Those who were at all interesting seemed to have engagements and preoccupations; after two or three experiments with the bashfuller sort--those who had come up to the metropolis with manuscripts in their hands, in the good old literary tradition--he wondered whether he was otherwise like them when he was young like them.

He could not flatter himself that he was not; and yet he had a hope that the world had grown worse since his time, which his wife encouraged: Mrs.March was not eager to pursue the hospitalities which she had at first imagined essential to the literary prosperity of 'Every Other Week'; her family sufficed her; she would willingly have seen no one out of it but the strangers at the weekly table-d'hote dinner, or the audiences at the theatres.

March's devotion to his work made him reluctant to delegate it to any one; and as the summer advanced, and the question of where to go grew more vexed, he showed a man's base willingness to shirk it for himself by not going anywhere.

He asked his wife why she did not go somewhere with the children, and he joined her in a search for non-malarial regions on the map when she consented to entertain this notion.

But when it came to the point she would not go; he offered to go with her then, and then she would not let him.