by fording a swollen river. At another table a
successful playwright obligingly expounded the laws of dramatic
construction to a respectful novice, who seemed puzzled by their
simplicity. At their own table a youth of yellow melancholy confided to
Piersoll that the afternoon had witnessed an important transaction in
verse--the sale of his ballade, "She Was a Belle in the Days of
Daguerre." "The editor of 'Quips' took it and paid on acceptance--let's
have another," he added with deep significance.

The atmosphere of the place was unthinkingly democratic. The cub
reporter here met his city editor as man to man. Piersoll identified
various members of the gathering--the dramatic critic of an evening
paper in busy talk with the Wall Street man of the same sheet; a
promising young composer cornered by the star reporter of a morning
paper, a grizzled knight of the world of war, crime, flood, fire, and
all mischance of any news value, a man who had attained the dignity of
signing his "stuff." Old men and young, they were compacted of nerves,
vividly alive, even those in whom the desk stoop could be detected.

The movable feast of the cocktail waned and the groups drifted upstairs.
The publisher for whom Piersoll waited came at last, a bland but
keen-eyed gentleman of early middle age, introduced to Ewing as Mr.
Layton, of Layton & Company. They followed the others up to the dining
room, and Piersoll found a table for three under the drawing of the
earnest but miscalculating angler.

Ewing nervously apprehended talk of an abstruse literary character from
which he would be debarred. The talk assuredly became abstruse, but it
dealt in literary values solely as related to public taste in the novel
of commerce, and to the devices of Layton & Company for divining and
stimulating that variable quantity.

Instead of descanting on Shakespeare, as Ewing had supposed a publisher
would do, Layton, with the soup, plunged into a racy narrative of how he
had "boomed" sales of "The Mask of Malcolm" the year before. That had
been a success compounded of trifles. Witness Layton's chance view from
a car window of a "Mask of Malcolm" poster on a watering cart that
toiled through the dusty main street of a remote Western village. He had
written to the postmaster of that town for the name of the cart's
driver, sent him a copy of the novel inscribed by the author, and
enough more posters to cover his cart. Result: a sale in the aroused
village an