the fashion of it. I
shouldn't care if the illustration was sometimes confined to an initial
letter and a tail-piece."

"Couldn't be done here. We haven't the touch. We're good in some things,
but this isn't in our way," said Beaton, stubbornly. "I can't think of a
man who could do it; that is, among those that would."

"Well, think of some woman, then," said Fulkerson, easily. "I've got a
notion that the women could help us out on this thing, come to get 'em
interested. There ain't anything so popular as female fiction; why not
try female art?"

"The females themselves have been supposed to have been trying it for a
good while," March suggested; and Mr. Dryfoos laughed nervously; Beaton
remained solemnly silent.

"Yes, I know," Fulkerson assented. "But I don't mean that kind exactly.
What we want to do is to work the 'ewig Weibliche' in this concern. We
want to make a magazine that will go for the women's fancy every time. I
don't mean with recipes for cooking and fashions and personal gossip
about authors and society, but real high-tone literature that will show
women triumphing in all the stories, or else suffering tremendously.
We've got to recognize that women form three-fourths of the reading
public in this country, and go for their tastes and their sensibilities
and their sex-piety along the whole line. They do like to think that
women can do things better than men; and if we can let it leak out and
get around in the papers that the managers of 'Every Other Week' couldn't
stir a peg in the line of the illustrations they wanted till they got a
lot of God-gifted girls to help them, it 'll make the fortune of the
thing. See?"

He looked sunnily round at the other men, and March said: "You ought to
be in charge of a Siamese white elephant, Fulkerson. It's a disgrace to
be connected with you."

"It seems to me," said Becton, "that you'd better get a God-gifted girl
for your art editor."

Fulkerson leaned alertly forward, and touched him on the shoulder, with a
compassionate smile. "My dear boy, they haven't got the genius of
organization. It takes a very masculine man for that--a man who combines
the most subtle and refined sympathies with the most forceful purposes
and the most ferruginous will-power. Which his name is Angus Beaton, and
here he sets!"

The others laughed with Fulkerson at his gross burlesque of flattery, and
Becton frowned sheepishly. "I suppose you understand this man's style,"
he growled