A Hazard of New Fortunes | Page 5

some turns about the room. It was growing late; the October sun
had left the top of the tall windows; it was still clear day, but it would
soon be twilight; they had been talking a long time. Fulkerson came
and stood with his little feet wide apart, and bent his little lean, square
face on March. "See here! How much do you get out of this thing here,
anyway?"
"The insurance business?" March hesitated a moment and then said,
with a certain effort of reserve, "At present about three thousand." He
looked up at Fulkerson with a glance, as if he had a mind to enlarge
upon the fact, and then dropped his eyes without saying more.
Whether Fulkerson had not thought it so much or not, he said: "Well,
I'll give you thirty-five hundred. Come! And your chances in the
success."
"We won't count the chances in the success. And I don't believe
thirty-five hundred would go any further in New York than three
thousand in Boston."
"But you don't live on three thousand here?"
"No; my wife has a little property."
"Well, she won't lose the income if you go to New York. I suppose you
pay ten or twelve hundred a year for your house here. You can get
plenty of flats in New York for the same money; and I understand you
can get all sorts of provisions for less than you pay now--three or four
cents on the pound. Come!"
This was by no means the first talk they had had about the matter;
every three or four months during the past two years the syndicate man
had dropped in upon March to air the scheme and to get his
impressions of it. This had happened so often that it had come to be a
sort of joke between them. But now Fulkerson clearly meant business,
and March had a struggle to maintain himself in a firm poise of refusal.
"I dare say it wouldn't--or it needn't-cost so very much more, but I don't
want to go to New York; or my wife doesn't. It's the same thing."
"A good deal samer," Fulkerson admitted.

March did not quite like his candor, and he went on with dignity. "It's
very natural she shouldn't. She has always lived in Boston; she's
attached to the place. Now, if you were going to start 'The Fifth Wheel'
in Boston--"
Fulkerson slowly and sadly shook his head, but decidedly. "Wouldn't
do. You might as well say St. Louis or Cincinnati. There's only one city
that belongs to the whole country, and that's New York."
"Yes, I know," sighed March; "and Boston belongs to the Bostonians,
but they like you to make yourself at home while you're visiting."
"If you'll agree to make phrases like that, right along, and get them into
'The Round-Robin' somehow, I'll say four thousand," said Fulkerson.
"You think it over now, March. You talk it over with Mrs. March; I
know you will, anyway; and I might as well make a virtue of advising
you to do it. Tell her I advised you to do it, and you let me know before
next Saturday what you've decided."
March shut down the rolling top of his desk in the corner of the room,
and walked Fulkerson out before him. It was so late that the last of the
chore-women who washed down the marble halls and stairs of the great
building had wrung out her floor-cloth and departed, leaving spotless
stone and a clean, damp smell in the darkening corridors behind her.
"Couldn't offer you such swell quarters in New York, March,"
Fulkerson said, as he went tack-tacking down the steps with his small
boot-heels. "But I've got my eye on a little house round in West
Eleventh Street that I'm going to fit up for my bachelor's hall in the
third story, and adapt for 'The Lone Hand' in the first and second, if this
thing goes through; and I guess we'll be pretty comfortable. It's right on
the Sand Strip --no malaria of any kind."
"I don't know that I'm going to share its salubrity with you yet," March
sighed, in an obvious travail which gave Fulkerson hopes.
"Oh yes, you are," he coaxed. "Now, you talk it over with your wife.
You give her a fair, unprejudiced chance at the thing on its merits, and
I'm very much mistaken in Mrs. March if she doesn't tell you to go in
and win. We're bound to win!"
They stood on the outside steps of the vast edifice beetling like a
granite crag above them, with the stone groups of an allegory of
life-insurance foreshortened in the bas-relief overhead. March absently
lifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange after so many years'

familiarity, and so