have spared myself my emotions."
+
+"Why?"  asked Beaton, briefly.
+
+"Well, I don't know as there's going to be any Christmas number."
+
+"Why?"  Beaton asked again.
+
+"Row between the financial angel and the literary editor about the chief
+translator and polyglot smeller."
+
+"Lindau?"
+
+"Lindau is his name."
+
+"What does the literary editor expect after Lindau's expression of his
+views last night?"
+
+"I don't know what he expected, but the ground he took with the old man
+was that, as Lindau's opinions didn't characterize his work on the
+magazine, he would not be made the instrument of punishing him for them
+the old man wanted him turned off, as he calls it."
+
+"Seems to be pretty good ground," said Beaton, impartially, while he
+speculated, with a dull trouble at heart, on the effect the row would
+have on his own fortunes.  His late visit home had made him feel that the
+claim of his family upon him for some repayment of help given could not
+be much longer delayed; with his mother sick and his father growing old,
+he must begin to do something for them, but up to this time he had spent
+his salary even faster than he had earned it.  When Fulkerson came in he
+was wondering whether he could get him to increase it, if he threatened
+to give up his work, and he wished that he was enough in love with
+Margaret Vance, or even Christine Dryfoos, to marry her, only to end in
+the sorrowful conviction that he was really in love with Alma Leighton,
+who had no money, and who had apparently no wish to be married for love,
+even.  "And what are you going to do about it?"  he asked, listlessly.
+
+"Be dogged if I know what I'm going to do about it," said Fulkerson.
+"I've been round all day, trying to pick up the pieces--row began right
+after breakfast this morning--and one time I thought I'd got the thing
+all put together again.  I got the old man to say that he had spoken to
+March a little too authoritatively about Lindau; that, in fact, he ought
+to have communicated his wishes through me; and that he was willing to
+have me get rid of Lindau, and March needn't have anything to do with it.
+I thought that was pretty white, but March says the apologies and regrets
+are all well enough in their way, but they leave the main question where
+they found it."
+
+"What is the main question?"  Beaton asked, pouring himself out some
+Chianti.  As he set the flask down he made the reflection that if he
+would drink water instead of Chianti he could send his father three
+dollars a week, on his back debts, and he resolved to do it.
+
+"The main question, as March looks at it, is the question of punishing
+Lindau for his private opinions; he says that if he consents to my
+bouncing the old fellow it's the same as if he bounced him."
+
+"It might have that complexion in some lights," said Beaton.  He drank
+off his Chianti, and thought he would have it twice a week, or make
+Maroni keep the half-bottles over for him, and send his father two
+dollars.  "And what are you going to do now?"
+
+"That's what I don't know," said Fulkerson, ruefully.  After a moment he
+said, desperately, "Beaton, you've got a pretty good head; why don't you
+suggest something?"
+
+"Why don't you let March go?"  Beaton suggested.
+
+"Ah, I couldn't," said Fulkerson.  "I got him to break up in Boston and
+come here; I like him; nobody else could get the hang of the thing like
+he has; he's--a friend."  Fulkerson said this with the nearest approach
+he could make to seriousness, which was a kind of unhappiness.
+
+Beaton shrugged.  "Oh, if you can afford to have ideals, I congratulate
+you.  They're too expensive for me.  Then, suppose you get rid of
+Dryfoos?"
+
+Fulkerson laughed forlornly.  "Go on, Bildad.  Like to sprinkle a few
+ashes over my boils?  Don't mind me!"
+
+They both sat silent a little while, and then Beaton said, "I suppose you
+haven't seen Dryfoos the second time?"
+
+"No.  I came in here to gird up my loins with a little dinner before I
+tackled him.  But something seems to be the matter with Maroni's cook.
+I don't want anything to eat."
+
+"The cooking's about as bad as usual," said Beaton.  After a moment he
+added, ironically, for he found Fulkerson's misery a kind of relief from
+his own, and was willing to protract it as long as it was amusing, "Why
+not try an envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary?"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Get that other old fool to go to Dryfoos for you!"
+
+"Which other old fool?  The old fools seem to be as thick as flies."
+
+"That Southern one."
+
+"Colonel Woodburn?"
+
+"Mmmmm."
+
+"He did seem to rather take to the colonel!" Fulkerson mused aloud.
+
+"Of course he did.  Woodburn, with his idiotic talk about patriarchal
+slavery, is the man on horseback to Dryfoos's muddy imagination.  He'd
+listen to him abjectly, and he'd do whatever Woodburn told him to do."
+Beaton smiled cynically.
+
+Fulkerson got up and reached for his coat and hat.  "You've struck it,
+old man."  The waiter came up to help him on with his coat; Fulkerson
+slipped a dollar in his hand.  "Never mind the coat; you can give the
+rest of my dinner to the poor, Paolo.  Beaton, shake! You've saved my
+life, little boy, though I don't think you meant it."  He took Beaton's
+hand and solemnly pressed it, and then almost ran out of the door.
+
+They had just reached coffee at Mrs. Leighton's when he arrived and sat
+down with them and began to put some of the life of his new hope into
+them.  His appetite revived, and, after protesting that he would not take
+anything but coffee, he went back and ate some of the earlier courses.
+But with the pressure of his purpose driving him forward, he did not
+conceal from Miss Woodburn, at least, that he was eager to get her apart
+from the rest for some reason.  When he accomplished this, it seemed as
+if he had contrived it all himself, but perhaps he had not wholly
+contrived it.
+
+"I'm so glad to get a chance to speak to you alone," he said at once; and
+while she waited for the next word he made a pause, and then said,
+desperately, "I want you to help me; and if you can't help me, there's no
+help for me."
+
+"Mah goodness," she said, "is the case so bad as that?  What in the woald
+is the trouble?"
+
+"Yes, it's a bad case," said Fulkerson.  "I want your father to help me."
+
+"Oh, I thoat you said me!"
+
+"Yes; I want you to help me with your father.  I suppose I ought to go to
+him at once, but I'm a little afraid of him."
+
+"And you awe not afraid of me?  I don't think that's very flattering, Mr.
+Fulkerson.  You ought to think Ah'm twahce as awful as papa."
+
+"Oh, I do! You see, I'm quite paralyzed before you, and so I don't feel
+anything."
+
+"Well, it's a pretty lahvely kyand of paralysis.  But--go on."
+
+"I will--I will.  If I can only begin."
+
+"Pohaps Ah maght begin fo' you."
+
+"No, you can't.  Lord knows, I'd like to let you.  Well, it's like this."
+
+Fulkerson made a clutch at his hair, and then, after another hesitation,
+he abruptly laid the whole affair before her.  He did not think it
+necessary to state the exact nature of the offence Lindau had given
+Dryfoos, for he doubted if she could grasp it, and he was profuse of his
+excuses for troubling her with the matter, and of wonder at himself for
+having done so.  In the rapture of his concern at having perhaps made a
+fool of himself, he forgot why he had told her; but she seemed to like
+having been confided in, and she said, "Well, Ah don't see what you can
+do with you' ahdeals of friendship except stand bah Mr. Mawch."
+
+"My ideals of friendship?  What do you mean?"
+
+"Oh, don't you suppose we know?  Mr. Beaton said you we' a pofect Bahyard
+in friendship, and you would sacrifice anything to it."
+
+"Is that so?"  said Fulkerson, thinking how easily he could sacrifice
+Lindau in this case.  He had never supposed before that he was chivalrous
+in such matters, but he now began to see it in that light, and he
+wondered that he could ever have entertained for a moment the idea of
+throwing March over.
+
+"But Ah most say," Miss Woodburn went on, "Ah don't envy you you' next
+interview with Mr. Dryfoos.  Ah suppose you'll have to see him at once
+aboat it."
+
+The conjecture recalled Fulkerson to the object of his confidences.
+"Ah, there's where your help comes in.  I've exhausted all the influence
+I have with Dryfoos--"
+
+"Good gracious, you don't expect Ah could have any!"
+
+They both laughed at the comic dismay with which she conveyed the
+preposterous notion; and Fulkerson said, "If I judged from myself,
+I should expect you to bring him round instantly."
+
+"Oh, thank you, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, with mock meekness.
+
+"Not at all.  But it isn't Dryfoos I want you to help me with; it's your
+father.  I want your father to interview Dryfoos for me, and I-I'm afraid
+to ask him."
+
+"Poo' Mr. Fulkerson!" she said, and she insinuated something through her
+burlesque compassion that lifted him to the skies.  He swore in his heart
+that the woman never lived who was so witty, so wise, so beautiful, and
+so good.  "Come raght with me this minute, if the cyoast's clea'."  She
+went to the door of the diningroom and looked in across its gloom to the
+little gallery where her father sat beside a lamp reading his evening
+paper; Mrs. Leighton could be heard in colloquy with the cook below, and
+Alma had gone to her room.  She beckoned Fulkerson with the hand
+outstretched behind her, and said, "Go and ask him."
+
+"Alone!" he palpitated.
+
+"Oh, what a cyowahd!" she cried, and went with him.  "Ah suppose you'll
+want me to tell him aboat it."
+
+"Well, I wish you'd begin, Miss Woodburn," he said.  "The fact is, you
+know, I've been over it so much I'm kind of sick of the thing."
+
+Miss Woodburn advanced and put her hand on her father's shoulder.  "Look
+heah, papa!  Mr. Fulkerson wants to ask you something, and he wants me to
+do it fo' him."
+
+The colonel looked up through his glasses with the sort of ferocity
+elderly men sometimes have to put on in order to keep their glasses from
+falling off.  His daughter continued:  "He's got into an awful difficulty
+with his edito' and his proprieto', and he wants you to pacify them."
+
+"I do not know whethah I understand the case exactly," said the colonel,
+"but Mr. Fulkerson may command me to the extent of my ability."
+
+"You don't understand it aftah what Ah've said?"  cried the girl.  "Then
+Ah don't see but what you'll have to explain it you'self, Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, Miss Woodburn has been so luminous about it, colonel," said
+Fulkerson, glad of the joking shape she had given the affair, "that I can
+only throw in a little side-light here and there."
+
+The colonel listened as Fulkerson went on, with a grave diplomatic
+satisfaction.  He felt gratified, honored, even, he said, by Mr.
+Fulkerson's appeal to him; and probably it gave him something of the high
+joy that an affair of honor would have brought him in the days when he
+had arranged for meetings between gentlemen.  Next to bearing a
+challenge, this work of composing a difficulty must have been grateful.
+But he gave no outward sign of his satisfaction in making a resume of the
+case so as to get the points clearly in his mind.
+
+"I was afraid, sir," he said, with the state due to the serious nature of
+the facts, "that Mr. Lindau had given Mr. Dryfoos offence by some of his
+questions at the dinner-table last night."
+
+"Perfect red rag to a bull," Fulkerson put in; and then he wanted to
+withdraw his words at the colonel's look of displeasure.
+
+"I have no reflections to make upon Mr. Landau," Colonel Woodburn
+continued, and Fulkerson felt grateful to him for going on; "I do not
+agree with Mr. Lindau; I totally disagree with him on sociological
+points; but the course of the conversation had invited him to the
+expression of his convictions, and he had a right to express them, so far
+as they had no personal bearing."
+
+"Of course," said Fulkerson, while Miss Woodburn perched on the arm of
+her father's chair.
+
+"At the same time, sir, I think that if Mr. Dryfoos felt a personal
+censure in Mr. Lindau's questions concerning his suppression of the
+strike among his workmen, he had a right to resent it."
+
+"Exactly," Fulkerson assented.
+
+"But it must be evident to you, sir, that a high-spirited gentleman like
+Mr. March--I confess that my feelings are with him very warmly in the
+matter--could not submit to dictation of the nature you describe."
+
+"Yes, I see," said Fulkerson; and, with that strange duplex action of the
+human mind, he wished that it was his hair, and not her father's, that
+Miss Woodburn was poking apart with the corner of her fan.
+
+"Mr. Lindau," the colonel concluded, "was right from his point of view,
+and Mr. Dryfoos was equally right.  The position of Mr. March is
+perfectly correct--"
+
+His daughter dropped to her feet from his chair-arm.  "Mah goodness!
+If nobody's in the wrong, ho' awe you evah going to get the mattah
+straight?"
+
+"Yes, you see," Fulkerson added, "nobody can give in."
+
+"Pardon me," said the colonel, "the case is one in which all can give
+in."
+
+"I don't know which 'll begin," said Fulkerson.
+
+The colonel rose.  "Mr. Lindau must begin, sir.  We must begin by seeing
+Mr. Lindau, and securing from him the assurance that in the expression of
+his peculiar views he had no intention of offering any personal offence
+to Mr. Dryfoos.  If I have formed a correct estimate of Mr. Lindau, this
+will be perfectly simple."
+
+Fulkerson shook his head.  "But it wouldn't help.  Dryfoos don't care a
+rap whether Lindau meant any personal offence or not.  As far as that is
+concerned, he's got a hide like a hippopotamus.  But what he hates is
+Lindau's opinions, and what he says is that no man who holds such
+opinions shall have any work from him.  And what March says is that no
+man shall be punished through him for his opinions, he don't care what
+they are."
+
+The colonel stood a moment in silence.  "And what do you expect me to do
+under the circumstances?"
+
+"I came to you for advice--I thought you might suggest----?"
+
+"Do you wish me to see Mr. Dryfoos?"
+
+"Well, that's about the size of it," Fulkerson admitted.  "You see,
+colonel," he hastened on, "I know that you have a great deal of influence
+with him; that article of yours is about the only thing he's ever read in
+'Every Other Week,' and he's proud of your acquaintance.  Well, you know"
+--and here Fulkerson brought in the figure that struck him so much in
+Beaton's phrase and had been on his tongue ever since--" you're the man
+on horseback to him; and he'd be more apt to do what you say than if
+anybody else said it."
+
+"You are very good, sir," said the colonel, trying to be proof against
+the flattery, "but I am afraid you overrate my influence."  Fulkerson let
+him ponder it silently, and his daughter governed her impatience by
+holding her fan against her lips.  Whatever the process was in the
+colonel's mind, he said at last: "I see no good reason for declining to
+act for you, Mr. Fulkerson, and I shall be very happy if I can be of
+service to you.  But"--he stopped Fulkerson from cutting in with
+precipitate thanks--"I think I have a right, sir, to ask what your course
+will be in the event of failure?"
+
+"Failure?"  Fulkerson repeated, in dismay.
+
+"Yes, sir.  I will not conceal from you that this mission is one not
+wholly agreeable to my feelings."
+
+"Oh, I understand that, colonel, and I assure you that I appreciate, I--"
+
+"There is no use trying to blink the fact, sir, that there are certain
+aspects of Mr. Dryfoos's character in which he is not a gentleman.
+We have alluded to this fact before, and I need not dwell upon it now: I
+may say, however, that my misgivings were not wholly removed last night."
+
+"No," Fulkerson assented; though in his heart he thought the old man had
+behaved very well.
+
+"What I wish to say now is that I cannot consent to act for you, in this
+matter, merely as an intermediary whose failure would leave the affair in
+state quo."
+
+"I see," said Fulkerson.
+
+
+"And I should like some intimation, some assurance, as to which party
+your own feelings are with in the difference."
+
+The colonel bent his eyes sharply on Fulkerson; Miss Woodburn let hers
+fall; Fulkerson felt that he was being tested, and he said, to gain time,
+"As between Lindau and Dryfoos?" though he knew this was not the point.
+
+"As between Mr. Dryfoos and Mr. March," said the colonel.
+
+Fulkerson drew a long breath and took his courage in both hands.  "There
+can't be any choice for me in such a case.  I'm for March, every time."
+
+The colonel seized his hand, and Miss Woodburn said, "If there had been
+any choice fo' you in such a case, I should never have let papa stir a
+step with you."
+
+"Why, in regard to that," said the colonel, with a, literal application
+of the idea, "was it your intention that we should both go?"
+
+"Well, I don't know; I suppose it was."
+
+"I think it will be better for me to go alone," said the colonel; and,
+with a color from his experience in affairs of honor, he added: "In these
+matters a principal cannot appear without compromising his dignity.
+I believe I have all the points clearly in mind, and I think I should act
+more freely in meeting Mr. Dryfoos alone."
+
+Fulkerson tried to hide the eagerness with which he met these agreeable
+views.  He felt himself exalted in some sort to the level of the
+colonel's sentiments, though it would not be easy to say whether this was
+through the desperation bred of having committed himself to March's side,
+or through the buoyant hope he had that the colonel would succeed in his
+mission.
+
+"I'm not afraid to talk with Dryfoos about it," he said.
+
+"There is no question of courage," said the colonel.  "It is a question
+of dignity--of personal dignity."
+
+"Well, don't let that delay you, papa," said his daughter, following him
+to the door, where she found him his hat, and Fulkerson helped him on
+with his overcoat.  "Ah shall be jost wald to know ho' it's toned oat."
+
+"Won't you let me go up to the house with you?"  Fulkerson began.
+"I needn't go in--"
+
+"I prefer to go alone," said the colonel.  "I wish to turn the points
+over in my mind, and I am afraid you would find me rather dull company."
+
+He went out, and Fulkerson returned with Miss Woodburn to the drawing-
+room, where she said the Leightons were.  They, were not there, but she
+did not seem disappointed.
+
+"Well, Mr. Fulkerson," she said, "you have got an ahdeal of friendship,
+sure enough."
+
+"Me?"  said Fulkerson.  "Oh, my Lord!  Don't you see I couldn't do
+anything else?  And I'm scared half to death, anyway.  If the colonel
+don't bring the old man round, I reckon it's all up with me.  But he'll
+fetch him.  And I'm just prostrated with gratitude to you, Miss
+Woodburn."
+
+She waved his thanks aside with her fan.  "What do you mean by its being
+all up with you?"
+
+"Why, if the old man sticks to his position, and I stick to March, we've
+both got to go overboard together.  Dryfoos owns the magazine; he can
+stop it, or he can stop us, which amounts to the same thing, as far as
+we're concerned."
+
+"And then what?" the girl pursued.
+
+"And then, nothing--till we pick ourselves up."
+
+"Do you mean that Mr. Dryfoos will put you both oat of your places?"
+
+"He may."
+
+"And Mr. Mawch takes the risk of that jost fo' a principle?"
+
+"I reckon."
+
+"And you do it jost fo' an ahdeal?"
+
+"It won't do to own it.  I must have my little axe to grind, somewhere."
+
+"Well, men awe splendid," sighed the girl.  "Ah will say it."
+
+"Oh, they're not so much better than women," said Fulkerson, with a
+nervous jocosity.  "I guess March would have backed down if it hadn't
+been for his wife.  She was as hot as pepper about it, and you could see
+that she would have sacrificed all her husband's relations sooner than
+let him back down an inch from the stand he had taken.  It's pretty easy
+for a man to stick to a principle if he has a woman to stand by him.
+But when you come to play it alone--"
+
+"Mr. Fulkerson," said the girl, solemnly, "Ah will stand bah you in this,
+if all the woald tones against you."  The tears came into her eyes, and
+she put out her hand to him.
+
+"You will?"  he shouted, in a rapture.  "In every way--and always--as
+long as you live?  Do you mean it?"  He had caught her hand to his breast
+and was grappling it tight there and drawing her to him.
+
+The changing emotions chased one another through her heart and over her
+face: dismay, shame, pride, tenderness.  "You don't believe," she said,
+hoarsely, "that Ah meant that?"
+
+"No, but I hope you do mean it; for if you don't, nothing else means
+anything."
+
+There was no space, there was only a point of wavering.  "Ah do mean it."
+
+When they lifted their eyes from each other again it was half-past ten.
+"No' you most go," she said.
+
+"But the colonel--our fate?"
+
+"The co'nel is often oat late, and Ah'm not afraid of ouah fate, no' that
+we've taken it into ouah own hands."  She looked at him with dewy eyes of
+trust, of inspiration.
+
+"Oh, it's going to come out all right," he said.  "It can't come out
+wrong now, no matter what happens.  But who'd have thought it, when I
+came into this house, in such a state of sin and misery, half an hour
+ago--"
+
+"Three houahs and a half ago!" she said.  "No! you most jost go.  Ah'm
+tahed to death.  Good-night.  You can come in the mawning to see-papa."
+She opened the door and pushed him out with enrapturing violence, and he
+ran laughing down the steps into her father's arms.
+
+"Why, colonel!  I was just going up to meet you."  He had really thought
+he would walk off his exultation in that direction.
+
+"I am very sorry to say, Mr. Fulkerson," the colonel began, gravely,
+"that Mr. Dryfoos adheres to his position."
+
+"Oh, all right," said Fulkerson, with unabated joy.  "It's what I
+expected.  Well, my course is clear; I shall stand by March, and I guess
+the world won't come to an end if he bounces us both.  But I'm
+everlastingly obliged to you, Colonel Woodburn, and I don't know what to
+say to you.  I--I won't detain you now; it's so late.  I'll see you in
+the morning.  Good-ni--"
+
+Fulkerson did not realize that it takes two to part.  The colonel laid
+hold of his arm and turned away with him.  "I will walk toward your place
+with you.  I can understand why you should be anxious to know the
+particulars of my interview with Mr. Dryfoos"; and in the statement which
+followed he did not spare him the smallest.  It outlasted their walk and
+detained them long on the steps of the 'Every Other Week' building.  But
+at the end Fulkerson let himself in with his key as light of heart as if
+he had been listening to the gayest promises that fortune could make.
+
+By the tune he met March at the office next morning, a little, but only a
+very little, misgiving saddened his golden heaven.  He took March's hand
+with high courage, and said, "Well, the old man sticks to his point,
+March."  He added, with the sense of saying it before Miss Woodburn: "And
+I stick by you.  I've thought it all over, and I'd rather be right with
+you than wrong with him."
+
+"Well, I appreciate your motive, Fulkerson," said March.  "But perhaps--
+perhaps we can save over our heroics for another occasion.  Lindau seems
+to have got in with his, for the present."
+
+He told him of Lindau's last visit, and they stood a moment looking at
+each other rather queerly.  Fulkerson was the first to recover his
+spirits.  "Well," he said, cheerily, "that let's us out."
+
+"Does it?  I'm not sure it lets me out," said March; but he said this in
+tribute to his crippled self-respect rather than as a forecast of any
+action in the matter.
+
+"Why, what are you going to do?"  Fulkerson asked.  "If Lindau won't work
+for Dryfoos, you can't make him."
+
+March sighed.  "What are you going to do with this money?"  He glanced at
+the heap of bills he had flung on the table between them.
+
+Fulkerson scratched his head.  "Ah, dogged if I know: Can't we give it
+to the deserving poor, somehow, if we can find 'em?"
+
+"I suppose we've no right to use it in any way.   You must give it to
+Dryfoos."
+
+"To the deserving rich?  Well, you can always find them.  I reckon you
+don't want to appear in the transaction!  I don't, either; but I guess I
+must."  Fulkerson gathered up the money and carried it to Conrad.
+He directed him to account for it in his books as conscience-money, and
+he enjoyed the joke more than Conrad seemed to do when he was told where
+it came from.
+
+Fulkerson was able to wear off the disagreeable impression the affair
+left during the course of the fore-noon, and he met Miss Woodburn with
+all a lover's buoyancy when he went to lunch.  She was as happy as he
+when he told her how fortunately the whole thing had ended, and he took
+her view that it was a reward of his courage in having dared the worst.
+They both felt, as the newly plighted always do, that they were in the
+best relations with the beneficent powers, and that their felicity had
+been especially looked to in the disposition of events.  They were in a
+glow of rapturous content with themselves and radiant worship of each
+other; she was sure that he merited the bright future opening to them
+both, as much as if he owed it directly to some noble action of his own;
+he felt that he was indebted for the favor of Heaven entirely to the
+still incredible accident of her preference of him over other men.
+
+Colonel Woodburn, who was not yet in the secret of their love, perhaps
+failed for this reason to share their satisfaction with a result so
+unexpectedly brought about.  The blessing on their hopes seemed to his
+ignorance to involve certain sacrifices of personal feeling at which he
+hinted in suggesting that Dryfoos should now be asked to make some
+abstract concessions and acknowledgments; his daughter hastened to deny
+that these were at all necessary; and Fulkerson easily explained why.
+The thing was over; what was the use of opening it up again?
+
+"Perhaps none," the colonel admitted.  But he added, "I should like the
+opportunity of taking Mr. Lindau's hand in the presence of Mr. Dryfoos
+and assuring him that I considered him a man of principle and a man of
+honor--a gentleman, sir, whom I was proud and happy to have known."
+
+"Well, Ah've no doabt," said his daughter, demurely, "that you'll have
+the chance some day; and we would all lahke to join you.  But at the same
+tahme, Ah think Mr. Fulkerson is well oat of it fo' the present."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Anticipative reprisal
+Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience
+Courtship
+Got their laugh out of too many things in life
+Had learned not to censure the irretrievable
+Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance
+Ignorant of her ignorance
+It don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time
+Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs
+Life has taught him to truckle and trick
+Man's willingness to abide in the present
+No longer the gross appetite for novelty
+No right to burden our friends with our decisions
+Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues
+Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes, v4
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+PART FIFTH
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Superficially, the affairs of 'Every Other Week' settled into their
+wonted form again, and for Fulkerson they seemed thoroughly reinstated.
+But March had a feeling of impermanency from what had happened, mixed
+with a fantastic sense of shame toward Lindau.  He did not sympathize
+with Lindau's opinions; he thought his remedy for existing evils as
+wildly impracticable as Colonel Woodburn's.  But while he thought this,
+and while he could justly blame Fulkerson for Lindau's presence at
+Dryfoos's dinner, which his zeal had brought about in spite of March's
+protests, still he could not rid himself of the reproach of uncandor with
+Lindau.  He ought to have told him frankly about the ownership of the
+magazine, and what manner of man the man was whose money he was taking.
+But he said that he never could have imagined that he was serious in his
+preposterous attitude in regard to a class of men who embody half the
+prosperity of the country; and he had moments of revolt against his own
+humiliation before Lindau, in which he found it monstrous that he should
+return Dryfoos's money as if it had been the spoil of a robber.  His wife
+agreed with him in these moments, and said it was a great relief not to
+have that tiresome old German coming about.  They had to account for his
+absence evasively to the children, whom they could not very well tell
+that their father was living on money that Lindau disdained to take, even
+though Lindau was wrong and their father was right.  This heightened Mrs.
