people began to call, she had a pleasure, a superiority, in saying that
it was a furnished apartment, and in disclaiming all responsibility for
the upholstery and decoration. If March was by, she always explained that
it was Mr. March's fancy, and amiably laughed it off with her callers as
a mannish eccentricity. Nobody really seemed to think it otherwise than
pretty; and this again was a triumph for Mrs. March, because it showed
how inferior the New York taste was to the Boston taste in such matters.

March submitted silently to his punishment, and laughed with her before
company at his own eccentricity. She had been so preoccupied with the
adjustment of the family to its new quarters and circumstances that the
time passed for laying his misgivings, if they were misgivings, about
Fulkerson before her, and when an occasion came for expressing them they
had themselves passed in the anxieties of getting forward the first
number of 'Every Other Week.' He kept these from her, too, and the
business that brought them to New York had apparently dropped into
abeyance before the questions of domestic economy that presented and
absented themselves. March knew his wife to be a woman of good mind and
in perfect sympathy with him, but he understood the limitations of her
perspective; and if he was not too wise, he was too experienced to
intrude upon it any affairs of his till her own were reduced to the right
order and proportion. It would have been folly to talk to her of
Fulkerson's conjecturable uncandor while she was in doubt whether her
cook would like the kitchen, or her two servants would consent to room
together; and till it was decided what school Tom should go to, and
whether Bella should have lessons at home or not, the relation which
March was to bear to the Dryfooses, as owner and publisher, was not to be
discussed with his wife. He might drag it in, but he was aware that with
her mind distracted by more immediate interests he could not get from her
that judgment, that reasoned divination, which he relied upon so much.