and knees, as he said, in abject gratitude at Beaton’s feet, though he had his qualms, his questions; and he declared that Beaton was the most inspired ass since Balaam’s.  “We’re all asses, of course,” he admitted, in semi-apology to March; “but we’re no such asses as Beaton.”  He said that if the tasteful decorativeness of the thing did not kill it with the public outright, its literary excellence would give it the finishing stroke.  Perhaps that might be overlooked in the impression of novelty which a first number would give, but it must never happen again.  He implored March to promise that it should never happen again; he said their only hope was in the immediate cheapening of the whole affair.  It was bad enough to give the public too much quantity for their money, but to throw in such quality as that was simply ruinous; it must be stopped.  These were the expressions of his intimate moods; every front that he presented to the public wore a glow of lofty, of devout exultation.  His pride in the number gushed out in fresh bursts of rhetoric to every one whom he could get to talk with him about it.  He worked the personal kindliness of the press to the utmost.  He did not mind making himself ridiculous or becoming a joke in the good cause, as he called it.  He joined in the applause when a humorist at the club feigned to drop dead from his chair at Fulkerson’s introduction of the topic, and he went on talking that first number into the surviving spectators.  He stood treat upon all occasions, and he lunched attaches of the press at all hours.  He especially befriended the correspondents of the newspapers of other cities, for, as he explained to March, those fellows could give him any amount of advertising simply as literary gossip.  Many of the fellows were ladies who could not be so summarily asked out to lunch, but Fulkerson’s ingenuity was equal to every exigency, and he contrived somehow to make each of these feel that she had been possessed of exclusive information.  There was a moment when March conjectured a willingness in Fulkerson to work Mrs. March into the advertising department, by means of a tea to these ladies and their friends which she should administer in his apartment, but he did not encourage Fulkerson to be explicit, and the moment passed.  Afterward, when he told his wife about it, he was astonished to find that she would not have minded doing it for Fulkerson, and he experienced another proof of the bluntness of the feminine instincts in some directions, and of the personal favor which Fulkerson seemed to enjoy with the whole sex.  This alone was enough to account for the willingness of these correspondents to write about the first number, but March accused him of sending it to their addresses with boxes of Jacqueminot roses and Huyler candy.

Fulkerson let him enjoy his joke.  He said that he would do that or anything else for the good cause, short of marrying the whole circle of female correspondents.