New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Women white collar workers -- Fiction
from Sandy Hook to San Diego, and chemists' shops from Hong-Kong to the
Scilly Isles. He is a modern Allah, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross is his
prophet.
§ 4
Una discovered that Mr. Ross, who had been negligible as
advertising-manager of the _Gas and Motor Gazette_, had, in two or
three years, become a light domestic great man, because he so completely
believed in his own genius, and because advertising is the romance, the
faith, the mystery of business. Mr. Pemberton, though he knew well
enough that soap-making was a perfectly natural phenomenon, could never
get over marveling at the supernatural manner in which advertising
seemed to create something out of nothing. It took a cherry fountain
syrup which was merely a chemical imitation that under an old name was
familiar to everybody; it gave the syrup a new name, and made twenty
million children clamor for it. Mr. Pemberton could never quite
understand that advertising was merely a matter of salesmanship by paper
and ink, nor that Mr. Ross's assistants, who wrote the copy and drew the
pictures and selected the mediums and got the "mats" over to the agency
on time, were real advertising men. No, the trusting old pirate believed
it was also necessary to have an ordained advertising-manager like Mr.
Ross, a real initiate, who could pull a long face and talk about "the
psychology of the utilitarian appeal" and "pulling power" and all the
rest of the theology. So he, who paid packing-girls as little as four
dollars a week, paid Mr. Ross fifteen thousand dollars a year, and let
him have competent assistants, and invited him out to the big, lonely,
unhappy Pemberton house in the country, and listened to his sacerdotal
discourses, and let him keep four or five jobs at once. For, besides
being advertising-manager for Pemberton's, Mr. Ross went off to deliver
Lyceum lectures and Chautauqua addresses and club chit-chats on the
blessings of selling more soap or underwear; and for the magazines he
wrote prose poems about stars, and sympathy, and punch, and early
rising, and roadside flowers, and argosies, and farming, and saving
money.
All this doge-like splendor Una discovered, but could scarcely believe,
for in his own office Mr. Ross seemed but as the rest of us--a small
round man, with a clown-like little face and hair cut Dutch-wise across
his forehead. When he smoked a big cigar he appeared naughty. One
expected to see his mother come and judiciously smack him. But more and
more Una felt the force of his attitude that he was a genius
incomparable. She could not believe that he knew what a gorgeous fraud
he was. On the same day, he received an advance in salary, discharged an
assistant for requesting an advance in salary, and dictated a magazine
filler to the effect that the chief duty of executives was to advance
salaries. She could not chart him.... Thus for thousands of years have
servants been amazed at the difference between pontiffs in the pulpit
and pontiffs in the pantry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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