ulting the weather forecasts, and running off on torrid days to the
mountains or the sea, and then hurrying back at the promise of cooler
weather. The colonel had not found it necessary to do this yet; and he
had been reluctant to leave town, where he was working up a branch
of the inquiry which had so long occupied him, in the libraries, and
studying the great problem of labor and poverty as it continually
presented itself to him in the streets. He said that he talked with all
sorts of people, whom he found monstrously civil, if you took them
in the right way; and he went everywhere in the city without fear and
apparently without danger. March could not find out that he had ridden
his hobby into the homes of want which he visited, or had proposed their
enslavement to the inmates as a short and simple solution of the great
question of their lives; he appeared to have contented himself with the
collection of facts for the persuasion of the cultivated classes. It
seemed to March a confirmation of this impression that the colonel
should address his deductions from these facts so unsparingly to him;
he listened with a respectful patience, for which Fulkerson afterward
personally thanked him. Fulkerson said it was not often the colonel
found such a good listener; generally nobody listened but Mrs. Leighton,
who thought his ideas were shocking, but honored him for holding them
so conscientiously. Fulkerson was glad that March, as the literary
department, had treated the old gentleman so well, because there was an
open feud between him and the art department. Beaton was outrageously
rude, Fulkerson must say; though as for that, the old colonel seemed
quite able to take care of himself, and gave Beaton an unqualified
contempt in return for his unmannerliness. The worst of it was, it
distressed the old lady so; she admired Beaton as much as she respected
the colonel, and she admired Beaton, Fulkerson thought, rather more than
Miss Leighton did; he asked March if he had noticed them together. March
had noticed them, but without any very definite impression except
that Beaton seemed to give the whole evening to the girl. Afterward he
recollected that he had fancied her rather harassed by his devotion, and
it was this point that he wished to present for his wife's opinion.

"Girls often put on that air," she said. "It's one of their ways of
teasing. But then, if the man was really very much in love, and she was
only enough in love t