第12章 PART FIRST(10)

"Never!"she retorted."Telegraph instantly!"They were only afraid now that Fulkerson might have changed his mind,and they had a wretched day in which they heard nothing from him.It ended with his answering March's telegram in person.They were so glad of his coming,and so touched by his satisfaction with his bargain,that they laid all the facts of the case before him.He entered fully into March's sense of the joke latent in Mr.Hubbell's proposition,and he tried to make Mrs.March believe that he shared her resentment of the indignity offered her husband.

March made a show of willingness to release him in view of the changed situation,saying that he held him to nothing.Fulkerson laughed,and asked him how soon he thought he could come on to New York.He refused to reopen the question of March's fitness with him;he said they,had gone into that thoroughly,but he recurred to it with Mrs.March,and confirmed her belief in his good sense on all points.She had been from the first moment defiantly confident of her husband's ability,but till she had talked the matter over with Fulkerson she was secretly not sure of it;or,at least,she was not sure that March was not right in distrusting himself.When she clearly understood,now,what Fulkerson intended,she had no longer a doubt.He explained how the enterprise differed from others,and how he needed for its direction a man who combined general business experience and business ideas with a love for the thing and a natural aptness for it.He did not want a young man,and yet he wanted youth--its freshness,its zest--such as March would feel in a thing he could put his whole heart into.He would not run in ruts,like an old fellow who had got hackneyed;he would not have any hobbies;he would not have any friends or any enemies.Besides,he would have to meet people,and March was a man that people took to;she knew that herself;he had a kind of charm.The editorial management was going to be kept in the background,as far as the public was concerned;the public was to suppose that the thing ran itself.Fulkerson did not care for a great literary reputation in his editor--he implied that March had a very pretty little one.At the same time the relations between the contributors and the management were to be much more,intimate than usual.Fulkerson felt his personal disqualification for working the thing socially,and he counted upon Mr.March for that;that was to say,he counted upon Mrs.March.

She protested he must not count upon her;but it by no means disabled Fulkerson's judgment in her view that March really seemed more than anything else a fancy of his.He had been a fancy of hers;and the sort of affectionate respect with which Fulkerson spoke of him laid forever some doubt she had of the fineness of Fulkerson's manners and reconciled her to the graphic slanginess of his speech.

The affair was now irretrievable,but she gave her approval to it as superbly as if it were submitted in its inception.Only,Mr.Fulkerson must not suppose she should ever like New York.She would not deceive him on that point.She never should like it.She did not conceal,either,that she did not like taking the children out of the Friday afternoon class;and she did not believe that Tom would ever be reconciled to going to Columbia.She took courage from Fulkerson's suggestion that it was possible for Tom to come to Harvard even from New York;and she heaped him with questions concerning the domiciliation of the family in that city.He tried to know something about the matter,and he succeeded in seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him.

VI.

In the uprooting and transplanting of their home that followed,Mrs.

March often trembled before distant problems and possible contingencies,but she was never troubled by present difficulties.She kept up with tireless energy;and in the moments of dejection and misgiving which harassed her husband she remained dauntless,and put heart into him when he had lost it altogether.

She arranged to leave the children in the house with the servants,while she went on with March to look up a dwelling of some sort in New York.