This man Gray, from the Gray Matter Agency, is a whirlwind. He has shot in some suggestive layouts for car-cards that make my head spin. These are some of his aspirations—
DIGESTIVE DICE
MEAN LUCK FOR THE LIVER
TRY GINGER CUBES
FOR A CHEW IN THE TUBES
CHOOSE GINGER CUBES
And he has doped out a map showing the whole digestive apparatus laid out like a subway system, and the Ginger Cubes keep traffic moving.
All this seems to me a bit too unconventional, although I confess I am amused by the originality. Tell me what your reaction is. I’m sending you some of the Cubes to distribute among the nurses.
Yours,
Nicholas Ribstone,
President The Ginger Cubes Corporation.
N.R./D.B.
III
[A letter from Miss Candida Cumnor, one of the nurses at the Hippocrates Hospital, to Mr. Nicholas Ribstone, President of the Ginger Cubes Corporation.]
Dear Mr. Ribstone: Poor Mr. Russell is still very weak, and has not been able to write to you himself. Dr. Nichevo says that he has never seen a more interesting case of complete exhaustion of the salesmanship glands. He thinks that the patient must have been under a very severe strain for a long time preceding the breakdown. I gathered from what Mr. Russell said in his period of delirium that he had been trying to sell by mail order a complete set of Tolstoy’s works, but by some mistake had bought the wrong mailing list from one of the houses that deal in such things. They gave him a list of members of the Ku Klux Klan, and the returns on his effort were so disheartening that it broke him all up. He was very queer for a while. But one delusion helped a great deal. He had a fixed idea that the temperature chart at the end of his bed was a sales graph, and the more peaks there were in it the better he was pleased, for he thought that at last the K. K. K. were beginning to fall for Tolstoy.