A Hazard of New Fortunes | Page 7

the family that she looked distinguished in them, or, at any
rate, cultivated. She took them off to give him a glance of question, and
their son Tom looked up from his book for a moment; he was in his last
year at the high school, and was preparing for Harvard.
"I didn't get away from the office till half-past five," March explained
to his wife's glance," and then I walked. I suppose dinner's waiting. I'm
sorry, but I won't do it any more."
At table he tried to be gay with Bella, who babbled at him with a
voluble pertness which her brother had often advised her parents to
check in her, unless they wanted her to be universally despised.
"Papa!" she shouted at last, "you're not listening!" As soon as possible
his wife told the children they might be excused. Then she asked,
"What is it, Basil?"
"What is what?" he retorted, with a specious brightness that did not
avail.
"What is on your mind?"
"How do you know there's anything?"
"Your kissing me so when you came in, for one thing."
"Don't I always kiss you when I come in?"
"Not now. I suppose it isn't necessary any more. 'Cela va sans baiser.'"
"Yes, I guess it's so; we get along without the symbolism now." He
stopped, but she knew that he had not finished.
"Is it about your business? Have they done anything more?"
"No; I'm still in the dark. I don't know whether they mean to supplant
me, or whether they ever did. But I wasn't thinking about that.
Fulkerson has been to see me again."
"Fulkerson?" She brightened at the name, and March smiled, too. "Why
didn't you bring him to dinner?"
"I wanted to talk with you. Then you do like him?"
"What has that got to do with it, Basil?"
"Nothing! nothing! That is, he was boring away about that scheme of
his again. He's got it into definite shape at last."
"What shape?"
March outlined it for her, and his wife seized its main features with the
intuitive sense of affairs which makes women such good business-men

when they will let it.
"It sounds perfectly crazy," she said, finally. "But it mayn't be. The
only thing I didn't like about Mr. Fulkerson was his always wanting to
chance things. But what have you got to do with it?"
"What have I got to do with it?" March toyed with the delay the
question gave him; then he said, with a sort of deprecatory laugh: "It
seems that Fulkerson has had his eye on me ever since we met that
night on the Quebec boat. I opened up pretty freely to him, as you do to
a man you never expect to see again, and when I found he was in that
newspaper syndicate business I told him about my early literary
ambitions--"
"You can't say that I ever discouraged them, Basil," his wife put in. "I
should have been willing, any time, to give up everything for them."
"Well, he says that I first suggested this brilliant idea to him. Perhaps I
did; I don't remember. When he told me about his supplying literature
to newspapers for simultaneous publication, he says I asked: 'Why not
apply the principle of co-operation to a magazine, and run it in the
interest of the contributors?' and that set him to thinking, and he
thought out his plan of a periodical which should pay authors and
artists a low price outright for their work and give them a chance of the
profits in the way of a percentage. After all, it isn't so very different
from the chances an author takes when he publishes a book. And
Fulkerson thinks that the novelty of the thing would pique public
curiosity, if it didn't arouse public sympathy. And the long and short of
it is, Isabel, that he wants me to help edit it."
"To edit it?" His wife caught her breath, and she took a little time to
realize the fact, while she stared hard at her husband to make sure he
was not joking.
"Yes. He says he owes it all to me; that I invented the idea--the germ
--the microbe."
His wife had now realized the fact, at least in a degree that excluded
trifling with it. "That is very honorable of Mr. Fulkerson; and if he
owes it to you, it was the least he could do." Having recognized her
husband's claim to the honor done him, she began to kindle with a
sense of the honor itself and the value of the opportunity. "It's a very
high compliment to you, Basil--a very high compliment. And you could
give up this wretched insurance business that you've always hated so,

and that's making you so unhappy