out these settles. They simply invite
loafing."

"I've noticed that they seem to do that."

"And better paint out that motto."

"I've sometimes fancied I'd better. _That_ invites loafing, too;
though some nice people like it."

"Nice people? Why haven't some of them bought a picture?" He perceived
that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when
removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed:
"Shabby things!"

She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was
going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other
things.

"Put them around the studio. But you needn't come to see the effect."

"No. I shall come to see you."

But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the
way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:

"I suppose you've come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well,
pour away! Has the magazine project failed?"

"On the contrary, it has been a _succes fou_. But I don't feel
altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print
much more rubbish than I supposed."

"Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their
nostrils."

She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close
to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her
mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she
stepped back rhythmically, tilting her pretty head this way and that,
he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her
mouth and shut it to say, "Well?"

"Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten
number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in
all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's
to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck
because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the
first quality."

"No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting up to her picture again,
"don't you tear the bad out, and sell the good?"

Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English.
"Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the
magazines? They're wired together, and you could no more tear out the
bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human
nature."

"I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to
let him go disconsolate. Aft