his wrath like a mad crusader and have cloven the blasphemer from skull to chine.  To-day, he had sat motionless, petrified, scarcely able to feel.  He knew that the man spoke truth.  As well put any noxious concoction of drugs on the market and call it a specific against obesity or gravel or deafness as Sypher’s Cure.  Between the heaven-sent panacea which was to cleanse the skin of the nations and send his name ringing down the centuries as the Friend of Humanity and the shiveringly vulgar Jebusa Jones’s Cuticle Remedy there was not an atom of important difference.  One was as useful or as useless as the other.  The Cure was pale green; the Remedy rose pink.  Women liked the latter best on account of its color.  Both were quack medicaments.

He raised a drawn and agonized face and looked around the familiar room, where so many gigantic schemes had been laid, where so many hopes had shone radiant, and saw for the first time its blatant self-complacency, its piteous vulgarity.  Facing him was the artist’s original cartoon for the great poster which once had been famous all over the world, and now, for lack of money, only lingered in shreds on a forgotten hoarding in some Back of Beyond.  It represented the Friend of Humanity, in gesture, white beard, and general appearance resembling a benevolent minor prophet, distributing the Cure to a scrofulous universe.  In those glorified days, he had striven to have his own lineaments depicted above the robe of the central figure, but the artist had declared them to be unpictorial, and clung to the majesty of the gentleman in the white beard.  Around the latter’s feet were gathered a motley crew—­the fine lady in her ball dress, the shoeblack, the crowned king, the red Indian in Fenimore Cooper feathers, the half-naked negro, the wasted, ragged mother with her babe, the jockey, the Syrian leper, and a score of other types of humans, including in the background a hairy-faced creature, the “dog-faced man” of Barnum’s show.  They were well grouped, effective, making the direct appeal to an Anglo-Saxon populace, which in its art must have something to catch hold of, like the tannin in its overdrawn tea.  It loved to stand before this poster and pick out the easily recognized characters and argue (as Sypher, whose genius had suggested the inclusion of the freak had intended) what the hairy creature could represent, and, as it stood and picked and argued, the great fact of Sypher’s Cure sank deep into their souls.  He remembered the glowing pride with which he had regarded this achievement, the triumphal progress he made in a motor-car around the London hoardings the day after the poster had been pasted abroad.  And now he knew it in his heart to be nothing but a tawdry, commercial lie.