The poetaster crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair, thrust an eyeglass into his eye, and turned over the pages of the paper volume which he had been carrying. Aaron Rodd followed his example. The poet, entirely unembarrassed, eyed hungrily each covered dish which passed. At the arrival of the meal, Harvey Grimm solemnly pocketed his book and replaced his eyeglass. Aaron Rodd went on reading for a moment. Then he glanced surreptitiously at their guest and laid his volume face downwards upon the table.
"Your poems, I perceive," Harvey Grimm observed, as he helped himself to a potato, "are not written for the man in the street."
"They are written," the poet declared, falling hungrily upon his chop, "for any one who will pay eightpence for them."
Conversation faded away. It was not until the service of coffee and cigars that anything more than disjointed words were spoken. The young man's face was still colourless but his eyes were less hard. He took out his pencil and toyed for a moment with the menu.
"Some little trifle," he suggested, "commemorative of the occasion?"
"I would rather," Harvey Grimm confessed, "think out some scheme for advertising your work. There's a little thing here about a lame 'busman——"
"Any scheme you suggest," the young man assented dreamily. "I frankly admit that the dispersal of my productions is a matter in which I have failed. The appreciative few may have purchased but the man of the day passes on, ignorant of the great need he really has of poetry. Ten thousand copies of my poems, sold in London, would produce at once a more gracious spirit. You would observe a difference in the deportment, the speech, the greater altruism of the multitude. How shall I force my works into their hands and their eightpences into my pocket?"
"Fourpence only," Aaron Rodd reminded him. "The publishers get half."
"In the event of a large circulation," the poet pointed out, with a wave of the hand, "better terms might be arrived at. You, as a legal man, can appreciate that possibility."
"There is only one idea which occurs to me," Harvey Grimm declared, after a brief pause. "Come and we will make an experiment."