f Jacqueminot roses and Huyler candy.

Fulkerson let him enjoy his joke. He said that he would do that or
anything else for the good cause, short of marrying the whole circle of
female correspondents.

March was inclined to hope that if the first number had been made
too good for the country at large, the more enlightened taste of
metropolitan journalism would invite a compensating favor for it in New
York. But first Fulkerson and then the event proved him wrong. In spite
of the quality of the magazine, and in spite of the kindness which
so many newspaper men felt for Fulkerson, the notices in the New York
papers seemed grudging and provisional to the ardor of the editor. A
merit in the work was acknowledged, and certain defects in it for which
March had trembled were ignored; but the critics astonished him by
selecting for censure points which he was either proud of or had never
noticed; which being now brought to his notice he still could not feel
were faults. He owned to Fulkerson that if they had said so and so
against it, he could have agreed with them, but that to say thus and so
was preposterous; and that if the advertising had not been adjusted
with such generous recognition of the claims of the different papers, he
should have known the counting-room was at the bottom of it. As it was,
he could only attribute it to perversity or stupidity. It was certainly
stupid to condemn a magazine novelty like 'Every Other Week' for
being novel; and to augur that if it failed, it would fail through its
departure from the lines on which all the other prosperous magazines had
been built, was in the last degree perverse, and it looked malicious.
The fact that it was neither exactly a book nor a magazine ought to
be for it and not against it, since it would invade no other field; it
would prosper on no ground but its own.

XIV.

The more March thought of the injustice of the New York press (which
had not, however, attacked the literary quality of the number) the more
bitterly he resented it; and his wife's indignation superheated his
own. 'Every Other Week' had become a very personal affair with the whole
family; the children shared their parents' disgust; Belle was outspoken
in, her denunciations of a venal press. Mrs. March saw nothing but
ruin ahead, and began tacitly to plan a retreat to Boston, and an
establishment retrenched to the basis of two thousand a year. She shed
some secret tears in anticipation of the p