Produced by David Widger
By William Dean Howells
The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial success of 'Every OtherWeek' expanded in Fulkerson's fancy into a series. Instead of thepublishing and editorial force, with certain of the more representativeartists and authors sitting down to a modest supper in Mrs. Leighton'sparlors, he conceived of a dinner at Delmonico's, with the principalliterary and artistic, people throughout the country as guests, and aninexhaustible hospitality to reporters and correspondents, from whomparagraphs, prophetic and historic, would flow weeks before and after thefirst of the series. He said the thing was a new departure in magazines;it amounted to something in literature as radical as the AmericanRevolution 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 toit. That was what must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and thespeeches must be reported. Then it would go like wildfire. He asked Marchwhether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he wassure, would come; he was a literary man. They ought to invite Mr. Evarts,and the Cardinal and the leading Protestant divines. His ambition stoppedat nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there he had to wait thereturn of the elder Dryfoos from the West, and Dryfoos was still delayedat Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was afraid he wouldstay there till his own enthusiasm escaped in other activities, otherplans.
Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall under a superstitioussubjection to another man; but March could not help seeing that in thispossible measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson's fetish. He did not revere him,March decided, because it was not in Fulkerson's nature to revereanything; he could like and dislike, but he could not respect.Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; and besides the homagewhich those who have not pay to those who have, Fulkerson renderedDryfoos the tribute of a feeling which March could only define as a sortof bewilderment. As well as March could make out, this feeling was evokedby the spectacle of Dryfoos's unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was fond ofdazzling himself with. It perfectly consisted with a keen sense ofwhatever was sordid and selfish in a man on whom his career must have hadits inevitable effect. He liked to philosophize the case with March, torecall 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 havedried into the hardened speculator, without even the pretence to anyadvantage but his own in his ventures. He was aware of painting thecharacter too vividly, and he warned March not to accept it exactly inthose tints, but to subdue them and shade it for himself. He said thatwhere his advantage was not concerned, there was ever so much good inDryfoos, and that if in some things he had grown inflexible, he hadexpanded in others to the full measure of the vast scale on which he didbusiness. It had seemed a little odd to March that a man should put moneyinto such an enterprise as 'Every Other Week' and go off about otheraffairs, not only without any sign of anxiety, but without any sort ofinterest. But Fulkerson said that was the splendid side of Dryfoos. Hehad a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to the strain of any suchuncertainty. He had faced the music once for all, when he asked Fulkersonwhat the thing would cost in the different degrees of potential failure;and then he had gone off, leaving everything to Fulkerson and th