as 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 to-morrow, and be the
better for it. If he's got this fancy for March, as I say, he ain't
agoing 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 cocoanut, 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 any more. 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