"I wish you would make me a promise."
"What is that?"
"Don't read the stuff I have sent you; it is not good. If you don't like it, send it back to me."
"I cannot do that, for I have advertised your name. You simply must put something into the first number, but of course it will be good: you could not write anything poor."
"Oh, you don't know. Mine is a queer brain: sometimes it won't act at all. I was not pleased with the article. Perhaps the public would overlook it, if you would only promise not to read it."
"My dear Miss Aylmer, I would do a great deal for you, but now you ask for the impossible. I must read what you have written. I have no doubt I shall be charmed with it."
Florence sat back in her seat; she could do nothing further.
The next day, when he arrived at his office, Tom Franks eagerly pounced upon Florence's foolscap envelope. He tore it open and began to read the silly stuff she had written. He had not gone half-way down the first page before the whole expression of his face altered. Bewilderment, astonishment, almost disgust, spread themselves over his features. He turned page after page, looked back at the beginning, glanced at the end, then set himself deliberately to digest Florence's poor attempt from the first word to the last. He flung the paper from him with a gesture of despair. Had she done it to trick him? Positively the production was scarcely respectable. A third-form schoolgirl would have done better. There were even one or two mistakes in spelling, the grammar was slipshod, the different utterances what few schoolgirls would have attempted to make: so banal, so threadbare, so used-up were they. Where was that terse and vigorous style? Where were those epigrammatic utterances? Where was the pure Saxon which had delighted his scholarly mind in the stories which she had written?
He rang his office bell sharply. A clerk appeared.
"Bring me the last number of the Argonaut," he said.