+March's resentment toward both Lindau and Dryfoos, who between them had
+placed her husband in a false position.  If anything, she resented
+Dryfoos's conduct more than Lindau's.  He had never spoken to March about
+the affair since Lindau had renounced his work, or added to the
+apologetic messages he had sent by Fulkerson.  So far as March knew,
+Dryfoos had been left to suppose that Lindau had simply stopped for some
+reason that did not personally affect him.  They never spoke of him, and
+March was too proud to ask either Fulkerson or Conrad whether the old man
+knew that Lindau had returned his money.  He avoided talking to Conrad,
+from a feeling that if be did he should involuntarily lead him on to
+speak of his differences with his father.  Between himself and Fulkerson,
+even, he was uneasily aware of a want of their old perfect friendliness.
+Fulkerson had finally behaved with honor and courage; but his provisional
+reluctance had given March the measure of Fulkerson's character in one
+direction, and he could not ignore the fact that it was smaller than he
+could have wished.
+
+He could not make out whether Fulkerson shared his discomfort or not.
+It certainly wore away, even with March, as time passed, and with
+Fulkerson, in the bliss of his fortunate love, it was probably far more
+transient, if it existed at all.  He advanced into the winter as
+radiantly as if to meet the spring, and he said that if there were any
+pleasanter month of the year than November, it was December, especially
+when the weather was good and wet and muddy most of the time, so that you
+had to keep indoors a long while after you called anywhere.
+
+Colonel Woodburn had the anxiety, in view of his daughter's engagement,
+when she asked his consent to it, that such a dreamer must have in regard
+to any reality that threatens to affect the course of his reveries.  He
+had not perhaps taken her marriage into account, except as a remote
+contingency; and certainly Fulkerson was not the kind of son-in-law that
+he had imagined in dealing with that abstraction.  But because he had
+nothing of the sort definitely in mind, he could not oppose the selection
+of Fulkerson with success; he really knew nothing against him, and he
+knew, many things in his favor; Fulkerson inspired him with the liking
+that every one felt for him in a measure; he amused him, he cheered him;
+and the colonel had been so much used to leaving action of all kinds to
+his daughter that when he came to close quarters with the question of a
+son-in-law he felt helpless to decide it, and he let her decide it, as if
+it were still to be decided when it was submitted to him.  She was
+competent to treat it in all its phases: not merely those of personal
+interest, but those of duty to the broken Southern past, sentimentally
+dear to him, and practically absurd to her.  No such South as he
+remembered had ever existed to her knowledge, and no such civilization as
+he imagined would ever exist, to her belief, anywhere.  She took the
+world as she found it, and made the best of it.  She trusted in
+Fulkerson; she had proved his magnanimity in a serious emergency; and in
+small things she was willing fearlessly to chance it with him.  She was
+not a sentimentalist, and there was nothing fantastic in her
+expectations; she was a girl of good sense and right mind, and she liked
+the immediate practicality as well as the final honor of Fulkerson.  She
+did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him; she did
+him justice, and she would not have believed that she did him more than
+justice if she had sometimes known him to do himself less.
+
+Their engagement was a fact to which the Leighton household adjusted
+itself almost as simply as the lovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the
+ladies at once, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson could keep from
+March very long.  He sent word of it to Mrs. March by her husband; and
+his engagement perhaps did more than anything else to confirm the
+confidence in him which had been shaken by his early behavior in the
+Lindau episode, and not wholly restored by his tardy fidelity to March.
+But now she felt that a man who wished to get married so obviously and
+entirely for love was full of all kinds of the best instincts, and only
+needed the guidance of a wife, to become very noble.  She interested
+herself intensely in balancing the respective merits of the engaged
+couple, and after her call upon Miss Woodburn in her new character she
+prided herself upon recognizing the worth of some strictly Southern
+qualities in her, while maintaining the general average of New England
+superiority.  She could not reconcile herself to the Virginian custom
+illustrated in her having been christened with the surname of Madison;
+and she said that its pet form of Mad, which Fulkerson promptly invented,
+only made it more ridiculous.
+
+Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton.  He was afraid, somehow, of
+Beaton's taking the matter in the cynical way; Miss Woodburn said she
+would break off the engagement if Beaton was left to guess it or find it
+out by accident, and then Fulkerson plucked up his courage.  Beaton
+received the news with gravity, and with a sort of melancholy meekness
+that strongly moved Fulkerson's sympathy, and made him wish that Beaton
+was engaged, too.
+
+It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left him behind and forgotten;
+in a manner, it made him feel trifled with.  Something of the
+unfriendliness of fate seemed to overcast his resentment, and he allowed
+the sadness of his conviction that he had not the means to marry on to
+tinge his recognition of the fact that Alma Leighton would not have
+wanted him to marry her if he had.  He was now often in that martyr mood
+in which he wished to help his father; not only to deny himself Chianti,
+but to forego a fur-lined overcoat which he intended to get for the
+winter, He postponed the moment of actual sacrifice as regarded the
+Chianti, and he bought the overcoat in an anguish of self-reproach.
+He wore it the first evening after he got it in going to call upon the
+Leightons, and it seemed to him a piece of ghastly irony when Alma
+complimented his picturesqueness in it and asked him to let her sketch
+him.
+
+"Oh, you can sketch me," he said, with so much gloom that it made her
+laugh.
+
+"If you think it's so serious, I'd rather not."
+
+"No, no! Go ahead! How do you want me?"
+
+Oh, fling yourself down on a chair in one of your attitudes of studied
+negligence; and twist one corner of your mustache with affected absence
+of mind."
+
+"And you think I'm always studied, always affected?"
+
+"I didn't say so."
+
+"I didn't ask you what you said."
+
+"And I won't tell you what I think."
+
+"Ah, I know what you think."
+
+"What made you ask, then?"  The girl laughed again with the satisfaction
+of her sex in cornering a man.
+
+Beaton made a show of not deigning to reply, and put himself in the pose
+she suggested, frowning.
+
+"Ah, that's it.  But a little more animation--
+
+   "'As when a great thought strikes along the brain,
+     And flushes all the cheek.'"
+
+She put her forehead down on the back of her hand and laughed again.
+"You ought to be photographed.  You look as if you were sitting for it."
+
+Beaton said: "That's because I know I am being photographed, in one way.
+I don't think you ought to call me affected.  I never am so with you; I
+know it wouldn't be of any use."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Beaton, you flatter."
+
+"No, I never flatter you."
+
+"I meant you flattered yourself."
+
+"How?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  Imagine."
+
+"I know what you mean.  You think I can't be sincere with anybody."
+
+"Oh no, I don't."
+
+"What do you think?"
+
+"That you can't--try."  Alma gave another victorious laugh.
+
+Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson would once have both feigned a great interest
+in Alma's sketching Beaton, and made it the subject of talk, in which
+they approached as nearly as possible the real interest of their lives.
+Now they frankly remained away in the dining-room, which was very cozy
+after the dinner had disappeared; the colonel sat with his lamp and paper
+in the gallery beyond; Mrs. Leighton was about her housekeeping affairs,
+in the content she always felt when Alma was with Beaton.
+
+"They seem to be having a pretty good time in there," said Fulkerson,
+detaching himself from his own absolute good time as well as he could.
+
+"At least Alma does," said Miss Woodburn.
+
+"Do you think she cares for him?"
+
+"Quahte as moch as he desoves."
+
+"What makes you all down on Beaton around here?  He's not such a bad
+fellow."
+
+"We awe not all doan on him.  Mrs. Leighton isn't doan on him."
+
+"Oh, I guess if it was the old lady, there wouldn't be much question
+about it."
+
+They both laughed, and Alma said, "They seem to be greatly amused with
+something in there."
+
+"Me, probably," said Beaton.  "I seem to amuse everybody to-night."
+
+"Don't you always?"
+
+"I always amuse you, I'm afraid, Alma."
+
+She looked at him as if she were going to snub him openly for using her
+name; but apparently she decided to do it covertly.  "You didn't at
+first.  I really used to believe you could be serious, once."
+
+"Couldn't you believe it again?  Now?"
+
+"Not when you put on that wind-harp stop."
+
+"Wetmore has been talking to you about me.  He would sacrifice his best
+friend to a phrase.  He spends his time making them."
+
+"He's made some very pretty ones about you."
+
+"Like the one you just quoted?"
+
+"No, not exactly.  He admires you ever so much.  He says" She stopped,
+teasingly.
+
+"What?"
+
+"He says you could be almost anything you wished, if you didn't wish to
+be everything."
+
+"That sounds more like the school of Wetmore.  That's what you say, Alma.
+Well, if there were something you wished me to be, I could be it."
+
+"We might adapt Kingsley: 'Be good, sweet man, and let who will be
+clever.'"  He could not help laughing.  She went on: "I always thought
+that was the most patronizing and exasperating thing ever addressed to a
+human girl; and we've had to stand a good deal in our time.  I should
+like to have it applied to the other 'sect' a while.  As if any girl that
+was a girl would be good if she had the remotest chance of being clever."
+
+"Then you wouldn't wish me to be good?"  Beaton asked.
+
+"Not if you were a girl."
+
+"You want to shock me.  Well, I suppose I deserve it.  But if I were one-
+tenth part as good as you are, Alma, I should have a lighter heart than I
+have now.  I know that I'm fickle, but I'm not false, as you think I am."
+
+"Who said I thought you were false?"
+
+"No one," said Beaton.  "It isn't necessary, when you look it--live it."
+
+"Oh, dear!  I didn't know I devoted my whole time to the subject."
+
+"I know I'm despicable.  I could tell you something--the history of this
+day, even--that would make you despise me."  Beaton had in mind his
+purchase of the overcoat, which Alma was getting in so effectively, with
+the money he ought to have sent his father.  "But," he went on, darkly,
+with a sense that what he was that moment suffering for his selfishness
+must somehow be a kind of atonement, which would finally leave him to the
+guiltless enjoyment of the overcoat, "you wouldn't believe the depths of
+baseness I could descend to."
+
+"I would try," said Alma, rapidly shading the collar, "if you'd give me
+some hint."
+
+Beaton had a sudden wish to pour out his remorse to her, but he was
+afraid of her laughing at him.  He said to himself that this was a very
+wholesome fear, and that if he could always have her at hand he should
+not make a fool of himself so often.  A man conceives of such an office
+as the very noblest for a woman; he worships her for it if he is
+magnanimous.  But Beaton was silent, and Alma put back her head for the
+right distance on her sketch.  "Mr. Fulkerson thinks you are the
+sublimest of human beings for advising him to get Colonel Woodburn to
+interview Mr. Dryfoos about Lindau.  What have you ever done with your
+Judas?"
+
+"I haven't done anything with it.  Nadel thought he would take hold of it
+at one time, but he dropped it again.  After all, I don't suppose it
+could be popularized.  Fulkerson wanted to offer it as a premium to
+subscribers for 'Every Other Week,' but I sat down on that."
+
+Alma could not feel the absurdity of this, and she merely said, "'Every
+Other Week' seems to be going on just the same as ever."
+
+"Yes, the trouble has all blown over, I believe.  Fulkerson," said
+Beaton, with a return to what they were saying, "has managed the whole
+business very well.  But he exaggerates the value of my advice."
+
+"Very likely," Alma suggested, vaguely.  "Or, no! Excuse me! He couldn't,
+he couldn't!" She laughed delightedly at Beaton's foolish look of
+embarrassment.
+
+He tried to recover his dignity in saying, "He's 'a very good fellow, and
+he deserves his happiness."
+
+"Oh, indeed!" said Alma, perversely.  "Does any one deserve happiness?"
+
+"I know I don't," sighed Beaton.
+
+"You mean you don't get it."
+
+"I certainly don't get it."
+
+"Ah, but that isn't the reason."
+
+"What is?"
+
+"That's the secret of the universe," She bit in her lower lip, and looked
+at him with eyes, of gleaming fun.
+
+"Are you never serious?"  he asked.
+
+"With serious people always."
+
+"I am serious; and you have the secret of my happiness--"  He threw
+himself impulsively forward in his chair.
+
+"Oh, pose, pose!" she cried.
+
+"I won't pose," he answered, "and you have got to listen to me.  You
+know I'm in love with you; and I know that once you cared for me.  Can't
+that time--won't it--come back again?  Try to think so, Alma!"
+
+"No," she said, briefly and seriously enough.
+
+"But that seems impossible.  What is it I've done what have you against
+me?"
+
+"Nothing.  But that time is past.  I couldn't recall it if I wished.  Why
+did you bring it up?  You've broken your word.  You know I wouldn't have
+let you keep coming here if you hadn't promised never to refer to it."
+
+"How could I help it?  With that happiness near us--Fulkerson--"
+
+"Oh, it's that?  I might have known it!"
+
+"No, it isn't that--it's something far deeper.  But if it's nothing you
+have against me, what is it, Alma, that keeps you from caring for me now
+as you did then?  I haven't changed."
+
+"But I have.  I shall never care for you again, Mr. Beaton; you might as
+well understand it once for all.  Don't think it's anything in yourself,
+or that I think you unworthy of me.  I'm not so self-satisfied as that;
+I know very well that I'm not a perfect character, and that I've no claim
+on perfection in anybody else.  I think women who want that are fools;
+they won't get it, and they don't deserve it.  But I've learned a good.
+deal more about myself than I knew in St. Barnaby, and a life of work, of
+art, and of art alone that's what I've made up my mind to."
+
+"A woman that's made up her mind to that has no heart to hinder her!"
+
+"Would a man have that had done so?"
+
+"But I don't believe you, Alma.  You're merely laughing at me.  And,
+besides, with me you needn't give up art.  We could work together.  You
+know how much I admire your talent.  I believe I could help it--serve it;
+I would be its willing slave, and yours, Heaven knows!"
+
+"I don't want any slave--nor any slavery.  I want to be free always.  Now
+do you see?  I don't care for you, and I never could in the old way; but
+I should have to care for some one more than I believe I ever shall to
+give up my work.  Shall we go on?"  She looked at her sketch.
+
+"No, we shall not go on," he said, gloomily, as he rose.
+
+"I suppose you blame me," she said, rising too.
+
+"Oh no! I blame no one--or only myself.  I threw my chance away."
+
+"I'm glad you see that; and I'm glad you did it.  You don't believe me,
+of course.  Why do men think life can be only the one thing to women?
+And if you come to the selfish view, who are the happy women?  I'm sure
+that if work doesn't fail me, health won't, and happiness won't."
+
+"But you could work on with me--"
+
+"Second fiddle.  Do you suppose I shouldn't be woman enough to wish my
+work always less and lower than yours?  At least I've heart enough for
+that!"
+
+"You've heart enough for anything, Alma.  I was a fool to say you
+hadn't."
+
+"I think the women who keep their hearts have an even chance, at least,
+of having heart--"
+
+"Ah, there's where you're wrong!"
+
+"But mine isn't mine to give you, anyhow.  And now I don't want you ever
+to speak to me about this again."
+
+"Oh, there's no danger!" he cried, bitterly.  "I shall never willingly
+see you again."
+
+"That's as you like, Mr. Beaton.  We've had to be very frank, but I don't
+see why we shouldn't be friends.  Still, we needn't, if you don't like."
+
+"And I may come--I may come here--as--as usual?"
+
+"Why, if you can consistently," she said, with a smile, and she held out
+her hand to him.
+
+He went home dazed, and feeling as if it were a bad joke that had been
+put upon him.  At least the affair went so deep that it estranged the
+aspect of his familiar studio.  Some of the things in it were not very
+familiar; he had spent lately a great deal on rugs, on stuffs, on
+Japanese bric-a-brac.  When he saw these things in the shops he had felt
+that he must have them; that they were necessary to him; and he was
+partly in debt for them, still without having sent any of his earnings to
+pay his father.  As he looked at them now he liked to fancy something
+weird and conscious in them as the silent witnesses of a broken life.
+He felt about among some of the smaller objects on the mantel for his
+pipe.  Before he slept he was aware, in the luxury of his despair, of a
+remote relief, an escape; and, after all, the understanding he had come
+to with Alma was only the explicit formulation of terms long tacit
+between them.  Beaton would have been puzzled more than he knew if she
+had taken him seriously.  It was inevitable that he should declare
+himself in love with her; but he was not disappointed at her rejection of
+his love; perhaps not so much as he would have been at its acceptance,
+though he tried to think otherwise, and to give himself airs of tragedy.
+He did not really feel that the result was worse than what had gone
+before, and it left him free.
+
+But he did not go to the Leightons again for so long a time that Mrs.
+Leighton asked Alma what had happened.  Alma told her.
+
+"And he won't come any more?"  her mother sighed, with reserved censure.
+
+"Oh, I think he will.  He couldn't very well come the next night.  But he
+has the habit of coming, and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything--even
+the habit of thinking he's in love with some one."
+
+"Alma," said her mother, "I don't think it's very nice for a girl to let
+a young man keep coming to see her after she's refused him."
+
+"Why not, if it amuses him and doesn't hurt the girl?"
+
+"But it does hurt her, Alma.  It--it's indelicate.  It isn't fair to him;
+it gives him hopes."
+
+"Well, mamma, it hasn't happened in the given case yet.  If Mr. Beaton
+comes again, I won't see him, and you can forbid him the house."
+
+"If I could only feel sure, Alma," said her mother, taking up another
+branch of the inquiry, "that you really knew your own mind, I should be
+easier about it."
+
+"Then you can rest perfectly quiet, mamma.  I do know my own mind; and,
+what's worse, I know Mr. Beaton's mind."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean that he spoke to me the other night simply because Mr.
+Fulkerson's engagement had broken him all up."
+
+"What expressions!" Mrs. Leighton lamented.
+
+"He let it out himself," Alma went on.  "And you wouldn't have thought it
+was very flattering yourself.  When I'm made love to, after this,
+I prefer to be made love to in an off-year, when there isn't another
+engaged couple anywhere about."
+
+"Did you tell him that, Alma?"
+
+"Tell him that! What do you mean, mamma?  I may be indelicate, but I'm
+not quite so indelicate as that."
+
+"I didn't mean you were indelicate, really, Alma, but I wanted to warn
+you.  I think Mr. Beaton was very much in earnest."
+
+"Oh, so did he!"
+
+"And you didn't?"
+
+"Oh yes, for the time being.  I suppose he's very much in earnest with
+Miss Vance at times, and with Miss Dryfoos at others.  Sometimes he's a
+painter, and sometimes he's an architect, and sometimes he's a sculptor.
+He has too many gifts--too many tastes."
+
+"And if Miss Vance and Miss Dryfoos--"
+
+"Oh, do say Sculpture and Architecture, mamma! It's getting so dreadfully
+personal!"
+
+"Alma, you know that I only wish to get at your real feeling in the
+matter."
+
+"And you know that I don't want to let you--especially when I haven't got
+any real feeling in the matter.  But I should think--speaking in the
+abstract entirely--that if either of those arts was ever going to be in
+earnest about him, it would want his exclusive devotion for a week at
+least."
+
+"I didn't know," said Mrs. Leighton, "that he was doing anything now at
+the others.  I thought he was entirely taken up with his work on 'Every
+Other Week.'"
+
+"Oh, he is! he is!"
+
+"And you certainly can't say, my dear, that he hasn't been very kind--
+very useful to you, in that matter."
+
+"And so I ought to have said yes out of gratitude?  Thank you, mamma! I
+didn't know you held me so cheap."
+
+"You know whether I hold you cheap or not, Alma.  I don't want you to
+cheapen yourself.  I don't want you to trifle with any one.  I want you
+to be honest with yourself."
+
+"Well, come now, mamma! Suppose you begin.  I've been perfectly honest
+with myself, and I've been honest with Mr. Beaton.  I don't care for him,
+and I've told him I didn't; so he may be supposed to know it.  If he
+comes here after this, he'll come as a plain, unostentatious friend of
+the family, and it's for you to say whether he shall come in that
+capacity or not.  I hope you won't trifle with him, and let him get the
+notion that he's coming on any other basis."
+
+Mrs. Leighton felt the comfort of the critical attitude far too keenly to
+abandon it for anything constructive.  She only said, "You know very
+well, Alma, that's a matter I can have nothing to do with."
+
+"Then you leave him entirely to me?"
+
+"I hope you will regard his right to candid and open treatment."
+
+"He's had nothing but the most open and candid treatment from me, mamma.
+It's you that wants to play fast and loose with him.  And, to tell you
+the truth, I believe he would like that a good deal better; I believe
+that, if there's anything he hates, it's openness and candor."
+Alma laughed, and put her arms round her mother, who could not help
+laughing a little, too.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela the social opportunity
+which the spring had offered.  After the musicale at Mrs. Horn's, they
+both made their party-call, as Mela said, in due season; but they did not
+find Mrs. Horn at home, and neither she nor Miss Vance came to see them
+after people returned to town in the fall.  They tried to believe for a
+time that Mrs. Horn had not got their cards; this pretence failed them,
+and they fell back upon their pride, or rather Christine's pride.  Mela
+had little but her good-nature to avail her in any exigency, and if Mrs.
+Horn or Miss Vance had come to call after a year of neglect, she would
+have received them as amiably as if they had not lost a day in coming.
+But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they would not have been
+forgiven; and she had planned the words and the behavior with which she
+would have punished them if they had appeared then.  Neither sister
+imagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christine was
+suspicious, at least, and it was Mela who invented the hypothesis of the
+lost cards.  As nothing happened to prove or to disprove the fact, she
+said, "I move we put Coonrod up to gittun' it out of Miss Vance, at some
+of their meetun's."
+
+"If you do," said Christine, "I'll kill you."
+
+Christine, however, had the visits of Beaton to console her, and, if
+these seemed to have no definite aim, she was willing to rest in the
+pleasure they gave her vanity; but Mela had nothing.  Sometimes she even
+wished they were all back on the farm.
+
+"It would be the best thing for both of you," said Mrs. Dryfoos, in
+answer to such a burst of desperation.  "I don't think New York is any
+place for girls."
+
+"Well, what I hate, mother," said Mela, "is, it don't seem to be any
+place for young men, either."  She found this so good when she had said
+it that she laughed over it till Christine was angry.
+
+"A body would think there had never been any joke before."
+
+"I don't see as it's a joke," said Mrs. Dryfoos.  "It's the plain truth."
+
+"Oh, don't mind her, mother," said Mela.  "She's put out because her old
+Mr. Beaton ha'r't been round for a couple o' weeks.  If you don't watch
+out, that fellow 'll give you the slip yit, Christine, after all your
+pains."
+
+"Well, there ain't anybody to give you the slip, Mela," Christine clawed
+back.
+
+"No; I ha'n't ever set my traps for anybody."  This was what Mela said
+for want of a better retort; but it was not quite true.  When Kendricks
+came with Beaton to call after her father's dinner, she used all her
+cunning to ensnare him, and she had him to herself as long as Beaton
+stayed; Dryfoos sent down word that he was not very well and had gone to
+bed.  The novelty of Mela had worn off for Kendricks, and she found him,
+as she frankly told him, not half as entertaining as he was at Mrs.
+Horn's; but she did her best with him as the only flirtable material
+which had yet come to her hand.  It would have been her ideal to have the
+young men stay till past midnight, and her father come down-stairs in his
+stocking-feet and tell them it was time to go.  But they made a visit of
+decorous brevity, and Kendricks did not come again. She met him
+afterward, once, as she was crossing the pavement in Union Square to get
+into her coupe, and made the most of him; but it was necessarily very
+little, and so he passed out of her life without having left any trace in
+her heart, though Mela had a heart that she would have put at the
+disposition of almost any young man that wanted it.  Kendricks himself,
+Manhattan cockney as he was, with scarcely more out look into the average
+American nature than if he had been kept a prisoner in New York society
+all his days, perceived a property in her which forbade him as a man of
+conscience to trifle with her; something earthly good and kind, if it was
+simple and vulgar.  In revising his impressions of her, it seemed to him
+that she would come even to better literary effect if this were
+recognized in her; and it made her sacred, in spite of her willingness to
+fool and to be fooled, in her merely human quality.  After all, he saw
+that she wished honestly to love and to be loved, and the lures she threw
+out to that end seemed to him pathetic rather than ridiculous; he could
+not join Beaton in laughing at her; and he did not like Beaton's laughing
+at the other girl, either.  It seemed to Kendricks, with the code of
+honor which he mostly kept to himself because he was a little ashamed to
+find there were so few others like it, that if Beaton cared nothing for
+the other girl--and Christine appeared simply detestable to Kendricks--
+he had better keep away from her, and not give her the impression he was
+in love with her.  He rather fancied that this was the part of a
+gentleman, and he could not have penetrated to that aesthetic and moral
+complexity which formed the consciousness of a nature like Beaton's and
+was chiefly a torment to itself; he could not have conceived of the
+wayward impulses indulged at every moment in little things till the
+straight highway was traversed and well-nigh lost under their tangle.
+To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes, even
+though one continues to do what one will; but Kendricks, though a sage of
+twenty-seven, was still too young to understand this.
+
+Beaton scarcely understood it himself, perhaps because he was not yet
+twenty-seven.  He only knew that his will was somehow sick; that it spent
+itself in caprices, and brought him no happiness from the fulfilment of
+the most vehement wish.  But he was aware that his wishes grew less and
+less vehement; he began to have a fear that some time he might have none
+at all.  It seemed to him that if he could once do something that was
+thoroughly distasteful to himself, he might make a beginning in the right
+direction; but when he tried this on a small scale, it failed, and it
+seemed stupid.  Some sort of expiation was the thing he needed, he was
+sure; but he could not think of anything in particular to expiate; a man
+could not expiate his temperament, and his temperament was what Beaton
+decided to be at fault.  He perceived that it went deeper than even fate
+would have gone; he could have fulfilled an evil destiny and had done
+with it, however terrible.  His trouble was that he could not escape from
+himself; and, for the most part, he justified himself in refusing to try.
+After he had come to that distinct understanding with Alma Leighton,
+and experienced the relief it really gave him, he thought for a while
+that if it had fallen out otherwise, and she had put him in charge of her
+destiny, he might have been better able to manage his own.  But as it
+was, he could only drift, and let all other things take their course.
+It was necessary that he should go to see her afterward, to show her that
+he was equal to the event; but he did not go so often, and he went rather
+oftener to the Dryfooses; it was not easy to see Margaret Vance, except
+on the society terms.  With much sneering and scorning, he fulfilled the
+duties to Mrs. Horn without which he knew he should be dropped from her
+list; but one might go to many of her Thursdays without getting many
+words with her niece.  Beaton hardly knew whether he wanted many; the
+girl kept the charm of her innocent stylishness; but latterly she wanted
+to talk more about social questions than about the psychical problems
+that young people usually debate so personally.  Son of the working-
+people as he was, Beaton had never cared anything about such matters;
+he did not know about them or wish to know; he was perhaps too near them.
