red lids of his large pop-eyes. Deane saw the color mount to his temples, saw the nervous tug that he gave to the end of the cigar, and smiled. He knew Beauregard hated to hear pictures spoken of as being ground out of a sausage machine. Beauregard wanted to call them "Art." And this is why. . . . Beauregard resented his own background, the poverty-stricken childhood where he had first learned the trade of hoarding up refuse, securing by physical effort something for nothing, and selling it for profit. For years he had been pointed out as the Junk Man,—as the Junk Man of Mott Street; then the Junk Man of Third Avenue; the Junk Man of Sixth Street; even the Junk Man of Fifth Avenue, when, after successful years on Wall Street, he retired and bought himself one of the conspicuous palatial residences on the Avenue between Sixty-sixth and Sixty-seventh Streets. Three years he had spent abroad, trying to wipe out the stigma. Junk man. He returned as George Beauregard, man of affairs, searching for artistic fields in which to invest his fortune. He bought an interest in a new publishing house—and two popular sellers established them. He backed a play, an artistic triumph, but a commercial failure. But he cared nothing about its failure, or the loss of money, because the critics, praising the play, lauded the producer, George Beauregard. Evidently the world had forgotten the Junk Man. Longing to satisfy the creative force in him, and realizing that his dull commercial mind could never have a natural outlet of expression, there was only left to Beauregard the subsidizing of creative artists. He became a patron of all of the tributaries of art. The man who sold him the controlling stock in the motion picture organization known as "The Elite Productions," spoke of the movies as the great new Art, and cleverly stressed the promise that all pioneers in the field would meet with international recogni-
