with excitement. He did not want a partner. He wanted to
be in this all by himself. He hated partners.

"You will agree to be manager, at a fixed salary?" said James
hurriedly and huskily, his fine fingers slowly rubbing each other,
along the sides.

"Why yes, willingly, if you'll give me the option of becoming your
partner upon terms of mutual agreement, later on."

James did not quite like this.

"What terms are you thinking of?" he asked.

"Well, it doesn't matter for the moment. Suppose for the moment I
enter an engagement as your manager, at a salary, let us say, of--of
what, do you think?"

"So much a week?" said James pointedly.

"Hadn't we better make it monthly?"

The two men looked at one another.

"With a month's notice on either hand?" continued Mr. May.

"How much?" said James, avaricious.

Mr. May studied his own nicely kept hands.

"Well, I don't see how I can do it under twenty pounds a month. Of
course it's ridiculously low. In America I _never_ accepted less
than three hundred dollars a month, and that was my poorest and
lowest. But of _cauce_, England's not America--more's the pity."

But James was shaking his head in a vibrating movement.

"Impossible!" he replied shrewdly. "Impossible! Twenty pounds a
month? Impossible. I couldn't do it. I couldn't think of it."

"Then name a figure. Say what you _can_ think of," retorted Mr. May,
rather annoyed by this shrewd, shaking head of a doddering
provincial, and by his own sudden collapse into mean subordination.

"I can't make it more than ten pounds a month," said James sharply.

"What!" screamed Mr. May. "What am I to live on? What is my wife to
live on?"

"I've got to make it pay," said James. "If I've got to make it pay,
I must keep down expenses at the beginning."

"No,--on the contrary. You must be prepared to spend something at
the beginning. If you go in a pinch-and-scrape fashion in the
beginning, you will get nowhere at all. Ten pounds a month! Why it's
impossible! Ten pounds a month! But how am I to _live_?"

James's head still vibrated in a negative fashion. And the two men
came to no agreement _that_ morning. Mr. May went home more sick and
weary than ever, and took his whiskey more biliously. But James was
lit with the light of battle.

Poor Mr. May had to gather together his wits and his sprightliness
for his next meeting. He had decided he must make a percentage in
other ways. He schemed in all known ways. He wou