March went away thinking of what Lindau had said, but not for the impersonal significance of his words so much as for the light they cast upon Lindau himself.  He thought the words violent enough, but in connection with what he remembered of the cheery, poetic, hopeful idealist, they were even more curious than lamentable.  In his own life of comfortable reverie he had never heard any one talk so before, but he had read something of the kind now and then in blatant labor newspapers which he had accidentally fallen in with, and once at a strikers’ meeting he had heard rich people denounced with the same frenzy.  He had made his own reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric, and the obvious buncombe of the motive, and he had not taken the matter seriously.

He could not doubt Lindau’s sincerity, and he wondered how he came to that way of thinking.  From his experience of himself he accounted for a prevailing literary quality in it; he decided it to be from Lindau’s reading and feeling rather than his reflection.  That was the notion he formed of some things he had met with in Ruskin to much the same effect; he regarded them with amusement as the chimeras of a rhetorician run away with by his phrases.

But as to Lindau, the chief thing in his mind was a conception of the droll irony of a situation in which so fervid a hater of millionaires should be working, indirectly at least, for the prosperity of a man like Dryfoos, who, as March understood, had got his money together out of every gambler’s chance in speculation, and all a schemer’s thrift from the error and need of others.  The situation was not more incongruous, however, than all the rest of the ‘Every Other Week’ affair.  It seemed to him that there were no crazy fortuities that had not tended to its existence, and as time went on, and the day drew near for the issue of the first number, the sense of this intensified till the whole lost at moments the quality of a waking fact, and came to be rather a fantastic fiction of sleep.

Yet the heterogeneous forces did co-operate to a reality which March could not deny, at least in their presence, and the first number was representative of all their nebulous intentions in a tangible form.  As a result, it was so respectable that March began to respect these intentions, began to respect himself for combining and embodying them in the volume which appealed to him with a novel fascination, when the first advance copy was laid upon his desk.  Every detail of it was tiresomely familiar already, but the whole had a fresh interest now.  He now saw how extremely fit and effective Miss Leighton’s decorative design for the cover was, printed in black and brick-red on the delicate gray tone of the paper.  It was at once attractive and refined, and he credited Beaton with quite all he merited in working it over to the actual shape.  The touch and the taste of the art editor were present throughout the number.  As Fulkerson said, Beaton had caught on with the delicacy