“I have often wondered,” he said, “at the enormous expansion of advertising, and doubted whether it was not mostly wasted.  But my author, here, has suggested a brilliant fact which I was unwittingly groping for.  When you take up a Sunday paper”—­I shuddered, and my friend smiled intelligence—­“you are simply appalled at the miles of announcements of all sorts.  Who can possibly read them?  Who cares even to look at them?  But if you want something in particular—­to furnish a house, or buy a suburban place, or take a steamer for Europe, or go, to the theatre—­then you find out at once who reads the advertisements, and cares to look at them.  They respond to the multifarious wants of the whole community.  You have before you the living operation of that law of demand and supply which it has always been such a bore to hear about.  As often happens, the supply seems to come before the demand; but that’s only an appearance.  You wanted something, and you found an offer to meet your want.”

“Then you don’t believe that the offer to meet your want suggested it?”

“I see that my author believes something of the kind.  We may be full of all sorts of unconscious wants which merely need the vivifying influence of an advertisement to make them spring into active being; but I have a feeling that the money paid for advertising which appeals to potential wants is largely thrown away.  You must want a thing, or think you want it; otherwise you resent the proffer of it as a kind of impertinence.”

“There are some kinds of advertisements, all the same, that I read without the slightest interest in the subject matter.  Simply the beauty of the style attracts me.”

“I know.  But does it ever move you to get what you don’t want?”

“Never; and I should be glad to know what your author thinks of that sort of advertising:  the literary, or dramatic, or humorous, or quaint.”

“He doesn’t contemn it, quite.  But I think he feels that it may have had its day.  Do you still read such advertisements with your early zest?”

“No; the zest for nearly everything goes.  I don’t care so much for Tourguenief as I used.  Still, if I come upon the jaunty and laconic suggestions of a certain well-known clothing-house, concerning the season’s wear, I read them with a measure of satisfaction.  The advertising expert—­”

“This author calls him the adsmith.”

“Delightful!  Ad is a loathly little word, but we must come to it.  It’s as legitimate as lunch.  But as I was saying, the adsmith seems to have caught the American business tone, as perfectly as any of our novelists have caught the American social tone.”

“Yes,” said my friend, “and he seems to have prospered as richly by it.  You know some of those chaps make fifteen or twenty thousand dollars by adsmithing.  They have put their art quite on a level with fiction pecuniarily.”

“Perhaps it is a branch of fiction.”