"Nice people? Why haven't some of them bought a picture?" He perceived that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed: "Shabby things!" She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other things. "Put them around the studio. But you needn't come to see the effect." "No. I shall come to see you." But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said: "I suppose you've come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well, pour away! Has the magazine project failed?" "On the contrary, it has been a _succès fou_. But I don't feel altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print much more rubbish than I supposed." "Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their nostrils." She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she stepped back rhythmically, tilting her pretty head this way and that, he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her mouth and shut it to say, "Well?" "Well, some people have come back at me. They've said, What a rotten number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What's to be done about it? I can't ask people to buy truck or read truck because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the first quality." "No. You can't. Why," she asked, drifting up to her picture again, "don't you tear the bad out, and sell the good?" Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English. "Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the magazines? They're wired together, and you could no more tear out the bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human nature." "I see," Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find him in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days that were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the rear of the room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin stove, so busy at something that he scarcely seemed aware of her. "What in the world are you doing?" she demanded. He looked up. "Who? I? Oh, it's you! Why, I'm merely censoring the truck in the May number of this magazine." He held up a little roller, as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer's ink, which he had been applying to the open periodical. "I've taken a hint from the way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it lets it go to the public." "And _what_ a mess you're making!"