Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/227

Rh It was dreadful, this snub to my happy sense that I had found out. 'I thought you wanted John Delavoy. I've simply stuck to him.'

Mr. Beston gave a dry laugh. 'I should think you had!' Then after an instant he turned oracular. 'Perhaps we wanted him—perhaps we didn't. We didn't at any rate want indelicacy.'

'Indelicacy?' I almost shrieked. 'Why, it's pure portraiture.'

'"Pure," my dear fellow, just begs the question. It's most objectionable—that's what it is. For portraiture of such things, at all events, there's no place in our scheme.'

I speculated. 'Your scheme for an account of Delavoy?'

Mr. Beston looked as if I trifled. 'Our scheme for a successful magazine.'

'No place, do I understand you, for criticism? No place for the great figures? If you don't want too much detail,' I went on, 'I recall perfectly that I was careful not to go into it. What I tried for was a general vivid picture—which I really supposed I arrived at. I boiled the man down—I gave the three or four leading notes. Them I did try to give with some intensity.'

Mr. Beston, while I spoke, had turned about and, with a movement that confessed to impatience and even not a little, I thought, to irritation, fumbled on his table among a mass of papers and other objects; after which he had pulled out a couple of drawers. Finally he fronted me anew with my copy in his hand, and I had meanwhile added a word about the disadvantage at which he placed me. To have made me wait was unkind; but to have made me wait for such news! I ought at least to have been told it earlier. He replied to this that he had not at first had time to read me, and, on the evidence of my other things, had taken me pleasantly for granted: he had only been enlightened by the revelation of the proof. What he had fished out of his drawer was, in effect, not my