e children, and the
buildings little; in the horse-cars the Boston faces seemed to arraign
their mother with a down-drawn severity that made her feel very guilty.
She knew that this was merely the Puritan mask, the cast of a dead
civilization, which people of very amiable and tolerant minds were
doomed to wear, and she sighed to think that less than a year of the
heterogeneous gayety of New York should have made her afraid of it. The
sky seemed cold and gray; the east wind, which she had always thought so
delicious in summer, cut her to the heart. She took her children up to
the South End, and in the pretty square where they used to live they
stood before their alienated home, and looked up at its close-shuttered
windows. The tenants must have been away, but Mrs. March had not the
courage to ring and make sure, though she had always promised herself
that she would go all over the house when she came back, and see how
they had used it; she could pretend a desire for something she wished to
take away. She knew she could not bear it now; and the children did
not seem eager. She did not push on to the seaside; it would be forlorn
there without their father; she was glad to go back to him in the
immense, friendly homelessness of New York, and hold him answerable for
the change, in her heart or her mind, which made its shapeless tumult a
refuge and a consolation.

She found that he had been giving the cook a holiday, and dining about
hither and thither with Fulkerson. Once he had dined with him at the
widow's (as they always called Mrs. Leighton), and then had spent the
evening there, and smoked with Fulkerson and Colonel Woodburn on the
gallery overlooking the back yard. They were all spending the summer
in New York. The widow had got so good an offer for her house at St.
Barnaby for the summer that she could not refuse it; and the Woodburns
found New York a watering-place of exemplary coolness after the burning
Augusts and Septembers of Charlottesburg.

"You can stand it well enough in our climate, sir," the colonel
explained, "till you come to the September heat, that sometimes runs
well into October; and then you begin to lose your temper, sir. It's
never quite so hot as it is in New York at times, but it's hot longer,
sir." He alleged, as if something of the sort were necessary, the
example of a famous Southwestern editor who spent all his summers in
a New York hotel as the most luxurious retreat on the continent,
cons