+Besides, there was an embarrassment, at least on her part, concerning the
+Dryfooses.  She was too high-minded to blame him for having tempted her
+to her failure with them by his talk about them; but she was conscious of
+avoiding them in her talk.  She had decided not to renew the effort she
+had made in the spring; because she could not do them good as fellow-
+creatures needing food and warmth and work, and she would not try to
+befriend them socially; she had a horror of any such futile
+sentimentality.  She would have liked to account to Beaton in this way
+for a course which she suspected he must have heard their comments upon,
+but she did not quite know how to do it; she could not be sure how much
+or how little he cared for them.  Some tentative approaches which she
+made toward explanation were met with such eager disclaim of personal
+interest that she knew less than before what to think; and she turned the
+talk from the sisters to the brother, whom it seemed she still continued
+to meet in their common work among the poor.
+
+"He seems very different," she ventured.
+
+"Oh, quite," said Beaton.  "He's the kind of person that you might
+suppose gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life; he's a
+cloistered nature--the nature that atones and suffers for.  But he's
+awfully dull company, don't you think?  I never can get anything out of
+him."
+
+"He's very much in earnest."
+
+"Remorselessly.  We've got a profane and mundane creature there at the
+office who runs us all, and it's shocking merely to see the contact of
+the tyro natures.  When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos--he likes to put
+his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish
+motive, that he has an eye to office, and is working up a political
+interest for himself on the East Side--it's something inexpressible."
+
+"I should think so," said Miss Vance, with such lofty disapproval that
+Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused it.
+He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, "Well, the man of one
+idea is always a little ridiculous."
+
+"When his idea is right?"  she demanded.  "A right idea can't be
+ridiculous."
+
+"Oh, I only said the man that held it was.  He's flat; he has no relief,
+no projection."
+
+She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived that he had silenced her to
+his own, disadvantage.  It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a
+little too exacting for comfort in her idealism.  He put down the cup of
+tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn staccato: "I must go.
+Good-bye!" and got instantly away from her, with an effect he had of
+having suddenly thought of something imperative.
+
+He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment's hail and farewell, and felt
+himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation
+with half a dozen other people.  He fancied that at crises of this
+strange interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him,
+and confidential, of all things, about her niece.  She ended by not
+having palpably been so.  In fact, the concern in her mind would have
+been difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments
+Mrs. Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could
+somehow be interested in lower things than those which occupied her.
+She had watched with growing anxiety the girl's tendency to various kinds
+of self-devotion.  She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire
+withdrawal from the world in a life of good works.  Before now, girls had
+entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the young
+and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament to be
+influenced by them.  During the past summer she had been unhappy at her
+separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their
+stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried her
+aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come.
+Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she
+befriended.  Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was
+actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers.  This, of course,
+had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society,
+and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing
+it.  At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it;
+she was afraid that Margaret's health would give way under the strain,
+and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a
+decline.  She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as
+she could employ.  At an age when such things weary, she threw herself
+into the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after
+her; and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion her
+course from ball to ball, from reception to reception, from parlor-
+reading to parlor-reading, from musicale to musicale, from play to play,
+from opera to opera.  She tasted, after she had practically renounced
+them, the bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionable amusement, in the
+hope that Margaret might find them sweet, and now at the end she had to
+own to herself that she had failed.  It was coming Lent again, and the
+girl had only grown thinner and more serious with the diversions that did
+not divert her from the baleful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn
+felt that she was throwing her youth away.  Margaret could have borne
+either alone, but together they were wearing her out.  She felt it a duty
+to undergo the pleasures her aunt appointed for her, but she could not
+forego the other duties in which she found her only pleasure.
+
+She kept up her music still because she could employ it at the meetings
+for the entertainment, and, as she hoped, the elevation of her working-
+women; but she neglected the other aesthetic interests which once
+occupied her; and, at sight of Beaton talking with her, Mrs. Horn caught
+at the hope that he might somehow be turned to account in reviving
+Margaret's former interest in art.  She asked him if Mr. Wetmore had his
+classes that winter as usual; and she said she wished Margaret could be
+induced to go again:  Mr. Wetmore always said that she did not draw very
+well, but that she had a great deal of feeling for it, and her work was
+interesting.  She asked, were the Leightons in town again; and she
+murmured a regret that she had not been able to see anything of them,
+without explaining why; she said she had a fancy that if Margaret knew
+Miss Leighton, and what she was doing, it might stimulate her, perhaps.
+She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on with her art?  Beaton said,
+Oh yes, he believed so.
+
+But his manner did not encourage Mrs. Horn to pursue her aims in that
+direction, and she said, with a sigh, she wished he still had a class;
+she always fancied that Margaret got more good from his instruction than
+from any one else's.
+
+He said that she was very good; but there was really nobody who knew half
+as much as Wetmore, or could make any one understand half as much.
+Mrs. Horn was afraid, she said, that Mr. Wetmore's terrible sincerity
+discouraged Margaret; he would not let her have any illusions about the
+outcome of what she was doing; and did not Mr. Beaton think that some
+illusion was necessary with young people?  Of course, it was very nice of
+Mr. Wetmore to be so honest, but it did not always seem to be the wisest
+thing.  She begged Mr. Beaton to try to think of some one who would be a
+little less severe.  Her tone assumed a deeper interest in the people who
+were coming up and going away, and Beaton perceived that he was
+dismissed.
+
+He went away with vanity flattered by the sense of having been appealed
+to concerning Margaret, and then he began to chafe at what she had said
+of Wetmore's honesty, apropos of her wish that he still had a class
+himself.  Did she mean, confound her? that he was insincere, and would
+let Miss Vance suppose she had more talent than she really had?  The more
+Beaton thought of this, the more furious he became, and the more he was
+convinced that something like it had been unconsciously if not
+consciously in her mind.  He framed some keen retorts, to the general
+effect that with the atmosphere of illusion preserved so completely at
+home, Miss Vance hardly needed it in her art studies.  Having just
+determined never to go near Mrs. Horn's Thursdays again, he decided to go
+once more, in order to plant this sting in her capacious but somewhat
+callous bosom; and he planned how he would lead the talk up to the point
+from which he should launch it.
+
+In the mean time he felt the need of some present solace, such as only
+unqualified worship could give him; a cruel wish to feel his power in
+some direction where, even if it were resisted, it could not be overcome,
+drove him on.  That a woman who was to Beaton the embodiment of
+artificiality should intimate, however innocently--the innocence made it
+all the worse--that he was less honest than Wetmore, whom he knew to be
+so much more honest, was something that must be retaliated somewhere
+before his self-respect could be restored.  It was only five o'clock, and
+he went on up-town to the Dryfooses', though he had been there only the
+night before last.  He asked for the ladies, and Mrs. Mandel received
+him.
+
+"The young ladies are down-town shopping," she said, "but I am very glad
+of the opportunity of seeing you alone, Mr. Beaton.  You know I lived
+several years in Europe."
+
+"Yes," said Beaton, wondering what that could have to do with her
+pleasure in seeing him alone.  "I believe so?"  He involuntarily gave his
+words the questioning inflection.
+
+"You have lived abroad, too, and so you won't find what I am going to ask
+so strange.  Mr. Beaton, why do you come so much to this house?"  Mrs.
+Mandel bent forward with an aspect of ladylike interest and smiled.
+
+Beaton frowned.  "Why do I come so much?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Why do I--Excuse me, Mrs. Mandel, but will you allow me to ask why you
+ask?"
+
+"Oh, certainly.  There's no reason why I shouldn't say, for I wish you to
+be very frank with me.  I ask because there are two young ladies in this
+house; and, in a certain way, I have to take the place of a mother to
+them.  I needn't explain why; you know all the people here, and you
+understand.  I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be
+speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people.  They do
+not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help
+themselves or one another.  But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure
+you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here.  You are
+either interested in one of these young girls or you are not.  If you
+are, I have nothing more to say.  If you are not--" Mrs. Mandel continued
+to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy
+gleam.
+
+Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself.  He
+had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be
+sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses,
+but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and
+sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years his
+senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty.  He reddened, and
+then turned an angry pallor.  "Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel.  Do you ask
+this from the young ladies?"
+
+"Certainly not," she said, with the best temper, and with something in
+her tone that convicted Beaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of
+her authority in the form of a sneer.  "As I have suggested, they would
+hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter.  I have no
+objection to saying that I ask it from the father of the young ladies.
+Of course, in and for myself I should have no right to know anything
+about your affairs.  I assure you the duty of knowing isn't very
+pleasant."  The little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as
+something rather nice.
+
+"I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel," he said, with a dreamy
+sadness in his own.  He lifted his eyes and looked into hers.  "If I told
+you that I cared nothing about them in the way you intimate?"
+
+"Then I should prefer to let you characterize your own conduct in
+continuing to come here for the year past, as you have done, and tacitly
+leading them on to infer differently."  They both mechanically kept up
+the fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine, but there was no doubt
+in the mind of either which of the young ladies the other meant.
+A good many thoughts went through Beaton's mind, and none of them were
+flattering.  He had not been unconscious that the part he had played
+toward this girl was ignoble, and that it had grown meaner as the fancy
+which her beauty had at first kindled in him had grown cooler.  He was
+aware that of late he had been amusing himself with her passion in a way
+that was not less than cruel, not because he wished to do so, but because
+he was listless and wished nothing.  He rose in saying: "I might be a
+little more lenient than you think, Mrs. Mandel; but I won't trouble you
+with any palliating theory.  I will not come any more."
+
+He bowed, and Mrs. Mandel said, "Of course, it's only your action that I
+am concerned with."
+
+She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he could not conceive what it
+had cost her to nerve herself up to her too easy victory.  He left Mrs.
+Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and he went away
+hating her as an enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he
+particularly needed exalting.  It was really very simple for him to stop
+going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simple for Mrs.
+Mandel to deal with the consequences of his not coming.  He only thought
+how lightly she had stopped him, and the poor woman whom he had left
+trembling for what she had been obliged to do embodied for him the
+conscience that accused him of unpleasant things.
+
+"By heavens! this is piling it up," he said to himself through his set
+teeth, realizing how it had happened right on top of that stupid insult
+from Mrs. Horn.  Now he should have to give up his place on 'Every Other
+Week; he could not keep that, under the circumstances, even if some
+pretence were not made to get rid of him; he must hurry and anticipate
+any such pretence; he must see Fulkerson at once; he wondered where he
+should find him at that hour.  He thought, with bitterness so real that
+it gave him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainly he could find
+him a little later at Mrs. Leighton's; and Fulkerson's happiness became
+an added injury.
+
+The thing had, of course, come about just at the wrong time.  There never
+had been a time when Beaton needed money more, when he had spent what he
+had and what he expected to have so recklessly.  He was in debt to
+Fulkerson personally and officially for advance payments of salary.  The
+thought of sending money home made him break into a scoffing laugh, which
+he turned into a cough in order to deceive the passers.  What sort of
+face should he go with to Fulkerson and tell him that he renounced his
+employment on 'Every Other Week;' and what should he do when he had
+renounced it?  Take pupils, perhaps; open a class?  A lurid conception of
+a class conducted on those principles of shameless flattery at which Mrs.
+Horn had hinted--he believed now she had meant to insult him--presented
+itself.  Why should not he act upon the suggestion?  He thought with
+loathing for the whole race of women--dabblers in art.  How easy the
+thing would be: as easy as to turn back now and tell that old fool's girl
+that he loved her, and rake in half his millions.  Why should not he do
+that?  No one else cared for him; and at a year's end, probably, one
+woman would be like another as far as the love was concerned, and
+probably he should not be more tired if the woman were Christine Dryfoos
+than if she were Margaret Vance.  He kept Alma Leighton out of the
+question, because at the bottom of his heart he believed that she must be
+forever unlike every other woman to him.
+
+The tide of his confused and aimless reverie had carried him far down-
+town, he thought; but when he looked up from it to see where he was he
+found himself on Sixth Avenue, only a little below Thirty-ninth Street,
+very hot and blown; that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling.  He could not
+possibly walk down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even to the
+Elevated station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to wait for a
+surface-car, and fell again into his bitter fancies.  After a while he
+roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car coming.  He
+found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily swinging his club by its
+thong from his wrist.
+
+"When do you suppose a car will be along?"  he asked, rather in a general
+sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any special belief that the
+policeman could tell him.
+
+The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco-juice into the gutter.
+"In about a week," he said, nonchalantly.
+
+"What's the matter?"  asked Beaton, wondering what the joke could be.
+
+"Strike," said the policeman.  His interest in Beaton's ignorance seemed
+to overcome his contempt of it.  "Knocked off everywhere this morning
+except Third Avenue and one or two cross-town lines."  He spat again and
+kept his bulk at its incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men
+on the corner below: They were neatly dressed, and looked like something
+better than workingmen, and they had a holiday air of being in their best
+clothes.
+
+"Some of the strikers?"  asked Beaton.
+
+The policeman nodded.
+
+"Any trouble yet?"
+
+"There won't be any trouble till we begin to move the cars," said the
+policeman.
+
+Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the men whose action would
+now force him to walk five blocks and mount the stairs of the Elevated
+station.  "If you'd take out eight or ten of those fellows," he said,
+ferociously, "and set them up against a wall and shoot them, you'd save a
+great deal of bother."
+
+"I guess we sha'n't have to shoot much," said the policeman, still
+swinging his locust.  "Anyway, we shant begin it.  If it comes to a
+fight, though," he said, with a look at the men under the scooping rim of
+his helmet, "we can drive the whole six thousand of 'em into the East
+River without pullin' a trigger."
+
+"Are there six thousand in it?"
+
+"About."
+
+"What do the infernal fools expect to live on?"
+
+"The interest of their money, I suppose," said the officer, with a grin
+of satisfaction in his irony.  "It's got to run its course.  Then they'll
+come back with their heads tied up and their tails between their legs,
+and plead to be taken on again."
+
+"If I was a manager of the roads," said Beaton, thinking of how much he
+was already inconvenienced by the strike, and obscurely connecting it as
+one of the series with the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of Mrs.
+Horn and Mrs. Mandel, "I would see them starve before I'd take them back
+--every one of them."
+
+"Well," said the policeman, impartially, as a man might whom the
+companies allowed to ride free, but who had made friends with a good many
+drivers and conductors in the course of his free riding, "I guess that's
+what the roads would like to do if they could; but the men are too many
+for them, and there ain't enough other men to take their places."
+
+"No matter," said Beaton, severely.  "They can bring in men from other
+places."
+
+"Oh, they'll do that fast enough," said the policeman.
+
+A man came out of the saloon on the corner where the strikers were
+standing, noisy drunk, and they began, as they would have said, to have
+some fun with him.  The policeman left Beaton, and sauntered slowly down
+toward the group as if in the natural course of an afternoon ramble.  On
+the other side of the street Beaton could see another officer sauntering
+up from the block below.  Looking up and down the avenue, so silent of
+its horse-car bells, he saw a policeman at every corner.  It was rather
+impressive.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The strike made a good deal of talk in it he office of 'Every Other Week'
+that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal.  He congratulated himself
+that he was not personally incommoded by it, like some of the fellows who
+lived uptown, and had not everything under one roof, as it were.  He
+enjoyed the excitement of it, and he kept the office boy running out to
+buy the extras which the newsmen came crying through the street almost
+every hour with a lamentable, unintelligible noise.  He read not only the
+latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial comments on it,
+which praised the firm attitude of both parties, and the admirable
+measures taken by the police to preserve order.  Fulkerson enjoyed the
+interviews with the police captains and the leaders of the strike; he
+equally enjoyed the attempts of the reporters to interview the road
+managers, which were so graphically detailed, and with such a fine
+feeling for the right use of scare-heads as to have almost the value of
+direct expression from them, though it seemed that they had resolutely
+refused to speak.  He said, at second-hand from the papers, that if the
+men behaved themselves and respected the rights of property, they would
+have public sympathy with them every time; but just as soon as they began
+to interfere with the roads' right to manage their own affairs in their
+own way, they must be put down with an iron hand; the phrase "iron hand"
+did Fulkerson almost as much good as if it had never been used before.
+News began to come of fighting between the police and the strikers when
+the roads tried to move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia,
+and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage of the police.  At
+the same time, he believed what the strikers said, and that the trouble
+was not made by them, but by gangs of roughs acting without their
+approval.  In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival of the State
+Board of Arbitration, which took up its quarters, with a great many
+scare-heads, at one of the principal hotels, and invited the roads and
+the strikers to lay the matter in dispute before them; he said that now
+we should see the working of the greatest piece of social machinery in
+modern times.  But it appeared to work only in the alacrity of the
+strikers to submit their grievance.  The road; were as one road in
+declaring that there was nothing to arbitrate, and that they were merely
+asserting their right to manage their own affairs in their own way.
+One of the presidents was reported to have told a member of the Board,
+who personally summoned him, to get out and to go about his business.
+Then, to Fulkerson's extreme disappointment, the august tribunal, acting
+on behalf of the sovereign people in the interest of peace, declared
+itself powerless, and got out, and would, no doubt, have gone about its
+business if it had had any.  Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps
+because the extras did not; but March laughed at this result.
+
+"It's a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and
+his forty thousand men.  I suppose somebody told him at the top of the
+hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about his
+business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had marched up
+with all that ceremony.  What amuses me is to find that in an affair of
+this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the
+public has no rights at all.  The roads and the strikers are allowed to
+fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and precisely a
+private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having tolerated--
+as any street war in Florence or Verona--and to fight it out at our pains
+and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they get tired.
+It's a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand
+inhabitants."
+
+"What would you do?" asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view of
+the case.
+
+"Do?  Nothing.  Hasn't the State Board of Arbitration declared itself
+powerless?  We have no hold upon the strikers; and we're so used to being
+snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our hold
+on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in their
+own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed us no
+services in return for their privileges."
+
+"That's a good deal so," said Fulkerson, disordering his hair.  "Well,
+it's nuts for the colonel nowadays.  He says if he was boss of this town
+he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man 'em with
+policemen, and run 'em till the managers had come to terms with the
+strikers; and he'd do that every time there was a strike."
+
+"Doesn't that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?"
+asked March.
+
+"I don't know.  It savors of horse sense."
+
+"You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson.  I thought you were the most engaged
+man I ever saw; but I guess you're more father-in-lawed.  And before
+you're married, too."
+
+"Well, the colonel's a glorious old fellow, March.  I wish he had the
+power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed
+in.  He's on the keen jump from morning till night, and he's up late and
+early to see the row.  I'm afraid he'll get shot at some of the fights;
+he sees them all; I can't get any show at them: haven't seen a brickbat
+shied or a club swung yet.  Have you?"
+
+"No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the
+papers, and that's what I really want to do, I suppose.  Besides, I'm
+solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under
+penalty of having her bring the children and go with me.  Her theory is
+that we must all die together; the children haven't been at school since
+the strike began.  There's no precaution that Mrs. March hasn't used.
+She watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this
+office."
+
+Fulkerson laughed and said: "Well, it's probably the only thing that's
+saved your life.  Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?"
+
+"No.  You don't mean to say he's killed!"
+
+"Not if he knows it.  But I don't know--What do you say, March?  What's
+the reason you couldn't get us up a paper on the strike?"
+
+"I knew it would fetch round to 'Every Other Week,' somehow."
+
+"No, but seriously.  There 'll be plenty of news paper accounts.  But you
+could treat it in the historical spirit--like something that happened
+several centuries ago; De Foe's Plague of London style.  Heigh?  What
+made me think of it was Beaton.  If I could get hold of him, you two
+could go round together and take down its aesthetic aspects.  It's a big
+thing, March, this strike is.  I tell you it's imposing to have a private
+war, as you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New
+York not minding, it a bit.  See?  Might take that view of it.  With your
+descriptions and Beaton's sketches--well, it would just be the greatest
+card!  Come!  What do you say?"
+
+"Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I'm killed and
+she and the children are not killed with me?"
+
+"Well, it would be difficult.  I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks
+to do the literary part?"
+
+"I've no doubt he'd jump at the chance.  I've yet to see the form of
+literature that Kendricks wouldn't lay down his life for."
+
+"Say!" March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another
+inspiration, and smiled patiently.  "Look here!  What's the reason we
+couldn't get one of the strikers to write it up for us?"
+
+"Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents," March suggested.
+
+"No; I'm in earnest.  They say some of those fellows-especially the
+foreigners--are educated men.  I know one fellow--a Bohemian--that used
+to edit a Bohemian newspaper here.  He could write it out in his kind of
+Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it."
+
+"I guess not," said March, dryly.
+
+"Why not?  He'd do it for the cause, wouldn't he?  Suppose you put it up
+on him the next time you see him."
+
+"I don't see Lindau any more," said March.  He added, "I guess he's
+renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos's money."
+
+"Pshaw!  You don't mean he hasn't been round since?"
+
+"He came for a while, but he's left off coming now.  I don't feel
+particularly gay about it," March said, with some resentment of
+Fulkerson's grin.  "He's left me in debt to him for lessons to the
+children."
+
+Fulkerson laughed out.  "Well, he is the greatest old fool!  Who'd 'a'
+thought he'd 'a' been in earnest with those 'brincibles' of his?  But I
+suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a
+world."
+
+"There has to be one such crank, it seems," March partially assented.
+"One's enough for me."
+
+"I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too," said Fulkerson.  "Why, it
+must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see 'gabidal'
+embarrassed like it is by this strike.  It must make old Lindau feel like
+he was back behind those barricades at Berlin.  Well, he's a splendid old
+fellow; pity he drinks, as I remarked once before."
+
+When March left the office he did not go home so directly as he came,
+perhaps because Mrs. March's eye was not on him.  He was very curious
+about some aspects of the strike, whose importance, as a great social
+convulsion, he felt people did not recognize; and, with his temperance in
+everything, he found its negative expressions as significant as its more
+violent phases.  He had promised his wife solemnly that he would keep
+away from these, and he had a natural inclination to keep his promise;
+he had no wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets shot when
+there is any firing on a mob.  He interested himself in the apparent
+indifference of the mighty city, which kept on about its business as
+tranquilly as if the private war being fought out in its midst were a
+vague rumor of Indian troubles on the frontier; and he realized how there
+might once have been a street feud of forty years in Florence without
+interfering materially with the industry and prosperity of the city.
+On Broadway there was a silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car
+bells and hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the
+avenues, roofed by the elevated roads, this silence of the surface tracks
+was not noticeable at all in the roar of the trains overhead.  Some of
+the cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with a policeman on the
+rear of each; on the Third Avenge line, operated by non-union men, who
+had not struck, there were two policemen beside the driver of every car,
+and two beside the conductor, to protect them from the strikers.  But
+there were no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly
+about in groups on the corners.  While March watched them at a safe
+distance, a car laden with policemen came down the track, but none of the
+strikers offered to molest it.  In their simple Sunday best, March
+thought them very quiet, decent-looking people, and he could well believe
+that they had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks in other parts of
+the city.  He could hardly believe that there were any such outbreaks; he
+began more and more to think them mere newspaper exaggerations in the
+absence of any disturbance, or the disposition to it, that he could see.
+He walked on to the East River
+
+Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspect as Second Avenue;
+groups of men stood on the corners, and now and then a police-laden car
+was brought unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and
+talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.
+
+March got a cross-town car, and came back to the West Side.  A policeman,
+looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the platform.
+
+"I suppose you'll be glad when this cruel war is over," March suggested,
+as he got in.
+
+The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.
+
+His behavior, from a man born to the joking give and take of our life,
+impressed March.  It gave him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had
+read of the French troops putting on toward the populace just before the
+coup d'etat; he began to feel like the populace; but he struggled with
+himself and regained his character of philosophical observer.  In this
+character he remained in the car and let it carry him by the corner where
+he ought to have got out and gone home, and let it keep on with him to
+one of the farthermost tracks westward, where so much of the fighting was
+reported to have taken place.  But everything on the way was as quiet as
+on the East Side.
+
+Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake that he was
+half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped down from the
+platform and ran forward.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Dryfoos sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. Mandel as usual to pour
+out his coffee.  Conrad had gone down-town; the two girls lay abed much
+later than their father breakfasted, and their mother had gradually grown
+too feeble to come down till lunch.  Suddenly Christine appeared at the
+door.  Her face was white to the edges of her lips, and her eyes were
+blazing.
+
+"Look here, father! Have you been saying anything to Mr. Beaton?"
+
+The old man looked up at her across his coffee-cup through his frowning
+brows.  "No."
+
+Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shook in her hand.
+
+"Then what's the reason he don't come here any more?"  demanded the girl;
+and her glance darted from her father to Mrs. Mandel.  "Oh, it's you, is
+it?  I'd like to know who told you to meddle in other people's business?"
+
+"I did," said Dryfoos, savagely.  "I told her to ask him what he wanted
+here, and he said he didn't want anything, and he stopped coming.  That's
+all.  I did it myself."
+
+"Oh, you did, did you?"  said the girl, scarcely less insolently than she
+had spoken to Mrs. Mandel.  "I should like to know what you did it for?
+I'd like to know what made you think I wasn't able to take care of
+myself.  I just knew somebody had been meddling, but I didn't suppose it
+was you.  I can manage my own affairs in my own way, if you please, and
+I'll thank you after this to leave me to myself in what don't concern
+you."
+
+"Don't concern me?  You impudent jade!" her father began.
+
+Christine advanced from the doorway toward the table; she had her hands
+closed upon what seemed trinkets, some of which glittered and dangled
+from them.  She said, "Will you go to him and tell him that this
+meddlesome minx, here, had no business to say anything about me to him,
+and you take it all back?"
+
+"No!" shouted the old man.  "And if--"
+
+"That's all I want of you!" the girl shouted in her turn.  "Here are your
+presents."  With both hands she flung the jewels-pins and rings and
+earrings and bracelets--among the breakfast-dishes, from which some of
+them sprang to the floor.  She stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring
+from the finger where Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her
+father's plate.  Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard her
+running up-stairs.
+
+The old man made a start toward her, but he fell back in his chair before
+she was gone, and, with a fierce, grinding movement of his jaws,
+controlled himself.  "Take-take those things up," he gasped to Mrs.
+Mandel.  He seemed unable to rise again from his chair; but when she
+asked him if he were unwell, he said no, with an air of offence, and got
+quickly to his feet.  He mechanically picked up the intaglio ring from
+the table while he stood there, and put it on his little finger; his hand
+was not much bigger than Christine's.  "How do you suppose she found it
+out?"  he asked, after a moment.
+
+"She seems to have merely suspected it," said Mrs. Mandel, in a tremor,
+and with the fright in her eyes which Christine's violence had brought
+there.
+
+"Well, it don't make any difference.  She had to know, somehow, and now
+she knows."  He started toward the door of the library, as if to go into
+the hall, where his hat and coat hung.
