d surrounding country of two hundred and eighty "Masks," where
otherwise not more than half a dozen would have been sold. Further
result: the watering carts of the great mid-West were now cunningly
blazoned with incitements to purchase Layton & Company's fiction.

Ewing still feared Shakespeare or Chaucer, or George Eliot, at the
least; but the publisher clung to earth, launching into his plans for
Piersoll's next book. "The Promotion of Fools" was in its hundredth
thousand. The next book must go beyond this.

"You want a smashing good love scene at the end," urged the sapient
Layton, "and plenty of good, plain, honest heart feeling all through it.
Make a quaintly humorous character, simple-minded, trusting, but still
shrewd, and win the reader's sympathy for him by giving him some sort of
hard luck--a crippled child that dies isn't bad, if the father has been
harsh to him some time, not meaning to be, you know. And not too much
dialect; enough to contrast well with the Fifth Avenue people. Then,
with the kind of hero you know how to draw--swell family, handsome,
refined, a real gentleman, and all that sort of thing, with an English
valet--you'll have a story that will _go_. You can write a winner,
Piersoll, if you'll listen to your publisher. We keep our fingers on the
public pulse; we know the taste better than you can know it, shut up in
your office. And have a good, catchy dedication--people are interested
in your personality. Couldn't you have in the next book something like
'To my Mother in Heaven, whose Memory----'"

"Our people are all Unitarians," suggested Piersoll.

"What difference does _that_ make----"

"And my mother has been graciously spared to us----"

"Well, then, 'To my Gray-haired Mother, whose Loving Counsel has ever--'
_you_ know the sort of thing, short and snappy, but full of feeling. It
helps, let me tell you, with the people who pick up a book on the
stands."

Ewing lost the run of this talk for a time, entertaining himself with a
study of the other diners. The rooms had rapidly filled, and two waiters
scurried among the tables. His attention focused on a long table in the
center of the room, whose occupants made savage and audible comment on
diners at other tables, and confided to one another, in loud, free
tones, their frank impressions of late comers.

The door opened upon a goodly youth in evening dress. Seven pairs of
eyes from the big table fixed him coldly as he removed his overc