“Back pedal there! Avaunt with your flowery speech, oh Idiot!” cried the Doctor. “Else will I call an ambulance.”
“No ambulance for mine,” chortled the Idiot.
“Nay, Sweet Gas-bags,” quoth the Doctor. “But for once I fear me we may be scorched by this Pelée of words that thou spoutest forth.”
“What’s the proposition, Mr. Idiot?” asked the Poet. “I’m always open to anything of the kind, as the Subway said when an automobile fell into it.’”
“I thirst for laurels,” said the Idiot, “and I propose that you and I collaborate on a book of poems for early publication. With your name on the title-page and my poems in the book I think we can make a go of it.”
“What’s the lay?” asked the Poet, amused, but wary. “Sonnets, or French forms, or just plain snatches of song?”
“Any old thing as long as it runs smoothly,” replied the Idiot. “Only the poems must fit the title of the book, which is to be Now.”
“Now?” said the Poet.
“Now!” repeated the Idiot. “I find in reading over the verse of the day that the ‘Now’ poem always finds a ready market. Therefore, there must be money in it, and where the money goes there the laurels are. You know what Browning Robinson, the Laureate of Wall Street, wrote in his ‘Message to Posterity’:
“‘Oh, when you come to crown my brow,
Bring me no bay nor sorrel;
Give me no parsley wreath, but just
The legal long green laurel.’”