+
+"Mr. Dryfoos," palpitated Mrs. Mandel, "I can't remain here, after the
+language your daughter has used to me--I can't let you leave me--I--I'm
+afraid of her--"
+
+"Lock yourself up, then," said the old man, rudely.  He added, from the
+hall before lie went out, "I reckon she'll quiet down now."
+
+He took the Elevated road.  The strike seemed a vary far-off thing,
+though the paper he bought to look up the stockmarket was full of noisy
+typography about yesterday's troubles on the surface lines.  Among the
+millions in Wall Street there was some joking and some swearing, but not
+much thinking, about the six thousand men who had taken such chances in
+their attempt to better their condition.  Dryfoos heard nothing of the
+strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange, where he spent two or three
+hours watching a favorite stock of his go up and go down under the
+betting.  By the time the Exchange closed it had risen eight points, and
+on this and some other investments he was five thousand dollars richer
+than he had been in the morning.  But he had expected to be richer still,
+and he was by no means satisfied with his luck.  All through the
+excitement of his winning and losing had played the dull, murderous rage
+he felt toward they child who had defied him, and when the game was over
+and he started home his rage mounted into a sort of frenzy; he would
+teach her, he would break her.  He walked a long way without thinking,
+and then waited for a car.  None came, and he hailed a passing coupe.
+
+"What has got all the cars?"  he demanded of the driver, who jumped down
+from his box to open the door for him and get his direction.
+
+"Been away?"  asked the driver.  "Hasn't been any car along for a week.
+Strike."
+
+"Oh yes," said Dryfoos.  He felt suddenly giddy, and he remained staring
+at the driver after he had taken his seat.
+
+The man asked, "Where to?"
+
+Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said, with
+uncontrollable fury: "I told you once! Go up to West Eleventh, and drive
+along slow on the south side; I'll show you the place."
+
+He could not remember the number of 'Every Other Week' office, where he
+suddenly decided to stop before he went home.  He wished to see
+Fulkerson, and ask him something about Beaton: whether he had been about
+lately, and whether he had dropped any hint of what had happened
+concerning Christine; Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow's
+confidence.
+
+There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither Dryfoos
+returned after glancing into Fulkerson's empty office.  "Where's
+Fulkerson?"  he asked, sitting down with his hat on.
+
+"He went out a few moments ago," said Conrad, glancing at the clock.
+"I'm afraid he isn't coming back again today, if you wanted to see him."
+
+Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate March's room.
+"That other fellow out, too?"
+
+"He went just before Mr. Fulkerson," answered Conrad.
+
+"Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the afternoon ?"  asked
+the old man.
+
+"No," said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been there a
+score of times and found the whole staff of Every Other leek at work
+between four and five.  "Mr. March, you know, always takes a good deal of
+his work home with him, and I suppose Mr. Fulkerson went out so early
+because there isn't much doing to-day.  Perhaps it's the strike that
+makes it dull."
+
+"The strike-yes! It's a pretty piece of business to have everything
+thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want a chance to lay off and
+get drunk."  Dryfoos seemed to think Conrad would make some answer to
+this, but the young man's mild face merely saddened, and he said nothing.
+"I've got a coupe out there now that I had to take because I couldn't get
+a car.  If I had my way I'd have a lot of those vagabonds hung.  They're
+waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then rob the houses--pack of
+dirty, worthless whelps.  They ought to call out the militia, and fire
+into 'em.  Clubbing is too good for them."  Conrad was still silent, and
+his father sneered, "But I reckon you don't think so."
+
+"I think the strike is useless," said Conrad.
+
+"Oh, you do, do you?  Comin' to your senses a little.  Gettin' tired
+walkin' so much.  I should like to know what your gentlemen over there on
+the East Side think about the strike, anyway."
+
+The young fellow dropped his eyes.  "I am not authorized to speak for
+them."
+
+"Oh, indeed! And perhaps you're not authorized to speak for yourself?"
+
+"Father, you know we don't agree about these things.  I'd rather not
+talk--"
+
+"But I'm goin' to make you talk this time!" cried Dryfoos, striking the
+arm of the chair he sat in with the side of his fist.  A maddening
+thought of Christine came over him.  "As long as you eat my bread, you
+have got to do as I say.  I won't have my children telling me what I
+shall do and sha'n't do, or take on airs of being holier than me.  Now,
+you just speak up!  Do you think those loafers are right, or don't you?
+Come!"
+
+Conrad apparently judged it best to speak.  "I think they were very
+foolish to strike--at this time, when the Elevated roads can do the
+work."
+
+"Oh, at this time, heigh!  And I suppose they think over there on the
+East Side that it 'd been wise to strike before we got the Elevated."
+Conrad again refused to answer, and his father roared, "What do you
+think?"
+
+"I think a strike is always bad business.  It's war; but sometimes there
+don't seem any other way for the workingmen to get justice.  They say
+that sometimes strikes do raise the wages, after a while."
+
+"Those lazy devils were paid enough already," shrieked the old man.
+
+"They got two dollars a day.  How much do you think they ought to 'a'
+got?  Twenty?"
+
+Conrad hesitated, with a beseeching look at his father.  But he decided
+to answer.  "The men say that with partial work, and fines, and other
+things, they get sometimes a dollar, and sometimes ninety cents a day."
+
+"They lie, and you know they lie," said his father, rising and coming
+toward him.  "And what do you think the upshot of it all will be, after
+they've ruined business for another week, and made people hire hacks, and
+stolen the money of honest men?  How is it going to end?"
+
+"They will have to give in."
+
+"Oh, give in, heigh!  And what will you say then, I should like to know?
+How will you feel about it then?  Speak!"
+
+"I shall feel as I do now.  I know you don't think that way, and I don't
+blame you--or anybody.  But if I have got to say how I shall feel, why, I
+shall feel sorry they didn't succeed, for I believe they have a righteous
+cause, though they go the wrong way to help themselves."
+
+His father came close to him, his eyes blazing, his teeth set.  "Do you
+dare so say that to me?"
+
+"Yes.  I can't help it.  I pity them; my whole heart is with those poor
+men."
+
+"You impudent puppy!" shouted the old man.  He lifted his hand and struck
+his son in the face.  Conrad caught his hand with his own left, and,
+while the blood began to trickle from a wound that Christine's intaglio
+ring had made in his temple, he looked at him with a kind of grieving
+wonder, and said, "Father!"
+
+The old man wrenched his fist away and ran out of the house.  He
+remembered his address now, and he gave it as he plunged into the coupe.
+He trembled with his evil passion, and glared out of the windows at the
+passers as he drove home; he only saw Conrad's mild, grieving, wondering
+eyes, and the blood slowly trickling from the wound in his temple.
+
+Conrad went to the neat-set bowl in Fulkerson's comfortable room and
+washed the blood away, and kept bathing the wound with the cold water
+till it stopped bleeding.  The cut was not deep, and he thought he would
+not put anything on it.  After a while he locked up the office and
+started out, be hardly knew where.  But he walked on, in the direction he
+had taken, till he found himself in Union Square, on the pavement in
+front of Brentano's.  It seemed to him that he heard some one calling
+gently to him, "Mr. Dryfoos!"
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Conrad looked confusedly around, and the same voice said again, "Mr.
+Dryfoos!" and he saw that it was a lady speaking to him from a coupe
+beside the curbing, and then he saw that it was Miss Vance.
+
+She smiled when, he gave signs of having discovered her, and came up to
+the door of her carriage.  "I am so glad to meet you.  I have been
+longing to talk to somebody; nobody seems to feel about it as I do.  Oh,
+isn't it horrible?  Must they fail?  I saw cars running on all the lines
+as I came across; it made me sick at heart.  Must those brave fellows
+give in?  And everybody seems to hate them so--I can't bear it."  Her
+face was estranged with excitement, and there were traces of tears on it.
+"You must think me almost crazy to stop you in the street this way; but
+when I caught sight of you I had to speak.  I knew you would sympathize--
+I knew you would feel as I do.  Oh, how can anybody help honoring those
+poor men for standing by one another as they do?  They are risking all
+they have in the world for the sake of justice! Oh, they are true heroes!
+They are staking the bread of their wives and children on the dreadful
+chance they've taken! But no one seems to understand it.  No one seems to
+see that they are willing to suffer more now that other poor men may
+suffer less hereafter.  And those wretched creatures that are coming in
+to take their places--those traitors--"
+
+"We can't blame them for wanting to earn a living, Miss Vance," said
+Conrad.
+
+"No, no!  I don't blame them.  Who am I, to do such a thing?  It's we
+--people like me, of my class--who make the poor betray one another.
+But this dreadful fighting--this hideous paper is full of it!"  She held
+up an extra, crumpled with her nervous reading.  "Can't something be done
+to stop it?  Don't you think that if some one went among them, and tried
+to make them see how perfectly hopeless it was to resist the companies
+and drive off the new men, he might do some good?  I have wanted to go
+and try; but I am a woman, and I mustn't!  I shouldn't be afraid of the
+strikers, but I'm afraid of what people would say!"  Conrad kept pressing
+his handkerchief to the cut in his temple, which he thought might be
+bleeding, and now she noticed this.  "Are you hurt, Mr. Dryfoos?
+You look so pale."
+
+"No, it's nothing--a little scratch I've got."
+
+"Indeed, you look pale.  Have you a carriage?  How will you get home?
+Will you get in here with me and let me drive you?"
+
+"No, no," said Conrad, smiling at her excitement.  "I'm perfectly well--"
+
+"And you don't think I'm foolish and wicked for stopping you here and
+talking in this way?  But I know you feel as I do!"
+
+"Yes, I feel as you do.  You are right--right in every way--I mustn't
+keep you--Good-bye."  He stepped back to bow, but she put her beautiful
+hand out of the window, and when he took it she wrung his hand hard.
+
+"Thank you, thank you!  You are good and you are just! But no one can do
+anything.  It's useless!"
+
+The type of irreproachable coachman on the box whose respectability had
+suffered through the strange behavior of his mistress in this interview
+drove quickly off at her signal, and Conrad stood a moment looking after
+the carriage.  His heart was full of joy; it leaped; he thought it would
+burst.  As he turned to walk away it seemed to him as if he mounted upon
+the air.  The trust she had shown him, the praise she had given him, that
+crush of the hand: he hoped nothing, he formed no idea from it, but it
+all filled him with love that cast out the pain and shame he had been
+suffering.  He believed that he could never be unhappy any more; the
+hardness that was in his mind toward his father went out of it; he saw
+how sorely he had tried him; he grieved that he had done it, but the
+means, the difference of his feeling about the cause of their quarrel,
+he was solemnly glad of that since she shared it.  He was only sorry for
+his father.  "Poor father!" he said under his breath as he went along.
+He explained to her about his father in his reverie, and she pitied his
+father, too.
+
+He was walking over toward the West Side, aimlessly at first, and then at
+times with the longing to do something to save those mistaken men from
+themselves forming itself into a purpose.  Was not that what she meant
+when she bewailed her woman's helplessness?  She must have wished him to
+try if he, being a man, could not do something; or if she did not, still
+he would try, and if she heard of it she would recall what she had said
+and would be glad he had understood her so.  Thinking of her pleasure in
+what he was going to do, he forgot almost what it was; but when he came
+to a street-car track he remembered it, and looked up and down to see if
+there were any turbulent gathering of men whom he might mingle with and
+help to keep from violence.  He saw none anywhere; and then suddenly, as
+if at the same moment, for in his exalted mood all events had a dream-
+like simultaneity, he stood at the corner of an avenue, and in the middle
+of it, a little way off, was a street-car, and around the car a tumult of
+shouting, cursing, struggling men.  The driver was lashing his horses
+forward, and a policeman was at their heads, with the conductor, pulling
+them; stones, clubs, brickbats hailed upon the car, the horses, the men
+trying to move them.  The mob closed upon them in a body, and then a
+patrol-wagon whirled up from the other side, and a squad of policemen
+leaped out and began to club the rioters.  Conrad could see how they
+struck them under the rims of their hats; the blows on their skulls
+sounded as if they had fallen on stone; the rioters ran in all
+directions.
+
+One of the officers rushed up toward the corner where Conrad stood, and
+then he saw at his side a tall, old man, with a long, white beard, who
+was calling out at the policemen: "Ah, yes! Glup the strikerss--gif it to
+them!  Why don't you co and glup the bresidents that insoalt your lawss,
+and gick your Boart of Arpidration out-of-toors?  Glup the strikerss--
+they cot no friendts!  They cot no money to pribe you, to dreat you!"
+
+The officer lifted his club, and the old man threw his left arm up to
+shield his head.  Conrad recognized Zindau, and now he saw the empty
+sleeve dangle in the air over the stump of his wrist.  He heard a shot in
+that turmoil beside the car, and something seemed to strike him in the
+breast.  He was going to say to the policeman: "Don't strike him!  He's
+an old soldier!  You see he has no hand!" but he could not speak, he
+could not move his tongue.  The policeman stood there; he saw his face:
+it was not bad, not cruel; it was like the face of a statue, fixed,
+perdurable--a mere image of irresponsible and involuntary authority.
+Then Conrad fell forward, pierced through the heart by that shot fired
+from the car.
+
+March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his car, and at the same
+moment he saw Lindau drop under the club of the policeman, who left him
+where he fell and joined the rest of the squad in pursuing the rioters.
+The fighting round the car in the avenue ceased; the driver whipped his
+horses into a gallop, and the place was left empty.
+
+March would have liked to run; he thought how his wife had implored him
+to keep away from the rioting; but he could not have left Lindau lying
+there if he would.  Something stronger than his will drew him to the
+spot, and there he saw Conrad, dead beside the old man.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+In the cares which Mrs. March shared with her husband that night she was
+supported partly by principle, but mainly by the, potent excitement which
+bewildered Conrad's family and took all reality from what had happened.
+It was nearly midnight when the Marches left them and walked away toward
+the Elevated station with Fulkerson.  Everything had been done, by that
+time, that could be done; and Fulkerson was not without that satisfaction
+in the business-like despatch of all the details which attends each step
+in such an affair and helps to make death tolerable even to the most
+sorely stricken.  We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little
+space to another; and only one interest at a time fills these.  Fulkerson
+was cheerful when they got into the street, almost gay; and Mrs. March
+experienced a rebound from her depression which she felt that she ought
+not to have experienced.  But she condoned the offence a little in
+herself, because her husband remained so constant in his gravity; and,
+pending the final accounting he must make her for having been where he
+could be of so much use from the first instant of the calamity, she was
+tenderly, gratefully proud of all the use he had been to Conrad's family,
+and especially his miserable old father.  To her mind, March was the
+principal actor in the whole affair, and much more important in having
+seen it than those who had suffered in it.  In fact, he had suffered
+incomparably.
+
+
+"Well, well," said Fulkerson.  "They'll get along now.  We've done all we
+could, and there's nothing left but for them to bear it.  Of course it's
+awful, but I guess it 'll come out all right.  I mean," he added,
+"they'll pull through now."
+
+"I suppose," said March, "that nothing is put on us that we can't bear.
+But I should think," he went on, musingly, "that when God sees what we
+poor finite creatures can bear, hemmed round with this eternal darkness
+of death, He must respect us."
+
+"Basil!" said his wife.  But in her heart she drew nearer to him for the
+words she thought she ought to rebuke him for.
+
+"Oh, I know," he said, "we school ourselves to despise human nature.
+But God did not make us despicable, and I say, whatever end He meant us
+for, He must have some such thrill of joy in our adequacy to fate as a
+father feels when his son shows himself a man.  When I think what we can
+be if we must, I can't believe the least of us shall finally perish."
+
+"Oh, I reckon the Almighty won't scoop any of us," said Fulkerson, with a
+piety of his own.
+
+"That poor boy's father!" sighed Mrs. March.  "I can't get his face out
+of my sight.  He looked so much worse than death."
+
+"Oh, death doesn't look bad," said March.  "It's life that looks so in
+its presence.  Death is peace and pardon.  I only wish poor old Lindau
+was as well out of it as Conrad there."
+
+"Ah, Lindau!  He has done harm enough," said Mrs. March.  "I hope he will
+be careful after this."
+
+March did not try to defend Lindau against her theory of the case, which
+inexorably held him responsible for Conrad's death.
+
+"Lindau's going to come out all right, I guess," said Fulkerson.  "He was
+first-rate when I saw him at the hospital to-night."  He whispered in
+March's ear, at a chance he got in mounting the station stairs: "I didn't
+like to tell you there at the house, but I guess you'd better know.  They
+had to take Lindau's arm off near the shoulder.  Smashed all to pieces by
+the clubbing."
+
+In the house, vainly rich and foolishly unfit for them, the bereaved
+family whom the Marches had just left lingered together, and tried to get
+strength to part for the night.  They were all spent with the fatigue
+that comes from heaven to such misery as theirs, and they sat in a torpor
+in which each waited for the other to move, to speak.
+
+Christine moved, and Mela spoke.  Christine rose and went out of the room
+without saying a word, and they heard her going up-stairs.  Then Mela
+said:
+
+"I reckon the rest of us better be goun' too, father.  Here, let's git
+mother started."
+
+She put her arm round her mother, to lift her from her chair, but the old
+man did not stir, and Mela called Mrs. Mandel from the next room.
+Between them they raised her to her feet.
+
+"Ain't there anybody agoin' to set up with it?"  she asked, in her hoarse
+pipe.  "It appears like folks hain't got any feelin's in New York.
+Woon't some o' the neighbors come and offer to set up, without waitin' to
+be asked?"
+
+"Oh, that's all right, mother.  The men 'll attend to that.  Don't you
+bother any," Mela coaxed, and she kept her arm round her mother, with
+tender patience.
+
+"Why, Mely, child! I can't feel right to have it left to hirelin's so.
+But there ain't anybody any more to see things done as they ought.  If
+Coonrod was on'y here--"
+
+"Well, mother, you are pretty mixed!" said Mela, with a strong tendency
+to break into her large guffaw.  But she checked herself and said:
+"I know just how you feel, though.  It keeps acomun' and agoun'; and it's
+so and it ain't so, all at once; that's the plague of it.  Well, father!
+Ain't you goun' to come?"
+
+"I'm goin' to stay, Mela," said the old man, gently, without moving.
+"Get your mother to bed, that's a good girl."
+
+"You goin' to set up with him, Jacob?"  asked the old woman.
+
+"Yes, 'Liz'beth, I'll set up.  You go to bed."
+
+"Well, I will, Jacob.  And I believe it 'll do you good to set up.
+I wished I could set up with you; but I don't seem to have the stren'th
+I did when the twins died.  I must git my sleep, so's to--I don't like
+very well to have you broke of your rest, Jacob, but there don't appear
+to be anybody else.  You wouldn't have to do it if Coonrod was here.
+There I go ag'in!  Mercy!  mercy!"
+
+"Well, do come along, then, mother," said Mela; and she got her out of
+the room, with Mrs. Mandel's help, and up the stairs.
+
+From the top the old woman called down, "You tell Coonrod--" She stopped,
+and he heard her groan out, "My Lord! my Lord!"
+
+He sat, one silence in the dining-room, where they had all lingered
+together, and in the library beyond the hireling watcher sat, another
+silence.  The time passed, but neither moved, and the last noise in the
+house ceased, so that they heard each other breathe, and the vague,
+remote rumor of the city invaded the inner stillness.  It grew louder
+toward morning, and then Dryfoos knew from the watcher's deeper breathing
+that he had fallen into a doze.
+
+He crept by him to the drawing-room, where his son was; the place was
+full of the awful sweetness of the flowers that Fulkerson had brought,
+and that lay above the pulseless breast.  The old man turned up a burner
+in the chandelier, and stood looking on the majestic serenity of the dead
+face.
+
+He could not move when he saw his wife coming down the stairway in the
+hall.  She was in her long, white flannel bed gown, and the candle she
+carried shook with her nervous tremor.  He thought she might be walking
+in her sleep, but she said, quite simply, "I woke up, and I couldn't git
+to sleep ag'in without comin' to have a look."  She stood beside their
+dead son with him.  "well, he's beautiful, Jacob.  He was the prettiest
+baby!  And he was always good, Coonrod was; I'll say that for him.
+I don't believe he ever give me a minute's care in his whole life.
+I reckon I liked him about the best of all the children; but I don't know
+as I ever done much to show it.  But you was always good to him, Jacob;
+you always done the best for him, ever since he was a little feller.
+I used to be afraid you'd spoil him sometimes in them days; but I guess
+you're glad now for every time you didn't cross him.  I don't suppose
+since the twins died you ever hit him a lick."  She stooped and peered
+closer at the face.  "Why, Jacob, what's that there by his pore eye?"
+Dryfoos saw it, too, the wound that he had feared to look for, and that
+now seemed to redden on his sight.  He broke into a low, wavering cry,
+like a child's in despair, like an animal's in terror, like a soul's in
+the anguish of remorse.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+The evening after the funeral, while the Marches sat together talking it
+over, and making approaches, through its shadow, to the question of their
+own future, which it involved, they were startled by the twitter of the
+electric bell at their apartment door.  It was really not so late as the
+children's having gone to bed made it seem; but at nine o'clock it was
+too late for any probable visitor except Fulkerson.  It might be he, and
+March was glad to postpone the impending question to his curiosity
+concerning the immediate business Fulkerson might have with him.  He went
+himself to the door, and confronted there a lady deeply veiled in black
+and attended by a very decorous serving-woman.
+
+"Are you alone, Mr. March--you and Mrs. March ?"  asked the lady, behind
+her veil; and, as he hesitated, she said: "You don't know me!  Miss
+Vance"; and she threw back her veil, showing her face wan and agitated in
+the dark folds.  "I am very anxious to see you--to speak with you both.
+May I come in?"
+
+"Why, certainly, Miss Vance," he answered, still too much stupefied by
+her presence to realize it.
+
+She promptly entered, and saying, with a glance at the hall chair by the
+door, "My maid can sit here?"  followed him to the room where he had left
+his wife.
+
+Mrs. March showed herself more capable of coping with the fact.  She
+welcomed Miss Vance with the liking they both felt for the girl, and with
+the sympathy which her troubled face inspired.
+
+"I won't tire you with excuses for coming, Mrs. March," she said, "for it
+was the only thing left for me to do; and I come at my aunt's
+suggestion."  She added this as if it would help to account for her more
+on the conventional plane, and she had the instinctive good taste to
+address herself throughout to Mrs. March as much as possible, though what
+she had to say was mainly for March.  "I don't know how to begin--I don't
+know how to speak of this terrible affair.  But you know what I mean.
+I feel as if I had lived a whole lifetime since it happened.  I don't
+want you to pity me for it," she said, forestalling a politeness from
+Mrs. March.  "I'm the last one to be thought of, and you mustn't mind me
+if I try to make you.  I came to find out all of the truth that I can,
+and when I know just what that is I shall know what to do.  I have read
+the inquest; it's all burned into my brain.  But I don't care for that--
+for myself: you must let me say such things without minding me.  I know
+that your husband--that Mr. March was there; I read his testimony; and I
+wished to ask him--to ask him--" She stopped and looked distractedly
+about.  "But what folly! He must have said everything he knew--he had
+to."  Her eves wandered to him from his wife, on whom she had kept them
+with instinctive tact.
+
+"I said everything--yes," he replied.  "But if you would like to know--"
+
+"Perhaps I had better tell you something first.  I had just parted with
+him--it couldn't have been more than half an hour--in front of
+Brentano's; he must have gone straight to his death.  We were talking,
+and I--I said, Why didn't some one go among the strikers and plead with
+them to be peaceable, and keep them from attacking the new men.  I knew
+that he felt as I did about the strikers: that he was their friend.  Did
+you see--do you know anything that makes you think he had been trying to
+do that?"
+
+"I am sorry," March began, "I didn't see him at all till--till I saw him
+lying dead."
+
+"My husband was there purely by accident," Mrs. March put in.  "I had
+begged and entreated him not to go near the striking anywhere.  And he
+had just got out of the car, and saw the policeman strike that wretched
+Lindau--he's been such an anxiety to me ever since we have had anything
+to do with him here; my husband knew him when he was a boy in the West.
+Mr. March came home from it all perfectly prostrated; it made us all
+sick! Nothing so horrible ever came into our lives before.  I assure you
+it was the most shocking experience."
+
+Miss Vance listened to her with that look of patience which those who
+have seen much of the real suffering of the world--the daily portion of
+the poor--have for the nervous woes of comfortable people.  March hung
+his head; he knew it would be useless to protest that his share of the
+calamity was, by comparison, infinitesimally small.
+
+After she had heard Mrs. March to the end even of her repetitions, Miss
+Vance said, as if it were a mere matter of course that she should have
+looked the affair up, "Yes, I have seen Mr. Lindau at the hospital--"
+
+"My husband goes every day to see him," Mrs. March interrupted, to give.
+a final touch to the conception of March's magnanimity throughout.
+
+"The poor man seems to have been in the wrong at the time," said Miss
+Vance.
+
+"I could almost say he had earned the right to be wrong.  He's a man of
+the most generous instincts, and a high ideal of justice, of equity--too
+high to be considered by a policeman with a club in his hand," said
+March, with a bold defiance of his wife's different opinion of Lindau.
+"It's the policeman's business, I suppose, to club the ideal when he
+finds it inciting a riot."
+
+"Oh, I don't blame Mr. Lindau; I don't blame the policeman; he was as
+much a mere instrument as his club was.  I am only trying to find out how
+much I am to blame myself.  I had no thought of Mr. Dryfoos's going
+there--of his attempting to talk with the strikers and keep them quiet;
+I was only thinking, as women do, of what I should try to do if I were a
+man.
+
+"But perhaps he understood me to ask him to go--perhaps my words sent him
+to his death."
+
+She had a sort of calm in her courage to know the worst truth as to her
+responsibility that forbade any wish to flatter her out of it.  "I'm
+afraid," said March, "that is what can never be known now."  After a
+moment he added: "But why should you wish to know?  If he went there as a
+peacemaker, he died in a good cause, in such a way as he would wish to
+die, I believe."
+
+"Yes," said the girl; "I have thought of that.  But death is awful; we
+must not think patiently, forgivingly of sending any one to their death
+in the best cause."--"I fancy life was an awful thing to Conrad Dryfoos,"
+March replied.  "He was thwarted and disappointed, without even pleasing
+the ambition that thwarted and disappointed him.  That poor old man, his
+father, warped him from his simple, lifelong wish to be a minister, and
+was trying to make a business man of him.  If it will be any consolation
+to you to know it, Miss Vance, I can assure you that he was very unhappy,
+and I don't see how he could ever have been happy here."
+
+"It won't," said the girl, steadily.  "If people are born into this
+world, it's because they were meant to live in it.  It isn't a question
+of being happy here; no one is happy, in that old, selfish way, or can
+be; but he could have been of great use."
