March’s irony fell harmless from the children’s preoccupation with their own affairs, but he knew that his wife felt it, and this added to the bitterness which prompted it.  He blamed her for letting her provincial narrowness prevent his accepting Fulkerson’s offer quite as much as if he had otherwise entirely wished to accept it.  His world, like most worlds, had been superficially a disappointment.  He was no richer than at the beginning, though in marrying he had given up some tastes, some preferences, some aspirations, in the hope of indulging them later, with larger means and larger leisure.  His wife had not urged him to do it; in fact, her pride, as she said, was in his fitness for the life he had renounced; but she had acquiesced, and they had been very happy together.  That is to say, they made up their quarrels or ignored them.

They often accused each other of being selfish and indifferent, but she knew that he would always sacrifice himself for her and the children; and he, on his part, with many gibes and mockeries, wholly trusted in her.  They had grown practically tolerant of each other’s disagreeable traits; and the danger that really threatened them was that they should grow too well satisfied with themselves, if not with each other.  They were not sentimental, they were rather matter-of-fact in their motives; but they had both a sort of humorous fondness for sentimentality.  They liked to play with the romantic, from the safe vantage-ground of their real practicality, and to divine the poetry of the commonplace.  Their peculiar point of view separated them from most other people, with whom their means of self-comparison were not so good since their marriage as before.  Then they had travelled and seen much of the world, and they had formed tastes which they had not always been able to indulge, but of which they felt that the possession reflected distinction on them.  It enabled them to look down upon those who were without such tastes; but they were not ill-natured, and so they did not look down so much with contempt as with amusement.  In their unfashionable neighborhood they had the fame of being not exclusive precisely, but very much wrapped up in themselves and their children.

Mrs. March was reputed to be very cultivated, and Mr. March even more so, among the simpler folk around them.  Their house had some good pictures, which her aunt had brought home from Europe in more affluent days, and it abounded in books on which he spent more than he ought.  They had beautified it in every way, and had unconsciously taken credit to them selves for it.  They felt, with a glow almost of virtue, how perfectly it fitted their lives and their children’s, and they believed that somehow it expressed their characters ­that it was like them.  They went out very little; she remained shut up in its refinement, working the good of her own; and he went to his business, and hurried back to forget it, and dream his dream of intellectual achievement in the flattering atmosphere of her sympathy.  He could not conceal from himself that his divided life was somewhat like Charles Lamb’s, and there were times when, as he had expressed to Fulkerson, he believed that its division was favorable to the freshness of his interest in literature.  It certainly kept it a high privilege, a sacred refuge.  Now and then he wrote something, and got it printed after long delays, and when they met on the St. Lawrence Fulkerson had some of March’s verses in his pocket-book, which he had cut out of astray newspaper and carried about for years, because they pleased his fancy so much; they formed an immediate bond of union between the men when their authorship was traced and owned, and this gave a pretty color of romance to their acquaintance.  But, for the most part, March was satisfied to read.  He was proud of reading critically, and he kept in the current of literary interests and controversies.  It all seemed to him, and to his wife at second-hand, very meritorious; he could not help contrasting his life and its inner elegance with that of other men who had no such resources.  He thought that he was not arrogant about it, because he did full justice to the good qualities of those other people; he congratulated himself upon the democratic instincts which enabled him to do this; and neither he nor his wife supposed that they were selfish persons.  On the contrary, they were very sympathetic; there was no good cause that they did not wish well; they had a generous scorn of all kinds of narrow-heartedness; if it had ever come into their way to sacrifice themselves for others, they thought they would have done so, but they never asked why it had not come in their way.  They were very gentle and kind, even when most elusive; and they taught their children to loathe all manner of social cruelty.  March was of so watchful a conscience in some respects that he denied himself the pensive pleasure of lapsing into the melancholy of unfulfilled aspirations; but he did not see that, if he had abandoned them, it had been for what he held dearer; generally he felt as if he had turned from them with a high, altruistic aim.  The practical expression of his life was that it was enough to provide well for his family; to have cultivated tastes, and to gratify them to the extent of his means; to be rather distinguished, even in the simplification of his desires.  He believed, and his wife believed, that if the time ever came when he really wished to make a sacrifice to the fulfilment of the aspirations so long postponed, she would be ready to join with heart and hand.

When he went to her room from his library, where she left him the whole evening with the children, he found her before the glass thoughtfully removing the first dismantling pin from her back hair.

“I can’t help feeling,” she grieved into the mirror, “that it’s I who keep you from accepting that offer.  I know it is!  I could go West with you, or into a new country ­anywhere; but New York terrifies me.  I don’t like New York, I never did; it disheartens and distracts me; I can’t find myself in it; I shouldn’t know how to shop.  I know I’m foolish and narrow and provincial,” she went on, “but I could never have any inner quiet in New York; I couldn’t live in the spirit there.  I suppose people do.  It can’t be that all these millions ­’

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

“I thought there were four or five.  Well, no matter.  You see what I am, Basil.  I’m terribly limited.  I couldn’t make my sympathies go round two million people; I should be wretched.  I suppose I’m standing in the way of your highest interest, but I can’t help it.  We took each other for better or worse, and you must try to bear with me ­” She broke off and began to cry.

