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Patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius
Person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it
Say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him
Shouldn't ca' fo' the disgrace of bein' poo'--its inconvenience
Timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man
A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES
By William Dean Howells
PART THIRD
I.
The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial success of 'Every Other
Week' expanded in Fulkerson's fancy into a series. Instead of the
publishing and editorial force, with certain of the more representative
artists and authors sitting down to a modest supper in Mrs. Leighton's
parlors, he conceived of a dinner at Delmonico's, with the principal
literary and artistic, people throughout the country as guests, and an
inexhaustible hospitality to reporters and correspondents, from whom
paragraphs, prophetic and historic, would flow weeks before and after the
first of the series. He said the thing was a new departure in magazines;
it amounted to something in literature as radical as the American
Revolution in politics: it was the idea of self government in the arts;
and it was this idea that had never yet been fully developed in regard to
it. That was what must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and the
speeches must be reported. Then it would go like wildfire. He asked March
whether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he was
sure, would come; he was a literary man. They ought to invite Mr. Evarts,
and the Cardinal and the leading Protestant divines. His ambition stopped
at nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there he had to wait the
return of the elder Dryfoos from the West, and Dryfoos was still delayed
at Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was afraid he would
stay there till his own enthusiasm escaped in other activities, other
plans.
Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall under a superstitious
subjection to another man; but March could not help seeing that in this
possible measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson's fetish. He did not revere him,
March decided, because it was not in Fulkerson's nature to revere
anything; he could like and dislike, but he could not respect.
Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; and besides the homage
which those who have not pay to those who have, Fulkerson rendered
Dryfoos the tribute of a feeling which March could only def
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