XVI
“Well, I guess she’s given him the grand bounce at last,” said Fulkerson to March in one of their moments of confidence at the office. “That’s Mad’s inference from appearances—and disappearances; and some little hints from Ma Leighton.”
“Well, I don’t know that I have any criticisms to offer,” said March. “It may be bad for Beaton, but it’s a very good thing for Miss Leighton. Upon the whole, I believe I congratulate her.”
“Well, I don’t know. I always kind of hoped it would turn out the other way. You know I always had a sneaking fondness for the fellow.”
“Miss Leighton seems not to have had.”
“It’s a pity she hadn’t. I tell you, March, it ain’t so easy for a girl to get married, here in the East, that she can afford to despise any chance.”
“Isn’t that rather a low view of it?”
“It’s a commonsense view. Beaton has the making of a first-rate fellow in him. He’s the raw material of a great artist and a good citizen. All he wants is somebody to take him in hand and keep him from makin’ an ass of himself and kickin’ over the traces generally, and ridin’ two or three horses bareback at once.”
“It seems a simple problem, though the metaphor is rather complicated,” said March. “But talk to Miss Leighton about it. I haven’t given Beaton the grand bounce.”
He began to turn over the manuscripts on his table, and Fulkerson went away. But March found himself thinking of the matter from time to time during the day, and he spoke to his wife about it when he went home. She surprised him by taking Fulkerson’s view of it.
“Yes, it’s a pity she couldn’t have made up her mind to have him. It’s better for a woman to be married.”
“I thought Paul only went so far as to say it was well. But what would become of Miss Leighton’s artistic career if she married?”
“Oh, her artistic career!” said Mrs. March, with matronly contempt of it.
“But look here!” cried her husband. “Suppose she doesn’t like him?”
“How can a girl of that age tell whether she likes anyone or not?”
“It seems to me you were able to tell at that age, Isabel. But let’s examine this thing. (This thing! I believe Fulkerson is characterizing my whole parlance, as well as your morals.) Why shouldn’t we rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage? When we consider the enormous risks people take in linking their lives together, after not half so much thought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I think we ought to be glad whenever they don’t do it. I believe that this popular demand for the matrimony of others comes from our novel-reading. We get to thinking that there is no other happiness or good-fortune in life except marriage; and it’s offered in fiction as the highest premium for virtue, courage, beauty, learning, and saving human life. We all know it isn’t. We know that in reality marriage is dog cheap, and anybody can have it for the asking—if he keeps asking enough people. By-and-by some fellow will wake up and see that a first-class story can be written from the anti-marriage point of view; and he’ll begin with an engaged couple, and devote his novel to disengaging them and rendering them separately happy ever after in the denouement. It will make his everlasting fortune.”
“Why don’t you write it, Basil?” she asked. “It’s a delightful idea. You could do it splendidly.”
He became fascinated with the notion. He developed it in detail; but at the end he sighed and said: “With this Every Other Week work on my hands, of course I can’t attempt a novel. But perhaps I shan’t have it long.”
She was instantly anxious to know what he meant, and the novel and Miss Leighton’s affair were both dropped out of their thoughts. “What do you mean? Has Mr. Fulkerson said anything yet?”
“Not a word. He knows no more about it than I do. Dryfoos hasn’t spoken, and we’re both afraid to ask him. Of course, I couldn’t ask him.”
“No.”
“But it’s pretty uncomfortable, to be kept hanging by the gills so, as Fulkerson says.”
“Yes, we don’t know what to do.”
March and Fulkerson said the same to each other; and Fulkerson said that if the old man pulled out, he did not know what would happen. He had no capital to carry the thing on, and the very fact that the old man had pulled out would damage it so that it would be hard to get anybody else to put it. In the meantime Fulkerson was running Conrad’s office-work, when he ought to be looking after the outside interests of the thing; and he could not see the day when he could get married.
“I don’t know which it’s worse for, March: you or me. I don’t know, under the circumstances, whether it’s worse to have a family or to want to have one. Of course—of course! We can’t hurry the old man up. It wouldn’t be decent, and it would be dangerous. We got to wait.”
He almost decided to draw upon Dryfoos for some money; he did not need any, but he said maybe the demand would act as a hint upon him. One day, about a week after Alma’s final rejection of Beaton, Dryfoos came into March’s office. Fulkerson was out, but the old man seemed not to have tried to see him.
He put his hat on the floor by his chair, after he sat down, and looked at March awhile with his old eyes, which had the vitreous glitter of old eyes stimulated to sleeplessness. Then he said, abruptly, “Mr. March, how would you like to take this thing off my hands?”
“I don’t understand, exactly,” March began; but of course he understood that Dryfoos was offering to let him have Every Other Week on some terms or other, and his heart leaped with hope.
The old man
