第8章 PART FIRST(6)

And,besides,if the Reciprocity Life should happen not to want my services any longer,it wouldn't be quite like giving up a certainty;though,as a matter of business,I let Fulkerson get that impression;Ifelt rather sneaking to do it.But if the worst comes to the worst,Ican look about for something to do in Boston;and,anyhow,people don't starve on two thousand a year,though it's convenient to have five.The fact is,I'm too old to change so radically.If you don't like my saying that,then you are,Isabel,and so are the children.I've no right to take them from the home we've made,and to change the whole course of their lives,unless I can assure them of something,and I can't assure them of anything.Boston is big enough for us,and it's certainly prettier than New York.I always feel a little proud of hailing from Boston;my pleasure in the place mounts the farther I get away from it.

But I do appreciate it,my dear;I've no more desire to leave it than you have.You may be sure that if you don't want to take the children out of the Friday afternoon class,I don't want to leave my library here,and all the ways I've got set in.We'll keep on.Very likely the company won't supplant me,and if it does,and Watkins gets the place,he'll give me a subordinate position of some sort.Cheer up,Isabel!I have put Satan and his angel,Fulkerson,behind me,and it's all right.Let's go in to the children."He came round the table to Isabel,where she sat in a growing distraction,and lifted her by the waist from her chair.

She sighed deeply."Shall we tell the children about it?""No.What's the use,now?"

"There wouldn't be any,"she assented.When they entered the family room,where the boy and girl sat on either side of the lamp working out the lessons for Monday which they had left over from the day before,she asked,"Children,how would you like to live in New York?"Bella made haste to get in her word first."And give up the Friday afternoon class?"she wailed.

Tom growled from his book,without lifting his eyes:"I shouldn't want to go to Columbia.They haven't got any dormitories,and you have to board round anywhere.Are you going to New York?"He now deigned to look up at his father.

"No,Tom.You and Bella have decided me against it.Your perspective shows the affair in its true proportions.I had an offer to go to New York,but I've refused it."

IV

March's irony fell harmless from the children's preoccupation with their own affairs,but he knew that his wife felt it,and this added to the bitterness which prompted it.He blamed her for letting her provincial narrowness prevent his accepting Fulkerson's offer quite as much as if he had otherwise entirely wished to accept it.His world,like most worlds,had been superficially a disappointment.He was no richer than at the beginning,though in marrying he had given up some tastes,some preferences,some aspirations,in the hope of indulging them later,with larger means and larger leisure.His wife had not urged him to do it;in fact,her pride,as she said,was in his fitness for the life he had renounced;but she had acquiesced,and they had been very happy together.

That is to say,they made up their quarrels or ignored them.

They often accused each other of being selfish and indifferent,but she knew that he would always sacrifice himself for her and the children;and he,on his part,with many gibes and mockeries,wholly trusted in her.They had grown practically tolerant of each other's disagreeable traits;and the danger that really threatened them was that they should grow too well satisfied with themselves,if not with each other.They were not sentimental,they were rather matter-of-fact in their motives;but they had both a sort of humorous fondness for sentimentality.They liked to play with the romantic,from the safe vantage-ground of their real practicality,and to divine the poetry of the commonplace.Their peculiar point of view separated them from most other people,with whom their means of self-comparison were not so good since their marriage as before.Then they had travelled and seen much of the world,and they had formed tastes which they had not always been able to indulge,but of which they felt that the possession reflected distinction on them.It enabled them to look down upon those who were without such tastes;but they were not ill-natured,and so they did not look down so much with contempt as with amusement.In their unfashionable neighborhood they had the fame of being not exclusive precisely,but very much wrapped up in themselves and their children.