His son suggested, “But when we make that money here, no one loses it.”

“Can you prove that?” His father turned sharply upon him.  “Whatever is won is lost.  It’s all a game; it don’t make any difference what you bet on.  Business is business, and a business man takes his risks with his eyes open.”

“Ah, but the glory!” Fulkerson insinuated with impudent persiflage.  “I hadn’t got to the glory yet, because it’s hard to estimate it; but put the glory at the lowest figure, Mr. Dryfoos, and add it to the twenty-five thousand, and you’ve got an annual income from ’Every Other Week’ of dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double-track, from this office to the moon.  I don’t mention any of the sister planets because I like to keep within bounds.”

Dryfoos showed his lower teeth for pleasure in Fulkerson’s fooling, and said, “That’s what I like about you, Mr. Fulkerson—­you always keep within bounds.”

“Well, I ain’t a shrinking Boston violet, like March, here.  More sunflower in my style of diffidence; but I am modest, I don’t deny it,” said Fulkerson.  “And I do hate to have a thing overstated.”

“And the glory—­you do really think there’s something in the glory that pays?”

“Not a doubt of it!  I shouldn’t care for the paltry return in money,” said Fulkerson, with a burlesque of generous disdain, “if it wasn’t for the glory along with it.”

“And how should you feel about the glory, if there was no money along with it?”

“Well, sir, I’m happy to say we haven’t come to that yet.”

“Now, Conrad, here,” said the old man, with a sort of pathetic rancor, “would rather have the glory alone.  I believe he don’t even care much for your kind of glory, either, Mr. Fulkerson.”

Fulkerson ran his little eyes curiously over Conrad’s face and then March’s, as if searching for a trace there of something gone before which would enable him to reach Dryfoos’s whole meaning.  He apparently resolved to launch himself upon conjecture.  “Oh, well, we know how Conrad feels about the things of this world, anyway.  I should like to take ’em on the plane of another sphere, too, sometimes; but I noticed a good while ago that this was the world I was born into, and so I made up my mind that I would do pretty much what I saw the rest of the folks doing here below.  And I can’t see but what Conrad runs the thing on business principles in his department, and I guess you’ll find it so if you look into it.  I consider that we’re a whole team and big dog under the wagon with you to draw on for supplies, and March, here, at the head of the literary business, and Conrad in the counting-room, and me to do the heavy lying in the advertising part.  Oh, and Beaton, of course, in the art.  I ’most forgot Beaton—­Hamlet with Hamlet left out.”

Dryfoos looked across at his son.  “Wasn’t that the fellow’s name that was there last night?”

“Yes,” said Conrad.