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year at the high school, and was preparing for Harvard. "I didnt get away from the office till half-past five," March explained to his wifes glance, "and then I walked. I suppose dinners waiting. Im sorry, but I wont 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, "youre 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 theres anything?" "Your kissing me so when you came in, for one thing." "Dont I always kiss you when I come in?" "Not now. I suppose it isnt necessary any more. Cela va sans baiser." "Yes, I guess its 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; Im still in the dark. I dont know whether they mean to supplant me, or whether they ever did. But I wasnt thinking about that. Fulkerson has been to see me again." "Fulkerson?" She brightened at the name, and March smiled, too. "Why didnt 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. Hes 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 maynt be. The only thing I didnt 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 cant 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 dont 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 isnt 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 didnt 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 husbands claim to the honor done him, she began to kindle with a sense of the honor itself and the value of the opportunity. "Its a very high compliment to you, Basil--a very high compliment. And you could give up this wretched insurance business that youve always hated so, and thats making you so unhappy now that you think theyre going to take it

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