n he had carried a plastic study so far that the sculptors
who saw it said that Beaton might have been an architect, but would
certainly never be a sculptor. At the same time he did some hurried,
nervous things that had a popular charm, and that sold in plaster
reproductions, to the profit of another. Beaton justly despised the
popular charm in these, as well as in the paintings he sold from time to
time; he said it was flat burglary to have taken money for them, and
he would have been living almost wholly upon the bounty of the old
tombstone-cutter in Syracuse if it had not been for the syndicate
letters which he supplied to Fulkerson for ten dollars a week.

They were very well done, but he hated doing them after the first two or
three, and had to be punched up for them by Fulkerson, who did not cease
to prize them, and who never failed to punch him up. Beaton being what
he was, Fulkerson was his creditor as well as patron; and Fulkerson
being what he was, had an enthusiastic patience with the elusive,
facile, adaptable, unpractical nature of Beaton. He was very proud of
his art-letters, as he called them; but then Fulkerson was proud of
everything he secured for his syndicate. The fact that he had secured it
gave it value; he felt as if he had written it himself.

One art trod upon another's heels with Beaton. The day before he had
rushed upon canvas the conception of a picture which he said to himself
was glorious, and to others (at the table d'hote of Maroni) was not
bad. He had worked at it in a fury till the light failed him, and he
execrated the dying day. But he lit his lamp and transferred the process
of his thinking from the canvas to the opening of the syndicate letter
which he knew Fulkerson would be coming for in the morning. He remained
talking so long after dinner in the same strain as he had painted and
written in that he could not finish his letter that night. The next
morning, while he was making his tea for breakfast, the postman brought
him a letter from his father enclosing a little check, and begging him
with tender, almost deferential, urgence to come as lightly upon him as
possible, for just now his expenses were very heavy. It brought tears of
shame into Beaton's eyes--the fine, smouldering, floating eyes that many
ladies admired, under the thick bang--and he said to himself that if he
were half a man he would go home and go to work cutting gravestones in
his father's shop. But he would wait, a