March’s irony fell harmless from the children’s preoccupation with their own affairs, but he knew that his wife felt it, and this added to the bitterness which prompted it.  He blamed her for letting her provincial narrowness prevent his accepting Fulkerson’s offer quite as much as if he had otherwise entirely wished to accept it.  His world, like most worlds, had been superficially a disappointment.  He was no richer than at the beginning, though in marrying he had given up some tastes, some preferences, some aspirations, in the hope of indulging them later, with larger means and larger leisure.  His wife had not urged him to do it; in fact, her pride, as she said, was in his fitness for the life he had renounced; but she had acquiesced, and they had been very happy together.  That is to say, they made up their quarrels or ignored them.

They often accused each other of being selfish and indifferent, but she knew that he would always sacrifice himself for her and the children; and he, on his part, with many gibes and mockeries, wholly trusted in her.  They had grown practically tolerant of each other’s disagreeable traits; and the danger that really threatened them was that they should grow too well satisfied with themselves, if not with each other.  They were not sentimental, they were rather matter-of-fact in their motives; but they had both a sort of humorous fondness for sentimentality.  They liked to play with the romantic, from the safe vantage-ground of their real practicality, and to divine the poetry of the commonplace.  Their peculiar point of view separated them from most other people, with whom their means of self-comparison were not so good since their marriage as before.  Then they had travelled and seen much of the world, and they had formed tastes which they had not always been able to indulge, but of which they felt that the possession reflected distinction on them.  It enabled them to look down upon those who were without such tastes; but they were not ill-natured, and so they did not look down so much with contempt as with amusement.  In their unfashionable neighborhood they had the fame of being not exclusive precisely, but very much wrapped up in themselves and their children.

Mrs. March was reputed to be very cultivated, and Mr. March even more so, among the simpler folk around them.  Their house had some good pictures, which her aunt had brought home from Europe in more affluent days, and it abounded in books on which he spent more than he ought.  They had beautified it in every way, and had unconsciously taken credit to them selves for it.  They felt, with a glow almost of virtue, how perfectly it fitted their lives and their children’s, and they believed that somehow it expressed their characters—­that it was like them.  They went out very little; she remained shut up in its refinement, working the good of her own; and he went to his business, and hurried back to forget it, and dream his dream of intellectual achievement in the