“Come, come, you idiot!” said March, rooting himself to the carpet.
“It’s just throwing the thing into our mouths,” said Fulkerson. “The wedding will be this day week. No cards! Teedle-lumpty-diddle! Teedle-lumpty-dee! What do you suppose he means by it, March?” he asked, bringing himself soberly up, of a sudden. “What is his little game? Or is he crazy? It don’t seem like the Dryfoos of my previous acquaintance.”
“I suppose,” March suggested, “that he’s got money enough, so that he don’t care for this—”
“Pshaw! You’re a poet! Don’t you know that the more money that kind of man has got, the more he cares for money? It’s some fancy of his—like having Lindau’s funeral at his house—By Jings, March, I believe you’re his fancy!”
“Oh, now! Don’t you be a poet, Fulkerson!”
“I do! He seemed to take a kind of shine to you from the day you wouldn’t turn off old Lindau; he did, indeed. It kind of shook him up. It made him think you had something in you. He was deceived by appearances. Look here! I’m going round to see Mrs. March with you, and explain the thing to her. I know Mrs. March! She wouldn’t believe you knew what you were going in for. She has a great respect for your mind, but she don’t think you’ve got any sense. Heigh?”
“All right,” said March, glad of the notion; and it was really a comfort to have Fulkerson with him to develop all the points; and it was delightful to see how clearly and quickly she seized them; it made March proud of her. She was only angry that they had lost any time in coming to submit so plain a case to her. Mr. Dryfoos might change his mind in the night, and then everything would be lost. They must go to him instantly, and tell him that they accepted; they must telegraph him.
“Might as well send a district messenger; he’d get there next week,” said Fulkerson. “No, no! It’ll all keep till tomorrow, and be the better for it. If he’s got this fancy for March, as I say, he ain’t a-going to change it in a single night. People don’t change their fancies for March in a lifetime. Heigh?”
When Fulkerson turned up very early at the office next morning, as March did, he was less strenuous about Dryfoos’s fancy for March. It was as if Miss Woodburn might have blown cold upon that theory, as something unjust to his own merit, for which she would naturally be more jealous than he.
March told him what he had forgotten to tell him the day before, though he had been trying, all through their excited talk, to get it in, that the Dryfooses were going abroad.
“Oh, ho!” cried Fulkerson. “That’s the milk in the coconut, is it? Well, I thought there must be something.”
But this fact had not changed Mrs. March at all in her conviction that it was Mr. Dryfoos’s fancy for her husband which had moved him to make him this extraordinary offer, and she reminded him that it had first been made to him, without regard to Fulkerson. “And perhaps,” she went on, “Mr. Dryfoos has been changed—softened; and doesn’t find money all in all anymore. He’s had enough to change him, poor old man!”
“Does anything from without change us?” her husband mused aloud. “We’re brought up to think so by the novelists, who really have the charge of people’s thinking, nowadays. But I doubt it, especially if the thing outside is some great event, something cataclysmal, like this tremendous sorrow of Dryfoos’s.”
“Then what is it that changes us?” demanded his wife, almost angry with him for his heresy.
“Well, it won’t do to say, the Holy Spirit indwelling. That would sound like cant at this day. But the old fellows that used to say that had some glimpses of the truth. They knew that it is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom. I suppose I should have to say that we didn’t change at all. We develop. There’s the making of several characters in each of us; we are each several characters, and sometimes this character has the lead in us, and sometimes that. From what Fulkerson has told me of Dryfoos, I should say he had always had the potentiality of better things in him than he has ever been yet; and perhaps the time has come for the good to have its chance. The growth in one direction has stopped; it’s begun in another; that’s all. The man hasn’t been changed by his son’s death; it stunned, it benumbed him; but it couldn’t change him. It was an event, like any other, and it had to happen as much as his being born. It was forecast from the beginning of time, and was as entirely an effect of his coming into the world—”
“Basil! Basil!” cried his wife. “This is fatalism!”
“Then you think,” he said, “that a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of God?” and he laughed provokingly. But he went on more soberly: “I don’t know what it all means, Isabel, though I believe it means good. What did Christ himself say? That if one rose from the dead it would not avail. And yet we are always looking for the miraculous! I believe that unhappy old man truly grieves for his son, whom he treated cruelly without the final intention of cruelty, for he loved him and wished to be proud of him; but I don’t think his death has changed him, any more than the smallest event in the chain of events remotely working through his nature from the beginning. But why do you think he’s changed at all? Because he offers to sell me Every Other Week on
