que furniture. This man--a Mr. Forrester--came to me
with his wife, very keen to take a house in that precise neighborhood.
I asked him the lowest rent to start with, and I told him that the late
owner had died of typhoid there, and that the drains had practically not
been touched since."

"And yet he took it?"

"Took it within twenty-four hours," Mr. Waddington continued. "He
seemed to like the way I put it to him, and instead of being scared he
went to an expert in drains, who advised him that there was only quite a
small thing wrong. He's doing up some of the rooms and moving in in a
fortnight."

"This sounds as though there might be an opening for an honest
house-agent," Burton suggested.

Mr. Waddington looked dubious.

"It's never been tried. Just this once it came off, but as a regular
thing I should have no confidence in it. People like to be
gulled. They've been brought up to it. They ask for lies--that's why
the world's so full of them. Case of supply and demand, you know."

"According to you, then," Burton remarked, a little dolefully, "it seems
as though this change in us unfits us for any sort of practical life."

Mr. Waddington coughed. Even his cough was no longer strident.

"That," he confessed, "has been worrying me. I find it hard to see the
matter differently. If one might venture upon a somewhat personal
question, how did you manage to discover a vocation? You seem to be
prospering," he added, glancing at his companion's neat clothes and gray
silk tie.

"I was fortunate," Burton admitted frankly. "I discovered quite by
accident the one form in which it is possible to palm off the truth on
an unsuspecting public."

Mr. Waddington laid down his knife and fork. He was intensely
interested.

"Art," Burton murmured softly.

"Art?" Mr. Waddington echoed under his breath, a little vaguely. The
questioning gleam was still in his eyes.

"Painting, sculpture, in my case writing," Burton explained. "I read
something when I was half starving which was in a newspaper and had
obviously been paid for, and I saw at once that the only point about it
was that the man had put down what he saw instead of what he thought he
saw. I tried the same thing, and up to the present, at any rate, it
seems to go quite Well."

"That's queer," Mr. Waddington murmured. "Do you know," he continued,
dropping his voice and looking around him anxiously, "that I've taken to
reading Ruskin? I've got a copy of 'The Seven