A Hazard of New Fortunes V4 ...........................................................................................................................1

William Dean Howells .............................................................................................................................1

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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 uptown, 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

The day he spoke of the dinner he rose and called from his door : "March, I say, come down here a minute,

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 getbeg, 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

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

"Ah, you don't get the idea!" said Fulkerson. "What we want to do with this dinner is to fix the fact."

"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 millionsthat, 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 cooperation, and longed to realize them for the benefit of our struggling young writers and

March had listened with growing amusement to the mingled burlesque and earnest of Fulkerson's

selfsacrificing 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; andand what I thinkwhat I wish to dothat 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

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."

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

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

"Oh, 'l'appeit vient en mangeant', as our French friends say. You'll be hungry enough when you see the

"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.

He looked sunnily from one to the other in succession. The elder Dryfoos said, with his chin on the top of his

"Well, just as you say," Fulkerson cheerfully assented. "I understand you to agree to the general principle of a

"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 firstclass shape. Bytheway!" cried Fulkerson, slapping himself on the leg,

"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 drawingrooms and admit the females to champagne, salads, and ices. It is

"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

"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 moneymaking 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 twentyfive or thirty Boston Mays, he gets to thinking that Providence has some particular

"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?"

"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

"You've got there! When it knocks down the sale about onehalf, I shall know it's made a hit."

"I'm not afraid," said Fulkerson. "That thing is going to attract attention. It's well writtenyou 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

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

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

diningroom? 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 cherrytree. 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. Bytheway, you've never had much talk with Miss Woodburn, have you, March?"

"Well, he is rather apt to scoop the conversation. I must draw his fire, sometime, when you and Mrs. 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 firstclass 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

"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

"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,

highandmighty 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?"

"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 newsstands.' Well, I'll talk it over with Mrs. March. I

March told his wife of the idyllic mood in which he had left Fulkerson at the widow's door, and she said he

"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. Mandelhe's

done so much for her, you know; and she is such a wellbalanced, wellpreserved person, and so ladylike

"Fulkerson had the word for her: academic. She's everything that instruction and discipline can make of a

"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 moralsyou can see how it would

have its charm, the Wedgwood in human nature? I wonder where Mrs. Mandel keeps her urn and her

"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

"Oh, not yet, not yet," he pleaded; with that man's willingness to abide in the present, which is so trying to a

"It will be the end of June before we know. And these people wanting the Boston house another year

"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."

"It wouldn't have been any change to go from one city to another for the summer. We might as well have

"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."

"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

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

"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

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

onehalf 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 ideasTom 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."

"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 Sundayevening 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."

"I suppose I may continue to pity him? He is such a poor, lonely old fellow. Are you really sorry he's come

"No, no; not that. I feel as you do about it; but I wish I felt easier about himsure, that is, that we're not

"I suspect we couldn't help it," March returned, lightly. "It's one of what Lindau calls his 'brincibles' to say

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

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 crosseyed Alsation for waiter, and a slim young

SouthAmerican 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 seventyfive 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 gentlelooking 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 backhair 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 touchand 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 andwhoop; 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

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

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 tenementhouses showed him the picturesqueness of

clotheslines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence; and the new apartmenthouses, breaking the old skyline

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, cleanshaven 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

ashbarrels and the groups of decently dressed churchgoers, to the docks, he experienced a sufficient

excitement in the recent arrival of a French steamer, whose sheds were thronged with hacks and

expresswagons, and in a tacit inquiry into the emotions of the passengers, fresh from the cleanliness of

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 manureheaps, 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 wastepaper and straw litter, and egg shells and orange peel, potatoskins and

cigarstumps, 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

"It's what Mr. Lindau says," answered the boy, doggedly, as if not pleased to have his ideas mocked at, even

"And you didn't tell him that the poor lived in dirty streets because they liked them, and were too lazy and

"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, 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

March repeated the substance of this talk to his wife. "I'm glad to know that Tom can see through such

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 wallfor 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

"Take me somewhere to meet my fellowexclusives, Isabel," he demanded. "I pine for the society of my

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.

"No; we should be strangers therejust as we are in New York. I wonder how long one could be a stranger

"Oh, indefinitely, in our way of living. The place is really vast, so much larger than it used to seem, and so

When they got down very far uptown, 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, wellsatisfied,

wellfed looking crowd poured down the broad sidewalks before the handsome, stupid houses that March

could easily pretend he had got among his fellowplutocrats 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

NewYorky; they were the sort of people whom you would know for NewYorkers elsewhere, so well

equipped and so perfectly kept at all points. Their silk hats shone, and their boots; their frocks had the right

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 commonminded 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

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 grassplots 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 manystoried 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 wellpaved alleys the ghosts of

eighteenthcentury 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 chaletstations 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 memorandumbook, 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 hiproof structures on the Ninth Avenue, which he thought more Dutchlooking. The

perspectives of the crossstreets 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 Homelike Hotel, and he speculated at fantastic

length on the gentle associations of one who should have passed his youth under its roof.

