The following story was the first fruit of my New York life when I began to live it after my quarter of a century in Cambridge and Boston, ending in 1889; and I used my own transition to the commercia...

“Now, you think this thing over, March, and let me know the last of next week,” said Fulkerson. He got up from the chair which he had been sitting astride, with his face to its back, and tilting towar...

“Now, you think this thing over, March, and let me know the last of next week,” said Fulkerson. He got up from the chair which he had been sitting astride, with his face to its back, and tilting towar...

All the way up to the South End March mentally prolonged his talk with Fulkerson, and at his door in Nankeen Square he closed the parley with a plump refusal to go to New York on any terms. His daught...

March’s face had sobered more and more as she followed one hopeful burst with another, and now it expressed a positive pain. But he forced a smile and said: “There’s a little condition attached. Where...

March’s irony fell harmless from the children’s preoccupation with their own affairs, but he knew that his wife felt it, and this added to the bitterness which prompted it. He blamed her for letting h...

His wife made no attempt to renew their talk before March went to his business in the morning, and they parted in dry offence. Their experience was that these things always came right of themselves at...

In the uprooting and transplanting of their home that followed, Mrs. March often trembled before distant problems and possible contingencies, but she was never troubled by present difficulties. She ke...

They went to a quiet hotel far downtown, and took a small apartment which they thought they could easily afford for the day or two they need spend in looking up a furnished flat. They were used to sta...

Mrs. March took the vertebrate with her to the Vienna Coffeehouse, where they went to breakfast next morning. She made March buy her the Herald and the World, and she added to its spiny convolutions f...

Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but it still had interest; and they varied their day by taking a coupé, by renouncing advertisements, and by reverting to agents. Some of these induced them ...

Nothing mystifies a man more than a woman’s aberrations from some point at which he supposes her fixed as a star. In these unfurnished houses, without steam or elevator, March followed his wife about ...

Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to their ideals from their husbands than from themselves. Early in their married life she had taken charge of him in all matters whic...

Fulkerson stopped and looked at March, whom he saw lapsing into a serious silence. Doubtless he divined his uneasiness with the facts that had been given him to digest. He pulled out his watch and gla...

The evening when March closed with Mrs. Green’s reduced offer, and decided to take her apartment, the widow whose lodgings he had rejected sat with her daughter in an upper room at the back of her hou...

The evening when March closed with Mrs. Green’s reduced offer, and decided to take her apartment, the widow whose lodgings he had rejected sat with her daughter in an upper room at the back of her hou...

“Why, Alma,” whispered the mother, “who in the world can it be at this time of night? You don’t suppose he⁠—” “Well, I’m not going to the door, anyhow, mother, I don’t care who it is; and, of course, ...

Angus Beaton’s studio looked at first glance like many other painters’ studios. A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light; casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sket...

The day wasted away in Beaton’s hands; at half-past four o’clock he went out to tea at the house of a lady who was At Home that afternoon from four till seven. By this time Beaton was in possession of...

“She is?” cried Alma. “Tchk!” She flew downstairs, and flitted swiftly into the room, and fluttered up to Beaton, and gave him a crushing handshake. “How very kind of you to come and see us, Mr. Beato...

In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had done himself injustice. When he uncovered his Judas and looked at it, he could not believe that the man who was capable of such work deserved the punishm...

March and Beaton remained alone together for a moment, and March said: “I hope you will think it worthwhile to take hold with us, Mr. Beaton. Mr. Fulkerson puts it in his own way, of course; but we re...

That evening March went with his wife to return the call of the Dryfoos ladies. On their way uptown in the Elevated he told her of his talk with young Dryfoos. “I confess I was a little ashamed before...

“Ah! hello! hello!” Fulkerson said, in recognition of the Marches. “Regular gathering of the clans. How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos? How do you do, Mrs. Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela, Aunt Hitty, and all the...

Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room, and sat down before the dull fire in his grate to think. It struck him there was a dull fire in his heart a great deal like it, and he worked out...

At the reception, where two men in livery stood aside to let him pass up the outside steps of the house, and two more helped him off with his overcoat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into the ...

March pushed the door open into a room like that on the left, but with a writing-desk instead of a cobbler’s bench, and a bed, where Lindau sat propped up; with a coat over his shoulders and a skullca...

March went away thinking of what Lindau had said, but not for the impersonal significance of his words so much as for the light they cast upon Lindau himself. He thought the words violent enough, but ...

The more March thought of the injustice of the New York press (which had not, however, attacked the literary quality of the number) the more bitterly he resented it; and his wife’s indignation superhe...

In the silence that followed, Fulkerson looked from one lady to the other with dismay. “I seem to have put my foot in it, somehow,” he suggested, and Miss Woodburn gave a cry of laughter. “Poo’ Mr. Fu...

The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial success of Every Other Week expanded in Fulkerson’s fancy into a series. Instead of the publishing and editorial force, with certain of the more repres...

The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial success of Every Other Week expanded in Fulkerson’s fancy into a series. Instead of the publishing and editorial force, with certain of the more repres...

A silence followed, of rather painful length. It was broken by the cheery voice of Fulkerson, sent before him to herald Fulkerson’s cheery person. “Well, I suppose you’ve got the glorious success of E...

That night Dryfoos was wakened from his after-dinner nap by the sound of gay talk and nervous giggling in the drawing-room. The talk, which was Christine’s, and the giggling, which was Mela’s, were in...

It was clear to Beaton that Dryfoos distrusted him; and the fact heightened his pleasure in Christine’s liking for him. He was as sure of this as he was of the other, though he was not so sure of any ...

