The day he spoke of the dinner he rose and called from his door: "March,
I say, come down here a minute, will you? Conrad, I want you, too."

The editor and the publisher found the manager and the proprietor seated
on opposite sides of the table. "It's about those funeral baked meats,
you know," Fulkerson explained, "and I was trying to give Mr. Dryfoos
some idea of what we wanted to do. That is, what I wanted to do," he
continued, turning from March to Dryfoos. "March, here, is opposed to it,
of course. He'd like to publish 'Every Other Week' on the sly; keep it
out of the papers, and off the newsstands; he's a modest Boston petunia,
and he shrinks from publicity; but I am not that kind of herb myself, and
I want all the publicity we can get--beg, borrow, or steal--for this
thing. I say that you can't work the sacred rites of hospitality in a
better cause, and what I propose is a little dinner for the purpose of
recognizing the hit we've made with this thing. My idea was to strike you
for the necessary funds, and do the thing on a handsome scale. The term
little dinner is a mere figure of speech. A little dinner wouldn't make a
big talk, and what we want is the big talk, at present, if we don't lay
up a cent. My notion was that pretty soon after Lent, now, when everybody
is feeling just right, we should begin to send out our paragraphs,
affirmative, negative, and explanatory, and along about the first of May
we should sit down about a hundred strong, the most distinguished people
in the country, and solemnize our triumph. There it is in a nutshell. I
might expand and I might expound, but that's the sum and substance of
it."

Fulkerson stopped, and ran his eyes eagerly over the faces of his three
listeners, one after the other. March was a little surprised when Dryfoos
turned to him, but that reference of the question seemed to give
Fulkerson particular pleasure: "What do you think, Mr. March?"