umes, the sale of which depended largely upon the beauty with which
they could be interpreted to the lay mind. The latter were not only to
be advertised in the United States and Canada, but in Mexico also, and
the fulfilment of the contracts in either case was dependent upon the
approval given by the advertisers to the designs for newspaper, car and
billboard advertising which he should submit. It was a ticklish
business, worth two hundred thousand dollars in ultimate profits, and
naturally he was anxious that the man who should sit in the seat of
authority in his art department should be one of real force and
talent--a genius if possible, who should, through his ideas, help him
win his golden harvest.

The right man naturally was hard to find. The last man had been only
fairly capable. He was dignified, meditative, thoughtful, with
considerable taste and apprehension as to what the material situation
required in driving home simple ideas, but he had no great imaginative
grasp of life. In fact no man who had ever sat in the director's chair
had ever really suited Mr. Summerfield. According to him they had all
been weaklings. "Dubs; fakes; hot air artists," were some of his
descriptions of them. Their problem, however, was a hard one, for they
had to think very vigorously in connection with any product which he
might be trying to market, and to offer him endless suggestions as to
what would be the next best thing for a manufacturer to say or do to
attract attention to what he had to sell. It might be a catch phrase
such as "Have You Seen This New Soap?" or "Do You Know Soresda?--It's
Red." It might be that a novelty in the way of hand or finger, eye or
mouth was all that was required, carrying some appropriate explanation
in type. Sometimes, as in the case of very practical products, their
very practical display in some clear, interesting, attractive way was
all that was needed. In most cases, though, something radically new was
required, for it was the theory of Mr. Summerfield that his ads must not
only arrest the eye, but fix themselves in the memory, and convey a fact
which was or at least could be made to seem important to the reader. It
was a struggling with one of the deepest and most interesting phases of
human psychology.

The last man, Older Freeman, had been of considerable use to him in his
way. He had collected about him a number of fairly capable artists--men
temporarily down on their luck--who like Eugene