“What?”

“Every Other Week.”

“It isn’t bad.”

“Ta-ta!”

II.

All the way up to the South End March mentally prolonged his talk with Fulkerson, and at his door in Nankeen Square he closed the parley with a plump refusal to go to New York on any terms.  His daughter Bella was lying in wait for him in the hall, and she threw her arms round his neck with the exuberance of her fourteen years and with something of the histrionic intention of her sex.  He pressed on, with her clinging about him, to the library, and, in the glow of his decision against Fulkerson, kissed his wife, where she sat by the study lamp reading the Transcript through her first pair of eye-glasses:  it was agreed in the family that she looked distinguished in them, or, at any rate, cultivated.  She took them off to give him a glance of question, and their son Tom looked up from his book for a moment; he was in his last year at the high school, and was preparing for Harvard.

“I didn’t get away from the office till half-past five,” March explained to his wife’s glance, “and then I walked.  I suppose dinner’s waiting.  I’m sorry, but I won’t do it any more.”

At table he tried to be gay with Bella, who babbled at him with a voluble pertness which her brother had often advised her parents to check in her, unless they wanted her to be universally despised.

“Papa!” she shouted at last, “you’re not listening!” As soon as possible his wife told the children they might be excused.  Then she asked, “What is it, Basil?”

“What is what?” he retorted, with a specious brightness that did not avail.

“What is on your mind?”

“How do you know there’s anything?”

“Your kissing me so when you came in, for one thing.”

“Don’t I always kiss you when I come in?”

“Not now.  I suppose it isn’t necessary any more.  ‘Cela va sans baiser.’”

“Yes, I guess it’s so; we get along without the symbolism now.”  He stopped, but she knew that he had not finished.

“Is it about your business?  Have they done anything more?”

“No; I’m still in the dark.  I don’t know whether they mean to supplant me, or whether they ever did.  But I wasn’t thinking about that.  Fulkerson has been to see me again.”

“Fulkerson?” She brightened at the name, and March smiled, too.  “Why didn’t you bring him to dinner?”

“I wanted to talk with you.  Then you do like him?”

“What has that got to do with it, Basil?”

“Nothing! nothing!  That is, he was boring away about that scheme of his again.  He’s got it into definite shape at last.”

“What shape?”

March outlined it for her, and his wife seized its main features with the intuitive sense of affairs which makes women such good business-men when they will let it.

“It sounds perfectly crazy,” she said, finally.  “But it mayn’t be.  The only thing I didn’t like about Mr. Fulkerson was his always wanting to chance things.  But what have you got to do with it?”