Mrs. March was not eager to pursue the hospitalities which she had at first imagined essential to the literary prosperity of ’Every Other Week’; her family sufficed her; she would willingly have seen no one out of it but the strangers at the weekly table-d’hote dinner, or the audiences at the theatres.  March’s devotion to his work made him reluctant to delegate it to any one; and as the summer advanced, and the question of where to go grew more vexed, he showed a man’s base willingness to shirk it for himself by not going anywhere.  He asked his wife why she did not go somewhere with the children, and he joined her in a search for non-malarial regions on the map when she consented to entertain this notion.  But when it came to the point she would not go; he offered to go with her then, and then she would not let him.  She said she knew he would be anxious about his work; he protested that he could take it with him to any distance within a few hours, but she would not be persuaded.  She would rather he stayed; the effect would be better with Mr. Fulkerson; they could make excursions, and they could all get off a week or two to the seashore near Boston—­the only real seashore—­in August.  The excursions were practically confined to a single day at Coney Island; and once they got as far as Boston on the way to the seashore near Boston; that is, Mrs. March and the children went; an editorial exigency kept March at the last moment.  The Boston streets seemed very queer and clean and empty to the children, and the buildings little; in the horse-cars the Boston faces seemed to arraign their mother with a down-drawn severity that made her feel very guilty.  She knew that this was merely the Puritan mask, the cast of a dead civilization, which people of very amiable and tolerant minds were doomed to wear, and she sighed to think that less than a year of the heterogeneous gayety of New York should have made her afraid of it.  The sky seemed cold and gray; the east wind, which she had always thought so delicious in summer, cut her to the heart.  She took her children up to the South End, and in the pretty square where they used to live they stood before their alienated home, and looked up at its close-shuttered windows.  The tenants must have been away, but Mrs. March had not the courage to ring and make sure, though she had always promised herself that she would go all over the house when she came back, and see how they had used it; she could pretend a desire for something she wished to take away.  She knew she could not bear it now; and the children did not seem eager.  She did not push on to the seaside; it would be forlorn there without their father; she was glad to go back to him in the immense, friendly homelessness of New York, and hold him answerable for the change, in her heart or her mind, which made its shapeless tumult a refuge and a consolation.