prolong these moments of preparation. 

 "Take 'em both," Bartley suggested.  "Don't want your money without your life, if you come to that. But you're just one million times more interesting to the public than if you hadn't a dollar; and you know that as well as I do, Mr. Lapham. There's no use beating about the bush." 

 "No," said Lapham, somewhat absently. He put out his huge foot and pushed the ground-glass door shut between his little den and the book-keepers, in their larger den outside. 

 "In personal appearance," wrote Bartley in the sketch for which he now studied his subject, while he waited patiently for him to continue, "Silas Lapham is a fine type of the successful American. He has a square, bold chin, only partially concealed by the short reddish-grey beard, growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips. His nose is short and straight; his forehead good, but broad rather than high; his eyes blue, and with a light in them that is kindly or sharp according to his mood. He is of medium height, and fills an average arm-chair with a solid bulk, which on the day of our interview was unpretentiously clad in a business suit of blue serge. His head droops somewhat from a short neck, which does not trouble itself to rise far from a pair of massive shoulders." 

 "I don't know as I know just where you want me to begin," said Lapham. 

 "Might begin with your birth; that's where most of us begin," replied Bartley. 

 A gleam of humorous appreciation shot into Lapham's blue eyes. 

 "I didn't know whether you wanted me to go quite so far back as that," he said.  "But there's no disgrace in having been born, and I was born in the State of Vermont, pretty well up under the Canada line--so well up, in fact, that I came very near being an adoptive citizen; for I was bound to be an American of SOME sort, from the word Go! That was about--well, let me see!--pretty near sixty years ago: this is '75, and that was '20. Well, say I'm fifty-five years old; and I've LIVED 'em, too; not an hour of waste time about ME, anywheres! I was born on a farm, and----" 

 "Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters: regulation thing?" Bartley cut in. 

 "Regulation thing," said Lapham, accepting this irreverent version of his history somewhat dryly. 

 "Parents poor, of course," suggested 

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