“All right; very good; first-rate.  The ayes have it.  Paper it is.  I don’t mind telling you that we had decided for that paper before you came in.  Mr. March wanted it, because he felt in his bones just the way you do about it, and Mr. Dryfoos wanted it, because he’s the counting-room incarnate, and it’s cheaper; and I ’wanted it, because I always like to go with the majority.  Now what do you think of that little design itself?”

“The sketch?” Beaton pulled the book toward him again and looked at it again.  “Rather decorative.  Drawing’s not remarkable.  Graceful; rather nice.”  He pushed the book away again, and Fulkerson pulled it to his aide of the table.

“Well, that’s a piece of that amateur trash you despise so much.  I went to a painter I know-by-the-way, he was guilty of suggesting you for this thing, but I told him I was ahead of him—­and I got him to submit my idea to one of his class, and that’s the result.  Well, now, there ain’t anything in this world that sells a book like a pretty cover, and we’re going to have a pretty cover for ‘Every Other Week’ every time.  We’ve cut loose from the old traditional quarto literary newspaper size, and we’ve cut loose from the old two-column big page magazine size; we’re going to have a duodecimo page, clear black print, and paper that ’ll make your mouth water; and we’re going to have a fresh illustration for the cover of each number, and we ain’t agoing to give the public any rest at all.  Sometimes we’re going to have a delicate little landscape like this, and sometimes we’re going to have an indelicate little figure, or as much so as the law will allow.”

The young man leaning against the mantelpiece blushed a sort of protest.

March smiled and said, dryly, “Those are the numbers that Mr. Fulkerson is going to edit himself.”

“Exactly.  And Mr. Beaton, here, is going to supply the floating females, gracefully airing themselves against a sunset or something of that kind.”  Beaton frowned in embarrassment, while Fulkerson went on philosophically; “It’s astonishing how you fellows can keep it up at this stage of the proceedings; you can paint things that your harshest critic would be ashamed to describe accurately; you’re as free as the theatre.  But that’s neither here nor there.  What I’m after is the fact that we’re going to have variety in our title-pages, and we are going to 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.