Every word was a stab in March’s heart, so weakly tender to his own; his wife’s tears, after so much experience of the comparative lightness of the griefs that weep themselves out in women, always seemed wrung from his own soul; if his children suffered in the least through him, he felt like a murderer.  It was far worse than he could have imagined, the way his wife took the affair, though he had imagined certain words, or perhaps only looks, from her that were bad enough.  He had allowed for trouble, but trouble on his account:  a svmpathy that might burden and embarrass him; but he had not dreamed of this merely domestic, this petty, this sordid view of their potential calamity, which left him wholly out of the question, and embraced only what was most crushing and desolating in the prospect.  He could not bear it.  He caught up his hat again, and, with some hope that his wife would try to keep him, rushed out of the house.  He wandered aimlessly about, thinking the same exhausting thoughts over and over, till he found himself horribly hungry; then he went into a restaurant for his lunch, and when he paid he tried to imagine how he should feel if that were really his last dollar.

He went home toward the middle of the afternoon, basely hoping that Fulkerson had sent him some conciliatory message, or perhaps was waiting there for him to talk it over; March was quite willing to talk it over now.  But it was his wife who again met him at the door, though it seemed another woman than the one he had left weeping in the morning.

“I told the children,” she said, in smiling explanation of his absence from lunch, “that perhaps you were detained by business.  I didn’t know but you had gone back to the office.”

“Did you think I would go back there, Isabel?” asked March, with a haggard look.  “Well, if you say so, I will go back, and do what Dryfoos ordered me to do.  I’m sufficiently cowed between him and you, I can assure you.”

“Nonsense,” she said.  “I approve of everything you did.  But sit down, now, and don’t keep walking that way, and let me see if I understand it perfectly.  Of course, I had to have my say out.”

She made him go all over his talk with Dryfoos again, and report his own language precisely.  From time to time, as she got his points, she said, “That was splendid,” “Good enough for him!” and “Oh, I’m so glad you said that to him!” At the end she said: 

“Well, now, let’s look at it from his point of view.  Let’s be perfectly just to him before we take another step forward.”

“Or backward,” March suggested, ruefully.  “The case is simply this:  he owns the magazine.”

“Of course.”

“And he has a right to expect that I will consider his pecuniary interests—­”

“Oh, those detestable pecuniary interests!  Don’t you wish there wasn’t any money in the world?”

“Yes; or else that there was a great deal more of it.  And I was perfectly willing to do that.  I have always kept that in mind as one of my duties to him, ever since I understood what his relation to the magazine was.”