They smoked awhile, meditatively.
“What I would like to figure out,” said Sanford, “is some way of making an impression on the Old Man. I've got to get more money. The trouble—some part of it is, I feel instinctively that he and I live in different worlds. We hardly even talk the same language. Well, there's no chance of his learning my way of thinking; so I suppose I'll have to learn his.”
“He's the man who puts the nil in the Manila envelope,” said one of the others.
“As far as we are concerned, yes. But there's plenty of the stuff going round on Fridays for the kind of people he understands.”
“He seems to be an absent-minded old bird. When I talk to him, it's as though I were trying to speak through a fog.”
“It looks to me as though his mind had overstayed its leave of absence.”
“He likes the kind of men who, as he says, 'have both feet on the ground'.”
“Yes, but you've got to have at least one foot in the air if you're going to get anywhere.”
“See here,” said the literary editor, who was more tolerant than the others. “What's the use of panning the Old Man? He's trying to put the paper over, just as hard as we are. Maybe harder. But he doesn't know. And I believe he knows he doesn't know. I think the chief trouble is, they all knuckle down to him so. They're scared of him. They think the only way they can hold their jobs is by agreeing with him. If someone could only put him wise——”
“But how can you put him wise? He doesn't see anything unless it's laid out for him in a strip cartoon or a full-page ad. The kind of thing that interests him is the talk he hears in a Pullman smoker or club car.”