Their Silver Wedding Journey | Page 2

let me
go down and engage your passage, and--"
"No, no!" the editor rebelled. "I'll think about it;" but as he turned to the
work he was so fond of and so weary of, he tried not to think of the
question again, till he closed his desk in the afternoon, and started to
walk home; the doctor had said he ought to walk, and he did so, though
he longed to ride, and looked wistfully at the passing cars.
He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, it

was a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if
the flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had
been 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
afforded him, and had always thought of getting March to edit. The
magazine which is also a book has since been realized elsewhere on
more or less prosperous terms, but not for any long period, and 'Every
Other Week' was apparently--the only periodical of the kind
conditioned for survival. It was at first backed by unlimited capital, and
it had the instant favor of a popular mood, which has since changed,

but which did not change so soon that the magazine had not time to
establish itself in a wide acceptance. It was now no longer a novelty, it
was no longer in the maiden blush of its first success, but it had entered
upon its second youth with the reasonable hope of many years of
prosperity before it. In fact it was a very comfortable living for all
concerned, and the Marches had the conditions, almost dismayingly
perfect, in which they had often promised themselves to go and be
young again in Europe, when they rebelled at finding themselves
elderly in America. Their daughter was married, and so very much to
her mother's mind that she did not worry about her, even though she
lived so far away as Chicago, still a wild frontier town to her Boston
imagination; and their son, as soon as he left college, had taken hold on
'Every Other Week', under his father's instruction, with a zeal and
intelligence which won him Fulkerson's praise as a chip of the old
block. These two liked each other, and worked into each other's hands
as cordially and aptly as Fulkerson and March had ever done. It amused
the father to see his son offering Fulkerson the same deference which
the Business End paid to seniority in March himself; but in fact,
Fulkerson's forehead