第33章 PART FIRST(31)

He parted from him on the usual terms outwardly,but he felt obscurely abused by Fulkerson in regard to the Dryfooses,father and son.He did not know but Fulkerson had taken an advantage of him in allowing him to commit himself to their enterprise with out fully and frankly telling him who and what his backer was;he perceived that with young Dryfoos as the publisher and Fulkerson as the general director of the paper there might be very little play for his own ideas of its conduct.Perhaps it was the hurt to his vanity involved by the recognition of this fact that made him forget how little choice he really had in the matter,and how,since he had not accepted the offer to edit the insurance paper,nothing remained for him but to close with Fulkerson.In this moment of suspicion and resentment he accused Fulkerson of hastening his decision in regard to the Grosvenor Green apartment;he now refused to consider it a decision,and said to himself that if he felt disposed to do so he would send Mrs.

Green a note reversing it in the morning.But he put it all off till morning with his clothes,when he went to bed,he put off even thinking what his wife would say;he cast Fulkerson and his constructive treachery out of his mind,too,and invited into it some pensive reveries of the past,when he still stood at the parting of the ways,and could take this path or that.In his middle life this was not possible;he must follow the path chosen long,ago,wherever,it led.He was not master of himself,as he once seemed,but the servant of those he loved;if he could do what he liked,perhaps he might renounce this whole New York enterprise,and go off somewhere out of the reach of care;but he could not do what he liked,that was very clear.In the pathos of this conviction he dwelt compassionately upon the thought of poor old Lindau;he resolved to make him accept a handsome sum of money--more than he could spare,something that he would feel the loss of--in payment of the lessons in German and fencing given so long ago.At the usual rate for such lessons,his debt,with interest for twenty-odd years,would run very far into the hundreds.Too far,he perceived,for his wife's joyous approval;he determined not to add the interest;or he believed that Lindau would refuse the interest;he put a fine speech in his mouth,making him do so;and after that he got Lindau employment on 'Every Other Week,'and took care of him till he died.

Through all his melancholy and munificence he was aware of sordid anxieties for having taken the Grosvenor Green apartment.These began to assume visible,tangible shapes as he drowsed,and to became personal entities,from which he woke,with little starts,to a realization of their true nature,and then suddenly fell fast asleep.

In the accomplishment of the events which his reverie played with,there was much that retroactively stamped it with prophecy,but much also that was better than he forboded.He found that with regard to the Grosvenor Green apartment he had not allowed for his wife's willingness to get any sort of roof over her head again after the removal from their old home,or for the alleviations that grow up through mere custom.The practical workings of the apartment were not so bad;it had its good points,and after the first sensation of oppression in it they began to feel the convenience of its arrangement.They were at that time of life when people first turn to their children's opinion with deference,and,in the loss of keenness in their own likes and dislikes,consult the young preferences which are still so sensitive.It went far to reconcile Mrs.

March to the apartment that her children were pleased with its novelty;when this wore off for them,she had herself begun to find it much more easily manageable than a house.After she had put away several barrels of gimcracks,and folded up screens and rugs and skins,and carried them all off to the little dark store-room which the flat developed,she perceived at once a roominess and coziness in it unsuspected before.

Then,when people began to call,she had a pleasure,a superiority,in saying that it was a furnished apartment,and in disclaiming all responsibility for the upholstery and decoration.If March was by,she always explained that it was Mr.March's fancy,and amiably laughed it off with her callers as a mannish eccentricity.Nobody really seemed to think it otherwise than pretty;and this again was a triumph for Mrs.

March,because it showed how inferior the New York taste was to the Boston taste in such matters.