miling by, and pushed and
shook him in the liking there was between them. "Now you go, March! Mrs.
Fulkerson feels just as I do about it; we had our outing last year, and
we want Mrs. March and you to have yours. You let me go down and engage
your passage, and--"

"No, no!" the editor rebelled. "I'll think about it;" but as he turned to
the work he was so fond of and so weary of, he tried not to think of the
question again, till he closed his desk in the afternoon, and started to
walk home; the doctor had said he ought to walk, and he did so, though he
longed to ride, and looked wistfully at the passing cars.

He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, it
was a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if the
flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had been
going so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among the
butterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this illusion,
himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it mocked the
notion. They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they were ever to
find it again, was to be looked for in Europe, where they met when they
were young, and they had never been quite without the hope of going back
there, some day, for a long sojourn. They had not seen the time when they
could do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized, even dreaming
is not free from care; and in his dream March had been obliged to work
pretty steadily, if not too intensely. He had been forced to forego the
distinctly literary ambition with which he had started in life because he
had their common living to make, and he could not make it by writing
graceful verse, or even graceful prose. He had been many years in a
sufficiently distasteful business, and he had lost any thought of leaving
it when it left him, perhaps because his hold on it had always been
rather lax, and he had not been able to conceal that he disliked it. At
any rate, he was supplanted in his insurance agency at Boston by a
subordinate in his office, and though he was at the same time offered a
place of nominal credit in the employ of the company, he was able to
decline it in grace of a chance which united the charm of congenial work
with the solid advantage of a better salary than he had been getting for
work he hated. It was an incredible chance, but it was rendered
appreciably real by the necessity it involved that they shoul