“Oh, not yet, not yet,” he pleaded; with that man’s willingness to abide in the present, which is so trying to a woman. “It’s only the end of April.”
“It will be the end of June before we know. And these people wanting the Boston house another year complicates it. We can’t spend the summer there, as we planned.”
“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.”
“Had you? This is a surprise.”
“Everything is a surprise to you, Basil, when it happens.”
“True; I keep the world fresh, that way.”
“It wouldn’t have been any change to go from one city to another for the summer. We might as well have stayed in New York.”
“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.”
“Nonsense! You know we couldn’t spend the summer in New York.”
“I know I could.”
“What stuff! You couldn’t manage.”
“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 to dining there again. Or, I could keep house, and he could dine with me here.”
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 upon you and your guest.”
“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 wife.
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 one-half 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 ideas—Tom 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.”
“Had he better hear them at home?” demanded his wife.
“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
