"Then I'll tell you. You attack. You manufacture a totally different Case and then proceed to demolish it. First of all you make hay of charges that were never made, and then you carry the fight over to the other fellow. If somebody says this flying-fellow's been getting gun-work in, you simply sidestep, come back, and want to know what's wrong that he hasn't been recommended for a K.B.E. Never defend, my boy. Always go for your man. What is it that Boche philosopher wrote? 'Every attack is a victory.' You've got a beauty of an opening.... You say this fellow Smith really is the goods—thinker, live wire—genuine national-importance sort of fellow?" he demanded.
"So his friends seem to think."
"Then what's simpler than for you to take a column in the Circus and say so? And then take another column and damn the other side? Pack of shirkers who bolted underground while your friend went up and kept the Hun off London? The old tricks are always the best—that's why they're old. Do it on general lines, of course; keep off sub judice cases and all that. As regards his being over London, you've got to make a molehill out of that mountain, if it is a mountain. What are the Regulations exactly?"
I told him what they were, not exactly, but in all their unavoidable inexactitude. At one of them he suddenly stopped me.
"Ah, there you are. A Secretary of State has power to except him, has he?"
"Hardly after the fact, I should say."
"Oh, don't be so dashed pedantic about it! Nothing would ever get done at all if everybody talked like that! I'm not suggesting this as his defense; it's his attack, so that he shan't be charged at all, don't you see? And if you know a better 'ole go to it.... Now you get those articles written. Write them so that they'll start correspondence. I don't quite see the Daily Circus being put in the cart by a Chelsea auctioneer. Then take a month's holiday.... Now tell me how the novel's going on."
This last I did over our second liqueur.