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
bad. Then the text had some chance."

"Old legitimate drama days, when ugliness and genius combined to storm
the galleries," said Fulkerson.

"We can still make them bad enough," said Beaton, ignoring Fulkerson in
his remark to March.

Fulkerson took the reply upon himself. "Well, you needn't make 'em so
bad as the old-style cuts; but you can make them unobtrusive, modestly
retiring. We've got hold of a process something like that those French
fellows gave Daudet thirty-five thousand dollars to write a novel to use
with; kind of thing that begins at one side; or one corner, and spreads
in a sort of dim religious style over the print till you can't tell
which is which. Then we've got a notion that where the pictures don't
behave quite so sociably, they can be dropped into the text, like
a little casual remark, don't you know, or a comment that has some
connection, or maybe none at all, with what's going on in the story.
Something like this." Fulkerson took away one knee from the table long
enough to open the drawer, and pull from it a book that he shoved toward
Beacon. "That's a Spanish book I happened to see at Brentano's, and I
froze to it on account of the pictures. I guess they're pretty good."

"Do you expect to get such drawings in this country?" asked Beaton,
after a glance at the book. "Such character--such drama? You won't."

"Well, I'm not so sure," said Fulkerson, "come to get our amateurs
warmed up to the work. But what I want is to get the physical effect,
so to speak-get that sized picture into our page, and set the fashion
of it. I shouldn't care if the illustration was som