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 fulfillment of the aspirations so long postponed, she would be ready to join him 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 those 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 anymore. 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.