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 as Beaton." He said that
if the ta