e was at Moffitt again. He was supposed to be closing up his
affairs there, but nobody could say.

Fulkerson told March the morning after Dryfoos returned that he had not
only not pulled out at Moffitt, but had gone in deeper, ten times deeper
than ever. He was in a royal good-humor, Fulkerson reported, and was
going to drop into the office on his way up from the Street (March
understood Wall Street) that afternoon. He was tickled to death with
'Every Other Week' so far as it had gone, and was anxious to pay his
respects to the editor.

March accounted for some rhetoric in this, but let it flatter him, and
prepared himself for a meeting about which he could see that Fulkerson
was only less nervous than he had shown himself about the public
reception of the first number. It gave March a disagreeable feeling of
being owned and of being about to be inspected by his proprietor; but
he fell back upon such independence as he could find in the thought of
those two thousand dollars of income beyond the caprice of his owner,
and maintained an outward serenity.

He was a little ashamed afterward of the resolution it had cost him to
do so. It was not a question of Dryfoos's physical presence: that was
rather effective than otherwise, and carried a suggestion of moneyed
indifference to convention in the gray business suit of provincial cut,
and the low, wide-brimmed hat of flexible black felt. He had a stick
with an old-fashioned top of buckhorn worn smooth and bright by the palm
of his hand, which had not lost its character in fat, and which had a
history of former work in its enlarged knuckles, though it was now as
soft as March's, and must once have been small even for a man of Mr.
Dryfoos's stature; he was below the average size. But what struck March
was the fact that Dryfoos seemed furtively conscious of being a country
person, and of being aware that in their meeting he was to be tried
by other tests than those which would have availed him as a shrewd
speculator. He evidently had some curiosity about March, as the first
of his kind whom he had encountered; some such curiosity as the country
school trustee feels and tries to hide in the presence of the new
schoolmaster. But the whole affair was, of course, on a higher plane; on
one side Dryfoos was much more a man of the world than March was, and
he probably divined this at once, and rested himself upon the fact in
a measure. It seemed to be his preference that his son shou