+
+"Perhaps he was of use in dying.  Who knows?  He may have been trying to
+silence Lindau."
+
+"Oh, Lindau wasn't worth it!" cried Mrs. March.
+
+Miss Vance looked at her as if she did not quite understand.  Then she
+turned to March.  "He might have been unhappy, as we all are; but I know
+that his life here would have had a higher happiness than we wish for or
+aim for."  The tears began to run silently down her cheeks.
+
+"He looked strangely happy that day when he left me.  He had hurt himself
+somehow, and his face was bleeding from a scratch; he kept his
+handkerchief up; he was pale, but such a light came into his face when he
+shook hands--ah, I know he went to try and do what I said!"  They were
+all silent, while she dried her eyes and then put her handkerchief back
+into the pocket from which she had suddenly pulled it, with a series of
+vivid, young-ladyish gestures, which struck March by their incongruity
+with the occasion of their talk, and yet by their harmony with the rest
+of her elegance.  "I am sorry, Miss Vance," he began, "that I can't
+really tell you anything more--"
+
+"You are very kind," she said, controlling herself and rising quickly.
+"I thank you--thank you both very much."  She turned to Mrs. March and
+shook hands with her and then with him.  "I might have known--I did know
+that there wasn't anything more for you to tell.  But at least I've found
+out from you that there was nothing, and now I can begin to bear what I
+must.  How are those poor creatures--his mother and father, his sisters?
+Some day, I hope, I shall be ashamed to have postponed them to the
+thought of myself; but I can't pretend to be yet.  I could not come to
+the funeral; I wanted to."
+
+She addressed her question to Mrs. March, who answered: "I can
+understand.  But they were pleased with the flowers you sent; people are,
+at such times, and they haven't many friends."
+
+"Would you go to see them?"  asked the girl.  "Would you tell them what
+I've told you?"
+
+Mrs. March looked at her husband.
+
+"I don't see what good it would do.  They wouldn't understand.  But if it
+would relieve you--"
+
+"I'll wait till it isn't a question of self-relief," said the girl.
+"Good-bye!"
+
+She left them to long debate of the event.  At the end Mrs. March said,
+"She is a strange being; such a mixture of the society girl and the
+saint."
+
+Her husband answered: "She's the potentiality of several kinds of
+fanatic.  She's very unhappy, and I don't see how she's to be happier
+about that poor fellow.  I shouldn't be surprised if she did inspire him
+to attempt something of that kind."
+
+"Well, you got out of it very well, Basil.  I admired the way you
+managed.  I was afraid you'd say something awkward."
+
+"Oh, with a plain line of truth before me, as the only possible thing,
+I can get on pretty well.  When it comes to anything decorative, I'd
+rather leave it to you, Isabel."
+
+She seemed insensible of his jest.  "Of course, he was in love with her.
+That was the light that came into his face when he was going to do what
+he thought she wanted him to do."
+
+"And she--do you think that she was--"
+
+"What an idea!  It would have been perfectly grotesque!"
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+Their affliction brought the Dryfooses into humaner relations with the
+Marches, who had hitherto regarded them as a necessary evil, as the
+odious means of their own prosperity.  Mrs. March found that the women of
+the family seemed glad of her coming, and in the sense of her usefulness
+to them all she began to feel a kindness even for Christine.  But she
+could not help seeing that between the girl and her father there was an
+unsettled account, somehow, and that it was Christine and not the old man
+who was holding out.  She thought that their sorrow had tended to refine
+the others.  Mela was much more subdued, and, except when she abandoned
+herself to a childish interest in her mourning, she did nothing to shock
+Mrs. March's taste or to seem unworthy of her grief.  She was very good
+to her mother, whom the blow had left unchanged, and to her father, whom
+it had apparently fallen upon with crushing weight.  Once, after visiting
+their house, Mrs. March described to March a little scene between Dryfoos
+and Mela, when he came home from Wall Street, and the girl met him at the
+door with a kind of country simpleness, and took his hat and stick, and
+brought him into the room where Mrs. March sat, looking tired and broken.
+She found this look of Dryfoos's pathetic, and dwelt on the sort of
+stupefaction there was in it; he must have loved his son more than they
+ever realized.  "Yes," said March, "I suspect he did.  He's never been
+about the place since that day; he was always dropping in before, on his
+way up-town.  He seems to go down to Wall Street every day, just as
+before, but I suppose that's mechanical; he wouldn't know what else to
+do; I dare say it's best for him.  The sanguine Fulkerson is getting a
+little anxious about the future of 'Every Other Week.'  Now Conrad's
+gone, he isn't sure the old man will want to keep on with it, or whether
+he'll have to look up another Angel.  He wants to get married, I imagine,
+and he can't venture till this point is settled."
+
+"It's a very material point to us too, Basil," said Mrs. March.
+
+"Well, of course.  I hadn't overlooked that, you may be sure.  One of the
+things that Fulkerson and I have discussed is a scheme for buying the
+magazine.  Its success is pretty well assured now, and I shouldn't be
+afraid to put money into it--if I had the money."
+
+"I couldn't let you sell the house in Boston, Basil!"
+
+"And I don't want to.  I wish we could go back and live in it and get the
+rent, too!  It would be quite a support.  But I suppose if Dryfoos won't
+keep on, it must come to another Angel.  I hope it won't be a literary
+one, with a fancy for running my department."
+
+"Oh, I guess whoever takes the magazine will be glad enough to keep you!"
+
+"Do you think so?  Well, perhaps.  But I don't believe Fulkerson would
+let me stand long between him and an Angel of the right description."
+
+"Well, then, I believe he would.  And you've never seen anything, Basil,
+to make you really think that Mr. Fulkerson didn't appreciate you to the
+utmost."
+
+"I think I came pretty near an undervaluation in that Lindau trouble.
+I shall always wonder what put a backbone into Fulkerson just at that
+crisis.  Fulkerson doesn't strike me as the stuff of a moral hero."
+
+"At any rate, he was one," said Mrs. March, "and that's quite enough for
+me."
+
+March did not answer.  "What a noble thing life is, anyway!  Here I am,
+well on the way to fifty, after twenty-five years of hard work, looking
+forward to the potential poor-house as confidently as I did in youth.
+We might have saved a little more than we have saved; but the little more
+wouldn't avail if I were turned out of my place now; and we should have
+lived sordidly to no purpose.  Some one always has you by the throat,
+unless you have some one else in your grip.  I wonder if that's the
+attitude the Almighty intended His respectable creatures to take toward
+one another!  I wonder if He meant our civilization, the battle we fight
+in, the game we trick in!  I wonder if He considers it final, and if the
+kingdom of heaven on earth, which we pray for--"
+
+"Have you seen Lindau to-day?"  Mrs. March asked.
+
+"You inferred it from the quality of my piety?"  March laughed, and then
+suddenly sobered.  "Yes, I saw him.  It's going rather hard with him,
+I'm afraid.  The amputation doesn't heal very well; the shock was very
+great, and he's old.  It 'll take time.  There's so much pain that they
+have to keep him under opiates, and I don't think he fully knew me.  At
+any rate, I didn't get my piety from him to-day."
+
+"It's horrible! Horrible!" said Mrs. March.  "I can't get over it!
+After losing his hand in the war, to lose his whole arm now in this way!
+It does seem too cruel!  Of course he oughtn't to have been there; we can
+say that.  But you oughtn't to have been there, either, Basil."
+
+"Well, I wasn't exactly advising the police to go and club the railroad
+presidents."
+
+"Neither was poor Conrad Dryfoos."
+
+"I don't deny it.  All that was distinctly the chance of life and death.
+That belonged to God; and no doubt it was law, though it seems chance.
+But what I object to is this economic chance-world in which we live, and
+which we men seem to have created.  It ought to be law as inflexible in
+human affairs as the order of day and night in the physical world that if
+a man will work he shall both rest and eat, and shall not be harassed
+with any question as to how his repose and his provision shall come.
+Nothing less ideal than this satisfies the reason.  But in our state of
+things no one is secure of this.  No one is sure of finding work; no one
+is sure of not losing it.  I may have my work taken away from me at any
+moment by the caprice, the mood, the indigestion of a man who has not the
+qualification for knowing whether I do it well, or ill.  At my time of
+life--at every time of life--a man ought to feel that if he will keep on
+doing his duty he shall not suffer in himself or in those who are dear to
+him, except through natural causes.  But no man can feel this as things
+are now; and so we go on, pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling,
+thrusting aside and trampling underfoot; lying, cheating, stealing; and
+then we get to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame,
+and look back over the way we've come to a palace of our own, or the
+poor-house, which is about the only possession we can claim in common
+with our brother-men, I don't think the retrospect can be pleasing."
+
+"I know, I know!" said his wife.  "I think of those things, too, Basil.
+Life isn't what it seems when you look forward to it.  But I think people
+would suffer less, and wouldn't have to work so hard, and could make all
+reasonable provision for the future, if they were not so greedy and so
+foolish."
+
+"Oh, without doubt!  We can't put it all on the conditions; we must put
+some of the blame on character.  But conditions make character; and
+people are greedy and foolish, and wish to have and to shine, because
+having and shining are held up to them by civilization as the chief good
+of life.  We all know they are not the chief good, perhaps not good at
+all; but if some one ventures to say so, all the rest of us call him a
+fraud and a crank, and go moiling and toiling on to the palace or the
+poor-house.  We can't help it.  If one were less greedy or less foolish,
+some one else would have and would shine at his expense.  We don't moil
+and toil to ourselves alone; the palace or the poor-house is not merely
+for ourselves, but for our children, whom we've brought up in the
+superstition that having and shining is the chief good.  We dare not
+teach them otherwise, for fear they may falter in the fight when it comes
+their turn, and the children of others will crowd them out of the palace
+into the poor-house.  If we felt sure that honest work shared by all
+would bring them honest food shared by all, some heroic few of us, who
+did not wish our children to rise above their fellows--though we could
+not bear to have them fall below--might trust them with the truth.  But
+we have no such assurance, and so we go on trembling before Dryfooses and
+living in gimcrackeries."
+
+"Basil, Basil! I was always willing to live more simply than you.  You
+know I was!"
+
+"I know you always said so, my dear.  But how many bell-ratchets and
+speaking-tubes would you be willing to have at the street door below?
+I remember that when we were looking for a flat you rejected every
+building that had a bell-ratchet or a speaking-tube, and would have
+nothing to do with any that had more than an electric button; you wanted
+a hall-boy, with electric buttons all over him.  I don't blame you.  I
+find such things quite as necessary as you do."
+
+"And do you mean to say, Basil," she asked, abandoning this unprofitable
+branch of the inquiry, "that you are really uneasy about your place?
+that you are afraid Mr. Dryfoos may give up being an Angel, and Mr.
+Fulkerson may play you false?"
+
+"Play me false?  Oh, it wouldn't be playing me false.  It would be merely
+looking out for himself, if the new Angel had editorial tastes and wanted
+my place.  It's what any one would do."
+
+"You wouldn't do it, Basil!"
+
+"Wouldn't I?  Well, if any one offered me more salary than 'Every Other
+Week' pays--say, twice as much--what do you think my duty to my suffering
+family would be?  It's give and take in the business world, Isabel;
+especially take.  But as to being uneasy, I'm not, in the least.  I've
+the spirit of a lion, when it comes to such a chance as that.  When I see
+how readily the sensibilities of the passing stranger can be worked in
+New York, I think of taking up the role of that desperate man on Third
+Avenue who went along looking for garbage in the gutter to eat.  I think
+I could pick up at least twenty or thirty cents a day by that little
+game, and maintain my family in the affluence it's been accustomed to."
+
+"Basil!" cried his wife.  "You don't mean to say that man was an
+impostor!  And I've gone about, ever since, feeling that one such case in
+a million, the bare possibility of it, was enough to justify all that
+Lindau said about the rich and the poor!"
+
+March laughed teasingly.  "Oh, I don't say he was an impostor.  Perhaps
+he really was hungry; but, if he wasn't, what do you think of a
+civilization that makes the opportunity of such a fraud? that gives us
+all such a bad conscience for the need which is that we weaken to the
+need that isn't?  Suppose that poor fellow wasn't personally founded on
+fact: nevertheless, he represented the truth; he was the ideal of the
+suffering which would be less effective if realistically treated.  That
+man is a great comfort to me.  He probably rioted for days on that
+quarter I gave him; made a dinner very likely, or a champagne supper; and
+if 'Every Other Week' wants to get rid of me, I intend to work that
+racket.  You can hang round the corner with Bella, and Tom can come up to
+me in tears, at stated intervals, and ask me if I've found anything yet.
+To be sure, we might be arrested and sent up somewhere.  But even in that
+extreme case we should be provided for.  Oh no, I'm not afraid of losing
+my place!  I've merely a sort of psychological curiosity to know how men
+like Dryfoos and Fulkerson will work out the problem before them."
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+It was a curiosity which Fulkerson himself shared, at least concerning
+Dryfoos.  "I don't know what the old man's going to do," he said to March
+the day after the Marches had talked their future over.  "Said anything
+to you yet?"
+
+"No, not a word."
+
+"You're anxious, I suppose, same as I am.  Fact is," said Fulkerson,
+blushing a little, "I can't ask to have a day named till I know where I
+am in connection with the old man.  I can't tell whether I've got to look
+out for something else or somebody else.  Of course, it's full soon yet."
+
+"Yes," March said, "much sooner than it seems to us.  We're so anxious
+about the future that we don't remember how very recent the past is."
+
+"That's something so.  The old man's hardly had time yet to pull himself
+together.  Well, I'm glad you feel that way about it, March.  I guess
+it's more of a blow to him than we realize.  He was a good deal bound up
+in Coonrod, though he didn't always use him very well.  Well, I reckon
+it's apt to happen so oftentimes; curious how cruel love can be.  Heigh?
+We're an awful mixture, March!"
+
+"Yes, that's the marvel and the curse, as Browning says."
+
+"Why, that poor boy himself," pursued Fulkerson, had streaks of the mule
+in him that could give odds to Beaton, and he must have tried the old man
+by the way he would give in to his will and hold out against his
+judgment.  I don't believe he ever budged a hairs-breadth from his
+original position about wanting to be a preacher and not wanting to be a
+business man.  Well, of course!  I don't think business is all in all;
+but it must have made the old man mad to find that without saying
+anything, or doing anything to show it, and after seeming to come over to
+his ground, and really coming, practically, Coonrod was just exactly
+where he first planted himself, every time."
+
+"Yes, people that have convictions are difficult.  Fortunately, they're
+rare."
+
+"Do you think so?  It seems to me that everybody's got convictions.
+Beaton himself, who hasn't a principle to throw at a dog, has got
+convictions the size of a barn.  They ain't always the same ones, I know,
+but they're always to the same effect, as far as Beaton's being Number
+One is concerned.  The old man's got convictions or did have, unless this
+thing lately has shaken him all up--and he believes that money will do
+everything.  Colonel Woodburn's got convictions that he wouldn't part
+with for untold millions.  Why, March, you got convictions yourself!"
+
+"Have I?"  said March.  "I don't know what they are."
+
+"Well, neither do I; but I know you were ready to kick the trough over
+for them when the old man wanted us to bounce Lindau that time."
+
+"Oh yes," said March; he remembered the fact; but he was still uncertain
+just what the convictions were that he had been so stanch for.
+
+"I suppose we could have got along without you," Fulkerson mused aloud.
+"It's astonishing how you always can get along in this world without the
+man that is simply indispensable.  Makes a fellow realize that he could
+take a day off now and then without deranging the solar system a great
+deal.  Now here's Coonrod--or, rather, he isn't.  But that boy managed
+his part of the schooner so well that I used to tremble when I thought of
+his getting the better of the old man and going into a convent or
+something of that kind; and now here he is, snuffed out in half a second,
+and I don't believe but what we shall be sailing along just as chipper as
+usual inside of thirty days.  I reckon it will bring the old man to the
+point when I come to talk with him about who's to be put in Coonrod's
+place.  I don't like very well to start the subject with him; but it's
+got to be done some time."
+
+"Yes," March admitted.  "It's terrible to think how unnecessary even the
+best and wisest of us is to the purposes of Providence.  When I looked at
+that poor young fellow's face sometimes--so gentle and true and pure--
+I used to think the world was appreciably richer for his being in it.
+But are we appreciably poorer for his being out of it now?"
+
+"No, I don't reckon we are," said Fulkerson.  "And what a lot of the raw
+material of all kinds the Almighty must have, to waste us the way He
+seems to do.  Think of throwing away a precious creature like Coonrod
+Dryfoos on one chance in a thousand of getting that old fool of a Lindau
+out of the way of being clubbed!  For I suppose that was what Coonrod was
+up to.  Say!  Have you been round to see Lindau to-day?"
+
+Something in the tone or the manner of Fulkerson startled March.  "No!
+I haven't seen him since yesterday."
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Fulkerson.  "I guess I saw him a little while
+after you did, and that young doctor there seemed to feel kind of worried
+about him.
+
+"Or not worried, exactly; they can't afford to let such things worry them,
+I suppose; but--"
+
+"He's worse?"  asked March.
+
+"Oh, he didn't say so.  But I just wondered if you'd seen him to-day."
+
+"I think I'll go now," said March, with a pang at heart.  He had gone
+every day to see Lindau, but this day he had thought he would not go, and
+that was why his heart smote him.  He knew that if he were in Lindau's
+place Lindau would never have left his side if he could have helped it.
+March tried to believe that the case was the same, as it stood now; it
+seemed to him that he was always going to or from the hospital; he said
+to himself that it must do Lindau harm to be visited so much.  But be
+knew that this was not true when he was met at the door of the ward where
+Lindau lay by the young doctor, who had come to feel a personal interest
+in March's interest in Lindau.
+
+He smiled without gayety, and said, "He's just going."
+
+"What! Discharged?"
+
+"Oh no.  He has been failing very fast since you saw him yesterday, and
+now--" They had been walking softly and talking softly down the aisle
+between the long rows of beds.  "Would you care to see him?"
+
+The doctor made a slight gesture toward the white canvas screen which in
+such places forms the death-chamber of the poor and friendless.  "Come
+round this way--he won't know you! I've got rather fond of the poor old
+fellow.  He wouldn't have a clergyman--sort of agnostic, isn't he?  A
+good many of these Germans are--but the young lady who's been coming to
+see him--"
+
+They both stopped. Lindau's grand, patriarchal head, foreshortened to
+their view, lay white upon the pillow, and his broad, white beard flowed
+upon the sheet, which heaved with those long last breaths.  Beside his
+bed Margaret Vance was kneeling; her veil was thrown back, and her face
+was lifted; she held clasped between her hands the hand of the dying man;
+she moved her lips inaudibly.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+In spite of the experience of the whole race from time immemorial, when
+death comes to any one we know we helplessly regard it as an incident of
+life, which will presently go on as before.  Perhaps this is an
+instinctive perception of the truth that it does go on somewhere; but we
+have a sense of death as absolutely the end even for earth only if it
+relates to some one remote or indifferent to us.  March tried to project
+Lindau to the necessary distance from himself in order to realize the
+fact in his case, but he could not, though the man with whom his youth
+had been associated in a poetic friendship had not actually reentered the
+region of his affection to the same degree, or in any like degree.  The
+changed conditions forbade that.  He had a soreness of heart concerning
+him; but he could not make sure whether this soreness was grief for his
+death, or remorse for his own uncandor with him about Dryfoos, or a
+foreboding of that accounting with his conscience which he knew his wife
+would now exact of him down to the last minutest particular of their
+joint and several behavior toward Lindau ever since they had met him in
+New York.
+
+He felt something knock against his shoulder, and he looked up to have
+his hat struck from his head by a horse's nose.  He saw the horse put his
+foot on the hat, and he reflected, "Now it will always look like an
+accordion," and he heard the horse's driver address him some sarcasms
+before he could fully awaken to the situation.  He was standing
+bareheaded in the middle of Fifth Avenue and blocking the tide of
+carriages flowing in either direction.  Among the faces put out of the
+carriage windows he saw that of Dryfoos looking from a coupe.  The old
+man knew him, and said, "Jump in here, Mr. March"; and March, who had
+mechanically picked up his hat, and was thinking, "Now I shall have to
+tell Isabel about this at once, and she will never trust me on the street
+again without her," mechanically obeyed.  Her confidence in him had been
+undermined by his being so near Conrad when he was shot; and it went
+through his mind that he would get Dryfoos to drive him to a hatter's,
+where he could buy a new hat, and not be obliged to confess his narrow
+escape to his wife till the incident was some days old and she could bear
+it better.  It quite drove Lindau's death out of his mind for the moment;
+and when Dryfoos said if he was going home he would drive up to the first
+cross-street and turn back with him, March said he would be glad if he
+would take him to a hat-store.  The old man put his head out again and
+told the driver to take them to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.  "There's a hat-
+store around there somewhere, seems to me," he said; and they talked of
+March's accident as well as they could in the rattle and clatter of the
+street till they reached the place.  March got his hat, passing a joke
+with the hatter about the impossibility of pressing his old hat over
+again, and came out to thank Dryfoos and take leave of him.
+
+"If you ain't in any great hurry," the old man said, "I wish you'd get in
+here a minute.  I'd like to have a little talk with you."
+
+"Oh, certainly," said March, and he thought: "It's coming now about what
+he intends to do with 'Every Other Week.'  Well, I might as well have all
+the misery at once and have it over."
+
+Dryfoos called up to his driver, who bent his head down sidewise to
+listen: "Go over there on Madison Avenue, onto that asphalt, and keep
+drivin' up and down till I stop you.  I can't hear myself think on these
+pavements," he said to March.  But after they got upon the asphalt, and
+began smoothly rolling over it, he seemed in no haste to begin.  At last
+he said, "I wanted to talk with you about that--that Dutchman that was at
+my dinner--Lindau," and March's heart gave a jump with wonder whether he
+could already have heard of Lindau's death; but in an instant he
+perceived that this was impossible.  "I been talkin' with Fulkerson about
+him, and he says they had to take the balance of his arm off."
+
+March nodded; it seemed to him he could not speak.  He could not make out
+from the close face of the old man anything of his motive.  It was set,
+but set as a piece of broken mechanism is when it has lost the power to
+relax itself.  There was no other history in it of what the man had
+passed through in his son's death.
+
+"I don't know," Dryfoos resumed, looking aside at the cloth window-strap,
+which he kept fingering, "as you quite understood what made me the
+maddest.  I didn't tell him I could talk Dutch, because I can't keep it
+up with a regular German; but my father was Pennsylvany Dutch, and I
+could understand what he was saying to you about me.  I know I had no
+business to understood it, after I let him think I couldn't but I did,
+and I didn't like very well to have a man callin' me a traitor and a
+tyrant at my own table.  Well, I look at it differently now, and I reckon
+I had better have tried to put up with it; and I would, if I could have
+known--" He stopped with a quivering lip, and then went on: "Then, again,
+I didn't like his talkin' that paternalism of his.  I always heard it was
+the worst kind of thing for the country; I was brought up to think the
+best government was the one that governs the least; and I didn't want to
+hear that kind of talk from a man that was livin' on my money.
+I couldn't bear it from him.  Or I thought I couldn't before--before--"
+He stopped again, and gulped.  "I reckon  now there ain't anything I
+couldn't bear."  March was moved by the blunt words and the mute stare
+forward with which they ended.  "Mr. Dryfoos, I didn't know that you
+understood Lindau's German, or I shouldn't have allowed him he wouldn't
+have allowed himself--to go on.  He wouldn't have knowingly abused his
+position of guest to censure you, no matter how much he condemned you."
+"I don't care for it now," said Dryfoos.  "It's all past and gone, as far
+as I'm concerned; but I wanted you to see that I wasn't tryin' to punish
+him for his opinions, as you said."
+
+"No; I see now," March assented, though he thought, his position still
+justified.  "I wish--"
+
+"I don't know as I understand much about his opinions, anyway; but I
+ain't ready to say I want the men dependent on me to manage my business
+for me.  I always tried to do the square thing by my hands; and in that
+particular case out there I took on all the old hands just as fast as
+they left their Union.  As for the game I came on them, it was dog eat
+dog, anyway."
+
+March could have laughed to think how far this old man was from even
+conceiving of Lindau's point'of view, and how he was saying the worst of
+himself that Lindau could have said of him.  No one could have
+characterized the kind of thing he had done more severely than he when he
+called it dog eat dog.
+
+"There's a great deal to be said on both sides," March began, hoping to
+lead up through this generality to the fact of Lindau's death; but the
+old man went on:
+
+"Well, all I wanted him to know is that I wasn't trying to punish him for
+what he said about things in general.  You naturally got that idea, I
+reckon; but I always went in for lettin' people say what they please and
+think what they please; it's the only way in a free country."
+
+"I'm afraid, Mr. Dryfoos, that it would make little difference to Lindau
+now--"
+
+"I don't suppose he bears malice for it," said Dryfoos, "but what I want
+to do is to have him told so.  He could understand just why I didn't want
+to be called hard names, and yet I didn't object to his thinkin' whatever
+he pleased.  I'd like him to know--"
+
+"No one can speak to him, no one can tell him," March began again, but
+again Dryfoos prevented him from going on.
+
+"I understand it's a delicate thing; and I'm not askin' you to do it.
+What I would really like to do--if you think he could be prepared for it,
+some way, and could stand it--would be to go to him myself, and tell him
+just what the trouble was.  I'm in hopes, if I done that, he could see
+how I felt about it."
+
+A picture of Dryfoos going to the dead Lindau with his vain regrets
+presented itself to March, and he tried once more to make the old man
+understand.  "Mr. Dryfoos," he said, "Lindau is past all that forever,"
+and he felt the ghastly comedy of it when Dryfoos continued, without
+heeding him
+
+"I got a particular reason why I want him to believe it wasn't his ideas
+I objected to--them ideas of his about the government carryin' everything
+on and givin' work.  I don't understand 'em exactly, but I found a
+writin'--among--my son's-things" (he seemed to force the words through
+his teeth), "and I reckon he--thought--that way.  Kind of a diary--where
+he--put down--his thoughts.  My son and me--we differed about a good-
+many things."  His chin shook, and from time to time he stopped.  "I
+wasn't very good to him, I reckon; I crossed him where I guess I got no
+business to cross him; but I thought everything of--Coonrod.  He was the
+best boy, from a baby, that ever was; just so patient and mild, and done
+whatever he was told.  I ought to 'a' let him been a preacher!  Oh, my
+son! my son!" The sobs could not be kept back any longer; they shook the
+old man with a violence that made March afraid for him; but he controlled
+himself at last with a series of hoarse sounds like barks.  "Well, it's
+all past and gone!  But as I understand you from what you saw, when
+Coonrod was--killed, he was tryin' to save that old man from trouble?"
