m the home we've made, and to change the whole course of
their lives, unless I can assure them of something, and I can't assure
them of anything. Boston is big enough for us, and it's certainly
prettier than New York. I always feel a little proud of hailing from
Boston; my pleasure in the place mounts the farther I get away from it.
But I do appreciate it, my dear; I've no more desire to leave it than
you have. You may be sure that if you don't want to take the children
out of the Friday afternoon class, I don't want to leave my library
here, and all the ways I've got set in. We'll keep on. Very likely the
company won't supplant me, and if it does, and Watkins gets the place,
he'll give me a subordinate position of some sort. Cheer up, Isabel! I
have put Satan and his angel, Fulkerson, behind me, and it's all right.
Let's go in to the children."

He came round the table to Isabel, where she sat in a growing
distraction, and lifted her by the waist from her chair.

She sighed deeply. "Shall we tell the children about it?"

"No. What's the use, now?"

"There wouldn't be any," she assented. When they entered the family
room, where the boy and girl sat on either side of the lamp working out
the lessons for Monday which they had left over from the day before, she
asked, "Children, how would you like to live in New York?"

Bella made haste to get in her word first. "And give up the Friday
afternoon class?" she wailed.

Tom growled from his book, without lifting his eyes: "I shouldn't want
to go to Columbia. They haven't got any dormitories, and you have to
board round anywhere. Are you going to New York?" He now deigned to look
up at his father.

"No, Tom. You and Bella have decided me against it. Your perspective
shows the affair in its true proportions. I had an offer to go to New
York, but I've refused it."

IV

March's irony fell harmless from the children's preoccupation with their
own affairs, but he knew that his wife felt it, and this added to the
bitterness which prompted it. He blamed her for letting her provincial
narrowness prevent his accepting Fulkerson's offer quite as much as
if he had otherwise entirely wished to accept it. His world, like most
worlds, had been superficially a disappointment. He was no richer than
at the beginning, though in marrying he had given up some tastes, some
preferences, some aspirations, in the hope of indulging them later, with
larger means and larger leisure. His