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 countryseat 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 Twentyfifth Street inchoately

like Twentythird 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 workforces 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 lifeit was deathin 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: "Allall! 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

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 sortthose who had come up to the metropolis with manuscripts in their hands, in the

good old literary traditionhe 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

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 tabled'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

nonmalarial 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 Bostonthe only real

seashorein 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 horsecars the Boston faces seemed to arraign their

mother with a downdrawn 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 closeshuttered 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

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 wateringplace

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,

"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

"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."

"Yes. He's never opened on the subject yet. Do you know, I think Fulkerson has his moments of delicacy."

"Well, perhaps so. There is nothing in them to rouse his advertising instincts."

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 Saturdaynight 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

goodfellowship, 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 musicbook 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

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

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 contrarymindedness 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,

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

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

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

One day, with the usual show of writhing under Lindau's scorn, he said, "Well, I understand that although

"I ton't desbise you," the old man broke in, his nostrils swelling and his eyes flaming with excitement, "I bity

"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."

"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

"Hold on; hold on, now, Lindau! Ain't that rather unAmerican doctrine? We're all brought up, ain't we, to

honor the man that made his money, and look downor try to look down; sometimes it's difficult on the

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 gountingroom sees dat de etitorial room

"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

"Well," said Fulkerson, "I wish I was a subject of suspicion with you, Lindau. Bytheway," 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

"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

"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 inrub 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

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,

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 bricabrac 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 necksat 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 firstclass case of delirium tremens.

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

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

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.

"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

firsthalf 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;

"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,

"Yes, but it won't do, Fulkerson! I don't believe Lindau ever had on a dresscoat in his life, and I don't

"Well, neither had Dryfoos, for the matter of that. He's as high principled as old PanElectric himself, when

it comes to a dresscoat," said Fulkerson. "We're all going to go in business dress; the old man stipulated for

"It isn't the dresscoat 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

"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."

"You'll see," Fulkerson continued, "it 'll go off all right. I'll engage to make it, and I won't hold anybody else

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

"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."

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

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

Mrs. March was daunted and silenced for a moment. Then she said: "Oh, pshaw ! You know well enough he

"I'm very glad he didn't do it to please you, Isabel," said her husband, with affected seriousness. "Though

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 thateven your infallible Fulkerson couldn't work itand I'm afraid that there'll be some

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

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 womancook 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 roughshod 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

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 fellowconspirator 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 naturalgas 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

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 kindhearted, 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

"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 goodfortune is not honest. I simply say that I know nothing about it, and that I

"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

"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,

"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 instanceit 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

"I should say so. After all, he didn't give any reason he had for accepting. But perhaps the young lady had the

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

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 dresscoat, 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 drawingroom, 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 halfhour 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 comfortwith 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

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

"Put you next to March, Mr. Lindau," said Fulkerson, "so you can begin to put Apollinaris in his

champagneglass 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

"I suppose, sir," Colonel Woodburn interposed, with lofty courtesy, "champagne could hardly have been

"I suppose not, colonel," returned the younger man, deferentially. "He seemed to think that sack and sugar

"Perhaps he felt there was no question about that," suggested Beaton, who then felt that he had not done

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

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,"

"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!

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 poyhe was a poy denwars 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

"Ledt me zee," mused Lindau. "Wass it in fiftynine or zixty, Passil? Idt wass a year or dwo pefore the war

"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 redshirts pouring in everywhere. They had

"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

"I remember, I remember," said Lindau, nodding his head slowly up and down. "A coodt many off them nefer

"You're right, Mr. Lindau. But I reckon it was worth itthe 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

They cheered, and hammered on the table with the butts of their knife handles. Lindau remained seated. The

"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 skirmishesin fact, after Lee's surrender and I've took care of his

"Bytheway, March," said Fulkerson, "what sort of an idea would it be to have a good war storymight be

a serialin 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

"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

selfseeking and lowminded, 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 pasenesschelousy, fanity, ecodistic bridte. I haf zeen men in the

"Well," said Fulkerson,."it would be a grand thing for 'Every Other Week' if we could get some of those ideas

"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 papersay, three

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

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 mothercountry, 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 monopoliesthe 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

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 drygoods 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 oilwells 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 knifehilt. When the colonel demanded, "And what is the next thing?" he threw himself forward, and

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 gaswell, 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

"Come in, come in, Frescobaldi! We want to congratulate you," Fulkerson called to him. "Here, gentlemen!

