going so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among the
butterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this illusion,
himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it mocked the
notion. They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they were ever to
find it again, was to be looked for in Europe, where they met when they
were young, and they had never been quite without the hope of going back
there, some day, for a long sojourn. They had not seen the time when they
could do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized, even dreaming
is not free from care; and in his dream March had been obliged to work
pretty steadily, if not too intensely. He had been forced to forego the
distinctly literary ambition with which he had started in life because he
had their common living to make, and he could not make it by writing
graceful verse, or even graceful prose. He had been many years in a
sufficiently distasteful business, and he had lost any thought of leaving
it when it left him, perhaps because his hold on it had always been
rather lax, and he had not been able to conceal that he disliked it. At
any rate, he was supplanted in his insurance agency at Boston by a
subordinate in his office, and though he was at the same time offered a
place of nominal credit in the employ of the company, he was able to
decline it in grace of a chance which united the charm of congenial work
with the solid advantage of a better salary than he had been getting for
work he hated. It was an incredible chance, but it was rendered
appreciably real by the necessity it involved that they should leave
Boston, where they had lived all their married life, where Mrs. March as
well as their children was born, and where all their tender and familiar
ties were, and come to New York, where the literary enterprise which
formed his chance was to be founded.

It was then a magazine of a new sort, which his business partner had
imagined in such leisure as the management of a newspaper syndicate