“I know,” March went on, trying to be proof against her flatteries, or at least to look as if he did not deserve praise; “I know that what Lindau said was offensive to him, and I can understand how he felt that he had a right to punish it. All I say is that he had no right to punish it through me.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. March, askingly.
“If it had been a question of making Every Other Week the vehicle of Lindau’s peculiar opinions—though they’re not so very peculiar; he might have got the most of them out of Ruskin—I shouldn’t have had any ground to stand on, or at least then I should have had to ask myself whether his opinions would be injurious to the magazine or not.”
“I don’t see,” Mrs. March interpolated, “how they could hurt it much worse than Colonel Woodburn’s article crying up slavery.”
“Well,” said March, impartially, “we could print a dozen articles praising the slavery it’s impossible to have back, and it wouldn’t hurt us. But if we printed one paper against the slavery which Lindau claims still exists, some people would call us bad names, and the counting-room would begin to feel it. But that isn’t the point. Lindau’s connection with Every Other Week is almost purely mechanical; he’s merely a translator of such stories and sketches as he first submits to me, and it isn’t at all a question of his opinions hurting us, but of my becoming an agent to punish him for his opinions. That is what I wouldn’t do; that’s what I never will do.”
“If you did,” said his wife, “I should perfectly despise you. I didn’t understand how it was before. I thought you were just holding out against Dryfoos because he took a dictatorial tone with you, and because you wouldn’t recognize his authority. But now I’m with you, Basil, every time, as that horrid little Fulkerson says. But who would ever have supposed he would be so base as to side against you?”
“I don’t know,” said March, thoughtfully, “that we had a right to expect anything else. Fulkerson’s standards are low; they’re merely business standards, and the good that’s in him is incidental and something quite apart from his morals and methods. He’s naturally a generous and right-minded creature, but life has taught him to truckle and trick, like the rest of us.”
“It hasn’t taught you that, Basil.”
“Don’t be so sure. Perhaps it’s only that I’m a poor scholar. But I don’t know, really, that I despise Fulkerson so much for his course this morning as for his gross and fulsome flatteries of Dryfoos last night. I could hardly stomach it.”
His wife made him tell her what they were, and then she said, “Yes, that was loathsome; I couldn’t have believed it of Mr. Fulkerson.”
“Perhaps he only did it to keep the talk going, and to give the old man a chance to say something,” March leniently suggested. “It was a worse effect because he didn’t or couldn’t follow up Fulkerson’s lead.”
“It was loathsome, all the same,” his wife insisted. “It’s the end of Mr. Fulkerson, as far as I’m concerned.”
“I didn’t tell you before,” March resumed, after a moment, “of my little interview with Conrad Dryfoos after his father left,” and now he went on to repeat what had passed between him and the young man.
“I suspect that he and his father had been having some words before the old man came up to talk with me, and that it was that made him so furious.”
“Yes, but what a strange position for the son of such a man to take! Do you suppose he says such things to his father?”
“I don’t know; but I suspect that in his meek way Conrad would say what he believed to anybody. I suppose we must regard him as a kind of crank.”
“Poor young fellow! He always makes me feel sad, somehow. He has such a pathetic face. I don’t believe I ever saw him look quite happy, except that night at Mrs. Horn’s, when he was talking with Miss Vance; and then he made me feel sadder than ever.”
“I don’t envy him the life he leads at home, with those convictions of his. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be as tolerable there for old Lindau himself.”
“Well, now,” said Mrs. March, “let us put them all out of our minds and see what we are going to do ourselves.”
They began to consider their ways and means, and how and where they should live, in view of March’s severance of his relations with Every Other Week. They had not saved anything from the first year’s salary; they had only prepared to save; and they had nothing solid but their two thousand to count upon. But they built a future in which they easily lived on that and on what March earned with his pen. He became a free lance, and fought in whatever cause he thought just; he had no ties, no chains. They went back to Boston with the heroic will to do what was most distasteful; they would have returned to their own house if they had not rented it again; but, any rate, Mrs. March helped out by taking boarders, or perhaps only letting rooms to lodgers. They had some hard struggles, but they succeeded.
“The great thing,” she said, “is to be right. I’m ten times as happy as if you had come home and told me that you had consented to do what Dryfoos asked and he had doubled your salary.”
“I don’t think that would have happened in any event,” said March, dryly.
“Well, no matter. I just used it for an example.”
They both experienced a buoyant relief, such as seems to come to people who begin life anew on whatever terms. “I hope we are young enough yet, Basil,” she said, and she would not have it when he said they had once been younger.
They
