Fulkerson was delighted.  “You’ve hit it!  We do!  We are!”

“And as for holding my own, I’m not very proud of what I’ve done in that way; it’s been very little to hold.  But I know what you mean, Fulkerson, and I’ve felt the same thing myself; it warmed me toward you when we first met.  I can’t help suffusing a little to any man when I hear that he was born on the other side of the Alleghanies.  It’s perfectly stupid.  I despise the same thing when I see it in Boston people.”

Fulkerson pulled first one of his blond whiskers and then the other, and twisted the end of each into a point, which he left to untwine itself.  He fixed March with his little eyes, which had a curious innocence in their cunning, and tapped the desk immediately in front of him.  “What I like about you is that you’re broad in your sympathies.  The first time I saw you, that night on the Quebec boat, I said to myself:  ’There’s a man I want to know.  There’s a human being.’  I was a little afraid of Mrs. March and the children, but I felt at home with you—­thoroughly domesticated—­before I passed a word with you; and when you spoke first, and opened up with a joke over that fellow’s tableful of light literature and Indian moccasins and birch-bark toy canoes and stereoscopic views, I knew that we were brothers-spiritual twins.  I recognized the Western style of fun, and I thought, when you said you were from Boston, that it was some of the same.  But I see now that its being a cold fact, as far as the last fifteen or twenty years count, is just so much gain.  You know both sections, and you can make this thing go, from ocean to ocean.”

“We might ring that into the prospectus, too,” March suggested, with a smile.  “You might call the thing ‘From Sea to Sea.’  By-the-way, what are you going to call it?”

“I haven’t decided yet; that’s one of the things I wanted to talk with you about.  I had thought of ‘The Syndicate’; but it sounds kind of dry, and doesn’t seem to cover the ground exactly.  I should like something that would express the co-operative character of the thing, but I don’t know as I can get it.”

“Might call it ’The Mutual’.”

“They’d think it was an insurance paper.  No, that won’t do.  But Mutual comes pretty near the idea.  If we could get something like that, it would pique curiosity; and then if we could get paragraphs afloat explaining that the contributors were to be paid according to the sales, it would be a first-rate ad.”

He bent a wide, anxious, inquiring smile upon March, who suggested, lazily:  “You might call it ‘The Round-Robin’.  That would express the central idea of irresponsibility.  As I understand, everybody is to share the profits and be exempt from the losses.  Or, if I’m wrong, and the reverse is true, you might call it ‘The Army of Martyrs’.  Come, that sounds attractive, Fulkerson!  Or what do you think of ‘The Fifth Wheel’?  That would forestall the criticism that there are too many literary periodicals already.  Or, if you want to put forward the idea of complete independence, you could call it ‘The Free Lance’; or—­”