that!" his wife retorted.

"Is that any cause why you shouldn't?" She could not say that it was,
and he went on triumphantly:

"No, I won't take you away from the only safe place on the planet
and plunge you into the most perilous, and then have you say in your
revulsion of feeling that you were all against it from the first, and
you gave way because you saw I had my heart set on it." He supposed he
was treating the matter humorously, but in this sort of banter between
husband and wife there is always much more than the joking. March had
seen some pretty feminine inconsistencies and trepidations which once
charmed him in his wife hardening into traits of middle-age which were
very like those of less interesting older women. The sight moved him
with a kind of pathos, but he felt the result hindering and vexatious.

She now retorted that if he did not choose to take her at her word be
need not, but that whatever he did she should have nothing to reproach
herself with; and, at least, he could not say that she had trapped him
into anything.

"What do you mean by trapping?" he demanded.

"I don't know what you call it," she answered; "but when you get me to
commit myself to a thing by leaving out the most essential point, I call
it trapping."

"I wonder you stop at trapping, if you think I got you to favor
Fulkerson's scheme and then sprung New York on you. I don't suppose you
do, though. But I guess we won't talk about it any more."

He went out for a long walk, and she went to her room. They lunched
silently together in the presence of their children, who knew that
they had been quarrelling, but were easily indifferent to the fact, as
children get to be in such cases; nature defends their youth, and the
unhappiness which they behold does not infect them. In the evening,
after the boy and girl had gone to bed, the father and mother resumed
their talk. He would have liked to take it up at the point from which it
wandered into hostilities, for he felt it lamentable that a matter which
so seriously concerned them should be confused in the fumes of senseless
anger; and he was willing to make a tacit acknowledgment of his own
error by recurring to the question, but she would not be content with
this, and he had to concede explicitly to her weakness that she really
meant it when she had asked him to accept Fulkerson's offer. He said
he knew that; and he began soberly to talk over their prospects in the
event of their goin