and Francesca, who were trying to boil
the cat. It was very dreary.

"Harding," I said, "you were insisting only a little while ago that life
is always beautiful."

"So it is," he replied, too listless to be defiant. "To some people."

"To whom?"

"Well, to the two here, for instance," and he pointed to a pair of
handsome lovers playing golf all over a double page in the advertising
section of his magazine. "Do you mean to say these two ever know what
ugliness is, or pain, or want? Or ever grow old? Or cease to love? Here
is the perfect life for you."

"Are you so sure of that?" said some one over my shoulder, and I turned
about sharply to look into the most entrancing face I have ever beheld
in man or woman. It was Apollo standing there above me, or if not he, at
least one of the divine youths that the Greeks have left for us in
undying marble. He made Scipione's grimy cellar luminous with beauty.

"I beg your pardon for intruding," he said, seating himself at our table
as joyously confident and as simple as an immortal should be. "But I
feel myself competent to speak on the point you have raised because the
Advertising Supplement you refer to is my own home. This very young man
playing golf is, as you will observe, no other than myself."

There was no denying the amazing resemblance.

"You say the Advertising Supplement is your home," I collected myself
sufficiently to ask, "but just how do you mean that?"

"Literally," he replied. "My whole life, and for that matter my parents'
life before me, has been spent in the pages you are now fingering. My
name is Pinckney, Walter Pinckney, and if you are sufficiently
interested in my career I should be glad to describe it."

"Go ahead," cried Harding, with almost ferocious earnestness.

"If I begin a bit back before my birth," said Pinckney, "you will be
patient with me. I will not detain you very long."

"Begin where you please," said Harding in the same grim manner; "only
begin."

"My father," commenced young Pinckney, "at eighteen, was a sickly
country lad with less than the usual elementary education and no other
prospects than a life of drudgery on the old farm. But there was in him
an elemental strength of will that was sufficient, as it turned out, to
master fate. You have read his life again and again in the Advertising
Pages of our magazines. On his nineteenth birthday, as I have heard him
tell many a time, he began the reshaping of his life by invest