“Then you’d better not say anything about ‘Every Other Week’.  Fulkerson is preternaturally unscrupulous.”

March began to think so too, at times.  He was perpetually suggesting changes in the make-up of the first number, with a view to its greater vividness of effect.  One day he came and said:  “This thing isn’t going to have any sort of get up and howl about it, unless you have a paper in the first number going for Bevans’s novels.  Better get Maxwell to do it.”

“Why, I thought you liked Bevans’s novels?”

“So I did; but where the good of ‘Every Other Week’ is concerned I am a Roman father.  The popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell is the man to do it.  There hasn’t been a new magazine started for the last three years that hasn’t had an article from Maxwell in its first number cutting Bevans all to pieces.  If people don’t see it, they’ll think ’Every Other Week’ is some old thing.”

March did not know whether Fulkerson was joking or not.  He suggested, “Perhaps they’ll think it’s an old thing if they do see it.”

“Well, get somebody else, then; or else get Maxwell to write under an assumed name.  Or—­I forgot!  He’ll be anonymous under our system, anyway.  Now there ain’t a more popular racket for us to work in that first number than a good, swinging attack on Bevans.  People read his books and quarrel over ’em, and the critics are all against him, and a regular flaying, with salt and vinegar rubbed in afterward, will tell more with people who like good old-fashioned fiction than anything else.  I like Bevans’s things, but, dad burn it! when it comes to that first number, I’d offer up anybody.”

“What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulkerson!” said March, with a laugh.

Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous about the attack on the novelist.  “Say!” he called out, gayly, “what should you think of a paper defending the late lamented system of slavery’?”

“What do you mean, Fulkerson?” asked March, with a puzzled smile.

Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk, and pushed himself back, but kept his balance to the eye by canting his hat sharply forward.  “There’s an old cock over there at the widow’s that’s written a book to prove that slavery was and is the only solution of the labor problem.  He’s a Southerner.”

“I should imagine,” March assented.

“He’s got it on the brain that if the South could have been let alone by the commercial spirit and the pseudophilanthropy of the North, it would have worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition for the laborer, in which he would have been insured against want, and protected in all his personal rights by the state.  He read the introduction to me last night.  I didn’t catch on to all the points—­his daughter’s an awfully pretty girl, and I was carrying that fact in my mind all the time, too, you know—­but that’s about the gist of it.”

“Seems to regard it as a lost opportunity?” said March.