They all drank; and Frescobaldi, smiling brilliantly and rubbing his hands as he bowed right and left,

"Firstrate, firstrate!" 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

"Yes," Fulkerson answered, "and that ain't quite the stylethat little wigglywaggly blue flamethat 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 flowerbed, just like a jet of water from a fountain. My, my, my! You fel you

gentlemenought 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 halfway 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 Godevil,

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 paintedgot 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 Godevil. 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 Godevils 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 buggywheel 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

"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

"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 workingmen 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, andtold 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

firstrate man, and he did his duty every time; only he'd got some of those ideas into his head, and they

March saw Lindau listening with a mounting intensity, and heard him murmur in German, "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 marriagebell 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 halfcock, and about fifty fellows found themselves out of a job. You

"Pretty neat," said Kendricks, who looked at the affair purely from an aesthetic point of view. "Such a coup

"That was vile treason," said Lindau in German to March. "He's an infamous traitor! I cannot stay here. I

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

The others were discussing the matter, and seemed not to have noticed Lindau, who controlled himself and

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 nonunion. If they had attempted

violence, of course they could have been shot. But there was no fear of that. Those fellows can always be

"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

"That is so," said Kendrick, struck by the dramatic character of the conjecture. He imagined a fiction dealing

"Why don't some fellow do the Battle of Dorking act with that thing?" said Fulkerson. "It would be a card."

Fulkerson laughed. "Telepathyclear case of mind transference. Better see March, here, about it. I'd like to

"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

"And what would you do with the unionss of the gabidaliststhe drosts and gompines, and boolss?

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 infamousinfamous! What kind of man

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

"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

"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 authorityemperor, duke, president; the name does not matterfor the national expense and the

national defence, and it shall be responsible to the workingclasses of all kinds for homes and lands and

The workingclasses 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

"No, no, no!" shouted Lindau. "The State shall do thatthe 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

"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."

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;

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?"

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 goodnight from Dryfoos was

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

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

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 onearmed Dutchman do on this

"What does he do?" March echoed, as people are apt to do with a question that is mandatory and offensive.

"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

"I know what you told me, well enough. And I know what he is. He is a redmouthed 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

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

"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

March was standing at his desk, as he had risen to receive Dryfoos when he entered. He now sat down, and

"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

"I don't care for Mr. Fulkerson? He has nothing to do with it," retorted Dryfoos; but he seemed a little

"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

"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

"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

"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."

"I told Mr. Fulkerson so. I warned him that Lindau would be apt to break out in some way. It wasn't just to

"Mr. Fulkerson had a good motive," Conrad gently urged. "He did it because he hurt his feelings that day

"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

"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 truth!" the young man interrupted. "Didn't the Saviour himself say, 'How hardly shall they that have

"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

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

March felt himself getting provisionally very angry again. "Excuse me, Fulkerson, but did you know when

"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

"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

"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 ithe don't know

"Then I know better," said March. "I refused to receive any instructions from Mr. Dryfoos, whom I don't

"I don't care who owns the thing," said March. "My negotiations were with you alone from the beginning,

"Oh, better let the old fool drop," said Fulkerson. "He'll light on his feet somehow, and it will save a lot of

"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 dutyin a matter of

"Why, of course, March," said Fulkerson, coaxingly, "I mean to do the right thing. But Dryfoos owns the

"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

seeI can show you Why, confound the old Dutch beerbuzzer! Twenty of him wouldn't be worth the

"I don't think we've understood each other exactly, Mr. Fulkerson," said March, very haughtily. "Perhaps we

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

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

"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

"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

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

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

"I told the children," she said, in smiling explanation of his absence from lunch, "that perhaps you were

"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

"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

"Well, now, let's look at it from his point of view. Let's be perfectly just to him before we take another step

"Or backward," March suggested, ruefully. "The case is simply this: he owns the magazine."

"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.

"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

"If it had been a question of making 'Every Other Week' the vehicle of Lindau's peculiar opinionsthough

they're not so very peculiar; he might have got the most of them out of RuskinI 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

"I don't see," Mrs. March interpolated, "how they could hurt it much worse than Colonel Woodburn's article

"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 countingroom 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.

"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

"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

His wife made him tell her what they were, and then she said, "Yes, that was loathsome; I couldn't have

"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,

"Yes, but what a strange position for the son of such a man to take! Do you suppose he says such things to his

"I don't know; but I suspect that in his meek way Conrad would say what he believed to anybody. I suppose

"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

"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

"Well, now," said Mrs. March, "let us put them all out of our minds and see what we are going to do

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

"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

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

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

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

"Well, March," Fulkerson called out at sight of him, "it's all right! The old man has come down."

