March was inclined to hope that if the first number had been made too good for the country at large, the more enlightened taste of metropolitan journalism would invite a compensating favor for it in New York.  But first Fulkerson and then the event proved him wrong.  In spite of the quality of the magazine, and in spite of the kindness which so many newspaper men felt for Fulkerson, the notices in the New York papers seemed grudging and provisional to the ardor of the editor.  A merit in the work was acknowledged, and certain defects in it for which March had trembled were ignored; but the critics astonished him by selecting for censure points which he was either proud of or had never noticed; which being now brought to his notice he still could not feel were faults.  He owned to Fulkerson that if they had said so and so against it, he could have agreed with them, but that to say thus and so was preposterous; and that if the advertising had not been adjusted with such generous recognition of the claims of the different papers, he should have known the counting-room was at the bottom of it.  As it was, he could only attribute it to perversity or stupidity.  It was certainly stupid to condemn a magazine novelty like ‘Every Other Week’ for being novel; and to augur that if it failed, it would fail through its departure from the lines on which all the other prosperous magazines had been built, was in the last degree perverse, and it looked malicious.  The fact that it was neither exactly a book nor a magazine ought to be for it and not against it, since it would invade no other field; it would prosper on no ground but its own.

XIV.

The more March thought of the injustice of the New York press (which had not, however, attacked the literary quality of the number) the more bitterly he resented it; and his wife’s indignation superheated his own.  ‘Every Other Week’ had become a very personal affair with the whole family; the children shared their parents’ disgust; Belle was outspoken in, her denunciations of a venal press.  Mrs. March saw nothing but ruin ahead, and began tacitly to plan a retreat to Boston, and an establishment retrenched to the basis of two thousand a year.  She shed some secret tears in anticipation of the privations which this must involve; but when Fulkerson came to see March rather late the night of the publication day, she nobly told him that if the worst came to the worst she could only have the kindliest feeling toward him, and should not regard him as in the slightest degree responsible.

“Oh, hold on, hold on!” he protested.  “You don’t think we’ve made a failure, do you?”

“Why, of course,” she faltered, while March remained gloomily silent.

“Well, I guess we’ll wait for the official count, first.  Even New York hasn’t gone against us, and I guess there’s a majority coming down to Harlem River that could sweep everything before it, anyway.”