thinking the same
exhausting thoughts over and over, till he found himself horribly hungry;
then he went into a restaurant for his lunch, and when he paid he tried
to imagine how he should feel if that were really his last dollar.

He went home toward the middle of the afternoon, basely hoping that
Fulkerson had sent him some conciliatory message, or perhaps was waiting
there for him to talk it over; March was quite willing to talk it over
now. But it was his wife who again met him at the door, though it seemed
another woman than the one he had left weeping in the morning.

"I told the children," she said, in smiling explanation of his absence
from lunch, "that perhaps you were detained by business. I didn't know
but you had gone back to the office."

"Did you think I would go back there, Isabel?" asked March, with a
haggard look. "Well, if you say so, I will go back, and do what Dryfoos
ordered me to do. I'm sufficiently cowed between him and you, I can
assure you."

"Nonsense," she said. "I approve of everything you did. But sit down,
now, and don't keep walking that way, and let me see if I understand it
perfectly. Of course, I had to have my say out."

She made him go all over his talk with Dryfoos again, and report his own
language precisely. From time to time, as she got his points, she said,
"That was splendid," "Good enough for him!" and "Oh, I'm so glad you said
that to him!" At the end she said:

"Well, now, let's look at it from his point of view. Let's be perfectly
just to him before we take another step forward."

"Or backward," March suggested, ruefully. "The case is simply this: he
owns the magazine."

"Of course."

"And he has a right to expect that I will consider his pecuniary
interests--"

"Oh, those detestable pecuniary interests! Don't you wish there wasn't
any money in the world?"

"Yes; or else that there was a great deal more of it. And I was perfectly
willing to do that. I have always kept that in mind as one of my duties
to him, ever since I understood what his relation to the magazine was."

"Yes, I can bear witness to that in any court of justice. You've done it
a great deal more than I could, Basil. And it was just the same way with
those horrible insurance people."

"I know," March went on, trying to be proof against her flatteries, or at
least to look as if he did not deserve praise; "I know that what Lindau
said was offensive to him, and I can understand how he felt that