“Well, it won’t do to say, the Holy Spirit indwelling.  That would sound like cant at this day.  But the old fellows that used to say that had some glimpses of the truth.  They knew that it is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom.  I suppose I should have to say that we didn’t change at all.  We develop.  There’s the making of several characters in each of us; we are each several characters, and sometimes this character has the lead in us, and sometimes that.  From what Fulkerson has told me of Dryfoos, I should say he had always had the potentiality of better things in him than he has ever been yet; and perhaps the time has come for the good to have its chance.  The growth in one direction has stopped; it’s begun in another; that’s all.  The man hasn’t been changed by his son’s death; it stunned, it benumbed him; but it couldn’t change him.  It was an event, like any other, and it had to happen as much as his being born.  It was forecast from the beginning of time, and was as entirely an effect of his coming into the world—­”

“Basil!  Basil!” cried his wife.  “This is fatalism!”

“Then you think,” he said, “that a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of God?” and he laughed provokingly.  But he went on more soberly:  “I don’t know what it all means Isabel though I believe it means good.  What did Christ himself say?  That if one rose from the dead it would not avail.  And yet we are always looking for the miraculous!  I believe that unhappy old man truly grieves for his son, whom he treated cruelly without the final intention of cruelty, for he loved him and wished to be proud of him; but I don’t think his death has changed him, any more than the smallest event in the chain of events remotely working through his nature from the beginning.  But why do you think he’s changed at all?  Because he offers to sell me Every Other Week on easy terms?  He says himself that he has no further use for the thing; and he knows perfectly well that he couldn’t get his money out of it now, without an enormous shrinkage.  He couldn’t appear at this late day as the owner, and sell it to anybody but Fulkerson and me for a fifth of what it’s cost him.  He can sell it to us for all it’s cost him; and four per cent. is no bad interest on his money till we can pay it back.  It’s a good thing for us; but we have to ask whether Dryfoos has done us the good, or whether it’s the blessing of Heaven.  If it’s merely the blessing of Heaven, I don’t propose being grateful for it.”

March laughed again, and his wife said, “It’s disgusting.”

“It’s business,” he assented.  “Business is business; but I don’t say it isn’t disgusting.  Lindau had a low opinion of it.”

“I think that with all his faults Mr. Dryfoos is a better man than Lindau,” she proclaimed.

“Well, he’s certainly able to offer us a better thing in ’Every Other Week,’” said March.

She knew he was enamoured of the literary finish of his cynicism, and that at heart he was as humbly and truly grateful as she was for the good-fortune opening to them.