“But I don’t understand why you’ve set your mind on me,” March said. “I haven’t had any magazine experience, you know that; and I haven’t seriously attempted to do anything in literature since I was married. I gave up smoking and the Muse together. I suppose I could still manage a cigar, but I don’t believe I could—”
“Muse worth a cent.” Fulkerson took the thought out of his mouth and put it into his own words. “I know. Well, I don’t want you to. I don’t care if you never write a line for the thing, though you needn’t reject anything of yours, if it happens to be good, on that account. And I don’t want much experience in my editor; rather not have it. You told me, didn’t you, that you used to do some newspaper work before you settled down?”
“Yes; I thought my lines were permanently cast in those places once. It was more an accident than anything else that I got into the insurance business. I suppose I secretly hoped that if I made my living by something utterly different, I could come more freshly to literature proper in my leisure.”
“I see; and you found the insurance business too many for you. Well, anyway, you’ve always had a hankering for the inkpots; and the fact that you first gave me the idea of this thing shows that you’ve done more or less thinking about magazines.”
“Yes—less.”
“Well, all right. Now don’t you be troubled. I know what I want, generally speaking, and in this particular instance I want you. I might get a man of more experience, but I should probably get a man of more prejudice and self-conceit along with him, and a man with a following of the literary hangers-on that are sure to get round an editor sooner or later. I want to start fair, and I’ve found out in the syndicate business all the men that are worth having. But they know me, and they don’t know you, and that’s where we shall have the pull on them. They won’t be able to work the thing. Don’t you be anxious about the experience. I’ve got experience enough of my own to run a dozen editors. What I want is an editor who has taste, and you’ve got it; and conscience, and you’ve got it; and horse sense, and you’ve got that. And I like you because you’re a Western man, and I’m another. I do cotton to a Western man when I find him off East here, holding his own with the best of ’em, and showing ’em that he’s just as much civilized as they are. We both know what it is to have our bright home in the setting sun; heigh?”
“I think we Western men who’ve come East are apt to take ourselves a little too objectively and to feel ourselves rather more representative than we need,” March remarked.
Fulkerson was delighted. “You’ve hit it! We do! We are!”
“And as for holding my own, I’m not very proud of what I’ve done in that way; it’s been very little to hold. But I know what you mean, Fulkerson, and I’ve felt the same thing myself; it warmed me toward you when we first met. I can’t help suffusing a little to any man when I hear that he was born on the other side of the Alleghanies. It’s perfectly stupid. I despise the same thing when I see it in Boston people.”
Fulkerson pulled first one of his blond whiskers and then the other, and twisted the end of each into a point, which he left to untwine itself. He fixed March with his little eyes, which had a curious innocence in their cunning, and tapped the desk immediately in front of him. “What I like about you is that you’re broad in your sympathies. The first time I saw you, that night on the Quebec boat, I said to myself: ‘There’s a man I want to know. There’s a human being.’ I was a little afraid of Mrs. March and the children, but I felt at home with you—thoroughly domesticated—before I passed a word with you; and when you spoke first, and opened up with a joke over that fellow’s tableful of light literature and Indian moccasins and birch-bark toy canoes and stereoscopic views, I knew that we were brothers—spiritual twins. I recognized the Western style of fun, and I thought, when you said you were from Boston, that it was some of the same. But I see now that its being a cold fact, as far as the last fifteen or twenty years count, is just so much gain. You know both sections, and you can make this thing go, from ocean to ocean.”
“We might ring that into the prospectus, too,” March suggested, with a smile. “You might call the thing From Sea to Sea. By the way, what are you going to call it?”
“I haven’t decided yet; that’s one of the things I wanted to talk with you about. I had thought of The Syndicate; but it sounds kind of dry, and doesn’t seem to cover the ground exactly. I should like something that would express the cooperative character of the thing, but I don’t know as I can get it.”
“Might call it The Mutual.”
“They’d think it was an insurance paper. No, that won’t do. But Mutual comes pretty near the idea. If we could get something like that, it would pique curiosity; and then if we could get paragraphs afloat explaining that the contributors were to be paid according to the sales, it would be a first-rate ad.”
He bent a wide, anxious, inquiring smile upon March, who suggested, lazily: “You might call it The Round-Robin. That would express
