“What have I got to do with it?” March toyed with the delay the question gave him; then he said, with a sort of deprecatory laugh:  “It seems that Fulkerson has had his eye on me ever since we met that night on the Quebec boat.  I opened up pretty freely to him, as you do to a man you never expect to see again, and when I found he was in that newspaper syndicate business I told him about my early literary ambitions—­”

“You can’t say that I ever discouraged them, Basil,” his wife put in.  “I should have been willing, any time, to give up everything for them.”

“Well, he says that I first suggested this brilliant idea to him.  Perhaps I did; I don’t remember.  When he told me about his supplying literature to newspapers for simultaneous publication, he says I asked:  ’Why not apply the principle of co-operation to a magazine, and run it in the interest of the contributors?’ and that set him to thinking, and he thought out his plan of a periodical which should pay authors and artists a low price outright for their work and give them a chance of the profits in the way of a percentage.  After all, it isn’t so very different from the chances an author takes when he publishes a book.  And Fulkerson thinks that the novelty of the thing would pique public curiosity, if it didn’t arouse public sympathy.  And the long and short of it is, Isabel, that he wants me to help edit it.”

“To edit it?” His wife caught her breath, and she took a little time to realize the fact, while she stared hard at her husband to make sure he was not joking.

“Yes.  He says he owes it all to me; that I invented the idea—­the germ—­the microbe.”

His wife had now realized the fact, at least in a degree that excluded trifling with it.  “That is very honorable of Mr. Fulkerson; and if he owes it to you, it was the least he could do.”  Having recognized her husband’s claim to the honor done him, she began to kindle with a sense of the honor itself and the value of the opportunity.  “It’s a very high compliment to you, Basil—­a very high compliment.  And you could give up this wretched insurance business that you’ve always hated so, and that’s making you so unhappy now that you think they’re going to take it from you.  Give it up and take Mr. Fulkerson’s offer!  It’s a perfect interposition, coming just at this time!  Why, do it!  Mercy!” she suddenly arrested herself, “he wouldn’t expect you to get along on the possible profits?” Her face expressed the awfulness of the notion.

March smiled reassuringly, and waited to give himself the pleasure of the sensation he meant to give her.  “If I’ll make striking phrases for it and edit it, too, he’ll give me four thousand dollars.”

He leaned back in his chair, and stuck his hands deep into his pockets, and watched his wife’s face, luminous with the emotions that flashed through her mind-doubt, joy, anxiety.