By William Dean Howells

PART FOURTH

I.

Not long after Lent, Fulkerson set before Dryfoos one day his scheme for a dinner in celebration of the success of ‘Every Other Week.’  Dryfoos had never meddled in any manner with the conduct of the periodical; but Fulkerson easily saw that he was proud of his relation to it, and he proceeded upon the theory that he would be willing to have this relation known:  On the days when he had been lucky in stocks, he was apt to drop in at the office on Eleventh Street, on his way up-town, and listen to Fulkerson’s talk.  He was on good enough terms with March, who revised his first impressions of the man, but they had not much to say to each other, and it seemed to March that Dryfoos was even a little afraid of him, as of a piece of mechanism he had acquired, but did not quite understand; he left the working of it to Fulkerson, who no doubt bragged of it sufficiently.  The old man seemed to have as little to say to his son; he shut himself up with Fulkerson, where the others could hear the manager begin and go on with an unstinted flow of talk about ‘Every Other Week;’ for Fulkerson never talked of anything else if he could help it, and was always bringing the conversation back to it if it strayed: 

The day he spoke of the dinner he rose and called from his door:  “March, I say, come down here a minute, will you?  Conrad, I want you, too.”

The editor and the publisher found the manager and the proprietor seated on opposite sides of the table.  “It’s about those funeral baked meats, you know,” Fulkerson explained, “and I was trying to give Mr. Dryfoos some idea of what we wanted to do.  That is, what I wanted to do,” he continued, turning from March to Dryfoos.  “March, here, is opposed to it, of course.  He’d like to publish ‘Every Other Week’ on the sly; keep it out of the papers, and off the newsstands; he’s a modest Boston petunia, and he shrinks from publicity; but I am not that kind of herb myself, and I want all the publicity we can get—­beg, borrow, or steal—­for this thing.  I say that you can’t work the sacred rites of hospitality in a better cause, and what I propose is a little dinner for the purpose of recognizing the hit we’ve made with this thing.  My idea was to strike you for the necessary funds, and do the thing on a handsome scale.  The term little dinner is a mere figure of speech.  A little dinner wouldn’t make a big talk, and what we want is the big talk, at present, if we don’t lay up a cent.  My notion was that pretty soon after Lent, now, when everybody is feeling just right, we should begin to send out our paragraphs, affirmative, negative, and explanatory, and along about the first of May we should sit down about a hundred strong, the most distinguished people in the country, and solemnize our triumph.  There it is in a nutshell.  I might expand and I might expound, but that’s the sum and substance of it.”