as a generous impulse. When we were younger we could stand it; we could
give way to it and take the consequences. But now we can't bear it. We
must act from cold reason even in the ardor of self-sacrifice."

"Oh, as if you did that!" his wife retorted.

"Is that any cause why you shouldn't?" She could not say that it was, and
he went on triumphantly:

"No, I won't take you away from the only safe place on the planet and
plunge you into the most perilous, and then have you say in your
revulsion of feeling that you were all against it from the first, and you
gave way because you saw I had my heart set on it." He supposed he was
treating the matter humorously, but in this sort of banter between
husband and wife there is always much more than the joking. March had
seen some pretty feminine inconsistencies and trepidations which once
charmed him in his wife hardening into traits of middle-age which were
very like those of less interesting older women. The sight moved him with
a kind of pathos, but he felt the result hindering and vexatious.

She now retorted that if he did not choose to take her at her word be
need not, but that whatever he did she should have nothing to reproach
herself with; and, at least, he could not say that she had trapped him
into anything.

"What do you mean by trapping?" he demanded.

"I don't know what you call it," she answered; "but when you get me to
commit myself to a thing by leaving out the most essential point, I call
it trapping."