"My dear fellow, I know. I'm feeling the pulse of the public all the time. It's my business."
Jeff put out his hands for the sheets and the censor gave them up willingly.
"I'm frightfully disappointed," he said, taking off his eyeglasses to wipe them on his handkerchief and looking so babyishly ingenuous that Jeff broke into a laugh. "I thought we should get something 'live out of you, something we could push with conviction, you know. But we can't this; we simply can't." He had on his glasses now, and the all-knowingness had come mysteriously back. His eyes seemed to shoot arrows, and clutch and hold you so that you wanted to be shot by them again. "Tell you what, though. We might do this. It's a crazy book, you know."
"Is it?" Jeff inquired.
"Oh, absolutely. Daffy. They'd put it in the eccentric section of a library, with books on perpetual motion and the fourth dimension. But if you'd let us publish your name—"
"Decidedly."
"And do a little preliminary advertising. How prison life had undermined your health and even touched your reason, so you weren't absolutely—you understand? Then we'd publish it as an eccentric book by an eccentric fellow, a victim of prison regulations."
Jeff laid his papers down on the table beside him and set a glass on them to keep them from blowing away.
"No," said he. "I never was saner in my life. I'm about the only sane man in this town, because I've discovered we're all mad and the rest of 'em don't know it."
"That very remark!" said the young man, in unmixed approval. "Don't you see what that would do in an ad? My dear chap, they all think the other man's daffy."