“Sorry I haven’t anything new, but it struck me that you might like to look at an old thing of mine called ‘The Father of Santa Claus,’ and if you care to consider its publication I’ll let it go for a couple of hundred, just for the sake of old times.
I inclosed the story, and just before coming here I received a check for two hundred dollars.”
“What moral do you deduce from this, sir?”
“Don’t ever sell anything until you’ve gotten a big reputation.”
“Do you mind talking a little more shop?” asked the Timid Aspirant. Somehow he lost his timidity when talking to his renowned friend.
“Of course not. No one really does, though some affect to. Most talk is shop talk. It may relate to plumbing, or to dry-goods, or to painting, or to babies, but it is of the shop shoppy, as a rule, only ‘literary shop talk,’ as Ford calls it, is more interesting to an outsider than the other kinds. What particular department of our shop did you want me to handle?”
“I wanted to ask you if you believed in cutting a man’s work—in other words, do you believe in blue-penciling?”
“Ah, my boy, I see that they have been coloring your manuscript with the hateful crayon. No, I don’t believe in it. I dislike it now because it mars my work, and I used to hate it because it took money from my purse. Let me tell you a little incident.
“One time, years ago, I wrote an article, and after it was done I figured on what I would get for it and with it. If I sold it to a certain monthly I had in mind I should receive enough to buy a new hat, a new suit, a pair of shoes, ditto of socks, and a necktie, for all of which I stood in sore need. I hied me forth in all the exuberance of youth and bore my manuscript to the editor. As he was feeling pretty good, he said he’d read it while I waited. At last he laid it down and said: ‘That’s a pretty good story.’ My heart leaped like an athlete. ‘But’—my heart stopped leaping and listened—‘it will need a little cutting, and I’ll do it now, if you wish.’”