as a system of economics as well as a religion.  He could not get his wife to go with him; she listened to his report of what he heard, and trembled; it all seemed fantastic and menacing.  She lamented the literary peace, the intellectual refinement of the life they had left behind them; and he owned it was very pretty, but he said it was not life—­it was death-in-life.  She liked to hear him talk in that strain of virtuous self-denunciation, but she asked him, “Which of your prophets are you going to follow?” and he answered:  “All-all!  And a fresh one every Sunday.”  And so they got their laugh out of it at last, but with some sadness at heart, and with a dim consciousness that they had got their laugh out of too many things in life.

What really occupied and compassed his activities, in spite of his strenuous reveries of work beyond it, was his editorship.  On its social side it had not fulfilled all the expectations which Fulkerson’s radiant sketch of its duties and relations had caused him to form of it.  Most of the contributions came from a distance; even the articles written in New York reached him through the post, and so far from having his valuable time, as they called it, consumed in interviews with his collaborators, he rarely saw any of them.  The boy on the stairs, who was to fence him from importunate visitors, led a life of luxurious disoccupation, and whistled almost uninterruptedly.  When any one came, March found himself embarrassed and a little anxious.  The visitors were usually young men, terribly respectful, but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinions chasmally different from his; and he felt in their presence something like an anachronism, something like a fraud.  He tried to freshen up his sympathies on them, to get at what they were really thinking and feeling, and it was some time before he could understand that they were not really thinking and feeling anything of their own concerning their art, but were necessarily, in their quality of young, inexperienced men, mere acceptants of older men’s thoughts and feelings, whether they were tremendously conservative, as some were, or tremendously progressive, as others were.  Certain of them called themselves realists, certain romanticists; but none of them seemed to know what realism was, or what romanticism; they apparently supposed the difference a difference of material.  March had imagined himself taking home to lunch or dinner the aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked, whether he liked their work or not; but this was not an easy matter.  Those who were at all interesting seemed to have engagements and preoccupations; after two or three experiments with the bashfuller sort—­those who had come up to the metropolis with manuscripts in their hands, in the good old literary tradition—­he wondered whether he was otherwise like them when he was young like them.  He could not flatter himself that he was not; and yet he had a hope that the world had grown worse since his time, which his wife encouraged: