"We're all asses, of course," he admitted, in semi-apology to March; "but we're no such asses as Beaton." He said that if the tasteful decorativeness of the thing did not kill it with the public outright, its literary excellence would give it the finishing stroke.

Perhaps that might be overlooked in the impression of novelty which a first number would give, but it must never happen again.

He implored March to promise that it should never happen again; he said their only hope was in the immediate cheapening of the whole affair.

It was bad enough to give the public too much quantity for their money, but to throw in such quality as that was simply ruinous; it must be stopped.
These were the expressions of his intimate moods; every front that he presented to the public wore a glow of lofty, of devout exultation.

His pride in the number gushed out in fresh bursts of rhetoric to every one whom he could get to talk with him about it.