“No, darn you, Dunne. I took up your manuscript and I never laid it down until the first streaks of dawn. Then when I went to bed I lay awake thinking it all over. Why, Dunne, it’s the best book I ever read!”
“I wish,” David replied with a whimsical smile, “that you were a publisher.”
“Speaking of publishers, that’s why I didn’t 188 bring the manuscript back. I sail in a week, and I want you to let me take it to a publisher I know in New York. He will give it a prompt reading.”
“If it wouldn’t bother you too much, I wish you would. You see, it would take so long for it to come back here and be sent out again each time it is rejected.”
“Rejected!” scoffed Wilder. “You wait and see! Aren’t you going to dedicate it?”
David hesitated, his eyes stealing dreamily out across the bay to the horizon line.
“I wonder,” he said meditatively, “if the person to whom it is dedicated––every word of it––wouldn’t know without the inscription.”
“No,” objected Fletcher, “you should have it appear out of compliment.”
He smiled as he wrote on a piece of paper: “To T. L. P.”
“The initials of your sweetheart?” quizzed Fletcher.