“Well, I don’t know.  I always kind of hoped it would turn out the other way.  You know I always had a sneaking fondness for the fellow.”

“Miss Leighton seems not to have had.”

“It’s a pity she hadn’t.  I tell you, March, it ain’t so easy for a girl to get married, here in the East, that she can afford to despise any chance.”

“Isn’t that rather a low view of it?”

“It’s a common-sense view.  Beaton has the making of a first-rate fellow in him.  He’s the raw material of a great artist and a good citizen.  All he wants is somebody to take him in hand and keep him from makin’ an ass of himself and kickin’ over the traces generally, and ridin’ two or three horses bareback at once.”

“It seems a simple problem, though the metaphor is rather complicated,” said March.  “But talk to Miss Leighton about it.  I haven’t given Beaton the grand bounce.”

He began to turn over the manuscripts on his table, and Fulkerson went away.  But March found himself thinking of the matter from time to time during the day, and he spoke to his wife about it when he went home.  She surprised him by taking Fulkerson’s view of it.

“Yes, it’s a pity she couldn’t have made up her mind to have him.  It’s better for a woman to be married.”

“I thought Paul only went so far as to say it was well.  But what would become of Miss Leighton’s artistic career if she married?”

“Oh, her artistic career!” said Mrs. March, with matronly contempt of it.

“But look here!” cried her husband.  “Suppose she doesn’t like him?”

“How can a girl of that age tell whether she likes any one or not?”

“It seems to me you were able to tell at that age, Isabel.  But let’s examine this thing. (This thing!  I believe Fulkerson is characterizing my whole parlance, as well as your morals.) Why shouldn’t we rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage?  When we consider the enormous risks people take in linking their lives together, after not half so much thought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I think we ought to be glad whenever they don’t do it.  I believe that this popular demand for the matrimony of others comes from our novel-reading.  We get to thinking that there is no other happiness or good-fortune in life except marriage; and it’s offered in fiction as the highest premium for virtue, courage, beauty, learning, and saving human life.  We all know it isn’t.  We know that in reality marriage is dog cheap, and anybody can have it for the asking—­if he keeps asking enough people.  By-and-by some fellow will wake up and see that a first-class story can be written from the anti-marriage point of view; and he’ll begin with an engaged couple, and devote his novel to disengaging them and rendering them separately happy ever after in the denouement.  It will make his everlasting fortune.”

“Why don’t you write it, Basil?” she asked.  “It’s a delightful idea.  You could do it splendidly.”