ole window, not to _my_ charity, but to New
York's--to yours! Put this menu on an easel, with a background of that
wonderful velvet you had the other day--the one that killed your
competitors. It was wonderful!"

Before the artist could draw his breath H. R. had warmly bid him
good-by, leaving a menu in the astonished artist's hand.

They did. It was original, as they explained to the boss. And even
department-store bosses know that originality means novelty, and novelty
is what New York pays for.

Within six hours the first edition of menus was exhausted. In every shop
window in New York the public could read the Public Menu Commission's
masterpiece. Cost: $68.14 + H. R.

The undoubted possessors of perfect beauty gave more trouble than the
menu, and therefore got more space in the newspapers. A regular detail
of police guarded not only the Allied Arts Building day and night, but
also the honor and features of the Public Beauty Commission. Grace
Goodchild was compelled to make use of her neighbor's house, Mrs.
Vantine's, in order to reach the street. She used the Seventy-sixth
Street entrance. Mrs. Vantine congratulated Grace each time on her
deserved triumph and asked her to look at Louise, her youngest.

H. R. had told Barrett to convey delicately to the press that the
relatively young wife of one of the members of the commission had left
for Reno. No name was mentioned. Therefore the portraits of all the male
members were impartially published. A neat little interrogation-mark
after each name did _not_ constitute libel.

The commissioners were thereafter compelled to be particularly nice to
their own wives in public.

The theatrical profession howled individually, collectively, in person,
in writing, by telephone, and through press agents. Nightly these
favorites would ask, more or less nasally and slightly below pitch,
whether they were not perfectly beautiful, and gave the audience the
opportunity to judge of fifteen-sixteenths of their persons. And the
unanimous reply was, "You are!"--from the claque. It became the topic of
the day, and as such divided families and parted friends.

At the end of three days H. R. diabolically announced that only
sixty-eight had been selected.

"Aren't there one hundred perfectly beautiful girls in Greater New
York?" he feverishly asked the reporters. "Aren't there?"

The literary misogynists propounded the same query--in the head-lines,
at that! On the very morning tha