Beaton lit a cigarette which he pinched nervously between his lips before he spoke.  “You’ve come for that letter, I suppose, Fulkerson?  It isn’t done.”

Fulkerson turned from staring at the bust to which he had mounted.  “What you fretting about that letter for?  I don’t want your letter.”

Beaton stopped biting his cigarette and looked at him.  “Don’t want my letter?  Oh, very good!” he bristled up.  He took his cigarette from his lips, and blew the smoke through his nostrils, and then looked at Fulkerson.

“No; I don’t want your letter; I want you.”

Beacon disdained to ask an explanation, but he internally lowered his crest, while he continued to look at Fulkerson without changing his defiant countenance.  This suited Fulkerson well enough, and he went on with relish, “I’m going out of the syndicate business, old man, and I’m on a new thing.”  He put his leg over the back of a chair and rested his foot on its seat, and, with one hand in his pocket, he laid the scheme of ‘Every Other Week’ before Beaton with the help of the other.  The artist went about the room, meanwhile, with an effect of indifference which by no means offended Fulkerson.  He took some water into his mouth from a tumbler, which he blew in a fine mist over the head of Judas before swathing it in a dirty cotton cloth; he washed his brushes and set his palette; he put up on his easel the picture he had blocked on the day before, and stared at it with a gloomy face; then he gathered the sheets of his unfinished letter together and slid them into a drawer of his writing-desk.  By the time he had finished and turned again to Fulkerson, Fulkerson was saying:  “I did think we could have the first number out by New-Year’s; but it will take longer than that—­a month longer; but I’m not sorry, for the holidays kill everything; and by February, or the middle of February, people will get their breath again and begin to look round and ask what’s new.  Then we’ll reply in the language of Shakespeare and Milton, ‘Every Other Week; and don’t you forget it.’” He took down his leg and asked, “Got a pipe of ’baccy anywhere?”

Beaton nodded at a clay stem sticking out of a Japanese vase of bronze on his mantel.  “There’s yours,” he said; and Fulkerson said, “Thanks,” and filled the pipe and sat down and began to smoke tranquilly.

Beaton saw that he would have to speak now.  “And what do you want with me?”

“You?  Oh yes,” Fulkerson humorously dramatized a return to himself from a pensive absence.  “Want you for the art department.”

Beaton shook his head.  “I’m not your man, Fulkerson,” he said, compassionately.  “You want a more practical hand, one that’s in touch with what’s going.  I’m getting further and further away from this century and its claptrap.  I don’t believe in your enterprise; I don’t respect it, and I won’t have anything to do with it.  It would-choke me, that kind of thing.”

“That’s all right,” said Fulkerson.  He esteemed a man who was not going to let himself go cheap.  “Or if it isn’t, we can make it.  You and March will pull together first-rate.  I don’t care how much ideal you put into the thing; the more the better.  I can look after the other end of the schooner myself.”