first of the series.  He said the thing was a new departure in magazines; it amounted to something in literature as radical as the American Revolution in politics:  it was the idea of self government in the arts; and it was this idea that had never yet been fully developed in regard to it.  That was what must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and the speeches must be reported.  Then it would go like wildfire.  He asked March whether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he was sure, would come; he was a literary man.  They ought to invite Mr. Evarts, and the Cardinal and the leading Protestant divines.  His ambition stopped at nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there he had to wait the return of the elder Dryfoos from the West, and Dryfoos was still delayed at Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was afraid he would stay there till his own enthusiasm escaped in other activities, other plans.

Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall under a superstitious subjection to another man; but March could not help seeing that in this possible measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson’s fetish.  He did not revere him, March decided, because it was not in Fulkerson’s nature to revere anything; he could like and dislike, but he could not respect.  Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; and besides the homage which those who have not pay to those who have, Fulkerson rendered Dryfoos the tribute of a feeling which March could only define as a sort of bewilderment.  As well as March could make out, this feeling was evoked by the spectacle of Dryfoos’s unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was fond of dazzling himself with.  It perfectly consisted with a keen sense of whatever was sordid and selfish in a man on whom his career must have had its inevitable effect.  He liked to philosophize the case with March, to recall Dryfoos as he was when he first met him still somewhat in the sap, at Moffitt, and to study the processes by which he imagined him to have dried into the hardened speculator, without even the pretence to any advantage but his own in his ventures.  He was aware of painting the character too vividly, and he warned March not to accept it exactly in those tints, but to subdue them and shade it for himself.  He said that where his advantage was not concerned, there was ever so much good in Dryfoos, and that if in some things he had grown inflexible, he had expanded in others to the full measure of the vast scale on which he did business.  It had seemed a little odd to March that a man should put money into such an enterprise as ‘Every Other Week’ and go off about other affairs, not only without any sign of anxiety, but without any sort of interest.  But Fulkerson said that was the splendid side of Dryfoos.  He had a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to the strain of any such uncertainty.  He had faced the music once for all, when he asked Fulkerson what the thing would cost in the different degrees of potential