“In a way.”
B. B. tilted back in his chair and lifted his hand in a gesture of confirmation. “That’s what I was getting at. The fact of the matter is, when you ask a man to vote for you, you’re not asking him to do you a favor. You’re asking him to do himself a favor. I don’t suppose you ever thought of that.”
Wint grinned. “Well, no.”
“It’s true?”
“I guess it is.”
B. B. leaned forward. “Then go out and say so. Start something. Keep telling them to elect you; tell them louder and longer and oftener than Routt does, and they will.”
This was so like what Gergue had said that Wint told B. B. so; and the editor nodded and said Gergue was a wise man. “But I can’t do it,” Wint protested. “I don’t know how. I’ll never make a speaker.”
B. B. considered that for a while: and then he said: “You know, printed advertising was invented by the first tongue-tied man.”
“I don’t get it,” Wint confessed.
“He had something to sell, but he couldn’t tell people about it, so he put an ad in the papers; and after that, every one got the habit.”