Before Midnight

"One thing," I said, "is the name itself. To sixty-four and seven-tenths per cent of the women seeing it, it will suggest 'paramour,' and the percentage would be higher if more of them knew what a paramour is. I won't decry American womanhood. Some of my best friends are women. Very few of them want to be or have paramours, so you couldn't come right out and name a perfume that. Put it this way. They see the ad, and they think, So they have the nerve to suggest their snazzy old perfume will get me a paramour! Ill show 'em! What do they think I am? Half an ounce, ten bucks. The other thing-"

"One's enough," he growled.

"Yes, sir. The second thing, so many bottles. That's against the rules. The big idea in a perfume ad is to show only one bottle, to give the impression that it's a scarce article and you'd better hurry up and get yours. Not Pour Amour. They say, Come on, we've got plenty and it's a free country and every woman has a right to a paramour, and if you don't want one prove it. It's an entirely new approach, one hundred per cent American, and it seems to be paying off, it and the contest together."

I had expected to get the desired results by that time, but all he did was sit and turn pages. I took a breath.

"The contest, as you probably know since you look at ads some, is a pip. A million dollars in cash prizes. Each week for nearly five months they have furnished a description of a woman--I might as well give you the exact specifications, since you've been training my memory for years --'a woman recorded in non-fictional history in any of its forms, including biography, as having used cosmetics.' Twenty of them in twenty weeks. This was the description of Number One:

"Though Caesar fought to give me power

And I had Antony in my grasp,

My bosom, in the fatal hour,

Welcomed the fatal asp.

"Of course that was pie. Cleopatra. Number Two was just as easy:

"Married to one named Aragon,

I listened to Columbus' tales,

And offered all my gems to pawn

To buy him ships and sails.

"I didn't remember ever reading that Queen Isabella used cosmetics, but since nobody ever bathed in the fifteenth century she must have. I could also give you Numbers Three, Four, and Five, but after that they began to get tough, and by Number Ten I wasn't even bothering to read them. God knows what they were like by the time they got to Twenty--to give you an example, here's [Number Seven or Eight, I forget which:

"My eldest son became a peer

Although I couldn't write my name;