“We merely want the best,” he put in.  “One flight up, no noise or dust, with sun in all the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days.”

They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do not understand, in the foreign steamship offices.  The clerk turned unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in German which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part of a conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker.  A brief drama followed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the Norumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it if they decided to take it at once.

They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the Colmannia; it was within one of being the same number.  It was so providential, if it was providential at all, that they were both humbly silent a moment; even Mrs. March was silent.  In this supreme moment she would not prompt her husband by a word, a glance, and it was from his own free will that he said, “We will take it.”

He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one’s will is never free; and this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all the events before it.  No event that followed affected it, though the day after they had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August.  He felt obliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved nothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason than by all her previous unreason.  Reason is what a man is never prepared for in women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men.

V.

During nearly the whole month that now passed before the date of sailing it seemed to March that in some familiar aspects New York had never been so interesting.  He had not easily reconciled himself to the place after his many years of Boston; but he had got used to the ugly grandeur, to the noise and the rush, and he had divined more and more the careless good-nature and friendly indifference of the vast, sprawling, ungainly metropolis.  There were happy moments when he felt a poetry unintentional and unconscious in it, and he thought there was no point more favorable for the sense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they had a flat.  Their windows looked down into its tree-tops, and across them to the truncated towers of St. George’s, and to the plain red-brick, white-trimmed front of the Friends’ Meeting House; he came and went between his dwelling and his office through the two places that form the square, and after dinner his wife and he had a habit of finding seats by one of the fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathers and mothers of the hybrid East Side children swarming there at play.  The elders read their English or Italian or German or Yiddish journals, or gossiped, or merely sat still and stared away the day’s fatigue; while the little ones raced in and out among them, crying and laughing, quarrelling and kissing.  Sometimes a mother darted forward and caught her child from the brink of the basin; another taught hers to walk, holding it tightly up behind by its short skirts; another publicly nursed her baby to sleep.