t; we had our outing last year, and
we want Mrs. March and you to have yours. You let me go down and engage
your passage, and--"

"No, no!" the editor rebelled. "I'll think about it;" but as he turned
to the work he was so fond of and so weary of, he tried not to think
of the question again, till he closed his desk in the afternoon, and
started to walk home; the doctor had said he ought to walk, and he did
so, though he longed to ride, and looked wistfully at the passing cars.

He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut,
it was a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if
the flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had
been going so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among
the butterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this
illusion, himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it
mocked the notion. They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they
were ever to find it again, was to be looked for in Europe, where they
met when they were young, and they had never been quite without the hope
of going back there, some day, for a long sojourn. They had not seen the
time when they could do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized,
even dreaming is not free from care; and in his dream March had been
obliged to work pretty steadily, if not too intensely. He had been
forced to forego the distinctly literary ambition with which he had
started in life because he had their common living to make, and he could
not make it by writing graceful verse, or even graceful prose. He had
been many years in a sufficiently distasteful business, and he had lost
any thought of leaving it when it left him, perhaps because his hold on
it had always been rather lax, and he had not been able to conceal that
he disliked it. At any rate, he was supplanted in his insurance agency
at Boston by a subordinate in his office, and though he was at the same
time offered a place of nominal credit in the employ of the company, he
was able to decline it in grace of a chance which united the charm of
congenial work with the solid advantage of a better salary than he had
been getting for work he hated. It was an incredible chance, but it was
rendered appreciably real by the necessity it involved that they should
leave Boston, where they had lived all their married life, where Mrs.
March as well as their children was born, and where all their t