eral business experience and business ideas with a love for
the thing and a natural aptness for it. He did not want a young man, and
yet he wanted youth--its freshness, its zest--such as March would feel
in a thing he could put his whole heart into. He would not run in ruts,
like an old fellow who had got hackneyed; he would not have any hobbies;
he would not have any friends or any enemies. Besides, he would have
to meet people, and March was a man that people took to; she knew that
herself; he had a kind of charm. The editorial management was going
to be kept in the background, as far as the public was concerned; the
public was to suppose that the thing ran itself. Fulkerson did not care
for a great literary reputation in his editor--he implied that March
had a very pretty little one. At the same time the relations between
the contributors and the management were to be much more, intimate than
usual. Fulkerson felt his personal disqualification for working the
thing socially, and he counted upon Mr. March for that; that was to say,
he counted upon Mrs. March.

She protested he must not count upon her; but it by no means disabled
Fulkerson's judgment in her view that March really seemed more than
anything else a fancy of his. He had been a fancy of hers; and the sort
of affectionate respect with which Fulkerson spoke of him laid forever
some doubt she had of the fineness of Fulkerson's manners and reconciled
her to the graphic slanginess of his speech.

The affair was now irretrievable, but she gave her approval to it as
superbly as if it were submitted in its inception. Only, Mr. Fulkerson
must not suppose she should ever like New York. She would not deceive
him on that point. She never should like it. She did not conceal,
either, that she did not like taking the children out of the Friday
afternoon class; and she did not believe that Tom would ever be
reconciled to going to Columbia. She took courage from Fulkerson's
suggestion that it was possible for Tom to come to Harvard even from New
York; and she heaped him with questions concerning the domiciliation of
the family in that city. He tried to know something about the matter,
and he succeeded in seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent
to him.

VI.

In the uprooting and transplanting of their home that followed, Mrs.
March often trembled before distant problems and possible contingencies,
but she was never troubled by present difficulties. She