“Not on any account.  I want to see the whole list of flats that Mr. Fulkerson thought would be the very thing for us.”  She laughed, but with a certain bitterness.

“You’ll be calling him my Mr. Fulkerson next, Isabel.”

“Oh no!”

The fourth address was a furnished flat without a kitchen, in a house with a general restaurant.  The fifth was a furnished house.  At the sixth a pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted to take a family to board, and would give them a private table at a rate which the Marches would have thought low in Boston.

Mrs. March came away tingling with compassion for their evident anxiety, and this pity naturally soured into a sense of injury.  “Well, I must say I have completely lost confidence in Mr. Fulkerson’s judgment.  Anything more utterly different from what I told him we wanted I couldn’t imagine.  If he doesn’t manage any better about his business than he has done about this, it will be a perfect failure.”

“Well, well, let’s hope he’ll be more circumspect about that,” her husband returned, with ironical propitiation.  “But I don’t think it’s Fulkerson’s fault altogether.  Perhaps it’s the house-agents’.  They’re a very illusory generation.  There seems to be something in the human habitation that corrupts the natures of those who deal in it, to buy or sell it, to hire or let it.  You go to an agent and tell him what kind of a house you want.  He has no such house, and he sends you to look at something altogether different, upon the well-ascertained principle that if you can’t get what you want you will take what you can get.  You don’t suppose the ‘party’ that took our house in Boston was looking for any such house?  He was looking for a totally different kind of house in another part of the town.”

“I don’t believe that!” his wife broke in.

“Well, no matter.  But see what a scandalous rent you asked for it.”

“We didn’t get much more than half; and, besides, the agent told me to ask fourteen hundred.”

“Oh, I’m not blaming you, Isabel.  I’m only analyzing the house-agent and exonerating Fulkerson.”

“Well, I don’t believe he told them just what we wanted; and, at any rate, I’m done with agents.  Tomorrow I’m going entirely by advertisements.”

VIII.

Mrs. March took the vertebrate with her to the Vienna Coffee-House, where they went to breakfast next morning.  She made March buy her the Herald and the World, and she added to its spiny convolutions from them.  She read the new advertisements aloud with ardor and with faith to believe that the apartments described in them were every one truthfully represented, and that any one of them was richly responsive to their needs.  “Elegant, light, large, single and outside flats” were offered with “all improvements—­bath, ice-box, etc.”—­for twenty-five to thirty dollars a month.  The cheapness