+
+Yes, yes! It seemed so to me."
+
+"That 'll do, then! I want you to have him come back and write for the
+book when he gets well.  I want you to find out and let me know if
+there's anything I can do for him.  I'll feel as if I done it--for my--
+son.  I'll take him into my own house, and do for him there, if you say
+so, when he gets so he can be moved.  I'll wait on him myself.  It's what
+Coonrod 'd do, if he was here.  I don't feel any hardness to him because
+it was him that got Coonrod killed, as you might say, in one sense of the
+term; but I've tried to think it out, and I feel like I was all the more
+beholden to him because my son died tryin' to save him.  Whatever I do,
+I'll be doin' it for Coonrod, and that's enough for me."  He seemed to
+have finished, and he turned to March as if to hear what he had to say.
+
+March hesitated.  "I'm afraid, Mr. Dryfoos--Didn't Fulkerson tell you
+that Lindau was very sick?"
+
+"Yes, of course.  But he's all right, he said."
+
+Now it had to come, though the fact had been latterly playing fast and
+loose with March's consciousness.  Something almost made him smile; the
+willingness he had once felt to give this old man pain; then he consoled
+himself by thinking that at least he was not obliged to meet Dryfoos's
+wish to make atonement with the fact that Lindau had renounced him, and
+would on no terms work for such a man as he, or suffer any kindness from
+him.  In this light Lindau seemed the harder of the two, and March had
+the momentary force to say
+
+"Mr. Dryfoos--it can't be.  Lindau--I have just come from him--is dead."
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+"How did he take it?  How could he bear it?  Oh, Basil! I wonder you
+could have the heart to say it to him.  It was cruel!"
+
+"Yes, cruel enough, my dear," March owned to his wife, when they talked
+the matter over on his return home.  He could not wait till the children
+were out of the way, and afterward neither he nor his wife was sorry that
+he had spoken of it before them.  The girl cried plentifully for her old
+friend who was dead, and said she hated Mr. Dryfoos, and then was sorry
+for him, too; and the boy listened to all, and spoke with a serious sense
+that pleased his father.  "But as to how he took it," March went on to
+answer his wife's question about Dryfoos--"how do any of us take a thing
+that hurts?  Some of us cry out, and some of us don't.  Dryfoos drew a
+kind of long, quivering breath, as a child does when it grieves--there's
+something curiously simple and primitive about him--and didn't say
+anything.  After a while he asked me how he could see the people at the
+hospital about the remains; I gave him my card to the young doctor there
+that had charge of Lindau.  I suppose he was still carrying forward his
+plan of reparation in his mind--to the dead for the dead.  But how
+useless!  If he could have taken the living Lindau home with him, and
+cared for him all his days, what would it have profited the gentle
+creature whose life his worldly ambition vexed and thwarted here?
+He might as well offer a sacrifice at Conrad's grave.  Children," said
+March, turning to them, "death is an exile that no remorse and no love
+can reach.  Remember that, and be good to every one here on earth, for
+your longing to retrieve any harshness or unkindness to the dead will be
+the very ecstasy of anguish to you.  I wonder," he mused, "if one of the
+reasons why we're shut up to our ignorance of what is to be hereafter
+isn't because if we were sure of another world we might be still more
+brutal to one another here, in the hope of making reparation somewhere
+else.  Perhaps, if we ever come to obey the law of love on earth, the
+mystery of death will be taken away."
+
+"Well"--the ancestral Puritanism spoke in Mrs. March--" these two old men
+have been terribly punished.  They have both been violent and wilful, and
+they have both been punished.  No one need ever tell me there is not a
+moral government of the universe!"
+
+March always disliked to hear her talk in this way, which did both her
+head and heart injustice.  "And Conrad," he said, "what was he punished
+for?"
+
+"He?"  she answered, in an exaltation--" he suffered for the sins of
+others."
+
+"Ah, well, if you put it in that way, yes.  That goes on continually.
+That's another mystery."
+
+He fell to brooding on it, and presently he heard his son saying,
+"I suppose, papa, that Mr. Lindau died in a bad cause?"
+
+March was startled.  He had always been so sorry for Lindau, and admired
+his courage and generosity so much, that he had never fairly considered
+this question.  "Why, yes," he answered; "he died in the cause of
+disorder; he was trying to obstruct the law.  No doubt there was a wrong
+there, an inconsistency and an injustice that he felt keenly; but it
+could not be reached in his way without greater wrong."
+
+"Yes; that's what I thought," said the boy.  "And what's the use of our
+ever fighting about anything in America?  I always thought we could vote
+anything we wanted."
+
+"We can, if we're honest, and don't buy and sell one another's votes,"
+said his father.  "And men like Lindau, who renounce the American means
+as hopeless, and let their love of justice hurry them into sympathy with
+violence--yes, they are wrong; and poor Lindau did die in a bad cause, as
+you say, Tom."
+
+"I think Conrad had no business there, or you, either, Basil," said his
+wife.
+
+"Oh, I don't defend myself," said March.  "I was there in the cause of
+literary curiosity and of conjugal disobedience.  But Conrad--yes, he had
+some business there: it was his business to suffer there for the sins of
+others.  Isabel, we can't throw aside that old doctrine of the Atonement
+yet.  The life of Christ, it wasn't only in healing the sick and going
+about to do good; it was suffering for the sins of others.  That's as
+great a mystery as the mystery of death.  Why should there be such a
+principle in the world?  But it's been felt, and more or less dumbly,
+blindly recognized ever since Calvary.  If we love mankind, pity them,
+we even wish to suffer for them.  That's what has created the religious
+orders in all times--the brotherhoods and sisterhoods that belong to our
+day as much as to the mediaeval past.  That's what is driving a girl like
+Margaret Vance, who has everything that the world can offer her young
+beauty, on to the work of a Sister of Charity among the poor and the
+dying."
+
+"Yes, yes!" cried Mrs. March.  "How--how did she look there, Basil?"  She
+had her feminine misgivings; she was not sure but the girl was something
+of a poseuse, and enjoyed the picturesqueness, as well as the pain; and
+she wished to be convinced that it was not so.
+
+"Well," she said, when March had told again the little there was to tell,
+"I suppose it must be a great trial to a woman like Mrs. Horn to have her
+niece going that way."
+
+"The way of Christ?"  asked March, with a smile.
+
+"Oh, Christ came into the world to teach us how to live rightly in it,
+too.  If we were all to spend our time in hospitals, it would be rather
+dismal for the homes.  But perhaps you don't think the homes are worth
+minding?"  she suggested, with a certain note in her voice that he knew.
+
+He got up and kissed her.  "I think the gimcrackeries are."  He took the
+hat he had set down on the parlor table on coming in, and started to put
+it in the hall, and that made her notice it.
+
+"You've been getting a new hat!"
+
+"Yes," he hesitated; "the old one had got--was decidedly shabby."
+
+"Well, that's right.  I don't like you to wear them too long.  Did you
+leave the old one to be pressed?"
+
+"Well, the hatter seemed to think it was hardly worth pressing," said
+March.  He decided that for the present his wife's nerves had quite all
+they could bear.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+It was in a manner grotesque, but to March it was all the more natural
+for that reason, that Dryfoos should have Lindau's funeral from his
+house.  He knew the old man to be darkly groping, through the payment of
+these vain honors to the dead, for some atonement to his son, and he
+imagined him finding in them such comfort as comes from doing all one
+can, even when all is useless.
+
+No one knew what Lindau's religion was, and in default they had had the
+Anglican burial service read over him; it seems so often the refuge of
+the homeless dead.  Mrs. Dryfoos came down for the ceremony.  She
+understood that it was for Coonrod's sake that his father wished the
+funeral to be there; and she confided to Mrs. March that she believed
+Coonrod would have been pleased.  "Coonrod was a member of the 'Piscopal
+Church; and fawther's doin' the whole thing for Coonrod as much as for
+anybody.  He thought the world of Coonrod, fawther did.  Mela, she kind
+of thought it would look queer to have two funerals from the same house,
+hand-runnin', as you might call it, and one of 'em no relation, either;
+but when she saw how fawther was bent on it, she give in.  Seems as if
+she was tryin' to make up to fawther for Coonrod as much as she could.
+Mela always was a good child, but nobody can ever come up to Coonrod."
+
+March felt all the grotesqueness, the hopeless absurdity of Dryfoos's
+endeavor at atonement in these vain obsequies to the man for whom he
+believed his son to have died; but the effort had its magnanimity, its
+pathos, and there was a poetry that appealed to him in the reconciliation
+through death of men, of ideas, of conditions, that could only have gone
+warring on in life.  He thought, as the priest went on with the solemn
+liturgy, how all the world must come together in that peace which,
+struggle and strive as we may, shall claim us at last.  He looked at
+Dryfoos, and wondered whether he would consider these rites a sufficient
+tribute, or whether there was enough in him to make him realize their
+futility, except as a mere sign of his wish to retrieve the past.  He
+thought how we never can atone for the wrong we do; the heart we have
+grieved and wounded cannot kindle with pity for us when once it is
+stilled; and yet we can put our evil from us with penitence, and somehow,
+somewhere, the order of loving kindness, which our passion or our
+wilfulness has disturbed, will be restored.
+
+Dryfoos, through Fulkerson, had asked all the more intimate contributors
+of 'Every Other Week' to come.  Beaton was absent, but Fulkerson had
+brought Miss Woodburn, with her father, and Mrs. Leighton and Alma, to
+fill up, as he said.  Mela was much present, and was official with the
+arrangement of the flowers and the welcome of the guests.  She imparted
+this impersonality to her reception of Kendricks, whom Fulkerson met in
+the outer hall with his party, and whom he presented in whisper to them
+all.  Kendricks smiled under his breath, as it were, and was then mutely
+and seriously polite to the Leightons.  Alma brought a little bunch of
+flowers, which were lost in those which Dryfoos had ordered to be
+unsparingly provided.
+
+It was a kind of satisfaction to Mela to have Miss Vance come, and
+reassuring as to how it would look to have the funeral there; Miss Vance
+would certainly not have come unless it had been all right; she had come,
+and had sent some Easter lilies.
+
+"Ain't Christine coming down?"  Fulkerson asked Mela.
+
+"No, she ain't a bit well, and she ain't been, ever since Coonrod died.
+I don't know, what's got over her," said Mela.  She added, "Well, I
+should 'a' thought Mr. Beaton would 'a' made out to 'a' come!"
+
+"Beaton's peculiar," said Fulkerson.  "If he thinks you want him he takes
+a pleasure in not letting you have him."
+
+"Well, goodness knows, I don't want him," said the girl.
+
+Christine kept her room, and for the most part kept her bed; but there
+seemed nothing definitely the matter with her, and she would not let them
+call a doctor.  Her mother said she reckoned she was beginning to feel
+the spring weather, that always perfectly pulled a body down in New York;
+and Mela said if being as cross as two sticks was any sign of spring-
+fever, Christine had it bad.  She was faithfully kind to her, and
+submitted to all her humors, but she recompensed herself by the freest
+criticism of Christine when not in actual attendance on her.  Christine
+would not suffer Mrs. Mandel to approach her, and she had with her father
+a sullen submission which was not resignation.  For her, apparently,
+Conrad had not died, or had died in vain.
+
+"Pshaw!" said Mela, one morning when she came to breakfast, "I reckon if
+we was to send up an old card of Mr. Beaton's she'd rattle down-stairs
+fast enough.  If she's sick, she's love-sick.  It makes me sick to see
+her."
+
+Mela was talking to Mrs. Mandel, but her father looked up from his plate
+and listened.  Mela went on: "I don't know what's made the fellow quit
+comun'.  But he was an aggravatun' thing, and no more dependable than
+water.  It's just like Air.  Fulkerson said, if he thinks you want him
+he'll take a pleasure in not lettun' you have him.  I reckon that's
+what's the matter with Christine.  I believe in my heart the girl 'll die
+if she don't git him."
+
+Mela went on to eat her breakfast with her own good appetite.  She now
+always came down to keep her father company, as she said, and she did her
+best to cheer and comfort him.  At least she kept the talk going, and she
+had it nearly all to herself, for Mrs.  Mandel was now merely staying on
+provisionally, and, in the absence of any regrets or excuses from
+Christine, was looking ruefully forward to the moment when she must leave
+even this ungentle home for the chances of the ruder world outside.
+
+The old man said nothing at table, but, when Mela went up to see if she
+could do anything for Christine, he asked Mrs. Mandel again about all the
+facts of her last interview with Beaton.
+
+She gave them as fully as she could remember them, and the old man made
+no comment on them.  But he went out directly after, and at the 'Every
+Other Week' office he climbed the stairs to Fulkerson's room and asked
+for Beaton's address.  No one yet had taken charge of Conrad's work, and
+Fulkerson was running the thing himself, as he said, till he could talk
+with Dryfoos about it.  The old man would not look into the empty room
+where he had last seen his son alive; he turned his face away and hurried
+by the door.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+The course of public events carried Beaton's private affairs beyond the
+reach of his simple first intention to renounce his connection with
+'Every Other Week.'  In fact, this was not perhaps so simple as it
+seemed, and long before it could be put in effect it appeared still
+simpler to do nothing about the matter--to remain passive and leave the
+initiative to Dryfoos, to maintain the dignity of unconsciousness and let
+recognition of any change in the situation come from those who had caused
+the change.  After all, it was rather absurd to propose making a purely
+personal question the pivot on which his relations with 'Every Other
+Week' turned.  He took a hint from March's position and decided that he
+did not know Dryfoos in these relations; he knew only Fulkerson, who had
+certainly had nothing to do with Mrs. Mandel's asking his intentions.
+As he reflected upon this he became less eager to look Fulkerson up and
+make the magazine a partner of his own sufferings.  This was the soberer
+mood to which Beaton trusted that night even before he slept, and he
+awoke fully confirmed in it.  As he examined the offence done him in the
+cold light of day, he perceived that it had not come either from Mrs.
+Mandel, who was visibly the faltering and unwilling instrument of it,
+or from Christine, who was altogether ignorant of it, but from Dryfoos,
+whom he could not hurt by giving up his place.  He could only punish
+Fulkerson by that, and Fulkerson was innocent.  Justice and interest
+alike dictated the passive course to which Beaton inclined; and he
+reflected that he might safely leave the punishment of Dryfoos to
+Christine, who would find out what had happened, and would be able to
+take care of herself in any encounter of tempers with her father.
+
+Beaton did not go to the office during the week that followed upon this
+conclusion; but they were used there to these sudden absences of his,
+and, as his work for the time was in train, nothing was made of his
+staying away, except the sarcastic comment which the thought of him was
+apt to excite in the literary department.  He no longer came so much to
+the Leightons, and Fulkerson was in no state of mind to miss any one
+there except Miss Woodburn, whom he never missed.  Beaton was left, then,
+unmolestedly awaiting the course of destiny, when he read in the morning
+paper, over his coffee at Maroni's, the deeply scare-headed story of
+Conrad's death and the clubbing of Lindau.  He probably cared as little
+for either of them as any man that ever saw them; but he felt a shock,
+if not a pang, at Conrad's fate, so out of keeping with his life and
+character.  He did not know what to do; and he did nothing.  He was not
+asked to the funeral, but he had not expected that, and, when Fulkerson
+brought him notice that Lindau was also to be buried from Dryfoos's
+house, it was without his usual sullen vindictiveness that he kept away.
+In his sort, and as much as a man could who was necessarily so much taken
+up with himself, he was sorry for Conrad's father; Beaton had a peculiar
+tenderness for his own father, and he imagined how his father would feel
+if it were he who had been killed in Conrad's place, as it might very
+well have been; he sympathized with himself in view of the possibility;
+and for once they were mistaken who thought him indifferent and merely
+brutal in his failure to appear at Lindau's obsequies.
+
+He would really have gone if he had known how to reconcile his presence
+in that house with the terms of his effective banishment from it; and he
+was rather forgivingly finding himself wronged in the situation, when
+Dryfoos knocked at the studio door the morning after Lindau's funeral.
+Beaton roared out, "Come in!" as he always did to a knock if he had not
+a model; if he had a model he set the door slightly ajar, and with his
+palette on his thumb frowned at his visitor and told him he could not
+come in.  Dryfoos fumbled about for the knob in the dim passageway
+outside, and Beaton, who had experience of people's difficulties with it,
+suddenly jerked the door open.  The two men stood confronted, and at
+first sight of each other their quiescent dislike revived.  Each would
+have been willing to turn away from the other, but that was not possible.
+Beaton snorted some sort of inarticulate salutation, which Dryfoos did
+not try to return; he asked if he could see him alone for a minute or
+two, and Beaton bade him come in, and swept some paint-blotched rags from
+the chair which he told him to take.  He noticed, as the old man sank
+tremulously into it, that his movement was like that of his own father,
+and also that he looked very much like Christine.  Dryfoos folded his
+hands tremulously on the top of his horn-handled stick, and he was rather
+finely haggard, with the dark hollows round his black eyes and the fall
+of the muscles on either side of his chin.  He had forgotten to take his
+soft, wide-brimmed hat off; and Beaton felt a desire to sketch him just
+as he sat.
+
+Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from the dreary absence into
+which he fell at first.  "Young man," he began, "maybe I've come here on
+a fool's errand," and Beaton rather fancied that beginning.
+
+But it embarrassed him a little, and he said, with a shy glance aside, "I
+don't know what you mean."
+"I reckon," Dryfoos answered, quietly, "you got your notion, though.
+I set that woman on to speak to you the way she done.  But if there was
+anything wrong in the way she spoke, or if you didn't feel like she had
+any right to question you up as if we suspected you of anything mean, I
+want you to say so."
+
+Beaton said nothing, and the old man went on.
+
+"I ain't very well up in the ways of the world, and I don't pretend to
+be.  All I want is to be fair and square with everybody.  I've made
+mistakes, though, in my time--" He stopped, and Beaton was not proof
+against the misery of his face, which was twisted as with some strong
+physical ache.  "I don't know as I want to make any more, if I can help
+it.  I don't know but what you had a right to keep on comin', and if you
+had I want you to say so.  Don't you be afraid but what I'll take it in
+the right way.  I don't want to take advantage of anybody, and I don't
+ask you to say any more than that."
+
+Beaton did not find the humiliation of the man who had humiliated him so
+sweet as he could have fancied it might be.  He knew how it had come
+about, and that it was an effect of love for his child; it did not matter
+by what ungracious means she had brought him to know that he loved her
+better than his own will, that his wish for her happiness was stronger
+than his pride; it was enough that he was now somehow brought to give
+proof of it.  Beaton could not be aware of all that dark coil of
+circumstance through which Dryfoos's present action evolved itself;
+the worst of this was buried in the secret of the old man's heart, a worm
+of perpetual torment.  What was apparent to another was that he was
+broken by the sorrow that had fallen upon him, and it was this that
+Beaton respected and pitied in his impulse to be frank and kind in his
+answer.
+
+"No, I had no right to keep coming to your house in the way I did,
+unless--unless I meant more than I ever said."  Beaton added: "I don't
+say that what you did was usual--in this country, at any rate; but I
+can't say you were wrong.  Since you speak to me about the matter, it's
+only fair to myself to say that a good deal goes on in life without much
+thinking of consequences.  That's the way I excuse myself."
+
+"And you say Mrs. Mandel done right?"  asked Dryfoos, as if he wished
+simply to be assured of a point of etiquette.
+
+"Yes, she did right.  I've nothing to complain of."
+
+"That's all I wanted to know," said Dryfoos; but apparently he had not
+finished, and he did not go, though the silence that Beaton now kept gave
+him a chance to do so.  He began a series of questions which had no
+relation to the matter in hand, though they were strictly personal to
+Beaton.  "What countryman are you?"  he asked, after a moment.
+
+"What countryman?"  Beaton frowned back at him.
+
+"Yes, are you an American by birth?"
+
+"Yes; I was born in Syracuse."
+
+"Protestant?"
+
+"My father is a Scotch Seceder."
+
+"What business is your father in?"
+
+Beaton faltered and blushed; then he answered:
+
+"He's in the monument business, as he calls it.  He's a tombstone
+cutter."  Now that he was launched, Beaton saw no reason for not
+declaring, "My father's always been a poor man, and worked with his own
+hands for his living."  He had too slight esteem socially for Dryfoos to
+conceal a fact from him that he might have wished to blink with others.
+
+"Well, that's right," said Dryfoos.  "I used to farm it myself.  I've got
+a good pile of money together, now.  At first it didn't come easy; but
+now it's got started it pours in and pours in; it seems like there was no
+end to it.  I've got well on to three million; but it couldn't keep me
+from losin' my son.  It can't buy me back a minute of his life; not all
+the money in the world can do it!"
+
+He grieved this out as if to himself rather than to Beaton, who, scarcely
+ventured to say, "I know--I am very sorry--"
+
+"How did you come," Dryfoos interrupted, "to take up paintin'?"
+
+"Well, I don't know," said Beaton, a little scornfully.  "You don't.
+take a thing of that kind up, I fancy.  I always wanted to paint."
+
+"Father try to stop you?"
+
+"No.  It wouldn't have been of any use.  Why--"
+
+"My son, he wanted to be a preacher, and I did stop him or I thought I
+did.  But I reckon he was a preacher, all the same, every minute of his
+life.  As you say, it ain't any use to try to stop a thing like that.
+I reckon if a child has got any particular bent, it was given to it;
+and it's goin' against the grain, it's goin' against the law, to try to
+bend it some other way.  There's lots of good business men, Mr. Beaton,
+twenty of 'em to every good preacher?"
+
+"I imagine more than twenty," said Beaton, amused and touched through his
+curiosity as to what the old man was driving at by the quaint simplicity
+of his speculations.
+
+"Father ever come to the city?"
+
+"No; he never has the time; and my mother's an invalid."
+
+"Oh! Brothers and sisters?"
+
+"Yes; we're a large family."
+
+"I lost two little fellers--twins," said Dryfoos, sadly.  "But we hain't
+ever had but just the five.  Ever take portraits?"
+
+"Yes," said Beaton, meeting this zigzag in the queries as seriously as
+the rest.  "I don't think I am good at it."
+
+Dryfoos got to his feet.  "I wish you'd paint a likeness of my son.
+You've seen him plenty of times.  We won't fight about the price, don't
+you be afraid of that."
+
+Beaton was astonished, and in a mistaken way he was disgusted.  He saw
+that Dryfoos was trying to undo Mrs. Mandel's work practically, and get
+him to come again to his house; that he now conceived of the offence
+given him as condoned, and wished to restore the former situation.  He
+knew that he was attempting this for Christine's sake, but he was not the
+man to imagine that Dryfoos was trying not only to tolerate him, but to
+like him; and, in fact, Dryfoos was not wholly conscious himself of this
+end.  What they both understood was that Dryfoos was endeavoring to get
+at Beaton through Conrad's memory; but with one this was its dedication
+to a purpose of self sacrifice, and with the other a vulgar and shameless
+use of it.
+
+"I couldn't do it," said Beaton.  "I couldn't think of attempting it."
+
+"Why not?"  Dryfoos persisted.  "We got some photographs of him; he
+didn't like to sit very well; but his mother got him to; and you know how
+he looked."
+
+"I couldn't do it--I couldn't.  I can't even consider it.  I'm very
+sorry.  I would, if it were possible.  But it isn't possible."
+
+"I reckon if you see the photographs once"
+
+"It isn't that, Mr. Dryfoos.  But I'm not in the way of that kind of
+thing any more."
+
+"I'd give any price you've a mind to name--"
+
+"Oh, it isn't the money!" cried Beaton, beginning to lose control of
+himself.
+
+The old man did not notice him.  He sat with his head fallen forward, and
+his chin resting on his folded hands.  Thinking of the portrait, he saw
+Conrad's face before him, reproachful, astonished, but all gentle as it
+looked when Conrad caught his hand that day after he struck him; he heard
+him say, "Father!" and the sweat gathered on his forehead.  "Oh, my God!"
+he groaned.  "No; there ain't anything I can do now."
+
+Beaton did not know whether Dryfoos was speaking to him or not.  He
+started toward him.  "Are you ill?"
+
+"No, there ain't anything the matter," said the old man.  "But I guess
+I'll lay down on your settee a minute."  He tottered with Beaton's help
+to the aesthetic couch covered with a tiger-skin, on which Beaton had
+once thought of painting a Cleopatra; but he could never get the right
+model.  As the old man stretched himself out on it, pale and suffering,
+he did not look much like a Cleopatra, but Beaton was struck with his
+effectiveness, and the likeness between him and his daughter; she would
+make a very good Cleopatra in some ways.  All the time, while these
+thoughts passed through his mind, he was afraid Dryfoos would die.
+The old man fetched his breath in gasps, which presently smoothed and
+lengthened into his normal breathing.  Beaton got him a glass of wine,
+and after tasting it he sat up.
+
+"You've got to excuse me," he said, getting back to his characteristic
+grimness with surprising suddenness, when once he began to recover
+himself.  "I've been through a good deal lately; and sometimes it ketches
+me round the heart like a pain."
+
+In his life of selfish immunity from grief, Beaton could not understand
+this experience that poignant sorrow brings; he said to himself that
+Dryfoos was going the way of angina pectoris; as he began shuffling off
+the tiger-skin he said: "Had you better get up?  Wouldn't you like me to
+call a doctor?"
+
+"I'm all right, young man."  Dryfoos took his hat and stick from him, but
+he made for the door so uncertainly that Beaton put his hand under his
+elbow and helped him out, and down the stairs, to his coupe.
+
+"Hadn't you better let me drive home with you?"  he asked.
+
+"What?"  said Dryfoos, suspiciously.
+
+Beaton repeated his question.
+
+"I guess I'm able to go home alone," said Dryfoos, in a surly tone, and
+he put his head out of the window and called up "Home!" to the driver,
+who immediately started off and left Beaton standing beside the
+curbstone.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+Beaton wasted the rest of the day in the emotions and speculations which
+Dryfoos's call inspired.  It was not that they continuously occupied him,
+but they broke up the train of other thoughts, and spoiled him for work;
+a very little spoiled Beaton for work; he required just the right mood
+for work.  He comprehended perfectly well that Dryfoos had made him that
+extraordinary embassy because he wished him to renew his visits, and he
+easily imagined the means that had brought him to this pass.  From what
+he knew of that girl he did not envy her father his meeting with her when
+he must tell her his mission had failed.  But had it failed?  When Beaton
+came to ask himself this question, he could only perceive that he and
+Dryfoos had failed to find any ground of sympathy, and had parted in the
+same dislike with which they had met.  But as to any other failure, it
+was certainly tacit, and it still rested with him to give it effect.
