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.  It made him sick to think of it; and, when it came to the point, he would rather have given up the whole enterprise.  She had to nerve him to it, to represent more than once that now they had no choice but to make this experiment.  Every detail of parting was anguish to him.  He got consolation out of the notion