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.
"It was different," March went on, "when the illustrations used to be
bad. Then the text had some chance."
"Old legitimate drama days, when ugliness and genius combined to storm
the galleries," said Fulkerson.
"We can still make them bad enough," said Beaton, ignoring Fulkerson in
his remark to March.
Fulkerson took the reply upon himself. "Well, you needn't make 'em so bad
as the old-style cuts; but you can make them unobtrusive, modestly
retiring. We've got hold of a process something like that those French
fellows gave Daudet thirty-five thousand dollars to write a novel to use
with; kind of thing that begins at one side; or one corner, and spreads
in a sort of dim religious style over the print till you can't tell which
is which.
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