Of the 544 or so decorations for the _Morte d’Arthur_, several are repeated--some more than once. Let us take 400 as a rough estimate, just for argument. Calculating roughly that he made 400 drawings for the _Morte d’Arthur_, did he get a living wage for them? Did he get a bare subsistence, say of a guinea a drawing? Supposing he got £100 for them, then he would be working at something like five shillings a drawing! Two hundred pounds would be ten shillings a drawing; £300 would be fifteen shillings. His bank-book alone can reveal to us what he earned. But supposing he did not get a living wage! The law will not permit an usurer to charge even a scapegrace waster more than a certain usury. If so, then it is not lawful or moral to contract with an artist to work for a beggar’s wage. We cannot judge Beardsley until we know the whole truth. The quality of mercy is not strained. His “pound of flesh” may be an abomination to demand. It is not enough to hold up self-righteous hands in protestation, Shylock-wise, that he refused to pay his pound of flesh.... Even before Beardsley was done with _Salome_, he had exhausted the Japanesque formula of line. The play completed, the feverish brain has to evolve a _Title-page_, a _List of Contents_, and a _Finis_; and we have seen him playing in a new key. Closing the book of _Salome_, weary of the Japanesque, having got from it all that it would yield his restless spirit, he turns away, and picking up the rich blacks of his _Morte d’Arthur_ designs again, he was about to burst into a new song as hinted at by the last three designs for _Salome_. An artist is finding himself. Beardsley is on the threshold of a new utterance. [Illustration: TITLE PAGE OF “SALOME”] About the end of October or early in the November of 1893, Beardsley wrote to his old school that he had just signed a contract for a new book, to consist of his own drawings only, “without any letterpress,” which was probably a slight misunderstanding of what Beardsley said: that he was to make drawings with no relation to the letterpress in a new venture about to appear. For _The Yellow Book_ is the only contract that emerges out of this time. It is known that Henry Harland and Aubrey Beardsley were about this time, planning a magazine wherein to publish their wares; and that they took their scheme to John Lane. Whilst at work on the _Salome_, Beardsley began the long series of decorative covers, with the fanciful “keys,” on the reverse back, forming the initials of the author of each volume, which Elkin Mathews and John Lane began to issue from The Bodley Head in Vigo Street as _The Keynote Series_ of novels, published on the heels of the wide success of _Keynotes_ by George Egerton in the midst of the feminist stir and the first notoriety of the “sex novel” of this time. And it was in 1893 that Beardsley was elected to the New English Art Club.