“Walter Mason?” murmured Lester. “I don't think I know his work.”
“Hasn't Walt made Oxford yet?” asked Miss Denver. “He writes the prose poems in the evening papers, syndicate stuff, you know. Printed to look like prose, just the opposite of the free-verse gag.” She smiled reminiscently, and quoted:
When I am as dry as a fish up a tree, then I to the hydrant repair, and fill myself up, without ticket or fee, with the water that's eddying there. I drink all I want—half a gallon or more—and then I lie down on my couch; when I rise in the morning my head isn't sore and I don't wear a dark brindle grouch——”
“Is there any free-verse stuff that can cover that?” she asked.
Lester was somewhat disconcerted. His assessment of Female Mind did not seem to be proceeding methodically. He played for time.
“I thought you enjoyed the Oblique?”
“As a joke, yes: I laugh myself giddy over it. But I know darn well that kind of junk won't last. By and by the ghost'll quit putting up and the editors will get jobs as ticket choppers. I guess I'm a Philistine!”
With this deliciously impudent creature beaming at him, Lester felt himself cursedly at a disadvantage. Neither Harvard nor Balliol had informed him about this Walter Mason, and though he had seven hundred quips and anecdotes indexed in a scrapbook marked Jocoseria, none of them seemed to bubble up just now. Darn the girl, her mind wouldn't stand still long enough for him to take its temperature. It was like trying to write captions for the movies while the film was running. He blew a cloud of blue Russian vapour across the board, and smiled at her in a tolerant, veni-vidi-Bolsheviki kind of way. Behind his forehead he was fighting desperately to catch up.
As they wrestled with the spaghetti he remembered that someone had told him that publishers usually depend on the literary judgment of their wives. Perhaps that was the case with Mr. Arundel? But Miss Denver laughed aloud at the suggestion.
“Wrong again!” she said. “He's not married. Petunia Veal, the author of 'Sveltschmerz,' has been angling for him for years, and lots of other lady authors, too. He's so sentimental, he's escaped 'em all so far.”