Beaton went away with the smile on his face which he had kept in listening to Fulkerson, and carried it with him to the reception. He believed that Alma was vexed with him for more personal reasons th...

Mrs. Horn believed in the world and in society and its unwritten constitution devoutly, and she tolerated her niece’s benevolent activities as she tolerated her aesthetic sympathies because these thin...

Margaret Vance tried to give herself some reason for going to call upon the Dryfooses, but she could find none better than the wish to do a kind thing. This seemed queerer and less and less sufficient...

The notion that a girl of Margaret Vance’s traditions would naturally form of girls like Christine and Mela Dryfoos would be that they were abashed in the presence of the new conditions of their lives...

The Dryfooses went late to Mrs. Horn’s musicale, in spite of Mrs. Mandel’s advice. Christine made the delay, both because she wished to show Miss Vance that she was not anxious, and because she had so...

Not long after Lent, Fulkerson set before Dryfoos one day his scheme for a dinner in celebration of the success of Every Other Week. Dryfoos had never meddled in any manner with the conduct of the per...

Not long after Lent, Fulkerson set before Dryfoos one day his scheme for a dinner in celebration of the success of Every Other Week. Dryfoos had never meddled in any manner with the conduct of the per...

The Marches had no longer the gross appetite for novelty which urges youth to a surfeit of strange scenes, experiences, ideas; and makes travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues, an inexhaustible ...

First and last, the Marches did a good deal of travel on the Elevated roads, which, he said, gave you such glimpses of material aspects in the city as some violent invasion of others’ lives might affo...

The Dryfoos family stayed in town till August. Then the father went West again to look after his interests; and Mrs. Mandel took the two girls to one of the great hotels in Saratoga. Fulkerson said th...

“You see,” Fulkerson explained, “I find that the old man has got an idea of his own about that banquet, and I guess there’s some sense in it. He wants to have a preliminary little dinner, where we can...

So far as the Dryfoos family was concerned, the dinner might as well have been given at Frescobaldi’s rooms. None of the ladies appeared. Mrs. Dryfoos was glad to escape to her own chamber, where she ...

March met Fulkerson on the steps of the office next morning, when he arrived rather later than his wont. Fulkerson did not show any of the signs of suffering from the last night’s pleasure which paint...

He must have made more clatter than he supposed with his key at the apartment door, for his wife had come to let him in when he flung it open. “Why, Basil,” she said, “what’s brought you back? Are you...

Fulkerson parted with the Marches in such trouble of mind that he did not feel able to meet that night the people whom he usually kept so gay at Mrs. Leighton’s table. He went to Maroni’s for his dinn...

Superficially, the affairs of Every Other Week settled into their wonted form again, and for Fulkerson they seemed thoroughly reinstated. But March had a feeling of impermanency from what had happened...

Superficially, the affairs of Every Other Week settled into their wonted form again, and for Fulkerson they seemed thoroughly reinstated. But March had a feeling of impermanency from what had happened...

The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela the social opportunity which the spring had offered. After the musicale at Mrs. Horn’s, they both made their party-call, as Mela said, in due season; bu...

The strike made a good deal of talk in the office of Every Other Week⁠—that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal. He congratulated himself that he was not personally incommoded by it, like some of t...

Dryfoos sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. Mandel as usual to pour out his coffee. Conrad had gone downtown; the two girls lay abed much later than their father breakfasted, and their mother had ...

Conrad looked confusedly around, and the same voice said again, “Mr. Dryfoos!” and he saw that it was a lady speaking to him from a coupé beside the curbing, and then he saw that it was Miss Vance. Sh...

In the cares which Mrs. March shared with her husband that night she was supported partly by principle, but mainly by the potent excitement which bewildered Conrad’s family and took all reality from w...

The evening after the funeral, while the Marches sat together talking it over, and making approaches, through its shadow, to the question of their own future, which it involved, they were startled by ...

Their affliction brought the Dryfooses into humaner relations with the Marches, who had hitherto regarded them as a necessary evil, as the odious means of their own prosperity. Mrs. March found that t...

It was a curiosity which Fulkerson himself shared, at least concerning Dryfoos. “I don’t know what the old man’s going to do,” he said to March the day after the Marches had talked their future over. ...

In spite of the experience of the whole race from time immemorial, when death comes to anyone we know we helplessly regard it as an incident of life, which will presently go on as before. Perhaps this...

“How did he take it? How could he bear it? Oh, Basil! I wonder you could have the heart to say it to him. It was cruel!” “Yes, cruel enough, my dear,” March owned to his wife, when they talked the mat...

It was in a manner grotesque, but to March it was all the more natural for that reason, that Dryfoos should have Lindau’s funeral from his house. He knew the old man to be darkly groping, through the ...

The course of public events carried Beaton’s private affairs beyond the reach of his simple first intention to renounce his connection with Every Other Week. In fact, this was not perhaps so simple as...

Beaton wasted the rest of the day in the emotions and speculations which Dryfoos’s call inspired. It was not that they continuously occupied him, but they broke up the train of other thoughts, and spo...

While we are still young we feel a kind of pride, a sort of fierce pleasure, in any important experience, such as we have read of or heard of in the lives of others, no matter how painful. It was this...

“Well, I guess she’s given him the grand bounce at last,” said Fulkerson to March in one of their moments of confidence at the office. “That’s Mad’s inference from appearances⁠—and disappearances; and...

Beaton was at his best when he parted for the last time with Alma Leighton, for he saw then that what had happened to him was the necessary consequence of what he had been, if not what he had done. Af...

The Marches, with Fulkerson, went to see the Dryfooses off on the French steamer. There was no longer any business obligation on them to be civil, and there was greater kindness for that reason in the...