were willing to take a
working position of this character, and from them he had extracted by
dint of pleading, cajoling, demonstrating and the like a number of
interesting ideas. Their working hours were from nine to five-thirty,
their pay meagre--eighteen to thirty-five, with experts drawing in
several instances fifty and sixty dollars, and their tasks innumerable
and really never-ending. Their output was regulated by a tabulated
record system which kept account of just how much they succeeded in
accomplishing in a week, and how much it was worth to the concern. The
ideas on which they worked were more or less products of the brains of
the art director and his superior, though they occasionally themselves
made important suggestions, but for their proper execution, the amount
of time spent on them, the failures sustained, the art director was more
or less responsible. He could not carry to his employer a poor drawing
of a good idea, or a poor idea for something which required a superior
thought, and long hope to retain his position. Mr. Daniel C. Summerfield
was too shrewd and too exacting. He was really tireless in his energy.
It was his art director's business, he thought, to get him good ideas
for good drawings and then to see that they were properly and speedily
executed.

Anything less than this was sickening failure in the eyes of
Mr. Summerfield, and he was not at all bashful in expressing himself. As
a matter of fact, he was at times terribly brutal. "Why the hell do you
show me a thing like that?" he once exclaimed to Freeman. "Jesus Christ;
I could hire an ashman and get better results. Why, God damn it, look at
the drawing of the arm of that woman. Look at her ear. Whose going to
take a thing like that? It's tame! It's punk! It's a joke! What sort of
cattle have you got out there working for you, anyhow? Why, if the
Summerfield Advertising Company can't do better than that I might as
well shut up the place and go fishing. We'll be a joke in six weeks.
Don't try to hand me any such God damned tripe as that, Freeman. You
know better. You ought to know our advertisers wouldn't stand for
anything like that. Wake up! I'm paying you five thousand a year. How do
you expect I'm going to get my money back out of any such arrangement as
that? You're simply wasting my money and your time letting a man draw a
thing like that. Hell!!"

The art director, whoever he was, having been by degrees initiated into
the brutalit