of his temperament.  She expected him in this event to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with considerable comfort in holding him accountable.  He learned to expect this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with whatever he did he waited patiently till she forgot her grievance and began to extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable.  She would almost admit at moments that what he had done was a very good thing, but she reserved the right to return in full force to her original condemnation of it; and she accumulated each act of independent volition in witness and warning against him.  Their mass oppressed but never deterred him.  He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices, and he did it without any apparent recollection of his former misdeeds and their consequences.  There was a good deal of comedy in it all, and some tragedy.

He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbands of his kind will imagine, on going back to his hotel alone.  It was, perhaps, a revulsion from the pain of parting; and he toyed with the idea of Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment, which, in its preposterous unsuitability, had a strange attraction.  He felt that he could take it with less risk than anything else they had seen, but he said he would look at all the other places in town first.  He really spent the greater part of the next day in hunting up the owner of an apartment that had neither steam heat nor an elevator, but was otherwise perfect, and trying to get him to take less than the agent asked.  By a curious psychical operation he was able, in the transaction, to work himself into quite a passionate desire for the apartment, while he held the Grosvenor Green apartment in the background of his mind as something that he could return to as altogether more suitable.  He conducted some simultaneous negotiation for a furnished house, which enhanced still more the desirability of the Grosvenor Green apartment.  Toward evening he went off at a tangent far up-town, so as to be able to tell his wife how utterly preposterous the best there would be as compared even with this ridiculous Grosvenor Green gimcrackery.  It is hard to report the processes of his sophistication; perhaps this, again, may best be left to the marital imagination.

He rang at the last of these up-town apartments as it was falling dusk, and it was long before the janitor appeared.  Then the man was very surly, and said if he looked at the flat now he would say it was too dark, like all the rest.  His reluctance irritated March in proportion to his insincerity in proposing to look at it at all.  He knew he did not mean to take it under any circumstances; that he was going to use his inspection of it in dishonest justification of his disobedience to his wife; but he put on an air of offended dignity.  “If you don’t wish to show the apartment,” he said, “I don’t care to see it.”