+He could go back to Dryfoos's house, as freely as before, and it was
+clear that he was very much desired to come back.  But if he went back it
+was also clear that he must go back with intentions more explicit than
+before, and now he had to ask himself just how much or how little he had
+meant by going there.  His liking for Christine had certainly not
+increased, but the charm, on the other hand, of holding a leopardess in
+leash had not yet palled upon him.  In his life of inconstancies, it was
+a pleasure to rest upon something fixed, and the man who had no control
+over himself liked logically enough to feel his control of some one else.
+The fact cannot other wise be put in terms, and the attraction which
+Christine Dryfoos had for him, apart from this, escapes from all terms,
+as anything purely and merely passional must.  He had seen from the first
+that she was a cat, and so far as youth forecasts such things, he felt
+that she would be a shrew.  But he had a perverse sense of her beauty,
+and he knew a sort of life in which her power to molest him with her
+temper could be reduced to the smallest proportions, and even broken to
+pieces.  Then the consciousness of her money entered.  It was evident
+that the old man had mentioned his millions in the way of a hint to him
+of what he might reasonably expect if he would turn and be his son-in-
+law.  Beaton did not put it to himself in those words; and in fact his
+cogitations were not in words at all.  It was the play of cognitions,
+of sensations, formlessly tending to the effect which can only be very
+clumsily interpreted in language.  But when he got to this point in them,
+Beaton rose to magnanimity and in a flash of dramatic reverie disposed of
+a part of Dryfoos's riches in placing his father and mother, and his
+brothers and sisters, beyond all pecuniary anxiety forever.  He had no
+shame, no scruple in this, for he had been a pensioner upon others ever
+since a Syracusan amateur of the arts had detected his talent and given
+him the money to go and study abroad.  Beaton had always considered the
+money a loan, to be repaid out of his future success; but he now never
+dreamt of repaying it; as the man was rich, he had even a contempt for
+the notion of repaying him; but this did not prevent him from feeling
+very keenly the hardships he put his father to in borrowing money from
+him, though he never repaid his father, either.  In this reverie he saw
+himself sacrificed in marriage with Christine Dryfoos, in a kind of
+admiring self-pity, and he was melted by the spectacle of the dignity
+with which he suffered all the lifelong trials ensuing from his
+unselfishness.  The fancy that Alma Leighton came bitterly to regret him,
+contributed to soothe and flatter him, and he was not sure that Margaret.
+Vance did not suffer a like loss in him.
+
+There had been times when, as he believed, that beautiful girl's high
+thoughts had tended toward him; there had been looks, gestures, even
+words, that had this effect to him, or that seemed to have had it; and
+Beaton saw that he might easily construe Mrs. Horn's confidential appeal
+to him to get Margaret interested in art again as something by no means
+necessarily offensive, even though it had been made to him as to a master
+of illusion.  If Mrs. Horn had to choose between him and the life of good
+works to which her niece was visibly abandoning herself, Beaton could not
+doubt which she would choose; the only question was how real the danger
+of a life of good works was.
+
+As he thought of these two girls, one so charming and the other so
+divine, it became indefinitely difficult to renounce them for Christine
+Dryfoos, with her sultry temper and her earthbound ideals.  Life had been
+so flattering to Beaton hitherto that he could not believe them both
+finally indifferent; and if they were not indifferent, perhaps he did not
+wish either of them to be very definite.  What he really longed for was
+their sympathy; for a man who is able to walk round quite ruthlessly on
+the feelings of others often has very tender feelings of his own, easily
+lacerated, and eagerly responsive to the caresses of compassion.  In this
+frame Beaton determined to go that afternoon, though it was not Mrs.
+Horn's day, and call upon her in the hope of possibly seeing Miss Vance
+alone.  As he continued in it, he took this for a sign and actually went.
+It did not fall out at once as he wished, but he got Mrs. Horn to talking
+again about her niece, and Mrs. Horn again regretted that nothing could
+be done by the fine arts to reclaim Margaret from good works.
+
+"Is she at home?  Will you let me see her?"  asked Beacon, with something
+of the scientific interest of a physician inquiring for a patient whose
+symptoms have been rehearsed to him.  He had not asked for her before.
+
+"Yes, certainly," said Mrs. Horn, and she went herself to call Margaret,
+and she did not return with her.  The girl entered with the gentle grace
+peculiar to her; and Beaton, bent as he was on his own consolation,
+could not help being struck with the spiritual exaltation of her look.
+At sight of her, the vague hope he had never quite relinquished, that
+they might be something more than aesthetic friends, died in his heart.
+She wore black, as she often did; but in spite of its fashion her dress
+received a nun-like effect from the pensive absence of her face.
+"Decidedly," thought Beaton, "she is far gone in good works."
+
+But he rose, all the same, to meet her on the old level, and he began at
+once to talk to her of the subject he had been discussing with her aunt.
+He said frankly that they both felt she had unjustifiably turned her back
+upon possibilities which she ought not to neglect.
+
+"You know very well," she answered, "that I couldn't do anything in that
+way worth the time I should waste on it.  Don't talk of it, please.
+I suppose my aunt has been asking you to say this, but it's no use.
+I'm sorry it's no use, she wishes it so much; but I'm not sorry
+otherwise.  You can find the pleasure at least of doing good work in it;
+but I couldn't find anything in it but a barren amusement.  Mr. Wetmore
+is right; for me, it's like enjoying an opera, or a ball."
+
+"That's one of Wetmore's phrases.  He'd sacrifice anything to them."
+
+She put aside the whole subject with a look.  "You were not at Mr.
+Dryfoos's the other day.  Have you seen them, any of them, lately?"
+
+"I haven't been there for some time, no," said Beaton, evasively.
+But he thought if he was to get on to anything, he had better be candid.
+"Mr. Dryfoos was at my studio this morning.  He's got a queer notion.
+He wants me to paint his son's portrait."
+
+She started.  "And will you--"
+
+"No, I couldn't do such a thing.  It isn't in my way.  I told him so.
+His son had a beautiful face an antique profile; a sort of early
+Christian type; but I'm too much of a pagan for that sort of thing."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Yes," Beaton continued, not quite liking her assent after he had invited
+it.  He had his pride in being a pagan, a Greek, but it failed him in her
+presence, now; and he wished that she had protested he was none.  "He was
+a singular creature; a kind of survival; an exile in our time and place.
+I don't know: we don't quite expect a saint to be rustic; but with all
+his goodness Conrad Dryfoos was a country person.  If he were not dying
+for a cause you could imagine him milking."  Beaton intended a contempt
+that came from the bitterness of having himself once milked the family
+cow.
+
+His contempt did not reach Miss Vance.  "He died for a cause," she said.
+"The holiest."
+
+"Of labor?"
+
+"Of peace.  He was there to persuade the strikers to be quiet and go
+home."
+
+"I haven't been quite sure," said Beaton.  "But in any case he had no
+business there.  The police were on hand to do the persuading."
+
+"I can't let you talk so!" cried the girl.  "It's shocking!  Oh, I know
+it's the way people talk, and the worst is that in the sight of the world
+it's the right way.  But the blessing on the peacemakers is not for the
+policemen with their clubs."
+
+Beaton saw that she was nervous; he made his reflection that she was
+altogether too far gone in good works for the fine arts to reach her;
+he began to think how he could turn her primitive Christianity to the
+account of his modern heathenism.  He had no deeper design than to get
+flattered back into his own favor far enough to find courage for some
+sort of decisive step.  In his heart he was trying to will whether he
+should or should not go back to Dryfoos's house.  It could not be from
+the caprice that had formerly taken him; it must be from a definite
+purpose; again he realized this.  "Of course; you are right," he said.
+"I wish I could have answered that old man differently.  I fancy he was
+bound up in his son, though he quarrelled with him, and crossed him.  But
+I couldn't do it; it wasn't possible."  He said to himself that if she
+said "No," now, he would be ruled by her agreement with him; and if she
+disagreed with him, he would be ruled still by the chance, and would go
+no more to the Dryfooses'.  He found himself embarrassed to the point of
+blushing when she said nothing, and left him, as it were, on his own
+hands.  "I should like to have given him that comfort; I fancy he hasn't
+much comfort in life; but there seems no comfort in me."
+
+He dropped his head in a fit attitude for compassion; but she poured no
+pity upon it.
+
+"There is no comfort for us in ourselves," she said.  "It's hard to get
+outside; but there's only despair within.  When we think we have done
+something for others, by some great effort, we find it's all for our own
+vanity."
+
+"Yes," said Beaton.  "If I could paint pictures for righteousness' sake,
+I should have been glad to do Conrad Dryfoos for his father.  I felt
+sorry for him.  Did the rest seem very much broken up?  You saw them
+all?"
+
+"Not all.  Miss Dryfoos was ill, her sister said.  It's hard to tell how
+much people suffer.  His mother seemed bewildered.  The younger sister is
+a simple creature; she looks like him; I think she must have something of
+his spirit."
+
+"Not much spirit of any kind, I imagine," said Beaton.  "But she's
+amiably material.  Did they say Miss Dryfoos was seriously ill?"
+
+"No.  I supposed she might be prostrated by her brother's death."
+
+"Does she seem that kind of person to you, Miss Vance?"  asked Beaton.
+
+"I don't know.  I haven't tried to see so much of them as I might, the
+past winter.  I was not sure about her when I met her; I've never seen
+much of people, except in my own set, and the--very poor.  I have been
+afraid I didn't understand her.  She may have a kind of pride that would
+not let her do herself justice."
+
+Beaton felt the unconscious dislike in the endeavor of praise.  "Then she
+seems to you like a person whose life--its trials, its chances--would
+make more of than she is now?"
+
+"I didn't say that.  I can't judge of her at all; but where we don't
+know, don't you think we ought to imagine the best?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Beaton.  "I didn't know but what I once said of them might
+have prejudiced you against them.  I have accused myself of it."  He
+always took a tone of conscientiousness, of self-censure, in talking with
+Miss Vance; he could not help it.
+
+"Oh no.  And I never allowed myself to form any judgment of her.  She is
+very pretty, don't you think, in a kind of way?"
+
+"Very."
+
+"She has a beautiful brunette coloring: that floury white and the
+delicate pink in it.  Her eyes are beautiful."
+
+"She's graceful, too," said Beaton.  "I've tried her in color; but I
+didn't make it out."
+
+"I've wondered sometimes," said Miss Vance, "whether that elusive quality
+you find in some people you try to paint doesn't characterize them all
+through.  Miss Dryfoos might be ever so much finer and better than we
+would find out in the society way that seems the only way."
+
+"Perhaps," said Beaton, gloomily; and he went away profoundly discouraged
+by this last analysis of Christine's character.  The angelic
+imperviousness of Miss Vance to properties of which his own wickedness
+was so keenly aware in Christine might have made him laugh, if it had not
+been such a serious affair with him.  As it was, he smiled to think how
+very differently Alma Leighton would have judged her from Miss Vance's
+premises.  He liked that clear vision of Alma's even when it pierced his
+own disguises.  Yes, that was the light he had let die out, and it might
+have shone upon his path through life.  Beaton never felt so poignantly
+the disadvantage of having on any given occasion been wanting to his own
+interests through his self-love as in this.  He had no one to blame but
+himself for what had happened, but he blamed Alma for what might happen
+in the future because she shut out the way of retrieval and return.  When
+be thought of the attitude she had taken toward him, it seemed
+incredible, and he was always longing to give her a final chance to
+reverse her final judgment.  It appeared to him that the time had come
+for this now, if ever.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+While we are still young we feel a kind of pride, a sort of fierce
+pleasure, in any important experience, such as we have read of or heard
+of in the lives of others, no matter how painful.  It was this pride,
+this pleasure, which Beaton now felt in realizing that the toils of fate
+were about him, that between him and a future of which Christine Dryfoos
+must be the genius there was nothing but the will, the mood, the fancy of
+a girl who had not given him the hope that either could ever again be in
+his favor.  He had nothing to trust to, in fact, but his knowledge that
+he had once had them all; she did not deny that; but neither did she
+conceal that he had flung away his power over them, and she had told him
+that they never could be his again.  A man knows that he can love and
+wholly cease to love, not once merely, but several times; he recognizes
+the fact in regard to himself, both theoretically and practically; but in
+regard to women he cherishes the superstition of the romances that love
+is once for all, and forever.  It was because Beaton would not believe
+that Alma Leighton, being a woman, could put him out of her heart after
+suffering him to steal into it, that he now hoped anything from her, and
+she had been so explicit when they last spoke of that affair that he did
+not hope much.  He said to himself that he was going to cast himself on
+her mercy, to take whatever chance of life, love, and work there was in
+her having the smallest pity on him.  If she would have none, then there
+was but one thing he could do: marry Christine and go abroad.  He did not
+see how he could bring this alternative to bear upon Alma; even if she
+knew what he would do in case of a final rejection, he had grounds for
+fearing she would not care; but he brought it to bear upon himself, and
+it nerved him to a desperate courage.  He could hardly wait for evening
+to come, before he went to see her; when it came, it seemed to have come
+too soon.  He had wrought himself thoroughly into the conviction that he
+was in earnest, and that everything depended upon her answer to him, but
+it was not till he found himself in her presence, and alone with her,
+that he realized the truth of his conviction.  Then the influences of her
+grace, her gayety, her arch beauty, above all, her good sense, penetrated
+his soul like a subtle intoxication, and he said to himself that he was
+right; he could not live without her; these attributes of hers were what
+he needed to win him, to cheer him, to charm him, to guide him.  He
+longed so to please her, to ingratiate himself with her, that he
+attempted to be light like her in his talk, but lapsed into abysmal
+absences and gloomy recesses of introspection.
+
+"What are you laughing at?"  he asked, suddenly starting from one of
+these.
+
+"What you are thinking of."
+
+"It's nothing to laugh at.  Do you know what I'm thinking of?"
+
+"Don't tell, if it's dreadful."
+
+"Oh, I dare say you wouldn't think it's dreadful," he said, with
+bitterness.  "It's simply the case of a man who has made a fool of
+himself and sees no help of retrieval in himself."
+
+"Can any one else help a man unmake a fool of himself?"  she asked, with
+a smile.
+
+"Yes.  In a case like this."
+
+"Dear me! This is very interesting."
+
+She did not ask him what the case was, but he was launched now, and he
+pressed on.  "I am the man who has made a fool of himself--"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"And you can help me out if you will.  Alma, I wish you could see me as I
+really am."
+
+"Do you, Mr. Beacon?  Perhaps I do."
+
+"No; you don't.  You formulated me in a certain way, and you won't allow
+for the change that takes place in every one.  You have changed; why
+shouldn't I?"
+
+"Has this to do with your having made a fool of yourself?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Oh! Then I don't see how you have changed."
+
+She laughed, and he too, ruefully.  "You're cruel.  Not but what I
+deserve your mockery.  But the change was not from the capacity of making
+a fool of myself.  I suppose I shall always do that more or less--unless
+you help me.  Alma! Why can't you have a little compassion?  You know
+that I must always love you."
+
+"Nothing makes me doubt that like your saying it, Mr. Beaton.  But now
+you've broken your word--"
+
+"You are to blame for that.  You knew I couldn't keep it!"
+
+"Yes, I'm to blame.  I was wrong to let you come--after that.  And so I
+forgive you for speaking to me in that way again.  But it's perfectly
+impossible and perfectly useless for me to hear you any more on that
+subject; and so-good-bye!"
+
+She rose, and he perforce with her.  "And do you mean it?"  he asked.
+"Forever?"
+
+"Forever.  This is truly the last time I will ever see you if I can help
+it.  Oh, I feel sorry enough for you!" she said, with a glance at his
+face.  "I do believe you are in earnest.  But it's too late now.  Don't
+let us talk about it any more! But we shall, if we meet, and so,--"
+
+"And so good-bye! Well, I've nothing more to say, and I might as well
+say that.  I think you've been very good to me.  It seems to me as if you
+had been--shall I say it?--trying to give me a chance.  Is that so?"
+She dropped her eyes and did not answer.
+
+"You found it was no use! Well, I thank you for trying.  It's curious to
+think that I once had your trust, your regard, and now I haven't it.  You
+don't mind my remembering that I had?  It'll be some little consolation,
+and I believe it will be some help.  I know I can't retrieve the past
+now.  It is too late.  It seems too preposterous--perfectly lurid--that I
+could have been going to tell you what a tangle I'd got myself in, and to
+ask you to help untangle me.  I must choke in the infernal coil, but I'd
+like to have the sweetness of your pity in it--whatever it is."
+
+She put out her hand.  "Whatever it is, I do pity you; I said that."
+
+"Thank you."  He kissed the band she gave him and went.
+
+He had gone on some such terms before; was it now for the last time?  She
+believed it was.  She felt in herself a satiety, a fatigue, in which his
+good looks, his invented airs and poses, his real trouble, were all alike
+repulsive.  She did not acquit herself of the wrong of having let him
+think she might yet have liked him as she once did; but she had been
+honestly willing to see whether she could.  It had mystified her to find
+that when they first met in New York, after their summer in St.  Barnaby,
+she cared nothing for him; she had expected to punish him for his
+neglect, and then fancy him as before, but she did not.  More and more
+she saw him selfish and mean, weak-willed, narrow-minded, and hard-
+hearted; and aimless, with all his talent.  She admired his talent in
+proportion as she learned more of artists, and perceived how uncommon it
+was; but she said to herself that if she were going to devote herself to
+art, she would do it at first-hand.  She was perfectly serene and happy
+in her final rejection of Beaton; he had worn out not only her fancy, but
+her sympathy, too.
+
+This was what her mother would not believe when Alma reported the
+interview to her; she would not believe it was the last time they should
+meet; death itself can hardly convince us that it is the last time of
+anything, of everything between ourselves and the dead.  "Well, Alma,"
+she said, "I hope you'll never regret what you've done."
+
+"You may be sure I shall not regret it.  If ever I'm low-spirited about
+anything, I'll think of giving Mr. Beaton his freedom, and that will
+cheer me up."
+
+"And don't you expect to get married?  Do you intend to be an old maid?"
+demanded her mother, in the bonds of the superstition women have so long
+been under to the effect that every woman must wish to get married, if
+for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid.
+
+"Well, mamma," said Alma, "I intend being a young one for a few years
+yet; and then I'll see.  If I meet the right person, all well and good;
+if not, not.  But I shall pick and choose, as a man does; I won't merely
+be picked and chosen."
+
+"You can't help yourself; you may be very glad if you are picked and
+chosen."
+
+"What nonsense, mamma! A girl can get any man she wants, if she goes
+about.  it the right way.  And when my 'fated fairy prince' comes along,
+I shall just simply make furious love to him and grab him.  Of course,
+I shall make a decent pretence of talking in my sleep.  I believe it's
+done that way more than half the time.  The fated fairy prince wouldn't
+see the princess in nine cases out of ten if she didn't say something;
+he would go mooning along after the maids of honor."
+
+Mrs. Leighton tried to look unspeakable horror; but she broke down and
+laughed.  "Well, you are a strange girl, Alma."
+
+"I don't know about that.  But one thing I do know, mamma, and that is
+that Prince Beaton isn't the F. F. P. for me.  How strange you are,
+mamma!  Don't you think it would be perfectly disgusting to accept a
+person you didn't care for, and let him go on and love you and marry you?
+It's sickening."
+
+"Why, certainly, Alma.  It's only because I know you did care for him
+once--"
+
+"And now I don't.  And he didn't care for me once, and now he does.  And
+so we're quits."
+
+"If I could believe--"
+
+"You had better brace up and try, mamma; for as Mr. Fulkerson says, it's
+as sure as guns.  From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot,
+he's loathsome to me; and he keeps getting loathsomer.  Ugh! Goodnight!"
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+"Well, I guess she's given him the grand bounce at last," said Fulkerson
+to March in one of their moments of confidence at the office.  "That's
+Mad's inference from appearances--and disappearances; and some little
+hints from Alma Leighton."
+
+"Well, I don't know that I have any criticisms to offer," said March.
+"It may be bad for Beaton, but it's a very good thing for Miss Leighton.
+Upon the whole, I believe I congratulate her."
+
+"Well, I don't know.  I always kind of hoped it would turn out the other
+way.  You know I always had a sneaking fondness for the fellow."
+
+"Miss Leighton seems not to have had."
+
+"It's a pity she hadn't.  I tell you, March, it ain't so easy for a girl
+to get married, here in the East, that she can afford to despise any
+chance."
+
+"Isn't that rather a low view of it?"
+
+"It's a common-sense view.  Beaton has the making of a first-rate fellow
+in him.  He's the raw material of a great artist and a good citizen.  All
+he wants is somebody to take him in hand and keep him from makin' an ass
+of himself and kickin' over the traces generally, and ridin' two or three
+horses bareback at once."
+
+"It seems a simple problem, though the metaphor is rather complicated,"
+said March.  "But talk to Miss Leighton about it.  I haven't given Beaton
+the grand bounce."
+
+He began to turn over the manuscripts on his table, and Fulkerson went
+away.  But March found himself thinking of the matter from time to time
+during the day, and he spoke to his wife about it when he went home.  She
+surprised him by taking Fulkerson's view of it.
+
+"Yes, it's a pity she couldn't have made up her mind to have him.  It's
+better for a woman to be married."
+
+"I thought Paul only went so far as to say it was well.  But what would
+become of Miss Leighton's artistic career if she married?"
+
+"Oh, her artistic career!" said Mrs. March, with matronly contempt of it.
+
+"But look here!" cried her husband.  "Suppose she doesn't like him?"
+
+"How can a girl of that age tell whether she likes any one or not?"
+
+"It seems to me you were able to tell at. that age, Isabel.  But let's
+examine this thing.  (This thing!  I believe Fulkerson is characterizing
+my whole parlance, as well as your morals.) Why shouldn't we rejoice as
+much at a non-marriage as a marriage?  When we consider the enormous
+risks people take in linking their lives together, after not half so much
+thought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I think we ought to be glad
+whenever they don't do it.  I believe that this popular demand for the
+matrimony of others comes from our novel-reading.  We get to thinking
+that there is no other happiness or good-fortune in life except marriage;
+and it's offered in fiction as the highest premium for virtue, courage,
+beauty, learning, and saving human life.  We all know it isn't.  We know
+that in reality marriage is dog cheap, and anybody can have it for the
+asking--if he keeps asking enough people.  By-and-by some fellow will
+wake up and see that a first-class story can be written from the anti-
+marriage point of view; and he'll begin with an engaged couple, and
+devote his novel to disengaging them and rendering them separately happy
+ever after in the denouement.  It will make his everlasting fortune."
+
+"Why don't you write it, Basil?"  she asked.  "It's a delightful idea.
+You could do it splendidly."
+
+He became fascinated with the notion.  He developed it in detail; but at
+the end he sighed and said: "With this 'Every Other Week' work on my
+hands, of course I can't attempt a novel.  But perhaps I sha'n't have it
+long."
+
+She was instantly anxious to know what he meant, and the novel and Miss
+Leighton's affair were both dropped out of their thoughts.  "What do you
+mean?  Has Mr. Fulkerson said anything yet?"
+
+"Not a word.  He knows no more about it than I do.  Dryfoos hasn't
+spoken, and we're both afraid to ask him.  Of course, I couldn't ask
+him."
+
+"No."
+
+"But it's pretty uncomfortable, to be kept hanging by the gills so, as
+Fulkerson says."
+
+"Yes, we don't know what to do."
+
+March and Fulkerson said the same to each other; and Fulkerson said that
+if the old man pulled out, he did not know what would happen.  He had no
+capital to carry the thing on, and the very fact that the old man had
+pulled out would damage it so that it would be hard to get anybody else
+to put it.  In the mean time Fulkerson was running Conrad's office-work,
+when he ought to be looking after the outside interests of the thing; and
+he could not see the day when he could get married.
+
+"I don't know which it's worse for, March: you or me.  I don't know,
+under the circumstances, whether it's worse to have a family or to want
+to have one.  Of course--of course! We can't hurry the old man up.  It
+wouldn't be decent, and it would be dangerous.  We got to wait."
+
+He almost decided to draw upon Dryfoos for some money; he did not need
+any, but, he said maybe the demand would act as a hint upon him.  One
+day, about a week after Alma's final rejection of Beaton, Dryfoos came
+into March's office.  Fulkerson was out, but the old man seemed not to
+have tried to see him.
+
+He put his hat on the floor by his chair, after he sat down, and looked
+at March awhile with his old eyes, which had the vitreous glitter of old.
+eyes stimulated to sleeplessness.  Then he said, abruptly, "Mr. March,
+how would you like to take this thing off my hands?"
+
+"I don't understand, exactly," March began; but of course he understood
+that Dryfoos was offering to let him have 'Every Other Week' on some
+terms or other, and his heart leaped with hope.
+
+The old man knew he understood, and so he did not explain.  He said:
+"I am going to Europe, to take my family there.  The doctor thinks it
+might do my wife some good; and I ain't very well myself, and my girls
+both want to go; and so we're goin'.  If you want to take this thing off
+my hands, I reckon I can let you have it in 'most any shape you say.
+You're all settled here in New York, and I don't suppose you want to
+break up, much, at your time of life, and I've been thinkin' whether you
+wouldn't like to take the thing."
+
+The word, which Dryfoos had now used three times, made March at last
+think of Fulkerson; he had been filled too full of himself to think of
+any one else till he had mastered the notion of such wonderful good
+fortune as seemed about falling to him.  But now he did think of
+Fulkerson, and with some shame and confusion; for he remembered how, when
+Dryfoos had last approached him there on the business of his connection
+with 'Every Other Week,' he had been very haughty with him, and told him
+that he did not know him in this connection.  He blushed to find how far
+his thoughts had now run without encountering this obstacle of etiquette.
+
+"Have you spoken to Mr. Fulkerson?"  he asked.
+
+"No, I hain't.  It ain't a question of management.  It's a question of
+buying and selling.  I offer the thing to you first.  I reckon Fulkerson
+couldn't get on very well without you."
+
+March saw the real difference in the two cases, and he was glad to see
+it, because he could act more decisively if not hampered by an obligation
+to consistency.  "I am gratified, of course, Mr. Dryfoos; extremely
+gratified; and it's no use pretending that I shouldn't be happy beyond
+bounds to get possession of 'Every Other Week.'  But I don't feel quite
+free to talk about it apart from Mr. Fulkerson."
+
+"Oh, all right!" said the old man, with quick offence.
+
+March hastened to say: "I feel bound to Mr. Fulkerson in every way.  He
+got me to come here, and I couldn't even seem to act without him."
