Fulkerson stopped, and ran his eyes eagerly over the faces of his three listeners, one after the other.  March was a little surprised when Dryfoos turned to him, but that reference of the question seemed to give Fulkerson particular pleasure:  “What do you think, Mr. March?”

The editor leaned back in his chair.  “I don’t pretend to have Mr. Fulkerson’s genius for advertising; but it seems to me a little early yet.  We might celebrate later when we’ve got more to celebrate.  At present we’re a pleasing novelty, rather than a fixed fact.”

“Ah, you don’t get the idea!” said Fulkerson.  “What we want to do with this dinner is to fix the fact.”

“Am I going to come in anywhere?” the old man interrupted.

“You’re going to come in at the head of the procession!  We are going to strike everything that is imaginative and romantic in the newspaper soul with you and your history and your fancy for going in for this thing.  I can start you in a paragraph that will travel through all the newspapers, from Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida.  We have had all sorts of rich men backing up literary enterprises, but the natural-gas man in literature is a new thing, and the combination of your picturesque past and your aesthetic present is something that will knock out the sympathies of the American public the first round.  I feel,” said Fulkerson, with a tremor of pathos in his voice, “that ‘Every Other Week’ is at a disadvantage before the public as long as it’s supposed to be my enterprise, my idea.  As far as I’m known at all, I’m known simply as a syndicate man, and nobody in the press believes that I’ve got the money to run the thing on a grand scale; a suspicion of insolvency must attach to it sooner or later, and the fellows on the press will work up that impression, sooner or later, if we don’t give them something else to work up.  Now, as soon as I begin to give it away to the correspondents that you’re in it, with your untold millions—­that, in fact, it was your idea from the start, that you originated it to give full play to the humanitarian tendencies of Conrad here, who’s always had these theories of co-operation, and longed to realize them for the benefit of our struggling young writers and artists—­”

March had listened with growing amusement to the mingled burlesque and earnest of Fulkerson’s self-sacrificing impudence, and with wonder as to how far Dryfoos was consenting to his preposterous proposition, when Conrad broke out:  “Mr. Fulkerson, I could not allow you to do that.  It would not be true; I did not wish to be here; and—­and what I think—­what I wish to do—­that is something I will not let any one put me in a false position about.  No!” The blood rushed into the young man’s gentle face, and he met his father’s glance with defiance.