A Hazard of New Fortunes

Excerpt

The following story was the first fruit of my New York life when I began to live it after my quarter of a century in Cambridge and Boston, ending in 1889; and I used my own transition to the commercial metropolis in framing the experience which was wholly that of my supposititious literary adventurer.  He was a character whom, with his wife, I have employed in some six or eight other stories, and whom I made as much the hero and heroine of ‘Their Wedding Journey’ as the slight fable would bear.  In venturing out of my adoptive New England, where I had found myself at home with many imaginary friends, I found it natural to ask the company of these familiar acquaintances, but their company was not to be had at once for the asking.  When I began speaking of them as Basil and Isabel, in the fashion of ‘Their Wedding Journey,’ they would not respond with the effect of early middle age which I desired in them.  They remained wilfully, not to say woodenly, the young bridal pair of that romance, without the promise of novel functioning.  It was not till I tried addressing them as March and Mrs. March that they stirred under my hand with fresh impulse, and set about the work assigned them as people in something more than their second youth.