"It's perfectly feasible—perfectly," he chuckled. "It would be merely pounding sand into the traditional rat-hole with all the implements furnished—teaching our specialty to a world yearning to know how. You could get up the lectures and question schedules for the men, and I could make some sort of a shift with the women."
"Yes; but the text-books. Don't these 'Fit-yourself-at-Home' schools have text-books?"
"Um, y-yes; I suppose they do. That would be a little difficult for us—just at the go-off. But we could get around that. For example, 'Dear Mrs. Blank: Replying to your application for membership in the Post-Graduate School of W. B., would say that your case is so peculiar'—that would flatter her immensely—'your case is so peculiar that the ordinary text-books cover it very inadequately. Therefore, with your approval, and for a small additional tuition fee of $2 the term, we shall place you in a special class to be instructed by electrographed lectures dictated personally by the principal.'"
Isobel clapped her hands. "Jimmy, love, you are simply great, when you are not trying to be. And, after a while, we could print the lectures and have our own text-books copyrighted. But don't you think we ought to take in the young people, as well?—have a—a collegiate department for beginners?"
"'Sh!" said Jimaboy, and he got up and closed the door with ostentatious caution. "Suppose somebody—Lantermann, for instance—should hear you say such things as that: 'take in the young people'! Shades of the Rosicrucians! we wouldn't 'take in' anybody. The very life of these mail things is the unshaken confidence of the people. But, as you suggest, we really ought to include the frying size."
It was delicious fooling, and Isobel found a sketch-block and dipped her pen.
"You do the letter-press for the 'collegiate' ad., and I'll make a picture for it," she said. "Hurry, or I'll beat you."
Jimaboy laughed and squared himself at the desk, and the race began. Isobel had a small gift and a large ambition: the gift was a cartoonist's facility in line drawing, and the ambition was to be able, in the dim and distant future, to illustrate Jimaboy's stories. Lantermann, the Times artist, whose rooms were just across the hall, had given her a few lessons in caricature and some little gruff, Teutonic encouragement.
"Time!" she called, tossing the sketch-block over to Jimaboy. It was a happy thought. On a modern davenport sat two young people, far apart; the youth twiddling his thumbs in an ecstasy of embarrassment; the maiden making rabbit's ears with her handkerchief. Jimaboy's note of appreciation was a guffaw.
"I couldn't rise to the expression on those faces in a hundred years!" he lamented. "Hear me creak:"