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 eyeglasses; 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 anymore.”

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 anymore. 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 businessmen 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 cooperation 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.