were
necessarily, in their quality of young, inexperienced men, mere
acceptants of older men's thoughts and feelings, whether they were
tremendously conservative, as some were, or tremendously progressive, as
others were. Certain of them called themselves realists, certain
romanticists; but none of them seemed to know what realism was, or what
romanticism; they apparently supposed the difference a difference of
material. March had imagined himself taking home to lunch or dinner the
aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked, whether he liked their work
or not; but this was not an easy matter. 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. She said she
knew he would be anxious about his work; he protested that he could take
it with him to any distance within a few hours, but she would not be
persuaded. She would rather he stayed; the effect would be better with
Mr. Fulkerson; they could make excursions, and they could all get off a
week or two to the seashore near Boston--the only real seashore--in
August. The excursions were practically confined to a single day at Coney
Island; and once they got as far as Boston on the way to the seashore
near Boston; that is, Mrs. March and the children went; an