VII.

That evening March went with his wife to return the call of the Dryfoos ladies.  On their way up-town in the Elevated he told her of his talk with young Dryfoos.  “I confess I was a little ashamed before him afterward for having looked at the matter so entirely from the aesthetic point of view.  But of course, you know, if I went to work at those things with an ethical intention explicitly in mind, I should spoil them.”

“Of course,” said his wife.  She had always heard him say something of this kind about such things.

He went on:  “But I suppose that’s just the point that such a nature as young Dryfoos’s can’t get hold of, or keep hold of.  We’re a queer lot, down there, Isabel—­perfect menagerie.  If it hadn’t been that Fulkerson got us together, and really seems to know what he did it for, I should say he was the oddest stick among us.  But when I think of myself and my own crankiness for the literary department; and young Dryfoos, who ought really to be in the pulpit, or a monastery, or something, for publisher; and that young Beaton, who probably hasn’t a moral fibre in his composition, for the art man, I don’t know but we could give Fulkerson odds and still beat him in oddity.”

His wife heaved a deep sigh of apprehension, of renunciation, of monition.  “Well, I’m glad you can feel so light about it, Basil.”

“Light?  I feel gay!  With Fulkerson at the helm, I tell you the rocks and the lee shore had better keep out of the way.”  He laughed with pleasure in his metaphor.  “Just when you think Fulkerson has taken leave of his senses he says or does something that shows he is on the most intimate and inalienable terms with them all the time.  You know how I’ve been worrying over those foreign periodicals, and trying to get some translations from them for the first number?  Well, Fulkerson has brought his centipedal mind to bear on the subject, and he’s suggested that old German friend of mine I was telling you of—­the one I met in the restaurant—­the friend of my youth.”

“Do you think he could do it?” asked Mrs. March, sceptically.

“He’s a perfect Babel of strange tongues; and he’s the very man for the work, and I was ashamed I hadn’t thought of him myself, for I suspect he needs the work.”

“Well, be careful how you get mixed up with him, then, Basil,” said his wife, who had the natural misgiving concerning the friends of her husband’s youth that all wives have.  “You know the Germans are so unscrupulously dependent.  You don’t know anything about him now.”

“I’m not afraid of Lindau,” said March.  “He was the best and kindest man I ever saw, the most high-minded, the most generous.  He lost a hand in the war that helped to save us and keep us possible, and that stump of his is character enough for me.”

“Oh, you don’t think I could have meant anything against him!” said Mrs. March, with the tender fervor that every woman who lived in the time of the war must feel for those who suffered in it.  “All that I meant was that I hoped you would not get mixed up with him too much.  You’re so apt to be carried away by your impulses.”