Mr. Boldero cleared his throat. “We shall begin,” he said, “by making the most simple elementary appeal to their instinct of self-preservation: we shall point out that the Patent Small-Clothes are comfortable; that to wear them is to avoid pain. A few striking slogans about comfort—that’s all we want. Very simple indeed. It doesn’t take much to persuade a man that it’s pleasanter to sit on air than on wood. But while we’re on the subject of hard seats we shall have to glide off subtly at a tangent to make a flank attack on the social instincts.” And joining the tip of his forefinger to the tip of his thumb, Mr. Boldero moved his hand delicately sideways, as though he were sliding it along a smooth brass rail. “We shall have to speak about the glories and the trials of sedentary labour. We must exalt its spiritual dignity and at the same time condemn its physical discomforts. ‘The seat of honour,’ don’t you know. We could talk about that. ‘The Seats of the Mighty.’ ‘The seat that rules the office rocks the world.’ All those lines might be made something of. And then we could have little historical chats about thrones; how dignified, but how uncomfortable they’ve been. We must make the bank clerk and the civil servant feel proud of being what they are and at the same time feel ashamed that, being such splendid people, they should have to submit to the indignity of having blistered hind-quarters. In modern advertising you must flatter your public—not in the oily, abject, tradesmanlike style of the old advertisers, crawling before clients who were their social superiors; that’s all over now. It’s we who are the social superiors—because we’ve got more money than the bank clerks and the civil servants. Our modern flattery must be manly, straightforward, sincere, the admiration of equal for equal—all the more flattering as we aren’t equals.” Mr. Boldero laid a finger to his nose. “They’re dirt and we’re capitalists....” He laughed. Gumbril laughed too. It was the first time that he had ever thought of himself as a capitalist, and the thought was exhilarating. “We flatter them,” went on Mr. Boldero. “We say that honest work is glorious and ennobling—which it isn’t; it’s merely dull and cretinizing. And then we go on to suggest that it would be finer still, more ennobling, because less uncomfortable, if they wore Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes. You see the line?” Gumbril saw the line. “After that,” said Mr. Boldero, “we get on to the medical side of the matter. The medical side, Mr. Gumbril—that’s most important. Nobody feels really well nowadays—at any rate, nobody who lives in a big town and does the kind of loathsome work that the people we’re catering for does. Keeping this fact before our eyes, we have to make it clear that only those can expect to be healthy who wear pneumatic trousers.” “That will be a little difficult, won’t it?” questioned Gumbril.