good amateur work in whatever art. He
rescued them from their weaknesses and errors, while he left in them the
evidence of the pleasure with which a clever young man, or a sensitive
girl, or a refined woman had done them. Inevitably from his manipulation,
however, the art of the number acquired homogeneity, and there was
nothing casual in its appearance. The result, March eagerly owned, was
better than the literary result, and he foresaw that the number would be
sold and praised chiefly for its pictures. Yet he was not ashamed of the
literature, and he indulged his admiration of it the more freely because
he had not only not written it, but in a way had not edited it. To be
sure, he had chosen all the material, but he had not voluntarily put it
all together for that number; it had largely put itself together, as
every number of every magazine does, and as it seems more and more to do,
in the experience of every editor. There had to be, of course, a story,
and then a sketch of travel. There was a literary essay and a social
essay; there was a dramatic trifle, very gay, very light; there was a
dashing criticism on the new pictures, the new plays, the new books, the
new fashions; and then there was the translation of a bit of vivid
Russian realism, which the editor owed to Lindau's exploration of the
foreign periodicals left with him; Lindau was himself a romanticist of
the Victor Hugo sort, but he said this fragment of Dostoyevski was good
of its kind. The poem was a bit of society verse, with a backward look
into simpler and wholesomer experiences.

Fulkerson was extremely proud of the number; but he said it was too
good--too good from every point of view. The cover was too good, and the
paper was too good, and that device of rough edges, which got over the
objection to uncut leaves while it secured their aesthetic effect, was a
thing that he trembled for, though he rejoiced in it as a stroke of the
highest genius. It had come from Beaton at the last moment, as a
compromise, when the problem of the vulgar croppiness of cut leaves and
the unpopularity of uncut leaves seemed to have no solution but suicide.
Fulkerson was still morally crawling round on his hands and knees, as he
said, in abject gratitude at Beaton's feet, though he had his qualms, his
questions; and he declared that Beaton was the most inspired ass since
Balaam's. "We're all asses, of course," he admitted, in semi-apology to
March; "but we're no such asses