l attitude he took. A sense of the striving and the suffering
deeply possessed him; and this grew the more intense as he gained some
knowledge of the forces at work-forces of pity, of destruction, of
perdition, of salvation. He wandered about on Sunday not only through
the streets, but into this tabernacle and that, as the spirit moved
him, and listened to those who dealt with Christianity as a system of
economics as well as a religion. He could not get his wife to go with
him; she listened to his report of what he heard, and trembled; it all
seemed fantastic and menacing. She lamented the literary peace, the
intellectual refinement of the life they had left behind them; and
he owned it was very pretty, but he said it was not life--it was
death-in-life. She liked to hear him talk in that strain of virtuous
self-denunciation, but she asked him, "Which of your prophets are you
going to follow?" and he answered: "All-all! And a fresh one every
Sunday." And so they got their laugh out of it at last, but with some
sadness at heart, and with a dim consciousness that they had got their
laugh out of too many things in life.

What really occupied and compassed his activities, in spite of his
strenuous reveries of work beyond it, was his editorship. On its social
side it had not fulfilled all the expectations which Fulkerson's radiant
sketch of its duties and relations had caused him to form of it. Most of
the contributions came from a distance; even the articles written in New
York reached him through the post, and so far from having his valuable
time, as they called it, consumed in interviews with his collaborators,
he rarely saw any of them. The boy on the stairs, who was to fence him
from importunate visitors, led a life of luxurious disoccupation, and
whistled almost uninterruptedly. When any one came, March found himself
embarrassed and a little anxious. The visitors were usually young men,
terribly respectful, but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinions
chasmally different from his; and he felt in their presence something
like an anachronism, something like a fraud. He tried to freshen up
his sympathies on them, to get at what they were really thinking and
feeling, and it was some time before he could understand that they were
not really thinking and feeling anything of their own concerning their
art, but were necessarily, in their quality of young, inexperienced men,
mere acceptants of older men's thoughts and feel