The editor leaned back in his chair. "I don't pretend to have Mr.
Fulkerson's genius for advertising; but it seems to me a little early
yet. We might celebrate later when we've got more to celebrate. At
present we're a pleasing novelty, rather than a fixed fact."

"Ah, you don't get the idea!" said Fulkerson. "What we want to do with
this dinner is to fix the fact."

"Am I going to come in anywhere?" the old man interrupted.

"You're going to come in at the head of the procession! We are going to
strike everything that is imaginative and romantic in the newspaper soul
with you and your history and your fancy for going in for this thing. I
can start you in a paragraph that will travel through all the newspapers,
from Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida. We have had all sorts of
rich men backing up literary enterprises, but the natural-gas man in
literature is a new thing, and the combination of your picturesque past
and your aesthetic present is something that will knock out the
sympathies of the American public the first round. I feel," said
Fulkerson, with a tremor of pathos in his voice, "that 'Every Other Week'
is at a disadvantage before the public as long as it's supposed to be my
enterprise, my idea. As far as I'm known at all, I'm known simply as a
syndicate man, and nobody in the press believes that I've got the money
to run the thing on a grand scale; a suspicion of insolvency must attach
to it sooner or later, and the fellows on the press will work up that
impression, sooner or later, if we don't give them something else to work
up. Now, as soon as I begin to give it away to the correspondents that
you're in it, with your untold millions--that, in fact, it was your idea
from the start, that you originated it to give full play to the