"I have allowed you to talk so much," said the President after a while, "that you haven't had a chance to smoke. Allow me," and another match crackled into flame.
"Thank you," the editor said, as once more he lighted the cigar, and the fumes went clear up into the farthest corner of his brain.
"Take a fresh cigar," said the President after a while. "That doesn't seem to burn well. You will get one like that once in a while, although I am careful about my cigars."
"No, thanks, Mr. President," Bok said hurriedly. "It's I, not the cigar."
"Well, prove it to me with another," was the quick rejoinder, as he held out his case, and in another minute a match again crackled. "There is only one thing worse than a bad smoke, and that is an office-seeker," chuckled the President.
Bok couldn't prove that the cigars were bad, naturally. So smoke that cigar he did, to the bitter end, and it was bitter! In fifteen minutes his head and stomach were each whirling around, and no more welcome words had Bok ever heard than when the President said: "Well, suppose we go in. Halford and I have a day's work ahead of us yet."
The President went to work.
Bok went to bed. He could not get there quick enough, and he didn't—that is, not before he had experienced that same sensation of which Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: he never could understand, he said, why young authors found so much trouble in getting into the magazines, for his first trip to Europe was not a day old before, without even the slightest desire or wish on his part, he became a contributor to the Atlantic!
The next day, and for days after, Bok smelled, tasted, and felt that presidential cigar!
A few weeks afterward, Bok was talking after dinner with the President at a hotel in New York, when once more the cigar-case came out and was handed to Bok.