tment he had not allowed for his wife's willingness to get any
sort of roof over her head again after the removal from their old home,
or for the alleviations that grow up through mere custom. The practical
workings of the apartment were not so bad; it had its good points, and
after the first sensation of oppression in it they began to feel the
convenience of its arrangement. They were at that time of life when
people first turn to their children's opinion with deference, and, in
the loss of keenness in their own likes and dislikes, consult the young
preferences which are still so sensitive. It went far to reconcile Mrs.
March to the apartment that her children were pleased with its novelty;
when this wore off for them, she had herself begun to find it much more
easily manageable than a house. After she had put away several barrels
of gimcracks, and folded up screens and rugs and skins, and carried
them all off to the little dark store-room which the flat developed,
she perceived at once a roominess and coziness in it unsuspected before.
Then, when people began to call, she had a pleasure, a superiority,
in saying that it was a furnished apartment, and in disclaiming all
responsibility for the upholstery and decoration. If March was by, she
always explained that it was Mr. March's fancy, and amiably laughed it
off with her callers as a mannish eccentricity. Nobody really seemed to
think it otherwise than pretty; and this again was a triumph for Mrs.
March, because it showed how inferior the New York taste was to the
Boston taste in such matters.

March submitted silently to his punishment, and laughed with her before
company at his own eccentricity. She had been so preoccupied with the
adjustment of the family to its new quarters and circumstances that the
time passed for laying his misgivings, if they were misgivings, about
Fulkerson before her, and when an occasion came for expressing them
they had themselves passed in the anxieties of getting forward the
first number of 'Every Other Week.' He kept these from her, too, and
the business that brought them to New York had apparently dropped into
abeyance before the questions of domestic economy that presented and
absented themselves. March knew his wife to be a woman of good mind and
in perfect sympathy with him, but he understood the limitations of
her perspective; and if he was not too wise, he was too experienced
to intrude upon it any affairs of his till her own were