He had a sufficiently rueful face in owning:  “I oughtn’t to have done it, but I got started wrong.  I couldn’t help putting the best foot, forward at first—­or as long as the whole thing was in the air.  I didn’t know that you would take so much to the general enterprise, or else I should have mentioned the New York condition at once; but, of course, that puts an end to it.”

“Oh, of course,” she assented, sadly.  “We couldn’t go to New York.”

“No, I know that,” he said; and with this a perverse desire to tempt her to the impossibility awoke in him, though he was really quite cold about the affair himself now.  “Fulkerson thought we could get a nice flat in New York for about what the interest and taxes came to here, and provisions are cheaper.  But I should rather not experiment at my time of life.  If I could have been caught younger, I might have been inured to New York, but I don’t believe I could stand it now.”

“How I hate to have you talk that way, Basil!  You are young enough to try anything—­anywhere; but you know I don’t like New York.  I don’t approve of it.  It’s so big, and so hideous!  Of course I shouldn’t mind that; but I’ve always lived in Boston, and the children were born and have all their friendships and associations here.”  She added, with the helplessness that discredited her good sense and did her injustice, “I have just got them both into the Friday afternoon class at Papanti’s, and you know how difficult that is.”

March could not fail to take advantage of an occasion like this.  “Well, that alone ought to settle it.  Under the circumstances, it would be flying in the face of Providence to leave Boston.  The mere fact of a brilliant opening like that offered me on ‘The Microbe,’ and the halcyon future which Fulkerson promises if we’ll come to New York, is as dust in the balance against the advantages of the Friday afternoon class.”

“Basil,” she appealed, solemnly, “have I ever interfered with your career?”

“I never had any for you to interfere with, my dear.”

“Basil!  Haven’t I always had faith in you?  And don’t you suppose that if I thought it would really be for your advancement I would go to New York or anywhere with you?”

“No, my dear, I don’t,” he teased.  “If it would be for my salvation, yes, perhaps; but not short of that; and I should have to prove by a cloud of witnesses that it would.  I don’t blame you.  I wasn’t born in Boston, but I understand how you feel.  And really, my dear,” he added, without irony, “I never seriously thought of asking you to go to New York.  I was dazzled by Fulkerson’s offer, I’ll own that; but his choice of me as editor sapped my confidence in him.”

“I don’t like to hear you say that, Basil,” she entreated.