“The Jenkins story?” I said.  “How did you come to see it?”

“Then send me the Kensington,” he answered.  There was a touch of sourness in his tone, and I remembered that the Kensington I had seen had been ballasted with seven goodly pages by Callan himself—­seven unreadable packed pages of a serial.

“As I was saying,” Callan began again, “you ought to know me very well, and I suppose you are acquainted with my books.  As for the rest, I will give you what material you want.”

“But, my dear Callan,” I said, “I’ve never tried my hand at that sort of thing.”

Callan silenced me with a wave of his hand.

“It struck both Fox and myself that your—­your ‘Jenkins’ was just what was wanted,” he said; “of course, that was a study of a kind of broken-down painter.  But it was well done.”

I bowed my head.  Praise from Callan was best acknowledged in silence.

“You see, what we want, or rather what Fox wants,” he explained, “is a kind of series of studies of celebrities chez eux.  Of course, they are not broken down.  But if you can treat them as you treated Jenkins —­get them in their studies, surrounded by what in their case stands for the broken lay figures and the faded serge curtains—­it will be exactly the thing.  It will be a new line, or rather—­what is a great deal better, mind you—­an old line treated in a slightly, very slightly different way.  That’s what the public wants.”

“Ah, yes,” I said, “that’s what the public wants.  But all the same, it’s been done time out of mind before.  Why, I’ve seen photographs of you and your arm-chair and your pen-wiper and so on, half a score of times in the sixpenny magazines.”

Callan again indicated bland superiority with a wave of his hand.

“You undervalue yourself,” he said.

I murmured—­“Thanks.”

“This is to be—­not a mere pandering to curiosity—­but an attempt to get at the inside of things—­to get the atmosphere, so to speak; not merely to catalogue furniture.”

He was quoting from the prospectus of the new paper, and then cleared his throat for the utterance of a tremendous truth.

“Photography—­is not—­Art,” he remarked.

The fantastic side of our colloquy began to strike me.

“After all,” I thought to myself, “why shouldn’t that girl have played at being a denizen of another sphere?  She did it ever so much better than Callan.  She did it too well, I suppose.”

“The price is very decent,” Callan chimed in.  “I don’t know how much per thousand, ...but....”

I found myself reckoning, against my will as it were.

“You’ll do it, I suppose?” he said.

I thought of my debts ...  “Why, yes, I suppose so,” I answered.  “But who are the others that I am to provide with atmospheres?”

Callan shrugged his shoulders.

“Oh, all sorts of prominent people—­soldiers, statesmen, Mr. Churchill, the Foreign Minister, artists, preachers—­all sorts of people.”