"In New York, with your credentials?"
"Even so."
"I don't quite understand."
"It would take too long to explain."
"I can give you some letters."
"Thank you. It would be useless. Secretly and subterraneously, I have had the bottom knocked out from under my feet. Why, God knows! But no more of that. Some day I will give you my version."
The little man smiled over his butterfly, took out a wallet, something on the pattern of a fisherman's, and put the new-found specimen into one of the mica compartments, in which other dead butterflies of variant beauty reposed.
"So I become a private secretary, till the time offers something better." Breitmann stared at the sea.
"I am sorry. I wish I could help you. Better let me try." Fitzgerald stirred his coffee. "You are convinced that there is some cabal working against you in the newspaper business? That seems strange. Some of them must have heard of your work—London, Paris, Berlin. Have you tried them all?"
"Yes. Nothing for me, but promises as thick as yonder sands."