kept up with
tireless energy; and in the moments of dejection and misgiving which
harassed her husband she remained dauntless, and put heart into him when
he had lost it altogether.

She arranged to leave the children in the house with the servants, while
she went on with March to look up a dwelling of some sort in New York.
It made him sick to think of it; and, when it came to the point, he
would rather have given up the whole enterprise. She had to nerve him to
it, to represent more than once that now they had no choice but to make
this experiment. Every detail of parting was anguish to him. He got
consolation out of the notion of letting the house furnished for the
winter; that implied their return to it, but it cost him pangs of the
keenest misery to advertise it; and, when a tenant was actually found,
it was all he could do to give him the lease. He tried his wife's love
and patience as a man must to whom the future is easy in the mass
but terrible as it translates itself piecemeal into the present. He
experienced remorse in the presence of inanimate things he was going
to leave as if they had sensibly reproached him, and an anticipative
homesickness that seemed to stop his heart. Again and again his wife had
to make him reflect that his depression was not prophetic. She convinced
him of what he already knew, and persuaded him against his knowledge
that he could be keeping an eye out for something to take hold of in
Boston if they could not stand New York. She ended by telling him that
it was too bad to make her comfort him in a trial that was really so
much more a trial to her. She had to support him in a last access of
despair on their way to the Albany depot the morning they started to
New York; but when the final details had been dealt with, the tickets
bought, the trunks checked, and the handbags hung up in their car, and
the future had massed itself again at a safe distance and was seven
hours and two hundred miles away, his spirits began to rise and hers to
sink. He would have been willing to celebrate the taste, the domestic
refinement, of the ladies' waiting-room in the depot, where they had
spent a quarter of an hour before the train started. He said he did
not believe there was another station in the world where mahogany
rocking-chairs were provided; that the dull-red warmth of the walls
was as cozy as an evening lamp, and that he always hoped to see a fire
kindled on that vast hearth and under that aes