Big Poker Site hazard of new fortunes 55

What youll get by inviting volunteer illustrations will be a lot of amateur trash. And how are you going to submit your literature for illustration? It cant be done. At any rate, I wont undertake to do it." "Well get up a School of Illustration," said Fulkerson, with cynical security. "You can read the things and explain em, and your pupils can make their sketches under your eye. They wouldnt be much further out than most illustrations are if they never knew what they were illustrating. You might select from what comes in and make up a sort of pictorial variations to the literature without any particular reference to it. Well, I understand you to accept?" "No, you dont." "That is, to consent to help us with your advice and criticism. Thats all I want. It wont commit you to anything; and you can be as anonymous as anybody." At the door Fulkerson added: "By-the-way, the new man--the fellow thats taken my old syndicate business--will want you to keep on; but I guess hes going to try to beat you down on the price of the letters. Hes going in for retrenchment. I brought along a check for this one; Im to pay for that." He offered Beaton an envelope. "I cant take it, Fulkerson. The letters paid for already." Fulkerson stepped forward and laid the envelope on the table among the tubes of paint. "It isnt the letter merely. I thought you wouldnt object to a little advance on your Every Other Week work till you kind of got started." Beaton remained inflexible. "It cant be done, Fulkerson. Dont I tell you I cant sell myself out to a thing I dont believe in? Cant you understand that?" "Oh yes; I can understand that first-rate. I dont want to buy you; I want to borrow you. Its all right. See? Come round when you can; Id like to introduce you to old March. Thats going to be our address." He put a card on the table beside the envelope, and Beaton allowed him to go without making him take the check back. He had remembered his fathers plea; that unnerved him, and he promised himself again to return his fathers poor little check and to work on that picture and give it to Fulkerson for the check he had left and for his back debts. He resolved to go to work on the picture at once; he had set his palette for it; but first he looked at Fulkersons check. It was for only fifty dollars, and the canny Scotch blood in Beaton rebelled; he could not let this picture go for any such money; he felt a little like a man whose generosity has been trifled with. The conflict of emotions broke him up, and he could not work. IV The day wasted away in Beatons hands; at half-past four oclock he went out to tea at the house of a lady who was At Home that afternoon from four till seven. By this time Beaton was in possession of one of those other selves of which we each have several about us, and was again the laconic, staccato, rather worldlified young artist whose moments of a controlled utterance and a certain distinction of manner had commended him to Mrs. Horns fancy in the summer at St. Barnaby. Mrs. Horns rooms were large, and they never seemed very full, though this perhaps was because people were always so quiet. The ladies, who outnumbered the men ten to one, as they always do at a New York tea, were dressed in sympathy with the low tone every one spoke in, and with the subdued light which gave a crepuscular uncertainty to the few objects, the dim pictures, the unexcited upholstery, of the rooms. One breathed free of bric-a-brac there, and the new-comer breathed softly as one does on going into church after service has begun. This might be a suggestion from the voiceless behavior of the man-servant who let you in, but it was also because Mrs. Horns At Home was a ceremony, a decorum, and not festival. At far greater houses there was more gayety, at richer houses there was more freedom; the suppression at Mrs. Horns was a personal, not a social, effect; it was an efflux of her character, demure, silentious, vague, but very correct. Beaton easily found his way to her around the grouped skirts and among the detached figures, and received a pressure of welcome from the hand which she momentarily relaxed from the tea-pot. She sat behind a

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