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 feel in
a thing he could put his whole heart into. He would not run in ruts, like
an old fellow who had got hackneyed; he would not have any hobbies; he
would not have any friends or any enemies. Besides, he would have to meet
people, and March was a man that people took to; she knew that herself;
he had a kind of charm. The editorial management was going to be kept in
the background, as far as the public was concerned; the public was to
suppose that the thing ran itself. Fulkerson did not care for a great
literary reputation in his editor--he implied that March had a very
pretty little one. At the same time the relations between the