His destiny, if tragical, presented itself with an aspect which he might have found comic if it had been another’s destiny.  Mr. Hubbell brought March’s removal, softened in the guise of a promotion.  The management at New York, it appeared, had acted upon a suggestion of Mr. Hubbell’s, and now authorized him to offer March the editorship of the monthly paper published in the interest of the company; his office would include the authorship of circulars and leaflets in behalf of life-insurance, and would give play to the literary talent which Mr. Hubbell had brought to the attention of the management; his salary would be nearly as much as at present, but the work would not take his whole time, and in a place like New York he could get a great deal of outside writing, which they would not object to his doing.

Mr. Hubbell seemed so sure of his acceptance of a place in every way congenial to a man of literary tastes that March was afterward sorry he dismissed the proposition with obvious irony, and had needlessly hurt Hubbell’s feelings; but Mrs. March had no such regrets.  She was only afraid that he had not made his rejection contemptuous enough.  “And now,” she said, “telegraph Mr. Fulkerson, and we will go at once.”

“I suppose I could still get Watkins’s former place,” March suggested.

“Never!” she retorted.  “Telegraph instantly!”

They were only afraid now that Fulkerson might have changed his mind, and they had a wretched day in which they heard nothing from him.  It ended with his answering March’s telegram in person.  They were so glad of his coming, and so touched by his satisfaction with his bargain, that they laid all the facts of the case before him.  He entered fully into March’s sense of the joke latent in Mr. Hubbell’s proposition, and he tried to make Mrs. March believe that he shared her resentment of the indignity offered her husband.

March made a show of willingness to release him in view of the changed situation, saying that he held him to nothing.  Fulkerson laughed, and asked him how soon he thought he could come on to New York.  He refused to reopen the question of March’s fitness with him; he said they, had gone into that thoroughly, but he recurred to it with Mrs. March, and confirmed her belief in his good sense on all points.  She had been from the first moment defiantly confident of her husband’s ability, but till she had talked the matter over with Fulkerson she was secretly not sure of it; or, at least, she was not sure that March was not right in distrusting himself.  When she clearly understood, now, what Fulkerson intended, she had no longer a doubt.  He explained how the enterprise differed from others, and how he needed for its direction a man who combined general business experience and business ideas with a love for the thing and a natural aptness for it.  He did not want a young man, and yet he wanted youth—­its freshness, its zest—­such as March would