Chum Frink agreed, “That’s so. But what I mind is their lack of culture and appreciation of the Beautiful--if you’ll excuse me for being highbrow. Now, I like to give a high-class lecture, and read some of my best poetry--not the newspaper stuff but the magazine things. But say, when I get out in the tall grass, there’s nothing will take but a lot of cheesy old stories and slang and junk that if any of us were to indulge in it here, he’d get the gate so fast it would make his head swim.” Vergil Gunch summed it up: “Fact is, we’re mighty lucky to be living among a bunch of city-folks, that recognize artistic things and business-punch equally. We’d feel pretty glum if we got stuck in some Main Street burg and tried to wise up the old codgers to the kind of life we’re used to here. But, by golly, there’s this you got to say for ’em: Every small American town is trying to get population and modern ideals. And darn if a lot of ’em don’t put it across! Somebody starts panning a rube crossroads, telling how he was there in 1900 and it consisted of one muddy street, count ’em, one, and nine hundred human clams. Well, you go back there in 1920, and you find pavements and a swell little hotel and a first-class ladies’ ready-to-wear shop--real perfection, in fact! You don’t want to just look at what these small towns are, you want to look at what they’re aiming to become, and they all got an ambition that in the long run is going to make ’em the finest spots on earth--they all want to be just like Zenith!” III However intimate they might be with T. Cholmondeley Frink as a neighbor, as a borrower of lawn-mowers and monkey-wrenches, they knew that he was also a Famous Poet and a distinguished advertising-agent; that behind his easiness were sultry literary mysteries which they could not penetrate. But to-night, in the gin-evolved confidence, he admitted them to the arcanum: “I’ve got a literary problem that’s worrying me to death. I’m doing a series of ads for the Zeeco Car and I want to make each of ’em a real little gem--reg’lar stylistic stuff. I’m all for this theory that perfection is the stunt, or nothing at all, and these are as tough things as I ever tackled. You might think it’d be harder to do my poems--all these Heart Topics: home and fireside and happiness--but they’re cinches. You can’t go wrong on ’em; you know what sentiments any decent go-ahead fellow must have if he plays the game, and you stick right to ’em. But the poetry of industrialism, now there’s a literary line where you got to open up new territory. Do you know the fellow who’s really _the_ American genius? The fellow who you don’t know his name and I don’t either, but his work ought to be preserved so’s future generations can judge our American thought and originality to-day? Why, the fellow that writes the Prince Albert Tobacco ads! Just listen to this: