ked so keen, so dynamic, like a polished Japanese carving,
hard and smooth.

"Now tell me all about yourself," began Summerfield. "Where do you come
from? Who are you? What have you done?"

"Hold! Hold!" said Eugene easily and tolerantly. "Not so fast. My
history isn't so much. The short and simple annals of the poor. I'll
tell you in two or three sentences."

Summerfield was a little taken back at this abruptness which was
generated by his own attitude; still he liked it. This was something new
to him. His applicant wasn't frightened or apparently even nervous so
far as he could judge. "He is droll," he thought, "sufficiently so--a
man who has seen a number of things evidently. He is easy in manner,
too, and kindly."

"Well," he said smilingly, for Eugene's slowness appealed to him. His
humor was something new in art directors. So far as he could recall, his
predecessors had never had any to speak of.

"Well, I'm an artist," said Eugene, "working on the _World_. Let's hope
that don't militate against me very much."

"It don't," said Summerfield.

"And I want to become an art director because I think I'd make a good
one."

"Why?" asked Summerfield, his even teeth showing amiably.

"Well, because I like to manage men, or I think I do. And they take to
me."

"You know that?"

"I do. In the next place I know too much about art to want to do the
little things that I'm doing. I can do bigger things."

"I like that also," applauded Summerfield. He was thinking that Eugene
was nice and good looking, a little pale and thin to be wholly forceful,
perhaps, he wasn't sure. His hair a little too long. His manner,
perhaps, a bit too deliberate. Still he was nice. Why did he wear a soft
hat? Why did artists always insist on wearing soft hats, most of them?
It was so ridiculous, so unbusinesslike.

"How much do you get?" he added, "if it's a fair question."

"Less than I'm worth," said Eugene. "Only fifty dollars. But I took it
as a sort of health cure. I had a nervous breakdown several years
ago--better now, as Mulvaney used to say--and I don't want to stay at
that. I'm an art director by temperament, or I think I am. Anyhow, here
I am."

"You mean," said Summerfield, "you never ran an art department before?"

"Never."

"Know anything about advertising?"

"I used to think so."

"How long ago was that?"

"When I worked on the Alexandria, Illinois, _Daily Appeal_."

Summerfield smiled. He couldn't help it.