"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

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

"Well," said Fulkerson, "he's going to leave Lindau to me. You won't have anything to do with it. I'll let the

"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 dismissalit

comes to that, whether you do it or I do it, and whether it's a positive or a negative thingbecause he holds

"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

"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

Mrs. March had judged it decorous for her to say nothing, but she now went and sat down in the chair next

"Ah, dog on it!" cried Fulkerson, rumpling his hair with both his hands. "What am I to do? The old man says

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. II'd take it as a personal favor if you would. It leaves me in a fix. You see

March made no reply to this, except to say, "Yes, you must stand by him, or you must stand by me."

"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

"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

They could not regain their lost exaltation, their lost dignity. At dinner Mrs. March asked the children how

"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

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

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,

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,

"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 youI 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 peginningif 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

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

"Well," said Mrs. March. "He is a crank, and I think you're well rid of him. Now you have no quarrel with

"Yes," said March, "I wish it didn't make me feel so sneaking. What a long day it's been! It seems like a

"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

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

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 largeeyed

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, oftenwashed 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."

"Row between the financial angel and the literary editor about the chief translator and polyglot smeller."

"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

"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

"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 piecesrow began right after breakfast this morningand 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

"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

"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 halfbottles over for him, and send his father two dollars.

"That's what I don't know," said Fulkerson, ruefully. After a moment he said, desperately, " Beaton, you've

"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'sa friend." Fulkerson said this with the nearest approach he

Beaton shrugged. "Oh, if you can afford to have ideals, I congratulate you. They're too expensive for me.

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

"No. I came in here to gird up my loins with a little dinner before I tackled him. But something seems to be

"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,

"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."

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

"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

"Mah goodness," she said, "is the case so bad as that? What in the woald is the trouble?"

"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

"And you awe not afraid of me? I don't think that's very flattering, Mr. Fulkerson. You ought to think Ah'm

"Oh, I do! You see, I'm quite paralyzed before you, and so I don't feel anything."

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."

"Oh, don't you suppose we know? Mr. Beaton said you we' a pofect Bahyard in friendship, and you would

"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

The conjecture recalled Fulkerson to the object of his confidences. "Ah, there's where your help comes in.

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."

"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

"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."

"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

Miss Woodburn advanced and put her hand on her father's shoulder. "Look heah, papa! Mr. Fulkerson wants

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

"I do not know whethah I understand the case exactly," said the colonel, "but Mr. Fulkerson may command

"You don't understand it aftah what Ah've said?" cried the girl. "Then Ah don't see but what you'll have to

"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 sidelight 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.

"Perfect red rag to a bull," Fulkerson put in; and then he wanted to withdraw his words at the colonel's look

"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

"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."

"But it must be evident to you, sir, that a highspirited gentleman like Mr. MarchI confess that my feelings

are with him very warmly in the mattercould 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.

His daughter dropped to her feet from his chairarm. "Mah goodness! If nobody's in the wrong, ho' awe you

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?"

"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

"Yes, sir. I will not conceal from you that this mission is one not wholly agreeable to my feelings."

"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,

"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

"And I should like some intimation, some assurance, as to which party your own feelings are with in the

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.

Fulkerson drew a long breath and took his courage in both hands. "There can't be any choice for me in such a

The colonel seized his hand, and Miss Woodburn said, "If there had been any choice fo' you in such a case, I

"Why, in regard to that," said the colonel, with a, literal application of the idea, "was it your intention that we

"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

"There is no question of courage," said the colonel. "It is a question of dignityof 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

He went out, and Fulkerson returned with Miss Woodburn to the drawing room, where she said the

"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

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

"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

"Mr. Fulkerson," said the girl, solemnly, "Ah will stand bah you in this, if all the woald tones against you."

"You will?" he shouted, in a rapture. "In every wayand alwaysas 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,

When they lifted their eyes from each other again it was halfpast ten. "No' you most go," she said.

"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."

"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. Goodnight. You can

come in the mawning to seepapa." She opened the door and pushed him out with enrapturing violence, and

"Why, colonel! I was just going up to meet you." He had really thought he would walk off his exultation in

"I am very sorry to say, Mr. Fulkerson," the colonel began, gravely, "that Mr. Dryfoos adheres to his

"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. II won't detain you now; it's so late. I'll see

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

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

"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 selfrespect rather

"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

Fulkerson scratched his head. " Ah, dogged if I know: Can't we give it to the deserving poor, somehow, if we

"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 consciencemoney, and he enjoyed the joke more than Conrad seemed to do

Fulkerson was able to wear off the disagreeable impression the affair left during the course of the forenoon,

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

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

"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

" 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."