Produced by David Widger
By William Dean Howells
[NOTE: Several chapter heading numerals are out of order or missing inthis 1899 edition, however the text is all present in the three volumes.D.W.]
"You need the rest," said the Business End; "and your wife wants you togo, as well as your doctor. Besides, it's your Sabbatical year, and you,could send back a lot of stuff for the magazine."
"Is that your notion of a Sabbatical year?" asked the editor.
"No; I throw that out as a bait to your conscience. You needn't write aline while you're gone. I wish you wouldn't for your own sake; althoughevery number that hasn't got you in it is a back number for me."
"That's very nice of you, Fulkerson," said the editor. "I suppose yourealize that it's nine years since we took 'Every Other Week' fromDryfoos?"
"Well, that makes it all the more Sabbatical," said Fulkerson. "The twoextra years that you've put in here, over and above the old styleSabbatical seven, are just so much more to your credit. It was your rightto go, two years ago, and now it's your duty. Couldn't you look at it inthat light?"
"I dare say Mrs. March could," the editor assented. "I don't believe shecould be brought to regard it as a pleasure on any other terms."
"Of course not," said Fulkerson. "If you won't take a year, take threemonths, and call it a Sabbatical summer; but go, anyway. You can make uphalf a dozen numbers ahead, and Tom, here, knows your ways so well thatyou needn't think about 'Every Other Week' from the time you start tillthe time you try to bribe the customs inspector when you get back. I cantake a hack at the editing myself, if Tom's inspiration gives out, andput a little of my advertising fire into the thing." He laid his hand onthe shoulder of the young fellow who stood smiling by, and pushed andshook him in the liking there was between them. "Now you go, March! Mrs.Fulkerson feels just as I do about it; we had our outing last year, andwe want Mrs. March and you to have yours. You let me go down and engageyour passage, and—"
"No, no!" the editor rebelled. "I'll think about it;" but as he turned tothe work he was so fond of and so weary of, he tried not to think of thequestion again, till he closed his desk in the afternoon, and started towalk home; the doctor had said he ought to walk, and he did so, though helonged to ride, and looked wistfully at the passing cars.
He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, itwas a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if theflowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had beengoing so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among thebutterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this illusion,himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it mocked thenotion. They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they were ever tofind it again, was to be looked for in Europe, where they met when theywere young, and they had never been quite without the hope of going backthere, some day, for a long sojourn. They had not seen the time when theycould do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized, even dreamingis not free from care; and in his dream March had been obliged to workpretty steadily, if not too intensely. He had been forced to forego thedistinctly literary ambition with which he had started in life because hehad their common living to make, and he could not make it by writinggrac