"Ha! ha! ha!" gurgled the Writer, "only one man in London who can set it, and, by Jove, I'll ring him up on the 'phone at once; a few judicious rehearsals—before Vellum and Crackles, the solicitors, are communicated with—to say nothing of Gentle Gammon, and—ha! ha! ha!—what a glorious joke. What's Billy Cracker's number in the book?"
A quarter of an hour afterwards, in answer to a most urgent summons by telephone, Mr. William Cracker made his appearance in the Writer's rooms.
Mr. William Cracker, called Billy by his friends, was rapidly rising to fame as a writer of musical comedy—a tall, sleek personage, with straw-coloured hair brilliantined very flat over his head, and carefully parted in the centre, wearing a monocle in one eye, which appeared to grow there, and was always lavishly adorned as an exact and living replica of the latest fashion plate.
Billy greeted the Writer and stared at him through his eyeglass quizzically.
"Whenever I hear you give that Mephistophelean chuckle at the end of the 'phone," commented Billy, "I always know you have got some particularly impish scheme on. Well, what is it?"
"Oh, Billy, Billy," chuckled the Writer, "I have indeed got a scheme, and it is funnier, Billy, than any of your musical comedies."
"In that case," announced Billy, as he leisurely helped himself to a smoke which the Writer offered, "I shall steal the plot."
"Listen, Billy. Could you write a tune, a refrain, an air, whatever you call it, so catchy that people would hum it and sing it on the spot? I want a perfectly irresistible tune, Billy."
"All my tunes are irresistible," confessed Billy modestly.
"Yes, but I want an absolute dead cert. The sort of thing you used to write at Oxford before you took up music as a profession; you know, one of those catchy things we all used to stand round and sing the instant you played it."