The young man sighed.
"It is a scandalous thing," he said, "to be published in paper covers at eightpence—fourpence to the author. So you are adventurers. You mean by that thieves?"
"Sir," Aaron Rodd interrupted, "I am a solicitor."
"My ignorance," the young man declared, "is amazing, but that, I presume, is a legalised form of robbery? I am one of the few persons in the world who give value for the money I earn. I produce, create. If only ten thousand people in the city were to pay eightpence for a copy of my works, I should be affluent, as you two are. I should lunch here every day and drink Burgundy."
"Then in a very short time," Harvey Grimm reminded him, "you would cease to write poetry."
His protégé shook his head.
"A well-nurtured body is an incentive to poetic thought," he insisted. "There is a richness of imagery which comes with after-dinner composing; a sort of mental starvation, an anæmic scantiness of similes, which follows the fruit luncheon and cold water of necessity. Adventurers, gentlemen, are you? That is to say you are people with wits. Tell me, then—bring me an idea from the practical world—how shall I make ten thousand people buy a copy of my poems?"
"Come, that's an interesting problem," Harvey Grimm declared. "Of course, if one were to answer you in a single word, that one would be advertisement."
"If I could write my name across the heavens, or flash it from a million lights through the clouds," the young man remarked, "I would do so, but these things call for either miraculous powers or money. I have neither."
"Your case," Harvey Grimm promised, "shall have our attention, my friend's and mine. In the meantime, the moment seems opportune, pending the arrival of our chops, for a glance at your work. Permit me."