Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/294

 top of a cold cream jar. I am sure of this, for Harrowby's Crême Cleopatre is one of the most popular articles our firm manufactures. I hesitate to tell you how many thousand husbands may find at will among their wives' possessions just such a talisman as Kennaston had discovered. I myself selected the design for these covers when the stuff was first put in the market. They are sealed on, you may remember, with gray wax, to carry out the general idea that we are vending old Egyptian secrets of beauty. And the design upon these covers, as I have since been at pains to make sure, is in no known alphabet. P. N. Flaherty (the artist implicated) tells me he "just made it up out of his head"—blending meaningless curlicues and dots and circles with an irresponsible hand, and sketching a crack across all, "just to make it look ancient like." It was along this semblance of a fracture—for there the brittle metal is thinnest—that the cover first picked up by Kennaston had been broken. The cover he showed me was, of course, complete So much for Mr. Flaherty's part in the matter; and of hieroglyphic lore, or any acquaintance with heathenry beyond