Big Poker Site hazard of new fortunes 77

if you want to take the trouble. Its what they came to New York for. I fancy its the great ambition of their lives to be met." "Oh yes," said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked up and said, intellectually: "Dont you think its a great pity? How much better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!" "Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them," said Beaton. "I dont suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?" "No," said Miss Vance, amused. "Not that I shouldnt like to go." "What a daring spirit! You ought to be on the staff of Every Other Week," said Beaton. "The staff-Every Other Week? What is it?" "The missing link; the long-felt want of a tie between the Arts and the Dollars." Beaton gave her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketch of the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of the new enterprise. Miss Vance understood too little about business of any kind to know how it differed from other enterprises of its sort. She thought it was delightful; she thought Beaton must be glad to be part of it, though he had represented himself so bored, so injured, by Fulkersons insisting upon having him. "And is it a secret? Is it a thing not to be spoken of?" "Tutt altro! Fulkerson will be enraptured to have it spoken of in society. He would pay any reasonable bill for the advertisement." "What a delightful creature! Tell him it shall all be spent in charity." "He would like that. He would get two paragraphs out of the fact, and your name would go into the Literary Notes of all the newspapers." "Oh, but I shouldnt want my name used!" cried the girl, half horrified into fancying the situation real. "Then youd better not say anything about Every Other Week. Fulkerson is preternaturally unscrupulous." March began to think so too, at times. He was perpetually suggesting changes in the make-up of the first number, with a view to its greater vividness of effect. One day he came and said: "This thing isnt going to have any sort of get up and howl about it, unless you have a paper in the first number going for Bevanss novels. Better get Maxwell to do it." "Why, I thought you liked Bevanss novels?" "So I did; but where the good of Every Other Week is concerned I am a Roman father. The popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell is the man to do it. There hasnt been a new magazine started for the last three years that hasnt had an article from Maxwell in its first number cutting Bevans all to pieces. If people dont see it, theyll think Every Other Week is some old thing." March did not know whether Fulkerson was joking or not. He suggested, "Perhaps theyll think its an old thing if they do see it." "Well, get somebody else, then; or else get Maxwell to write under an assumed name. Or--I forgot! Hell be anonymous under our system, anyway. Now there aint a more popular racket for us to work in that first number than a good, swinging attack on Bevans. People read his books and quarrel over em, and the critics are all against him, and a regular flaying, with salt and vinegar rubbed in afterward, will tell more with people who like good old-fashioned fiction than anything else. I like Bevanss things, but, dad burn it! when it comes to that first number, Id offer up anybody." "What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulkerson!" said March, with a laugh. Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous about the attack on the novelist. "Say!" he called out, gayly, "what should you think of a paper defending the late lamented system of slavery?" "What do you mean, Fulkerson?" asked March, with a puzzled smile. Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk, and pushed himself back, but kept his balance to the eye by canting his hat sharply forward. "Theres an old cock over there at the widows thats written a book to prove that slavery was and is the only solution of the labor problem. Hes a Southerner." "I should imagine," March assented. "Hes got it on the brain that if the South could have been let alone by the commercial spirit and the pseudophilanthropy of the North, it would have worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition for the laborer, in which he would have been insured against want, and protected in

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