“Stop it!” shouted March.  “I tell you I never cared anything for Fulkerson’s scheme or entertained it seriously, and I shouldn’t if he’d proposed to carry it out in Boston.”  This was not quite true, but in the retrospect it seemed sufficiently so for the purposes of argument.  “Don’t say another word about it.  The thing’s over now, and I don’t want to think of it any more.  We couldn’t change its nature if we talked all night.  But I want you to understand that it isn’t your limitations that are in the way.  It’s mine.  I shouldn’t have the courage to take such a place; I don’t think I’m fit for it, and that’s the long and short of it.”

“Oh, you don’t know how it hurts me to have you say that, Basil.”

The next morning, as they sat together at breakfast, without the children, whom they let lie late on Sunday, Mrs. March said to her husband, silent over his fish-balls and baked beans:  “We will go to New York.  I’ve decided it.”

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

“Yes, we are.  I’ve thought it out.  Now, listen.”

“Oh, I’m willing to listen,” he consented, airily.

“You’ve always wanted to get out of the insurance business, and now with that fear of being turned out which you have you mustn’t neglect this offer.  I suppose it has its risks, but it’s a risk keeping on as we are; and perhaps you will make a great success of it.  I do want you to try, Basil.  If I could once feel that you had fairly seen what you could do in literature, I should die happy.”

“Not immediately after, I hope,” he suggested, taking the second cup of coffee she had been pouring out for him.  “And Boston?”

“We needn’t make a complete break.  We can keep this place for the present, anyway; we could let it for the winter, and come back in the summer next year.  It would be change enough from New York.”

“Fulkerson and I hadn’t got as far as to talk of a vacation.”

“No matter.  The children and I could come.  And if you didn’t like New York, or the enterprise failed, you could get into something in Boston again; and we have enough to live on till you did.  Yes, Basil, I’m going.”

“I can see by the way your chin trembles that nothing could stop you.  You may go to New York if you wish, Isabel, but I shall stay here.”

“Be serious, Basil.  I’m in earnest.”

“Serious?  If I were any more serious I should shed tears.  Come, my dear, I know what you mean, and if I had my heart set on this thing ­Fulkerson always calls it ‘this thing’ I would cheerfully accept any sacrifice you could make to it.  But I’d rather not offer you up on a shrine I don’t feel any particular faith in.  I’m very comfortable where I am; that is, I know just where the pinch comes, and if it comes harder, why, I’ve got used to bearing that kind of pinch.  I’m too old to change pinches.”

“Now, that does decide me.”

“It decides me, too.”

“I will take all the responsibility, Basil,” she pleaded.

“Oh yes; but you’ll hand it back to me as soon as you’ve carried your point with it.  There’s nothing mean about you, Isabel, where responsibility is concerned.  No; if I do this thing ­Fulkerson again?  I can’t get away from ‘this thing’; it’s ominous ­I must do it because I want to do it, and not because you wish that you wanted me to do it.  I understand your position, Isabel, and that you’re really acting from a generous impulse, but there’s nothing so precarious at our time of life as a generous impulse.  When we were younger we could stand it; we could give way to it and take the consequences.  But now we can’t bear it.  We must act from cold reason even in the ardor of self-sacrifice.”

“Oh, as if you did that!” his wife retorted.

“Is that any cause why you shouldn’t?” She could not say that it was, and he went on triumphantly: 

“No, I won’t take you away from the only safe place on the planet and plunge you into the most perilous, and then have you say in your revulsion of feeling that you were all against it from the first, and you gave way because you saw I had my heart set on it.”  He supposed he was treating the matter humorously, but in this sort of banter between husband and wife there is always much more than the joking.  March had seen some pretty feminine inconsistencies and trépidations which once charmed him in his wife hardening into traits of middle-age which were very like those of less interesting older women.  The sight moved him with a kind of pathos, but he felt the result hindering and vexatious.

She now retorted that if he did not choose to take her at her word be need not, but that whatever he did she should have nothing to reproach herself with; and, at least, he could not say that she had trapped him into anything.

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

“I don’t know what you call it,” she answered; “but when you get me to commit myself to a thing by leaving out the most essential point, I call it trapping.”

“I wonder you stop at trapping, if you think I got you to favor Fulkerson’s scheme and then sprung New York on you.  I don’t suppose you do, though.  But I guess we won’t talk about it any more.”

He went out for a long walk, and she went to her room.  They lunched silently together in the presence of their children, who knew that they had been quarrelling, but were easily indifferent to the fact, as children get to be in such cases; nature defends their youth, and the unhappiness which they behold does not infect them.  In the evening, after the boy and girl had gone to bed, the father and mother resumed their talk.  He would have liked to take it up at the point from which it wandered into hostilities, for he felt it lamentable that a matter which so seriously concerned them should be confused in the fumes of senseless anger; and he was willing to make a tacit acknowledgment of his own error by recurring to the question, but she would not be content with this, and he had to concede explicitly to her weakness that she really meant it when she had asked him to accept Fulkerson’s offer.  He said he knew that; and he began soberly to talk over their prospects in the event of their going to New York.

“Oh, I see you are going!” she twitted.

“I’m going to stay,” he answered, “and let them turn me out of my agency here,” and in this bitterness their talk ended.