steful decorativeness of the thing did not kill it with the
public outright, its literary excellence would give it the finishing
stroke. Perhaps that might be overlooked in the impression of novelty
which a first number would give, but it must never happen again. He
implored March to promise that it should never happen again; he said
their only hope was in the immediate cheapening of the whole affair. It
was bad enough to give the public too much quantity for their money, but
to throw in such quality as that was simply ruinous; it must be stopped.
These were the expressions of his intimate moods; every front that he
presented to the public wore a glow of lofty, of devout exultation. His
pride in the number gushed out in fresh bursts of rhetoric to every
one whom he could get to talk with him about it. He worked the personal
kindliness of the press to the utmost. He did not mind making himself
ridiculous or becoming a joke in the good cause, as he called it. He
joined in the applause when a humorist at the club feigned to drop dead
from his chair at Fulkerson's introduction of the topic, and he went on
talking that first number into the surviving spectators. He stood treat
upon all occasions, and he lunched attaches of the press at all hours.
He especially befriended the correspondents of the newspapers of other
cities, for, as he explained to March, those fellows could give him any
amount of advertising simply as literary gossip. Many of the fellows
were ladies who could not be so summarily asked out to lunch, but
Fulkerson's ingenuity was equal to every exigency, and he contrived
somehow to make each of these feel that she had been possessed of
exclusive information. There was a moment when March conjectured
a willingness in Fulkerson to work Mrs. March into the advertising
department, by means of a tea to these ladies and their friends which
she should administer in his apartment, but he did not encourage
Fulkerson to be explicit, and the moment passed. Afterward, when he told
his wife about it, he was astonished to find that she would not have
minded doing it for Fulkerson, and he experienced another proof of
the bluntness of the feminine instincts in some directions, and of the
personal favor which Fulkerson seemed to enjoy with the whole sex. This
alone was enough to account for the willingness of these correspondents
to write about the first number, but March accused him of sending it to
their addresses with boxes o