One day, about a week after Alma's final rejection of Beaton, Dryfoos came into March's office.

Fulkerson was out, but the old man seemed not to have tried to see him.
He put his hat on the floor by his chair, after he sat down, and looked at March awhile with his old eyes, which had the vitreous glitter of old eyes stimulated to sleeplessness.

Then he said, abruptly, "Mr.
March, how would you like to take this thing off my hands ?" "I don't understand, exactly," March began; but of course he understood that Dryfoos was offering to let him have 'Every Other Week' on some terms or other, and his heart leaped with hope.
The old man knew he understood, and so he did not explain.

He said: "I am going to Europe, to take my family there.

The doctor thinks it might do my wife some good; and I ain't very well myself, and my girls both want to go; and so we're goin'.