“How many letters, may I ask?”
“Oh, fifteen or twenty.”
“And did you answer those yourself?”
She shook her head, smiling.
“What did you do with them?” Mason asked.
“Transferred them to another file.”
“What file?”
“The ‘LAPSED’ file.”
Mason chuckled delightedly. “Now there’s an idea, Della. We simply hold things in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file until a lapse of time robs them of their importance, and then we transfer them to the ‘LAPSED’ file. It eliminates correspondence, saves worry, and gets me away from office routine, which I detest... Incidentally, Della, things which seem frightfully important at the time have a habit of fading into insignificance. Events are like telephone poles, streaming back past the observation platform of a speeding train. They loom large at first, then melt into the distance, becoming so tiny they finally disappear altogether... That’s the way with nearly all of the things we think are so vital.”
Her eyes were wide and innocent. “Do the telephone poles really get smaller, Chief, or do they just appear smaller?”