+
+He put it questioningly, and the old man answered:
+
+"Yes, I can see that.  When 'll he be in?  I can wait."  But he looked
+impatient.
+
+"Very soon, now," said March, looking at his watch.  "He was only to be
+gone a moment," and while he went on to talk with Dryfoos, he wondered
+why the old man should have come first to speak with him, and whether it
+was from some obscure wish to make him reparation for displeasures in the
+past, or from a distrust or dislike of Fulkerson.  Whichever light he
+looked at it in, it was flattering.
+
+"Do you think of going abroad soon?"  he asked.
+
+"What?  Yes--I don't know--I reckon.  We got our passage engaged.  It's
+on one of them French boats.  We're goin' to Paris."
+
+"Oh! That will be interesting to the young ladies."
+
+"Yes.  I reckon we're goin' for them.  'Tain't likely my wife and me
+would want to pull up stakes at our age," said the old man, sorrowfully.
+
+"But you may find it do you good, Mr. Dryfoos," said March, with a
+kindness that was real, mixed as it was with the selfish interest he now
+had in the intended voyage.
+
+"Well, maybe, maybe," sighed the old man; and he dropped his head
+forward.  "It don't make a great deal of difference what we do or we
+don't do, for the few years left."
+
+"I hope Mrs. Dryfoos is as well as usual," said March, finding the ground
+delicate and difficult.
+
+"Middlin', middlin'," said the old man.  "My daughter Christine, she
+ain't very well."
+
+"Oh," said March.  It was quite impossible for him to affect a more
+explicit interest in the fact.  He and Dryfoos sat silent for a few
+moments, and he was vainly casting about in his thought for something
+else which would tide them over the interval till Fulkerson came, when he
+heard his step on the stairs.
+
+"Hello, hello!" he said.  "Meeting of the clans!"  It was always a
+meeting of the clans, with Fulkerson, or a field day, or an extra
+session, or a regular conclave, whenever he saw people of any common
+interest together.  "Hain't seen you here for a good while, Mr. Dryfoos.
+Did think some of running away with 'Every Other Week' one while, but
+couldn't seem to work March up to the point."
+
+He gave Dryfoos his hand, and pushed aside the papers on the corner of
+March's desk, and sat down there, and went on briskly with the nonsense
+he could always talk while he was waiting for another to develop any
+matter of business; he told March afterward that he scented business in
+the air as soon as he came into the room where he and Dryfoos were
+sitting.
+
+Dryfoos seemed determined to leave the word to March, who said, after an
+inquiring look at him, "Mr. Dryfoos has been proposing to let us have
+'Every Other Week,' Fulkerson."
+
+"Well, that's good; that suits yours truly; March & Fulkerson, publishers
+and proprietors, won't pretend it don't, if the terms are all right."
+
+"The terms," said the old man, "are whatever you want 'em.  I haven't got
+any more use for the concern--"  He gulped, and stopped; they knew what
+he was thinking of, and they looked down in pity.  He went on: "I won't
+put any more money in it; but what I've put in a'ready can stay; and you
+can pay me four per cent."
+
+He got upon his feet; and March and Fulkerson stood, too.
+
+"Well, I call that pretty white," said Fulkerson.  "It's a bargain as far
+as I'm concerned.  I suppose you'll want to talk it over with your wife,
+March?"
+
+"Yes; I shall," said March.  "I can see that it's a great chance; but I
+want to talk it over with my wife."
+
+"Well, that's right," said the old man.  "Let me hear from you tomorrow."
+
+He went out, and Fulkerson began to dance round the room.  He caught
+March about his stalwart girth and tried to make him waltz; the office-
+boy came to the door and looked on with approval.
+
+"Come, come, you idiot!" said March, rooting himself to the carpet.
+
+"It's just throwing the thing into our mouths," said Fulkerson.  "The
+wedding will be this day week.  No cards!  Teedle-lumpty-diddle! Teedle-
+lumpty-dee!  What do you suppose he means by it, March ?"  he asked,
+bringing himself soberly up, of a sudden.  "What is his little game?  Or
+is he crazy?  It don't seem like the Dryfoos of my previous
+acquaintance."
+
+"I suppose," March suggested, "that he's got money enough, so that he
+don't care for this--"
+
+"Pshaw!  You're a poet!  Don't you know that the more money that kind of
+man has got, the more he cares for money?  It's some fancy of his--like
+having Lindau's funeral at his house--By Jings, March, I believe you're
+his fancy!"
+
+"Oh, now!  Don't you be a poet, Fulkerson!"
+
+"I do!  He seemed to take a kind of shine to you from the day you
+wouldn't turn off old Lindau; he did, indeed.  It kind of shook him up.
+It made him think you had something in you.  He was deceived by
+appearances.  Look here!  I'm going round to see Mrs. March with you,
+and explain the thing to her.  I know Mrs. March!  She wouldn't believe
+you knew what you were going in for.  She has a great respect for your
+mind, but she don't think you've got any sense.  Heigh?"
+
+"All right," said March, glad of the notion; and it was really a comfort
+to have Fulkerson with him to develop all the points; and it was
+delightful to see how clearly and quickly she seized them; it made March
+proud of her.  She was only angry that they had lost any time in coming
+to submit so plain a case to her.
+
+Mr. Dryfoos might change his mind in the night, and then everything would
+be lost.  They must go to him instantly, and tell him that they accepted;
+they must telegraph him.
+
+"Might as well send a district messenger; he'd get there next week," said
+Fulkerson.  "No, no!  It 'll all keep till to-morrow, and be the better
+for it.  If he's got this fancy for March, as I say, he ain't agoing to
+change it in a single night.  People don't change their fancies for March
+in a lifetime.  Heigh?"
+
+When Fulkerson turned up very early at the office next morning, as March
+did, he was less strenuous about Dryfoos's fancy for March.  It was as if
+Miss Woodburn might have blown cold upon that theory, as something unjust
+to his own merit, for which she would naturally be more jealous than he.
+
+March told him what he had forgotten to tell him the day before, though
+he had been trying, all through their excited talk, to get it in, that
+the Dryfooses were going abroad.
+
+"Oh, ho!" cried Fulkerson.  "That's the milk in the cocoanut, is it?
+Well, I thought there must be something."
+
+But this fact had not changed Mrs. March at all in her conviction that it
+was Mr. Dryfoos's fancy for her husband which had moved him to make him
+this extraordinary offer, and she reminded him that it had first been
+made to him, without regard to Fulkerson.  "And perhaps," she went on,
+"Mr. Dryfoos has been changed---softened; and doesn't find money all in
+all any more.  He's had enough to change him, poor old man!"
+
+"Does anything from without change us?"  her husband mused aloud.  "We're
+brought up to think so by the novelists, who really have the charge of
+people's thinking, nowadays.  But I doubt it, especially if the thing
+outside is some great event, something cataclysmal, like this tremendous
+sorrow of Dryfoos's."
+
+"Then what is it that changes us?"  demanded his wife, almost angry with
+him for his heresy.
+
+"Well, it won't do to say, the Holy Spirit indwelling.  That would sound
+like cant at this day.  But the old fellows that used to say that had
+some glimpses of the truth.  They knew that it is the still, small voice
+that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.  I suppose I
+should have to say that we didn't change at all.  We develop.  There's
+the making of several characters in each of us; we are each several
+characters, and sometimes this character has the lead in us, and
+sometimes that.  From what Fulkerson has told me of Dryfoos, I should say
+he had always had the potentiality of better things in him than he has
+ever been yet; and perhaps the time has come for the good to have its
+chance.  The growth in one direction has stopped; it's begun in another;
+that's all.  The man hasn't been changed by his son's death; it stunned,
+it benumbed him; but it couldn't change him.  It was an event, like any
+other, and it had to happen as much as his being born.  It was forecast
+from the beginning of time, and was as entirely an effect of his coming
+into the world--"
+
+"Basil!  Basil!" cried his wife.  "This is fatalism!"
+
+"Then you think," he said, "that a sparrow falls to the ground without
+the will of God?"  and he laughed provokingly.  But he went on more
+soberly: "I don't know what it all means Isabel though I believe it means
+good.  What did Christ himself say?  That if one rose from the dead it
+would not avail.  And yet we are always looking for the miraculous!
+I believe that unhappy old man truly grieves for his son, whom he treated
+cruelly without the final intention of cruelty, for he loved him and
+wished to be proud of him; but I don't think his death has changed him,
+any more than the smallest event in the chain of events remotely working
+through his nature from the beginning.  But why do you think he's changed
+at all?  Because he offers to sell me Every Other Week on easy terms?
+He says himself that he has no further use for the thing; and he knows
+perfectly well that he couldn't get his money out of it now, without an
+enormous shrinkage.  He couldn't appear at this late day as the owner,
+and sell it to anybody but Fulkerson and me for a fifth of what it's cost
+him.  He can sell it to us for all it's cost him; and four per cent.  is
+no bad interest on his money till we can pay it back.  It's a good thing
+for us; but we have to ask whether Dryfoos has done us the good, or
+whether it's the blessing of Heaven.  If it's merely the blessing of
+Heaven, I don't propose being grateful for it."
+
+March laughed again, and his wife said, "It's disgusting."
+
+"It's business," he assented.  "Business is business; but I don't say it
+isn't disgusting.  Lindau had a low opinion of it."
+
+"I think that with all his faults Mr. Dryfoos is a better man than
+Lindau," she proclaimed.
+
+"Well, he's certainly able to offer us a better thing in 'Every Other
+Week,'" said March.
+
+She knew he was enamoured of the literary finish of his cynicism, and
+that at heart he was as humbly and truly grateful as she was for the
+good-fortune opening to them.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.
+
+Beaton was at his best when he parted for the last time with Alma
+Leighton, for he saw then that what had happened to him was the necessary
+consequence of what he had been, if not what he had done.  Afterward he
+lost this clear vision; he began to deny the fact; he drew upon his
+knowledge of life, and in arguing himself into a different frame of mind
+he alleged the case of different people who had done and been much worse
+things than he, and yet no such disagreeable consequence had befallen
+them.  Then he saw that it was all the work of blind chance, and he said
+to himself that it was this that made him desperate, and willing to call
+evil his good, and to take his own wherever he could find it.  There was
+a great deal that was literary and factitious and tawdry in the mood in
+which he went to see Christine Dryfoos, the night when the Marches sat
+talking their prospects over; and nothing that was decided in his
+purpose.  He knew what the drift of his mind was, but he had always
+preferred to let chance determine his events, and now since chance had
+played him such an ill turn with Alma, he left it the whole
+responsibility.  Not in terms, but in effect, this was his thought as he
+walked on up-town to pay the first of the visits which Dryfoos had
+practically invited him to resume.  He had an insolent satisfaction in
+having delayed it so long; if he was going back he was going back on his
+own conditions, and these were to be as hard and humiliating as he could
+make them.  But this intention again was inchoate, floating, the stuff of
+an intention, rather than intention; an expression of temperament
+chiefly.
+
+He had been expected before that.  Christine had got out of Mela that her
+father had been at Beaton's studio; and then she had gone at the old man
+and got from him every smallest fact of the interview there.  She had
+flung back in his teeth the good-will toward herself with which he had
+gone to Beaton.  She was furious with shame and resentment; she told him
+he had made bad worse, that he had made a fool of himself to no end; she
+spared neither his age nor his grief-broken spirit, in which his will
+could not rise against hers.  She filled the house with her rage,
+screaming it out upon him; but when her fury was once spent, she began to
+have some hopes from what her father had done.  She no longer kept her
+bed; every evening she dressed herself in the dress Beaton admired the
+most, and sat up till a certain hour to receive him.  She had fixed a day
+in her own mind before which, if he came, she would forgive him all he
+had made her suffer: the mortification, the suspense, the despair.
+Beyond this, she had the purpose of making her father go to Europe; she
+felt that she could no longer live in America, with the double disgrace
+that had been put upon her.
+
+Beaton rang, and while the servant was coming the insolent caprice seized
+him to ask for the young ladies instead of the old man, as he had
+supposed of course he should do.  The maid who answered the bell, in the
+place of the reluctant Irishman of other days, had all his hesitation in
+admitting that the young ladies were at home.
+
+He found Mela in the drawing-room.  At sight of him she looked scared;
+but she seemed to be reassured by his calm.  He asked if he was not to
+have the pleasure of seeing Miss Dryfoos, too; and Mela said she reckoned
+the girl had gone up-stairs to tell her.  Mela was in black, and Beaton
+noted how well the solid sable became her rich red-blonde beauty; he
+wondered what the effect would be with Christine.
+
+But she, when she appeared, was not in mourning.  He fancied that she
+wore the lustrous black silk, with the breadths of white Venetian lace
+about the neck which he had praised, because he praised it.  Her cheeks
+burned with a Jacqueminot crimson; what should be white in her face was
+chalky white.  She carried a plumed ostrich fan, black and soft, and
+after giving him her hand, sat down and waved it to and fro slowly, as he
+remembered her doing the night they first met.  She had no ideas, except
+such as related intimately to herself, and she had no gabble, like Mela;
+and she let him talk.  It was past the day when she promised herself she
+would forgive him; but as he talked on she felt all her passion for him
+revive, and the conflict of desires, the desire to hate, the desire to
+love, made a dizzying whirl in her brain.  She looked at him, half
+doubting whether he was really there or not.  He had never looked so
+handsome, with his dreamy eyes floating under his heavy overhanging hair,
+and his pointed brown beard defined against his lustrous shirtfront.  His
+mellowly modulated, mysterious voice lulled her; when Mela made an errand
+out of the room, and Beaton crossed to her and sat down by her, she
+shivered.
+
+"Are you cold?"  he asked, and she felt the cruel mockery and exultant
+consciousness of power in his tone, as perhaps a wild thing feels
+captivity in the voice of its keeper.  But now, she said she would still
+forgive him if he asked her.
+
+Mela came back, and the talk fell again to the former level; but Beaton
+had not said anything that really meant what she wished, and she saw that
+he intended to say nothing.  Her heart began to burn like a fire in her
+breast.
+
+"You been tellun' him about our goun' to Europe?"  Mela asked.
+
+"No," said Christine, briefly, and looking at the fan spread out on her
+lap.
+
+Beaton asked when; and then he rose, and said if it was so soon, he
+supposed he should not see them again, unless he saw them in Paris; he
+might very likely run over during the summer.  He said to himself that he
+had given it a fair trial with Christine, and he could not make it go.
+
+Christine rose, with a kind of gasp; and mechanically followed him to the
+door of the drawing-room; Mela came, too; and while he was putting on his
+overcoat, she gurgled and bubbled in good-humor with all the world.
+Christine stood looking at him, and thinking how still handsomer he was
+in his overcoat; and that fire burned fiercer in her.  She felt him more
+than life to her and knew him lost, and the frenzy, that makes a woman
+kill the man she loves, or fling vitriol to destroy the beauty she cannot
+have for all hers, possessed her lawless soul.  He gave his hand to Mela,
+and said, in his wind-harp stop, "Good-bye."
+
+As he put out his hand to Christine, she pushed it aside with a scream of
+rage; she flashed at him, and with both hands made a feline pass at the
+face he bent toward her.  He sprang back, and after an instant of
+stupefaction he pulled open the door behind him and ran out into the
+street.
+
+"Well, Christine Dryfoos!" said Mela, "Sprang at him like a wild-cat!"
+
+"I, don't care," Christine shrieked.  "I'll tear his eyes out!"  She flew
+up-stairs to her own room, and left the burden of the explanation to
+Mela, who did it justice.
+
+Beaton found himself, he did not know how, in his studio, reeking with
+perspiration and breathless.  He must almost have run.  He struck a match
+with a shaking hand, and looked at his face in the glass.  He expected to
+see the bleeding marks of her nails on his cheeks, but he could see
+nothing.  He grovelled inwardly; it was all so low and coarse and vulgar;
+it was all so just and apt to his deserts.
+
+There was a pistol among the dusty bric-a-brac on the mantel which he had
+kept loaded to fire at a cat in the area.  He took it and sat looking
+into the muzzle, wishing it might go off by accident and kill him.
+It slipped through his hand and struck the floor, and there was a report;
+he sprang into the air, feeling that he had been shot.  But he found
+himself still alive, with only a burning line along his cheek, such as
+one of Christine's finger-nails might have left.
+
+He laughed with cynical recognition of the fact that he had got his
+punishment in the right way, and that his case was not to be dignified
+into tragedy.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+The Marches, with Fulkerson, went to see the Dryfooses off on the French
+steamer.  There was no longer any business obligation on them to be
+civil, and there was greater kindness for that reason in the attention
+they offered.  'Every Other Week' had been made over to the joint
+ownership of March and Fulkerson, and the details arranged with a
+hardness on Dryfoos's side which certainly left Mrs. March with a sense
+of his incomplete regeneration.  Yet when she saw him there on the
+steamer, she pitied him; he looked wearied and bewildered; even his wife,
+with her twitching head, and her prophecies of evil, croaked hoarsely
+out, while she clung to Mrs. March's hand where they sat together till
+the leave-takers were ordered ashore, was less pathetic.  Mela was
+looking after both of them, and trying to cheer them in a joyful
+excitement.  "I tell 'em it's goun' to add ten years to both their
+lives," she said.  "The voyage 'll do their healths good; and then, we're
+gittun' away from that miser'ble pack o' servants that was eatun' us up,
+there in New York.  I hate the place!" she said, as if they had already
+left it.  "Yes, Mrs. Mandel's goun', too," she added, following the
+direction of Mrs. March's eyes where they noted Mrs. Mandel, speaking to
+Christine on the other side of the cabin.  "Her and Christine had a kind
+of a spat, and she was goun' to leave, but here only the other day,
+Christine offered to make it up with her, and now they're as thick as
+thieves.  Well, I reckon we couldn't very well 'a' got along without her.
+She's about the only one that speaks French in this family."
+
+Mrs. March's eyes still dwelt upon Christine's face; it was full of a
+furtive wildness.  She seemed to be keeping a watch to prevent herself
+from looking as if she were looking for some one.  "Do you know," Mrs.
+March said to her husband as they jingled along homeward in the
+Christopher Street bob-tail car, "I thought she was in love with that
+detestable Mr. Beaton of yours at one time; and that he was amusing
+himself with her."
+
+"I can bear a good deal, Isabel," said March, "but I wish you wouldn't
+attribute Beaton to me.  He's the invention of that Mr. Fulkerson of
+yours."
+
+"Well, at any rate, I hope, now, you'll both get rid of him, in the
+reforms you're going to carry out."
+
+These reforms were for a greater economy in the management of 'Every
+Other Week;' but in their very nature they could not include the
+suppression of Beaton.  He had always shown himself capable and loyal to
+the interests of the magazine, and both the new owners were glad to keep
+him.  He was glad to stay, though he made a gruff pretence of
+indifference, when they came to look over the new arrangement with him.
+In his heart he knew that he was a fraud; but at least he could say to
+himself with truth that he had not now the shame of taking Dryfoos's
+money.
+
+March and Fulkerson retrenched at several points where it had seemed
+indispensable to spend, as long as they were not spending their own:
+that was only human.  Fulkerson absorbed Conrad's department into his,
+and March found that he could dispense with Kendricks in the place of
+assistant which he had lately filled since Fulkerson had decided that
+March was overworked.  They reduced the number of illustrated articles,
+and they systematized the payment of contributors strictly according to
+the sales of each number, on their original plan of co-operation: they
+had got to paying rather lavishly for material without reference to the
+sales.
+
+Fulkerson took a little time to get married, and went on his wedding
+journey out to Niagara, and down the St. Lawrence to Quebec over the line
+of travel that the Marches had taken on their wedding journey.  He had
+the pleasure of going from Montreal to Quebec on the same boat on which
+he first met March.
+
+They have continued very good friends, and their wives are almost without
+the rivalry that usually embitters the wives of partners.  At first Mrs.
+March did not like Mrs. Fulkerson's speaking of her husband as the Ownah,
+and March as the Edito'; but it appeared that this was only a convenient
+method of recognizing the predominant quality in each, and was meant
+neither to affirm nor to deny anything.  Colonel Woodburn offered as his
+contribution to the celebration of the copartnership, which Fulkerson
+could not be prevented from dedicating with a little dinner, the story of
+Fulkerson's magnanimous behavior in regard to Dryfoos at that crucial
+moment when it was a question whether he should give up Dryfoos or give
+up March.  Fulkerson winced at it; but Mrs. March told her husband that
+now, whatever happened, she should never have any misgivings of Fulkerson
+again; and she asked him if he did not think he ought to apologize to him
+for the doubts with which he had once inspired her.  March said that he
+did not think so.
+
+The Fulkersons spent the summer at a seaside hotel in easy reach of the
+city; but they returned early to Mrs. Leighton's, with whom they are to
+board till spring, when they are going to fit up Fulkerson's bachelor
+apartment for housekeeping.  Mrs. March, with her Boston scruple, thinks
+it will be odd, living over the 'Every Other Week' offices; but there
+will be a separate street entrance to the apartment; and besides, in New
+York you may do anything.
+
+The future of the Leightons promises no immediate change.  Kendricks goes
+there a good deal to see the Fulkersons, and Mrs. Fulkerson says he comes
+to see Alma.  He has seemed taken with her ever since he first met her at
+Dryfoos's, the day of Lindau's funeral, and though Fulkerson objects to
+dating a fancy of that kind from an occasion of that kind, he justly
+argues with March that there can be no harm in it, and that we are liable
+to be struck by lightning any time.  In the mean while there is no proof
+that Alma returns Kendricks's interest, if he feels any.  She has got a
+little bit of color into the fall exhibition; but the fall exhibition is
+never so good as the spring exhibition.  Wetmore is rather sorry she has
+succeeded in this, though he promoted her success.  He says her real hope
+is in black and white, and it is a pity for her to lose sight of her
+original aim of drawing for illustration.
+
+News has come from Paris of the engagement of Christine Dryfoos.  There
+the Dryfooses met with the success denied them in New York; many American
+plutocrats must await their apotheosis in Europe, where society has them,
+as it were, in a translation.  Shortly after their arrival they were
+celebrated in the news papers as the first millionaire American family of
+natural-gas extraction who had arrived in the capital of civilization;
+and at a French watering-place Christine encountered her fate--a nobleman
+full of present debts and of duels in the past.  Fulkerson says the old
+man can manage the debtor, and Christine can look out for the duellist.
+"They say those fellows generally whip their wives.  He'd better not try
+it with Christine, I reckon, unless he's practised with a panther."
+
+One day, shortly after their return to town in the autumn from the brief
+summer outing they permitted themselves, the Marches met Margaret Vance.
+At first they did not know her in the dress of the sisterhood which she
+wore; but she smiled joyfully, almost gayly, on seeing them, and though
+she hurried by with the sister who accompanied her, and did not stay to
+speak, they felt that the peace that passeth understanding had looked at
+them from her eyes.
+
+"Well, she is at rest, there can't be any doubt of that," he said, as he
+glanced round at the drifting black robe which followed her free, nun-
+like walk.
+
+"Yes, now she can do all the good she likes," sighed his wife.
+"I wonder--I wonder if she ever told his father about her talk with poor
+Conrad that day he was shot?"
+
+"I don't know.  I don't care.  In any event, it would be right.  She did
+nothing wrong.  If she unwittingly sent him to his death, she sent him to
+die for God's sake, for man's sake."
+
+"Yes--yes.  But still--"
+
+"Well, we must trust that look of hers."
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Affected absence of mind
+Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever
+Comfort of the critical attitude
+Conscience weakens to the need that isn't
+Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach
+Death is peace and pardon
+Did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him
+Does any one deserve happiness
+Does anything from without change us?
+Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation
+Favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting
+Hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death
+Indispensable
+Love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence
+Married for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid
+Nervous woes of comfortable people
+Novelists, who really have the charge of people's thinking
+People that have convictions are difficult
+Rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage
+Respect for your mind, but she don't think you've got any sense
+Superstition of the romances that love is once for all
+Superstition that having and shining is the chief good
+To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes
+Took the world as she found it, and made the best of it
+What we can be if we must
+When you look it--live it
+Would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of A Hazard of New Fortunes, v5
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES, ENTIRE:
+
+Affected absence of mind
+Affectional habit
+Anticipative homesickness
+Anticipative reprisal
+Any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of
+Appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much
+Artists never do anything like other people
+As much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting
+Ballast of her instinctive despondency
+Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever
+Brag of his wife, as a good husband always does
+But when we make that money here, no one loses it
+Buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience
+Clinging persistence of such natures
+Comfort of the critical attitude
+Conscience weakens to the need that isn't
+Considerable comfort in holding him accountable
+Courage hadn't been put to the test
+Courtship
+Death is peace and pardon
+Death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach
+Did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him
+Dividend: It's a chicken before it's hatched
+Does anything from without change us?
+Does any one deserve happiness
+Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation
+Extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable
+Family buryin' grounds
+Favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting
+Flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another
+Gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it
+Got their laugh out of too many things in life
+Had learned not to censure the irretrievable
+Had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance
+Handsome pittance
+He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices
+Hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death
+Homage which those who have not pay to those who have
+Hopeful recklessness
+How much can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing
+Hurry up and git well--or something
+Hypothetical difficulty
+I cannot endure this--this hopefulness of yours
+If you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen
+Ignorant of her ignorance
+Indispensable
+It must be your despair that helps you to bear up
+It don't do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time
+Justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs
+Life has taught him to truckle and trick
+Love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence
+Made money and do not yet know that money has made them
+Man's willingness to abide in the present
+Married for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid
+Marry for love two or three times
+Nervous woes of comfortable people
+Never-blooming shrub
+No man deserves to sufer at the hands of another
+No longer the gross appetite for novelty
+No right to burden our friends with our decisions
+Novelists, who really have the charge of people's thinking
+Patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius
+People that have convictions are difficult
+Person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it
+Poverty as hopeless as any in the world
+Rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage
+Respect for your mind, but she don't think you've got any sense
+Say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him
+Seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him
+Servant of those he loved
+Shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo'--its inconvenience
+Sigh with which ladies recognize one another's martyrdom
+Society: All its favors are really bargains
+Sorry he hadn't asked more; that's human nature
+Superstition of the romances that love is once for all
+Superstition that having and shining is the chief good
+That isn't very old--or not so old as it used to be
+Timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man
+To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes
+Took the world as she found it, and made the best of it
+Travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues
+Tried to be homesick for them, but failed
+Turn to their children's opinion with deference
+Typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find
+Wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit
+What we can be if we must
+When you look it--live it
+Wish we didn't always recognize the facts as we do
+Without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child
+Would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES ***
+
+****** This file should be named wh6nf11.txt or wh6nf11.zip *******
+
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