The young man leaning against the mantelpiece blushed a sort of protest.

March smiled and said, dryly, "Those are the numbers that Mr. Fulkerson
is going to edit himself."

"Exactly. And Mr. Beaton, here, is going to supply the floating females,
gracefully airing themselves against a sunset or something of that kind."
Beaton frowned in embarrassment, while Fulkerson went on philosophically;
"It's astonishing how you fellows can keep it up at this stage of the
proceedings; you can paint things that your harshest critic would be
ashamed to describe accurately; you're as free as the theatre. But that's
neither here nor there. What I'm after is the fact that we're going to
have variety in our title-pages, and we are going to have novelty in the
illustrations of the body of the book. March, here, if he had his own
way, wouldn't have any illustrations at all."

"Not because I don't like them, Mr. Beacon," March interposed, "but
because I like them too much. I find that I look at the pictures in an
illustrated article, but I don't read the article very much, and I fancy
that's the case with most other people. You've got to doing them so
prettily that you take our eyes off the literature, if you don't take our
minds off."

"Like the society beauties on the stage: people go in for the beauty so
much that they don't know what the play is. But the box-office gets there
all the same, and that's what Mr. Dryfoos wants." Fulkerson looked up
gayly at Mr. Dryfoos, who smiled deprecatingly.

"It was different," March went on, "when the illustrations used to be