"Is that so?" asked Fulkerson. "Well, we must see what can be done. I
supposed you would be all settled by this time, or I should have humped
myself to find you something. None of those places I gave you amounts to
anything?"

"As much as forty thousand others we've looked at," said Mrs. March.
"Yes, one of them does amount to something. It comes so near being what
we want that I've given Mr. March particular instructions not to go near
it."

She told him about Mrs. Grosvenor Green and her flats, and at the end he
said:

"Well, well, we must look out for that. I'll keep an eye on him, Mrs.
March, and see that he doesn't do anything rash, and I won't leave him
till he's found just the right thing. It exists, of course; it must in a
city of eighteen hundred thousand people, and the only question is where
to find it. You leave him to me, Mrs. March; I'll watch out for him."

Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the station when he found they
were not driving, but she bade him a peremptory good-bye at the hotel
door.

"He's very nice, Basil, and his way with you is perfectly charming. It's
very sweet to see how really fond of you he is. But I didn't want him
stringing along with us up to Forty-second Street and spoiling our last
moments together."

At Third Avenue they took the Elevated for which she confessed an
infatuation. She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the
world, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say
that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it. She now said
that the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and that
the fleeing intimacy you formed with people in second and third floor
interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had a
domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effect
of good society with all its security and exclusiveness. He said it was
better than the theatre, of which it reminded him, to see those people
through their windows: a family party of work-folk at a late tea, some of
the men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying
her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a
table; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together. What
suggestion! what drama? what infinite interest! At the Forty-second
Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the track
to the branch road for the Central Depot, an