ind of book it was, whether it
wasn't a queer story of a wandering type, because he had to put what he
thought into the mouths of people. He had no doubt of being able to sell
it. When he first came out of prison three publishing firms of the
greatest enterprise had asked him to write his prison experiences. To
one of these he wrote now that the book was three-quarters done, and
asked what the firm wanted to do about it. The next day came an
up-to-date young man, and smoked cigarettes incessantly on the veranda
while he asked questions. What kind of a book was it? Jeff brought out
three or four chapters, and the young man whirled over the leaves with a
practised and lightning-like faculty, his spectacled eyes probing as he
turned.

"Sorry," said he. "Not a word about your own experiences."

"It isn't my prison experience," said Jeff. "It's my life here. It's
everybody's life on the planet."

"Couldn't sell a hundred copies," said the young man. Jeff looked at him
in admiration, he was so cocky and so sure. "People don't want to be
told they're prisoners. They want you to say you were a prisoner, and
tell how innocent you were and how the innocent never get a show and the
guilty go scot free."

"How do you think it's written?" Jeff ventured to ask.

"Admirably. But this isn't an age when a man can sit down and write what
he likes and tell the publisher he can take it and be damned. The
publisher knows mighty well what the public wants. He's going to give it
to 'em, too."

"You'd say it won't sell."

"My dear fellow, I know. I'm feeling the pulse of the public all the
time. It's my business."

Jeff put out his hands for the sheets and the censor gave them up
willingly.

"I'm frightfully disappointed," he said, taking off his eyeglasses to
wipe them on his handkerchief and looking so babyishly ingenuous that
Jeff broke into a laugh. "I thought we should get something 'live out of
you, something we could push with conviction, you know. But we can't
this; we simply can't." He had on his glasses now, and the
all-knowingness had come mysteriously back. His eyes seemed to shoot
arrows, and clutch and hold you so that you wanted to be shot by them
again. "Tell you what, though. We might do this. It's a crazy book, you
know."

"Is it?" Jeff inquired.

"Oh, absolutely. Daffy. They'd put it in the eccentric section of a
library, with books on perpetual motion and the fourth dimension. But if
you'd let us publish you