"Have a chair, Mr. Jones."
"Thank you. We handle some very successful writers. Malcomb Hardy, you may have heard, takes his little five hundred a week out of us; and poor Larry Bonner pulled down eleven hundred as long as he had health. His Chinese-laundryman sketches might be selling yet."
"Suspense is cruel," spoke D.K.T. eagerly. "Let the glad news come."
"Some time ago," said the syndicate man, "you printed in your column an essay in imitation of a schoolboy's. You called it 'Moral Principles'."
D.K.T. sank back with a low moan.
"If you can write six of those a week for a year," continued the visitor, "you won't ever need to slave any more. You can burn your pen and devote the rest of your life to golf and good works."
The poet closed his eyes. "Sham, swam, diagram," he murmured.
"Does a minimum guarantee of fifteen thousand a year look like anything to you? There will, of course, be the book rights and the movie rights in addition."
"Anagram, epigram, telegram, flimflam—aha!" cried D.K.T. "Siam!" He wrote it down.
"That little skit of yours," pursued the caller, "has swept the country. You have created a nation-wide demand. My ringer is on the journalistic pulse, and I know. Can you repeat?"